something new and fun for christmas

melvern taylor just got back from the north pole, and he brought back something for us all to open early this year. check it out--enjoy yourself--have some fun!

click here!

who's your santa?

online marketing and privacy invasion pay off

levis is running a 40%-off promotion "for the next four hours", which means it may or may not still be available by the time you read this, but i just thought i'd say. (enter "cyber40" in the promotion code area of the site to see if you get it). they're also selling their jeans at pretty hefty discounts to begin with, so all-in, with shipping, (which was free), i could get two pairs of my favorite styles of levis for $40. $20 a pair.

anyone who shops kohls or other discounters regularly enough knows that this ain't a bad price. anyone who shops kohls or other discounters regularly enough also knows that you don't always find your size in the color and style you want, and online the experience is no different. (i got black 501's, but had to go with stone-washed 560's instead of 550's, which may disappoint those who express best appreciation for my appearance in 550's, but, hey, what's a guy to do).

the important detail in all of this is that i was clued into the deal via an ad on facebook. these facebook ads are the worst and most insidious sorts of ads, matched to you via all sorts of nefarious invasions of privacy to determine what might best float your boat. (no, do NOT put your personal information onto facebook if you ever would like it to remain personal). well, here's the thing, though. i WANT these levis. and i like the price. i'm a buyer. their nefarious scheme worked for them. AND for me.

sometimes the future isn't always pure evil.

food for thought

both iceland and ireland have now experienced major banking collapses of the scale warned by our politicians (first the republicans under bush, now the democrats under obama, and all, apparently, under the guiding hand of guys like ben bernanke who have "served" under both administrations) that we could not allow, "or else". (you know, end of the world as we know it, etc.). well, you know about the tens of billions being shouldered by the EU to bail out the irish. ever wonder why you hear nothing about the "poor" icelanders who neither asked nor received any sort of bailout? (they let their banks fail and took what came).

well, here's a bloomberg interview with iceland's president, olafur grimsson to tell you all about it.

the reason we've heard nothing from iceland is that there's nothing to hear. they opened a 4.6B line of credit with the IMF, (as opposed to a bailout roughly ten times that amount being proposed for ireland), and they aren't even going to need all of it. unlike in the us and in ireland, the bankers took their well-earned losses, and the temporary loss in value of their currency (as much as 80% at its peak) didn't impact the citizenry much at all, except to make their exports far more attractive to buyers, and improving both their incomes, and their balance of trade in the process. (does that sound like something we could use here?) any way you look at it, its a win/win.

so why here are we continuing to print bad money and add it to the tax debt currently crushing the citizenry to the tune of over $50,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. (tell me, how do YOU plan to pay back your $50,000? you've got the money, don't you? don't you?)

both the democrats and the republicans, duly bought and paid for via campaign contributions from the money interests, are doing their part to ensure we're all left holding the bag. we need to vote for unaligned candidates and break this pattern of financial abuse before we're all, like the irish, in the shitter.

if you're a registered democrat, or a registered republican, please consider this before writing your next contribution check. the only way this nonsense stops is if YOU stop.

or would you rather owe more than the $50K you already do?

and spare me the rant about the "other" guys making it worse than your guys. neither could do any worse than has already proven capable to be done. your records are established. and YOUR party has failed.

sapere aude

more full and true loss of the thread

what is terrorism? is it having your house of worship firebombed? (i'd say yes).

islamic americans (that's AMERICANS, in case you missed it or are unclear on the concept) in corvallis, oregon had their house of worship torched because a somali teen fbi-sting-victim slash terrorist occasionally and coincidentally attended. it's the one actual act of terrorism committed among the many varied details of this particular situation/story, and it was committed by americans against americans in exactly the way we would like to think our "enemies" behave, while, in fuller truth, it's actually the way WE behave, only we're too myopic and arrogantly self-centered to admit it.

yes, as walt kelly was fond to say, "we have met the enemy and he is us".

yes, and it's evidence that these "americans" who took it upon themselves to hate and blame an entire religion for the acts of individual criminals have well and truly lost their minds, and, coincidentally, made all the rest of us far less safe, because they are fomenting violence by their own violence.

are we against terrorism, or aren't we??? (at least some of us are).

the fbi got turned onto mohamed osman mohamud via an anonymous tip. if we take a step back from the heated emotions here, and put a little thought into it, it doesn't take too long to figure that the source of that anonymous tip was very likely someone who was close enough to mohamud for him to offer evidence of his potential behavior, and that this likely someone was further likely someone who, say, may have attended a mosque with him. i'm just sayin'.

yes, patriotic americans will share such info with authorities, and i, for one, am grateful that someone in this case did. the fact that this person may have had their place of worship set ablaze for their efforts is a shameful statement on the state of "homeland security" in this country.

have we lost our minds???

edited to add:

the new englander points out that tarring all muslims with the stain of mohamud's attempted terrorism is no different than tarring all americans with the stain of the actual terrorist (i say "terrorist" cuz that's exactly what it is) retaliation. point fairly taken. where i would disagree is where he stops short of recognizing that this act of misdirected retribution IS a valid example by which ALL OF US share guilt of dangerous complicity with such actual terrorism.

paraphrased from my comment on the blog, we have to recognize that NOTHING EFFECTIVE was ever done to protect that mosque, the need for which was quite rightfully predicted and expected by its leadership once Mahomud was arrested. the FBI says "we have made it quite clear that the FBI will not tolerate any kind of retribution or attack on the muslim community", (per arthur balizan, special agent in charge of the FBI in oregon), but the obvious truth is that not they nor any other branch of "homeland security" have done anything effective to prevent it.

we spare no effort or expense to pull needles (mohamud) out of haystacks (random bombings), but we can't stop a simple and obvious arson attempt against a high-profile target???

that's disingenuous at best, and criminally and ethically and morally negligent at worst.

we MUST do better.

tone deafness

the other day, the TSA or whomever completely misread the empty hyperbole of a few would-be-disconvenienced air travelers to express fears of a huge public uprising against full body scans and related pat-downs at the airports for the holiday that could/would disrupt air traffic and create a huge public nuisance. to be fair, given the ridiculous excess and pointlessness of the scans and pat-downs, (see previous post on the efficacy of package bombs and/or simply getting on planes at feeder airports), there's always the possibility that a well-motivated and organized population might, indeed, one day, rise up to demand sanity, but the truth is that the fear-mongers at the TSA (that's their business, you know) simply can't tell when somebody is serious, or should be taken for so.

i think the TSA folks have a lot in common with the partisan party politicians who appointed them, which makes it all the more amusing to be reading this week therese murray immediately standing up (speaking up) to defend the practice of politicians getting jobs for constituents at the massachusetts probation department.

therese may very well have a point, that if a constituent asks their elected representative for assistance as may be rendered, it's very nice that such a representative might respond as they can, for example, to put their name in for an open government position should they be well-qualified, though only, as she qualifies it too, if it's not a dishonest bargain based on campaign contributions or other corruption.

but, seriously, therese, are you batshit crazy???

yes, she's from the charlie rangel school of "don't you realize the point yet?", and, like our friend charlie, she's still mouthing words that simply convince everybody else who is listening that she's an idiot. kinda like tom delay defending the re-routing of campaign cash against existing law, though, in his defense, being convicted already, he really has very little to lose.

the other point is that this tone-deafness is all over both sides of the aisle, including the partisan opinion hacks who make their livings spewing misinformation all over our communications media. cliff over at right side of lowell has illuminated much the same thing in the partisan mis-under-estimation of the beauty pageant contestant from alaska, and it would be funnier if it wasn't so serious.

"elite" has been a code word for coast-hating middle americans for quite awhile now. the real terrifying part to me is to consider the well-worn tactics of miscreants like the khmer rouge, (the communist chinese went after "intellectuals" too), and to worry about a possible future where a quality education becomes a lightning rod for criticism, and a rationalization for everybody else in the country not to get one.

we need more education, not less--education to re-train the folks put out of work by the ongoing economic collapse (aka the looting of america by well-educated common thieves of wall street, but lets not digress), and education to remind people that dinosaurs did, really, exist more than six thousand years ago, even if the one book that some people do actually read might say otherwise, and education to ensure that the better example of our founding (mandated public education of all citizens was a revolutionary idea, make no mistake about that) is not lost.

i have faith that, properly educated, both right and left can recognize reason and act accordingly. until then, we need more of it, not less of it, and i really get uncomfortable when political rhetoric goes in a different direction.

"quantitative easing"

this is worth viewing. it's educational, for one thing, and scary because it's true for another.

