Oh, Kentucky

Rest in peace, Frank Ramsey, Corydon native, all-KHSAA 1949 Sweet Sixteen despite his Maroons' famously heartbreaking loss to Paris in the second round, UK's second-leading rebounder (despite being only 6-feet-3), "a seven-time NBA Champion and the original 'Sixth Man,'" as-told-to-Frank DeFord author of an infamous Sports Illustrated article on flopping, Dixon Bank president whom Bob Cousy reportedly surmised has "more money than Trump," survivor of a 2005 tornado in Madisonville (pictured above is what remained of his home) and one Hopkins resident's vote for "our most famous resident in the history of the county."

"It looks like what has been historically referred to as the 'Carolina way' . . . was a complete farce."

Strong words from a UNC grad.

Smart Girl Reviews Doctor Who

Smart Girl and I have spent much of our holiday break watching Seasons 1 and 2 of Doctor Who.  This is the re-launched version of Doctor Who that began in 2005 -- not the "classic" series that ran from 1963 to 1989.  So the episodes we watched covered the first two seasons of the re-launch, in 2005 and 2006.  You can find them on Netflix.

Here is Smart Girl's review of what we've seen so far:

Hi all, Smart Girl here.  I finished the second season recently, so here's my reaction.

Season One (Warning: there will be spoilers)

Summary: This was the season that started the re-launch.  The Doctor for this season was the Ninth Doctor, played by Christopher Eccleston.  In the first episode, the Doctor meets a 19-year-old girl named Rose Tyler and with her help, saves the world from living plastic.  At the end of the episode, Rose decides to come along with the Doctor and become his "companion."  They travel through time and space, meeting aliens like the Slitheen, the Gelth, and the Face of Boe.  They also find another person to join their merry company, Captain Jack Harkness.  All through their travels, they see and hear references to the "Bad Wolf."  In the last two episodes, we meet a new (and old) foe, the likes of which we have never seen before, foes that shouldn't exist.  A foe whose only goal is to "exterminate."  The Daleks.  The humans mount a last defense, but the worst thing that they can do to a Dalek is "impair its vision."  The Doctor has sent Rose back to her own time to keep her safe and keep his promise to her mother.  He has built a machine that will destroy all the Daleks, but kill everyone on planet Earth as well.  The Dalek Emperor taunts the Doctor, saying that the Doctor will become "the great exterminator." The Doctor chooses to be a coward and refuses to start the machine.  Meanwhile, Rose has looked into the heart of the TARDIS and comes back, spreading "Bad Wolf" across the universe to bring her there and destroying all the Daleks.  Unfortunately, you aren't supposed to look into the heart of the TARDIS, so the Doctor takes on all that energy, ensuring his death.  In the last moments of the season, the Doctor "regenerates" into the Tenth Doctor,(David Tennant)  the most iconic of the re-launch.

My Opinion:  Whew, that summary was long!  Well, I really liked this season, and it will always have a special place with me, because it is the season that made me give Doctor Who a second chance after having a bad experience with a later episode I had seen.  I like the Ninth Doctor and thought he was very funny.  I thought this season, especially the first episode, was a good way for me to get into it because the special effects were so obvious to my 2012 eyes that it never got too scary.  The two main things I didn't like about this season were the Slitheen and Rose.  I thought the Slitheen were a little overused, and I felt like their reasoning for one of the Slitheen re-appearing in a later episode was little more than an excuse.  More annoying to me was Rose and the people associated with Rose.  Her mother was annoying and her boyfriend Mickey was, well frankly, an idiot.  The thing that irked me the most, though, was Rose's relationship with the Doctor.  In my opinion, the Doctor shouldn't have romantic relationships with his companions at all.  I think the Doctor should be attached to them, but not romantically.  They should be like a brother or sister, or a best friend.  The only other thing that really bothered me was that Rose didn't do as much as I thought she should.  She spent a lot of time being a damsel in distress.  Other than those things, I really liked this season, especially the Daleks.

