De File

The Pac-10 bashing keeps building on itself. I'm surprised no one at ESPN has suggested stripping the conference of its one automatic bid. I mean, sure, the overall level of play is lower than it has been in quite a while -- I'm thinking it's kind of mid-to-late 80s-ish -- but I have a hard time believing that it's as bad as these "neutral" observers keep saying it is. And that's why I'm fantasizing about a Pac-10-Atlantic-10 Challenge. Let's see if the conference that many commentators are saying will only get a single bid can measure up against one that quite a few people have argued is worthy of five or perhaps even six. Bring it on!

For day after day it has been hotter and drier than our much-longed-for Monsoon season has any right to be, with nights so clear it looks like someone important thinned the air. But then, just as the Perseid meteor shower is supposed to begin, perhaps even more impressive than usual, the skies turn cloudy. It's so overcast right now you could persuade me it's a wintertime Portland sky if I didn't know better. Not only that, we didn't get a drop of rain as compensation for the cancelled spectacle.

For years, many of the people I speak with regularly have responded to my monologues on the problem of "particulate matter" with varying degrees of mockery. When I have tried to explain that just one particle can trigger a reaction in me that costs me days of productivity or worse, they have raised eyebrows and insinuated that my troubles may be mental. And my complaints about the start of the season when people in Tucson -- mostly old people, who get cold even when it isn't -- start burning wood for heat have inspired particular impatience, as if they were a sign of my beginning to come unhinged.

Well, perhaps they are. But the article on wood-burning fireplaces I'm reading right now, from the February, 2009 issue of Sunset magazine, has fortified my conviction that the design I discern on the yellow wallpaper isn't just in my head. Consider this part, in which Lori Kobza from the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District holds forth:

Kobza explained that woodsmoke causes almost 50 percent of the fine particulate matter in the fall and winter. And that those particles are "so fine they can get into your lungs and bloodstream, and can cause heart disease and stroke. Particulate matter is unhealthy even for healthy people to breathe."

Add to this information the fact that woodsmoke is a more potent carcinogen than tobacco smoke and you can see why many places have banned the burning of wood, unless under tightly controlled conditions. Since Pima County, Arizona is a place where such regulations either do not exist or are not seriously enforced, however, folks like me get to spend a few months each year on pins and needles, wondering whether we are going to passively inhale something that sends our health into a steep downward spiral.

Well, the Mike Montgomery hire has paid its first dividends. Sadly, they are encased by parentheses. And the fact that the rabid-seeming silver fox in these parts showed better powers of persuasion isn't helping me to feel any better about the news either.

I really have lost all patience for Hillary Clinton's supporters, who make the term "sore loser" seem like an encomium:

Clinton's camp insisted Obama shouldn't get any pledged delegates in Michigan since he chose not to put his name on the ballot, and she should get 73 pledged delegates with 55 uncommitted. Obama's team insisted the only fair solution was to split the pledged delegates in half between the two campaigns, with 64 each.

Remember how no one was supposed to be on the Michigan ballot, folks? How Hillary's name was left on, but the pledge to not campaign remained? Seriously, these people should find a time machine to take them back to the Eastern Bloc, where they would have great success as historians.

Although most of the reviews for Speed Racer were dreadful, I found it highly enjoyable. Having recently seen Iron Man, which has been lauded as much as Speed Racer has been lambasted, I found myself once again wondering whether major film critics are ever able to transcend their intuition about whether they are going to like a picture or not. I'm not saying that Speed Racer is a great film. I'm not saying that it's better than Iron Man, which I also found diverting. My point is simply that the gulf between the former and the latter is nowhere near as wide as the critical scorecard suggests. Sure, Speed Racer is long-winded and suffers from a skeletal story arc. But have you seen the show on which it's based? More importantly, have the critics?

The original series was hardly a masterpiece of plotting, after all. Its charm had to do with the way it looked and sounded -- racing represented as if it were lovemaking -- as well as the eeriness conjured by the fact that it made such heavy use of "stock footage," shots repeated over and over and over like words in a William S. Burroughs cut-up. The 2008 film does a decent job of simulating that aesthetic, particularly the tie-in with sex: every eye-match looks like a prelude to fucking. The colors are fun, appropriately Pop Art, given the television show's late-1960s context. And the racing scenes are great precisely because they are incoherent. If those classic Hot Wheels tracks with the loops were actually torus knots, you'd have something like the courses Speed and his fellow drivers navigate. Somewhere in the domain of the counter-factual, Jacques Lacan is looking up from The Wire -- how did Baltimore get so much worse from 1966 until 2006? -- to nod his bemused approval. If you have even the slightest glimmer of interest, you should go see it in the theater, where its madness can't be domesticized by the size of your television screen.

I had a vegan brunch yesterday. Not being a big fan of "cheez," I ordered mushrooms stuffed with risotto, only to find that the rice had been simulated by tofu as well. Now, I really love tofu, when it's prepared as tofu. But I find the practice of using it to approximate as many foods as possible, whatever its noble Buddhist lineage, highly annoying. As I told Joel and Rich, vegan cuisine of this sort might as well come with an announcement thanking the support of Archer Daniels Midland. At least the mushrooms were mushrooms.

When I was in East Berlin back in 1987 I went into a bookstore looking for history books. But I couldn't find any for a good portion of the twentieth century. Maybe it was just a joke, but the clerk told me, "Those are being revised right now."

It continues to astonish me, all the ways that Cal games can break my heart even after I think I'm past the point of caring. Props to today's officiating crew, who surpassed the highly questionable foul called on Stanford's Lawrence Hill Thursday by not calling a foul on UCLA in the closing seconds today even though the Bruins were trying to foul.