Larry King Does Plato

Larry King is like Greeks in Egypt learning something deep from their teachers.

Last night Larry did an episode on Tiger's infidelities and what he should do to repair his public image. I don't get the assumption that it's necessary for Tiger to worry about his public image. The man is a great golfer and makes plenty of money from golf itself. And as far as endorsements go, he's obviously not losing them. But even if he were in danger of losing the endorsements, why should he care? Why is there this assumed, oddly quasi-moral imperative for the guy to maintain his brand at all costs? He has other sources of income and even if he didn't he could live on what he's made. Who's to say that Tiger even likes being a huge brand? I have no idea, but the way Larry's guests talked about Tiger you'd think that the real thing he'd done wrong wasn't cheating on his wife, but harming his brand and violating some sort of trust we had in him, a trust he has an ethical duty to repair via carefully coached and phonily sincere interviews. (One even said that he shouldn't come out with his wife because that's such a cliche and would detract from the appearance of sincerity. Well what if he sincerely wants to make a statement with his wife, and she with him?) Anyway, Larry had a surprisingly Platonic moment with his panel of damage control doctors last night. They're all saying what Tiger should do and suddenly Larry asks:

Do you teach remorse? You're either remorseful or you're not. Or do you guys teach it?

BRAGMAN: You teach him how to show it, I mean, you know... (LAUGHTER)

KING: Would the old George Burns thing, the secret of sincerity -- if you can fake it, you've got it made?

Compare this to this exchange from Plato's dialogue, Gorgias:

Soc. Let me tell you then, Gorgias, what surprises me in your words; though I dare say that you may be right, and I may have understood your meaning. You say that you can make any man, who will learn of you, a rhetorician?
Gor. Yes.
Soc. Do you mean that you will teach him to gain the ears of the multitude on any subject, and this not by instruction [by which Socrates means the teaching of actual knowledge] but by persuasion?
Gor. Quite so.
Soc. You were saying, in fact, that the rhetorician will have, greater powers of persuasion than the physician even in a matter of health?
Gor. Yes, with the multitude-that is.
Soc. You mean to say, with the ignorant; for with those who know he cannot be supposed to have greater powers of persuasion.
Gor. Very true.
Soc. But if he is to have more power of persuasion than the physician, he will have greater power than he who knows?
Gor. Certainly.
Soc. Although he is not a physician:-is he?
Gor. No.
Soc. And he who is not a physician must, obviously, be ignorant of what the physician knows. Gor. Clearly.
Soc. Then, when the rhetorician is more persuasive than the physician, the ignorant is more persuasive with the ignorant than he who has knowledge?-is not that the inference?
Gor. In the case supposed:-Yes.
Soc. And the same holds of the relation of rhetoric to all the other arts; the rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know?
Gor. Yes, Socrates, and is not this a great comfort?-not to have learned the other arts, but the art of rhetoric only, and yet to be in no way inferior to the professors of them?

Video Hoes, Beware (And A Couple Good Songs):

"A 38-year-old former Miss Argentina has died from complications after undergoing cosmetic surgery on her buttocks.

Solange Magnano, a mother of twins who won the crown in 1994, died of a pulmonary embolism Sunday after three days in critical condition following a gluteoplasty in Buenos Aires.

Close friend Roberto Piazza said the procedure involved injections and the liquid "went to her lungs and brain."

"A woman who had everything lost her life to have a slightly firmer behind," he said."

Normally I wouldn't really sympathize but a mother of twins, shit.

