29toLIFE

I never really wanted to like the Heat. It was never something I planned on doing. For the better part of fifteen years, I’ve been as strong a Heat detractor as one could be, without actually being Bill Simmons v2.011. Clarence Weatherspoon, Allan Houston, Shawn Marion; these are all names that have brought me great joy througout my basketball-loving life, yet, somehow, I find myself sitting in front of the computer, writing the following sentence:

I <3 the Miami Heat.

Not the organization or their history, of course. After all, it’s hard to truly love Pat Riley’s sliminess or Alonzo Mourning’s legacy if you’re not already a long-time Heat fan. Nobody’s asking you to love those guys. But this particular team, a team consisting of three guys who are really good and nine who look like they’d never even seen a basketball before March. How do you not love them?

The Miami Heat isn’t just Dwyane Wade and LeBron James lobbing full-court alley-oops. It isn’t Chris Bosh awkwardly yelling at the sky. It’s the Mike Bibby SunPass lane on defense. It’s Mario Chalmers randomly fouling someone for no reason and then passing to the wrong team on the very next possession. It’s Mike Miller missing a three. And then missing another. And another. And another. It’s Joel Anthony’s hands being surgically removed and replaced with cast-iron skillets. It’s Juwan Howard still – quite inexplicably – collecting an NBA paycheck. It’s Jamerickas Dampgauskgloire. It’s the cast of your favorite TV sitcom wearing basketball shoes. It’s a fun story with entertaining characters. It’s their success despite their comical ineptitude. What’s not to like?

I admit that it’s strange, because this team is last year’s Cavaliers. Not as far as superstars go, obviously, but at least in regards to the supporting cast. They’re just as dysfunctional as Cleveland was and I didn’t particularly like that team at all. The thing is, though, LeBron James was stuck with that group. They were his burden. This team? These merry misfits? The Big Three chose them. This Heat team feels a lot less like a guy forced to babysit his little brother’s slumber party and a lot more like three buddies who decided to spend their weekend chaperoning a group at the Special Olympics.

Who knows? Maybe in the near future, it’ll be different. Maybe next year, UD becomes a little too Kevin Garnett for my liking. Maybe lovable losers like Bibby and Chalmers turn into players who aren’t as easy to root for. Maybe these feelings I have are nothing more than the civic pride that comes from being born and raised in a city that now finds itself under attack from the rest of the sports-loving country. Hell, it’s possible that I’ll never feel this way again about this team, that I’ll go back to praying for missed jumpers and blown out knees once the season ends. All I know is that, on my way into work this morning, I thought about last night’s win. I thought about LeBron being all clutchy and stuff, even though a month ago, he was, like, the unclutchiest guy in the NBA or something. I thought about Dwyane Wade seeing Derrick Rose’s poster and raising him a YouTube clip. I thought about how much I’ve hated the Heat, how much I’ve truly despised this organization over the years. And I couldn’t help but smile.

So, let me write this again before the Knicks fan in me comes to his senses and hits the delete button on this entire post. Let me write this again while I still feel it, even though I’m not entirely sure why I feel it.

I <3 the Miami Heat.

In 1999, with the help of the highly-talented Sean Klitzner, I became something of a local — very local — celebrity. I was seventeen. Sean and I, along with three other counselors at summer camp decided to form a fake boy band and perform at the end-of-the-year talent show. At the height of *NSync and Backstreet Boys’ popularity. It blew up. For the last three days of that summer — and subsequent summers, as well — we were rock stars. We signed autographs and took pictures and little girls would scream our names whenever we walked through the halls. One girl in particular would break down in tears. All of this over our fake, crappy celebrity.

After that first summer, Sean went ahead and sent our video to MTV, where they decided to air it just before the number one song on TRL, “Larger Than Life”. Ho. Ly. Shit. There I was, my face plastered on MTV, Carson Daly calling me by name.

Again, I was seventeen years old. Up until that point, the coolest thing that had ever happened to me was getting to play roller hockey with Ed Jovanovski. But, now, here I was walking around with girls from summer camp fawning over me like I was Justin Bieber. I was even recognized in the mall. Once.

I’m now twenty-nine, I have a loving girlfriend, a fairly successful career and zero regrets about my past, and I still look back on that brief moment of minor celebrity like it was one of the most amazing times of my life. Because, really, it was. Go ahead, tell me all of the crazy cool shit you did when you were that age. It probably doesn’t involve being on MTV or having girls bawl their eyes out at the mere sight of you.

