The Winter Of Our Discontent

So it's time for the baseball Winter Meetings, and my baseball team, the team I care about, decides to liven up my Hot Stove League mind with a Jeremy Hermida, whatever that is, and a new contract for a 43 year old pitcher with back problems? Really, this is our plan to unseat the World Champion Yankees? This should work, sure.

A Point I've Been Trying to Make

Bill Simmons, from his Week 9 NFL column: (http://bit.ly/3TElpC)

"On Monday night, Atlanta coach Mike Smith became the latest to screw up the "down by two scores in the final two minutes" conundrum. If you missed it, the Falcons recovered a fumble with 1:23 remaining on their own 47. Trailing by 11, they got two quick first downs and reached New Orleans' 23 with less than a minute to play. Right there, they should have spiked the ball, kicked a field goal and gone for the onside kick-Hail Mary combo. Nope. They kept plowing ahead. Quarterback Matt Ryan suffered a sack and was forced to spike the ball on second down. Tick … tick … tick … On third-and-13, they wasted a few more seconds on a quick slant out of bounds. Finally, their kicker nailed the 40-yarder that they could have had 25 seconds earlier. To make it worse, they recovered the onside kick but didn't have enough time (just 28 seconds) to get in Hail Mary range. Now, if they had hired a 17-year-old video game nerd as their Madden Late-Game Coordinator, he would have told them to grab that 40-yarder as soon as they could get it. This happens all the time. So let's call this a futuristic Great Call of the Week: I'd like to hand it out to the first NFL coach smart enough to hire a 17-year-old video game nerd for these situations. Someday. We can only hope."

Bill James, from the 1986 Baseball Abstract (http://bit.ly/626VN)

"In many other professions, simulations are much prized as educational tools; a major airline would never think of sending a pilot up with lives in his hands unless he had pulled a few dozen planes out of simulated crashes. And what is an APBA [cards and dice baseball simulation] game, anyway? Why, it is a simulation of a manager's job, nothing more nor less."


This is a powerful idea. I play baseball and football simulation games all the time. (Well, not all the time. Not as much as I'd like. But a lot.) It doesn't qualify me to be a major league manager. BUT IT WOULDN'T HURT!

So many times, we see managers of multi million dollar organizations unable to make the most simple, straightforward decisions. No, the game isn't the same as the real thing-but, if the game is constructed correctly, the math IS THE SAME. The first sports organization that gets a handle on this-using simulations to teach, not management, but the math of the game situations, will have an advantage.

To take the example Simmons cites in more detail, you need the two scores, regardless. The field goal is the easier score to get, by far-once you get the ball close enough, with a professional kicker, it's as close to automatic as you are going to get. So, as Simmons says, once you're in range, you TAKE IT. You need the ball back anyway, and you need as much time as possible left when you try to get the second score. It doesn't matter which score you get first, because you need both. What you need more of is TIME, and trying to get the touchdown now wastes that time. If you fail at the onside kick, you lose anyway. So why not do like Simmons says, get the kick now and then try to get the ball back? As he says, a Madden player knows this-instinctively, instantly. At the end of a game, when you need two scores, time is precious. Time is CRITICAL. You kick the field goal, then try to get the ball back. The key is you NEED TWO SCORES. Without the easy one, the hard one doesn't matter. So take the easy one, and save the time.

It's easy.

Top Ten Comedians

Apropos of a suggestion I made on the NaNoWriMo forums, and to keep my NaBloPoMo streak running, The Top Ten Standup Comedians I Have Ever Heard-

1. Bill Hicks
2. Jimmy Pardo
3. Steve Harvey
4. Patton Oswalt
5. Lewis Black
6. Doug Stanhope
7. Maria Bamford
8. Dana Gould
9. Mitch Hedberg
10. Brian Posehn

My criteria are lasting impact/philosophical nature, relistenability, cleverness/creativity and laugh out loud impact.

Let The World Change You

From protoblogger Dave Winer (http://bit.ly/3SQwpG):

"I am a former young person who wanted to Change The World himself. I look back at that young person, and think -- he was lovely in many ways but he made a pretty good mess of his life, because he had no clue who he was and how he got that way. Change The World? Good thing that didn't happen! As someone who just watched his father die, I don't think any of us have the first clue how the world works. My father was a smart man, spent a lot of time thinking, and at the end, he may have understood 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent of how the world works. And some of that was based on faulty assumptions....Change is made by all of us, over many generations. The best we can do is make a few other people happy for a while, make ourselves happy, and if you do that, and leave the place a little nicer for having been here, I say -- Job Well Done! Maybe instead of changing the world, relax, and Let The World Change You. That's closer to what actually happens in life, no matter how rich or famous (or not) you are."