On another note, two good songs. In one corner, B.G. f. Soulja Slim, Boosie and C-Murder - 'Nigga Owe Me Some Money.' You can't go wrong with B.G. and Soulja Slim - 'Fired Up,' which I believe I've written about here, was one of the great songs this decade - and you can't go wrong with B.G. and C-Murder. And I don't really like to acknowledge Boosie for stupid reasons but he's good too. Unfortunately, Soulja Slim just does, or rather, did the hook (R.I.P., Soulja), and C-Murder sounds like he's getting a little old - still raps just as well, but his voice has become a slightly blunter instrument. As if he ate Juvenile circa today for lunch. But a great song nonetheless. B.G., like Kurrupt, is the sort of minor talent that just doesn't decline with age. I actually happened to pick up his first album, True Story, that he made with a 12-year-old Wayne when he was 14, and he was just about the same rapper then that he is today. I'll say something about it sometime. In the other corner, Gucci makes up for the deficiencies of previous album leaks (see previous post below) with some virtuosic technical fireworks on 'Gingerbread Man,' over a Mannie Fresh track that sounds nothing like vintage Mannie Fresh but thankfully sounds nothing like his recent crappy work either. More of a solid approximation of a Zaytoven beat, which is good enough given how great the rapping is, and OJ has a surprisingly good verse, although perhaps I like Bad Goofy OJ more than Surprisingly Decent OJ. At this point I'm fine with the fact that Gucci's weedcarriers can't rap, and when they do rap well it's a bit like if ODB were to have suddenly busted out a really solid 16 on some Wu-Tang song - defeats the whole purpose of his being a member instead of, like, Killah Priest, or that guy in Killarmy. Actually though, it would be okay if Waka Flocka learned how to rap, as he doesn't have the personality to make up for it. Guy doesn't have an accent. It's like, who invited the fifth-rate N.Y. mixtape rapper to the party? But anyway.

Brief And Reasonably Clever Larry King Remarks (White House Party Crashers' Friends)

More articulate people have said it less tritely before, but you've got this weird phenomenon in today's media where, out of a concern to appear unbiased, reporters will actively avoid coming down on one side or another of a question of fact. Which is understandable, because the line between questions of fact and questions of opinion can be a hard one to draw (for instance, whether Obama's healthcare bill will improve or hurt the quality of our healthcare is both, in a sense, a factual matter, but also such a heavily disputed and somewhat unknowable factual matter that it's really just as much a matter of opinion), and because questions of fact can become politicized and therefore picking a side can look like partisan bias. But some things are just hardcore questions of fact and should be treated as such, not as issues where reasonable minds can disagree or state their views. And one such question is whether the Salahis were invited to Obama's big soiree last week. They weren't, and they didn't get confused and think they were either. They just crashed. But in a journalistic world where objectivity has come to mean that it's forbidden to actually report that someone is lying about something, that can become hard to say. And it's particularly hard for Larry King, who seems to inhabit a world where the sky could be blue - or it could be green. We just don't know.

So Larry has on three friends of the Salahis the other night, two of which are just stupid people and one of whom was wildly insane. And how does this go down? The first question Larry asks the friends is how the poor Salahis are doing. Gee, Larry, how do you think they're doing? They've just become famous for being colossal buffoons. But Larry's into seeing both sides of a story, so that's what he asks, and they say that the Salahis aren't doing so well because people are running around taking pictures of them now. OH NO. Then Larry asks why they went if they weren't invited. The one woman says "as far as I know, they were invited." Which only means - as she admits that she has no evidence of that fact - that her friends lied to her and said they were. Really, what is the point of this exercise? This is like having Jeb Bush on and asking him why his brother invaded Iraq, and Jeb saying, "Larry, as far as I know George didn't invade Iraq. That was his evil twin. George TOLD ME so." Larry, however, doesn't ask why we should give any credence to the lies Miss Salahi Friend has been told by these two nuts; he just moves on to the next guest, who is the insane one.

Since Larry has no bullshit filter, you can basically walk out of a mental clinic and say whatever you want on Larry King Live. Unless you're a beauty pageant contestant, in which case Larry must hold you to the highest standards of journalistic scrutiny, because hedging about the confidential contents of your settlement with Miss USA Inc. is really important stuff. Otherwise, though, you're good. Well, Mr. Matthew Christian Davis, author of The Best of D.C., is here to defend his friends proudly. For Mr. Davis featured them in three, count 'em, three different areas of his book, the purpose of which is to chronicle the defining change in America's leadership. The first area is design and couture; Ms. Salahi rocked the runway fashion show. She's leading the way in America in couture. #2 is D.C. for Divas in Charge, an event where Ms. Salahi, a D.C. Diva in Charge, wore a green number. And the third was the book launch at the National Press Club, where she emceed with three other ex-Miss D.C.'s. So you can see that Ms. Salahi is really the best of D.C., and part of that defining change in our nation's leadership. This is all direct quotation, more or less.

