SA pwns IND, 122-109

Slim Duncan can finally bend over to pick up a loose ball. (from NBA.com)

SAS x IND, 122-109, and I am an elated fan.

Some game notes:

The Silver Lining

• Tim Duncan gets lighter than last year, and has lost 10-15 lbs of weight twice in two years already. The medical team has been trying to bring a bounce back to his step and at the same time alleviating the stress on his knees and his previous plantar fasciitis injury. Twenty-three points, 12 rebounds, three assists, three steals, and four blocks tallied by Duncan like it was 1998.
• Tony Parker got faster than he was last season, after making a full summer's rest. I'm not saying he's back to being 'Le Blur' but a fast Parker is better than last year's limping Frenchman. Solid near double-double for TP (20 pts, 9 ast).
• Although Manu Ginobili gets paid star money, he looks diluted, and I'm not judging from thinning crown of hair. Six of 14 FG, and five out of nine from deep. Twelve million for a spot-up shooter is not the best thing, but Spurs fans like me are hoping he's biding enough to make Texas and Argentina proud in the playoffs. Twenty-two points for "Left-handed Kobe".
• George Hill and James Anderson are the caliber of shooters that San Antonio needs:Intense, solid, and gutsy enough to swish the money balls from the corner. I expected Hill to start, and though he looked bad in the first half, he made up for it in the second half.
• Richard Jefferson scored 16 points. Anything he scores over that 12.3 ppg he averaged last season is an improvement. Fair $10 M price for 16 a night.
• Spurs have the "win the games you should" mindset.

Spurned Spurs

• High-volume scoring meant that the Spurs were led to play Indiana ball. This isn't the usual tempo that Popovich intends to play in, but over time Coach Pop has tempered the team to play micro-ball.
• DeJuan Blair was known in the NCAA for pwning taller guys like Hasheem Thabeet, but Roy Hibbert owned him in this one, using seven inches and one year of experience as an advantage over Blair. Preseason Blair might've gotten stage fright at the start, but he'll get used to it.
• The hype surrounding Gary Neal in the Summer League and the preseason has cleared, and he will have to regain Pop's trust by hitting buckets in scrub time. He's a shorter 2009 Roger Mason Jr., and he can be a liability once he loses his sweet stroke.
• Roster hopeful Bobby Simmons goes 0-2. I wish we would've kept James Gist or Marcus Cousin in the roster instead. I'll give him time to, in his words, 're-invent himself'.
• Tiago Splitter will be out until next Monday, when the Spurs face the Clippers.

And other random thoughts:

• Though it is highly unlikely the parties concerned set up a deal, Danny Granger would be a great fit in San Antonio. Passable athleticism, great size for small forward, and a sweet shooting touch. He has had issues with regression, as mentioned by Larry Bird, maybe because he's a good player playing for a bad team. If he played in the San Antonio system, he doesn't need to create shots for himself because the Spurs guards incessantly drive and kick-out.
• Although they took a taste of their own medicine, the blistering Pacers are still overlooked. A bunch of these guys can help out a championship caliber team. Hibbert has silently improved over two seasons. Forward Josh McRoberts has finally found use for his hops, and developed his range as well. Mike Dunleavy can still shoot, and an overpriced TJ Ford can play valuable minutes at back-up. They look like they're headed to the lottery but the pieces are all there.
• I won't give the Spurs a playoff standing until they've beaten bigger fish. The Rockets are 0-2 but they gave the Lakers a scare. Dallas has improved their defensive fortress (and is a team in my dark horse list for the championship). The Thunder are all still on the positive side of 20, and the Blazers are in a good position to contend with a year of chemistry under their belts.
• The Suns suck, and will not sweep anyone out of the playoffs this year. Just kidding, I'm expecting them to develop a chemistry mid-season and will turn out to be a surprise.

Cool People

"Great minds talk about ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds talk about people."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

That being said, I'm a small mind, because this post is going to be about two people I know personally. Profiles are always great to write not because they make the subjects look good, but because it surprises me how much or how well I know a person. It helps to appreciate 'normal' people more, including the things I take for granted about them. It's those little details that make the world more interesting; those little facts and quirks that, if remembered, make us all feel a little better about our existence.

Writers don't always get the attention they deserve; they shell it out, shedding light on a potpourri of different topics and ideas. Writers seldom get written about, unless they're awfully good at their craft (Miguel Syjuco, Neil Gaiman); most writers get written about after they've passed away (Jose Rizal, Sylvia Plath).

