Honolulu, Belgium

MYSELF and The Official Wife of IN PLAY LOSE are back from our glorious honeymoon in Tahiti, which is a wonderful place and all of you should go immediately. But this is IN PLAY LOSE, of course, and you don’t want to hear me regale with wonderful stories of a joyous trip to the beaches and the food trucks of the South Pacific (although you can look at the pictures, if you like). No, you come to this corner of cyberspace to hear about madness and absurdity and failure. I know my readership by now. I know what they like. So to that end, I give you this week’s nominees for ruling my own personal Belgium.

And who knew all of the capital of said Belgium was Honolulu? Our first flight arrived at HNL from Fa’a’a at 5:20 a.m. on Sunday morning. It was already somewhat odd to me that the aeroport in Tahiti is basically dormant all day, only to then have all three flights leaving the island – to HNL, LAX, and CDG – leave within 20 minutes of each other starting at 11:30 p.m., resulting in a pile of humanity in the waiting area the likes of which I haven’t seen since a weather delay at O’Hare. And it was certainly strange to arrive at HNL at 5:20 a.m. to find the immigration desk staffed by one person to serve a flight of well over 100 people. But this is HNL we’re talking about, an aeroport which is an absurdist mess. Our flight home was scheduled for 1:30 p.m. in the afternoon, meaning we had 8 hours to kill. Seems like a good idea to go into Honolulu and hang out at Waikiki, right?

The nominees for ruler of my personal Belgium from among the extensive list of candidates during the 8-hour vortex that was Waikiki:

• The cab driver who insisted on driving us to the Moana Surfrider Beach Resort, even though we said we just wanted to go to the beach. He asked if we were staying there and we said no. He said, “you must be hungry so I will take you to a restaurant,” and dropped us off at the Moana, anyway.
• Every single cab driver after that who wouldn’t pick us up later that day at the Moana Surfrider Beach Resort unless we checked first with the concierge. Why do we need to check with the concierge? We want a damn ride! Just take us to the aeroport! Sure, there is some sort of arrangement going on here whereby the cabs and the aeroport and the hotels work together, but one cabbie said to us, “you go check in over there,” pointing to the cab stand and the concierge, and promptly drove away from us with his door open. Just give us a damn ride, already.

• The guy who walked up to KC on the street and said, “so, Miss, can I have my heels back?”
• The guy taking his pig on a leash to Waikiki.
• The cabbie who did eventually pick us up to take us back to HNL and tried to convert me to religion. Which religion is unclear. It may have been more than one. At first he sounded like an evangelical Christian and by the end he was talking like a Muslim. If we’d travelled any further, I may have wound up Hindu by the end of the trip.
• The two Israeli women arguing in front of us while we were eating lunch in the aeroport. A woman and her mother, in fact, the daughter being the mother of three squirming sons of her own. What were they arguing about? Whether or not to feed the 3-year-old an avocado. For 20 minutes. “You should smoosh it up for him.” “Mom, it’s too late for that.” “Give to me, I smoosh it.” “Mom, you should’ve smooshed it an hour ago.” “Is he hungry? I smoosh him an avocado.” I’ve never heard the word smoosh uttered so frequently. It was as least 100 times, maybe more. The whole thing had an air to it of “I have spent the past two weeks you and I’m sick of your shit,” at which point (fill in the blank) is a good reason for an argument, but this just went on and on while KC and I calmly went about contributing to the destruction of all roosters by eating our Lahaina Chicken Company roast bird. The daughter said probably a dozen times that it would take to long to smoosh up an avocado for her son. During the 20 minutes they were arguing, she could’ve smooshed up about a dozen of them. Meanwhile, the kids are squirming about, the dad is in line at the Burger King, they’re supposedly late for their flight but it’s not too late to argue about an avocado. I hope I never reach a point where someone pisses me off to the point where I just want to argue about stupid shit for the sake of arguing. Oh, wait, I play scrabble, where we argue about stupid shit all the time.
• The two clownshoes TSA guys who rerouted the security line at least 10 times while we were in it, one of whom made up for being clueless by simply acting like an asshole. He was the type of guy who responded to confused foreign travelers who didn’t speak English by simply saying it louder. HNL has maybe the most confoundingly bad set-up I’ve ever seen for security, due mainly to the fact that the place has obviously outgrown itself and can’t handle the volume of travelers. The labyrinth changed shape 10 times, and no one had any idea where they were supposed to go, and none of the other TSA agents seemed to know, either.