Then Larry asks whether this eminently honorable woman was actually invited. Mr. Davis has an answer for that. He comes from three generations of law enforcement and proudly served his country in "such places as Rwanda during the genocide in 1994." Being a patriot and a proud servant of this country, he is "a strong believer that our nation has a front line, a first line of defense that will protect our leader, our commander in chief by all means necessary." What are you saying, Larry asks? That they must have been invited because otherwise they couldn't have gotten past the first line of defense? Yes, Mr. Davis replies. But quick, we've got to take a commercial break.

When we return, the one friend continues to say that the Salahis were invited to the best of her knowledge. This is turning into the Watergate hearings. She admits, however, that she never saw the invitation. Larry asks Mr. Davis what would happen if he went to the White House without an invitation. Mr. Davis says that Larry has a blanket invitation wherever he goes, because he's such a hell of a guy, and that "I do not want to make any comments in terms of seeing that you're not being considered welcome to a party." Mr. Davis won't even consider the hypothetical because it's too offensive. Larry follows up; aren't the Salahis well-known too, like Larry? Why yes, Mr. Davis says, "they are D.C.'s dynamic couple, another acronym for them in the book. However, in this particular case, D.C. also represents diligence and courts. I feel they are innocent until proven guilty." Pay attention to what Mr. Davis just did. He's spelling out D.C. acronyms about the Salahis. They're the Dynamic Couple. But they also should receive the benefits of our justice system's Dilligence and Courts. All this is just flying over Larry's head. If Larry realizes he's talking to a madman, he doesn't show it.

After the break, Larry probes some more about that invitation, and this time the Salahi Friends admit they had the feeling that the Salahis were not invited to the dinner, but only the reception. But they're really sure that they were invited to the reception. Because the Salahis told them so. Why Larry hasn't finally started booking serial killers' best friends and beloved pets to testify to their innocence, I don't know. It would make no less sense than this. Finally, Larry says that he can imagine how heartbroken the Salahis must be and that he looks forward talking to them. For as he says, "we don't have an agenda on this program. I would like to learn what this was all about." No agenda! No bias! Just lively debate about the color of the sky.

Another Annoying Tray Complaint About Rap (See 3rd Paragraph)

I'm (obviously) abandoning my Larry King wrapups, as I don't find them too entertaining, and I really don't care too much about rap right now, and I don't really have anything interesting to say about the weird Pill/Gibbs flare-up on the blogs a couple weeks back, other than that, yes, Pill and Gibbs, pretty great rappers, but admittedly, it is a little weird that these somewhat limited talents are the most ballyhooed rappers in the rap blog world right now, and there is something a little - I don't want to say retro about their work, because I don't particularly hear any kind of blatant Outkast imitation going on the way you did with the Knux or Da Backwudz - but a little "cinema of quality" to their output. Cinema of quality being a term of derision a group of young French film critics (who ultimately became great young French directors) in the late 50s used to throw up at the very competent and finely crafted, but a touch lifeless and certainly not at all innovative, movies made by their elders. And that's kind of how I feel about Pill, though he's not one bit lifeless, but I do feel that we've perhaps progressed beyond finely polished rapping of the sort he has to offer being the gold standard anymore, and that it's just a bit of an artistic dead end in the very large scheme of things. In the not so large scheme of things, it's just a relief to hear some very good rapping these days, and it's not like it's thematically barren stuff either.

Anyway, I've become a partial Gucci Mane convert, and listened to about half of his new mixtapes (skipping Brrussia and Great Brrrrtain) with a fair amount of approval, though all the songs do seem to blend into one big ad-lib, aside from interesting changes in flow (I love the Jeezy imitation on 'Dope Boys,' since Jeezy is no longer very interested in being himself, and the slurry mumbly mess that isn't actually a mess at all that's 'Trap Goin Crazy') and some stupid-funny jokes that help to distinguish tracks from each other. But the album cuts, so far, have not been so wonderful. For a mixture of reasons. With 'Heavy,' Gucci's reaching the point of diminishing returns in his fun "my whole life can be reduced to one word that expresses its awesomeness" subgenre. Why he can't just put 'Wonderful' or 'Awesome' or 'Gorgeous,' or maybe my favorite, 'Disaster' on the album, I don't understand; in the great old material vs. the exciting new material that's not nearly as good as the old, I always come down on the great old material side. That way, you might actually have an album worthy of reissue ten years from now, at which point no one will remember how new the material was. Then there are songs like 'Bad Bad Bad,' where the guest appearance (Keyshia Cole) actively detracts from the quality of the song. Gucci Mane's the kind of artist who needs his own Blue Raspberry to fit into his insular world of mealy-mouthed vocals and Brrrr's, not some top-of-the-line chanteuse. But it's an album and record labels seem to think that big names help move records, in addition to which rappers seem to genuinely like working with big names. So okay, excusable pitfall of the medium.

