Ramblings in a State of Insanity
zenith
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Posts by zenith
Big 10 Divisions
Sep 3rd
When I heard the Big 10* was splitting into two divisions that would culminate at the end of the year with a single playoff game between the two divisions to determine a Big 10 winner, I was undecided. Would the Michigan-Ohio State game get lost in the shuffle? What if it wasn’t the end of the season? Would we all die???
Turns out the divisions do not suck and I find myself mildly pleased. Not overly enthusiastic because I am mourning the loss of the UM-Penn State game — YOU PENN STATE PEOPLE KNOW WHO YOU ARE — but it is far less a bag of suck then what usually comes out of college football. The divisions are:
* Michigan, Nebraska, Iowa, Michigan State, Minnesota and Northwestern.
* Ohio State, Penn State, Wisconsin, Illinois, Purdue and Indiana.
I liked the addition of “protected games” although some of them are a little contrived. I also realize everyone wants Michigan to play Nebraska every year as a big marquee game. They kept the Michigan-Michigan State game and the Little Brown Jug game. I think it works out. Sure, no more UM-Penn State, UM-Purdue or UM-Wisconsin games, all staples of the schedule, but I think we’ll live.
I also suspect this has been engineered to absorb Notre Dame and Missouri. No one has made any particular secret that the dream is to expand the Big 10 into a 16 Team Supergroup**, sort of like a Velvet Revolver of College Football. Or maybe Them Crooked Vultures — it has Dave Grohl. But that means Notre Dame and Missouri have to sign up. I bet they will — it makes the Big 10 huge and the ad revenue on TV will be even more astronomical, astronomical-astronomical, than it is now. The lure of filthy lucre will pull Notre Dame, forever going ‘I will not be seen with those stinky State Schools***’ into its ugly orbit. And Missouri will want to play Nebraska. But what do you do about the Michigan-ND rivalry since the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry is protected? Complications!
The only big hitch? This entire system is all predicated on Michigan not sucking. And that, my friends, is hilarious.
My points:
1. I am not horrified by the Big 10 divisions.
2. But I am a bit sad at the lack of some of the staple games I look forward to every year. And the yearly mockery.
3. I look forward to a glorious 16 team future! Where there are 16 teams! … or at least 14.
4. I like the playoff game to determine a Big 10 Champion. Now if we can have interconference play between other conference champions that built up to some kind of, oh, I don’t know, playoff system at the end of the season, all the better.
Update:
Eric points out that the addition of Missouri and Notre Dame would make the Big 10 the Big 0×10. They are all engineering schools, right?
* Now with 12 team action!
** Mysteriously still called the Big 10. State schools save ND, and we don’t count gud.
*** Unless it’s college hoops.
It’s Savage Out There
Sep 2nd
I saw NBC Universal, ABC and Telemundo trucks. The NBC Universal guys seemed to be slouched, bored, and having a smoke. I also spotted the FBI (very early) and several brand new “NO SKATE BOARDING SIGNS THIS MEANS YOU” signs which, I suspect, are a coincidence. Some photographer yelled at me to get out of the way while standing in the parking lot of the Panera — I don’t know what was up with that. I was passed on the way back from lunch* by people wearing press passes. They all looked bored. There are 17,392,531 security guards standing around the Discovery Channel building but they’re all talking among themselves.
No sign of our local normal Crazy Sign Guys. Not even Jesus Guy or our Local Anti-Abortion Protesters.
I see the news has moved on to Yet Another Exploding Oil Platform and Burger King being sold for $4B. The World Moves On. Also, my brain is now completely consumed with the new Big 10 divisions. No Michigan-Penn State games in 2011 or 2012!
Steam tofu on rice — thrilling, yeah?
The Discovery Channel Building
Sep 2nd
I went to the gym today. I was feeling particularly virtuous because it meant I went to the gym multiple times this week. I even managed to keep my heart rate “in the zone” (below 140) for the majority of the time on the cross-trainer and it left me feeling a bit sore in places that need exercise. I mention this because I had a meeting at 1:30pm and I needed to pick up lunch and be back by around 1pm-ish. Had I gone at my normal time, I would have been locked out of my building.
