redeyechicago.com - Off the Markley

#1 Draft Pick to Give This Cavs Fan Ulcer

Stephen Markley — Wed, 22 May 2013 07:15:00 -0500

Busy with my life of slinging brilliant insight and watching as much NBA playoff basketball as I can manage, I'd pledged to catch only the second half of Tuesday night's Memphis-San Antonio game, and in doing so completely forgot to watch the draft lottery.

Therefore, my phone practically blew up in my pocket, sending shards of iPhone glass into my thigh, when every basketball fan friend I have from Ohio texted me simultaneously as the league revealed that the Cleveland Cavaliers, for the third time in a decade, would have the #1 overall pick.

Of course, I'm excited. A first pick to be paired (or traded) with our phenom point guard, and the first pick just two years ago, Kyrie Irving? Yes, please. I'll have some of that on my plate with a garnish, and then no pie at the end because I'll be full from this meal of Kyrie Irving and another #1 overall pick, and also, I don't necessarily like all pie-apple, blueberry, strawberry rhubarb, lemon merengue, sure, but don't force pumpkin on me and if you bring pecan pie anywhere near me, I'll freak out and barf on your eyes. You get exactly what I'm saying here.

However, whenever your team has the #1 pick in the draft it comes with a great amount of anxiety. Here's your team's one shining moment to change everything, to nab that future hall of famer who will turn your fortunes around in a beautiful, spiraling, rotational 180. Yet the history of the #1 pick is replete with failures, losers, injuries, and devastating decisions. The first team I ever loved in my youth, the Portland Trail Blazers, drafted Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan: an immobile, mostly talentless, injury-prone center over the greatest player ever. Then they turned around a couple decades later and with the #1 pick drafted an immobile, mostly talentless, injury-prone center over the best pure shooter of his generation (Greg Oden over Kevin Durant being pure Bowie redux).

When the Cavs had the first pick in 2003, they drafted a hometown hero, who changed the franchise and who had the potential to overshadow Michael Jordan himself. We all know what happened there.

So much heartbreak comes with the #1 pick, I almost feel a melancholy just possessing it. Here are your hopes and dreams as a sports fan wrapped up in this one electric decision. Like the Knight said to Indy, "Choose wisely."

The consensus #1 pick this year has long been thought to be Kentucky center Nerlens Noel, who went down with an ACL tear his freshman year. Noel makes me so incredibly anxious that my fingernails will vanish next season if we draft him. After all, he's a raw nineteen year-old with a major injury already under his belt. Sure, he might be great someday, but right now I'd trust my post moves over his. All I'm saying is if we draft this guy, then Ben McLemore and the possibility of trading the pick will haunt my dreams until proven otherwise.

(It also doesn't help that I disapproved of the Cavs 2011 pick at #4, Tristan Thompson, not to mention Dion Waiters at #4 in 2012 when Harrison Barnes was still on the table. I mean, for chrissake the talent of Rookie of the Year Damion Lillard may have been hard to predict, but not Harrison Barnes. I'm sorry, but if a guy is six-eight, 210 with decent range and can play either the Three or a small-ball Four, what are we thinking drafting a smallish guard who never demonstrated he could actually shoot and went for around 40% from the field and had a -3.7 PoP48 rating [points per par over 48 minutes-or how many points a player effectively wins or loses for their team per 48 minutes of floor time, duh]. Furthermore, when evaluating draft picks don't we have to assess the chance for re-injury? Why hasn't Nate Silver tackled this area of potential draft-deflation wherein an injury-prone player is given some kind of probability for further injury based on a mathematical model that assesses similar injuries to past players? What the hell is everyone so busy doing that they're not on this problem like flies on shit? We need the defensive help, don't get me wrong-Noel's mere presence would almost undoubtedly put opponents back on their toes and make up for Irving and Waiters's lackluster D, but we also don't want to throw away a #1 on a glorified Serge Ibaka, a shot-blocker and stopper with limited offensive prowess [And what is with that annoying tic where sports fans refer to their team as "we"? I'm not on the Cavaliers payroll; I don't have a jersey that says "Markley" on the back; Nothing bad will happen to my career, health, or love life if the Cavs blow it; I'm just some goddamn idiot in Chicago freaking the f*** out about who we're going to draft with our #1 pristine, pure, white-as-the-driven snow pick.])

My stomach hurts.

Give 'The Office' One Last Chance

Stephen Markley — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:16:00 -0500

I'll warn you in advance that this column will reveal what a total pussy I am, but here goes anyway.