Worthy nominees all, and I could go on. At first, I thought that maybe it was just sleep deprivation and jetlag, but no, everyone in Honolulu is nuts.

Meanwhile, up at the front of the enormous security line, the agents handling the screening kept giving out contradictory orders – what you do/don’t have to take out of your bags, whether you do/don’t have to take off shoes, whether you do/don’t have to put things in bins. Now, I’ve generally found TSA agents to be good natured and trying to do a good job, and maybe this was just a case where they were overwhelmed by a volume of travelers which snaked in a myriad of directions and ran out the door and down the sidewalk, but it was a hopeless mess, and our King of Belgium for the week handled this situation in a curious way. The Zia Sun tattoo on this guy’s calf shows him to be a native of New Mexico, which means he’s used to stuff that doesn’t make any sense to begin with, and he received about three contradictory sets of instructions as he approached the conveyor belt and metal detector, which clearly annoyed him. At which point he took off his shoes, took off his shirt, took off his shorts, threw all of his clothes on the conveyor belt and walked through the metal detector wearing only his boxers. It was so surreal that no one knew how to respond. The agent on the other side of the metal detector just stared at him in stunned amazement. It was the damnedest thing I have ever seen at an aeroport.

That guy wins at life for doing that. He is King of My Personal Belgium for the week.

Quick Misses

Always a fan of the work of David Maiki !     http://wondermark.com/1k67/

LOTS to talk about. To the buzzard points!

• It was somewhat fitting, in the season we can christen The Year The NFL Couldn’t Do Anything Right, that the only thing anyone talked about after the first week of the playoffs was an officiating controversy in Dallas. Instead of talking about the games themselves, and the players making plays on the field, everyone was talking about how the arbiters and administrators of the game should’ve all been fitted with clown shoes.
To be fair here, after the play in question, which came with about 8½ remaining in the game, with the Lions leading 20-17 and possessing the ball on Dallas' 46 yard line, it wasn’t the officials’ fault that a) the Lions wimped out and didn’t go for it 4th-and-1; b) their punter shanked a 10-yard punt; c) they aided and abetted the Cowboys scoring drive with two defensive penalties, both of which were obvious infractions; d) the defense couldn't get a stop on 4th-and-6 when every single person who has watched a Dallas Cowboys game in the past decade knew that Jason Witten would be the primary target of the pass [miss of the blatant holding penalty aside since, you know, it was only right in the middle of field where everyone was looking, and thus was hard to see]; and e) Matt Stafford fumbled twice on the Lions’ final possession after Dallas had taken the lead. That right there is enough mistakes for two games, let alone 6½ minutes. The Lions still had their chances, and basically beat themselves down the stretch.
Having said all of that:

Picking up the flag on this play is terrible. Absolutely terrible. The defender makes contact and makes no effort to play the ball. That’s a penalty. Tack on another 15 for Dez Bryant screaming on the field of play (which should’ve been called, but the dysfunctional group of zeebs were too busy making a mess of things and didn’t throw a flag), and the Lions would’ve had the ball inside the Dallas 20, primed to score again and possibly put the game out of reach. Now, given that it’s the Detroit Lions we’re talking about here, the potential for them to screw it up was still there, but this play very much changed the tone of the game. It definitely shifted momentum (well, the shank punt did probably more so). Dallas caught a break and, given a second life, made the most of it, which is what good teams do.
 Which is saying something, because Dallas looked comically awful in their first game of the year against the 49ers, and somehow have figured it out on the fly this season and become a pretty good team. This particular game was the best of the playoff weekend in terms of on-field talent, and The Lose was curious to see whether the 2013 TLOTY Award Winners or the 1st ballot inductee into the Hall of Lose be the one(s) to mess it up. Turns out, everyone involved had help in messing it up for them from the guys in the stripes.

