I suddenly wish I were a Fark member already, especially since there's a 24-hour waiting period to post after signing up. So despite the blindingly obvious gimmick for this photoshop contest, and despite my actually having the skills to do it, I guess I'll have to wait for someone else to make pi sometime tomorrow....
1. For several minutes today I had on one team every Tampa Bay Buccaneer worth rostering.
Depending on your take on Martin Gramatica (injured, will probably miss week 10, might lose his job), this might still be true. Just traded for Brian Griese (needed QB help, as both mine got hurt at the same time, namely the two Marshall alumni) and already owned Michael Pittman and Michael Clayton. (Alstott is injured and out for the year; I suppose in some keeper contexts he's worth holding onto. Tim Brown... only in a huge league that's also point-per-catch.)
2 Glad I didn't keep Stephen Davis for a second-round pick (#23 overall) in my keeper league. Then again, it's not as though Santana Moss was a better use of the second-round pick (long since dropped from that team), nor Tyrone Wheatley (for a r8) a better use of that keeper spot.
3. Last week was a total bust (0-3), including the third-best score in one league (featuring the aforementioned Pittman) against the best score in that league. (Still had a shot at a Monday night comeback, albeit a longshot... thanks for nothing, Marvin Harrison.)
4. In a non-keeper league, how many NFL players are there for whom you'd trade Jamal Lewis? How many quarterbacks? I presume no quarterback not named Manning or Culpepper would make that list. (Sure, the list expands a bit if you talk about package deals, but then I'm strongly of the inclination that when in doubt, the team that got the best player "won" any given trade, even if it's ostensibly quality-for-quantity.)
5. In a keeper league, what value do you need to get back to trade an unkeepable LaDaian? Or for that matter a Mike Vick who'd be kept for a 4th-round pick in 2005 (1st-round pick in '06)? Best I can tell, best potential keeper value in that league right now is my own Ben Roethlisberger for next year's r14. Antonio Gates for r10 might be second-best; would Tomlison (and Marcus Pollard) for Gates (and a warm body) be utterly insane? LaMont Jordan for r7 might even be third-best; I wish I'd successfully dealt for him when his value was r12, before he was given up on and cut.
"If nothing else, I'd love it if they'd raise awareness of environmental and energy infrastructure issues, which are the ones that really should be under debate in four years, rather than all this gay marriage and abortion and family values crap, talk of which obscures discussion of things that are really going to affect our nation's future."
--Maribeth
In general she's absolutely right about what isn't important; as for what is important, how 'bout a nice big "yes and no..." But first, informal, obviously skewed-sample-size poll: What political issues make you tick, and why? For me:
(National political candidate level only, for my post, though you may feel free to use other parameters yourself. One meta-complaint I have is when people have opinions about particular political offices based on issues that have nothing to do with that particular office. Like years ago when my mom was phone-banking for a particular school board race and someone wanted to know the candidate's position on abortion. When would this EVER come up in a school board context?!)
1. War on Terror.
#1 with a bullet, going back to September 11. I'm proud of, if anything, how restrained the reaction of most American people has been, how we've avoided lashing out at innocents. By the same token, the people who carried out that attack need to be destroyed before they destroy us. They don't need to "be understood"--they want us dead and/or converted to their interpretation of Islam, what's hard to understand about that?
2. War in Iraq. At the executive level I want leadership that not only understands why taking out Saddam was the right thing to do but also will finish the job of stamping out terrorists in Iraq right now, seeing free elections through, and pulling out on our own terms.
(In particular, people who understand why #1 and #2 aren't as distinct as they look...)
3. Free market. It pains me for this to be anywhere below #1, but until September 11 I thought our economic liberty was in greater danger than our sovereignty. Anyhow, you get the general idea: Lower taxes, lower federal spending...
4. Tort reform. There are too many stupid lawsuits and stupid verdicts in this country. All of these amount to a transfer of wealth by force and a negative-sum game (zero-sum, minus all the resources that both sides put into the litigation). Then again, at least the trial lawyers profit handsomely.
