Big Wheel

Not likely. If the Pacers blow out the Heat, there won't be a fight because both teams need all their players for Game 7. Something might happen if the Heat blow out the Pacers, but I doubt it because the NBA has brought in three hair-trigger refs for this one.

Leave aside the way it's pretty much impossible to avoid getting close to the ball when hacking a shorter player who's driving. Just watch the replay and watch Hansbrough's off hand. No way that wasn't calculated. On the Haslem foul, Haslem's hands only ended up as far from the ball as they did because Hansbrough ended up changing his shot to a jump hook when he saw Haslem in his face. The only way to prevent a player from getting off a jump hook is to push his upper arm and shoulder - getting the ball when you are guarding that closely is virtually impossible, which is why I like to take lots of hook shots when playing against taller defenders.

Flopping is not dirty. You may not like it (I think it's starting to get out of hand), but it has nothing to do with clean/dirty play. The play in the All-Star Game was a hard foul on a layup that happened to catch Bryant in the nose. It doesn't look like an intentional shot to the face to me, but YMMV. The Collison play I'll allow was an obvious flagrant, but again...I can't really evaluate it as "cheap" it while ignoring the larger context of very physical play that's been going on this whole series by both teams. The only way to justify Haslem receiving a harsher punishment than Hansbrough is if you take the position that retaliation shots by their nature deserve harsher punishment, regardless of the damage caused by the fouls in question. For once in my entire life, I agree with Skip Bayless. The Haslem foul was a glancing shot to the face and mostly caught Hansbrough's arm and shoulder. Hansbrough's foul caught Wade's head with both arms, even the one that was nowhere near the ball. So far you haven't named one specific cheap shot taken by LeBron James. The only controversial calls I've seen him involved in are entirely legal screens in the backcourt that the defensive players have only themselves to blame for blindly running into.

The WCF should be very exciting and competitive, even if you're just an EC fan. No doubt Thunder/Spurs will be interesting. My point was more that the West playoffs have been relatively boring and predictable up to this point while practically every East series has featured intensity and serious drama...yet for some reason everyone here has been ignoring all of them in favor of gabbing about the Lakers even after they've been eliminated.

That's a strong claim. Can you back it up with evidence? I'm not aware of Udonis Haslem having a reputation for any incidents of dirty play (not counting what happened in game 5, which I think is fair to discount given the history in the game and the series). Dwyane Wade is the only one for whom I think the claim is at least defensible, although here too I think Wade hasn't been the aggressor in most of the incidents (cf. Rip Hamilton). And arguing that Lebron is dirty is absurd. I've never seen him do anything even rising to the level of Bryant's questionable follow-through, which seems to whack guys on the head a surprising percentage of the time.

Maybe we should rename this thread "Boring Western Conference Discussion Corner". Meanwhile in the East the Heat and Pacers are now in a full-on cage match that's one hard foul away from Jeff Van Gundy dangling from Alonzo Mourning's leg.

Lebron with a ludicrous 40/18/9 today. Granted, a few of the points and rebounds were in the waning seconds of the game, but....damn. I'm not sure the Heat will be healthy enough to make it to the Finals this year but Lebron is still fighting.

FWIW, it's never been clear that she made the remarks in the first place. The "reports" of her words, such as they are, seem to mostly stem from rumors of her early '80s concerts rather than any clear documentation. Some people are claiming that stuff that Gloria Gaynor actually said got attributed to Summer. From what I can tell this is the kind of thing where a rumor that's quite plausible (Summer became a born-again Christian and in later interviews seemed to imply that she thought being gay is a sin, but also none of her business) is still far from proven.

Yeah, I think it's at least ambiguous what happened there. Not only did they indeed show a replay from more than one angle (http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1188796-thunder-vs-lakers-video-watch-metta-world-peace-knee-russell-westbrook ), but Westbrook was already flailing at MWP pretty violently when the knee came down. But beyond that the mechanics of it don't really make any sense. I'm not quite 6 feet tall and my knees can't extend down with any force to the level of a guy in the prone position when I'm standing up. MWP has about 9 inches on me and probably has legs 10-12 inches longer, which would make it even harder to pull off something like that. Try bending down to knee a chair leg from a standing position. You can't really do it without outright falling knee-first on it and completely losing your balance.

1. RZA 2. Ghostface Killah 3. Method Man 4. GZA 5. Ol' Dirty Bastard 6. Lennie Tristano

Uh, they have to make money on the thing somehow. It comes down to whether you decide $120/year is worth killing the commercials. I haven't bitten the bullet at this point, but it's definitely a better value to me than, say, cable TV. The jazz selection on Spotify has in some ways gotten a little worse over the last year and a half. Zorn pulled almost all of Tzadik's stuff a year ago and ECM yanked most of their catalog a couple months ago. For medium to large jazz labels, you could still do worse. Most of the Blue Note catalog that was still in print when Spotify launched is still up there, even if some titles were deleted by BN after and have disappeared from stores. The Verve catalogs were mediocre but have gotten much better (including most if not all of the Verve material put out by Mosaic, even the sets that are still in print), and it looks like Concord is finally starting to put a lot of stuff on there from Fantasy labels. This highlights one of the problems of these services. If Blue Note /ECM or any other label has a spat with the service, then what you've enjoyed listening to suddenly disappears. Of course, but that's the nature of any media. The same kind of thing happens with cable companies too, it's just that that industry is established enough for a) those kinds of disputes to be infrequent, since it's long since been accepted by both the service and the TV channel what constitutes appropriate pricing, b) the customer base is big enough and concentrated enough that there are big disincentives to both service and channel to get into disputes serious enough to pull their stuff altogether.

