If you’re a friend, seen my personal Facebook page or have been to this site before, you know that I’m a big time LeBron hater. That kind of hateration truly became trendy and caught on like wildfire (or STD in the shady parts of Manila) during this year’s off season when LBJ took his talents (and yearly disappearing act) to Miami. But I’ve been hating longer than that. And the reason’s real simple. He’s a threat to the dude I’m rooting for. Unless you were born in the States and have a real territorial claim to a team or were born to a fanatic dad and raised to hate a team, here in the Philippines, I’m leaning toward the notion that it’s having your team threatened that breeds the hate. 

I should know about hate. Before RING-O Starr of The Heatles spammed everyone’s news feeds and timelines, well actually before there were Facebook news feeds and Twitter timelines in the first place, Kobe Bryant was the most hated athlete in the NBA. 

He made it easy. He made it so easy in fact, that he didn’t really even have to threaten anyone’s fandom before he elicited hate. From announcing his intentions to enter the NBA Draft as a 17 year old with his sunglasses on his forehead, to enjoying special treatment from the upper Lakers management, which the veterans greatly frowned upon, to being more concerned with hotdoggin’ than playing team ball, to shooing a Karl Malone pick away at the all-star game, to making that same game too much of a one on one battle with America’s favorite son Michael Jordan....the list is endless. But he was my guy and I stuck with it. I stuck through people saying he was nothing more than Shaq’s garnish during those championship years. I was with him through the whole ass-fucking the blonde adultery / rape case. I was rooting for him when he had Kwame fuckin Brown, Devean George and Smush Parker starting with him. And the hate did not relent. Through all of his accomplishments, the hate stayed. It was real and it was passionate. It was fandom at its best. Jesus, if you’re a threat to Michael “I haven’t done anything right since I left Chicago” Jordan, that’s gonna’ happen. I know some people will scoff at me calling him a threat. He’s never going to be Jordan, right? Correct. But six rings to five and the stunning similarities in game, mannerisms, oration and competitive drive will make him the closest one can get.

Well, that was until LeBron James came along. Everyone got so enamored from the get go with the kid who threatened to enter the NBA as a high school junior, who had “Chosen One” inked across  his back, who (outside of Shaq & Wilt) is the most physically impressive and dominating specimen the NBA has ever seen. He was the King and he was too good, too soon that it was inevitable not to crown him with greatness even before he proved anything on the NBA floors, right? The NBA was his, and after a few seasons, a number of media outlets already proclaimed him to be the best basketball player on the planet. 

I totally understand the hype and the promise. But the best wins, and that LeBron has yet to do. So being the Kobe fan boy that I was, I did what I could...hate. Hate with a passion. Hate with a purpose. I tried to debate, offered nuances of the game that found James still wanting compared to Kobe. “LeBron only has straight line drives. He has no midrange game. He has no post up game. He’s rapper name is 75cent.” But that wouldn’t do it. It was the earth shaking power of the King’s one handed tomahawks and combination of speed, power and elevation that awed the masses and eventually led to rudimentary arguments like: “Kobe’s getting old, he’s not what he used to be and he can’t take over like he once did. Kobe don’t scare us no more.” That was the chorus of the LBJ bandwagon and that would be more fuel for the hate. 

What began as technical analyses to prove points of Kobe’s superiority versus James enormous potential was waylaid. I resorted to anything to clown the King. Be it using constant barrage of play with words to overstate my witnessing of nothing, or the juvenile and foul quips like LeBron going south and his mom going West. I stopped at nothing. But that was before he made it easy. The Decision, the “Big 3” signing celebration, the “not four, not five, not six, not seven...” promise to Heat fans...LeBron made it too easy to hate him, it became the norm. He polarized. If you weren’t a James fan, you hated the fuck outta’ him. And he made it fun. The choking, the crying, the constant PR missteps, the preening, the choking, the disappearing. He made it so fun and easy, you started to not care about your own fandom anymore. It was schadenfreude at its most orgasmic.

Speaking of German...

Then T-Mac 2.0 keeps treating us haters with his yearly disappearing act. One time it was his mom getting banged on by a teammate that messed up with his play, next it was Rashard Lewis taking his talent’s into LeBron’s baby momma’, it really lifts my spirits when people resort to that kind of internet rubbish to make sense of why the Chosen One can’t seem to pull it all together. What makes this particular basketball player spawn such logical necessities? 

And then he has to say things like this gem:"At the end of the day, all the people that was rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I'm going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that. They can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal, but they have to get back to the real world at some point."

Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports put it best: "To hear James suggest that the world will have to return to its sad, little ordinary lives and he’ll still get to be LeBron James late Sunday night was a window into his warped, fragile psyche. It was sad, and portends to how disconnected to the world he truly is."

Stay Classy, LeBron!

I was going to just waft through of the hours of the day, with deadlines not imminent and creativity being of the selective sort. So I figured, I’d share some of the things that have piqued my interest for the past few weeks now. 

It all kicked off with a buddy’s mention of the History Channel’s “Ancient Aliens.” If you’ve never heard of it, find time to check out the video below. 