But then you have something like 'Stupid Wild,' of which I can only conclude that no one involved gave a shit. 'Stupid Wild,' you know, if done right, could actually have been a pretty important song for this generation, the way 'Black Republicans' was supposed to be for people old enough to care about Jay or Nas, the way 'Mr. Carter' kind of maybe actually was, the way, I don't know, the Flava In Your Ear remix was. Think about it - the three critical darlings of the decade, each one of whom was or is a pretty huge cult figure outside of critical circles, all on one track. Produced by Bangladesh! What could go wrong? Well apparently everything. First, Bangladesh decided to refurbish 'You Don't Want Drama.' What is that about? Maybe it's not on him and Gucci particularly wanted to rap over that track? Well if so, that was a mistake, because he sounds suffocated by it (note how he just gets off one muffled 'Brrr' and one 'Well damn!'). Wayne reuses the same forgettable verse he had on previous Gucci/Wayne collabo, 'Bitches Wanna' - although perhaps that was a leaked incomplete version of this track, but given that no one liked 'Bitches Wanna' much, shouldn't this have been a signal to go back and actually record a good verse, instead of this collection of throwaway lines like "Mr. Coach Carter, or Mr. Go Harder" and "and if you wanna fight, come on, you can fight my guns"? And then there's Cam, who just can't much rap anymore. "Started getting on my nerves so I hit her with a BRRRRR" is about as embarrasing as any of Jay's recent exercises on overemphasis and punched-in adlibs. (It's also very typical of rap these days that no one thought to partially redeem this lame idea by having Gucci complete Cam's line, which would at least create an illusion of chemistry and shared studio time that your average 90s rap posse track thrived on.) Who to put Cam's verse on is hard to say; it's between Cam, who is capable of working around his deficits for a 30-second spurt or so (see 'Popeye's'), and Gucci, who didn't have the gumption to say the verse wasn't good enough to make the record. You know, the way rappers used to do when a guest appearance sucked.

If this were just one disappointing song, it wouldn't be worth taking a break from studying contracts to write about, but the thing is, virtually every big collaboration or remix is like this these days. One generally gets the sense that today a rapper decides to do a song with someone, sends him the instrumental, gets a recording of his verse back, and puts the verse on the song regardless of whether it's any good. If it's good, we get lucky and get a good song, and if it's bad we're unlucky and don't. What was the last time you heard of a verse being shot down? You do hear about it occasionally, but usually in the context of replacing one rapper with another with a bigger name - more for the sake of marketing than quality. Compare this to some of the old XXL write-ups about the making of Cuban Linx or what have you, where you read about artists rejecting bad verses, listening to different verses - in the case of 'Verbal Intercourse,' for example, telling Nas that the legendary verse that made the record was the one he should use, when he apparently wanted to go with another - and you can see one major reason for why today's album rap is rarely better than mediocre. A reason, I might add, that really isn't on the label so much as it is on artists not giving a shit. It goes beyond that though - one doesn't get the sense, with today's big collabos, that the featured artists get up for them the way they undeniably did in the past. Wayne's verse on this song, or Gucci's or Cam's, definitely can't be their idea of a great verse. They're just passable at best, and they have to know that. Maybe this is the fault of mixtapes - anything but your lead single, a torch-passing collaboration with Jay, or the intro to your album is just another song out of millions, so why bother trying to make something unusually good - but even if that is the cause, it's no excuse.

