mike damone is a little prick

alex rodriguez is a little prick.

stop the flop

Jeff Van Gundy, who is turning out to be a somewhat entertaining and insightful announcer (I like the sarcastic interplay between him and Mark Jackson -- it's like a slightly more intelligent update on Bill Walton vs. Snapper Jones), went off the other night about flopping and how he hopes it is addressed next season by the league. I agree 100%.

Flopping, and the way defenders leap dangerously underneath driving offensive players in an attempt to draw charging fouls, is the single biggest reason basketball isn't as much fun as it used to be.

In the Golden Age of Basketball, an offensive foul used to happen a few times a game, when the player with the ball either:

1) Cleared out space with his off hand as he shot
2) Ran at full speed into a defender who was planted.

Rarely, and I admittedly have no statistical data to support this, would an offensive player be called for a charge when he had already left his feet on his way to the hoop. Nor when he was backing down a defender in the post. Now the paint is full of bodies. Guys are diving all over the place searching for calls. Defenders are scrambling to get in front of driving offensive players in an insane race "to the spot." Guys are falling down and getting hurt. Whistles are blowing. Flow is interrupted. Channels are turned.

Suggested solution:
1) Review game tape and punish floppers with a point system leading to an eventual suspension.
2) Stop calling offensive fouls when guys are being undercut. Stop calling offensive fouls when dudes fall down after a post player leans on them slightly. Adjust the dial on block/charge by like 25% until guys stop using "step-in and take the hit" as a defensive strategy.

One guy who plays pure defense is Andrei Kirilenko. He rotates off his man to help, he goes after blocks and steals, he tries to stay in front of the guy he's guarding, but he doesn't resort to flopping and begging. As much of a mess as he is offensively, he is a joy to watch on D.

***

Hope you had a good weekend. I have only three work days left until HIATUS. I have started putting together some ideas for how I will spend it. Thanks for your suggestions. I appreciate DLee's thought that I should be looking for another job that is less soul-sapping. I probably won't get around to it, though. I'm fucking spent. One thing I will attempt to do is eat better. Stay away from the chunky chews. Get back to my sexy weight.

Disjointed new softball recap is live.

Make yourself a sandwich, drink a glass of milk...do some fuckin' thing.

Every day you find the time to do the things you love the most (play hoops, have verbungle-bruising sexual relations with attractive strangers, drive with speed and efficiency in heavy traffic, whatever it might be) still brings you one day closer to death.

But every day you don't do those things -- that brings you TWO days closer.

And here's the kicker: every day you spend doing things you hate doing -- and this isn't just me talking, this is a documented scientific fact -- brings you THREE days closer.

brent barry: deadbeat scuzzball

I've been so very tired lately. Just counting down the daze until my hiatus rescues me. I have been working one (Shawshank) job from like 9am-7pm and then coming home and working on my other job from like 10pm-4am. So I would guess that at my best I am operating at 62% efficiency right now.

Last night I tried to stay up and work but got so burned out that I decided to treat myself to a ten minute break to watch some of the Spurs-Suns game I had DVR'd earlier in the evening. It was like 3am and I plopped down on the couch, honestly thinking I could go back to work after a few minutes. Of course I started drifting off to sleep almost immediately. You know that state when you are fighting to stay awake but like 80% of your brain has entered shutdown mode, and you keep waking up and trying to convince yourself that you can snap out of it, but it's a hopeless battle? That was me. Just cashed. Every few minutes I would open an eye or two and look at the TV screen. However, my powers of cognition were so depleted that I could no longer understand what it was that I was watching. Again: I ceased comprehending that there was a basketball game on. The last thing I remember was seeing Brent Barry and thinking, "Oh...that dude. I think he owes me money!" I repeat: I thought Brent Barry was an acquaintance who owed me money.

That is fucking tired.

Two more weeks of this crap. Two more brutal weeks and then it's moustachioed afternoons at the bar, bike rides down the WSH, dancing with bruised redheads in the park, and figuring out the rest of my life. Oh, and maybe some Doritos when nobody's looking.

