Living the Dream

This just came in the mail today:



I'm only going to own it for 10 days, but still. I never thought I'd have a copy in my possession for even that long.

How Not to PItch Your Work

Seriously.

The NYT Op-Ed Page

If you've ever fantasized, however briefly, about what it would look like if Steve Sailer had a column on the New York Times's op-ed page, this is probably a pretty good embodiment of that fantasy.

It's got it all: Direct engagement with Dowd; a willingness to talk about racial and ethnic stereotypes; and some actual datapoints with which no one would ever be willing to seriously engage.

The High-Water Mark for 60 Minutes?

Good thing the president didn't have to follow that.

Nintendo's Project Atlantis

Unless you're waaaay into videogames, you probably never heard of Nintendo's "Project Atlantis"--a secret, high-powered hand-held system that Nintendo planned to succeed the original Game Boy, but which never materialized. Like something out of DARPA, Atlantis's existence has long been the stuff of half-rumor. Now Galley Friend M.R. sends us this amazing link to a story on Atlantis which should be of interest even to non-gamers because there are a bunch of business lessons in it:

Presumably [Atlantis] established a baseline for the GBA [Game Boy Advance]; Nintendo president Satoru Iwata mentioned in his keynote today that the company's game design guru, Shigeru Miyamoto, has a tendency to recycle good elements of failed projects years down the road, and that philosophy likely extends to hardware as well. (In fact, Kuwahara showed off a GBA touchscreen peripheral he had worked on that never saw the light of day but almost certainly mutated into the DS.) But the 1996 target date for Project Atlantis and the GBA's 2001 release is quite a gap. Why the delay?

My guess is: Pokémon. Game Freak's socially-driven cockfighting RPG was an unexpected end-of-life hit for the Game Boy, and its out-of-left-field success added years to the fading system's life. The popularity of Pokémon might actually have been the first time Nintendo realized that technology and profitability don't go hand-in-hand. This happy windfall let them subsist for a few more years on the far more lucrative Game Boy Color, whose components were downright ancient by the time it launched -- making for a machine that was very, very inexpensive to manufacture, and thus a much-needed way to soak up money while N64 sales fell behind PlayStation and third parties began to drift away.

That in turn gave Nintendo time to perfect their 32-bit handheld . . .

Mickey Kaus: Hero

I think that in the past I've said some not-nice things about Mickey Kaus, his cleverness, etc.

I take it all back. All of it.

Kaus has posted a thread from inside Ezra Klein's JournoList. Go read it now, before it disappears. You can't imagine how awesome it is.

Seriously, you cannot possibly imagine the hotness.

But Mickey, I beg you: Unleash the redactedness!

Update: Galley Friend M.L. emails, "Feeling this much pleasure must be bad for you."

Kind of like this:

The Left's Bill Buckley

Ezra Klein, who Ross Douthat calls "the William F. Buckley of movement liberalism," had a heart-felt post the other day about President Obama's historic address to the Iranian people. Said Klein,

There are times when it's hard to believe that this is how my country acts now. That somewhere in government, some young bureaucrat had the idea that the President should publicly honor the Iranian New Year, and that bureaucrat felt that her superiors would also think this a good idea, and, indeed, the thought went all the way to the President, who agreed that a display of engagement and goodwill was consonant with our national values and foreign policy goals.

Of course, as Mark Hemingway notes, President Bush did basically the same thing last year.

The entire thing seems pretty indicative of the problem with having 20-something pundits who don't actually know anything. They feel free to hold forth about the weaponizing of space or getting rid of the Air Force or caucus politics in Nevada without knowing anything more than what was in the major papers that day (and what other bloggers said about those stories).

(Just to be clear, that weaponizing space link isn't a jab at Galley Friend M.G., it's an example of actual reporting taking apart glib pontificating.)

Variety is reporting that the Farrelly brothers are working on a remake of The Three Stooges. If all works out according to their plan, Sean Penn will play Larry, Jim Carrey will be Curly, and Benicio del Toro will be Moe.

While they're at it, how about a score by John Williams, Janusz Kaminski as d.p., with a screenplay by Steve Zaillian?

Dear God--BSG, The Board Game!

Galley Friend K.N. has recently lost her husband to The Battlestar Galactica Board Game. I hadn't heard of it before, but this reviewer's description makes it sound incredibly interesting:

Players each choose a character from the cast of the television series. Each player, on his or her turn:

1. Draws skill cards (which double as action cards),
2. Optionally moves to location on Galactica (or Colonial One, or, as a pilot, through the space around Galactica),
3. Activates a location or plays an action on a card (or, as a pilot in a Viper, moves again or fires at Cyclon raiders and basestars in order to protect the human fleet),
4. Draws and resolves a Crisis Card.

Most crisis cards depict a distressing event (with art and text from the television series), be it a food shortage or a lost scouting party, and offer a choice and/or a skill check to be made to minimize the damage to Galactica or her resources. Skill checks are resolved by players secretly contributing positive (matching color/type) or negative (incorrect color/type) skill cards. In addition, many of these crisis cards also activate enemy ships or move the Galactica closer to making its next jump.

But all that would just make for a typical cooperative game. Each player also receives a secret loyalty card that indicates whether they are a treacherous Cylon (skinjob) or a human. The humans attempt to survive the journey to Kobol (by making jumps that total at least eight units, plus one additional jump to end the game) whereas the Cylons do their best to sabatoge the human effort, either covertly (which involves a great deal of bluffing and secretly tipping the scales via secretly played cards) or overtly (by revealing themselves as Cylons and just hammering at the Galactica with all the tools a revealed Cylon has). Furthermore, halfway through the game another set of loyalty cards is dealt, such that there are a total of two Cyclon players (in a five player game; the number of Cylons and sympathizers varies based on the number of players).

All I'm saying is, it's a good thing Galley Brother B.J. lives on the other side of the country.

Thank You Dr. Emma Russell

Agence France Presse reports that the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego has had a significant breakthrough in the development of cold fusion. And boy are those Russians pissed!

Math, Self-Esteem, the Jindals, and the McCains

There's a fascinating aside in Megan McCain's interview with Supriyah Jindal:

Megan McCain: I went to Space Camp twice as a child and wanted to be an astronaut growing up. I am still a fan of hers.

Supriyah Jindal: So what happened along the way that made you change your mind about becoming an astronaut? See, something happened.

Megan McCain: As I got to high school, I was told I was bad at math and got discouraged.

Supriyah Jindal: See, and there is no need for that. I am sure you were great.

I wonder why Mrs. Jindal is so certain that McCain was "great" with math. Isn't math the sort of subject where talent is reasonably easy to spot? It isn't like, say, poetry or political science, where a child's latent genius might easily go under-appreciated. If you're good at math--particularly the type of algebra, geometry, and elementary calculus which is taught in high schools--then don't you tend to, you know, do well in math?

The exchange is so wonderfully revealing. McCain doesn't say that she was bad at math, she says that she "was told" that she was bad at it. And Jindal immediately assumes that McCain was simply the victim of some Larger Force which didn't want the child of a powerful and important man to succeed in school.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Republican party. Good luck in 2012.

AV Porn

If you've gone receiver shopping during the last 10 years, you probably noticed that receivers, like other pieces of home electronics, have gotten cheaper while adding more features--Dolby 5.1, DTS decoding, room correction, etc.

I always assumed that this was an unalloyed blessing; but then, I'm more of a videophile. For me, five-channel sound was always most important, and then in service to movie watching. I very, very rarely listen to two-channel sound, which is where you notice actual sound quality.

Gene DellaSala has an interesting essay about how advances in circuitry and computing power have made it possible to put more features into AV receivers. But DellaSala notices that these advances have come at a price: The non-silicone parts of a receiver, which are responsible for sound quality, have been gradually cheapened.

A must-read for home theater junkies.

Notes from the Undercover

Galley Friend Bob Hamer on Jockeys and a case he worked on race-fixing. Fascinating stuff, including this little perfect study in irony:

Nicknames were commonplace. Among the many I dealt with were Fingers, the Mouth, the Greek, the Broom, and the Printer. It’s a long story and I detail it in my book “The Last Undercover,” but the short version is I managed to the worm my way into the group. One gambler questioned if I was a cop. Thus my name around the track became “Bob the Cop.”

And this brilliant scam:

The investigation did uncover a pretty sophisticated tax scheme. Under federal tax law, any winning wager where the odds are 300-1 or greater require the winner to fill out tax forms prior to cashing the ticket. In track parlance it’s known as a “sign-up.” The track automatically takes out 28% of the winnings before paying off the bet. Thus a winning bet of $10,000 pays only $7,200. Now winnings can be off-set by losses, but that entails keeping losing ticket stubs and preparing tax returns at the end of the year. Most gamblers don’t want the hassle, and many don’t want their spouses to know they spent the afternoon at the track. Thus the “signer” comes into play. For a fee he’ll sign for your ticket, filling out the IRS forms in his name.