5. Freedom of technology. In some ways this is a subset of #3 and #4, but I'm all in favor of technological process (including everything from stem cell research to GM food to nanotechnology...) and concerned about the people who will overreact to what they see as potential dangers and pass stupid laws against things.
6. Health care. Read: "Please no socialized medicine in my lifetime."
7. Social Security. If I'm forced against my will to put that much of my paycheck into this boondoggle, I'd kind of like to actually get some of it back by the time I'm finally of age to do so. Unless something changes, that's not bloody likely.
8. Freedom of consenting adults to enjoy life as they see fit. Including but not limited to recreational drugs. Surprised this came in so high? If anything I'm sad that both major parties are doing atrociously on this plank. Between that and my not personally using illegal drugs (never have, underage drinking aside), it doesn't come up; doesn't mean it doesn't matter. (Obligatory "Why is this at the national level, shouldn't states set their own laws?" angle: As long as the DEA is a federal agency, that's the source of a lot of the most asinine policies. And as long as federal highway funds are tied to an absurd drinking age...)
9. Abortion. Surprised (from what you know of me) that this came in so low? A lot of this is just facing the fact that hell would freeze over before anything changed here, and given just how angry people get (perfectly justifiably, given what we all agree about the rights of women and what they believe - though I disagree - about whether and when another human life is involved...) laws aren't the right way to go about this. Still, in my ideal world: No second- or third-trimester abortions would ever happen. Beyond that... well, we have a lot more to learn about prenatal activity.
10. Eminent domain abuse. Maybe I read too much Reason magazine but while everyone else is paranoid about the Patriot act or what RIAA is up to, the biggest concrete rights abuse I see in this country is when people can have their property taken away from them (for some compensation, of course, but still, it's coerced) because the local powers-that-be think some random megacorporation will use the space better than its rightful owners were. This closely dovetails with...
11. Education. I'm in favor of it (duh). But more precisely I like charter schools, vouchers, more comprehensive testing, phonics... a whole lot of things that a lot of establishment education people despise. The federalist in me does chafe at listing this on the national level, though.
12. Opposition to corporate welfare. As much as I like lower taxes across the board, don't misunderstand how I feel about so-called "targeted tax breaks": Anything that plays favorites with taxpayer money is pretty despicable, especially under the guise of sham economics. This really means I'm sick of sports owners getting publicly bankrolled as rich as they already are, but that's not all that corporate welfare entails.
13. Gay marriage. Strongly in favor, that is. This shouldn't be on a list of national political issues period (See below) but as long as people are pushing for a constitutional amendment, my opinion matters at the national level after all.
14. Guns. I have a strong opinion on correct parsing of the Second Amendment. Technically I have a strong opinion on the correct parsing of a lot of amendments, though this is the one where people who disagree with me have the greatest chance of getting their way (and, in my opinion, the greatest harm would come of their actually getting their way). Thankfully, this is still one of those "not a chance in hell" situations, given that pro-gun people exploit overreactions for fundraising every bit as well as pro-choicers do on abortion.
Not mentioned: Anything you don't see here, is absent for one of three reasons.
1. I honestly didn't think of it (so really how important could it be to me?).
2. The best solutions (in my opinion) involve technology and/or the free market rather than (increased) government regulation. This is especially true on environmental issues. Mind, I'm NOT saying get rid of (e.g.) the Clean Water Act or whatever (a lot of regulation I'd probably favor repealing but this is such a hot button that you have to start slowly and settle for saying at least don't pass new laws if they happen to be stupid.
Actually, as you will have noticed, this directly contradicts the heart of Maribeth's quote above. So why not take her on regarding those political issues, instead of typing so many characters to make a laundry list? Well... she's put a lot more thought into these issues than I have. My general inclination is to let the free market do its thing if it can, but she could probably persuade me pretty easily that some particular structural issue is unsolvable by the market and should be solved instead by some particular government policy. As long as the policy in question isn't just economically ruinous, I'm all ears, though my gut response would still be to whine about economic impact and we'd be back to first principles.
