It’s 4:13am — off to Hawaii, suckers.
(read : I will be stuck in a plane for approximately four times longer than I’ve ever been before; tin-can induced insanity updates to follow whenever possible.)
Tags: hawaii, pineapples, tin cans, vacation
Michigan again recorded the highest unemployment rate among the states, 14.3 percent in January. The states with the next highest rates were Nevada, 13.0 percent; Rhode Island, 12.7 percent; South Carolina, 12.6 percent; and California, 12.5 percent.
Don’t worry, I can still visit.
… but this is too easy.
What??? You can accelerate in a Prius? I HAD NO IDEA.
Tags: bad jokes, cars, making fun of efficient cars that drive better than mine, toyota
Bill Simmons and Keith Olbermann had a Twitter fight. Blah, blah, blah, whatever, that’s what Twitter is for, I guess. It’s all summarized here.
I read some of the things involved, and here’s my take :
1. The way seemingly intelligent, established media figures like Olbermann and Pierce become angrily obsessed with everything Simmons does is really creepy and weird.
2. Someone — probably Deadspin — mentioned that all of these rants seem to have a distinct “get off my lawn” tone to them, and they really, really do.
3. Simmons occasionally sounds a little petulant in his media fights, but I can always visualize myself getting that way in a similar situation (being something of a literary hot-head myself). Olbermann, however, comes across as a massively condescending doofus in his endless ranting; I feel like punching him even when I agree with him.
4. Olbermann complaining that somebody says something in 2,000 words that could be said in 500 is the biggest “pot calling the kettle black” moment I’ve heard since the former Governor of Alaska complained about socialism and federal spending; this is a guy who goes on ten minute long rants on his TV show where he keeps calling whoever he’s mad at “sir”, only to turn to a different camera and KEEP GOING for another five minutes.
Basically, Simmons’ little comment — that KO is the worst case scenario for his career in twelve years — is actually pretty insightful, Olbermann’s context-lacking attempt to belittle the internet cult hero’s career notwithstanding. Simmons is a media superstar right now (the media is different, but whatever, tee-vee ain’t what it used to be anyways), and if he ever lets his head get too big, Olbermann’s exactly what I suspect he’d turn into.
Tags: ESPN, get off my lawn, interwebs, my opinion on this is obviously essential to a functioning media landscape, simmons, tv, twitter
If you watch one thing today, or this week, make it this.
Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere
“Here’s some footage of Congress.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
As a happy customer, I’m been known to sing the praises of currently public-relations-and-also-stopping-challenged auto manufacturer Toyota. Now, of course, despite the cartoon-ready shenanigans going on with their company as of late, they are, of course, still solvent, which keeps them on a different level than their American counterparts, to say the least.
But even I, Toyota-lover, can enjoy a good, extremely-dark-humored laugh. Someone at work left this on my desk.
No, I’m not really sure why I have this, and yes, the irony police are here to take it, and myself, away. Even better though, was what I found inside.
Because of my unbelievably bad cell phone camera, you probably can’t read it, but the heading is “what can your business learn from Toyota“, and the first bullet item is “double or triple the speed of any business process“.
You can imagine where this went at lunch.
“Wait, is there a section on stopping a business process? Or at least slowing it down?”
“AHHHH, THIS BUSINESS PROCESS IS OUT OF CONTROL, EVERYONE OUT OF THE BUILDING!!!!”
“Nothing can stop my business now! Not even my frantic pounding on the brakes or desperate cries for help!”
And while we’re berating otherwise successful Asian companies, Samsung, how could you possibly give me such a horrible cell phone camera? What’s the point of storing 1200×800 pictures if they are totally unreadable?
Tags: audiobooks, bad jokes, Business, stopping, the toyota way does not apparently include hiring a PR guy, tips, toyota, workplace humor
Conan O’Brien is even more awesome than I initially suspected. Some people just know how to use being famous the right way.
Meanwhile, I have no idea how anyone can root for Kobe Bryant. Check out the replay at 1:00 — I love that punching Barnes in the man region while he’s trying not to fall on anyone after a dunk isn’t enough. He’s gotta go for the throat elbow too, and then do the insufferable “look, my hands are up, I’m completely innocent” garbage after doing it on national TV with ten HD cameras catching the entire thing.
