Sports:
[S1] Mark Mangino, for my money one of the best coaches in college football, has been reduced to being an assistant coach at Youngstown State. I know there was an air of controversy surrounding his tenure at Kansas, but I would have guessed that someone would have given him a chance by now and figured that the reason he hadn’t coached was that he didn’t want to. He should be UTEP’s head coach right now, or better.
[S2] It has to be a mixed bag for the Tulane Green Wave when you get a highly sought-after recruit, but he is openly admitting that he is only there because his mother made him.
[S3] The case for leaving Lance Armstrong alone.
Environment & Energy:
[EE1] The potential health hazard of reusable grocery bags.
[EE2] Liberals and environmentalists have Gasland and Promised Land to warn of the dangers of fracking. Conservatives now have FrackNation and TruthLand.
[EE3] Some tribes in North Dakota are angry at their leadership for leasing their land to oil explorers too cheaply. The US and China both have a lot riding on shale.
Progress:
[Pr1] Google Glass and the end of privacy.
[Pr2] Did the neanderthals die out because they couldn’t hunt rabbits? Also, the father of all men appears to be 340,000 years old.
America:
[A1] The Episcopal evolution on gay marriage.
[A2] I’m attracted to the idea of region-based visas, as some counties aren’t producing/keeping enough natives, but I think trying to prevent free movement within the US would be difficult.
[A3] Experience tells us that even when there is a pathway to citizenship, immigrants often don’t take it. On the other hand, Mexican millionaires are fleeing to San Antonio.
[A4] Americans are renouncing their citizenship due to tax laws to become… British?!
[A5] Teaching the Eskimos. Or trying to. And the problems with top-down education reform.
Business:
[B1] HP is laying off 15,000 people, but if you quit on them and try to take some people with you, they’ll take you to court.
[B2] It may be verboten at Yahoo, and that may have been the right call, but John Schoen says telecommuting is here to stay.
[B3] Is the USPS’s “welcome kit” for people who just moved a violation of privacy?
[B4] Nobody likes a tattle-tale. Unless you’re Sharron Watkins. But then, she wasn’t actually a whistleblower so much as she played one on TV.
[B5] On the good side, it’s good that American commutes aren’t taking longer. On the nad one, a lot of that is attributable to the economy.
Entertainment:
[En1] I’m still way too excited about Girl Meets World. They’ve cast Cory and Topanga’s son.
[En2] A couple weeks ago, a Spiderman suit. This week, an invisibility suit! It’s actually kind of odd that there’s no iconic invisible superhero (The Shadow coming the closest to ‘icon’ status). Maybe it’s hard to make an icon you can’t see.
Thievery:
[T1] A butt-dial spoils a drug deal. A cell phone thief is caught when several stolen phones ring at once.
[T2] The ruling in Ohio that speed cameras are a scam hasn’t been getting enough attention.
[T3] West Virginia purchased Cisco routers for libraries that, at least in one case, are worth more than the library itself. $22,000. After a stink was made by the auditor’s office and the press, Cisco offered a refund.
Politics:
[Po1] Politicians think we’re more conservative than we actually are. I’ve long thought that the assumption that we were a socially liberal by economically conservative society had it backwards, for the most part. The problem for Republicans is that is that they’re losing the cultural issues that used to be an underestimated strength.
[Po2] If we ever wonder why our politicians are so robotic and distant, it might have to do with the fact that we give them a hard time when they’re not.
[Po3] I knew that a guy got fired from the Republican Study Committee for advocating copyright reform, and I knew someone started a petition that may just let us unlock our smartphones, but I didn’t know they were the same guy. Slate follows him around CPAC.
[Po4] Speaking of CPAC, I loved this ABC article on the attempts to find love there.
[Pr2]
You ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t Cro Magnon kind
I have no idea how this tracks to real life, but I am in the midst of a (very slow) re-read of The Once And Future King. In it, the King’s taciturn monosyllabic Master Huntsman, Twyti, who has successfully hunted all manner of beast, is said to wax rhapsodic about the hunting of one animal only – coneys – because successfully hunting them takes more skill than any other animal.
Does he ever track them to the island they came from? It’s a very amusing place.
