It’s been a while since something substantive. So here you go:

• Hillary’s defeat in Indiana and North Carolina is, as previously mentioned, a Pyrrhic victory for the Obama camp. I can’t predict if she’ll quit early–I personally think she won’t, and will ride it out to the convention’s bitter end–but it almost doesn’t matter. Things that happen early in the campaign are dug up and kept around until the end–anyone remember “I voted for it before I voted against it?”–and Hillary has beaten up enough on Obama already that there’s little left unsaid. I do think McCain’s proxies will bring back the secret-Muslim thing because it’ll play a lot better with Republicans in the sticks than it has so far with Democrats. Despite Hillary’s “He’s not a Muslim, as far as I know,” statement, the Indonesian childhood and Kenya photo really haven’t been hammered too much. The funny thing about that will be that Obama’s taken so much flack for being too close to a Christian pastor, and now he’s about to be hit for not even being Christian. The fun of election season!
• I think Hillary’s surprise effect on Obama was that he came into the race expecting the negative stuff to come out only in the general-election phase, and that he could actually use the negativity against the Republicans. (”Same old G.O.P. character-assassination shit while they let the country die,” etc. etc.) But then when Hillary started throwing kitchen sinks, he couldn’t very well take the line that, “This party is no good for you; look how negative they are.”
• For people who liked my Crosby piece, or people who didn’t, here’s what I think about the series:
  1. I like the offense’s chances against Biron. Biron has faced significantly more shots–an average of 32.91 shots per game in the playoffs, vs. Fleury’s 28.44 average–but he hasn’t played against a team with as much line depth as the Pens. Washington and Montreal both have great players, but not as much consistency across multiple lines. Eventually a goalie is going to get weary of being sprayed with pucks, and after two rounds that might be now.
  2. Kris Letang, Georges Laraque and Brooks Orpik are going to be the big factor in beating up (perhaps literally) Derian Hatcher and protecting Crosby and Malkin. I think the Flyers might have things in toughness, though definitely not in talent. (Though I would take Briere on Pittsburgh anyday.) Big Georges (that’s singular), you are the man, but please tell your web guy that your site needs an update reflecting the six years since the 2001-02 season.
  3. I thought about buying tickets to a game in Philly, being that it’s so close, but then I do value my life. Seriously, Philadelphians: I have never not picked up an incredibly angry vibe while traveling through your town. You don’t have to be stuck on how you became a has-been town once the 1770s ended. People call Pittsburgh a has-been town all the time, but you don’t see us throwing batteries and snowballs. (Except at Dave Parker.) For real: it’s time to find a new, friendlier identity.
• Today the Mrs. went to see Made of Honor, starring Lucius Vorenus and Dr. Octagon of “Grey’s Anatomy”. Fortunately I had to work, so I was spared the trip. I was later informed that the movie was a great example of what I hate most about romantic comedies: the innocent victim.

  The innocent victim is exactly what he (usually a he) sounds like: somebody who does absolutely nothing wrong, but gets dumped (often at the altar!) simply because he’s not the star. Lucius Vorenus’ character was apparently smart, handsome, successful, athletic and considerate, yet he still got dumped right in the middle of his vows so some reluctant lurker could come along and steal the show. Then the movie ends, and we’re supposed to be happy that some homewrecker ran roughshod over the type of dependable dude who keeps this great nation running. (This MSNBC article does a good job of illustrating this.) “But he just wasn’t right for her,” the ladies are saying. So? How do you know he realized that? Even Patrick Dempsey himself played this role, in Sweet Home Alabama (ugh). Other famous examples are Bill Paxton in Sleepless in Seattle and that other “Grey’s Anatomy” dude playing a weird Italian guy in The Wedding Planner (a really, really, really awful movie). Life is unfair, but these movies want us to cheer when this is demonstrated to us yet again. F that.

  And to any dudes who won’t accompany the ladies to these movies because it’s “gay”: have fun dying alone.

• Fruits, in descending order of great-tastingness:
  1. Watermelon
  2. Cherry
  3. Blueberry
  4. Grape
  5. Apple
  6. Pear
  7. Orange
• Finally, I’ve buried the lede here, but we’re moving to Chicago in two weeks. I’ll be there this summer before Michigan, then plan to find a job there again in 2010 after graduation. I forgot to inform the readership that I will once again be based in the land of Vienna Beef and US Cellular Field. Word to Sean Connery in The Untouchables.

My piece on Sidney Crosby and hockey’s TV fix just posted today to Slate. Go check it out if you’re into the NHL, and even if you’re not, there’s stuff in there for you too.

87 Is the Loneliest Number

I just saw this today:

Pittsburgh beats Los Angeles as sootiest city

A professor in the article points out that it’s Ohio’s fault, as power-plant emissions drift across the state line. How did this happen when we don’t even have the factories anymore? If Pittsburgh kids have to have asthma, at least we could get some jobs for the trouble.