Whether you’re a skeptic or a willing believer, you have to admit that the production crew manages to make the show compelling, amidst the seemingly absurd claims. One thing that would quickly strike the mind, though, is that often it appears that for lack of better available information, hard evidence or just another concrete explanation, they seem all too happy to blame everything on extraterrestrials. A bunch of episodes into the show, I even found all the wide eyed, excitable characters who sear by these ancient aliens laughable. Not because I don’t think their claims to be possible, but because I felt like they were trying to shortcut the facts. Perhaps not them directly (I’m sure sitting down with a few of these people would allow them a full explanation as to why they find it so convenient to look to the stars), but the presentation of facts, make it appear so.

Anyway, as I skimmed through the episodes and reached Season Three, it seemed all to commercial by then. I needed something more academic. And who better to turn to for advice than Joe “Muthafuckin” Rogan.

Well, that’s just the outermost tip of the breadth of subjects this guy constantly touches upon. And as I used company time to “enlighten” myself through his YouTube channel, I became aware that the voice you hear when you watch the UFC (who you compliment for his vast understanding of the sport) is a highly self-educated and enlightened being beyond the triviality of mixed martial arts. 

Back to the subject, it was through one of his many video and audio recordings that I came across the name Graham Hancock. Apparently, the dude has spent 50 some years of his life to try and uncover the mysteries behind these megalithic structures that have people outside mainstream archeology baffled. From the question of how the fuck could they have built those? To, whatever the hell are those for? He has devoted his life to try and unearth the truth behind such things. Catch a glimpse...

It may not possess the flashy machinations of “Ancient Aliens,” but if you really want to delve into these things without reading countless books, Hancock has a collection of videos that has you covered. He even has interviews where he weighs in on the war against drugs and his choice for altering his state of consciousness.

Truly interesting shit. You need not be high to be compelled. Once you’ve found time to check out the videos above and even the other videos available to you online, do chime in your thoughts on the subject.

I’m leaning more into the possibility of a lost civilization being responsible for the astronomically precise and physically imposing structures that have been here for thousands and thousands of years. I’m not discounting extraterrestrial hands as well, but my instincts want to uncover the intricacies of these lost civilizations, the cataclysmic events that buried the truths about them and how, as great as the technologies we seem to currently possess, our civilization has been akin to a computer being reformatted.

But if you’d much rather explore your own mind and are wondering when the hell you can get your hands on some grade A mushrooms or whatever it is you’ve used in the past to expand your consciousness, know that there is a natural, albeit technically challenging way to get it done. Again, courtesy of that mofo, Joe Rogan...

And if you want to try and have one for free, here’s how...

Let’s start of with some NBA randomness because that’s the feeling the result of Game Three gave me.

My thoughts from left to right, top to bottom: 


*For a boy who would grow some 20 meters more, Yao Ming’s face sure didn’t change much, oh, and that’s a real nice Great Wall photo. 

*Steve Nash isn’t that old for his photo to be in black and white, right? So either he was already artistic back then, or this photo came from someone’s phone app.

*This Dirk photo has to be around the time the “Hoff” was huge in Germany.

*In that photo of D-Fish, he just got back from the gym.

*Chris Paul: Looking at those sandals, you kinda’ already knew that kid would go places and could get anywhere on the floor.

*Chauncey Billups: I zoomed in, that’s why I noticed it, but that bump on his forehead shows some people are born hard-nosed.

*Andrew Bogut: Krikee! (or however the hell you spell that...)

*Bosh: How’d he get so Boshy??

*Paul Pierce: Who woulda’ thunk a kid with this look would develop so much swag.

*D-Wade: Is that a mouse above his right eye? He already looks so Miami with that bow tie.

Well, nothing else really stands out except that I picture Kris Humphries with that exact same look when Kim K. privately gave him a tour of her behind.

I’m not particularly in the mood to share insights and analysis on Game Three, not because the Heat won (well, at least not entirely), but because if you saw the game, it kinda’ speaks for itself. Two teams deserving to be in the Finals playing like two teams who deserve to be in the Finals. One thing that stands out to me, though, is while the Heat thrive to be on the break, the low scoring that has been the trend through three games tells me that their defense has been dictating the pace. It also tells me that the Mavs, who I thought needed to impose their pace to have a chance, were a better team (yes, I still don’t know exactly how good they really are) than I deemed them to be. Although, apparently, still not good enough to have a series lead which tells me they need to work on imposing their own pace after all. 

In the spirit of trying anything to jinx the greatest basketball player to ever wear shoes, this may be his best response at a media type trying to coax him into something.

I hear the dude is a national journalist and not exactly an NBA beat writer, so I guess some of the other media types weighing in on that question are right in saying that’s a case of a writer wanting the players to write their stories for them (which for the most part, the Heat have more than happy to do). So yea...Good job LeBron, you truly are the greatest combination of DNA, style and grace...EVER!


On a side note. check out the vid below...

As Kelly Dwyer of “Ball Don’t Lie” points out, Chalmers gets the pass from Haslem with his heels touching the mid-court line, which should have, technically, been a back court violation and would have disallowed the shot. But that happened in the 1st quarter and a ton of things happened between that play and Bosh’s game deciding jumper. And to be fair to refs, it was impossible to spot in real time. So as it turns out, I'm just sayin'.