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.
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.
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.
"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)
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?
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)
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.
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)
"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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
Saving the world with appropriate technology.
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).
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.
I knew I'd seen that typo before.
This related Google search has just one hit, but one was enough.
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.)
...tend to have unusually aggressive drivers, regardless of what's actually on the stickers.
"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.)
More importantly, only $3,000 to indirectly kill people?
"poured concrete Vogon love poem"
(Photographic evidence, but I can attest that, as winterspeak notes, "It's much worse in real life."
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.
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.)
"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?
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.
(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.)
(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!
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).
This is the best example of such a table I've seen in quite a long time.
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.
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.
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.)
(By the way, that's a question that probably should rarely if ever be asked about something in McSweeneys of all places.)
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:
There was no evidence of:
* 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.
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.)
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.
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.
"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!
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.
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.
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."
Thanks to Awful Announcing and cut-and-paste, I've updated these posts.
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)
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)
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.)
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.
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.
...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.)
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.
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."
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.)
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.
(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.
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.
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.
Whale of a good YouTube clip here.
(See, this is what Bill Simmons is good for.)
"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)
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...
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."
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.
80-person brawl at a Chuck E Cheese in Flint.
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?
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?
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.
I really enjoy the "Our Dumb World" atlas, but shouldn't poutine be somewhere in Quebec? (Not Alberta!)
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
(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.
(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.
The best one on today's chart.
It's not immediately obvious why.
Anyway, Jane Eyre runs for president. Spot-on.
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.
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.)
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)?
(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.
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.)
Can you find the Marginal Revolution post (specifically, some hyperlink text) that keeps distracting/startling me?
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).
(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.)
"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
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.
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.)
...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.)
(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.
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.
I'm really looking forward to this book.
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.)
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.
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.)
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.
(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.
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...).
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.
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.)
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.)
More exactly, "at what frequency of usage would either of these phrases annoy you"?
A. "Mea culpa"
B. "My bad"
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."
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
When it comes to Bay Area traffic, black is worse than red -- but pink is worse than either of them!!
"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'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."
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).
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.)
(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.
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.
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.
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").
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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].
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?)
(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.
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.
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).
"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.
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.
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?)
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?
That is all.
Find two comic strips (Monday, October 1) that both mention jellyfish. In my Houston Chronicle "custom" comics page they appear consecutively.
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.
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.
(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.
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)
"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 kn