Without the help of Turbo Tax, the Mouth took this to a whole level, and I grudgingly admired his ingenuity. Mouth would sign that $10,000 ticket and give you back the $7,200, if not more. He would then gather up losing tickets, often for bets he never placed or losing tickets he shared with other gamblers. Since these losing tickets equaled the dollar amount of the winning tickets, he had off-set all of his so-called winnings. By the next tax season he was collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax refunds…all because those winning sign-ups he claimed to be his were off-set by the losing tickets he claimed to be his. It was a perfect scheme. The track didn’t really care because he was providing a service to those patrons who were winning. The patrons weren’t going to complain because they too were violating the law. The violation was rather difficult and time-consuming to prove so the IRS wasn’t interested in investing the manpower to guarantee a successful prosecution. I got lucky and caught the Mouth. He did my sign-ups. He went to trial, was convicted, and served time in federal prison.

The BSG Series Ender

I didn't like it much. I have a few thoughts, about the final episode, the fourth season, and the series in general, but first a couple caveats: (1) If you did like the finale, don't take any of this as me trying to argue you into unhappiness. (2) The final episode's failures fall to Ron Moore, but my initial inclination is that they don’t significantly diminish his overall achievement and the greatness of the show. That said, there were some things to like, most notably:

* I particularly enjoyed Cavil’s suicide. The spontaneous ceasefire which preceded it was ridiculous. (Cavil gets on the phone and calls off all Cylon forces? What kind of phone is that?) But when the situation goes south and Cavil sees no way out, I like that he chooses suicide. The essence of Cavil is his sadism. Read de Sade and you see that the heart of sadism—more than cruelty, even—is the idea of blasphemy. We’ve been told that they Cylon religion forbids suicide, so for Cavil to off himself is his last fuck you to the God that he insists doesn’t exist, but spends a lot of time and energy rebelling against anyway. Nicely done.

* The CiC as the Opera House felt quite satisfying.

* I liked the idea of Racetrack’s nukes being triggered by accident after her death because it harkens to one of my favorite tropes, the idea of a grenade falling from a dead man’s hand. I’ve been a sucker for that ever since the final confrontation between Kwinn the Eskimo and Dr. Venom.

That aside, there were a great many things that I found troubling about the episode because they either didn’t make sense or ignored what the series had been doing before. I won’t go into all of them, but here are a few, in ascending order of importance:

* That final montage proves that when the Third Cylon War breaks out, we’ll have the Japanese to blame.

* BSG has been, to a large degree, a show about choices. When Helo is wounded, Athena is given a choice: save him or chase after Hera. She chooses Hera, which is the right thing to do. But then Helo survives anyway. As a dramatic device, that’s cheap and out of character for the show.

* The writing of Bill Adama had faltered in recent weeks. The Galley Wife noticed this first. Here’s her spot-on diagnosis:

So much of Adama’s character has always been done with subtext. Side-long glances, a mumbled grunt, a slow stare. For a lot of season four, Adama became more sentimental, less in control, and more wordy. The ur-example was in “Daybreak, Part 1” when Starbuck says to Adama, “I don’t know what I am” and he answers her, “I know what you are. You’re my daughter.”

In the first few seasons, Adama would have simply said, “I know what you are.” And we would have seen the daughter stuff, making it much more elegant and powerful. All that nuance was gone by the series finale.

I completely agree.

* So Starbuck, post Eye of Jupiter, is an angel. Okay. There was a time when I would have bought that. Except for this: BSG has been showing us angels since the very first episode. In that time, they’ve established an (admittedly informal) set of rules for how angels work: They’re seen by people one at a time; they appear and disappear; they can’t physically interact with the world. To then fundamentally change those rules with 10 minutes left in the series is a sign of writerly failure. It’s quite a lot like Buffy throwing away its core concept about slayers (“one girl in all the world”) 10 minutes before the end of its series finale.

* Way back in season 1, the Cylons went to a great deal of trouble to put Helo and a model 8 together, hoping that they would fall in love and manage to reproduce. They did, giving us Hera. But by the end, we had no idea why she was so important to the Cylons. Or the humans. The thing about Maguffins is that while they don’t have to be important to us, they do have to be plausibly important to the protagonists.

* Trusting Cylon Centurions with a basestar while retaining no weaponry of your own is just a “risk you’ll have to live with”? Somehow I don’t think the colonials would be willing to live with that decision seeing as how they fought a civil war to stop from integrating with the skin-jobs.

* This leads to a deeper complaint: The finale turns its back on one of the animating ideas of the series, which was that politics is inherently messy because even in the most dire times, people never agree, totally, on anything.

But here we are on earth, finally, and in 48 hours the colonials decide to abandon all of their technology, destroy their spaceships, and scatter into small agrarian communities? This kind of civilization-changing, irrevocable decision seems like it would spark an enormous political conflict.

* And that leaves aside the more practical consideration: How long do you think small groups of humans with no practical skills could survive trying to live off the land on a foreign planet? They won’t have access to sources of power. They won’t be able to work metals. Or manufacture medicine. Helo and Athena say they’re going to teach Hera how to hunt. With what?

Look, I get that it’s just a TV show and I’m really not trying to pick nits: It just seems pretty clear that if the colonials set down on a new planet and tried to rebuild their civilization starting with all available tech and a single city, they’d have had some small (1-in-20?) chance of survival. By splitting up and trying to work the land in small groups, they’ve signed their species’ death warrant.

* Finally, there’s Moore’s big idea in the finally: his rejection of technology in favor of humanism (and possibly even deism). In fact I’d argue that Moore is actually going even further: By having the colonials settled into small, remote, agrarian groups, he’s rejecting not just technology, but civilization itself. That’s certainly a Big Idea. But without passing judgment on it, qua idea, I just don’t believe that the people we’ve spent four years watching as they tried, at every turn, to cling to the fragile memory of their civilized selves, would suddenly decide that the answer to their problems is to jettison the little civilization they had preserved at such great cost.

Ezra Klein = William F. Buckley?

I confess to knowing little about Ezra Klein (that is, aside from the reports about his keen wit and hard-eyed professionalism). But is he really, as Ross Douthat suggests "the William F. Buckley of movement liberalism"?

Wouldn't a much, much better analogy be that Klein is a liberal Grover Norquist?

Isn't it obvious that JournoList is a pumped-up virtual version of Norquist's Wednesday Morning meetings?

Williams to Paper: "Hey WaPo, how my ass taste now?"

I don't think one first-round tournament win can completely vindicate a coach, but Maryland's Gary Williams has certainly made the Washington Post look really stupid.

Again--I have no dog in this fight. But I do find it curious that the big local paper would launch something approximating a crusade against Williams. Did the institution ever go after Georgetown's John Thompson in a similar manner? Local Hoya fans would know better than I do, but my sense is that they did not. Even during his latter years when Thompson was driving the program into a ditch. And I'd argue that Thompson's Georgetown program and Williams's UMD program were roughly equivalent: clean, up from nothing jobs with several Final Fours and a national championship.

The difference, of course, is that Thompson was, without a doubt, one of the worst coaches ever to work the bigs. Seriously: Has any Div. I coach ever gotten so little from so much talent?

But Thompson was, for a variety of non-basketball reasons, untouchable. When his son was hired, I said to VLM, "I hope he's good. Because even if he stinks, you can't ever get rid of him."

I was (kind of) joking at the time. But now I'm not so sure. This is a serious question for the Hoya Paranoia crowd: Let's grant that it is entirely too early to declare Thompson the Younger a failure. He's already got a Final Four appearance under his belt and even the best coaches how down years. But just for the sake of argument, how bad would the Hoyas have to get for Thompson to lose his job?

Would a string of NIT berths with the occasional first- or second-round NCAA result be enough to keep him ensconced? I suspect that it would. And I'd bet that even with that sort of mediocrity the Post would never dare campaign against him the way it did Williams.

Damn You CBS!!!!!!!!

CBS no longer allows its media player--which delivers all of the NCAA early-round games to your desktop--to work on Macs.

They will, however, allows you to stream the games on your iPhone, provided you pay for their app and are hooked into wi-fi.

Cold comfort, that.

Update: DO NOT buy the CBS iPhone app. It stinks.

NCAA Day

Czabe has a Sweet 16 tourney going on, pitting hotness against hotness. The most deadly region? The East Rutherford Models pod, which pits Bar Rafaeli against Marissa Miller in a first-round matchup.

The committee really blew that one.

Carlson-Stewart II

In which Galley Friend T.C. takes apart the only guy on Comedy Central less funny than Dane Cook.

You can dismiss this as payback or whatnot. And that's fine. But it doesn't change the fact that T.C. is, in every particular, dead right.

For instance, on the Cramer ambush:

Stewart summed up the significance of what Cramer had said on the tape: “You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG, and all this derivative-market stuff,” he said sternly.

Except that you can’t draw any such line. In the video, Cramer hadn’t mentioned derivates or securitized loans or credit-default swaps, or any of the other exotic financial instruments that caused the fall of AIG and the current recession. There’s no evidence that Jim Cramer had anything to do with any of that, and Stewart didn’t offer any.

