ryanjeffreynoonan

I can see Madison Square Garden from my Manhattan apartment. This year, the arena installed LED lights along the exterior columns of the building — blue, red and white for New York Rangers games; orange and blue for New York Knicks games. They outshine everything else along a drab stretch of Eighth Avenue. When the Knicks colors shine, I’m reminded that there’s a dreadful basketball team playing a few blocks from me.

The Knicks are 5-22 on the year, on pace for their worst season in the not-exactly-glorious history of the franchise. But unlike a lot of bad teams, the Knicks are not yet in rebuilding mode. Their only players to have performed at an above-average level so far this season⁶² are 30-year-old Carmelo Anthony, 32-year-old Amar’e Stoudemire and 37-year-old Pablo Prigioni. They have a few (not many) good players and a few (not many) young players, but there’s almost no overlap on the Venn diagram.

Just how dire is the Knicks’ situation? Are they worse off than the Los Angeles Lakers? Than the Philadelphia 76ers, who very much are in rebuilding mode and are 2-22?

Let’s take a longer view. What are the chances any of these franchises will field a championship-caliber team over the next five seasons (from this year through 2018-19)? On the flip side, which NBA franchise has the most reason to be optimistic about its future? Would you rather be the Cleveland Cavaliers or the Golden State Warriors? Would you rather be the Memphis Grizzlies, with a sterling record so far this season but no superstar, or the New Orleans Pelicans, who aren’t so good yet but have a potential world-beating talent in Anthony Davis?

There have been some valiant attempts to answer such questions before (see ESPN’s NBA Future Power Rankings). Our method here will be simpler and more statistically driven. The idea is to project the number of NBA championships a franchise might expect to win over the next five seasons based on three easily quantifiable factors:

• How good is the team now?
• How old the team?
• How good is its best player?

To be clear, we are not claiming these are the only things that matter. You’d probably want to give a team some extra credit if it’s run by a genius like Gregg Popovich. You’d probably want to dock it if it has traded away some of its future draft picks (as the Knicks have) or if its salary cap situation is poor. And our approach will not be so great at handling teams with injuries to star players. But simple models like these can be a useful tool for understanding how NBA franchises evolve.

Some modestly technical bits follow. You can skip ahead a few paragraphs if you’re not sweating the small stuff.

As I mentioned, our goal is to estimate the likelihood of a team winning an NBA championship over the next five seasons. The method won’t give much credit to a team for being just decent. Unlike in certain other sports, an NBA team almost never backs into a championship by being slightly above average and then getting lucky in the postseason. A 52-win team in the regular season will win the NBA championship only about 2 percent of the time; a 64-win team will win it something like half the time.

More specifically, the model takes the form of a logistic regression analysis where the inputs are three factors I described above — age, overall team quality and the quality of its best player — and the output is the projected number of championships won.⁶³ I’ve used data from the ABA-NBA merger season of 1976-77 onward.

To measure overall team quality, I’ve used the number of games a team won.⁶⁴ But when looking toward future seasons, a team’s most recent win-loss record isn’t all that matters; so does the distribution of its talent. The presence of an actual or potential superstar significantly improves its chances of winning championships.

This shouldn’t be surprising. In the NBA’s economic structure, there are two types of players who routinely produce a high return on investment: young players (who often make far less than they would as free agents under the rookie salary scale) and superstar players (who are often underpaid because of the maximum salary). Teams built around superstars face downside risk; if the superstar leaves town or gets hurt, they’re screwed. But in the NBA, you’d rather take a high-risk, high-reward approach than settle for a No. 8 seed every year.

Our measure of superstar talent is how a team’s top player rated according to the statistic “wins added,” which is described at more length here. Wins added is based on a combination of Win Shares and Player Efficiency Rating (PER). Neither metric is perfect (far from it), but because each can be computed from readily available “box score” statistics, they allow us to compare players and teams on a level playing field dating back to 1976-77.

Having a younger team helps, of course, but it’s better to evaluate the age of a team’s best players rather than everyone on its roster. So, our calculation of a team’s average age is weighted based on wins added.⁶⁵ This is important. The average New York Knick, weighted based on the number of minutes played this season, is about 28 years old. But the team’s better players are old; its average age is closer to 30 when weighted by wins added.

There are a couple of further details in the footnotes,⁶⁶ but let’s see how this works in practice. Here’s how the 30 NBA teams ranked in future championship potential based on their statistics at the end of last season. We’ll run the numbers based on the current season’s data in a moment.

At the end of last year, the Oklahoma City Thunder had the most hopeful situation in the league, projecting to win 0.8 championships over the next five years. This total includes cases where the Thunder would win multiple championships, so this is not quite the same as saying they had an 80 percent chance of winning at least one championship. (Titles in the NBA can come in bunches.)

Still, this was a reasonably impressive figure; since 1976-77, only 12 teams had a better projection. The top one belonged to the Chicago Bulls going into the 1996-97 season. They projected to win 1.2 more championships to go with the four that Michael Jordan had won already; Jordan won two more in reality.

But the NBA is a tough league. Some of the teams that projected almost as highly as Jordan’s Bulls never won a championship. The Cleveland Cavaliers projected to win about 1.2 championships over their next five seasons heading into the 2009-10 season — but LeBron James left, and they didn’t win any. (A championship in Cleveland this season now that James has returned would be one year too late to count within the five-year window.) Other teams appeared likely to follow one championship with more but failed to do so. The Philadelphia 76ers, coming off a 67-win championship season in 1982-83, projected to add another title to Julius Erving’s mantle but never did.

Last season is old news, however. So, we’ve also come up with a projection that accounts for roster turnover and a team’s performance so far this year. This required a few modifications to our original model:

• Team win totals are projected based on John Hollinger’s playoff odds, which account for potential reversion to the mean.⁶⁷
• For individual players, wins added are projected based on a combination of a player’s performance so far this year and in recent past seasons.⁶⁸
• Team ages are weighted based on projected wins added.
• To estimate a team’s chances of winning a title this year (2014-15), I used Hollinger’s playoff odds simulation. For the remaining seasons in the five-year window through 2018-19, I used the figures from our model instead.
• All projections are based on stats through Tuesday evening.

One team is clearly ahead of the pack. It’s the Golden State Warriors.

The Dubs project to win 0.95 championships between now and 2018-19. Some of that is because they’re the favorite to win the title this year, according to Hollinger’s method, with a 36 percent chance. But they also rate as the best bet to win the championship in each subsequent season through 2018-19.

This isn’t rocket science: the Warriors are really good. They’re young — in fact, their average age has declined slightly from last year as older players like Andre Iguodala have come to play less important roles. And they have a superstar in Stephen Curry.

Following the Warriors on the list:

• At No. 2, the Los Angeles Clippers. They’re not off to the start the Warriors are, and they’re a little older. But they have the talent they’ll need.
• At No. 3, the Cavaliers, who have a young core surrounding James, but who don’t yet look like they’ll stand head and shoulders above the pack as James’s teams did some years in Miami.
• At No. 4, the Toronto Raptors, another obvious choice. They’re young, Kyle Lowry is on the verge of being a superstar, and they have the benefit of playing in the Eastern Conference.⁶⁹
• At No. 5, the Houston Rockets, whose projection is largely unchanged from the end of last season despite a disappointing off-season.
• At No. 6, the Grizzlies. Note, however, that this year is probably their best hope of a championship drive. The roster is fairly old, and there’s not a true superstar to build around.
• At No. 7, the Pelicans. They haven’t gotten off to an especially strong start this year and have little shot of title contention this spring. But Davis has as bright a future as anyone in the league and the team’s average age (weighted by wins added) is just 23.6. They project to be the second- or third-best team in the league by the end of the five-year window, according to the model.
• At No. 8, the Portland Trail Blazers, whose numbers are similar to the Raptors across the board but who play in the tougher conference.
• At No. 9, the Chicago Bulls. Theirs is a decent projection, but the Bulls are older than you might think, and Derrick Rose hasn’t played like a superstar lately, even on the rare occasion he’s played. Instead, wins added thinks that Jimmy Butler is their best player.
• And at No. 10, the Thunder, whose projection has declined more than any other team since the end of last season.

Does this underrate OKC? Yeah, probably. As I’ve said, our simple method is liable to underrate teams dealing with injury problems. The Thunder have played pretty well since Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook have returned to the lineup. But two points to consider.

First, when a team has the talent the Thunder do, there’s no time like the present to win a title. But the Thunder are unlikely to win the championship this year. They’d be the No. 8 seed in the Western Conference if the playoffs started today, and while Hollinger’s method may underrate them, there’s a big gap between the Thunder and the top seven seeds. Even if they improve to (for instance) the No. 6 seed, they’ll probably have to win four playoff series as the road team to win the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy. Not. Easy.

Second, Durant is a superstar by any definition, but the degree of superstardom matters. If Durant is the star Sirius, as he was last season, shining brighter than anyone else in the NBA firmament, the Thunder will always have a leg up on the rest of the league, other things held equal. If he’s merely “in the conversation” as the league’s best player, along with Curry, James, Chris Paul, James Harden and Davis, then the Thunder will perennially compete with Curry’s Warriors, James’s Cavs, Paul’s Clippers, Harden’s Rockets and Davis’s Pelicans — but not necessarily beat them.

To be even more geeky about it, championship contention in the NBA is nonlinear function. Being a 56-win team instead of a 60-win team — because, say, Durant has become a half-step slower or more injury-prone — could matter a great deal.

But how overjoyed Gotham would be if blue and orange stood for the Manhattan Thunder and not the Knicks! The Knicks, obviously, will not win the championship this season. And here’s how the model pegs their chances over the next four seasons. In 2015-16, they have a 0.3 percent of winning the title. In 2016-17, their chances are 0.6 percent. And then in the two subsequent seasons, 0.9 percent and 1.0 percent. Overall, there’s about a 3 percent chance the Knicks will win the NBA title in the next five years.

