I posted to the main page yesterday evening, but it didn’t appear as the most recent post. At first I thought it was the work of those Nazis, but then I realized that it posted at the time that I saved it as a draft.
Just FYI if you didn’t know, saving a post as a draft will cause it to post to the site at that time as opposed to the time you publish.
If this is not news to anyone, then I’ll wear the dunce hat for the day.
What’s not to love about this story:
1) That a group of white men in Indiana feel compelled to dress up in Nazi regalia to celebrate the birthday of Hilter? (Note the festive Happy Birthday sign on the front of the podium.)
2) That a Republican candidate for Congress spoke at the event (pictured)?
3) That he justified his appearance by likening Nazis to black people? ("I’ll speak before any group that invites me. I’ve spoken on an African-American radio station in Atlanta.")
This article is it’s own punchline. Just sit back and enjoy.
H/t Slog.
I was pretty sad that we didn’t do an NBA fantasy league this year, especially since it’s turned into one of the best NBA seasons I can remember. The finals look to be almost as good though, at least out west, so you should all fill out a playoff bracket. I made a league:
http://www.nba.com/playoffs2008/picknroll/login.jsp
League Name: JttM
Password: miccle
Next time I see him or her, I will personally buy the winner a chicken dinner.
Go fill out a bracket now. It only takes like five minutes. Go do it.
My bracket is done, so now I just have to decide what sides I’ll be buying myself at Popeye’s.
But only as as far as a personal update is concerned. I haven’t bought a house with someone named Kristin.
What I have done is become a felony prosecutor. That means more work, same money and more stress because I’m deciding on punishment that ranges from 5 years to life…or death. Zoinks!
I just moved into an old apartment building in downtown Tulsa that is across the street from the courthouse. It’s called the Blair. I’m pumped because I’m walking to work and saving tons of money on fuel and utilities. The place is tiny, but I feel much more comfortable here than in my old place that is twice the size.
As of Labor Day last year, I have been dating a girl named Lauren. She’s a 1L at OU law. Things are going great, and she’ll be working in Tulsa this summer. Sorry to ZJohnso for trying to become you. Nearly sharing our first and middle names and going to grad school in the upper Midwest was not enough.
I’ve started playing ultimate on the weekends, although I’m still just as slow and inaccurate as ever. I’m also playing guitar and mountain biking when I get the chance. Next up is probably a puppy. Gotta build the yuppie cred.
Am I taking root in Tulsa? Kinda. I’m involved with a church here, and my family’s here, but it’s unclear how long I’ll be here until something else comes along. Work is great, so I’ll just say that for now.
I hope everyone’s doing well, and I look forward to the Summit of the Seven.
Kristin and I decided that we’re tired of living in a centipede cave, so we bought a house. We picked one that needs some fixing and improving, a.k.a. a grandma house. If all goes as planned I’ll be a handy-man within a year or two.
Although the economy might fall apart, although the housing market might keep falling, and although John McCain might be our next president, we jumped on the house… perhaps because it seemed like a steal for the neighborhood, or because interest rates are low, or because we’re stupid. Mi casa, su casa.
I doubt it, but you never know. Thanks to Boo for sending me this:
A ‘West Wing’ Writer Imagines the Showdown at the Democratic National Convention – New York Magazine
Because here it is:
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I feel like we could all use a few fun ways to keep our balance when life gets a little bumpy.
Also, keep your fingers crossed, because I’m in negotiations to ghost write the sequel:
Life is Also Like Hoola-Hooping: Fun Ways to Shake Things Up When Life Gets a Little Loopy
I would like to propose we set a date to hang out at Daniel’s cabin or Las Vegas even if its just for a long weekend. Joel suggested Vegas and I think that is a solid idea. We can make this happen.
So what dates are good for everyone? Post in the comments so we can figure this out, I’ll update the thread as they come in.
Ben: I’m fine with either location and pretty easy on dates, maybe late summer or fall sometime?
Also, if this happens and it is at Daniel dad’s cabin maybe ahead of time we can order a Foosball table to be delivered? If we split it would be not too bad.
Thoughts? Ideas?
PS. I’m still in Cairo Egypt and will get back to the states in late June..
As NBA fantasy experts, we all know that the last ten games of the regular season are usually a bit of a joke. Ordinarily, this would be the time that we would tune into the NCAA tournament while NBA guys we’ve never heard of finish the final pre-playoff stretch. This year, though, is an extraordinary one.