So I've been continuing to watch the American version of "The Office" for the last few years even as it first grew lame, then terrible, then borderline unwatchable. It introduced genuinely unfunny characters, stopped and started plot threads that led nowhere, and generally felt like a meandering waste of time.

I couldn't figure out why I was still bothering to watch this show that had become so totally uninteresting to me that each new episode felt like homework. It was some kind of TV inertia I have in which once I've invested any time and thought into characters I must see how those characters develop as if they're my own friends-even if they've become a boring and pale version of their more interesting British selves (pun intended).

I was reminded of just how far the American version had strayed from Ricky Gervais's original creation when my roommate Pat began watching it for the first time on Netflix. Even though the American version is a carbon copy in theory, the British version was so much darker, meaner, and bleaker that it's practically night and day compared with the emo American version.

Anyway, all this is to say that if you at any point enjoyed the American "Office" I highly recommend you check out the series finale.

It hit so many totally perfect notes that it almost made up for slogging through the last three seasons of the show. It was funny, poignant, and even insightful about the ways in which this funny little life flows. Of course most of this comes out through the viewer's central avatars in the show, Jim and Pam, a relationship that ceased being interesting by about season 4, but which comes back to life in this final episode in extremely thoughtful ways. The central conceit is that the castmates have all become minor celebrities after their documentary aired and are reunited a year later to talk about what's happened since.

Unlike a lot of the shows using the faux-documentary format ("Parks and Rec", "Modern Family"- it feels like that ploy became ubiquitous for a brief moment), here we see the results of a camera crew following these people around for nine years. There is even a rather smart underlying dialogue about what it means to be famous in America, and how people of all stripes can project their own hopes and desires upon those objects of fame.

I'll say this: I watched the episode with my friends Joe and Laurie while their little baby slapped me in the face and played with my beard stubble (Riley either bawls her eyes out every time she sees me walk through door or slaps me around; much like my relationship with most women).

All three of us kind of sat staring at the screen, not looking at each other as wave after wave of laughter and lump-in-throats hit us. Like Joe said, "I wish you two weren't here so I could cry."

Which is why I watched it later on my own. Even if you've skipped the last three to five years of the show, give the series finale one last chance.

There Are Plenty of Scandals, Just Not These Ones

Stephen Markley — Mon, 20 May 2013 02:45:00 -0500

There's a familiar template for the "scandals" that have so far "plagued" the Obama administration, in that they are all, for the most part, total bullshit and/or unfortunate events in the vast federal bureaucracy that have as much to do with the guy actually sitting in the Oval Office as how the busses are running on the north side of Chicago. We'll start with the first two that were supposedly going to be "worse than Watergate."

• Solyndra This was supposedly a case of a corrupt administration steering taxpayer money to a doomed solar manufacturer. In a case of hilarious displacement, given that previous Republican administrations have unashamedly flooded the pockets of the fossil fuel industry, conservatives convinced themselves the same was happening with Democrats and this solar company that lost the government the equivalent of a copper-shaving from a penny. In reality, some of the grants and loan guarantees from the stimulus didn't pan out, others did, and still others from a program called ARPA-E may someday change the world. Overall the Department of Energy's loan program was a success, no wrong-doing whatsoever was overturned by endless Republican investigations (the real waste of taxpayer dollars), and it turned out Solyndra failed because the price of solar panels keeps dropping as that technology becomes cheaper and more successful. The real story is not that solar is a bust but that it's becoming the most promising energy technology since the discovery of petroleum.

• Fast and Furious This was the gun-running scandal in which, supposedly, the ATF trafficked guns across the Mexican border, which ended up killing an American DEA agent. The media horrifically misreported this story until Fortune Magazine's Katherine Eban wrote a bombshell piece of investigative journalism called "The Truth About the Fast and Furious Scandal." In the article she lays out that the ATF was never in the business of "walking" guns over the border. In fact, they were trying to intercept them by tracking the gunwalkers. Unfortunately Arizona gun laws are so "Mad Max"-f***ing crazy that the ATF basically has no power to stop anyone doing anything with firearms. The Arizona Republicans are inadvertently doing the bidding of Mexican drug cartels, who give straw purchasers gobs amounts of money to purchase insane numbers of guns in America's Toys 'R Us of personal weapons. You know, there was a president who did illegally sell guns to right-wing murder squads, though. Went by the name of Ronnie Reagan.

