Based on Googling, this quote has been used for political snark regarding the Big Three auto companies and regarding military stop-loss orders, but -- to my surprise -- nothing recent (at least nothing that would get a high Page Rank).
Without further ado (watch to the end, of course).
Sometimes I Google chess move sequences, just to see what's being played and discussed. (This is kosher for correspondence, right? By contrast I think it would not be kosher to ask someone for advice about a live position.)
Anyhow, I did this search, and check out the third hit. I have no memory of this game.
"If you need proof that this is the most important election in a generation, get this: Jewish grandkids are flying to Florida to visit their grandparents -- without being guilted into it -- to talk their elders out of voting for John McCain."
--Joel Stein
It's a cute idea, but how does "grandkids are flying to Florida" demonstrate "most important election in a generation"?
Call me a math geek, but I do not think the word "proof" means what most op-ed writers think it means.
Dear Nancy Pelosi,
Is this bailout thing critical to our nation's financial security or not? If it were, then your only move would be to get it passed and stop trying to pad the vote with cross-party CYA. That you'd rather blow it up than pass it along party lines tells me one of two things: one is deeply unflattering to the bailout, the other is even more deeply unflattering to you.
Dear John Boehner (et al),
THANK YOU for standing up for fiscal sanity. The New York Times editorial board will of course judge you for "partisanship," even though the only two relevant questions are:
Does the country need a bank bailout?
Does the country need this bank bailout?
This is not McCain's finest hour, but if I had the time I'd barnstorm district by district to get more of you and less of Frank/Pelosi. (And yes, they showed me why my vote is best spent on McCain after all.)
Remainders:
A healthy bank's perspective on the rescue plan. (I wonder what this bank thinks.)
Only 48 hits, most of them from whacked-out message board threads. I wonder what the number will be in a week.
UPDATE: You'll no doubt read (here for example) about how Newt Gingrich did the same "at least 100 other-party votes" thing for NAFTA. But that was an unambiguously good thing (that was politically unpopular despite being unambiguously good), where we would either make the world a much better place soon or have to wait awhile for that to happen.
By contrast, I assume everyone agrees that this $700B bailout would be terrible, where the only question is (and only plausible reason for passing it) whether the entire system would collapse tomorrow without it. The only circumstances under which this bailout should come to pass are circumstances so dire that nobody should give a damn about party affiliation.
John McCain lost my support today*: This post explains it best, among other things that "McCain’s intervention makes passage of the [bailout] more likely"
My support isn't worth much, as a California voter who doesn't contribute time or money to political campaigns, but it's still a sad day for me.
*- That doesn't mean I'll vote for Obama, just that if the election were tomorrow I would decline to vote.
"This is a huge week for pickups because there are six teams on a bye in Week 4. The Giants, Colts, Patriots, Lions, Seahawks and Dolphins all take the week off, which means a lot of holes. For you … and your Week 4 opponent. I suggest looking very carefully at what you need and, just as importantly, what your opponent needs. Because you may not need a quarterback, but if you are playing the guy who has one of the Mannings, why not grab Trent Edwards, who has a sweet matchup at St. Louis, and have him sit on your bench instead of racking up the yards for your opponent?"
--the strangest on-topic paragraph The Talented Mr. Roto has written in awhile.
"Yeah, Trent Edwards would otherwise have been the best use of my last roster spot, but the guy I'm playing this week actually lost Tom Brady way back when, so... heck with it, I'll grab a wide receiver."
Ah, this gave me glee.
A partial list of former presidential candidates who will not win this November, despite having nontrivial chances a few months ago:
Hillary Clinton
John Edwards
Mike Huckabee
Mitt Romney
Rudy Giuliani
(Eh, as you know I wouldn't have minded Rudy so much. But your mileage may vary considerably.)
All five of the above would have certain weaknesses compared to either Obama or McCain. This isn't necessarily to say that McCain and Obama were the two best options (though I think they were), but at the very least you can focus on one or two of the five and think "there but for the grace..."
While we're here, I predict that you (any given reader) know at least one person who will insist that this point-counterpoint was the Funniest Thing Evar. You'll learn a lot about what makes someone tick, and how different people judge humor, when that happens.
"I must tell you, there are those in the public debate who have said that we must act now. The last time I heard that, I was on a used-car lot," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Indiana. "The truth is, every time somebody tells you that you've got to do the deal right now, it usually means they're going to get the better part of the deal."
--quoted by Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy
Jay Jaffe won't miss Yankee Stadium.
