My sweet-assed Christmas playlist

Whenever I'm visiting my parents for Christmas, there's always a lot of negotiation over the music selection. My mom wants to hear carols non-stop. Me, it's been about 17 years since I've liked most of that stuff. I don't want to be a fucking Grinch, so in car trips I'm trapped listening to this crap non-stop.

Then I reached a solution. I originally wanted to come up with a list that would please my parents without hurting me, but now I realize that it's oh-so-much better than that. Download these songs and arrange them in this precise order, and you're guaranteed a happy Christmas regardless of creed or temperament.

1. That's What Christmas Means to Me My Love, Stevie Wonder. If the lyrics were different, I'd listen to it year-round. This song is just really, really good.
2. Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), Darlene Love. Always reminds me of Goodfellas, and might explain why I consider Goodfellas a Christmas movie.
3. Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, Brenda Lee. An old standard that doesn't suck.
4. The Chipmunk Song. Annoying even in tiny doses, but in the company of these other songs, it's a Yuletide delight.
5. Run Rudolph Run, Chuck Barry. Rowdy and zany!
6. Santa Baby, Eartha Kitt. For the seductive materialist in all of us.
7. Feliz Navidad, Jose Feliciano. I rocked out to this during the Sesame Street Christmas special when I was about three or four. Another indispensable classic.
8. Frosty the Snowman, The Ronettes. Christmas and Motown go together brilliantly.
9. 'Zat You Santa Claus? Louis Armstrong. Can't spell "rousting morals" without Louis Armstrong!
10. O Holy Night, Tiny Tim. What makes a traditional religious song palatable to an atheist? A hilarious, wacky rendition, that's what.
11. Mambo Santa Mambo, The Enchanters. Calypso also goes well with Christmas.
12. White Christmas, Darlene Love. See entry 8.
13. White Christmas, Bing Crosby. Throw in a traditional song to keep Mom happy. The two versions of White Christmas work best back to back.
14. The Christmas Song, Nat King Cole. This also makes Mom happy, but it's a great song to boot.
15. Frosty the Snowman, Jimmy Durante. It's funny.
16. Sleigh Ride, The Ronettes. See entry 8.
17. We Wish You a Merry Christmas, Jingle Dogs. Also featuring: cats. You go out with a bang, and all the pets in the house will go moderately crazy, cocking their heads and barking and running around.

This playlist goes well on Christmas morning with the family, yes, but it also works as a normal hang-out playlist. I listened today as I walked around Manhattan's cold canyons, Marlboro Light dangling from my mouth as I spread a unique brand of holiday cheer. It really got me in the spirit of the season.

It's also good stuff for someone who loves Christmas but prefers to stay true to its pagan roots. But even if you're a Believer, it's good for you too.

Some brief thoughts on the occasion of Michigan hiring a new football coach

Throughout the past month, as bloggers and even some of my respected fellow alums drove themselves intensely, twitchily crazy pouncing on every shred of internet-spread information re: Michigan's coaching search, I have done my best to remain calm.

• No coach is a savior. Michigan doesn't even need saving. Lloyd Carr is a pantheon-worthy Michigan coach. My biggest concern was coming to grips with the fact that no one else would be, you know, like him. Lloyd seemed to me the ideal of a balanced man, with interests above and beyond college football. He will be missed. Michigan could have hired the second coming of Fielding Yost and I'd still miss Lloyd. It's OK.

• There were three major inflection points in this roller-coaster ride of a search. Maybe four. The first was on the final Saturday of the year, when Kirk Herbstreit looked into the camera, batted his baby blue eyes and announced that Les Miles would be coming to Michigan, and bringing Georgia Tech defensive coordinator Jon Tenuta with him. I emailed Crimenotes, noting that Tenuta (whom I've admired for years) helped soften the blow of Michigan having hastily nabbed Miles, and went out to the greenmarket. I came back to the chaos that was the aftermath of that whole fiasco. (Personally, I think Martin slow-walked him on purpose. But it's possible he just got too caught up in christening the Flying Wasp. We should all be so flaky.)

