Fancy Store-Bought Dirt

Fireworks

The guy on the radio mentioned that half of all household fireworks accidents involve children 16 or under. Really this just means that the median age of someone in a household fireworks accident is 16, which sounds about right.

(I hope there weren't too many innumerate fools who falsely concluded that half of all 16-and-under kids end up in a fireworks accident!)

I'm told that in most of Canada household fireworks are legal. In most cities around the Bay Area they're not. As a general rule I'd much rather see people lean how to use them safely than wind up in accidents while evading the law. But I could be convinced otherwise depending on what portion of the victims of fireworks accidents were innocent bystanders.

My Two Favorite Recent Onion Quotes

Man on the street, regarding Palm Pre: "Yeah, me and a bunch of other guys camped outside the Sprint store all night. When it opened, however, I found out that everyone else was just homeless."

From "National News Highlights", on the Local page: "Miles and Katie Hall announced at a recent picnic with relatives that they were going to start trying to conceive soon, and then went for a walk into the woods."

Also, this is by far my favorite of the Old Jews Telling Jokes series.

Sunday Comics as Banal Agitprop

At least five of today's comics (just from among what the Alameda Times-Star carries) fit that description. Shockingly none of them is Doonesbury. Even more shocking, Non Sequitur not only avoided that category today but also managed to be the second-most brilliant of the whole section (behind only the FoxTrot cipher).

In ascending order of lameness:

5. Family Circus: Bil tells Dolly not to worry about monsters (they're just her imagination) but becomes paralyzed by fear of his own "monsters" (labeled recession/pollution/war/etc.).

I'd be tempted to buy this, but who actually is supposed to be the target audience for Family Circus? Is there really someone out there sophisticated enough to appreciate this irony, yet still appreciative of those dotted-line path jokes?

4. Pearls Before Swine: Welcome to the demagogue side of the bank/AIG/TARP/etc. kerfuffle, Pastis. Only six weeks late, with nothing new to say. (As for one of the old things he says: Really, we're attributing to the "bank C.E.O." the "home loans to people he knew could not pay them back" (emphasis added) problem? The borrowers, of course, were totally blindsided by this, to say nothing of the specific loan officers whose job it was to use sound judgment when they approved or denied specific loans.)

3. Candorville: Ha ha ha! So this guy gets foreclosed on, thrown out in the street, shivering in some alley, when a newspaper page blows across him and he gets a bit of warmth... but it's the newspaper's last issue. ROFL!

So actually, the idea that newspapers are homeless people's chief source of warmth actually manages to be less implausible than the idea that newspapers becoming obsolete in the Internet age is remotely on par with the fallout from the burst housing bubble. Either way... did I already say ROFL? Nothing like biting political satire to give someone a smile when they read their funnies.

2. For Better or For Worse. Really, if the world were ruled by moms "there'd be a zillion soldiers with nothin[g] to do"? What does Kim Jong Il's mama think of that, or Hamida al-Attas? I mean, sure, you could split a whole bunch of hairs about what "rule the world" really means, since in real life nobody does. Not the U.S., for b[you get the idea]. Certainly not the UN, as all the moms I know have (and wield) the power of food, shelter, and bedtime, and have far better enforcement mechanisms available than strongly worded letters and unenforced resolutions. I guess it could be worse, though: If she'd had room for one more panel, would Lynn Johnston have snuck in a joke about the [Canadian counterpart to the] Pentagon and what a wonderful world it would be if they had to hold bake sales to buy B-1 bombers?

1. Wee Pals: Did you know that if you like Wee Pals, you might also like Herb & Jamaal? I mention this specifically because of the opening line of the strip at hand: "There doesn't seem to be a lot of social progress in America." Non-specificity AND (unlike H&J) a thesis that, by any rational definition of terms, is ludicrously wrong. But instead of calling out the weak original premise, the strip's resident straw-man goes off on a bellicose rant about bootstraps, to which "suppose you don't own a pair of boots" is supposed to be the game-set-and-match response.

Meanwhile, as with every Wee Pals (does anyone other than the Alameda Times-Star and Oakland Tribune actually carry this piece of work?), we get "Soul Corner," a glowing profile of some path-breaking African-American who 99% of the time is a politician. This particular one was Pennsylvania's first African-American female secretary of state (is that enough qualifiers?), who I'm sure is a wonderful beacon of light of a person and in no way shape or form the kind of corrupt tool who typically becomes a state-level secretary of state. Oh, we do learn that she "led a campaign against offensive lyrics in hip-hop music." Setting aside the slippery language ("led"/"a campaign" -- so is she like the Tipper Gore of that genre or just one of the multitudes of opportunists?), I don't know and am inclined not to care whether she was one of the people who asked nicely or one of the people who decided that, first amendment be damned, this was For The Children.

Thursday Night TV Thoughts

Overrated: the Bobby Knight poster. Underrated: Ryan Howard watching the Free Market Montgomery video.

For years now I've highly esteemed Tina Fey, and in the past I somewhat highly esteemed Julia Louis Dreyfus, but didn't realize until the latter's commercial appearance that the former is on the order of a thousand times better looking.

The new Hulu ad with Seth MacFarlane reminds me: When did he start absolutely phoning in Family Guy? This past Sunday was a rerun but the previous three new episodes have all been absolutely beyond atrocious, even worse than circa season 11-12 Simpsons.

Brief points of criticism:
1. Stewie has degenerated into a frat boy icon who acts as though he's well aware of this status.

2. But if there's anything worse than Stewie implicitly breaking the fourth wall, it's Peter eviscerating that fourth wall.

3. I have to pretend that when Brian gets on his soapbox (he's become Lisa Simpson to the nth power), we're not supposed to take him entirely seriously. Otherwise, well yeah he typically has a point, but we're at about the intellectual level of a college dorm bull session.

4. Everything likable about the past three new episodes, combined, is in general something American Dad does better (maybe that actually answers the question that began this segue)? And by "everything likable" I basically mean the ST:TNG subplot and the creation process for Handi-Quacks.

Things Only Stephen King Does

1. Use "shit" as a sentence-opening ejaculation. (Many examples exist, of which the one I most recently saw is quoted by Will Leitch.)

Seriously, he does this all the time. (Had he written that sentence, it would have been, "Shit, he does this all the time.") I have yet to see any other author do that.

My Actual 10 Favorite Comics

As of right now; subject to change as always.

1. xkcd
2. Get Fuzzy
3. Pearls Before Swine
4. Dilbert
5. Peanuts
6. Apartment 3-G (where oh where did I go wrong?)
7. Zits
8. Sherman's Lagoon
9. Pickles
10. Rose is Rose

A Comics Page So Sad, the Survey Probably Won't Help

I got to this survey from The Comics Curmudgeon via The Oregonian. If you see this by March 3 then you too can take the survey if you so desire.

"Please choose your favorite comic." And then the pulldown menu, in its entirety:

I guess my top three among these would be Bizarro, Pickles, and Rose is Rose (edging out Peanuts, which really shouldn't need my vote anyway).

Adam@Home: As you might guess from the strip name, the protagonist works from home. He's a work-at-home dad who also has lame Internet humor, or did as of the late 1990s when I last saw this strip via the Boston Globe. I forget what I found so grating about his persona, but it just was.

Baby Blues: It's better than Family Circus, of course. It may even make my top three among these choices, by default. One of the kids is named Hammy.

Better or Worse: Does Lynn Johnston really think she can get away with this revisionist history wherein kindergarten Michael was in love with Deanna all along? I THINK NOT.

Bizarro: If memory serves (and as Wikipedia confirms), Piraro went to my high school. I'll make this my #1 choice.

Blondie
Cathy
...let's barge in on Dagwood in the bathtub and watch Cathy saying "Ack!" as she tries on a swimsuit, and it'll be 1970 all over again.

Close to Home: This one's still on my Houston Chronicle build-your-own, even though it's astonishingly lame as pale shades of The Far Side go.

Cul de Sac: I'm actually not familiar with this one. (Ditto Grand Avenue, or The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee.)

Elderberries: The inferior of the two "old people" strips on this list.

Garfield
Hagar the Horrible
Hi and Lois
...those first two are great if you're seven years old.

Judge Parker: Isn't this otherwise a very family-oriented page?

Luann: Ah, the gratuitous faux-erotic tension.

Mutts: in which animalsh talk like thish.

Non Sequitur: OK, we get it, Danae hates icky boys, and Wiley himself has a huge man-crush on Keith Olbermann.

Peanuts: sweet, endearing, and great to have around (but readily available in years worth of anthologies)

Pickles: the better of the "old people" strips; this one is actually surprisingly good.

Rose is Rose: for reasons that are lost to the sands of time, I used to despite Rose is Rose for being so sickly sweet. It's really grown on me, though, especially the theme that Pasquale loves school.

Sally Forth: Ces is a good guy; glad he doesn't take this strip entirely seriously.

The Family Circus: pass.

Wizard of Id
Ziggy
...which of these is creepier when it tries to make topical jokes?

Which Recurring Onion Op-Ed Columnist Has the Creepiest Backstory?

What's funny is that it's not even close. This one has the rest beat by a mile, though it's gotten so subtle that you may have missed the most recent reference.

Usually the NY Times Reserves Sociopathic Behavior for the First Page of Sunday Styles

Despite this write-up I remain convinced that the blog in question is a parody.

The title of this post comes from two consecutive top Sunday Styles articles that I'd meant to kvetch about but never did: The one where people use their school phone lists for solicitations (if a corporation did it they'd scream bloody murder, but their own pet causes are just so important that you have to understand), and more recently the one about looking busy at work wherein a guy intentionally leaves his cell phone at his desk, AT FULL VOLUME, with the intent that people will hear his phone ring AT FULL VOLUME.

"That's Even Higher Than #1!"

I only rarely post to Fark. (Can still count on one hand the number of times I have.) The log-in name I use is a Seinfeld reference, but I feel sheepish about it because it turns out to be very similar to (just a leading article added to) the screen name of someone else who posts a lot, and well.

Anyway, the only thing to do with an ill-conceived Seinfeld themed screen name is to make the obvious Seinfeld reference whenever, inexplicably, no one else is making it. (And of course to garble the delivery with a stupid typo.)

No Wonder the Second Sentence Was So Funny

I couldn't understand why this excerpt made me laugh out loud:

"If the change happens, that doesn't necessarily mean an end to Saturday mail delivery. Previous post office studies have looked at the possibility of skipping some other day when mail flow is light, such as Tuesday."
--Postmaster General: Mail days may need to be cut

Then I realized Dwight had the answer a year-and-a-half ago:

"I'm now convinced the funniest day of the year is last Tuesday. Note that I mean 'last Tuesday' as a relative concept, not July 31."

Ressentiment, as portrayed in an Onion article

This turns out to be so brilliant. I didn't expect the joke to carry a full-length article but they take it exactly the right direction.

(Here's the Wikipedia article on ressentiment, and OH MY GOODNESS Google "beyond good and evil" right now and behold what society (at least the Internet) has come to)

Where I Live Fact of the Day

"In 2008, Oakland witnessed 124 homicides. That’s three fewer than in 2007. But 25 more than in San Francisco, which saw 99 homicides (its highest since 1995) in 2008. And it's a stunning 121 more than the city of Alameda, which saw three homicides in 2008 and is only separated from Oak town by a short underground tunnel."
--SF Bay Guardian

(Or a drawbridge, depending on what route you take.)

Assuming the source is accurate, I'll have to ask Julia how many of Alameda's three 2008 homicides she can place.

This is presumably one of them.

...and 2009 is on pace to blow 2008 out of the water (two already!).

You'd think this 2008 year in review would refer to all three, but I only found two (one in July, mentioned above, and one in August). Some of the other blurbs leave a lot of questions unanswered (e.g. "Joyce Carroll saved a man's life while taking a different route to work one day looking for a newspaper. If she hadn't decided to leave work early and had taken her usual route, the man might not be alive today.").

EdgyCat.com

OK fine, I've seen the URL day after day after day, I'll check out the site.

About 80% of the time, the comic strip Sylvia leaves me cold (at best), but apparently the other 20% are worth it.

A sign of how far quiz-bowl has come in 15 years or so: I remember a question that began "The woman who does everything better than you." That's about where I got it right; I learned that in another room someone buzzed in at roughly that point with "Martha Stewart."

(Is there any way to write a well structured, clues-in-the-right-order, tossup about Martha Stewart with that lead sentence? Probably not, though a clues-out-of-whack tossup about her could plausibly lead with that.)

We Don't Do Christmas Letters... But If We Did

Dear Friends,

Julia and I had our first child on Sunday, October 5. Simon Jonathan Bruce was born at 7:47 a.m. after a nine-hour labor that began on our nightly walk along Shoreline Drive. He was 8 pounds, 5 ounces, and 21 inches long. Now he has blue eyes, like his paternal grandmother's family, and red hair, like my sister and father and Julia's mother.

Simon has very good neck control and enjoys vocalizing, though he's still months away from words. He enjoys being held by his parents, riding in his car seat, or relaxing in the bouncer my sister got him, with a giraffe to his left and an elephant to his right. He's already put his long fingers on Julia's parents piano keys; who knows how soon he'll play?

All four grandparents were on hand for his birth. My mom visited him in early December and we will spend Christmas in Chicago with my parents. Simon sees Julia's parents several times a week, as we live a mile away.

Speaking of which, we have lived in the same Alameda apartment, on Shoreline Drive, that we moved into two years ago. We've spent several months house hunting but did not find the right place at the right price. Maybe in 2009, market conditions permitting.

I continue to work at Gracenote, which was bought by Sony in May. Despite our new corporate overlords we continue to operate independently and have a variety of big-name customers for our music and video metadata, notably several automakers (for voice-activated music control) and Apple iTunes. As "Manager of Content Analysis" I write perl and SQL, do Excel tricks (one goal for 2009 is to minimize the Excel), and dabble in Crystal Reports. People ask me questions that (I hope!) can be answered with a database query; I answer them and set up processes to deliver the same data at regular intervals.

Julia is getting her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at Mills College in Oakland; she is set to graduate in 2009. Mills has an all-female undergraduate student body but co-ed grad programs. Julia writes magazine articles and young adult fiction; she has almost finished her first book, whose protagonist explores Russian Jewish identity and heritage.

Julia also directed this year's Alameda Children's Muiscal Theatre summer camp programs, featuring a production of Fiddler on the Roof Jr. She also assisted with ACMT's productions of Bye Bye Birdie in the spring and A Christmas Carol this month. The latter was Simon's first play (as a spectator, of course) and he especially enjoyed the bright lights of the Ghost of Christmas Future.

I continue to write trivia questions for National Academic Quiz Tournaments; Julia and I help run our high school and college championships. Our college tournament was in St. Louis this year and, for the fourth year in a row, our high school tournament was in Chicago. Once again the high school field size increased by 32 teams, now up to 160. Each team plays 10 games Saturday, always against an opponent with a similar record; teams that go 6-4 or better make the Sunday double-elimination playoffs. 60-some game rooms are in operation at once, mostly converted hotel suited, with over 130 game officials, over 1,000 players, and hundreds of coaches and parents.

Aside from the quiz championships, we spent the first week of July in southern Oregon, where we enjoyed the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the breathtaking views at Crater Lake. A week later we visited Julia's brother's family in Los Angeles and brought our niece and nephew back with us to spend time with their grandparents. For them that was the start of a much longer journey, to Toronto where Julia's brother is producing Gnomeo and Juliet (IMDB expects a 2010 release).

Whenever we're away from home we dearly miss our cat, Mewelde, and we like to think the feeling is mutual. She still has a beautiful tuxedo coat and an outgoing, adventurous, but very gentle disposition. She is not yet enamored of her frequently fussy pink peer, whose cries send her on brisk walk to the other side of the apartment. She does appreciate the attention we give her even as new parents, in fact her most recent routine is to demand petting and playing at 4 a.m. And she is once again our littlest, holding steady at nine pounds (Simon at 11 weeks is well over 12 pounds).

Back when she was our only little one, we were happy to spend time with the Williams family on their March visit to San Francisco, and to make a day trip to Pescadero (just south of Half Moon Bay) for the end-of-July wedding of our friends Paul and Juliana. We also attended a dozen Oakland A's games, just over half as many as on our previous ticket plan. Although we probably won't buy any advance tickets for 2009, we look forward to Simon's first baseball game when he's still young enough to nap in our arms.

Continuing with sports, Mewelde is glad that her namesake scored a few touchdowns after joining the Pittsburgh Steelers. Although neither Julia nor I had any previous Steeler ties, our western Pennsylvania friend Dwight got Mewelde (the cat, not the running back) her own Terrible Towel.

That's about it for 2008. Next year we look forward to the growth of Simon, of Julia's writing career, and of the High School National Championship Tournament field. I would happily remain at Gracenote and on Shoreline Drive, but who knows what opportunities the future holds? We hope you've had an outstanding 2008 and wish you many opportunities and much growth of your own.

Love,
Matt, Julia, & Simon

Zeugma of the Year

(Definition of zeugma here, with a famous quote frequently misattributed to Disraeli.)

"Summer and Cory will meet in the hospital lobby after visiting hours and awkwardly make up, out, love, a child, a loveless marriage, and ruined lives for all." -- Comics Curmudgeon commenter Uncle Lumpy, regarding a Funky Winkerbean storyline

Ad Hominem of the Day

(Or more generally just "argument by assertion": I don't object to calling something "absolute crap," especially when I agree with that judgment, but I do object to categorizing it that way without in any way explaining or supporting the assertion.)

The title of this Volokh Conspiracy post is "Boys go to ESPN to get more stupider:" - but it takes several paragraphs to get to the relevance of the title. The poster had written a column that cited declining interest in reading as one reason for slower newspaper sales, and a sports journalist wrote in to tell him, among other things:

"ESPN is a great, wildly profitable business. It's also a killer of young men's minds. People who might normally spend a day reading or going outdoors and meeting people and learning more about the world instead stay shut indoors watching crap like televised poker and two-hour long NFL pre-game shows and moronic round-the-horn gasbag, sports "debate" shows.

Add in all the dumb radios sports talk, regional 24-hour sports networks, and you've got a lot of absolute crap that young guys spend their time watching instead of picking up a good read."

Open questions for the (unnamed) writer, or anyone else of a sympathetic mindset:

1. Is sports talk radio any more or less "absolute crap" than political talk radio? What is the root cause of any distinction there?

2. Would you wring your hands if you found a correlation between more people watching live artistic performance (symphony, ballet, Broadway musical, community theater...) and fewer people reading? If so, to what extent are either of these factors relevant: sports versus non-sports performance; in person viewing versus television viewing

3. How would you distinguish a sports pre-game show from a book review (really a book preview, since people typically read these before choosing whether to read a book) or some other piece of crit?

4. The typical criticism of a sports couch potato -- and it's a point well taken -- is that they should spend less time watching sports on TV and more time playing outside. Why do you think it is that you almost never hear someone say "you should spend less time listening to music and more time playing an instrument"? Intuitively obvious answers will immediately come to mind; even so, you'll have a much more productive discussion thinking these points through, even belaboring the obvious, than calling out "absolute crap" without any further analysis.

Celebrity Peers

Which would you find more surprising: A Slate piece by Donald Fagen about the greatness of Jean Shepherd, or a Slate piece by Jean Shepherd about the greatness of Donald Fagen?

I think Shepherd is hands-down more accomplished (and not just because I thoroughly enjoy A Christmas Story or think of Steely Dan as exhibit A as to why people about my age are significantly cooler than people 10 years older), but since he's also more likely than Fagen to get published in Slate, one could sort of see it going either way.

Something similar comes up when one household name reviews another household name's book in the New York Times book review section.

These Are Not Antonyms

You've heard the "progress" is the opposite of "Congress." (It's hard to find a joke with more mold on it.)

"Increment" and "excrement" also fit this category, though without quite the punchline (unless scatology is inherently funny).

What other words look like they should be antonyms but aren't?

(Not quite on topic, since it's rather the opposite thrust: Today Bill Simmons tried to coin "overfeated" as the opposite of "undefeated." I don't think it works if one word is actually a consonant short of the right prefix and the other word is just made-up. Same premise but much simpler, maybe just "unfeted"? Firefox recognizes "feted" as a word but not "unfeted." Then again "feted" is pretty close to "fetid," and the Detroit Lions are certainly that.)

updated comics page link

here

I finally removed They'll Do It Every Time (how long ago did Scaduto die?) and them Piranha Club because it's not worth the effort.

Hope blogrolling is editable again soon.

That's Some Exquisite FAIL

I have a new pet peeve: Things labeled FAIL that shouldn't be. (Some of them do sort of represent lack of success, but some alleged FAIL's are just too much of a reach, and a waste of everyone's time.)

Having said that, the three most recent FAIL Blog items (Firetruck Fail and the two right below it) are how it's done.

Collection Agency Calls - From India

Interesting read (the link below was also via Marginal Revolution). If that were a Fark thread then, based on previous experience, about 85-90% of the posters would have sympathies opposite mine, and about 10-15% of those would anger me with their nativist pigheadedness.

Straight from the (British) Headlines

Ah, Fred Basset, your September 30 strip is so funny to British people (and those of us who happen to know a specific piece of jargon from the crime debate over there). Maybe not so much on our side of the pond.

Politicians and the Dogs They Look Like

Great coincidence!

Invisible to Deer

New hunting camouflage.

It's about time -- unless you subscribe to the theory that hunting gives Darwin a sporting chance at the hunters themselves.

Up to now, camouflage has been the worst of both worlds: It's bad enough if wildlife actually can see you just fine, but potentially catastrophic if you've successfully made yourself invisible to other humans with guns.

David Chase 1, Lynn Johnston 0

Have I ever told you about my dislike for tacked-on "this is where they are now" story endings? J.D. Rowling committed arguably the worst atrocity in this vein, though most of the time it's just printed words superimposed at the end of a movie.

(The Animal House ending is an exception because I take it to be a send-up of American Graffiti.)

Some endings are better left ambiguous, and even for those that aren't, there are some absurdly gratuitous levels of detail out there.

The Best Sentence I've Read Today

"These are the many millions who live to despise every last thing about the comic strip [For Better or For Worse], and, as such, have never missed a day."
--The Washington Post (emphasis in original)

This Would Make A Good Wits & Wagers Question

According to an August 2008 post to LiveScience, over the past 25 years, cheerleading accounted for what percent of all catastrophic sports injuries to high school females?

Rain, A Free Ride, and/or Good Advice

I did not know this particular plot twist:
"Not long ago, [Lynn] Johnston, 61, had planned to retire this year and offer mostly reruns of her 29-year-old comic strip. But her life changed when her husband fell in love with another woman and the couple divorced."
--L.A. Times

The potential irony here involves:
A. The name of her comic strip?
B. The content of her comic strip?
C. Who cares? (Actual indifference.)
D. Who cares? (Sadistic glee.)

(found via Comics Curmudgeon of course)

A(n Almost Literal) Million-Dollar View

We went to Monterey this past Saturday to see the penguins. Between where we parked and the aquarium itself were two open houses: 1.5 blocks inland from the water, a 4 bed 4 bath was asking $999,000. On the street that runs past the water, a 2 bed 2 bath was asking $1.9 million.

Meanwhile on Cannery Row, there's a Toll House store where you can custom-order an ice cream cookie sandwich with your choice of cookie flavor and ice cream flavor.

Favorite Nations

Blog content filler: pick your favorite nation from each non-Antarctic continent.

North America: United States. (Quick, how many of the 23 countries in North America can you name?)

South America: Uruguay, avoiding any side of the ABC rivalry.

Europe: Germany (honorable mention: Czech Republic)

Asia: Thailand

Africa: Botswana

Australia: Australia (let's call this Oceania to expand the eligibility: I'd still go with Australia, though I realize there are many New Zealophiles)

We Should Also Brush Our Teeth Three Times a Day and Floss Daily

"It's time to shun the lust for gold medals and embrace dignity in competing cleanly at the Olympics. " --caption to the top photo on Yahoo! Sports right now, accompanying an op-ed whose teaser is "Going for bronze without the help of performance-enhancing drugs should be as good as gold for America and its Olympians."

Did this really need to be written?

Blue Collar Jobs on Reality TV

This op-ed is a bit over the top but I agree with the general premise. What took people so long to develop shows like The Deadliest Catch? (Someone had to be smart enough to think of it.)

Coincidentally, a couple weeks ago some guy at Newsweek wrote a blurb excoriating these same shows. I meant to mock that guy to no end, openly questioning his manhood etc., but never got around to it.

Fictitious Fire Convergence

This post comparing on-line trolls to Objectivistsinaccurately describes Ayn Rand's position on saving someone from a fire (a couple commenters set Megan straight), though that hypothetical did remind me of a specific scene last night's American Dad! rerun (where Francine's birth dad won't save Stan from a fire, having called someone on his cell phone for advice ("What's my liability?")).

That episode in turn was way better than last night's Family Guy rerun. Both skirted the line of ethnic stereotypes, but at least the American Dad! episode was trying to be good (and generally succeeding).

Two Tangentially Related Links

A snarky blog about real estate in Alameda (thanks mom!), with a great URL. I wish I were as observant and incisive as this writer.

An Oakland police dept. crime map, configurable by crime type, last N days, and size of the circle around your point of interest.

You'd Think Someone Would Have Vetted All 17,576 Possibilities by Now

Sometimes license plates get unfortunate three-letter combinations.

An exercise for the reader: How many of the 17,576 would a reasonable person find offensive? FUC, FUK, ASS, DIK, and a few others are gimmes. There are some judgment calls -- I'm going to claim that DAM is not (because of the structure that controls the flow of some waterways) but your mileage may vary.

This might be fluid: 15 years ago I don't think WTF would have stood out the way it does now.

Right of Publicity 101

No, a fast food chain may not refer to a well-known rapper by name in its ads, without that rapper's permission.

Yes, doing so dilutes his brand, and he's entitled to compensation for it.

Yes, somebody in advertising just saw his career end (unless the whole point was that the free publicity would be worth more than the damages paid out).

These Are Good People

Saving the world with appropriate technology.

Two Random Fark Links

As you may know, Eliot Spitzer's favorite escort got her pseudonym from the stolen driver's license she used to fake being 18 for a spot on Girls Gone Wild. The real owner of that license has sued for the besmirching of her name. I sympathize with her but it's a weak case: Among other things there's not a very good foreseeability argument.

If this is how they treat their customers, you may want to avoid Boots (a chain I'd previously never heard of).

Rubyfruit Bar and Grill Closes

The West Village (NYC) has one less lesbian bar.

Was just talking to a friend last night about how skyrocketing property values have meant that young gays can't move into the Castro (or to a lesser extent Provincetown, Boystown, etc.), yet greater social acceptance has meant they don't necessarily feel the need for an enclave.

Today's Rex Morgan MD has something in common with Harvard's 1990 commencement program

I knew I'd seen that typo before.

This related Google search has just one hit, but one was enough.

Women's Sports News(?)

Another WNBA player dunked a basketball during a game.

Meanwhile, the Olympic soccer team includes the goalie who was ostracized for complaining about being benched in the World Cup semifinal, and does not include the beloved veteran who allowed four goals in that game. No word on whether the teammates are [still] friends with either or both goalies.

I moderately enjoy some womens' sports leagues, but the kind of press coverage they often get really doesn't help any particular cause.

(By contrast, I think men complain about being benched about as often as they dunk basketballs, and with about as much news value attached.)

Cars With Bumper Stickers

...tend to have unusually aggressive drivers, regardless of what's actually on the stickers.

Best Friends, As Envisioned by Insipid Ad Campaign Designers

"It's like watching sports with your best friend. If your best friend actually knew what he was talking about."
--ESPN banner ad promoting Bill Simmons as "The Sports Guy"

(Given ESPN's focus on sports, how weird is it to have a singular designation "the sports guy." By contrast would Rob Neyer be "the weather guy" or something?)

Two more along these lines: If you've heard those radio ads where a guy compares beer to darts, or to the world wide web, you know that in real life everyone around that guy would recognize him as a tool and yearn for the day he shut up.

Meanwhile, in real life the frosted hair guy who talks to the camera (across the table) on those TGIF TV ads would have a painfully obvious, just all-around awkward, homosexual crush on his table mate. ("And then you could buy something for those girls at that other table"? - totally a front.)

How Much Purchasing Power Did 30 Pieces of Silver Have in 33AD?

More importantly, only $3,000 to indirectly kill people?

The Best Phrase I've Ever Read About an Eye-Sore

"poured concrete Vogon love poem"

(Photographic evidence, but I can attest that, as winterspeak notes, "It's much worse in real life."

ESPN Columnists Who Have Uninteresting Daddy Issues

Before today, there were zero ESPN columnists for whom I'd give one iota of care about their issues with golf, father-son relations, and/or alcoholism.

That number still stands at zero, despite the best efforts of ESPN's current front page splash.

What Do You Mean "We," Wojciechowski?

This column makes a bizarrely ambiguous use of first-person plural.

It also has a frightening lack of understanding of basic economics, much less human freedom. I don't think there's anyone who has both the standing to do what Wojciechowski wants done and the incentive to do it.

(We'd live in a much worse world if there actually were.)

Breathtaking Statistical Manipulation of the Day

"Gasoline is also a fairly minor expense when you consider the overall cost of car ownership. In 1975, gasoline made up 33.4 percent of the total cost of owning and operating a car. By 2006, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, gasoline costs had declined to just 17.1 percent of the total cost of car ownership. Of course, fuel costs have risen by about $1 per gallon since 2006, but even with those increases, fuel continues to be a relatively small part of the cost of car ownership. By contrast, the fixed costs of ownership—insurance, licensing, taxes, and financing—have increased nearly fivefold since 1975."
--Robert Bryce, Slate

I don't necessarily disagree with his overall point. I remember making fun of people who complained about $2.00 gas, because adjusted for inflation we were still doing well. But can you count the sleights of hand in the quote above? They include:

1. Selective endpoints. (1975 sounds vaguely like a round number, but gosh, weren't we just getting over a price shock at the time?)

2. Obfuscation by constant changing of units. Here's a percent stat... and then here's a "change since 2006" that he compares to a "change since 1975." What, you're not smart enough to convert in your head on the fly?

Gen-X Zen

There's a catch-22 that I'm inordinately proud of "my" "generation" even as part of that level of pride involves a highly misunderstood ethos, one of whose manifestations (by all rights) ought to be refusal to pigeonhole yourself by arbitrary age range.

(Another of those, and perhaps the most misunderstood, is the meme of not caring about anything or anyone - rather the point is not to care about stupid people, and in general the sort of people who waste words on generational stereotypes are decidedly among the stupid.)

Anyway, this piece is sort of interesting and sort of vindicating if you can get over the fact that by definition it had no reason to exist.

One thing about "us" is that we'll do a significantly better job raising our kids than those silly helicopter parents did with the Y people.

We Are Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich!

(As a country.)

I never really reflected on what it means that there were so many of these in the past few years (just count the distinct facilities accounted for in the Related Videos).

Who needs bread and circuses? Can you imagine how badass it would have been for a Roman emperor to say "We need a new Colosseum, let's just demolish the old one"?

(Lest there be any confusion, I hope you already know full well my position on governments handing new stadiums to rich owners who by all rights could have paid for the things themselves. It's not like there are schools to fund or anything.)

It's Like Those HBO Comedy Specials, Only Worse

(My favorite of the black/white meta-jokes is when 30 Rock's Tracy Jordan did a "Black people dial the phone like this" bit.)

Once every few months Sylvia (the comic strip) is so funny that it's worth the drought. But oh, the drought.

Today we learn that, if stranded at an airport, many men would probably love to pay $200 for time on an indoor putting green, while many women would love a French manicure. Guffaw!

Speaking of comic strips, we learned yesterday that Zits is quite a magical family: They make 12-letter words in Scrabble, without even needing the board/grid! Just lay 'em out on the table!

Dear Sports Bloggers, And People Who Hate Same,

The political world already dealt with this blog angst thing three years ago, and got over it.

Unlike some of you, I had this post as my first exposure to this live extended rant.

The most annoying thing, by far, about Bissinger's approach is the needless generalization. Eugene Volokh wrote a long time ago about how absurd it was to describe any communication medium as a monolith. (This might not even be the best Volokh post on the subject, just the best I could find in three Google searches or fewer.)

Fortunately, Fire Joe Morgan made the exact same point (which I would have realized had I read the comments to the Reason post before now).

Analogy, in the Form of a Table

This is the best example of such a table I've seen in quite a long time.

Do You Have Any Idea What You're Missing?!

Two seemingly unrelated ideas from blog posts, where the thing they have in common on the surface is exactly what their fundamental common bond is:

"When I was a kid, I loved baseball more than anything, and I’m afraid I mean that literally — more than my family, my friends, even more than my dog. If given the opportunity, I would have played baseball 24 hours a day. And when I couldn’t play it, I would watch it on T.V.

Now I can barely sit through a whole inning of a game on T.V."
--Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics Blog

"So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television."
--Clay Shirky, quoted by Marginal Revolution

Dubner's quote also describes me, both as a kid and as an adult. I think it would still describe me no matter what baseball did to try to maximize the quality of its telecasts, because I've learned two important lessons since being a kid:

1. (less important) Attending a major league game in person is a tremendously satisfying experience to which TV can't possibly compare.

2. (more important) Adult life is chock full of tremendously satisfying experiences to which TV can't possibly compare.

Some Artists Are Too Full of Themselves

You may have heard about one or both of:

1. The artist who allegedly starved a dog to death as part of an exhibit (in Central America)

2. The Ivy League student who allegedly impregnated herself once a month, purposefully inducing miscarriage each time

The second one has to be a hoax, right? The first one may actually have happened; if it did, I fervently hope the artist himself starves to death some day.