Three percent is not zero percent, so naturally you’ll find the exception to the rule if you dig in deep enough. The 2007-08 Miami Heat, who finished at 15-67, are the most favorable precedent. Their situation wasn’t entirely different from the Knicks’; in a down season, their roster featured one star (Dwyane Wade) and a lot of aging and overpriced “talent” around him. Three seasons later, they signed LeBron James, and in 2011-12 they won the NBA title.

So, maybe the Knicks will luck into Jahlil Okafor in next year’s draft. And maybe Durant signs with them two years from now, and maybe Anthony has a gentle decline. I’m telling you there’s a chance, Knicks fans! It’s just not bloody likely.

The Knicks, however, do not quite have the worst projection in the league; instead that belongs to the 76ers, whose title chances are lower still.

If your eyes are on the long-term, wouldn’t you rather be in a tanking rebuilding situation like Philly than in the predicament of the Knicks or Lakers? Maybe, but the history of teams who have been as laughably bad as this year’s Sixers is not good. Since the ABA merger, 51 teams have finished with fewer than 20 wins in a 82-game season or the equivalent amount in a shortened season. How many of them won a championship in the next five years? Only one — the aforementioned 2007-08 Heat, whose situation was more analogous to that of the Lakers or Knicks than that faced by the 76ers.

The thing about starting from a 15-win baseline is that you can add a 20-win megawatt superstar from the draft, and sign a 10-win free agent, and have another guy develop into a five-win talent … and still be a 50-win team, a No. 5 or 6 seed. It’s not clear there’s anyone on the Sixers’ roster who is a good bet to develop into a better-than-average NBA player. A team like the Detroit Pistons, who at least have Andre Drummond, is about twice as likely to develop into a championship contender, according to the model. The Pistons also face extremely long odds, but you’d rather have Drummond and a slightly inferior lottery position than the other way around. Tanking doesn’t pay, kids!

But there are a lot of ways to be awful in the NBA, and only one team wins the title. Golden State is the best bet to be pouring the champagne soon.

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic.

One of the traditional, fundamental political divides between the left and the right has been the question of rights and ability, the question of positive rights. Conservatives have tended to endorse only negative rights, while liberals have endorsed a more expansive vision of positive rights. Healthcare is a prime example. Conservatives have long reacted to liberal claims of a right to healthcare by saying that people have a right to healthcare, but no reasonable expectation that government or any other entity will secure people access to healthcare. Society’s only responsibility is to prevent some from obstructing access to healthcare by force. Liberals have always argued that to speak of rights in this way is meaningless, that rights have no meaning without the ability to use them. That’s what I’ve argued, my entire adult life, and I have long been able to assume broad liberal support for that stance.

But when it comes to free speech rights, American liberals seem to have sprinted in the opposite direction. The congealing conventional wisdom among progressives now is that the right to free expression has only been abridged if government literally physically prevents you from speaking. Absolutely every other way in which your right to express yourself is fair game. So when I wrote about a University of California Santa Barbara professor who physically ripped a sign from the hands of another person in an attempt to silence that sign’s message– her quote was literally, “I’m stronger so I was able to take the poster”– it was patiently explained to me by patiently explaining liberals that there was no actual abridgment to free speech, because the government hadn’t sent tanks to silence those protesters. What that professor did was “direct action” and was thus permissible. Why that person using her physical advantage to silence someone amounts to direct action, and a crowd beating up antiwar protesters would not, I have no idea.

Or take the Brandon Eich situation. I have been told by liberals lately, again and again, that Brandon Eich has no right to unpopular political beliefs in the workplace, that he entered into a contract with his employer and that part of that contract means giving up his right to hold and express unpopular opinions. If that sounds like straightforward Cato Institution-style libertarian argument, that’s because it is, and to see so many self-identified progressives aping it would be shocking, if not for the fact that this kind of argument by convenience is so common in today’s liberalism. That there are fundamental issues of principle at stake here, or that the long-term consequences of all this could be profound, goes largely unsaid. In a piece typical of the current progressive style, Alex Pareene mocks concerns like mine without even really attempting to grapple with them at all, content in the idea that because the people who are complaining about this stuff are on the wrong side, their complaints are necessarily ridiculous.

Personally? I don’t know how you can possibly say that we have free speech in principle if you’re enthusiastically supportive of efforts to restrict free speech in practice. It’s just like saying that Bill Gates and a homeless man have the same right to own a Ferrari. Of course free speech doesn’t mean you have a right to not be criticized or a right to occupy every forum. But the way in which contempt for the very term “free speech” has become one of those cultural signals that are the glue of today’s bourgie elite progressivism can and will lead to actual, no bullshit suppression of speech. A liberalism that claims that rights are only denied if tanks are rolling through the streets is a pathetic liberalism and one that stands in direct and stark contrast to the history of the principled left.

It seems superficially, straightforwardly true to me: people like the anti-abortion protester and Brandon Eich are presumed by progressives to have no right to free expression because progressives don’t like what they have to say. It’s pure tribalism, which more and more often is the only organizing principle of liberal America that has any valence whatsoever. Take #CancelColbert, which seemed to me to be a straightforward case of people misunderstanding satire. The opinion of the crowd seems to have become that only effect matters– that intention is irrelevant, and if someone is offended by satire, that satire is offensive even if the intent was not. I find this an interesting attitude, not least of which because progressives don’t even pretend to apply it equally. After all, who is most likely, in American life, to misunderstand satire and be offended by it? Not liberals, but rather conservatives, particularly conservative Christians. How many times have progressives mocked conservatives for mistaking The Onion for real news? There are entire websites devoted to this purpose. How often has Colbert been defended by the self-same progressives because he offended the conservative rubes? It turns out that the principle of “that which offends is offensive” only applies when it’s the right sort of people taking offense.

If it all is just tribes– if there’s no principle that matters except for Yooks vs Zooks– then fight, OK. I won’t be on board, but I’ve never been much of a joiner. But please: just come out and say so. Just own up to it. If you think that a feminist woman should have the right to hold unpopular political beliefs without being fired for it, but someone who opposes gay marriage doesn’t, because you agree with the former and not the latter, just say so. If you think a counter-protester has the right to physically rip a sign from the hands of an anti-abortion protester but not from a pro-choice protester, just say so. If you think satirists have the right to offend conservatives but not liberals, just say so. It would make all of this so much easier and more honest.

Me, I am absolutely chilled by the idea that companies should have the right to fire people because they hold unpopular political beliefs, even when those beliefs are not being expressed in the workplace. And I find the notion that progressives can safely endorse that bit of crude libertarianism so immensely short-sighted I can’t quite believe it. I also don’t want to live in a world where anyone, no matter how much I agree with them on the issue of substance, feels free to say “I’m stronger so I could stop speech I didn’t like.” If your average progressive disagrees with me, out of a desire to root for the ol’ home team, that’s fine. But let’s be open and honest about what’s happening.

Update: In a system where you have to work to live, if employers have unfettered ability to force your expulsion because you hold political beliefs that the company or your fellow employees find unpalatable, then there is no right to hold unpopular political beliefs at all. There’s no protection, not only for opponents of gay marriage, but for radical feminists, communists, black nationalists…. And the long-term consequence of a world where employees lack the right to political expression is a world where that right becomes solely held by the idle rich.

They probably didn't mean for his hat to look like a butt

A slow April day in the middle of the college football wasteland had a bomb detonated on it when Stephen Godfrey and SBNation published an in-depth article on the shadow economy of the SEC, wherein people get paid by other people to play football for school X.

"I had this one kid, great player, good guy. Never got in trouble, but never did much on the field. But he's calling me all the time. 'Hey, the sunroof in my car is leaking,' he says, so I tell him to come meet me. $150. Two days later it's: 'Hey, I'm going out this weekend with a girl, can you help me?' $200. Next week after that he's got $300 in parking tickets. So one day I go to meet him to give him money and I ask, "Hey man, aren't you a business major? Have y'all learned what ROI means yet? It means return on investment, and at this rate I'm going to need to start seeing some touchdowns.'"

The article is fascinating and you should go read it now. I'll wait.

…

Now, let's talk about how much we care about this. I do. I've got a sneer or two in me left when I see kids at Clemson and Ole Miss whose recruitments did 180s away from Ann Arbor. There was a recruit in the last five years who Michigan led for; his sudden decision to go somewhere else was financially motivated and that was an open secret amongst that recruiting class. As a guy who wants to see his football team win games, that kind of thing still grates my gears.

But that's all at this point. It's just partisan crybaby stuff. I regard it as a character flaw. (The tatgate thing was different since Tressel lied to the NCAA multiple times. You can't do that and expect to keep your job, even if you lied about stupid rules that make no sense.)

So I don't care, you know, morally. The NCAA's prohibition on kids taking money is not only asinine but (obviously) unenforceable. It also serves no purpose other than to concentrate wealth in the hands of administrators. Whenever I get in discussions about these sorts of things with the dwindling number of people on the side of amateurism, the conversation usually boils down to this:

ME: I guess I just don't see why rich guys giving some of their money to poor people is such a problem.

THEM: But then they'll have money.

ME: I'm unclear on why that's an issue.

THEM: But then they'll be influenced.

ME: …

Around here we like to say things like "I'm so glad Michigan doesn't do that." I think it's time to stop that. The rule is arbitrary, the system inherently corrupt, and if Michigan has a shadow network of boosters my main problem with them is that they're not good enough at being shadowy and boostery. The basketball recruits other schools have swooped in on aren't picking these other schools because of the coaching, man.