The point is this…

“Friday” is an awful, awful piece of music. Or something closely resembling music. Its simplistic lyrics seem to have been written by an illiterate third grader, there’s a suspicious black man who appears way too excited to be following around a school bus in the middle of the night and there’s enough Auto-Tune throughout the whole thing to make T-Pain cringe, but remember this:

Rebecca Black is thirteen years old.

At thirteen, what would you have given to have your song recorded in a real music studio, with real producers? To have a semi-elaborate music video created just for you? To watch as your video racked up almost ten million views on YouTube in the first week? To be the kind of minor celebrity that Rebecca Black is right now? I don’t care how much her parents had to pay for that. It’s their money to burn and that’s an awesome gift for your thirteen year old daughter.

Maybe in 2017, Rebecca Black will turn out to be a talented musician and we’ll all laugh about this song when VH1 mocks it on their hit new TV show, The Return of Pop Up Video! Or maybe she’ll wind up being an accountant who despises her job, just like the rest of us average folk. Either way, the worst thing that will come from this dreadful piece of music is that, somewhere down the road, years from now, she’ll think back to this moment, watch the video and get a little embarrassed. But, should she be? She’s a thirteen year old girl singing a bad song. Is that really all that surprising?

Rebecca, if you’re reading this, know that you shouldn’t be embarrassed. Ever. Because you’re living the dream of every thirteen year old in America. The whole world is talking about you. You’re a celebrity. And even if you wind up a thirty-two year old single mom, living in a trailer park, you’ll still be able to think back and remember how great it was to be you all those years ago. That, for a brief period of time, you were the biggest thing on the internet. That you had almost 18,000 Twitter followers. That your life, at one point, was completely fucking awesome.

You should soak it up. You should enjoy it. No matter how much an internet full of cynical assholes tries to make you feel otherwise.

The Tumblr community confuses me almost as much as Tyler Perry’s brand of comedy and a little more than bras that clasp in the front. If I express my thoughts on a topic I find interesting and/or important, one person “likes” it. Meanwhile, someone else will post a photo of their new haircut and, within minutes, 43 people will “like” it. I don’t know much about this place, but I think if I’ve learned anything about Tumblr, it’s this:

Animated GIFs, poorly crafted MS Paint artwork, cats, nudity and food = Like.
Introspection and thought = Cursory glance.

Also, I’ve learned that not very many of you will “like” my posts.

Whenever I go to the mall, every transaction at every store ends in pretty much the same way. I go to swipe my debit card, see pen marks on the little touch screen, look at the person behind the counter, he/she looks back at me, I say, “Really?”, shake my head and we both share a good laugh. Happens every time.

But, really, who are these idiots?

I could understand if this were 1999 and people were still getting used to the idea of these credit card reader things, but it’s TWO THOUSAND-FUCKING-ELEVEN! We’re so far into the age of technology that the DVD player is almost on its way out. My mom owns a smart phone. My dad watches baseball on his computer. At this point, you can’t even blame it on old people, because even they should be able to understand how the checkout process works by now.

Try putting yourself inside the mind of the person signing a touch screen with a real pen. You can’t even do it. Common sense and a rudimentary knowledge of the ink-to-paper process we all went through in middle school won’t allow you to do something that stupid. What, exactly, did that person think was going to happen once he/she got the ink on the screen? Where was it supposed to go from there? Do stores have giant filing cabinets in the back where they keep all of the previously signed tablet receipts? That would seem like a terrible waste of precious space that could be better used for inventory.

The person who signs one of those screens with a pen might as well just take the pen and sign the counter. It would make just as much sense.

There’s been so much talk (at least down here) about the need to draft a quarterback in the first round that I decided to do a little shoddy research. I’m not entirely sure what any of it actually means, but this is what I came up with…

Of the 31 teams in the National Football League, plus the Carolina Panthers, 18 of them have a starting quarterback who was drafted somewhere in the first round. Only 4 teams employee a second round draft pick, while the other 10 are going with somebody drafted in the third round or later.

Of the 18 teams with first round quarterbacks, 10 of them are in possession of a guy you would be happy with. Another 7 have quarterbacks who would be considered average, at best. And one team got stuck with Alex Smith. (Sorry, Niners’ fans.)

The second round of the NFL draft produced just 4 quarterbacks. And, really, Drew Brees is the only one anyone would consider a success. The other three? T-Jack, Chad Henne and Jimmy Clausen.