Underrated Technology of the Day

Let's hear it for elevators! They've gone surprisingly far in giving us the lifestyle we now enjoy.

Unless you live in the Beltway, where height restrictions have led to astonishing unintended consequences. Yes, all that sprawl, all that traffic.

(This Reason post and the two linked-to entries had been open in my browser all day.)

Wasn't There a Gasoline Alley Storyline About This?

(By the way, that's a question that probably should rarely if ever be asked about something in McSweeneys of all places.)

Gross Factual Error of the Day

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal has ordered McDonald's to pay $55,000 for failing to do enough to accommodate an employee whose disabling skin condition prevented her from complying with the restaurant's hand-washing policy. Among other grounds for its decision, the tribunal cited the following:

* the relationship between food contamination and hand-washing;...
--Overlawyered.com

If any given legal body insists on flagrantly exceeding its fact-finding mission, the least it can do is avoid getting the facts ludicrously wrong.

Olympic Torch Apocrypha

According to this account, "authorities were forced to deliberately extinguish the flame for the first time ever as it passed through Paris."

(emphasis added)

My understanding is that the torch has gone out by accident many times. And if you ask me the whole ceremony is vastly overrated anyway, though you already knew how I felt about not only Olympiads in general but also (especially) Beijing 2008.

I'm heartened to see an entire world of people who feel about the same way I do about that regime and its behavior, though it's a little frightening how fervent the protest has become. (It's not as if mobs in Paris will somehow transform mainland China into a republic, any more than a local motorist could free Tibet.)

The Grammar of "None"

Volokh is right about this, though my ax to grind here is that I tend to associate "none" with plural verbs if I don't happen to think about it.

If you'll pardon the math jargon, an empty set is much more likely to have a relevant comparison to a set of many things than to a set of one thing.

How Did He Pull That Off?!

Read today's (March 27) Pearls Before Swine first, then today's Sally Forth. The first panel of the latter slayed me, given that context.

Real Estate Sentence of the Day

"They're not really being realistic about what the place is worth."

So claims the would-be seller of a house nobody wants to buy (at the listed price).

(From Yahoo! Finance via David Bernstein, in turn via Instapundit.)

"Greg and Barbara Abbott have already cut the price twice on the two-bedroom condominium they are trying to sell on the Las Vegas strip. They're asking $669,900 now -- and an offer in the $650,000 range means they'll lose money."

You mean to tell me goods occasionally lose market value? THE HORROR!

Misleading Factoid of the Day

The Tampa-St. Pete subregional was the first time in NCAA Division 1 basketball tournament history that all four underdogs won first-round games at the same subregion.

BUT: Until earlier this decade, each subregional had eight teams vying for the same quarterfinal spot. That means each subregional had either a #1 seed or a #2 seed.

They only started mixing and matching regions to subregionals very recently. I wonder how many subregionals have had first rounds entirely of 5-12 or 4-13 games.

NCAA Hoop Glimpses

As soon as I loaded Western Kentucky-Drake, Western Kentucky started a blood rain of 30-foot 3-pointers. Beautiful to watch.

American was "hanging with" Tennessee (per CBS Sportsline blurb), but then Tennessee hit upon a strategy of making the first free throw, missing the second, getting the rebound, getting fouled [etc.].

Gonzaga-Davidson is ugly as sin. They're standing around tossing the ball to each other and eventually taking hideous shots.

I wonder if the UPS whiteboard guy knows about Crayon Physics.

We Don't Know How Good We Have It

Burglary is way down because the stuff people would burgle is cheap and plentiful new (obviously if stolen it's used), thus the burglars would have nobody to sell to.

Meanwhile, instead of "Wow! It's live sports video on my computer screen!" I'm spoiled enough instead to think "Craig Bolerjack's partner is stinking up this broadcast."

CBS Broadcasters

Thanks to Awful Announcing and cut-and-paste, I've updated these posts.

March Madness TV: Friday

Two games in green = I'd probably watch or listen, access permitting.

Friday, ca 12:30 EDT
(15) American (21-11) 12:15 pm EDT
(2) Tennessee (29-4)
BJCC Arena (Birmingham, AL: Verne Lundquist and Bill Raftery)

(10) Davidson (26-6) 12:25 pm EDT
(7) Gonzaga (25-7)
RBC Center (Raleigh, NC: Jim Nantz and Billy Packer)

(12) West. Kentucky (27-6) 12:30 pm EDT
(5) Drake (28-4)
St. Pete Times Forum (Tampa, FL: Tim Brando and Mike Gminski)

(10) St. Mary's (25-6) 12:30 pm EDT
(7) Miami (FL) (22-10)
Alltel Arena (North Little Rock, AR: Ian Eagle and Jim Spanarkel)

Friday, ca 3 EDT
(little known fact: Austin Peay is in Tennessee, not actually in Austin, TX. But UMBC is right down the road from Georgetown)
(10) South Alabama (26-6) 2:45 pm EDT
(7) Butler (29-3)
BJCC Arena (Birmingham, AL: Verne Lundquist and Bill Raftery)

(15) UMBC (24-8) 2:55 pm EDT
(2) Georgetown (27-5)
RBC Center (Raleigh, NC: Jim Nantz and Billy Packer)

(15) Austin Peay (24-10) 3:00 pm EDT
(2) Texas (28-6)
Alltel Arena (North Little Rock, AR: Ian Eagle and Jim Spanarkel)

(13) San Diego (21-13) 3:00 pm EDT
(4) Connecticut (24-8)
St. Pete Times Forum (Tampa, FL: Tim Brando and Mike Gminski)

Friday, ca 5 EDT
You'll get nothing and you'll like it!

Friday, ca 7 EDT
(It's good to be North Carolina, and open the tournament in your home state year after year.)
(16) cannon fodder 7:10 pm EDT
(1) North Carolina (32-2)
RBC Center (Raleigh, NC: Jim Nantz and Billy Packer)

(11) St. Joseph's (21-12) 7:10 pm EDT
(6) Oklahoma (22-11)
BJCC Arena (Birmingham, AL: Verne Lundquist and Bill Raftery)

(13) Siena (22-10) 7:20 pm EDT
(4) Vanderbilt (26-7)
St. Pete Times Forum (Tampa, FL: Tim Brando and Mike Gminski)

(9) Oregon (18-13) 7:25 pm EDT
(8) Mississippi St. (22-10)
Alltel Arena (North Little Rock, AR: Ian Eagle and Jim Spanarkel)

Friday, ca 9:30 EDT
(9) Arkansas (22-11) 9:40 pm EDT
(8) Indiana (25-7)
RBC Center (Raleigh, NC: Jim Nantz and Billy Packer)

(14) Boise St. (25-8) 9:40 pm EDT
(3) Louisville (24-8)
BJCC Arena (Birmingham, AL: Verne Lundquist and Bill Raftery)

(12) Villanova (20-12) 9:50 pm EDT
(5) Clemson (24-9)
St. Pete Times Forum (Tampa, FL: Tim Brando and Mike Gminski)

(16) TX Arlington (21-11) 9:55 pm EDT
(1) Memphis (33-1)
Alltel Arena (North Little Rock, AR: Ian Eagle and Jim Spanarkel)

March Madness TV: Thursday

Two games in green = I'd probably watch or listen, access permitting.

Thursday, ca 12:30 EDT
(14) Georgia (17-16) 12:20 pm EDT
(3) Xavier (27-6)
Verizon Center (Washington DC: Craig Bolerjack and Bob Wenzel)

(16) Portland St. (23-9) 12:25 pm EDT
(1) Kansas (31-3)
Qwest Center Omaha (Omaha, NE: Kevin Harlan and Dan Bonner)

(12) Temple (21-12) 12:30 pm EDT
(5) Michigan St. (25-8)
Pepsi Center (Denver, CO: Gus Johnson and Len Elmore)

Thursday, ca 3 EDT
(11) Kentucky (18-12) 2:30 pm EDT
(6) Marquette (24-9)
Honda Center (Anaheim, CA: Dick Enberg/Carter Blackburn and Jay Bilas)

(11) Baylor (21-10) 2:50 pm EDT
(6) Purdue (24-8)
Verizon Center (Washington DC: Craig Bolerjack and Bob Wenzel)

(9) Kent St. (28-6) 2:55 pm EDT
(8) UNLV (26-7)
Qwest Center Omaha (Omaha, NE: Kevin Harlan and Dan Bonner)

(13) Oral Roberts (24-8) 3:00 pm EDT
(4) Pittsburgh (26-9)
Pepsi Center (Denver, CO: Gus Johnson and Len Elmore)

Thursday, 5 EDT
(14) Cornell (22-5) 5:00 pm EDT
(3) Stanford (26-7)
Honda Center (Anaheim, CA: Dick Enberg/Carter Blackburn and Jay Bilas)

Thursday, ca 7 EDT
(11) Kansas St. (20-11) 7:10 pm EDT
(6) USC (21-11)
Qwest Center Omaha (Omaha, NE: Kevin Harlan and Dan Bonner)

(15) Belmont (25-8) 7:10 pm EDT
(2) Duke (27-5)
Verizon Center (Washington DC: Craig Bolerjack and Bob Wenzel)

(13) Winthrop (22-11) 7:20 pm EDT
(4) Washington St. (24-8)
Pepsi Center (Denver, CO: Gus Johnson and Len Elmore)

(9) Texas A&M (24-10) 7:25 pm EDT
(8) BYU (27-7)
Honda Center (Anaheim, CA: Dick Enberg/Carter Blackburn and Jay Bilas)

Thursday, ca 9:30 EDT
(14) CSU Fullerton (24-8) 9:40 pm EDT
(3) Wisconsin (29-4)
Qwest Center Omaha (Omaha, NE: Kevin Harlan and Dan Bonner)

(10) Arizona (19-14) 9:40 pm EDT
(7) West Virginia (24-10)
Verizon Center (Washington DC: Craig Bolerjack and Bob Wenzel)

(12) George Mason (23-10) 9:50 pm EDT
(5) Notre Dame (24-7)
Pepsi Center (Denver, CO: Gus Johnson and Len Elmore)

(16) Miss. Valley St. (17-15) 9:55 pm EDT
(1) UCLA (31-3)
Honda Center (Anaheim, CA: Dick Enberg/Carter Blackburn and Jay Bilas)

It's Not the Naming So Much as the Typing

How many countries can you type in five minutes? (Me: 118) Go here to find out. (The real graphic took way too long to load.)

Catching Up On Shared Sports Culture

This post gave me a chance to see this ending (which I think I'd actually never seen before).

Adam Morrison: Even sadder than I'd have guessed.

Gus Johnson: I claim to like him as much as anyone, yet this particular game he overdid it.

Ceiling Bed Is

Watching you from obstructed view?

Seen Today at Cody's Books

A novelization of Garfield: The Movie. Is this book, as distinct from the comic strip anthologies, better or worse than the Scrabble Home Game that's based on the TV game show rather than on Scrabble proper? And compared to this particular book, can Jim Davis take credit for writing graphic novels?

Also, a novelization of Shrek 2.

And finally, Yiddish for dogs.

My Sports Coverage Pet Peeve

...extended to fan commentary:

"Jason, when you ask to be traded from the team you signed a contract with, you quit on them."
--ESPN.com's "Featured Comment"

Maybe I'm just being eccentric here (is it the Milton Bradley in me?) but it's disrespectful for this "Gazzellioni" user, or anyone else who doesn't know Jason Kidd personally, to address him by first name only. (It pains me that one of the worst offenders here is Oakland A's GM Billy Beane.)

Alumni Should Be Appalled by This

An assistant basketball coach may have broken rules by visiting high school players to tell them why they should go to Harvard.

"Why should someone go to Harvard?" is a question that shouldn't even need to be asked.

Quasi-Urban Life is Good

If you'll forgive the pretentious trailing 'e' then Alameda Towne Center is a nifty place. It's exactly what a shopping area in California should be like.

Now, I think it was very short-sighted of the powers that be not to let Target do any expansion on the empty building where Safeway used to be (before Safeway moved to its much much bigger quarters). Instead they hit an impasse, Target walked, and that building stays empty. But on balance Alameda has worked out very nicely.

I feel very fortunate to be within walking distance of all our errands, and across the street from San Francisco Bay. The main difference between our life and the modern urban planner's ideal is that we hardly ever use public transportation. But it's not like we drive around the island a lot either: I drive to and from work (8.2 miles each way; a comparable Tulsa commute would be 51st & Sheridan to downtown -- since obviously everyone who reads this knows their Tulsa geography cold). We drive to A's games (4.8 miles, at least until the move) and to {SF, Berkeley, or points south}.

In any case I was reading about this heinous crime, and even though I have nothing but contempt for the terrorists in question, I'm still quite relieved not to live in a distant suburb, even a "rural cluster."

Yao

Pretty good discussion thread, with a financial market metaphor that I don't know enough to understand. (Not that I know enough basketball to comment intelligently on Yao Ming's career either.)

30 Years of Sketch Comedy on One Web Site

A few days after the Super Bowl, I watched the highlight package on NFL.com -- and minutes later read a Bill Simmons column complaining that Super Bowl highlights weren't on YouTube (nor, as far as his incompetent self knew, anywhere else on the Internet).

Long story short I wonder how many fans of Saturday Night Live experience something similar. On the off chance you didn't know, they roll their own archives. For example, Jimmy Carter talks you down from a bad trip.

Problematic Sports Sentence of the Day

(N.B. I really don't follow college basketball, except at best about three weeks a year. You can guess in which month. I also have no horse to back between Memphis and Knoxville. They're both decent cities.)

"Memphis wanted to prove it really was the best team in the country, maybe even make a run at perfection. Turns out, the Tigers aren't even best in their own state."
--Associated Press by way of Glenn Reynolds (doesn't everyone get their sports updates from the right half of the political blogs?).

Last night Tennessee proved to be better than Memphis. So as of last night, Memphis indeed "wasn't the best." I suppose a lot depends on what time frame you give to any given superlative.

On the season, Yahoo! tells me that Memphis is 26-1 compared to Tennessee's 25-2. (Don't make me dig up their respective Ratings Percentage Indexes: I just don't care enough.)

If you throw all your eggs in the "head-to-head" basket then does that mean Tennessee is putatively the better of those teams until the moment they meet again?

If your argument rests on winning "when it counts" then the best is yet to come of course.

This Has Been Impolite to Point Out Since Katrina

When Bill Simmons writes:

"There wasn't that hard-core N'Awlins stench that always makes you feel like you're inhaling 150 years of garbage, spilled drinks and various forms of bodily fluids."

...he reminds me that the stench in question was otherworldly, and is by far what I remember most from every time I've been to the French Quarter.

San Diego Snowstorm

Hmm

Shaq to Suns

This isn't exactly an appeal to authority, but I wish I'd gotten around to staunchly defending the Shaq-to-Suns trade before ESPN finally published a Bill Simmons column doing the same.

This is grounded in intuition rather than analysis, but then so was my (OK, everyone's) belief that the Giants would get big playoff momentum from nearly upsetting New England.

The two situations are similar, in that bean-counting points strongly one direction but Hollywood storytelling points strongly in another. The big difference seems to be that most people thought the Giants would do great in the playoffs (where at the time, "great" could mean even as many as two playoff wins, much less four), while almost nobody likes the Shaq trade.

If Mary Tyler Moore Were Written by WKRP Writers

Whale of a good YouTube clip here.

(See, this is what Bill Simmons is good for.)

Capitalist Quote of the Day

"Boy, these airlines will do anything to get your money, like charge you for labor and services."
--The Onion, man on the street, about United's $25 surcharge for a second checked bag.

I'm already breathless in anticipation of "World Leaders Gather To Roast Mahmoud Ahmadinejad" (will get to it later)

Meta-Imposter Syndrome

This article about Imposter Syndrome is interesting at first -- there have been specific contexts in my work career where I've identified -- but the sample questions they give don't seem to measure what I think of as Imposter Syndrome.

At times, I feel my success has been due to some kind of luck

Hasn't everyone's? It would represent an entirely different set of neuroses not to realize this, and it would be churlish not to acknowledge it.

I can give the impression that I’m more competent than I really am

That's just being a good presenter.

If I’m to receive a promotion of some kind, I hesitate to tell others until it’s an accomplished fact

That's just being a good Jew, and not counting your chickens...

Ancient Fake Poetry

There's nothing new on the Internet. Earlier this week someone forwarded me the map of the U.S. by beverage synonym ("pop"/"soda"/"coke"). Earlier this month various libertarian bloggers rediscovered the guy who aesthetically ranked U.S. world flags. On it goes.

[Link added, text fixed. I guess that's some kind of right-of-center Freudian slip?]

Anyhow, there's a small chance you never saw Francis Heaney's (The Modern Humorist) Holy Tango of Poetry ("If poets Wrote Poems Whose Titles Were Anagrams of Their Names"). Read it all post-haste, especially Dammit, Dave, both haiku, "Yoga Alumnae," and "I Will Alarm Islamic Owls."

Sharks

Owen Nolan and Mike Grier got into a fight today.

I sometimes listen to hockey on my way home from work, at least if the Sharks game has preempted classic rock.

I've heard of both Nolan and Grier -- but aren't they both pushing 40?

The Sharks were playing Calgary and the Flames got a power play. I rooted for the power play conversion just to see where the game was -- that is, whether the home crowd would cheer a goal. The goal came within ten seconds of the penalty, and indeed it was a Calgary crowd.

Then I realized that if it's 17:00 in the third period at 8 p.m. PST then the game is almost certainly Mountain time.

We Can't Stop Here, This Is Michael Moore Country!

80-person brawl at a Chuck E Cheese in Flint.

Wild Speculation

Pretend for a moment that instead of happening in real life, Heath Ledger died just before the opening credits of your favorite police procedural drama, or your favorite mystery series.

Now solve the case in 100 words or less. What are the big plot twists and how does it all get resolved?

A Very Satisfying 4th Wall Experience

Watch these in either order:

Monk - "Mr. Monk and the T.V. Star" (Sarah Silverman's first appearance as Marci Maven)
Family Guy - "Da Boom" (Y2K apocalypse)

(How you accomplish this is up to you: DVD rental, DVD ownership, serendipitous syndicated reruns, torrents...)

For a quick 10 points what person is the common factor here?

Yourself, Myself, or Scott Adams, in One Word

Scott Adams has discovered an interesting phenomenon that might actually have a simpler explanation than he (directly) mentions.

Suppose you had to pick one word to describe yourself. Your first reaction, I assume, is that it is impossible. You are so many different things, in so many different contexts. No one word can capture more than a tiny slice.

Now suppose I ask you to think of people you know, and see how many of them you can describe in one word.

You can describe people you know in one word, because you happen to know them in one context (rather than the many contexts of your own experience).

Not to sound arrogant but I probably have a lot of acquaintances whose one-word description of me would be "smart" (or some synonym); you all probably also do. But if you actively seek out the company of extremely intelligent people, suddenly that word isn't so useful as a label for any given person within that group.

Lazy Onion Gaffe of the Day

I really enjoy the "Our Dumb World" atlas, but shouldn't poutine be somewhere in Quebec? (Not Alberta!)

TV Thoughts by Demographic Stereotype

We've learned so far in 2008 that we're not 13-year-old girls (nor the flounciest gay men imaginable). We're not 19-year-old girls who long to be out of college (nor 40-something women who long to be 19). We're not pretentious stoners (who don't seem to realize that Mary Louise Parker's character is as dumb as a post).

There's a very good chance we're senior citizens. I'm actually quite eager for a second season's worth of research on this.

Nonpolitical Links at Reason

A Missouri town wants to ban swearing in bars.

The font revolution: Remember when typeface design could only involve printing presses? I don't either.

Some genetically modified rice might slow down global warming.

I Have A New Favorite Deadspin Thread

That kid who got himself killed by a tiger was buried in a Raider jersey.

Best comment in the thread: Rob Iracane

Worst comment in the thread: The painfully unfunny, obvious one. (With a sentiment that I agree with, but as message board threads go the thought itself is, like, so two weeks ago.) I'd like to think if this were real-time conversation, that one would lead to two seconds of awkward silence, then a right back where everyone left off.

They Don't Outsource Everything

My first thought, on reading this guy's account of Rose Parade volunteering, was "shouldn't they find a way to outsource this?"

My second: Why pay some guy in India 25 cents an hour when they can get this chump to do this absolutely free?

My third: He spent hours doing what? Heaven forbid he spend the same amount of time at a battered women's shelter, in a classroom, in a hospital, or on any of dozens of other projects that much more directly make the world a better place. "Tediously beautiful," indeed.

(To be sure, there are a lot of things I spend hours doing that could have been much more nobly spent on the aforementioned charity work. But I'm very clear-eyed about that being my own time. If you're going to blow a huge chunk of hours doing something so unpleasant in its own right, why on Earth would you let the greater good be something so lame?)

Largest Carbon Footprint in Human History

Really? David Beckham?

I'd have been dead certain it was George W. Bush. In fact, I'm still not entirely convinced it isn't.

Beckham's is still pretty flagrant.

The Cheeseburgers Are Unusually Good Today

(Cat pictures, that is.)

Three of the first four (this, this, and this) are each better than anything else I've seen there in the past few days.

Videocracy

(From The Onion AV Club)

I don't think this was an accident. (NSFW?)

Both Hillary and Agnetha have on entirely the wrong shade of lipstick for their respective contexts.

This man knows how to move.

The best one on today's chart.

I Liked This Book a Lot in High School

It's not immediately obvious why.

Anyway, Jane Eyre runs for president. Spot-on.

Wikipedia: A Mild Disappointment

That what follows could even be called "a mild disappointment" reflects an astonishing idea, that one could hold Wikipedia (of all sources) to high expectations for breaking news coverage. On the big stories, though, Wikipedia tends to be both thorough and even-handed.

That said, I learned nothing new from the San Francisco zoo tiger attacks page, and in fact they listed one allegation (slingshots) that has since been denied without being corroborated.

Since I tend to lots of sympathy for Tatiana and very little for the dead guy or the brothers, I was hoping to have my bias tempered; instead, if anything, one can easily infer that the most recent editors of this page have a worldview similar to mine.

DNRstrong

(smirk)

Suburbanites Behaving Badly

The Netflix sleeve for Season 1, Disc 1 of Weeds claims that the show is "hilarious and poignant." Having watched the first episode, Julia agrees with poignant but I think they're wrong on both counts. (That said, I think I'm more willing than she is to keep watching.)

I've never seen Desperate Housewives but my wild guess is that Weeds has a similar feel (with slightly racier subject matter).

One general premise behind this whole category of entertainment is that suburbia breeds vapidity and ennui. Seems plausible to me, but whether it's actually interesting is another matter. I'm not sure whether we're supposed to identify, to empathize, or to pointedly do neither.

(There's always a "protest too much" element when someone claims that potentially controversial material is boring. But I'm libertarian enough to sympathize with your friendly neighborhood drug dealer, be it a newly single mother, an awkward gay teenager, or whoever we become acquainted with when we finally get to The Wire.)

24: Season 4

Two things bother me about the same subplot at the end.

1. A Chinese man flees to a Chinese consulate after collaborating with a terrorist named Marwan. If masked men subsequently abduct the Chinese guy, then wouldn't the presumptive suspects be the U.S. government and Marwan himself? Why go out of your way to frame some random dissident group when it would make so much more sense for Marwan to have done it?

Cleverer David Palmer: "OH NO! We think he's in Marwan's hands now. Care to help us track him down?"

2. The Chinese wanted [the appearance of] justice, with Bauer tried and sentenced under their laws. How does a dead body fulfill their wishes, especially if the death is under mysterious circumstances (and the corpse in question isn't actually Bauer's)?

My Rooting Interests May Surprise You

(Or not.)

Two otherwise unrelated notions:

1. I want New England to finish 19-0. I realized this while on the phone with Chad at the end of the Patriots-Ravens game a few weeks ago.

2. Even before reading this article, I had more sympathy for the tiger than for the humans. The article just supported my immediate suspicions.

The Decline and Fall of 24

It happens late in Season 4, right around the time that Iowa is inexplicably identified as "mountainous terrain." (A few minutes after a point at "115 degrees west" had been grossly misplaced into Iowa.)

But the geographic ignorance isn't the problem, just the symptom of a problem that manifests itself from midnight onward.

(lots of spoilers follow, but only through Season 4)

The first 16 hours of 24, Season 4 -- and the first 88 hours of the series itself -- are magnificent television. Even the big plot twist at 11 p.m. (the shooting down of Air Force One, which I believe Bill Simmons of all people spoiled for me) leaves open all sorts of possibilities.

The 11 p.m. to Midnight episode focuses entirely on recovering the nuclear football, and nicely accomplishes two things: drama in and of itself, along with exposition.

Then two things in particular happen:
1. The writers abruptly stop being even-handed, particularly about torture. I don't think any sane person could accuse the first 88 hours of the series of political hackery. All previous scenes of torture, or potential torture, had been morally ambiguous at best. In Season 2 we see a president about to rely on faulty intelligence to start an unwise war(!), and even a few hours earlier in Season 4 we see corrupt defense contractors. Even immediately before Air Force One goes down we see the catastrophic consequences of intelligence people doing their job badly, i.e. failing to observe procedures and letting a big lead fall through the cracks until it's too late. But the last few hours of Season 4 are agitprop: They support a position I agree with, but very ham-handedly.

2. As a plot device to bring back a super-popular character (and also support the aforementioned ham-handedness), they make vice president Logan out to be a complete pansy. Now, 24 asks people to believe a lot of far-fetched things (of which my favorite is that Jack Bauer would find it a uniquely good idea to knock over a gas station (and take hostages!) as pretext for stalling a suspect). I love David Palmer as much as anyone (Julia loves him even more) but this I just can't buy.

In any case, some of my left-minded acquaintances have scoffed at 24 and made allusions that had previously made no sense whatsoever to me -- until I realized that the plot and even the tone they had in mind where what we start to see at the end of Season 4.

Bonus points for "can you torture a guy who might know where a nuke is about to go off in an hour?" AND the hoary old rail-switch problem into the same episode. (OK, not literally one man versus five on train tracks, but instead one sure death versus millions in peril, in that "Jack points a gun at a surgeon's head" scene just before 3 a.m.)

Don't Wear It Out

Can you find the Marginal Revolution post (specifically, some hyperlink text) that keeps distracting/startling me?

The Next Big YouTube Meme

Car crashes into ABC7 Chicago studio

This is exactly why WKRP needs to come out on DVD (and why I wonder how we ever got along before YouTube).

An Off-the-Cuff Ranking of Dunder Mifflin Employees

(Most of the way through The Office (U.S.) Season 2 via Netflix-on-demand. The rankings below are inordinately influenced by the "take your kid to work" episode.)

1. Dwight K. Schrute. He's an acquired taste, to be sure, and it's taken the better part of two seasons to acquire. That said, there's deceptive depth of character here. Even at his worst, he's painfully similar to people I've known through school or quiz-bowl. At his best (for example, the speech he gives upon winning a salesmanship award), he blows my mind.

2. Kevin Malone. The big guy's sense of humor is a guilty pleasure. Bonus points for being accidentally(?) named after the Dodgers' infamous "new sheriff."

3. Ryan Howard. Speaking of MLB namesakes, the temp gives one of the best off-stage interviews. He's just witnessed something truly disturbing, and instead of words, everything is in his facial expression -- and at that, entirely in his eyes. All the better when he begins seeing (but dreading) the ditzy Indian gal.

4. Phyllis. From the kids' show: "Are you Mother Goose?" More importantly, she's the only person (other than Roy I guess) ever to give Pam a well deserved (if inadvertent) emasculation, after all Pam put Jim through. (At Jim's party, when Pam asks Phyllis about office romance, hoping to hear some Dwight-Angela gossip.)

5. Stanley. Speaking of Ryan, the black guy was a bit underdeveloped (all he ever did was glower at Michael and be the foil for Michael's awkward racist jokes) until he got to yell at Ryan after his own eighth-grade daughter was hitting on Ryan. "...Jesus himself won't be able to help you..."

6. Jim Halpert. Everyman, I guess.

7. Derek. Poor guy. All the warehouse foreman wanted was to get the shipments out on time, then this jerk Michael has to come down and ransack the place.

8. Indian gal whose name I forget. Shallow and chatty enough to make my whimper, but giving her at least that much personality is a step up from the archetype Michael sees when he sees her.

9. Michael Scott. Had to get around to this eventually. He's such a despicable man (but Steve Carrell plays him so well!).

10. Oscar. I hope his home life gets fleshed out further. We've only just met his boyfriend(?).

11. Toby. Human resources guy. Pleasantly underplays his part. Wouldn't a real-life Toby have gotten a real-life Michael fired long ago?

12. Pam. She's too cute to rank any lower, but where is the outrage? Her unique combination of self-unawareness and weak will is completely ruining at least two lives (maybe three if there's more to Roy than we see).

13. Alcoholic redhead whose name I forget. One-joke pony.

14. Roy. But I have to admit that of all possible Valentine's Day gifts, "the best sex you've ever had" reflects by far the most chutzpah.

15. Jan Levinson. More personal weakness than Pam, but without the good looks to overcome that. Compare what I hate about Pam and Jan as characters to what I like about Dwight as a character. Who knew that between 24 and The Office, the latter would be more likely to mold me into some creepy fascist?

16. Todd Packer. His only redeeming virtue is how ridiculous his "big package" ends up making Michael look. (Compare Michael's reaction before he knows who did it, to the reaction after he learns Packer did it.)

Book Review of the Day

"I had not read anything by Jack London before, nor did I know that Jack London was gay, but The Sea Wolf has a gaydar cross-section of 100 dBsm. Fighter jets could potentially dispense canisters of Sea Wolf paperbacks to jam enemy gaydars. Just saying."
--Richard Mason

Dumbest Ideas of 2007

Two finalists. There might be notions more illogical, plans more catastrophic, or assumptions more spectacularly false, but for stupidity so obvious it's almost elegant -- so aggravating that your blood pressure will instantly go up -- it's almost impossible to top one or the other of:

1. Cell phones that blare an alarm when you call 911. Some day this "feature" will get someone killed. (Honorable mention for the Slashdot comment, modded up to the highest possible score, that begins "I call 911 on a regular basis [...]".)

2. Cops in a suburb of Sacramento will pull drivers over to reward them for driving well. (Remember when Homer Simpson invented the "EVERYTHING IS OKAY!" alarm?)

I'm seriously tempted to claim that #2 is the dumber idea, despite being less likely to result in someone's death.

Decimation via Infant Mortality

Eek:

It says here that Romania has the highest child mortality rate in the developed world: 19 deaths per every 1000 newborn children.

That's nearly 1 in 50.

(I don't necessarily agree with the blog to which I immediately linked: The biggest problem with Romania is probably something other than that the health care is government-run, and I'm sure someone else could find many countries without government-run health care where the medical treatment is abysmal.)

I'm With Him on the Non-Apology...

...but this guy lost me with his pity party quote. (I almost wrote "victim routine," which would have created interesting/unfortunate language ambiguity given what made him notorious to begin with.)

Great Mismatches Between Hubris and Accomplishment

(Do I just mean "smarm" instead of hubris?)

"What, you want to argue with 5,000 fact-based season simulations?"
--image caption on ESPN's front page

Five thousand is a tiny bit smaller (in fact it's smaller by a factor of 20) than the one simulations run by Baseball Prospectus for baseball's playoff odds.

Ironically, one million was itself the figure that brought derision down on Dr. Evil.

Sports Human of the Year

I agree with commenter Becky_MI: Isiah Thomas vs. Marques Slocum (he of the fornication feline) is an unfair first-round match because they both belong in the top four.

May I Mambo Dogface to the Banana Patch?

I'm really looking forward to this book.

Nurse Carla Espinosa Syndrome

If you watch Scrubs, have you ever noticed that the greater the degree of Carla's assumed moral authority, and the more indignant she is, the more wrong she is? (This is especially true when it comes to her marriage.)

Facebook Statuses

Thanks to Facebook, I know who won 2007 TrashMasters, who came in second, and (most importantly) who successfully defended her dissertation and became a Ph.D.

Worst State Quarter, Bar None

The final five coins will start with Oklahoma, which entered the union in 1907. It will feature the state bird, the scissortail flycatcher, and the state wildflower, the Indian blanket.
--Yahoo! News (via Fark)

WTF?

(So what would I have done? Put a feather headdress on an oil derrick. Direct and to the point.)

Copa Boda

This is a week old but this Deadspin post reminded me:

As many of you remember, on our wedding day the U.S. drew Italy. Last week we went to a wedding in Hanford, sharing a suite with Julia's parents. In the morning we watched Israel upset Russia (more straightforward story here) on Fox's Spanish-language all-futbol cable channel. Great game, winning goal scored just past the 91-minute mark.

Sniglet is not a Word

(By definition.)

However, I've gotten SNIGLET (also known as TINGLES or SINGLET or GLISTEN) on my Scrabble rack at least three times in recent memory.

Mary Worth = Dolores Umbridge?

Discuss.

Canine Cuteness

This is the face of an adorable dog.

I tend to favor big dogs, with short thick fur, who could plausibly perform acts of heroism (yet also be gentle and loving to a small child).

On further review (i.e. a bunch of Google Image Searches) my favorite dog breed seems to be husky. Honorable mention to collies (we had one growing up) and golden retrievers. I'm not much of a fan of hounds, terriers, frou-frou dogs, fighting dogs, or Great Danes (ha ha, most Great Danes look a lot like Marmaduke...).

JC Penny Catalog

From 1977

Tonight's Fox Lineup

As I mentioned to someone by e-mail nearly an hour ago, tonight's Simpsons had the most promising beginning in years. It went downhill as soon as they stopped caring about the comic book plot, but those five minutes were fun while they lasted.

