Willie Burton played for a couple teams in his 8 year career and is most known for throwing up a 50 point game in 1993.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Random NBA Player Post
Willie Burton played for a couple teams in his 8 year career and is most known for throwing up a 50 point game in 1993.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
A crying shame - By Tom Lutz (LA Times, 12/15/10)
We've seen Rep. John A. Boehner (R- Ohio) cry twice recently in public. On election night, addressing supporters, he was overcome with emotion while describing his up-by-the-bootstraps pursuit of the American dream. Then on Sunday, during a "60 Minutes" interview with Lesley Stahl, Boehner's tears began to flow as he worried aloud about today's schoolchildren.
So what can the tears tell us about our new House speaker?
One of our fondest cultural myths — one of baffling durability, like the idea that Republicans are fiscally conservative — is that crying is a sign of sincerity or authentic feeling. No matter what we may know of crocodile tears, we continue to read weeping as a sign of true, pure emotion. All the research suggests something else entirely.
Crying is often the sign of excruciatingly mixed emotion. Take the mother who cries at her daughter's wedding: She may be happy about the marriage and flooded with positive emotions — feelings of role fulfillment, of accomplishment, of pride, of happiness for her daughter. At the same time, she feels a sense of loss: A part of her life is over; she is losing not only a daughter but a purpose, a role.
Even our moments of extreme grief are complicated. The stages of grief do not follow each other in a neat therapeutic procession; instead, they are often a jumble. Loss is complicated by rage, by denial, by guilt. We weep and we wail, and we do so not because we know, without a doubt, exactly what we are feeling. We cry, in fact, because we don't.
Boehner's tears aren't hard to read. After analyzing hundreds of psychological experiments and sociological studies of weeping, hundreds of accounts of crying in different cultures and different historical periods, thousands of tearful moments in film and fiction and art, I have come to see that, like the mother of the bride, many of us weep because we are overwhelmed by contradictions.
Oliver North cried at the Iran-Contra hearings whenever he talked about how much he loved his country. His patriotism was real, but it was complicated by the fact that he was lying to Congress. His part in an illegal operation meant that he was subverting the very Constitution he spent his life defending. These moments when real honesty is coupled with bad faith, especially when it is personal — when the speaker who is at once telling the truth and a lie is, like North, talking about himself — these are the moments that call forth tears.
On "60 Minutes," Boehner told Stahl that he couldn't visit schools anymore; that he got too upset, worrying about whether today's schoolchildren will have the same opportunities that he and his generation had. As he spoke, he started to weep. Why?
He does, I believe, worry about the children, and yet his entire political philosophy is devoted to limiting the federal government's ability to help them. He has voted against providing health insurance for children (many times), against student aid, against unemployment benefits, against equal pay, against food safety, against money for teachers, against raising the minimum wage, against tobacco education, mine safety, alternative energy, pollution control, whistle-blower protection, science and technology research. If he were making his decisions based on what government programs might help today's schoolchildren reach their dreams, like the Kennedy- and Johnson-era programs that helped him, his voting record would be very different. It is a deep enough contradiction to make him weep for the future.
"Making sure that these kids have a shot at the American dream, like I did, is important," he told Stahl through his tears. Yet he and his Republican colleagues are working hard to make sure that they can't; that the middle class he once aspired to becomes smaller rather than bigger. His college received federal grants and federal student aid while he was there, and it continues to do so, including from the stimulus bill he voted against.
The America that gave Boehner a shot at his dream had a minimum wage that, adjusted for inflation, topped $10 an hour. In 2006, he voted against letting the minimum rise from $5.15 to its current $7.25. It took Boehner seven years to finish college while working minimum-wage jobs; how long would it have taken if the minimum wage had purchased as little as it does today?
Boehner put himself through school, he said on election night, unsuccessfully trying to stem the flow of tears, "working every rotten job there was." He mopped floors, waited tables and tended bar. One could feel both his horror at once having done that sort of work and his exuberance at having left it behind to become the golfing, jet-setting, deeply tanned man weeping before the cameras.
Would he agree with this assessment? Does he know that, despite his assertions to the contrary, cutting taxes for the rich won't do anything to produce those jobs he keeps promising? Does he feel conflicted knowing that his golf bill (reported at $83,000 last year) is six or seven times the take-home pay of someone working 40 hours a week at minimum wage, and several times the median income in many of our communities?
I suspect he does, and that when he thinks about the America of his youth, he knows it will never return if his party gets its way in Washington. It is all too much. He weeps.
Tom Lutz is a professor at UC Riverside, editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books and the author of "Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears."
via Los Angeles Times
So what can the tears tell us about our new House speaker?
