What’s the quickest way to piss off a million people? Claiming that Dallas is a better place to live than New Orleans. Sean Payton just found this out the hard way when he announced that he was moving his family to the Vaquero Club, an ultra-exclusive, ultra-expensive golf course community in Westlake, a suburb of Dallas. Reportedly, the house once belonged to Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira, who used to play for the Texas Rangers. And as you might expect for a guy who supposedly makes about $8 million a year, it’s a really, really nice house.
As time has passed, more information has come out about how this situation is going to work. First, there were reports of a door-to-door 90-minute commute by private plane, which sounded a bit unlikely. Instead, according to an article in today’s Times-Picayune, Payton will live full-time in the New Orleans area during the season, with his family flying in for Saints home games; he also expects to move from Mandeville somewhere closer to Saints headquarters in Metairie.
Most rational Saints fans and New Orleanians acknowledge and understand Payton’s desire to do what he feels is best for his family. But just about everyone in the area, on at least some level, is emotionally appalled at Payton’s decision. You live in Dallas for a couple years, then you live here for five years, become more-or-less deified after winning a Super Bowl, then you decide Dallas is a nicer place to raise a family than here? New Orleans has had a long rivalry/inferiority complex with regards to Dallas and Houston and Atlanta. Everybody holds those cities up as crown jewels of the South, with their downtown corporate headquarter skyscrapers and their vast, sprawling suburbs filled with cookie-cutter houses and strictly regulated signage in commercial areas. But we in New Orleans steadfastly reject those supposed paragons of commerce and industry and wealth. We think it’s a good idea to take a mid-winter Tuesday off work, make enormous papier-mâché tractor-towed floats, throw silly trinkets from said floats, fight over said trinkets, and drink alcohol and eat king cake while doing these things. Clearly our way of life is different. Continue reading ‘that sean payton is moving his family to dallas’
America is counting down to a Super Bowl that will involve two of the NFL’s most storied franchises: the Steelers and the Packers. Both have trophy cases lined with league championships. Both can point to many Hall of Fame players who have suited up for them. Both have had a tremendous amount of fan support. But there’s one very big difference. The Steelers are owned (and essentially have been since their inception) by the Rooney family. The Packers? They’re owned by 112,158 people. They are the only major American sports franchise owned in such a manner. And it’s not like the shareholders are looking to get rich: the club is a non-profit entity, and if it is ever sold, the proceeds would have to go to local charities. Thanks to this structure, the team can’t hold the city hostage and threaten to move if they don’t get a fancy new stadium.
In case you don’t already realize how awesome this concept is, let’s go back to basics. What is the point of a business? To make money. What is the point of a sports team? To win. What is the point of a business that is a sports team? To make money and to win. But what happens when those two goals collide? Which one of them gets pushed by the wayside? Sure, some owners spend money lavishly, running their teams more to stroke their ego than to make money. Others are miserly, clinging to their investment and looking for every last penny.* The two goals—profit and winning—can come into conflict, and a team’s success is often determined by which of the two the owner would rather seek. Continue reading ‘that we don’t have more community-owned sports teams’
I’m not usually one to get worked up over sad or scary news stories. But I was as disturbed and upset as I can ever remember when I heard about the assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Why was I more upset about this than any other similar incident I can think of? There have been deadlier shootings in the US, accidents that have killed dozens, natural disasters, and so on. Why did this affect me so much?
