I watched Romney’s speech at the GOP Convention, which I thought was way bland — was he shooting for the voters who buy Franklin Mint plates? — until he got to his laugh line about Obama caring about rising seas, which the crowd thought was hilarious. Nothing says humor like the drowned homes of billions. So I have to agree with this sadly brilliant tweet:
that climate change laugh line is going to be in every documentary from the latter half of the 21st century
Still, I’m feeling strangely better all of a sudden … it’s the scent of lukewarm wing grease, stale Coors Light, and desperation wafting from a size-XS Bears T-shirt slit down to the sternum amidst a sea of Cutler-bejerseyed bros …
The NFL.
It’s a mere week and a half until I can declare the end to my yearly sports-free summer (Baseball? Psh!) and gorge on the bounty of Steeler hysteria just around the corner. Your correspondents at The Economist will have to wait patiently until Wednesday evenings before I pick up their magazine, because there’s RedZone to watch and NFL Rewind to analyze. Let’s break down my 2012 season:
How will I watch? I’ve called it a day with NFL Sunday Ticket To Go: I mostly enjoyed it last year, but not enough to justify the $300 per season price tag. This year I can’t even find any material about how to get solo STTG without signing up for a full TV package — DirecTV is really pounding on subscriptions to the point of hinting that STTG isn’t even available without a DirecTV subscription, which is unlikely because it would be in direct violation of DirecTV’s exclusive contract with the NFL from 2009.
But it’s all good, because the live cuts of the RedZone channel are in almost every way better than having to manually jump around between games — I’m perfectly happy to let the pros keep track of each game for me and cut live to the best parts of the 1 and 4 p.m. games, particularly to the tune of only $5 per month. It’s then just another $39 to buy NFL Rewind for the full season, where I can watch every full game the day after it broadcasts, including coaches’ film or their fantastic 30-minute condensed broadcasts.
You might ask about the Steelers in particular — how will I watch them live without Sunday Ticket? Fortunately the Steelers are a good team and popular across the country — perhaps due to our spread-out “faces of meth” fanbase — so there are a good number of games that get a high slot for national broadcast, including the opener against Denver. For those games that aren’t national, I can always hit Lincoln Tap Room or Durkin’s (a.k.a. “The Vomit Room”), but no matter what, I can watch the full game on Monday. When I add the fact that this setup is just $64 for the season, I’m all set for game consumption.
(I will note that the “condensed game” feature provides high-powered ammunition to anyone complaining about the pacing of the NFL — when you can watch all the meat of a 3-hour broadcast in 30 minutes, there’s something to the football haters’ perspective. Still, that’s like saying we should eliminate all milk in favor of condensed milk, which while delicious is not really a one-to-one substitute. I don’t put condensed milk in my tea, because that would be really weird and insane. Debate point: pro football and me.)
Why do I watch pro so much more than college? Easy:
No puke-worthy hypocrisy about “student athletes” playing for pristine, academics-first institutions and their pure love of the game,
More focus on quality of team play because everybody’s a super-duper athlete, making the game impossible for one dude to dominate, and
I use Saturdays to actually do things, while Sundays are historically a day for sitting around like a lump anyway, so I feel less guilt about 12 hours of getting fat and watching people collide violently for my entertainment.
Why won’t ESPN bring back the fantastic Monday Night Football intro music (the awesome instrumental, not Hank Williams)?
How can I ethically watch guys permanently injure themselves? The concussion focus of the past few years has given me pause about football fandom, but ultimately I know I’ll watch anyway. How is this OK? If you asked 100 American men if they’d trade five years of their life to be a pro football player with all the perks that come with it, I think 95-99 would take the deal. Hell, I probably would. We put football players on a pedestal as early as high school, showering them with money, fame and adulation all the way into retirement. Clearly this is a societal priority way out of whack, but it makes it a rational choice to live the football life. Most of these guys are such great athletes that they could just as easily pursue a different sport, like baseball or basketball, that has less risk of injury for the same personal glory. But they chose football, still the nation’s top stage. The country isn’t going to give up the NFL, and I don’t think that it should have to — we all pay into it, and we all take from it.
That’s not to say the NFL shouldn’t try to reduce injuries instead of just giving it lip service and selling us on the violence itself. Hypocrisy sucks.