Before Cramer could defend himself, Stewart moved on to a new charge: Cramer and his colleagues at CNBC had known that the financial sector was in imminent danger of collapse, but had pretended otherwise—a ruse that Stewart described as “disingenuous at best and criminal at worst.”

This was even more farther-fetched. A ratings-hungry TV network had the scoop of the decade but decided to sit on it? Why? In order to curry favor with soon-to-be-disgraced corporate executives? It didn’t make sense.

On Stewart's real-fake-real journolistic treatment of Democratic presidential nominees:

at times Stewart seems like less a comedian than a courtier to the establishment. In August 2004, a week before the Republican convention, Stewart got an interview with then-candidate John Kerry. At the time, reporters covering Kerry couldn’t get closer than the rope line, so the interview qualified as a booking coup.

Stewart squandered it embarrassingly. His first question (after, “How are you holding up?”) was: “Is it a difficult thing not to take it personally” when your opponents are mean?

“You know what it is, Jon?” Kerry replied. “It’s disappointing.”

Four years later, Stewart had become, if anything, even softer. Over the course of a reverential eight-and-a-half minute interview with Barack Obama six days before the election, Stewart failed to ask a single substantive question, much less venture into policy (though, as with Kerry, he did open with, “How are you holding up?”). Instead, like the cable-news morons that he often criticizes, Stewart stuck strictly to the horserace, at one point even resorting to a sports metaphor.

And he sucked up, hard. “So much of this has been about fear of you,” Stewart empathized. “Has any of this fear stuff stuck with the electorate?”

Facing puffballs like this, Obama coasted through with snippets from his stump speech. The result wasn’t simply uninformative, it was boring. Obama didn’t say a single interesting thing, and Stewart wasn’t funny.

And on the fact--which no one else seems willing to say out loud--that Stewart simply isn't funny:

A serious man needs a serious mission, however, and this is suddenly a problem. With Bush gone and the Republican Party in chaos, most of Stewart’s targets have disappeared. Yet rather than pivot with the times and challenge those now in power, Stewart continues to attack the same old enemies, at this point mostly straw men and pipsqueaks. A couple of weeks ago, he spent an entire seven minutes mocking the crowd at a CPAC conference.

His studio audience loved it, though that isn’t saying much. Stewart’s audience would erupt if he read the phone book, or did his monologue in German, a response that over time is a threat to any man’s soul. During many segments, Stewart’s audience doesn’t laugh so much as cheer, a distinction that would bother most comedians. Stewart keeps them around anyway. Uncritical praise corrupts absolutely.

As Stewart becomes more self-righteous, he inevitably becomes less funny. Sanctimony is the death of humor, and also of innovation. Where a show like South Park challenges its audience’s every conceivable assumption, The Daily Show has become safer than Jay Leno, pandering night after night to the converted."

Seriously: Just give David Brock that time slot. He'd get the same numbers. The only difference would be that the rest of the media wouldn't bother to pretend that Brock was either funny or sage.

Or give Dane Cook the slot. He'd get better numbers with material that might, every five episodes or so, earn an actual snicker.

The Supernote

Galley Hero Bob Hamer has a post up over at Big Hollywood about a North Korean counterfeiting ring and Operation Smoking Dragon, an FBI sting operation that snared the guys passing around phony $100 bills so good that they're dubbed the "Supernote."

It's a fantastic post but the kicker here is that Hamer is the UC agent who ran the operation. Stone. Cold. Stud.

Still More Than Meets The Eye

Variety reports that Paramount and Dreamworks studios have announced a release date for Transformers 3. Not 2, mind you, but 3. Which by then will probably match Autobots and Decepticons with Dinobots, Gobots, Voltron, or Space Giants. My vote is for Space Giants.

Cohen, Cramer, Stewart

Richard Cohen dares to criticize John Stewart, which will no doubt anger Stewart's hundreds of thousands of fans.

But Cohen seems to misunderstand the most vile aspect of the Cramer/Stewart fight: It was prompted not by Cramer's shoddy financial advice, which people who pay close attention to this stuff have been mocking for years.

No, John Stewart only discovered what a contemptible figure Cramer was after Cramer had the audacity to criticize President Obama.

It's not clear to me that there's any foundational difference between Stewart and David Brock, except that people in the mainstream media feel the constant need to genuflect before Stewart.

One Shinging Moment

The Czabe has a nice tribute to the history of the "One Shining Moment" montage--including the first-ever OSM!

The Rob Liefeld Obama

What I don't get is this: Where are the president's pouches?

Fighting Words

Jimmy Akin doesn't think BSG will hold up well:

I don't think BSG will hold up that well: In the effort to make the characters realistic and flawed, it's gone too far.

I think in future viewings, a couple of years from now when the immediacy of the first run has worn off, the characters will too often come across as cartoons of the gritty, profoundly flawed hero type (like Wolverine became in the comics). It won't be possible to take them seriously because they are so over-the-top flawed and are constantly being put in situations designed to milk the maximum amount of emotion out of a situation, no matter how implausible the results.

I'm just trying to get a rise out of you--Akin's post is typically thoughtful and well-considered. For my part, I have no idea how Battlestar Galactica will hold up, but for a different reason: The series is so tied to 9/11 and the West's conflict with (radical) Islam that it's not clear to me how this period will be remembered/regarded in the future and without knowing that, no way to know what lens BSG will be viewed through.

(Important note: I don't think that this is a shortcoming of the series by any means. It's clearly an attempt to seriously grapple with the issues of the day in a serious manner. If that limits its long-term playability, so be it. I'm not complaining.)

You should read Akin's post, though. Very smart, very interesting writerly stuff.

Who Do You Have in Your Final Four?

The Fetish Final Four, that is.

I've got Facials, Tentacle Rape, Robot Sex, and Barely Legal, with Tentacles over Barely in the finals.

Obviously.

(Why Robot? Because it's a 12 seed!)

KSK Does Watchmen

This is sheer genius. Everything about it. I can't even imagine the man-hours it took.

Do yourself a favor: If you only waste five minutes of your time today, waste it on this.

The Current Financial Crisis and Cylon Resurrection

One of the potential holes in Ron Moore's Cylon back-story is his explanation for Cylon resurrection technology, which, unless I'm mistaken, goes something like this:

For a very long time, Cylons could not achieve sexual reproduction, so they "reproduced" via download, or "resurrection." Then something happened and Cylons could reproduce sexual reproduction, so they abandoned resurrection in favor of it. They turned their backs on resurrection technology for so long, in fact, that when they needed it again, nobody could quite figure out how to make it work any more. Or rather, it took a group of very smart Cylons working together for a very long time to reverse-engineer the tech.

The obvious problem being, how does an advanced civilization "lose" the ability to create an old technology. It sounds a little contrived; but maybe not.

Today's Post carries an op-ed about credit default swaps by David Smick, which essentially makes the point that we have this giant financial system and nobody actually knows how it works:

I suspect Obama's advisers would like nothing more than to dismantle an irresponsible firm such as Citigroup. They are afraid to do so, for one reason: All the big banks are connected to a potentially lethal web of paper insurance instruments called credit default swaps. These paper derivatives have become our financial system's new master.

The theory holds that dismantling a big bank could unravel this paper market, with catastrophic global financial consequences. Or not. Nobody knows . . .

In addition, Geithner worries that because the troubled insurance giant American International Group (AIG) is a conduit for the banks' use of credit default swaps, a collapse of AIG (as an unintended consequence of dismantling the big banks) could be catastrophic. AIG's more than 300 million terrified holders of insurance-related investments and pension funds, who have investments totaling $20 trillion (U.S. GDP is $14 trillion), could suddenly rush for redemptions -- the equivalent of a run on a bank. Geithner would face a worldwide insurance collapse to accompany his global banking collapse.

Or again, maybe not. Nobody knows.

Maybe resurrection technology looked just as opaque to the Cylons.

Seat licenses?

Adding to what my colleague Mr. Last said back in January in the Wall Street Journal, Ben Casselman keeps the ball rolling in his recent Journal entry, "Luxury Strikes Out". Just one tidbit:

Top-level ticket holders can actually park inside the [Dallas Cowboys] stadium building, then relax in the more than 200,000 square feet of clubs and lounges. The priciest boxes are at field level, with patios just feet from the Cowboys bench. Players will pass through the attached club on their way to the field.

Season tickets along the sidelines at Texas Stadium used to cost $129 a game, compared with $340 a game for similar seats in the new stadium. To earn the right to buy season tickets, fans must buy "personal seat licenses"--a one-time, up-front fee that can run as high as $150,000 a seat.

Dallas-area real estate agent Linda Taylor says she was shocked to learn that the $130-a-game Cowboys seats she'd had for years at the old Texas Stadium would jump to $340 in the new building--and require a $35,000 seat license.