• The second was the near-hiring of Greg Schiano. Apparently, he took Michigan's offer home, mulled it over in the brand-new house he has on land carved out of a nature preserve on the Raritan River, then walked a few steps over to his office and told his guys he couldn't leave. Totally understandable. I was mildly disappointed, having gotten excited about having a defense of 11 guys flying around like angry happy fun balls.

• Then there was the actual hiring of Rodriguez, which was an on-off-on situation. At first it seemed he would stay, but then he changed his mind, apparently after a discussion with his mentor, Don Nehlen. Who was an assistant with, yes, Bo Schembechler.

And so it was that Bo helped get Michigan a new coach, who was born in a small town in West Virginia, just a couple miles from the one where Fielding Yost was. It sounds like a nice, tidy storybook ending, but really it's just beginning. Nothing is promised. Bad things happen.

But so do good ones. Doubtless, We'll have much more to say on this, but I wanted to get some thoughts down on "paper" for now without trying to overthink things. There are issues to discuss, not least of which is the massive, massive culture shock Rodriguez is in for coming from West Virginia to Ann Arbor.

I told you being tough was important

Faceful of snow: Fun!

Especially when you play a bunch of soft, warm-weather pansies like the Buffalo Bills, who wouldn't know cold if it worked its icy finger around their puka-shell necklaces and down their chicken-wing themed Hawaiian shirts.

This is what we've been waiting for in Cleveland. For a long time. The Browns played an important game in December for the first time since 2002. And even then, that was kind of a fluky year in which a lot of things came together. To some extent, the same could be said of this one.

But these Browns have real talent and ability. Braylon Edwards would start for any team in the league. Ditto Joe Thomas and Kellen Winslow most likely. Derek Anderson has been a revelation at quarterback, and there's even some good players on a defense that is, well, it's not all that impressive. But between the defense that plays better than it's league-worst ranking and near blizzard on the lakefront, the Browns held the Bills scoreless and won 8-0.

If that score looks like one from another era, it's because the NFL hasn't seen a final like that since 1929. And it happened not on a TD and a two-pointer, but on a pair of a highly improbable field goals by Phil Dawson, who should get some sort of medal or something for making kicks in that snow -- especially the one from almost 50 fucking yards.

Playoff implications aside, this is a highly satisfying win.

Whose lake? Our lake, bitches.

You've got to be tough

Even after looking at handfuls twice, I didn't believe what I was seeing, so I scooped a handful of the slushy snow onto the navy blue brim of my cap. But it wasn't slush or snow, either. They really were spherical little ice crystals, falling out of the sky at 3 in the morning.

The way they looked under the street light against the dark cloth made me think of diamonds, spilled onto black velvet somewhere warm and dry for appraisal. I got into a cab and wondered if we'd get hit by some idiot driver who couldn't handle the weather, and if I'd get killed or maimed or something, my life forever changed by some stroke of bloody-minded luck, like I was in some Raymond Carver story.

But we didn't, and I got out and walked a couple blocks to my place. The wind drove the hard little balls of ice -- not hail; hailstones grow in layers, going up and down in thunderclouds until their weight is too much for the convection and out they spill. They stung my ears and eyes and I had to put my head down and let my cap take the brunt of it for me.

A couple hours earlier, I'd been IMing with my friend who lives in Portland. The one in Oregon. He reported that he thinks the black guys in his neighborhood don't fuck around with his naive, suburban self because he often wears a Browns hat. It's his version of one of those T-shirts that reads [Location or place name]: You've Got To Be Tough, except in Portland, maybe they don't get the joke.

I thought about that while I was trying to estimate the speed at which these tiny bits of icy buckshot were peppering me. Fast enough for them to be moving horizontal. Weather like this just isn't surprising. Sometimes, I think I should move out there, move to fucking California where nights are soft. I wonder what it'd take to make me laugh out loud on the street there at 3 in the fucking morning.

I can't believe I'm actually defending Bill Martin

It seems like I've bitched about him virtually from the beginning. My dislike peaked with the quickly-withdrawn sponsorship offer to give SBC naming rights for the Michigan-Ohio State game, but really had momentum with his shepherding of the Michigan Stadium renovations. The anger there wasn't so much toward luxury boxes themselves -- they're a necessary evil -- but because he showed as much respect for dissent and process as Robert Moses at his worst.