My prediction for the Super Bowl: Patriots over Eagles. I will completely hate this Super Bowl if I’m right.
Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing “launch” instead of “lunch” in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.
And finally, a look at the cut I sustained this week when I scraped my bare foot against a roof vent. (Shoes = good invention.) NOTE: Pretty gross, so I’m making you click to see the grossness.
The Blue Angels flew right over the house during the Air & Water Show, giving me the chance to get this photo using only my smartphone. Those F-18s are the serious loudness.
Calling women “broads” is played-out and weak. This is the message conveyed: “Using this conspicuous 1940s sexist lingo shows what I think of your ‘polite society’ in the most passive-aggressive way! Toss me a mass-market light beer and lend me $200 for my bookie!”I avoid Jim Rome wherever I can, as he’s exactly the type of shithead who would use this word. I assume it makes up 63 percent of his show.
The more I read Flipboard, the more I note that I spend the most time reading their News (U.S. Edition) feed, which is either human-edited or the most smart-person-like news algorithm built anywhere. Despite the title, it includes a broad array of international news from locales that the Yahoo! News / CNNs of the world avoid on their main pages, whether that’s Syria, Burma, the Philippines or anywhere else making news that fits into the spinach, rather than ice cream, category.Evidence would indicate that Flipboard leans toward the human element, as they hired Josh Quittner (TIME.com!) as their editorial director a year ago and have only improved the product with each app release. That’s smart: robot editors are what makes Google News unworthy of eyeballs. Don’t become Google News.
Couscous: I invented this with some vegetables on hand, but it tasted awesome, so here it is:
Phat chicken couscous
1 1/2 cups water
1 1/2 cups dry couscous
Salt for the water
2 chicken breasts, cubed 1/4 yellow onion, diced
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1-2 sizable tomatoes, chopped, preferably from your porch container if you’re cool like me 3/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped 1/2 cup fresh basil, chopped
1 tbsp dill (dry is ok)
1 tbsp coriander seeds
1 bay leaf
Salt and black pepper to taste
1 jalapeno, chopped (optional)
In a pan with a cover, heat the salted water, then when it’s boiling, throw in the couscous and cover with the heat off. In a different medium saucepan, heat the oil, then add the chicken and cook it through. Add the onion, coriander and bay leaf (and optional jalapeno) about halfway through so it browns too. Immediately after that, throw in the tomatoes and cook it about a minute, then add the parsley / basil / dill and the cooked couscous, turn the heat off, stir it for like two minutes or so, then get your grub on. Serves however many you feel like.
Paul Ryan’s not just the GOP VP candidate, he’s the most prominent successful example of the young professional ambitious political person, or YoPAPP.I started running into YoPAPPs at Northwestern, met a crap-ton in D.C., and then even knew a few here and there at Michigan. They come in all ethnicities, genders and a somewhat varied scope of economic backgrounds, but all share several traits:
A calculating personality that makes it difficult to discern conviction from triangulation – everything is expressed in such a practiced way that even spoken core beliefs leave you with the nagging feeling that those beliefs could change tomorrow;
Flat tone that might sometimes dip slightly into “I’ll say I’m concerned” if something is particularly sad and occasionally rise into “almost bemused” when something funny or charming happens, but otherwise showing very little in the way of empathetic connection;
Little to no professional work outside the politics / policy sector, save the odd high-school or college job to provide some color;
Seemingly unstoppable advancement within said politics / policy sector, starting at the high-school level;
Conscious avoidance of all cameras when in fun situations, unless the fun is explicitly planned for the cameras.
As much as those sound like dislikable qualities, the YoPAPP is very much a creature of our own political society – with constant news coverage sparking an obsession with the trivial, perhaps these YoPAPPs are so robotic because they truly do care about “how it should be” to the point that they recognize the only way to get to an elected position of power is to button up completely and wall off from the normal human experience of venturing, triumphing, failing and becoming a wiser person through all of it. Cool realization, bro.
I had to quit MapMyRun – despite my prior props, I couldn’t deal with the messed-up GPS tracking and decided I’d do better with Google Maps and my smartphone stopwatch. They did send this promo email last week that’s ostensibly supposed to make me focus on running, but subliminally I’m also supposed to focus on other things:
It’s the time of year for NFL preview writing, and after I’ve found SI’s preview issues to be a little stale the past few years, I really like the ones at the NYT’s Fifth Down blog. Even better, I don’t think they count against the 20-articles-per-month threshold for the payroll that I quit a few years ago. Bonus awesome NFL reads: the “Why Your Team Sucks” series at Deadspin.