• Benghazi The sheer incoherence of what Republicans actually think the Obama administration did following the attack against the American embassy and the death Ambassador Christopher Stevens is basically all you need to know about this one. Now we're down to a scandal about some revisions of talking points. As far as I can tell from my favorite conservative blogs, they think the Obama administration wanted to cover up the terrorist nature of the attack and blame it on that insulting video so he could um, win re-election? Is that it? You think the administration wanted to keep under wraps the CIA, every reporter on the planet, and the group that claimed responsibility for the attack until after the election? Sure, I guess that's possible. It would be the stupidest, most pointless thing to ever attempt cover-up ever, but sure, whatever you say. Or-OR!-here's a wild thought: a tragic attack occurred, there was initial confusion about who was responsible, the administration found out who was responsible, they talked openly a few days later about the terrorist group responsible, and then conservative media found out the word "Benghazi" was good enough to keep their mindless readers and viewers with a full chubby.

• The IRS Yes, it would be appalling if, like Richard Nixon, the Obama administration used the IRS to target political opponents. Luckily, that is not even remotely what happened. Here's what did: there were some IRS workers in Cincinnati who needed a way to sort through a huge burst of applications for 501(c) (4) status, and they chose to use political buzzwords. This included Tea Party groups, but progressive groups also come in for similar scrutiny and last year one progressive group even got its status revoked. Their immediate supervisors found out about the practice, and told them to cut it out. They continued to use their criteria anyway, and then they got told to cut it out again, and they did. That's the whole story. Higher-ups in the IRS didn't even know about it, let alone the executive office. So the conspiracy theory, if I might summarize, is that the President's political team, at his behest, got in touch with a group of frontline IRS workers in Cincy and told them to force Tea Party groups to fill out some extra paperwork. Pretty nefarious. And if they were rejected for 501(c) (4) status, they would-gasp-not be able to funnel money from vested corporate interests to influence political outcomes. The real scandal here is the 501(c) (4) itself, which is supposed to have a social welfare mission, but which is actually an overtly political vehicle that people like Karl Rove, the Koch brothers, and other puppet masters use to flood elections with money. They're one of the instruments Stephen Colbert spent a year delving into his Pulitzer-worthy look at SuperPacs and federal election law. What's gone totally unreported is that all of these groups that got singled out are almost certainly in violation of the nebulous, incredibly vague laws that have turned the post-Citizens United campaign finance system into a dystopian farce.

• The AP This one actually does bother me, but as with all of these, the President of the United States-based on everything that's been reported-had zero to do with it. Eric Holder's Justice Department began a leak investigation because the Republicans in Congress were shrieking about this particular leak. Then the investigation subpoenaed some AP phone records without telling the AP. It's unclear if Holder knew about this, but that's definitely worth finding out. If he acted inappropriately, then he should go (I think it's also worth noting that this leak had to do with an undercover operative who'd infiltrated an al-Qaeda cell in Yemen, and who could have been killed had the AP gone forward with the story before that operative could be retrieved-very cloak and dagger and ethically murky). Again, this can't really be called a scandal per se, because everything the DOJ did is entirely legal. In our post-9/11 fugue you'll remember that laws don't actually protect any vestige of your privacy anyway, and even if we could turn back the time on the national security state erected after those attacks, the same people who've suddenly discovered their inner civil libertarians at a politically convenient time would start shrieking about how we need to wire-tap everyone the next time a couple of pissant losers blow something up in public. The real scandal here is the rather nutty system of permanent surveillance and unlimited spying power that the government has erected in the past decade in the name of counter-terrorism. The irony is also that Obama is the one who's long supported the Media Shield Act, which would actually make stuff like this illegal. Guess which faction of hypocritical wangs oppose it?

There's the old journalism adage that no one reports on cats not stuck in trees. The political media feeds on pre-conceived narratives and the conservative media has figured out how to juice the mainstream media into talking about what it wants to talk about. It has also figured out that people are generally lazy and won't bother to read past a headline. All of the stuff I just talked about in those bullet points isn't my silly liberal Obamabot opinion; these are all reported facts that are easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Granted, most of us are using that internet connection to look at sports scores, porn, and celebrity gossip.

One need only look back to the Clinton era, when House Republicans spent six years and millions of dollars on a fishing expedition that eventually turned up a blowjob. We've all seen this movie before. It was almost entirely political wishful thinking and hot air that eventually dug up enough dirt to find a reason-any reason-to try to impeach Clinton. Now we have similar hot air and wishful thinking, the only difference being that nothing of substance has actually turned up.