I walked back into the building at 1:06pm, annoyed a few people, sat down to my desk, and heard people talking loudly about something going on across the street. Then I heard the police sirens. I have a big wall of windows. I can see actual weather and time, but I can also hear the street noise from 29 and the Silver Spring Metro (Red Line). Most importantly, the building is across the street from Discovery Channel HQ and most windows have a view.
By “across the street,” I do not mean down the block a half mile away. I mean, literally, across the street. Look out the window and there it is. The building makes a big wind tunnel in winter. It’s hilarious during Shark Week when they strap giant inflatable shark parts to the building. It has the best lobby with a giant dinosaur skeleton and a physics machine. The lobby is open to the public and people do stroll through at lunch. I have done so myself.
This means I called into my meeting and it was punctuated by sirens in the background and people going, “What was that?” I had my droid and peered at twitter and coworkers who were coming back from lunch were posting pictures of police mayhem right outside. We all got off the phone (meeting over) and headed off to go peer out a window with a good view. We watched the police block off 29 and put up yellow tape. We watched the news helicopters fly in and the various TV stations set up their gear and harass random people heading back from Downtown. We watched at least 30 police cars show up and park.
So okay, it turns out there’s a crazy guy in the DIscovery Channel building across the street and the FBI was called in. He has a gun and he has fired either one or five shots. He had between one and twelve hostages at any one time. He has a bomb. He has multiple bombs. The downtown strip behind the building by Borders was evacuated (this one was true). Cops were telling people to get off the street or they were going to arrest them (they didn’t). The giant Police Command Center RV pulled up. We found streaming video of the news outside. We watched the helicopters above us give us shots on the monitors of what we were looking at out the windows.
And we did watch the cops evacuate the day care center in the Discovery Channel building. People pushed cribs across 29. They disappeared into the McDonald’s. We joked that the McD’s was selling its weight in McFlurries.
Nothing happened for a long time. Our building was switched to key card access only, probably to keep the gaggles of reports that set up on our curb in front of our building (Metro Level exit) from wandering in and out. The news told us the name of the guy, flashed a picture, and it was eerie: it was a guy who had been seen, often, standing around on various corners at lunch time waving his sign. It was THAT GUY in a “HEY, IT’S THAT GUY!” sort of way. People got up and milled around and went to the windows to watch the SWAT guys stand around. (One apparently took a header climbing out of the truck.) Work kind of happened in drips and drabs with the thoughts that the guy across the street had something strapped to him and it might be a bomb and it might be worse.
That was exciting.
I spent most of my afternoon watching the news spread from the local news to the WaPo to CNN to the NYTimes to the BBC and then everywhere. It was a little boggling that closing the street outside my window was now world-wide news. It didn’t help that our local crazy guy had left a manifesto full of environmentalism and evolution and anchor babies and squirrels. (Squirrels?) It was a manifesto’s manifesto and the Internets, as they are, were having a field day while we were waiting for it to end so we could go home.
Then it was over. 5pmish. The SWAT guys lured our friend, the local crazy guy, out of the lobby by the nice dinosaur bones and science displays, out to the manicured sitting area in front of the doors and ended it. The crazy guy’s bomb did go off, but it went pfft. We watched the cops pull away and some of the back streets began opening up.
Then there was escape.
Good grief, man. What kind of world do we live in now that it seems sensible to try to blow up the Discovery Channel? Not a BP office? Or the nice government offices around the corner? I joked when it started that the guy objected to “The Deadliest Catch” and I wasn’t far off. And it’s not like those offices are small. That building is huge. I know the crazy guy had years of being barred from coming into the building and he snapped. But really? The Discovery Channel?
That was my day. How was yours?
