While Game 6 affirmed my faith in sports, the subsequent press conferences and roundtables, packed as they were with superficial dishonesty, brought me right back down. “It may be shallow, it may be narrow-minded and it may be unfair. But it is also reality and there’s little use talking around it,” wrote ESPN.com’s Brian Windhorst before the Heat’s overtime win. “The next three days will define these three years for the Miami Heat.”

Windhorst is right—it is shallow, narrow-minded, and unfair. If Kawhi Leonard makes both of his free throws with 19 seconds to go or Ray Allen’s shot doesn’t go down, then the Spurs are working through their 500th bottle of Veuve Clicquot right about now. There would be stories written about Tim Duncan’s throwback 30-point, 17-rebound performance, Tony Parker’s amazing pair of shots late in the fourth quarter, and Gregg Popovich’s standout on-court leadership. Duncan is the greatest player of his generation. Parker is the best point guard in basketball. Pop is on the Mount Rushmore of NBA coaches. And LeBron James and the Heat are huge stinking losers.

How does one missed free throw—a shot that hovered over the rim, spun around, and fell out—change any of that? It doesn’t make the Spurs any worse or the Heat any better, but everyone on TV is obligated to pretend otherwise.  [emphasis mine]  Now, we have to listen to ESPN’s Michael Wilbon and Magic Johnson talk about San Antonio choking the game away, which is about the least intellectually sophisticated thing a sentient being could say after watching the Spurs and Heat fight each other desperately on every possession…

After a great game, we too often conflate what’s debatable with what’s worth debating. We can argue about Popovich’s substitutions and the refs and how to tote all this up on LeBron’s career ledger. But we shouldn’t let it drown out everything that went right, for both the winners and the losers…

5. The long hello.

You spot someone you know on the street — fantastic! You actually really like this person! And exchange a wave, setting up a stop and chat. Problem is, they’re still 100 yards away, so now you have to spend a good minute walking directly toward them. Where do you look? What do you do with your face? Are you supposed to smile at them THE ENTIRE TIME? Nightmare.

THE RULE: Heads down after the initial wave, with a follow-up nod every 10 meters until you arrive.

Definitely experienced that one.  But the next example is one I’ve spent far too much time thinking about:

3. The hug, kiss, or shake?

At the workplace, it’s simple: shake, nod, smile. Congratulations: You’re introduced. But in other cases, it starts to get awkward. A handshakes seems a bit formal and a hug seems like a bit much. Cheek kiss? OK — but how many? If you go for one, she goes for two, and you accidentally leave her nuzzling air, you’ll have no choice but to kill yourself, spoiling the very social gathering you’re there for in the first place.

THE RULE: Let’s settle this once and for all: right-handed shake, left-arm shoulder pat, and a single left-cheek kiss. EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Of course, with other men, this is easy.  Can’t go wrong with a shake.  And some guys get the other hand on the upper arm or shoulder.  But this can be really hard with women (that I am resaonably close to)  in a social environment where a handshake definitely seems too formal and a hug seems to close/intimate.  The end result is often no physical contact at all, which seems wrong.  If it is a male friend on a similar level, it’s almost always just a hearty handshake.  No kisses on the cheek from me, though.

1) Please stop calling your wife of many years “my bride.”  It’s not cute.  It’s just affected and annoying.  Okay, harmless enough.

2) This one really bugs me, though… you don’t graduate from kindergarten!  You finish it and move onto first grade.  You no more graduate from Kindergarten than you do from 2nd grade.  It does not merit a cap and gown nor teary-eyed parents.  I would strenuously argue that you graduate from high school and a college/university.  That’s it.  When we have all these pre-school, elementary, middle school graduations, we cheapen what graduation is.  While most everybody in the socio-economic class of the readers of this blog will graduate from high school, it is not voluntary– it is an accomplishment and a choice.  Doubly-so for college.  Graduation from high school also represents a very important symbolic step into adulthood.  These things deserve to be celebrated and publicly recognized.  Putting on a cap and gown because you’ve finished West Suburban Middle School is absurd.  Have some form of celebration and appreciation that you’ve finished a particular school and are leaving it behind, but it is not a graduation.

Okay, I feel better now.