Nothing like starting afresh, so here is the new hotness. I have four color schemes to choose from in the rightnav — your choice will be cookied onto your PC and saved for ya; UPDATE: seems you have to refresh the page before this appears — plus a more intuitive professional-pages navigation for people of the future trying to hire me. (Pray that there will be many once the b-school loans come due.)

As far as the motivation behind the facelift, sometimes I just want to do hoodrat stuff with my friends, you know?

The colossal squid in New Zealand is being defrosted and studied right now, and the lab set up a blog:

http://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/

While this squid is most fascinating, I can’t help but agree with this BBC dude that the catching of really weird deep-sea animals is a bad sign: it means fisherman are going further and further into the ocean to satisfy our ravenous fish-eating appetites. And I know I will be pissed if tuna steaks cease to exist.

There’s this from The Root:

The Democratic Party’s Nightmare

Whiskey-drinking beat gutterball-bowling today in my home state’s leisure-activity primary, proving that the Canadian distilled-spirits industry packs an electoral punch that can’t be beat.

I’m pretty surprised by the results in this Pennsylvania primary-results graphic from NYTimes.com, in that I figured Hillary would probably win, but not by this much. She crushed Obama in all the whitey parts of central PA that will vote Republican anyway, but she also won Allegheny County. (Pitt students: as a large body of the young people who are supposed to be all “Obama is my life,” where were you on that one? Did everybody skip the primary today to drink 40s at the O?) Admittedly Allegheny was closer than the boonie counties, but then a 10% margin of victory (55-45) is pretty significant.

Six quick summations to end:

1. I’m not at all surprised by Hillary’s win;
2. I am surprised by her margin of victory;
3. Throwing the kitchen sink at your opponent works a lot better than political optimists would like to admit;
4. Hillary can kiss the black and youth vote goodbye if she wins the nomination;
5. Barack is just going to be a “meh” candidate for the huge working-class Democratic segment if he wins;
6. Winning the Democratic nomination is becoming more of a Pyrrhic victory each day.

NHL.com informs me that the Flyers just won Game 7 over the Capitals in overtime tonight, 3-2. I had to check that online because the game is inexplicably blacked out here in DC. It was a home game, so maybe it didn’t sell out. But I can’t find any explanation online, so if I were a Capitals fan, I would sure be mad pissed.

What really matters is the Penguins defeating the Rangers, and particularly fashion maven Sean Avery. I’ve watched this about ten times and still can’t believe your boy thought to do what he did:

Avery already has a history with Crosby, too.

I can’t think of some clever fashion-industry diss on Avery, but I’m sure one is out there somewhere — the web is a large place. Go Pens!

Here’s a good one for all my NU buds:

One of the career panel discussions featuring Michigan alums had a panelist who had attended the University of Wisconsin as an undergrad. When they opened the panel up for questions, I asked another panelist what he thought about the consulting vs. general management track at Ross, then added a jokey question for the Wisconsin dude in which I asked, as a fellow Big Ten undergrad dealing with similar issues, how it felt to be in a conflicted football-fan state for grad school. My question got a chuckle from the panel and the audience, prompting the panelist to ask me which Big Ten school I attended for undergrad. When I answered “Northwestern”, the whole room laughed at me and at least one dude shouted, “That doesn’t count.”

Go ‘Cats!

While Perry Bible Fellowship is solid, my favorite web comic would have to be Toothpaste for Dinner. Here’s one reason why:

I spent last weekend in Ann Arbor, Mich., for “Go Blue Rendezvous”, the school’s official event for admitted students. Final verdict: fun. I’m sorry to all the Michigan haters out there, but the place is pretty damn cool.

I say that first of all because people at Ross just seem down-to-earth. I met a ton of classmates who were all really friendly and excited to meet each other. One of the deans said Michigan business school is not competitive in the bad sense of the word “competitive”, and I got the feeling that people really get their helpful team-atmosphere on. Plus, it’ll be nice to have career-planning services. Normally in life we get that stuff a little in high-school and probably even less in college, making this a great time to look at my work future and do some idea-making. So I’m excited to get there this fall.

That’s the gushy stuff. Another question is when did undergraduates get so young? I did a lot of the same stuff when I was in college as I do now, but I look around at these young peeps and wonder how they’re even allowed to drive a car. The girls looked grown-up and hot when I was in college, but now I get a bit of a creepy old-dude feeling just walking around. I should be telling the undergrads to get off of my lawn and go play in the neighbor yard.

If I can’t actually be an undergraduate again, at least I can socialize like one, because apparently Ross students are into college-house-party nostalgia. Friday night I walked up to an off-campus house and came upon people spilled onto the porch drinking beer from red-plastic Solo cups. After that we went to a second house party that cost $5 to get in, upon which I was given a higher-quality souvenir plastic cup for entry. Maybe next I receive a pledge paddle at graduation? I already have two, so it would have to be extra awesome for graduate school, with spikes on one end or something. Sweet.

(w2q3iksaz, responds our cat. Indeed.)

