Are we friends?

I have recently come to find that Facebook is useful for me and I am punching up my presence there. If we are not connected as friends and you have an account on Facebook, can we connect?

Linkedin, too, though I have yet to find that service useful, it has promise.

Bombay/Mumbai - now its personal

One of the Rabbi's I work with knew the Rabbi at the Chabad house in Mumbai, and his family. He came in this morning looking a little out-or-sorts because he had been at an all-night prayer vigil.

I consider this a cowardly attack on free people, it is little different for me than if this had happened down the street. I don't really have anything else to say, except if you were wondering if this had touched someone you know, it has. This Rabbi from work is a dear, dear friend. He's devastated, and he works with dying people all day. It's not like he's suddenly come to terms with mortality or anything, this is just senseless hatred.

By the way, every native Indian I know says "Bombay."

The lost art of the mid-range jump shot

The Tar Heels handled UCSB pretty well last night, as they were expected to, but they didn't look great. Tyler Hansbrough is back, he played a full game, approaching his old form, but it looks like the conditioning is not quite there. Now the Heels are on their way to Maui for the Maui Invitational, which is somewhat interesting for me because they could end up playing Texas, my alma mater. In fact, that's the most likely outcome.

I have only a moment's worth of conflict over that, I was never much of a Texas sports fan while I was there. I worked for the Athletic Dept as a tutor while I was in school, so I saw Div 1 college sports Texas-style from the inside, seeing what they players go through (for one thing, they have practically no time to study) and how little they get (I used to take players out for pizza on Sunday on my dime because otherwise they'd be eating PB&J as the athletic cafeteria was closed on Sunday nights and most of them had no money) in spite of the fact that they generate millions for the school.

As an aside, we should consider athletic scholarships a work-study program and pay them the same money schools pay students to work in the library or whatever on their work-study programs. They earn it.

Anyway, all that left me with a less-than-sweet taste in my mouth for UT Athletics. I've gotten over it, and I know things are probably not much different at UNC, but I've come to be a UNC fan. I'm probably the most devoted UNC fan who has never stepped foot in the state of North Carolina.

In short, I became a UNC fan in 1983, while a student at UT, when I took a US Civil Rights History course which in part examined the role of college sports in the US civil rights movement. Dean Smith, the long-time (and then) coach of the UNC basketball team was a courageous leader in integrating college sports. I was interested in watching a few games once I learned this, and if you know your BBall history you know UNC had a guy named Michael Jordan playing for them back then. The rest, as they say, is history. These days, it doesn't hurt that the most significant other in my life is a UNC Alum and a particularly rabid BBall fan.

Anyway, this year they moved the 3-point line back a foot to 20' 9", still three feet short of the NBA line. People who follow the game like I do are watching to see what that does to the game. I watched the Tar Heels brick a bunch of threes last night, but frankly they were doing that back when it was at 19' 9".

What it is likely to do is re-introduce the mid-range jumper back into offensive strategies. There are a number of players for whom the foot makes a difference, not your great perimeter shooters, but guys who would launch one from out there when they had a good look because they could hit about one in three of them.

The mid-range jumper, a two-point shot taken from 10-18 feet, is a powerful weapon for the same reason an option play is useful in college football. It gives you another choice when you try to drive the lane and find some obstacle to getting in for your lay-up. You set up for the mid-range jumper the same way you begin a drive in for a lay-up, leaning in with one shoulder and forcing the defender to make a choice about to which side you are going to turn and break.

If the defender guesses correctly, cutting off your lane, his momentum is moving towards the basket and you can plant a foot and get a clean look for the jump shot. My theory is that the line moving back a foot is going to open that area of the court up a bit. This was Jordan's shot, by the way, it was the one he used to win the 1982 Tourney, and it can be devastatingly effective not only at scoring, but at making defenders afraid to commit to cutting off a lane, thus opening them up for drives.

It will be nice to see it come back, if it does. It is too early to tell yet. You can't really tell what is going on with a college basketball team in a particular year until they've played about ten games, right now everyone is at three or four. SImilarly, it's hard to tell what a minor change like this will do until about the same point in the season.

But, those jumpers are graceful sights to behold when done by the true artists, by people like Stephen Curry at Davidson. It'll be fun to watch.

Oh, and for Em, Duke handed Michigan their ass last night. It wasn't really close. Your boys are for real this year.

College Basketball clinics now on ESPN

College basketball season is underway, and the first Tar Heels game I could see was Tuesday night, and the pre-game included the usual panel of commentators with one new guy--Robert Montgomery Knight, aka Coach Knight, who retired from Texas Tech but made his name at Indiana.

