Dave's Verse

What a crappy way to end a really good season. That was close to a dominant performance by the Spurs. All of the games were close aside from game 1. But the Spurs are clearly the better team, both in regards to having the better players and the better coach. This series wasn't complicated. The Grizz like to throw the ball down to ZBo and Gasol in the post and play really good defense. The Spurs like to let Tony Parker run the pick and roll where he gets an open shot for himself or finds an open 3 point shooter. And they play an underrated defense. Those are their strengths. The weakness of the Grizz was 3 point shooting, both making them and defending them. The Spurs don't really have any offensively (maybe Duncan not being a low post player anymore). And defensively they were probably not great at defending the post, which everyone thought the Grizz could exploit. Given all of that most people thought this would be a close series, going 6 or 7 games. So what happened? The ...

I was going to name this the gif of the day. But this is too epic for such a title. This is one of the (possibly the ) best gifs I've ever seen. That comes from a pajiba biz break post where Henry Cavill says he would like to see a Batman and Superman team up movie. Uh, seconded. That would be incredible. I'm not sure how that movie wouldn't completely destroy the box office. It would be so huge that the Friday it opens it might be declared a national holiday so that everyone could get off work to go see it. Make this happen Warner Bros. Speaking of Batman, I had an idea I posted on pajiba regarding the Batman franchise. They are obviously going to keep making Batman movies. If for some reason they pull another Schumaker and screw things up, I have an idea for them that they could do in about 20 years. By that time Christian Bale will be about 60. You could go full "The Dark Knight Returns" within the continuity of the The Dark Knight Rises story. John Blak...

Obama gave a wide-ranging speech about the "war on terror" today. I'll send you to the always awesome Charles Pierce for some reaction to the speech . I don't expect this speech to have much, if any, effect on policy. Congress won't all the sudden be convinced to close Gitmo. What this speech seemed like to me was a way for Obama to try and frame his legacy. As he acknowledged, the topics he discussed can be very difficult issues. The answers aren't clear cut in many cases, though less clear cut than Obama wants to admit. For instance, he suggests that he has to send drones to kill people because someone sitting around thinking about killing people is the same as (or similar enough to) someone actively killing people. I think that's kind of ridiculous, or at least ridiculous to conclude that you need to kill that person instead of arresting them. Anyway, I'm not sure why he chose today to make this speech. But unless he has learned nothing the past...

That was a weird game. The first half played out almost exactly how game 1 did, with the Grizzlies playing poorly on both ends of the floor and with ZBo looking like he didn't put in his contacts. But ZBo got things going in the 2nd half and the Spurs finally stopped making shots in the 4th quarter. That allowed us to grind back into the game and tie it up. But our offensive problems showed up again in OT and we couldn't pull out what would have been a pretty crazy comeback. The fact that we took this game to OT doesn't have me very optimistic about the series. We were still significantly outplayed for most of the game. And we still haven't really figured out the Spurs' offense. I thought they still got too many open 3s. They just regressed to the mean and only hit a solid 36% instead of over 50%. We still can't figure out the pick and roll. I don't think we will completely stop Tony Parker. He's just too good. But I would like to see us go under every...

Apparently the creator of the "gif" says it's pronounced "jif". That's bullshit. I'm going with the hard g and I don't care what the consensus is. Today's gif comes from Dustin Rowles at warmingglow.com (he also runs pajiba.com). He celebrated the awesomeness that was the show Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23. Here's one of my favorites from his list: The unaired episodes from the second season are on abc.com. I plan on spending the weekend watching them and lamenting the loss of a great show. And then maybe I'll get weird and play some Mario Kart.

Game 1 against the Spurs was almost as ugly as it gets. ZBo had one of his weird off nights that he has from time to time. Surely that won't happen again. And even though we played horrible defense, the Spurs aren't likely to shoot quite as well as they did. So I'm not terribly concerned about this series yet. But there are some problems we have to deal with. And they weren't things we didn't know about coming into the series. Here's what I said after we beat the Thunder: The only weakness I see in this team is 3 point shooting on both ends. Defensively we leave 3 point shooters open too much. Late last night we left Derek Fisher (I'm not sure why he was in the game. But thanks Scott Brooks) wide open several times. That happened throughout the series. And that could be a big problem facing either the Spurs or Warriors, both of whom shoot the 3 very well. Offensively we don't have many good 3 point shooters. Conley is pretty good. But Allen and Prince...

I came across this on my Tumblr feed and had to share it. I'm not sure Bruce Wayne is an introvert by nature. It could be because of his childhood trauma that he seems to be an introvert. But however he got there, it's one of the many reasons I love the character and can identify with him. Speaking of Batman, the Bitter Script Reader tweeted this story of the real story of how Batman was created. Bill Finger was a friend of collaborator with Bob Kane. He came up with a lot of the ideas for Batman but Kane and the comic industry screwed him out of credit. I feel bad for Finger for not getting his due as what looks like the major force in creating one of the greatest characters ever. But at least he is now going to get his due from one of his biggest fans.