The agendas of regents' meetings were manipulated to limit the speaking time of those who disagreed with him. Most egregiously, he used the memorial service for Bo Schembechler as an opportunity to pimp his stadium plans. I've searched for transcripts of his remarks, but I can't find them. Essentially, he recalled that one of his final conversations with Schembechler involved overhauling the stadium. He claimed that Bo supported the plans, which was evidence that until his dying day Bo wanted what was best for Michigan. Putting aside that such conversation can never be verified, Martin essentially used the funeral for a beloved coach to rally support for his pet project, and implied that people who disagreed with him were anti-Bo, and hence, anti-Michigan.

I think Martin's a manipulator and a dick.

Still, Martin's list of accomplishments is incredibly impressive, even if they don't all track my own agenda. A short recap from the top of my head includes the following:

• Push through the aforementioned stadium renovation plans, despite dissent from regents and most of the faculty. He played dirty, but he got what he wanted.
• Plans for a reconstituted baseball facility.
• Retained a very popular and successful baseball coach right at the moment when it looked like he'd be poached.
• Hired John Beilein. (I don't know about basketball or give a damn, but everyone seems to think this was a great hire.)
• Hired a women's basketball coach.
• Most importantly, fixed an Athletic Department that was in a financial mess following Tom Goss's tenure.
  

There's more that I'm forgetting. He's abrasive and manipulative, largely unlovable, but his job isn't to be loved, it's to keep finances strong and get shit done. Half-wits can give him grief for scheduling Appalachian State, but in his list of responsibilities and priorities, that falls somewhere around No. 63.

The problem isn't that he's fucked anything up, it's that most people literally have no understanding of what his job is. He could completely blow this coaching search. It would be a black mark on his record, but would only land somewhere in the top five flashpoints of his tenure. It certainly wouldn't be a firing offense. Taking the athletic department into the red, accounting irregularities, an NCAA investigation, hideous cost overruns: those would be firing offenses. Those are the things that his job is about. Not to serve as a figurehead or comforter-in-chief.

So far as I can tell, Bill Martin's sins in the Michigan coaching search are the following:

• He sails. So did Don Canham.
• He didn't land Les Miles. As stated in previous posts, I hate Les Miles, so I don't view this as a bad thing. If you think this non-hire is the product of sailing-related negligence, you're dreaming. Anyone with a position of even marginal responsibility in this world -- including yours truly -- is reachable at any time. Blackberrys are Satan's curse. If Michigan wanted to hire Les Miles, Martin would have been available. Michigan did not want to hire Les Miles. This angers people. That is a policy disagreement, which is not the same thing as incompetence.
• He didn't land Greg Schiano. Greg Schiano has his own reasons for staying put. It's highly possible that no offer from any school other than Penn State would attract him. This wasn't a product of Michigan getting snubbed by lowly Rutgers. Look, I don't know how much experience people have in being recruited for jobs, or trying to recruit other people for jobs, but these decisions are made for about a dozen different reasons. Money and prestige are not always the determining factors, even for high achievers. By this rationale, Bo should've left for A&M when they dangled a fat paycheck his way. People don't always operate this way, and we're better off for it.
• He didn't hire a search firm. Maybe this would have smoothed the process a little, but as we learned in the stadium project, Martin seems less concerned about process than getting the results that he wants. If he's got some kind of decision tree or list of candidates that he knows he wants, a search firm might have made things marginally easier but I don't see how it would have affected the end result. This leads to the following criticism:
• This is happening too slowly. Bullshit. You're hiring somebody who's going to be there long term. This isn't a race. The goal isn't to hire the flashiest name as quickly as possible. It's a long-term investment, not day trading. Do your fucking diligence and take into consideration the dozen or so factors that you want in the next head coach. Nothing would be worse than a knee-jerk decision to hire the flashiest new thing (e.g., Pinkel) and bask in accolades, only to find out three years down the line that you've brought in a horrible mismatch. That's program suicide.
  