I'm over it. And you should be too, because the attitude about I'm So Glad We Don't Do That that's so pervasive around these parts is almost certainly false. I'm So Glad We Don't Do That As Much doesn't have the same horse height. Very averaged-sized horse, that. That's a horse that you can see your lunch getting eaten from only.

And in the service of what?

"Last week I got a call. We've got this JUCO transfer that had just got here. And he's country poor. The [graduate assistant] calls me and tells me he's watching the AFC Championship Game alone in the lobby of the Union because he doesn't have a TV. Says he never owned one. Now, you can buy a Walmart TV for $50. What kid in college doesn't have a TV? So I don't give him any money. I just go dig out in my garage and find one of those old Vizios from five years back and leave it for him at the desk. I don't view what I do as a crime, and I don't give a shit if someone else does, honestly."

Everywhere else in society, an 18 year old who works really hard at something is financially compensated for it and most of them do not… I mean… why am I even arguing about this? If you're the kind of person who thinks that young people doing dumb things with money is a threat instead of, you know, life, you probably start arguments with "Speaking as a parent." Anyone who starts arguments with "Speaking as a parent" wants you to turn off your brain so they can feelingsball you. They are my mortal enemies, speaking as a person who can formulate an argument.

The aura of paternalism that hangs over objections to letting players get theirs is suffocating. "But if they get money they'll…" They'll what? They'll still be under the thumb of a drill sergeant of a football coach desperate to remain in his good graces lest the faucet turn off. They will be the same, just with fewer things to stress about.

They might waste it. They might not. I just don't care anymore. Let them have their five hundred dollars.

Game of Thrones, television’s most consistent show, returns this Sunday night for its fourth season at the peak of its powers and popularity. A series that launched as an enormous, pricey gamble — how many characters? And she does what with the horse heart? — now swaggers like a front-running sure thing. More than 13 million people watched last year’s Red Wedding, in which slashed necks burbled like shaken bottles of champagne — and that’s not counting the untold millions who crashed the party via illegal downloads and “borrowed” HBO GO passwords. It’s the sort of swelling, fanatical audience HBO hasn’t achieved since the heyday of another violent show about warring clans, The Sopranos. And Thrones’ cultural footprint is only expanding. In the run-up to Sunday’s premiere, the cast and crew have been laying siege to the media with the vigor and relentlessness of Stannis Baratheon’s fleet sailing on King’s Landing. Here’s the cast lounging on the rocks on the cover of Vanity Fair; there they are unwinding at the beach on costar Lena Headey’s delightfully chill Instagram feed. Two weeks ago, HBO feted the series with a gala premiere at Lincoln Center followed by a lavish party at the American Museum of Natural History. At the former, the New York Philharmonic played “The Rains of Castamere” and an auditorium full of jaded media types gasped and cheered like Lannister teenagers. At the latter, Peter Dinklage and Alfie Allen gobbled sushi while society reporters hovered around them like flies. Winter may still be coming, but Game of Thrones appeared to be in full bloom.

With its Season 4 just days away, Game of Thrones has reached a saturation point reserved only for the best and most beloved of TV shows. These are the good times, the glory days, when crew and critics alike are flashing the same contented smiles. It’s the moment when the x-axis of audience anticipation and the y-axis of satisfaction cross like the sigil of House Bolton. For some series, this happens early in the run — think Lost after the first-season finale — for others, it occurs as a show’s story engine revs up in preparation for the final turn. With Breaking Bad gone and Mad Men exiting, Game of Thrones’ ascent feels especially significant: It’s now the last consensus show on the air, a pan-demographic Goliath that successfully juggles the adrenalized whomp of a summer blockbuster with the attention-demanding intricacy of a prestige drama. Even with the existence of those physical spoilers known as “books,” Thrones obsessives wouldn’t dare miss their Sunday-night trip to Westeros. It’s the sort of shared, albeit occasionally horrifying, experience that is becoming less and less common as our entertainment becomes increasingly more personalized.

In fact, there’s so much good feeling heading into this new season that it’s almost unsettling. As a critic — but more important in this case, as a fan — I feel like a Stark stuck listening to the best man’s speech and waiting for the music to change. How can a show built around so much carnage and strife be so uniformly celebrated and beloved? And how, by the old gods and the new, can it possibly stay that way?

♦♦♦

Before we climb that wall, let’s dig down a bit. It’s no secret that TV shows receive the most attention when they begin and when they end. It’s a Darwinian binary that syncs up well with the fevered way we cover television these days — in which everything is The! Best! Ever! (unless it’s The Worst) — but doesn’t reflect the way we actually watch. Whether we binge in great gulps or limit ourselves to satisfying weekly sips, TV is best experienced as an ongoing relationship. It ought to be enjoyed in the moment as something much more than the sum total of a meet-cute and a breakup. This is especially relevant this week with the howling rage over the How I Met Your Mother finale threatening to drown out all discourse. The end of something shouldn’t define it, even if all our frustrations — and a good portion of the Internet — are loudly telling us otherwise.

And yet in 2014, even the humble network sitcom finds itself perched on the knife blade of opinion from week to week, forever at risk of falling, like a Dothraki from his horse, from favor to disgrace.¹ There’s no universally agreed-upon term for when a series, like Game of Thrones, is at its peak. (If Jack Donaghy were still in charge of NBC — instead of current president Kenneth Parcell — he’d call it Reaganing. I’m partial to “shooting J.R.”) But there is a more noxious term for the exact opposite scenario, when a once-adored show either founders on the rocks of critical opinion or is stoned to death by a mob of exasperated former fans.

“Jumping the shark” owes its origin to Happy Days but its persistence to cynicism. The eagerness some have to identify the precise moment a show becomes irredeemable has never made any sense to me. It reeks of the sort of entrenched pessimism that makes genuine engagement impossible. It’s like watching Olympic skiing and rooting for the mountain. Besides, the thing that makes TV so unique and exciting is that, contrary to what the shark-jumpers would have you believe, it’s always in flux. The open-ended nature of TV production guarantees that even if your favorite show finds itself all at sea, there will always be a chance to right the ship.²

How does this apply to Game of Thrones? Well, on the one hand, it doesn’t, at least not exactly. The show remains unique, not only in its reach but in its — sorry, Ned Stark — execution. The comforting safety net of George R.R. Martin’s expansive novels allows showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss the luxury of devoting their energies to the sorts of niceties that bedevil more traditional producers, things like “pacing” and “structure.” Despite the enormous budget (the largest in TV), ever-expanding cast (ditto), and a far-flung plot that demands three separate crews filming in three disparate European cities (Belfast, Dubrovnik, and Reykjavik), the prevailing sensation of Game of Thrones is calm. Not the character-based calm that dominates other high-profile hours — Frank Underwood’s duplicity on House of Cards has to remain uncovered for at least another season; Alicia Florrick will be The Good Wife for the long haul — but the calm that comes only from a well-appointed train ride on tracks that have already been laid.

Because Benioff and Weiss know where they’re going, decisions that might sink lesser series — the season-long marginalization (and mutilation!) of Theon Greyjoy, for example — are met with patience, not fury.³ TV viewers are increasingly savvy, but also paranoid; we refer to our viewing choices as investments and balk when our money managers give off even the slightest whiff of doubt. The long arc of Martin’s story has freed Benioff and Weiss from those sorts of inquiries, but in the process it may also have unfairly diminished the magnitude of their achievement. The Red Wedding was truly shocking, a moment unlike any other in TV history. For fans demanding huge returns, it was the equivalent of a Publishers Clearing House novelty check with the long line of zeros written in dripping blood. Everything — and everyone — that went down in that castle had been painstakingly set up for more than two and a half seasons. Benioff and Weiss knew exactly what they were doing, taking particular delight in the way their audience — still scarred and shaking over what happened to Ned Stark in Season 1 — had only just recently begun to trust again.⁴ The real achievement of that stunning episode wasn’t the body count, it was the elegance and skill with which it was tallied.

Which is an important thing to remember, since no road map can cover everything. Eventually every traveler will hit the uncharted region marked “Here Be Monsters.” (Of course, in Westeros that could just be spray-painted over the entire continent.) For Game of Thrones, that time may be approaching sooner than we realize. The new season, like the one that preceded it, contains events from the third of Martin’s novels. There are two published books remaining for Benioff and Weiss to adapt. Martin insists the sixth novel in the series, The Winds of Winter, will be out relatively soon. This is tough to believe, as the gap between his books has begun yawning wider than the Shivering Sea: The first three novels were separated by roughly two years each; then there was a five year wait for Book 4, and it was six for Book 5. As a gesture of good faith, Martin recently posted a chapter from Winter on his website. Rather than instill hope, it had roughly the same effect as a finger being mailed to the family of a kidnap victim.

Benioff and Weiss have spoken of their series lasting seven seasons, which suggests an end date just three years away. It also suggests they don’t plan on respecting Martin’s glacial publishing schedule. It’s a fact of which Martin isn’t ignorant but one he seems hell-bent on ignoring. In the expansive Vanity Fair cover story, he expressed hope that HBO might consider pausing production should it run the risk of lapping his authorly endeavors.⁵ Some might read this as vain, but it struck me as sweetly naive. Until now, Martin has been indulged by Thrones, greeted and fawned over like a Maester and encouraged to contribute a teleplay each year. But the TV business cares about accuracy and creative vision only as long as they are profitable. The minute Martin’s imagination threatens to derail the money train, he’ll be tossed out along with it.

