Danny ChaiI really like the way Georgetown plays offense. Supposedly they run a modified Princeton offense. I wish I knew more about basketball to appreciate it. But I like the synchronization, how people move away from the ball, how people move immediately after passing the ball, and all the cuts and subsequent easy baskets involved. It’s just really fun to watch.
I also really admire how UCLA plays defense. They way they pressure the ball-handler consistently moves him a step or two further away from the basket. It’s brilliant.
Anyway, I don’t get why Cal people can be such haters. No offense, but some of them they are wayyyy too into the Stanford rivalry thing. With Stanford people, Cal is our rival, but it’s just that, a sports rivalry. You wear a Cal sweatshirt around campus, no one will care too much. With Cal people, it’s like hate. They’ll force an innocent child to strip naked and cry if they’re wearing Stanford gear at Cal. I’m not making this up. Drew told me this, how at a game the Cal folks made some 5 year oldish kid “take off that red shirt” and he cried. I dunno, that level of hate is bit much for me.
I was talking to my uncle, who went to Cal, and he was mentioned how his nephew is getting ready to apply to colleges. He was talking with his brothers, who went to Stanford, and said how they got into a disagreement because he would rather him go to USC than to Stanford. I was stunned. That’s just hateful. Even ignoring academics, just on a purely athletic level, you would rather him go to USC, which (unreasonably) provides 80% of the Pac 10’s smug? Egad.
I related this to Albert, who happened to be in town last weekend, and he was like, wow, USC or Stanford, that’s a hard choice. He wouldn’t even make it. I think his final answer was Washington State.
Incidentally, he also made the ridiculous claim that he would rather have Cal’s basketball season this year than Stanford’s, since “everyone” was saying how they didn’t deserve to be there and got blown out by Louisville. That’s one of the most ridiculous examples of self-deception I’ve ever heard. He’d rather have a season not making the tournament than making it? I mean, come on. I don’t know what’s in the water at Cal, but they need to stop it with haterade. As for me, I have zero problem with Cal. I root for them when they’re playing non-Pac 10 teams. I have and wear as many Cal T-shirts as Stanford. Can’t we all just get along? Let love rule.
ditty’s comment on my last entry is, I think, far too sanguine. It is true that civilizations have continually come up with alternative energy sources, but that’s a self selecting examination – civilizations succeed only if they come up with alternatives, and those that don’t collapse. We will probably find alternatives in the future, but if history is any guide, there will be much pain and loss of life in the transition before those alternatives are found.
I had a talk with dcpark about this a while back, based on Jared Diamond’s (the guy who wrote Guns, Germs and Steel) book Collapse, which deals with, big surprise, the collapse of civilizations. He looks at various collapsed societies in history, including recent history, and arrives at the main thesis is that a primary factor in societal collapse is running out of environmental resources. Even in examples like Rwanda, where it is commonly thought that the genocide was driven by racial hatred, he argues that the underlying issue was too many people and not enough land to farm.
Unfortunately, while I read Guns, Germs and Steel, I haven’t actually read Collapse, so I’m kinda talking out of my butt based on Wikipedia and what Dave said. But it’s an interesting topic, why societies fail. And kind of a warning that, historically, the maintenance of environmental resources doesn’t automatically work itself out without much loss.