The End of Iraq
Sep 1st
This stumbling finish to the end of the Iraq war feels like the end of the college football season: inconclusive, no clearly declared winner, no closure or finality, and will stumble forward despite the declaration of The End because there’s too much money in it not to. And as Iraq is planning to buy $13 Billion in arms from the US, it’s a Federal jobs stimulus program, too.*
I recommend this article on the New Yorker, a Date that will Live in Oblivion:
What President Obama called the end of the combat mission in Iraq is a meaningless milestone, constructed almost entirely out of thin air, and his second Oval Office speech marks a rare moment of dishonesty and disingenuousness on the part of a politician who usually resorts to rare candor at important moments. The fifty thousand troops who will remain in Iraq until the end of next year will still be combat troops in everything but name, because they will be aiding one side in an active war zone. The proclaimed end of Operation Iraqi Freedom has little or nothing to do with the military and political situation in Iraq, which is why Iraqis were barely aware when the last U.S. combat brigade crossed into Kuwait a few days ago. And for most of us, too—except, perhaps, those with real skin in the game, the million and a half Iraq war veterans and their families—there’s hardly any reality or substance to the moment.
Yeah, that.
* Suck it, US Census.
[Review] Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians”
Aug 27th
I am not an enormous fan of fantasy* but I have been known to make exceptions for urban fantasy. Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” popped up on a book list recommend by the lit snobs over at Slate. As I cannot resist lit snobbery, and it comes in convenient e-book form, it appeared on my Kindle.
Quentin, our super brilliant emo protagonist who normally would be in line for the new Arcade Fire CD, is whisked off mysteriously to take a bunch of entrance exams for some mysterious Wizard College. He gets in after some brutal and bizarre exams, because he’s the main character, and he gives up all the vestiges of his old life to become a wizard. The first half of the Magician’s is a bit of Harry Potter meets College Angst meets the X-Men. Quentin meets a whole bunch of other proto-wizards, makes a bunch of friends, and learns to become content with his weird wizarding self. This part of the book is more “New X-Men” than “Harry Potter” frankly — it feels more than a little like Professor Xavier and his secretive school for Mutants in Upstate New York than Hogwarts, especially once the students start to differentiate into different magical power specialities.
The second half is post-college early-20s angst with magic. The book picks up here. It feels like the characters are in a holding pen until they are let loose to go wreak havoc on the magical world. The book becomes funnier and it moves faster once it acquires something that resembles the vague outline of a plot; before then it was just a coming of age story set in a fantasy background. This book does have a lack-of-plot problem. The big evil is not well formed. The fantasy on a fantasy world is pretty vague although, to be fair, it is supposed to be. The fights are written well and the plot ends satisfyingly enough.
The book is highly readable. It doesn’t feel bogged down with turgid prose and it moves at a brisk pace. It mixes modern sensibilities and pop culture references (D&D references; fight club; drinks and drugs of all kinds) with urban fantasy into a nice little whole. The writing gets better as the book goes on, leading me to believe this is a sophomoric effort and leading me to hope for a possible sequel — something with a firmer plot with the same characters would make for a better story.
Originally I gave this book 3 stars out of 5 because I read it immediately following Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose.” If you have read Umberto Eco, you know it’s hard for a fantasy novel, let alone any novel, to follow up that act. I docked it a star merely because it came after a better written book. It’s unfair and I give it back half a star and upgrade it to 3 1/2 stars out of 5. It is good. Not great. Not fantastic. It is solidly a good and entertaining read.
* Exception made for Game of Thrones.
10th Anniversary!
Aug 26th
Happy 10th* Anniversary to my Eric! Yay! We made it to the Official Tin Foil Hat Anniversary! Now we are officially crazy. Er. Crazier. We have earned the right to wear our tin foil hats!
10 years ago we did this:
* GASP
So, Alaska!
Aug 26th
So, um, hi!
For our 10th Anniversary (10 years? REALLY?) we took a cruise on Princess Cruises up the Inside Passage from Vancouver, BC to Anchorage, AK.* Fascinating thing about being in the middle of nowhere: a distinct lack of the Internet. Not that we missed it. We were too busy on an adventure. We had some mild peril. We had some not-so-mild peril. We saw stuff! Some of it was huge! Most of it had mountains!