The remaining 10 teams have quarterbacks taken in the third round or later. Half of them are mediocre, while 4 of them can be considered anything from good to great. And, again, one team wound up getting stuck with Derek Anderson. (Sorry, Cardinals’ fans.)

Now, some of that data is either flawed or incomplete. For instance, guys like Sam Bradford and Josh Freeman are way too young to accurately assess their talent levels. And, in some situations, I wanted to use the quarterback that the team would most likely be relying on going forward, as opposed to the aging, hired gun some teams were using, which is why Tarvaris Jackson was listed instead of Brett Favre. I had no idea what to do for teams like the Redskins and Panthers, who are probably going to be switching quarterbacks at some point in the near future, so I was forced to go with the guy they had been using, even if he’s not a realistic part of their future. Again, I never said this was 100% accurate, just a general representation of what’s going on in the league.

Now, let’s look at the draft…

The numbers I’m about to go over only take the first twenty picks into consideration. Why not use the entire first round? Because the remaining picks are basically playoff teams, which means that they’re already pretty good, which means that any quarterback taken at that point will get to sit, learn for a while, and then wind up starting for a team with receivers and linemen who are actually capable of performing football-related tasks. Unlike, say, the Bills. And since we’re trying to find out what your crappy team should do in the first round, let’s try and stick to similar situations.

Since 1993, there have been 34 quarterbacks taken somewhere in the first twenty picks of the draft. Of those, maybe 10 have been great, 12 have been good/mediocre, and 12 have been godawful. Again, of the 12 mediocre quarterbacks, 4 are too young to assess with any certainty, so they might become great, but they also might become Jay Fiedler.

So, what does all this mean? It means that if you take a quarterback with the third pick in the draft, you could wind up with Steve McNair. Or Heath Shuler. Or Akili Smith. And if you wait till after the tenth pick to take a quarterback, you might get stuck with Kyle Boller. But, you also might wind up with Ben Roethlisberger.

I think what this whole thing means is that nobody has a clue. We like to talk about certain GMs being smarter than the rest, but if that were the case, the Patriots would’ve taken Tom Brady with the 46th pick, instead of waiting until the 199th. Matt Leinart and Jay Cutler were taken one pick apart. So were Drew Bledsoe and Rick Mirer. Those weren’t smart picks. They were lucky.

It means that I have no idea what your team should do. It means that nobody does, not even the people hired by the teams to know these things. Because so much of this sport, especially the draft, is throwing darts at a piece of paper taped to the wall. Just hope your dart lands on Donovan McNabb and not Tim Couch.

This idea might need a little work, but I’ll put it out there anyway, because someone needs to make this happen. Like, now. Because, honestly, if I see one more old woman applying mascara while doing 40mph in the left lane on the 826, while a cop flies by doing 107mph, completely oblivious to her 1986 Buick LeDeathTrap, I’ll fucking snap.

Here goes:

• Every car will be fitted with a transmitter. It will be illegal to remove these.
• Every car will also be fitted with a small laser pointer. The actual laser will not be visible.

Here’s how the system works:

If you’re driving along and see someone doing something stupid and/or illegal on the road (running a red light, texting while driving, etc., etc.), you point your laser at the offending vehicle and push the button on the end of the laser pointer to tag that person’s car. That vehicle has now been tagged.

One tag, by itself, will do nothing. Hey, we all screw up sometimes. However, if a car is tagged by at least five others in a span of five minutes or twenty others in a span of one week, then the moment the occupant of that car takes the key out of the ignition, a red light will begin to blink on the dashboard, the engine will immediately lock, and the owner will be forced to pay a small fine in order to turn the vehicle back on.

But, what about an overzealous tagger? Or a gang of taggers working together to put someone’s automobile out of commission? First and foremost, gang-like activity will be considered illegal and carry a severe punishment, and since this is entire system is based on electronic tagging, suspicious activity will be easier to monitor. As for the overzealous tagger, each laser pointer will be limited to five tags per week. Use them wisely. The guy driving 6mph over the speed limit probably isn’t worth the tag.

Laser pointers will only work while inside of the vehicle to which they belong, and only if that vehicle’s engine is currently running. Similarly, a vehicle may only be tagged if it is moving at a speed above 4mph. This will prevent the unnecessary tagging of stationary vehicles, as they are of no harm to anybody.

I’m pretty sure there are flaws with this system, but the groundwork is there for anyone who wishes to get this thing done. Now get to it, overachievers.