• He had advance notice that Lloyd was likely leaving, and didn't do enough advance planning. Brilliant call. If there's been any actual problem with this goddamn search, it's that every time someone sneezes there's a leak and the latest turn is all over blogs and newspapers. If I were Martin, I'd have a Nixonian level of paranoia about leaks at this point. Say he uses intermediaries and starts putting out feelers to prospective coaches over the summer and fall: At this point, there's no doubt that such shit would've hit the press within five minutes. For all the people who seem to give a shit about nothing but recruiting, official rumors of the head coach's imminent departure sure wouldn't have been good for that, right? There would've been no season, only obsessive speculation about who was coming next, when that issue wasn't even ripe.

There are plenty of reasons why a person shouldn't like Bill Martin. I don't like him. But I have to acknowledge that for the length of his tenure, he's done an extremely difficult job really, really well. He singlehandedly righted the athletic department's finances, went on a building spree reminiscent of Robert Moses, handled the final stages of the fallout from the Ed Martin/Steve Fisher scandal, and generally gotten everything that he's wanted. He's nothing if not an extremely smart and capable of son of a bitch. He's not responsible for micromanaging the fucking basketball team, it's not his job to handicap Appalachian State, and the fact that he didn't hire a dream candidate that you've fetishized for months does not equate to a firing offense.

Republican primaries: short version

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

 e.e. cummings

Why Les Miles will never be my coach

I can't stand the guy.

It's not just that I'm a Lloyd "apologist" or "loyalist," whatever those things are. There's a real possibility that Les Miles wooed teenage athletes by telling them that Michigan's head coach (beloved in my circle though not everywhere) suffered from a chronic neurodegenerative disease. If I'm the Marques of Queensbury because that makes me hate him, so be it. I'm loyal to my school, not a prospective head coach to be named later.

The qualities that seem to draw Joe Michigan to Miles are the same things that make my stomach roil. "Excitement" and "aggression" make sense when they're value-added. Miles is Steve Fossett in a ballcap. Cool shit to watch from a distance, but not so cool when you're scraped across the desert because adventure ballooning sounded fun. At LSU, he's had talent but still only won by razor-thin margins. To call his on-field playcalling "risky" would be an understatement. In The Deer Hunter, Christopher Walken did well for a long time playing Russian Roulette. He made plenty of money, and then it came to an end.

But it's more than all of this.

The University of Michigan is not a football school. It's a vast, great academic institution that happens to have a football program.

Michigan losing to Appalachian State didn't change my life. It ruined a three-day weekend and briefly prompted ideations of suicide, but a week later life was back to normal, even after Oregon's ass-kicking.

The team can lose on the field, and I'll be pissed and traumatized. I have nightmares about losses, condemn my lifestyle choice, scream to my friends that I wish I'd gone to Middlebury or Amherst or some other liberal arts school where kids spend Saturdays high, reading Keats in the woods somewhere. But that, I can divorce from my overall feelings about Michigan as an institution. When I walk into work and a millionaire in his sixties gently mocks me about losing to Appalachian State, I can laugh uncomfortably and concoct a rationalization.

What I could not rationalize is having a head coach whose public behavior is a consistent embarrassment. It's why Gary Moeller managed to get himself fired. Unfortunately, Michigan's head football coach is linked to how the public at large views the school. Lloyd was terse, close-mouthed, careful -- he might have been abrasive with sideline reporters and he might have been a dull interview, but you never feared that he'd utter words to embarrass you as an alumnus.

Michigan's unofficial spokesperson cannot be someone who would say, "We have a new rival in fucking Michigan State." He can't get choked up in press conferences. He can't rationalize a two-loss record as tantamount to being undefeated in regulation. He can't storm in front of television cameras and deliver a UFC-style rant.

That shit's fine at Oklahoma State or LSU. Alabama coaches can call people "coon-asses" and compare losing a football game to September 11. At some places, football plays a role in the hiring of college presidents and is a principal fundraising motivator. I did not go to one of those schools. Mary Sue Coleman, Lee Bollinger and a $7 billion endowment have nothing to do with a team.