But would this necessarily be such a bad thing? Though I’ve not read a single page of Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire — I prefer to cover the work as a TV series first, a fact I’ll be repeating ad nauseam for the next 10 weeks — I’ve been warned by many who have that they’ve found them to offer significantly diminishing returns. Until now, Benioff and Weiss have been able to bolster their meandering epic with judicious mounds of red meat: a surprise beheading here, a savage castration there. But much of the big game has already been hunted. Though the remaining characters are still sprawled across two continents, Game of Thrones for the first time appears ready to contract rather than expand its scope. It’s a natural pivot for any long-running series, but it still seems surprising on a show so devoted to grandly clearing its throat. (Sorry, Cat Stark.) Even the new characters introduced early in Season 4 — including Pedro Pascal’s wonderfully slithery Prince Oberyn Martell — seem determined to thin the cast list rather than add to it. Who knows how many Red Weddings remain to shock us?⁶ What if Daenerys’s desert ramble starts to look less like this and more like this?

Should such a circumstance arise, I have total faith in Benioff and Weiss to do what generations of TV showrunners and scheming Lannisters have done before: adjust. After watching Sunday’s premiere — no spoilers to follow, I swear on the Sept — I was reminded of how the real pleasures of Game of Thrones derive not from the swords but from the people swinging them. To me, the early episodes of the season always evoke the first day of summer camp — not just because it’s muddy and the rich blond kids are acting like bullies, but because they provide a wonderful chance to catch up on old friends. Look, there’s Jaime Lannister all cleaned up and within stump’s reach of his beloved sister! Hey, Jon Snow and Samwell Tarly are reunited on the safe⁷ side of the wall! And get a load of Arya and the Hound, still enacting the best mismatched buddy comedy since Turner & Hooch! Why worry so much about the destination when the ale is flowing and the company’s so good?

Game of Thrones is an intensely modern show, both in form and content. But it’s worth noting how strongly it resists the sort of online hyper-dissection that can either carry a series aloft or tear it apart, limb by limb, like a starving mob in Flea Bottom. The show proceeds at its own stately pace, telling its own knotty story. Rather than be concerned that future seasons might mar the world that Martin, Benioff, and Weiss have painstakingly created, it’s probably healthier — for your sake and mine — to focus instead on the majesty of that world as it exists now. The night may well be dark and full of terrors, but rest easy: We’re still hours away from dusk.

DIRTBAG SHAKESPEARE imagines modern remakes of Shakespearean plays with a teenage dirtbag cast. The rest is pretty self-explanatory. Previously: Dirtbag Hamlet.

(TYBALT is using BENVOLIO’S own hands to smack him in the face)
TYBALT: stop hitting yourself
stop hitting yourself
(BENVOLIO manages to retract all but his middle fingers)
TYBALT: hey
fuck you man
that’s not cool

ROMEO throws himself facedown on BENVOLIO’S bed
BENVOLIO: what’s the matter
ROMEO: you wouldn’t understand
BENVOLIO: then get off my bed
ROMEO (muffled): no

ROMEO: I WILL NEVER LOVE AGAIN
BENVOLIO: do you want to go out
would that make you feel better
ROMEO: NO
god
you never understand anything
BENVOLIO: ok sorry
ROMEO: wait
lets go out though

LADY CAPULET: juliet the party already started
get dressed and come downstairs
JULIET (smoking): youre a fascist
i dont go downstairs with fascists
LADY CAPULET: would it kill you to put on something nice
and be polite for five minutes
JULIET (smoking two cigarettes): yes

MERCUTIO: what if fairies
had midwives
ROMEO: lol what
MERCUTIO: what if she taught people how to have sex
ROMEO: what

ROMEO: hi
JULIET: hi
i dont even want to be here
i fucking hate my parents
ROMEO: that’s cool
JULIET: do you want to get out of here
(ROMEO climbs behind Juliet on her Vespa)
ROMEO [OS]: sick

JULIET: we should get married
ROMEO: okay
JULIET: thatll show em
ROMEO: when
JULIET: i dont give a shit
like right now
ROMEO: hell yeah

 (in bed)
ROMEO: I wish I were a bird
JULIET: do you want to have sex again
ROMEO: yes
ROMEO: wait how old are you even
JULIET: how old are you
ROMEO: fair enough

LADY CAPULET: so what do you think of Paris
He really seems to like you
JULIET: WHY DON’T YOU JUST FUCKING MURDER ME ALREADY
YOU FASCIST

JULIET: help me sneak out tonight
im gettin married
then im gettin laid
NURSE (stubs out cigarette): fuckin HELL YEAH

(ROMEO and JULIET stand outside a church)
ROMEO: I want to get married
FRIAR LAURENCE: Who is this
ROMEO: who is who
FRIAR LAURENCE: where is rosaline
ROMEO: who the fuck is rosaline

(MERCUTIO is dying)
MERCUTIO: fuck
this is so fucking gay dude
ROMEO: fuck this
MERCUTIO: this is so fucking gay
(He dies)

NURSE: why don’t you just marry Paris too
JULIET: what
NURSE: two for the price of one
you could nail em both
double patty on a single bun
JULIET: what

JULIET: wheres tybalt
ROMEO: who
JULIET: my cousin tybalt
ROMEO (hides bloody sword): who fuckin cares
he was a fascist anyway
let’s run away
JULIET: okay
where
ROMEO: wherever you want

JULIET: do you know what I think would be super romantic
ROMEO: what
JULIET: if we drank poison together
ROMEO: yeah
okay yeah
JULIET: hell yeah
you go first babe

Artwork by Rob VonRamm.

Read more Dirtbag Romeo and Juliet at The Toast.

For each good picture of a male cosplayer you find online, there’s plenty more featuring females. However, today, I’m looking to change all that by featuring 15 guys who really know what they’re doing when it comes to cosplay. For the sake of diversity, I’ve picked people from all around the globe, from the United States to Australia, passing through Finland, Italy, Canada, and more!

Xailas – Jeff Siegert Fanpage (USA)

Jeff Siegert is a North American artist, cosplayer and music producer. He his most known for his totally epic Raiden (Metal Gear) cosplay, which is one of the most detailed and well crafted costume I’ve ever seen.

[Xailas - Jeff Siegert Fanpage on Facebook | Photo by Erik Estrada]

—

Elffi Cosplay (Finland)

Elffi is a 25-year-old male cosplayer from Jyväskylä, Finland, that has been cosplaying for the past 8 years. He likes to travel all over the world, visiting conventions to take part in cosplay competitons as a judge or a participant. He currently studies Business Management in the Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences.

[Elffi Cosplay on Facebook | Photo by Renaud.M.Photographe]

—

Justin Acharacter (Australia)

Justin writes:

I love art and doing artistic things, I was introduced to cosplay by a friend and have never looked back, it is art that I can wear and still get that wow factor, my speciality is superhero and gaming characters.

[Justin Acharacter on Facebook | Photo by E Photography]

—

Carlos Blanchard (Rage Custom Creations) (USA)

Carlos Blanchard is a costumer who has built a reputation in the costuming community, over the years, for his passion in costuming and photography, as well as making a name for himself with his unique designs in both costumes and props. From his now famous Medieval Batman to the Facehugger Corset, and the super viral Venom shoot with Superhero Photography by Adam Jay, his work is known far and wide.

[Rage Custom Creations on Facebook | Photo by Superhero Photography by Adam Jay]
—

Knightmage (USA)

When it comes to cosplay, the main goal for Knightmage, beside having fun, is to inspire and spread good will through cosplaying. The Knightmage: Cosplay Against/Awareness Campaign along with the Knightmage: Prints for Charity (FREE at conventions) is that avenue. Find out more about Knightmage and his work at www.facebook.com/knightmage1 or on twitter @Knightmage.

[Knightmage on Facebook | Photo by Superhero Photography by Adam Jay]
—

Something Wicked Cosplay (Australia)

Something Wicked is a 26 year old Australian cosplayer who designs and recreates characters from multiple genres. Interested in comics, horror movies, video games and pop culture, he has a passion for all things geeky and loves to add his own touch to the characters he cosplays. He loves making all kinds of props and promotes the idea of cosplay being all about having an awesome time.

[Something Wicked Cosplay on Facebook | Photo by E Photography]

—

Kelan Ord (Canada)

Guillaume, aka Kelan Ord, is a graphic artist/designer living in Quebec, Canada. He is also a big Star Wars fan and all around geek. He got into cosplay about two years ago and is now a member of the application team for the Mandalorian Mercs Costuming Club.

[Kelan Ord on Facebook | Photo by Eve Panneton]
—

Junkers Cosplay (USA)

Junkers Cosplay is a San Diego, California-based cosplayer, UCSD engineering student and hardcore corgi enthusiast. He also excels at building props of all kinds. You can follow him on Facebook or on his blog right here.

[Junkers Cosplay on Facebook | Photo by When Was This Taken? (Photography)]

—

Captain Cosplay (USA)

Captain Cosplay is a New York City-based cosplay artist that designs and fabricates costumes for himself, but also does commissions for other cosplayers as well.

[Captain Cosplay on Facebook | Photo by K. Mulligan Photography]

—

Harley’s Joker (USA)

Anthony Misiano is a New York City based actor, filmmaker and artist. He began drawing and creating characters early in childhood, and began performing at the age of fourteen. He has appeared in nearly three dozen stage plays and numerous independent films, some of which he has also written and directed. In 2012 he appeared at San Diego Comic Con as the classic comic book villain the Joker, and the internet went a little crazy. He has since enjoyed visiting multiple comic, pop culture and media cons, costume in tow. In 2013 he left his home town of San Diego, California, bound for New York. He continues to make his living as an actor and artist, and plans to do so until the day he dies.

Also featured in the photo (above): Joker’s Harley.

[Harley's Joker on Facebook | Photo by Eric Anderson Photographic]

—

Leon Chiro Cosplay Art (Italy)

Leon writes:

Hey there, I’m Leon Chiro, an Italian Cosplayer with a huge passion for Cosplay Art. I love Cosplay Contests, I love to interpretate my characters and to enjoy conventions in good company! Fun is the main part of this hobby! In my real life I’m a Photomodel, bartender, and a student in Sports Science and Physiotherapy.

