Suppose you owned a football team and had a coach you wanted to fire, but you also wanted to weasel out of paying him the two years remaining on his contract.
You could just fire him anyway and renege on the contract, figuring that even if he sues he'll have a hard time collection. But why make a sworn enemy for life?
Instead, making a guy choose between his contractually obligated money and his dignity is a stroke of genius. Unless he decides to hold you to the money, perhaps on the theory that he's still young and has plenty of time to get his dignity back.
The Oakland Raiders: Commitment to Excellence taunting zoo animals but failing to get out of the way.
Mix to taste. (For best results, start the former around 0:15 or 0:20. Or just speed that one up a bit.)
And yet one of the first full albums I ever bought on iTunes (possibly the first) still has yet to make a footprint on YouTube.
Every time I'd ever heard bits of this song on the radio, for some reason I thought it was Kelly Clarkson, or if not her then some other Idol.
If Kid Rock were a girl (s)he'd be Fergie.
Update: Did this song kill Kid Rock's buzz? Did this song kill Poison's groove? Are they fundamentally the same song?
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?
If it weren't for a Jeff Feagles reference in this chat I would have been completely oblivious to this Fox camera gaffe (warning: search term is profane) from OVER A YEAR AGO.
(This was the one game I missed out of those four particular playoff games that weekend, as Julia's high school friends got together at a sushi restaurant for a very belated holiday gift swap.)
I wonder if that will turn out to have been Dick Stockton's last call of an NFL playoff game.
"Hispanic baseball pioneer Roberto Clemente’s uniform number 21 will be retired from use by all 30 teams in Major League Baseball if the New York City Council has its way.
--NY Sun via Baseball Primer (emphasis added)
The throwaway line on this post uses the exact same rhetorical scenario from a question I asked Julia on Sunday while we read that day's paper.
A brilliant stimulus package: Let people make tax-free 401K withdrawals. This puts more money into circulation and is revenue-neutral.
Any other plan is needlessly complicated (and riddled with unintended consequences) compared to this.
Obama's biggest Illinois state-legislative achievement: All police interrogations are videotaped. Simple(?) and effective(?). The question marks are there because I'd love to see some empirical evidence of what's changed since that bill passed.
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?
Inspired by two Facebook "Which [Party X] candidate would you LEAST like to see win?" debate questions: In full, top-to-bottom order of my personal preference as of today.
1. John McCain
2. Fred Thompson
3. Rudy Giuliani
UPDATE: A serious gap opened up here the moment Obama dissed NAFTA. I'd move Obama behind Romney if the latter weren't busy pandering to all these people whose specific jobs really aren't coming back (and who ought to focus instead on what to do next)
4. Barack Obama
5. Mitt Romney
6. Hillary Clinton
7. John Edwards
8. Ron Paul
9. Mike Huckabee
10. Dennis Kucinich
8 vs. 9 is a close call. Other than that, from 4 onward, the pairwise difference between any two candidates is greater than the difference between 1 and 4.
What follows is meaningless without full context/criteria, yet the way it's phrased you can get the gist/zen of it and maybe even convince yourself you don't need the full context.
Stadium Arcadium is probably about to surpass American Idiot. Not this week, but maybe next week.
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!)
(You already know I'm about as pro-drug as any non-drug-using (caffeine addiction aside) person could be, so obviously you understand that this is about culture, and cynically derivative efforts, rather than anything personal or political.)
So was Weeds just the gateway TV series?
At this point wouldn't the obvious next step be a Will Farrell movie in which he sells heroin, yet in the style of all his sports movies?
Loose ball at midfield, with two minutes left in a tie game whose winner goes to Super Bowl.
When I first saw Scrabulous I figured the lawsuit or cease/desist order would be days away. When it didn't happen, I figured they'd worked out some financial deal, exactly the kind of deal they still can (and should!) work out.
In theory Hasbro should get a vast majority of the revenue (they can team up with an arbitrary development partner; Scrabulous has only one possible partner). In practice I wonder how closely this resembles those economic games where one person proposes a deal and if the other side rejects it nobody gets anything.
While we're here, I'll brag about my last five Scrabulous games, by final score:
381-275
433-365
424-384
420-389
329-319
Before that an 8-10 game stretch of .500 ball 3-6 skid with final scores around 300 flat
Posted by Matt Bruce at 08:18 PM
So it turns out I don't weigh almost exactly 500 kg after all.
Most of the political commenters here are from somewhere other than California. But if you're local, or just well-informed on it, how should I vote on these Indian gaming propositions that are getting so many TV ads both ways?
My gut instinct here is Yes. I think if these really were corrupt sweetheart deals, the No side would have far more compelling evidence than it actually does.
This isn't nearly as dumb as the ad alluded to in the post title (it's actually an interesting question), but:
In light of the mock Second Life IBM ad, do we really agree that "The point of innovation is to make real money"?
In theory any capitalist would/should agree, but is it inefficient of me that every now and then I innovate just for kicks and giggles?
Does Scott Adams owe John McCain $1000? I say yes.
How eagerly would Mike Huckabee be McCain's running mate? Their mutual respect, and seeming cooperation worries me a little.
Does this amount of corruption disqualify Obama as a presidential candidate? (More here.) I say no, I'd still rather have him than Hillary, though it sharply reduces my inclination to vote for him.
On the other hand, I've learned via e-mail from a respected peer that controlling and destroying nuclear stockpiles has been one of Obama's key issues in the senate. We already know he's been relatively aggressive about advocating pursuit of Osama bin Laden into Pakistan. Does that make him a good anti-terror candidate? It might be plausible.
(By the way, Hillary deserves credit for pointing out in a debate that we'd really need to warn Pakistan that any given attack was coming from us rather than from India.)