"It just seemed crazy, especially for true fans. It's different if we were a corporation," she says. Ms. Taylor and her family ended up paying license fees of $16,000 per seat for seats that aren't as good as their old ones.

I mean, really? (Needless to say, both Casselman and Last are must-reads.)

Dr. Manhattan Blue Himself Early

Galley Reader D.H. sends along this suggestion as to how Zack Snyder might have improved Watchmen. If he had been willing to depart from the source material to replace Dr. Manhattan:



With Dr. Fünke:



The dramatic possibilities stagger the mind. For instance, imagine the internal tensions in a god-like figure who nonetheless is compelled to wear cut-offs.

All of that said, I have some thoughts on Watchmen which I'll share at a later date, for reasons that a couple readers already understand.

Revolution Number... 20?!

Thanks to Galley friend A.F., aka The Walrus, I just listened to what is purported to be a recently unearthed Beatles song. Or at least a take of one. Over at Never Get Out of the Boat!, you will find a recording of "Revolution 1 (Take 20)" that runs all of 10 minutes and 46 seconds. The first 4 minutes are rather conventional and are pretty much what ended up on the White Album. Acoustically inclined with a few electrical zips here and there plus the subtle doo-wop ("shoobie-doowop-bop"), "Take 20" then descends into the anarchy and cacophony we saw bits of at the end of "I am the Walrus" and "All You Need is Love" and which ultimately climaxed with "Revolution 9." Yes, I'm just making this up as I go along. In any event, it ends with Yoko Ono saying something to the effect of "you become naked." (Not that any of us should ever picture her naked.)

UPDATE: After telling The Walrus that, not knowing it was Yoko's voice, it kind of sounded hot, he told me to go to YouTube and type in "Lennon" and "hound dog" (the actual link was broken) and ask myself again if I thought so. I am so sorry I ever held that notion. Warning: This link is not for the faint of heart.

A Look at Fortune, circa 1936

The Pig has some great images from an issue of Fortune from November 1936, hard by the Depression.

The Death of Newspapers

Czabe has a truly radical suggestion: Newspapers should get out of the internet altogether and be print-only.

It's so crazy it just might work! Surely someone should at least experiment with it, no? What's the worst that could happen?

How Influential Is Rush Limbaugh?

The carefully orchestrated elevation of Rush Limbaugh to Grand High Muckety Muck of the Republican party is a confluence of interests. It's in the interest of the Obama administration to have Limbaugh as a foil and it's in Limbaugh's interest to be seen as such.

Without taking a side in the question of whether or not Limbaugh fairly represents the face of the Republican party, I'm interested in a notion which everyone involved--even Republicans who object to Limbaugh--seems to stipulate to: That Limbaugh wields enormous influence. Is that true? Does Limbaugh really matter in any important way?

I don't mean to be churlish. My own tastes in talk radio run exclusively toward sports talk, so I've listened to Limbaugh very little. On the few occasions I have listened to him--maybe 30 hours, total--he wasn't my particular cup of chamomile. But really, who cares what I think? He has lots of listeners and plenty of professional radio people seem to believe that Limbaugh is very good at what he does.

Yet I'm not convinced that either of those things mean Limbaugh is influential.

Let's take Limbaugh's large daily audience. I'd argue that raw audience size is a very imperfect indicator of influence.

Consider television. From 1998 to 2005, Everybody Loves Raymond was among the top 15 rated shows on TV. For five of those years it was in the top 10. It averaged 17.4 million viewers. Was Everybody Loves Raymond influential? I would argue that the show left a very small--maybe non-existent--cultural footprint.

If you sift through the Nielsens from recent years, you'll find a number of highly-rated shows pulling in tens of millions of viewers, which were basically invisible after the credits rolled. This is true even at the very top of the heap: CSI and Home Improvement each finished #1 overall and yet, had they been canceled in the middle of their ratings dominance, I doubt anyone would have noticed.

That said, sometimes high ratings are an indication of influence. American Idol has been the top-rated show for the last four years and might be one of the most influential programs in the history of the medium. My point, however, is that it's a mistake to assume that raw audience equals influence. You often see small shows (The Sopranos, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica) creating much larger (and longer-lasting) impacts than shows which draw many times their audiences.

So if the size of Limbaugh's audience isn't the determining factor of his influence, what is? Well, I'll assume that Limbaugh can send a crowd of people toward a weblink if he mentions it on his program or his website. But crashing a server doesn't take all that much. Slashdot and Boing Boing can do that, too. Can Limbaugh sell books? I'm not being pedantic--I honestly don't know the answer to this question. But if Limbaugh really is influential, then the mere mention of books he likes ought to be enough to routinely put them high on the NYT's best seller list for weeks, the way Oprah Winfrey's approval does.

But for the purposes of this discussion--political power--we have pretty good recent examples of Limbaugh's influence. I understand that Limbaugh (and other conservative talk-radio hosts) weighed in heavily against the Bush immigration deal. That deal failed. But was this because of Limbaugh? Maybe. But presumably Limbaugh was against a great number of other Bush initiatives that passed--No Child Left Behind, Medicare prescription drugs, the omnibus energy bill, the Detroit bailout. (I'm just guessing here; if I'm incorrectly ascribing views to Limbaugh, I apologize in advance.)

The 2008 primary season provided a particularly good indication of Limbaugh's level of influence. He seems to have supported Mitt Romney. Despite Limbaugh's support, Romney received only 4.7 million votes. The candidate Limbaugh favored least and argued against most--John McCain--won the nomination. Again, I'm not a devotee of Limbaugh's show, but my sense is that Limbaugh made his distaste for McCain very apparent. Republican primary voters paid little heed.

After the Romney flame-out, Limbaugh began promoting what he called "Operation Chaos," where he instructed listeners to vote for Hillary Clinton in Democratic primaries. Limbaugh claimed a good deal of credit for her subsequent victories, but I've never seen any data which suggests that his influence was significant, let alone decisive. To the contrary, almost all of the Democratic primary results--both before and after “Operation Chaos”--fit within a stable racial, socio-economic model.

Finally, in the general election, I presume that Limbaugh favored (to some degree) McCain over Obama. Again, Limbaugh's influence failed to materialize.

I'm open to the argument that Limbaugh is influential; but I don't think there’s a prima facie case for it. On the contrary, I'd argue that the evidence suggests Limbaugh is an expert entertainer in a medium with a small cultural, intellectual, and political footprint. He has very little influence in the world of ideas. And when it comes to actually energizing the masses toward action, his record is, at best, mixed.

Limbaugh’s powers of influence seem more on the level of Howard Stern. At his peak, Stern drew about 13 million listeners, which is in the ballpark with the 14 million or so Limbaugh has drawn through most of this decade. Like Limbaugh, Stern was credited with having a great deal of influence on his listeners. But that influence never really materialized beyond his ability to get people to tune in to a show he was giving away for free. Stern's one attempt at translating his influence to the movies failed--the 1997 Howard Stern’s Private Parts opened to $14 million and grossed only $40 million. And when Stern moved to subscription-based satellite radio, his audience let him go without a second thought.

Netflix Porn

Or is it? Galley Brother B.J. sends word that Netflix stocks an R-rated version of the big-budget porntacular Pirates II.

I understand that porn producers shoot lots of different versions of every film. I think it was in a New Yorker story about the industry a few years ago that a producer from one of the big houses compared, in a very unsettling way, his company to the indians Native Americans, saying that they used every single scrap of the buffalo.

But how do you get an R-rating for material spliced down from hard-core?

Sports Bubble, cont.

The Pig sends along this story suggesting that the NHL is already in trouble. He gives a rundown of the most vulnerable franchises--here's a taste:

ATLANTA

This could be a blueprint of how not to operate an expansion franchise. General manager Don Waddell is by all accounts a lovely man but he has become the Inspector Clouseau of the NHL. Despite having prime draft picks every year the Thrashers rank even below the much-maligned Maple Leafs in player development.

The Hockey News recently ranked the Thrashers 23rd in prospects. And, when they did get a solid player, Waddell has lost him. In eight seasons, the team still is looking for its first playoff game victory.

The team's fan base has eroded. Attendance dropped another 7.9% the first half of this season -- second biggest drop in the NHL. It has cash flow problems which hasn't been helped by a collective agreement that forces it to spend at least $41-million.

Nobody really knows if Atlanta would support an NHL team because, in all honesty, it never has had one of NHL calibre.

If the NHL bought out the owners and folded the team it would be considered a mercy killing. Or, if a less desperate solution is more to Bettman's liking: Keep the team; fold Waddell.

NASHVILLE

A 27 % share of the Predators got tied up in minority owner William Del Biaggio's bankruptcy hearings. Del Baggio has been accused in three lawsuits of providing forged documents to financial institutions to land multimillion dollar loans that he has not repaid. Del Biaggio is just the latest NHL owner being fitted for a pinstripe suit courtesy of the U.S. government. The NHL may lead all of pro sports in the number of owners who could audition for a starring role on Judge Judy.