I understand Matt Barnes was out there to get in Kobe’s face, and be annoying, and probably chippy. But Kobe just has this horrible faux-tough-guy image, where he’s just too cool to even care about a guy like Barnes — and then Barnes dunks on his head and all of sudden he feels the terrified, juvenile need to punch him in the jewels. To me, if you seek out cheap shots to the groin in an athletic contest, you aren’t “competitive”; you are insecure about not being good enough. That’s just the way I see it.
And I hate stuff like this. I want my NBA stars to be transcendent, and Kobe has never seemed this way. As badly as I want the Celtics to beat both the Lakers and the Cavs, when my team loses to Los Angeles, this is the stuff that stands out. When they lose to Cleveland, it’s some awesome play by LeBron. Even the way LBJ has handled the impending free agency thing is a million times better than Kobe’s ridiculous trade demands from a few years ago that we’re all supposed to pretend never happened because they won the Pau Gasol sweepstakes and are good again.
Yes, everyone complains about fouls, but Kobe has always seemed like somebody who will do anything to win — personally –and only takes the high road of destroying guys in some kind of honorable fashion, or even being a good, decent teammate, when it’s convenient to him. In other words, if he wasn’t so good, he’d be Bruce Bowen, or the guy in my league who pushes me in the back when I box him out.
Obviously he can do this. He gets paid a lot of money to win. But I don’t have to root for him, and I never, ever will.
Kobe Bryant is incredibly unlikable. I mean, even more than I thought.
Tags: Celtics/NBA, d-bag, kobe, nba
I’m still toiling away in my adult recreation basketball league. My wife has already won a championship; like Tracy McGrady, I’ve yet to win a playoff game (okay, he won a game, but we don’t have series, so I feel his pain). I’ve been through some pretty brutal losing seasons, and I never seem to get quite as good as I think I should. Are my expectations too high? Probably. After all, I’m the guy who created my NBA Live counterpart, and immediately selected the “Ray Allen” template — not a particularly realistic goal in a non-PlayStation generated setting.
Anyways, I’ve had my share of moments, but in an attempt to not get smoked in our opening round playoff game, I went over to one of the open gyms my league runs during the week to get a little burn, brick a few threes, and hopefully get a few turnovers out of my system. Usually, these things are pretty busy (15-20 people), but last night, there was basically no one there but me. That meant, for the first time in a while, I got to hang out in a gym and just shoot for about an hour.
Now, you may not know this, but mindlessly shooting baskets in empty gyms/playgrounds is a pretty big part of my life. When I was a kid, I’d spend most fall afternoons shooting eighteen footers on the little brick court in my backyard, again and again. In the summer, I’d wander over the courts outside our high school, and just shoot. In college, we had this dusty, crappy auxiliary gym that — when not populated by “Jazzercise” — was where I’d go to slide around and shoot more eighteen footers. A couple years later, as an underemployed bum in Cleveland, OH, I’d burn away the afternoons of my wife’s three week Asia trips aimlessly shooting free throws in our driveway.
This is what I do. It doesn’t make for a great basketball player (you need defense and probably some kind of organized drilling for that), but it does give you this weird sort of zen-like sense of comfort on a basketball court.
So, as I entered my beloved hoop-seeking trance, I started to think about a couple things, as I tend to do. Here they are, before I forget them.
“The Old Man Conspiracy”
If you’ve ever played a lot of indoor basketball, you’ve certainly noticed the effect that dusty floors have on the game. It is really different playing competitive basketball without any traction. The sport is a game of cuts, of footwork, and speed changes, and without any traction, it becomes kind of ridiculous for most players. This is, far and away, the worst part of my recreational league — 90% of my games seem to be in gyms where it takes three times as long to change directions. For a guy like me — who isn’t very big and relies heavily on cuts — this is incredibly annoying.
We’ll come back to this in a minute.
Another interesting thing my league has are old people — quite a lot of them. Old men basketball players are, traditionally, incredibly dirty competitors. Age differences tend to blow up traditional male hierarchies in weird ways; all of a sudden, 40 year old guys who have always been the best athlete of their peers are slower than guys like me, who have never been the best athlete of theirs. I am not really an alpha male, and I don’t really act like one — but when playing basketball with guys in their late 30’s, I simply have (for the moment) some youthful advantages that are simply undeniable.
Like, say, being able to jump.
