the Dirk/LeBron-DWade cough controversy

HERE.

The two Miami stars made fun of Nowitzki’s “supposed” illness in Game 5, which sounded like a real illness to me and most others (sinus infection with a 101-degree temperature).

When I first saw the headline that Nowitzki had responded, I thought he had lost the battle: he shouldn’t have let such a stupid joke get under his skin at a time like this.

But having actually read the article, my assessment has flipped. Dirk handled it with the appropriate degree of contempt. LeBron and D-Wade really were being childish and immature, their response to his response was equally dumb, and I now expect Dallas to put this one away in Game 6. They seem to be more focused right now, while the Miami joking sounds to me like alibi creation. (“We’re just enjoying life. Why take everything so seriously?”) If Michael Jordan had just lost Game 5 to go down 3-2 in the NBA Finals, do you think he’d be making stupid cough jokes about Karl Malone? No, he’d come out in Game 6 with an evil glare and score 50 points and tie the series. LeBron isn’t going to do it, and that’s why LeBron is no Jordan, über-talented though he is. Jordan never created alibis for himself.

It’s a pretty good law of human affairs: when you see someone starting to prepare alibis, you can expect them to fail in the next stage.

One example… People who are coming up for tenure soon and suddenly pick fights with everyone in their university. “Why now?,” you wonder. Precisely now, is the answer. They feel like they’re going to fail, but rather than fail on the merits and have to face the fact, they want to be able to say that they didn’t clear the hurdle because everyone at the university hated them. In order to make this plausible to themselves, they act in such a way that everyone does hate them. I’ve seen this happen at least once at every university I’ve been in. Selected graduate students do the same thing. They have a feeling they won’t be able to finish the dissertation, so suddenly they have “a fight with their advisor,” usually a completely unnecessary one. Alibi creation.

Have you ever been on a date with someone who started telling you the gory details of the symptoms of some disease they have, or have you ever done this yourself for no known reason? It’s a good way to create an alibi so that you’re not being accepted or rejected at your best.

But back to the topic… It feels to me like Dallas is intensely focused on the win, while Miami is descending into childish practical jokes, and Dallas isn’t being rattled by them.

They’ve come a long way. Many people, including me, were ready to write Dirk off just a few years ago as a prolific scorer but a softie with a heart made of wax. He’s about to prove us all wrong.

Dirk, you’re not soft at all, are you?

The ultimate mentally tough athlete:

the vet called

That’s the thing about Egypt… We do things late into the night here.

The vet called, and the worm test is now negative. We’ve erased the last traces of Tamanya’s early street life.

But suddenly she has a new rascally habit: jumping into every garbage basket in the house, overturning it, and dragging selected pieces of trash everywhere. This seems to be one of those “get my attention” pranks, as opposed to the ones she’s now enjoying for their own sake. The way I can tell is that she usually doesn’t overturn any garbage basket unless I happen to be in the room.

“Egypt secularist forces want constitution first, elections later”

Yes, and most of my friends are among the secularist forces and also want a new constitution before the election.

However, they already lost a referendum on this by a huge margin, so I’m afraid they’re just going to have to live with what the public decided.

Article HERE.

Egyptian soccer

After winning three straight African Cups, it now looks like they’re not even going to qualify for the 2011 tournament.

Disappointing, but I guess Egypt has bigger fish to fry right now.

‘Mass Brawl’ Erupts On Barbados-Bound Virgin Atlantic Flight

“Brandford said that one woman yelled at another, ‘You swore in front of my child,’ repeatedly, her voice escalating in volume each time. The woman then reportedly yelled, ‘And it’s my birthday.’…

Following the fight, all passengers were ordered to stay in their seats for the rest of the flight, with bathroom breaks allowed only after two hours.”

I can’t decide which of those two paragraphs is more hilarious.

Levi vs. the boring and trite epistemology police

HERE.

Read Levi’s book The Democracy of Objects when it’s out in a few weeks. It’s so much more interesting than the things he’s attacking.

chairing thesis defense tomorrow

We don’t have a graduate program in philosophy here, so this will be the first thesis defense I ever chaired. It’s on al-Farabi, and it’s housed in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Civilizations (ARIC). The other two readers are from that department. It’s about al-Farabi’s views on language and logic, and there’s obviously a fair amount of Aristotle in the background.

best historical name?

My vote goes to Vercingetorix, chieftain of the Gauls, defeated by (pre-Emperor) Julius Caesar.

Caesar’s Gallic Wars is a great read, incidentally. By contrast, I thought his Civil Wars was a uish-written bore.

vet report

The good news: she weighs 1.25 kg! It was 0.3 and 0.85 on the first two vet visits. It’s calming to have her above the magic 1 kg barrier. Makes her seem less fragile.

The bad news: she hated this trip. She had lost her baby-like trust in vets seen the first two times, and clearly viewed them more as potential inflictors of pain. Whereas on the past two trips she quickly bonded with the vets and forgot my existence entirely, this time she kept looking for me to make sure I hadn’t left, as if she were feeling very insecure.

Everything else was the same as always. She loved the mint-flavored deworming medicine, and spilled enough over her lips that she still smells like mint. But she hated the rectal thermometer/worm sample more than ever. There’s just no way for a vet to do that painlessly.

The photo below shows Tamanya a few minutes ago, playing in a warm fuzzy blanket that I wadded up for her benefit, since she seemed to have a few chills after returning from the vet.

Tamanya is home!

Though I’ve been back in Cairo for three days, for various reasons it wasn’t logistically possible for me to get Tamanya bak until today. She’s just in time for her vet appointment this evening.

This time, she clearly remembers both me and the apartment; after I returned from Oxford it was pretty clear that she didn’t. The length of absence was 8-10 days in both cases.

Nada did a great job with Tamanya, but she seems not to like Nada’s cats as much as Wafaa’s, so it’s possible that Wafaa will do the bulk of the babysitting during the summer. We’ll see. Wafaa is the recently retired longtime Assistant to the Provost, while Nada is one of the three young women on the Provost’s staff. Both are great animal lovers. I’m very fortunate that both have been willing to help with my recent and upcoming travels.

Changes in Tamanya since I last saw her…

*Not sure if she’s heavier (we’ll know at the vet’s today). But she’s definitely longer.

*The biting has gone way down. She’s bitten me once in half an hour. The Tamanya of late May would have bitten me 40 or 50 times by now.

*She’s even more athletic than before. What an amazing jumper! And she finds such joy in doing it just for the sake of doing it– jumping as far as she can between two very remote pieces of furniture, for instance.

*She’s a bit less interested in food than before, though maybe Nada gave her a huge breakfast. I’m not sure about that.

*Less emotional neediness. She still likes to be in the same room I’m in at all times, but doesn’t necessarily need to be biting or touching me at all times like before.

*As a corollary to the previous point, while she’s still interested in mischief, it now seems more like mischief for her own amusement’s sake, not for the sake of getting my attention so that I’ll pick her up.

*Her color pattern is changing a bit. She used to be mostly dark with only a few white mottled spots (enough so that some people wrongly described her as a black cat after seeing her once). But now the mottled parts are increasing in size, especially on the chest.