The real reason I'm posting today is to alert you of two fresh pieces of digital content:

1) Season's first softball recap is live, thanks to PBdotC.
2) My good friend from college, redneck-thwarting bcny, has started a cool blog. Check it!

hiatus 2007: when I became a man

The 2006-2007 Shitsacking Season has kicked me in the balls with tremendous force nearly every day. In fact, even outside of work it's been a challenging and exhausting year. And the next 5 weeks may be the hardest of them all. I think on Tuesday I am scheduled to kill a man at 10 am and then tell his family about it on a conference call after lunch.

5 more weeks of working Saturdays and Sundays, staying late every night, having a pit in my stomach, making the Anxious Hans face, and gasping for sweet air at the end of the day.

But then, and here comes the good part, I go on HIATUS. For June and possibly half of July, I will be free. Free to do what I want, any old time. The dark side of the HIATUS period is that the real possibility exists that I get laid off when HIATUS starts, in which case HIATUS becomes BYE-ATUS. I have a one year contract and it's expiring, so if they wanna dump me they can. No questions asked. Some of my friends probably won't be back next year. And it could definitely happen to me as well. (5/3/07 edit: I didn't get laid off! Some friends did however.)

But I am not worried about that. All of my available brain units are focusing on two things:
1) Surviving the next five weeks.
2) HIATUS, bitches.

During HIATUS, I will be on the dole. This completes the Bungle legacy -- now my entire family (mom, pop, sis, me) has been on unemployment at one time or another. $350 a week is what I hear. We should be OK because I am making decent dough throughout May. America, expose for me your glorious teat and I will suck it contentedly for two months straight.

So the question becomes, What will I do on HIATUS? Somehow I only started thinking about this the other day. And now I can't stop thinking about it. It's like 6 straight weeks of Christmas. It's fucking unprecedented.

Here are some preliminary thoughts. I invite you all to weigh in on these and suggest more of your own (10 GP's for every suggestion that I actually implement).

-Get in shape -- not bloody likely. Even if I have 16 free hours a day, I will probably come up 15 minutes short of the 15 minutes of non-sports-related exercise I'd need to make a difference.
-Rediscover my love for basketball and play it 3 or 4 times a week. Get good at it again. Possibly ride my bike around the city, playing on different courts and using the experience as a launching pad for a story about how the sport has changed my life over the last 24 years. Most likely I will just play once or twice a week and not write any such thing. I'd still be satisfied.
-In a related idea, get my bike up and running and ride that shit all over the place. Explore the city. Check out some cool things I never checked out before.
-Smack it up, flip it, rub it down, oh no.
-Spend a couple of afternoons at the bar. Sipping beer, talking shit. Maybe go to that beer garden in Queens. Hey, take the day off. Join me. I just need to clear it with the wife.
-Go to a couple Yankee games alone and sit in the bleachers. The last time I went to a baseball game alone was in 1987, when my friend Herm was supposed to meet me on the 59th street subway platform and didn't show up. I tried calling him but he didn't answer, so I just went and sat there at the game and it was still a good time. Later I found out that the reason Herm hadn't shown up was that he'd been in a terrible bike accident that left him with a big (and sexy) scar on his face.
-Take a class, better myself in some measurable way
-Count down the Final Days of Barker on The Price Is Right
-Read three great books (suggestions, please)
-blog like a rabid badger
-Spend time with Baby Bungle -- as of now she is all mine on Mondays and Fridays.
-Grow a moustache. This is as inevitable as your own approaching death. It will happen. It's out of our hands now. The universe has spoken, and it wants it to happen. As you should do whenever you are reaching for greatness in life, I even did a trial run last weekend. I had a pre-stache for about four hours, including our Sunday softball game. The game was great (recap, anyone?), and so was the pre-stache, as you can see here:

I'll think of more later.

It's gonna be a hell of a summer.