Draft Day

the NFL draft is today. I just wrote a paper on how the draft is like any economic bubble--specifically the Dutch Tulip bubble, but whatever. The point is that no matter how much informmation is available about a player, what matters more to that player's value as a draft pick is the talk about that information, and the force of history. Why else so many WR taken in the first draft when so many f them are busts? I mean, Marques Colston was like a 6th round pick and I'd take him over any of the WRs taken over him last year.

I wonder if I should ust present this paper on wednesday instead of the paper I have yet to write.

UPDATE: Calvin Johnson, GaTech WR, just went #2 overall. Will he be a Torry Holt or a Marcus Nash? Keep in mind he was drafted by Detroit (http://www.coldhardfootballfacts.com/Article.php?Page=776)

it's hard to blog

when you are up to your eyeballs in chi-square and Spearman rho tests for correlation and you barely know what this shit is. Plus! populations sample parameters. I don't even know if I know the right term. Damn. Aren't there any good textbooks on this stuff?

the worst possible conditions for studying

The worst way to study is to be on the L platform, while on the other side of the little shelter a dude is cackling and pounding on the divider.

wipeout

I went for a run this morning. I tripped on my pants and wiped out in the road. I seriously skidded. I'm completely ok though. I guess it was all forward motion that got converted into heat between my clothes and the road instead on my face and the road. or something.

doofuses

doofuses (doofii?) don't like non-doofs. That's what makes them doofuses.

what is up is grad school

I have to write like, 40 pages total by tuesday afternoon. I'm seriously working hard here. It beats my old life in several very important ways. One of those ways is that I  am drinking beer while doing this work and IT IS TOTALLY OK. Up yours, being a systems administrator.

Also of note is the presence of my wife's cat, who could never come keep me company in the server room but is totally rubbing her head on my knee right now. Hegemony tells me she likes me but i know it's just dinner time.

Blog it up!

I'm about to.

marriage

Being married is like being insane: the scope of your life increases by 100% and you have NO CONTROL over that new territory. Seriously, it's like, What's my left hand doin'? I don't know!


Note: this musing was inspired by laundry day.

ECON 101

The other day it was raining.  I stood waiiting for the bus, getting wet because my rain jacket is "water-resistant," not "water-proof."  On the bus, a couple of older black women had cut open old plastic groocery bags and made bonnets out of them.  I paid like $75.  They paid nothing.  Who was dryer? 

musings on the state of capitalism.

I just imagine myself walking into the groocery store and saying..."do you have any sort of product that might help me to wash fruit?"

The oscars featured a montage of epic movies.  The moral was that you could only truly appreciate these at thhe theater.  I.e., don't stay home hunched over your PSP.  But where are you gonna see Ben Hur or The Sound of Music at a theater?  Durrr.

environmentalism and doom

Maybe environmentalism is just prolongin the suffereing. The sooner we, as a species, poison ourselves, the sooner the Earth can peacefully get on with the business of waiting for the sun to turn red giant and swallow it.


Unless without humans to eat them metahne-farting cows will cause a runaway greenhouse effect and the next thing you know, we've got Venus Mark II going on.

I would just like to point out...

That the coors commercial about how Coors will cool down a hot day is currently playing. it starts the 2004 Super Bowl champions, the New England Patriots. It is hot. A Coors train comes through the stadium. Classic rock plays. A breeze blows the cheerleader' skirts up. Coors is GOD.

Culture of empties

Reading these descriptions of the commercials that will comprise the new Coors campaign made me almost unbearably sad. Except for this book I was supposed to read in 7th grade called "winning" about a highskool footbal player's courageous life after becoming a parapalegic, I've never read anything so pathetic and empty.

Direct quotes, describing wat happens after a beer is opened:

1. The music gets louder and the party gets better.
2. People are so refreshed that they start dancing and the party gets better.
3. Coors Light can turn a dreary hot summer day into a wonderful icy-cold experience.
4. It was all a dream...or was it?

Ok, I made one of those up. i get this intense feeling of deja vu when I read these. Also a feeling that all culture is futility.

And the abyss stares back.

File under: pure complaining
Sheesh. You'd think that after I just bragged about how good I am at getting things done I would in fact be getting things done. But no. I'm on spring break I guess, but I have a metric buttload (15% larger than the imperial) of things to do for school. I might not graduate on time. My job is killing me. My current insurer doesn't cover meds I need to breathe, so I spend both a lot of money on meds and a lot of time not really breathing all that great.

At least I get to go home now.

What the heck is up with Mission of Burma? Where the heck do they get off breaking up for 20 years and then getting back together and making a great album like it was no big deal? It doesn't sound like a pale imitation of the originals. It just sounds like the next MoB album. Yesterday I turned off the best song, "Wounded World," on my CD just in time to catch the new Green Day. Oh man. There was What's Wrong With Music Today(tm) and the cure for it right there.

Getting things done.

I've been seeing a lot of this stuff around lately. The "Geting things done book" is everybody's darling these days. It seems needlessly complex. As a full-time Sys admin and a full-time media studies student, I'm under the impression that I know a thing or two about getting things done. So, here's my own recipe for productivity (and increased charisma and improved body odor):

If it is a thing to do, do it.
If you need to write it down to remember to do it, write it down.

That's about it.

I wonder what's behind the productivity industry. If I remember right. this is only the latest in a long line of people selling you a thing that will help you be more productive. Why do people flock to these crutches? Adding a ritualistic aspect is perhaps a replacement for plain old obligation motivation.

Adding this insane process to every item that drifts across your transom is just going to bog things down.

blog post

The best blog post is the one about how I'm so blah and uninspired that I can't work on my paper or on my HP-UX system. I'm bored and restelss and I already ate my sandwich and apple so I have nothing to look forward to all day. When I go home I absolutely have to do some homework, some of which is math homework, and I'd rather take a nap but then I'll never get to sleep and then waking up will kill me tomorrow. Maybe I should move over to LivJournal. Current Mood: neurasthenic

The destruction of ethics.

So, I've like totally got this Media Ethics class. Anyway, in the discussion, media ethics come up (surprise) and the values that come up the most are things like: objectivity, fairness, accuracy. You know, the ususal. And I was thinking that these values never get anyone anywhere. How about some new values and goals for journalism?

1) Be informed. Is this asking too much? Can the white house press corps ever know enough to actually report fairly?

2) Be understanding. This replaces "objectivity." This though was poked out of my head by the works of William Vollmann. The way he digs into a situation, whether in reporting, or in historical fiction goes beyond the idea of objectivity and goes deep into honest atempts at understanding.

and now there's too damned much going on around me at work for me to think clearly.

I was in Chicago over Labor day. I took this for my photojournalism class. I don't have a digital camera. This was taken on Kodak Gold 800 iso film with my trusty old Pentax MXII and scanned using a Nikon something or other negative scanner. I've got other cool photos, but no more access to the scanner.

Children play in front of a video-screen fountain at Chicago's Millennium Park, Sunday, Sept. 5, 2004, after the Chicago Jazz Festival.