Predators

If true, this is disconcerting.  Iraqi insurgents allgedly have been able to hack into Predator video feeds.

Quick question

We all know that SF is dying as a newspaper town (I will update this
later with a link to a great piece in the current Harper's about this
when I find it.) Here's my burning question of the day - how good of
a Chinese language newspaper town is SF?

Health Care

A few weeks ago, I asked why the health care bill was going to be such a budget buster without a public option.  Implicit in that question was another, namely, why is the bill worth the trouble.  Here's one person's (informed) view that it is worth the effort along with some bullet points in support of that argument.

Food for Thought

There are two food items that San Francisco currently has too much of: : (1) cupcakes, and (2) porchetta.  Discuss.

Sports Guy

Currently running on New York Magazine's site is a discussion circle about Bill Simmons' Big Book of Basketball, which I guess I would describe as a Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, except of the NBA not MLB and with less stats and more pop culture references.  One of the 4 or 5 (I forge the total) contributors to the discussion is one of the freedarko.com guys, and that site and its NBA book The Macrophenominal Baseball Almanac are some of my favorites.  (In his case, I think this could lead to an appearance of bias, however, freedarko got their product to market way earlier and it's just way, way different.  And excellent in a different way.)  A lot of the group's criticism of the book is spot-on, there is tons of sexism, there is a Celtics bias (he doth protest too much on keeping it out, but you can't argue that he doesn't disclose the risk) and I don't think it's going to stand the test of time because it's way too grounded in the pop culture of the present and immediate past.  Still, I've read a bunch of the entries and I still don't think their verdict is "don't buy this even if you like the NBA."  I like the NBA, I bought it, I've read most of it, I think it's got a lot of flaws and I still think it was worth the purchase (albeit with Amazon's pre-release price guarantee).  All of that is preamble to Simmons' take on the Tiger Woods saga.   Ironically enough, freedarko's twitter feed lauded it today and said that his take is the reason that Simmons "was put on this earth." (Is this itself an ironic takedown?  You decide.)   Read away (it's in two parts).  In the second part, he makes some great points.  One is that all of this ambien talk seems like it provides a pretty simple explanation for Tiger's SUV crash, he was sleep driving.  The other is similar to the Deadspin thing I pointed out the other day: namely that this is going to put a big spotlight on what he calls "celebrity debauchery," as he puts it, "[w]ith the O.J. saga, the sub-story was domestic violence. With Tiger, it's going to be this ritzy (and lucrative) world of celebrity debauchery. You watch. Miami, Vegas, Manhattan, Hollywood … a big shiny spotlight is about to be turned on you."  Simmons is also right that Tiger was basically the only consistent topic of discussion at holiday parties.  It's taken over.

Factual interlude....Woods announced he's taking an indefinite break from golf.  I tend to think indefinite equates to "until the Masters" for a number of reasons.  First, the Masters represents an easy way back, it's basically a golf tournament put on by a dictatorship.  The media have to follow the sports equivalent of North Korean journalism guidelines while there, the patrons will be polite or be tossed out on their you-know-whats.  And although this past few weeks has totally messed up his google results, I'm pretty sure I remember that Woods has admitted that all he really cares about are the Grand Slam/Major events anyway...end of Factual Interlude.

Here's the question which caused me to write.  Simmons starts his piece with the argument that this is the sports story of the decade.  Bigger than steroids.  Bigger than Michael Vick.  Simmons doesn't even mention a positive story like the Patriots success, Lance Armstrong's Tour de France runs, etc...is he right?  I think he's not.  I think that this is just some recency effect at work.  Steroids and baseball will, I think end up being the story of the decade but it's still an incomplete story.  Only when we see how the steroid-tinged stars of the era treated after they leave the game will it be completely written.  Will Barry Bonds make the Hall of Fame?  Will A-Rod?  Will Roger Clemens?   Tiger's story has the benefit of being bite-sized.  It can be broken into cocktail party chatter in a way that other big sports stories cannot.  I'm not willing to give the Oughts to Tiger yet.