One of our fondest cultural myths — one of baffling durability, like the idea that Republicans are fiscally conservative — is that crying is a sign of sincerity or authentic feeling. No matter what we may know of crocodile tears, we continue to read weeping as a sign of true, pure emotion. All the research suggests something else entirely.
Crying is often the sign of excruciatingly mixed emotion. Take the mother who cries at her daughter's wedding: She may be happy about the marriage and flooded with positive emotions — feelings of role fulfillment, of accomplishment, of pride, of happiness for her daughter. At the same time, she feels a sense of loss: A part of her life is over; she is losing not only a daughter but a purpose, a role.
Even our moments of extreme grief are complicated. The stages of grief do not follow each other in a neat therapeutic procession; instead, they are often a jumble. Loss is complicated by rage, by denial, by guilt. We weep and we wail, and we do so not because we know, without a doubt, exactly what we are feeling. We cry, in fact, because we don't.
Boehner's tears aren't hard to read. After analyzing hundreds of psychological experiments and sociological studies of weeping, hundreds of accounts of crying in different cultures and different historical periods, thousands of tearful moments in film and fiction and art, I have come to see that, like the mother of the bride, many of us weep because we are overwhelmed by contradictions.
Oliver North cried at the Iran-Contra hearings whenever he talked about how much he loved his country. His patriotism was real, but it was complicated by the fact that he was lying to Congress. His part in an illegal operation meant that he was subverting the very Constitution he spent his life defending. These moments when real honesty is coupled with bad faith, especially when it is personal — when the speaker who is at once telling the truth and a lie is, like North, talking about himself — these are the moments that call forth tears.
On "60 Minutes," Boehner told Stahl that he couldn't visit schools anymore; that he got too upset, worrying about whether today's schoolchildren will have the same opportunities that he and his generation had. As he spoke, he started to weep. Why?
He does, I believe, worry about the children, and yet his entire political philosophy is devoted to limiting the federal government's ability to help them. He has voted against providing health insurance for children (many times), against student aid, against unemployment benefits, against equal pay, against food safety, against money for teachers, against raising the minimum wage, against tobacco education, mine safety, alternative energy, pollution control, whistle-blower protection, science and technology research. If he were making his decisions based on what government programs might help today's schoolchildren reach their dreams, like the Kennedy- and Johnson-era programs that helped him, his voting record would be very different. It is a deep enough contradiction to make him weep for the future.
"Making sure that these kids have a shot at the American dream, like I did, is important," he told Stahl through his tears. Yet he and his Republican colleagues are working hard to make sure that they can't; that the middle class he once aspired to becomes smaller rather than bigger. His college received federal grants and federal student aid while he was there, and it continues to do so, including from the stimulus bill he voted against.
The America that gave Boehner a shot at his dream had a minimum wage that, adjusted for inflation, topped $10 an hour. In 2006, he voted against letting the minimum rise from $5.15 to its current $7.25. It took Boehner seven years to finish college while working minimum-wage jobs; how long would it have taken if the minimum wage had purchased as little as it does today?
Boehner put himself through school, he said on election night, unsuccessfully trying to stem the flow of tears, "working every rotten job there was." He mopped floors, waited tables and tended bar. One could feel both his horror at once having done that sort of work and his exuberance at having left it behind to become the golfing, jet-setting, deeply tanned man weeping before the cameras.
Would he agree with this assessment? Does he know that, despite his assertions to the contrary, cutting taxes for the rich won't do anything to produce those jobs he keeps promising? Does he feel conflicted knowing that his golf bill (reported at $83,000 last year) is six or seven times the take-home pay of someone working 40 hours a week at minimum wage, and several times the median income in many of our communities?
I suspect he does, and that when he thinks about the America of his youth, he knows it will never return if his party gets its way in Washington. It is all too much. He weeps.
Tom Lutz is a professor at UC Riverside, editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books and the author of "Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears."
via Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
On Haynesworth
Many minds, from NFL insiders to armchair GMs, have an opinion on this Albert Haynesworth thing. Here's mine.
Despite any acclaim Haynesworth has earned in the league with his play, my highlight reel for him contains two clips. The first is him stomping on Andre Gurode's face during a game in 2006. The second, which happened a few weeks ago, is Big Al laying down on the job while Michael Vick dances around the other ten Redskins.
Is it fair to reduce his entire body of work? No. But good or bad, this is how we as sports fans remember players. We generalize a few significant plays over the span of a career. The Shot. The Run. The Drive. More often than not, the specific moments we associate with players are pretty close to the legacies they leave. The one major exception is Malice in The Palace. Ron Ron has a championship ring now, and is a pretty good guy on and off the floor, but some observers will never move on from that incident.