New Orleans is currently at the top of the Western Conference at 49-22. Phoenix’s record is 48-24 - which is just 1.5 games behind New Orleans. What’s unbelievable is that Phoenix is currently 6th in the conference, which means there are four teams sandwiched in that tiny space between New Orleans and Phoenix! Then there’s poor Denver, who is only 5.5 games behind New Orleans and they’re in the dreaded 9th spot (only the top 8 make the playoffs). Although the season is almost over, Denver shouldn’t be too upset because they still have a chance to make the playoffs…. and a chance at finishing first in the conference! This is crazy.
In the East there are still six teams fighting for the final playoff spot. The current holder of the 8th spot is my beloved Atlanta Hawks. They’re trying to hold of the Nets, Pacers, Bulls, Bobcats, and Bucks.
So while you’re cheering on Davidson to an NCAA championship, don’t assume that the NBA has nothing to offer, because the pros are showing just as much fight as the kidos.
Has anybody been following the 700MHz auction or it’s results. I feel like I should understand what’s going on, but I don’t. Somehow, the fact that Google was bidding, but hoping not to win, increased the chances that “consumers whose devices use the C-block of spectrum soon will be able to use any wireless device they wish, and download to their devices any applications and content they wish.” I understand that google didn’t want to win, and I understand that this will all help their android platform, but I don’t understand how.
Have you ever wondered why you are not a pro footbal player? Here’s the short answer. Meet 21 yeard-old Vernon Gholston, a defensive end projected to be picked up in the first round of this year’s draft. He’s 6′3″ and 266 lbs. He jumps like Lebron James (42″ flat-footed vertical), can pump iron like Hulk Hogan (can bench 225 lbs 37 times), and his peformance in the running tests will be better than some of the running backs drafted, including his 40 time of 4.57 seconds.
Found this little gem going through some stuff at my parent’s house.
I just read a pretty interesting interview with Michael Pollan, who has a new book called In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. The inverview is a bit scattered, and long, but I found it really interesting and well worth the read. The guy seems to really know his stuff regarding the problems with our industrialized system for producing and distributing food.
The point of the book is to give people some good rules of thumb when trying to eat healthy. He is suggesting, mainly, that we eat whole foods, and pay less atention to “nutritionism” which is the idea that everything you eat can be viewed as a collection of individual nutrients, and that some nutrients are good and some are bad. Here are some good quotes:
Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don’t think so. I don’t think we want to change our eating decisions based on nutritional science.
[policy makers can] talk about saturated fat … about antioxidants, but you cannot talk about whole foods. So that is the kind of official language in which we discuss nutrition.
Conveniently, it’s very confusing to the average consumer. Conveniently to the industry, they love talk about nutrients, because they can always – with processed foods, unlike whole foods, you can redesign it. You can just reduce the saturated fat, you know, up the antioxidants. You can jigger it in a way you can’t change broccoli. You know, broccoli is going to be broccoli. But a processed food can always have more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff. So the industry loves nutritionism for that reason.
it’s a literary scientific experience now going shopping in the supermarket, because basically the food has gotten more complex. It’s – for the food industry – see, to understand the economics of the food industry, you can’t really make money selling things like, oh, oatmeal, you know, plain rolled oats. And if you go to the store, you can buy a pound of oats, organic oats, for 79 cents. There’s no money in that, because it doesn’t have any brand identification. It’s a commodity, and the prices of commodity are constantly falling over time.
So you make money by processing it, adding value to it.
people don’t really think about food in terms of climate change, but in fact the food system contributes about a fifth of greenhouse gases. It is as important as the transportation sector, in terms of contributing to greenhouse gas. It’s a very energy-intensive situation. What we did with the industrialization of food, essentially, is take food off of a solar system – it was basically based on photosynthesis and the sun – and put it on a fossil fuel system. We learned how to grow food with lots of synthetic fertilizers made from natural gas, pesticides made from petroleum, and then started moving it around the world. So now we take about ten calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food energy. Very unsustainable system.
if you look at the layout of the average supermarket, the fresh whole foods are always on the edge. So you get produce and meat and fish and dairy products. And those are the foods that, you know, your grandmother would recognize as foods. They haven’t changed that much. All the processed foods, the really bad stuff that is going to get you in trouble with all the refined grain and the additives and the high-fructose corn syrup, those are all in the middle. And so, if you stay out of the middle and get most of your food on the edges, you’re going to do a lot better.