[Leon Chiro Cosplay Art on Facebook | Photo by Fotomania]

—

Mark Meer (Canada)

Apart from being a huge geek, Mark Meer is also an actor, writer and improvisor. His voice is featured in many games from Bioware, namely in the mass effect series where he plays as Commander Shepard. Mark also has his own TV show, Tiny Plastic Men, which he co-created. Here’s a preview clip:

Mark writes:

Here’s my Hobgoblin costume, most recently worn at DragonCon 2013. Fabric components by Brian Parsley, custom silicone mask by Wes Branton of CFX.

[Mark Meer on Twitter | Photo by Marc-Julien Objois]

—

Steven K Smith Props (USA)

Steven writes:

I am a freelance illustrator turned prop maker living outside of Kansas City, Missouri. I love making video game props and am best known for my hyper realistic Borderlands Psycho Bandit masks and iconic Buzz Axes. Feel free to follow my future prop builds at www.facebook.com/stevenksmithprops.

For those interested, you can purchase Steven’s amazing Psycho Bandit masks over at his Etsy shop right here.

[Steven K Smith Props on Facebook | Photo by Michelle Ramos Makeup and Photography]

—

Danquish (USA)

Danquish writes:

I am a Cosplay, Ninja, Giant Robot and Shiba Inu fan. I got into cosplay about 4 years ago when I discovered that I could extend my love for recreating my favorite characters to more than just once a year at Halloween. Over the years I have made some great friends as well as met some of my personal cosplay and creative heroes, all while bringing smiles to fans who share the same passion for the characters I strive to recreate.

[Danquish on Facebook | Photo by Vivid Vision]

—

Conclusion

As you can see, there’s some really talented male costumers out there, you just have to dig a little deeper than usual to find them! Thanks to everyone who sent in their suggestions for this post! I also have to say that writing this took me a lot longer than what I thought it’d initially take. Tracking all these people and their photographers, and then asking for their permission to feature their work on Geeks are Sexy nearly drove me insane.

Please note that all these photos are copyrighted and are the propriety of their respective owners.

HAIL TO THE BEEF

With Celebrity Hot Tub, of course.

The discussion on Twitter yesterday demanded a full review of Presidents as edible meats. We have a few ground rules. First: we use the USDA's beef rating scale. Second, the standing President is exempted from the discussion, mostly because we do not want a call from the Secret Service. Third, we reserved the right to claim some Presidents weren't even meat at all. Fourth, we call dibs on Taft.

PRIME

William Taft. Let's be clear: Taft was the Kobe of Presidentmeats, and a standard we shall never see again walking the paths of the Rose Garden. In a time when weighing over 200 pounds made one a Clydesdale, Taft ballooned to a richly fed and powerful 320 pounds at his peak. In modern numbers, Taft would have weighed seven thousand pounds, and had his own gravitational field surrounding him with a mini-constellation of junk mail and random street debris at all times.

Actual photo of the Millennium Falcon escaping Taft.

The possibilities are endless--the tomahawk steak cut on Taft alone would run you a hundred bucks in a quality steakhouse--but remember that the Comanche could live for three months on one Taft, and used every part of the Taft in their daily lives. Be respectful with this peerless beast, and the top grade meat it gave its life and Supreme Court seat up for to land on your plate.

William McKinley. The Gold Standard was not just a fiscal policy for McKinley, but a personal ethos. Believing that he should shed his body of all but its most essential elements, McKinley gradually had many of his organs and appendages removed until, at the time of his assassination, he was a skeleton-less, but succulent, sentient beef tenderloin. (In other words: THE FINAL FORM OF EVERY OHIOAN.)

Zachary Taylor. A bigger man, well-marbled and active enough to make for a good blend of fat and muscle. More importantly, Taylor's fondness for Louisiana cooking likely gave his meat a tinge of savory Creole spices and a natural immunity to malaria. Serve carne asada-style to Mexicans for maximum irony, or enjoy all by itself in any cut. A truly top-flight Presidentmeat.

Herbert Hoover. How a 220 pound man from Iowa who was resoundingly unpopular in the midst of the Great Depression wasn't publicly seized, coated with dry rub, and grilled is a mystery that scholars still can't unravel. People ate literally anything in the 20s, including barrels with POISON written on them in comically large font.

Chester A. Arthur. A well-marbled and well-maintained 220 pounds fed on gout-inducing banquets, you want to make sure you get your Chester A. Arthur only after it's matured into its full adult body. Ample jowls make for some of the best Presidentmeat guanciale around.

James Madison. The smallest president at a teensy 5' 4" and 122 pounds, Madison is the executive branch's game hen - it must be tasty because it's so expensive, but in reality you're just like "fuck how many bones does this thing have?"

Bill Clinton. Leftover Popeye's chicken that you sneak into the kitchen to eat in the middle of the night because fuck what that doctor said salad is joyless. This is not a metaphor.

CHOICE

Gerald Ford: HELLO I AM GERALD FORD AND I LIKE FOOTBALL AND HIGH FIVES AND PLUTO THE DOG BUT NOT THE PLANET THIS IS A FUNNY BATHTUB YOU PUT ME IN AND IT IS VERY WARM I HAVE NEVER HAD A BATHTUB FULL OF ONIONS AND BEEF STOCK BEFORE BUT IF MY MOM SAYS IT'S OKAY THEN IT'S OKAY GOSH IT IS REALLY GETTING WARMER NOW WELL NOW I AM STEW

John Adams. Described as small but "well-knit," Adams was basically like a suckling feral pig raised on oceans of hard cider and beer. Too small and un-marbled to be Prime, mind you, but certainly good solid winter ham material. For best results, put one of John Adams's legs in a pot with some greens, smashed garlic, and some chicken broth. Now let it simmer all day, low and slow like the little man himself.

James Monroe. Big farm-fed slabby beef, basically, so treat him like a cheaper Prime Rib. The Family Pak of Presidentmeat, for use at second weddings and lesser banquets only.

Martin Van Buren. First president from New York; also the first president who was not a man but actually just a slab of salted venison Jackson kept hidden inside an overcoat and called "Vice President." (The wig was for laughs.)

Andrew Johnson. The first President to be impeached. In their haste, historians often fail to note that he was also cured with apples and lemons. Savory country eatin' untainted by literacy or antibiotics.

SELECT

George Washington. Certainly organically raised and thus high quality, but too lean to make Choice. Dental problems should give you pause, though. Losing adult teeth on the regular is a sign of being too turnt.

Richard Nixon. Oh, you criticize him for his anti-Semitic comments on tape, but how would you feel if you were the first president made completely from blood sausage? You have no idea how cruel Talmudic scholars were to young Richard "Treif-ling" Nixon.

Thomas Jefferson. Our nation's first gourmand-in-chief ate practically everything, so like most relentless omnivores his flesh was probably either a.) oily and tough like a bear's, or b.) tasted like a river silt sandwich like that of a giant catfish. One of our best Presidentmeat prospects for frying in a heavy batter, since all man may be created equal but some simply lack the marbling to become anything but meat-fritter material.

Franklin Pierce. Cured just enough by years of intense drinking, Franklin Pierce makes fine enough jerky for a woodsman's lunch, and would be acceptable hamburgers in a pinch provided you had a grinder, and did not need the hamburgers to have a definitive moral standpoint on slavery.

Harry Truman. Not much meat for eating, but slap that bad boy and some herbs in a pot on low heat for four or five hours and you've got yourself a sassy, flavorful stock. (Strain carefully to remove bones and eyeglasses.)

Rutherford B. Hayes. Not bad eating, it's just that it takes forever to clean the beard off it during kitchen prep.

Warren G. Harding. Tasty, but nearly impossible to clean because of all the baggies of cocaine secreted away inside his body.

Calvin Coolidge. Stringy, but connoisseurs know flash-frying a Coolidge's hat makes for a surprisingly good amuse-bouche.

Jimmy Carter. Passable skirt-steak flavor, but watch your ass when you get near those teeth. Butchers have lost fingers thanks to underestimating the crushing power of those things.

Dwight D. Eisenhower. You don't get that fifth star on accident, and in Ike's case his unique ability to survive off his own fingernails was just what a resource-depleted Army needed. (Note: this is how Bugles were invented.) So, no, there's no meat here. But there's nutrition in a pinch, and that's how we're going to beat those Vichy sons-of-bitches.

STANDARD

John Quincy Adams. Lived on very little, so has to be one of our stringiest, stingiest selections. Probably like eating a cat, but not a feral cat. Also spent his life obsessed with the haters, which toughens the meat. (This is why Lil Kim can only be used as jerky.)

James K. Polk. Regular participation in underground Washington Stabbing Salons kept him lean and fit, but be sure to sort through his Presidentmeat very carefully after cooking, as it's full of broken-off blade tips. They're like extreme bay leaves.

Andrew Jackson. Old Hickory is the Presidentmeat that hunts you back. Thin. Mean. Riddled with lead, tuberculosis, and once coughed up a Spartan's helmet at the White House dinner table in the middle of calling Henry Clay a motherfucker. Andrew Jackson's sole advantage as Presidentmeat is that hatred, disease, and environmental conditions pre-cured him into living jerky. Drop a piece of Andrew Jackson on the floor, and he would clatter like gunmetal. Never spoils; also was never edible in the first place.

William Henry Harrison. Died after a month in office, so strictly sausage grade meat sold to countries without regulatory agencies or a concept of traceable corporate liability.

John Tyler. Well-fed on an organic diet, but not substantial eating. HOWEVER: did have 14 children by two different women, so would likely be prized for his aphrodisiac properties and hunted quickly to extinction by Chinese medicine vendors.

