I don’t get haircuts very often. For the past few years, it’s been pretty much a twice-a-year thing. When I get a haircut, my hair goes from being long and shaggy to very short. It is completely obvious when I get a haircut. And yet sometimes, people will ask, “Did you get a haircut?” I realize they’re just trying to be nice and make conversation. And they wouldn’t want to compliment me on a haircut if I hadn’t gotten one. But trust me, when I get a haircut, you’ll know. I know that many people get haircuts far more frequently than I do. If you go to the barbershop every week, people won’t be able to notice if you just got a haircut. Or if you have really long hair and you get a few inches trimmed off, people may not notice, or could just think you’re doing something slightly different with your hair.
Ultimately, this goes back to my hatred of stupid questions. Asking me if I got a haircut when it’s obvious I had one is a really stupid question. So save yourself the trouble. If you’d like to compliment or criticize my haircut, go straight to that.* You don’t need to ascertain whether I got it cut or not.
* BTW, there is absolutely no consensus whatsoever as to how long I should keep my hair. Some say it looks better short, some say it looks better long. Personally, I don’t give a shit, so I figure that I please everyone at some point in the period between haircuts.
After a shaky 4-3 start, the Saints are on a roll. They now have a 10-3 record, second-best in the NFC. And yet, if the playoffs started today, they’d be a #5 seed and would head on the road to take on the 6-7 St. Louis Rams. You know, that team the Saints just crushed. This is a result of the NFL’s obnoxiously tiny divisions and their insistence upon seeding division champions above higher ranked wild card teams.
Now, some of you may say that this is sour grapes, as my team is the one currently being affected. Well, of course I’m bitter. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Numerous times over the past few seasons teams with better records have missed the playoffs for the sake of champions of crappy divisions, or teams with better records have gone on the road to play a division champ with a worse record. In 2009, Green Bay finished 11-5 but had to go to Arizona to play the 10-6 Cardinals, losing 51-45 in overtime. In 2008, the 11-5 Patriots missed the playoffs (finishing tied with Miami for 1st in the AFC East but losing on tiebreakers) while the 8-8 Chargers won the AFC West and locked up the #4 seed. Continue reading ‘the nfl’s playoff seeding’
You’ve probably heard that Sarah Palin has a TV show on TLC. I caught a few minutes of it a couple weeks ago and it was pretty dreadful. Ostensibly it’s a look at her family, her life, and her unabashed worship of all things Alaska, but we all know it’s a tool for her political ambitions, which almost surely will include a campaign for President at some point in the future. I hadn’t planned on watching another episode, but then I heard that there was a bit of an uproar over the most recent episode, in which Palin and her dad go on a hunting trip in the Alaskan tundra. Aaron Sorkin, well-known screenwriter and prominent advocate and donor to various Democratic candidates, came out with a column on the Huffington Post in which he bashed Palin for killing an animal on TV. Palin had attempted to pre-empt criticism by saying that anyone who used leather products or ate meat shouldn’t criticize her, but Sorkin (who says that he does, in fact, eat meat and has leather shoes and furniture) went after her anyway.
I don’t really care to turn this into a vegetarianism or animal-rights debate. And since Palin, Sorkin, and I all eat animals, it doesn’t need to be. (If you’re a vegetarian and want to object to the episode on the grounds that animals should never be killed and eaten, go right ahead. But not on this blog.) Sorkin says he doesn’t “relish the idea of torturing animals.” From the footage shown on the episode, it doesn’t look like torture to me. Close-up on Palin, “Bang!” goes the shot from her gun, then cut to the animal to see it fall down. By the time the hunting party walks over, the caribou is long dead. If I had to choose between that death and the death of the average factory-farm-raised cow or chicken, I’d take the caribou’s death. (And if I had to choose which life to lead, it’d be the caribou, by far. Wandering across Alaska beats standing in my own shit any day of the week.) Continue reading ‘aaron sorkin’s criticism of sarah palin’s hunting trip’