So, what’s so interesting about all that, you ask?  He was a Republican.  No go ahead again and tell me how the Republican party has not actually moved very much to the right.

In Virginia you can’t drive until you’re 16, plus three months. You can’t drink until you’re 21. But for some reason you can own a basic shotgun at any age. That blows my mind. Anyone who has ever had or been a child knows that no matter how well-intentioned or cautious they may be, children are impulsive and scatterbrained. And so are some adults, sure, but the difference is that adults are supposed to know better. Kids aren’t. Kids are irresponsible because their brains and bodies haven’t fully developed yet. They lack the judgment, experience, and perspective that comes with age.

According to the Hollifield report, the boy’s father “stated that he trusted his son with the firearm and that his son was knowledgeable about maintenance and care of the firearm.” But no matter how responsible and knowledgeable your kids might seem, they’re still kids. They’re going to make mistakes and forget things because that’s what kids do. If you’re going to let your kid have a gun, then you can’t assume that they won’t do anything stupid with it. You have to assume that they will do something stupid with it, and you have to do everything in your power to make sure they don’t. That means caring more about gun safety than your kid does, not less.  [emphases in original]

Some readers have emailed me questioning why I’m fixating on accidental child shooting deaths, given how relatively rare they are. And they’re right. The absolute number of children who are killed in accidental shootings is low. But these incidents could almost all have been prevented if the parents or guardians in these cases had been more attentive. The primary purpose of a gun is to shoot small holes in things, and if a boy shoots a small hole in his sister because he forgot there was a shell in his shotgun’s chamber, it is the fault of the parents. They were the ones who allowed him not only to have the gun, but to attempt to fix it, alone and unsupervised, in the freaking living room. An adult who gives a kid a gun needs to bear responsibility for what the kid does with it. Prosecuting the parents of the children in these incidents sends a clear message that society expects those parents to take care of their guns, and their children.

And, some accompanying explanation (though if you are reading this blog, this should be familiar):

The latest research, from a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by James Heckman and Lakshmi Raut, concludes that a policy of free preschool for all poor children would have a raft of cost-effective benefits for society and the economy: It would increase social mobility, reduce income inequality, raise college graduation rates, improve criminal behavior (saving some of the societal expenses associated with it), and yield higher tax revenue thanks to an increase in lifetime wages.

Specifically, Heckman and Raut estimate that the percentage of children whose parents never graduated from college who go on to graduate themselves would rise from 6.71 percent to 9.45 percent. And such a preschool policy would reduce the percent of the population that falls in the long run into poor socioeconomic status, from 35.71 percent to 29.14 percent. (Heckman and Raut define poor socioeconomic status as families earning less than 70 percent of the average in the economy.)

Keep such a policy in place for years, and its benefits accrue from one generation to the next. Put a child in preschool, in other words, and that improves her chances of graduating college. But it also improves the future education and earnings prospects of her children and grandchildren. Obviously, the quality of a school that a child attends later in life matters, too. And we’d be foolish to invest in preschool without continuing to invest in poor children as they age.

House Republicans are considering legislation “that would deny publicly subsidized emergency care to illegal immigrants [emphasis mine] and force them to purchase private health insurance plans, without access to federal subsidies, as a requirement for earning permanent legal residency.”

So amidst an effort to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill meant to help the Republican Party appeal to Hispanic voters, Republicans are making a point of demanding that legalized immigrants can’t get Obamacare, and in some cases can’t even get emergency care. They’re also considering a crushingly punitive version of the individual mandate, in which undocumented immigrants need to purchase private health care on their own, without subsidies, or they can’t even become legal residents. And they’re refusing to agree to Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion in some of the states where it would do Hispanics the most good.

Are you serious?  How are you supposed to force illegal immigrants to buy private health insurance plans they cannot afford (citizens get subsidies if they cannot afford them).  More notably, citizens are not going to be left to die sitting outside of emergency rooms.  Those illegal aliens, however…  Well, I guess they can just go back to Mexico for the hospital, damnit!  If this wasn’t disturbingly stingly and misanthropic, it would just be funny, as it really does sound more like what a cartoon villain would come up with.  Alas, ladies and gentleman, your modern Republican party (which, I’ve been told by commenters, has not actually moved to the right at all).