merrill whatley

This game is unreal. Kobe, Ariza and Odom are having crazy good games. I think Odom’s 3s may have been the turning point.

Look, I’m from Alabama. But the man who did sports while spitting dip juice into his coke can was a better sportscaster than Jim Hill and all of LA’s CBS2 Sports Central (insert lightning logo here!) team. Here’s a recap of their March Madness recap:

• - “UCLA plays Alabama at 5 pm on Saturday, Live on CBS2!”
• - They never showed, on-screen, the final score of a game. They would say it in passing, but they’d show highlights until they tired of it — say, when Team A was up 52-49 at the half over Team B — and then Jim would mumble, “And Team B scored 10 unanswered at the end to win it by 3.”
• - “Steve, UConn’s struggle really points out what a great job UCLA did against Belmont.”
• - I should point out I’m not making this up: they misspelled “Madness.” The PowerPoint template they used to show tomorrow’s game schedule said “MARCH MADNES 2006″ at the top of each “slide.” You’d see “MARCH MADNES 2006: TEAM A vs. TEAM C” and then they’d have this awesome cyclonic Sports Central logo flash on the screen at the sound of a passing jet, dissolving to the next game — “MARCH MADNES 2006: TEAM E vs. TEAM G.”
• - We’re gonna have to see how Thursday’s bomb threat in San Diego before the early game will affect UCLA tomorrow in their 5 PM game LIVE HERE ON CBS 2 versus Alabama.

In downtown Dothan, there’s a clothing store that’s been there since the 70’s called SuperBad. In the 90’s, SuperBad had a secret meeting of all their top scientists, and they created a smooth robot who anchors Dothan’s news station. If you’re ever in Dothan, watch the news — you’ll see what I mean.

There are times when I’ve been at home and it’s clear that the SuperBad News Robot is the only entity at the station during the broadcast, controlling camera changes with his robotic stare. Did he eliminate the others on the news team? Is he holding morning show host Ann Varnum hostage in the WTVY basement? Is he reading our minds at home?

Anyway, the SuperBad news robot? Better than the pros here in my hometown of Los Angeles.

This beautiful January weather we’re having (trust me, rest of country) has coincided with an extremely busy couple of weeks. All Saints’ hosted a conference last week for which I ran sound and tech. It was fun, just long days (after getting home, had other clients to catch up on, all that). We’ve also received some news about my grandmother’s health these past few days… kind of in a holding pattern right now as we wait for more news.

Managed to go to see Brokeback Mountain sometime last week — Utah, you don’t know what you’re missing — and ate at a fun Korean BBQ place over the weekend. Also, running sound at the conference means I got to be around people while I was busy, which was nice. Even chatted with some folks, got to know the people I worked with, made new friends. Nice working like that.

Still, it all adds up to exhaustion if you’re not careful — so I believe Thursday morning will be a surf day. Mid-morning is supposed to see some amount of swell in case anyone wants to meet at Ocean Park.

A while back on “the neighborhood,” I posted about the murder of Eric Gelman. He was killed here in the Fairfax disctrict while walking to his car after work.

I grabbed a local free newspaper this morning and learned that the police have arrested a man on charges of murdering Eric. The man’s name is Kim McMurray, he’s 43 and being held on 1.08 million dollars bail. They believe the murder was in the course of a robbery.

The front page portion of the article from the Park Labrea News/Beverly Press appears below. Click on it to read the rest of the article.

Here’s something unusual and kind of funny…

I recently registered my car, and the registration is valid through February of 2007. The DMV advises exactly how to put the sticker on so it can not be easily peeled off. Rather than peel it off or steal the plate altogether, a compromising sort came up with the idea of just cutting that year sticker-side of the plate off. (You’ll notice in the photo below that the last character from my plate is missing.)

This seems a lot of trouble to go through… of course, so does the probably pointless photoshopping of the tag I just did to change the numbers from what they really are. Would that really matter? Whatever. My DMV appointment for a replacement is Tuesday.

P.S. Yes, I do need to wash my car.

In the past few hours, California Governor Schwarzenegger officially denied clemency for Stanley Tookie Williams. If you had no strong conviction regarding the death penalty, I believe being in the Governor’s position would be a tough one in that you would have to overlook 24 years of court rulings, jury decisions, California Supreme Court decisions, etc., in order to come to a conclusion you felt was technically defensible. That is to say I wish this Governor had a strong anti-death penalty conviction.

Not because this person “deserved” the death penalty any less or any more than any other person who is or has been on death row. I just wish California would get ahead of the curve on this one (compared to most of the rest of the U.S.) and abolish the death penalty altogether. Aside from all the usual arguments against or for the death penalty that I’ve heard over the years, two things stick out for me:

1. When I lived in Alabama, some candidate was running for Attorney General. I can’t remember his name. One of his ads described how, as a judge, he presided over a case of a man who was accused of murder. The scene cut to a video of the murder victim’s sister, a sweet looking elderly woman who said, “I was there in the courtroom, and Judge (so-and-so) didn’t blink when he sentenced that man to death.” She became steely-jawed and narrow-eyed about mid-statement. (Keep in mind this ad was in support of the judge.)

Seeing this woman made me ill. This sort of revenge does something unkind to a person (not that losing someone to murder doesn’t). I know this is a can of worms and I don’t know if I have the eloquence at the moment to argue it all the way out, but I can say for certain that:

a) I would want revenge on anyone who hurt anybody that I care about;
b) I think most anyone would honestly say the same; and
c) that’s exactly why we don’t take care of these things ourselves.

The reason we don’t take revenge because we are not the murderers. Yet I believe that the death penalty is revenge, and we are the ones doing it, through the State.

2. When we were in London a few weeks ago, we were speaking with a man who is involved in the UK Government. He pointed out that somewhere around 80% of the British public would actually support capital punishment but that it will never come to a vote in Parliament. The reason, boiled down to one idea: the country is civilized, and the death penalty is not.

If a person commits murder, therefore breaking the primary rule that allows us to be a civilization in the first place, they must face punishment and, if they are willing to be party to it, enter rehabilitation. And they do. It’s not that we owe it to the murderers to attempt rehabilitation, it’s that we owe it to ourselves as a civilized society.

So I feel that tonight just after midnight Pacific Time will be yet another sad moment. For the man dying, for the families of his victims, for California, for the country, and so on.

First link for today: this stunning collection of items from teaching materials for federally-funded high school abstinence programs. Local U.S. Representative Henry Waxman commissioned a report which collected these items. Some of it is just stunning. Harper’s titled this piece Blue Balls for the Red States.