Places we have been:
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Ketchikan, AK
Juneau, AK
Skagway, AK
Haines, AK
Whittier, AK
Anchorage, AK
Things we have seen:
Whales
Bald Eagles
Mountains
Alaskan Primary Campaign Signs
Glaciers
More Glaciers
Even More Glaciers
Fjords
Ford Seward
Crazy Native American Anthropologists with Awesome Fishing Hats
Thing we had to go to the zoo to see:
Bears**
Vancouver International Airport (YVR) is the strangest airport I have seen. It was very clean, very neat, very tidy, and completely devoid of human life. I don’t know if we hit it in some sweet spot but people were few and far between. Canadian customs is like all things Canadian — polite. But the moment I hit YVR I no longer had phone service.
Now that we have seen Vancouver, we have decided to run off and move to Vancouver. Eventually. Someday. Or at least return for more than a few hours. We failed to see Scott Pilgrim in Vancouver but we did manage to see some of the city, and eat sushi there, and have a huge breakfast, and be asked by the cabbie why the Detroit Red Wings suck. I had no real answer.
The ship itself (Diamond Princess) is a floating bar with bars inside of bars. The point of a cruise is to drink and spend money, and we drank and spent money. On a cruise ship, it is always booze o’clock. After a while the constant hovering service, especially in the dining room, got to us, but the ship was always nice, neat, and well designed to slice up the huge floating population into small groups so it did not feel crowded. For Glacier Bay it also boasted the US Forestry Service to give us a tour over the loudspeaker and, afterward, their own on-board crazy Naturalist. He was my favorite guy on the ship, that Naturalist. He was Very. Enthusiastic. About. Whales!
Ketchikan, AK is a disappointment but everyone who has taken this tour has said the same thing: Ketchikan, AK is a disappointment. It’s a tourist trap that exists only to fleece tourists on cruise ships. It’s full of horrible shops full of horrible, crappy things.*** It wasn’t even fun like, say, going to Ishpaming with its bizarre Yooper-based gift shops. We should have taken a tour to Saxman Island, as that’s the only thing of worth to do there, but live and learn. We did get a few nice pictures and luckily we only spent half a day there.
Juneau, AK is, on the other hand, neat even if it is unreachable by land. Who puts the capital of a state where it can only be reached by sea or air? It’s an odd place. Mendenhall Glacier! Top of Mount Roberts! I found the local knitting shop with my super tingly knitting senses! Juneau is very walkable as cities go. It’s neat and tidy — not the sparkling clean of Vancouver but a long way from dirty. We walked Juneau until I was convinced my knees were going to blow out and then we walked a bit more. Then it was drink o’clock. My plan of living off the guide book worked well here.
Skagway, AK is like Henry Ford Village. It was a mining town in the gold rush but now it’s sort of a touristy trappy town preserved in time and tiny. But we were there only for an hour before we joined our tour and took a 45 minute ferry to Haines, AK. We took a bus to a mountain and then I drove a glorified 4×4 golf cart up a mountain on unpaved roads. Then came the more interesting part — driving the ATV back down the mountain. It was a complication I hadn’t though about. I thought about it very hard around the hairpin turns. It was worth it, though — the view from the top of the mountain over the fjord was amazing. I absolutely recommend taking the insane Sub-Alpine ATV excursion in Haines, AK.
Glacier Bay is amazing but cold. Mountains! Glaciers! Mountains! Glaciers! Between the rain, the wind, and the air temperature, I was convinced I would never be warm again. They were selling hot spiced wine to go with the glacier and somehow I resisted until I caved to coffee. We stared at the big glacier (Marjorie) for a while and went ooooooh but it only calved off some smaller bits of ice. On the way out, though, we saw 16 whales. 16! 6 in a pod! I had the binoculars so I didn’t get pictures but Eric did. 16 whales!
By time we got to College Fjord, though, I was tired of being cold so I don’t have any pictures of the Harvard Glacier. But that sucker absolutely did calve off great bit huge chunks of ice into the water with a huge thundering splash and because we’re all suicidal morons we sat in the bar that gave us a good view, drank, and applauded Mother Nature. Woo! Go Nature! Trying to kill us with ice! WOO! Do it again!
