I’m Not Going to Do This Every Day

…&etc. Seriously, check out this, from the Times’ Play mag, by Sunday Game basketball player Chip Brown:

“Not to Get Too Mystical About It”

I am David Stern’s prime target. I’m a basketball player, and fan, even in bad times. The NBA had me at “Fo, fo and fo.” I attended the last game the Kansas City Kings played in KC, which, perhaps more than anything else I could say, is evidence that I Love This Game. I’ve watched at least one game of every NBA finals since 1980.

Except this year.

Spurs-Cavs held no appeal for me, and apparently none for the members of my basketball team, who also tuned out. Along with “Why the hell did we go 1-7 last season?” the question that keeps us Exterminating Angels up at night is this: Why can’t we bear to watch Tim Duncan?

After all, Duncan is exactly the kind of guy a team of left-leaning, unathletic (well, at least in my case) basketball fundamentalists should embrace. He plays smart, efficient, winning basketball; he’s a terrific team player who makes the people around him better; he’s by all accounts a decent, stand-up guy. And yet, while the Spurs were dismantling the Cavs, we were all pretending the playoffs ended when Stoudamire got suspended, and wondering whether the Blazers should take Durant (who, by the way, wants to get a little Starbury action of his own) or Oden.

It’s not just us. TV ratings were horrible for the series, especially considering that the other half of the card featured the man the league hopes is the next Jordan. And Bill Simmons says he has been far more excited by the NBA draft than the playoffs.

So what makes Tim Duncan so hard for me to watch?

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Somewhat good news for Ex Angel T, of Ball In fame, one of those guys who loves TV shows not wisely but too well: Jericho, the recently show set in a post-apocalyptic Kansas (having never seen the show, I’m not going to comment on how well the producers captured my home state, other than to note that the town map on the show’s Website doesn’t really look like the layout of a town in the western part of the Sunflower State, which is usually much more of a grid; see, for instance, Goodland, KS) may be getting some new life.

I hope so, for T’s sake; the show sounded interesting, and I certainly became a fan of the last doomed show he recommended, Firefly. Still, I’m afraid of getting hurt again, of, like with Firefly, falling in love with a show, only to have it shut down before that love gets fully realized, or, you know, I get entirely sick of the thing. If TV shows are indeed the new novels, this is one of the tough side effects: Novels never just stop halfway through because not enough people are reading them; you always get a chance to find out how things turn out, even if you have to skip the last two thirds (unless, of course, you’re trying to read Mason & Dixon; I’m still trying to get through that one, and getting increasingly angry that it’s such a chore. As one of my former editors once smartly noted, it’s hard enough to write clearly and well without making it a homework assignment for the reader as well).

Still, if the bloggers aren’t able to prevail, and Jericho goes dark, we’ll always have this:

UPDATE via Screens:  Jericho Fans strike back:

and

In America, the the sign that you’ve truly arrived as a cultural institution is to be mocked by The Onion. Finally, the dream has come true for TAL.

It’s all pretty good, but our favorite bit features one of the Exterminating Angels:

Though This American Life is now lauded as the definitive source for material about getting an autistic teenager admitted to Harvard, its early run was marked by painful trial-and-error, according to producer Alex Blumberg.

“At first, we were getting a lot of stories from recovered drug addicts and East African refugees living in the States, which had their compelling elements but came off a bit cloying,” Blumberg said. “But then we realized that if we had overeducated people with voices rather unsuitable for radio narrate the stories with clever analogies and accessible morals, the whole thing would come off far less depressing.”

Blumberg said that the turning point came in 1997, when producers discovered a group of inner-city schoolchildren inadvertently teaching an important lesson to their attractive, suburban-raised teacher about what makes us human.

We’re all very proud.

As the Exterminating Angels closed out a fun but ultimately fulfilling season in the Urban Professionals League (being a tougher division than, say, the NBA’s Atlantic, our 7-5 record meant that we didn’t qualify for the playoffs), I heard the following sideline conversation from on sidelines in the closing minutes of our 61-53 win:

“Are those the Starburys?”

“Yeah. I love those shoes. We should get some for our team.”

The Starbury is now, at this point, the semi-official shoe of the Ex Angels; three of us wear them in our games (the verdict: you’d do well to insert an additional insole, but, especially for $15, this is a legit shoe) and it’s the subject of continued fascination in our postgame beer conversations.

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Which is, of course, the date that the brilliant This American Life (produced in part by the even more brilliant (and Exterminating Angels power forward) Alex Bloomberg) adds visuals to the audio. Which is, of course, the Dylan-goes-electric moment of our time. And I hear good things about the other shows on SHO. Plus, if you order now, you apparently can see the first episode already.

In the meantime:

and

and

Since the Exterminating Angels already have the best center in the Urban Professionals League, I think we’ll stand down on this guy:

If you live in Manhattan and want to get in on the $15 Starbury basketball shoe action, you must first ascend the escalators of the Manhattan Mall, a suburban mall flipped on its side and smushed into a midtown skyscraper that is more commonly known to New Yorkers as the Tenth Circle of Hell. Steve and Barrys, the only store that carries the Starbury, is located in the back of the second floor of the Tenth Circle. Once inside, it’s obvious that this is the Temple of Stephon; besides the shoes, the aisles are filled with Starbury apparel–shorts, jerseys, sweats—and everywhere there are posters of the Knicks guard with the slogan: “This is my life, my vision. Are you feeling me?”

Maybe. That’s what I’m here to find out. My basketball team, the Exterminating Angels, has been obsessed with the Starbury1 since it hit stores in August. It started with an email from T, our point guard:

Did you guys see the article today in the Times re: Stephon Marbury’s new shoe? It only costs $15 bucks, and he’s going to wear them during the season.

What do you think? I’m dying to get a pair (or 5). Should we make them the official shoe of the Exterminating Angels?

Of course, as you might expect of a team named after a Bunuel film, the Ex Angels are concerned with matters of social justice. So T’s email was quickly followed by this one, from J:

What’s the labor story? That’s why I’ve been buying New Balance. I’m I misguided on that?

After much discussion, in which we concluded that, on balance, NB’s are a good choice because they have some of their manufacturing done in the U.S., they, like all basketball shoe manufacturers, are probably producing at least some of these in sweatshop conditions. The Starbury1 is produced in China, and our question became, since these are so cheap, are they produced in, um, especially bad sweatshops?

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