"the only thing deflating, that i can see, is the fed's credibility"

to wit:

"so let me get this straight--if i want to buy the treasury bonds with my money, i can buy them directly from the treasury". "yes". "and if you want to buy the treasury bonds with your money, you can buy them from the treasury". "right". "but if ben bernanke wants to buy the treasury bonds using the american people's money, he does not buy them from the treasury, he buys them from goldman sachs?" "exactly".

there's another bit about the guy buying the bonds (william dudley, president and ceo of the federal reserve bank of ny) being an ex-goldman partner (that was something i hadn't known before) that's worth a listen, too. it's amazing what you can't read in the newspaper these days.

sun tzu (again)

thinking of the body scan crock o' hooey puts me in mind of sun tzu's admonition that to win at war one must defeat not ones opponent's tactics, (nor even ones opponent for that matter), but ones opponent's strategy.

so what, in fact, is our opponent's strategy?

for lack of a less colorful way to put it, our opponent's strategy is to inflict "death by 1000 cuts", and, for good measure, take advantage of the fact that we are prone to making most of the cuts ourselves. the miscreants arrayed against us can't build large-scale weapons of war, (they actually can't build much of anything at all), nor hope to ever defeat us at all. it can't be done. we are too powerful. but they have a strategy nonetheless, and, let's be honest, it's an effective and impressive one.

these miscreants are dreaming up ways that they can leverage asymmetrical warfare to their only advantage, which is, sadly for us, that they have absolutely nothing that they care about losing. so, for $4200, they can assemble a series of parcel bombs and post them into our package delivery network, and this then costs us BILLIONS of dollars to screen and scan against, even if we could hope to do it. (which it is absolutely not clear that we practically can). we're chasing underwear bombers and shoe bombers and package bombers and roadside bombers (there's a common thread here) and train bombers and you-name-it bombers, and that doesn't even begin to estimate what it meant that commando raids into coastal cities (a la the one in india awhile back) are also on their menu of options. on top of that, i'm sure it's occurred to someone somewhere that attacks against public water supplies, disruptions to transportation infrastructure, (ever wonder what might happen to new york were a coordinated group of people with junk cars to abandon them inside the various tunnels and on the various bridges in and out of manhattan all at the same time?), and desecration of various national monuments and treasures would likewise get our attention and cause us to spend many millions and billions of times more money to guard against than it will ever cost to put them on.

let's face it--our "security" strategy is a LOSER. ELL, OH, ESS, EEE, AR, loser. we cannot prevail. it will always be cheaper to vandalize and terrorize than it will be to secure ourselves against it. ALWAYS.

i want to hear more about REAL strategies to combat this. one is the "hearts and minds" approach being taken on the ground in iraq and afghanistan. (currently completely undermined by civilian casualties inflicted by our forces simultaneously, but that's another sad story). another is the israeli strategy of infiltration, espionage and intelligence. (think of the unibomber, and what was done to track him down).

i kinda like the infiltration, espionage and intelligence option, myself. first of all, it works--how else do you think we found those UPS package bombs before they brought down those planes? second of all, if you watch any sort of tv at all, you know that the first thing to unravel within a social, political or other kind of network is the trust between individuals that's necessary to accomplish anything.

think about it. if your average al qaeda operative can't trust anyone, he can't coordinate his little "1000 cut" attacks the way he needs to be effective. and, if your average al qaeda operative could very well be your average double agent, it's only a matter of time before one of them gets close enough to osama to plunge in the shiv that really goes a long way towards making all of this even again.

save me the billions on airport security. build me the effective equivalent of the mossad, and turn them loose on the maggots who would murder innocents and call it politics.

THAT's a strategy.

we have well and truly lost it

body scans are a crock, and anyone with even the slightest vestige of a brain should be able to see why they're not only offensive, but an enormous waste of time that makes us absolutely no safer to fly.

do we even remember 9-11?

where did the hijackers enter our air system?

did they enter in dallas, or chicago, or atlanta, or denver, or anywhere else where all these "advanced screening" devices are installed? (you can see the complete list here, and while you're seeing it please also notice the note that "every entryway into the airport concourses at these airports do not have whole-body scanners", and that list of omission includes, for example, ALL the southwest gates in phoenix).

the answer to the previous question is that the hijackers that crashed the planes into the world trade center towers got into our air "security" system at the portland international jetport in portland, maine. (no, the portland international jetport is NOT on the list of airports with full-body scanners, and neither are hundreds of others).

so, you tell me. any miscreant wanting to down another plane--would they get on in atlanta? new york? anywhere on the full-body list???

there's a reason they won't accept passengers from lagos, nigeria, at any international airport without completely re-screening all passengers and their luggage. the cold hard truth is that 90% of our US airports have to be treated like lagos, nigeria, or the whole thing is just one huge giant clusterfuck waste of money, time and, not least of all, liberty.

second of all, if anyone has been paying attention, the low-cost alternative to passing actual humans onto planes in order to bring them down is putting a device into a parcel and just shipping it via any number of package delivery services. (they've even been advertising the "how-to" guide on the internet, so that every nut job on the planet can learn to play along at home). if you haven't been paying attention, airlines accept air freight onto their passenger jets to earn a little extra money for themselves (the planes are flying anyway, right?) so it's not even like it only has to be a shipping company plane that goes down via this technique.

so, do i feel "safer" because they're fondling everybody's junk these days? absolutely not. and you shouldn't either. because you're not safer. not in the least. you're absolutely MORE at risk because we're spending all our time, energy and effort tilting at windmills while the vandals are passing right through the (for all practical purposes) non-existent gates.

wake up.

(and after we wrap our heads around what it would take to actually screen everything that goes onto every airplane, we can consider that they were targeting trains in europe YEARS ago, and that you can put even bigger toys inside those shipping containers that sail into all our major coastal cities each and every day, and that getting into most any public water supply takes little more than a pair of wire-cutters just in case there's chain link around it, or, in other words, we need to focus on intelligence, not screening, just the way the israelis do, if we really want to BE safe, and not just pacified).

owelled

knot sherr hoo figgered awl rappaz kneaded mizpelt namz, butt sho izz tupid attt diz poin affah awl deez yeeaz

soshul cee inn da howz, yawl

15 minutes

i think, if i were to guess, that the television industry would not exist were it not for penis pills, automobiles, beer, and car insurance. (because of penis pills, automobiles and beer we of course need plenty of car insurance). of course, it wouldn't surprise me that there might be various female-targeted products advertised on tv as well, but when all you watch is sports and jon stewart, (ok, i'm addicted to craig ferguson, too), you don't run across too many of those to mention.

on the subject of car insurance, i today gave a spin to a couple of the tv hucksters who promise all sorts of marvelous things related to their policies, (amica & geico) and discovered to little surprise that there's a generous amount of fud (fear, uncertainty and doubt) being spread around regarding policy pricing and claims service, and there's absolutely no way to do any sort of apples-to-apples comparison unless you are prepared to never file a claim and want to proceed merely on price.

for example, compared to my present insurer, (a relatively local company, commerce insurance), amica is a solid $500 more expensive. on the other hand, by same comparison, geico is a hefty $300 less. go with geico, right?

here's where it gets dicey. if you read online about their claims service, you quickly discover that geico has an earned reputation for canceling insurance against drivers who have filed a claim. i can't say about commerce, since i've never filed one, and they weren't covered by this particular website, but by reputation amica is one of those outfits that is much more likely to stand behind an unfortunate customer. (though you can find plenty of complaints about them, too).

so what's the right answer?

well, for one thing, geico won't insure my condo, (big multi-unit buildings aren't every company's cup of tea), and there's the matter of my additional umbrella liability coverage that depends on that. (if you don't have umbrella liability coverage, you're paying too much for that sort of thing on your auto policy). for another thing, i rather like knowing that commerce insurance is represented by a local agency (for me, fred c. church) and their reputation on claims, from what i hear, ain't bad. (at least not as bad as geico's).

so what's a compulsive insurance shopper to do?

that's up to each of us, now, isn't it.

orphans thanksgiving

years ago, to reconcile the impossibility of in-law schedules among five siblings, my family went to a saturday-after thanksgiving plan that's been working fabulously for years. nobody misses any t-day football at the old high school (that's not been my thing, but my older brother is a fixture at the oldest hs football rivalry in the country--1882, whatchoogot?--so it's great for him) and everybody gets to spend a relaxing meal with everybody else in the family every two days after. the additional happy consequence for those of us whose lives are no longer complicated by in-laws is that we're blissfully free to do whatever we want on the traditional day, and i, for one, have always put in the effort to enjoy the opportunity to its fullest potential.

one thing i've got going for me in this is a coincidentally t-day orphaned friend who is aces in the kitchen. (last year it was goose--this year it's farm-fresh turkey, but, sadly, no longer from gerard farm in framingham from here on out, but mayflower in cambridge doesn't do a bad job with the fresh birds at all). i've also got a leftover video projector (one of the few things won in the divorce sweepstakes) that will enable me to watch the pats on a 10 foot screen while sampling this year's canapes and doing damage to my stash of harpoon ipa. the capstone to the evening will be a trip out to the movies, and not one single question to be answered about what have i been doing with myself. (cultivating relationships with people who are good in the kitchen and other places, tyvm). if this sounds like a good plan to you, and you're also one of us t-day orphans, don't hesitate to raise a hand and ask about invites.

as for the rest of you, and at the risk of revealing long-buried family secrets that might embarrass anyone to be revealed at this late date, i should mention that my oldest's birthday preceding thanksgiving day by only a few short weeks gave rise to a ruse that bears both memory and mention. "gee, mom, we'd love to, but we have to go to her (or his depending on your gender) family's this year". we put the kid in a basket right there on the table like a centerpiece, and took apart one of gerard farms' best for hours. heaven. since i don't need it anymore, you're welcome to use it for yourself. doesn't require infant children to pull off, but such certainly motivate one to just stay home and take it easy.

i won't tell your mom.

happy t-day week, everyone!

