Possessives and Attributives

Last Friday, Tom Ziller of Sactown Royalty, AOL FanHouse, The Sporting Blog, Ballhype, Hot or Not, WebMD, The Hawk and Tom Morning Show on B93.7 (All the Hits!), and Google.com asked us for our informed thoughts on the necessity of the apostrophe in the name of newest King Donte' Greene. Unsurprisingly, our comments were entirely unusable. We have reproduced them here to show you why.

Tom asked...
Shoals said one of you advanced thinkers had previously lobbied for the continued survival of Donte' Greene's apostrophe. Will either of you admit to the cause? I'm annotating Donte''s name on StR and a paragraph on the import of the apostrophe would be absolutely awesome.

Carter retorted...
Your use of "Donte''s" just made my day. Any world where that's proper punctuation is a world I want to live in. Initially I had slight pangs that I was being guilty of all sorts of, "oh those funny black people and their silly names," (speaking of which, how unintentionally tremendous was that ballhype post a while back), but really I'm just a fan of ridiculously unnecessary punctuation in any context, regardless of racial overtones. So ya, viva the apostrophe. Espn and everyone else needs to get their shit together.


Ty quipped...
If he names his son Donte' Jr, does the family contain two Donte's? This could result in some kind of Abbott and Costello routine that goes a little like this:
Douby: Who's there?
Hawes: The Donte's.
Douby: The Donte's what?
Hawes: The Donte's are there.

It will be the most popular scene in Douby and Hawes Meet Frankenstein.

Carter proffered...
That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard. You can't hear apostrophes.

Ty retaliated...
The conversation takes place by telegram. It's a period piece.


Carter riposted...
Oh ok. That's ok then.

While I'm not sure how an apostrophe can change the pronunciation of a name if it comes after the word, I'm so happy this mission has been left in your [Tom's] capable hands. I don't even know what blog is out there for the Rockets, but I'm sure whoever they are they would have dropped the ball. [Note: Plissken loves The Dream Shake!]

Ty rejoined...
I still think "Dontae' Jones" is better, but someday a parent will use the æ grapheme and sire someone who'll swallow planets whole.

Also, the summer I worked full-time in the Stanford basketball office my friend and made a list of all potential recruits with apostrophes (and we actually got one that year -- Da'Veed Dildy!). I still think "P'Allen" is the greatest name in history.

Tom interrupted the echo chamber...

P'Allen made me spit tea.

I wish someone would write on uncensored version of that chapter on names from Freakonomics.


Ty ignorantly questioned...
What is the Freakonomics chapter about?

Tom enlightened...
How funny names end up attached to kids who don't start off in the best financial/neighborhood situations.

Ty clutched his grad school diploma...
Do they attribute any cause to it?

Carter mixed up three stories...
Wasn't there evidence of external discrimation [sic] based on the fact that names were funny and therefore more likely to be black? Or am I thinking of a separate craigslist experiment that someone did in the same class as the guy who did the point-shaving paper?

Tom actually answered the question...
There was that evidence, but if I remember right (and I'm not sure I do -- that was ages ago) it was small in impact compared to the fact kids with the names tended to be born into dire straits.


I don't remember what they attribute as a cause for the funny naming conventions. I think illiteracy in some cases, and in others that the names aren't funny, and have some (possibly tenuous) connection to African dialects or whatnot.

Wait, how did this thread get so serious? I apologize, sincerely.

Ty failed to see the distinction...
I took Douby and Hawes incredibly seriously.

Carter made things uncomfortable...
Douby Hawes would be a good name. Up there with Sabian Roman. Consider it for a little ziller: Douby Hawes Ziller.

Plissken al Zumbador

Yes, we haven't really tended this garden much lately. But that really doesn't matter, because we have the greatest thing in the history of the site to share with you. Someone by the name of "marcosfs," aka the greatest-ever member of YouTube, has posted the video that gave this blog its name. And it's in Spanish.



We watched the movie tonight for the first time since christening this blog, and it is clear that we chose well.

Oh, and now that our teams are out of the race, maybe we'll restart this thing again and become the first-ever NBA blog dedicated solely to the offseason.

Synthesizer Guide Book on Fire

Anyone who reads this blog has probably figured out that we ripped off our post format from FreeDarko. That decision was mostly grounded in homage; we think it's one of the best sites on the internet. But the homage carries value beyond the respect we have for the blog. Quite simply, their format denotes a particular way of writing about basketball, and, in most of our posts, we've tried to use that intellectual, freewheeling approach.