King of the Hill was everything brilliant that this show is capable of being: An upstanding man, who's basically right about everything, coping with an absurdly changing world. Lots of satire across the board but all of it gentle. Our food could taste so much better than it typically does.

It pains me that tonight's Family Guy is about to rip off a Season 7 Simpsons episode, but I'll roll with the punches. (Something I learned by way of an image on a Deadspin thread: Tom Brady was on The Simpsons a year before he was on Family Guy.)

Update still to come re Family Guy & American Dad. I have to admit the latter is an acquired taste, yet I'm in the process of acquiring it, especially subplots involving Haley and the alien.

UPDATE: My sister and I had the exact opposite reactions to tonight's Seth MacFarlane shows. I can't tell you how brilliant American Dad was: Everything from the alien as a bad poker player to the half price park admission with soda can to the dog outside the convenience store.

Speaking of Oklahoma

It turns 100 tomorrow. Happy birthday (in case I forget)!

Nothing much happened on April 22, 1989, if I remember right. At least nothing that got as much coverage as Nolan Ryan striking out Rickey Henderson for #5000. (Yes, I had to look up both the land rush day (just the day, knew the year) and what else happened that day.)

Boston University Fact of the Day

It says here BU School of Law ranks in the 89th percentile on the US News ratings, while the undergraduate institution is in the 78% percentile.

Both of those sound about right to me.

On the same topic: Nearly every law school uses GPA and LSAT as two of the main admission criteria. As of 1996 BU gave LSAT more weight (relative to GPA) than nearly any other institute. Does my not being a lawyer vindicate the more GPA-centric admissions departments?

(By the way, Google cares deeply about applicants' college GPA. Very few employers do (aside from deciding whether to hire recent graduates) but Google does.)

Do Either of These Phrases Annoy You?

More exactly, "at what frequency of usage would either of these phrases annoy you"?

A. "Mea culpa"

B. "My bad"

Has Seth MacFarlane Run Out of Ideas?

I'm not saying Part 2 (tonight) wasn't funny at times, but that's a lot of broken walls, shattered conceits, gratuitous crossovers, and the like.

"Whose dream is it going to be?"

"His of course."

Aslan as Allegory

Best religious commentary I've read in awhile. (Rebutting another piece of commentary.)

The sacrifice of the Lamb of God is extraordinary precisely because the Lamb of God is actually the Lion of Judah. A lamb that dies on the sacrificial altar is no more than one in a string of pointless sacrifices; the lamb has no choice in the matter. What is central to the Narnia stories, and to Christian theology, is that the lion, which could rend the sacrificiants limb from limb, instead deliberately eschews violence and lays himself down to be killed. The lion-as-lamb simultaneously acts to end the violent power that is lion-ness, and the passivity that is lamb-ness. It is an endlessly rich act, which Gopnik would have us replace with the martyrdom of the cow at the slaughterhouse gate.

What About Those of Us Who Built Our Own Comics Pages?

E-mail subject line from Houston Chronicle Subscriber Services: "Get your collectible HANNAH MONTANA Poster in THIS Sunday's Chronicle!"

The message body is an HTML graphic that I assume doesn't tell you anything you didn't infer already.

Shaq

Is Shaquille O'Neal 0-4 with that monstrosity of a beard (as seen on ESPN's front page) or is that thing older than it looks?

New House Contest Snafu

This is problematic. (On the other hand, unbelievably many commenters made the same ridiculous reading comprehension error. In fairness the article was unacceptably confusing on the point in question. Whoever wrote that copy should be fired on the spot.)

If the real estate company's claim is true then her odds of getting the house are essentially zero; on the other hand, especially in light of all the newspaper publicity, if ever there was a case for negligent infliction of emotional distress...

Other Than That, It's A Safe Neighborhood

This murder happened very close to where my wife grew up (link fixed). (You can tell by the size of the tennis courts and the infield dirt on the baseball fields. Depending on where in the park this was, the 0.4 mile "drive" is probably more like 0.2 on foot.)

Statistic of the day: "Oakland has had more than a hundred homicides this year. Until Halloween night, Alameda had had none this year."

The assailants were Asian juveniles, slender in build with heights ranging from 5 feet 5 inches to 5 feet 8 inches.

User Interface of the Day

When it comes to Bay Area traffic, black is worse than red -- but pink is worse than either of them!!

Today's Succinct Putdown of a Professor I Once Had

"A good rule of thumb is to read anything that comes from Belknap Press at Harvard, unless of course it is Michael Sandel's question-begging critique of transhumanism and genetic engineering."
--Tyler Cowen

Sandel team-taught a political philosophy class with Harvey Mansfield. He was Alan Colmes before Hannity & Colmes existed.

I Want One of These!

"I've got BETTER things to DO than DRUGS" (or, BETTER [...] DO [...] DRUGS)
--unfortunate bracelet that won't be distributed in schools after all

That's a whole lot better than using marker to change "The Choice For Me: Drug Free" to "The Choice For Me: None of Your Business."

Clark Byse

If I were a better alumnus, I'd have heard long ago that Clark Byse died earlier this month, without needing to read the Orin Kerr's tribute on Volokh.com.

I took contract law from Byse, in the same section as Markos Moulitsas (of DailyKos).

ZA as a word

I can't quibble with its status as a word, either the slang for "pizza" (mind, I don't know anyone who calls it that, just as I can't wrap my head around a plausible pronunciation of "puter" - is it a homophone for "pewter"?) or if you insist as a Japanese trade guild.

Even so, it adds a lot of variance to the letter "Z" in certain word games (and Facebook apps that mimic those games). QI also has this effect.

(Neither Scrabble nor Scrabulous agrees with my claim that "zen" is often used as a common noun; then again Firefox doesn't recognize it as a correctly spelled word either.)

Buffalo

(The bison intimidate the bison who intimidate the bison who [...])

Buffalo probably can't make a comeback, and more to the point the money spent trying to restore a place is wasted compared to money spent improving the lives of people.

On the other hand, Gregg Easterbrook is implicitly surprised that corporations don't flock to "top-quality housing stock at far below the median U.S. price, ideal summer weather, a strong cultural scene, the last open-for-development urban waterfront in the United States, a human-scale city where you never waste one second of your life stuck in traffic jams."

Easterbrook left out the part about the high taxes, not to mention the relatively low % of locals with college degrees.

Flawed Premise of the Day

How soon did you spot the fundamental flaw in the first two paragraphs of this piece (the "fatal" flaw? ha!)?

In paragraph four we learn that the author apparently has too much tunnel vision to even contemplate euthanasia at the exact moment when it needs to be contemplated. (The subsequent paragraph has a particularly egregious deflection of responsibility: When she writes "Sabra had no such luck," she really means "Sabra's owner is ssslllooowww.")

FULL DISCLOSURE: We do have a cat. A few months ago we took her to a feline dermatologist, where we managed to get a bill for almost exactly the same amount I was paying in monthly rent four years ago. I regret none of this: She seemed to have allergies but now we're 99% sure she doesn't; we got a diagnosis (her symptoms aren't nearly as bad as the usual case, which is part of why it was a challenging case) and neither she nor we are suffering.

I doubt we'll ever take a dead animal to the vet, and I can tell you now that we'll NEVER EVER have a sudden in-car epiphany after dropping an animal off for tests that it was too bad we didn't think of euthanasia. Reject it, maybe, but to just slap your head as if you could've had a V8? Maybe Dahlia Lithwick isn't the most brain-dead Slate writer after all.

Quick Question About Apartment 3-G

Is Ruby paying any rent? If not, then I'm completely with Margo on the upcoming cat fight.

UPDATE: On the other hand, Ruby can live. April (FBoFW) and Vera (Mary Worth) both must die of melodrama.

UPDATE2: On the third hand this week's Sally Forth is awesome. It puts the actual soap opera strips to shame.

This Just Makes Me Love My Baseball Think Factory Screen Name All The More

Joe Mathlete explains Marmaduke. The October 2 entry is the hardest I've laughed in months. (For full effect, scroll down gradually, taking in the others along the way.)

P.S. My Baseball Think Factory screen name is "Marmaduke Ellington." (I post at best once in a blue moon.)

Warning: swear words after the jump.

The September 6 entry is especially priceless. "Marmaduke is an Asshole" is an even better alternate title for that strip than some Comics Curmudgeon commenter's suggestion ("Fuck You, I'm Marmaduke").

Best Meta Ever

I'm speechless. That was pitch-perfect.

How long will it be before I can read Dave Barry, James Lileks, or any of an entire genre again?

Worst PR Man Ever

I had previously held 100% sympathy for the girl at the heart of this story. It never occurred to me that the complaining neighbor might be the lesser of the two a'holes. Her dad, a "public relations expert," seems to have anointed her as a graffiti artist.

Apples-to-Oranges Comparison of the Day

"In today’s America, there are more World of Warcraft players than farmers." -- Kung Fu Monkey (via Marginal Revolution by way of Paul Krugman and Nicholas Beaudrot)

There are probably also more iPod owners than doctors and lawyers combined.

I believe the Census Bureau treats farming as an occupation; World of Warcraft, not so much. (Many people play WoW for an hour or two per week; I can't picture people "farming" that sporadically.)

This would be a non-issue if so many otherwise brilliant people hadn't gee-whiz'd it.

Deconstructing Dumbledore

Heavily edited: All edits in red.

I'll buy that Dumbledore's gay, given the context of his relationship to Grindelwald, but I draw the line at its [supposed] revelation coming from an author's off-hand comment, and I take no end of anger annoyance from some of the truly frivolous other pronouncements that came from the same source but without literary foreshadowing.

Look, assume we accept some plane of existence that includes Harry, Hermione, Ron, Hogwarts, and so on. (Obviously we do, if we experience the book series as a sequence of events rather than a sequence of creatively constructed sentences.) It would be absurd to think that any of those characters perceives their creator goddess as this Scottish chick with a keyboard -- this is a straight-up fantasy world, not some experimental super-meta breakdown of nth walls.

So they live in a world where things happen, will happen, and/or have happened. Their world consists entirely of what words on a printed page say (or suggest or allude to). Once the books have gone to press, that's the universe they live in.

(I suppose an anal lit-crit person could say they live in millions of separate universes in which the reader also has some godlike powers. I don't know how much I buy that, and anyway it has its limits if we're talking about characters sufficiently well-formed for multitudes of readers to discuss them, and be "on the same page" (ha!) in the course of such discussions.)

Anything Rowling says without justification in the text is at best apocryphal, and at worst irrelevant to the point of self-love. If Dumbledore were unambiguously gay -- more importantly if his sexual identity had any bearing on the story -- it would have made its way to the page already, even if only as particular passages that the author could to and say "here look, page 899, should I have made it even more clear?" As M.S. points out, this is basically what she did.

Meanwhile, On the other hand, good god, what possible use is there for a statement like "Neville marries Hannah Abbott"? Pointing to page numbers and saying "this is why you could have seen it coming" might be interesting, but pulling it out of thin air is just pandering.

Rowling could learn a lot from Elmore Leonard.

P.S. The degree to which I believe in authorial intent exceeds zero. Post hoc authorial elaboration is a lesser evil than overambitious deconstruction.

5 Disasters Coming Soon

This Popular Mechanics piece is sobering -- but then commenter #2 just angers me.

TERORRISTS ARE NOT STUPID. If they've devoted their lives to bringing America to its knees, chances are they're already aware of these things.

But of all the people who need to prepare for (and also think of how to prevent, but moreso "prepare for") these disasters, chances are none of us think about them often enough or seriously enough. That first one affects us directly (if I'm not mistaken Alameda = most populous island in San Francisco Bay) yet had never occurred to me.

Thermablades

Wayne Gretzky says they will "revolutionize the game of hockey." Is this a good thing? (Hint: I think it is.)

But would you be inclined to add a mental asterisk to any records set by a player wearing thermablades? If not, [insert loaded baseball question here].

The Worst Sentence I've Read in Awhile

Remember when you first learned how to read and write, and you wrote simple sentences where the subject was the first word?

"Suspecting that had the tape of game three much less the series been rewound and replayed again and again the Diamondbacks don’t hit into three double plays and Torrealba doesn't hit that homerun in most of those alternate outcomes is I'm sure of little comfort to Arizona and its fans."
--Dan Fox

(Did you notice the mild irony in how I set that up?)

Obscure Abbreviations Considered Harmful

(Nifty Wikipedia page of the day: I don't mean that obscure abbreviations cause literal harm so much as confusion, obfuscation, and annoyance.)

Somebody printed and posted on a break room bulletin board a page from the September 2007 BBC Music Magazine: the article is "Too Young to own an LP?" and the author laments going into a classroom where not one student knew what an "LP" was.

Well, shoot me too, because I think before this job I wouldn't have recognized the abbreviation "LP" either. (But like most sentient beings I'd recognize a vinyl record, a turntable, etc., even if the etymology eluded me.)

Meanwhile (with less annoyance and more amusment) this article refers to "Gracenote's CDDB database": the ATM machine of the new millennium! One problem here is the phrase "compact disc database" actually conveys more information (with fewer syllables!) than the unqualified abbreviation.

You should expand most of the abbreviations you use, at least on first reference. In a world where computer programmers have all sorts of hair-splitting discussions of what things should be called, the purpose of such anal nomenclature just gets thwarted by reducing things to opaque series of letters.

Non-Video Link Catchup

Kudos to McSweeneys, Reason, and Slate...

Adjectives rejected in favor of "Kafkaesque"

Horror movies for kids (my favorite: High School Musical vs. Predator)

Canadian hookers: which side are you on?

The picture of George W. Bush (actually the stipple)

Two stories of injustice involving police and dogs (interesting timing given last night's first Simpsons episode)

How to win a Nobel Peace prize

A paean to college football: I still think amateur football as a whole is one of America's most colossal wastes of time, but mine probably is (probably should be?) a 1% opinion, especially among guys. It's a form of clan loyalty about which I'll write more soon.

Accent

I took the same quiz Maribeth took and came out "Neutral":

You're not Northern, Southern, or Western, you're just plain -American-. Your national identity is more important than your local identity, because you don't really have a local identity. You might be from the region in that map, which is defined by this kind of accent, but you could easily not be. Or maybe you just moved around a lot growing up.

Oklahoma until age 17. Most of the time in Boston over the next seven years; northern California ever since. The two strongest accents I can think of in my family both reflect where that person has/had spent most of their adulthood (not childhood).

Charitable Irony

"If a charity spent only 30 percent of its proceeds on charitable works, the managers would soon be in jail."
--Gregg Easterbrook is so, so, so naive

The ironic part is that his column is about the NFL, an entity whose charity of choice is the United Way. An exercise for the reader is to do the obvious further research.

Scandal at ORU

But the real story is, how often do people misspell the surname of Associated Press Writer JUSTIN JUOZAPAVICIUS?

To my mild surprise, despite the first comment of this thread making fun of the name "Oral," not one of the Fark commenters mentions the writer's odd name.

Grading Curves

I can't remember the last time I found one day's output of a quasi-political blog as outstanding as today's Volokh Conspiracy posts.

Paraphrasing the post below, this is Orin Kerr at (almost) his best. (I suppose you could argue that Orin Kerr at his best must by definition involve Fourth Amendment law. I'd disagree but I'd see the point.)

On the other hand Kerr tortures the word "curve" almost beyond recognition. The difference between a strict curve and a benchmark is that the universe of the former is, by definition, the class itself, with all the potential small-sample-size pitfalls you might expect; the universe of the latter is much bigger.

This passage is especially interesting, though I think it's less confusing without the part I elided:
The common convention that an "A" range grade is a 90-100, a "B" range grade is 80-89 [...] works on the premise that the professor who writes an exam uses a relative distribution of easy and difficult problems so that the scores will track the class's expected levels of achievement.

My freshman year of college I took a math test on which the highest raw score on the midterm was 32 out of 100. If you're used to the "90% = A" benchmark then this tells you about how hard this test was (compared to tests that make any attempt to hew to such a benchmark) than about how well we'd done learning the material.

Obligatory math brag (incredibly tenuously on topic): The highest score I ever got on the Putnam was 29 out of 120. If you've ever heard about a six-hour test on which the median score is zero (at least both of those were true as of the early 1990s), this is probably what you heard about.

(I've always wondered about the "9" part given that the most common scores on each of the 12 individual problems are 0, 1, and 10: Maybe I gave an otherwise absolutely right answer that contained some irrelevant but egregiously wrong aside?)

Dear Web Site That Allegedly Provides Humor to College-Age People

What would cause pictures of any given celebrity to be "funny"?

In particular what's "funny" about the particular picture you've chosen to saturate other web sites with in your ads? What breathtaking hilarity is going over my head here?

jelly fish

That is all.

Find two comic strips (Monday, October 1) that both mention jellyfish. In my Houston Chronicle "custom" comics page they appear consecutively.

Is it too late for me to do fantasy hockey?

The only reason I'd have done fantasy hockey this year is to use the team name "Puck Lions." That said, I'd like to think at least a few dozen Deadspinners already thought of that angle.

Great Theme Music, Terrible Show

Guess what's coming back?

I predict they replace the great old theme music with atrocious new music, make a bad show even worse (it's a bad sign that the whole premise of the revamp is to be derivative of some other franchise), and fail to give Germany an additional cult hero.

Gratuitous Detail as Evidence of Fakery

(Please forgive the fourth straight post on the craft of writing.)

This week's Savage Love (warning: very explicit text) contains samples of letters whose anecdotes Dan Savage has evaluated to be fictional. As the first sign (other than a specific overused X-rated scenario (urban legend?)) Savage refers to "the piling on of unnecessary details in a self-conscious effort to make the letter seem more plausible."

I wonder how many writers of fiction-consumed-as-fiction make the same mistake, thinking that they need to pile on details to paint a vivid enough picture with their words.

An interesting example: a few weeks ago a Comics Curmudgeon reader pointed out that every Gil Thorp character, no matter how minor, somehow ends up being assigned a first and last name (with full name given on first reference).

Along those lines, some high percentage of the erotic fiction on Usenet (alt.sex.*) is written by men. The subset of erotic fiction in which the second or third paragraph reads like "But first let me tell you a bit more about myself. I'm [height], [weight], with [...]" is even more obviously male-written.

Writing That Looks Easy

Erin McKean, editor-in-chief of The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2e, has been guest-blogging at Volokh.com this week. (She also has a picture on her Wikipedia page, and looks almost exactly how I'd have pictured her.) Several things strike me about her writing style.

1. It's very conversational; yet

2. It's impeccably direct and to-the-point

3. It's eerily similar to the "voice" I aspire to in my own prose

As a terse (so I try!) writer, a math geek, a fan of crystal-clear thoughts and expression, and a bit of a smartass, I'm madly in love with this particular sentence:

"When people say something 'isn't a word,' they aren't usually saying that the item in question is a piece of rotten fruit, or a shoe, or a phone number, or some other non-lexical object."
(minor punctuation changes added)

Dollar Bill, RIP

"I will never go to another Blackhawks game again until Bill Wirtz is dead."
--Jimmy P., comment #51 on this thread. Wirtz passed a few hours later. It's unclear whether the commenter knew Wirtz had cancer (I didn't know myself).

Not to speak ill of the dead, but the rest of the thread is edifying, as well as the linked article.

Life Imitates Moot Court

A Tennessee appellate court has ordered a woman to give her engagement ring back to her ex.

In the moot court case I "represented" the woman (who was dumped by some abusive guy), which worked out well since I was dead convinced that in general the correct rule should be "she keeps it."

Off the top of your head, can you think of anything other than an engagement ring that you'd describe as "given in contemplation of" some event? The closest analogy I can think of is putting down a deposit: By that logic, she'd certainly keep it if he were the one who ended the engagement, and be morally compelled to return it if she broke the engagement.

Even if you're queasy about courts having to evaluate evidence of who dumped whom (the best moot court argument for the other side was that bright-line standards are massively more efficient than case-by-case adjudication), I think "she always keeps it" leads to far greater repose than "he's supposed to get it back ('oh yeah?! come and get it!')."

If I held any esteem whatsoever for the legal/economic/societal opinions of Fark commenters, I'd bother to read the thread instead of just linking to it.

Boston Police are Still Insane

And Fark threads still contain a handful of racist cretins.

I'm surprised the bomb scare hasn't made Reason's blog yet.

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

Interesting stuff.

Two sentences that especially stood from the WSJ recap:

"Every new fact discovered through experiment represents a foothold in the unknown."

If you want to be a hair-splitting philosopher, isn't the set of "facts" "discovered" through experiment limited to the specific results of that experiment at that specific time and place? Everything else is reasonable logical inference.

"Last month, the Chinese government proposed a new law to allow its scientists to admit failures without penalty."

Speaking of reasonable inferences: That's an amazing euphemism considering what we might infer about totalitarian PRC control of scientific research as it stands now.

The more we see constructions like "the government proposed a new law to allow [people] to [do something] without penalty," the more clear it becomes just how far the concept of freedom still has to go.

Getting back to the original premise (but with some political overtones), here's an interesting rebuttal to a study whose researchers probably concluded a lot more than the experiment's premise could reasonably support.

Mixed Nuts Might Be Steve Martin's Most Underrated Movie

This entry in Marginal Revolution points to this story about incompetent suicide hot lines.

Single-Word Tongue Twisters

Tufts's

As in, "The veterinary school is Tufts's main claim to fame."

(When we went to the vet on Tuesday, he had a visiting student from Tufts watch him do the consult. I used almost that exact sentence in conversation in the car on the way home before realizing that "Tufts's" is a mouthful.)

Geopolitical Insight from Get Smart

"Your brand of KAOS is weak and confused. Only in our country is there pure KAOS."
--Miss Formosa, actually a KAOS agent, to the "Transmanian" KAOS agents she's just shot. "The Girls From KAOS," season 2, airdate February 1967.

Mind, seconds later in the same episode we learn that "to the computer, they all looked alike," about why photo matches didn't identify Miss Formosa as a KAOS agent.

(Coincidentally, this fansite makes both those observations, though I disagree with a comment about the second one: I've seen at least five lines/gags that were distinctly more racist/sexist/what-have-you.)

Two episodes earlier, both Julia and I were mistaken: It wasn't Gavin McLeod playing an Israeli agent, it was Alan Oppenheimer.

Unintended Consequences Are Everywhere!

Or rather, "single points of failure are everywhere!"

Why were the Titanic's crow's nest binoculars under lock and key to begin with?

Why was it a lock that only this one key could open?

Why was Second Officer David Blair removed from the crew at the last minute? Was this sort of last-minute crew removal routine enough for a standard operating procedure to evolve?

We'll never know...

The Best Onion Themes Are Cyclic

This commentary is almost like a first-person account of this old news story.

Democracies, Cults of Personality, etc.

This article about the new leader of Turkmenistan made me come to appreciate both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush by contrast.

Bush in particular strikes me as one of the world's least likely 30-foot-statue tyrants, almost like Zaphod Beeblebrox but self-effacing.

Then I watched the video wherein a South Carolina beauty pageant contestant answers a question incomprehensibly (even by beauty pageant standards), and read about how now she's developing a fan base and got loads of sympathetic publicity. This too reminded me of Bill Clinton (remember how his over-long 1988 convention speech made him a laughingstock until he turned the publicity in his favor with the Johnny Carson appearance: will this entire remark make me feel old when it's before your time?).

I can understand sympathy for the stupid, but the idea of rallying around her just makes all of life's burdens a little heavier. This is almost full-circle back to the fascists who blindly elevate authority icons, except that's the worship of contrived failure rather than fake success.

Deadspin HOF Update: I Think Good Fourth Walls Make Good Virtual Neighbors

With that (paraphrased) aphorism in mind:

'Is February 1, 2007 In The Hall Of Fame?' - ABSOLUTELY NOT.
'Is "Lemme Know" In The Hall Of Fame?' - again, no

The latter is entirely about the adventures of a Deadspin contributor. The former involved a lot of users, not just Deadspinners, but just enough of the latter that it's too self-referential for my taste. (Also, both suffer greatly from the lack of a better handle to make it compelling for anyone who missed the inside joke the first time.)

This is as good a time as any to admit I've never watched a Kige Ramsay ("YouTube Sports") video. I'll let you know what I think. Headphones are busy for now beholding the large continent of "Carmines" (Hawk Harrelson's term) fans in the "Pale Hose" home park.

UPDATE: Kige, absolutely yes.

Another Convergence Involving ESPN

This time it's title inflation at bastions of elite journalism:

In my professional life, I've run into quite a number of people who say that in college they were editor of the Crimson, Harvard's famed newspaper. I often have wondered how it was possible that I personally could know such a high percentage of former Crimson editors. Well, it turns out that everyone who does anything for the Crimson receives the title "editor." Last semester, the paper listed 800 editors. This means there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people who truthfully can say, "I was editor of the Harvard Crimson."
--Gregg Easterbrook

Something similar happens at The New Republic but since Snopes has disabled copy/paste you'll just have to read about it here (the Snopes relevance is to debunking a supposed Reagan diary entry slamming George W. Bush).

The Duty To Defend Bad Actors in Lost Causes

Strange convergence between this "Why isn't the NFL Players' Union sticking up for Michael Vick against the commissioner's office?" piece and the dentist who came out $750,000 ahead because his malpractice insurance wouldn't defend him when he disfigured a co-worker.

Dean Update

(I'm probably the millionth person to think of this.)

"And you know something? You know something? Not only are we going to St. Lucia. We're going to Dominica, Martinique, and Guadalupe. We're going to Jamaica. We're going to Quintana Roo. We're going to the Bay of Campeche. And then we're making landfall on Mexico again. To do a bunch of damage. YEAH!"

The Existential Problem With "Fame"

"I voted no, because I don't think anyone will even remember who he is by the end of this football season, much less in years to come."
--comment in this thread about whether Ned should be part of the Deadspin Hall of Fame

(There's still time to vote for him!)

Either the reasoning behind that comment is invalid, or the reasoning behind Halls of Fame is invalid. (Maybe this doesn't apply to halls of fame sprung from ironic detachment.) If the criterion for enshrinement were "Will people still remember you?" then you wouldn't NEED the official enshrinement: They'd remember you anyway.

Along those lines I have a pathological dislike for the word "famous" as part of a trivia question. Of course this thing is (relatively) famous, otherwise why would we bother asking about it? Removing the word "famous" from a question generally has zero effect on the question (other than shortening it). Maybe there are exceptions where two plausible answers amount to "the famous one" versus "the obscure one," but surely there are better ways to distinguish!

It's even worse when a Wikipedia author/editor asserts that some subject matter is "well known for" [a given property]. Is this real reason for bothering to include that phrase so that a future editor will take it at face value if he would've otherwise been tempted to cut that part?

My Baby Broke All The Rules

There is a positive correlation between how well kids learn in a classroom and what percentage of the students are girls.

(DISCLAIMER: As the second commenter in the link points out, the original source says "We find, however, no effect on individual behavior of boys or girls, which suggests that the positive peer effects of girls on classroom environment are due mostly to compositional change, namely due to having more girls in the classroom and not due to improved behavior of peers." So it's the girls themselves learning, not inducing others to learn.)

The Spider-Man Comic Strip

Thanks to The Comics Curmdgeon I know that the current Spider-Man villain calls himself "The Shocker" and urges his nemeses to Google him. This can't end well.

Today's Egregious, Yet Officially Sanctioned, Misuse of 911

From this story about an idiot criminal (voyeur) who put a camera in a theater's lady's room but accidentally filmed himself doing the install:

'"Once the detectives review this information, they're going to try to see if they can identify people who were on the tape," [Police spokeswoman Renee] Witt said. "If anyone feels they may have been a victim of this, they can definitely call 911.'

Does the Seattle police department face a catastrophic shortage of phone numbers (or epidemic of publicity-shy detectives) such that they couldn't point these people to a non-emergency hot-line?

Pop Culture Progression of the Morning

"I don't get that site on my computer." --one co-worker (deadpan) to another, referring to an international music web site.

This reminded me of my grandmother, who would say "I don't think we get that on my TV" about shows she'd never heard of, even if they were network TV.

That reminded me "The One Where Nana Dies Twice" (Friends episode), leading the first character to claim (still deadpan?) that every sit-com in American TV history had devoted an episode to senility.

"Even Diff'rent Strokes?"

And once you mention Diff'rent Strokes, a reference to this Very Special episode (link goes to Youtube: content is Safe for Work but does involve a shirtless child actor).

Ah, Gordon Jump: Maytag repairman; radio station manager; but most of all, bike shop owner with a thing for boys.

Various NY Times Tidbits

What kind of world do we live in if this piece on couples group therapy the Times's second most e-mailed article?

This profile of a casino dealer is interesting, though not much that a Two Plus Two wouldn't already know (except: since when did Andy Samberg of all people become a household name?).

The new font overtaking our highway system: Easily the best article in this week's magazine.

At times this piece about men, women, and sex partners seems to confuse median with mean. I have little doubt that men overestimate a bit, women underestimate a bit, and a handful of promiscuous women have a much greater effect than the professor realized. I'd love to know what the mean averages are, in addition to the widely reported medians.

Bottled water is unfashionable now. But really it should be bottled anything. And I actually wonder just how much, on the margin, an individual bottle really "costs" the environment. (I also suspect that some time soon someone will have a great idea that involves bringing safe drinking water to developing areas via bottle, only to get a terribly out-of-proportion backlash.)

David Wain is handing out flyers for The Ten. I have a co-worker who predicts this will be incredibly good.

And finally, best euphemism in week's paper: "I once advised a friend who was newly pregnant while having an affair with a married man to consider not having the baby." Not that he was advocating any particular alternative -- say, a medical procedure that happens to have a name -- just that he wanted her to do something other than give birth. Like maybe take up yoga.

Not All Blog Commenters Have Common Sense

(Or lucid thought processes.)

Two unrelated examples:

1.
"'I can’t think of a good reason why the subject shouldn’t be allowed to speak up in a forum that everybody, and not just the writer, can see.'

Gee, what about speaking for the record in the article itself? What about resisting the urge to tell your assistant to say that you’re 'unavailable for comment'?"
--someone named Paul, first comment to this thread

For a quick 10 points, what implicit assumption did Paul make that is probably often false?

UPDATE: I realize weblog commenters are almost universally bad, but the Freakonomics Blog commenters in particular I now hate with a white-hot fiery passion for utterly missing so many points. Especially in this thread.

2.
"There is nothing unsexy about good communication."
--someone known as Mr. Impressive, in this comment to a very well-posed hypothetical about sexual assault law

Out of context that's a reasonable sentiment, but within the thread it's part of a defense of the idea that you should get express consent for each step of physical intimacy with a romantic partner, in particular the notion that's (literally) a crime not to.

Think about every physical relationship you've been in, and every step of physical intimacy within those relationships. What percent of the time did you literally ask permission first? I suspect the answer is close to zero.

(Kisses almost never begin with a request for permission --at least twice in my life asking the question really did kill the mood -- and it's hard to converse with someone when your mouth is preoccupied with the kiss.)

By the way for what it's worth, the best idea I've ever had for a one-shot-only terrorist attack involves a suicide bomber standing in a long holiday line at airport security.

(As originally conceived the line in question was the airline check-in, specifically at Logan airport circa December 1993.)

Yes, Tulsa is Hot in August

Several years removed I still get odd local pride from stories like this. (Generally the only two things that put Tulsa into the national sports spotlight are golf majors at Southern Hills or Cinderella runs by the Golden Hurricanes in men's basketball tournaments of the 1990s.)

I played Little League in those same triple-digit temperatures. Some days the heat index was so bad we'd be specifically told not to hustle on certain plays.

A couple weekends ago we went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival. According to Julia's car dashboard, the outside temperature got as high as 99 degrees (but didn't crack 100 to my mild disappointment). Note that for all my bravado, avoiding that extreme heat/humidity is a minor but important reason to live so close to San Francisco.

Finally Caught up With the Sunday NY Times

(For the first time since that May/June trip.)

Those of you who also read the Sunday Times, which was the bigger waste of space in the August 5 edition?

A. Selena Roberts really, really, really, really, really hates Barry Bonds (but can't be bothered to introduce rational arguments or anything we haven't seen in a dozen other sports columns this summer).

B. Stanley Fish gets flustered at Starbucks.

(As wastes of space go I thought "A" would be insurmountable until I saw "B." The sheer inanity of it all gives Fish the upset.)

Four Interesting Things in Today's Seattle Times

I love the "Most Read" widget. In no particular order:

1. (I came for) "Even if [Adam Jones] doesn't play it's a good learning process for him," [Seattle manager John] McLaren said. "We're going to use him in different places, spot starts, defense, pinch running, possible pinch-hitting. It's not a priority for me to find him a place to play right now."

Yeah. That's how you treat a blue-chip prospect. Nothing will help him adjust to the big leagues quite like letting him grow rust.

2. Mariners are now on top of the AL wild card race. Who knew?

3. KIRO changes its format. No more one-hour (one hour?!?) talk show for Ron Reagan.

4. What happens to restaurant tips?

5. Social Security Administration hoses woman whose husband disappeared but might not be dead after all

The Farmer in the Flood

The last line of this Onion column about teaching your cats about Jesus reminded me of my all-time favorite religious joke.

I actually first heard it in a sermon, which makes sense given the moral of the story. I didn't fully appreciate at the time that there are entire denominations who completely miss that moral.

Unsettling Google Maps

2007 ICT hotel to playing site (that endpoint is the official address of Blegen Hall but you'll need to pan east: most game rooms south of the covered walkway, auditoriums north).

Hotel to Metrodome: Pan a bit north to see the bridge that collapsed tonight.

2005 ICT was at Tulane, in New Orleans. As far as I know, nothing bad happened in or near College Park, MD, in August 2006.

Štadión Petržalka

Despite the Comics Curmudegon snark, this is a reasonably good-looking stadium.

Artmedia Bratislava had a nice UEFA cup run in 2005 (that I knew nothing about until just now).