AT&T's Data Network, Ugh

My phone isn't really working here in SF today, who knows why, but Twitter is buzzing with the issue.  In the midst of that coverage, I came upon this brilliant piece by a semi-famous tech blogger Fake Steve Jobs, imagining a discussion with AT&T in light of their weird statement earlier this week that they were going to try and figure out a way to cut down a limited number of iPhone users' data usage.  It's a genius response.  FSJ likens this to the release of the album Meet the Beatles in the 60s.  When the album hit the U.S. and proved to be extremely popular, did Capitol seek to figure out ways to limit the popularity or did they try and press more records?  Yeah.  We know what they did.  Instead of trying to make their network better, AT&T is trying to figure out ways to avoud doing so and charge users more.  Follow the link if you're interested, the guy has a sense of humor.

Because Hunter Asked For It...

Tiger.  Were I a member of the PGA, I think my response to any media inquiry on this would be "none of my business."  Not because I would be scared of Tiger (any more than I normally would be) but because I'd be afraid of his caddie Stevie.  Stevie looks like he's got a long memory.  And like he's keeping a black book of the dumb things said by the nerds in the PGA.

Luckily, I'm not a member of the PGA or a public figure so I feel like I can have an opinion.  In one of my first jobs, I had one boss who was an NBA agent.  The stuff he used to tell me that he'd have to do for some of his clients was mind-boggling.  Trust me when I say that wrangling the Jaimee Grubbs of the world would have been almost beneath him in terms of the craziness factor.  And therein lies a big difference.  People I've run into over the past couple of days have cited Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan as comparators to Tiger.  Kobe in terms of "if he could recover" (true) and Michael in terms of "can you imagine the stuff he got away with (also true)."  Here's the difference.  If you're a big NBA prospect, you show up in the league, unless you're really unlucky and end up on the Portland Trailblazers circa 2005, you probably end up in an environment where a veteran or two takes you aside and gives you advice about sensibly living it up in today's media and sports culture.   This is stuff your agent should handle, this is stuff that your posse/people should handle, etc...

Put simply, I doubt that Mark O'Meara taught Tiger this sort of stuff when Tiger hit the tour.  So, my initial reaction ended up as Tiger may have been a mix of naive, scoundrel, and overconfident.  The last quality is probably common to billionaires, not that I know any.  That was my initial reaction.  Then I read this Deadspin piece today.  Called "Chaos in Tigerland," it's an anonymously sourced piece that reports that two of the most prominently mentioned "girlfriends" of Tiger in Las Vegas weren't girlfriends at all.  The nice way to put it is that they were concierges.  The less nice way to put it is that they were pimps.  The piece argues:

This is the world of high-end nightclub VIP treatment, where velvet ropes guard comfy, cloistered areas with leathery couches and bottles of Grey Goose, everything catered to the wishes of the much sought-after professional athlete clientele. And, yes, sports fans, that means loading their velvet-roped stable with fake-boobied ponies to f***. "The fact that people don't understand that these affairs are well-orchestrated is pretty naive..."Rachel Uchitel works for Tiger the minute he gets off the plane wherever he is: from dinner, to photos, to nightclubs, to drugs, to girls — whatever he wants."  And Tiger's a mighty whale. [Deadspin's source] estimates she's probably on retainer for about 10-15k per month to handle all his dirty business, and the tips for successful Tiger [lady]-wrangling (among other things) could net her upwards of 50k in tips.

Now that's a horse of a different color.  This isn't a naive Tiger being burned by the tabloid media, it's a business deal gone bad.   One or more of the ladies lined up for Tiger by his concierge are not playing by the rules.  Boo-hoo.  This is about a guy who may be spending six figures a year to round out his time in Vegas or on the road.  Which, while occurring at the same time as one's wife is having one's kids does not make one look like an appealing guy.

So, yeah, I feel bad for Tiger's family.  It's hard to argue that they thought they were signing up for this.  But Tiger?  Sorry, I can't get on the "even athletes deserve a private life" horse first trotted out of the barn by Charles Barkley last week.  This isn't Tiger's private life, it's one of his paid consultants f f***ing up and choosing someone for his companionship who couldn't follow the omerta rules which presumably were one of Tiger's prerequisites.