3. They're issues about which the federal government neither is involved at the moment nor should be involved at the moment. This is everything from the purely local (once I was phonebanking for an Oklahoma congressman and somebody wanted to know his opinion about turnpikes... as if I knew) to the government-shouldn't-be-involved-period-and-thankfully-really-isn't.
Here's one... 11-year-old girl kept doing cartwheels in the playground at school; "school authorities" kept telling her not to, for safety reasons. Finally she did one cartwheel too many and they suspended her.
This National Review writer sides with the school. Strictly speaking, the girl wasn't suspended for doing a cartwheel so much as for continuing to disobey an instruction. No matter how stupid she thinks the rule is, it's a rule in place for good reason. I'd like to see kids brought up with at least a modicum of respect for authority.
On the other hand, the rule does seem awfully overprotective. If they want to homeschool her, that's probably best for all involved.
From Tim Blair's weblog, quoting his relatives:
Aunt: "Why do you suppose they decided to race horses? Why not race cows?"
Grandmother: "It would be fun if they raced cows over the jumps!"
He also has a post about election-related estrangement. I'm proud (relieved?) not to have any stories along those lines, that I know of. (Who knows? Maybe people have written me off and haven't bothered to say so.)
So who's being dogmatic, again?
"This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."
--Disclaimer placed in Cobb County, Georgia, biology textbooks.
To oversimplify greatly, evolution isn't significantly more or less factual than any other prevailing scientific theories. To accept anything in science without at least questioning it is stupid and/or insane. (Read this Maribeth post about the experiment where her classmates fudged the data to get the "right answer.")
On the other hand, the case for evolution (more precisely for natural selection) is pretty compelling. Ironically, I understood a lot more of the broader framework of evolutionary biology as a result of having a shameless advocate of a high school teacher than I would have from a teacher who tried to be evenhanded and simply teach from a book.
It's a silly disclaimer inasmuch as it singles out evolution (as opposed to, say, Newtonian classical mechanics, which we know to be somewhat inaccurate) The people who filed a lawsuit over the aforementioned disclaimer should be ashamed; I'll worry if they win. The people who think for some reason that the lawsuit is about evolution itself (i.e. Scopes redux) should be even more ashamed for not understanding the facts of the case.
(When asked why 90% of science fiction was crap, Theodore Sturgeon replied (correctly) that 90% of everything was crap.)
Julia and I apparently have sharp differences on the merits of modern drama, or at least one modern drama in particular. We trekked up to Petaluma, California (tired of making fun of backwards hicks or making fun of monolithic liberalism? - now you can make fun of both at the same time), to see Christopher Durang's Laughing Wild, a play from the late 1980s that hits you over the head with its being set in the late 1980s.
Act 1 is two fantastic monologues. Well written; well performed last night, though as usual I thought the crowd was way too generous with its ovations and random laughter. (I'm a tough crowd, what can I say? One step closer to being an honorary Russian...) Act 2 is a very uneven collection of dream sequences that I won't spoil for you, with one exception.
At some point the heroine dreams that she's killed Sally Jesse Raphael and become the new host of Sally's talk show. Her guest is the Infant of Prague (actual Catholic icon, whom I'd never heard of before lastnight). She harangues the infant about condoms in schools (did I mention how dated this was?) and AIDS and so on, and the baby attempts to articulate Church doctrine in an infantile lisp and cry.
The audience, of course, laughed and cheered whenever the heroine made the same points they would have made (about kids who'd have sex anyway and don't you want them to live? and so on), and jeered and mocked the lisping baby.
I have no need to carry water for arguably anachronistic Catholic doctrine. I'm Protestant myself, and seeing people on both sides of various social debates prop up the Roman Catholic church as something bigger than it is... just gets tiresome, of course. But that's not the point.