Millard Fillmore. Supported opening up the U.S. to new trade markets, secretly to find tonics and tinctures to enhance the lustrousness of his hair, which he prized more than "any political freedom man may seek to enjoy." Biohazard.

James Buchanan. Might be fine eating but for one thing; Buchanan's flesh was so alcohol-soaked that his very presence in a kitchen with open flame would be a screaming fire hazard.

He would get angry when the White House would only be stocked with small bottles of champagne. Every Sunday he'd go to a distillery to pick up a 10 GALLON jug of whiskey. He'd drink cognac... and up to two BOTTLES of other alcohol... every night.

Would make an excellent firestarter, however.

Ulysses S. Grant. See "James Buchanan," do not eat.

Abraham Lincoln. One time we read a travel guide to China that said hey, listen: you might see chicken on the menu, and you might want to order it, and you will. Then you'll get a chicken, and realize that every chicken in China outside of the coastal areas appears to have died of starvation. Abraham Lincoln is that rural Chinese chicken, and you should not eat him.

James Garfield. Was fond of squirrel soup, tea, and simple crackers, so his meat probably tasted like nursing homes smell.

Grover Cleveland. The chili meat of Presidents, and yes that is a joke about how you're going to see him in non-consecutive settings.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt. You'd think veal, and you'd be very, very wrong. In the Yalta variety pack of meats, the order is Churchill (rich, boozy,) Stalin (lean and mean, like horsemeat,) and then Roosevelt, a bologna-grade meat Subway would have difficulty slipping past inspectors without a giggle.

John F. Kennedy. The only meat the FDA classifies as a protein and amphetamine. Not to be consumed by pregnant women, small children, those who need to operate heavy machinery, or the elderly or immune-compromised.

Lyndon B. Johnson. Fun fact: is the only Presidentmeat mentioned in Fallout series of video games. A can of it gives the player "a five point bonus for lying about your war record" and "bunghole awareness." (Does cause you to lose three points of "not having your dick out in public," though.)

N/A

Benjamin Harrison. Was actually 180 pounds of pure tempeh.

Theodore Roosevelt. Many think of Roosevelt as one of the most masculine figures to sit in the White House. But his years as an outdoorsman and conservationist hid a shocking secret: he developed the ability to photosynthesize, and was thus not made of meat at all.

Woodrow Wilson. Was technically racist poultry.

Ronald Reagan. How much does 184 pounds of tapioca pudding cost? We don't know either, but it beat the Russkies with a smile and a shiny tie pin so maybe you should ask them, comrade.

George H.W. Bush. More of an immortal condiment than a meat, like mayonnaise that never goes bad and also invades Panama because it just feels like doing it.

George W. Bush. Skittles.

rhiannon42:

Captain Kelly Sue speaks for us all, I think.

Like so many of their films, Coen Brothers obscure but lovely new period piece, The Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug, is both a shaggy dog story and an exercise in inertia, or more properly, a lack thereof. Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch), a renowned figure of indeterminate but impressive background, lives alone, cloistered with a fortune of equally uncertain vintage, uninterested and otherwise withdrawn from the world outside. The “desolation” of the title is a fair portrait of his state of mind; like so many Coen protagonists, he is at once self-involved and depressed—his pomposity cohabits with anomie, and more than anything, he is suffused with an air of melancholy depression.

Indie filmmakers of a more ordinary Sundance-circuit variety might take this as the template for a quirky tale of mild uplift; surely a girl would be introduced, an indiepop score sounded; a homecoming home-come. The Coens, though, have darker interests. As was the case in A Serious Man, where they mischievously combined their own Midwestern Jewish upbringing with a pastiche-retelling of the Book of Job, here too their subject is Jewishness—in this case, they have chosen for their setting England in the mid-Nineteenth Century; indeed, there are startling echoes of Daniel Deronda throughout.

Like Deronda, Smaug is of some vaguely aristocratic extraction, perhaps having been fostered by another wealthy nobleman. His parentage is unclear. In an interesting twist on Eliot’s tale, Smaug’s love interest is not a beautiful young woman, but rather a midget homosexual circus performer, played with charm by an almost unrecognizable Martin Freeman. The two find themselves frequently harried by a phantasmagorical collection of Jewish gargoyles—Zionists with an eye on recapturing a homeland that may or may not have ever existed. The English, meanwhile, are equally grotesque, portrayed as a group of impossibly lovely but thoroughly effete, decadent, and largely closeted inverted racists. What other directors in the relative American mainstream would risk such stylistic outrageousness in this age of $200 million corporate sequels?

Again, as in A Serious Man, the Coens have created an ambiguous ending; and as was the case in Deronda, there is a hint that Smaug intends to “go east” as he departs the comfort of his longtime home. After True Grit, their appealing but relatively insubstantial 2010 Western, The Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug represents a real return to form.

John Gara over at Buzzfeed came up with 6 Sharknado sequels that need to happen, like, right now, because everyone wants to see sharks coming out of a volcano.

[Source: Buzzfeed]

Oh my god, you geeks. There is a kickstarter about zombie ants, possessed by fungus.



One of the rewards is fungus.

tastefullyoffensive:

[chaoslife]

Oh but this is missing my favorite bit of bird talk. “Look at me! I’m sexy! Hey ladies! Look at me!” over and over again at 6 in the morning…

This comic needs more damn robots.

The conceit of this piece by Josh Marshall is that there's some great mystery to why some people feel differently than he does about whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. In fact it's brutally simple: Marshall sees nothing to fear from authority and the state, because he is one of the Chosen People of authority and the state. Meanwhile, those who are not among the elect fear and distrust authority, because it daily oppresses them. This fear and distrust is as rational as a thing can be, but Marshall cannot bring himself to believe in it.

Marshall has that in common with Jeffrey Toobin, Richard Cohen, and David Brooks: no reason to fear the police state. Why should they? They are, all of them, American aristocrats: white, male, rich, and properly deferential to anyone with a title or a badge or authority or an office. Of course they don't know why anyone would worry about limitless surveillance. They themselves have nothing to fear because they are the overclass. They can't imagine what it might be like to be Muslim or black or poor or to have any other characteristic that removes them from the ranks of the assumed blameless.

But the story of America is the story of people with reason to fear power. It's the story of how very dangerous it can be to find oneself outside of the overclass, how relentlessly the state and the moneyed work to crush difference. Marshall's notion that men like Manning and Snowden should simply have backed off and played by the rules is one of the most consistent and dishonest messages in American political history. It was the message delivered to the AIDS activists who are profiled in How to Stop a Plague. It was the message delivered to Martin Luther King and the rest of the Civil Rights movement. It was the message delivered to the suffragettes. It was the message delivered to the abolitionists. It was the message delivered to the American revolutionaries. In each case, self-serious men told those who perceived themselves to be oppressed and suffering to get on board and play by the rules, in deference to the community.

Would Marshall have told the Black Panthers that they should have colored within the lines? Would he have told them that they had nothing to fear from the state? Ask Fred Hampton if he had anything to fear from the security state. I don't know how Marshall would regard the Black Panthers. He might be the type of liberal to cluck his tongue at their radicalism. The other movements I mentioned have all become lacquered in bronze in the American mind, and I don't doubt that he'd rush to say that of course he would have supported their movements. And that, really, is the contemporary American liberal in its Platonic state: supportive of all resistance movements, so long as they live in history. Today's movements never rate. They are too challenging, too impolite.

That's part of Corey Robin's point, in this post. He points out that Brooks's limp appeals to family and community are in keeping with traditional methods used to bring radicals and subversives to heel. For someone like Brooks, there's no contradiction between communal fidelity and deference to power. His community is power. His family is the overclass. He wants you to defer to society because he knows no society but the society of the comfortable, of the safe, of the privileged. Perhaps Josh Marshall has, in the realm of pure theory, a greater regard for those who find themselves outside of the benevolent embrace of the American establishment. But as he demonstrates, he cannot see to really understand what it means to be disfavored by power, to be disfavored by government. Again and again in the past few days, we have read people delivering some version of the same argument. "I don't see what they have to worry about." That's the real crime, of the people who attack Edward Snowden instead of grappling with what it means to be a subversive in the eyes of the state: a profound failure of imagination.

As a rule, I’m suspicious of economic explanations, because I regard economics as a fraudulent pseudoscience, although in my more charitable moments, I allow that it might just be a kind of Becherian proto-science, a vast expanse of arithmetical phlogiston that our descendant generations will regard as very nearly quaint. The civic discourse of the present era is completely dominated by economics; young pundits with degrees in philosophy begin to be taken seriously only when they start dropping its jargony solecisms into their op-eds. Economics actually claims to be both a behavioral science and a physical one, even though it appears to believe that its natural laws derive from the word problems at the back of the book than vice versa, and anyway it has a record of near total failure at figuring out why things actually happened or predicting if and when they will happen again. All that said, I’m going to propose a sort of economic explanation for the fact that the government just can’t stop spying on us.

I think we need to see programs like the NSA’s immense and unanswerable but also totally wasteful and unproductive spying program as a form of rent-seeking. That isn’t to say that it isn’t also weird, evil, sinister, and creepily totalitarian, and it isn’t necessarily to claim that it’s a sign of gross incompetence either. For instance: rent-seeking investment banks are very good at what they do, which is balling up other people’s money, auctioning it off, and charging everyone for the privilege of having someone else direct their losses. They are useless, unproductive, and destructive, and they can seem incompetent if you take as their task the purported reason for such institutions to exist, which is to generate wealth for their clients while directing their clients’ wealth toward investment in productive enterprise, but if you understand them for what they actually are, understand that the purpose of Goldman Sachs is to rob people to grow Goldman Sachs, then their incompetence begins to seem a little more like a form of genius.