To be clear, it's not that I think the Obama administration is shiny and flawless. In fact, there's clearly a massive scandal at the heart of its foreign policy thinking, which has turned the bombastic Bush-era "War on Terror" into a covert war, which mostly evades the headlines and which most Americans are happy not to think about. Drones and Seal Teams are regularly dispatched across the Middle East and Africa for a whole variety of reasons, including rescuing American aid workers from pirates and occasionally killing children and pregnant women. There's virtually no public oversight of any of this, there's evidence that it's creating great hostility among people who were already not super pleased with us, and mainstream reporting has been woeful at best. Republicans don't want to have that conversation because they entirely agree and want to start more hot wars in Syria and Iran.

But sure, there are plenty of scandals. Did you hear that a graduate student found a major flaw in a seminal paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which (further) discredits current conservative economic theory? How about that the military has all but admitted that there's a pervasive culture of rape within its ranks? That we're all suffering under austerity forced upon us by an idiot faction of cranks called the House Republicans (who actually got fewer total votes in the last election) even though the last thread of their argument just snapped rather dramatically? Or what about that atmospheric carbon has hit 400 ppm, and we're basically running out of time to keep the planet habitable for life as we know it?

Ezra Klein put it best when he wrote, "When future generations look back on the scandals of our age, it'll be the unchecked rise in global temperatures, not the Benghazi talking points, that infuriate them."

We have plenty of actual scandals, they're just not anything people are paying attention to.

On Syria, Liberal Interventionism, and The Onion

Stephen Markley — Wed, 15 May 2013 06:01:00 -0500

Like every other college-educated urban white person, I love The Onion. Its satire sometimes feels like everything that's left of the guiding light of civilization.

Yet recently I've noticed stories on the Syrian civil war that very much embody the thoughtless ways Americans have come to look at foreign policy, especially the sticky club of liberal interventionists. Sure, you can count on Lindsay Graham and John McCain to want to get involved in whatever Middle Eastern wars might be lying around, but The Onion captures liberal interventionist sentiment well.

"'Syrian Lives Are Worthless,' Obama Tells Daughters Before Kissing Them Goodnight" hit a rare note of not only being obvious and unfunny but also daft about what a Syrian intervention would mean. You could imagine a Fox News-financed conservative satirical newsletter trying to make the same joke in 2003: "'Iraqi Lives Are Worthless,' Liberals Tell Children Before Kissing Them Goodnight."

As on so many other matters, we imbue the president with a power not at all commensurate with his ability to influence events in the world. Also, we drastically overestimate the abilities of the military in these scenarios. When it comes to Syria this is especially dangerous because as the violence ramps up the drumbeat for Obama to "do something" gets louder.

In February 2012, I wrote a column asking if intervention in Syria was inevitable. Now that the situation has deteriorated from awful to catastrophe with tens of thousands killed, hundreds of thousands of refugees flowing across the borders, and the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons, it has become more inevitable and yet worse to contemplate. All the reasons the administration wanted to stay out of Syria have only become more acute even as the pressure to intervene has increased.

Military action has nothing but downsides and unintended consequences. Critics say, put up a no-fly zone, but Syria's air defenses were built to repel the Israeli military. In other words, they are for real. Creating a no-fly zone would mean dismantling, i.e., bombing, much of this network. It would almost certainly kill civilians, perhaps a large number of them, and it would put our own servicemembers at risk. Furthermore, the Syrian military can keep up the campaign on the ground anyway, and as the killing continues there will be increased pressure to strike targets on the ground. Essentially, a no-fly zone would mean starting a hot war with Syria.

Critics say, take out the chemical weapons, but you can't just bomb chemical weapons facilities in populated areas without, again, killing civilians and potentially releasing the chemical agents. The Pentagon says it could take as many as 50,000 troops to fight there way in and secure the sites. Again, call that what it is: starting a hot war with Syria.

So critics say, arm the rebels. But some of the rebels are almost scarier than the Assad regime. The most powerful rebel group is called Al Nusra, and it's leaders were former lieutenants to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Basically Al Qaeda in Iraq moved across the Syrian border at the beginning of the war and gave itself a Syrian makeover (this includes changing their names to sound more Syrian). These are the people who five years ago were drilling holes in captives and cutting off their heads.

What happens if American-delivered arms end up on the wrong side of a massacre against the ruling Allawite minority? What if anti-aircraft missiles that the Saudis and McCain are eager to supply end up bringing down El Al jets, as one member of the administration speculated to the New Yorker's Dexter Filkins?