Larry and Mariah Go Back Like Babies and Pacifiers (Blogging LKL Pt. 2)

The thing about Larry and really big-name female celebrities is that he's friends with all of them. It's weird but true. So anytime he has some really famous woman on above the age of 30, it's not going to be a very funny episode because he just cuddles up to them for an hour and whispers sweet nothngs in their ears. Basically. So aside from

a) Larry reciting the lyrics of 'Hero' like it was the fucking Rime of the Ancient Mariner
b) the hilarity of an old white man like Larry saying "and then along came Nick Cannon!"
c) Larry's creepy fascination with how Mariah, who he seems to think is a gorgeous woman, managed to look so ugly (as he puts it, "how about the question of playing down the looks") in her new awful overrated abuse-porn film Precious
d) Larry telling Mariah that 'Obsessed' is "pretty great... a great song"
e) the "abuse bombshell she drops exclusively to us" turning out to be a vague claim that once upon a time she was mentally and emotionally abused by a certain unnamed someone

nothing on this episode was too good. The one great part was when Larry asked Mariah to define 'diva' for him. I half-expected Mariah to calmly explain that a diva is a female version of a hustler, but she instead said that a diva is (a) a great opera singer, and (b) a difficult woman, but that today the diva concept has become diluted:

but now it's like everybody's a diva. The Cupcake Lady -- oh, the Diva of Cupcakes. You're the diva of, you know, whatever it is. It's sand, you make great sand castles. It doesn't have the same connotation.

Really, Mariah, the diva of sand? Anyway, Larry, who's honestly trying to understand what a 'diva' is, says, with a straight face:

So it lost its meaning.

Tonight, though, should be way better, because we're getting "the "DC Sniper's" ex-wives and one of his sons! One night before his scheduled execution, his first ex-wife will be there to hear his last words before he is put to death. The dark side of John Allen Muhammad revealed." I would've thought that he already revealed that dark side when he shot a ton of people.

Blogging Larry King, Pt. 1 (Fort Hood, Domestic Abuse, Obama's Brother)

No words.

Everyone's always known that Larry King was the squishiest of big-name interviewers. But he used to be something more than a complete joke. Remember when he had Ross Perot and Al Gore on to debate NAFTA? (I do and I was 8 at the time.) These days, though, Larry is quasi-senile, his producers are insane, and the result is the most dependably hilarious 60 minutes of television since, I don't know, fucking I Love Lucy. Larry's probably been this nuts for years but I started watching him religiously after this summer's double whammy of the Jermaine Jackson interview and the Ashton/Diddy/Seacrest/Fallon Twitter episode. A few traits define Late Larry:

• A penchant for having on crazy and/or retarded guests.
• A complete suspension of disbelief or critical thinking as these crazy and/or retarded guests say crazy and/or retarded things.
• Blind celebrity-love.
• Great trust in highly dubious "experts."
• Bizarre levels of inanity - inane questions, inane subjects, inane musings.
• Inadvertent surrealism.
  

Anyway, my obsession with latter-day Larry is such that I've decided, now that I have a handy DVR, to start blogging the best bits from each Larry episode. I start with his second episode on Fort Hood.


Fort Hood

The Fort Hood episode was fairly subdued by Larry's standards, but we did get a few great moments of unwitting self-parody. The episode kicked off with an interview of a neighbor of the officer who shot the assailant; the subtitle under her head read "SHE KNOWS FORT HOOD HERO COP." (One of the best parts of Larry's show is the crazy subtitles.) Larry, naturally, asks what she thought when she heard her neighbor was the hero cop. The neighbor, being a well-intentioned but clearly dim young Texan woman, says that she wasn't surprised at all because her hero cop neighbor had previously deterred some juveniles from breaking into a house, and then gone to the heroic extent of warning residents in the neighborhood to be careful of marauding juveniles. Midstream into this story, Larry inexplicably goes, 'Wow!" And when it's all over, instead of being like, "um, what does that have to do with anything," he goes:

So she was the heroic type.

Next up, Larry had a man whose "SON LOOKED SHOOTER IN THE EYE" (and who also was wounded). Larry sensitively asks whether he immediately thought of his son when he heard about the shootings; the man, for the first time in the history of post-mass-murder interviews, says no because it was a base of 50,000 and what was the chance his son was one of the victims? Then, in typical "something just isn't right up there" LK fashion, he asks:

We understand he was scheduled to come home for Thanksgiving and then go to Afghanistan. Can we imagine that's all changed - well, he'll still get home, won't he, for Thanksgiving?

Dad says he's sure his son will. Next, after some reporters whom Larry effusively congratulates on their great reporting, we get "MEDIC WHO TREATED HERO COP". Much to Larry's disappointment, the medic didn't get a chance to talk to hero cop because she was unconscious, but the medic does tell an involved tale of putting a torniquet on the woman's leg. To which Larry quoth:

That's what great medics do. Thank you, Francisco.