• The Lions and their fans were livid about this, of course, and the frustration led to an abundant number of clever memes online, which I approve of, but enough with the conspiracy theories already. The game wasn’t fixed. That mess in Dallas doesn’t even come close to seeming malicious, unlike this debacle, where the fix was clearly in, nor this, nor this, nor this curious run, nor the granddaddy of them all. The Lose inherently subscribes to the theory of Hanlons razor when it comes to officials, and I never assume malice if incompetence is in the neighbourhood. (And my faith in this concept has already been tested to the extreme, but I still believe it to be true.) The NFL has a ways to go when it comes to on-field corruption. This is certainly one area they could use some work on.

• The NFL is planning on floating a proposal at their upcoming league meetings to add two playoff teams in 2015, but the game last Saturday in Charlotte was an advertisement for playoff contraction if there ever was one. The 7-8-1 Carolina Panthers, who were counted among this sad lot before ‘miraculously’ winning their last four games and the NFC South title (‘miraculously’ meaning they beat four really terrible teams and won an awful division), won 27:16 over an Arizona Cardinals team QB’d by Ryan Lindley, who put up a 6.1 QBR in the game, but what can you expect from what is basically their 4th-string QB? The Cardinals gained 78 yards in the game, which is a playoff record low. The Panthers, dominating the stats and outgaining the Cardinals by over 300 yards, negated these advantages by turning the ball over routinely. Had the Cardinals not coughed it up twice in the 2nd half – a half where they gained all of 13 total yards – they actually stood a chance to win the game. The two teams combined for six turnovers and any aspect in the game involving kicking the football was fraught with disaster on either side. It was an astonishingly bad football game which made you wonder if it was really the best the league had to offer.
What a strange end to the season for the Cardinals, who started the season 9-1 and finished the season losing to a sub-.500 team in the first round of the playoffs. It was a shell of the team that had started the season 9-1 and had a 3-game lead in the NFC West. (A team which, truth be told, was pretty fortunate to be 9-1). Between using a QB who they had cut and then resigned off the Chargers practice squad, and having a revolving door at the running back position due to injuries, the Cardinals essentially attempted to try and play the game without a functioning offense. Their defense then wore out and started getting gashed at season’s end. They looked more like a 5-11 team than an 11-5 one, and there were almost certainly a few homebound teams in the NFC watching that performance by the Cardinals, who looked truly terrible, and wondering why it was that the Cardinals were in the playoffs instead of them.

