The late, great FameTracker had a regular feature called 2 Stars 1 Slot, for cataloging how even actors (and not just movies) come in pairs. They picked up on 2/3 of this trio, but neglected the final leg of the tripod, perhaps due to an over-rigorous devotion to their format. While I may lack their verbosity (really!) and wit, I can still exceed them with Three Stars, 1 Slot: the mellow, cocky, studly Southern white boys: Matthew McConaughey, Cole Hauser1, and Josh Lucas.
I am trying out Disqus for comments. Anyone have any, um, comments (besides that it screws up the layout)? I'm curious how it looks in feed readers; for various (not necessarily good) reasons I don't have a separate post template for RSS.
A recent headline in the local newspaper 1 claimed "Most Radiohead Fans Decline to Pay," referring to the band's experiment in digital music retailing. The headline should instead read, "Most Radiohead Downloaders Have Not Paid Yet." Just because they downloaded the music doesn't mean they're a fan; they could have just grabbed it to see what the hype was about. Secondly, the album will be released on CD in a couple of months. I would rather not pay for a digital download now and then pay full retail later. I am ethically at ease with downloading the music now without paying and buying the CD when it becomes available. I am not, in other words, declining to pay, but rather waiting to pay. Is it a terrible error? No. Does the distortion conform to the conventional narrative of music downloaders being thieves? Yup.
As his wedding day approached last spring, Marshall Whittey found that his money could not keep pace with the grandiosity of his plans. But rather than scale back, he chose instead, like millions of homeowners across the country, to borrow against the soaring value of his home.
He and his bride, Holly Whittey, exchanged vows on the grounds of a sumptuous private estate in the Napa Valley. They spent their honeymoon at a resort in Tahiti.
But now, in an ominous portent for the national economy, Mr. Whittey has grown tight with his money. His home is worth far less than it was a year ago, and his equity has evaporated. And like many other involuntary adopters of a newly economical lifestyle, he can borrow no more.
"It used to be that if I wanted it, I'd just go and buy it and finance it," Mr. Whittey, 33, said. "I'm feeling the crunch, and my spending is down significantly."
Link1. What a tragedy? What a tool. The people I know have varying degrees of financial responsibility, but few of them are outright irresponsible. I figure few of you come right up against this kind of idiocy, so it's good to know how recklessly foolish people can be.
The manic part of manic-depressive disorder has always sounded like a fun
mental illness. You feel good, you don't need much sleep, you have lots of
energy to do things. It was only after reading "An
Unquiet Mind" that I understood that it's not just the other pole of
bipolar that causes the damage. Mania means extreme impulsiveness and losing touch
with reality. It's not a stable condition; either you spiral away into
complete psychosis, or you come back to Earth and realize you've spent $20,000
you don't have on Precious Moments figurines because they spoke to something
deep within you. And that's assuming you don't somehow kill yourself in a
moment of insane recklessness. Moreso than Jan Lars
Jensen's "Losing My Mind,"Kay Redfield
Jamison's memoir of her mental illness gives a devastating picture of
what it is like. Perhaps that is because her illness has lasted decades, while
his memoir focused on a single (if extended) incident.
As involving as her story is, the memoir she wrote could have done with a
better editor. I get the feeling that Jamison would be pretty annoying to know
in person. It seems like every man she knows is "good-looking, witty, and
quite tall." She overflows with effusiveness, which is all right at first, but
gets wearisome. Every page had some form of the word "intense" on it. It was
enough to make me wonder if maybe she was in the midst of a manic episode as
she was writing the book. Nevertheless, it's a valuable book to read if you
want to understand the danger of bipolar insanity, and the lethal danger that
lurks in the depths and stalks the heights.
Media coverage around the 2008 presidential election is excessively focused on the campaigns. They describe and dissect the daily doings of campaigns like Monday morning quarterbacks. They talk about tactics and perceptions rather than the candidates and the issues. It's too much about the machinery and not enough about the end goals. It's too much noise signifying too little, but its appearance of pulling back the curtain makes it seem deep rather than shallow. It's all built up out of nothing, which makes it easier for the media to shape it. They give their blessing to the "serious" candidates who play the game, like Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney, while dismissing as jokers and weirdos the more interesting candidates like Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, or Mike Gravel.
A naïaut;ve observer might have guessed that 24-hour news would have offered the opportunity for broader coverage, but instead it has enabled saturation bombing of even narrower messages. I have similar hopes for the Internet, with some satisfaction to be found from the strength of Ron Paul's showing, but there's also the lesson of Howard Dean to give me pause. The campaigns are no more relevant than the card stock used for mailings. Losing sight of the candidates and the issues makes it easier for weak candidates with a poor grasp of the issues to slip through; indeed, it encourages it. Unless we reject the shallow focus, we'll get more of the same, and we'll deserve it.