Season Two (Once again, there will be spoilers)

Summary:  This season begins with the Rose getting used to the new Doctor.  In this season, we meet more colorful alien life, such as the Abzorbaloff, "the Wire," and another blast from the past, this time, in a parallel universe, the Cybermen!  In this season, in almost every episode, there is a small reference to "Torchwood."  At the beginning of the last two episodes of this season, Rose tells us that this is the story of how she died.  It starts harmlessly enough, with a return to home for Rose.  Things soon turn bizarre when a "ghost" comes and nobody but Rose and the Doctor is alarmed.  The Doctor, naturally, looks for the source, and finds these "ghosts" are coming from the mysterious Torchwood.  They discover that Torchwood, which the audience witnessed the founding of in an earlier episode, is the part of the British government that deals with aliens.  So, naturally, they are doing something stupid, namely, expanding a hole between our universe and a parallel universe.  We find that the Cybermen from the parallel universe have traveled through the hole into ours.  Unfortunately, they didn't make the machine that can go between the universes.  "But then who did,Smart Girl?"  You ask.  Well reader, it was a very old foe who we already defeated.  That's right.  Our favorite villains, the Daleks!  But this time, these are the last four, we promise!  All the others are gone!  Oh wait, they have some "Time Lord science."  But not just any Time Lord science, they've got a prison ship!  Filled with millions of Daleks.  Oops.  However, the Doctor has a plan.  He is going to close the hole between the worlds and all the Daleks and Cybermen will be sucked into a "void," leaving them trapped between universes where they can do no harm.  However, since our heroes have all been through this hole, they would get sucked into the void as well.  The Doctor manages to send the other heroic characters (except for Rose) across to the parallel universe.  He and Rose plan to open the hole, then hold onto some super-spaceman handles until the hole closes.  They will be in one universe, their friends will be in the other, and everyone will be saved.  Everything is working perfectly until the machine that opens the hole starts going offline.  Rose pushes the lever back up, but is being sucked into the hole when suddenly, her dad (from the parallel universe) comes and takes her back to the other world.  The hole closes before she can go back and she and the Doctor are stuck in parallel universes, the only things the TARDIS can't go through.  So they are separated forever.  They have one last goodbye, where Rose confesses her love for the Doctor, but they're cut off before the Doctor can confirm or deny if he feels the same.

My Opinion:  This season was even better than the first.  The Tenth Doctor is awesome and hilarious.  This season also has my favorite episode so far, the last one.  Not because Rose and the Doctor were separated, but because of one section of dialogue between the Daleks and the Cybermen.  Now, I'll do a little explaining here.  The Daleks only have one emotion: hatred, and want to destroy all other species because they are inferior. They're also nearly impossible to kill.  The Cybermen have no emotions and want to turn all humans into Cybermen.  They are easier to kill.  The dialogue goes something like this:

Cybermen: Join with us and together we will upgrade the world.
Dalek: Are you proposing an alliance?
Cybermen: Yes.
Dalek: Request denied.  Exterminate! (Dalek kills the two Cybermen it was talking with)
Cyberman Leader: You have declared war on the Cybermen.
Dalek Leader:  This is not war.  This is pest control!
Cyberman Leader:  We are 5 million!  How many are you?
Dalek Leader:  Four!
Cyberman Leader:  You would defeat 5 million Cybermen with four Daleks?
Dalek Leader: We would defeat 5 million Cybermen with one Dalek!

And I believe they could.  See why this is my favorite episode?

NBA Update

Facing elimination tonight in Boston, LeBron James scored 45 points and had 15 rebounds as the Heat blasted the Celtics 98-79 to force a Game 7 in Miami. Naturally, this will give all the folks on ESPN a chance to talk about LeBron's "will" and "effort," because from their perspective, that's all that matters in basketball. Actually, any Kentucky fan would have recognized tonight's game as what happens when a really athletic team is hitting jump shots, while the opponent that needs to shoot well from the outside is ice cold. Those games usually turn into blowouts for UK, and that's what happened to Boston tonight. The Celtics were only 1-14 from three-point range, while Miami went 7-16 from behind the arc. LeBron was also unusually dialed in with his mid-range shot, as he went 19-26 from the floor. Boston had no chance under those circumstances, so it is not surprising that Miami cruised to an easy win. And if Miami is red-hot and Boston is ice-cold on Saturday, the Heat will roll again. But my guess is that both teams will regress to the mean, and that Game 7 will be much more competitive.