When the time comes, I'll miss exactly one thing about [A's baseball at the] Oakland Coliseum: its proximity to where we live.
Then again, in the 1990s I was aghast at the condition of Fenway Park, mainly how unhygienic it all was. I had no desire to see taxpayers buy a new stadium, but I just didn't see how the "Save Fenway Park" movement could succeed. Apparently the new [as of earlier this decade] ownership did a tremendous job, though.
It's about time -- unless you subscribe to the theory that hunting gives Darwin a sporting chance at the hunters themselves.
Up to now, camouflage has been the worst of both worlds: It's bad enough if wildlife actually can see you just fine, but potentially catastrophic if you've successfully made yourself invisible to other humans with guns.
Well gosh, do you think there's any chance that this was partly a consequence of this?
(Of course, the picayune environmental requirements don't help - it's not that they're stricter than surrounding gas regulations so much as that they're incompatible. Heaven forbid different states' environmental lobbies get their act together and settle on one standard.)
I keep getting this one Facebook ad that represents a crime against the English language, not to mention the game it's intended to support:
Play Chess against opponents worldwide in what is known as "correspondence" style chess.
1. Lower-case chess, and no need for quotes around correspondence
2. Did someone put a gun to their head and force them to squander syllables? (Did "Play correspondence chess against opponents worldwide" just not have a good ring to it?)
3. Correspondence isn't really a style, certainly not the way Chess960 constitutes a style. "Correspondence" traditionally meant that moves were mailed. The two big points here are that you don't have to be in the same room as your opponent, and you could (if you so chose) spend hours if not days analyzing a game in progress. Well, any old Internet site (from FICS to games.yahoo.com) satisfies the first criterion, and Facebook's leading chess app* (*- chess.com, not to be confused with letsplaychess.com from the ad in question) actually satisfies both inasmuch as the default time control is one move per three days.
Really, though, it's the awkward turn of phrase in the ad that just drives me up a wall.
Songs that didn't make this Onion AV Club list include, in no particular order:
1. Guns N' Roses, "November Rain"
2. Exposé, "Seasons Change"
3. Richard Marx, "Endless Summer Nights"
4. Billy Joel, "This is the Time"
5. Simon n' Garfunkel, "Hazy Shade of Winter"
I have a feeling some particular AV Club writers are at least 5-10 years younger than me. (Yes, I could have dated my adolescence with this entire list if I'd happened to choose the Bangles cover for #5.)
A Crimson columnist wants Harvard to deny admission to private school students. (Via Joanne Jacobs.)
It's not entirely clear what Harvard would stand to gain from this. (...says the guy who wants Harvard to stop charging tuition -- but here at least my conceit is that Harvard would suddenly have the best students by a mile, rather than a barely perceptible edge over whichever school is second-best.)
This rather reminds me of Slashdotters who, just as Google was about to make its IPO, not only wanted Google to become non-profit but also assumed that Google itself would share that vision.
While plausibly in their earshot, I've yelled worse things to at least two three four pitchers in my baseball watching lifetime, one of them specifically weight-related:
1. The year Jose Mesa (then with Cleveland) was acquitted of rape charges, he made his first appearance at Fenway Park the same evening Harvard and/or BU held a Take Back the Night Rally. I've conveniently forgotten my actual choice of words here.
2. (the only home player heckle among the four) Late 1990s, Fenway Park: When Jim Corsi was a Red Sock (and on the large side), I accused him of being on the Rich Garces diet plan.
3. 2002, Oakland Coliseum: five rows behind the visiting bullpen, I was one of many fans simultaneously mocking Kaz Sasaki's alcoholism.
4. Also 2002 (this game), same location, I loudly accused Roberto Herrnandez of singlehandedly crippling the Royals' franchise with his ridiculous contract. A ridiculous assertion in hindsight, since
a) it's not his fault he took the money that anyone else would've taken
b) it's not as if the lack of that contract would have magically made Kansas City non-dysfunctional
(And one point of preface: I'm willing to believe that we escaped unspeakable catastrophe, and that the Fed making credit available was a Good Thing. But that's a far cry from spending $700 billion outside the purview of Congress, or even outside judicial review. Getting to the point...)
1. More seriously: What can ordinary Americans do to stop the most egregiously illegal aspects of this bailout?
2. Less seriously: I can't wait to see the South Park episode based on this crisis. (Would you believe that I never did see Gnomes until about the night before last? Now that the entire series is free on-line, we're working our way through; just finished Season 2.)