Filkins, the great war correspondent, brings up all of this and more in a recent article, but you'd need a seven volume book series to get to the heart of how messy this is. When the Assad regime falls, whether America has intervened or not, there will likely be a bloodbath in Damascus as the various groups vie for control. Syria has so many different ethnic factions and rebel groups at this point, no one knows who or what could come out of this after the fall of Assad, but it will almost surely include more civil war. The slaughter will continue, and we'll have to pick a horse and keep arming that horse even as it goes about killing a lot of other horses. This is Iraq, but more complicated. Like Saddam Hussein, Assad's authoritarian rule was the nail holding the whole house together. Remove the nail, and the entire edifice implodes. It's entirely possible that what comes after Assad falls will be worse than this.

My only point being-other than this is all pretty f***ed up-that it's all well and good to feel like we, the U.S., should do something, but if it's an empty gesture meant to appease guilty consciences rather than anything resembling a concrete plan to stabilize Syria (and that might potentially destabilize it further), maybe it's better to bear the wrath of Lindsay Graham and The Onion after all.

Happy 400 ppm Week!

Stephen Markley — Tue, 14 May 2013 07:46:00 -0500

Happy 400 ppm week! What'd you get me?

This past week the Earth passed a wondrous milestone: atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reached 400 parts per million, a level not seen on the planet in at least two million years but probably more like ten (okay, so it hasn't hit 400 ppm at every measuring station, but in the Arctic it's actually been there for nearly a year).

Seeing as how scientists have now concluded that the safety level for CO2 levels is roughly 350 ppm, and we breezed by that rest stop in the early Nineties, 400 ppm doesn't make all that much difference other than a nice marker for your kids to fondly dream about when we've reached 500 ppm and the Earth is on course for a civilization-ending six degrees centigrade rise in global average temperature.

With CO2 levels rising about 2 ppm each year, we're roughly on course to hit 500 ppm in the next fifty years if we continue burning fossil fuels the way we're doing now. The people knowledgeable about these kinds of things tend to think that global greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next decade if humanity wants even a prayer of keeping the planet habitable. In order for that to happen, the entire developing world will have to skip economic development via fossil fuel extraction and burning, while those of us whittling our thumbs away at the apex of late-stage capitalism will have to stop our emissions on a dime.

Still, it's not all doom and gloom. As New York Mag's Jonathan Chait aptly points out, President Obama is well on his way to the emissions reductions he promised at Copenhagen in 2009 (not enough, but then again nothing politically palatable would be), and he still has one huge card to play. In twenty years no one is going to remember Benghazi or Boston or budget negotiations or any of the other distractions that flit by in the daily news cycle. The EPA regulations for existing power plants could be the most important component of his entire presidency, and we'll find out within the next two years if he's serious about climate change, and in turn, his legacy. While the Keystone pipeline remains a more potent litmus test for environmentalists (and Obama should reject it), the more powerful and important step would be for the EPA to regulate existing power plants by giving states an emissions cap, similar to a proposal from the National Resources Defense Council.

There are other signs that the world's waking up to the utter catastrophe that lies in our immediate future. South Korea has passed the heaviest carbon price in the world. Germany's solar power boom proves renewable energy is totally viable if the political will exists. Bill McKibben's divestment movement continues to gain steam.

The problem is that none of this is happening fast enough. Having hit 400 ppm with emissions still climbing, it seems virtually unthinkable that the earth will avoid the 2 degree temperature increase that looks increasingly terrifying. The storms will get more powerful, the droughts will get more severe, the wildfires more devastating, sea levels will rise at least another foot this century.

Now all of that may sound rather anodyne in the abstract, but think about it this way: if you are one of these brave, foolhardly souls who has or is planning to have children, and if we continue with business as usual when it comes to burning fossil fuels, your child is virtually guaranteed to see the end of the world.

How does that sound, people my age having babies?

No equivocating on that one: If the world does not cooperate in bringing global emissions to a rapid halt and develop multiple ways to remediate carbon out of the atmosphere, your kids are going to watch the end times play out in disaster after disaster after disaster.

And you say I didn't get you anything for 400 ppm week.

'Back to the Future' or modern reality?

By Stephen Markley, @stephenmarkley — Sun, 12 May 2013 18:06:00 -0500

I've come up with a theory that will almost undoubtedly end with me winning a Nobel Prize. No big deal.

It strikes me that the terror, fear and general despondency of the world-the dystopian quality of the past decade or so-makes perfect sense in the context of the film "Back to the Future: Part II."