lemme get this straight

i hate anecdotal evidence and emotion charading as logic badly enough most days, but these past few with the picture of an extremely small number of "i got mine" folks more or less accusing the present city administration of proposing death panels, it's gotten way past reasonable. (yes, one james malloy used the phrase "signing the death warrant for many retirees" at the meeting this past tuesday night).

linda dano told the city council that her master medical coverage is the reason she is alive and not dead. fair enough. so, then, i would ask, where is the accounting for the number of people who are dead but not alive today because they DIDN'T have master medical?

am i the only one here who sees the bullshit quotient implied in all of this?

if this plan is exactly what these people say it is, (aka, the only thing standing between "many retirees" and certain death), how is it that we can possibly sit still, least of all those with the coverage who know best how it's saving their lives, and not fight tirelessly so each and every resident in the city also enjoys the life-saving benefit??? i want to hear those folks, like linda dano, who cannot sleep at night because other people don't have master medical. yes i do.

the truth is, master medical patients go to the same doctors to whom you and i go with our lower-priced insurance coverage, and there's nothing costing them their lives in the least about having that coverage replaced with something that costs less to the city. oh, sure, they may have increased out-of-pocket costs, but speaking as one whose health insurance coverage just increased several thousand dollars this year, i really don't think that's life or death at all. that may be life or cigarettes, or life or catfood, or life or dunkin donuts coffee every day, but it's not life or death. (i really, really, REALLY wanted to ask linda dano if she is or was ever a smoker, but that would have been rude, wouldn't it...)

until then, besides being reminded yet again as to why my not voting for rita mercier was one of the most positive and productive things i've done over the past year, i'm feeling better and better about the way bernie lynch is approaching some of the challenges faced by this city. there are some decrying an absence of "imagination" inherent in his actions lately, but, from where i'm standing, a cleaned-up inspectional services department and the abolition of supremely-selfish and prohibitively expensive master medical coverage are 1 and 2 on my list of happy-to-see city improvements.

TTUUKKAA!!

took awhile to get himself his first win, but he did it in style with a 41-save shut-out of the florida panthers last night at the gahden. nice to hear the crowd so enthusiastically on his side, too. i've been saying it since the tank shut out the coyotes in prague that first weekend of the season--with THE two best goaltenders in the league, and the talent they have skating in front, this is a bona fide contender that we have right here. (and two of the team's best skaters--savvy and sturm--haven't even suited up yet).

watch this space!!!

murkowski update

alaska's election commission is pronouncing her the winner, though, of course, joe miller is refusing to concede, even though he trails by over 10,000 votes while his stooges have only been able to find ticky-tack fault for 8,153 of them. (you know, 'cuz "lisa" was spelled with a cursive letter "s" and stuff like that). congrats ms murkowski.

the interesting other shoe is how this reflects on the former miss alaska contestant who so loudly stumped for the ultimate chump, i mean, joe miller, during both the primary and final elections. the linked AP article goes into some detail on how murkowski's campaigning sharpened up after losing (taking for granted?) the primary, and how historic (first time in 50 years) her successful write-in campaign for US senator has been.

i don't really have a dog in the dogfight between the palins and the murkowskis (bad blood there for whatever reason) but i do have a very warm feeling today that when people get fed up, even while party politicians do everything they can to make having their way as difficult as possible, the electorate can still stand up and demand to be counted.

congrats to alaskans, and to us.

gettin' old

nope, not about me this one.

i sometimes try to describe to my kids, whose sportswatching lives are upside down to mine, what it was like to follow the patriots in the 1960's. (we won't even get into tony eason). i tell them how the yankees were laughingstocks, and the orioles were the cream of the american league crop, and how the sox never, ever finished first. i tell them the pride and joy of just watching bobby orr skate, and how no stanley cup can measure that ephemeral love that we can have for our sporting heroes, and how to keep their eyes on tuukka rask and tyler seguin for no better reason than the possibility of that. but mostly i tell them of what it was like to be in love with the patsies for no better reason than they were your team, and how they may never know how easy they have it for tom brady.

so dave champagne wrote a song, "there's something missing in my life", that perfectly sums up the inevitable and irretrievable breakdown of a marriage in process, by describing the qualification of her love for the rolling stones ("they're getting old") and his simply stated response that "that's not love". (no, that isn't). which is all a segue to describing the link i was offered this morning to a dc sports commentator's rant about monday night's circus that literally goes on for almost 13 minutes with hardly a break to swallow back the spittle and the bile before launching yet another hopelessly self-involved tirade describing nothing better than himself, though nominally directed at the object of his perceived frustration, the washington redskins.

i laughed. the whole way through. oh, i laughed.

i can recall how every smarmy self-satisfied skins fanatic would want to rub john riggins endlessly in my face, and even though it's decades too late, i know the truth that this week that at least one of them has received at least a small portion of their just due for it. (there was simply no retort based on houston antwine at the time that could ever get back on it, so you knew better than to even try). yes, the satisfaction of revenge is sweetest when the dish is served very, very cold.

i used to believe that philadelphia eagles fans were the least deserving, most self-obsessed, crude, profane and faithless bunch of football fans on this planet, but today, after listening to chad dukes go off on his "beloved" skins, i have to pause and consider if there might indeed be parity of sorts to some lower portions of the nfl.

no, chad, that's not love.

get yourself a babe parilli jersey (his were the records for yards passing and touchdowns that tom brady broke if you weren't paying attention as weren't my kids) and then maybe, MAYBE, you can learn to feel it. when there's every possibility your team won't win a single game, but you still come out every sunday to support them, THEN you're a fan. (right, fellow long-time lovers from new orleans?) if you're upset that your biggest rival just kicked your butts in record-setting fashion on national tv, then sit down, shut up, and enjoy the irony.

enjoy the clip!

totally

recent revival of vinyl music sales (growing at double-digit rates while cd purchases continue to decline) is most frequently attributed to the unique and superior sonic quality of "analog" (as opposed to digital) music, along with the unique and superior visual and tactile quality of an LP record and related cover art compared to any other alternative. which is all a long way of saying we like to see and touch our music, in addition to listening to it in as close to "live" format as possible, and i'm reminded of all of this today as i'm enjoying a link to hannah persson's incredible photographs of the gilded splinters' most recent gig at toad in cambridge this past monday night.

hannah's photographs can be seen for yourself here, though what may escape casual observation (especially if one has never been to a toad gig when the lights have been turned down so low you almost wonder if they believe in them at all) is how incredibly difficult it must have been to capture any of it, as opposed to so much of what it's like to be there while the music is playing. i'm stunned at how remarkable these images are.

couldn't help but share, as well as contemplate how sight and feel complement sound so wonderfully well.

and i can't help but mention that this coming thursday evening, as in, tomorrow, the gilded splinters are playing a gig at the rosebud in davis square right after melvern taylor and his fabulous meltones are playing one just a few short blocks away at toad in porter square, and how, as melvern would tell you, you should totally come.

earmark update

mitch mcconnell of all people is now on board the anti-earmark train, and it's getting to be wonderful sport to watch the pork-barrelers double-talking their rationalizations for clinging to the noisome process. (oh how frustrating it is to realize that ANYONE REASONABLE could have defeated harry reid this last time around, and all the tea partiers could come up with was 41-to-angle, and he we are, screwed as usual). obama, to his credit, has lined up with those who will at least call a 2-year moratorium on anonymously burying local spending pork in unrelated financing bills and leaving the american public with the tax bill, and now it's time to see how many of the waffling racketeers we can push into the doing the right thing. (we won't ask why the practice isn't to be outlawed completely yet, because that would require too much of a miracle to achieve, though it's nice to dream).

seriously: if such local spending is so worthwhile, why wouldn't it pass a transparent vote as is now being suggested we try?

the answer is that such local spending is not nearly so worthwhile to anyone but the political cronies being paid off for their campaign contributions, and it's time to end it, but the democrat-controlled senate seems to be positioning itself to screw us over simply because, owing to senate rules, they surely can.

as always, i welcome d-is-for-donkey replies to explain why it is, exactly, that harry reid bringing home bacon to nevada is in any sort of national interest. (after which, they could explain the sobriquet "king of pork", and to whom they would now suggest we bestow it since bobby byrd has passed on).

and, to continue to enforce the equal time provisions of this little rant-fest of mine, i should also hope we could hear from some r-is-for-robber-barons as to the historical records of partisan porkers like newt gingrich and tom delay who used to hand them out like halloween candy to reward "loyal" lawmakers, by which is meant PARTY-loyal, not america-loyal, as one might otherwise hope, but lets not let me digress too far.

the truth is that washington has been a fetid cesspool of earmark corruption for years, and that BOTH parties are to blame for the practice. now there are a few from both parties who are suggesting we clean that up. i'm for all of those.

how about you?

wally

lots of people i know, even those who don't work in or really understand what really happens in today's business office culture, love dilbert. they love making fun of the PHB (pointy-haired boss). they love alice's fist of death. but nobody i know loves as much about dilbert as i love EVERYTHING about wally.

today's strip provides even further clue as to why.

wally says: "nothing i say in meetings actually means anything".
asok the intern says: "then why do you talk?"
and wally replies: "i tried listening once--it was awful". (yes, it IS!!!)

i have no idea how scott adams comes by these moments of genius, but they are most definitely that.

in the running for my favorite book of all time, next to poe's "the complete tales of mystery and imagination" and nash's "selected poetry of ogden nash", is adams' "what would wally do"--224 pages of the most profound truths that exist in the universe.

asok: "can you teach me to work smarter, not harder?"
(wally's rule #1 was funny enough, but i'll spare you so we can get right to wally's rule #2)
wally: "make sure your shirt and your toothpaste are the same color".

