Nowitzki and That Crazy Rap Music!
On this day, when horses in Lexington will run to satisfy our nation's deeply engrained gambling urges, I write here as the loser of a bet. Worse yet, it was a bad bet. Breaks down like this: I made a bet with the operator of That Crazy Rap Music! that Dirk Nowitzki would score more than 25 points in Thursday's Game 6 of the Dallas Mavericks-Golden State Warriors first round playoff series. Nowitzki wasn't even close; he scored eight points on 2-13 shooting. Nowitzki struggled for the entire series, save for a one-minute stretch in Game 5, when he hit two straight threes with his team trailing by 9 in the final minutes. I figured he'd build on this. I was wrong. That Crazy Rap Music! was right. Dirk SUCKED in Game 6.
The wager was for the integrity of this site. Having lost, I will now tell you why another site does what we do better than how we do.
So without further ado: That Crazy Rap Music! is a better site than Cosmodrome.
[Ed. note: photo at right is Dirk Nowitzki and unknown person - not the author of TCRM!]
This blog has it all. From crazy YouTube links to other crazy YouTube links, life stories, NBA analysis, political commentary, deep analysis of life's great debates, crazy YouTube links, funny photos, cultural analysis, crazy YouTube links, classic basketball highlights, responses to bad writing, and even the occasional crazy Youtube link - it covers everything you need.
I may be prone to exaggeration, so I'm not going to say this is the one site a day you should read. In fact, you should probably read the news if you're only going to one site a day. However, if you're going to check TWO sites a day, That Crazy Rap Music! should be one of them. Think about it: where else can you get news, sports, cultural analysis, the best of YouTube, and more? Sure, Cosmodrome publishes that stuff too. But That Crazy Rap Music! is just better at it. It's less pretentious (no punctuation! no capitalization!). It's more regularly updated, and it's tapped into the all-important youth movement that dominates the "blog" culture. We just don't have that.
And unlike us, That Crazy Rap Music! doesn't bother defining itself. The No. 1 rule of the blog is that there are no rules. Josh will post about everything from movies he's seen to crazy observations that just pop into his head about politicians' wives. This allows for such a wide array of awesomeness that it will blow your mind.
If I ran a media company, I'd probably want to pay him to do the site. Sure, it's just being done as a hobby than anything else, something to do when Josh gets out of class. But it's deep. I know Josh has never dreamed of making a living from it, but hypothetically speaking, if The New Yorker wanted to publish something from the site, I think he'd consider it. If the Old Media bigwigs ever decided to check out That Crazy Rap Music! they would see it doesn't have that familiar opportunistic "look at me, look at me" feel of so many other blogs (and this site), and would pounce on the opportunity to publish it themselves.
Some of you might think that Josh would be compromising the mission of TCRM! if he were to go big media. But the true sellouts are blogs like Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo that blatantly rely on advertising. Blogging shouldn't be a competition. It's not about getting published in an anthology with a foreword by David Foster Wallace and going on a 30-stop book tour. Josh doesn't need that kind of attention, and that's what makes his site better and more attention-worthy than ours.
[Additional reporting on this story was provided by Ben Tiedemann.]