In no particular order:
1. What kind of name is Rogers Cadenhead, anyway?
2. That's the name of a person, whose weblog is named "Drudge Retort." If I were Matt Drudge I'd be tempted to file a trademark claim based on likelihood of confusion.
This (via Orin Kerr); there's sometimes an inverse correlation between the amount of breathless hysteria on the part of particular bloggers, and the degree to which there's anything to be breathlessly hysteric about.
4. This is not the first time (and probably won't be the last) this individual has been involved in something stupid. By my count these are the seventh, eighth, and tenth Google search results on his name, where in we find:
A. Someone else accuses him of intellectual dishonesty in light of his critique of BitTorrent
B. A mainstream news source lists him among those cyber-squatting papal domain names
C. He himself accuses some conservative think tank of wanting a Bush dictatorship
(If you're looking for a political slant either way here: Cadenhead seems to be a left-wing crackpot; the people I saw most vehemently in his court (more exactly, most vehmently anti-AP) are righty bloggers, Instapundit et al; Orin Kerr is a moderate who posts thoughtful-but-not-very-libertarian entries on the mostly-libertarian Volokh Conspiracy.)
Thank goodness (in both directions!):
“We spent 18 months and millions of dollars making 'Hillary The Movie,'" laments David Bossie, head of Citizens United and a longtime Clinton tormentor. “We’re incredibly proud, but the problem is the film has no relevance anymore.”
--Reason
Americans drove 4.5 billion fewer miles in April. How ’bout that. Economics works! If you really want to change habits, let the market-driven rise in the cost of gas force people to drive less, and force energy companies to come up with new and more efficient ways of getting us around. Of course, politicians don’t trust markets. So they’ll find ways to artificially lower gas prices while simultaneously bemoaning “our dependence on oil.”
--Radley Balko, who also points out this Penny Arcade post about snacks designed to look like Legos (a lawsuit waiting to happen!)
Analyze with me!
In the game below the fold, at what point did White (me) cinch the win, and was there ever a point at which I was just toast?
My 26th move is tricky because of Black's eventual threat of Qf4 into Qd2. My 21st move also feels very LAGgy (loose-aggressive), to borrow poker terminology.
[Event "Online Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2008.06.11"]
[Round "1"]
[White "Matt B."]
[Black "Carlos C."]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteElo "1515"]
[BlackElo "1449"]
[TimeControl "1 in 3 days"]
1. d4 d5 2. Nf3 h6 3. Bf4 Nf6 4. e3 a6 5. Bd3 Nc6 6. c3 Bg4 7. Nbd2 e6 8. h3 Bxf3 9. Nxf3 Bd6 10. Ne5 Qe7 11. Qc2 O-O 12. Ng4 Bxf4 13. exf4 Na5 14. b4 Nc4 15. Ne5 Nh5 16. g3 Na3 17. Qe2 Nf6 18. g4 Nd7 19. h4 Nxe5 20. fxe5 f6 21. g5 fxg5 22. O-O-O gxh4 23. Rdg1 Rf7 24. Qh5 Kf8 25. Rxh4 Rxf2 26. Qg6 Qf7 27. Qh7 Qg8 28. Rxh6 Qxh7 29. Rxh7 Ke8 30. Rgxg7 Rd8 31. Rh8+ Rf8 32. Bg6# 1-0
I used to be much more interested in preserving baseball tradition than I am now. Most of the change results in the degree to which traditions have become outdated if not absurd, or (more charitably to those traditions) the degree to which baseball is already ignoring too much, where there's a choice between half-heartedly keeping a tradition stupidly, or making a clean break and doing something that makes sense.
Joe Sheehan ranted about interleague play earlier this week, yet his proposed solution really doesn't do anything to address the actual problem.
(Other than the second-order problem that MLB vastly overstates the excitement of interleague play by failing to adjust for time of year and time of week; as Joe points out, summer weekend series will always draw better than school-in-session weeknight series.)
Anyway, my wife finds it strange that particular teams will play each other only once every three years or so. The schedule as it stands now is confusing and (as Joe illustrates) unfair. If you temporarily ignore how we got here, a better way would be for all 30 teams to play each other at least once series a year, no?
So I have in mind three 10-team divisions. You get one three-game series a year against each team outside your division (whoever you host in even years you visit in odd years). With the 162-game schedule that leaves 102 games within the division, which averages to 11.3.