But I digress. Old guys make up for all this by being incredibly dirty, which I can sort of understand. You will get elbowed. You will get held. Everything you do will be called a travel. If a guy is driving to his right, you will be pushed off with his left hand, and maybe held. There will be flopping — oh lord, will there be flopping. Most of all, you will be pushed in the back constantly. This is –apparently — the number one go to move for old guys, and it seems to be applicable in all situations. Spotting up on the wing? Give a push in the back. Guarding a guy in the post? Push him in the back. Being boxed out? Oh yeah, push in the back time. I’m not talking about that “I’m being backed down by a 6′3 guy” hand-check thing I do to Steve, either — this is about dislodging a guy, not keeping him at bay.
So you’ve got old guys. Slow, dirty, move the ball almost exclusively by passing. And you’ve got my league, which is full of old guys. And the courts we play on always seem to be incredibly slippery. See where I’m going with this?
I think they’re doing it on purpose.
There, I said it.
“Who really sucks at math?”
By the time I shook myself free of the latest perceived conspiracy to keep me from reaching my basketball potential, I was pretty tired. I spent the last ten minutes or trying to shoot bank shots at ridiculous angles — angles I would never, ever use in any kind of game situation, but seemed worth trying. To my surprise, maybe half of these went in.
Think about this. First of all, I’m not a professional basketball player, or even a particularly good shooter. Secondly, we’re talking about a random ball, a random hoop, and a random angle. Yes, there’s some similarities between all basketballs and all hoops, but in a lot of ways, each shot was a pretty new experience. As I stood there trying to figure out exactly how to shoot a basketball, so as to properly ricochet it into a hoop, I was pretty much going by instinct, and that “finger in the wind” kind of fuzzy math my grandfather uses as an excuse to not follow the directions that came with our shed.
But despite all of this, I was actually doing pretty well — like I said, probably hitting about half of these weird, uncontested shots.
Here’s my question.
If I’m so good at this, why was I so bad at high school physics and geometry? I understand, yes, at some point it’s time to break out your TI-86 and stop going by feel, but never at any point was my “gut” involved in the process of solving an exam question in either of these subjects, except maybe when I tried to guess how many times my teacher would make the answer “C” before panicking and making it something else.
(the answer : I don’t know.)
Here’s a better form of my question. Aren’t people wired to work with math, just as they’re wired to understand the social complexities of democratic politics, or the narrative of a piece of fiction? I can’t even tell you how many times I was badly prepared for a history or lit exam, and simply used The Force to battle my way to a B+ with only cursory knowledge of the subject in question. No, I don’t remember the exact timelines of Salem Witch Trials, or many of the characters involved, but I understand the kind of thinking that causes that sort of event, why it’s important, and how it can be fostered. That’s not enough, of course, but it was definitely enough to write an essay that made some sense, and get a test result back that more accurately reflected what I knew (a fair amount, but definitely not everything).
When I got into this kind of situation in Geometery, though, I was screwed. There was no way out — either you knew exactly how to do this kind of thing, procedurally, or you knew absolutely nothing at all. High school math and science went from things that seemed to make logical sense, to things that seem a lot like filing my income taxes. With the same degree of preparation, and a similar level of natural aptitude, I’d get an 85 in English, and a 28 in Geometry.
Is that an acceptable form of education? Obviously the skills involved in the kind of math I suck at are useful and necessary in many contexts, but how many people with a knack for math, or who just sort of “get” physics on a very deep level are driven into the humanities by a system that determines worth almost entirely based on discipline and attention to detail? I’m not putting one school of thought above another, here. Accountants are really important (I’ve done a 180 on that since college), just like coders are really important to software development.
But in software, architects and concept guys are really important too, and sometimes I wonder if some of the potentially best ones are writing poetry and dumb music reviews instead today because we just didn’t know what to do with them when they seemed smart, but barely passed Trigonometry.
These are the kinds of things that cross my mind when I shoot a basketball.
Tags: Celtics/NBA, conspiracies, dusty floors, jobs, legends, math, old men, physics, school, shooting, work
Aren’t there already a ton of “Call of Duty” games?
Activision’s announcement of a business unit devoted to the military first-person shooter suggests the publisher’s desire to extend the franchise’s reach as a video game brand name, industry experts say.