Uh, they have to make money on the thing somehow. It comes down to whether you decide $120/year is worth killing the commercials. I haven't bitten the bullet at this point, but it's definitely a better value to me than, say, cable TV. The jazz selection on Spotify has in some ways gotten a little worse over the last year and a half. Zorn pulled almost all of Tzadik's stuff a year ago and ECM yanked most of their catalog a couple months ago. For medium to large jazz labels, you could still do worse. Most of the Blue Note catalog that was still in print when Spotify launched is still up there, even if some titles were deleted by BN after and have disappeared from stores. The Verve catalogs were mediocre but have gotten much better (including most if not all of the Verve material put out by Mosaic, even the sets that are still in print), and it looks like Concord is finally starting to put a lot of stuff on there from Fantasy labels.

Care to make it interesting?

I dunno. Denver had a mediocre season topped off by a just-glad-to-be-here playoff appearance. The Lakers are notorious for having down games against less than stellar teams. If they would have tried, the Nuggets would have been gone in four. Presumably the Lakers tried in Game 7 and yet they still blew a 16-point lead in the third quarter, with the Nuggets going up 4 with about 8 minutes left. Despite Gasol having a monster game and Gallinari getting completely shut down by Artest, they threatened to take it until the last 3-4 minutes or so. Karl's strategy of relentlessly doubling Kobe almost worked. In two years Ty Lawson is going to be a monster.

Man. Tough game for the Nuggets. My feeling is that they are like a younger, rawer version of the Heat. No size down low, but dangerous in transition. 3 or 4 better decisions by their guards in this game and they send LA packing.

No particular expertise with these, but which part of the Bay are you in? If you are east of the Caldecott in the East Bay maybe a hot dry summer will nuke them without any intervention on your part. Just conjecture though.

As this is like watching a bunch of JFK assassination conspiracy theorists who have never seen the Zapruder film, I feel compelled to post the original text: While I will not attempt a close reading here (this is likely to bring the post-structuralists out of their village, torches aflame) I will offer up the following observations: -The horseplay prior to the incident was good-natured enough. Perhaps the cat was declawed? -The people in the film are speaking a Germanic language and it appears the child is being ordered to strike the cat. -The laughing that transpires after the cat's retaliation is high-pitched enough to make one suspect the child is being watched and filmed by another young person. Let the games begin! Extra points awarded for the victor eating the spleen of the defeated.

These playoffs are already nuts. Amar'e Stoudamire was so angry after Game 2 against the Heat that he punched a fire extinguisher box in the arena and seriously lacerated his hand. Now he's likely to be out along with Lin and Shumpert. So of the 8 playoff teams in the East, the Knicks have imploded, Rondo has screwed the Celts, the Bulls are going to have to do it without Rose and the Magic are a giant hot mess. I never expected to think that the Hawks or Pacers had any reasonable shot of making it to the conference finals.

Ha. Never thought about it before but Hays changes the melody on the bridge to make it hipper. Rather than just repeat that octave+descending minor 3rd (starts on the 4th of the ii chord) three times, he takes it up a half step twice in a row. This makes the melody hit the b9th on the V7 chord and the 13th and #11th on the I chord. I should have known that the original is much more boring.

Or Kevin Hays. Hated the tune before I heard that one. Big band arrangements of it can be painfully cheesy.

Seriously... America's obesity problem isn't being caused by people eating too many avocadoes or walnuts. I think the article is targeted at a certain middle-class reader between about 45 and 70 who spent the 1990s with various talking heads shouting at them about the cardiac danger of all dietary fat and cholesterol. Certainly I remember the years when my dad banned egg yolks from the house and had periodic meltdowns over things like Cracklin' Oat Bran (contains palm oil) and shellfish (lots of cholesterol).

Hey Michael, apologies for taking a couple days off from looking at the musician's forum. Thanks for looking at this so quickly!

Of course - I didn't mean to imply that there were a bunch of Stone Age types dropping dead of heart disease at 20 because they were eating lots of raw gazelle fat. Just that appealing to Stone Age notions of nutrition as "not bad for you because, after all, we exist today" is a shifting of the burden of proof that makes no sense. Our whole notion of "bad for you" is predicated on a lifespan that most of those people could barely dream of.

Uh... "If modern sewer systems are so great for public health, why did mankind endure for 100,000 years without them?" "If guaranteed health care is such a good idea, why did the human race manage to do well enough to get to AD 1900 without it?" "If sleeping exposed in near-freezing temperatures with substandard clothing is such a dumb idea, how did enough Cro-Magnons manage to do it that we're here today?" While I think a lot of nutritional panicking about this food or that is probably overblown if not outright wrong, there is not a contradiction between saying "this food is bad for you if you want a reasonably long life" and "people could eat this food without it wiping out all of humanity." A species only has to live to reproductive age (i.e., 15 years old for us) for it to not go extinct. Prehistoric people had much shorter lifespans, and it's not a huge stretch to think that at least some of that was caused by poor nutrition.