Don't think too hard about this, because if you're like me it may lead to brief but debilitating depression (near catatonia). But if you're morbidly curious...
(On a much more uplifting note, that also happens to have a sports theme (despite the sports "hook," the central questions here are by no means sports specific; maybe culture specific), 50 years ago there was no such thing as a Super Bowl. What will exist 50 years from now that will be as important then as the Super Bowl is now, yet unfathomable to us now?)
How likely are the 2108 Chicago Cubs to exist? (As you know the 1908 Cubs won the World Series, and the 2008 Cubs keep getting reminded that their franchise hasn't won a World Series since then.)
How likely are the 2508 Cubs to exist?
I think it's safe to assume that the 12008 Cubs won't exist, though it's unclear why I assume that. Will MLB lose popularity to a competing league? Baseball to a competing sport? How likely is Chicago (as we know it) to exist in 10008? (The obvious follow-up is "define 'as we know it'!")
When will be the final season that the Cubs exist?
When will be the final calendar year that the United States exists?
When will be the final calendar year that people living in the present actually think of within the same time system we currently use?
(That is, exactly 10,000 years from now how likely are people to think of that day as May 2, 12008? Cutting to the chase, how likely are people to exist?)
So I have to take a step back and admit that in two different contexts people who think like me come dangerously close to wanting it both ways:
Does the labeling and marketing of Mike's Hard Lemonade create a likelihood of harmful confusion?
When the consequence of the question is whether government agencies get to regulate the product [further], we tend to say no. Yet in this case, when it's about the actions of a father who inadvertently bought his kid alcohol, we're tempted to say yes, he just got confused, anyone could have.
Obviously those positions can't both be 100% right.
The hand-waving (or, if you prefer, measured common sense) solution is that, yes, there's a tiny chance that Mike's Lemonade could confuse someone (just as one might confuse Long Island iced tea with iced tea proper), but not enough of one to justify government action; meanwhile, the dad who bought his kid a Mike's Hard Lemonade did something stupid, but not nearly stupid enough to justify having his kid taken away from him for a week.
If the picture that the NY Daily News and UK Telegraph both host is the one that got everyone in a tizzy then I'm completely dumbfounded.
1. Celebrities have backs? Who knew?
2. Don't most teen swimsuits show more skin than that?
3. The two most offensive elements of that photo are her Medusa hair and whoever butchered her makeup. I'd let a kid wear an outfit that skimpy (i.e. a toga) long before approving of that much lipstick.
"Baseball Primer needs to buy a franchise and make it open-source. "
--comment #29 on this thread
So would that mean the team would send a guy down to Triple-A because random user submitted a mod to that effect?
Do I read the April 30 entry on this blog correctly?
It compares Max Sapp (23rd overall pick in the 2006 draft) to eight other players, seven of whom were picked 21st or earlier. (But how dare a team fail to snag Joba Chamberlain from the rough!)
Isn't that sort of like blaming the 1984 Washington Bullets (or any of 19 other teams) for drafting players other than Michael Jordan, Hakeem, or Charles Barkley?
How did it take until comment #4 on this thread to point that out?
What Obama wishes he could say:
"Thrown off his game by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright uproar, Barack Obama’s strongest answer to Hillary Rodham Clinton is one he won’t give: Senator, do you really want to get in a contest with me over who has more unsavory personal associations? "
(via Jim Lindgren's post to Volokh Conspiracy)
Apparently Rush Limbaugh and I fervently support opposite Democratic candidates for (in part) the same ulterior motive: He seems to be under the impression that Clinton would be easier to defeat than Obama in a general election. If that's true (it's probably not: I've probably gotten the wrong idea from second- and third-hand retelling), that's crazy-talk!
The unsavory Clinton associations, and uncanny ability of the Clintons to wield personal power, feed off of each other.
Myopic leftism can (as necessary) be reigned in by branches of government and by the reality on the ground. (Obama may have some strange ideas, but he's not stupid.) That's not quite so true of corruption.
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).
Despite the italicized phrase in the last line of this post, as far as I can tell, the images linked from this article (in theory there exist workplaces where those images are NSFW) don't actually depict any body parts, naughty or otherwise.
They depict erotic toys, to be sure, but they come no closer to representing "images of penises" than would a photo of the Washington Monument.
My team in the Kimera Bartee Open (fantasy baseball league that rewards players for playing badly) has a collective hitting line that represents about 1.5 seasons worth of a real full-time player's at-bats. So, multiplying everything by 2/3, we get:
AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB K GIDP E
616 86 153 34 4 6 56 18 4 60 116 13 12
Our hypothetical bad player is hitting .248/.315/.346 (for OBP, assume no HBP or sac flies) - in today's offensive environment that's unacceptable, but you could squint and imagine a below-average shortstop. 34 doubles? 18 steals? Just 12 errors?
That's a lot better than Tony F. Pena would do (and yes, Pena is one of the players represented by this composite- had a big decision between Pena and Adam Everett with the #2 overall pick, and I'm still shocked that Pena was still around at #13).