"how often do you need to launder a shirt that smells minty?"

take the link up above to the e-book and read adams' explanation for whence the wally character was derived. genius.

MUSIC!

would be remiss if i didn't clue you into the opportunity:

carl johnson, arte kenyon and peter lavender (the jkl supergroup) is playing tonight at voices rock club in lowell. (full disclosure requires that i admit to you that their musical genius is often only exceeded by their musical generosity--aka they're letting me sit in, but please don't fault them for that). i still haven't gotten the fine details on whether or not justin beaulieu is able to make it to add drums to the mix, but the great news from your perspective is that it's awesome BOTH ways, and you simply cannot lose. (edited to add late-breaking news that justin indeed will be in the house--jackpot!)

8:30pm (or so) might catch you some solo tyngsborough carl johnson. 9:30pm will absolutely catch you the full three-part-harmony treatment of many of carl's, arte's and peter's best songs. (to catch them all also requires a cd baby membership and diligent traversing of the web to find the outtakes and demos and other awesome collectibles floating around--do NOT miss "cherry red wine" from carl's reverbnation page--but tonight's show should absolutely do you as an appetizer, and will absolutely get you a taste of some never before released material that you NEED to hear/see).

best of all, the whole thing gets you out early enough to still catch the later set of half-past eight at furey's, or home in time for a full night's sleep--your call. (you know where i'll be, anyway).

do it!

the bs gets deep

political sloganeering is a fascinating contact sport. somewhere deep within the bowels of every hopeful and selfishly-motivated political plot these days is a wordsmithing operation to make upton sinclair blush, and the bs (and the nation-screwing hypocrisy) is getting powerfully deep. to wit: there's now a PR campaign being initiated by fed-ex to paint currently-proposed legislation in dc (republican house, yo) as a "bailout" try by ups. even the "even-handed" news articles who cannot help but point out the word "bailout" is bs, since, literally, there's no money being requested or argued here, paints the thing as an attempt by ups and the teamsters to "hobble" fed-ex and create an unfair playing ground.

except, just think about this for a minute:

the government itself, at the behest of some extremely corrupt railroad magnates back in the day, created this prima facie unfair playing ground to exempt "express" shipping operations (in the day, railroads, and today, airlines), from regulations governing trucking. (even the language of the railway "labor" act makes it obvious--stating its intent to "avoid any interruption to commerce", which doesn't take a rocket scientist to conclude is squarely aimed at defeating unions and their inconvenient proclivity to strike). fed-ex, because it carries the majority of its packages at some point in their transit on an airplane, earns itself RLA "regulation", which if i might be so bold to translate for you means "not so much regulation". on the other hand, ups, whose majority of packages toddle around the country on only trucks, gets to live under the national labor relations act, which is far more union-friendly, to put it kindly. as you can imagine, the labor costs for fed-ex are a fraction of ups', and even though they tend to charge you and me far more for what they do than does ups, they're crying foul about the possibility of having to face a unionized workforce in the loudest and least reasonable way. (next time you buy something online, compare the fed-ex costs with the ups costs--go ahead--and let me know what you find).

want to know how i read this? (of course you do).

if the goal were truly a level playing field, there would be a counter-proposed bill that would insist we drop nlrb regulation of ups so that they could enjoy the same union-free existence of their fiercest competitor. THAT would be fair. THAT would be level. THAT would put the interest of competition ahead of the interest of screwing your competitor.

but that's not what's being argued here. on the one hand ups is asking in the only way they are legally allowed to let ONE set of rules govern competing businesses. it's a bad way, since it would, as all opposed seem to agree, put the union sclerosis completely across the entire package delivery industry. (i linked you upton sinclair's seminal work above so that you could read it if you have not, and become disabused of any notion that unions were created for selfish reasons, and have not been NECESSARY to create this great nation of ours that we know and love today, though it must be argued and observed that union behavior these days is very often exactly what is choking the life out of the businesses that pay them, and the us auto industry is a good case in point after you read all about the teamsters strikes which have crippled ups in the past). but if one were to take the rla regulations and spread them liberally (ok, that was a bad pun) across ALL the package delivery and other transportation industries THAT and only THAT would be both creating a level playing field and doing it in a way that encouraged the financial health of corporations and lower prices. (at the cost, potentially, of turning fed-ex and ups into giant mobile walmarts in terms of employee treatment and compensation, but who's counting these days when one has a job, which, it might be pointed out, was exactly how we came to need unions in the first place 150+ years ago, but, as i said, who's counting).

but "bailout"??? puh-leeeeeeeeze. what we have here is a tug-of-war initiated by a union aimed at creating the kind of level playing field that benefits THEM. fed-ex has tried to turn it into a semantic bullshit argument about a "bailout" that is anything but, to maintain the decidedly UN-LEVEL playing field that enjoys for them such fat profits. NOBODY is advocating for those of us who might enjoy cheaper and faster package delivery, and who might prefer a level playing field that benefits the consumer while it also benefits the robber barons running the "infrastructure" for us.

now, there's a whole 'nuther argument to be had about unions which i'm purposefully obfuscating here. we are being told that we have to screw unions to return to prosperity, and it's an argument that's not without merit observing the destruction of entire industries (auto, etc.) due to economically unsustainable union compensation and benefits (pension funding always seeming to be the rhode-island-sized straw that breaks every commercial camel's back), but this always as seems to be these days forgets the reason we have books like "the jungle" and the reason we have unions (and workers not living in company slums) and a prosperous workforce these days, which, i should remind all the pro-business types and they are so quick to remind the rest of us, is where they get their market for all that package delivery in the first place, but i, as i always do, digress.

we are losing our minds because we are losing our ability to call things what they are, and not what their corrupt proponents want us to think they are.

there's no bailout.

there's a question of whether our federal labor regulations are fair, and it's obvious that, when it comes to fed-ex and ups they are not. it would be nice if we could do something fair about that.

playing political chicken

barry o tried to take the political initiative the other day by calling for reform of "earmark" spending, aka, the sport of congressional porkbarrelling in which spending on pet home projects by legislators that care nothing for the fiscal (and hence military in addition to endless other dimensions) strength of this county is buried in unrelated bills so that the merits of the projects are neither known nor debated. it's an opportune moment for the out-of-power party to try to look good (since they couldn't vote to restrict such spending in the house even if it came up for an actual vote) but i'm delighted this morning to note that the anti-spending sentiment of the electorate has FINALLY become political currency of the realm, and johnny boehner has called his arch-nemesis on the disingenuity. (seriously--if he's been president for TWO YEARS, why is it only finally now that he's decided that this sort of practice needs attention? could it be because HIS brand of crooks had the senatorial supermajority, and the run of the house, and preferred to exploit the opportunity while they could, but now that they can't they're willing to take it away from the other guys??? nah, that would be cynical of us/me to think...)

johnny boner, i mean bayner, is grandstanding in a most remarkable way. he's playing political chicken with his rivals, and daring them (and barry as their leader) to call for an outright ban on the practice. i love it.

i'm not so sanguine as to expect anything will come of this, but i, for one independent constituent, am excited that they're even learning to talk this way. if you're a D-is-for-donkey, i can't wait to hear your obfuscated and convoluted logic as to why obie's excuse, that "some of them support worthy projects in our local communities", holds any water at all. is anyone else listening??? if it's a "worthy project", shouldn't it be easy to pass as a regular, transparent and normally-debated bill??? i mean, isn't that what congress is SUPPOSED to do?

nah, i guess obie-number-one-nairobi doesn't feel like we're smart enough to do it that way, or something.

score one for the red team, and color me tickled pink that it's coming to this.

let's hear it for orange americans! you go, johnny b!!!

delaying the improbable

checking back in on the alaska senate race, where write-in choice-of-the-people lisa murkowski leads major political party nominee choice-of-the-tea-party joe miller almost every way you look at it, except joe's...

the only imperfect detail is that, until her party primary loss to joe miller this year, lisa murkowski was a loyal party-faithful politician, (in this case, republican), so it's not completely the independent candidate being graced by the independent voice of the people, but it's pretty damn close as far as i'm concerned, and i'm rooting for lisa in this race all the way. joe, on the other hand, fired his first salvo by petitioning a federal court to revoke the franchise of tens of thousands of alaskans for errors including the use of cursive handwriting to scribe the "L" in lisa. (no joke--"shortly after the second day of write-in ballot counting began, a miller observer challenged a vote for murkowski that appeared to have her name spelled and printed correctly, though the L in lisa was in cursive handwriting").

the funniest part? even joe's hypercritical nonsense has only been able to call into any sort of question about 9.9% of the first 30,000 murkowski write-in ballots scrutinized. at this rate, he'd still fall short of stopping the inevitability of murkowski's victory. (and, not to worry if you, like me, believe in honoring the votes of each and every voter wherever reasonable and possible--the state of alaska election commission has already cited case law defending their intent to discern voter intent in counting the ballots).

to her credit, murkowski is refusing to claim victory until the election is completed. to their credit, alaskans have proven that they will make any effort required to select the candidate of THEIR choice, not the major american political parties'. to nobody's credit, joe miller is continuing to do whatever he can do to disenfranchise anyone who opposes him.

yup, that much is indeed party politics as usual.