David Stern, Marketing Genius

Betting scandal threatening your league? No problem. Sports news (other than your league) dominated by some other sport's trading deadline? Voila! See to it that your own league has a big star traded to put the other league's blockbuster trade to shame.

Harry Potter 7

SPOILERS

Masterfully written. Plot came together beautifully. Every major spoiler has a satisfying "obvious in hindsight" quality, especially the doe patronus (I correctly surmised it was Harry's mom but didn't take it a step further and actually trace that patronus to someone who was, y'know, alive).

At least one chapter too long, maybe more. (The epilogue seemed tacked on and poorly executed. I wouldn't be surprised if someone other than Rowling actually wrote that part.) Even the last two "real" chapters could plausibly have been done away with, just ending where Harry gave himself up to die.

(The more I think about it the more I appreciate what David Chase did with the Sopranos ending.)

The last "real" chapter was probably obligatory and as well-done as it could be. The meeting in Kings Cross was... interesting. I liked it, though it's unintuitive how that really went down.

A Complete Spectrum of Advice Columnists

I realized just now, glancing at a paper in the break room, that four of the most prominent advice columnists happen to fill every combination of hard-vs.-easy question and right-vs-wrong answer:

Miss Manners answers hard questions correctly.

The Ethicist (Randy Cohen, NY Times Sunday Magazine) answers hard questions incorrectly.

Dear Prudence (Slate) answers easy questions correctly.

Dear Abby answers easy questions incorrectly.

Discuss.

I Smell Whitewash

People's Republic of China still corrupt; Fark thread FYI.

Tee for Two

Excellent article, with empirical evidence about an interesting question.

(And I don't even play golf!)

Found that via Houston Clear Thinkers, written by an attorney who, shall we say, does not like overreaching federal prosecutors very much.

Germany is in a Baby Mini-Boom

This is one of the most obtuse articles I've ever read. Gosh, do you think maybe something festive might have happened in Germany about a year ago?

Second comment here points that out, though the first comment is also interesting/informative.

This Isn't "Payback" So Much as Irony

Maybe this kid wasn't meant to fly after all?

No matter what noun you use, for some reason this Scrubs vignette got stuck in my head.

Economics 101

About 10 months before the scheduled opening of the new water park at the Columbus Zoo, the park's name is spouting a problem.

"I wonder why someone would want to do it," Borin said. "We created it; the public voted for it - why not let the public have it?" --WBNS TV via Fark

(emphasis added)

Amazon Reviews of the Day

It does a body good.

Pittsburgh Fact of the Day

The largest city near Dwight is taking the word "Public" out of the name of its school system, rebranding all of its schools as "Pittsburgh [Name of School]," and adopting the catchphrase Excellence for All.

This blog post converts all the obvious snark points.

Two More From Marginal Revolution

(Also the source of the China blog link below.)

Replacement drivers in Korea. ("Why not in the United States?" The large land area seriously complicates the logistics of getting back from your customer's home.)

Excessive ovation syndrome: Maybe I'm a terrible snob (or an honorary Russian?) but I find that undeserved ovations diminish my repeat-visit symphonic experience because they cheapen the impact of a deserved ovation.

Good, Bad, and Ugly Observations from Marginal Revolution

(That is, this blog.)

Good:
Small changes in incentives can make a big difference in our beliefs. For instance, UFO sightings are down dramatically in the last decade...I think [one factor is] cell phones and cell phone cameras.

...The story is suddenly a little harder to swallow. Most of all, it is harder to fool oneself, not just one's spouse and friends.

Bad (i.e. spot the [sic]):
I suspect that iPods encourage musical nuggets which are short, to the point, and complementary to adrenalin. I've heard the ? and the Mysterians song "99 Teardrops" more often in the last week than in the preceding last year.

Ugly (insightful but scary):
Public computer surfaces are reservoirs for methicillin-resistant staphylococci.

The role of computer keyboards used by students of a metropolitan university as reservoirs of antibiotic-resistant staphylococci was determined. Putative methicillin (oxacillin)-resistant staphylococci isolates were identified from keyboard swabs following a combination of biochemical and genetic analyses. Of 24 keyboards surveyed, 17 were contaminated with staphylococci [...]

Have you disinfected your keyboard today? What are you waiting for?

FBoFW Was Never This Good

Enjoy this while it's still available. I bet Johnston's lawyer jumps all over this.

Two Perspectives on Medicare

Both Mickey Kaus and Jane Galt agree that any flaws Medicare has can/should be fixed, independent of whatever happens with U.S. health care generally.

Kaus (quoting Bob Shrum) and Galt seem to disagree about whether it's a good thing for any given younger person to be on Medicare -- but note the ambiguity between "let everyone join" and "make everyone join." The former may or may not work but the latter would be outright theft.

"[Bob Shrum] argued that all the Democratic health care plans are too complicated, that whoever is the Dem candidate should just say he or she plans to let everyone join Medicare and leave it at that. People know Medicare. It's hard to attack Medicare as 'socialized medicine.' ... P.S.: I've never quite understood why this politically appealing position is fatally flawed on policy grounds. (If there are problems with Medicare, fix them! Surely they need to be fixed even if the program doesn't get extended to younger Americans.)"
--Mickey Kaus

"We will not 'save money' by adding younger, healthier people to the government's insurance pool. We may lower the average cost of caring for them, but sticking the nation's 18 year olds onto the Medicare rolls will not lower one iota the amount it costs to replace Grandma's hip. Putting 18-year-olds into the insurance pool is a slightly nicer way of slapping them with a gigantic tax on their earnings in order to cover the old and six; it does not actually make the care any cheaper."
--Jane Galt on Medicare for young people

"Now, I can think of several ways to reduce that spending. But they all have one of two problems: either they could (and should) be done right now; or they are not currently being done because they are politically inconceivable. For example, I could mandate electronic medical records at doctors offices. That might save money. (Might not, of course, but why not try?) But Medicare could do this right now, by the simple expedient of demanding that doctors keep records for Medicare patients using a system that complies with some sort of information standard. If you think that we could save money this way, don't wait for single-payer--go out there and do this right now! Then you can show everyone how awesome government payments systems are."
--Jane Galt again (same link) on making Medicare more efficient.

In Praise of the Single File Line

Why isn't this obvious?

(From Marginal Revolution (Tyler makes this a lot harder than it needs to be!) via Jane Galt (also my direct source for the Mitt Romney tidbit below) and Unfogged.)

Not a Brush With Greatness

San Francisco supervisor Ed Jew was born in 1960 (according to Wikipedia), and therefore is not the Ed Jew (from San Francisco!) whom I faced in the 1992 national high school chess championship.

(I was white. He played a French defense, we castled on opposite sides. I sacrificed a knight to get to his king, he resigned in a position where his only legal move allowed e6# ["pawn to king six, checkmate"].)

Mayor Bill Simmons Welcomes You to ESPN.com

At SFO, there are signs all around the International Arrivals with the same picture of Gavin Newsom (but not of his wife).

His face shot is eerily familiar. Judge for yourself after the jump.

I CAN HAS LITR?

Running errands today I went into a store that had a TV on mute, with closed captioning. An ad came on for Tidy Cat, and in the commercial the cats were talking (as lampooned by The Onion eight years ago) and the closed captioning was white text, all caps.

Even though it was exactly the look and feel of a LOLCAT image, the dialog was completely lame compared to what they could've done.

In Honor of Pride Weekend

I'd actually never seen this Onion article before, though this one (actually about Pride parades) is an old chestnut.

See also:
Band Teacher Gay in Retrospect
Gay Couple Feels Pressured to Marry
Denver Optometrist...
Closeted Father Lives Vicariously...
I Can't Seem To Find The Moline Gay District
Area Homosexual Thinks He's Still In Closet
Carload [...] Just Pulled Up To Drive-Thru

(For what it's worth I found the last one by correctly remembering it was set at Hardee's and doing this search. The other obvious way to find it would have involved a search term I'd rather avoid.)

...and finally my all-time favorite, Area Man Experimenting With Homosexuality For Past Eight Years

"But eventually, the strain of the long-distance thing got to be too much. That's why we broke up. That and Michael's inability to keep his cock out of my roommate Bruce's mouth."

Pandora's Sisters

Have any of you heard of either Michael Stephen Fuchs, Pandora's Sisters, or The Manuscript? The last two are "cyber-thriller" novels by the former.

He sent an e-mail to (I presume) his entire address book promoting his second novel. I'm surprised to be in his address book given that I last saw him 12 years ago at a get-together for non-traditional college halftime bands. (i.e. Stanford, Virginia, Rice, and seven of the eight Ivies (only Cornell does the traditional marching thing))

Despite My Usual Dislike of Frivolous Lawsuits...

...I actually sympathize with this plaintiff.

Meanwhile, basically none of the Fark posters do.

Top 100 Celebrities: 94% Recognition

I knew enough to give a one-sentence description of everyone on this list, with six exceptions:

41. Kimi Raikkonen
56. Gore Verbinski
58. Valentino Rossi
85. J.J. Abrams
93. Rhonda Byrne
100. Bobby Flay

Comics Advice of the Day

"From now on, I’ll be taking my late father’s advice - only bother reading [9 Chickweed Lane] when that damn cat is in it. Though, come to think of it, I think he was talking about Sylvia when he said that."
--Mack

Dear CalShakes,

This shouldn't be so bitterly funny.

Nothing on this page suggests anachronism, but then nothing in last year's material suggested that the staging of The Merchant of Venice would be as self-indulgent as it turned out to be.

Off to Europe

I hope this entry stays on the main page the whole time we're gone, but the wife and I are about to see London, Vienna, Odessa (where her parents grew up), and Prague.

This weekend we helped run this tournament, which some of you staffed.

While I'm out, comment about whatever strikes your fancy. I'll leave you with this thread.

Celtic Schadenfreude

Has it really reached the point where I will wish bad things on a storied franchise just because of one ubiquitous ESPN.com Page 2 columnist?

Why yes, yes it has.

No, Bill Simmons, your team cannot have Greg Oden or Kevin Durant. Not yours.

(Full odds had already been up. Portland rivered a two-outer.)

What Is The Dumbest Comment on the Linked To Post?

This post is about a very complicated, intense, emotional issue. It's difficult to find a true insight or epiphany -- but based a few on the comments, very easy for observers to say ridiculous things.

(There are several candidates here.)

A Boy's Mind, Reflected By The Onion

I think this kid became this kid.

Both of them distinctly ring true to a boy's thought processes.

UPDATE: This article saves the best line for last.

Baby Name Extinction

This story about Katrina (the name not the event) points out the obvious, that nobody names their kid Adolf anymore.

My first thought was, "yet people still name their kids Joseph." I suppose the benevolence associated with Saint Joseph (father figure to Jesus) outweighs the millions of deaths attributable to Stalin. (I presumed there is no Saint Adolf. But I presumed incorrectly. Poor saint.)

I suppose Italians now avoid Benito, though I can think of at least one prominent Puerto Rican Benito.

The last time I saw a story about a freshly unpopular baby name, that name was Monica, almost ten years ago by now. It keeps getting less and less popular but the decline is from a much higher point of popularity than I would have guessed.

News Flash

James Smith of Pleasantville, OH, was seen picking his nose earlier today. Unconfirmed reports indicate that he frequently fails to wash his hands after using the rest room.

Meanwhile, a source close to Smith indicated Smith's romantic interest in neighbor Sally Jones. We'll have more on this breaking story as events warrant; meanwhile, tell us what you think: Do you, the general public, find James Smith to be icky? Are you rooting for him or against him in his quest for the heart of Sally Jones?

Two Excellent Freeway Photos/Graphics

Map of the crash site with main detours (note that the red arrows are NEAR the roads but not on them the way Google Maps would do it).

Aerial photo. This picture is facing south. The Bay Bridge is to the right, my office is "behind" you, and Alameda a ways further "in front of" you. The roadway with a big gap on it leads right-to-left from the Bay Bridge to 580 East. The roadway with all the debris on it leads bottom-to-top from Berkeley to 880 South.

Even More Death (Fictional This Time)

I can't tell you how happy I am that The Onion decided to kill off by far its most overrated columnist.

It's not that the column was bad so much as that a whole lot of people assigned WAY too much humor value to a one-trick gimmick that had gotten old years ago. Those same people should go play with a text converter.

One Last Indictment of the Tragedy News Cycle

(or of myself, take your pick)

Just now I was trying and failing to remember why the flags were at half mast and there was a moment of silence a week ago when we went to a baseball game.

The most embarrassing part of that piece of vapor lock is that one of my closest colleagues is a Virginia Tech alumnus.

SoccerNet = Bad UI

Dear ESPN and whoever you're partnering with,

I shouldn't have to cross the equivalent of the Great Wall of China every time I dare to click on a story about soccer. Nor should I have to "set my region" every #*(&@& time I do that. You ALREADY HAVE MY IP ADDRESS and can resolve that to a country. Most of all, if I clicked to a story from ESPN, I should still have the same menu options I'd have from any other ESPN story, e.g. the ESPN home page itself.

Freeway Mayhem

Google Maps doesn't know yet (at least as of when I post this) that my normal commute home from work involves a piece of highway that no longer exists.

(Check on this when you see this post: If Google is sending me on the C-shaped curve of 880 South then it doesn't know yet; once that same link sends me onto 580, then 980, and only then 880, then you'll know it's learned its lesson. Then again Google has me going all the way to Park Street and backtracking, which seems silly compared to the Broadway exit and the Webster Tube.)

Note that the reverse directions won't need to change: 880 North to Berkeley still works fine, and anyway that was never optimal because barriers make it so that a certain merge doesn't happen until after the Powell Street exit.

One thing this fustercluck illustrates is just how messed-up East Bay highway nomenclature is.

If you're easily confused just skip the next few paragraphs and picture a sharp sign. Going west from there takes you to/across the Bay Bridge; going north takes you to Berkeley (the confusing-named highway mentioned one paragraph from now); going east takes you onto 580 East; going south takes you onto 880 South. Now add two already-existing "you can't get there from here" wrinkles: Inexplicably you can't go from 580 West to 880 South at that particular intersection, nor from 880 North to 580 East. (In both cases that's what the 980 is for, a bit east of our sharp sign.) Finally, pulverize the bottom left intersection of that sharp sign so that you can no longer go straight eastbound nor straight southbound.

There's a particular stretch of highway where the northbound lanes are simultaneously 80 East and 580 West; the southbound lanes are simultaneously 80 West and 580 West. Henceforth I'll call that "Berkeley Northbound" and "Berkeley Southbound."

As best I can tell, the accident knocks {Bay Bridge Eastbound to 580E} out of commission but does nothing to {Berkeley Southbound to 580E}.

Conversely, it knocks {Berkeley Southbound to 880S} out of commission but does no harm to {Bay Bridge Eastbound to 880S}.

Thank You Tim Goodman

Now that I've just gotten through slagging an SF Chronicle columnist, praise is due for someone who gets it. Like most of Goodman's TV reviews, this column is interesting, insightful, and... not "counterintuitive" so much as "against the grain."

It helps that I find him deadly accurate, both that "TV-Turnoff Week [is] one of the most reactionary, ill-advised movements in memory" and that few adults realize just how perfectly suited the Teletubbies are for their infant audience.

I don't know (and really don't care) what Goodman's political views are like (nothing would surprise me), but he has enough common sense that I'd like to think he easily wins some newsroom political arguments on issues where the Chron tends to be at its most batty.

Various SF Gate Links

This is just dying for a caption contest.

I half-expected this transsexual sports columnist to be Christina Kahrl.

When you burgle a house, don't go around wearing a stolen t-shirt. (This has probably already made Fark.)

Man sold fake TVs using Craigslist.

Old News But Still Hilarious To Me

CBS News said yesterday it planned to install a new level of editorial oversight to its Web site since revelations that the CBS anchor Katie Couric read a plagiarized commentary on the site last week.

CBS has fired the producer who wrote the piece for Ms. Couric [...]
--NY Times

As Virginia Postrel put it: Make That "Katie Couric's Flunky's Notebook"

Tenuous Cause-and-Effect of the Day

"Students asked to go cold turkey on television time for 10 days in bid to curb bullying on playground"
--SF Chronicle

To be fair the body of the article mentions that "Research has found that children who cut back on screen time are less verbally and physically aggressive on the playground," though I question whether the root cause of the decline in aggression was TV so much as the fact the kids were being studied (i.e. paid attention to).

I will probably come across as a problem parent: If my kids attend a school that tries to pull a stunt like this, I will politely decline to participate. (Obviously I won't force them to watch TV but I'll make clear to them privately that they're welcome to go either way.) Nor will my kids be subjected to D.A.R.E. or the like. Life is too short and actual teaching/learning seems to be drastically under prioritized.

The New Irresistible Force and Immovable Object

Sense of entitlement vs. bassackwards police state.

I'm impressed by the extent to which Ms. "blond, petite woman from Canada" managed (unwittingly) to make Georgia traffic cops seem vaguely sympathetic by comparison.

A Random Distance of 8 Miles

Dave Chappelle mentions in his For What It's Worth (2004) stand-up act that Elizabeth Smart was held captive eight miles away from where she lived. Julia asked me for an example of something eight miles from where we live.

We're 8.5 miles from the Oakland Zoo, for what it's worth.

Oh, and 8.1 miles from where I work.

Brooke McEldowney Infinity, Nicole Hollander 0

Compare today's 9 Chickweed Lane to today's Sylvia.

Both are basically about how one tells a story to a captive audience but even before I saw the Sylvia I was amazed at the right-on accuracy of the main character's (the one on the right in the first panel) response in 9 Chickweed Lane.

If It Weren't For Aldomania 2006

...I'd swear the current Mary Worth storyline began five years ago, given the pace at which it's dragged on.

Maybe a month ago I'd have been vaguely curious about this secret from Vera's past, but the more time they waste just hinting at something terrible, the more apathetic I become.

FBoFW: It Finally Happened

Given all the other story lines I've seen in the last few years (decades!), and all the furor that hip comic readers direct toward e.g. Anthony (honestly I'm indifferent to him), how is it that now we find the sequence that makes me loathe For Better or For Worse with every fiber of my being?

For heaven's sake, people: You've NEVER moved before?!? (Or for that matter, NEVER talked through an important family decision before?) I know I'm blessed to be in a family of reasonable people (rather than drama queens) but this is the first time I can remember that every single non-infant Patterson, without exception, needed to be told to GET OVER YOURSELVES.

Is This Uncharacteristically Shady of Me?

"You are a worker in a hospital. An unidentified patient dies on your ward. In his pocket are two tickets for a sold-out concert for two hours hence. You are pretty sure he isn't going to be identified in time to use the tickets. Would you take them? And if not, why not?"
--Jane Galt

I immediately said yes: If you don't act now not only are the tickets are likely to become worthless, but somebody's opportunity to enjoy the concert will be extinguished.

(I do morally object to the hospital worker's profiting from the exchange, but do not object to the tickets getting used somehow.)

This is vaguely similar to the ethical issues surrounding stealing music, a topic Scott Adams had already blogged about, and coincidentally Adams also posted the Butler's dilemma -- though here the situation is difference because the jewelry would still get some use, even if it's a less worthy use than feeding starving children.

Anyhow, here too is his post about copyright violation. And it's worth pointing out one distinctions between the music stealer and the hospital worker:

Stealing music would be more comparable to if you took from a dead guy's pocket two tickets to a concert that wasn't sold out. (Or would it? You could go a different night in a different city?)

In Russia This (Innocent) Man Would Have Gotten A Prison Sentence

The New Jersey man who inadvertently caused the crash that hospitalized the governor, that is.

Everything about that story reminded me of this one -- except of course for the driver's fate. (And I'm gratified to see that the guy I was thinking of eventually had his sentence overturned.)

My Favorite 2007 Onion Article (So Far)

This is pitch-perfect, especially the archetypical NYT headline ("In Manhattan, Even Felines Have Therapists").

The Importance of Word Order

This is awesome, but it would be even better if Dan Liebert had enough experience writing tossups that he instinctively phrased the sentence to put the money word at the end.

Adverse Possession 101

Am I missing something or is this a very easy case?

Roadside!

The ironic thing about comment #166 to this thread was that I was doing the exact same thing.

I say April does go "roadside," only to be caught in the act.

Armchair Psychiatry Gone Berserk

"Anyone who would take [Greg] Oden with the No. 1 pick in the draft after seeing how he reacted to the Ohio State buzzer beater is clinically insane. The entire bench erupts and where's Oden? Quietly clapping in the background. Your team just hit a shot to prolong your college career and that's all you got? No fire. No passion. Give me K[evin] D[urant] all day."
--someone named Tyler in Tuscaloosa, quoted by this column

Oh, that's nice. Take a decision between two great, potentially all-time great players, one of whom might be a little bit better than the other (or a lot better than the other) (though it's not clear which is which), and let the deciding factor be that you don't like the one guy's poker face?

I'd love to see any empirical evidence of the correlation between facial expression and "fire [and] passion," or the correlation between that and success.

Is there any? (Oh, never mind: enough people have a gut feeling about this that we take it as received wisdom.)

DISCLAIMER: I've never seen Kevin Oden or Greg Durant play a game. I know close to nothing about basketball. If there is a good way to evaluate which of them is a better long-term value, I don't know how to do it, though I'm almost dead certain that facial expressions aren't very high up in the criteria.

March Merriment: Day 3

Nate 22
Matt 18
John 12

Nate & John each had three of today's winners. Nate had five of today's losers and I had the other three. Tomorrow's teams include seven of mine, six of Nate's, and three of John's.

Point Possibility Frontier: Matt 82, Nate 75, John 65. (Most of Nate's drop results from no longer having any East presence.)

Is this Ironic Ad Placement?

NASCAR won't let Jeff Burton's race team change its Cingular logo to an AT&T logo. And yet, on the linked-to page is an ad from Jeff Gordon's sponsor purporting to let you design Gordon's car.

("You Design It. Jeff Drives It.")

You'd think that ad itself (to the extent that NASCAR condones it) would have evidentiary value.

Are You Ready for Some Property Law?

In the absence of a settlement, who wins this?

(Employment law might also be involved.)

What's so great about The Whale?

Apparently people think Ingalls Ice Arena (New Haven, CT) is one of the 150 best buildings in the U.S. I've been there, and it's interesting, but I still don't get it.

I liked the old Walter Brown better than The Whale. (Haven't seen BU's new facility.) Bright Hockey Center (Harvard's) is generic and serviceable, or was as of the 1990s. It's probably gotten better or gotten worse or been replaced.

The Yale Bowl is also overrated (though if anything Harvard Stadium is even more overrated). Franklin Field is a bit underrated; Baker Field is seriously underrated, though I may just be in love with its location (northern tip of Manhattan near the Hudson banks).

I think my favorite indoor sports facilities are barns; my favorite football stadia are... to be honest, indistinguishable from youth soccer fields. (I can't remember what Dartmouth's field is called, but I had retro fun there.)

March Merriment: Day 1

Nate 8 points (5 teams eliminated, 8 teams tomorrow)
Matt 5 points (3 teams eliminated, 14 teams tomorrow)
John 3 points (3 teams eliminated, 5 teams tomorrow)
The Cat 0 points (5 teams eliminated, 5 teams tomorrow)

So far a correct computation of Possible Points (correctly accounting for when two teams with the same owner face each other) has eluded my ability to futz with Excel and watch a movie at the same time.

UPSET POINTS: at this point the 4 points would go to me (for #11 VCU over #6 Duke). John can't match that (he got a bit unlucky that Old Dominion didn't beat Butler.)

Nate can surpass that with an upset by Long Beach over Tennessee, or else match it with Winthrop over Notre Dame, though I have five opportunities to improve on it.

Spot the Fallacy

(This has politics AND sports. W00t.)

What does McCain's bracket tell us about the campaign he's running? It would be hard to come up with more conservative picks. McCain has all four No. 1 seeds going to the Final Four. That's never happened in NCAA history, and it's a classic front-runner strategy sure to lose the office pool. His longest shot in the Elite Eight is a third seed, Washington State; the rest are first or second seeds. The Arizona senator doesn't even choose his home-state Wildcats to knock off top-seeded Florida. Straight talk, or a savvy play for Florida's Super Tuesday primary? You make the call. --Slate

HINT: Think about how the case against picking all four #1 seeds compares to the case against, e.g., happening to pick the #2 seed from the West and the #1 seed from the other three regions. Cutting to the chase, the "classic front-runner strategy sure to lose" canard is just like the theory that 1-2-3-4-5-6 never won the lottery, only even more wrongheaded.

Assuming you get even odds on each game, you don't go against the chalk (or eschew the lotto numbers 1-2-3-4-5-6) to increase your probability of having the best score, you do it to increase your SHARE of the big prize in the event that you do luck out.

(Or, if you're just playing for fun, you go against the chalk because the full chalk is boring.)

UPDATE: I should've looked closer at the by-line. The more of Bruce Reed I read, the more I suspect the only reason he has a Slate column is to make Dahlia Lithwick look acceptably intelligent.

Sports Themed Urban Legend of the Day

They say that ever year around this time -- about the third Sunday in March -- after all eight #1 seeds cruise through their respective first round NCAA Division 1 basketball tournament games, a group of Harvard women get together and pop the champagne.

(Actually I completely made that up, but it'd be neat if it were true.)

Lessons Learned

What wisdom you learned in the last several years? This is basically self-help, but it should be more profound than (say) "stop and smell the roses."

I've learned (I'd like to think I've learned) not to over-explain things or make them too byzantine. This mostly a flavor of "keep it simple, stupid" but it specifically applies to the TD ("tournament director") role: Everything from running quiz-bowl to running a fantasy sports league.

You?

March Merriment: Auction Style!

Announcing a free, fun team-picking game over the true 64-team field of this year's NCAA Men's Basketball tournament. This is open to anyone who can do a Yahoo! Chat from 18:00 PDT (21:00 EDT) (also known as 6pm/9pm) Wednesday, March 14, lasting 90 minutes or so.

Please comment here (or e-mail me) by 17:00 PDT Wednesday, with your Yahoo! username, so that I know to invite you. Please read on to see how this will work.

Two sections: "Team Selection" and "Team Scoring."

TEAM SELECTION
2-10 participants[1] in a Yahoo! Chat room will each start with a fictitious budget of 128 rubles. Players will take turns[2] opening the bidding on a team in the 64-team[3] NCAA men's tournament field.

OPENING BIDS
To open the bidding just type a team name and a ruble amount; for example, "Ohio State for 1" or "Florida for 17" or "Penn for 128." You must choose a team from the field of 64 that hasn't already been bid on. Your opening bid must be an integer between 1 and your remaining budget. Invalid bids will be ignored, or gently chided. If you can't make a valid opening bid within 15 seconds, we'll go on to the next person.

SUBSEQUENT BIDS
Subject to budget constraints anyone can bid in any auction[4] Bids must be integers, at least 1 more than the previous bid and at most whatever budget you have left. If two people bid the same amount, the earlier bid is the real one; the auctioneer (me) will resolve any ambiguity.

WINNING BIDS
The auctioneer (me) will announce "[team] to [owner] for [amount] going once", then (barring further bids) "going twice", then (barring further bids) "sold."[5] The auctioneer will also announce the winning player's remaining budget. There is no maximum number of teams per player: The only limits are your budget[6], your time, and the total of 64 available teams.

END OF TEAM SELECTION
Bidding will be completely done[7] once any of the following is true:
1. All 64 teams have come up for bid.
2. Nobody still in the chat room has any rubles left over.
3. Nobody still in the chat room wishes to bid further.[8]

TEAM SCORING
Up to 128 points are available.

1 point for every team that wins in the first round.[9]

2 more points for every team that wins in the second round.

3 more points for every team that wins in the third round.

4 more points for every team that wins in the quarterfinals.

6 more points for both teams that win the semis.

8 more points for the team that wins the final.

4 more points for the team that pulls the biggest first-round upset.[10]

For example, a 4-seed that reached the Sweet Sixteen (but went no further) would get 1+2 = 3 points. A 1-seed that won the whole thing would get 1+2+3+4+6+8 = 24 points.

Teams' points go to whichever person won that team at auction. Whoever gets the most points wins the pride of a job well done.

--
[1] If 11 or more people want in, we'll make an arbitrary split into two or more groups.

[2] We'll randomly determine the order. Remember, this is the order in which bidding is opened: Subject to budget constraints anyone can bid in any auction.

[3] That is, the 65 teams announced on Sunday, March 11, minus whichever team loses the Tuesday "play-in" game.

[4] But only on the team currently up for grabs. If someone opens with "Texas for 5" you can't respond with "Oklahoma State for 6." (Nor can you say "Texas for 4" but this should be obvious.)

[5] Only one person will "win" any team. That's right, only one of us will "own" Ohio State or Florida or Texas or whoever.

[6] If you're down to N rubles then you can win at most N more teams.

[7] But people can keep chatting, you won't get kicked out.

[8] Once bidding is done, any remaining rubles just disappear.

[9] This probably won't matter but the Tuesday play-in game is NOT part of the first round!

[10] Based on seed difference. If two teams tie for the biggest upset they'd each get 2 points. If three or four teams tie for the biggest upset they'd each get 1 point.

I Know Someone Exactly Like This

He's one of my favorite people, yet this description of his "devil's advocate" role is eerily spot-on pitch-perfect.

Onion Verite

The children we saw have all had to contemplate on their way to hospital that they do not in fact possess superpowers.

Ah, no wonder Child-Safety Experts Call For Restrictions On Childhood Imagination.

Two Oddly Precise Estimates

...both from headlines on the first page of today's San Francisco Chronicle business section.

1. The state of California estimates only a "2.9% chance" of rolling blackouts this summer. Not 2%, not 3%, but 2.9%. There you go.

2. Meanwhile, a headline writer asserts that Bill Gates told Congress that the U.S. has an "infinite" need for H1B visas. Not ten thousand, not one million, but infinite. I didn't read the article to see whether Gates was quoted accurately.

Like the United Way Only Bono-er

$100 million spent on marketing results in $18 million spent on African relief.

I wonder who will end up being the safe drinking water (or pick your own favorite simple, effective improvement) counterpart to Norman Borlaug. I think we know who it won't be.

Aldomania 2007!!

Mary, Mary... all about the instant nostalgia. Sit right back and she'll get you up to speed about last summer's catchiest comic strip plot line.

UPDATE: Today's Pearls Before Swine correctly identifies the best possible use of a stripper pole. I thoroughly agree with Pig's sentiments in the final panel.

"That's not a dope pipe..."

Find out how the sentence actually continued, then devise an improvement.

Pleez Lern 2 Spel

Note to Fark submitters, various bloggers, and many other people: There is no such celebrity as "Rachel Ray" [sic]. It's "Rachael." Write it 50 times until you get it right.

Likewise, ten years ago there was no such celebrity as "Cal Ripkin" [sic]. (There still isn't.) Why are these things so hard?

Former Soviet Republic Videos of the Day

Best Patriotic Video

Best Sports Video

CharlieCards!

Until now I didn't realize the MBTA had gone completely automated.

Did CharlieCards get their name from this folk song?

Oh, while we're linking to stuff via Fark: Artest being Artest

Public Choice Theory At Its Finest

The negotiating stance taken by the Pittsburgh Penguins should tell you nearly everything you need to know about how sports team owners operate.

Even though I think it's silly that the bluenose powers-that-be turned down a casino bid, all the same the Pens are holding out for the best possible offer because they can. In the event that they really do move, the city of Pittsburgh should regret nothing: Rather, this would be a case where the ability to suck on a local government teat was apparently worth completely screwing over a fan base.

This would be the most despicable franchise relocation of my lifetime, with Art Modell's flight to Baltimore a distant second. (The Colts' leaving Baltimore under cover of darkness in third, though it's a tough call between them and Modell.)

Funky Highway Interchanges

Some pictures here. The Tom Moreland Interchange (85 & 285) isn't nearly as complicated as the other.

As interchanges go my hometown favorite is 24 & 580 in Oakland (or Berkeley? - I'm not sure where the city limit is). But there it should be crystal clear what different freeway exits do. The only funky elements are the very long on-ramp to 580 East (it begins west of the interchange) and the 51st/MLK exit (just north of the displayed area).

Oh, and I suppose it's confusing that the same highway is called "980" south of that interchange but "24" north of it.

And honorable mention to the stuff just east of the Bay Bridge toll plaza. Serpentine and industrial.

A Neologism is Like A Noble Spirit

Both embiggen the smallest mind.

The main purpose of words of course is to communicate clearly. Most of these "is that really a word?" word get their point across just fine, yet a choice of words can easily be so jarring that the dissonance disrupts the meaning. In cases like that, surely a better choice of words existed.

For example, people who say "utilize" instead of "use" and "action item" instead of "task" are almost always just being gratuitously stilted.

Vindication for Floyd Landis?

Hmm...

Mostly unrelated: The most recent Sunday NY Times had a column about Lance Armstrong in which he mentioned that he still loves his first wife.

Modern Religion

It's come to this.

Sunni vs. Shi'ite: A Quiz

I went 8 for 8. Only had to stop and think on two of them.

Eye of Newt, Toe of Dromedary

The first panel of today's Luann features quite an attention to detail.

Ivy Chic

It's all the rage on the mean streets.

When asked about the provenance of his Harvard jacket, Shakeil Brown, a St. Anthony High School student in Jersey City, responded: “I don’t know,” He helpfully pointed to the back: “It says ‘Crimson.’”

A worker at a hip-hop clothing store named Morlee’s in Jersey City showed me a fitted Cornell hat ($25, plus tax) and chuckled that the kids thought it was for the Cincinnati Reds (which it does resemble). I asked him what the hat did represent. “Some college team,” he said. “Clemson, I think.”