I can handle losing to the Appalachian States of the world. I could even handle the program decaying into a Northwestern-style mediocrity -- that would surely suck and require years of pain and adjustment, but it would not make me renounce my degree or tarnish my feelings about the school.

I wouldn't feel the same way if the school's highest-profile employee were perpetually uncorked and verbally reckless. Michigan has always kept sports in its place, and that's no easy achievement. You can spend four years at the school, ignore its athletics, and not feel like you're missing anything. You can be on faculty without giving a damn about football. If you're a major donor wanting to give $20 million for cancer research, your decision of whether to donate to the hospitals at Duke, Michigan or Columbia will not incorporate coaching behavior.

This is why big-time athletics at Michigan have always been risky. By and large, they're good public relations and enhance the undergraduate experience. They also open up the school to forces that have nothing to do with its institutional mission, which, if kept unchecked, risk overshadowing everything else.

And then one day there's a clip repeated ad nauseum of some dumb-ass head coach popping off in a press conference, or in headlines because he said something dumb about the Pac-10, and Michigan starts to look like a football school. As an alumnus, you have a hard time explaining the person away. As a prof, maybe you feel embarrassed to be affiliated with a circus. And as a donor, the football program still doesn't mean jack shit to your decision, but if you're looking to do something serious with your legacy, quite possibly there's an itch somewhere about not wanting a new rival in fucking: Michigan State.

This is how it happened

Last Saturday was a fiasco for Michigan athletic director Bill Martin. He was apparently totally unreachable down at his club in Key Largo, Florida, when Les Miles' agent called him, frantically hoping to get an offer for his client now that LSU had upped the ante. When he got back to Michigan, reporters were calling wanting to know why he spent the day sailing. Even the bloggers were mocking him, making it sound as if he'd been enjoying himself when really everything had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

First, Mrs. Martin snapped the bowsprit off their new sloop when she tried to christen it. Then Miles roared past in the new cabin cruiser LSU bought him and the wake nearly knocked everyone off the dock. Then, after Miles was done terrorizing jet-skiers and quintets, he flew up to Atlanta, called a press conference and announced: "I just got head from Amelia Earhart!"

Sources say any counteroffer would have to involve Pancho Barnes.

Champagne wishes

When the Ravens scored in the third fourth quarter to take a touchdown lead, Tony Kornheiser pointed out that Shula had grabbed his back in excitement. Shula pretended like he wasn't rooting against anybody ... but we knew. -- Deadspin, Dec. 4, 2007.

It would certainly be nice to have once been part of some band of brothers that achieved something singular and unique. And it would be nice, if, once a year, all of us having gone our separate ways, we paused our lives at the same moment to celebrate and remember all that we accomplished.

If, however, that cause for commemoration was that someone else had failed, leaving the glory alone to us, I would have to wonder how people had lived with me all this time. What an ugly spectacle the 1972 Miami Dolphins now seem to be making of themselves, with the New England Patriots aiming at an undefeated season that would not just match the Dolphins' achievement, but surpass it by two wins at 19-0-0.

Yes, the Patriots have cheated. Yes, I too am tired of hearing each of them held up for adulation as if the men who don that uniform are somehow jewels the rest of the league, never mind us mere mortals, can never hope to equal. Yes, I have my own team's interests in mind, too.

But man, how narcissistic must you be to celebrate someone falling short of your own achievements? I wonder who else is this awful? Do you think Max Planck put his fist through his hat when Einstein won the Nobel Prize three years later? Do you think Sebastian Coe kicks his Corgi every time someone says the name "Hicham El Guerrouj"?

I mean, not to indulge in metaphor here, but the behavior of the 1972 Dolphins is something like if Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay busted out the Piper-Heidsieck every time the Nepalese Air Force had to helicopter a corpse off of Everest.

Crisis averted

Depending on the ultimate explanation, I'd like to thank Mary Sue Coleman, the University of Michigan Board of Regents and/or Les Miles's avarice for sparing my university years of pain and embarrassment.

I look forward to sleeping the sleep of the just and discontinuing vitriolic e-mails.