11-11-11

no, this is not a reminder to promote 11-11-11 to be nigel tufnel day, (though anyone who has not see this little bit of nonsense is quite the bit poorer for it), it's a reflection on why it might have taken this country 135 years, and, indeed this whole world of ours until 1918, to set aside time to remember those who put their lives in harm's way so that the rest of us should never.

i've always been fascinated by the less obvious history of our own american revolutionary war, and the demographics of those soldiers we so facelessly bury beneath the iconic horseback image of general george washington "defeating" the british at yorktown. (general george's greatest ability, imho, was his ability to keep an army in the field against all odds, and one can usefully equate cornwallis' temporary underestimation of his tactical situation with england's complete disrespect for an unkempt, poorly trained collection of little more than society's margins, and realize that had england really wanted to kick our collective asses, they were more than capable to do so even after 1783). some years ago i had privilege to learn some of my genealogy back to that particular period of american history, and it struck me how only the unmarried and childless members of the family had taken revolutionary military service. gary b. nash, professor emeritus from princeton university, itself hard by some of the narrative he expounds, in his book "the unknown american revolution", describes the almost unbelievable truth of who these men not-quite-in-uniform really were.

save perhaps some officers looking to advance a career, the american revolutionary war soldier was by vast majority a veritable outcast from the society he risked his life to build. he was poorly paid to the point of not being at all, he was poorly fed and provisioned to the point that his life was more likely to be taken by disease than by violence, and he was so poorly respected that civilians (rightly in many cases) feared him more than the english whenever he tramped through town for his incivility and coarse life beyond better-defined lawfulness. the "patriots" we revere, in other words, today would be more likely a legion of deadbeat dads with substance abuse issues, than family men with hearts of gold as they're painted. (this is NOT the characterization and demographic of the citizen soldiers of the massachusetts militia who fired the shot heard round the world, but, rather, the continental army in whom it was entrusted to take that fight to its ultimate conclusion--you'll hear more of my genuflections to the massachusetts boys every april for patriots day, and it's important to understand the difference if only to contemplate the devotion it takes to leave family behind without sure expectation of coming back, because THAT is the choice taken by so many of our soldiers today).

which is all a long way of coming around to say that "veterans" are a very complex bunch, and they are not always easy to love. above all, they share a bond of obedience to their calling and their country which deserves supreme reverence, and today is one day set aside for us to do so, and so we should--indeed and so we must. every war, it seems, is different. our revolution tells one story. our war for union another. world war I, world war II and the korean conflict yet more. (so many fewer of these men and women remain to tell their stories--i hope we still have time to listen). the majority of our veterans today recall vietnam and more recent conflicts, and they, once again, are different than all those who went before, except in that one all-important way.

most of us enjoy a life for which a smaller number of others have endeavored to pay. we remember those who lost their lives every may, but we so often forget the burdens carried by those who have not yet. there are memories of brothers and sisters lost, and atrocities (war is, indeed, as w. tecumseh sherman supposed, hell) the rest of us shall never fully know. we have never been as outraged at our collective disrespect as we should be, (sending troops to iraq and afghanistan, the land of the "ied", without armored vehicles and bodies is still unfathomable to me), and we have never been as warm in our welcome home as we could be.

today, however, we can think about what we owe, and what we might better do to recognize the debt. (for it can never be fully repaid).

for my father and my only uncle, the same as for my great, great, great, great, great, great, great uncles all before them, and to all who have earned same, a salute.

sun tzu

sun tzu, via his "art of war", is one of the most closely-studied and best-regarded military theorists and strategists in the history of this planet. one of his basic premises, if i may be so bold as to sum up such a rich and deep treasure-trove of ideas into a single sentence, is that strategy, and not force of arms, is the key to victory. ("victorious warriors win first, and then go to war"). another is that knowing ones self and ones enemy is an absolute prerequisite to success. ("if you know your enemies and know yourself you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles"). another is that tactics are what we can most easily observe, while strategy is, by definition if successful, far less apparent. ("all men can see the tactics whereby i conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved").

in reflecting on the schoolboy nonsense of the previous post, it's clear that the pajamas media guy believes wholly in tactics. he believes that he can take a collection of 11 year olds and configure them into "winners" by simple exhortation and rearrangement. it's the same sort of american gung-ho-ism that leads so many of us to rah-rah our invasion of third and fourth-rate military countries like iraq and afghanistan, without properly understanding the depth of strategy necessary to earn that success, and the cost implicit in achieving it. (not to mention how it's entirely a different sport than competing with real armies from real countries like russia and china). at the risk of falling into the same arrogant trap into which he's already fallen, i might suggest that, given a few minutes with the team he so proudly bested, i could reconfigure the result with even less effort. (what is it that bum phillips once said of his mentor, bear bryant? "he can take his'n and beat your'n, and then take your'n and beat his'n"?)

what has me so exercised today is that we have become a nation of armchair quarterbacks (armchair coaches, to be more accurate) who are all sooooo much smarter than everybody else, and, to paraphrase sun tzu, knowing neither ourselves nor our potential opponents. (we can't even tell an actual muslim from a terrorist sham of one). our "strategy" is a reliance on tactics (let's NUKE 'EM!) and, more clear today than ever, we go to war before ever understanding how it is that we might be able to actually win. (would you prefer to have to visit downtown iraq today, or downtown iraq 10 years ago?) it's written all over the daily news, and its written all over opinion pieces like the tripe in pajamas media where someone who understands nothing about soccer, and, according to sun tzu, nothing about winning, tries to pretend he's teaching 11 year olds anything about either.

i've written previously about the norwegian university study that shows that conditioning, not practice with ball skills, yields best results on the soccer pitch compared with presently accepted training methods. (nobody is suggesting that one be practiced without the other). i've written a bit here about how superior players should not be positioned on the field to touch the ball the least, despite what mr. pajamas media would have you believe. there are litany of other things to be understood (know yourself and know your enemy, and know how to win before you go to war) and the ultimate truth is that you will find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to judge from your observations the strategy used by someone else to win, unless they explain it to you.

if i were teaching 11 year olds to play soccer, (which i have done with great reward and success in the past, though not success as mr pajamas media might measure it), i would start by explaining that the key to true and lasting success on a soccer field, as well as life, is in maximizing the contribution of ALL players on a team--not maximizing the contribution of a few. (this would be contrary to middle school american football coaching that focuses on the star quarterback, and, apparently, anathema to pajamas media soccer coaching that focuses on putting the most talented players as far away from the middle of the field as possible). i would put my best athletes where they would find the ball in front of them and towards the opponents goal with greatest frequency, and i would ensure that my opponents' best athletes would never be far away from several players who were their match in speed and athleticism. from there, i would guess, knowing my pajamas media opponent as well as myself, that it would be just a matter of time before non-scoring frustration would pull more and more of his better athletes further and further ahead of the ball, until none of them remained where they could do anything about the counterattack that would defeat them.

i worry, with our military stretched to such an extent waging war on multiple fronts, whatever might have happened (or may still happen) if a well-strategized opponent chose this time to attack us. i fear we would not fare so well.

though i'm sure many of our 11 year old soccer coaches would be extremely quick to blame everything else but the truth about why that might be so.

texas football

apologies up front for using the term "football" here to refer to "american football", and "soccer" to refer to "association football" as it's officially known in the land of its invention, in order to best serve my american readers, but perhaps you've seen this viral video over the past few days, whereby the corpus christi texas driscoll middle school schoolboys outfoxed their erstwhile 11, 12 and 13 year old opponents with the help of an inspired bit of shenanigans that has to be seen to be believed. implied in the disciplined way in which the driscoll boys held their stances during the ruse, it's obvious some significant coaching and practice time went into this "success". (more on this later).

i put the word "success" in quotation marks, because i see in this the same sort of parental idiocy that has led one particular pajamas media contributor to conclude that he's solved both schoolboy athletics and world geopolitics by reconfiguring his son's otherwise hapless soccer team in place of a coach who is given neither opportunity nor grace for an explanation. (nods to the right side of lowell who nods to instapundit for a pointer to the source). the premise of the soccer story is that a collection of eleven year old boys, losing every game, can be remade by simple adjustment of tactics and psyche into world-beaters in one quick wave of the coach's whistle, thus "proving" that a must-win attitude and the elevation of the "best and the brightest" is at the base of any successful sports team and civilization.

so, first, for my caveats--i neither disagree with the premise that a must-win attitude is at the base of any previously successful civilization, nor deny the possibility that his son's coach may be as ineffective as he is portrayed. history is clear--he with the best (best strategized) army wins, and any set of facts with which one is ignorant is pointless to argue.

however.