Over time, I've read some friends' writings. I can't judge them based solely on what they write, but I get to know them better and some stand out.

Take for example my friend Tet Domingo, who says she's not so spectacular. She says she's a replaceable cog, because there's nothing indispensable she can't offer (or at least that's what she thinks). She wished she had something useful to offer, like drawing skills cut for Pixar, or supreme tap-dancing skills (not what she said) or a pink Vespa (not what she also said).

You'll see her in school lumbering around in hipster-ish clothes with a musician boyfriend wielding a laptop and a big umbrella. The pairing seems unlikely at first (because they look like brother/sister or Sully/Boo or because she's an Aries and he's a Taurus), but so far she's made it work with him, and they've accomplished wonders. While he's home writing the songs, she's a few blocks away making album covers or album art for Luna's, her boyfriend's band whose genre I don't know. They sound like Coldplay without being gay.

What few people don't know is that she can quote Fight Club from her ass at any given day and time. She's read a lot of Palahniuk's stuff, and shows that she isn't grossed out a single bit from all the violence going on. She's seen a lot of films not a lot of people have seen, and she's one to whop your ass in a pop culture drinking game.

What's unusual about her is that she doesn't maintain a blog for public use. She makes blogspot her own diary, a Mecca of her deeper thoughts. If her knowledge about pop culture shows how much breadth she has, her blog shows her depth. She allows little room for shallowness when she reflects, and she reaches on personal dilemmas we all might have experienced in the past, adding a little touch of emotional warmth. She defends her own opinions with an aggressive fire, because she knows what she's entitled to. These are vague, but once you get to read her stuff, you'll get what I mean.

Aside from writing, she's a member of the Loyola Film Circle and a writer for Bantay Presidente, a campus publication that deals with behavior/misbehavior of the freshly minted Pres. Noynoy Aquino. She's maintains two blogs, a Twitter, and a secret 'secret blog'. With all the lookbook and the tumblr polyvore posts aside, she doesn't come off as a ditz when she writes or tweets; she's more of low-key and witty, with amounts of comic sarcasm.

She likes watching movies - a buttload - and there are lots more she can quote from those produced beyond the year I was born. She makes a lot of movie and TV references in random daily conversation. Now, if she could only translate that to writing, because real film and TV connoiseurs are hard to come by. She's not the type to write about how handsome Zac Efron looks in Charlie St. Cloud or how fat Cobie Smulders is in the latest ep of How I Met Your Mother. She's one who can flesh out a plot, look at the cinematic flow, and then judge if it was good or not.

But I'm not saying she should take Arbie Baguios' seat as a movie critic in g! (Ateneo de Manila University's official online magazine), one of the young writers who developed an intricate, intelligent style at his fresh age (18). I don't know the stuff Arbie crams into his bristly head but he's one to turn to about a lot of the 'deep' stuff, things like metaphysics and controversial issues (the reproductive health bill, cosmology). Leaving him in the library with a laptop or a pen with a piece of paper is deadly, because his writing is pretty enough to steal your girl.

In the same breath as Tet, Arbie is a culture critic. Though his ass doesn't have Fight Club quotes, he can make fresh ones out of his curly noggin. His head is relatively small, but the amount of gray matter in there is astounding. Do you know where the hell Petrichor is? I sure don't but he'll gladly show you what it's like to be there, beer in hand.

Aside from being a writer in g!, he's a Development Studies major in my school and a Loyola Mountaineer. Life is a big bucket list for him, and he's likely to try anything (except gay butt sex yes?), and he does it with amusing nonchalance. He knows when to wing it and he knows when to, in his words, give an 'actual fuck'.

His writing style seems mystical at times, and although I got lost finding out what his message was, it was undeniable he had a way with words. His vast consciousness and youthful brazenness are evident, but there's something torrential and powerful with the message he wants to convey to all the world: Fuck it, let's live. He thinks more than he drinks.

These two are just a handful of talented writers I know, They're the ones who fly under the radar because they don't get a lot of credit for what they do best. Maybe I'll see them working for major publications in the future, and I'm glad to have known and seen them work their way up.

*This is my first post so I started off easy. I'm shaking a lot of rust off from my writing arm, and I think shrooms have grown since I last started writing. It looks like I'll be stuck here writing out my idiocy and misadventures, but hey, like the courtside vixen Jessica Mendoza said, "I like writing, you like reading, or else you wouldn't be here. Let's do both for free."

VISIT them at their respective blogs:

Tet - http://innovatorprocrastinator.tumblr.com

Arbie - http://neusdadt.tumblr.com