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.
Quote of the Year:
Q: What percent of your success would you say is attributable to randomness?
A: That really depends on what you mean by randomness. Was it random that I was born in the U.S. to a caring family that was able to educate me instead of to a poor family in Zimbabwe? That was probably the biggest determining factor in my success, and one of the most random.
--Freakonomics Blog interviews a poker pro
Have you ever been the only person (or only people, if you went together) in a movie theater? Julia and I were the sole audience for last night's 10 p.m. Jack London Square showing of Leatherheads.
Previews: Al Pacino has a couple of cop/legal thrillers coming out. Mama Mia! should have stuck to the stage.
The Hulk franchise has conspicuously airbrushed Ang Lee out of its cultural history. Not that I blame them -- this film was a crime against humanity -- but wow, what a slap in the face to an otherwise good director. (Along those lines I can only wait and hope and pray for someone to finally bury this piece of garbage and do saturation marketing for "the Hitchhiker's Guide movie you've always wanted to see.")
The movie itself: The first 3/4 of it were fantastic! Like a sports movie, only better; like an "old movie" (say, Cary Grant's finest) but recent.
Then all it took was one ridiculously stupid, anti-historical, incomprehensibly slapdash plot development for me to lose interest almost instantly. The plot twist in question may have set a record for being just wrong on so many levels at the same time.
Then again, sports movies are surprisingly bad about sporting veracity, and from what we know of George Clooney in real life it's probably too much to expect civic veracity from him. (For a quick 10 points, which constitutional amendment would effectively prevent an athletic commissioner -- regardless of how he was appointed -- from punishing a reporter who had no business connection to the league in question?)
(Wikipedia doesn't shed much light, but I did read a little bit about this guy and this guy. (This guy needs no introduction.))
Oh, while we're here: Is John Krasinski going to make an entire career out of characters who look crestfallen because everything went to hell because they didn't speak up? If only he'd just admitted he wasn't a real war hero, why, he could be dating Pam!
"By embracing baseball analytics, Brian Bannister has transformed himself into a must-own fantasy pitcher. "
--headline text at fantasysports.yahoo.com
You know, I think it's utterly fantastic that Brian Bannister is a baseball stat geek (as well as an actual pitcher). But his stat-geekdom isn't what makes him succeed on the mound! If that were all you needed, hey, sign me up. But I know better than to think a 55-mph fastball will work at this level.
Even among people with the raw talent to be pro athletes, understanding stat geek principles is a far cry from applying them. I heard somewhere that Dante Bichette (of all people), for example, had a deep innate understanding that OBP is life. This didn't change the fact that hacking at the first hittable pitch he saw was too ingrained in him to do it any other way.
(Ironically, whatever Bannister preaches, what he practices is well worth staying away from if you do fantasy baseball: In the long run his strikeout rate is unlikely to be sustainable.)
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.)
This Don Williams song and this Kylie Minogue song are completely different musical genres, yet strikingly similar lyric structure.
(Thanks Maribeth, for reminding me of the former. Wow, I hadn't heard that song in decades.)
While we're here (the Kylie Minogue part), what's the Australian counterpart to For Better or For Worse? Of course I don't mean a comic strip, necessarily, just anything that ubiquitous and long-lived (yet oddly pernicious) that has wound up inadvertently representing a nation.
(The other day I saw the YouTube video of Andrew Bogut high-fiving himself, then read about Peter Moylan's injury. It was Oz convergence.)
An exercise for people who read lots of political blogs:
Find someone who expressed a strong opinion about the firing Ward Churchill, yet also expressed a strong opinion the other way about the Berkeley tenure of John Yoo.
(For my part: I strongly defend Yoo's tenure and don't believe anything he did at the White House is sufficient to make his tenure revocable. Churchill, as I understand the story (my understanding may be flawed), got caught lying about his past scholarship. To be sure, the real reason people wanted him fired was his anti-American screeds, but on its face he was kicked out for being a fraud. I claim my positions are consistent; your mileage may vary.)
"Kernkraft 400" is a song by Zombie Nation, not vice versa. (Per Wikipedia, Many people believe the band to be named "Kernkraft 400" and the song to be "Zombie Nation". I had been one of those people.)
This music video makes it out to be an anti-consumer screed. Don't tell all those sports fans (especially both the 2002 Giants and 2002 Angels: the first thousand times I heard this song were by way of either or both venues of that World Series).
(By the way, that's a question that probably should rarely if ever be asked about something in McSweeneys of all places.)
"I am happy that I am divorced now. I will be able to go back to school."
--the eight-year-old (emphasis added) whose father put her into an arranged marriage. AFP via Google News, Althouse, and Instapundit.
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.
You know me: I'm rarely sympathetic to tort plaintiffs, at least compared to most people. But this seems like a pretty good proximate cause case to me.
The chain of events is spelled out more clearly here:
1. The original woman buys hamster at PetSmart.
2. Hamster allegedly infects new owner with LCMV, a rodent-borne viral infectious disease.
3. The original owner then dies of unrelated stroke.
4. Dead owner’s organs are transplanted into various recipients including Thomas Magee, who has a liver transplant at Massachusetts General Hospital in April 2005.
5. Magee contracted LCMV and dies.
I'd be a sympathetic juror. It's actually pretty hard to find a tort case where I'd be a sympathetic juror, but this would be one.
This entire King Kaufman column (both halves: the kid going to the NBA, and the Red Sox jersey) is so obviously right that I'm depressed that any of it actually needed to be written.
You got a problem with that?
I... actually don't. I agree with the Yankees 100% here. I'd like to claim that I'd still feel that way even if I were Catholic, though of course it's impossible to know for sure.