I’m facing the ultimate old-guy ailment right now: I pulled a muscle, and back pain is all up in this piece. On to the post:
I was talking to my brother about the fact that we both have an urge to be able to justify our broader existence as members of the workforce, i.e. we want to connect our work directly to some sort of human effort driving the slow roll of history. I think most people want to feel meaning in their work, but I know that we’re fortunate to even be able to have this discussion, as jobs that simply put food on the family are needed by millions.Regardless, my brother is a Navy lieutenant, and tying yourself to history through the military is pretty obvious — and in fact my own plan at 18 was to do just that until the Navy ROTC people saw my eye-exam results and were all “no thanks bro” — but what about me today?I used to be in journalism, so that’s the first draft of history and whatnot, but frankly I think my job now is almost more of one where I’ll be chillin’ with my great-grandkids (in the artificially cooled biodome to shield us from the overheated Earth) and they’ll say, “Wow! You were around at the start of the Internet when people were figuring everything out?” Because yeah, that’s me. Think about if you met someone today who had worked in TV in the 1950s: that’d be some shit, and they had a hand in shaping the medium that’s shaped our world today. (For better or worse.) So in the 2070s, that’ll be me.Sometimes I miss the media, and most of my cool at-work stories still come from those days, but I realized I like the Internet broadly more than I like journalism specifically. With this digital-strategy thing, I get to do a lot more shaping. So yeah, I’m just a temporary being in a giant cosmos, but at least I have something to do with building what will be an ongoing part of human existence.
“The Zanzibar Chest”: Speaking of history-linked careers, I just finished this memoir/historical drama by Aidan Hartley, a war correspondent who worked in Somalia, Serbia and Rwanda right as those three countries were respectively going to terrible fates. Hartley parallels his own experiences with those of both his British colonial-service father and his father’s fellow service friend Peter Davey, who was ultimately murdered while in Yemen and whose diary was in the eponymous chest left by Hartley’s father. Overall I enjoyed this book and got a lot of perspective from it, but that came primarily from the portions from Hartley’s own life, which are at turns hilarious, swashbuckling, shocking and horrifying. The book unfortunately slows a bit each time the author jumps to Davey’s story, and I found myself wishing he would stick to the first person. I understand the motivation for tying together the British-side optimism of the colonial days and the miserable legacy that left for the populations living in the post-colonial areas today, but something about the way the two stories were woven together just didn’t do it for me. That said, it’s a great read and a firsthand tour of some of the uglier parts of recent history. I give it four phats out of five:
The awesomeness of the chimney starter. Not much more to add – it’s just awesome.
I continue to like this image after several months:
Few things are as incongruous as the meathead Under Armour ethos and the nerdtopian reality of attending Northwestern University, but here we are:
Much as I find the TED scene self-congratulatory and annoying, I did find these two talks particularly cool:
Pranav Mistry: The potential of SixthSense technology. This one is from 2009. Mistry, from MIT, demos his new technology for real-world digital interaction Minority Report-style. I’m anxiously awaiting the day when I can write this blog on an invisible keyboard, so once this technology hits the mainstream, I’ll be psyched. Unfortunately we still don’t see it on a wide scale after three years, which makes me wonder if the mobile companies are trying to milk the handset market for a while longer, but it could be any number of reasons.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrtANPtnhyg
Marc Goodman: A vision of crimes in the future. This video made me thankful that there are people smarter than me out there fighting against the dregs of the world who are also smarter than me (at least at technology). The real-time Mumbai terror control center was a fact I had heard before, but Goodman puts it into much more directly fearful terms and spotlights the implications with that and more.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E97Kgi0sR4
Steve Jobs: bold visionary willing to do what it takes to make history, or lowdown anti-family man who stabbed his colleagues in the back? More importantly, can you be one without the other?
I know I value integrity more than anything else about a person, so I have to hope that’s an asset in my career and not a detriment. I’ve seen plenty of causes to question that, though.
