the downside of globalization

OK, I know that globalization has some very real negative consequences on some people who can ill-afford to suffer them. But let me just point out another downside of globalization: all that damn flopping in the NBA. Anyone who watched last year's World Cup soccer match will recognize Manu Ginobili's technique, for example -- BAM, as if taking a close-range shotgun blast. All that's lacking are the stretchers.

Worse, blue-blooded American boys have recognized the incentive to play along and are doing the same thing, with no apparent pride whatsoever.

Give us back our game.

Beneath the Underdog

Finished it a week or so ago. Feh. Didn't really get what people see in it. That it's nonlinear and therefore somehow jazzy? I thought it was self-indulgent crap. I need to look up some info (maybe read a real biography of Mingus) to find out when it was written. It wouldn't surprise if it was ca. 1970, when what CM was playing doesn't move me much, either. But what do I know.

I just wish there were some actual discussion of, ummm, music.

Also read Theodore Roszek's The Making of a Counterculture, which I enjoyed a lot. A little heavy-handed at places, and the author seems to be trying too hard to sound profound, but his analysis, that the counterculture represented an attempted to rediscover magic and rescue life from the technocracy, made good sense to me.