• One such team would have to be the 49ers, who fired ‘mutually agreed to part ways’ with head coach Jim Harbaugh. All Harbaugh did in four seasons was compile a 49-22-1 record and take the 49ers to three straight NFC Championship Games and a Super Bowl two seasons ago. The 49ers had gone almost a decade without being relevant, then Harbaugh rises and they suddenly become a power, and now he’s gone and why, you ask? Well, he was ‘fired’ for one of the most common of reasons in the workplace: his bosses thought he was a pain in the ass.
There were rumblings about this last off-season, of course, when weird reports started surfacing about the possibility of Harbaugh winding up coaching the Cleveland Browns. Which, on the surface, made no sense, given that the 49ers were less than 10 yards away from winning the Super Bowl two seasons ago, and the length of Richard Sherman’s fingertips away from going back to the Super Bowl a season ago. They were on a terrific run of success. Why fix what ain’t broke?
Well, what was broke, obviously, was the working relationship between Harbaugh and the 49ers front office. We forget, sometimes, amid the flurry of statistics and the immediacy of the results, that sports are, like any other enterprise on earth, about people. People have to find a way to work together. (Viewing the game exclusively as a bunch of numbers, and forgetting that these are actual human beings prone to mistakes and irrationality, is one of the reasons why rotisserie league sports are stupid.) In the case of the 49ers, that apparently was no longer possible.
But shouldn’t it matter that Harbaugh was such a successful coach and the team thrived spectacularly? Of course it should. This is some proof that the business of sports isn’t much different from businesses of every other sort, many of which are run badly and a good number of which fail to live up to their potential, often times for the stupidest of reasons. Reading the financial news these days is a lot like reading a Hollywood gossip column. It’s all about corporate politics and in-fighting and bickering and everything else. A couple truths I’ve come to discover in business, however, are that 1) if you’re boss thinks your a pain in the ass, (s)he will find a way to get rid of you; and 2) that (s)he will do that in spite of how well things may or may not be going in the organization as a whole. Bosses willingly make bad decisions if, in the immediate, it gets rid of the pain in the ass. Foolish? Of course it is, but we’re talking about petty personality conflicts here, and no one – no one – seems to be above them.
There were rumblings for months about ‘friction’ and ‘tension’ among the 49ers collective inner circle, and that sort of stuff gets reflected in the on-field performance. The 49ers always seemed distracted out there. They were constantly doing things – taking delay penalties, burning timeouts needlessly, jumping offsides – that indicated a lack of focus. The 49ers played a great first half in Dallas, and then proceeded to play about 15½ games of mediocre football. Toss in a few bad injuries, and they never looked like a serious contender this year.
Now, Harbaugh made out of this deal pretty well – receiving a 7-year, $40 million contract to coach at Michigan, his alma mater – and the 49ers, meanwhile, have now contined their yearlong trend of looking stupid. Their new stadium in Santa Clara hasn’t exactly garnered great reviews, the team grossly underperformed at 8-8, there were off-field conduct issues and an abundance of self-created drama. Now they have to find a coach who will be willing to take over a team that isn’t aging terribly well, that lacks speed on the outsides, lacked continuity in the trenches, and whose $126m QB, Colin Kaepernick, horribly regressed during the season. Oh yeah, and he has to replace a guy who was wildly successful, and also genuinely popular with players and fans alike. Good luck with that.

• And I wondered, at the time, just how much the 49ers would come to rue losing the Super Bowl two seasons ago to the Ravens. The 49ers had a better team than the Ravens, in my opinion, but they were nervous and fidgety and made mistakes, had defensive breakdowns and let it get away from them. This after essentially fumbling away, to the New York Giants, the NFC Championship Game the season before. Those are the sorts of games that really get to you, after a while. It’s one thing to be terrible at something. It’s quite another to be really, really good at it, but never be quite good enough.

32,000 pts. means the guy should go 1-on-5. Of course it should.

• Having lost 14 in a row, plummeting to an overall record of 5-34, and actually supplanting the 76ers in the dog house of the Atlantic Division, the New York Knicks have now signaled their intent to throw in the towel, as they made a trade this week which sent J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert packing in exchange for three guys they promptly waived. The trade done simply to make people go away is a telltale sign your NBA team is tanking ... no, don’t call it tanking, it’s clearing cap space so as to pave the way for a brighter future! Pfft. Whatever. NBA trades are always astoundingly, hilariously and deliberately lopsided, the idea behind them being that if you’re losing with a guy on your team, you can go on losing without him. Easily the most hilarious trade of the year is the continuing Andrei Kirilenko saga in Philadelphia – or not in Philadelphia, as the case may be, since he has refused to report and has now been suspended, which isn’t any big deal to him since he doesn’t want to be in Philly to begin with. He was acquired by the Sixers to prop up the salary cap numbers and be dealt at the trade deadline, and for no other reason than that. They couldn’t give a shit whether he can actually still play or not. Being well aware of what the Sixers think of him, he doesn’t want to go there. He’s on a personal leave from the Nets, hasn’t reported to Philly and has no intention of doing so. So now the Sixers have no trade piece to dangle, in their ever widening attempts to create so much cap space that they can then foolishly throw at free agents who wouldn’t want to be caught dead with that team. Other teams who might want Kirilenko can simply wait it out. Why make a deal? Why give up anything for a player whose trade value is now essentially nothing? It’s dumb moves like this make me question the though process of the entire 76ers organization. The whole “be bad until you’re good” line of NBA reasoning, in the end, rarely pans out. Far more often, you’re just bad ad infinitum. About the only business that’s good for is the business of writing this blog.