For those not familiar with the crown jewel of the "Back to the Future" series, the second film finds Marty McFly traveling to the future with Doc Brown to put right an error his future self makes. In the course of doing so, Marty's nemesis, Biff, manages to deliver a copy of a sports almanac to his past self that allows him to predict the future and build an empire on gambling winnings. When Marty returns to his present day, he finds himself stuck in an alternate Biff-tainted reality.

That's what's happening right now: We are the unfortunate souls living in the Biff reality.

Think about it: The 2000 election debacle, 9/11, the Iraq war, the Bush presidency, Paris Hilton, economic stagnation followed by near collapse of the world economy, accelerating climate change, ocean acidification, firearms proliferation and the resulting killing sprees, "Honey Boo Boo," unemployment, urban violence, Fox News and white male resentment as political ideology, the Afghanistan quagmire, the clash of civilizations predicted by Samuel Huntington accelerated by the globalization of communications that has created senseless killers out of disenchanted diaspora-dwellers like the Tsarnaev brothers, the Syrian civil war, Gwyneth Paltrow and her preposterously high fence-all of it makes sense only in the context of the Biff alternate reality.

Certainly, this is terrible. After all, I don't want to live in the Biff alternate reality. I want Biff washing my car while my hit science fiction novel plunders the best-seller list.

However, the good news is that all we have to do is find the so-called "Biff" of our time-the one absurdly successful individual who has reveled in wealth, fame and power even as the rest of the world has gone to crap in a hellbasket.

But who could it be? Professional billionaire buffoon Donald Trump? Some sleazy Wall Street kingpin like JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon? Rupert Murdoch? Beyonce Knowles? My candidate would be someone who has profited from the laugh-out-loud absurdity of the horrors of the modern age, like Stephen Colbert.

Whatever the case, we need to find this person and destroy that sports almanac, ASAP.

Of course, I can hear people whining already, "But Markley, if we had civic institutions, a redoubtable media sector and an engaged citizenry, then we could safeguard our country-nay, the world!-from the encroachment of self-serving individuals who exploit blah blah blah blah ..."

Sure, we could do all that work. Or we could invent a time machine and travel back to the moment everything went off the rails and start flapping butterflies' wings and see how it all shakes out. Let's look for shortcuts is what I'm saying.

Then again, maybe the Biff of our world is closer than you think. After all, I assume the Nobel Prize one wins for the Biff Theory comes with a cash prize and babes.

RedEye special contributor Stephen Markley is the author of "The Great Dysmorphia" and "Publish This Book."

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Things I'd Rather Do Than See 'Gatsby'

Stephen Markley — Wed, 8 May 2013 14:24:00 -0500

When I heard about Baz Luhrmann's remake of "The Great Gatsby" a bubble of bile rose up in my throat. The director of such opulent visual messes as "Moulin Rouge" and "Australia" bringing to the big screen F. Scott Fitzgerald's melancholy meditation on the emptiness of American wealth and empire as it went about immolating in its own excess?

My bile retreated momentarily when I heard that my boy, DiCaprio would play Gastby opposite Tobey McGuire as Nick and Carey Mulligan as Daisy. It returned full-bile when I saw the trailer, which looked like Liberace copulated with an Andre 3000 album. It made me wonder what awful fate might someday await all classic American novels. How far away can we be from "Native Son" directed by Michael Bay?

Here's a list of things I'd rather do than go see Luhrmann's take on the distant green light:

1) Keep watching NBC's "Hannibal." Speaking of ill-imagined retreads of classic books, NBC's turgid, comatose take on Thomas Harris's original Hannibal Lecter novel, "Red Dragon" could not have been done less well. It takes your basic serial-killer-of-the-week premise and throws in endless circular discussions on their nonexistent, unimportant motives. Typical dialogue: "Does the killer think he's God?" "He wants to be God." "No, he's watching God." "The angel wings represent how he wants to be close to God."

2) Lose an election to Mark Sanford. Stephen Colbert's sister couldn't quite manage to pull out a victory in her South Carolina congressional race, but she was running in a heavily Republican district that apparently doesn't really care what kind of freak show runs beside the (R). Moreover, it's probably good to have Sanford back in the news cycle just so we can all be front and center when he mortifies himself the next time.

3) Be a Christian rock star who gets caught trying to hire a hitman to kill my wife. Such is the fate of As I Lay Dying frontman Tim Lambesis. And who said Christian rock couldn't be interesting? Nope, wait, this is the most interesting thing to ever happen to the genre of Christian rock.

4) Attend the July 4^th rally planned by an "anti-tyranny" group, where they intend to march with loaded rifles. I see no way that this could go wrong.