Trying to keep this in perspective, I admit that I don't follow Haynesworth closely. I know he got a huge contract when he left Tennessee to come to Washington. Other than that, what I know about him is bad.
Let's get this out of the way: Mike Shanahan has spent a lot, maybe too much time this season dealing with Haynesworth. He singled him out from the start. First it was a conditioning issue, followed by Albert's alleged refusal to play in a 3-4 defensive scheme. I don't know what the core issue is but Shanahan made it a project to send Albert some type of message that never transmitted. When Albert didn't submit, he gave him a surprise benching followed by a season ending suspension.
It appears that there are two camps on this issue - Pro Shanahan and Pro Haynesworth. I don't think it's that cut and dry. What's troubling to me is that many of the viewpoints I've encountered from the online community, largely of fellow African Americans, side blindly with Haynesworth thus, relieving him of any responsibility in how this situation progressed.
To hold Coach Shanahan completely responsible in this soap opera without acknowledging possible actions that Haynesworth could have taken to change the course is a grave error in thinking. To limit this issue solely to race is just stupidity.
I like examples so let's look at one. You and your friend work at the same job. You are close to a model employee but your boy isn't. The boss has an almost open dislike for your friend, one that goes beyond professional and can be argued that it's more personal bias. You both discuss how the boss has it in for your friend, and can probably get another employee to admit hearing the boss talk negatively about him to other workers. Over several months, your friend gets consumed with his own disdain for the boss and shows up to work late 3 days out of 5, is unprepared for meetings, and is consistently behind on his production. You arrive at work one day and find out your boy got fired.
Is that justified?
Reports say Haynesworth came to the facility hung over, complained of being sick, refused to practice, and said he would not play in the 3-4 scheme. This sounds like violations of the staff code of conduct and insubordination - grounds to get terminated from ANY job. You and I would be fired for this, so why can't Haynesworth be suspended? A change in the defensive scheme is no excuse. Some quarterbacks play for multiple offensive coordinators in a career. They can't refuse the new plays just because it's foreign to what they're used to. If they did, there is another QB waiting to take those snaps.
A coach was unhappy with a player's work ethic and attitude and this became a pissing contest between the two. Spoiled Athlete vs the Curmudgeon Coach. Albert forgot Shanahan had the Big Joker. After a while, he may have been "out to get" Albert. But Haynesworth didn't see the writing on the wall?
I've seen some "slave" rhetoric used to describe this situation in regards to whether Haynesworth should have toed the line just because of his large salary. We really need to chill with that. Being told to do something you don't want to do doesn't make you a slave. To apply a slave connotation to those who kowtow excludes all the slaves who fought back, escaped and forged pathways for our freedom. That's disrespectful to my ancestors to even consider the thought.
Ask yourself whether Haynesworth could have handled this situation any better. I'm not saying turn the other cheek. I'm saying, "Do your job." If his plan was to spit in the face of authority he played himself, and at the same time, left his teammates out to dry. Redskins fans: Y'all couldn't have used another lineman out there to chase down QBs and tackle running backs? D'Angelo Hall could have used one. Albert has been called out by one teammate who knows the whole deal. It's life, man. Sometimes the boss gets after you, but I'm not surrendering my paycheck for anybody. People who are riding for Albert are leaving out the issue of personal accountability.
We will never get the whole story of what both sides did, but I refuse to believe that if Haynesworth would have just been a professional about it all, it would have exposed what Shanahan was doing and this conversation would be void. If the story did break, it would have been Haynesworth telling it and more people would be willing to listen. Instead, he allowed himself to become a victim of the machine, where the athlete, not the organization, is to blame. What's worse, he fell into one of the most hurtful African American stereotypes: The lazy black man.
Finally, to any individual of color who feels as if those who refuse to champion Haynesworth's cause are "selling out," I question that individual's ability to succeed in this world, as well as their perception of reality. When your daughter comes home from school and says that her white teacher doesn't like her, what will you do? Are you going to tell her to stop doing her homework? Maybe she should refuse to study for tests as a sign of silent protest. Hopefully you tell her to "boss up." Provide her with the necessary skills to succeed in a world that won't always smile on her, and might discriminate against her because of her skin color.
On Haynesworth, ignoring Shanahan's petty punitive measures and honoring his contract would not make him a sell out. It would make him a man.
Despite any acclaim Haynesworth has earned in the league with his play, my highlight reel for him contains two clips. The first is him stomping on Andre Gurode's face during a game in 2006. The second, which happened a few weeks ago, is Big Al laying down on the job while Michael Vick dances around the other ten Redskins.