Meantime, the team can't score on the ice, or with fans. Management revealed it considered buying thousands of unsold tickets so it can qualify for a full share of the NHL's revenue sharing plan. Through 22 home games, the Predators' average paid attendance was 256 tickets short of the 14,000 average required for a full share of the revenue-sharing pool that netted the team $12 million last season.

The plan gives small-market clubs money that the NHL collects from the 10 highest-earning teams. The amount franchises receive falls if certain attendance figures aren't achieved.

Predators lead owner David Freeman made an estimated $50 million selling a medical waste disposal business. So, when it comes to waste you'd think an expert like Freeman would recognize it even if it was disguised as a hockey team. But, he says his reputation as a businessman is at stake, and he wants to make hockey work here. So, as for Jim Balsillie buying and moving the team?

"There is no Plan B," Freeman said.

Pity.

How bad will things get with pro sports? No one knows. My guess is that, in the median-variant scenario a bunch of minor leagues (WNBA, Arena, MLS, MLL) fold, NASCAR retrenches from its quasi-mainstream status, and the NHL loses a franchise (or two).

One of the things that interests me a lot is what happens to the PGA. I don't know a ton about the tour, but it seems heavily reliant on financial services sponsors. If that's true, then that money should dry up pretty fast and, even in an economic recovery, may not return for some time. What does golf do? Cut back tour stops? Cut back purses as they rely more on TV and gate revenue? Is there enough interest in the LPGA to keep that tour going?

That Must Have Been Quite a Speech!

I haven't heard it myself, but Hugh Hewitt says that Rush Limbaugh's address to CPAC "will be talked about for years and even decades."

Must be some speech. I mean, there have probably only been--what?--three, maybe four, speeches from the last 35 years that could fit such a description and all of them were by presidents. (I'm thinking Reagan's Goldwater infomercial; Carter's malaise speech; and then Reagan in Berlin. Maybe you have others.)

So its kind of amazing that we get two generational, historic-grade speeches--Obama's opus on race in America and Rush at CPAC--within just a few months of one another.

The Sports Bubble

Galley Friend P.G. sends along this Bill Simmons column about the economic future of the NBA and, if Simmons' reportage and math is to be trusted (this isn't a dig--I really have no idea), then the immediate future looks grim.

My Gift to You

Always late to everything, I offer up this under-appreciated gem: the FX series Damages.

Caught the first three episodes last night. It's very, very good. Crazy good.

But don't take my word for it--you can check out the entire first season for free on Hulu.

The Death of Plasma?

A week or so ago, Pioneer announced that it was leaving the plasma market. Vizio is out of the plasma market too and now there's word that LG may abandon plasma as well.

I wish that someone--maybe Santino?--would write a big reporting piece explaining what this all means. So far as I can tell, plasma is technically superior to LCD (though the gap has narrowed) and is competitive, maybe even better, price wise. So why is LCD outselling plasma 8-1?

On first blush, I wonder if this has something to do with computer displays: Maybe having a built-in manufacturing base for all of those LCD computer displays gives LCD a giant edge in production costs? Though that only matters for manufacturers, not consumers.

For my own part, I love my Pioneer plasma set and have no plans to replace it until I leapfrog into an OLED.

Gary Williams as Bush--Updated--Again

Paul Mirengoff has a pretty interesting discussion on the Washington Post's campaign against U. Maryland basketball coach Gary Williams. The assault seems to be done in concert with the UMD athletic department.

I've got no dog in this fight and I understand the nature of conflicts between AD's and coaches. But it seems at least a little strange that a coach who has won a national championship in the last 10 years and is still playing .500 ball is being attacked, at least in part, because he doesn't do ethically questionable recruiting. Whatever else his faults, Williams seems to be one of the cleaner guys in a very dirty profession.

Update: Galley Friend P.G. writes in to throw some cold water on my romanticized vision of Williams:

I've got to disagree with you on Gary. As anyone knows, nobody is above being fired at the college ranks, regardless of history. Gary has presided over the fastest decline of a national title winner over the past 2 decades. No team, upon winning a national title, has failed to make the tournament 3 of the next 6 years. Teams win a national title and then turn that into building a formidable program that contends every year. Gary has done the opposite. Furthermore, Gary's program was so perfectly situated in the heart of the best high school basketball metro area in the nation, right when some of the best talent ever to emerge from this area were ready to sign. The list of players Gary missed is insanely long, including some guys who are going to be NBA HoFers. And almost all of them cite Gary as the reason they didn't go to UMD. He doesn't play freshmen enough and he doesn't recruit players he thinks will be one-and-done. Gary also isn't as clean as he likes to claim, he has long-standing ties to the controversial Pump Brothers. Furthermore, the practice Gary claims is dubious, hosting AAU games, he's done himself (Nic Caner-Medley).

Look, Gary's title was a fluke. He won a national title with a hard-working over-achieving group because the best HS players for that stretch of time were not entering the college ranks. They were going straight to the pros. This gave Gary a window to win a title with juco transfers and hard working players, and he took advantage of it. Gary is a fantastic game coach, perhaps the best at the college ranks. But he's a TERRIBLE recruiter, and a disinterested one at that. His claim that his job is not to recruit is simply crap. It is his job. And not everyone is dirty, while Gary is clean. There are plenty of clean programs that are more successful than the Terps. Gary is just a lousy recruiter, and he should be fired.

Then, the Czabecast talks a little bit about the Sickest Recruit of the Year, the decline of Duke, and Gary Williams' moral vanity:



Update 2: Galley Reader writes in to offer a qualified defense of Williams:

The truly accurate point that Paul makes is that the coverage is out of whack. So much of this has to do with the Post focusing so intently on Maryland's basketball program - both in how many reporters they assign to cover the team, and which reporters they are - and it's true of local radio as well. Hell, they act like any program on the other side of the Potomac is basically nonexistent (one of the reasons they had no clue who any of the Mason players were during the Final Four run - it was comical to watch Comcast and see paid reporters weigh in on players they hadn't ever seen in a single game before the tournament).

It's true that Williams is a subpar recruiter. But he gets incredible production out of the players he does recruit, and he's always on the bubble in the second-toughest basketball conference in the country. Without him, I think Maryland would quickly drop to the level of UVA.

Further, look at this. So when Gary does try to land a five star prospect, it "reeks of desperation"?

I'm not even a Maryland fan, and this stinks.

Is There a Wonderlic Caste System for Basketball?

Steve Sailer asks if centers are generally smarter than players at the other positions in basketball. I don't have anything like a real answer for this, but my initial observation would be that the two most intelligence-demanding positions would be center and point guard.

The point guard position is fairly obvious: You need to know the plays, and everyone else's position in the plays. But the position probably also requires a better handle on spacial relations than the others because you have to see so passing lanes so consistently.

I think you can make the case that the center and PG positions are also the least athletically demanding roles on the basketball court. They're physically demanding--you can't play center if you're short--but that's very different from innate athleticism. The 2, 3, and 4 positions all let you paper over nearly every possible deficiency with raw athleticism in a way that the 1 and the 5 really don't. And it might be true--I'd have to think about this some more--that when the center position is properly played it demands the second-best court vision and passing ability on the floor, because you have to see double teams on the post and understand how and where to kick the ball out.

What I've always wondered about centers is this: What percentage of men over 7-feet-tall play Division I and/or professional basketball? I'd wager that I've never seen a 7-foot-tall man who wasn't a high-level basketball player--in the tens of thousands of people I've walked past on the street, in the airport, etc, I've never seen a 7-footer.

So is being born to be 7-feet tall like winning the lottery? Is it a free pass to a paid-for college education and/or at least some professional sports money? What percentage of 7-footers do make it to that level? 5 percent? 10 percent? 60 percent?

I've never quite figured out a way to find the data on this.

Clover Field Test

Over the weekend I did a little piece on Starbucks as a leading indicator for the broader economy. In the course of the piece, I mentioned SBUX's acquisition of the company that makes Clover coffee machines--space-aged contraptions that brew individual cups of super-premium coffee. How super-premium are we talking? The machines are $11,000 each and the coffee they make sells for about $4 a pop. For regular coffee.

In any case, in March of 2008, shortly after the Clover machines debuted, SBUX bought the company which produces them. The idea at the time was to put a Clover in every SBUX, ramping up the company's luxury status. Events have since rendered this idea impractical. Almost a year later, only 51 SBUX stores have a Clover.

All of this is prelude to saying that this weekend I found a small, independent shop which bought a Clover machine before SBUX scooped up the franchise. And I bought a cup of the $4 coffee. And while it was good, even pretty good (I had a Guatamalen light roast) it wasn't worth more than $2.50 and didn't measure up to Misha's Caravan Blend, which is the reference coffee for Washington, D.C.

NBA All-Star Game

After descending to self-parody a few years back with the WNBA-NBA "3-ball" team-up, this year's All-Star game will feature something people might actually want to watch: NBA H-O-R-S-E.