Social Science Observation of the Day

Studies purporting to show that happiness does not increase with income are likely to be flawed. Here's an analogy of why that might be so.

Name these Performance Enhancing Chemicals

Pictures here. "One of these chemicals is legally available only through a difficult-to-obtain prescription (although many college students use it illegally). Another one can only be purchased by adults. The other three can be purchased legally without age restrictions."

I believe either (1) or (2) is caffeine. I hope caffeine isn't (2), which seems very likely to be nicotine from the carcinogenic reference. One of the last three seems to be Ritalin but I couldn't tell you which one.

Bovine Musicology

In book form.

Remember JetBlue?

What do you say when a company melts down and dies before your very eyes?

(Other than "they could have used some better Operations Research," I guess.)

Sadly, JBLU is one of nine stocks still in my handpicked portfolio. Other than CPHD (hey, how's that anthrax detector working out anyway?), four are each up at least 200% while the other four are each down at least 35%.

(Partial list of stocks that I owned at one point but no longer do: MSFT, LUV, KKD (ugh!), CCU (double-ugh!), SBUX, and BUD.)

If you care enough about it to do the "for 5 points each" thing: The "good four" are all in basically the same industry, with a continuum of whether they help you find things or help you buy things. Of the "bad four," I already mentioned JetBlue. Another is the market leader in a field where Microsoft runs a strong second. (I guess the "good four" all sort of compete with MSFT.) The other two are a duopoly in an industry that I thought would be way more successful than it has been.

Tim Allen Unavailable for Comment

Chimps use tools.

Tennis As Spectator Sport Question

Which makes for more watchable tennis: Long rallies or wicked aces? (Not a rhetorical question: I assume the former but what do I know?)

If the former, then in general wouldn't faster courts translate to less watchable games?

At the SAP Open in San Jose, they made a conscious decision to speed up the surface. Then Andy Roddick went out and won his opener in under an hour.

Auto Racing is a Farce (as is ESPN)

"Add Michael Waltrip's crew chief and competition director to Daytona's list of cheaters. Each were suspended indefinitely Wednesday for using an illegal substance in Waltrip's engine during 500 qualifying."
--ESPN front page, emphases added

Wait, let me guess: It was steroids, wasn't it?!?

Call me an anarchist but the more infractions your "sport" feels the need to define, and the more precisely they have to be defined, the less legitimacy your pursuit has.

Obviously some basic ground rules are necessary to define the objectives of your sport (the car goes around the track 200 times, no fewer, and it never cuts across diagonally...), and some things might as well be codified to resolve ambiguity and prevent unsportsmanlike conduct.

(For example, I have no problem with NASCAR prohibiting the use of Molotov cocktails or IEDs, though I'd be surprised if they have a rule specifically devoted to same.)

But my goodness gracious... they have to regulate the gasoline?! That's insane. (Yes, I also think corked bats should be legal, as should hockey sticks where the blade dares to be longer or curvier than spec.)

ON SECOND THOUGHT: I'm opposed to the use of aluminum bats because they're a threat to life and health. So you could argue that fuel that makes cars go too fast is also unhealthy. Blah. I suppose a weaker form of my original premise is that the more complexity is involved in defining the restriction, the more the restriction makes the pursuit itself bogus. So, bats: Wood fine. Superballs bad. Aluminum is OK for boys but not for me. Fuel... ?

Charlatan?

Judge for yourself.

I hadn't previously been aware that Christ condoned pyramid schemes.

This Team Got Hosed

Fire these officials. The technical foul there is gratuitous.

By the way, if anyone remembers: What was the deal with the Dolphins-Patriots game several Decembers ago whose last play happened 45 minutes of real time after the rest of the game? Did the refs suddenly discover there was still supposed to be one second left? I vaguely remember news reports that exactly one fan was left in the stands for that final play. I've always wondered who he or she was.

24: Season 3 (Looking Back)

Oodles of spoilers.

First off, yes, Almeida committed treason. Yes, I would have probably done the same thing in his shoes but that's why he works (worked) for CTU and I don't. Treason is treason (this was the fundamental flaw with The English Patient).

Quick conversational parameters: Things I already know about Season 4 through the present include... Almeida is dead. David Palmer is dead. (A trivia question spoiled Almeida for me; Bill Simmons spoiled Palmer, but now that Dennis Haysbert is on that new CBS show everyone should have deduced it anyway). Jack Bauer is alive. Chloe is alive. (A Fox promo made those last two obvious.) The rest is a glorious fog to me.

9 a.m. to 1 p.m. (the last disc of 24: Season 3 episodes) might be among the best four hours of television ever made, more than redeeming the lackluster (at best) Mexico storyline.

I refuse to believe that Nina Myers is dead. Something weird happened there. Maybe this is irrational, like claiming that Elvis is alive, but something doesn't add up. Compare the televised footage of her supposed demise with the televised footage of Sherry Palmer being shot. Sherry's clearly dead.

Chase is bad-ass, between burning shut his torture wound around 9 p.m. and then letting his hand get axed off not 15 hours later.

When you watched the scene with Sherry asking David Palmer for marital reconciliation, did it pass through your mind that he'd broken up with his multi-year girlfriend barely more than 12 hours earlier?

Oh, one last thing: After the president had grounded all air transportation and ordered everyone to stay home, why was school in session at that one L.A. middle school? (It's surprising enough that the subway still operated.) Between the terror alert level and the NIH quarantine zones (how fortuitous that none of the chases or rendezvous visibly ran up against those), you'd think that would be a "school's out" day.

When Books Were New

Good stuff passed along by Brian.

File Under "Barbaro"

ESPN's "E-Ticket" has had some eye-catching features, most notably this travesty of justice, but I'm peeved that anyone sees their latest as newsworthy:

"By helicopter, boat and car, searchers are obsessed with finding Vivi, the show dog who has been lost for a year."

Because, you know, NO OTHER DOG has ever gone missing. Is it worse to see people treat specific animals as royalty than to see them treat specific humans as royalty? (Famous person dies prematurely on the same day that scores of ordinary people die in various auto accidents, fires, etc.)

Either way, gag me (the "induce vomiting" kind, not the "suppress speech" kind) and leave me out of it.

The Sunday (February 4) Times sports section had a bunch of letters to the editor about Barbaro, 100% of which were annoying on some level. The thing about horse racing is, they whip those horses to make them go faster. The horses run faster to try to avoid the sting of the whip.

Not to go all PETA on you but my esteem for horse racing is even lower than my esteem for boxing.

Celebrity Sightings

Nice catch, Maribeth.

Julia recognized someone at a Farmer's Market in Studio City a couple weekends ago but I didn't catch a glimpse and now don't remember who it was. (Speaking of which, the farmer's market in question was near Moorpark & Laurel Canyon. In a 24 (season 3) episode that intersection is the given location of an emergency room, but in real life I'm 90% sure there's no ER there.)

Most of my biggest celebrity sightings came in one package: A weekend in Las Vegas that combined top high school graduating seniors with high achievers from other walks of life. Tom Clancy, Oliver Stone, Robert Gates (when he was CIA director), Barbra Streisand (made gratuitously nasty partisan comments in a banquet speech: this was my first awareness of how... singular... a person Babs can be), Dolly Parton, and many others.

Biggest up-close-and-personal athlete sighting was Martin Brodeur, in the visitors' locker room at Fleet Center. (The only time I ever filled in for a wire service person at a sporting event.)

I'm one degree removed (as are a whole lot of you) from a staggering array of famous people:

1. Cooch talks to Red Sox every spring/summer's day.

2. My wife's friend's husband (a.k.a. my newest poker buddy) works for the A's.

3. Julia's brother does animation and her sister-in-law does P.R.

4. Oh, and I met Kibo a few times, mainly through being friends with a roommate of his. The form of Internet celebrity he cultivated seems so quaint now.

I Suppose Neither of Them is Related to William Wallace

Is it weird that I knew who William Shawn was before I knew who Wallace Shawn was?

(Complete this analogy in any way that makes sense: William Shawn is to Tina Brown is Wallace Shawn is to [???])

I briefly misapprehended that they were the same person, but at least I was close: they're brothers, and William's son just wrote a book about acute phobias.

Name The Three People in the Linked Image

For 10 points each..

Athletes as "Property"

Hmm:

Meanwhile, the NBA's main objective for the age limit has been realized -- namely, that we're getting to know future superstars before they actually enter the league. We're forming opinions on them. We're learning about them. In some cases (like myself with Durant), we're becoming fans of them. And that's a HUGE deal. The age limit wasn't about protecting these kids as much as cultivating them as properties over the long haul.
--BS

If your reaction to that metaphor was as visceral as mine then you can understand how I feel about the NCAA in general (and big-time athletic programs more specifically).

embiggens

A thread in Cooch's World (how did Sly not know that A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man?!) reminded me that I hadn't read this Antarctic travelogue in weeks.

(The common thread is that Brad's e-mail handle is embiggens.)

The Last Non-Sunday Fox Trot

Go here if you missed it (while the link lasts). I saved the image locally just in case It's a flash animation, so no image saving.

Super Bowl Ad Recap

The crabs?!? That test group severely overrated every Budweiser ad other than (ironically) the only good one.

BEST Super Bowl XLI ads (in my opinion):

0. Letterman & Oprah (not included in USA Today sample but way superior to what they did include).

1. NFL - Fans mourn end of season.

2. Bud Light - Slapping replaces fist bumping.

3. Emerald Nuts - Robert Goulet and low energy danger.

4. General Motors - Factory robot dreams he's fired.

5. Doritos - Guy in car, girl show Doritos qualities.

6. Chevrolet - Stars sing songs with Chevy in lyrics.

WORST:
5. Taco Bell - Lions chat about new Taquitos.

4. Blockbuster - Rabbit uses (real) mouse to order.

3. Snickers - Mechanics enjoy candy bar.

2. Garmin - GPS navigator vs. paper map monster.

1, Doritos - Checkout girl gets excited.

ACTUAL WORST: The Budweiser ESL ad.

MOST DISAPPOINTING:
Budweiser - Stray dog and the Clydesdales. Maybe I'd have ranked this highly if I hadn't initially misunderstood it.

Black History Month History Week History Day

This is brilliant.

Ivy League Balance Restored

It looked as though Yale had a long period of triumphant reign to enjoy after the "We Suck" stadium placard prank. There's just no way to recover from that.

Until now.

UPDATE: Dartmouth for the win.

'many hundreds of Yale administration-to-student emails"?

Maybe a lot changed from 1992-96 to 2000-04 but I don't remember the existence of administration-to-student emails, or of administrators who felt the need for same.

Boston's Finest

I have nothing to add to the January 31 Cooch's World entry.

Why don't we talk about how these things were posted under cover of night, in some cases three weeks ago, and no one noticed. Under bridges, in subway stations, everywhere. Where were all the security people? Where was all the crack staff designed to protect us from shit like this? Why didn't they notice?

Because it's impossible. I'm not saying the point is not to try, but let's stop deluding ourselves into believing that if someone wants to plant a bomb somewhere and blow a bunch of people up, they can't do it.

I Choose to Believe This Is A Joke

The Miss America contest dates back to 1921 — when there were only 48 states, mind you! — and the winner has come from New York only three times.
--this bizarre rant

Today's Comics

Get Fuzzy has a better line in panel one ("Indeed, I am the biggest tool you have ever seen") than most comic strips have as a punchline.

Quigmans lifted its punchline directly from The Onion, and at that it was an Onion article from right around two weeks ago (i.e. submit deadline).

Get Fuzzy: A News Summary

Ten papers asked for cleaner alternatives to last week's story line.

Either Get Fuzzy or Pearls Before Swine will replace Fox Trot in the Anderson Independent Mail (South Carolina).

Get Fuzzy replaced Fox Trot in Kalmazoo. And Halifax.

Get Fuzzy will not replace Beetle Bailey in Concord, NH.

I can't figure out what this guy is trying to say, but this person likes to hug people.

GF is some anonymous person's favorite comic strip but is unavailable to this blog on MSNBC.

Last but not least, according to the The Spectrum of St. George, Utah, Get Fuzzy is a comic like "Garfield" but with a little more edge.

Darby Conley should put that on his business card.

Currency Reform: Get Rid of the... Nickel?

Here's a suggestion that the U.S. Treasury stop minting nickels and start accepting pennies at the same rate of exchange that nickels now enjoy.

This would pose all sorts of practical problems (vending machines come to mind) but I like the approach.

I also hate nickels. It's illogical that they're bigger than dimes or that they cost so much to mint. Nickels are even worse than people who can't let go of the penny.

One More (Belated) Comics Question

Was last week's "Get Fuzzy" series (Bucky wants to run for president but his signs are all inadvertently pro-marijuana) just Darby Conley's way of seeing how far he could go without newspapers dropping a day?

Is he hoping to make Bucky Katt a stoner hero?

(I'm as pro-drug as the next guy (excluding people who actually take them: my drug of choice is caffeine) but a week of that was excessive.)

Some Horrifying Comic Strip News

The characters will in essence be frozen in time; for example, Ellie Patterson's father, Jim, who has been suffering the depredations of age, will remain forever old.
--For Better or For Worse to go timeless.

That the characters age in real time is one of the neat things about the strip. (Michael is my age, for example. Liz is younger than my sister but not by much.)

As much as people mock its excesses I agree that FBoFW is on balance a good thing (I also know at least one of you fervently disagrees). It needs to retire gracefully, but the strip has still been a good run.

In other comic strip news, the day I reset my Houston Chronicle build-your-own page, I think I saw the name "Fast Track" and mistakenly believed it would be "Jump Start" (which the Chronicle seems not to carry). Oh well: "Fast Track" seems to exist to illustrate by counterexample that not every workplace comic strip will automatically achieve Dilbert quality.

Blog Prod of the Day

C'mon, it's been more than 18 months now: where's part 3 of how to build a particle accelerator?

This post and the one below it remind me: An uncanny percentage of my favorite people are physics people who do/did quiz-bowl (or else communications students who do/did quiz-bowl).

Along those lines, about 12 (13?) years ago I met for the first time someone whose e-mail handle is topquark. Referring to that handle I asked one of the stupidest questions I've ever asked another person in my life: "I presume you're a physics major?"

He told me he was actually studying economics. The worst part was that I believed him. (I hope he doesn't remember this. I obviously do remember.)

Blog Plug of the Day

These comic strips are hilarious.

They're also uncannily accurate depictions, not only of what the Masons look like but also of how their conversations go (in my small sample size).

Do Six-Year-Olds Understand Irony?

Some of them do, though not many. It had never occurred to me to wonder when people pick up this skill, though now I'm curious.

My six-year-old nephew typically does not understand irony. He'll ask a question with a seemingly obvious answer, usually of the form "Are you going to [...]?" I'll say "No, [snappy comeback]." He'll become incredulous and ask, "Really?"

"No, I was just kidding."

I suppose if you don't understand irony, you're immune to certain zingers.

Apartment 2G

Today's Apartment 2G is just unspeakably cold -- yet richly entertaining. I blame Comics Curmudgeon for turning me on to that strip.

People Being Assholes to Each Other for a Living

The great thing about having a standalone DVD player is that watching movies doesn't require the computer.

I say Julia bails on Prada some time in the next 15 minutes. She's wavering...

If this movie had come out 8-10 years sooner I could have quickly dispensed with one especially ill-advised prolonged crush.

UPDATE: Hasn't bailed yet. I have a theory that every Anne Hathaway movie is actually the same movie. I have a sample size of two (maybe more if that Julie Andrews Princess movie had any sequels).

Kids on Planes

This story drew over 1,100 Fark comments. (You can tell the submitter/approver didn't expect that kind of schmidtstorm given that they show an actual comment count instead of infinity or pi.)

Where to begin?

1. Worst customer service imaginable, though I think we all already had a variety of reasons never ever to fly AirTran.

2. That said, if a child becomes disruptive to other passengers, that child needs to leave the plane. (It's unclear from the story whether the kid did anything worse than hit its mommy and refuse to be seated, though if it were impossible to strap the kid into the seat then that alone would disruptive given takeoff regulations.)

It's entirely possible that a kid was misbehaving too much to fly safely -- which is to say I have less sympathy for the family than they would have probably hoped to get, though certainly more sympathy than whoever at Fark gave the airline a "Hero" tag.

Comic Strips from The Houston Chronicle

Apparently people who view their favorite comics via personal login have experienced problems.

I still connect just fine, mainly because the URL I bookmarked has specific query strings and seems not to require a login.

Follow this link to read the exact same comics I read. I configured it months ago and so far the only change is that long after The Boondocks discontinued, a glitch in the Chronicle's exception handling led them to fill the void with unattributed strips of 9 Chickweed Lane.

(From the first day I saw it, took forever for me to realize what strip it was. Best guess is that it is the alphabetically first strip in the Chron's portfolio (digits precede letters, and I guess Six Chicksx goes by "Six" rather than "6" (if the Chron even has it)).)

UPDATE: BUILD YOUR OWN PAGE here.

Here is my new and improved page, with several additions shamefully resulting from Comics Curmudgeon exposure.

Update to the update: I even changed the URL one more time. Since "Zits" was on its own page (in the 4-page-page mode), I felt like adding three more. "Mutts" is cute now and then without inducing much vomit; "Quigmans" holds its own against the "Bizarro"/"Boffo"/"Non Sequitur" ilk; and in the last spot... so help me... the absolute WORST comic that I would ever voluntarily opt into...

(So not "The Lockhorns" -- just shoot me in the head first -- but certainly more distinctive than "Marmaduke" and more worthwhile than "Baby Blues".)

"Rose is Rose."

One of the biggest differences between "Rose is Rose" and FBoFW is the lack of continuing story lines. (Neither Rose nor her husband nor their kid nor their cat ever ages.) But if you want to talk about just DIABETIC sweetness, sometimes combining all the worst elements of FBoFW with The Family Circus, and completely yet impossible to look away from...

"Rose is Rose" is a class all its own. I can't believe it's so obscure given how potentially polarizing it could be.

24: Season 3 (Disc 3)

If season 6 weren't already underway then as of that disc we'd be halfway caught up with the 24 series run. Spoiler space (in the very unlikely even that you're even further behind than me yet want to catch up).

Ga-El was obviously a triple-agent (not double), because if he were just a run of the mill double agent they wouldn't have made his duplicity so obvious from the outset.

I was also right about the timing of Nina's appearance but dead wrong about the context: I thought Hector's girlfriend would turn out to be Nina w/plastic surgery.

Maybe this is specific to the looks and mannerisms of the actor who plays Ryan Chappelle, but having him be the boss who doesn't want a baby in the office was like a bad Ally McBeal flashback only worse. (It was unclear which of {Chloe, Kim} was more likely to sleep with him or to have already slept with him.)

I'm aggressively uninterested in the Milliken plot line. Even though it's nice to have Penny Johnson Gerald back doing what she does best, this all feels very tacked on. I wish I was so aggressively indifferent to the baby, but sadly I'm intrigued.

Amador's apparent plan (representing to sell a bioweapon at seemingly distressed prices, pitting two buyers at time into sealed bids, collecting the money, swiping the sample with a bomb, and moving on to the next victim(s)) is brilliant and evil. Stark contrast to the scheme that is Season 3's central premise. The more I think about it, the more obscenely ridiculous Jack and Tony and Ga-El's idea was.

Someone At The Onion Shares My Wife's Disdain for Graphic Novels

Rich Inner Life of Jughead

Darwin Award Candidate

Yes, the radio station that hosted this contest is partially responsible, but if you didn't already know that too much water can kill you then you didn't have a good ninth grade biology teacher.

(Or, it's possible that I knew because I had a great one, take your pick. Ironically, given the theme I chose for this post, mine was the most passionate explainer and promoter of evolution I've ever known. This even though I did once take a class from Stephen Jay Gould. (Team-taught by Alan Dershowitz, mentioned a couple posts below here, and by Robert Nozick, the most underrated thinker of the three. Meaning no disrespect to Dersh, it's sad that he's the only one of the three still alive.))

Don't EVER sicken yourself on purpose, especially if doing so is expressly to win some sort of contest. Your body makes yourself expel impurities for a good reason.

I first heard about this from Opie & Anthony, who are less than three months away from the tenth anniversary of the first time a radio stunt got them fired. Note that neither claiming that the mayor of Boston died (on April Fools day) nor promoting sex inside a cathedral actually KILLS anyone.

24: Season 3 (Discs 1-2)

Also known as "Bad Idea Jeans: Jack Bauer Edition"

(spoilers)

I didn't think it was possible for Jack Bauer to have an even worse idea than arranging the hire of his own severely underqualified daughter for a CTU desk job where -- whodathunkit? -- she'd fall in love with a field agent who reminded her of daddy.

The prison break is the most harebrained scheme imaginable. I for one would have seen to it, if at all possible, that the Ramon was KILLED as soon as possible. Once the return of Ramon was impossible, what, would the Mexicans just kill hundreds of thousands of people out of spite?

6:00-7:00 is the worst 24 episode ever. (to that point)

The Wreck of the Frigid Miss Lizzy

For you For Better or For Worse fans, this is the funniest thing I've read in a long time.

UPDATE: This is actually a close second.

Incidentally, the best man for Liz is in fact Warren the helicopter pilot, but I expect neither Lynn Johnston nor takes of this poll to go that route, for the same reason that a third party will never succeed in U.S. politics.

Eminence vs. (Overstepping) Authority

History professor arrested for jaywalking (History Network report here, local story here.)

Meanwhile, Padres pitcher Jake Peavy was arrested for disorderly conduct at the Mobile airport a few days ago. He left his car double-parked and, when approached by airport police, told them to write up a ticket and he'd just pay the ticket. (Baseball Think Factory thread here.)

My favorite over-the-top HNN sentence: To come up up with the money Fernandez-Armesto, the author of nineteen books, had to make an arrangement with a bail bondsman.

Contrast that to the BTF comments excoriating Peavy for supposedly acting as though his money made him better than the rest of us. (That thread subsequently devolved into a political flamewar with some anti-anti-Peavy posters accused of being elitist Republicans. Although I haven't gotten to the Reason thread yet, somehow I don't expect that same charge to be lobbied.)

Anyhow, in both cases I think a situation got out of hand almost entirely because of a policeman's overreaction. The other party's status in life has nothing to do with this (or at least ought to have nothing), either way. Although someone will probably point out that it's easier to say "Write me a ticket and I'll pay it" if you're wealthy, at least anyone who wants to CAN express that sentiment (and ought to be able to without being accused of evildoing).

Against Whiny Anti-Publisher Rants Within Exclusive Media

The Comics Curmudgeon might mention something about today's Curtis -- or might not.

The mother in the strip has just told a Kwanzaa story (covering two weeks of strips) and is now explaining why it's never been published as a book. "Publishers aren't kind to new talent. Some actively 'block' them from being published. So millions of people are deprived of reading great ideas because of a handful who think they know it all." (Quotes in original: Ray Billingsley is notorious for gratuitous interior quotes, as in the names of the bullies "Derek and 'Onion'."

Got a great book idea? SELF-PUBLISH.

Got a rant? GET A BLOG.

Creative bandwidth is a whole lot less scarce than it used to be when you had to rely on bookstores or libraries for non-newspaper prose... or for that matter newsprint for your daily comics. I can read nearly any comic strip I want to now (thanks, Houston Chronicle!) but ironically, if that weren't the case, Curtis's mom's little rant would be a waste of space that could otherwise have gone to Candorville, whichever of Pickles or The Elderberries your paper doesn't carry, or even (dare I suggest) Liberty Meadows.

Sit aside whether this is an appropriate use of comic page space. (In a perfect world every daily strip would actually be funny, but For Better or For Worse ruined that awhile ago.) Take the anti-newbie conspiracy theory to its logical conclusion and assume that newspaper editors are racial bean counters (no less logical an assumption than that publishers "actively 'block'" new talent):

How many newspaper-days of The Boondocks did the world miss out on because complacent editors decided to themselves "Why do we need another black strip when we already have Curtis?"

Against Generic Punchlines

Julia, reading The New Yorker, asked me last night whether the Knicks were really bad. They had a cartoon something like:

"If you don't finish your vegetables, I'm taking you to a Knicks game."

The only reason that's any funnier than "If you don't finish your vegetables, I'll castrate you" is... well, never mind the analysis that takes itself too seriously, let's pretend the joke was made by a baby.

"There, do you see what I did there Brian? I took something that used to be highly desirable and pointed out just how undesirable it has become. That's right, Brian, I went there."

(Full circle, one of the best Peter Griffin moments ever is when he buys a New Yorker and stands on a street corner for more than a full day trying blankly to comprehend a cartoon.)

Personal Headline Confusion of the Day

No, Tiki Barber didn't have a "laminitis setback"; rather it was some horse.

Speaking of which, this is months old by now but I'm told there's a Barbaro message board where middle-aged women go to send him get-well wishes and people who see who ridiculous this is make it even more ridiculous by trolling them.

"It is interesting to note that..."

Let's list as many phrases as possible that someone should NEVER say or write.

"It's interesting to note that..." come to my mind first: If the ensuing piece of information weren't "interesting to note" then why waste your time mentioning it?

Caltech Basketball

With apologies to the Harvard women's team (still the only #16 seed ever to win an NCAA basketball tournament game*), any particular Ivy League champion, Oklahoma State, or even Duke, I have a new favorite college basketball team.

*- Fun fact recently learned from a local sports section and collaborated this instant via Wikipedia: Maples Pavilion only has a 7,392 capacity. That's about half of what I would have guessed otherwise, though it does explain why the building looks so small when one drives past it.

Would You Trade A Year in Prison For 18 Months' Greater Life Expectancy?

Question here: If spending a year in prison increased your life expectancy by eighteen months, would that make you want to do time?

Tyler Cowen adds, "Make that a low-security prison, no rape, and play around with the margin."

Before I met Julia this was a slam-dunk "yes" for me, meaning no disrespect to anyone else whom I love or am fond of. (At my strangest I would have probably been indifferent to "one year in prison vs. 13 months added life expectancy.") Now it's just as much of a slam-dunk no, where I wouldn't even consider this unless my wife's life expectancy also increased.

One year as a late-20s/early-30s newlywed turns out to be incredibly valuable, relative to one year as a 19-year-old or one year as an 80-year-old.

This Is No More Arbitrary Than Any Other Ad-Hoc Trifecta

Further proof, as if any were necessary, that "all deaths come in threes*": James Brown, Gerald Ford, and Saddam Hussein. Birds of a feather, really.

*- All deaths also come in pairs, in quintets, and in groups of 41, if you know how and where to look.

Where's My Impromptu Oratory?!

This week's Onion retrospective is incomplete without this article.

Granted, it duplicates the theme of Bush Finds Error in Fermilab Calculations, but there's always room for one more mocking reference to his little-known genius.

Ain't That Right, Lamar?

This morning, entirely randomly, was the first time I thought of that ad catchphrase since the passing of Lamar Hunt. (I don't remember offhand whether Mr. Hunt had anything to do with the Qwik Trip dog.)

(Julia has no idea what this is about and asked whether I could find what I'm talking about on YouTube. I'll check...)

Along those lines I'm still stunned that Jim Varney became famous. "Hey Verne" was his line from commercials for Braum's Ice Cream and Dairy Stores. He always gave his pitch directly into the camera ("Verne" was us), standing in a doorway, leaning in from beyond.

Neither this history page nor this FAQ mentions Varney.

It says here Braum's was one of the first three chains to use Jim Varney in ads.

Happy New Year

Albeit with one minor annoyance: At 23:59 PST I'm not terribly interested in what happened in Times Square three hours earlier. If the ball dropping in Times Square is that meaningful to you then you should choose to observe the year change at midnight EST, even if it's only 21:00 (or 23:00) where you live.

I wish I'd thought of this 13 hours sooner, but 23:57 local time would have been the perfect time to start watching "The Trouble With Trillions," as available on the recently release Simpsons Season 9 (hi Sarah).

The Meme Died A Horrible Death Not Long After The Man Died Peacefully

Yes, yes, you're the millionth person to mention it. He was delicious. Funny the first 500,000 times.

Free FM

My wife asked me the other day whether I'd ever heard of two radio guys named Opie & Anthony.

Several anecdotes later, she found the cathedral incident funny but the Mayor Menino death hoax offensive.

Today I drove her car. One of them told a very funny story involving the song "Dream Weaver" and a bad date on horseback.

On a somewhat related note (and rehashing months-old material from this blog): Nik Carter is available for voiceover work.

Also, bringing this entry full-circle, I believe Free FM's own promo voiceover work is done by the same guy who did WBCN promo voiceovers in the 1990s.

Fark Roundup

He was delicious. Thanks to that sketch, Gerald Ford's death may have been one of the world's most eagerly anticipated obituaries.

Hockey's fight code.

Luggage found in Houston dumpster.

Uncle

When my wife told me this morning that I make a good uncle I immediately thought of this uncle, with whom I have very little in common.

Two kids can easily give sensory overload to a kitten (much less an uncle). Kitten and uncle are by ourselves tonight, plowing through some quiz question production while the wife takes care of business.

I sort of regret not stopping by when I could, just catching them at their grandparents' house before the first bedtime, but the question push is a bit of a blessing in disguise: Without it, Mewelde would be here alone.

Oh, speaking of people named Mewelde: Green Bay punted twice while I drove home from work. (That makes my commute sound way longer than it is - those punts bookended a very short Viking drive and very short Packer drive.) Dick Enberg can't pronounce "Mewelde" the same way twice.

A Puddles Christmas

This most recent Luann plot line is freaking me out. Their dog had never talked or otherwise exhibited any anthropomorphism, then a throwaway comment ("Santa doesn't bring presents to dogs?!") begins a whole road trip adventure.

(I read on some comics forum that this entire storyline is a rerun from 1999, in which case it at least predates The Polar Express.)

The most unnerving part of this whole story is, not matter how I fight it, how much it really does tug on my heart strings. (Between Christmas and dogs I also know exactly which parent I get this from.)

Veruca Salt Reference of the Day

Lal Bihari (cited on this list) is officially dead.

Today's FBoFW Commentary

"Why I Hate Anthony"

By treading the same ground with Liz, Johnston gives the peculiar impression that she thinks everyone ought to be paired off with their first loves. Already, there have been exchanges hinting that teenage April’s forgettable boyfriend Gerald is the man with whom the youngest Patterson sibling is destined to spend her life. Since April and Gerald have known each other, if I’m remembering correctly, since preschool, this may be the ultimate FBOFW match: April will get to marry the first person outside her immediate family she ever met.

Compare to 18-Year-Old Miraculously Finds Soulmate in Hometown (The Onion of course).

Collate!

("COLLATE!" --Mike Develin's command to Joon's new in-laws' dog, at an August 2005 post-wedding brunch. You must admit this is much funnier than "Fetch!" The dog gave us a look of mild confusion.)

Of all the people who have a big effect my pop culture consumption, Nicole Hollander is one of the most annoying. Even her web page UI should drive you batty (though I give her props for clearly designing her site herself, since no self-respecting web designer could charge money for this with a straight face).

I bring it on myself, though, for continuing to read Sylvia every day just for the one strip every month or two that makes it all worthwhile.

Today's is one such strip, but only for a reference in the first two panels that might mean nothing to you without the inside joke I just mentioned.

UPDATE: Today's Zits is also existentially hilarious, though you can find it on your own.

Come Back, Aaron McGruder, All Is Forgiven

Does "Wee Pals" (Morrie Turner) still exist anywhere other than the Oakland Tribune?

I'd never heard of it until a few months ago (based on this link and this it seems as though I ought to feel some remorse).

You'll be glad to know that Turner is a "California Public Education Hall of Famer" (what does that even mean?) and "still very active." Unfortunately, every "Wee Pals" strip reminds me of what people who hated late-stage Peanuts claimed to hate about it.

Several Basketball Stat Questions

If any of you happen to know:

1. Prior to the first offensive rebound (if any), what percent of NBA possessions result in:
A. Turnover
B. Missed shot (defensive rebound)
C. Free throws
D. Made 2-pointer
E. Made 3-pointer

1a. Same questions as above, for the aftermath of an offensive rebound

2. What percent of rebounds go to the offense? Are the some easily measurable (and reliably kept) factors that affect this percentage?

3. What percent of blocked shots result in a defensive rebound? (Effectively all of them?)

4. Is there an easily measurable, reliably tracked way to differentiate steals that yield fast break opportunities from steals that just result in the other team's half court offense?

5. Probably most difficult of all but I still wonder: Is any effort made to track "field position" (for lack of a better term) versus shot clock status? Since the shot clock runs continuously (compare to outs or downs) and player positioning is fluid (compare to yard lines or bases), this couldn't be any sort of Markov chain but it could still be at least a running point expectation.

I haven't bothered to read Bill Simmons's latest ode to Allen Iverson, nor have I read (though I'm familiar with) the work of statheads who claim that Iverson is consistently one of basketball's least valuable players.

My intuition is that Efficiency is the least misleading readily-available NBA statistic, but that it overrates blocks, underrates steals, and handles rebounds imprecisely. I also vaguely suspect that metrics that put Iverson at the bottom of the league use too high an "expected" scoring percentage, by insufficiently distinguishing transition / "dunk opportunity" contexts from half-court contexts, and perhaps even by underrating the factors that produce fast breaks or dunk opportunities.

Three Lax Players and a...

Pay close attention to the subject and verb of the dependent clause of this sentence:

A judge ordered testing Friday to determine whether three Duke lacrosse players fathered the child of a woman who accuses them of rape --Fox sports

In hindsight this was a terrible movie

Cause-Effect Confusion of the Day

Best unintentionally funny weblog comment I've seen in awhile, on this tipping thread (not poker-related: I mention that only because people who read card-player message boards realize that in that context tipping threads are the most annoying threads ever):

I get called upon to tip my paper delivery person every year, and every year I tell my wife the same thing: "When he can get it in the driveway instead of the ditch and bag it right when it rains, then he'll get a tip." --Dan

They Should Teach Arabic and Hindi

I'm serious. This guy is right that French is profoundly over-taught in American schools. I also hadn't realized that Spanish classes were teaching the language of Spain rather than of Latin America.