Rock The Casbah

I heard The Clash’s “Rock The Casbah” on the radio this morning. I know this brands me as an ignoramus, but I don’t get the Clash, I never have. I feel about the Clash the way I feel about architecture-I know it’s important, but I just don’t get it-it doesn’t move me at all. Maybe you had to be there. I wasn’t really there for REM-I didn’t start to listen to them until they were huge, though. I don’t know what it is. I don’t get the Clash, though.
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To The Best of Our Knowledge this week was a perfect exploration of music and its meaning, “Coming of Age Through Music”, featuring one of my alltime Fave Raves, Nick Hornby, talking about his new book, “Juliet, Naked”, which I loved.
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The first speaker on TTBOOK, Lavinia Greenlaw, said something very interesting-teenage girls use music to express and share feelings, and teenage boys use it to categorize emotion-put it into taxonomies and hierarchies. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a description more spot on. Unless it’s “you’re really not well, are you?”
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I’m reading an interesting book, “Say Everything”, by Scott Rosenberg, about the history and future of blogging. Strangely, I’m not mentioned anywhere-but I’m sure he’s just waiting for the paperback.
(Ha!)
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One of the interesting parts of the book is descriptions of some flame wars and battles between protobloggers like Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis. Anyone who spends more than 3 ½ seconds online is familiar to the uncivilized nature of Internet speech in 2009-nature red of tooth and claw, as it were. Sadly, it appears, ‘twas ever thus.

What this made me think about this morning was how really grateful I am to all my readers and commenters. To have something that you have written, or just quoted, or cited, provoke a reaction from someone else is really gratifying. Why write anything at all if you don’t want a response? So, even if you think I suck (cue my friend Eric Parr saying, “but you DO suck!”), thanks for noticing.
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An IPod on Shuffle is a good way for me to discover albums I forgot I enjoyed-so far, Eric Clapton’s “24 Nights” and Billy Joel’s Live in Russia record, KOHUEPT. (Read that last word in Cyrillic to get the proper impact.
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Apropos of nothing, how brilliant was it to use the Doors’ “People Are Strange” in the movie, “The Lost Boys”? It still sounds freaky, more than 40 years after they recorded it. That sounds like a neat job to have, picking out music to put in movies.
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The Loneliness of the Long Distance Congressman

Dan Carlin hit another home run in this week’s “Common Sense” show. He’s talking about the role of genius in human endeavor, and how desperately we need geniuses in our society in every field-but especially politics. We need to cultivate them and, in a football vernacular, get our playmakers the ball. And, of course, in our current system, we don’t incentivize the great ones-the gifted ones at forging consensus and synthesizing different types of information-into becoming our leaders. We don’t pay them well(compared to businessmen), we make them leave their families behind, we don’t listen to their arguments for longer than 30 seconds, we fill the airwaves with incendiary speech (some of which, truth be told, I have written here), we essentially force them into a system of organized bribery. We ask them to deliver us services, and scream when they ask that we pay for them. Is it any wonder we don’t get geniuses in Congress? I think it was a PJ O’Rourke or Dave Barry joke-we send them to Congress because we don’t want them around.

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I wish I remembered what book it was in,(“Parliament of Whores”, maybe) but in one of O’Rourke’s books, there was a story about a Congressman that O’Rourke spent the day with once. He described all the different things he had to do-phone calls, answering letters(this was the pre-Internet in the home age), fulfilling requests, voting on bills, all that. Near the end of the piece, O’Rourke notes an enormous pile of mail the Congressman had gotten through, noting that the pile contained exactly one thank you.

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"Everybody’s tired of something/Round here.”

-Counting Crows

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NaNoWriMo Word Count: 10810

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Beck’s “Loser” keeps coming up on my IPod. Do you think it is trying to tell me something?

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“Humanity is a virus with shoes.”

-Bill Hicks

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Fiscally Responsible?

Andrew Sullivan with a quick hit about fiscal responsibility.

A note from his reader:
"According to the treasury department's Bureau of Public Debt, the federal deficit went from $5,728,195,796,181.57 on January 22, 2001 to $10,626,877,048,913.08 on January 20, 2009. Bear in mind that the allegedly fiscally conservative Republican Party ran this government for six of those eight years. Roughly two trillion of that debt was added after Democrats took over Congress in 2007."