5) Be neighbors with the Ariel Castro and his brothers (wow, did Cleveland really not need that story).

6) Live in Texas with its giant killer African snails. You read that right. Texas has an invasive species problem with giant snails that carry a form of meningitis known as "rat lungworm." If there has ever been an illness with a more horrifying name than "rat lungworm" I'll accept your nominations now.

7) Be Chris Christie's lap band. Yes, I'd rather be the silicon or titanium band wrapped around New Jersey governor Chris Christie's corpulent stomach in order to keep him less hangry all the time than go see Baz Luhrmann's music video version of "The Great Gatsby."

3 Reasons the Bulls Should Not Play Derrick Rose

Stephen Markley — Tue, 7 May 2013 21:42:00 -0500

Here in Chicago, sports talk has become consumed by snide disdain for star point guard Derrick Rose as he remains on the bench during the playoffs while the Bulls hobble on after an impressive if battering series against the Brooklyn Nets. Now that they're playing LeBron James and the Heat, I hear Bulls fans making openly hostile comments about Rose remaining on the injured list despite being "cleared to play."

My favorite overheard joke is that the Bulls are going to erect another statue outside the United Center, this one of Rose peering from the end of the bench in a suit.

Still I feel as though it's my duty to step in and offer some rational thinking on the matter. Here are three reasons the Bulls should not bring Rose back for the playoffs, even after an awesome Game 1 they stole from the Heat:

1) The Bulls are not going to win the championship this year. Ostensibly, the reason to have a franchise player like Rose is to bring a championship to your franchise. The Bulls have three impressive pieces in place: Rose, the relentless Joakim Noah, and coach Tom "Looks Like He Should Own a Steakhouse on Michigan Avenue Called 'Thibs'" Thibodeau.

The majority of the rest of the team is migraine list of terrible contracts and half-pieces that will never get them over the hump of Miami. No matter how exciting that Game 1 victory was-and I was rooting enthusiastically for the Bulls, as I will throughout-you are delusional if you think they can actually win that series. If the Bulls were up 100-62 in Game 4 on the verge of a sweep, I'd still put my money on LeBron to pull that series out of his ass. Bringing Rose back in a fit of delusion that he could somehow take over the series while Noah's feet are aching, Deng's recovering from the superflu, Carlos Boozer is playing Carlos Boozer defense, and Kirk Hinrich's calf is split in half would be the apex of basketball magical thinking.

2) Who says Rose will be anything close to 2010 form? You're talking about throwing a guy back on the court who hasn't played a real game for a year. This season the Bulls have learned how to play without him, for better or worse. Reintroducing him to the lineup in February might have worked, but plugging him back into the rotation on the fly could actually work against whatever weird offensive rhythm the Bulls have managed over the course of a season where they stayed in the hunt. Guys coming back from severe injuries have plenty of 3 for 15 games with 6 turnovers in their systems before they work out the rust. For Rose to have all of those rust games in high stakes playoff situations just seems cruel. You can hear sports radio collectively saying, "Hey, Derrick, why'd you play so shitty? We blame you for this loss."

3) Rose is going to get injured again, and it's just a matter of how soon. Playoff basketball is brutal. It moves faster, the defense is harder, the refs let more bruising contact go without a whistle. Recall that before his season-ending knee injury last year, Rose had a whole slew of health problems, from his back to his thigh. For Rose to be effective, he needs to go hard to the basket. What happens when he tears a calf muscle or snaps an ankle or shreds a meniscus? Then everyone's saying, "Why the hell did you risk playing him?"

Bottom line, theirs massively more downside in this situation. You're banking your franchise player on some improbable notion that a guy who hasn't played for a year can lead your team to the most improbable upset ever and spark the most improbable championship run in NBA history. It makes zero sense, and Bulls fans should probably-here's an idea-shut up and quit shit-mouthing the best thing to happen to their franchise since Michael Jordan.

Baby Alien Skeleton Totally Freaking Me Out

Stephen Markley — Sun, 5 May 2013 16:39:00 -0500

So I was perusing Weather.com trying to figure out if it was going to be 85 or 43 degrees in Chicago on a given day, and what should I happen upon but this story about an "alien-looking skeleton" that "poses a medical mystery."

After watching the video of this tiny skeleton discovered in the Atacama Desert, all I can say is calling this a "medical mystery" is the understatement of the year.

It's a freaking goddamn baby alien skeleton, people. That's scrotum-shrinkingly weird.