Provided you don’t click away on any of its links, this Gawker history of the Internet’s most infamous gross-out linkbait, which I won’t even name here, paints a good picture of the web underbelly in its formative late-90s / early 2000s years. (Anti-thanks to Bill S. from freshman year for dropping that mind-scarring image on me.) It was humorously awkward when my coworker had to explain why this TIME cover was generating so much reaction from online readers:
Also, I really don’t feel too bad for NBC getting slammed. This AV Club piece did a nice job of acknowledging the strategic reasons NBC would take the tape-delayed-good-stuff approach, and I’m totally OK with that, but the author also deconstructed just why the content of the broadcasts was bad. I hate, hate the fact that the Olympics coverage always requires these human-interest narratives in a way that other televised sports don’t. I watch for the performance, not to learn about any number of adversities whose outcome has nothing to do with one’s athletic ability in the first place. (If athletic talent were the only way to overcome difficulty, I’d never be able to get out of bed in the morning.)Also Ben Silverman annoys me, and NBC still seems to be using his programming philosophy. It didn’t work, yo.
As I write this on the PHP-driven WordPress platform, which I can then share on PHP-driven Facebook, I’m reminded of one of my bosses during my front-end developer days who argued that PHP “isn’t scalable”. That was not an enlightened statement.
The compilation managed to touch on people from multiple classes, educational statuses and lengths of time out of work, showing that it’s not something as simple as “laziness” that keeps many unemployed people from working. (Though I hope the people out of work for just a few months don’t panic – that’s really not that long for a job search.) Each person without a job has to meet a different set of needs for getting back to work, but scorn and disgust from others aren’t going to fill any of those needs.
Quick review of the two free Android apps I use for fitness:
JEFit: This is my lifting app of choice. It comes with a database of hundreds of exercises, which you can then place into routines and track your sets, weight, reps and all those other steakhead stats. It automatically tracks your one-rep max so you know when you’re getting stronger. Also includes areas to share your routines, track your body stats, etc. JEFit gets four phats:
MapMyRun: I use this one for, yes, mapping my runs. You turn on your phone’s GPS and the app tracks your time (which you can pause via a big red button if you’re stopped for traffic or something) and your path, then calculates your pace and splits at the end and inputs the whole thing into a calendar of your workouts. The whole thing would be super convenient if it weren’t for the iffy GPS results – I took a look at my mapped routes, and MapMyRun had me running directly through Lake Michigan during a 5K last week. The app therefore adds distance to your run with the same amount of time, making you think you’re super fast when you’re still the same jungle sloth in a Dri-FIT shirt. You can manually go in and edit your maps, though, and then reuse those edited maps for later run tracking, which I’ve done and find way more effective. I give this one three phats with an asterisk, as I’m not sure whether to blame the app or the phone’s GPS itself for the mapping problem:
*
I was reading about Killer Joe and learned that Gina Gershon is 50. This is a 50-year-old:
I passed a graffito yesterday where the dude named himself “Clunked”. That is a terrible graffiti handle.
In the wake of last week, some friends on Facebook have posted about buying a gun. I think most people make this decision based on emotion and not logic, so I’ll repost this comment I made on how to think about it:
I think it’s a contextual game-theory thing where people should examine their most frequent circumstances before purchasing a gun. For instance, I think the guy in the video was in pretty extraordinary circumstances: he was unseen and thus able to get the drop on the criminals, so that was great and a benefit to all, but if you buy a gun to avoid being mugged, you’re planning for a one-on-one situation where someone’s probably pulled a weapon on you already, so your chances of drawing and firing before they harm you are a lot worse – better to avoid antagonizing things and escape with your life (e.g. if the goal is always to survive intact, you win every fight you walk away from.) You could shoot first if you get a bad vibe, but that’s what George Zimmerman did and now Trayvon Martin is dead for potentially having done nothing. Plus what about lawfully bought guns that are stolen (57,000 reported lost or stolen to the ATF between 2008 and 2010), guns in homes with untrained kids, relatives with mental illness, etc. Tally it up and a lot more of those things are likely to occur than a situation where you get the perfect drop on a genuine bad guy.
Hunting? Sure! Protection when you live in an isolated rural area? Sure! But when in a populated area? I think most people imagine themselves as safer simply for carrying, but if you think through the situations in which lethal force might become an issue in a “how is this most likely to play out” way, owning a gun usually doesn’t make one more secure. It’s still a matter of beating base emotion, though, and that argument is rarely won by the numbers.
