The construction of humor from horror

Veteran Richard Jefferson woke up and his heart was beating too fast and his eyes felt wet and painful. "Probably the apnea, or the nightmares," he supposed as he stood up and walked to the hotel sink. "The basilisks of 2003. Would they ever slither in and out of Duncan's eyes again, as they had in Game 6? Were they ever really there or had I invented them?" he wondered as he turned on the faucet and moistened a towel to wipe off his bloodshot, pus-filled eyes.

During these quick first moments in the morning, in the slick and adequate hotels of Eastern Conference roadtrips, RJ often had days like this. According to the mirror, the whites of his eyes were completely red. "Clay Face" they used to call him, because his head and face seemed so malleable, innocent, and bald. But the reddened eyes gave the gentle giant a sort of distortive horror and ruined the illusion, and his face now appeared as a bleeding bronze stone - a single, indivisible sadness. He poured a cup of tea from the ancient bronze hotel samovar and noticed, intricately carved around the samovar, an ouroboros - the snake that eats its own tail. "How old was this samovar? What will happen if I -...," sipped Richard Jefferson.

Here's the rundown of the last post.

Here's the rundown of the last post. (click for larger version)

These Mist Colored Mountains

Let's look at outer space through the eyes of a baller.

The Solar System (at time of writing) must be understood to be a Finals game between the Cavs and Spurs. Right now I suppose that the Spurs have the ball (Earth's moon) on offense, and the Earth is Tony Parker, driving the moon through Mars (LeBron) and Jupiter (Shaq) through Saturn's Rings, the rims of this side of the arena.

Unfortunately, Ilguaskas is Saturn, ever in a stupid goaltending position, hoisting himself between the great rims. Meanwhile, the other Cavs dance electric around Shaq and Lebron and Ilgauskas, like the moons of these respective planets in orbit. For example, Jamario Moon is a moon. This doomed gambit of Parker driving towards a blocked basket will soon demand an official or a foul of contact on the lingering lunk Saturn, but life is so slow for planets, those ponderous giants set in a world of light and speedy atoms. For planets any resolution is long in coming.

The Summoning

We all know, deep in our hearts, that virtue consists of all and only those things that David Robinson tried to teach us back in the day. The gnomes, Tim, are out of bounds. Not the flowers. The gnomes. The - the occult, Tim. Out of bounds. And building a school is a pretty cool thing to do too. But in the weeping moments, I sometimes crave more than what is written in the interviews and coded in the highlights. What does the Admiral think about the scaffold, for example? Where is his wisdom then?


Now, David Robinson is omnibenevolent, but certainly not omniscient - he is obviously not watching you watch his Hall of Fame speech or his old highlights; he is not so vain or idle. But while he does not see everything, he can be channeled to be anywhere. And I performed just such a channeling the other day.

That great Spurs player and school-builder appeared in a greatcoat outside my apartment - here in freezing, snowy St. Petersburg. Only Mr. Robinson's iconic face was visible through the black cloak, which was neatly ornamented with golden buttons like a constable's uniform. It looked somehow oversized, like a child's costume. This great figure was capped by a black hat shaped like a basketball court that made perfect sense when I saw it. With fast wit, I commented how GREAT his greatcoat was. He showed me that, face excepted, he was made totally of greatcoats. A mass of greatcoats, everstacked and interleaved like a planar knot. The heavy and stacked greatcoats were without flesh or form, just as Robinson himself was without malice. We were beyond the concerns of the physical world and its harsh winters. His face beamed and the winter went away.

Here's the rundown of the last post.

Here's the rundown of the last post.

Darnell Jackson will outlive us.

Darnell Jackson will outlive us.

Big Z, Il Gauske, the Big One-Dimensional, the Big Dismal, the surreal second center of the Cleveland Cavaliers...is in constant conflict with his superior, Shaq, but it is not the one-sided conquering the casual might expect. On his side Z has not youth, but the relentless consistency of mediocrity. Shaq is a million feet tall and can get into foul trouble quick. He is a force of nature that is actually...really inconsistent and unpredictable, for such a renowned competitor. Big Z can "accidentally" injure the Big Man when Mike Brown inexplicably plays both centers.

But whereas Shaq is incredibly inconsistent, and whereas Z is incredibly mediocre, and they are in ineffable dialectic, there is a third center on the roster: the little-used, invisble Darnell Jackson. Less than 25 and looking like an undistinguished Shaq, Darnell Jackson is Dustin Hoffman from the Graduate, but of the center position of the Cavs. He exists in the rare case that one of these two archetypes (that represent the two sides of Mike Brown's personality) is injured, and Mike Brown needs a dependable third wheel. He has no adjectives. When Darnell plays, he is the absence of form, structure, and meaning.