If it's a success, why not go all the way next year and have H-O-R-S-E game featuring not just current players, but legends, too. Would you tune in to see Larry Bird and John Paxson take on Kobe and Ray Allen?

Professional Wingman

In today's WSJ, Hannah Karp has a fantastic profile of Julian Jones, a fellow who lives in Vegas and whose job is, as far as I can tell, to hang out with pro athletes and keep them out of trouble. You have to read this thing.

When the Journal finally puts together a sports section, it's going to blow the doors off everything else around.

The Case for the Cylons

That sounds more provocative than I mean it. Prompted by Robert Farley's brilliant essay arguing that Tom Zarek and Felix Gaeta are heroes, not traitors, I've tried to explore the other side of the argument: That a Colonial-Cylon alliance carries real advantages for humanity.

Like, for instance, hundreds of 6's and 8's running around looking to get pregnant. I'm just saying.

But I also argue that we can't pass a final moral judgment on the Cylon empire quite yet. You may not be convinced.

Destiny Calls

Every so often, two visionary souls with unique visions combine to create a work of staggering genius. Today, Santino brings word that Brett Ratner is going to direct a movie based on Rob Liefeld's Youngblood.

There will be no feet.

"Jerry, we're all at the same skill level."

Remember tough-guy Michael Westbrook? He's into MMA now. And he's not exactly fighting within his weight class. Click through and watch the video.

In Defense of Christian Bale

No, not from me--from the largest fame-whore on the planet.

You didn't think Bale would go totally undefended, did you? This is America. Nothing is indefensible.

Like a scene out of 'Tropic Thunder'

In the midst of filming the latest Terminator movie, actor Christian Bale goes off on the d.p. for walking in the background of the set, which Bale finds distracting. At one point he yells to the director McG, who I picture cowering somewhere in the shadows. (Yes, I would be too.) It also doesn't help that the d.p. has the name Shane Hurlbut.

(Bale also mentions Bryce Dallas Howard and, I suspect, associate producer Bruce Franklin when he says, "No, shut the fuck up, Bruce.")

PSA

For a limited time, you can buy the entire run of the New Yorker on DVD for $20.

Basestar Galactica?

Last Friday's episode ("The Oath," 4.13) was seriously great, a sign that Moore may have a tighter grip on his end-game than I gave him credit for. Some spoiler-filled thoughts (in case it's still sitting on your DVR):

* I'm a fool for Navy porn, law of the sea stuff and the legal implications of Gaeta's mutiny are awesome to contemplate. Mutiny is a crime worse than treason, worse than collaboration. It's hard to see how Adama could grant amnesty to any of the mutineers. When the admiral said that there will be a "reckoning," what he really meant, I suspect, was "mass executions."

* All of that said, we're used to seeing mutinies portrayed as the product of villainy, ambition, or some other nefarious impulse. The Galactica mutiny is particularly interesting because the mutineers are objecting to a very real, very serious action: The integration of two hostile cultures by military force. In TV Land, these sorts of integrations usually go seamlessly with the cultures reconciling and the one or two holdouts dispatched or converted. In the real world, this is the type of conflict that causes civil war.

* Who knew Gaeta had this in him? Or rather, who knew Gaeta would be so effective as a mutineer? We've seen hints for a long time that Gaeta is ambitious and willing to question authority (his questioning of the election; his service to Baltar). What we hadn't seen was cool, collected bluffing with everything in the balance. (For a brilliant exploration of Gaeta's progress, see this.)

* The final Big Think point of "The Oath," however is that Adama and Roslin share a large part of the blame for the mutiny. Since finding Earth, the two of them have been out of sorts. They became inward-facing and muddled, disengaged from the life of the fleet. "The Oath" affirms the notion that weakness is a provocation.

Sailer on QBs

Some fantastic stuff from Sailer about the creation of the quarterback caste:

I was going to mention that a cool thing about 2-time Super Bowl winning quarterback Ben Roethlisberger (besides his being Swiss-American) is that his sports upbringing seemed more old fashioned Jack Armstrong-like go-outside-and-play than that of so many of the new robo-quarterbacks who are raised by their fathers from the cradle to be NFL quarterbacks. The Sideline Dad has become as ubiquitous as the Stage Mom.

For example, Notre Dame's quarterback Jimmy Clausen was held back two years by his parents so that as a high school senior at expensive Oaks Christian in Ventura County, he was a 19-year-old man playing against 17-year-old boys, making him the top-rated high school QB in the country. He also had two older brothers who had started at QB in the SEC, and had a former NFL QB as his private quarterback tutor since he was 10.

Quarterback is turning into something of a caste. Now the quarterback at Clausen's old high school, Oaks Christian, is Nick Montana, whose dad is some guy named Joe. But don't worry, there's still hope for boys whose dads aren't NFL Hall-of-Fame QBs. It's said that the Oaks Christian second string QB next season will likely be Trevor Gretzky, the son of an immigrant.

Anyway, Roethlisberger was this enormous kid (he's now 6'-5" and 241 pounds) with fantastic coordination who played three sports in high school. Basketball was his strongest emphasis in high school, then baseball (where he played shortstop), and then, finally, football.

Dept. of Awesome

Ed Driscoll caught Detroit's NBC affiliate doing some Philly-stizz hate on Sunday: Every time Matt Millen appeared on screen, the local affiliate ran a crawl saying, "Matt Millen was president of the Lions for the worst eight-year run in the history of the NFL. Knowing his history with the team, is there a credibility issue as he now serves as an analyst for NBC Sports?"

Can we get Charlie LeDuff to find the guy at the station who came up with the idea?

Gun Porn

The best part of David Frum's New Majority is the weaponry column by "J. Moses Browning," who, I'm happy to report, is a friend. You can find Browning's archive here. It's crackerjack stuff for anyone who's into weaponry, guns, and ballistics. Don't miss it.

Mark Steyn Goodness

Writing about the corporatization of rock:

Rockers attending the Obama inauguration are like visiting royalty at a Bourbon or Habsburg wedding. By the way, over the years I've met kings, princesses, dukes and all the rest, and none of 'em were as hung up on precedence as the aristorockracy. A decade or so back, Sting had to issue a formal apology because at one of his big save-the-rainforest banquets at his country pile he committed the ghastly social faux pas of seating Jools Holland (of the band Squeeze) next to some no-name session musician. In Britain, these guys all live in stately homes, and any of their number who makes it to 50 without choking on his own vomit or being found face down in the swimming pool gets knighted - Sir Elton John, Sir Mick Jagger, Sir Paul McCartney, etc. Obama's pal Bono has a knighthood. You say you want a revolution? Sorry I'm having tea with the Prince of Wales that day.

Final Super Bowl Note

My guess is that going into the 4th quarter, a lot of people who had the Steelers and the under were feeling pretty good.

Steam vs. Sail

Advantage: Blogosphere!

(Courtesy of Galley Friend P.G.)

The King Is Dead

After Wimbledon last year I wrote that the age of Federer was over. Although the Swiss took the U.S. Open to close the season, I'm holding to that. Yesterday's Aussie Open final between Federer and Nadal was the final act of deposition.

Nadal did not have his best day, they were on the fastest court in the majors, and Federer still couldn't win. Nadal has slowly taken away each of Federer's redoubts--his dominance in finals, his dominance on grass, and now his dominance on hard courts. Federer has nowhere left to go, no plausible case to make to himself for how he can beat Nadal. As a measure of how deeply this is weighing on his psyche, look at Federer's first-serve percentage and his return of Nadal's second serves. More than any other facet of the game, those are moments that a player has nearly complete control over. And yesterday Federer was dreadful on both. In the fifth set, he was completely unmanned, spraying the ball all over the court. It was the collapse of a player who is seeing the end--not of a match, but of their career.

That's why Federer cried after the match. He understood that this loss meant that he is in eclipse. And at 22, Nadal will only get better.

So what's next? I honestly don't know how Federer will go on. He'll show up to Roland Garros and get blown off the court again. His window to take another major probably closes altogether at the end of 2010. And for him to win another one, he'll probably need help in the form of someone else sneaking up on Nadal in the other half of the draw.

As for Nadal, he now has as good a chance to win the Grand Slam as anyone since Wilander. And I'd put his chances of beating Sampras's record a little better than Federer's.

Super Bowl Round-Up

Meh. A championship team that can’t get in the endzone on 1st-and-goal given 8 plays is kind of pathetic. That said, I hear Omar Epps is available when Disney is ready to make The Mike Tomlin Story.

The highlight of the broadcast was the Hulu ad, which was funnier even than most episodes of 30 Rock:



Home. Run.

What's the Dumbest Thing You Read on the Internet Today?

Because I doubt it could top this.

Is There a Sports Bubble?

Galley Hero Steve Czaban says yes! I think he may be right.

But the bubble isn't the classic one you might think--bubbles are, in the strictest economic sense, formed by speculators and pro-sports doesn't have a lot of those. There are a pretty small number of owners who are all in it for the relatively long-haul.