The obvious first reaction from politicians and people of all political views was shock, dismay, and sadness at this horrific crime, which was obviously the work of a mentally unstable individual. But it wasn’t long before partisans of the left and right started lobbing accusations (whether justified or not) at the other side. Many people have called for a re-examination of the harsh rhetoric often used in American politics. Perhaps the most criticized was the map that Sarah Palin’s political action committee had posted in the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections; that map targeted vulnerable Democrats with crosshairs on their congressional districts. Now, thankfully we live in a country where the right to free speech is cherished, and people who want to use questionable rhetoric or take shocking stances can do so. But just because we can use such rhetoric, should we? Many people have suggested that harsh political rhetoric, demonization of one’s political opponents, etc. may very well trigger the mentally unstable to commit acts of violence they otherwise would not have committed. Perhaps that’s true. Jack Shafer at Slate, however, takes another approach:
“Only the tiniest handful of people—most of whom are already behind bars, in psychiatric institutions, or on psycho-meds—can be driven to kill by political whispers or shouts. Asking us to forever hold our tongues lest we awake their deeper demons infantilizes and neuters us and makes politicians no safer.”
To a certain extent, I’d agree—after all, the word “hates” is in the title of my blog.** The risk of an insane person being driven to murder by indirect vitriolic political rhetoric is small enough and the consequences of swinging too far in the direction of squelching free speech are great enough that we should continue to defend people’s rights to express their political views, even when they do so in a manner that some or many or most or even almost all of us find distasteful. I should also point out here that we have no idea whether the shooter*** was influenced by any particular politician’s speeches or writings; from what we know his politics were a collection of fringe views, but I doubt we will ever establish any sort of link between a particular phrase he may have heard and the crime he committed. And in any case, it is ridiculous to lay the blame for this crime on anyone other than the person who committed it. Continue reading ‘the arizona shooting and the state of American political discourse’
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’
As those of you who are college football fans probably heard, TCU just decided to join the Big East. Maybe you’re wondering what a school in Fort Worth is doing in a conference comprised mostly of East Coast schools (with a few Midwestern ones thrown in). Well, the answer is pretty simple: they want a better shot at a BCS bowl, especially the national championship game. Despite a 12-0 season, the Horned Frogs are on the outside looking in and will have to hope that either Auburn or Oregon lose this weekend. With a move to the Big East, by far the weakest of the AQ conferences, TCU pretty much guarantees itself a BCS berth any year it wins the conference, something that was not the case in the Mountain West. Oddly enough, though, had they decided to stick around the Mountain West may have been able to finagle an AQ spot—a conference with both Boise State and TCU may have had the clout to get a permanent berth. But strictly from a football perspective, you can’t blame TCU for jumping on a sure thing. And the Big East makes a smart move: they pick up a good team to quash any chance of getting demoted from AQ status. It’s a win-win football move.
But should football be the one thing that determines everything in intercollegiate athletics? This move is great in football, but a complete disaster by any other standard. For basketball and the non-revenue sports, you’re shipping TCU’s athletes on trips of 1,000 miles or more. Just in case you actually thought the NCAA and the schools were concerned about the “student-athletes,” moves like this would surely dissuade you from that notion. For football, the travel argument doesn’t matter all that much. Fly out on Friday, miss class that day (if you can’t set up your schedule otherwise), and do that five or six times a year. No big deal. Football is one of the few sports where the travel demands on athletes aren’t unreasonable (although conferences whoring themselves out to ESPN for Tuesday or Wednesday night games is kind of ridiculous). But why on earth should we be sending soccer or volleyball or softball teams halfway across the country? It makes a mockery of the theory that these athletes are supposed to be students first. As a college sports fan, I’ll admit I’m part of the problem. I’ve got a Tuesday night basketball game on the TV as I type this. Fans watch, ESPN pays, conferences do anything for a buck. Continue reading ‘tcu’s move to the big east’
I like Christmas music as much as anyone. When December comes around, I listen to a lot of Christmas music. Now, some of you may remember my post about my least favorite Christmas song. But today I’m not writing to bash any particular song, but instead the creep of Christmas music into earlier and earlier parts of the year.