Choose your weapon

But I think I’m getting old for another reason, which is that the novelty of a hotel stay is wearing off. When I was a kid taking a trip with my parents, we’d settle in to our hotel room and the ‘rents would give me and my bro change to go out to the hallway vending machine and get a can of pop. That was just about the greatest thing about going on vacation, but then you add in a swimming pool, too? A completely mind-blowing experience. At age 27 I still believe it’s high luxury that someone else makes the bed for me, but after that’s been untucked and I’m trying to actually sleep, I find myself thinking it would be a lot cooler if I were back in my own bed. And again, those kids really do need to get off of my lawn.

But like an old man, I’m rambling. The point here is that going to Michigan business school is going to be both useful and fun. I have found one annoyance that’s probably not great going into business school, which is that I really hate the word “brand”. This word is very useful to convey the idea of how a company presents itself to the outside world, but it’s become the new “thinking outside the box” catch-all term that doesn’t always make sense. One of the speakers this weekend mentioned “building your own personal brand.” Acknowledging one’s talents and abilities is very important in life, but navigating the complexities of human social interaction is a bit different from changing the font on a bag of Doritos. (Although if you had a Blazin’ Buffalo and Ranch soul you could probably rep that.)

You know what else is cool? Bold tags.

I’m out.

I’m sitting here reading about PHP exception handling when the idea strikes me: some peanut-butter toast would hit the spot like some sort of proverbial spot-hitting device. That got me thinking about why peanut butter is an amazing product.

Peanut butter tastes great. You can rock peanut butter with lots of things: chocolate, jelly, Nutella, bread, celery, apples, Thai food, cookies and lots of other stuff. Maybe I’m expanding on the Thai food part, but they use crushed-up peanut paste with oil in their cooking, so that’s close enough for me.

Peanut butter has phat mouth feel. Mouth feel is the term for how food feels all up in your craw, and peanut butter is great. You don’t have to chew it, but it still hangs out for a while, as if to say, “What’s up, mouth. Let’s get to know one another.”

Peanut butter is good for messing with your dog. If you put peanut butter in one of those Kong toys, it will blow your dog’s mind. He looks like a freaking idiot trying to lick peanut butter out of a rubber ball for 19 hours, but the mutt loves it!

Peanuts are a friend of the environment. They’re natural — granted, Jif or Skippy not quite so much — and you can grow hella peanuts on just a little land. That means more efficiency and fewer animals getting faded for protein. Sadly there is no such thing as peanut bacon just yet, but scientists are probably working on it. Speaking of that,

Peanut butter is associated with George Washington Carver. Wikipedia says he did not actually invent peanut butter as we know it, but he did do lots of work with it. Plus, the dude made gasoline and nitroglycerin substitutes out of peanuts. His name always seemed to come up in school, and I admired him for his devotion to that greatest of foods. Now if someone just steps up to his legacy and invents bacon from peanuts, we’re in good shape.

There you have it: peanut butter.

I was working my way through my weekly Economist when I came upon this gem in a story about Pennsylvania.

Pittsburgh feels decayed, like Cleveland, Ohio.

What a bunch of jagoffs. Everybody knows Cleveland was the nation’s No. 1 poorest city in 2003, while Pittsburgh was only 37th. Take that, haters! We’re Number 37!

Friend of the site Steve B., whose New York Islanders failed to make the playoffs and thus are not up three games to none like my Pittsburgh Penguins, writes:

what do you make of this Obama/Pennsylvania thing?

Well, Steve: in short, it was mad dumb and probably will get its damage on.

This is usually what happens when you play too hard to your audience, and playing to the audience is particularly frought with difficulty when your audience is a political group like San Francisco liberals that’s defined very specifically on a national level. Americans aren’t into the whole condescending thing, and thus will vote for someone who fronts like a regular guy even as he keeps them down over somebody who might genuinely care about average people but can’t hide a sense of hoity-toitiness well-enough. Obama already has problems with so many of his supporters being hip, urban types — the type of people who are resented by rural PA dudes. William Kristol really went off the deep end trying to say that this makes Obama into some closet Marxist, but this was still tone-deaf politically. So there’s that aspect of it that will hurt him with all the Pennsylvanians who like guns and religion, I think moreso than Jeremiah Wright — at least it was Wright saying that stuff, not Obama.

Plus, it doesn’t even make sense to say that people pursue cultural activities like hunting or religion because of their economic situation. Lots of people back home go hunting and go to church, and I can’t remember ever hearing someone walk out of Mass to shout, “Woo! Take that, all you outsourcing CEOs! Where’s your Chinese manufacturing now!?”

On a related note, liberal fans of cute furry things shouldn’t look down their noses at hunting. With all the deer in Pennsylvania that would otherwise end up starved to death or exploded by a tractor trailer, hunters are a vital population check, plus they tend to be very pro-environment. So there’s that.

Yo from my blackberry in Ann Arbor. More on my trip coming later.