The point is, you have people preaching to the choir, with the object of absurdity as a lisping baby. Why not just put on a play where you stage a Bush-Kerry debate where the part of Bush is played by a live chimpanzee? That would be no less original. For that matter, why not bring out a priest and have the priest have sex with the baby? Why not write in a hook-nosed Jew who steals all your gold?
It's going to sound to most of you as though the problem was that I was offended. Well, not quite... in some sense I was offended that the playwright wasted my time (and the audience's time) with this particular scene, which didn't fit in remotely well with the rest of the play but did cater to the prejudices of the expected audience. More to the point, I'm all for offensive performances so long as they're actually funny.
What's funny about a lisping baby? Why not rewrite one of those West Wing scenes where Josiah Bartlett gets all preachy, yet instead of a Republican aide pretending to argue the other side, bring out the Something About Mary "franks and beans" retarded kid?
Julia suggested that I not actually take this seriously (which, again, would be fine if this thing-not-to-be-taken-seriously were actually funny...). On further review of a Western Civilization's worth of drama, maybe she has a point.
I'll still adamantly claim that this scene sucked, though it sucks in a way that surprisingly much of Aristophanes sucked (wow... a philosopher with his head in the clouds... well, that'll pretty much refute any Socratic argument you want to make, no?), in a way that Garry Trudeau sucks (gee, I used to like Newt Gingrich, but now that I see him drawn as a bomb, I see the error of my ways...), Mallard Fillmore, and heaven knows what else.
Most political satire is crap, specifically inasmuch as it bothers touching anything that people would ever have arguments about or reasonably disagree. You can't present both sides, or at least won't, if that's not the point. Instead, the people who are already on-board, the choir to whom you're preaching, will honestly think that a lisping baby is funny because they're ignorant enough to believe that this is the best the Catholic church could possibly have done. Similarly, Rush Limbaugh will play one of his "update" themes (if he still does those), e.g. animal rights with a track of Andy Williams's "Born Free" and gunshot/dying-animal sound effects, and I suspect how you feel about animal rights will strongly inform just how much of a kick you get out of this.
Of course it's fine for me to say that, being a South Park fan and all that. But here, watch and learn two very important things:
1. South Park at least tries to capture two or more sides to whatever the issue at hand might be.
2. It actually is funny... witty... certainly [insert "lisping baby" reference here and wrap this up already]
Some fine police work here... Chief Wiggum would be proud.
Cooch, if you see this, act now while supplies last.
...also via Reason's Hit and Run weblog:
I'd call this screed something like "f'k the 'f'k the South' people."
In the wake of all the mutual stereotyping and recriminations between states, Jesse Walker of Reason blogged a link to this blast from the past.
Article tagline: "In Wyoming, there are a few bigots who don't like gays. In the media, there are a lot more bigots who don't like Wyoming."
Prior to today, when was the last time a high-profile criminal case ended in a guilty verdict?
What does it say about my news-absorption habits that I first heard about the Scott Peterson verdict from Instapundit?
Apologies to people who want no part of this, but I see what gets comments here and what doesn't. In light of the multi-comment thread a few posts below this one...
RESOLVED: In 1996, as much as Clinton-haters may have hated Bill Clinton himself (and/or his wife), people didn't generally savage the set of people who voted for Clinton, just because they voted for him. In contrast, the most noxious element of the 2004 post-election whine is the nastiness of what some virulently anti-Bush people are saying about Bush voters themselves.
(The distinction, put into strawmen on both sides, is "The guy you voted for is a corrupt pervert" versus "You yourself are a bigoted hick.")
Discuss.
So there've been at least four bands in music history that I despise more than Train. Quick web searches to make sure that two of them are the bands I think they are... okay, yep.
Apparently the rest of the world hates Matchbox 20 too (aside from radio program directors). Good call, rest of the world...