Pretty psyched to see Ireland find major oil reserves. There’s some kind of lame potatoes-as-natural-resource joke to be made there, but screw that, it’s cool news.
Good deed for the week: If you love seafood and the ocean like me, get your grub on sustainably using this handy guide from the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
The phone showed up last night, and so far, so good. It’s much bigger than the prior phone, which makes it slightly unwieldy when reaching for the top left icons, but the difference is made up in the amazing screen clarity and the fact that I can type nearly as fast as I can on a full-sized physical keyboard. (I’m typing this post all up on it right now.) Also, going from a 3G to a 4G connection is a complete generational shift in speed. Damn, yo!
First World Problem: I am past ready for my new phone to arrive. Verizon decided to sell the Galaxy S III a week later than the other carriers – probably to get all their bloatware loaded properly – so I’m still waiting until Monday for this thing to ship. This must be what that 14-year-old kid on “My Sweet Sixteen” went through when her mom mistimed her gift of a brand new Lexus.
On to an actual serious issue: it’s hot as hell right now. I work in an air-conditioned office, but from past experience working outdoor labor in the heat, I think I’d rather do that again than have to do my current computer-based job outdoors. Sweating is way more annoying when you don’t feel like you’ve earned it. So to all bosses: Don’t give in to the totally rational temptation to make your sedentary employees drag their PCs out in the sun.
As much as I’m a man who appreciates the finer things in suds, when it’s brutally hot like this, that all goes out the window in favor of the coldest Bud/Miller/Coors light beer on hand. They sell it cold to hide the lack of taste, but at this time of year, I appreciate the tradeoff.(Exception made for Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy, though that’s more tasty than high-quality.)
A week or so ago I looked at my own TIME.com web-work inventory page for the first time in a while, and after clicking around, I was pretty deflated to learn that all but a tiny handful of my news specials are now 404s, magazine TOC redirects and “Method Not Allowed” errors. The server-side team didn’t even bother to stylize the error messages for the latter. Three and a half years at Time Inc., and these days I’m not even a digital wisp there.
Damn.
The great irony of actually working in the “your digital trail is eternal” Internet is that this is the way it goes: If your site’s not being constantly redesigned and refreshed, you suck at Internetting, so anybody working for that site in a production context had better get used to their mellow getting harshed. This certainly isn’t the first time I’ve had my work overwritten in the wake of site updates — I let out one of those “passage of time” sighs when Slate redesigned last fall and overwrote the last vestiges of my front-end dev work there — but it’s always a buzzkill to look for your old stuff only to find it dead and gone. And I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve played web executioner and enjoyed it: Tearing out the sites’ old weeds from primitive web days used to give me as great a joy as right-clicking “Delete Directory?” can give a man, which isn’t actually that much joy, but it’s still more-than-zero joy. It must have sucked for the producer who coded all those table tags for some 1998 web special on “She’s All That”, but even as the Internet Archive Wayback Machine fights a brave battle, we all know this web game is pixels to pixels, dust to dust.
So as a memorial to the first time I ever personally appeared on the Internet, I’ve created from memory this replica of the extremely well-designed champions’ roster page for the Pittsburgh 1997 NHL Breakout Roller-Hockey Tournament Under-18 Amateur Division, a webpage which has long since gone the way of the Godsmack fanbase:
1997 Champions!
Under-18 Amateur Jeff Bache Todd Seitz Patrick Stack Bill Strosnider Brian Voiner Nathan Younkin Brian Zambotti Mark Zeitler
Pretend that took four full minutes to load in a Mosaic browser. 28.8 kbps dial-up salute to you, old page.
The NFL.
You might ask about the Steelers in particular — how will I watch them live without Sunday Ticket? Fortunately the Steelers are a good team and popular across the country — perhaps due to our spread-out “faces of meth” fanbase — so there are a good number of games that get a high slot for national broadcast, including the opener against Denver. For those games that aren’t national, I can always hit Lincoln Tap Room or Durkin’s (a.k.a. “The Vomit Room”), but no matter what, I can watch the full game on Monday. When I add the fact that this setup is just $64 for the season, I’m all set for game consumption.
1997 Champions!