I would say check out the pictures of this dome-headed, tiny alien skeleton except you won't be able to fall asleep for a month. Jesus Christ, just when I'd gotten the Montauk Monster out of my memory this thing comes along.

Sure, the scientists are talking like this is just a couple of deformities and maybe some screwy DNA, but come on, scientists, we're not stupid. This thing only has ten ribs, whereas humans have twelve; it's six inches long even though DNA tests say it was between six and eight years old; oh yeah, and it looks like a f***ing alien.

So what's the plan here, aliens? Are you invading us with your babies? Did your babies build the pyramids and the Easter Island statues? Or maybe you're all just that size, and you're messing with our heads by using the alien-human hybrids you've implanted among the population (Obama, LeBron) to craft a narrative that you're not so diminutive?

Or what if the aliens saw the last two to three seasons of "X-Files" and were like, "Wow, did that show plummet downhill. And what's with the second movie, 'X-Files: I Want to Believe' where Mulder and Scully are like playing house and Mulder is wanted by the FBI until he performs like the barest of consulting gigs on this pedophile psychic, and there's also something about cutting people's heads off to stick them on other bodies, and really the whole movie is just total dogshit, and there's even a scene where Scully has to perform some kind of experimental stem cell procedure on a dying kid, so she Googles 'stem cell therapy'-Oh, I'm sorry, your surgeon is going to begin her experimental procedure by Googling the procedure? I don't think so, 'X-Files: I Want to Believe.' We need to drop some of our dead babies on to Earth just in the hopes that Chris Carter and Vince Gilligan will do one more X-Files movie that isn't a pile of putrid garbage."

What if that's the plot behind the baby alien skeleton?

Hey, Sandra Day O'Connor, All's Forgiven!

Stephen Markley — Wed, 1 May 2013 18:03:00 -0500

Hey, former Supreme Court Justice of the United States, Sandra Day O'Connor, I just wanted to say thank you so much for your recent interview with the Chicago Tribune's editorial board. I really can't express how awesome it is that over a decade after you cast the fifth vote to end the Florida recount and make George W. Bush the forty-third president, you totally recognize what a boneheaded move that was.

What was it you said?

"'It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue,' O'Connor said last Friday. 'Maybe the court should have said, 'We're not going to take it, goodbye.'"

Haha! Yeah that probably would've been better. Oh well! Hindsight's twenty-twenty! No point in crying over spilled milk, a $3 trillion war, torture, a crippled economy, a bunch of dead American soldiers, dead Iraqis, budget-busting tax cuts, a botched hurricane response here, a financial meltdown there, environmental degradation and persecution of government scientists, extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay, or a few hundred other terrible things the guy you voted into office did.

I couldn't help but watch George W. Bush's jaw-droppingly insipid, un-self-aware interview with Charlie Rose on CBS, and think to myself, "Man, it is not just a bad dream, it is not just outrageous to think that this guy was president for eight years-it's downright painful." Whoever voted for him sure has to feel like a total fool at this point!

And there was O'Connor admitting the court made a poor decision taking the case, that under Florida election law, each county had every right to count ballots based on its judgment of the intent of the voter, and the Supreme Court made a partisan choice to install Bush, the loser of the national popular vote as well as the electoral college by many reasonable (though not all) measures. Even though Jeb Bush and Republican legislature in Florida made a hilariously racist pre-election effort to disenfranchise as many black people as they could, thereby eliminating tens of thousands of votes that would have tipped the election to Al Gore by a comfortable margin, the Bush team still needed an assist from a Reagan-appointee who was overheard doling out conspiracy theories about the Democrats in the days after the election.

Thanks, Sandy. The acceleration of climate change during the Bush years surely made your name more relevant (haha, devastating hurricane joke!).

We, the American people, are so grateful you can look back at the choice you made to pick our president and say to yourself, "Whoopsies, looks like I might have miffed that one."

Certainly, Sandy, you and your compatriots' votes have definitely not-repeat, definitely not-given most of us the assumption that the law exists only as a superstructure to protect the interests of the rich, powerful, and connected. It's not like the guy you voted into office in 2000 picked yours and Chief Justice William Rehnquist's replacements, thus dooming the country to the thumb of the most regressive decision-making body in a generation. It's not like you helped give us Citizens United or anything! You weren't on the court then, so your sterling reputation as a fair and impartial arbiter of the law is unscathed.

So thanks a whole f***ing bunch, Sandy. You will be remembered fondly as a paragon of jurisprudence, who can look back misty-eyed at the end of a long career and life and know that the decision for which you will be most remembered was only a total, abject, unequivocal disaster.