Only 250 crazy people live in Whittier**** but Anchorage wasn’t bad. The room was a bit dumpy but not somewhere one uses to dry out from their drug habit. We ended up renting a car in Anchorage. I wish I knew it was a “car is necessary if staying for more than 4 hours” sort of place because we would have a) gone straight to the airport and b) had a car waiting for us at some cheap rate. But I did not know. Now we know. Rent a car in Anchorage. The city is a grid. It’s simple to navigate.
We saw Scott Pilgrim at the local mall. We went to the Alaska Native Heritage Center. We went to the Alaska Zoo to see bears. We went to the Glacier Gardens. We drank the local beer. Mmmm beer. The local beer is fantastic. Anchorage is like Grand Rapids with mountains. It’s very, very, very Northern Michigan with mountains. I could not shake the feeling of deja vu.
It was at the Heritage Center where, listening to a pat talk about Aleut Indians, we were invaded by above anthropologist who simply started talking to us. He was making a visor out of wood by planing the wood down to very thin and then planning to soak it in water. One of the people there was fascinated by the hat and would not accept that it was just a hat. But it was a hat. And a cool hat! It was one of the highlights of the trip for me.
We had fun. We spent a ton of money. We currently have 1800 pictures up for the brave — but I’ll post something weeded down in a few days. It was different. Different from going to the Caribbean. I think, yes, I would happily return to Alaska. It is much less psycho than it seems from the outside. People do not randomly claim they can see Russia from their house.***** I would take a different trip. We’re more drinking and adventure people over drinking and shopping people. That’s something to consider on balance.
If I did another big cruise it would be with Princess as we were very pleased with the cruise overall but if I could afford it, I am tempted by the National Geographic offerings. I can recommend this trip. Except for Ketchikan, it was amazing.
The only sad thing was how obvious global climate change is up there. Go to Alaska and learn not to doubt. A few of the glaciers are still growing but most are receding. They are growing apple trees on Kodiak Island. See Alaska before it melts!
* I believe a few others have taken this trip this year. To which I say: we were past the mosquito season.
** I was informed I should be thankful about the lack of bears-in-the-wild. Eric was damn well not leaving Alaska without a picture of a bear.
*** Later in Anchorage I would pick up a pamphlet that helped to identify real Native American arts from the stuff in the gift shops. I wish I had it when we started — not that I bought anything — but it would have helped. They have a special seal on the real things.
**** When the locals describe someone as “strange” it is time to run.
***** We were tempted to drive to Wassila. It’s only 40 miles outside of Anchorage. But it is way too far to see Russia from anywhere. That assertion is just dumb.
Tomgram: StepExtremism at Ground Zero (Again)
Aug 11th
An excellent post this morning from TomDispatch: Stephan Salisbury, Extremism at Ground Zero (Again).
Summing up a little online Fiasco
Aug 11th
To (Addison, fade), Eric pages: I am declaring a scene! It is time for John to learn about Heroin.
You paged (Eric, fade) with ‘YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.’.
You paged (Eric, fade) with ‘Oh wait. Heroin is bad.’.
You paged (Eric, fade) with ‘BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.’.
(Fiasco is this totally awesome game by Jason Morningstar you should totally buy and play. Seriously.)
Update: You can read a log of Act I of our BEHIND THE MUSIC game here. At this rate, one of us is going to end up being a Wacky Commentator on a VH-1 retrospective show.
What the Hell?
Aug 9th
I missed this new development over the weekend. Islam is not a religion and thus isn’t covered by Constitutional First Amendment protections? That must come as one hell of a surprise to the 1.5 billion adherents worldwide. When did this one start? Did I miss a memo?
It says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” It does not matter if you consider it a religion or not*. As long as they consider it a religion, it’s a religion! I don’t believe certain religions in this country are any more than fancy cults with Voltron Castle-like buildings but that doesn’t mean I can get them to go away by wishing it so. In the US we all suffer together.
But after this offensive little bit of xenophobia and propaganda, I am off political blogs for… at least an hour. My stomach, it turned.
* United States v. Ballard, 1944






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