Almost forgot: As of November 12, 1996, we were a week removed from Bill Clinton winning another one of those 43% 49%(never try a political post in a hurry) mandates.
Oh, the crying, the wailing, the gnashing of teeth... actually not really. Someone who knew me back then can fill me in on whether my public reaction was remotely like what we're seeing on the left this month.
I have no good sense of when Howard Stern's show ends each morning (maybe he doesn't either), usually not as soon as it must have ended today. In the immedate post-Stern morning hours, Live 105 fills in with some 1990s retro stuff. Today, they went through their own top five most-played songs from this week in 1996. I missed #5, but...
#4. Cake, "The Distance." Very consistent with what I remember of that time period. This was almost exactly the end of my devoting my full academic attention to law school (bad timing given that this was 1L fall and finals were around the corner). In fact, today being Friday, November 12, 2004, I can tell you that Tuesday, November 12, 1996, was the day before about a week's worth of autobiographical plot twists that I remember all too well yet won't bore you with.
I did have a medium-sized crush on my 1L seatmate. Well, not quite true, we only sat next to each other for two classes. I sat in the front row (bottom semicircle), I think literally the seat closest to the door. I can picture the three women to my left and the guy behind me; that's about it. Anyhow, come to think of it, this seatmate was a lot like a cross between Julia and Julia's best friend, shrink-wrapped to... well, if she topped five feet, it wasn't by much. The resemblance here is mainly a particular sense of humor. Longstory short, the week's worth of plot twists made this crush very moot (convenient since I don't think it was requited).
Here the DJ started talking about a band whose breakthrough album was so successful that a backlash came up of people who asked whether it was too manufactured a sound. So they got Steve Albini to produce a follow-up album, Razorblade Suitcase... [bunch of other clues that, in a tossup, might have helped someone else, but I was nowhere near it; certainly no mention of Gavin]
#3. Bush, "Swallowed." Even though I don't like this band at all, any non-personal 1990s compilation needs to include Bush to be fully representative. Just now I actually considered adding Bush to a revised hypothetical "Matt" 1990s compilation. If I did, not sure between "Swallowed" and "Glycerine." Actually I don't think Bush will make the revised cut after all, but (don't ask how this tangent happened) Alice In Chains probably will with "No Excuses."
The lead singer of this next band died six months earlier...
[My immediate horrified reaction: "Not [expletive] Sublime!" Blah blah, Brad Noel, and sure enough...]
#2. Sublime, "What I Got." As long as I can remember I've claimed that The Fifth Dimension was the worst band ever (except some point in the 1990s when I would have equally fervently claimed this honor for Sublime). It's really a tossup between the two, with Train a distant third (aside from bands I intensely hate but just am not thinking of).
How best to describe the sheer awfulness that is (the ironically named) Sublime? Best place to start is, I think, the lyrics:
"I don't cry when my dog runs away. I don't get angry at the bills I have to pay..."
"Annie's 12 years old, in two more she'll be a whore..." (Until Googling just now I'd always misheard this as "tomorrow she'll be a whore.")
"I can't take pity on men of his kind, even though he now takes it from behind..." (Actually "Date Rape" was a pretty clever song; mitigation points...)
They also managed to release an "I love to smoke up" song that was braindead even by "I love to smoke up" song standards. Well, they had a lot of those songs (including a cover of "Smoke Two Joints," which is actually a fine song), but the one in particular... all I can remember is the guitar riff and the bong sound effect.
Anyhow, aside from the lyrics, their music is mindless repetition played with total apathy. I'm sure that describes a lot of bands but none to quite the extent of Sublime.
#1. Garbage, "#1 Crush." When great bands release clunker songs (and ironically the crap does better on the charts than their good stuff)...
Also at this time KFOG was doing its daily 10@10, 1970 this time, with Simon & Garfunkel's "The Boxer" matched up against part of Subime and part of Garbage. Now that's quality nostalgia. (More quality than nostalgia since as of 1970 I wouldn't be born for another five years.)