as i commented on the right side of lowell's post, "i filled in for my child's coach and the team won" is the worst possible argument in favor of one style of soccer and against another, and it makes crazy to hear it. as i further observed, soccer is a sport that almost no american parent understands, and it is absolutely NOT about the one kid who has matured ahead of his or her peers and can run around them all and poke the ball into the net at age 11, no matter how hard the pajamas media parent thinks he's proved it by re-jiggering his lineup to put his best 11-year old nearest to the opponent's net. (you can read the rest of my comment if you like--it pretty much covers the bases).

in many american sports, like baseball and football, there is ample logic and professional proof that having ones best arm at the starting pitcher and quarterback positions is the key to success. the guy writing the pajamas media piece takes this premise straight to the soccer field and brags about not putting "the terrible kids in at forward or in goal", and further lauds those "terrible kids'" "heroic" efforts on defense to keep the ball out of their own net. i'm sure these must be your classic american little league right fielders right here (hello, nancy drew) and this guy is so full of self-congratulations that he's found a place to hide them on his field that it would border on comedy, if it wasn't so sad.

see, when right fielders grow up, they enjoy the same positional luxuries as they did while 11 year olds, with fewer balls hit in their direction, and the least impact on their team's defense beyond every other position on the field with the possible exception of first base. (curiously enough, unlike at the pro level, first basemen in little league need to be some of the better athletes, because they have to be able to run to the base, turn around and catch a ball with some reliability, which, let's be honest, is something that remains beyond many 11 year olds, and, so, well, welcome back to right field...) however, when "terrible kids" who used to play defense as 11 year old soccer players grow up, they unfortunately find that they are otherwise required to mark some of the fastest and most-capable athletes on the opponent's team, and that there really is no place for them at all on the pitch.

so, back to coaching, what, exactly, is best to do when trying to teach 11 year olds the game of soccer? do you teach them that putting the early-maturing athletes nearest the goal is the soul of the sport, the way that there is no penalty to do in baseball or football, since the quarterback and the starting pitcher are, indeed, the soul of those sports? i'm sorry, but i consider myself rare among parents in this country that i understand how stupid that strategy clearly is when it comes to mature (i.e. not 11-year old) soccer, and i'm hear to tell the pajamas media guy that he may have taught those kids something about how winning feels better than losing, (something, ironically, that those kids already well knew), but he did worse than taught them nothing about the game there were supposedly being taught--he taught them WRONG and did them a huge disservice in the process.

by way of a quick explanation for my reasoning, think about a soccer field, and how infrequently the ball is between the most-forward player (called the "striker", if you must know, and not a "forward") and the opponents' goal where it is he's supposed to put it. simply put, if your best player stands at that position, he will touch the ball fall less frequently than anyone else on the field, and be marginalized to the extreme. or, in other words, (sorry pajamas media guy, but its true), you are writing the script for failure, and not success, whenever this tactic is tried while the sport is played at any reasonable level. much more like a basketball point guard, there is far greater value to be gained by placing ones best player at the center of the field or the court, both for the increased amount of time to be spent with the ball between ones self and the opponents' goal, but also to be spent in closer proximity to your opponents' best players. of course, in basketball the analogy breaks quickly down because of the skewing impact that physiological coincidence (i.e. height) plays on a basketball court. however, in soccer, the truth is absolute--all the best players are midfielders.

now that isn't to say that there isn't star-maker machinery behind the privilege to be the one most likely to place the ball into the opponents' net, and wayne rooney is one of the best-sexed athletes in the world to speak to that truth. but if you look at a list of the top-50 highest-paid soccer players in the world, (wayne is #20), it is led and dominated by midfielders almost without significant exception. simply put, the game is played through the central midfield, and the best-skilled, best-fit and best-performing athletes must be there if their teams are to succeed. (we're still talking about success, right?)

i used the analogy of nfl defensive backs vs wide receivers to make the point in my comment to the RSOL post, and i think it's useful. the fact is that nfl defensive backs are generally better athletes than the wide receivers they cover, while the significant skill possessed by the wide receivers in addition to a modicum of speed is their ability to catch the ball. simply put, defensive backs need speed, as they have to keep up with the wide receivers while running backwards and not knowing where the quarterback is likely to heave the ball, and it's best to have your fastest guy on defense in football rather than the other way around. similarly, in soccer, defenders have to be able to keep up with attackers running backwards and without foresight as to the trajectory of the ball, or their team will lose. attackers can willingly trade speed for their ability to shoot the ball with accuracy (analogous to the catching skill in football) and the best configuration of talent is always to have superior athletes defending. i'll point you back to the pajamas piece to observe that this yahoo, in attempting to "teach" his 11 year old players about winning soccer, got it exactly backwards.

there's good reason that soccer generally end with so few goals scored. (ostensibly, via attention deficit disorder, the reason so few americans make the effort to understand it properly). the game of successful soccer is, paradoxically, to keep the ball out of your own net. i'm appalled to read that there's a father out there somewhere (there are legions, actually) who doesn't care that he doesn't get it, and is confusing 11 year olds into believing that the soccer equivalent of that crazy trick play in the video (you knew i was going to tie it together in the end, right?) is the best way to teach kids how to play.

of course, the driscoll coaches will talk (not necessarily without merit) about how imagination and deception are important football skills, and even if that play won't serve those kids ever again in their lives, the experience of dreaming it up and executing it will, but i'm here to say, for the game of soccer, that the absence of such nonsense at an early age is why brazilians, and not americans, are king of the sport of soccer, and will be for the rest of our lifetimes.

want to know how brazilians learn soccer? first and foremost, they have no idiots "teaching" them idiocy at age 11. 99% of their playing time is without lines, nets or even fields. they play it on the beach. in gymnasiums. (look up "futsal" sometime). anywhere they can touch a ball. and, when they do play it "for real", with grass, lines, nets, officials and coaches, they learn the game from people who understand it.

sometimes i fear for our future as a nation, i truly do.

the chance column

back when i was in college, back in the days when alcohol-related misbehavior most often received a wink rather than anything else it more fully deserved, my enterprising buddies and i salvaged a perfectly functional soda vending machine from a local gas station in the process of going out of business. you see, the real estate on that corner being worth more than the few pennies per gallon left by big oil for the little distributors, the owner was properly pursuing his capitalist american dream to cash out to the highest bidder, and fire sale the fixtures to whomever might be interested. of course, the capitalist american dream for enterprising college students looking to make some extra cash with which to buy beer was to purchase said used vending machine in order to re-purpose it to sell beer. it was a perfect solution. (ah, unregulated capitalism...)

the machine was a rock-solid refrigeration unit with four separate columns, each purpose-fitted to hold about a case-and-a-half of 12 oz aluminum beverage cans and dispense them out a single opening at the bottom for any (one single) price that might be preferred. (the mechanism for setting the price and then properly interpreting the coins as they were inserted was fascinating and a remarkable feat of engineering, especially in its mechanical intelligence to make change, but i'll try not to digress). the cost of mainstream big-brand beer (budweiser, miller, miller lite, etc.) was such that a nice round .50 cents yielded a nice round 100% profit margin on the .25 cent per can inventory. the only real business challenge left was to determine which four flavors of beer should be stocked in order to optimize customer satisfaction, hence sales, hence profits.

bud was an easy choice, just as it remains today--not anything remarkable by taste, but consistent and well-recognized, and quite suitably popular among beer-thirsty college kids when had at the right price. second was a bit less obvious, (schlitz beer was long gone by the turn of the 80's), and we never did reach a final conclusion there. (coors suffered by its cans being an odd over-long shape, so could never be tested, though theories were that it may have done well in that position). mostly we rotated miller and even faddish now-obscurities like stroh's and didn't worry so much about it. third was an even easier choice than the first, as lite/light beer was well into its market ascendance, and a rotating choice between miller lite and bud light kept sales in that category neck and neck with the first column, and popular with the girls who, truth be told, drank just as much if not more than their male classmates, and would eagerly switch to beer from their preferred mixed cocktails if it were sunday and there being no other choices. ah, but the fourth column...

the fourth column was the real challenge, but, as the chinese are fond to also say, the real opportunity. having covered all the necessary big-brand mainstream labels, and lite/light versions in the first three columns, there was a real disagreement of the beer machine board of directors as to how best exploit the last one. some wanted to go for big margins, and fill it with swill like meisterbrau (.15 cents a can or less if it was on sale) and put up with slower sales (who wants to pay .50 cents for meisterbrau, even today?) as a consequence. (fewer runs to the package store, too). other, more connoisseur--like advocates felt that volume might better make up for higher inventory carrying costs, and politicked for things like michelob (.65 cents per can and higher) to try to optimize profits. unfortunately, even college kids are well-aware that michelob is just bud in a fancy can, and that strategy didn't pan out, either.

the visionaries pondered the existential dilemma. the REAL volume drivers, e.g. heineken, (though college kids are and were well-aware of the michelob swill-factor, they, just like inexplicable and untold millions today, had and have a hard time recognizing what absolute crap heineken is, was and will always be, and there's just no explaining that), cost just about .50 per can themselves straight from the cheapest package store in the entire area, (blanchards, gordons--we tried them all), and would topple the entire business if they were to be accommodated. (raising prices to accommodate the luxury brand would seriously impact the ability to sell with a straight face all the rest of it). yet nobody would willingly push a button for .15 red white and blue beer when there was bud and miller lite right next to it.

