Take Me Back To The Omni

This Hawks team has me reaching back. Way back. Back to the days of Dominque, Spud, Doc, Willis, and some epic battles with the Bad Boy Pistons. The old Omni. The red/yellow/white wave unis. Human highlights. Why?

• Best record in the East (tied with the defending EC champs who supposedly improved over the summer).
• Rare source of agreement between ESPN's typically divergent Marc Stein (gut/faith) and John Hollinger (stats/reason). Stein and Hollinger are like Locke and Jack a few seasons ago on Lost, at odds but sort of needing each other. And I like them both for what they bring to the table/island. And somehow they (Stein/Hollinger, not Locke/Jack) both have the Hawks ranked #2 this week.
• Cumulative and legitimate swagger. This team kicked it all off by pushing the Celtics around two seasons ago in the playoffs and have continued to parlay that swagger into experience and real-deal-ness. That kind of accumulated confidence over that much time can not and should not be discounted.
  

Attention, shoppers, K-Mart is getting shut down

With apologies to the original, er, second original K- Mart (Kenyon Martin), the new K-Mart is getting shut down for 6-8 weeks.

Given our wager with The Kings, this certainly makes 14 wins by January 29 less likely. In honor of that, I made a quick list of things I might be doing in Utah- rather than attending a Jazz/Kings game- on Friday January 29.

- Writing a thank you note to the country of Spain for recognizing the benefits of trading matador for matador. Carlos Boozer will have no trouble with the bulls and the NBA's first bullfighter Ricardo Montoya, if he keeps up that hustle, will have no problem finding Jerry Sloan's good graces.

- Night skiing with Robert Redford, who'll need to decompress after a long Sundance. We'll have our usual talk about Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid and how it was kind of his Catcher In The Rye and how sometimes he wishes he had more Salinger in him.

- Countdown the days until the Vancouver Olympics start while simultaneously watching the Raptors' plummet in their bid to become Canada's Team.

- Watch TMZ.

- Read some message boards about the last season of Lost, wish that ABC hadn't cast Juliet in their new show V because it kind of tells you how limited her role will be, speculate on Sawyer/Kate/Jack replacing Juliet in their love square with...Sun? But then it would be a pentagon, which would explain the government conspiracy...

- Drink the last of my personal hoarded stash of egg nog.

- Burn a couple candles for the Kings at the shrine for St. Lenny Wilkens, the NBA's losingest coach.

What The World Needs Now

(the title of which is a conscious nod to Cracker's Teen Angst, not Dionne Warwick's midlife tripe. This may or may not become a new series of, basically, gripes)
is....

:: another posthumous Jeff Buckley release of odds & ends cobbled together from the vaults of, essentially, the same 9-10 songs (in NEW and UNRELEASED and LIVE incarnations) from the good-but-lamentably-oversaturating Grace. For a man with, really, one official release, Buckley sure has a lot of releases. Please note: I am a fan. My little brother ensured that. But I don't need to hear the 17th version of "Mojo Pin" from some radio interview. Please, leave my Grace alone.

:: more talk about the NBA's 2010 free agents. Yes, yes, yes! Keep repeating those same things like Rousseau's 15-year-old recording in Lost and digging for new angles like George Clooney in Burn After Reading.

:: more opportunists. Coming soon, I'm sure, are: Farrah Fawcett's behind-the-scenes bio, a heap of vultures (family, hangers-on, exes) waiting to swoop in on whatever these celebrities left behind, a new Jackson 4 album, Steve McNair's high school coach on Oprah, and at least 400 Michael Jackson bio/I knew the guy/inside scoops. In fact, there should be an office pool, where everyone gets to pick a name: LaToya, Quincy Jones, Lisa-Marie, Brooke Shields, Blanket, and the list goes on. Who would you choose if you got first pick?

:: more Michael Jackson coverage. It's both stating the obvious and exacerbating the problem (since our readership is so vast) to even mention it, but I am so done. Though, not without pleading for somebody to make a McCauley Culkin Tribute To Michael poster, which would essentially be a Photoshopped version of the Home Alone poster, but with a sequined glove on one of the hands. There, I'm really done now.

:: I had one for here and I lost it. Let me know if you come across it.

...like I need a hole in my head. Thank you, David Lowery.