After Michael Lewis blew me away with "Moneyball" and "The Blind Side", I made sure to grab his first book, "Liar's Poker." Lewis didn't originally start as a writer; he became a bond trader at Salomon Brothers in the mid-1980s after graduate school. That gave him a front row seat on some of the greatest excesses the decade of greed had to offer. Think Gordon Gekko. It was a weird and chaotic period, which makes for interesting reading. I claimed before that Michael Lewis "had a gift;" I still think that's true, but comparing his first book with his later ones demonstrates that he spent a lot of time honing his skills as a writer. It's still a much better book than many others ever write.
0140143459978-0140143454
I've noticed that luxury car models tend to have names that are more like part numbers than words. It's not a perfect correlation, but it's pretty reliable. Non-luxury cars tend to have words as their names. Luxury cars may use words such as "Turbo" as modifiers on the base model name, or non-luxury cars may have alphanumeric codes like 2500HD in the same role, but the base model names tend to follow the pattern. Note the luxury cars (exceptions highlighted; it looks like there are more exceptions than there really are because the names much longer):
Ford: Crown Victoria, Edge, Escape, Escape Hybrid, E-Series Van, E-Series Wagon, Expedition, Explorer, Explorer Sport Trac, F-150, F-250 Super Duty, F-350 Super Duty, F-450 Super Duty, Five Hundred, Focus, Focus Wagon, Freestar, Freestyle, Fusion, Mustang, Ranger, Shelby GT500, Taurus, Taurus X
GMC: Acadia, Canyon, Envoy, Savana, Savana Cargo Van, Sierra 1500, Sierra 2500HD, Sierra 3500HD, Sierra Classic 1500, Sierra Classic 2500HD, Sierra Classic 3500, Sierra Hybrid, Yukon, Yukon Denali, Yukon XL
Back when I was swimming regularly, I considered a mile to a mile and a half a good workout. That comes out to about 70 to 100 laps in a standard 25-yard pool. In a non-standard pool, though, like these fantastic ones, the whole workout would be just one round-trip.
What does it mean that only 5 of the top 45 teams in college football (Division I)1
are private schools? My bias tells me that it's because public schools are less accountable to their financiers, and so can justify blowing the money. Contrary to popular belief, college sports contribute very little to academics. Notre Dame contributes the most, at $21 million per year, or a respectable $1800 for each of the approximately 11,000 students. However, other programs contribute much less. The University of Texas Longhorns football team contributes $4.7 million per year to academics, or a paltry $94 for each of the approximately 50,000 students. The majority of profits get funneled back into sports programs. And these are among the most profitable programs in the most profitable college sports.
To me, this just supports my opinion that college sports are no different from professional sports. That is, for everyone who isn't a student. The networks make money, the coaches make money, the athletic programs make money, but the students rarely benefit. Few of the athletes benefit beyond the value of their scholarships; even the most successful programs rarely see more than a handful of their athletes enter the professional leagues. The big sports live in their own separate worlds from the rest of the university; they're de facto independent. UT's football team is nearly a professional football team, just with burnt orange branding.
There's nothing wrong with making money. I endorse that vigorously. In fact, I want to go further. Let the players get paid. Get rid of the academic requirements. Let the programs keep all of their money instead of letting the schools siphon some off. Forget the pretense of the student athlete 2 and call Division I football what it is: a development league for the NFL.
1
#8 University of Southern California,
#11 Boston College,
#19 Brigham Young University,
#34 Wake Forest University,
and
#40 the University of Tulsa
2 Which only exists in less visible sports or lower divisions
There are a number of "engineered stone" countertop manufacturers all selling basically the same thing1. A handful of manufacturers dominate the market, and they're the ones you'll see at the big stores. Oddly, each manufacturer tends to have only a couple dozen colors, which means you're unlikely to find something just right from any given one. There's little difference in the product, and the costs can vary a lot, so it's worth knowing about the smaller players. I was unable to find a single, complete list of manufacturers that sell in the United States, so I had to find them one by one. Here's my list for future reference (yours, mine, whoever):
Rocksolid Granit (sic): this isn't quite the same as engineered quartz, but it's similar. An advantage with these particular people is that they install right over your existing countertops, eliminating the cost of removal and avoiding the need to go without countertops for a week 3.
It is unclear whether this is the same as the other quartz engineered stones, but it's similar. One article calls it engineered granite, but quartz is a key component of granite.
1 I am told they all license the same manufacturing Bretonstone process, which is probably why they all have the same mix of 93% quartz and 7% binder and color
3 Usually installers need the previous countertops removed for proper measurement, and it takes about a week for them to get the new ones fabricated and ready to install
The distribution of Federal Reserve Districts is clearly indicative of the era in which it was created. At first glance, it seems obvious that the 12th District needs to be split, while the 5 Northeastern Districts could be consolidated into 2 or 3. I wish there was a USA Mapper that did for the US what does for the world. That would make it clearer how they should be redrawn.
48 sub-cutaneous injections later, I have discovered I'm allergic to pretty much everything biological in Austin. Some of these are more recent developments.