Instead Czabe thinks, and I agree, that the bubble may be on the demand side for both tickets and stadiums. If there is a bubble there, then the stadium-revenue model for pro-sports, which undergirds every league, could be in for a big correction.

Samantha on Style--Updated

Galley Friend Samantha Sault has launched what I suspect will become D.C.'s indispensable fashion blog: SamanthaOnStyle..

Sam should be the go-to alternative to the ridiculously overrated Robin Givhan because she (a) knows a truly insane amount about fashion; (b) has a sense of humor; and (c) knows how to write.

It's like Washington has gotten its very own Fug Girl.

Update: Why is Sam so money? Because of posts like this.

The A Team

So which will be worse? The Stephen Sommers G.I. Joe, or the Joe Carnahan A Team?

Santino Goes Global

Video, a link on Drudge, and a confrontation with Fenster.

A star is born.

PSA

Courtesy of Galley Friend P.G., it turns out that the Circuit City "liquidation sale" is a fraud.

Just one more example of why this chain deserved to die.

Bad Robot

Galley Wife S.L. sends along this link to J.J. Abrams's TED speech. It's a pretty good talk, and possibly worth your 18 minutes. But what's particularly interesting is the revelation that Kevin Weisman's "Marshall" character from Alias was basically a spot-on imitation of Abrams.

T.O. Gets His Own Reality Show

VH1 is to blame. But the really interesting bit in the story is that it seems Owens has replaced his old publicist Kim Etheridge--the gal who awkwardly boasted that Ownes had "25 million reasons to live" after he kind of/maybe attempted suicide.

Aussie Open Notes

How about Jelena Dokic? Her match to get into the quarters was one of the gutsiest things I've seen on the women's side in years. All of my memories of Dokic were of her as a hot-shot teen, storming Wimbledon--to see her making this run as a 25-year-old, in her adopted homeland, with all the things she's seen in recent years, is pretty wonderful.

Looking at her now I'm struck by how old her eyes look. It's rare to see someone finding redemption like this on a tennis court. Good for her.

In other notes, have you seen ESPN's addition to the telecast: the blonde, super-thin trainer/TV personality Tiffany Cherry? That's the most ready-made porn name I've ever heard.

Aussie Open Notes

How many times will Richard Gasquet break my heart? In tennis there are usually a handful of players with the skills and physical gifts to be champions. Non-physical factors separate these players from the champion: work-habits, circumstance, timing, luck. But the head counts for so much--I fear that by this point, Gasquet is so far gone that he'll never win a major. It's crazy: Gasquet has top-5 talent. He's a brilliant shot-maker, the best serve and volleyer left in the game, he has amazing feet.

And for my money, his game is, Federer excepted, more fun to watch than anyone on the tour. It's a thing of beauty.

But having match point in the third, going to a fifth, holding serve, but blowing 5 break points, and then losing 12-10? This is the type of loss that haunts you your entire career.

In fact, I suspect you can trace today's defeat to Gasquet's similar collapse at Wimbledon against Murray last year.

Screw the Dark Knight

Santino does the work for me.

BSG: Decline and Fall?

Ellen Tigh.

So what do we think about that? For my part, not very much. But after reflecting on the first episode of season 4.5 ("Sometimes a Great Notion," ep. 4.11) for a week, some thoughts occur to me:

* There was a lot to like in 4.11, first and foremost being the suicide of Dualla. Moore and writers David Weddle and Bradley Thompson needed to convince us of how severe a blow Earth's false paradise was. Dualla's suicide accomplishes that and fits within the arc of her character, which has been trending toward deep unhappiness since New Caprica.

But it does something more: It serves as a stunning indictment of Lee Adama. The young Adama has his father's ambition and sense of command but has always been corrupted by an enormous egotism. Remember the first moment we met him: He was being bitchy and condescending to the Galactica's deck crew because he wanted to be sure that these people, who he'd never met before, understood his displeasure with his father. Lee showed that kind of righteous self-absorption over and over again, but the writers never made him pay for it with the audience. They always left a way for people to overlook Lee's flaws and see him as the fair-haired boy that we want to see.

In episode 4.11, Lee is standing in front of his ex-wife, a woman whose heart he treated very shabbily, and she is clearly in distress. Yet he's so blind to the world that he keeps talking about himself and his own troubles that he can't see that she needs saving. And so Lee walks away, still thinking of himself, while Dualla puts a gun to her head.

* Meanwhile, what's up with Lee's father? The admiral hasn't been himself for a few episodes now--crying and wallowing and, in 4.11, trying to goad Tigh into killing him. If you go back in time, you'll note that this unraveling of the great admiral began when he admitted that he had fallen in love with Laura Roslyn.

I think there's something going on here about romantic love being incompatible with command. And I like it all the more because it's being explored purely with subtext.

* As for the big reveal, I really don't know what to make of Ellen Tigh being the fifth cylon. Maybe it will make sense after some explanation. (I think it's now clear that when Deanna told one of the final five "I'm sorry, I had no idea" back on Kobol that she was speaking to Tigh, not the obscured "final Cylon.")

But my real fear all along has been that Moore is creating the show's mythology on the fly and not according to a long developed, pre-conceived plan. As with any show that has a deep mythology to it, that's a path to narrative chaos.

This interview is particularly unsettling because Moore says that he decided Ellen would be the final Cylon during the third season. Two problems here: (1) The importance of the final five seems to have occurred to Moore as the series was progressing; and (2) So did their identities.

We've seen this kind of unraveling before with very good shows--Alias, Lost, X-Files, etc. A great concept is sustained for a few seasons but then peters out because the showrunner didn't know ahead of time what the final act would be. It's fine to freelance your mythology during production so long as you know where you'll eventually end up.

I maintain that BSG will successfully conclude if it can coherently answer two questions:

(1) What happens to the humans?

(2) What was the Cylons' plan?

If Moore can get those two answers right, then nothing else really needs to be explained. We don't need to know who was on earth or what the 13th tribe was. We don't even need to know what happens to the mass of cylons presumably still hanging around Caprica and points West. (Remember, throughout the series, we've been watching a conflict between a small band of humans and, one assumes, a reasonably small group of Cylon chase ships. The main body of the Cylon civilization and navy is most likely still back around the colonies doing whatever it is they do. In that way, the series is a lot like Master & Commander: We're at the far edge of the earth watching a struggle that's really only important to the two players involved in it.)

In any event, if Moore loses sight of those two big questions, or garbles them with other questions, the chances of BSG holding together in the final reckoning decrease. He's done so much right that I'm happy to follow him to the end; I just hope his conclusion is worthy of his beginning.

The Penn Family

The Oscar nominations are out and, of course, Sean Penn got a Best Actor nod for Milk. I haven't seen the movie--maybe it's great--but I did get a funny email over the weekend from Galley Brother B.J., who exited the theater wondering whether or not Harvey Milk was mentally handicapped. I assured him that the real Milk was not.

His reply:

So why does Penn have his Magic Retard Face^TM on the whole movie? Was he just trying to stack the deck for the Academy, worried that playing gay and martyred wasn't enough?

Maybe. Sean Penn seems to get a lot more credit than he deserves as an actor. How many good performances has he given over the last decade? But sadly, his brother Michael Penn seems to get almost no credit at all for being one of the better singer/songwriters of his generation.

I'll grant that Penn's stuff (Michael, I mean) isn't designed to be hugely commercial. But, to my ears it's incredibly catchy and smart; pop music for people who read. And I'd argue that what he does--finding new and clever and beautiful ways of saying things which have been said millions of times--is harder than putting on a Magic Retard Face^TM by an order of magnitude.

But to restore your faith in the Academy, how great is it that Melissa Leo got a nomination? She's a total stud.

The Eye Is Watching

I noted elsewhere Venus Williams's refreshingly non-worshipful shrug at the Australian Open when asked by reporters about the magnificence of President Obama. If you haven't seen it, it's worth following the link and reading the exchange just for the sheer novelty of seeing a celebrity say that they don't really know anything about politics and aren't too excited by it. Sample awesome:

Q. Politics aside, does it inspire you with the inauguration and with president‑elect Barack Obama?

VENUS WILLIAMS: Can you be more specific, please?

Twenty-four hours later, Venus was bounced in three by the unseeded Carla Suarez Navarro. Punishment for her deviationist views?

No Escape From D.C.

Even the Australian Open broadcast won't stop talking about the Obama inauguration, in the most reflexively slobbering tones imaginable.

It's all kind of confusing: 46 percent of the country voted against Obama. You would think that people in business might want to avoid potentially antagonizing such a big chunk of consumers.

Apparently not.

The Debacle

A few thoughts:

* Objectively speaking, these Cardinals are surely the worst Super Bowl team in the modern era, no? Who are the other contenders? The Stan Humphries-led Chargers? The '86 Pats? The Grossman Bears? At least those teams had impressive regular season records padded from being in a weak conference. This Arizona team doesn't even have that.

And for the record, if the Eagles had won, I think they would have been the worst Super Bowl team ever.