I’m a big fan of firefox’s spell check, but it only works in big <textarea> fields not small <input type="text"> fields. Or so I thought:
How to eliminate speling mistkes in Firefox text boxes - Download Squad
So for all you out there who found the misspelled titles of my blog entries quaint and endearing, sorry but you’ll just have to console yourself with all my other quaint, endearing qualities
I just found an great debut album today. On For Emma, Forever Ago, Bon Iver offers a unique neo-soul-indie-folk flavor that often sounds like TV on the Radio playing an unplugged set at 3 am. You will certainly love it if you like Band of Horses, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Phosphorescent, Iron and Wine, Wolf Parade, or Sunset Rubdown.
I’m not sure how many people besides Joel/Boo/Me are watching and loving Battlestar Galactica, but if you aren’t you should be. I just found this picture of the cast posing as Da Vinci’s Last Supper, as if the show didn’t have enough religious overtones….
Boo asked me to post this, its an awesome video talking about how the last West Wing election is very similar to the Obama McCain match up and why that is. Very interesting on how they basically predicted the type of candidates we would see. Or maybe that those are the only types of candidates we see and its a cycle.
Boo:
As a HUGE fan of the West Wing (at least when Aaron Sorkin was writing it) I find this utterly amazing…
Joel and I were having a conversation earlier today about what it would be like to race against a fast football player in the 40-yard dash. More precisely, we wanted to know how far behind we would be once they crossed the finish line.
I found some useful information on average 40 times and splits (10 yards, 20 yards) here.
If I can run as fast as the average offensive lineman, then I’ll hit 10 yards in 1.8s, 20 in 3.05s; and 40 in 5.3s. That’s 2.25 seconds to run the last 20 yds. Since I’m probably running about the same speed over that 20 yard interval, that’s 8.8 yds/sec. I’ll only get to run that fast for 1.25 seconds though, because that’s when the other guy will finish (4.3s). 1.25 seconds x 8.8 yds/sec = 11.1 yds. That puts me at 31.1 yds, or 8.9 yds behind (almost 27 feet behind in a 120 foot race).
A 4.9 40, an average time for a QB, would put me 6 yds behind.
A 4.55 40, an fine RB time, would put me 3 yds behind.
Slate has a pretty interesting article that uses the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to analyze the personalities of the three remaining viable candidates (sorry Mike, you get no love…). The article says a lot about each candidate, but not a lot you probably didn’t already know. What makes it interesting is that most of what it says is not based on observations of the candidates. It comes from directly from stock descriptions of each candidates personality type.
In general, I’m no big fan of psychology as a discipline. A lot of it feels like pseudo-science to me, and I’m hesitant to put much stock in its assertions. Nevertheless I’m sort of fascinated by Myers-Briggs tests; once you’ve ascertained someone’s type, the descriptions of their type are often uncanny in their accuracy. The author points out, for instance, that some of what Bush’s type indicates could have forewarned us about some of his problems.
So here are my questions:
here are a couple links:
and here are my answers:
The flu might be bad for my body, but it sure has given me lots of time to research the upcoming NFL combine and draft (which isn’t obviously a good thing). This article will probably only be interesting to the truest of true Razorback fans, or those interested in mocking pathetic sports fans.
My interest in following Razorbacks into the NFL hasn’t panned out too well… yet. Matt Jones’ injury problems plagued him long enough for his coach to not count on him anymore. Ahmad Carroll was awesome 95% of the time, but absolutely horrible the other 5%, which is fine if you play for a good team, but not fine if you play for a crappy team with angry fans looking to blame someone not named Brett Favre (oh, and then there’s the gun charges). Cedric Cobbs was playing great for the Broncos, but then suffered an injury after fumbling an important punt. I think he’s out of the NFL now. Shawn Andrews is multi-time pro-bowler, but I can rarely catch his games and the media doesn’t care about offensive linemen. Ken Hamlin is a pro-bowler and has a reputation as a hard hitting safety, but he also missed a season and lost some of his bang after he had his skull busted open in a bar fight. Chris Houston is starting for Atlanta, although he’s got a long way to go before he’s a stud.
While occasionaly I question my fanhood, Darren and Felix have recently revived my hopes that all of my internet searches over the years, and time and money spent watching games, will have a great pay off.