So I announce with great pleasure that, beginning Wednesday or Thursday, we will start writing somewhat regularly for FreeDarko. This is a huge honor, obviously, and we could not be more excited. Given the respect we have for the site, we can only hope we don't screw anything up too horribly. Much thanks to everyone at FD, of course.

Some of you might be wondering what this announcement means for Plissken. Let me be frank: this blog is still very much a functioning website, but this new gig will obviously funnel some of our resources away from here. Things shouldn't change too drastically, though, and the good news is that I highly doubt many readers of our site don't check out FD on a regular basis. (If you don't, then shame on you.) Plus, at the risk of giving too much away, Big Plissken Announcement #2 will address this concern.

If you're visiting our site for the first time, welcome. As I said up top, we write somewhat heady posts about anything related to basketball. We also have an unnatural obsession with Marco Belinelli, and for some reason I write more posts about mascots than any sane man should. I hope you like the site and come back often.

Other brief, less exciting news:

- The fine folks at We Rite Goode invited us to be a part of their NBA preview, which solicited input from a great number of excellent writers hailing from all areas of Blogburgh. Our individual previews of the Warriors (me) and Lakers (Carter) are not yet up, but they have posted this fine introductory piece that details everyone's record predictions. They will be updating this entire week -- highly recommended. I'm sure we'll link our bits here when they go up, because we are whores.

- Speaking of NBA previews, we're going to write one within the week. I know that makes us significantly late to the preview-writing game, but I don't think it will be too much of a problem. We're trying to do something different, so groove on the idea of what that might be while you wait.

The Annexation of Puerto Rico

No, this is not another post about last night's USA/PR game. I have recently been drafted by Jason Gurney (who goes by the clever alias "Jason" in our comments) to write a series of posts over at Ballhype about "17 Games," a new game they've created involving weekly NFL picks. (Yes, I like other sports, too.) There's a celebrity blogger group (featuring such Blogburgh stalwarts as Jamie Mottram and The Big Lead) for which I'm serving as an "up-and-coming" embedded correspondent. Essentially, that means I'll write weekly updates on the group and NFL-at-large. My first post, a preview of the competition, is up now.

Fear not, readers who don't care about football. This gig will not change my posting patterns here in any way; if anything, it'll probably make me take this whole blogging thing that much more seriously.

Site updates: I don't know how much more I can say about the Tournament of the Americas, but we should have a post up at some point later tonight on a topic of importance. Plus, if I were to write something on the Uruguay game happening right now, I would probably just laud LeBron the whole time. His first half was unreal.

Anyway, I'm heading back to the obliteration of Uruguay. Again, we'll be back later tonight.

Moisturizing My Situation and Preserving My Sexy

Giorgos Printezis probably never expected his $800 suit to be such a big deal, but it has definitely caused a bit of a stir.


The other day I followed a link from True Hoop to an SI article on the 58th pick, which featured a raving endorsement of his fashion sense from none other than P Diddy:

Now this cat I can get down with. He looks like he's about to breeze through a club down in Miami. I love Miami, I record a lot of my music down there. And Miami cats don't wear those fitted caps, this kid knows how to pull the whole look off. That's Bad Boy, baby!

While I could easily picture Diddy refer to a random Greek dude as "Bad Boy, baby!" something about the quote didn't feel quite right. After a little digging (google's an amazing thing) I realized it was because I had seen that quote before, from the hilariously fake Miss Gossip column with Puffy's fashion critique of the draftees. After spending a good 10 minutes trying not to piss myself laughing at the hilarity of SI stealing quotes from an imagined conversation, I decided I needed to create a Fanhouse account and ESPN account for the sole purpose of sharing the awesomeness. Since this, SI has taken down the quote, ran a correction while still refusing to give credit to the original source, and Fanhouse has a post about the dust-up, where we kindly get mentioned. So what we've long suspected is now officially confirmed: Plissken is "P. Diddy's favorite West coast basketball blog." Now if we can just win Mistah FAB's support I'll really be pleased.

(Update: Deadspin has a post up now about this story, as well.)



Totally unrelated note, our fondness for Marco Belinelli is no secret. Now it appears that the youtube awesomeness is no fluke. Unless of course his 37-point explosion today was a fluke. At this point I'm expecting fadeaways from 30 feet. I'm not sure whether to continue being outrageously jealous that the Lakers didn't get him, or absolutely thrilled that he'll be on a team as exciting as the Warriors.