Well, the surveillance state is at its root—and this isn’t to discount all of its other more nefarious acts and ends, but simply to regard them as symptomatic rather than causal—an ongoing argument for its own existence, a self-replicating machine whose only real purpose is itself. What on earth will the government do with all this data? Well, it will hire more people and discover that this particular dataset is broad but shallow which will necessitate gathering billions more bytes which will continue to have precisely the same effect of necessitating more, more, and more until, hopefully, one day the machines become actually intelligent and decide to devote their considerable processing power to something more necessary, like playing chess or writing metrical poetry.

Some of us nerds recognize it: information is still sufficiently scarce and finite to function as a kind of currency, and the spies are just taking a commission at every point of exchange, but at least when VISA does it with the old money some satisfied customer may walk away from some satisfied merchant. You might consider the NSA program, and others like it, as a kind of information tax without benefits—it’s an absolute requirement, universal and un-appealable, but it doesn’t even cold patch a pothole on the information superhighway. When Google maps your brain into a computer you might get a coupon out of it, some provision of service in exchange. In the meantime, while I believe that we should fight and protest these intrusions on our privacy and personhood, I also come down on the vaguely optimistic side; just as JP Morgan has no idea what to do with its billions other than make more billions, I don’t think the government can do much with this titanic volume of information but add to it. It is morally but not practically outrageous; it’s an exercise of mere accumulation, which isn’t a sign of malevolence so much as of a chronic and probably terminal decadence.

This is part of a series of posts about the fictional economy of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, so nonfans may wish to ignore it, but the principles are applicable to the real world. Post 1 argues that House Tyrell is in fact richer than House Lannister, while Post 2 considers the Lannisters' investments in sovereign debt. Post 3 concerns the market for dragons. Post 4 is on the link between cold weather and economic equality.

A sophisticated modern economy depends heavily on legally enforceable contracts, which is why fancy lawyers get paid a lot of money. But no enterprise consists entirely of fully specified enforceable legal obligations. Instead, tacit understandings, customary practice, and handshake arrangements fill out the framework of legalisms. That's one reason hostile takeover firms can make money by violating tacit understandings. Also in low-trust environments you tend to see a proliferation of small firms, which saps productivity but offers a way of coping with the low-trust situation. And here in the United States I worry that trust is being eroded by rising inequality and an elite failure.

For a society such as that of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, with its very limited formal capacity for legal administration, the availability of trust and custom is even more important. But as we saw on last night's episode, sometimes the gains from a breach of trust can be temptingly large.

When considering this matter, I think it's worth saying that Robb Stark's actions are arguably even worse than Walder Frey's. Whether he broke his original promise out of a misguided sense of honor (as in the books) or simply true love (as in the show), he's actively undermining the key social and political institution of Westeros. Arranged marriages run afoul of modern sensibilities and strike us as cynical. Turning such a marriage aside for honor or love strikes as us idealistic if perhaps misguided. But that would be a mistake. Marriage contracts are the only means that the major houses of Westeros have for forming alliances and ending conflicts. Walder extracted a high price from the Starks in exchange for his assistance in crossing the river, but the Starks were asking a favor of considerable value. The coin that Walder demanded—marriage arrangements for his children—was absolutely the standard sort of exchange for major political favor. A world in which one house promises another house a marriage alliance and then turns its back on the promise on a whim is a world in which houses are going to be perpetually at war.

Walder's decision to respond to betrayal in kind is extreme. But tit-for-tat is a viable strategy in the iterated prisoner's dilemma and arguably represents a reasonable approach. We, with direct access to Stark/Tully perspectives, know that the Edmure Tully fallback marriage is a perfectly good-faith arrangement but the view from the Twins is not so clear. You really wouldn't want to elevate a new King who right from Day 1 is betraying not only the Iron Throne but also his own bannermen. If you squint at it right, you can see what Walder was thinking. By contrast, the betrayal committed by Roose Bolton is pure ambition and cynicism with no justification whatsoever.

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic.

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May 30th, 2013: So in my quest for accuracy in this comic about talking dinosaurs, I needed to know how many enemies there actually are in Super Mario Brothers! I did what all dilettante researchers do these days: I asked Twitter. And Mark came through with this TMK page and enemy count table (scroll down to "enemy inventory"). The total is 552 enemies, but that's WITHOUT any that repeatedly spawn (Spinys, Bullets Bill, etc). So that's your impossible-to-reach minimum count, and I doubled it because I'm counting the Princess's "Second Quest" where the Goombas all turn into Buzzy Beetles, and that gives us our (conservative) total of 1104 evil exes in T-Rex's new game. A more accurate number may be obtained by doing a series of Monte Carlo experiments on the game. NOW YOU KNOW. One year ago today: if this 5% royalty share on gross is applied retroactively to all characters who match this generator then i am SET – Ryan

“I Can t Find You,"

YIKES, sorry.

 

How Do The Census Bureau And Bureau Of Economic Analysis Set Data Release Dates?

The Economics and Statistics Administration’s (ESA’s) constituent bureaus—the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)—release 12 monthly and quarterly “principal federal economic indicators (PFEIs).” PFEIs are key economic data that businesses, governments, and private citizens rely upon to make decisions every day. Because of their importance, the statistical agencies and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) publish the full year of PFEI release dates at the beginning of each calendar year in accordance with Statistical Policy Directive No. 3—Compilation, Release, and Evaluation of Principal Federal Economic Indicators. 

The directive is not a light read, but it remains as important today as when it was first published in 1985:  to remain credible, reliable, and relevant, federal statistical agencies must provide timely data, with equal, simultaneous access to everyone. Specifically, agencies must get the data out the door in the shortest amount of time “practicable” after the data “reference period”—that is, the period for which we are measuring exports, retail sales, employment, or other data. Some of the most popular government statistics may be published for a specific month or year, but in reality reflect economic activity for only part of the month. For example, the 2010 decennial Census measures the population as of April 1, 2010 (Census Day) not the average of 2010 as a whole. For the PFEIs, OMB asks agencies to release their data no more than 22 business days following the end of the month or quarter they are measuring. OMB also tries to avoid multiple PFEI same-day releases. (Data, like good meals, are best digested in small portions).

If you have read this far, you must love data as much as I do and want to know how exactly Census and BEA set their PFEI release dates each year. Read on to find out the details of five of the bureaus’ major releases: international trade in goods and services; advance monthly sales for retail and food services; new residential construction; advance report on durable goods; and gross domestic product.

U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services (Census Bureau and BEA)

Data on goods entering and leaving the U.S. over a certain value require that documentation be filed with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. These data are continuously and mandatorily compiled and processed as shipments depart from and arrive in the United States. BEA compiles data on services via a monthly survey and estimates the total monetary worth of lower value shipments because these shipments do not require documentation with Customs. The Census Bureau and BEA use all of these data to estimate total U.S. exports and imports each month.

There are an enormous amount of data the two agencies must process to produce this PFEI: in 2012, the combined value of U.S. exports and imports in goods and services was almost $5 trillion. Census and BEA release the data, on average, 35 calendar days after the end of the reference month because of the volume and complexity of the data.  However, this period has been dramatically shortened over time thanks to advancements in technology that result in improvements in data processing. Since 2000, the average processing time has been reduced twice: from 50 days (2000-2002) to 42 days (2003-2012) and then down to 35 days this year. As a result, the foreign trade release data are available one week earlier than they were last year.

Advance Monthly Sales for Retail and Food Services (Census Bureau)

Retail sales data for the monthly advance release are collected through the Monthly Advance Retail Trade Survey (MARTS). The advance estimates are based on a smaller group of stores, restaurants, and other businesses than the preliminary and final estimates released in later months; surveying a smaller group of businesses allows the Census Bureau to process the data faster and release the estimates sooner. For the advance release, the Census Bureau mails or faxes out approximately 5,000 forms to a sampling of stores, restaurants, and other businesses five business days before the end of the month, and the forms are due back two business days into the new month. Recipients are asked to report their sales for the entire month that just ended and have the choice of responding by mail, fax, or online. Census processes these data quickly and releases the report approximately nine business days after the close of the reference month.

New Residential Construction (Census Bureau)

This release combines data from two surveys: the Survey of Construction (SOC) and the Building Permits Survey (BPS), which together measure the number of residential building permits authorized, housing starts, and housing completions for the entire month that just ended. The Census Bureau releases these data approximately 12 business days after the end of the reference month. This is quite a feat considering that Census field representatives collect SOC data in person and that the BPS samples 9,000 local building permit officials through a voluntary mail survey each month. SOC data collection begins on the first day of the new month and continues through the 7^th business day. So the Census Bureau takes just five business days after data collection to process the information and publish preliminary estimates. 

Advance Report on Durable Goods: Manufacturers’ Shipments, Inventories, and Orders (Census Bureau)

This report, commonly referred to as “M3,” measures durable goods manufacturers’ orders, shipments (sales), and inventories each month. It is available approximately 18 business days after the close of the reference month. (The Census Bureau releases additional data, including data on nondurable good industries, approximately 23 business days after the close of the reference month). The M3 release dates are based not only on the processing time needed by bureau staff, but more importantly on the availability of data from several key companies that report for the M3 survey. These companies do not report their data to the Census Bureau at the last month of each quarter until their financial data becomes public (these are the data required by the Securities and Exchange Commission). If the Census Bureau published initial estimates prior to receiving these companies’ data, this could result in large revisions in subsequent months. Interested in what happens during the 18 days of data processing? Check out the “How the Data are Collected” tab on the M3 Web page.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (BEA)

BEA releases the advance, or first, estimate of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) for each quarter roughly one month after the quarter ends. So the advance estimate of GDP for the January-March quarter is released near the end of April. BEA draws upon a plethora of data from many sources to calculate GDP, so the other data must be available before BEA staff can begin their work. All of the data discussed above—the monthly data on foreign trade, retail sales, new residential construction, and durable goods—are inputs for estimating GDP. As more data become available, BEA staff crunch some more numbers, fine-tune their calculations, and release a revised (preliminary) estimate of GDP approximately two months after the close of the quarter and a final estimate approximately three months after the close of the quarter.

