Dis(Parity) in the NBA: One Year Later

Now that the Los Angeles Lakers have won the 2009 NBA title, as a follow-up to my post a little over a year ago on Disparity in the NBA, let’s look at how NBA championships since 1980 now stack up:

8 franchises have, among themselves, won the last 30 NBA championships, for an average of 3.75 championships per franchise.

Taking out the Philadelphia 76ers’ win in 1983 and the Miami Heat’s win in 2006, 6 franchises have, among themselves, won 28 of the last 30 NBA championships, for an average of 4.67 championships per franchise.

Those numbers are up from 3.5 and 4.33, respectively, before the Boston Celtics won the championship in 2008.

Gregg Doyel Update #4: Cheap Amusements

I made Gregg Doyel's HateMail again today. He cut off some of my message. I don't remember word for word what I wrote, but the full message went something like this:

Dude ... What's with the new picture? I had to look at it a few times, and I'm still not sure it's you. I know the Arizona Cardinals claim that making the bird on their logo look "tougher" helped them gain the ferocity to make the Super Bowl, but do you really need to be like the Detroit Lions and try to follow suit? I could relate to your old picture. You were a doofus just like the rest of us. But now? You look like a muscle-head with whom I have little in common (or like Chris Daughtry ... I'm not sure yet). You and I are both smart enough to know I'm not going to stop reading your columns, but I had been praising you lately and now I'll probably have to go back to critiquing you. And here I was thinking that my critique of you last year had helped produced a brighter, more eloquent Gregg Doyel. Now I need something else to stroke my ego. Thanks. Thanks a lot.

Again, my wording in the message might have been a bit different, but that was the gist of it.

Anyway, there's not really any particularly more profound point to this post other than my own cheap amusement, as I mentioned in my title. Speaking of which, though, there's a cool book by Kathleen Peiss from the mid-1980s called Cheap Amusements that examines at the leisure activities of working-class women around the turn of the 20th century. I had to read it for two different courses while working on my Master's degree in the mid-1990s. If memory serves me correctly, it's written in a style that's relatively accessible for non-academic audiences, even as it maintains academic credibility. Of course, the best part is that she starts out the book by quoting Cyndi Lauper's song "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." In writing a review of the book for one of the courses for which I had to read it I decided to start off each paragraph by using the title of a Cyndi Lauper song at the beginning of the first sentence of the paragraph. So, one paragraph started "Time after time ..."; another started "True colors were shown ..."; and so on. The professor didn't catch the references and marked all of the "awkward" opening sentences to paragraphs. I never told him what I did. I'd be very surprised if he even remembers it, but obviously it made an impression on me ... but, then again, I do, as I mentioned in my message to Gregg Doyel, have that ego to stroke and, of course, I am a big fan of Cyndi Lauper.

And, no ... I didn't find a way to start a sentence with "She Bop" ... but, then again, maybe I just wasn't being inventive enough ...

Barack Obama and Gay Rights

Ragan Fox (assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Cal State-Long Beach and fellow ASU alum (I was directly in front of him in the graduation line when we both earned our Ph.D.s)) recently offered a post on his blog in which he associates gay men and women supporting Obama's administration with being in an abusive relationship. I found it to be an insightful connection about an important set of issues, so I thought I'd share it here.