the genius of the answer was the "chance" column--mix meisterbrau, red white a blue, pabst blue ribbon, carling black label and every other manner of cheap brew with heinekens to whatever point where the cost of goods sold hovered around the magic .25 cents, and let the thrill-seeking nature of the customer base follow their muse. the final mix was somewhere around a 1-in-4 chance for heineken, and a 3-out-of-4 probability that you were going to be drinking schaefer. (i LOVED schaefer, and would actually trade heinekens 2-for-1 whenever it was the cheap beer in the mix, but then you are learning altogether too much about me now, aren't you). beer sales were good. life was good. ahh, college...

well, making an extremely long story even longer, i'm put in mind of my youth in reading that expedia is now offering "blind-booking" for hotel rooms in concert with hotwire.com. observing that half of all hotel rooms in the world are vacant on any given night, the plan is to drive travelers to rooms that would otherwise stay empty (meisterbrau, anyone?) by mixing them in with places you might actually be interested to stay, and offering things for a sizable discount. (you sort hotels by date, star rating and location, and then roll your dice). hotwire manages the display, pricing and back-end booking with the hotel. expedia just brings buyers to the market via their travel booking site.

here's my experienced concern, and reason why i will never be availing myself of this "service". once the draw is established, (the heineken of hotel rooms, as it were), there is absolutely no incentive left to care the first damn bit about the rest. meisterbrau is meisterbrau, unless, of course, it's old milwaukee, and i'm hoping you're beginning to get my point. once brand is no longer of any concern, or living up to any sort of brand promise that might be implied, there's a perverse thing called "profit" that will lead even the best-intended purveyors to eagerly cut corners with the happy understanding that people will be pushing their "chance" column button regardless.

unfortunately, with hotels, the budweisers of the industry (hello, marriott) are already well-known and well-established. they suck, yes indeed they do, but they're everywhere, they're predictable, and they're familiar. (thing of marriott as the mcdonalds of business travel, and you'll pretty much be where my experience has taken me over lo these many years). anyone hoping to do better runs afoul of the perverse nature of the overnight-staying public, (we're like college kids when we travel--we're cheap because we can't afford to be otherwise, yes we are), and the hard economic reality that there's really very little reason to do better for people if they're going to have to book a room anyway, no matter what. one of the worst possible things for this whole situation will be the "chance" column, and you can quote me on the prediction, if indeed they can ever make such a thing successful. (beer to college kids is just about the most rock-solid business foundation you can devise, so trying anything else is taking chances by comparison).

yes, i know, we were irresponsible and guilty of offense against untold numbers of liquor regulations to be selling beer out of a vending machine in a college dorm, but, as i said, those were the days of proverbial wine and roses. (beer and some sort of flower that goes well with beer?) from such i learned that giving the people what they want can be extremely profitable (are any of the bars in downtown lowell listening?) if you find the right price point for your market. it's not about how much you make on every pour, it's how many pours you're privileged to make.

some day soon i'll tell you about the "8 beer club", and how to build loyalty for your business in one easy step. you'll be appalled. i promise. :-)

score!

just thought i'd let you know, in plenty of time for the holidays: kimball farms still has half gallons. (in all the basic food groups--vanilla, chocolate and strawberry). i got my winter supply, so it's safe to let you know you can get yours. (when they're sold out, they're sold out).

melvern!

every other thursday is melvern night at toad and for me, as you likely long well know. (and i appreciate that you keep your eye-rolls to yourselves :-). last night the first treat was kicking off the evening via a trio of unrehearsed deep cover classics from writers i only could dream to recognize (well, i did get "blue eyes cryin' in the rain" by willin nelson to start things off, but the rest went straight over my head and to my heart from there, and i loved every single minute of it) in addition to, as melvern likes to put it, "all the hits". the second treat was a mini-set by zach jones during the break which brought me a little bit back towards even for having missed the press room show in portsmouth a couple of weekends ago due to some extenuating circumstances. (the reviews from attendees at the show for zach's contributions were all raves). zach even wrapped up his little interlude of goodness with yet another out-of-the-blue unrehearsed gem, where he and melvern teamed up to harmonize the ever-lovin' be-jeezus out of the muppet classic "rainbow connection". no, it wasn't quite debbie harry and kermit, but it was pretty damn outstanding.

how much fun did you have on your thursday night?

but, wait! there's more!

on the way home i had the pleasure to discover davis square's rosebud cafe's back bar room, (it's pretty nice--harpoon on tap and everything!), and another gilded splinters gig. (gilded splinters are the new monday night residency at toad since jen kearney's sabbatical, which reminds me how much i can't wait to hear jen's new songs, but let's try not to become distracted, shall we). like monday night, though down a pedal steel, josh and the boys (featuring carl johnson!!!) still managed to more than fill the room with country-fied rock and roll. i'd have chosen to dial back the volume, (seriously--that's three mentions of musical volume over the past little bit--am i getting old?), because the sweet keys and lead guitar fills were finding themselves always overpowered by the bass and rhythm parts, and leaving josh nowhere to go but louder on his vocals, and there really wasn't any reason it couldn't have been better mixed and matched to the fine quality of the material (which is great, by the way) and the musicianship, which hardly need that kind of volume to get the point across. didn't have the chance to stick around long enough for josh to dig into his brian-setzer-orange gretsch, (oh, i LOVE a great guitar), because it was, after all, thursday, and a school night, or to see if they wrestled the mix into better perspective later on, but i left with that kind of "full night" happy music feeling that is so nice to achieve, and that's great.

ironically, my friday night schedule is wide open right now. (saturday is quintuple booked and counting, though, so no need to feel sorry for me yet).

westford 1, dracut not so much

i'm fairly serious about ice cream. one could observe that, being the descendant of so many generations of dairy farmers, it could be a genetic thing, but i like to think it's because i live in the area of the world where it's done better than everywhere else, and it's easy to become extremely picky as a result. to wit: i've been buying milk straight from the cows at richardson's and shaw farms since springbrook farm in littleton stopped producing theirs, (there are fires and then there are tragic fires, and the barn fire at springbrook was tragic), and i know my local dairy products. being so positively impressed by the sublimity of the dracut dairiers' bottled milk products, (they are remarkably good, and if you're not buying them, you have no idea what you're missing), i was eager to dip my scoop deep into their ice cream to say the very least. unfortunately, for whatever reason, their grasp on the whole ice cream thing pales (and i mean PALES, and, yeah, there's a milk pun to be made here, but i'll let you figure that out for yourself) in comparison to kimball farms in westford, and their milk supremacy falls prostrate at the foot of the ice cream king.

kimball's rules.

richardson's was the supreme disappointment, loaded as it is with un-natural ingredients, low milkfat content, and air, but shaw farms' ultimately fell short, too, with the same sort of soft consistency in which not enough fat and too much air necessarily result, even though they get much higher marks for quality of ingredients and flavor. kimball farms' stretches, taffy-like, and weighs heavy in your hand in a way that the air-puffed, lighter ice creams can only dream, and their flavor is ice creamy perfection. ultimate irony of ironies? you can actually get a half-gallon of kimball farms' for less money than either.

i hope kimball's isn't out of their summer stock yet--i'm feeling like i need to stock up for the long, cold winter. (it's never too cold for ice cream!)

tastes filling / less great

the dow is up over 200 points already this morning, and the easy explanations are either the anticipation of more republican congresspeople, or $600 BILLION in new fed spending.

it's more than a little ironic that D's withholding the fed boondoggle i mean bond buy-back until after the election only reinforces the perception that R's are "good news", (heaven forbid the D's be caught tossing about hundreds of billions of other people's dollars while the electorate, aka the other people, is watching), though it's more than a little disconcerting that our bloated government's only apparent imagination with interest rates at historical lows and debts at historical highs is to try to print more money in order to lower the rates further. (we can ask the japanese how that worked for them over the past many decades, but, then again, that would imply a requirement for some imagination...)

here's the math the way i see it: lots of somewhat-permanently unemployed people. (you can add up whatever statistics you like--the answer stays the same). a few chicken littles are cheeping about the potential for inflation, ("stagflation" for those old enough to remember the american later 70's), but i'm distracted by the japanese' experience after their real estate bubble burst a few decades ago. check out these circumstances:
1. collapsed asset (especially real estate) prices
2. collapsed equity (especially insolvent company stock) values
3. collapsed banks (somebody has to be holding the notes on all those insolvencies)
4. stubborn refusal to write off bad investments for what it might do to the appearances of things

sure quacks like that kind of duck to me...

like many japanese did and do, i'm looking at real estate (it's undervalued because of the collapse, remember?) but not until it absolutely bottoms out--just like it hasn't yet in japan, either. (they're going on 20 years of this, so it's not clear when the "buy" signal might occur, here or anywhere). the whole thing is quite sobering when you realize that you're one of the lucky ones just to have a job, regardless of your ability to maintain any sort of reasonable standard of living.

the good news is that savings are never eroded by an absence of inflation, so that if you can put aside anything at all for a rainier day that is undoubtedly coming, it'll be there later when you might need to use it. the bad news is that if you're already digging into your savings in order to maintain your present lifestyle, it's absolutely time to re-evaluate your lifestyle and priorities, and prepare yourself for the unfortunate truth that you're a heck of a lot poorer than you realize, and you're living beyond your means at the precisely worst possible time to be doing so. the best advice to all is to do exactly what your government is exhorting you not to, which is to cut back even further, and hoard your pennies..