Now, being a Tar Heel fan, I didn't know all that much about Coach Knight other than the fact that people I respected were impressed with him. He got a lot of bad press, whether or not he deserved it I don't know.

Last Tuesday, I sat in front of the TV open-mouthed as he made more serious and substantive observations in the ten minutes or so he had the floor than I've heard out of Dick Vitale's mouth his entire career (and unlike Vitale, he was about to complete a thought without mentioning what a "class program" they have at Duke). I *learned* a lot, a shocking amount considering how much study I give the game in general and this team in particular, from his low-key off-hand comments and observations about the Tar Heel's up-coming game with a badly-struggling Kentucky squad.

Tonight, he provided the color commentary for Duke's game with Southern Illinois. As little as I can stand watching Duke play (Why can't they just play a clean game? Why all the elbows and tripping? Oh, never mind), and worse yet, win, I was unable to turn it off because I was endlessly fascinated by Coach Knight's commentary. I think I learned more about the game in those two hours watching him call a Duke game (I can't believe I'm writing that) than I learned in my first five years as a serious fan.

Whatever you may think of Coach Knight's career thus far, if you want to understand the way the game is played, and why defenses set up they way they do, and what works on offense, and what teams that are falling behind need to do to catch up, try to catch a game that Coach Knight is calling. It was absolutely riveting. He's got a great career ahead of him as a commentator.

QoTD: Becoming

Becoming, which results from clinging, involves the idea of having or being something more satisfying than at present. We want to become a very good meditator, or we want to become spiritual, or more learned. We have all sorts of ideas but are all bound up with wanting to become, because we are not satisfied with what we are. Often we do not even pay attention to what we are now, but just know that something is lacking. Instead of trying to realize what we are and investigating where the difficulty actually lies, we just dream of becoming something else. When we have become something or someone else, we can be just as dissatisfied as before.

-Ayya Khema, When the Iron Eagle Flies

Firefox tells me (via the text completion feature) that I have posted a blog with the title before, it might even be the same quote. Interesting, this lesson is something I really need to realize, which is another way of saying that I believe I need to become a person who relinquishes becoming. Funny.

Shuttle Endeavor is in orbit.

The crew assisting the astronauts aboard forgot to put in one of the locking pins for the inner door of the "white room," the retractable passageway that the astronauts use to board the vehicle, so it was flapping in the breeze as they retracted it (some poor sap might have lost his job this evening), but other than that it was a pretty nominal launch.

Election night in Harlem

Being an old hand at electoral politics, I knew Obama won at 9:23 pm EST when whatever channel I was watching called Ohio.

But, as my election night friend and I watched PBS at 11 p.m., which wasn't calling any states, just reporting what others called, we heard a spontaneous uprising of cheers and general celebrations out the window in Harlem. The entire community had spontaneously erupted in shouts of "Obama" and "Yes, We Did."

I walked home about 20 minutes later and now I am blogging to you about it. On the way home a large African-American gentleman in a leather jacket walked up to me and offered his hand and we exchanged the handshake familiar to African-Americans in these parts, an elaborate ritual that ends in a hug, and he said to me "This is not just for me, brother, it's for you, too."

I said, "Oh, don't I know it. I moved to New York to get away from George W. Bush."

Harlem erupts. Everyone was walking uptown from where I was, probably to the State Office Building at 125th and Seventh Ave where a campaign celebration was sponsored by Charlie Rangel, my newly-re-elected congressman, out in the courtyard in front of the building. It's probably quite a scene out there.

Now I know that my electoral college predictions were way shy of where they're going to end up. I didn't have Obama winning Ohio or Virginia, but I'm still confident in my popular vote predictions, which has always been my forte, anyway. If you don't count 2000, since we actually did win (3,000 aging Jews in Palm Beach County did not intend to vote for Pat Buchanan, even he admits that), I have called every Presidential election correctly since 1976.

But, I have never seen anything like I saw tonight in Harlem at 11pm. That was utterly remarkable.

Voting in Harlem

I went to vote this morning at about 8:15am, roughly 2 hours after the polls opened.

Usually, I walk right up and in to the voting tables in the cafeteria of the elementary school where I vote. This morning, there was a line for the first time in my experience (I voted here in 2004 for Kerry) and my name had been purged from the voter rolls even though I have not moved or otherwise changed my status. Thank you HAVA! I did cast an affidavit ballot.

At other places in Harlem which I walked past on the way to work the lines were like those pictured at the right. Specifically this picture is for a voting place across the street from my neighborhoods Starbucks, at W. 118th Street and Eighth Avenue.

Lots of young people in line, lots of people with their children in tow. I think this is hopefull