When I lived in Germany with a host family, their 12-year-old daughter spoke almost fluent English, with a flawless BBC-style British accent.

Speaking of which, I did take German. My first choice would actually have been Russian (I wouldn't meet Julia until 14 years after my freshman year of high school; then again, 1988 was still in the Cold War era) but there was some conflict involving (if I remember right) band.

If I could do it over again I'd take either Russian or Latin. Our school had Japanese and Chinese classes: I'm quite proud that they were available but I don't regret not taking either option.

If I were a high schooler today and taking Arabic were possible, that would be my first choice (for the same reason Russian was circa 1988). Second choice probably Latin, third choice Spanish but only if it were a dialect widely spoken in the Western Hemisphere. No disrespect to German (the language of math!), but there are so many good choices. (Or rather, getting back to the subject here, there ought to be so many, except that too many schools give you Spanish, French, or nothing.)

Mewelde Update

Go to the Wikipedia page for "cat". Towards the bottom they have pictures labeled "A male tuxedo cat" and "A male bicolor cat." Mewelde is female, yet she bears an eerily close resemblance to the pictured bi-color cat. (For some reason Julia thinks Mewelde looks more like the pictured tuxedo cat. Her coloring is definitely more tuxedo-like than the model bi-color cat, but that is still the almost-dead-ringer for her.)

Mewelde Update

I'm starting Ciatrick Fason in an FFL playoff game against the guy who has Chester Taylor. (Last time I checked, Taylor was on his bench and his RB/WR flex spot was empty. Unless he picks someone up, his least bad flex option looks like Jerricho Cotchery - UPDATE: he actually seems to be going with Cedric Benson.) But that's not what this post is about (though I do think Mewelde Moore can be far more than just a 3rd down back).

Our kitten Mewelde seems to have finally gotten over her cold. Now she's astoundingly playful. Favorite toys include the cheap iTunes earphones (certainly far more useful as a cat toy than as attempted listening device), a mouse with a bell, and a roll that our paper towels used to surround.

Question About 24: Season 2

(Might as well include spoiler space...)

Assuming absolutely nothing went wrong (from his perspective), how was Kingsley's plan supposed to work?

Instigating the surprise retaliation depended on agents immediately finding and "verifying" the Cyprus tapes in Sahid Ali's apartment. This presupposes that Los Angeles would not be a nuked-out disaster area.

Getting away with it all depended on Hewitt being dead. This presupposes that Los Angeles would be a nuked-out disaster area.

Aside from this seeming contradiction, did Kingsley intend for the bomb to go off? As long as the Cyprus tapes were discovered somehow, I presume he preferred for the bomb to be found and disabled, yet didn't terribly mind if Los Angeles were nuked after all.

I'm disappointed that Kim's former employer had nothing to do with anything (that we know of as of the end of Season 2). Incredible timing that she'd rescue the kid (and the father kill the mother) on the very day that Los Angeles was secretly under threat. But perhaps not much more incredible than her finding the nuclear bunker guy on that very day, or needing to pee inside the very convenience store that the crazy Mexican guy would hold up.

Obligatory political angle: I wonder how many viewers did a complete about-face ("This is so realistic! Why can people in the real world understand?!" to "Oh, C'MON, that's not how it works" or vice versa) as the underlying theme shifted from "Terrorists are threatening us, we must go all-out to stop them" to "Evil rich guys are maneuvering us into a war for oil, we must avoid going to war until we're dead certain the evidence calls for it."

Fark Olfactory Roundup

Scent marketing. Between this and the short-lived chocolate chip cookie smells at SF bus stops, we're not too far removed from pseudo-biowarfare. (Remember stink-bombs from middle or high school? I only ever remember being in the vicinity of one, but one was plenty.) Speaking of sensory assault: I agree that Old Spice Red Zone is deeply underrated.

A Septupleheader of "24"

Season 2: Disc 3 and 75% of Disc 4, 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. Although it would have been nice to finish the disc, where we stopped is almost certainly a more natural stopping point than midnight.

Above the fold because this really isn't a spoiler: Every torture scene reminds me of "Scooby Snacks" (Fun Lovin' Criminals). "You can torture me all you want." "Torture you, that's good, that's a good idea, I like that one."

Also not a spoiler: Too many female characters on the show remind me of this very recent Onion article.

Lonnie: WTF? "If we get nuked you'll have to stay in my fallout shelter" has to be the lowest percentage pickup strategy ever. And the one day he not only randomly meets a girl but also randomly meets a girl who really does think L.A. is about to be nuked -- he still blows it. Poor guy.

We've decided that all Kim Bauer subplots are comic relief, if not occasions actively to root against her.

So that soap opera style confrontation between two sisters, earlier in the day? At the time it annoyed me as something seemingly superfluous to the real plot. That said, Julia and I did both correctly identify that family's real villain several hours before it was revealed.

I still haven't figured out how (if at all) the abusive father figures into all this. I'll be deeply disappointed if he doesn't (I've become dead convinced he works for NSA), though not terribly surprised. I'm also not holding my breath to see Kim's boyfriend Miguel again.

Family Guy's "Creepy Old Man": Call Your Office

The latest Zits plot line may be of interest to you.

Two FBoFW Thoughts

Today's strip will either make Nate laugh grudgingly or make Nate hate For Better or For Worse all the more.

I appreciated it, though that still doesn't make up for the sheer amount of makeup Liz (not in today's strip, prominent in the past few weeks though) is wearing these days. Does she realize she looks like a clown?

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

I've never seen the show, and until just now I falsely assumed that it was animated.

Did you know it was live action?

24: Scrubs Style

This is Sarah Clarke. You know her as Nina on 24.

This is Sarah Chalke. You know her as Elliott on Scrubs. Note the similarity of their names.

In an alternate universe Nina is played by Sarah Chalke, and Jack Bauer by Zack Braff (complete with interior monologue and quick cuts between vignettes illustrating his monlogue). And yes, John C. McGinley is David Palmer. (Skin tone aside, are Penny Johnson Gerald and Christa Miller interchangeable?)

Oh yes, and Donald Faison as Almeida, though I'm still not sure where Judy Reyes (nurse Carla) fits in.

Satellite Imagery, Coming Through

(I remember when TinyURL.com produced 24-character URLs. They are occasionally up to 25 now.)

Our apartment complex almost completely fills this image.

Zooming out a bit, the athletic fields northeast of us are part of a middle school.

Here's a bit more of San Francisco Bay.

That body of water a long block north of us is the lagoon.

All of Alameda (except for the old naval base to the west, and Bay Farm Island to the southeast).

For 10 points each, name the airport and find the pro sports stadium complex.

For one point, name the major metropolis just west of us.

My Accent

What American accent do you have?

"You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.

"The South" narrowly edges "The West" on my ensuing bar graph.

Two Unrelated, Painfully Obvious (Yet Underappreciated) Ideas

Most of what's known about past space-object strikes comes from the study of land craters. But three-quarters of Earth's surface is water; [Dallas] Abbott [of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University] reasoned that three-quarters of space objects must crash into the seas. Her work suggests a lot of comets and large rocks have hit the seas, many recently in geologic terms.
--TMQ

[T]he fact that Africa is so heavily affected by HIV has very little to do with differences in sexual behavior and very much to do with differences in circumstances. Second, and perhaps more important, there is potential for significant reductions in HIV transmission in Africa through the treatment of other sexually transmitted diseases.

Such an approach would cost around $3.50 per year per life saved. Treating AIDS itself costs around $300 per year. There are reasons to provide AIDS treatment in Africa, but cost-effectiveness is not one of them.
--Emily Oster, via Jane Galt

I think I already knew of Emily Oster via either Freakonomics or Marginal Revolution. She was so precocious as a baby that her parents drew entirely the wrong conclusions about the thought processes of infants/toddlers. Ah, here's the link. Someone with more time than I do, please go update/enhance her painfully botched Wikipedia entry.

(The picture of Oster on her home page doesn't change my impression that she should be on "my list" (see the Rachael Ray post below). Before I had any idea what she looked like, I was dead certain she belonged. Her headshot does nothing to dissuade me, but since the reasons I was theoretically attracted to her had nothing to do with looks, mapping everything else I know about her to a visual image just causes cognitive dissonance, and probably would no matter what she looked like.)

Highest Paid State Employee

For a quick 10 points, name the highest paid employee of the state of New Jersey. (Five points if you don't know the employee name but do know what position it is.)

I wouldn't have been surprised to find a Wikipedia page about the phenomenon, though I'm also not surprised that I didn't find one.

In any case, supposed "highest paid state employees" have included:

The chief investment officer of a pension fund (California, 2003)

Basketball coach Larry Eustachy (Iowa, before he was fired) and football coach Rick Neuheisel (Washington).

The athletic director of U. of Kansas (2003), the chancellor of Maryland (2002), and the president of Purdue (2006).

The governor himself (Connecticut - but only if the linked-to bill actually passed). I idly wonder whether this was an indirect attack on Jim Calhoun.

Does Scott Adams Appreciate the Irony...

...that if free will really doesn't exist, then he can't take credit for persuading anyone that it actually doesn't exist?

(Without free will -- that is, if the function of the brain is really no more than the consequence of various rules of physics -- then there's nothing special about rational argument, as opposed to emotional appeals or mass lobotomy.)

His case against free will seems compelling enough to me at first glance -- just irrelevant. If we completely lacked free will then we'd all just do what we're destined to do, and so getting into contentious debate about it doesn't accomplish anything. (If it's just your destiny, and you're hard-wired to get into those discussions instead of making something beautiful or consuming something beautiful... I'd say it sucks to be you, though of course you're welcome to disagree (whether you choose to disagree or are hard-wired to do so).)

P.S. Regarding this post, the "problem" he identifies (perhaps half-jokingly) isn't nearly as big a problem as e.g. the scarcity of potable water. (Smartass rebuttals work well on nebulous concepts like "end poverty" or "world peace" but they do nothing to address concrete problems with easily defined objectives.)

Michael Richards vs. Cosmo Kramer, Redux

Kenny Kramer's story.

Another Funny Thing About How Human Interest Stories Work

If 24 (Season 2: Disc 1) were a local news teaser:

"Nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. 2.5 million people might die. But first: Find out how an au pair saved a girl from her abusive father."

The Modern Dystopian Counterpart to a Pre-Nup

If you ever successfully sue someone for wrongful death, make sure the award includes 100% of the profits (or certainly more than 0% of the profits) from any business venture the guilty party launches as a direct or indirect result of his involvement in said wrongful death.

Also, if you're in the news media and you see a potential story that should shock any thinking person's consciousness, yet is also a transparent publicity ploy put on by someone with a book deal, for the love of all that's good in life IGNORE THEM. Any attention whatsoever just gives them exactly what they want.

Hometown Basketball Overload

Oral Roberts upsets Kansas

Of all the universities in NCAA Division 1, Oral Roberts is physically closest to the house where I grew up.

Kansas is still coached by Bill Self, the guy who led Tulsa to some 1990s Cinderella runs. ORU is coached by Scott Sutton, nth son of Eddie. I assume that I just have a parochial view of things and that the Sutton brothers are not the college basketball counter to hockey's Sutter brothers. (But then again maybe they are.)

The home page of the Mabee Center bills itself as "Tulsa's Premier Venue."

Just off the top of my head, sites that could also claim that title include (but are not limited to):
Drillers Stadium
Skelly Stadium
Maxwell Convention Center
Bells Amusement Park
Big Splash
Cain's Ballroom
Woodland Hills Mall

(Just kidding about the last one.)

Mewelde

One baby names site claims that the name Mewelde means "sparkling jewel" in Africa.

Both YouTube search results for "Mewelde" point to plays in the 2002 Hawaii Bowl.

Mewelde Moore claims to have spider sense. He's the only player in the NFL this year to throw a touchdown pass and also return a kick for a touchdown.

Our new kitten's name is Mewelde. (The wife called my bluff, but apparently I wasn't bluffing. I still don't know what to make of this.) She is beautiful.

Shirley Temple Black, Call Your Office

TMQ brings us this howler:

Skater Michelle Kwan has been named a "public diplomatic envoy" -- good-will ambassador -- by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Surely this makes Kwan the first American diplomat ever to have done swimsuit modeling!

I have yet to check my Yahoo! Mail today or read any web sites outside the ESPN.com domain. Please tell me the rest of the world was already all over this.

Comics Roundup

Great subtle Monty Python reference in today's "Get Fuzzy."

"Boffo" (previously known as "Mr. Boffo") has a reference to lobster from concentrate, with a nifty visual gag.

Today we start to see the source of Sally Forth's snark. Some day Ted's just going to lose it.

This isn't at all comics related but to save a post: As of today first Google News hit on Lamont Jordan is the same letter to the Oakland Tribune sports section that I read in my complimentary copy of that paper yesterday. "I saw where LaMont Jordan is questionable for Monday night's game in Seattle. LaMont Jordan has been 'questionable' since he came West! ..."

I also have it on reliable authority (though second-hand info) that Jordan is one of the worst poker players at The Oaks.

Running For Mayor

This week "Pearls Before Swine" and "Sherman's Lagoon" have remarkably similar plot lines.

This is comedy gold.

Halloween in the Castro

4 0 years since the last violent incident.

"See, this is why..."

Sentence that begin with those four words are often comedy gold, especially if written by DEK, though also if written by Josh the Comics Curmudgeon.

(Search for "Momma, 10/31/06")

Dear LuAnn,

(The comic strip title character, not the King of the Hill character.)

It's a trick! We who read the strip have been aware of this for several days now. (At least I'd like to think we're all astute enough to notice the obvious.) The Aaron Hill comment on your MySpace page is no more real than the talent scouts who were interested in Tiffany Sheraton St. Louis.

P.S. Of Aaron Hill and Bobby Hill, which middle infielder is less fringe? Wait, never mind, it's not even close. Very respectable season here.

A Google Amusement

This guy is also this guy.

Sports Passings

I found news of Trevor Berbick's death to be much more harrowing than news of Red Auerbach's death.

Lots of people die of old age. Not many people... [shudder]

So You're Driving From SF to LA

(Or vice versa.)

With an assist from Wikipedia and Google Maps, here's how far you've gotten.

First, let's standardize the endpoints as:
1. Junction of 238 with 580 (from "in the Bay Area" to "leaving the Bay Area"*)
2. Junction of 5 with 405 (from "approaching LA"** to "in LA")

*- with apologies to our friends in Dublin, Pleasanton, Livermore, and Tracy)
**- with apologies to some of the San Fernando Valley

You'll have some driving beyond both those endpoints, but you'll know how much. If it's about the same extra on each end, then just know that your trip is a bit closer to "50% done" than the number would otherwise say. Google Maps gives 333 miles between these endpoints. Subtracting the exit numbers gives 288 miles on 5 (not 287) but that's a tiny rounding issue.

Anyhow,
If you're at the entrance to 5, you're 13.8% there.
If you're at 140 (Merced, mile marker 418), you're 22.22% of the way there.
If you're at 152 (Gilroy, mile marker 403), you're 26.73% of the way there.
If you're at 165 (Los Banos, mile marker 391), you're 30.33% of the way there.
If you're at Manning Ave. (San Joaquin, mile marker 365), you're 38.14% of the way there.
If you're at 33/145 (Coalinga, mile marker 337), you're 46.55% of the way there.
If you're at 269 (Avenal, mile marker 319), you're 51.95% of the way there.
If you're at 41 (Kettleman City, mile marker 309), you're 54.95% of the way there.
If you're at 46 (Lost Hills, mile marker 278), you're 64.26% of the way there.
If you're at 58 (Buttonwillow, mile marker 257), you're 70.57% of the way there.
If you're at 43 (Wasco, mile marker 246), you're 73.87% of the way there.
If you're at 166 (Maricopa, Taft, mile marker 225), you're 80.18% of the way there.
If you're at 99 (Bakersfield, mile marker 221), you're 81.38% of the way there.
If you're at Laval Road (Laval Road, mile marker 219), you're 81.98% of the way there.
If you're at Lebec (Lebec, mile marker 207), you're 85.59% of the way there.
If you're at 138 (Lancaster, mile marker 198), you're 88.29% of the way there.
If you're at 126 (Ventura, mile marker 172), you're 96.1% of the way there.

Of course these percentages are reversible.

...and All The Children Are WAY Above Average

At Harvard (where else?).

The line I used over and over again about my college experience was that this was a group of otherwise normal people where everyone was intelligent and everyone was also damned good at whatever it was they did best.

Compare to the quoted excerpt:
[W]hen I was an undergraduate at Harvard [I] realized that Harvard had, in at least one interesting way, the perfect social system: Everyone at the top of his own ladder. The small minority of students passionately interested in drama knew perfectly well that they were the most important people at the university; everyone else was there to provide them with an audience. The small minority passionately interested in politics knew that they were the most important ones; their friends were there to be herded into meetings of the Young Republicans and Young Democrats in order to get them elected to positions in those organizations that were the stepping stones to further political success. The small minority...

[Via the Marginal Revolution link to Will Wilkinson.]

Obligatory personal angle: Here again my generalization (plus slacking) defeated me. I was nowhere near the best mathematician; wasn't the best quiz player (only the one who voluntarily spent the most time organizing things), not the best right-libertarian pundit (editor, layout person, etc.), certainly not the best bandie, etc.

My niche might have just been in-depth extracurricular activity. There were of course the people who joined a club (or "comped," for the ones by tryout only) just to say they did; I was the one who had a million activities but actually got things done within those groups.

(I did also join some groups in name only, though in each case I honestly expected to participate and assumed I would: Everything from the Civil Liberties Union to comping the Lampoon (read: showing up at the first meeting). I honestly believed I would at least submit the three humor pieces -- how hard could humor writing be?? -- but never even started on one.)

Two Six-Word Stories

(The second is arguably a six-word poem.)

1. Darkness. Muffled cry. Splash! Footsteps fade.

2. Seeds become trees. Girls become men.

Where Were You the First Time You Saw Krazy George?

(This is Krazy George.)

Deadspin mentions the 25th anniversary of The Wave.

Even though I'm dead certain Krazy George was working Tulsa Roughnecks (North American Soccer League) games when I was of the right age to go to them, it's hard to find any evidence on-line that they're a part of his c.v.

This search does turn up an alumni message board for a high school I didn't go to, where you get an in-passing reference to Krazy George in the story of Tulsa's own Myron Noodleman (whose Wikipedia page is in danger of deletion: do I have a labor of love in my near future? Probably not, but...).

Hmm, how does one describe Nathan Hale High School to a non-Tulsan? If you've read The Outsiders, Edison : Socs :: Rogers : Greasers (this would probably sit well with both the real life Thomas Edison and the real life Will Rogers). Hale fits somewhere in between. Nine high schools in the Tulsa Public Schools system (at least as of ten years ago), and I won't bore you with the rest.

Fark Roundup

(These stories are all via you know where)

Cleaning fluid packaged to look just like sports drink: What could possibly go wrong? (I'm disappointed that the actual Fark headline did not use the "What could possibly go wrong?" meme.)

Unluckiest woman ever: Seriously injured by freak accident in 1997 Thanksgiving parade, and Cory Lidle's plane explodes into her bedroom.

Inmats smuggling cell phones

Band teaches itself how to play song with explicit lyrics. High school football fans sing along, reciting the explicit lyrics en masse. Fan offended.

Obligatory band tie-in: Harvard's two most frequently used "self-taught" songs (no sheet music, just passed down like folklore, songs spontaneously begun by tuba section) were "Psycho Killer" (The Talking Heads) and the Anheuser Busch Clydesdale theme.

Oh, bonus band tie-in (though this one is not via Fark): Just what WERE these Wisconsin bandies doing?

[I still remember the strange look a woman at Star Market gave us when we bought an odd combination of quasi-liquids, all of a vaguely brownish hue, none of them unhealthy but not particularly appetizing either (imagine them when combined), as part of an annual tradition related to Harvard vs. Brown.]

UPDATE: I just now noticed (a minute after hitting "post") that the Wisconsin Deadspin entry now does have details of what got them in trouble. Replace "sex toy" with "banana" and cut out the "women kissing women" part and it all sounds vaguely familiar.

Until Just Now, I Thought The Phrase "Boom, Head Shot" Was Primarily About Fashion Photography

Boom, head shot

Faith, Forgiveness, Community Values, and the Amish

The heroine of this story was shunned for pressing charges against her brothers for sexual abuse, rather than simply forgiving them. Discuss.

In a better world, the Amish standards of forgiveness would be great. In this one, I'm sure you can see all the reasons (mainly deterrence by way of incapacity) why justice requires more.

Also, community standards alone can't suffice as ethical standards, especially when some elements of those community standards are monstrous ("monstrous" in whose valuation? - well, everyone's: there are some intuitively obvious notions of right and wrong behavior that I'd like to think are universally understood).

A Lot of Jewish Cultural Heritage Centers on Observance of Tradition

As a self-described conservative (small-c, certainly not "Conservative" as opposed to Reformed or Orthodox) I should approve of this.

After One Judaism Class, I Believe in Satan

I post this as a teaser, with explanation to come tomorrow morning cliff notes that I may or may not ever elaborate on.

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

Several children were once surveyed about God. The number who had "felt the presence of" God exceeded the number who "believed in" God. But what does it mean to "believe in" God? I know that Santa Claus is not real, but I've felt Santa's presence every time I watch Miracle on 34th Street.

At least one rabbi has written at length about how god is impossible to define, in that any definition imposes limits on god and thus commits inadvertent heresy. This may be quite true, but when we use words to communicate with each other (you know, those sequences of symbols like what you're reading right now), we can't effectively understand nontrivial ideas unless they're expressed with terms that have at least some meaning. There's not much point spending time discussing a "god" without at least a general consensus on definition (even if the consensus is probably wrong).

Just to make sure I get to the titular point: Apparently some Reformed Jews take the "stories" of the Old Testament as primarily allegorical. Well, The Screwtape Letters were also allegorical (and damn good literature at that), so you know...

(And of course you realized that "The Bible is a fantastic literary work" is no reason to "believe in god" yet not believe in Satan: I can think of several very high quality works (books, television, music) that center on the devil.)

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he does not exist."

This Story Was Made for Roe Konn

Casual sex at Indian call centers

I'll check the WLS web page for possible contact info. Not that this does me any good, 1000 miles away from Chicago airwaves with no speakers on my computer, but still.

(Here's the Fark comment thread: Yes, Anthony, I read some truly messed-up sites. Like, well, Fark.)

A Code I Have No Productive Reason To Remember

And yet nine-plus years after I first encountered it, I still remember it exactly. As an exercise for the reader: What do each of these three-character strings represent (a completely correct answer would associate each string with an entity, rather than just saying what they are collectively).

(Note that four of them are in the extended entry. You should guess before you read the extended entry. For what it's worth, I always thought the "T" one was the most misleading.)

AOR
BRS
CAN
DWS
EIN
FDE
GKC
HMB
ITW
JYA
KOA
LSM
MTX
NBJ
OAT
PCC
QRE
RHO
SLA
TEX
UNY
VPH
WPI
XSL
YSD
ZSF

1CO
2FL
3AZ
4TB

Argus Hamilton Sighting

This is probably the funniest thing Argus Hamilton ever wrote. I wonder how long it'll take to become attributed to George Carlin.

Most of what you think George Carlin said was actually someone else. Which is funny given that most of what Mike Barnicle wrote...

Even Hipsters Have Reading Comprehension Issues Sometimes

1. Go to The Comics Curmudegon

2. For the October 4, 2006, post, look at the included image of "They'll Do It Every Time" and note the presence of an e-mail address in the upper right corner.

3. Now read the comment thread and count how many people ask for help on how to contact the strip writer.

All that said, comment #36 made my day. ("OH MAN. I just had the greatest idea of my life. If Lambnesiac shares how to break the Scaduto code, I could start sending in reworded Lockhorns captions and see how long it takes the Lockhorns guy to notice.")

Alumni: Rich, Famous, Incongruously Stinking Drunk

Via Deadspin: Mark Cuban goes back to Bloomington and gets trashed.

I bet you didn't know John Lithgow does this whenever he's in Cambridge. (You didn't know that because I totally made it up, but wouldn't be be funny if it were true?)

This Was Better Without the Context

Imagine, if you will, a tennis scandal involving Maria Sharapova and a banana.

If you don't already know what actually happened, when you find out you'll be disappointed.

This is Quintessential Ig Nobel Material

Distance of leeway motorists give cyclists as a consequence of helmet status and blondeness.

You're Gonna Have to Trust Me On This

Liability insurance for CIA counter-terrorist officers.

I can't explain it now, there's no time.

P.S. My favorite Jack Bauerism: You try calling a hospital and telling the staff there that X's life is at risk, while X is on the operating table undoing major surgery. X's life is at risk? You don't say! (Yes, I realize he meant "X is at risk of a homicide attempt." But saying "life is in danger" is amusingly vague in that exact context.)

Magellan Hack

Have I already mentioned me desire one day to replace the sound effects of the Magellan navigation system with Gorillaz clips? ("It's comin' up... it's comin' up... it's comin' up... IT'S DARE (w00t!)!")

Derek Bok Completely Missed the Real Problem

I can't quite put my finger on whether (or if so why) this news offends me. For what it's worth I applied early action (not "early decision": I strongly agree that the binding commitments are nefarious) to Harvard, and was accepted, and am proud of both.

Doing away with early admission might be a good idea. It might reduce the disadvantage faced by the "disadvantaged." But do you know what would reduce that disadvantage still further? STOP CHARGING THEM TUITION. Even with financial aid (which not only transfers a huge burden to the government but also strongly influences tuition artificially even further upward - you see why, right?), student loans become onerous.

Harvard is the one institution that could easily afford this step (what the hell else are they going to do with billions upon billions of endowment?), and in fact would end up with an applicant pool that blew rival colleges out of the water.

So why not do away with tuition? The answers to that are an exercise for the reader, and they don't reflect entirely well on Harvard.

I remain steadfast, however, in not giving one red cent to that place until they do in fact get rid of tuition.

24: Lessons From Disc 1

Okay, so I didn't follow through with my plan to procure entire season(s) at once and do a real-time marathon. Even so, I'm finally catching up to the rest of the world. Every lesson other than the first is a potential spoiler.

1. If a show runs in real time and shows you the "clock" just before and after each commercial break, you learn appalling things about just how long those commerical breaks last.

2. "I hope Palmer's president." --Julia, speculating about how Seasons 2 thru N might differ from Season 1.

3. If you and a friend are ever kidnapped and your abductors abandon your friend as potentially dead, DO NOT beseech them to go back and get your friend. If your friend really is dead it doesn't matter anyway but if your friend is alive, it's much better to have that person as a witness for your rescue.

4. If you're about to get into a firefight, TURN OFF YOUR CELLPHONE.

5. No matter how stupid or megalomaniacal they're being, don't sass cops if your life or a loved one's life depends on their cooperation.

6. On the other hand (speaking of cops), it's easy to tell which characters on this show will die soon after they appearl

7. Every show needs a smalltime Hollywood (male) prostitute with a heart of gold.

Bistromath

Douglas Adams 1, lack of originality at the Onion 0

Like many of you, I know a Caltech physicist or two.

Coincidentally, a movie critic I've worked with from time to time is friends with Rob Schneider.

"Ducks eat free at Subway. I did not know that."

Burger King charges kid $1.04 for ice after he was hit by a car.

Is this an outrage? I thought so at first but now I'm torn. Cuts and scrapes aren't quite a life-or-death situation, and Burger King is not a medic station.

(Does anyone remember when something similar to this happened at a Starbucks on September 11? I'm trying and failing to remember details here. That situation was clearly outrageous.)

But outrage or no outrage, this is PR suicide, and I can't feel any sympathy for Burger King for being this obtuse.

"Boycott Smelly Burger King!" --cardboard sign that used to hang on an apartment window just above a Burger King on 9th Street between Judah & Irving, visible to anyone riding the N-Judah line on that stretch. Even though I was near those parts last night I didn't get to see whether the sign was still there (we were between Irving & Lincoln, then on Irving itself).

News in Brief

Our solar system has 12 planets, not 9.

JonBenet was killed by someone other than her parents.

Apparently they let psychotic homeless people fly transatlantic now.

And it's been about a week since I did anything useful with my e-mail account, for no good reason whatsoever.

Children: Some Unrelated Musings

Have you ever ad-libbed a bedtime story from scratch? It's a lot of fun, you should try it. Harder than it looks though.

Jacqueline Mackie Paisley is -- how to put this nicely? -- about what you'd expect from someone named "Jacqueline Mackie Paisley." Maybe I've become so conditioned to [false?] modesty that I just don't know how to take a supremely confident person. The supreme confidence is only part of why she was worth a mention, though: There's also a lot of coming out and saying (writing) things that not everyone would bother to spend the time typing.

Saying things that not everyone would bother to say isn't entirely bad, though: I highly respect anyone who would come right out and say, "My mother deciding to have kids may have benefited me personally, but I’m still sad for what it did to her own life. She is a *very* smart, politically savvy, charming, and talented person. If her life had not been derailed by having children [...]"

I would never use the word "derailed" to describe the effect on my mother's life of her having children (she chose to; it's unclear from context whether Massey's mom chose to), though I'm well aware that both of my parents gave up a lot, and I hope my sister and I have justified the sacrifice.

Tyler Cowen is the source of my link to Plassey, for what it's worth. Cowen also links to this blogger who can't comprehend the set of people who are undecided about having children.

I'm 99% sure that in the long run I want children. I'm just as certain that the time is not yet right. I also know that had I not been lucky enough to find Julia, children would have been out of the question. But in that event, I'd have had much more regret about the lack of Julia than about the lack of little Julias.

It's plausible that I would have met someone whom I saw as a perfect mate, but who had no interest in children. It's plausible that we would have fallen in love, married, and spent our lives together without children. Both having children and not having children entail a completely different set of sacrifices, and it's not always obvious which set of sacrifices you'd rather make.

Neat Quote About Norman Borlaug

"If you know just one name of one person in the world today, that name should be Dr. Norman Borlaug."
--Penn Jillette

Two Unrelated SF Chronicle Features

(Maybe one or both of them are also syndicated.)

David Lazarus ("Lazarus at Large") is a pompous ass and usually a waste of space.

On the other hand Don Asmussen ("Bad Reporter" editorial strip) rocks my world even though in real life politics we probably agree on almost nothing.

Academic Tenure vs. Eternal Salvation

Suppose for the sake of argument that Martin Luther was essentially correct. That is, not only is there a God and not only was Jesus messiah, etc., but most importantly that faith alone is sufficient to receive the gift of eternal salvation.

I'd never thought about this until reading Richard's thoughts about tenure, but being tenured puts you in a remarkably similar position to faith-alone salvation.

In both cases your status is guaranteed. In both cases you could, in theory, abuse this guarantee, but in both cases the idea is that the sort of person who'd achieve this status to begin with isn't the sort of person who'd be inclined to abuse it in a given manner.

Oversimplifying all over the place, of course.

If Bret Easton Ellis Were A Woman

Ellis still wouldn't write this well.

One Night in Bangkok Makes A Hard Man Humble

Bridge isn't chess but the reference is still apt.

States That Are Not Midwestern

This is all absolutely true, and hilarious because of it. I cannot emphasize enough how true this is.

Until Penn State joined the Big 10, there was a simple and elegant test of whether a state was Midwestern: A state was Midwestern if and only if a Big Ten school were in that state. (In other words: Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio.)

An Easy Lateral Thinking Puzzle

As it happens, I haven't read Lileks in ages.

Why did this ESPN column remind me of that?

Nuge Quote of the Day

Deer thoughts.

Meanwhile, both Cooch and I hate Sublime.

Thinly Veiled Blackmail of the Day

"It is not our intention to move or relocate the teams -- as long, of course, as we are able to negotiate a successor venue to the current basketball arena and arrangements to ensure the Sonics and Storm can succeed," Bennett said.
--OKC investors buy Seattle basketball teams

Hating On Pop Cultural Juggernauts

The Masons didn't like Gray's Anatomy.

I've never seen it and probably never will. On the other hand I'm starting to seriously reconsider the merits of my "never seen American Idol" state of being.

(Oh, and I've never seen 24 -- any season whatsoever -- but I have a plan for that involving future vacation time, Netflix (or borrowed complete seasons), and marathon upon marathon.)

Two Shocking News Stories, But One Silver Lining

Fatal Big Dig collapse

11-year-old assaulted by football players

Both of these are beyond unconscionable, but thank goodness they're both still rare enough that each incident is a standalone source of meganews rather than one of many.

Because He's French

News Roundup

This is old news by now but they shut down the casinos in Atlantic City because of New Jersey's state budget impasse.

Do-it-yourself train service in Cambodia.

Putin kisses boy's belly. Those crazy Russians...

Gaza fashion trend: What this says about how the world views America is an exercise for the reader.

Also in the Middle East (and continuing the theme of links via Reason's Hit and Run weblog): What unites Jerusalem's Catholics, Jews, and Muslims? They're all anti-gay.

Between Me and Chad, We Have the Entire NHL Covered

(Going back a couple weeks on this.)

I don't think either Kubi or I is a major NHL fan (we both seem to agree about where it fits among other leagues) but in both cases, the rooting interests we do have are largely motivated by an opinion about the nation in which the Stanley Cup belongs. We disagree completely on that point.

(Here I'm the Canadophile.)

Oh, the NHL draft was in Vancouver at the same time Julia and I were. In fact I think some coaches and/or newsconferency stuff were (like us) at the Hotel Vancouver.