the grand irony is that the REAL way out of the morass is capital investment, (which leads to new and higher-paying jobs), which is the sure result of the accumulation of all that new saving from all the new penny-pinchers, and the government is only telling you what they tell you because they want you to remain serfs to the system their graft and corruption has created. don't buy it--don't buy anything you don't absolutely need to--and take care of yourself first. the rest, with luck, good fortune, and a smaller government, will take care of itself in time.

sapere aude.

the next shoe

awhile back i commented to a thread on the dick howe site regarding the (unreasonable, i thought) amplification of some mediocre employment statistics. somehow the author (of the source article, as well as the referential blog post) found words like "plunging" and "plummeting" and "encouraging" to describe the present unemployment statistics. as you can see by the comments, i was not so sanguine.

well, here's the next shoe via reuters, and this all absolutely falls into the "biased, or stupid?" question category we discussed the other day. "the four-week average of new jobless claims, considered a better measure of underlying labor market trends, rose 2,000 to 456,000". it's not like there isn't ample statistical evidence to figure this stuff out, if you aren't looking at it all through a rose-colored prism of partisan political love. (and doing the very same pre-election partisan political BS act over there at the blog as was being done in reverse over at the sun). funniest part is that if dubya had been in charge, i'm quite confident that the dick howe folks would have been all over the fuller truth right from the start.

sapere aude, folks!

oh! and another thing!

got to meet bob mills last night, and personally thank him for his police blog and all-around outstanding work for the lowell sun. (i hope he's able to pass along my fan-boy enthusiasm for lisa redmond to her, too). won't go back into things other than to say that bob's (and lisa's) work are what make the paper worth whatever it is, and folks who haven't yet figured that out are welcomed (encouraged!) to follow the blog and see what it's all about.

and one helpful hint: if you follow the blog via google's reader, (reader.google.com), you never have to feel dirty about actually visiting the sun's barely navigable website. just press the "add a subscription" button on the main reader page, and paste "http://www.thesunblog.com/policeblog/" into the box. (i highly recommend google reader--i follow over two dozen blogs these days, and can read anything and everything new in just a few moments by calling up the reader page.

ok, back to work!

the dub two

had a burger, onion rings and bass ale last night while watching the b's, and enjoyed myself at the new dub. the room feels right, and the new renovations are great. the burger was basic "8-oz angus aramark", but i thought the onion rings were outstanding and the bass was just fine, too. for whatever reason they'd cranked the sound system up past comfortable conversation (there were less than a dozen people in the place, so not much sense to that if you ask me, but, hey, i must be old, though i will say i was the only person singing along to "kick out the jams" when it played, so their mix gets some credit, even if their volume was incongruous to the circumstances) but once that was cut off things felt much more as they should in a neighborhood pub on a wednesday night. i liked it, and i'll be coming back for sure. (especially if they program more live music like they've already planned for fridays).

i'd come over from the downtown lowell sub committee meeting with superintendent lavallee and representatives from many of the local downtown establishments, (including the new owner of the dubliner), which covered downtown police patrol updates through the end of september and an accompanying downtown crime activities report, (specifically for the hours between 10pm and 2am), which was quite interesting. the good news is that "disorder crimes" in the downtown area, aka assaults, disorderly/disturbing, vandalism, etc. including "oppositional defiant disorder" whenever directed at a peace officer, were down 20% from the same time period in 2009. (though spiked back up to previous september levels, so who knows the trend). the bad news is that the number of incidents involving a liquor establishment increased 50% from the prior year, from 22 to 33, and the discussion of this between residents and establishments was the lion's share of the meeting. (more on that in a sec).

here's one possible take on the statistics overall: cutbacks to police funding are reducing the number of police resources (aka patrols and patrolmen) and capacity to catch folks being bad while they're being bad. the rash of recent car break-ins certainly isn't an encouraging sign. it's also possible that the reason the "liquor establishment related" incidents continue to increase is that ODD folks are feeling freer to be themselves downtown, and staying longer, and, well, there you have the accident waiting to happen. i, for one, continue to be impressed by the efforts, efficiency and effectiveness of the lowell police department downtown, and i know none of the increases, and all of the decreases, are a credit to their professionalism and diligence. we really are lucky here in lowell in general, and downtown in particular, for such good fortune.

my hope is that future budget adjustments put back the necessary support for the police, because commerce and all related tax revenue depends on it, and its obvious anyone trying to "save" otherwise will find themselves disappointed with the results.

but, back to the helpful "incident locations" table provided by superintendent lavallee: knowing that "vandalism" counts towards the stats, and knowing from conversations with various owners several incidents that undoubtedly contributed to the totals, these figures all have to be taken with a cruiser-sized grain of salt. however, i can speak from first-hand experience that the two establishments at the top of the list didn't get there by accident, (blue shamrock and village smokehouse), and there's probably an iceberg of unreported incidents hiding there beneath the better-than-one-third of the total they represent. i'm glad to see it's to the attention of the right people, and being discussed.

i should also mention that not all the conversations were critical. echoing my purely positive experiences with the ownership and management of brian's ivy hall, (will rock for food!), specific compliments were made for BIH's responsiveness to noise and other concerns, and behavior as a good downtown neighbor. el rincon was credited for having altered their outdoor and open-door practices, and it appears as if hookslide kelly's is receiving the same hint. (we'll see how effectively hookslides adjusts to their new popularity at the next meeting). all-in-all the meeting was a tribute to the effectiveness of open communication, and superintendent lavallee deserves good credit for making it a priority of his department. (we even got to be hosted by the superintendent in the emergency management center within the police station because the city hall meeting room was double-booked and we got booted, and i have to say they're really doing a lot on their shoestring over there at the police department, and it would be very nice to see what they might be able to do for our benefit with more generous/appropriate funding).

my favorite was the "downtown disorder crimes" map and the little crime icons used to represent the various disorder crimes. (disorderly conduct is a little cartoon speech balloon, and intimidation, simple assault and aggravated assault are little fists in various gradations of increasingly red color). lots of jawboning and vandalism over by majors/cappy's, (vandalism is a little blue spray-paint can), and much more of the rough stuff around the blue shamrock.

what did you get to do with your wednesday night?

"oppositional defiant disorder"

seems that the dsm-iv has grown yet again while i was paying attention to other things. (aka "adhd"). their latest edition adds "oppositional defiant disorder" to the very long list of things by which one can be diagnosed, and this one actually makes a clinical definition of questioning authority. the paranoid among us might imagine the logical extension of obamacare to rounding up all those who oppose it and the rest of the government, but i'm sure the rest of you have nothing to worry about.

http://offthegridnews.com/2010/10/08/is-free-thinking-a-mental-illness/

(there's a little bit of a wink in there somewhere--i'm not questioning the dsm-iv, no, i'm not, honest)

just stupid

last i checked, lowell wasn't part of massachusetts' 3rd middlesex, (comprised of waltham, weston, lincoln, bedford, carlisle, chelmsford, concord and parts of sudbury and lexington), but, as might go a long way to explain sandi martinez' third straight election debacle in that district, her election night concession party, i mean campaign rally, was held here last night in our fair 1st middlesex city.

i don't know about you, but if i'm from any one of those aforementioned towns, i really wouldn't care to vote for someone most prominently invested in someone else's beeswax.

but maybe that's just me.

biased or just stupid?

the paper of record (can't even nod again to the mr mill city boys, silent as they have become) was consistent in its spinning of pre-election polling to "report" that charlie baker was every bit the political match to deval patrick, in addition to its fawning editorial endorsement of CB to go along with it, and, yet, this morning, we learn that patrick won going away with a 7% margin of victory, (49 to 42), that mirrored the extant and obvious news sources that the sun ignored while crafting its daily pre-election "news" headlines.

i'll ask the simple and obvious question that arises from this: is the sun editor, jim capanini, biased, or just stupid?

neither quality being useful in a newspaper editor, i guess we lowellians just have to keep putting up with our misfortune to have nothing better on our newsstand shelves.

litmus sense of humor test

last night's daily show featured a skit covering boehner's likely ascension to the speakership as a triumph for "orange americans". (could only find the full-episode link here). in trying to locate a copy of it to enjoy again today online, i ran across this piece from andy borowitz last december, which seems to be their (somewhat dated) source for the gag.

first of all, let me say that i was disappointed to have to endure the blind partisanship of jon's audience. (cheering every D and booing every R betrays profound and blind stupidity more than anything else and eloquently points out that jon still could benefit from better balance in his fun-poking). but, second of all, let me also say i found the bit on boehner to be just the sort of harmless irreverence that both sides of this country so dearly seem to need. it wasn't an ideological attack, and it wasn't mean-spirited, it was just silly. (think chevy chase continually falling down as gerald r. ford, or everybody on TV doing lecherous bill clinton impersonations, which, btw, only became funny once kenneth star ceased to waste countless tens of millions of our money on trying to make a federal case out of a sexually-harrassed blowjob, but lets not digress).

i, for one, am looking forward to the possibility of spend-slashing as the political fad du jour, and if the face of that fiscal attention happens to be a bit more tanned than would seem to be normal for most ohioans, i'm still absolutely OK with that.

let's get to work, america, at fixing this mess!