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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, February 16, 2008

The Brooklyn Of The West 

...it hasn't quite happened yet, but the good people of Seattle, who have put up with their own full measure of crap from the world of major league professional sports over the decades, are about to get slapped in the face in a way that only the fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers - or maybe the Baltimore Colts - can truly understand. The Seattle Supersonics, the only existing member of the three current professional male sports franchises to ever bring a championship to the city, are going to be leaving town. There currently isn't any question of if; the only question is when...

Forty Years. A host of famous names: Hall of Famers like Bill Russell and Lenny Wilkins; other players like Dennis Johnson (later more famous as a Celtic), Spencer Haywood, Paul Silas, and Nate McMillan (now the coach of the Portland Trailblazers). A lot of seasons of heartache and pain and periods of joy, with that one special moment in the spring of 1979 when they beat the Bullets 4 games to 1 to win the NBA championship. That was the 33rd year of the existence of the National Basketball Association; the Sonics were part of the first expansion of the NBA from 9 to 14 teams (along with the Bulls, Rockets, Bucks, and Suns). They will be leaving Seattle for the same reason that most teams leave: arguments over who should pay for the creation of a glitzy new arena that will maximize revenue for the owner/investor brood...

The loss of the Sonics to Seattle and the Pacific Northwest won't be a killer moment. Hell, Boeing corporate headquarters fled for the vast wastelands of the midwest a couple of years ago based on the rather twisted argument that it needed to be more centrally located, as if the whole concept of the Internet Age and the idea of jet travel as the creation of a global community had somehow escaped its intellectual grasp, and yet there hasn't been a recurrence of the 1971 billboards saying "Would the Last Person Leaving Seattle Please Turn Out the Lights". Seattle survived the tragic Major League Baseball episode of the Pilots (two years after the birth of the Sonics) who lasted one year before moving to Milwaukee to become the Brewers, and it wasn't until a full decade after the birth of the Sonics that Seattle finally had full-time representation in both Major League Baseball (Mariners) and the National Football League (Seahawks). In the meantime, as a vicious underhanded act of Puget Sound revenge, Microsoft and Starbucks took over the world...

There will still moments, however, where the loss of the Supersonics will be felt. This was the first team to bring one home for the Pacific Northwest in the modern era of major media sports coverage. Until we boomers all die, what ends up mattering is that this was the first boomer team of champions in the Pac NW and, long before anyone ever cared about or even understood what the hell 'Windows' or 'venti' would mean to urban and suburban lives in the Northwest and beyond, we understood what it meant to live in an otherwise forgotten part of the country and be able, just for one moment, to stand up on our hind legs and wave those "we're No. 1" banners in front of all those national cameras. It may seem like a stupid, cheap sort of event to which you would choose to pin your identity, but when the oldest existing major professional sports franchise in the region is about to pull up stakes and leave town, it ends up being all that a lot of people have left...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:28 PM 0 comments

"The Dead Zone" - Coming To A Beach Near You 

...while it's not clearly understood why it is happening, it is becoming a sucker's bet that each summer will bring the development of an area of ocean off the Pacific Northwest coast that has either alarmingly low dissolved oxygen or be completely hypoxic. It's our own home-grown version of The Dead Zone, an area virtually devoid of aquatic life, and it is a phenomenon that - while never apparently having been detected previously over the last half century - has happened on a reliable schedule over the last six years...

I once joked with a long-time friend about the similarities between a recently-detected growing bulge on the flanks of a dormant Oregon Cascades volcano called South Sister (part of the Three Sisters group of volcanic peaks) and that Pierce Brosnan volcano movie. We had gone through the eruption of Mt. St. Helens together early in our careers and talk about bulges on nearby mountains not only had a chilling familiarity, but also seemed to tie in nicely with that Dante's Peak story line: The populace stumbles around in blissful ignorance, unaware of or resistant to the building natural signals and the persistent warnings of those voices who really do know what's about to happen. That whole 'volcano' thing may be an apt metaphor for what we are going through right now; we appear to be crawling uncomfortably close to the lip of the gaping maw of something big, strange, and dangerous that we may not begin to adequately understand before it's too late to bite the big one in the final, climactic reel of this movie...

The advent of climate change as a result of anthropogenic inputs (and, please, could someone kindly propose civil penalties for use of the term "global warming") is starting to look less theoretical all the time, and the persistent development of 'dead zones' off the Oregon and Washington coast is just another example of just the sort of thing that climate change could yield. It probably isn't as ironic as it should be that in the last month paper argues that we have the Holocene era and have entered the epoch that has been dubbed the Anthropocene. Although these people are geologists who spend an unseemly amount of time studying landforms and dirt and stuff (I kid because I love), these physical elements are affected by the climate, and the authors make the rather compelling argument that there are beginning to be sufficient detectable changes in the climate to say that we have left the comforting motherly embrace of the Holocene period in which we have been ensconced for the last 120 or so centuries. The recent establishment of the coastal dead zones in the Pac NW are just the sort of thing that contribute to a future fossil record that would define the change in circumstances that would allow the drawing of a line between the end of one era and the beginning of another due to some sort of....change...

There are and will continue to be those who insist that there isn't sufficient evidence to claim the existence of climate change. Not surprising, that; there are still strange little pockets in the world where you can find those who deny the occurrence of the Holocaust. Time and evidence is beginning to lean hard on that first group, though, and the crabbers along the Pacific Northwest coast are probably aren't going to be part of the choir that they are preaching to...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:07 PM 0 comments

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Big Mo And That Horse Race Thing 

...one troubling aspect of the "horse race" nature of political coverage - and, of course, it is only one of a very many aspects that should be troubling - is the fact that the breathless coverage of the Democratic race between Obama and Clinton, with all of the "Big Win" themes and Breaking News "Campaign Meltdown" bulletins, misses the fact that there is still a campaign going on over on the Red side of the map. Mike Huckabee doesn't think that the Straight Talk Express is barrelling down the HOV lane toward the Republican nomination; following his wins in Kansas and Louisians, his campaign staff is making noises in Washington state over the manner in which vote counts and conclusive statements by state party officials are being done and made...

...which I have to confess doesn't sound like the actions of a campaign that feels itself to be "hopelessly behind"...

The impression of momentum, as ballyhooed by the MSM, is one of the more critical determinating factors in the outcome of a campaign. We are very possibly watching the beginning of the demise of the Hillary Clinton campaign largely as a result of the impressions being created by the nature of the reporting about her personal campaign loan, the weekend state campaign events, and changes at the top of her campaign staff. At the same time, McCain is said to be marching toward his victorious annointment as the Repub nominee, followed with all that triumphalist chatter about the problems he poses for the Democrats (even though many of the primaries and caucus votes he won are in states that he probably won't stand a hoot in hell of winning in November), even though Huckabee doesn't show any particular interest in giving up the struggle and faces a number of favorable states in the remainder of the nominating season...

I somewhat suspect that McCain doesn't have the nomination so perfectly sewn up as Big Media would have me think; he is only one off moment, one ill-timed display of his famously vicious temper in one of those epic Bob Dole "quit lying about my record" episodes, from turning the whole thing on its head. For now, though, we are neck deep one more time in that 'great guy to have a beer with' syndrom (probably not suprising when his opponents have most recently been a Mormon and a Southern Baptist minister), so the horse race is going McCain's way to just about the same degree that it isn't breaking for Clinton...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:35 PM 0 comments

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