I learned from a tour guide that many Vancouverites root against the Alberta teams (Edmonton, Calgary) for the same reasons that a blue-stater in the U.S. might root against Texas teams.

Red Devil Sightings

Combining the last two entries' themes:

Just as Joe saw some about a month ago, when Julia and I were in Vancouver the Friday before last, as we walked to lunch (Ukrainian place) we walked past several Korean BBQ's, sports bars, or both, all of which were packed with red-clad soccer megafans.

I was disheartened to learn afterwards that Switzerland had won the game in question. Some day, Korea...

My updated soccer allegiances, based almost entirely on Schadenfreude:

I will root against nations of tyranny (Iran etc.) no matter what. Fortunately those tend to have craptacular soccer teams anyway.

I will root against France almost no matter what, unless they're playing an Iran-type nation.

I will root against Brazil unless they're playing an Iran-type nation, or France.

Aside from everything above, I will root against England if I find the TV coverage excessively Anglo-centric. (For example, what business did the inferior England-Portugal matchup have being on ABC when the game that involved the winners of each of the last three Cups was relegated to ESPN? That's insane. Stupid Anglophilic Americans...)

Aside from everything above, in general it's hard to root for Argentina because Diego Maradona was (probably still is) a putz.

Aside from everything above, I will root against any continental Europe team if it's squared off against any non-continental-Europe team.

Soccer: Question and Comment

Am I correct to assume that FIFA is widely despised? They seem nearly as bad as the NCAA and (in a different way) nearly as bad as the United Nations.

Penalty kicks are fun to watch but if you're interested in an equitable result they're an abomination. That said, the English goalie was completely pwned on Portugal's shot sequence. Aim left, aim left (around here I mentioned to Julia that they were all shooting left), aim left, aim left, and then completely fake him out with a stutter step before nailing the wide-open right high.

But, again, penalty kicks are an abomination, perhaps even more of an abomination than the blatantly Anglo-centric ABC coverage/commentary. What, they couldn't afford also to do an on-site at some Portuguese sports bar?

I Am A Married Man

Various notes:
This is the best restaurant ever, but it's only in Vancouver. All-you-can-eat sushi and all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ, all for one low ($20) price.

We played Funkenschlag at my bachelor party. You can often figure out an unfamiliar word's meaning from context but in this case there might be red herrings.

My karaoke sheen has faded, but only a bit. A few years ago at The Mint I brought down the house with my rendition of "Could've Been." This was so long ago that (if I'm not mistaken) the friend who drove us there had not yet met his now longtime significant other. The woman he did accompany wanted to do a duet of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" but time didn't permit. Then 15 months ago on a Royal Caribbean weekend cruise I did "September Morn" and "Sk8er Boi," drawing rave reviews for the latter.

First karaoke night on the honeymoon cruise (week in Alaska): "Wonderful Tonight" (well received), then since they were having a hard time getting volunteers, I repeated with "Steal My Sunshine." Sadly the karaoke teleprompter didn't have the spoken bits ("Have you seen Mark..." [etc.] and then "Karen, I LOVE YOU!") and I couldn't quite ad lib.

Second karaoke night we didn't make (exhausted from a seven-mile hike). Final one, I took a stab at "Evergreen." Didn't flub it (took it mostly an octave down) but nothing special either. Then just in case they'd have time to allow repeats I put in for "Friends in Low Places," if only because it hadn't been done Monday and hadn't been done yet Saturday. At some point they announced there wouldn't be room for repeats, which is fine. Then Joe from Dallas (very Texan though also very Muslim, interesting combination), who'd sung a Garth Brooks ballad on Monday, took his turn and as he was coming up I knew he was going to do FILP, and told Julia as much, and sure enough he dedicated the song to the crowd itself and the first notes made it obvious.

No obvious new places for me to go with karaoke. Maybe some Journey. I'd wanted to do "Don't Stop Believing" but their particular songbook had no Journey at all.

Other cruise highlights: Wonderful food, activities, and views, of course. Walked around Ketchikan, took the long hike on the Juneau stop, and did a "nature hike and tour" of Sitka.

There's a famous Russian Orthodox church in Sitka, St. Michael's. Across the street from it is a not-so-famous Lutheran church founded by the Finnish crew whom the Russians brought along to settle Alaska. The Orthodox church was a bit of a letdown but the Lutherans were quite welcoming and even let me play the oldest organ west of the Mississippi.

Other Vancouver highlights: We walked 10 miles to, around, and from Stanley Park. Our Friday dining included both a Ukrainian restaurant and a Chinese place (Imperial Chinese Seafood) that had walnut chicken. In North Vancouver Friday afternoon we walked across Capilano Suspension Bridge and went up to Grouse Mountain. On Vancouver Island Saturday (90-minute ferry ride each way) we saw downtown Victoria and Butchart Gardens.

Seattle highlights of course included the waterfront, The Market (Pike Place Market), the Spade Needle, surprisingly good views from West Seattle's own waterfront, and randomly wandering around the Microsoft campus in Redmond on Wednesday.

My Favorite Wedding Gift So Far

Mike H-L bought me a book. The foreward is by Spike Lee. For a quick 10 points whose autobiography is it?

World Cup Rooting Interests

Teams I Plan to Root For:
Poland (my Dad spent time there on business)
Ecuador (I used to work with a DBA from Ecuador)
Germany (I spent two summers there - but only after they advance from Group A)
Anyone who plays against England (take a stand against hooligans)
Anyone who plays against Iran
United States
Anyone who plays against Brazil
Australia
Anyone who plays against France
Korea (the only person I know who'll attend games in person is Korean)
Ukraine (Julia's family is from Odessa)
Anyone who plays against Saudi Arabia
African countries in general (despite expecting them to lose)

Teams Julia Plans to Root For:
United States

When it comes to sports, Julia is a much better American than I am.

UPDATE: No need for me to root for Germany since so many locals will be. Re Nate, yes, my anti-Brazil sentiment is almost entirely rooting against the dominant power. (Note also that Germany is my first choice among the longterm WC superpowers.)

Oh, and my office roommate is from Italy (and I used to have a roommate roommate from Italy), so I should probably add them. (Hey, another reason to root against Brazil! Darn that Baggio...) Then again another office colleague claims Dutch heritage, yet I don't feel like going out of my way to cheer on The Netherlands.

Until Just Now I Didn't Know The Difference Between

DeSagana Diop and Boris Diaw.

MEME: Chain of Law & Order Spoilers

First one person gives (from memory) the fact pattern from the start of some Law & Order episode. Then somebody else posts (from memory) that episode's main spoilers and lays out the introductory facts from a different L & O. I'll go first in the extended entry, let the games begin in the comments.

(from Criminal Intent):

Argentine-American woman found dead. Some signs of a struggle and some signs she was beaten, though the wounds are suspiciously non-forceful. Dead woman's husband is a factory foreman involved in some insurance chicanery. Their daughter had just moved to her own apartment (with the mother's strong encouragement) a month earlier. Dead woman had also been volunteering at a nursing home(?) whose inhabitants had previously been refugees.

Do You Know What Today Is?

Today marks the 62nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

I understand that numerologists are also having a field day with today, but am I the only one who very quickly found that whole meme tiresome?

Florida

Okay, neither Pennsylvania nor Oklahoma (nor California for that matter) can compete after all.

The six most recent Fark stories with a "Florida" tag:

This is what a redneck control tower would look like. (I realize it's Miami-Dade, not upstate, but still.)

The crime scene was fake but the body was real.

Slow: Senior citizen zone.

Ditzy 23-year-old inadvertently abandons her own 6-year-old son at the same Chuck E. Cheese where she gave him a birthday bash.

Descendant of Genghis Khan: "'I think I do have a certain number of administrative skills,'' Robinson said, noting he was once president of a local financial analyst society. ``I haven't done any conquering, per se.'' First, the "per se" clinches it. Second, yes I realize this isn't so Florida-specific, but I threw it in because I presume we're all Douglas Adams fans here and remember the construction crew foreman who took Arthur's place in the mud.

Helium balloon 2, dim-witted would-be inhalers 0.

Election Quote

I didn't watch the finale but read that the 63 million votes cast "were more than any president has ever received." Maybe if we reformed the electoral system so that teenagers could vote by text message four hundred times for their favorite Rock the Vote candidate, that would not be a concern.
--Smart Bohemian

"Votes received" is a funny thing. I remember when I used to fill out dozens of All-Star ballots. The last time I did this (on-line) I used every e-mail variant I could think of that would actually reach me. The end result of all this was a lot of MLB.com spam. I lose.

Here's a Sentence Lead-In for You

Like Jesus, Gandhi, or Hitler...

Ted Nugent might run for governor.

That easily trumps Arnold. Jesse Ventura would be a distant third.

Three Great McSweeneys Articles in a Row

Historical Ryan Seacrest, the 4-year-old, and spam finally taps into our real desires.

The Onion

They seem to have switched from posting four new main articles every Tuesday evening, to posting one new main article every couple days (and expiring one old main article from the front page).

Not that I've built my weekly routine around obsessively checking The Onion several times every Tuesday afternoon or anything.

(They'd already gone quasi-daily with the "What Do You Think?" feature. News in Brief and opinion columns still seem to be strictly weekly updates.)

Book Sighting

Our local Walgeeens has a special display (rented by the publisher?) for these tiny devotional paperbacks, one of which is 101 Questions Children Ask about God.

With time to spare while wrapping paper was chosen, I looked through this book. Sample question with paraphrased (I hope not unfairly) answer: How do we know what the Bible says is true? Because God said so and He wouldn't lie to us.

I can't think of an easier way for a bright, non-gullible person suddenly to become agnostic, even if he'd previously been steadfast in his faith.

I hope to teach my children that there's a lot in this world that we just don't know. I hope they realize that "I don't know" isn't a problem but rather an invitation to learn and to think things through. (Of course sometimes even if we can't know something we need to take some conventions on faith for life to go on: We don't know that there will be a tomorrow, but obviously we live as though there will be.)

Equine Schmaltz

I know this really happened, but regardless of how it ends this storyline has the makings of the Worst Tearjerker Ever. I've avoided reading about it for exactly that reason.

A Good Anti-Luddite Cartoon

here.

Elevator Pitch

Here's my proposed draft for my soon-to-be father-in-law's appearance on the Startup Nation radio show. Obviously the hyperlinks are for weblog only; he won't actually stop and interject them (they're not in his copy).

If you know people with venture capital (or have it yourself) and want to improve the world, I urge you to read on and follow up.

I'm George Khait, founder of Acculine International. We have patented a full-service medical bed for immobile patients. The UniService bed includes bedsore relief and automatic linen changing -- all without moving or lifting the patient at all. This improves treatment of the bedridden and enhances their dignity.

We have a full-scale working prototype but we need five million dollars to build 12 units for clinical trials. Each UniService bed would save over 20,000 dollars a year in labor costs. That is a 10 billion dollar market, for a technology we already patented.

Economic Trends

Instant group discounts

Web-facilitated multiway bartering

Wal-Mart: masters of supply chain management

Predict outcomes of business/dating negotiation from minimal non-verbal cues.

More Thinly-Veiled Snobbishness

I actually have even less respect for people who read Us Weekly than for people who read The National Enquirer (or the like). Us makes even People look like The New Yorker.

(The New Yorker has been a tad overrated from the Tina Brown era onward but that's a completely different story.)

A few weeks ago when we waited too long to print out boarding passes (and got consigned to Southwest's "C" list), I shared an airplane row with a couple in their 50s. He was reading The Robb Report, she was reading Us Weekly. I have to assume his father or grandfather was the one who made all the family money, because the two of them had some of the most banal conversation I've ever been captive to, much of it centered on passages from Us that she inexplicably found funny.

Illegal in Oklahoma

Tattoos were illegal there, until just recently. (I remember knowing this, and assuming that laws against tattoos were much more widespread than they actually were.)

Loss leaders (sometimes inaccurately called "predatory pricing") may still be illegal in Oklahoma (and almost nowhere else), for all I know.

Confess Your Snobbery.

Name a group of people at whom you secretly (or not so secretly) look down your nose. I'll go first.

Parrotheads.

ß Is For...

I got nothing.

(If you're befuddled go here.)

Leave a comment if you would like me to bestow a letter on you. However, I will refuse to do so, and you'll just end up leaving a comment on the blog of someone who did this meme for real.

(By the way, I'll admit that immediately before posting this I checked Mike's blog on the off chance he'd already done this.)

Like A Hotel Room SportsCenter Loop

(Or a hotel room Headline News loop, depending on your TV viewing choices.)

Just sat in on back-to-back meetings relaying the same information (to slightly different audience makeup) in the same set of PowerPoint slides. At least one more of that same presentation still to come.

The second or third time through that SportsCenter loop, does anyone else delude yourself into thinking you've acquired that much more intrisic mastery of the previous night's game highlights, that you truly grok this sliding catch, that walkoff home run, or how the gamebreaking moment relates to the chosen catchphrase?

Two More From Fark

Gas price wars do happen sometimes. Not often enough but sometimes. (Kudos to that station for prominently placing "Grand Rapids, MI" on its web template. I hate it when there's a link to a local TV station or local newspaper whose story pages don't bother to tell you where they're from. Then the copy will mention some small town and you still don't know, "is this somewhere in Florida? Missouri? Idaho?"

About this story, I heartily agree with the first commenter: I'm not his damn hug monkey.

You need hugs from strangers? Get them on your own time, don't waste everybody else's time. (And now with a rebuttal, that creepy dude from the Dave Matthews Band video for [whatever that song was].)

Crossing That Line

This fake sports story is hilariously offensive, obviously moreso if you're familiar with the events to which it alludes.

For Precocious Children

This entry is for any three-year-old who might be reading this weblog. Then again if any three-year-olds are reading this weblog, we've got more important things to take care of.

If you're ever asked, "What does a [name of animal] say?", don't just settle for the noise that animal makes. Technically the noise is "What does [name of animal] sound like?"

A cow says something like "Man this cud is good. I could spend all day out here in the meadow, chewing... chewing... chewing... hmm, my udder itches."

A cat says something like "Stupid window pane. If it weren't for this piece of glass all you birds would be going DOWN, you hear me?!"

Oh and while we're at it, (stealing from a story that R. tells of his own childhood): If anyone ever asks you to say as many words as possible in 30 seconds, you can't go wrong with "one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen [...]"

Legend has it that in real life, some child psychologist argued with the very young R. about whether those were words (and of course they indeed are, which is obvious if you see them spelled out though not obvious if you hear them out loud).

Today's Best Comics

("Today" = May 2, if you see this entry after the fact.)

Bizarro, Get Fuzzy, and Zits.

(Go here if they're not in your local paper.)

I'll reuse today's Bizarro punchline as some sort of recurring Quote of the Day.

Two From Fark

The Fark headline for this story got it about right:
"Road rage + stabbing + NFL DE + hate crime + pepper spray + jailarity + creepy-ass mugshot goodness = other 49 states surrender" (With a "Florida" tag, of course.)

This is so creepy I don't even know where to begin. Please don't ever give publicity to people like this. EVER. (I admit that by linking to it I contradict that whole idea. Even so, train-wreck.)

If Eddie Van Halen Were God

Fair enough, you lived a virtuous life, but this contract specifically called for no brown M&Ms: To fire and brimstone with you!

If you find this allegory useful in some theological speculation, run with it.

(For example, I'm a "salvation by faith alone" person, who would argue that if our works make/break us then, aside from the fact that humans should fail en masse (because we all suck), we're perilously close to an absurdity like you see above. Rereading the Baptism post and thinking about pouring vs. immersion led me down this path.)

Why Is Baptism a Sacrament?

Today we attended a Roman Catholic baptismal ceremony. Of course I'm very happy for our friends and their baby. But I think I have some unorthodox views about baptism.

To keep it brief (at least until the ensuing comments), I believe most Christian sects put too much emphasis on baptism and not enough on confirmation. Baptism of babies in particular strikes me as odd because they're not old enough to understand what's happening to them and why.

(I'm gobsmacked by the historical notion that baptizing a baby (or failing to) could make the difference between that baby's eternal salvation and eternal limbo (or worse yet damnation). I'm also gobsmacked by how heated the debates became about pouring versus immersion. What might one infer about a God to whom that made such a big difference?)

I'll admit it's silly to ask that religions be rational. And I'll admit that I'm still theistic. Well, at least more than agnostic. I'm 70-80% sure that God exists, and even confident enough to claim that Christianity's version of theology is about a 50/50 shot to be closer to the truth (whatever the truth may be) than anything else out there.

Where I've changed is that even though I claim I still comprehend (as much as any human ever could) what a stunning gift eternal salvation would represent, I'm happy enough with life on Earth that even if eternal salvation turned out not to exist after all, I'd still be thankful for the blessings on Earth that we do get in our lifetimes.

The Harvard Plagiarist

Julia and I agree this gal knew exactly what she was doing.

Julia credits her with brilliantly subverting a silly paradigm (chick lit in general) but I just call it a super-duper-mega publicity stunt.

(Would you have any idea who this person was had the scandal not broke?)

Best Recent Comics Curmudegon Quotes

(Here. Funnier if you've seen the comic strips in question but still plenty funny out of context.)

"Boy, is Hillary in luck! She’s bonded with a moody goth girl just in time to learn about death!"

"They really tried to baptize the hell out of that cat. Anyway, the only way this cartoon could have been improved would have been to dress Jeffy up like Robert Mitchum’s evil preacher from Night of the Hunter."

Rats' Asses Given

Masterpiece.

Cultural Geography Visual Bonus

For 5 points each, name these religious denominations from population data by county:

(Source: American Ethnic Geography, Valparaiso. Via Marginal Revolution.)

U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Another Story In Need of the "Oklahoma" Tag

If you want a virgin bride, advertising by yard sign is the way to go.

I realize the canonical wacky radio show news item quiz is "Florida or Pennsylvania?" but, with due respect to DEK, I think the Sooner State can hang with the Keystone State for news of the inane.

Some Day Fark Will Have An "Oklahoma" Tag

Empty House 1, Tactical Squad 0

Adverb Clause Watch

Adverb clauses rarely bring anything to the table, and in fact often introduce unnecessary confusion.

Today's example: The final sentence of this column.

Tellingly, a year from now, I doubt our analysis will be much different.

Compare to "A year from now, I doubt our analysis will be much different."

Can anyone explain in 100 words or less what connation the word "tellingly" is supposed to give to the sentence that actually ran? I've actually tried to find a reasonable meaning from context but utterly failed.

Cross-Comic In Jokes

Read this Pearls Before Swine and this one. Then look very closely at this Baby Blues.

RFID Your Cat

And your child while you're at it.

That should prevent evil stories like this.

Punchline as Status Symbol

The fourth panel on today's Doonesbury uses the only school for which the joke would actually work.

What other name could Trudeau put in there? Yale? (It would be funny only if you knew he went there himself.) Duke? (Would come across as a lame half-hearted attempt to namedrop breaking news.)

Notice that Stanford never calls itself "the Yale of the West." No school describes Princeton as "the {Rice, Duke, etc.} of the Northeast." When you see cheapo souvenir t-shirts comparing two schools, unless it's about those schools' direct rivalry (Ohio State-Michigan or whatnot), chances are one of the two schools is Harvard and the other school is the one whose boosters are selling the shirt.

Just saying.

(I'm usually way too smug to even bother with undergrad alma mater boosting, except during hockey season, and even at that there's a dash of irony and a dash of underdog given that Harvard's hockey team hasn't been quite as successful as other Beanpot schools lately.)

Products That Have Become Laughably Obsolete

Re Matt L's latest, I'm surprised there's still any market for Maxwell House and its ilk. Granting that neither Starbucks nor Peet's makes much of attempt to compete on price, I'd strongly argue that the quality difference here is more than pocket change per cup.

Can you think of other fields in which the market leaders provided a level of quality that newcomers subsequently blew out of the water, yet the old stand-bys still did business selling the same old thing?

Are These Things Really That Rare?

It says here:
On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be: 01:02:03 04/05/06.

Now I distinctly remember being woken up early on October 9, 1987 (at 6:54 a.m.). But aren't there surprisingly many seem-sorta-unique ways to arrange numbers like this?

Car Wash

Farktastic.

GooberMcFly and I Think Alike

This article goes with this Fark thread.

Forget the shed itself, I noticed the same thing as pointed out in the second comment: Nifty use of a spreadsheet there.

Prisoner's Dilemma and Absurd Beliefs

Marginal Revolution has both a link to empirical analysis of the game show Friend or Foe? and a comment thread about the most absurd propositions people believe.

Tying the two together, the most absurd proposition I believe is that in any given real-life prisoner's dilemma situation, no matter how close you get to the classic model, despite what game theorists tell you cooperation is the best solution. When you model the problem, the correctness of the standard solution depends on the notion that a game is played only once with no relevant future rounds.

Life doesn't work like that, even in situations where it would appear to. Even if there's no obvious logical connection between a given situation and some future spot you're in, I honestly do believe that good behavior tends to be rewarded over time.

If nothing else, the more people cooperate the more of a societal expectation develops that people will cooperate, and so the more likely you are to be the beneficiary of a cooperative partner/opponent in some future game.

Not to Caricature an Entire Sport But

This is what boxers do: Their raison d'etre is to attack and inflict violence on other people.

One striking characteristic of many pieces 1950s (and earlier) Americana, especially "I Love Lucy" episodes, is just how popular boxing used to be. I've said before and will say again, thank goodness that's no longer true.

Two Great Blog Quotes

"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
--tagline here

"Q. So do you think George Bush is really an idiot, or incredibly smart and just plays an idiot on TV?

A. I think he is smarter than 90% of the public. But many politicians are smarter than 99% of the public, so the difference can seem disturbing."
--Scott Adams

Spreading The Mason Meme

I created my first Internet memetic virus, which is, "Recount a one-line anecdote for each state you have visited [and then demand that others do the same]." --RJM

Alabama: Went to Space Camp; surprisingly, didn't enjoy it
Alaska: Never been, but honeymoon cruise sufficiently exciting to include in advance.
Arizona: Watched Fall League games on November 2002 fantasy baseball symposium weekend (Teixeira awesome, Drew Henson awful)
Arkansas: Won a chess tournament in Little Rock the weekend my dog died
California: Once lived within four blocks of the Pacific Ocean
Colorado: Watched Rockies-Cardinals game from fifth deck of old Mile High Stadium
Connecticut: Ate New Haven's famous pizza with Tom Galloway et al (good pizza but not great)
Delaware: Visited cousins there once; told jokes about flatulence
D.C.: Lost potential photo-op with Reagan when MathCounts buzzer race bumped me from 3rd to 4th
Florida: Best ice cream I've ever had was at one of the Disney resorts
Georgia: Fell asleep at an uneventful Braves-Red Sox game
Illinois: Almost made Julia laugh out loud just before Nutcracker began
Indiana: Passed through on car trips eight years apart, nighttime each time
Iowa: Another pass-through-in-a-car state, this one with distinctive smell
Kansas: On an unseasonably warm Thanksgiving day, tossed a football around with Kubicek's niece and nephew
Kentucky: 1992 National High School Chess Championship at convention center adjoining Rupp Arena
Louisiana: Most depressing night I can remember was an overnight stay near Baton Rouge (no real reason)
Maine: Julia and I drove up after a wedding; I had lots of seafood
Maryland: Both Kent Mercker's no-hitter and Kurt Cobain's death coincided with 1994 ACF Nationals
Massachusetts: Streaked (with dozens of others) despite sub-zero weather, as part of a January night-before-finals tradition
Michigan: When Colorado won the 2001 Stanley cup the two Avs fans in the bar were Kubicek and this woman whose guyfriends barely tolerated her as she bawled with joy
Minnesota: Julia didn't realize that the river we were crossing was the Mississippi
Mississippi: Passed through it on I-10, otherwise I got nothing
Missouri: Smoothest quiz tournament I've ever been part of (2004 ICT)
Nebraska: Stopped for lunch in Sidney; in awe for the vast brown flatness
Nevada: Used a urinal adjacent to Oliver Stone
New Hampshire: Listened to non-WEEI Red Sox affiliates as Barry Zito dominated the least eventful game of 2003 ALDS
New Jersey: With fellow chess geeks ate at the dinner that inspired a Billy Joel song
New York: Stopped for speeding (95 in 55) near Buffalo en route to chess tournament in Toronto
North Carolina: Picked beans from my grandmother's garden
Ohio: Did laundry at a hotel, on a trip-within-a-trip (from Cali via Boston)
Oklahoma: Said many cute and/or precocious things as a kid
Oregon: Browsed an adult video store in downtown Portland
Pennsylvania: Reaction to the carcass from a Boston Market dinner is comic relief from otherwise painful story
Rhode Island: The sign outside the Providence Bonanza station has an extra 's' in the word 'buses.'
South Carolina: Passed up unintentionally comic indoor football to see Myrtle Beach Pelicans baseball and eat great pulled pork
Tennessee: Played piano (taking requests) during downtime at a TRASHionals
Texas: There's a supposedly Indian restaurant in downtown Austin that has salsa on every table
Utah: The interstate from Salt Lake City all the way to Wendover is ramrod straight and slightly downhill with no exits to speak of
Vermont: Darkest night sky I've ever seen
Virginia: Wherever we ate there had the most stereotypically southern waitress I've ever seen
Washington: Got as close to Mt. Saint Helens as the public was allowed circa 2002
West Virginia: If you take I-81 you're in the state about half an hour

San Diego Arena Evacuated

Read about it here. Surprised it isn't bigger news yet.

If all the games are delayed two hours then that Washington vs. Utah State game would tip off around midnight eastern.

Has it really been three years since ESPN picked up CBS's Thursday-Friday coverage while Dan Rather bloviated about the Iraq invasion?

Do I Care About This Game? A March Madness Algorithm

1. Can I root for Oklahoma State, Tulsa, an Ivy League school, Boston University, Iowa State (homage to Kubicek), Oklahoma, Cal, Stanford, Ohio State, or Indiana?

(If both teams qualify for 1, the order listed is the tiebreak order.)

2. Can I root for a team seeded 14 or lower?

3. Nonwithstanding the two criteria above, can I root for Duke?

4. Can I root against Kansas?

5. Nonwithstanding the above, can I root for a Big 12 team against a team from some conference I dislike?

6. Nonwithstanding the above, can I root for some team or conference that strikes my fancy (this year: Missouri Valley all the way) against a team from some conference I dislike?

First round games that I care about (other than seeds 14 or worse), by the above rules:
15 Penn over 2 Texas
6 Oklahoma over 11 Wisconsin-Milwaukee
7 Cal over 10 NC State
2 Ohio State over 15 Davidson
6 Indiana over 11 San Diego State
13 Bradley over 4 Kansas
7 Wichita State over 10 Seton Hall
11 Southern Illinois over 6 West Virginia
10 Northern Iowa over 7 Georgetown
12 Texas A&M over 5 Syracuse

What Keown Said

I concur with this column.

On a Page 2 cognitive dissonance note, just as we don't care what your bracket is, we also don't care what your wife or mother's bracket is.

A Slice of Hoops: Friday

"John Chaney to spend retirement hunting John Calipari."
--fake scroll headline on Sports Pickle

If you've never seen footage of the press conference confrontation that this headline alludes to, you're missing out.

Wachovia Center (Philadelphia)
#8 Arizona vs. #9 Wisconsin (12:30 EST)
#1 Villanova vs. #16 Monmouth (2:50 EST)
#1 Connecticut vs. #16 Albany (7:25 EST)
#8 Kentucky vs. #9 UAB (9:45 EST)

Two #1 seeds in the same building, not bad. (Most people who cared enough to read the extended entry at all realize this, but since a couple years ago NCAA subregionals do not necessarily feature eight teams in the same bracket. Four teams are playing for one Sweet 16 spot, four teams are playing for a different spot, but there's no reason those two spots have to feed into the same regional final.) So every game in this region (both Friday and Sunday) either ought to be exciting or definitely features a powerhouse. Still, four games where the outcome is almost pre-ordained, especially with Villanova getting the home crowds.

Dayton Arena
#2 Ohio State vs. #15 Davidson (12:15 EST)
#7 Georgetown vs. #10 Northern Iowa (2:35 EST)
#6 Michigan State vs. #11 George Mason (7:10 EST)
#3 North Carolina vs. #14 Murray State (9:30 EST)

This might actually be the most interesting subregional location of the eight, Ohio State's quasi-home crowd aside. Georgetown vs. Northern Iowa brings the Big East vs. MVC feud to a head.

The Palace (Auburn Hills, MI)
#3 Iowa vs. #14 Northwestern St. (12:25 EST)
#6 West Virginia vs. #11 Southern Illinois (2:45 EST)
#5 Pitt vs. #12 Kent State (7:10 EST)
#4 Kansas vs. #13 Bradley (9:30 EST)

Not bad either. Another Big East vs. MVC. I hate those "Big Ten vs. ACC" (or insert megaconference here) challenges but I'd watch Big East vs. MVC, understanding of course that the 5th tier and below could get ugly.

American Airlines Center (Dallas)
#8 Arkansas vs. #9 Bucknell (11:30 CST)
#1 Memphis vs. #16 Oral Roberts (1:50 CST)
#7 Cal vs. #10 NC State (6:20 CST)
#2 Texas vs. #15 Penn (8:40 CST)

Anyone facing Texas has an uphill climb, especially since both their first round opponent and most likely second round opponent are to some extent egghead schools. (Not that UT-Austin isn't also (among many other things since it's so huge) an egghead school.)

A Slice of Hoops: Thursday

Previewing games by bracket is so trite. In the past I've grouped by timeslot, since that's what a TV viewer will care about, though as I'm gainfully employed it's not all that useful to me either.

This time around let's pretend we could go to any subregional in person.

UPDATE: Anonymous commenter, thanks for the tag fix. That made me happy.

Greensboro Coliseum (Thursday)
12:20 EST: #7 Wichita State vs. #10 Seton Hall
2:40 EST: #2 Tennessee vs. #15 Winthrop
7:10 EST: #8 GW vs. #9 UNC-Wilmington
9:30 EST: #1 Duke vs. #16 Southern

A lot of local flavor here, and how hosed should GW feel that their lower-seeded opponent has the quasi-home crowd? Year after year there's a North Carolina subregional with either Duke or UNC in it. Is that really necessary to guarantee sellouts, memorabilia sales, and so on? Where by "necessary" I mean useful in the sense of marginal profit. I honestly don't know.

Best game of this slate is actually the first one, a nice test case for the mid-major versus behemoth conference controversy. When I first heard about this I assumed people were disappointed that the Missouri Valley et al got such little respect instead of too much. Billy Packer is one of the biggest idiots in his profession, all the more impressive given what that profession is.

Jacksonville Coliseum (Thursday)
12:25 EST: #6 Oklahoma vs. #11 Wisconsin-Milwaukee
2:45 EST: #3 Florida vs. #14 South Alabama
7:10 EST: #4 LSU vs. #13 Iona
9:30 EST: #5 Syracuse vs. #12 Texas A&M

The Aggie have a tournament-worthy team? That doesn't happen very often. This is a blah subregion, though the local fans will like the Florida-South Alabama game.

Huntsman Center (Salt Lake City) (Thursday)
10:40 MST: #4 Boston College vs. #13 Pacific
Noon MST: #5 Nevada vs. #12 Montana
5:20 MST: #3 Gonzaga vs. #14 Xavier
7:40 MST: #6 Indiana vs. #11 San Diego State

Interesting enough. Indiana seems to get that late-night slot a lot. Nevada and Montana: Two schools with players nobody east of the Mississippi has heard of. I like it. I wonder between BC and Pacific who will adjust worse to the breakfasty local time start time.

This is the region from which nobody will see the start of games (unless CBS chooses to showcase Gonzaga: Might as well, since Duke could already be a blowout by the time this tips off) but everyone will see the finishes given the 10-minutes-later start times.

Cox Arena (San Diego) (Thursday)
11:40 PST: #7 Marquette vs. #10 Alabama
1:55 PST: #2 UCLA vs. #15 Belmont
4:25 PST: #4 Illinois vs. #13 Air Force
6:45 PST: #5 Washington vs. #12 Utah State

Conspiracy theory: Utah State and Air Force were both chosen purely to save travel costs to San Diego. (But then, if you were a Marquette or Bama booster, wouldn't you find it worth your money to cheer your team and get a nice vacation destination out of it?)

That UCLA game is the one that we West Coasters will get televised while you Easterners sit through Dan Rather Bob Schieffer.

Look for a Friday-themed post tomorrow as this stuff takes too long to type.

Oh, They'll Show Him What Religious Intolerance Really Looks Like

This better result in a hilarious epsiode where Chef is kidnapped and brainwashed. If that indeed comes to pass and You Know Who files suit, I'd contribute to the defense fund.

xenu

Various Fark

I'd sue too. You don't have to mollycoddle, but kicking the kid out when he did nothing wrong is indeed asinine.

Best quote from this article: He thought he was only doing 120 or 130.

Get a room! (Not sure whether this is better or worse than the guy using a Fark-approved link to propose to his girlfriend.)

Three More Onion Classics

Sara Gilbert [...]

Rick Steves [...]

Barbra Streisand [...]

Thoughts on Dilbert

(The short-lived animated series, not the comic strip proper.)

Odd that UPN (circa 1999) was the network that picked this up. Is it even possible to create TV comedies more different than "Dilbert" and "Moesha"?

It's hard to think of a cartoon with more gratuitous violence.

Fantastic casting decisions, though.

The "Charity" episode in particular stands out as a work of staggering genius. Now that I've already called out Chuck Klostermann for misusing Ayn Rand's name, I'll come close to misusing it myself and claim she'd be proud of the thrust of this episode.

Everyone knows about the entity of which "Associated Way" is a thinly veiled parody. The real-life version is at least that insipid, cute NFL tie-in ads nonwithstanding.