UPDATE: Since a lot of you apparently hadn't heard, see Wonkette and this link via Obscure Store re Cheney. Not sure what my source was for Gore, but on retroactive Googling it involved a Rolling Stone cover airbrushed to remove a bulge.
So have you heard what else Al Gore and Dick Cheney supposedly have in common? I've seen references to the latter in two different places now (and the former in several, but never the direct evidence); finding them yourself is an exercise for the reader.
I imagine Dan Quayle was not part of this trend, but what do I know? (If he was, then maybe this is all just a variant on the bulletproof vest thing that led to so much conspiracy speculation after that one Bush debate screen capture...)
About time this asshole died. This will actually do wonders for Israeli/Palestinian peace talks given how obstinant and megalomaniacal he's been all these years. Other than that I just hope he's warm enough.
Speaking of news links with gratuitous obscenity, when did we become a nation full of whiny bitches? Your favorite presidential candidate loses and you need therapy to get over the grief?!? Reasonable people will have disagreements in politics, right down to some of the basics. You can choose to engage your countrymen on that basis, or you can smear everyone who disagrees with you as evil and acccuse the president of polarizing you simply because you choose to hate him. People who do the latter are beneath contempt, not to mention a waste of time when it comes to discussion or persuasion. So 51% of the country thought one guy was better than another guy (or at least not as bad as the other guy), and suddenly it's an oppressive, unlivable nation? Please.
(That goes especially to sex columnist Dan Savage this week, for going out of his way to live up to the ugliest of the "drama queen" [rhymes with 'gag'] stereotypes.)
On the other hand, by all means let's make sure we got this election thing right, at least for something as simple as correctly recognizing who won. I'm one of those people fairly convinced that all the "anomalies" are easily explained/debunked... so let's get to it. Thing is, there's a difference between actual research and testing, where you figure these things out, versus supposedly wishy-washy actually deeply-loaded "reporting" where you let your opinion out like flatulence and let it fester as innuendo because keeping the innuendo alive serves your purposes better than actual legwork ever could.
(So why do I feel this way now, when I was so appalled by what the process became in 2000? Easy: In 2004 we can use common sense and get things right. In 2000 you had a losing candidate trying things piecemeal, first cherrypicking the places to recount and then having his supporters continue to change the ground rules as they went along. From where I stood, it seemed crystal clear to me then that not only Gore's team itself but also the Floridians doing the recounting were far less interested in an objective resolutoin than in doing what it would take to get their man over the top. If you ever watched the ballot-by-ballot examinations, where the one Republican said one thing [and common sense tended to agree with him] but the two Democrats overruled him, you know what I mean.)
Sick this week, stayed home from work Tuesday. Julia worked Tuesday. I think both those decisions contributed heavily to my working yesterday and today (and her staying home both days), and by extension my coming out one day ahead of her.
On the day I stayed home legitimately sick, apparently a lot of people nationwide feigned illness to play Halo 2. In a way I'm glad to have clearly identifiable symptoms, to ensure nobody would mistake me for a truant gamer.
Off-site meeting at work yesterday; this movie was involved. From the marketing/advertising I expected to loathe it; the opposite was true. (Funny how that was also true of Nemo. Something about how Pixar promotes its movies consistently rubs me the wrong way, despite very high quality actual movie content.)
Mentioned in a qb post below, here's the Purple America electoral map.
This became a team name as suggested by one conservative (hi) to two people known to be unhappy with this election. Lame, I admit, but we thought of nothing better at the time. Maribeth did indeed wear purple. Richard wore blue. I perhaps should have worn red to complete the theme; wore a shirt/sweater one-piece that always looks purplish to me in the closet even though it's clearly just dark blue.
Two reports of note: one negative, one positive.
War is never easy. On the other hand, for all the bajillions of dollars the U.S. has spent on military technology over the years, you'd think we'd have these guys vastly overpowered, no?