So in a given year you'll have 12 games each against three particular division opponents and 11 games each against the other six. As the current schedule features 52 series in 26 weeks (although there's the All-Star Break, there's also exactly one occasion where teams get three series, 2-2-3, in one Monday-Sunday cycle), there'd be 20 series outside the division and 32 series within. Three of your division opponents you'd do 3-3/3-3; two of them you'd do 3-3/3-2; four of them you'd do 4-3/4. It's the least problematic way to implement this.
Who's in what division?
Call them West, Central, and East, and you're 90% there. Move the Houston Astros to "West" (buy off Astros owner Drayton McLane for the trouble of the few more West Coast trips that the Texas Rangers already fail to object to).
Do we continue to make sure that same-metro teams aren't both {at home, on the road} at the same time? If so, how?
Sure, why not. The most straightforward way to do this is split each division into five teams that tend to do the opposite of their five counterparts. So you'd have something like:
OAK-LAD-SD-COL-SEA[-OAK-LAD...]
SF-LAA-ARI-HOU-TEX
CHW-MIL-MIN-KC-STL
CHC-CIN-CLE-PIT-DET
FLA-TB-ATL-WAS-NYY
PHI-BOS-TOR-BAL-NYM
(Each pair of same-metro teams could be flipped here. In general I think non-division teams would want to host at least one team per pair of the {Yankees-Red Sox}, {Cubs-Cardinals}, and/or {Dodgers-Giants} any given year.)
I haven't fully put this down to paper (spreadsheet?) but as a general rule road trips would be a sequence of 2-3 teams from one of the cycles above (so e.g. Seattle then Oakland, or Tampa Bay then Atlanta, or Cubs then Cincinnati).
What does the schedule basically look like?
Keeping things as simple as possible unless/until we butt into mathematical impossibilities, I have it in my mind as:
Nine series, everyone in their division (round robin). 15 series, two divisions face each other and the third stays within itself. (5-5-5 for each of those combinations.) Nine series, everyone in their division. 10 series, everyone outside their division. Nine series, everyone in their division.
Your season series with any given division rival would start no later than the first May series and end no sooner than the last August series.
What about playoffs?
This implementation mostly doesn't care about that. The ideal would be three division winners plus a wild card, but if the masses insist on eight playoff teams then the smoothest scenario is three 1st place teams, three 2nd place teams, two wild cards.
What about the DH?
Another question on whose answer this implementation doesn't necessarily depend. But I will say, coming full circle to my belief in baseball tradition (or lack thereof), that my personal preference order is:
1. Everyone uses the DH
2. Nobody uses the DH
[large utility gap]
3. Whether you use the DH depends on who the visiting team is
4. Whether you use the DH depends on who the home team is
...yes, of the four obvious ways to do it, MLB picked the one that (in my opinion) is worst. (Why is "depends on the home team" worse than "depends on the road team"? Because it's ridiculous that pitchers on "DH teams" bat so rarely that they bat only on the road. If an A's pitcher is going to bat maybe once or twice a year, it should happen in front of the home crowd!)
Oh, while we're here, my wife has suggested that from the 10th inning onward, the home team bat first each inning (but the next team to score wins!). I've come to like that idea...
I can't immediately tell what day this column went live, but it refers to an incident Deadspin already told us about two weeks ago.
Maybe the author needed two weeks to collect his thoughts and express insight that would leave us two weeks more enlightened?
For this story is anything more enlightening than "don't do that" even possible, much less necessary?
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!
Love,
Party A
Postscript #1: Congratulations also to the thousands of other Party A's and Party B's who finally became eligible for official recognition today.
Postscript #2: Party B figures that the "B" stands for "Bride" but wonders whether the "A" stands for something obscene.
Postscript #3: Country music fans urgently need to keep their own marriages intact (and I suspect whatever problems they face have nothing to do with anybody else's relationship or marriage), because songs like this and this are way too depressing.
Postscript #4: And of course, as you know, it was two years ago today that Italy drew the U.S. (1-1) and this game outlasted our reception.
Law School to Organize Bush War Crimes Trial
(Legal Blog Watch by way of Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy)
Of the "Top Editorials" on the left nav bar, my favorite title is "Will President Obama be impeachable for allowing Bush's impeachable high crimes to continue past January 20?"
...tend to have unusually aggressive drivers, regardless of what's actually on the stickers.
The wrong focus and the right focus -- in the same Sunday NY Times review section!
So you know those women's advocacy groups that kill who-knows-how-many trees to send those alarmist "send us money" letters? Just think what they could accomplish if they spent nearly as much effort on the plight of women around the world as they do on demonizing Republican straw men. But I guess if you really want to rake the money in you have to redefine women's issues as simply issues that affect American women.