house cats vs. savannah cats

This had never occurred to me before, but given the very sharp and painful bites I’ve been taking from a tiny 1.5kg kitten, I wonder whether house cats aren’t just as dangerous, pound for pound, as the big cats you see on safaris.

If Tamanya were increased to human size, in other words, there’s no question she would be a serious danger to my health. Even with her minuscule fangs, my hands are cut up fairly badly right now.

And of course the big savannah cats are even bigger than human size in terms of weight. If Tamanya were that big, we’d have to release her into a national park in Kenya. She’d be much too dangerous to live in a human dwelling.

concerning the LeBron mockery in Peoria

I already mentioned that this was going to happen. But now they’re reporting on it, HERE.

The new twist beyond the preliminary announcement is here:

“Before the event, the Chiefs had also joked that they hoped to skip the fourth inning of Thursday’s game against the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers to ‘honor’ James. James was criticized for his poor performance in the fourth quarter of games during the NBA Finals against Dallas.”

Funny, in a mean-spirited sort of way. But also dishonest, when you think about it. Here’s what I mean.

*they’re not doing a mockery night for a truly bad or mediocre player, or for someone who can’t play at all; obviously, if they did a “Joe Biden NBA Championship Ring Giveaway” night with non-existent rings, it could only be funny in a weird, quasi-avant garde sort of way, since Biden was never a pro basketball player and it would never occur to us to mock him for not having won a championship.

*they’re not mocking James simply for being a braggart about winning championships in Miami. There have been far emptier braggarts in NBA history, and they didn’t get mockery nights in Peoria.

No, the reason we’re all having a bit of fun teasing James (and why Peoria went a bit overboard) is precisely because we all want him on some level to dominate these championships for awhile as his talent deserves.

So, there’s a strange incoherence here, an inability to decide between mockery of a dead opponent and fond hopes for someone’s success.

Imagine, for instance, that LeBron read the Peoria story and became so depressed that he shot himself in the head. No one would want that, obviously, and people would feel bad about having mocked him. To take a less extreme example, imagine he simply became so depressed by the Peoria story that he was barely able to wake up in the morning, and his career went into a permanent tailspin. Again, it would then turn retroactively from mockery into something that looks more like inhumane cruelty.

In other words, mockery is often parasitic on the strength of that which it mocks. You wouldn’t go around beating up weaklings (I hope), and neither would the Peoria Chiefs give out non-existent championships rings for Joe Klein or Jack Haley. Nor would they give them out for Charles Barkley or Karl Malone, superstars who already retired without a championship. The mockery of LeBron for not being a winner is based on the expectation and the hope that he *is* going to come back and win a number of these. If he doesn’t, if the mockery turns out to be literally true, then it will vanish.

There’s probably some passage where Lacan says something like this too, but more economically.

Anyway, the mockery has gone far enough, and I’m back on the LeBron bandwagon. He did make one major insulting screw-up, last summer. But…

(a) he was only 25 years old, and none of us would defend everything we did or said at 25

(b) he’s possibly the most talented natural athlete we’ve seen in any of the major team sports in the U.S.

(c) he’s one of the nicest people ever to star in any of the major team sports in the U.S.

He’s paid his penalty this year as deserved, and now I think it’s time to support LeBron again.

ridiculous Huffington headline

“Big Bear High School Yearbooks Contain Child Porn”

Sounds like a huge scandal or at least a major editorial gaffe, doesn’t it?

I won’t link to the stupid story, but all that really happened is that one of the yearbook photos from a school dance has a couple (aged 17 and 15) doing something that might horrify their parents, but which isn’t especially shocking to anyone who has ever attended high school themselves. And that’s “child porn”? There are some pretty serious criminal things that fall under that heading, and I’m afraid this isn’t one of them.

There’s a more general problem here with the legalistic classification of such activities. A few years ago I was reading the local newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and ran across the sex offender registry. There were some bona fide sex offenders in there, but then there was also some poor 18-year-old guy who’d been caught doing something with his 16-year-old girlfriend. And now he was a “sex offender,” with his name and story in the newspaper, and his job prospects probably destroyed. It seemed more than a bit outrageous to lump him in the same category as child molesters and serial rapists.

So too, naughty behavior at a high school dance, accidentally discovered in the background of a yearbook photo, now becomes “child porn.”