Supposedly Shared Cultural Phenomena That Really Aren't

I had to give up on Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs around the Celtics/Lakers chapter, where among other things Chuck Klostermann namedropped Ayn Rand in an egregiously irrelevant misuse.

(For a quick 10 points, who did Klostermann randomly and inappropriately compare to Rand? Hint: It's the same person who Joe Queenan once hilariously described as the scariest hypothetical Stephen King villain imaginable.)

(For what it's worth the Rand comparison was inappropriate because rather than just discussing cultural struggles per say, Rand has an axe to grind. Compare someone to Rand only if he or she has strong opinions about which side is good and which is evil, with a several-thousand-word lecture about why that's the case. Klosterman's cultural name-dropping became orders of magnitude less impressive when I realized that he doesn't truly grok whoever or whatever he's citing. You could write a half-decent AI to simulate that kind of writing.)

Those of you who are about my age (give or take), in the 1980s did you ever give a moment's thought one way or another to Celtics vs. Lakers? Am I an anomaly for not being exposed to (or caring about) it? Is this a coasts-vs.-flyover-country disparity?

Twenty years from now will we all be subjected to atrocious overwriting about the supposed greater significance of this decade's Red Sox-Yankees clashes?

I Think This One-Ups the Autistic Kid

Play a high school basketball game, then give birth two hours later.

Bonus No. 2 Pencil goodness: How many things can you find wrong with this quote?

"You've heard of third world countries? Well, that is what is happening to West Virginia because of homeschooling."

Onion OTD

ESPN Anchors... - not a classic as such (very recent actually) but the last three words alone take it from blah to elite status.

Fark Miscellany

Good.

Als good.

Priority Mail, indeed.

This is also why if you have a newspaper column you probably shouldn't openly discuss getting high.

Revisionist History (Basketball)

I listened to most of the 1998 NBA finals on the radio.

Now that I've seen "The Spot" (new shoe ad campaign), if it's at all realistic then I just have to ask: How on Earth was Michael Jordan's series-winning shot anything other than a pushoff? Wouldn't 99% of NBA players have been whistled for the offensive foul there, and if so isn't there something wrong with a player getting treated like royalty in that context?

UPDATE (tying both these past two posts together): Yes, Christian Laettner's play against Kentucky was also a blatant offensive foul.

Comics Quotes

Today's Bizarro and today's Mr. Boffo.

Punchlines after the jump if you're not inclined to find the actual strips.

Also, if you're a fan of the TV show "Lost" then you should probably start reading Monty (the strip formerly known as Robot-Man).

Oh, and Pearls Before Swine: I feel like that sometimes. Not that I'd ever try to satiate myself at a McD's drive-thru but still.

(Woman talking to man on the beach, with appropriate prop)
"The kids and I built a sand cubicle for you."

(Devil talking to line of people in hell)
"Careful... everything's extremely hot."

Darwin Award Nominee...

...or disturbing attempted alibi? You make the call. I say "Darwin."

Things ESR Does Not Like

In no particular order:

The narrative carelessness of C.S. Lewis

The gustatory fraud perpetrated by the Cheesecake Factory

Economically illiterate business reporters

A Quintet of Onion Classics

Couple Upstairs... (especially recommended for the dialog)

Marxists' Apartment...

Bar Trivia Champ... (anyone we know?)

18-Year-Old Miraculously... (one of the most depressing things I've read in awhile)

Debate Team...

Imperatives in Back to Back E-mail Subject Lines

"come to church!"
--subject line of a message that, given the sender, is probably to a mailing list that I'm still on nearly a decade removed from the last time I went to the church in question. It was on a campus (MIT) where I was never a student, and the particular service combined forces between two denominations, of which the Episcopalians seem to be the (relative) driving force.

"Sit On Stage With Bon Jovi!"
--sent by one Nikki Blakk (ah, the things DJs do with k's these days), who I actually heard on one station yesterday afternoon (drive time) and thought to myself "She used to be weekend nights on [now-defunct station to whose format her current station has gravitated a bit]."

The midday DJ for San Francisco's (now defunct) most recently country station is now an evenings/weekends fill-in DJ on Alice (AAA format, was named Alice long before the Jack phenomenon).

I Wish I Could Shoot Like an Autistic

Kid comes off the bench and goes 6-for-7 from behind the line. Not bad. (Via Fark, which also has this woman going the wrong way on the freeway (nobody hurt) story, video included.)

People Are Stupid And Screwed

Very depressing set of posts at #2 Pencil today.

Don't Write Like This

"However, you can only push an envelope so far before you get a nasty paper cut, one sure to be infected with the gangrene of social unrest."
--actual quote from a student newspaper op-ed, reprinted here

Why I Don't Donate to My Alma Mater

I need the money more than they do. I mean really, would you make charitable contributions to Warren Buffett or Sam Walton? Then why give to an institution that makes Buffett and Walton look like paupers?

(Yeah, yeah, a university does great things, don't get me wrong. But if you consider the entire endowment to be an investment -- as you should, because otherwise the money's just sitting there -- then even with all the academic achievements Harvard still represents piss-poor ROI.)

Apparently alumni contributions are down in the Laurence Summers era, either because people are mad at Summers or because they're mad at the faculty (take your pick). I'd hate to see him go (his departure would degrade a once-fine institution still further) but I don't really feel inclined to open my checkbook with that purpose in mind, as opposed to opening it to feed hungry cats or something.

Onion

Government Encroachment on Individual Liberties...

Harsh Light of Morning...

UPDATE: Just ran across what I declared at the time to be the Best Onion Article Ever (and can't think of any that surpass it), though it's quite risque: Hedonistic...

Bad Ideas: Math Edition

Palm Beach County strikes again.

Ack!

"Who knew some Danish comics would start WWIII? I always assumed it would be Cathy."
--a commenter on Comics Curmudgeon, requoted here

More Onion Classics

Family Secret...

...Father Lives Vicariously...

Horrified Teen Stumbles Upon...

Skanky Ice

I agree with No. 2 Pencil: This is a science fair project.

Sanctimonious B'h of the Day

Some of you were already well aware of Lynn Johnston's high horse, and though I disagreed with you about the merits of her strip (yes, I to this day think it has merit), I realized you were onto something, even if it never hit me until now just how holier-than-thou she actually was.

Once and for all, for freedom of speech purposes, offense is not subjective and cannot possibly be.

UPDATE: Best comments from the ensuing thread:
Canada: A nation of hall monitors.

--

If one innocent person dies because of this capricious incident, publishers must accept the blame.

Does this mean we also have to blame Jodie Foster for the shooting? Or was it more Scorsese's fault?

Today's Onion Classics

Fat Roommate Travels All The Way To Tennessee [...]

Carload [...] Just Pulled Up To Drive-Thru, Cashier Reports

Oh, and in honor of today, the all-time best Jim Anchower column: I Guess I Got A Girlfriend

Archived Onion Article OTD

Alternate-Universe James Hetfield Named Taco Bell Employee Of The Month

Onion Article(s) of the Day

The Onion has made it a lot easier to find old articles; more specifically, the archives are no longer trapped behind the premium service.

Hence a new meme born of random surfing and fond rediscoveries. Today's entries:

Denver Optometrist Not Sure Why He Has Gay Cult Following

Goofy Guy Named Gary Enlivens Otherwise Intolerable Wedding Reception

DEK's Menagerie

Next to the carnivorous teddy bear is there room for an undercover kitten?

While we're already lifting Fark links, this one has nothing to do with Dwight that I know of.

Pwn3d

This has to be the highest-profile use ever of the title concept, albeit not in fact literally the title neologism.

(Or, if you prefer, "Pwnz0r3d!!!1!!eleven!!")

Free Will and the Robotic Bitch

If you haven't already seen "The Lateness of the Hour" (Twilight Zone, Season 2, Disc 2), please do so.

If you've seen this episode but haven't already discussed it with your significant other (that's really directed at me), please do so.

In about a week (after the above are accomplished), some interesting bloggage might ensue, on this thought experiment: What if the world as we know it had been created by a god whose mindset were like Dr. Loren? In what ways would that differ from our actual world and what we believe of its origins?

(Speaking of TZ Season 2 Disc 2: "Nick of Time" is well worth watching for the very young male lead but otherwise, is the episode remarkably lame? All signs point to yes.)

The Secret Despair of a Mainline Protestant

True, therefore hilarious: This Onion column is devastatingly accurate.

Given that I really do think Jesus was who he claimed to be, the appropriate direction of conversion should probably be to Catholicism rather than Judaism. Yet I now have an obvious connection to the latter, and I have irreconcilable differences with the teachings of the former (completely aside from what a typical American's differences are).

Plutification

Two quotes about multiplication that at first glance seem to contradict each other, but instead focus on two things in life that are both make-or-break:

The important thing is not knowing how to multiply, but what, when, and why to multiply. Once you understand what calculation to do to check something, you can do it easily enough on a calculator. But the calculator won't explain to you how to structure the calculation, or whether a calculation ought to be done.

That, incidentally, is one reason that I'm so frustrated when people say "I never minded math" (usually referring to arithmetic or at most algebra) "in school, but I just never liked the word problems." All of life is word problems! A problem in the real world never comes to you as "figure out 123 x 456 + 789." Understanding how to translate the real-world condition into numbers is the important skill, not the calculation.
--Eugene Volokh (first emphasis in original, second emphasis added)

Johnny somehow had reached ninth grade without learning the multiplication tables.

Because he was shaky on those, his long multiplication was error prone and his long division a mess. As Johnny tried to work algebraic equations, his arithmetic kept bringing up weird results. He'd figure he was on the wrong track and make up an answer.
--from an LA Times column, reprinted by Joanne Jacobs

By the way, if you haven't already read this stirring defense of civics (and other things: hard to describe it in that few words without oversimplifying), you should. That said, forgive me for being a subject matter snob in a context in which everything is make-or-break important, but at the foundational level of education I really do place literacy and numeracy above all else.

Every functioning human being should do basic times tables (and basic phonics) so automatically that they can build off of both without having to waste conscious brain power and time second-guessing it. Going forward from that, everyone should have the experience, comfort, and clear-headedness either to set up a word problem correctly or to write a coherent paragraph making a particular point.

In the long run social studies become far more important, because the literacy and numeracy are just building block tools to improve the world, while social studies classes (and lab sciences) are where one gets elbow-deep into what improving the world will actually involve. So of course anyone who deals frequently with high schoolers (to say nothing of college) should place a high emphasis on social studies, lab sciences, and expressive arts. That said, if you're not literate and numerate, it's going to be almost impossible to learn even a fraction of what the higher level classes ought to teach you.

Today's Spam-Inspired Question

Is there some educational system, either here or around the world, within which the idea of being Nominated for an MBA would even make sense?

Is it like the Nobel Peace Prize where surprisingly many people could nominate whoever they feel like nominating and technically it would be a valid nomination? Can I nominate my next door neighbor for an MD?

Chuck Klosterman

Even though I think people rave about Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs way more than is merited, Klosterman is still a far, far better writer even than most people who write for a living.

Here in particular, from his Super Bowl diary (by the way, how transparent is it that Bill Simmons does those things if and only if the Patriots are in the game?) is the most brilliant thing I've ever read about sports journalism:
It is probably a cheap (and unoriginal) shot to ridicule journalists for asking idiotic questions, but I still find myself obsessed with the media's desire to understand what playing pro football feels like. A few minutes ago, Jerome Bettis was asked this question: "OK, Bus -- let's say the clock is ticking down and the Steelers are ahead. You are about to win the Super Bowl. Tears are running down your face, and the game is almost over. What is going through your mind?" Now, how is this a reasonable query? I'm mean, it's not that easy to describe how you feel when you're actually experiencing life in the present tense; how is Bettis supposed to describe the emotive sensation of a futuristic alternative reality? Does this guy think Bettis is Philip K. Dick? And how does he know Jerome is necessarily going to start weeping (and -- if he does -- wouldn't that suggest Jerome's mental state will be completely self-evident)?

In 1994, David Foster Wallace wrote an amusing essay about how reading Tracy Austin's co-written autobiography deeply disappointed him, partially because Austin was prone to expressing sentiments such as, "I had just won the U.S Open. It felt great." Obviously, we don't really need to read books to learn such things. But there continues to be this unkillable belief that the role of sports journalism is to help us understand how it feels to live an extraordinary athletic life, since that kind of life is beyond the average human's physical (or mental) comprehension. The problem, of course, is that this is an impossible quest, and not just because it's difficult to quantify any visceral experience; it's impossible because everyone perceives their own experiences as normative. For Jerome Bettis, winning a Super Bowl would probably feel less alien than having to operate a forklift for eight hours, which is probably why this was his response to the reporter's question: "Mission accomplished."

(Some italics lost from the original because I copied and pasted lazily.)

Ethel vs. Ethel

Among 1950s icons, Mertz mops the floor with Rosenberg.

Hoops News

I have just one question about this story:

Can we name our child Epiphanny [sic]?

Actually I have two questions (this time blatantly stealing from Bill Simmons): Find her image in the Fark thread, then do an image search on Tyronn Lue. "NBA player or WNBA player?" might have a bright future as a challenging quiz.

Honest TV Question

What does Grey's Anatomy offer that Scrubs doesn't?

Is that like asking "What does Chicago Hope offer that E/R doesn't?"?

Silly Binary Comparison Joke

From a many-months-old e-mail exchange. The two things being compared are striking in their own right but not at all necessary to grok the quotes themselves.

"One of these things is not like the other."

"Neither is the other."

That's a Very Low Epiphany Threshold

I had an epiphany a few years ago where I was out at a celebrity party and it suddenly dawned on me that I had yet to meet a celebrity who is as smart and interesting as any of my friends. --Moby, via the "Quote of the Day" widget on personalized Google homepages.

Um... duh??? It's true, of course, but how facile do you have to be for that to sound in any way profound?

From Our Mountie Friends

Bait Car! This is unintentional comedy at its finest and most Canadian.

Fields of Bronze

Cool contest over here (thanks for the pointer, Greg). Pick five countries participating in the 2006 Winter Olympiad. Win a bronze medal, gain a point; win a gold, lose a point. Post your picks over there but feel free also to mention them here.

My countries (tis of thee?):
Austria
Iceland
Ireland
Sweden
Switzerland

Today's Comics

If you like animal-themed comics, today's "Get Fuzzy" and "Monty" are both among the best ever.

Untitled

As I type this I have Toad saving one set of data and a perl script mining another set. Today's TMQ mentioned me by name and this morning two radio stations simultaneously played "Jack and Diane" and "Fast Car" (you've all already known for ever that they have the same guitar riff, right?).

Julia finished her free-lance project this morning, proof-listening the discs of an audio book against the text of the book itself.

Life would be perfect if I didn't have a minor linguistic usage quibble with a certain coffee mega-chain. Which phrase sounds more natural to you: "large iced coffee" or "iced large coffee"? Surely the former, right. Because its icedness is more central to the coffee's identity than its largeness, the word "iced" is closer to the word "coffee" than the word "large" is.

(Or say you had a fast food place that served both traditional french fries and curly fries, each in small, medium, or large. Surely you'd order "large curly fries" and not "curly large fries.")

And yet, every time I order a "[synonym for large] iced [syonym for espresso]," the barista relays my order to the coffee marker as "iced [synonym for large] [synonym for espresso]."

If that's my biggest complaint, though, life is good.

Antonio Davis

No further penalty is necessary, in fact I'd find it deeply unjust if any further penalty is assessed.

He had a reasonable belief that his wife was in danger and took a measured response (went up to see what the problem was). Had he actually thrown a punch (or equivalent) in the stands, my opinion would instantly turn from "no penalty" to "25 games," and it does seem odd to draw such a sharp distinction, but draw it I do. Your mileage may vary.

January is a Good Time to Admit

I've not only never seen 24 but also never seen American Idol.

That both of them are so utterly dominant in water cooler (more like weblog) buzz this time of year is a huge triumph for someone in Fox marketing.

Some year I'll find time to watch each season of 24 the way it was meant to be watched: If Episode 1 begins at noon then start watching it at noon, and finish watching the season exactly one day later.

But I don't intend ever to begin watching Idol. Oh, if you're that into reality TV, maybe this McSweeneys piece is even funnier to those in the know than to those outside the know.

One Woman, Perfect Symbol of a Nation

In this case, France.

The Dumbing Down of Religion

This critique is spot-on.

[T]he spread of Christian pap does have spillovers, not the least of which is that devout Christian faith no longer brings with it a deep familiarity with what's actually in the Bible, as opposed to a few verses from the preacher's PowerPoint. Unless the person is over a certain age, Biblical literacy, when you do find it, rarely means acquaintance with great English. Forget theological or philosophical sophistication. I'd settle for the ability to comprehend complex sentences.

Throughout American history, Christian (largely Protestant) devotion has stretched people's minds and given them reason to think, if only within a closed system of belief. Religious practice has taught people to read, write, and speak. The rhythms and rhetoric of the Bible have given America its greatest political rhetoric, from Abraham Lincoln's to Martin Luther King's. Today's Christianity produces...George W. Bush.

Nietzsche saw this coming centuries ago. I don't have the exact quote handy (big brownie points to anyone who does) but he fulminated against the Reformation for bringing religious interpretation directly to the people, on the theory that the people would interpet it stupidly. In this case as in many others, Nietzsche was a raving lunatic who nonetheless had a brilliant not-entirely-incorrect insight.

Two Related Things That Are Broken

1. The Legacy of MLK: I have no idea how best to pay our respects, but the current state of affairs seems suboptimal and I can't put my finger on why.

2. Corporate Holiday Policies: We had MLK off a year ago; we don't have it off this year. The difference is entirely because January 1, 2005, fell on a Saturday. In 2005, giving the MLK holiday was preferable to giving Monday, January 3; yet in 2006 giving Monday, January 2, was preferable to giving the MLK holiday. The really funny thing is I understand the logic and can't really disagree even though it seems weird.

It'd be much simpler just to get N holidays, most of which were floating. Granting that there are fixed costs to having the office open a given day, how many days are really unambiguous don't-bother-to-open-the-office days?

Off the top of my head:
January 1
Memorial Day
July 4
Labor Day
Thanksgiving
December 24
December 25

If one of those happens to fall on a weekend in a given year, then everyone just gets one more floating holiday than usual, no muss, no fuss.

That's Just Wrong

No need to scroll through this entire contenst:
First entry wins hands-down.

Everything You Need to Know About Hockey

Discovered in the car just now that among other things, KFOX carries San Jose Sharks hockey. Within five seconds of this discovery, someone scored on the power play to give the Sharks a 6-2 lead. I never get to watch (or listen to) goals, but apparently that's all changed.

Remember all those 1-0 n-tuple overtime playoff games in 1996? Those were my fault as a viewer.

Character Rank Mini-Meme: AD

Note: I've only seen seasons 1 and 2 of "Arrested Development," all on DVD. Anything that's happened in season 3 is beyond my acquaintance.

1. George Michael. His loyalty to his father and heart-rending sexual tension carry the show (and also mirror his father's own family loyalty plus dry spell).

2. Maeby. My favorite subplot is her job at the studio.

3. Ann Veal. She's here because she's too good a character not to be. The easy thing would be to limit this list to Bluths and Fünkes, yet so much of what makes George Michael great is the entire triangle. (I'm sure there are other non-family characters worthy of consideration, certainly more interesting to me than Oscar, but this would open an even further can of worms.)

4. Michael. Having grown up with 1980s sit-coms, I'm amazed at how far Jason Bateman has come.

5. Tobias. Even though the writers need to ease up on the transparent double-entendre, or at least make it more subtle.

6. G.O.B. Apparently a lot of people like G.O.B. more than I do. Given that "Afternoon Delight" was the first episode I watched (home for the holidays when it aired), for the longest time I had this impression of him as a complete jackass without the qualities we've come to know and love.

7. Narrator. Ron Howard's voiceover developed just enough of its own presence to belong on this list.

8. George

9. Lindsay, if only for both the bachelorette auction episodes.

10. Lucille. Previously she'd have been at the bottom of my list, yet I gained a new appreciation for her character when she drank Kitty under the table. I suppose it's for the good of the show that she's generally so rotten, though I detest most of the Lucille-Buster subplot. (As distinct from the Buster-Lucille II subplot.)

11. Buster. See above comment about Lucille-Buster subplots, though the G.O.B. and Buster subplots are priceless.

12. Oscar. Nothing against him, and I appreciate Jeffrey Tambor's talent, but he does nothing for me.

Compared to this Guy, Tucker Max is a Poseur

Via Fark. Shared with you in the fascination one might have at a train wreck.

Please do not emulate or glorify this guy.

First there was "Real Ultimate Power"

...now there's this Chuck Norris homage (parody?).

Items of Interest

DNA offers new insight concerning cat evolution. (I'd clicked from Google News to a NY Times article about Sharon and Olmert, and found the linked article as the most e-mailed. No wonder: Really interesting!)

You can also get Playboy in braille.

He Won't Last Long

This story angers me -- but not as much as it otherwise could have, if only because the odds that the convict will face vigilante justice are so overwhelming.

Character Mini-Rank Meme: Soap

Great show. Seeing it after "Arrested Development" exposes its weaknesses but still, groundbreaking for its time. Needs to get rid of the laugh track, though. Ranked below are members of the two main familys, though generally not in-laws or anyone else who comes and goes from the show.

(Even a bit into Season 2, I still have no sense of whether e.g. Tim Flotsky or Elaine Lefkowitz should be on lists like this somewhere.)

By the way, best pair of consecutive Soap scenes by far: Mary, Jessica, Corinne, and Eunice eating the cake while they discuss sex, then Burt and Danny having the phone conversation in the same room about putting a steeple on their 40-story office building for a tax break.

1. Burt Campbell: Especially when he pretends to be invisible.

2. Benson

3. Corinne Tate

4. Jodie Dallas: Billy Crystal was indeed quite the young talent.

5. Grandpa Tate

6. Jessica Tate: From this point on down they fall into line almost by default.

7. Chester Tate

8. Danny Dallas

9. Mary Campbell

10. Eunice Tate

11. Whatzisname (the 14-year-old boy Tate)

12. Bob and Chuck: I have a visceral dislike for ventriloquist acts. (If you're wondering, I found G.O.B. and Franklin almost unwatchable in the first episode to feature them, though I did end up warming to them. Not Bob/Chuck, though. Goodness no.)

The Twilight Zone: Season 2 (Disc 1)

The definitive episode on this disc is (in my opinion) overrated, but nonetheless definitive. At least two on this disc, however, are absolute clunkers.

1. Eye of the Beholder: If I were a high school English teacher I'm sure it wouldn't take me long to come to loathe The Catcher in the Rye and all the badly-written papers a work like that could inspire. This episode has that feel to it, though one should be careful to distinguish moderately good, thought-provoking material that a teenager might overrate from true crap like The Crucible. At least today's teenagers may not actually already be aware of the big spoiler.

Obligatory Nine Inch Nails lyric: "Doesn't it make you feel better? The pigs have won tonight..."

2. Nervous Man in a Four-Dollar Room: An unassuming episode like this lives and dies on actors' execution, and this is just magnificently performed. Has the feel of a one-act drama at the neighborhood playhouse, of course.

3. The Man in the Bottle: Despite all the mindgames soon to come on this blog about optimal wishing, this incarnation is (as Julia pointed out) generic enough and formulaic enough to be good rather than great.

4. The Howling Man: On the opposite end of the spectrum from socially relevant works that smack you over the head with the nature of their social relevance (c.f. "Eye of the Beholder") are works that make you ask 'WTF is going on here?' There has to be more to "The Howling Man" than meets the eye, since surely nobody's attempting to agitprop the theme that 'Maybe those religious wackos are right after all.'

Maybe the illusion of deeper complexity makes me overrate this one, who knows. I can't bring myself to pan it completely, though I can at least point out that a much more effective way to imprison the devil would come with its own Frequently Asked Questions guide:

"The staff you see barring this door is the Staff of Truth. If the man behind the door were who he said he was, then he'd have no problem lifting it. In fact, we've put him in a position where lifting it would otherwise be easy, expressly so that you notice that even though you'd think he could, he can't."

5. A Thing About Machines: This seemed to have so much potential, especially with the character of the protagonist, but then it degenerated into chase fright on the slasher level, as bad as if not worse than the "The Fever" (slot machine).

6. King Nine Will Not Return: War is hell. Yeah, got it. Some of the best Twilight Zones are set at wartime, but apparently so too are some of the worst. This is just tedious, desperately thrashing about for a good deeper meaning to frame it. The ending is about the only thing he could have done with it after all, though the sand in the guy's shoes is a transparent and illogical attempt to be spooky and Make You Think.

If this is indeed the season opener, it's uniquely ill-suited to open a season of a show of such otherwise high quality. (But then I thought the same of "Where is Everybody?" as a series opener. At least that one had a moderately interesting wrap-up that wasn't handled hamhandedly.)

Be Careful What You Wish For

There's a Twilight Zone episode, "The Man in the Bottle," in which a couple who run a curio shop are granted four wishes. Like many of the best TZ, writers for The Simpsons paid homage to this in a Treehouse of Horror.

(The monkey paw -- "The frogurt is also cursed.")

Not to spoil the entire episode, but the four wishes and their consequences follow in the extended entry. In the near future I will spend a seemingly crazy amount of time blogging about how to optimize your N wishes from a genie. (As always, wishing for more wishes isn't allowed.)

This is philosophically more tricky than you'd think. In any case, of all the wishes and consequences from the TZ episode, the one I found most profound and illustrative was the outcome of the very first wish.

Moral: Don't wish for happenings that are temporary and easily subsequently undone.

Anyhow, the major categories of wishes seem to involve money and improved conditions. Both of those have interesting sets of side effects. Far more on this later.

1. Fix the broken glass on the front of their display case: Granted immediately with no side effects.

2. A million dollars' cash in the store, in $5 and $10 bills. (Crazy! this is over 100,000 pieces of paper!) They give some away to their friends and then are socked with a tax bill over $900K, all but $5 of what they had left.

3. He wishes to be head of a foreign country, "and can't be voted out of office." He immediately becomes Hitler in the bunker.

4. He wishes to undo the previous wish. Done.

In the end their only change other than the $5 seems to be the fixed glass -- which he immediately accidentally breaks again after sweeping up the bottle.

Dick Clark

Can I get a written transcript?

Now I swear up and down I happened to catch live the infamously incoherent Jessica Savitch newsbreak. I'd have been eight years old at the time but I'm dead certain I saw it and realized something was up.

Dick Clark tonight made Savitch sound like a BBC reporter. Harry Caray comparisons are also apt.

Wisconsin Synod Sighting

Lutherans (and/or their friends) in the U.S. realize that ELCA and LCMS are quite different animals, the latter far more traditional and devout.

So when I read about this I hazarded a guess as to which branch was involved. Looked it up here, and how soon we forget: There are (at least) three major Lutheran branches in the U.S., and the Wisconsin Synod folk make the Missouri Synod folk look like [insert generic Protestant denomination here].

If you're interested in theological detail, Wikipedia has more for you (note the "Differences From" subheads). Based on what limited knowledge I have from an ELCA background, it seems accurate enough.

Character Mini-Ranks: AYBS

New meme: For a given TV show with an ensemble cast, rank the main characters from top to bottom. Kicking it off: Are You Being Served?

1. Mr. Humphries: I presume this is the consensus. John Inman is so talented.

2. Mrs. Slocumb: The lady of the house won me over to her, though the recurring drinking binges help. "I am unanimous," indeed.

3. Mr. Mash: Maybe I'm just a sucker for his accent.

4. Capt. Peacock: Underrated.

5. Young Mr. Grace

6. Mr. Lucas: So I recognized the name Trevor Bannister before I recognized any other actor's name from this show. With that in mind he's sort of a letdown, and his caricture becomes tiresome (yes, yes, he's always late and always scamming ladies) but still gets in some good lines.

7. Mr. Grainger: I want to rank him lower just because the writers should be ashamed of making so much of his character definition be his age and decrepitness, but still, he's endearing.

8. Mr. Rumbold: I just don't like him, though I realize that's by design.

9. Miss Brahms: At first I liked her, though I think it's entirely the accent. She's not pretty and she has no personality to speak of. All she ever does is say hateful things accompanied by a contemptuous smile.

(The "Lucas acts like a cad towards Brahms" subplot falls way too much into the "tell" domain and not nearly enough into the "show.")

Christmas Scrabble

Not a full play-by-play, but highlights. (So help me it was an interesting game.)

He opened with GIVEN (leaving QU on his rack).
She played GIVE
He played FED (IF, ED) and the tone was set for a closed board working over the left diagonals.

From that point on his racks where nearly all consonant, even as she rued out loud her nearly all-vowel racks. He got the big points from big letters (REX (AX) with the "X" on a double-word; ZIN on a double-word; QUA with the "Q" on a double-letter) but she got the first three triple-word scores (JUS (SCORE); DOTE (EKED); QUIT).

Around here the only ways to open the board up were a T[...] word whose second letter made a "?E" two-letter word, or an ED[...] word whose third letter made a "N?" two-letter word. He played EDUCT; she did the QUIT; he made BIRTH exploiting two triple-letters and his redraw put SH?RPEN on his rack. Obviously he wanted to make SHARPEN (BE, IN) but she played "RAP" and for two seconds he mistakenly thought his big score was foiled.

A couple words later his rack was AORTTAS (sadly "aortas" only has one 't') with a Y of all things as the only convenient eight-letter-word hook (a singular word was available for the S-hook). He thought surely there was a big score here but couldn't think of one (and on-line searches after the fact seem to confirm there wasn't one).

So instead he played TAO (AE), saving five great letters (START) and also creating another hook. He drew "IS" - you'd be surprised how long it took him to realize what very common seven-letter word he had on his rack. I'm sure a true Scrabble player recognizes that one instantly.

Barbie Animus

"Violence and torture against Barbie were repeatedly reported across age, school and gender. No other toy or brand name provoked such a negative response.

The methods of mutilation are varied and creative, ranging from scalping to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving[.]"

(Paragraphs quoted out of order for no particular reason.)

Should Your Child Skip A Grade?

If her precocity (hey, sweet, it seems to be a real word) is so pronounced that the subject is broached then the answer is probably yes.

(Seemed to work out fine for me at least.)

Sunday xor Christmas

Apparently if Christmas is a Sunday then the megachurches, of all people, blow it off.

"I wonder what they do when Easter is a Sunday," he deadpanned.

Weather Today

45 degrees Fahrenheit in my neck of the woods. I almost never complain about being cold but these past few days, so be it, I've been cold.

Never mind that it's freezing (more or less) on the eastern seaboard and 13 degrees in Chicago.

Harry Potter and the Alliance of Magicians

Your creative writing assignment for today: Send a member of the Bluth family to Hogwarts.

Difficulty: You can't use "I [bleep]ed Umbridge" or variants (since I thought of it first), unless your implementation is really funny.

A Strikingly Profound Observation

Most people study to make themselves feel better about doing their work, and not to actually succeed in their chosen field of study. They spend hours staring blankly at sheets of paper. They should spend more time trying to solve problems or answer questions, usually under simulated exam conditions and with a clock ticking.
--Tyler Cowen

A silver lining to the shamefully little studying I did in school is that so much time other people spent "studying" was time wasted. Instead of accomplishing much, they gained the moral victory of being (in theory) diligent.

How To Reach a Human Customer Service Agent

This list will be surprisingly useful until it becomes so widespread that companies change things around on you.

Justice and Retribution

Food for philosophical thought here.

I'm not crazy about the idea of retribution as a reason to punish someone, except that (to borrow from the platitude about democracy) it's better than any other reason to punish someone.

Either not enough thought goes into theories of justice/punishment, or too much muddleheaded thought goes into such theories and not enough clarity. In any case, I have some strong, seemingly non-mainstream observations that seem so obviously correct to me (yet so far from being universally acknowledged) that I fear any confident-sounding exposition of them will sound the way a crackpot's scientific theories sound.

The problem is that no other reason for punishment fits the model of punishing someone if and only if he did bad.

Incapacitation: If you're deciding whether to incapacitate someone, absent any moral considerations the only relevant fact would be his likelihood to commit a future crime. That he did(n't) commit a past crime may shed some light on his likelihood of a future crime, but the correlation between those who've already committed crimes and those who will commit crimes in the future isn't 1 and may not even be close to 1.

Deterrence: For a punishment to be an effective deterrent, it technically doesn't matter whether the people being punished are guilty. A 1:1 correlation between guilty people and punished people isn't nearly as important as a 1:1 correlation between people whom the general public believes to be guilty and people whom the general public believes are being punished. If that last sentence doesn't make sense, please read it again. If it still doesn't make sense, please comment. Outside of mathematics, code, or real-life interaction with real people I know, that may be literally the most profound observation I've ever had. (If so, this says more about my other observations than about that observation, which dates back to 1995-96 when I took Thinking About Thinking.)

Our criminal justice system places tremendous importance on punishing guilty people, leaving innocent people alone, and avoiding either the punishment of innocent people or non-punishment of guilty people. If retribution weren't an important reason to punish then this system would be grossly inefficient. The concept of justice, as such, is the reason why hypothetically more efficient ways to achieve incapacitation or deterrence should strike you as barbaric, far more barbaric than retribution itself.

The only possible alternatives to a somewhat barbaric system based primarily on retribution are a grossly inefficient system or a signficantly more barbaric system.

Or, of course, the failure to punish people at all (or need to). At some point Nietzsche claimed that in an enlightened society, punishment would ultimately cease to exist. In theory, I agree with him. That is, I'd love for the world to reach that point. (Don't hold your breath.)

Early Favorite for a 2006 Ig Nobel

"There appears to be no evidence suggesting a causal role of alcohol use in