Is it fair to reduce his entire body of work? No. But good or bad, this is how we as sports fans remember players. We generalize a few significant plays over the span of a career. The Shot. The Run. The Drive. More often than not, the specific moments we associate with players are pretty close to the legacies they leave. The one major exception is Malice in The Palace. Ron Ron has a championship ring now, and is a pretty good guy on and off the floor, but some observers will never move on from that incident.
Trying to keep this in perspective, I admit that I don't follow Haynesworth closely. I know he got a huge contract when he left Tennessee to come to Washington. Other than that, what I know about him is bad.
Let's get this out of the way: Mike Shanahan has spent a lot, maybe too much time this season dealing with Haynesworth. He singled him out from the start. First it was a conditioning issue, followed by Albert's alleged refusal to play in a 3-4 defensive scheme. I don't know what the core issue is but Shanahan made it a project to send Albert some type of message that never transmitted. When Albert didn't submit, he gave him a surprise benching followed by a season ending suspension.
It appears that there are two camps on this issue - Pro Shanahan and Pro Haynesworth. I don't think it's that cut and dry. What's troubling to me is that many of the viewpoints I've encountered from the online community, largely of fellow African Americans, side blindly with Haynesworth thus, relieving him of any responsibility in how this situation progressed.
To hold Coach Shanahan completely responsible in this soap opera without acknowledging possible actions that Haynesworth could have taken to change the course is a grave error in thinking. To limit this issue solely to race is just stupidity.
I like examples so let's look at one. You and your friend work at the same job. You are close to a model employee but your boy isn't. The boss has an almost open dislike for your friend, one that goes beyond professional and can be argued that it's more personal bias. You both discuss how the boss has it in for your friend, and can probably get another employee to admit hearing the boss talk negatively about him to other workers. Over several months, your friend gets consumed with his own disdain for the boss and shows up to work late 3 days out of 5, is unprepared for meetings, and is consistently behind on his production. You arrive at work one day and find out your boy got fired.
Is that justified?
Reports say Haynesworth came to the facility hung over, complained of being sick, refused to practice, and said he would not play in the 3-4 scheme. This sounds like violations of the staff code of conduct and insubordination - grounds to get terminated from ANY job. You and I would be fired for this, so why can't Haynesworth be suspended? A change in the defensive scheme is no excuse. Some quarterbacks play for multiple offensive coordinators in a career. They can't refuse the new plays just because it's foreign to what they're used to. If they did, there is another QB waiting to take those snaps.
A coach was unhappy with a player's work ethic and attitude and this became a pissing contest between the two. Spoiled Athlete vs the Curmudgeon Coach. Albert forgot Shanahan had the Big Joker. After a while, he may have been "out to get" Albert. But Haynesworth didn't see the writing on the wall?
I've seen some "slave" rhetoric used to describe this situation in regards to whether Haynesworth should have toed the line just because of his large salary. We really need to chill with that. Being told to do something you don't want to do doesn't make you a slave. To apply a slave connotation to those who kowtow excludes all the slaves who fought back, escaped and forged pathways for our freedom. That's disrespectful to my ancestors to even consider the thought.
Ask yourself whether Haynesworth could have handled this situation any better. I'm not saying turn the other cheek. I'm saying, "Do your job." If his plan was to spit in the face of authority he played himself, and at the same time, left his teammates out to dry. Redskins fans: Y'all couldn't have used another lineman out there to chase down QBs and tackle running backs? D'Angelo Hall could have used one. Albert has been called out by one teammate who knows the whole deal. It's life, man. Sometimes the boss gets after you, but I'm not surrendering my paycheck for anybody. People who are riding for Albert are leaving out the issue of personal accountability.
We will never get the whole story of what both sides did, but I refuse to believe that if Haynesworth would have just been a professional about it all, it would have exposed what Shanahan was doing and this conversation would be void. If the story did break, it would have been Haynesworth telling it and more people would be willing to listen. Instead, he allowed himself to become a victim of the machine, where the athlete, not the organization, is to blame. What's worse, he fell into one of the most hurtful African American stereotypes: The lazy black man.
Finally, to any individual of color who feels as if those who refuse to champion Haynesworth's cause are "selling out," I question that individual's ability to succeed in this world, as well as their perception of reality. When your daughter comes home from school and says that her white teacher doesn't like her, what will you do? Are you going to tell her to stop doing her homework? Maybe she should refuse to study for tests as a sign of silent protest. Hopefully you tell her to "boss up." Provide her with the necessary skills to succeed in a world that won't always smile on her, and might discriminate against her because of her skin color.
On Haynesworth, ignoring Shanahan's petty punitive measures and honoring his contract would not make him a sell out. It would make him a man.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)