(And even the wiliest guerrilla tactics aren't going to outsmart generations worth of studying these things and experiencing them through training exercises, etc.)
Suffice to say, I place more stock in the positive piece.
I was about to compliment ESR's commonsense estimate of the size of the homeless population, but then right below it I saw his unironic claim that the best thing the Democrats could do would be to embrace the second amendment.
It's an unintuitive argument without much of an attempt at supporting evidence. Given what I know of ESR's views on the subject (which I happen to share, though I don't share his actual experience with firearms), it has about the same effect as if Bush had lost badly and someone suggested that the Republicans embrace drug legalization.
Mark Cuban has been fined by the NBA for comments he made on his own weblog (at least that's what he himself says; I have no sense of how widely sports media outlets have reported this).
I presume the offensive comments are in the paragraph that begins, "Tuesday is when it gets real. I won’t say what i really think about the genius that started the season on election day since it’s probably the same person that started the season on Halloween in previous years. There’s only a presidential election 1x every 4 years. We start on that day..Genius." [etc.]
He asks, himself,
"Do the customers and fans of the NBA or other leagues, feel it makes the league appear stronger, weaker or unaffected when a player, owner, coach, GM, or executive publicly criticizes the league?"
My real reason for caring about this question has to do with quiz-bowl, more specifically NAQT. We have a fundamentally different situation there: "Customers" aren't game spectators but rather game participants.
I actually really like to see constructive criticism from players and coaches, even if (especially if?) it's in a public forum. Tells us what we need to improve on. My guess is that how such criticism affects customers depends on two things:
1. Their esteem for the people making the criticism.
2. How effectively "we" respond to it.
As for internal criticism (of us, by "us") gone public, I think this would adversely affect customer esteem. Not enough to justify a league fining an owner, but enough that the highest-profile of "us" know better. (Individual member blogs can be found here, here, here, and here (and of course what you're reading right now), maybe others I don't know about.)
I worry a bit about people who don't actually speak for NAQT, but who are high-profile enough that someone might get the impression that they do. Only a little bit, though.
To journalists it's a "three-dot" column. (Sentences strung together by ellipses to mask their lack of cohesion, or even lack of coherence.) To Cooch it's the preferred way to sum up a trip if you're too busy to write a true travelogue. Now I get to borrow the format myself.
1. If that's what traffic was like on the 101 at 1:30 Saturday afternoon or 6:30 Saturday evening, I'd hate to see the weekday morning or afternoon commute times.
2. But I do really like Los Angeles driving. The signage is highly informative; the other drivers are courteous and attentive. If you need to merge they'll let you, but they won't waste their own time or the time of drivers behind them.
3. Julia's brother, sister-in-law, niece, and nephew are all just the best.
4. Da Ali G Show is hilarious but hard to sit through. It's as if Sascha Cohen decides to hold onto a joke as long as he possibly can just to maximize the discomfort. Like Maribeth I watched a whole lot of the same show the day before TRASH Regionals. For quiz purposes our experiences were about equally useful.
5. They have Panda Express in at least one of the main places-to-stop-for-food along Interstate 5. Come to think of it, I was in the mood for some semblance of Chinese food, particularly the "orange-flavored chicken." (Panda does this so well, yet I've literally never had a satisfying experience with either orange or lemon chicken at any other Chinese fast food place, nor any "real" Chinese place.) What would it take to package Indian food or Thai food in such a way that you could have ubiquitous and uniform franchise at every highway exit and restaurant-theater-industrial complex in America? Could you put yellow curry in one of those squirt bottles Taco Bell uses for sour cream?
6. Julia's right that the Coffee Bean is way better than Starbucks, especially the "black forest" iced coffee drink.
7. Satya, just east of the Caltech campus, remains unparalelled among Thai places; Richard and Maribeth remain unparalelled among potential dining companions for lunch at a Thai place.