• Finally this week, this thought: If you do not like the way that you are being portrayed, and your response to it is to promptly behave in that very way, all you have managed to do is prove their point. The joke is on you.

The Scarlet Letter

The game of basketball was a big winner today, because this guy lost his job and will likely never coach at a significant level again. Nor should he. He’ll be branded for life for this, and deservedly so. And I’m all for second chances, mind you, but anyone who does something like this needs another line of work. The fundamental covenant of education – that a school environment provides a safe place for young people to learn – seems to have been forgotten here by all the supposedly responsible adults. And some vulgar, bullying boor throwing around racially tainted and homophobic slurs has no place being on the payroll of the State University of New Jersey, nor anywhere else for that matter.

And frankly, the cowardly Rutgers A.D. who didn’t fire him on the spot needs to go too. Hiring Mike Rice to coach the basketball team was his first big hire at the school, you see, and he didn’t want to eat the slice of humble pie with a side of crow that comes with admitting you fucked up. Suspending him for three games? Really? What a joke. His judgment has clearly been compromised, and he has no business continuing in his position, either.

You can understand why the kids never said anything, as the deck is stacked against them. A school can revoke your scholarship, make it difficult for you to transfer. It’s a shitty system in need of reform. Frankly, I think the kids in this video show amazing restraint. If one of them had popped this jerkstore in the mouth, it would’ve been understandable.

Rutgers’ basketball program has been a mess for years, the coaching position occupied by a revolving door of lunatics fired for all sorts of bizarre and unprofessional behaviours. But whomever the Scarlet Knights hire next, it can’t be any worse than this … can it?

King of My Personal Belgium

The reason there has been nothing but crickets here the last couple of weeks is that the LOSE has been working a couple of jobs simultaneously, striving and straining to make a couple of deadlines (which happened to be on the same day) and managing to make neither (though failing to make said deadlines, as it turned out, had very little to do with anything I was doing).

Along with my Hero of the Week, I will occasionally crown various citizens of my personal Belgium as royalty for the week. As has been stated before, I feel a kinship to the Belgians, who live in the most successful failed state in history and manage to cope with the lunacy through dabbling in absurdism and drinking lots of beer.

This week's King of My Personal Belgium earned his honour by finding a unique solution to a time-old dilemma here in Brussels San Francisco, which is having to move your car early in the morning. They're very concerned with making easy money through parking tickets keeping the streets spiffy here, which means streetsweepers come charging weekly and the weasels from the Department of Parking and Transportation ticket pretty much any parked vehicle that gets in the way. So the other day, we're driving down César Chávez St. and we see a guy hastily stagger out of his house, dressed in slippers and a robe and needing to move his car. He jumps in, starts it up ...

And drives it over the kerb and parks it on the sidewalk.

Now that is the sort of out of your mind the box thinking that will earn you nobility in this little failed state in which I live. I hereby declare Mr. Fuzzy Slippers Parking on the Sidewalk to be King of My Personal Belgium for the week.

We'll get back to our more regular schedule of losing here in a few days. Between now and then, I can hopefully get some shit done.