Christmas, an ostensibly religious celebration, has morphed into a massive celebration of American commercial culture, with people being told to spend as much money as possible—after all, it’s good for the economy if we all take out second mortgages on our overvalued houses just so we can buy stupid gifts, right? But I’m not here to complain about the commercialization of the holiday, either, except to note the connection of capitalism with the expansion of the holiday season. Thanksgiving used to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November. Wikipedia has this to say (emphasis mine): “In August 1939, Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, warned Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year (November 30) could possibly have an adverse effect on retail sales. At the time, it was considered bad form for retailers to display Christmas decorations or have “Christmas” sales before the celebration of Thanksgiving.” Sure enough, FDR, who loved meddling with everything, decided to make Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday rather than the last Thursday, and an elegant portmanteau was coined: Franksgiving. After a few years of confusion and grumbling, the new date became widely accepted, and retail stores were saved from an extra-short shopping season every few years. But don’t people have the same presents to buy regardless of the span of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas? Shouldn’t an extra few days be insignificant? Probably. But back to the main point: the holiday season was extended, but it wasn’t long before retailers’ reluctance to put out Christmas displays before Thanksgiving. And I’m guessing that this trend went hand-in-hand with Christmas music being blared throughout November.
Now, why should I care whether Christmas music gets played before Thanksgiving? True, it’s a free country. If Christmas music in April is your thing, go right ahead. But we’ve gotta draw a line somewhere. And Thanksgiving is a nice line.
I was picking up some fast food for dinner a few nights ago. The total came out to $4.98 and I handed the cashier a $5. He gave me back three pennies. I was about to call his attention to his mistake, but I figured, “Why bother?” Who cares about one cent? Hell, I didn’t even care to have the three cents. Had there been a tip jar on the counter, I’d have dropped the three pennies in. Instead they went into my pocket. I think I left them in my car, but maybe I left them in my pants. Maybe they got washed. Maybe they’re on a windowsill in my house. I really don’t know. And I don’t care either. Why? Because pennies are so close to being worthless that for all practical purposes, that’s what they are. Worthless. The penny is a relic of a distant past; the sole reason for its continued existence is the zinc lobby.
The reasons to get rid of the penny are numerous. Perhaps the most glaringly obvious one is that it costs more than a cent to make a penny. 1.7 cents, in fact. (Thanks, Wikipedia.) In other worse, the government is just throwing away money. Furthermore, they then passed a law to make it illegal to melt down pennies for the cost of the zinc and copper. Sounds like a dumb law, right? There would be no need for it if the penny were made out of something else (steel, say) that costs less than one cent per penny. But Jarden Zinc Products, the company that makes the blanks the pennies are made out of, won’t have any of that. They hired lobbyists to fight a Congressman who tried to outlaw pennies. Continue reading ‘pennies’
A lot of dumb stuff happens during football games, even at the NFL level. I’ve chronicled quite a few dumb things here on my blog. But today’s blunder from Sean Payton will surely rank up there as one of the dumbest things I’ve ever witnessed during an NFL game.
The Saints were down 20-10 and had just kicked off to the Browns; twelve minutes remained in the 4th quarter. The Saints had a chance to force a three and out. Colt McCoy dumped off a third down pass to one of his receivers; Darren Sharper dove to make a play at the ball but missed. It seemed, however, that Sharper had touched the receiver, making him down by contact; but the receiver scrambled off for a 12-yard-gain and the first down. Sharper protested to the refs, but to no avail; however, Sean Payton and his staff saw what happened and got ready to challenge. But wait—there’s a flag on the opposite side of the field, well away from the play. From where it’s thrown, it could only seem to be defensive holding or something similar. Sure enough, Malcolm Jenkins had been whistled for illegal hands to the face, a five yard penalty that is also an automatic first down.
At that point, Sharper’s tackle became completely irrelevant. Sure, he actually did make the tackle, but an upheld challenge by the Saints would only lead to the Browns’ acceptance of the penalty. And it’s not as if there were tons of yards at stake; the difference would be 1st and 10 at the 36 or 1st and 10 at the 29. Obviously if the receiver had run for a touchdown a challenge would be the proper call; and obviously, had there been no penalty, a challenge would have been the smart thing to do. Continue reading ‘sean payton’s dumb fourth quarter challenge’