LeBron Lip-Syncing Eminem

Maybe Bethlehem Shoals will do a one tenth brilliant, nine tenths dopey post tomorrow on the social meaning of this here lip-syncing. I was just taken aback by the sheer aggressiveness of LeBron's lip-syncing, although kind of disappointed by the lame choice of material. Also disappointed by the reminder of Drake's continued relevance. Perhaps the 2010s will bring us a revival of the posse track. Maybe in the future no one will buy CDs, not even small children, and being a star of a high school soap opera will no longer be a stepping stone towards rap superstardom. Maybe Tru will do another reunion album and only sell 8200 copies. Maybe I'd buy one.



About the game, LeBron is quite a force, but as a loyal member of the Play The Right Way coalition (I'm a Republican who delights in the death of uninsured peoples, I like conservative basketball, it all coalesces), it's kind of jarring to see a guy shoot 12-16 from inside the arc... and 1-9 from outside it. Like you look at the 37 points on 13-25 shooting line and you think, nice efficient night for a perimeter guy, but it could have been a ridiculously dominant night if he just skipped the threes. And you know the defense didn't make him take any of those nine shots. He can get anything he wants. Interestingly enough, if you go to hoopdata.com, where they have all kinds of exciting advanced stats and shit, you find that LBJ was 6-6 at the rim, 6-10 on long twos, which is very good, and 1-9 on threes... and he took nothing in the 5 to 15 foot range. No, LeBron has no midrange game to speak of, and he's still this good. (Perhaps when the Wizards finally trade Jamison over, they could send assistant coach Sam Cassell along with. That way he could do in-game interviews during the playoffs.) Meanwhile Kobe took 29 shots to score 31 points, the announcers enthused over how tough the shots he made were, and his team just scored 87, because when you take 29 shots to score just 31 points, you're not actually helping your team. Unless your teammates are Smush Parker and co., which they aren't anymore. (Although to be fair, Artest and Gasol had crappy nights too. Of course Artest often has those, offensively he's like you just threw a linebacker out on a basketball court and asked him to make plays just by dint of his athleticism. And then the linebacker starts trying his hand at shooting from long range, knowing that his teammates are too afraid that he'll Terry Tate them to say anything about it.) I might do a post sometime soon about how the simultaneous troubles of Arenas, McGrady, Iverson, and Marbury headed to China signal the death of the post-Jordan maniacal perimeter gunner. Brandon Jennings is trying to bring the prototype back, trying real hard, but I feel like there's already a Jennings backlash or a Jennings skepticism that just wouldn't have been there if he came into the league 5 years ago. People are actually cognizant of, and openly mention the fact that since the 55 game everything's been 5 for 21, 6 for 19. There was a time when no one seemed to care about that shit.

Finally, on a nice personal note, I aced every damn thing last semester, am at the top of my class and might as well have Harvard Here I Come stamped on my forehead. Well not quite, but at least a Columbia or something of that ilk. We'll see about Harvard. Anyway, Lexington is an odd place. I moved into an old Victorian house in the leafy part of town and there's an old print of Stonewall Jackson, great Confederate general, Lexington native, just sitting on the floor. The woman who owns the place was the one person in town with a Creigh Deeds sign on her lawn (that was the Democratic candidate for Governor who lost by a million points in another election that had no bearing on what voters thought of Obama, just local issues at stake, bad candidate, nothing to see here), but she can't seem to bring herself to dispose of her ancestral Stonewall print. So it's sitting on the floor. I would've liked to talk to more natives about their strange feelings about the Civil War and whatnot, but I'm not a documentarian, and everytime I do chat with locals they say strange things like, "I knew a Jewish person once," or strange crap about how much they love their fishin and huntin. This one locksmith one time used the phrase, "word, booty!" to describe how much ass there was to be had at some bar that's no longer here, but the way he used it it almost sounded like he was talking about spoils of piracy. It makes you wonder, as a future legal eagle of the Republican Party, which party's leadership would be more uncomfortable on a desert island with its base. That is, would Dick Cheney rather spend a year here in Lexington, or would Al Gore rather spend a year hanging out in Anacostia? I would say that Cheney would rather spend a year in Lexington... but it's close. He actually likes fishin and huntin though so maybe he'd fit in.