Categorical Marxism; Shaq. But I repeat myself.

Scientists have known that the world is a giant category ever since Karl Marx proved it in the 19th century. The denialism surrounding this revelation is just plain denialism. The reasons? Well that's a category unto itself.


What is a category? A category is two things. First, a category is a bunch of dots, representing objects. Second, a category is a bunch of transitive arrows between the dots. These arrows represent transformations between objects. So, two objects might be a blank manuscript, and then this very essay. This essay didn't used to be written, but now there it is. I am an arrow going between that blank manuscript and the manuscript of this write-up. Now we have an essay thanks to my miraculous arrowing of that blank scroll. I arrowed the hell out of it. I wrote the essay, son.

666 Million AD

The flag was American, and right now was being watched. The flag was waving ironically in the summer anti-breeze. Just one of those days, the Watcher supposed. The Watcher watched things, every day, to pick up subtle contradictions.

"So how do you watch television, The Watcher?" a nearby child asked, unwary of the Watcher's processes.

"I watch it to make sure it doesn't jump up and eat me," the Watcher intoned, verbatim from his manual. There were answer manuals that Watchers could read, before and after they technically were certified Watchers.

"But what happens if you eat a television, The Watcher? Must you live in fear of your stomach?"

Uh-oh, thought The Watcher. There was nothing in the manual about this. I will have to improvise.

"Uh...no. If I eat a television it ceases to be a television, by virtue of its newfound unwatched nature. And no one has to watch unwatched things. I don't have to watch it. In fact, I don't have to watch anything that is unwatchable. Why, that is absurd. Move along, child."

Why I support the Spurs this year (I'm with you in Utah)

Why I support the Spurs this year
by Alex, age 20.

Dear SI-for-kids,


I'm sorry to be writing to a publication primarily aimed at sports fans half my age, but the knowledge I have encountered goes beyond age. I may be forgiven for having the pretensions of a more skilled author, just as your young readers may be forgiven for their naïve literary tastes and nebulous views of their home teams, good and bad. May I recommend to you Lovecraft's “At the Mountains of Madness”, kids? Do you know what a shoggoth is?



The god of scientists is an engineer. Whether this engineer is acknowledged as a god is another story, but whatever his name, his function is clear: To create a universe based on elegant laws and constants that we as humans can hope to divine through reason. This god is not a direct creator so much as he is a good engineer. A good electrical engineer doesn't constantly supervise the value of every circuit; rather, he uses as little information as he has to, in order to avoid repeated work and misunderstandings. Humans are therefore merely a consequence of creation, and not a cause, and that we happen to exist on this planet is a matter of likelihood, and not a matter of divine blessing.

Santa Fe Post-Draft Catharsis Symphony

Enter: A spherical room of eyes, stomachs, membranous walls, and appendages, always misshapen, always reaching across the room to the other side.

The man inside heard a seal and a lock.  Looks like he would be here for the duration.  "So this is where they put the players that don't make the playoffs.  I guess I shouldn't have been injured, heh, heh, heh."  He had better make the most of it, he supposes.  Two months will fly by when you are busy!  The stench of organs and dead flesh and meaning would have been overwhelming, but the man in question is a man of indisputable military discipline.  After a few minutes the man had started a fire on some stalagmite-shaped tonsil twitching nervously.  After a few hours his experiments began.  After a while of the man and his business, he had settled things down. 

Two months pass when you are busy, indeed.  "The finals are over!  You can all come out now!"  David Stern's voice had been transmitted to the manifold rooms of the unsuccessful Spurs. Many of them had been psychologically broken merely by the months of solitude, even excluding the special horrors of their chambers.  Each Spur in his room claimed his room and experiences were the most extreme.  Despite these claims, David Robinson's room, the flesh sphere, had in fact been the worst.  The chambers opened to reveal some unneeded therapists and a certain friend of Mr. Robinson.

Things that aren't as inherently funny as you might expect them to be

A list of things that seem to have inherent humor but instead are heavily contingent on the situation.

-John Goodman
-Shaq
-Carrie Anne-Moss

Anyway I hope to light a flame that will not die
to explain why
I
support Shaq and his Cavaliers.  but not in the NBA fi-
nals.  The logic is simple, the reasoning almost insulting.

You see, the Magic are a godly force in the East.  They have hundreds of players, manifold stables of guards, and millions of centers.  There are a million Dwight Howards housed in the Florida area.  Every public appearance he has made was made by a different Dwight Howard.  But with all of this depth in the line-up, I get a sort of...sense of what should not be. Not Satan, nor any of the demons invented by man.  But Lovecraft comes close.