Sullivan's take:

"Here's my litmus test for the Tea Party right: when they hold up effigies of Bush and Cheney as socialists, I'll take them seriously. Until then, they're more partisan than principled."


Indeed.

NaNoWriMo Word Count: 6160

Bill Moyers on Afghanistan and Sacrifice

There has been a horrible shooting incident at Fort Hood in Texas. There isn't much to say about that, other than I hope and pray that the victims and the families (and the perpetrator) can find some peace.

The reports hint that the perpetrator was upset about an impending deployment to Iraq. Who knows whether or not this is true, but whether it is or not, I think it is inarguable that these two wars continue to take an enormous toll on the military and their families.

Bill Moyers on the war:

"Reporting on...attacks that killed eight Americans, CBS turned to animation to depict what no journalists were around to witness. This is about as close to real war as most of us ever get, safely removed from the blood, the mangled bodies, the screams and shouts.

October, as you know, was the bloodiest month for our troops in all eight years of the war. And beyond the human loss, the United States has spent more than 223 billion dollars there. In 2010 we will be spending roughly 65 billion dollars every year. 65 billion dollars a year.

The President is just about ready to send more troops. Maybe 44 thousand, that's the number General McChrystal wants, bringing the total to over 100 thousand. When I read speculation last weekend that the actual number needed might be 600 thousand, I winced.

I can still see President Lyndon Johnson's face when he asked his generals how many years and how many troops it would take to win in Vietnam. One of them answered, "Ten years and one million." He was right on the time and wrong on the number-- two and a half million American soldiers would serve in Vietnam, and we still lost.

Whatever the total for Afghanistan, every additional thousand troops will cost us about a billion dollars a year. At a time when foreclosures are rising, benefits for the unemployed are running out, cities are firing teachers, closing libraries and cutting essential maintenance and services. That sound you hear is the ripping of our social fabric.

Which makes even more perplexing an editorial in THE WASHINGTON POST last week. You'll remember the "Post" was a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq, often sounding like a megaphone for the Bush-Cheney propaganda machine. Now it's calling for escalating the war in Afghanistan. In a time of historic budget deficits, the paper said, Afghanistan has to take priority over universal health care for Americans. Fixing Afghanistan, it seems, is "a 'necessity'"; fixing America's social contract is not.

But listen to what an Afghan villager recently told a correspondent for the "Economist:" "We need security. But the Americans are just making trouble for us. They cannot bring peace, not if they stay for 50 years."

Listen, too, to Andrew Bacevich, the long-time professional soldier, graduate of West Point, veteran of Vietnam, and now a respected scholar of military and foreign affairs, who was on this program a year ago. He recently told "The Christian Science Monitor," "The notion that fixing Afghanistan will somehow drive a stake through the heart of jihadism is wrong. …If we give General McChrystal everything he wants, the jihadist threat will still exist."

This from a warrior who lost his own soldier son in Iraq, and who doesn't need animated graphics to know what the rest of us never see.

So here's a suggestion. In a week or so, when the president announces he is escalating the war, let's not hide the reality behind eloquence or animation. No more soaring rhetoric, please. No more video games. If our governing class wants more war, let's not allow them to fight it with young men and women who sign up because they don't have jobs here at home, or can't afford college or health care for their families.

Let's share the sacrifice. Spread the suffering. Let's bring back the draft.

Yes, bring back the draft -- for as long as it takes our politicians and pundits to "fix" Afghanistan to their satisfaction.

Bring back the draft, and then watch them dive for cover on Capitol Hill, in the watering holes and think tanks of the Beltway, and in the quiet little offices where editorial writers spin clever phrases justifying other people's sacrifice. Let's insist our governing class show the courage to make this long and dirty war our war, or the guts to end it. "

Did I Mention I Love Pierre Robert?

Getting into my car to do something unpleasant and unnecessary, I was in a foul mood. My man Pierre Robert, a DJ on WMMR-FM in Philadelphia, as if he was reading my mind for me, had this little gem of a song cued up for me.

If you don't enjoy this song, you don't enjoy life.

Your special World Series Bonus Fact

When FOX starts showing graphics tonight about how Player X is batting .083 in the postseason or something, remember this: Yogi Berra, arguably one of the top three catchers who ever lived and one of the top winners in the history of team sports, batted .140 with two home runs and 5 RBIs in his first 14 postseason games.

(h/t Allen Barra's new book, "Yogi Berra:Eternal Yankee")