I Never Left "Allentown"

The blogging has been a little light this week. Without football, precious football, on tap- the weeks seem blander- languid in their pace and disposition.

But stuff does occasionally stir us from our malaise, and I am not merely talking about testing at Daytona. Last night, I attended the important BILLY JOEL concert at Madison Square Garden. A classy entertainer- it felt alternately like we were either all in his living room, Manhattan’s living room, or just back from high school listening to “Glass Houses” for the thousandth time.

“A bottle of red, a bottle of white..”

Section 122. Check it out. Thank you Lord for making me the client of a bulge bracket bank. Drop whatever you are doing and get thee to the Arena of your choice.

In other important news, the Sixers lost yet another game due to their inability to guard anyone. Six Magic players had ten points or more. Turkoglu went for 25 points, Garrity had 24 and Howard added 22.

You can’t lose games like this to Orlando. Consequently, I can’t square the essential dichotomy of the Sixers. First, they try. They are a team that does play with effort every night- and the captain leads by example. Defense is about effort- but they don’t get any results at all..

Now I am not blind- they lack the requisite bodies to be a good or particularly smart defensive team. But they don’t dog it either. You normally can cover defense problems three ways: mobility, rebounding and counter-attack in the open court. The Sixers aren’t quick- so they get few cheap stops when other teams make mistakes- loose balls, bad passes, moving the ball to someplace or someone dumb. They can’t board either- so teams get multiple scoring attempts. And that lack of rebounding means few open court opportunities and compensatory scores for what is a pretty good “run the floor” team when they get chances.

Lastly, I don’t wander frequently into events- but I cannot imagine any American not being horrified by this particularly disgusting bit of propaganda. If you’ve been following the news from China concerning Google and censoring, here is the sick product of their work: here. Thank God every day our hockey team wears red, white and blue.