So there you have it – release dates explained. Now, you not only know WHEN your favorite data will be released, but WHY they are released on such a precise, and not random, schedule. Use ESA’s Release Calendar to stay on top of the latest data as they become available.

Jessica R. Nicholson, Economist

Happy Birthday Gene Wolfe

Tor.com celebrates our favorite author’s birthday with a nice little blog post.

They just sit around with other video game characters listening to the Super Mario Bros. 2 soundtrack. Ironically. 

(Sam Milham via Kotaku)

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Tyler Cowen offers a distressingly unsystematic look at the question of what is the most perfectly average place in America, recapitulating the excessively anti-urban bias of conventional thinking about the American character.

He offers as his candidate Knoville, Tenn., which has a metropolitan area population of just 824,000 people. Fully 180 million Americans live in larger metropolitan areas than Knoxville. The larger Tennessee city of Memphis is almost spot-on the average, but I'd say Memphis is a bit too distinctive to qualify as "perfectly average." Fortunately for us, if you rank U.S. metro areas by population size and then add up the cumulative totals, you get the conclusion that the median American lives in the Jacksonville, Fla., metropolitan area. And Jacksonville, though it may have its virtues, is not especially distinctive or noteworthy. It's a great example of a generic American city. It's in the South, but not really all that southern. It's on the coast, but it's not "coastal." And since the city of Jacksonville is consolidated with Duval County, it doesn't feature any kind of urban-suburban divide. The typical Jacksonviller, just like the typical American, lives in an auto-oriented, suburban-style community that's part of an integrated urban area. In educational terms, Jacksonville has fewer high school dropouts than the average American city and also fewer college graduates than the average American city. In other words, its citizens are exceptionally average in their educational attainment. 

If you're ever in the Jacksonville area and get the chance to visit the White Oak Conservation Center, I'd recommend it. Very much a non-average experience.

By Thoreau

I just learned that “jerk” is not a word that you can say in front of kids these days.  Nor can you say “stupid.”  Apparently parents these days have become total retards.

When I’m a parent, my kid will probably have the foulest mouth in the school.  And it won’t help matters that my strongest language will probably be reserved for when I’m helping them with their math and science homework and I’m all “Your idiot teacher did what again?”  That might be enough to push me over the edge and have me doing workshops for teachers….workshops on science fundamentals and traditional methods, mind you.

Post title explained.

Link in case the embedding doesn't work.

I am, as you know, not a fan of Rand Paul. Being that I am a socialist and that Paul is (sort of) a libertarian, this will come as no surprise. And, I agree that there was much to shake my head at in Paul's remarks at Howard University, from both a policy perspective and on the level of aesthetics. There are many ways to criticize the stuff he said. Just about the worst way to do it is to snark around, giggling and hawing at the rube from Kentucky in a way that makes your disagreement seem cultural rather than substantive. And the really stupid way to do it is to simultaneously claim that we need to move past feelings and dialogue when it comes to race-- a point I've made dozens of times myself-- while ignoring the actual, substantive point a powerful legislator made about a matter of law. From Dave Weigel's far more honest take on Paul's remarks.

I am working with Democratic senators to make sure that kids who make bad decisions such as nonviolent possession of drugs are not imprisoned for lengthy sentences,” said Paul. “I am working to make sure that first time offenders are put into counseling and not imprisoned with hardened criminals.” Barack Obama and George Bush did drugs, after all, and they turned out okay because they got “lucky.”

The drug war, of course, is one of the most damaging weapons that is employed in this country's ongoing war on black people. It's also one of the few places where I ever feel genuine optimism about our coming to legislative progress on race and class injustice. I can actually imagine a Republican coalition working with progressive legislators to help gradually decelerate our ruinous, racist, cruel drug policy. I can't see that happening, though, if prominent liberal voices like that of Hayes are so busy chuckling and snarking on national television that they give up every opportunity to find common cause. 
Of course, because he's Rand Paul, and Rand Paul is a dumbass with generally bad politics, he couldn't help himself:

Paul was on to something, but it didn’t last. “Some argue with evidence that our drug laws are biased—that they are the new Jim Crow,” he said. “But to simply be against them for that reason misses a larger point. They are unfair to everyone.”

Look, we've got a system that is almost sadistically bent away from representing the interests of our cities. High population states are systematically underrepresented compared to their rural, low population counterparts. Our governmental structures emerged from a fetish for compromise, one that holds the whole country hostage to the most extreme conservative minority. No pragmatic political value can be wrung from those structures without occasionally finding common cause with people who generally believe stupid things. If Rand Paul is willing to throw his voice and his vote behind a long-term effort to end the drug war, I'm willing to listen to what he says, even if he turns around and demonstrates that he doesn't understand the full extent of the problem, where it comes from, or what it will take to actually end racial inequality in this country.

Weigel puts it aptly:

When he left the campus, past the students still holding the “White Supremacy” banner and conducting interviews, Paul remained the Republican most likely to reform mandatory minimums. He remained the most prominent Republican supporter of drug law reform. He wouldn’t apologize for the Republican Party, or for libertarianism, or for that 2010 interview about the Civil Rights Act. “Should we limit speech from people we find abhorrent?” he said then. “Should we limit racists from speaking?” Now, he was offering African-Americans some accommodation, from time to time.

I wonder if Hayes has considered the possibility that part of the reason why we have such a problem with racial equality in this country-- why we have a hard time getting to those substantive, material changes that he is talking about-- is because people like himself are so busy sneering at the cultural differences of their political opponents that they can't produce common ground. What does Hayes imagine would happen if a conservative who is on the fence about drug law reform were to watch his show? How does this performance do anything but eject such a person from that conversation?

My fear is that Hayes didn't worry about that because he knows that no such person is watching his broadcast. To someone who would never in a million years vote for Rand Paul, who agrees on substance with probably 99% of the things Hayes believes on drug and crime policy, and who can think of a thousand things wrong with Paul's reported remarks, this clip looks like nothing more than pure red meat for Hayes's assumed audience. It's service journalism, reassuring Hayes's Democratic viewership of their superiority on this issue. I am, as you know, not someone who ever insists on compromise or political expediency. If Hayes thinks that Paul's legislative perspectives on the drug war is incorrect, and can't support them, he should say so and say why. I'd support that kind of principled resistance. But to claim to want to focus on the material aspects of our racial inequalities and then ignore the substance of a prominent Republican's take on just those aspects is dishonest and unhelpful. I would turn Hayes's question back on him: what, exactly, is your priority?

Look at it.

No, just look. In the image above, there is no whistle. There is just Trey Burke, consensus national player of the year, making another magnificent, awe-inspiring play—and in a season when he's done that time and again, I don't recall #3 blocking a shot quite like that. Stripped of the context of the game, it's simply 60 more frames of Burke's greatness.

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We all witnessed a basketball classic last night, no "college" qualifier necessary. Michigan and Louisville put on a showcase of everything that is great about the sport—no two other teams in the country could've combined, on that stage, to showcase such a sublime combination of talent, skill, coaching, and the free-flowing style that makes for the most entertaining of games.

The exception was the officiating, and it's not like the Wolverines bore the brunt of that incompetence alone. Louisville's run to close out the first half could've swung the game even more had the refs not whistled phantom fouls on, if memory serves, both Peyton Siva and Russ Smith as they were in the midst of picking Wolverines clean and heading the other way for a layup. Look closely enough and you'll never fail to find points left on the table.

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I watched the game last night at my apartment, with my brother and roommate, just as I had the first five games of the tourney—same people, same seats. After the final buzzer, we sat in silence for a few moments, collecting our scattered feelings. My roommate, normally the one who lets his emotions get the best of him, was the first to break the silence. Let's have a drink, go outside, get some air.

We stood on the back patio, and over a backdrop of hovering helicopters and wailing sirens we talked about the game, this team, the tourney run. The specifics of the conversation are lost to a long night and a few beverages, but I remember the smiles that crept over all of our faces as we recounted our favorite moments from an unforgettable season. Back inside, we flipped on a rerun of Arrested Development on the DVR, laughing with the Bluths like it was any other April night.

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Today, I woke up a little late, and yes, with a little bit of a headache. This was what I saw when I turned on my laptop:

Michigan may have lost, but Spike Albrecht is still doing his thing, and I'm not one to count him out these days. After all, he was the Most Eligible Bachelor even before he had one of the most unlikely performances in championship history.

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It's always disappointing when your team comes up just short, not because you're disappointed in them, but for them; there's no coach more deserving of a title than John Beilein, no player who's earned a crowning achievement more than Burke, and for a moment after the game I ached for them. But someone always has to ache, and who's to say who's more deserving? You know Kevin Ware; now read about Luke Hancock having the game of his life while his ailing father watched from the stands, or the incredible story of a 13-year-old Peyton Siva talking his father out of suicide, and there's no anger to be felt as Louisville celebrates. They have lives and stories just like our guys, we're just not as familiar with them.

And today, Spike Albrecht—Spike Albrecht!—is the talk of the nation, as is Burke's incredible block and that game, man, that game. Regardless of departures, and there will be departures, this program is in better shape than it was 24 hours ago. The whole country knows what we've known this whole year about Michigan basketball: they've arrived, they aren't going anywhere, and they're damn fun to watch. For 14 minutes, Spike Albrecht made everyone forget about Trey Burke, and we're not even sure he's going to start next year.

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Look at it, one more time. It's still beautiful, and forever will be.

This will make you punch a wall or vomit or both.

AHHH WALL PUNCH VOMIT

[HT: UMHoops.]