Our composite hypothetical pitcher is 8-12 over 168 1/3 innings, with 186 hits allowed, 114 runs, 20 HR, 76 BB, 97 K. RA = 6.09, WHIP = 1.56
So far Deadspin has run at least three editions of "The Dark Side of the Locker Room." One of them was actually quite good: Jeff Passan writing about a Fresno State basketball player whose girlfriend had taken out a restraining order. The other two that I've seen were unbelievably lame, including Jeff Pearlman getting sand in an unmentionable place because how dare Will Clark be mean to him, and then this one.
A few rules of thumb that I would have thought were common sense:
1. Act as though you belong, and other people will act as though you do (the converse is also true)
2. If you're in a locker room, don't stare.
3. Athletes like to yell. (Blame the testosterone, or the greenies.) If they're blatantly just trying to yank your chain, give your chain some slack.
4. Not a rule so much as an observation: I don't for the life of me understand what was wrong with what Piniella did in this anecdote.
Now obviously a feature like this should only get the most extreme stories -- which is all the more reason why I've been transcendently disappointed so far. People will care even less about the run-of-the-mill interactions.
But I'd be willing to be that my favorite Standard-Times writer has at least ten fantastic stories, nine of which he absolutely can't share. And even I have a thoroughly mediocre story from the only professional sporting event I ever "covered" (a basketball game at Boston College almost counts as professional, but not quite).
On January 1, 2000, the Boston Bruins and New Jersey Devils skated to a 2-2 tie. Whoever usually covered Bruins games for SportsTicker was probably off celebrating the holiday.
I got post-game quotes from the visiting locker room by standing near the edge of the throng, but I didn't have any questions that nobody else already asked.
On my way from the press ring to the locker rooms I got lost and accidentally wound up completely outside the stadium. Despite my credential the security people almost didn't let me in, but finally did.
(If they hadn't, the wire service story might have had one or two fewer Martin Brodeur quotes, though life would have continued.)
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.
This doesn't really fit in well with my general belief that politicians will succeed more (and ought to succeed more) by recognizing the inherent goodness of this country, its people, its founding principles, etc. But it needs to be said:
America -- WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?
Why do you destroy families for lack of common sense?
How can you fail to understand even the simplest budget-balancing principles?
Why do so many of you fall back on "There ought to be a law" when the far greater problem is almost always, "There ought NOT to be a law"?
Our voice mail system at work is Outlook compatible, and through a happy idiosyncrasy of sort order and incomplete metadata, every time I play a message the immediately following track is from the scherzo of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. (You know the riff: radio shows have used it as bumper music all the time, usually leading into news of the day.)
Every voice mail message is significantly improved if you think of that theme as the closing of the message itself.
Without any prior knowledge of the issue at hand, I saw the title of this post ("The Vogue Cover Controversy:") and the image in question (direct link) without scrolling further. The problem wasn't immediately obvious to me but after a few seconds I had a good guess that turned out to be exactly right.
(If I hadn't known "this cover is controversial" I probably wouldn't have drawn the connection.)
So the furor is probably exaggerated but at least not completely out of left field (compare to Orlando Patterson's NY Times op-ed somehow divining racist undertones from, of all things, the original Hillary 3 a.m. ad).
Here verbatim is Richard's open letter to his representative (my own version would read "Dear Mr. Stark"):
Dear Mr. Waxman,
I am writing as one of your constituents to register my total opposition to Barney Frank’s mortgage bailout plan, and any other plan to use tax dollars to rescue housing lenders and borrowers from financial difficulty of their own making.
Unsustainable mortgages of the type addressed by the Frank plan could never have occurred without willful negligence and a degree of deception on both sides of the table. Such reckless borrowers and lenders deserve each other perfectly. What they do not deserve is one thin dime of taxpayer money once they find they have double-crossed each other.
Although the Frank plan is represented as aiding borrowers, in reality it would enable lenders to offload bad mortgages for 85% of the home’s supposed value. Of course, lenders will only accept this deal because in their estimation the mortgages are worth even less than that. So when the Financial Services committee supposes that only 1-2% of the new FHA mortgages will default, they are displaying much the same willful financial obtuseness as the original lenders did.
I have heard Barney Frank acknowledge that his plan will rescue the imprudent and undeserving, but he justifies this on the grounds that “the economy” will suffer without a bailout. As you know, Los Angeles has a high percentage of renters, and also many homeowners who did not gamble recklessly and dishonestly in the housing market. We too are part of “the economy.” For us to see our taxes go up or our government’s deficit increased, while the federal government blithely underwrites the worst loans made by the most imprudent lenders to the least responsible borrowers, would be the most perverse policy I can imagine.
Please safeguard the public purse from Barney Frank’s costly, immoral bailout plan.
Regards,
Sal Fasano would be a 0, Michael Irvin would be 100, and even Michael Jack Schmidt would probably still be at least in the 30s given how long Philadelphia's fans still booed him.
What about Scott Rolen and J.D. Drew, both of whom I just acquired in the same fantasy baseball deal? (Something about them both stimulated the same part of my brain, and I was trying to remember what else they had in common besides both being made of glass.)