I like their hot dogs.
At least with coney dogs, you know what kind of meat is in them. Tasty, tasty (and apparently hard to catch) coneys.
Fast food.
B2 — my brother-in-law owns a tech company; most of the engineering talent already telecommuted, allowing him to put together a staff of the best folk world-wide in that particular business. Recently, they closed their office. Everyone telecommutes, now. Significant cost savings from not having to run a physical facility. And meetings, etc., that aren’t done on line can be done anywhere in the world that works, with the company paying for travel, and still it a huge savings over paying for physical space.
with the company paying for travel, and still it a huge savings over paying for physical space
This is the kind of thing that amazes me, just absolutely blows my mind in the most wonderful we-are-in-the-future-right-now kind of way. I love this kind of thing.
[Po4]: They put the money line right there in the second paragraph: “I came here to meet a nice conservative girl, but I think I’m only gonna meet crazy conservative girls”. No further comment necessary.
[Pr2]: From the article, “it seems Neanderthals chose extinction.”
Aaghh! Such stupid stupid writing. Not Will’s fault, of course. But good god, is the concept of the editor completely dead in the world of journalism?
Yes.
“Alright, I’ve gathered you all here tonight because we have a rather important decision to make, and given its importance, and the fact that it will likely impact all of us, I thought we should hold a vote…”
“Extinction! I vote extinction!”
Ah, come on. Can’t we just kill some effin’ bunnies, instead?
[S3] – I mostly don’t have too much of a problem with the idea of just ignoring Lance at this point, but I think the article ignores the issue that makes his actions especially egregious and intolerable in a way that is not true for other doping cases – he actively sought to censor, throough litigation, and/or viciously defame anyone who ever offered a whiff of criticism.
Except to the extent its fun to needle people like our own Mike Schilling, I’ve never actually gotten terribly exercised about the Barry Bondses and Mark McGwires of the world, and I’ve always found the moralizing about what they did pretty hypocritical. That Lance was a massive doper, in and of itself, would perhaps be a bit more disappointing because of how inspiring his story appeared to be, but frankly would have been unsurprising and probably wouldn’t have much affected my view of the man. That he viciously smeared and censored anyone who he viewed as standing in his way, invoking the power of governments in the service of his revenge mission while almost certainly perjuring himself in the process (and not in the Barry Bonds-made-misleading-statements-to-investigators kind of way)…..well, that’s another story altogether.
Some of the attacks and lawsuits he’s now facing may well be hypocritical, but it’s hard to see them as anything more than him getting a taste of his own medicine (and really, just a taste since the attacks on him have the benefit of actually being true).
That’s a really good point, Mark. I didn’t think it would bother me all that much to find out that Lance was in fact using. But I did. I’ve never been sure why, but I think the smearing might play a big role in it on a less-conscious level. Some combination of that and his sudden about-face. Oddly, I think on some degree if you deny something for long enough, you don’t get the opportunity to “come clean.”
See also Rose, Pete.
I got 4 paragraphs in, saw the piece’s author
1. Use the phrase “going postal” to smear the USPS, and
2. Invoke the lawsuit against McDonald’s for the third-degree burns as a baseline for “crazy”,
and decided it was a faux-“common sense” waste of time. If I want John Stossel, I know where to find him.
Will, the Google Glass link goes to something about a 1980s show that I vaguely remember called Captain Power. It was a cool link but it wasn’t about the end of privacy.
I used to play that! They’re allegedly bringing it back.
A2: Also it would be unconstitutional.
It would depend on how we go about it I think. Would tying it to location be less constitutional than tying it to an employer like we do now?
Which is to say we can’t prevent them from visiting Hartford, but we could prevent them from getting a job there (unless Hartford wants them taking a job there).
The Privileges and Immunities clause might say otherwise but it might not apply to resident aliens.
Magnificent web site. Lots of useful info here. I am sending it to a few pals ans also sharing in delicious.
What’s with these spam links to Zimbabwe’s Standard? Another one just popped up over on the Bruce Wayne post at Blinded Trials. Apparently it’s a legitimate newspaper. Are you guys modifying the links to point there, or are these as submitted?