NFL.com has team by team video galleries: I highly recommend clicking any link that looks like "Sharks 17, Jets 14" (you'll get Radio calls and video highlights of the [team name] win over the [team name] in Week [n].).
I recommend AGAINST any link that looks like "NFL Game Day: Sharks vs. Jets highlights." If I had Eisen, Deion Sanders, and Steve Mariucci in the same room with just one bullet, I'd face quite the dilemma.
Will Carroll (best known for gathering info about sports injuries) devotes a Baseball Prospectus blog post to the recent Wall Street meltdown: "Saul Hansell takes a solid look at what some are calling a failure of the quantitative analysts on Wall Street and already, some are wondering if the same kind of backlash will happen in baseball." (hyperlink in original)
(The gist of the Saul Hansell piece is that financial analysts gave their computer models bad initial assumptions, for example (this part is my jumped-to conclusion, certainly not Hansell's per se) underestimating just how many American homebuyers would turn out to be deadbeats.)
Anyhow, shortly after reading that blurb I saw Todd Zywicki, a Volokh Conspirator, ask readers which analogy was more apt between "liquidity problem" or "misvalued assets." There's a lot of both, of course.
Full circle between the financial world and the baseball world, I can finally reconstruct the question I asked Sandy Alderson at a 1999 symposium about players vs. owners, big market vs. small market, etc. (This was at baseball's winter meetings, sponsored by Baseball America; as I recall the panelists were Scott Boras, Gene Orza, and Jerry Glanville; and Sandy Alderson, Randy Smith, and Jerry Colangelo.)
The prevailing meme at the time had been that teams like the Pirates or Royals couldn't afford to sign the best/most expensive free agents. So my question was something like this (nine years after the fact, this is a paraphrase at best):
Did they really mean to imply that it would be unprofitable, even in the long run for a small-market team to sign a big star? Since the very best athletes tend to bring a team marginal revenue well beyond their salaries, wasn't what-can-the-Royals-afford-to-pay-their-players just a liquidity problem that could be easily solved with judicious lending/borrowing? But if the real issue was that signing big stars wasn't worth the opportunity cost (versus sucking but consistently profiting, like the Pirates do), why couldn't they just admit that instead of crying poor?
Boras visibly enjoyed the question; Alderson pretended not to understand it.
The biggest flaw with my premise is of course that a big star will make a much bigger financial difference in a market with more viewers or ticket buyers at stake. If a player would be "worth" $100M to the Yankees or $50M to the Royals, the Yankees could offer $50.1M and reap a big gain. Then again, the flaw with the flaw is that arguably, aside from needing to borrow the money, the small-market teams could have been the top bidders on some particular stars (obviously not others - here's where baseball common sense comes in, e.g. don't overpay mid-30s veterans about to hit a career cliff) and still come out positive (just not necessarily ahead of their otherwise-most-profitable option)
P.S. Speaking of Boras, he certainly knows how to start with an ostensible fight against an arguably unjust situation and extract maximum rent for his client in exchange for letting the broader injustice slide.
As reported by John Perrotto on Baseball Prospectus:
The [Houston] Astros are making a fashion statement in the final days of the season as a sign of protest. They're wearing red T-shirts under their jerseys with a caricature of Commissioner Bud Selig on the front and the inscription "Bud killed us." On the back are the words "We survived Hurricane Ike."
The Astros are still clearly peeved that Selig rescheduled two of their three games against the Cubs that that could not be played in Houston last weekend because of Hurricane Ike to Milwaukee's Miller Park, just a 90-minute drive from Chicago. [...]
"It's just not right what happened," said pitcher Brandon Backe, the Astros' player representative to the Major League Baseball Players Association, and also a native of Galveston, Texas, which was devastated by the hurricane. [...] "To make us have to leave our homes so soon after a major disaster struck showed no compassion whatsoever. All of my family and friends were affected by the storm. Some of the people closest to me are homeless because their houses are gone. It was really a flip of the coin whether I was going to get on that plane and go to Chicago. I knew it was the right thing to do to go with the team but it was hard to leave, one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. I don't think anybody's heart was in those games in Milwaukee. Heck, we got one hit in two games. What does that tell you?"
I know exactly what it tells me, though that's not necessarily the same thing it tells him. If this isn't sore losing personified, I don't know what is.
(For what it's worth: thanks to WGN I grew up a Cub fan, especially the 1989 team. At some point the Tribune Company's blatant lack of commitment to winning (why should they have cared? win or lose the team was a cash cow) left me indifferent to the Cubs, though obviously living in Boston and then near Oakland also had a lot to do with it.)