So, the Celtics have successfully lulled the rest of the NBA teams into a false sense of security. That's all that this suspicious inability to win a playoff game on the road against the worst team to make the NBA playoffs this season has been. After all, the notion that the Boston Celtics could lose a game 7 at the fake Boston Garden is laughable.

The Celtics are sending the Cavs a message. If they can take a seven game series with the potential to turn into an historic choke job this lightly, how lightly can they take a series against LeBron James, even though LeBron is by himself better than any three Celtics?

History is totally on the side of the Celtics here. Their record in Game 7s is astronomically against the Hawks. It's not as though a Celtic team has won over 60 games in a season and then blown a game 7 at home before, right? Oh wait. The 72-73 Celtics (who set a franchise record for wins, by the way) dropped a Game 7 at home to the New York Knicks in shameful fashion. At least those Knicks were much better than these Hawks, though.

If I were in the habit of making predictions in this space (I've given it up since they had that nasty habit of going spectacularly wrong), I'd pick the Celtics to win by 37 points. After all, the pressure is off here. Even if they lose to Atlanta and set NBA history in a bad way, it's not as though they could outchoke the Patriots on the local sports scene. The Pats set the NFL record for most points scored, Brady and Moss both broke records for TDs in a season and they'd already pulled off a spectacular comeback against the Giants on the road in winter conditions.

That's a bit worse than simply dropping a best of seven series to a chump team coming off the best regular season record in the NBA. It's not as though the Celtics are a dynasty at this point, and this season won't mark the end of an era the way the recent Super Bowl catastrophe did. Garnett and Allen are still under contract, and even if they do slow down the way the Patriots geriatric linebackers have, there are enough terrible teams in the East that it won't make a difference.

In other matters, even though I rip Bill Simmons from time to time, I am not above stealing a couple of links from him to bring to your attention in case you don't have as much time to waste as I do. First, I want to comment on the facebook scandal raging at the Horace Mann School in NYC.

Students are using facebook to ridicule and criticize their teachers to the point of bullying and even intimidation. And no one knows how to stop them. Since they can use their own computers to do this and this is, for the moment, a free country, the burden of stopping this falls on the parents.

God knows, if I had been part of something like this whilst I was a kid (and possibly even now), my parents would have descended on me as though they were Robert Duvall's Air Cav unit and I was a small Vietnamese village near good surfing and Martin Sheen's mission insertion point. All I would have heard would have been some strains of Wagner and then fade to black. But we're expected to believe that violence is not the answer to life's problems... That's crap, limited violence directed at a given object for a given reason is the oldest solution there is, and whatever we're doing now ain't working.

Among the many problems that should have been anticipated in this story, first and foremost, you're obviously going to have a serious wave of bad karma at an elite private school named after the guy who practically invented public education in America. And obviously you're going to have a huge problem brewing among rich, entitled kids in Manhattan. Rich kids are almost all d-bags, and assholes are the last remaining renewable resource in the Northeast. Go figure worlds collided here.

This is a big problem for American society as a whole. If these parents have allowed their malignant little brat kids to bully teachers, administrators and everybody else under the sun all their lives, what will happen when this ostensibly irresistible force meets the immovable object that is the real world? Sooner or later, these kids will find out that they are not talented, they are not special, they are not God's gift to the rest of us and they generally suck at life.

So what is the end result of this sort of child coddling and ambition directed to status symbols rather than tangible achievement... Well, let's just say I really don't want to be the one who gets shot when little Jimmy the CEO's spawn realizes that Mommy and Daddy didn't love him enough to raise him to be human and he fires rounds into unsuspecting subway patrons ten years from now. But God forbid we disappoint the children of our "betters"...

And on a lighter note, check out this clip from the Star Wars holiday special in 1978. It's easily the creepiest thing I've seen this year.

It also makes you wonder how Lucas ever managed to make Empire Strikes Back and it didn't end up totally sucking. Over the last couple of months, I rewatched all of the episodes in both trilogies, and I have some thoughts on them that I feel like posting on, so that will be up sometime in the next week or so. And if you think it's too far off the general area of interest of this blog, don't forget that Lucas learned how to make crappy movies while studying at USC, and he probably hates TO.

And before I wrap, I want to pass on a link I got indirectly through Simmons. Thanks to his strange sissy fight with the "people" at RaptorsTruthers or whatever they call their silly little syndicate, I came across this blog by a beat writer for the Toronto Star. In this post, he makes a snide reference to the Florida vote being rigged in 2000 enabling Bush to become President.

I realize that this was a joke, but it still angers me somewhat. For some reason, Canadians and Europeans think that they have some right to meddle in American affairs. Consider John LeCarre (famed British author of boring, pointless, politically shameless spy novels) sending letters to voters in Ohio urging them to vote for John Kerry in 2004.

I find this offensive because if an American turned about and did something similar, it would be lamented far and wide as yet another instance of our creeping, insidious imperialism. Of course, it is difficult for Americans to meddle in Canadian politics, mostly because no one really gives a damn about Canada. And how can you materially influence a process by which an empty suit like Stephen Harper becomes PM because he caught a greased up deaf guy at the Ontario Province Fair?

So I just want to pass on a message to any readers from Canada, France, Great Britain, Germany and anywhere else in the world who think they have a right to input in any American electoral process...feel free to fuck off and die.