From the news

As I try and become a real (paid) writer, it is clear I will need to give other things up, at least temporarily. The biggest candidate is internet browsing. This hurts, because I truly love the World Wide Web, but it is a matter of priorities. The iffier candidate is the daily newspaper. It doesn’t take up as much time as the internet, but it still may be time wasted.

Anyway, before I decide to jettison the daily Oregonian for the next five months, I am going to ruminate on a few things I have been noticing from the papers.

First off, although I gave up following the Blazers years ago (getting rid of Whitsitt wasn’t enough—I think I need Allen gone too), I do still occasionally catch something, and it is hard not to look at Greg Oden and think back to 1984 and the oft-injured Sam Bowie. Now generally what people remember is that we could have had Michael Jordan, and that it was a stupid choice. This is not necessarily true, but I am not going to get into that. There is an excellent article from Jon Scott on the subject at http://www.bigbluehistory.net/bb/bowie.html and I don’t need to add anything to that.

There are two intriguing points to be made here though. One is that there is no reason that Oden can’t go on to have a perfectly respectable career. Bowie certainly did, even if it wasn’t stellar. So far, there’s no reason to think he is the next Brian Bosworth (I know, wrong sport).

Otherwise, it really intrigues one about the future career prospects of this year’s number three pick, Al Horford. Could he be the next basketball phenomenon that makes us rethink how the game is played? Probably not, but I would still keep an eye on him.

The other thing that caught my eye was an article yesterday when they were going over the iPod playlists of different movers and shakers, and they had this quote from Governor Ted Kulongoski regarding his Rolling Stones selections:

“I have always been jealous of Mick Jagger, as he is not that good looking, but all the women are yelling at him as if he looked like George Clooney.”

True, and true. It caught my eye because this is something I have been noticing lately as I look up old music videos on www.youtube.com. It came up specifically with Survivor’s High on You and Dishwalla’s Somewhere in the Middle. I noticed that I was disproportionately attracted to the lead singers.

It’s not that they are ugly, but they are not as good looking as I am finding them. The Dishwalla guy reminds me of Ike Barinholtz (MadTV) when he is doing his Abercrombie jock character, and that would make him hard to take seriously, but he is singing. And watching the Survivor video, I am aware at the time that they are big dorks (observe the blond guitarist’s rocking—it is not cool), but it doesn’t matter because they are working the notes and I am smitten. Frankly, I find it highly manipulative.

To be fair, male attractiveness is pretty easy to upgrade anyway—give us flowers, tell us our eyes are pretty, say something interesting about a book—and they just keep turning cuter right before our eyes. Jerks.