Then we have the sister of one of the victims. Why she's chosen to put herself through the gauntlet of an emotionally insensitive Larry King interview, who knows. Larry opens with "when did you find out that Jason had been killed?" Which he follows with "he was just 22, right?" And to really rub it in:

Do you know, Leila, you can expect someone who goes in the Army, goes to Iraq, OK, you're hardened for the worst. But you certainly never expect him to die at his base, right? Never.

Amazingly, Leila does not sue Larry for intentional infliction of emotional distress. Finally, Larry caps things off with the duo of General McCaffery and Wesley Clark, who know absolutely nothing about what happened or base security in general, but proceed to argue over whether we should all be afraid of Muslims now. Typically, Larry, who never questions his interviewees' veracity or judgment, acts oblivious to his guests' raging debate because acknowledging it might force him to pick a side. Wesley, once a Democratic Presidential hopeful, actually muses on "what it would take for you to feel comfortable now" serving with Muslims and darkly hints that we're "just scratching the surface of the enormous conflict that must be so present in so many people around this country and around the world." McCaffery says that this is a completely isolated incident that we can learn nothing from whatsoever. Larry just thanks these two "outstanding servants" for showing up.

Domestic Violence

This episode starts with a great premise - let's get four mildly famous battered women (or sisters of famous dead battered women), including Robin Givens, together to watch clips of Rihanna's interview with Diane Sawyer and offer their expert commentary. But it never really picks up the absurdist steam you'd expect. Though at times Larry's attempt to subject Rihanna's interview to some sort of Perez Hilton-meets-deconstructionism analysis yields up some gems, as when he actually asked Mary Murphy, reality TV judge on "So You Think You Can Dance," and a oneitme battered spouse, this question:

Do you think [it was] worse for her than you, or apples and oranges?

Mary thinks it's maybe apples and oranges. Robin manages to be the least sympathetic domestic violence victim ever, constantly reminding us that Mike went on to eat Evander's ear, and at one point clapping for something Nicole Brown Simpson's sister said - who, by the way, reveals her myopic class biases when she says that most women used to think that abuse couldn't happen to them, but when they found out that Nicole got battered, they realized it could happen to affluent people too. As if most women are affluent or something, or maybe just the ones who matter. Larry attempts to sympathize with all these whiny abuse victims, but eventually shows his true colors and asks:

A famous psychiatrist once said to me - and I wonder how you would all react to this - he said, "If you come home at night -- you are a man -- and your wife hits you with a lamp, and you come home the second night and she hits you with a lamp, and you come home the third night, and she hits you with a lamp, on the fourth night, if you come home, who is nuts?" So that we relate to. If you are hit all the time, granted, the hitter is wrong - again, why do you come back to get punched?

The women are so shocked that they don't know what to say. Then Larry adds in a doctor to the mix and asks her "have we had a definitive study of the violent person?" What? The doctor says there are lots of different kinds of violent people. Larry says he just meant domestic violent people. Like that makes his question any less retarded.

Obama's Brother

Mark Obama Ndesandjo is one of those people whose remarks, as nutty and incoherent as they read in print, sound a million times more demented on TV. The guy just seems like he's done a ton of drugs. He sounds a lot like the SNL guy who does Obama, if that guy swapped brains with Jermaine Jackson. It's not even like he's going up there with some rational plan to cake off Obama and sell tons of copies of his book, because the first thing he emphasizes is how that book is a work of fiction with no insights into his brother or the Obama family. Even Larry seems to half-realize that the guy is nuts. Mr. Ndesandjo explains that his book is of no interest to the Obama-curious reader at all, but rather is a novel with three important messages, namely

1. Domestic violence.
2. Starting from scratch.
3. The power and the spirit of service.

These messages, Ndesandjo says, are not just about the Obama family. Rather, "they run across all countries, all regions.... all religions." Again, you really need to see the video because in between each word he takes huge pauses in a futile attempt to gather his thoughts, pauses that can only be the product of a lifetime of heavy drug use.

After that, Larry asks him what effect being beaten as a child had on him. Typically inane Larry question made to seem almost brilliantly rational by Nde's colossally off-point answer. Ndesandjo starts his answer like so:

Let me -- I guess one thing I would like to share, Larry, is that, just to recap a little bit, my life has always been about self-expression, whether it is through music, calligraphy, writing, and so forth.