8. We went 4-6 "the easy way" at TRASH Regionals. Eight teams total. Two I knew going in were clearly better than us. I thought going in that more than one would be clearly worse than us, but at most one actually was (and even the team we beat twice, one of those wins was on the last question). Anyhow, we were in the process of laying an egg in the round robin, then picked up the last game and swept the bottom bracket.
9. Quiz experience that's never fun: You're facing a team that you assume isn't as good as you (though of course that assumption could be just wrong). First question, your team gets a neg on a perfectly reasonable buzz; other team gets the tossup and 30's the bonus. Rest of the game your team gets the lion's share of the tossups but can't convert enough on the bonuses to build your lead up to anywhere near a comfort zone. This is probably a serious personality flaw, the sort of thing that would show up in psychological profiling and deep-six my NFL or military officer career, but in those situations I easily slip into "play not to lose" mode.
10. Do you buzz more or less aggressively depending on the perceived quality of your opponent? One of the two best teams rolled over us in our match, but in the process they took a lot of negs where if they understood the limits of their opponents' knowledge base, they wouldn't have rung in nearly so early. Fortunate for them that their run of negs didn't correlate with a pack full of Stuff We Know (rather than Stuff They Know). I suppose if you're a really really good team, whose long-run goal is a national championship, if you start thinking too hard about your opponents you'll fall into bad habits, "sitting on" tossups and so on, that'll bite you against your fellow juggernauts.
11. Three of my own negs were against the team that ultimately won the whole thing (without much surprise). I took some chances and if they'd come out right... well, we'd have still lost, given how that round ended up, but I know we couldn't have beaten that team playing passively.
12. The scorekeeper that round mistakenly gave at least two of my negs to Maribeth, for what it's worth (which she and I agreed was close to zero).
13. With statkeeping like that, I take my 5th place finish in individual stats (round robin portion) with a grain of salt. Take the 2nd place finish in individual stats (if you count all 10 rounds, which they didn't for all the right fairness and opponent-quality issues) with an even bigger grain of salt.
14. Very first tossup of the first round of the tournament... I don't want to spoil it in case these questions will still be used somewhere. Suffice to say I got it. Come to think of it, I think I've gotten the first tossup of the first game in N straight of the TRASH Regionals I've played in.
15. I also relished winning the first-clue buzzer race on a tossup with some pr0n content, then hearing the other player curse that he'd been beaten to it. (Though rather than frequenting the racy stuff ourselves, I suspect Paul and I both knew the answer based on seeing the same story here.)
16. At least one question involved material that was the subject of argumentative comments on this blog between myself and a TRASH author. (Not even CE/politics stuff.) It was high-profile enough material that really anyone in TRASH could have written that question; no idea who actually did.
17. This would have boggled my mind from the Boston University days, but I was on a team that "lamed" a sports bonus to get to a science fiction bonus (obviously we didn't know what the next bonus would be), then got 30 points of stone-cold knowledge on the sci-fi (not sure how stone-cold it was, though Richard had no doubt of any of the answers). We would have likely had zero on the sports bonus, or 20 fewer than if I'd paid better attention to some particular Bill Simmons columns.
18. Only once the whole tournament did we get 30 points on bonus where I had to say out loud, "Wow - we didn't deserve that." It was a baseball question, where maybe my background/bias leads me to think of baseball questions as too easy.
19. One of USC's players played quiz-bowl for Harvard at the same time I did (at most my freshman and sophomore year, maybe just my freshman year), yet embarrassingly I had no memory of him. Not until he mentioned Jordan a couple times did I finally vaguely place him. (And then there's As [pronounced "Oz"], whom of course I remember, and who was one of the readers this weekend.)
20. When one of our players dropped out at the last minute, my attempts to convince Julia to play with us failed. (Instead, she spent time with her niece and nephew Sunday, which worked out extremely well as their parents could go out of the house and be kid-free for awhile.) Just as well, since there was nowhere near as much Julia-friendly retro pop culture content as I'd have hoped for.