Miami participated in the last Eastern Conference Final to go seven games back in 2005. They lost Game 7 at home, 88-82 to the Pistons. The next year the Heat won the championship.

Boston hasn't played in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Final since May 30, 1987, when their legendary series again against the Detroit Pistons ended in Boston. The Celtics won that game 117-114, winning the East for the fourth year in a row -- but for the last time until 2008.

The Heat are going for their third trip to the NBA finals; the Celtics are trying for their 22d.

Tubby and Izzo: A Tale of Two Coaches

Thoughts on Minnesota's 61-66 loss at home to Michigan State last night, from someone who has spent a great deal of time thinking about Tubby Smith.

I turned this game off tonight while Minnesota was still in the lead, because I've sat through enough Tubby/Izzo match-ups to know what was coming.

I'm not sure that any coach has ever done more to damage the reputation of another coach than Izzo has done to Tubby. On March 21, 1999, Tubby Smith was a genius who had won the national championship in his rookie season at Kentucky and who was on the verge of taking his Cats to yet another final four. In the Elite Eight against Michigan State, Tubby's Wildcats were leading the Number-2 Spartans 36-35 at the half. But in the second half, Michigan State got hot from the outside and beat Kentucky 73-65.

Six years later, On March 27, 2005, Tubby was trying desperately to get back to the Final Four for the first time since 1998, and thereby restore his reputation as a big-time winner. His Wildcats, ranked number 7 in the country, needed only to beat number 15 Michigan State in the Elite Eight to set up a glamorous Final Four match-up with UNC. At the half, the Wildcats led 37-33. But they blew that lead, and needed a miracle shot from Patrick Sparks to get into overtime. At the end of overtime, the game was tied and UK had the ball -- but they couldn't get off a shot. In double overtime, the Spartans pulled away for a 94-88 victory. Two years later, Tubby's career in Lexington was over.

Tubby went to Minnesota, seeking to rebuild his reputation and prove that the UK fans who doubted him were wrong. But in his first four seasons there, he only made two trips to the NCAA's, and was never seeded higher than 10th. This year, his team was on the bubble, but tonight's loss probably knocked them off of it. A big part of his trouble is that he cannot beat Michigan State -- the Gophers are 1-11 against Izzo's men since Tubby arrived. Seven of those losses -- including the one tonight -- were by less than 10 points.

Book Reviews: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) and The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006)

Since the glory days of Harry Potter, no book series has exploded onto the culture like Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy. The backstory to the books is fascinating. Larsson was a left-wing investigative journalist in Sweden who spent most of his career writing about various extremist groups in his home country. But in his free time, he wrote a series of crime stories about the seamier side of Swedish life. According to some reports, he planned to write ten of these stories, and by 2004 he had completed three, which were accepted for publication in Sweden. Soon thereafter, in November 2004, Larsson died of a heart attack. He was only 50 years old. The first book in the series was published the next year in Sweden, and was an enormous success. Soon the books had become a global phenomenon. By May 2010, 27 million copies had been sold worldwide. All three books have been made into movies in Sweden, and an English-language movie based on the first book is scheduled for release in December.

As a big fan of crime fiction, and a sentimentalist moved by an author's dying just as he was about to become world famous, I was interested in these books. So far I have read two of them. Being a sentimentalist, I wish I could report that they were really good. But as a big fan of crime fiction, I must admit that they are actually quite dreadful.

To be fair, the first book (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) starts promisingly. Back in the mid-1960's, a teenage girl who belonged to one of the richest and most powerful families in Sweden disappeared from the family's estate during a family gathering. She's been gone for almost 40 years. But every year since her disappearance, the uncle who loved her receives a pressed flower similar to the ones she gave him as a child. The uncle asks Mikael Blomkvist (a crusading left-wing journalist in trouble for committing libel) to find out what happened to his niece. Meanwhlie, Blomkvist's actions are being followed by Lisbeth Salandar, a 20-something genius hacker with a photographic memory, very poor social skills, and a big tattoo of a dragon on her back. Will Mikael meet Lisbeth? Will they find out what happened to the missing niece? All in all, not a bad framework for a thriller.

