I’m quite fond of sleeping. I don’t understand those work hard/party hard types who push sleep aside and run on some combination of caffeine, cigarettes, and drugs (legal or otherwise). Sleep is amazing, and I often find myself looking for ways to get more sleep.
Back in the day, I was pretty good at being a morning person. I’d wakeup and watch cartoons and SportsCenter and playing video games. Those were the days. But sometime between the beginning and end of my college years, that changed completely. Yes, I can still drag myself out of bed in the morning, but it’s a labor. There is, however, a massive change in our society which could remedy the laments of the non-morning people. That change? The siesta. Continue reading ‘the fact that we don’t have siestas’
Okay, I guess I’m a few days late with this post, but a certain sore loser from Russia won’t shut his trap, so why should I? I’m talking about Evgeni Plushenko, the silver medalist in men’s figure skating, who has spent the days since his loss (if one can call a silver medal a loss) bitching about the winner, American Evan Lysacek. Most of Plushenko’s criticism centers around one fact: Lysacek didn’t do a quad, and Plushenko did. In Plushenko’s mind (and in the mind of some commentators, such as noted mullet-loving Canadian figure skating great/he-man Elvis Stojko), the quad should be the sine qua non of men’s figure skating. In their minds, the sport hasn’t advanced in decades, while other sports have moved ahead in leaps and bounds—just compare this year’s halfpipe routines to ones from four years ago. Continue reading ‘evgeni plushenko’s whining’
There’s 50 states in the USA. And 49 of them have something horribly wrong with their state governments. The sole exception? Nebraska. And what does Nebraska do right? They have a unicameral state legislature. Uni-what? Instead of having a senate and a house of representatives (or whatever the equivalent names are in various states), they have just a single chamber.
Some background: the US has a Senate and a House of Representatives. As you may or may not remember from your 10th-grade American History class, this was a compromise between the states with small populations (who favored an equal number of seats for each state) and the large states (who favored seats based on population). Eventually Roger Sherman masterminded the Connecticut Compromise, which led to our bicameral federal legislature.* Continue reading ‘bicameral state legislatures’
I’m an Olympics junkie. Every two years, all I want to do is watch round-the-clock coverage of sports I wouldn’t otherwise care about, except that I’m sucked in by jingoism and sappy human interest stories. This year, NBC has apparently decided that it would like to do the crappiest job possible of televising the Olympics, and is making my life miserable.
The Olympics are in Vancouver, so that should be great for TV in the USA, right? No need to tape-delay stuff for ten or twelve hours until prime time. I’m cautiously optimistic that the live prime time coverage will be good, but it looks like NBC is going to suck horribly at everything else. I’ve been looking through the TV schedule and this is pretty much the way it works on the average day (all times Central):
NBC: mixture of sports/feature pieces from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. (weekdays) or 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. (weekends), the big-name sports from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., then recap/medal ceremonies/some sports coverage from 10:30-11 or 11-12.
MSNBC/CNBC/USA: USA curling & hockey matches, some other hockey matches. Continue reading ‘nbc’s olympics coverage’
Before we begin, a semi-related cartoon for your education and entertainment:
I usually try to steer clear of politics, but given the out of control spending of the Bush and Obama administrations, I simply can’t stay silent. In the name of “economic recovery” or “stimulus” (since those sound better than “bailouts” and “corporate welfare” and “giving money to idiotic companies so that they can give huge bonuses to their executives”) the federal government has been on an out-of-control spending spree, one that could very well bankrupt future generations (read: “people my age”). Yet this stimulus spending is only a small part of the problem. We find ourselves in a demographic crunch in which a massive redistribution of wealth from workers to retirees may sink our country in a morass of debt from which we cannot escape. At the heart of this problem is Social Security, which was a bad idea when it began and is an even worse idea now. Continue reading ‘social security’
So we just won the Super Bowl. The city is pretty much at a standstill as people celebrate. The Saints are on top of the NFL…and we’re still not the favorites to win next year’s Super Bowl. So I say, “Screw you, Vegas oddsmakers.” (The Colts are 6-1, the Saints and Chargers are 8-1). And I say screw you to all those commentators who talked about how Peyton Manning lost the game with his interception, which Tracy Porter returned for a game-sealing touchdown. The pundits treated a 13-3 team like miserable underdogs. Then we won. And they still think we’re not as good—consider The Onion’s take on things: New Orleans moves to No. 3 in NFL power rankings. Too bad—we have this:
and nobody else does. You can respect us or not. It really doesn’t matter to me. Quarterbacks like Mark Sanchez, Brett Favre, and Peyton Manning got more commercial airtime than Drew Brees during the Super Bowl, but those three didn’t get to lift the MVP trophy and film the “I’m going to Disney World!” commercial. People are acting like Drew Brees is just now a member of the NFL’s elite QBs, when anyone with a brain would have seen the numbers Brees has been putting up ever since he arrived in New Orleans and realized just how phenomenal a player he is. Clearly he was already among the elite, and you moronic pundits are just late to the party. Continue reading ‘the fact that people still don’t respect the Saints’
I know what you’re saying: “Kevin, not another article about quotation marks!” (Okay, probably four people are saying, “Ooh, another article about quotation marks!” But they’re in the minority.) My topic today concerns those authors who have decided they’re too good to use quotation marks. They have to come up with some novel concept for quoted material, but that non-standard invention never works quite as well as the tried-and-true. Continue reading ‘authors who don’t use quotation marks’
So there’s this little football game that takes place every year and it’s kind of a big deal and millions of people watch it on TV. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Maybe you just watch for the commercials or the wardrobe malfunctions? It’s the Super Bowl. And this year our beloved Black & Gold Boys are in it, so New Orleans is in a state of giddy delirium. But if you want to go, you pretty much have to pay through the nose, since the powers that be only see fit to distribute a few thousand tickets (at the merely eye-popping price of $800) to actual fans of the two teams involved.
Now, for what it’s worth I want to state that there’s not a chance I’d actually go to the Super Bowl at $800 a ticket plus all the travel expenses involved—that’s a lot of money, and besides, we still have two performances of Footloose this weekend (though we canceled our Sunday show, natch), so I’m a little too busy anyway. So I’m not that personally involved. But I’m sure my parents, lifelong Saints fans—my mother grew up going to games in Tulane Stadium with her father, and even attended a Super Bowl many years ago—would jump at the opportunity. It’s just that when the price goes from $800 to $1400 or $1600 or $1800 that things start getting a little too unaffordable. And it’s utterly ridiculous that out of 76,500 seats only a few go to actual fans getting tickets directly from the teams. The Saints sold 4,600 tickets to season ticket holders who were chosen in a weighted lottery, with the Colts likely offering 6,000 or so to their season ticket holders (I saw that 6k number on a Saints message board but was unable to confirm it). That’s out of something like 13,000-14,000 tickets each of the two teams received. Everything else went out to corporate sponsors, employees, and the like. I realize the NFL is a business* but why do the league and its teams give so few tickets to actual fans? Not to mention that only a third or so of the tickets go to the two teams involved—the majority of tickets go to the NFL and its sponsors and affiliates, or to the other 30 NFL teams. Continue reading ‘super bowl ticket allocations’