“Activision (is) aiming to position the Call of Duty universe as a malleable world in which multiple characters, plotlines and game types for various platforms can simultaneously co-exist,” says Scott Steinberg, a technology analyst and author of the book Get Rich Playing Games.
And expect the publisher to turn to Guitar Hero for inspiration on the Call of Duty business model. “For years, we’ve all been talking about video games and using movies as an entertainment industry comparison,” says John Davison, executive vice president of content at GamePro magazine. “But the more we see these “annualized” announcements, the more it’s clear that TV seasons are a much more appropriate comparison; yearly blocks of content that are churned out until the audience grows tired of them.”
Wow. That is really depressing, in a way. I actually bought the first Call of Duty for my computer back in, I dunno, early 2005? Very, very cool game. The new ones look pretty awesome, but I’m skeptical “shoot the terrorist” has a whole lot more game play to mine from it than “match the colored notes”, particularly at $60 a pop. Jeff-Tron and I are sticking to the $14.95 downloadable “Battlefield 1943″ for our exploding-vehicle fix.
Of course, from the quote above, it’s obvious that sucking the franchise dry is exactly the plan. Which is okay, I suppose; just kind of a bummer.
Tags: Business, explosions, jeff-tron, lowest common denominator, Nerdery, video games
I admit it — the MySpace generation (which I guess I’m semi-part of) can be pretty annoying.
I find it pretty surprising, though, how big of a difference there is between people my age (25-30), and people maybe a decade younger, who didn’t really have any major period of social development without the internet. As far as I’m concerned, if you spent most or all of high school either offline, or dialing up to get temporarily connected (and tie up the phone line), you have some very concrete understanding of life without the internet.
Otherwise, you’re a full member of the new guard. Because I’m (a) not that old, (b) in the internet software industry, and (c) kind of a dork, I find myself in the weird position of being exceedingly comfortable with the trappings of the YouTube-era, but not particularly reliant on them for social purposes.
Of course, you can always compare this to my parents generation, who simply went to college and never saw any of their friends ever again. As my Dad so eloquently put it a few years ago:
“We had one phone in the building. What were you going to do; write a letter?”
So yeah, there’s that.
Tags: emails, generations, get off my lawn, interwebs, kids, Nerdery
From Marc Stein’s Twitter feed:
Source tells ESPN.com that Wolves will release C Mark Blount later Monday, making Blount eligible to appear in the playoffs for another team
If I had a Twitter feed, I would respond with :
Source tells natesullivan.com that Mark Blount is a horrendous, lazy basketball player no one wants
But I don’t, so we’ll just have to pretend. I know what you’re saying, of course — “but Nate, he’s even got a YouTube mix, how bad could he be?”
Bad, my internet friends. He is very, very, bad. But you’re right about one thing; YouTube highlight mixes are potent marketing material. I think I need to make one for myself and Jeff-Tron running the pick and roll, or possibly me sitting at my desk “implementing revenue generating initiatives”. With loud enough hip-hop blasting in the background, I think it could work.
Tags: celtics, Celtics/NBA, highlight films, nba, revenue generating initiatives, twitter
Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard on Haiti :
As a friend said to me before I left, “It’s as though God bisected the island of Hispaniola, and said, ‘This side gets the shortstops. This side gets the cholera.’ ”
Ouch.
Tags: depressing, haiti, shortstops
Dana Millbank on Obama’s health care summit :
“The forum matched his lawyerly skills — and, less flatteringly, his tendency to act like the smartest guy in the room.”
Dude, it’s Congress. We’re talking about the kind of people who hide bribe money in the freezer, not the faculty at Carnegie Mellon. There’s a very good chance he’s not acting.
Tags: Congress, low standards, Politics
Did you know Mark McGwire had a brother who’s writing a book about him? And that they don’t speak to each other? Do you know why? The Associated Press does!
“The brothers haven’t spoken since 2002. They fell out after Jay McGwire’s stepson, Eric, tickled Mark and caused Mark to spill coffee on himself. Mark then swatted Eric on the backside. Jay’s wife, Francine, then refused to attend Mark’s wedding.”
Wow. We’re drifting well into “overshare” territory here, folks. DOES THE AP KNOW WHAT BRAND OF COFFEE??? COME ON, WOODWARD — TO THE JOURN-O-MOBILE!!!!
Tags: AP, coffee brands, mark mcgwire spankings, Media, mlb, Red Sox/MLB, steroids