The problem is that Larsson's skills as a fiction writer are extremely limited. Neither Blomkvist nor Salandar seem like real people. Blomkvist, the crusading lefty journalist who sleeps with almost every woman he meets -- yet retains his dogged moral certitude -- seems very much like the idealized version of himself one would expect someone with Larsson's background to make up. Salandar, who combines the personality and computer skills of Mark Zuckerberg with gothic looks and a remarkably eager sexual appetite (particularly when it comes to middle-aged crusading lefty journalists), is more like a nerd fantasy than an actual human being.

Of course, no one expects fully-developed characters in a thriller, but Larsson spends enormous amounts of time on aspects of Blomkvist's and Salandar's personal lives that bear absolutely no relation to our plot. In particular, he spends a lot of time on their sex lives, even though he writes just about the dreariest and most tiresome sex scenes I have ever read.

Despite these holdups, the plot creaks along, with Blomkvist and Salandar making discoveries every 50 pages or so. But as the plot develops, it becomes increasingly obvious that Larsson has dragged his political prejudices into his fiction as well. Any left-wing character is good. Businessmen, mainstream government officials, and people with traditional views on almost anything are bad. (If you read the Bible, you're really bad.) The Swedish title of the book is Man som hatar kvinnor -- Men Who Hate Women -- which gives you a sense of Larsson's black-and-white view of the world. This stereotyping is not only tiresome in and of itself -- it undermines the whole point of a thriller, which is to surprise the reader. Polemics are not surprising, and I can't imagine that any reader was particularly surprised by the identity of the villains in this story.

Despite my problems with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I subsequently tried the second book in the series, because some commentators indicated that it was better than the first. Those commentators were wrong.

The second book is called The Girl Who Played with Fire, and this title is a direct translation of the Swedish title, Flickan som lekte med elden. The Girl Who Played with Fire is significantly worse than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Instead of a cool set-up involving a missing rich girl, we are given an episodic series of adventures relating to various issues with little obvious connection to each other, such as the sex trade in Sweden, the future of Blomkvist's magazine, Salandar's romantic life, and whether or not Salandar murdered three people in Sweden. No suspense results from any of these adventures, because Larsson's propagandizing again signals the identity of our heroes and villains, and because Salandar's expertise in computers and research has now been combined with mastery of weapons, money, and whatever other powers she may need to overcome her enemies. Also, Larsson apparently could not develop complicated plots that would work naturally, because time and again he has to bail out his characters with ludicrous coincidences. (Blomkvist just happens to be walking near Salandar's apartment at 3 AM when she is attacked by murderous hoodlums! A professional boxer -- who happens to be a friend of the unsociable Salandar -- just happens to be parked outside of Salandar's apartment when her roommate is kidnapped! And so on).

The books suffer from two other major problems that didn't really fit into the criticisms above. In the first place, they are far too long -- stuffed with entire subplots and characters who never amount to anything. In the second place, Larsson constantly violates the principle that you should develop your characters by showing their qualities, not telling about them. We are forever getting sentences like "Blomkvist was the sort of person who . . .", "Salandar always hated it when . . . " This type of hand-holding is not only tiresome and annoying -- it further reduces suspense by eliminating the need to work out the characters' personality from their behavior.

Given the many problems with these books, how can one account for their popularity? I suppose that for a certain type of person -- the sort of person who is convinced that Western governments are dominated by hateful right-wingers who do terrible things to women -- they serve the same purpose as Batman comics did for me when I was about 8. They are simplistic melodramas with some cool trappings and lots of violence. They ask nothing of the reader, but spoon-feed him both the plot developments and political attitudes that are very popular among PC types. And I think books like this -- especially if they are marketed well -- can always find an audience. Look at the success of Dan Brown, whose books suffer from many of the same flaws as Larsson's.

And I must say that while I didn't like these books, I am glad that the 20th-century artists who hated melodrama so much were unable to kill it. I am encouraged that even in our own supposedly "post-modern" time, so many highly-educated urban types are eager to curl up with a story about a good guy and a good girl who bravely take up arms against villainy. That remains a noble concept -- no matter how poorly it's developed.

Nevertheless, I do not recommend these books at all.