Calligraphy. Then, for the next two minutes, Ndesandjo muses on how "there are things that are sometimes extraordinary situations that can occur in a man's life," among which "could be, it could be, it could be" the loss of a job or falling in love. When these things that are sometimes extraordinary situations occur, Ndesandjo seems to be groping towards, the abuse victim begins to reflect on his sucky childhood. To which Larry can only blurt out in exasperation:

And the effect on you was WHAT??

This shouting seems to trigger some coherence in Nde, who, on cue, promptly regurgitates memories of seeing his mother being beaten in Kenya. Very vivid memories:

you -- you see the light. There's like a golden -- the light of the lamp in the living room, and you hear thuds -- and I have mentioned this before in the interviews -- and YOU CAN'T PROTECT YOUR MOTHER!

'Wow,' Larry says. Nde begins to cry. After a commercial break, Larry says that they have limited time on the satellite (??), so he just wants Nde to give some quick comments on whether he and Barack have discussed their father. Nde will have none of it and instead goes on one of the great lunatic rants you'll ever see on cable television:

I want to just get back to one issue, and that is that my brother talked about having a difficulty in terms of relating to people, and I think this is very true, because what happens is that when you are in such situations, your skin -- you become hardened to emotional attachments to people. And in the book, while the book is an autobiography -- excuse me, is a novel that is semi-autobiographical -- it has strong parallels with my father, with my mother, with me, and also my grandmother. Now, I just wanted to say that what happens is that sometimes -- because you're not able to connect with other people, you do things which are very strange -- for example, when you fall in love. In the story there is a character called David, and he falls in love with Spring. And what happens is that they butt against each other; they seem to break apart. And it's because of dumb emotion and dumb emotion. And then what happens is that David discovers his father's diary. Now, I have not discussed my father with -- with Barack, but I do know that we have had similar thoughts, and we have had similar -- I think similar reflections on certain things, but I -- Barack and I never had the benefit of a diary which could explain the fullness of, for example, my father. I thought my father was just a bad man for a long, long time, and I shut a lot of things out of my life. And then what happened is that I felt that there had to be good in him. There had to be good in him - and so I wrote this diary in my book because that would fill out the good parts.

Larry, constitutionally incapable of uttering a "what the fuck are you talking about" or the broadcastable equivalent, can only say that he's very anxious to read Nde's book.

Iverson, Iverson

Anyone could have told you that Iverson in Memphis would be a disaster. But who would've thought things would blow up so quickly? I was expecting more of a gradual disaster, where A.I. would completely stymie Mayo/Conley's development, see his playing time slashed, complain a whole lot, and ultimately be sent home by about March. Instead, he's already complaining about coming off the bench, and today things got a lot worse. But first, the bench complaining. First off, he's just come off an injury so he has no reason whatsoever to complain - this is what NBA teams do with veteran players coming off injuries, but besides that, what makes A.I. so special that he can't come off an NBA bench? Rasheed Wallace comes off the bench. Manu Ginobili comes off the bench. Jason Terry comes off the bench. Jamal Crawford comes off the bench. Al Harrington is coming off the bench and averaging 22 per. Does A.I. really think he's that much better, today, than Ginobili? That because he accomplished a lot of stuff in his career a long time ago, he's an essential part of any team's starting rotation? Where does he propose to start anyway? Over Conley, the team's point guard of the future? Over Mayo, the team's shooting stud? What purpose would that serve - making the team, maybe, the 13th best team in the West instead of the 15th?

But it gets better. Tonight, Iverson's left the team, just 3 games into his Grizzlies career, for personal reasons - reportedly, his upset over playing time - and it's unknown when he's coming back. Says Marc Spears:

A frustrated Allen Iverson has departed the Memphis Grizzlies and is not expected to return any time soon, if at all, a source close to Yahoo! Sports said today. The source said Iverson is going back to Atlanta to clear his head and is extremely unhappy about the lack of communication with coach Lionel Hollins over his playing time and reserve role in three games since returning from an injury.

You can't be serious! Even if the guy was actually promised that he would start over the team's future point guard, which would be insane, this would still border on the psychotic. Who, in the history of the NBA, has left a team three games into his season because he was unhappy over only playing 22 minutes a game?