* Did you like that pass interference no-call on the final drive? Kind of beyond comprehension. I choose to blame George W. Bush. It seems incontrovertible that President Bush is the one who picked up the red phone and told The Commish that the Eagles' 4th quarter drive better not end in anything crazy.

Look, you can say what you want about Bush, but on his watch, he did what he had to do to keep America safe. And you and I both know that the consequences of a World Series/Super Bowl double for Philly would have been terrifying.

* Where does this rank in the Pantheon of Philly losses? I'd say it's up there. Way up there. The only loss I can think of that comes close is the NFC championship choke against Tampa Bay.

That Tampa Bay loss was hideous. First, it was against Tampa Bay, an expansion franchise which had been hapless for it's entire existence. Second, Philly was home, and favored. And finally, Tampa had some ridiculous streak--something like 0-54--in games where the temperature was below freezing. That streak ended in Philly.

On the other hand, Tampa actually won the Super Bowl. Arizona is going to get crushed.

* On the bright side, only 111 seasons of Philly sports left until our next championship. Rock on.

Updated Final Thought: How many QB's have taken two different teams to a Super Bowl? How many have won with two different teams? I'm not a football stat-head, but those must be very short lists. So you would think that between this accomplishment and his insane career numbers that Kurt Warner would be regarded as one of the great quarterbacks of all-time--at least in the top 20.

Yet he was buried on the depth chart under Matt Leinart after being kicked to the curb for Marc Bolger. Neither of whom, I'm guessing, will make the Hall of Fame.

Which just goes to show that true meritocracy doesn't really exist anywhere, even in the NFL, which is about as much of a pure capitalist, results-oriented marketplace there is. Situations matter. Personalities matter. Non-talent, non-results-based decisions get made all the time because the people charged with making the decisions have other agendas.

Eagles Stag Film

Philly Love and Baltimore Hate, Together At Last

KSK:

I was at a game at an interleague game at Camden Yards in the spring of 2004 (this being still when the Or-ee-oos were the closest available MLB team to me) during the brief period when the Ravens were trying to orchestrate a trade for Terrell Owens which he nixed in favor of going to Philly (even T.O. isn’t dumb enough to want to play for the Ravens). The game was between the Giants and the Orioles, yet an entire section of Eagles fans had gotten tickets for the express purpose of chanting “WE GOT T.O.! WE GOT T.O.!”

Yes, at a game between the San Francisco Giants and the Baltimore Orioles, a group of Eagles fans had bought up an entire section at a baseball game and driven in just to taunt people from Baltimore about a football transaction that had taken place in the off-season. And this wasn’t a quick little chant. It went on FOR FOUR FULL FUCKING INNINGS! And nobody tried to stop them, save shooting them the occasional ugly look.

It's funny on so very many levels.

Headline of the Day

"Extensive reshoots for WOLVERINE... Is Fox financing it with some new glowy blue money?"

BSG Tonight

I confess to being somewhat worried that BSG has placed so much store on the reveal of the final Cylon. To my mind, the most crucial questions of the series--by which I mean, the questions that, if answered in a satisfying way, would make the series a final success--were:

(1) Where do the humans go?

(2) What was the original Cylon plan?

(3) Is there a reconciling between human and Cylon cultures?

(4) Whose theistic views are correct? The pagan humans or the monotheistic Cylons?

I've always thought that if Ron Moore et al could answer those questions is a satisfying way, then the series would have an enormously successful conclusion. Instead, we seem to have reached a place where series turns on a twist reveal, like an M. Knight Shyamalamalaman movie. Narratively speaking, I think that's dangerous ground on which to make your final stand.

All of that said, I'm not as down in the mouth as Gregg Easterbrook, who says that nothing about the Cylons makes any sense.

Instead, I'd posit that everything about the Cylons makes sense, if and only if the Cylons are right about there being one god. If the Cylons are right, then we can view the series as grounded in a sort of Old Testament ethos--a universe where there are prophets and visions and the hand of god actively moves among the earthly. If that's what's going on, then we can explain and believe the Starbuck's visions, Leoben's prophecies, etc.

Also, if I were a betting man, my guess would be that Adama is the final Cylon. He's the only character who makes sense narratively, logically, and theistically.

Tragedy in the Desert

Here's the Czabe on what that Eagles +4 line is really saying:

Think about this: if a team had beaten another team by a 48-20 margin in the regular season, even if it was at home, how on earth would they only be 4 point road favorites? Makes no sense right? Unless it makes perfect sense. Arizona is one of those typical “front running” teams, just like their fans, who are SUDDENLY on the bandwagon. Now that the Cardinals have a chance to go to the Big Game, I think they’ll play like a house on fire. Plus, isn’t Philly’s move to CHOKE when everything is perfectly lined up for them? This is who they are. This is what they do. Westbrook, hurt. Boldin, back. Nah. Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb aren’t this lucky. PICK: Cardinals 38-21.

I have no retort.

Jim Johnson Puts You On Warning

KSK has Jim Johnson's Match.com blurb:

I coached the number three defense in the league and am really the only thing that’s kept Andy Reid employed the last few years. I’m four years younger than Old Man LeBeau up there and twice as dessicated. And I’ll send nine guys after your quarterback up 30 points in the 4th quarter on a 3rd and 20, ’cause I don’t fucking like your face.

Deserve's got nothin' to do with it.

Lereah Watch

Another hit-piece on David Lereah, this time courtesy of the WSJ. You should read, and savor, it all. But just to tantalize you:

* Lereah claiming that was only following orders!

* Lereah's wife lamenting that they have "an expensive lifestyle" and that her husband needs to make some more money so they can still afford the housekeeper, the country club, etc.

* Lereah explaining how great he is now as an analyst: "I feel I have such a refreshing view now because I'm not representing any interests."

(Is that even English? What is a "refreshing view"? Does Lereah actually have one, or does he just "feel" like he has one?)

The best part is the revelation that Lereah is now working for himself, advising "Japanese companies" (he's huge in Japan!) and churning out a weekly newsletter on the housing market, for which he charges $495 a year.

Lereah says he's got "under 50" subscribers now--which could also mean 2 subscribers--but expects to have 1,500 by the end of the year. The market for his refreshing views is red-hot!

And the Oscar Goes To . . .

Sean Penn, Milk!

Give Me Odds

Who will be the first to run this headline next week:

"And The Government Will Be Upon His Shoulders"

On vodka

I now know of three people who are involved in the ever-expanding luxury vodka industry. One works at Diageo, an empire of alcohol whose vodka products include Smirnoff and Ciroc. His house is never dry, though it comes close when I am there. Another is an old friend from New Jersey who invested in a fledgling company a few years back and from what he tells me, the numbers already look good. The brand is called Americana Vodka and if you consider yourself a patriot, you'll buy it! Not that it is available everywhere. Yet. But up in the tri-state area it is certainly in stock. Just look for the handsome angular bottle with hues of red and blue. The cap is actually a cork. And the flavor... well, it is vodka after all so there really shouldn't be a taste or smell. But it is extremely smooth and does have a clean finish. Try making a vodka martini with it or mix in some club soda and a twist of lime. No, I do not get any kickbacks for supporting Americana Vodka. I'm just doing my job. As a patriot.

If you cannot get a handle of Americana, be on the look out for another fine brand known as Koval. The website has not yet gone live but the distillery site is here. At the moment, Koval is a husband and wife team. Robert Birnecker left his job at the Austrian embassy and his wife left her tenured teaching position to move back to Chicago and devote themselves fully to the operation. Ultimately they plan on distilling not only vodka but fruit brandies and other liqueurs. Since the age of 16, Robert has been interested in distilling, watching his grandfather at work back in Austria. That sort of professional craftsmanship he is now carrying over to Chicago. The potstills are imported from Germany.

You're probably thinking there couldn't be a more perilous time for such ventures. After all, isn't there already a glut in this market (think Grey Goose, Ketel, Belvedere, Chopin, Imperia, Stoli, Absolut, Smirnoff, Van Gogh, Level One, Hanger, Effen--yes, Effen Vodka--Skyy...)? Robert would argue that with a wealth of expertise and knowledge and just the right amount of careful marketing, there is still room for good vodka. (We both agreed that Svedka has got to be the worst.) He also pointed out a few misnomers. For instance, just because a vodka is super-filtered (Absolut is more filtered than Ketel) does not make it better or more enjoyable.

Robert had recently done extensive taste tests on vodkas (not actually ingesting) and considers--next to Koval--a Polish vodka to be superior. Unfortunately he forgets the name. He used to enjoy Absolut but not as much these days. He is not a fan in the least of Grey Goose. If Koval is not on the shelf, what would he prefer? Ketel One.

They are living the American(a) dream. And I wish them all well. No, I do not expect a case of vodka to come my way. Maybe a bottle? In any event, they at least are doing something they love. Or at least I hope. I asked Robert if his wife (and business partner) likes vodka. He said, "She does now."

Superman Co-Creator Draws Fetish Art

He was young, he needed the money.