In case you hadn’t noticed, football is a business. Fans buy tickets (or they watch on TV, which creates a huge advertising market, which creates huge TV contracts). The owners take the money from the tickets and the TV deals, and they pay the players. (Yes, it’s slightly more complicated than that, but you get the picture.) The end result is that people (say, Calvin Johnson) can sign contracts for $132 million. (Of course, keep in mind that the numbers you always hear are really just splotches of ink on paper; NFL contracts aren’t guaranteed and Johnson could very well be cut sometime before his contract expires. Pay attention to the guaranteed number; in Johnson’s case, $60 million. Still pretty good, right.)

To the 99% of us, that sounds like an exorbitant amount of money. And it is. But does he deserve it? Of course he does. The simplest argument is that someone is paying him that money; therefore, he deserves it. His owner and general manager are perfectly happy to pay him that money (well, I’m sure they’d have liked to have given him less, but Calvin Johnson wasn’t holding a gun to their heads and demanding $132 million).

Beyond that, consider how much revenue the NFL is taking in. For example, in 2008 the NFL took in $1.68 billion in ticket sales. (See lots of numbers here.) In 2007, the NFL made roughly $3.7 billion from its TV deals. Throw in licensing, local revenues from teams, and everything else, and the total adds up to somewhere around $9 billion.

$9 billion. Per year. Divide that by 32 teams and you’re looking at roughly $280 million per team. (The NFL shares more revenue than the other sports leagues do, so there’s not as much variation among teams as there would be in, say, MLB.) When a team is making $280 million a season, does paying a superstar $15 million seem ridiculous? I don’t think so. Sure, the teams have various other costs besides player salaries; that’s why there’s a collective bargaining agreement specifying how much money the players are going to get.

Now, I’ve explained how the NFL makes money. So why do the players command such salaries? Why don’t the NFL owners just pay the NFL minimum (a few hundred thousand dollars, if memory serves) to some CFL or Arena League players? For that matter, there are plenty of fans who’d certainly play for minimum wage. (And if you’re a college, you can get them to play for free! But that’s another story.) Why not drag some people off the street, coach them up, and then have them play in the Superdome?

The answer to that is pretty simple. It would be horrific to watch. People want to watch the best football players in the world. And I can assure you, the drop-off between the best players and the scrubs at the end of the bench can be quite drastic. Now, remember that the 53rd guy on the roster was probably the best player at the playground, the best player on his high school team, and probably got a full college scholarship. But he is nowhere near as good as the players ahead of him. A few years ago I was watching a preseason game (Dolphins at Saints) at the Superdome. The quarterbacks for the vast majority of the game were Joey Harrington and Chad Henne. Those were two and a half of the most miserable hours of my life. (On a side note, after that game I have almost never complained about any of the rules protecting quarterbacks. I’ve been spoiled by my years of watching Drew Brees and I do not want to watch a terrible quarterback play for my team ever again.) If the best players weren’t in the league, the quality would be much, much worse. The simple fact of the matter is that the best players, through their talent and hard work, have skills that are virtually impossible to replicate. People complain about how such-and-such a profession is underpaid (perhaps teachers, or policemen, or whatever). That’s because many more people can do those jobs acceptably well. Left tackle in the NFL? Much more difficult to pull off. Sure, maybe you could say that some of the people in those “underpaid” professions “contribute more to society”; but that’s virtually impossible to measure. What you can measure is what people spend their money on. And millions of Americans choose to spend it on the NFL.

The bottom line is that the NFL is an entertainment business. The players are entertainers. Is Taylor Swift overpaid when 20,000 teenage girls pay $100 a ticket to watch her sing? Is Drew Brees overpaid when 70,000 people pay $100 a ticket to watch him throw a football? Is (insert name of movie star here) overpaid when millions of people pay $10 to see him on a screen? There are two ways to approach those three questions. You can either respond with petty, jealous emotion; or you can rationally consider what those people did to inspire so many fans to part with their hard-earned time and money to enjoy the entertainment provided. Would I like it if my Saints season ticket was $100 a season instead of $480? I sure would. Is Tom Benson knocking at my door threatening to break my kneecaps if I don’t buy a ticket? No. If you don’t like the money that Calvin Johnson or Drew Brees or even Taylor Swift is making, then don’t spend your money on them. It’s as simple as that.

But this isn’t a diatribe against sleazy boosters or rule-bending coaches or corrupt governing bodies. This is about the absurdity of the very notion of amateurism and its roots in the snootiness of 19th century England. The lazy landed gentry with their public school educations (in England, “public school” means “school where the really rich people go”) were playing cricket or various forms of football and didn’t want to compete against the working-class rabble. The people who had actual jobs couldn’t afford to take the time off work needed to compete at the highest level, so sports were, at first, exclusively for “amateurs” (i.e. the elites). In some cases, not only was getting paid to play outlawed, but in the case of rowing, anyone who was a “mechanic, artisan, or labourer” was not allowed to compete. Heaven forbid the factory workers with their big muscles should compete against the upper class. However, in the late 19th century sports such as soccer and rugby started to attract spectators (i.e. money). This led to a desire for better players, and in 1885 soccer’s governing body in England, the Football Association, officially allowed professionalism. Rugby didn’t handle things so well, leading to the 1895 split that still exists today: rugby league (which allowed professionalism) and rugby union (which, shockingly, didn’t officially become professional until 1995).

Meanwhile, American universities were a major part of the nation’s sporting landscape. What started out as occasional matches between schools morphed into big business. In the 1920‘s, for instance, Illinois’s star running back, Red Grange, parlayed his college football fame into a huge NFL contract. And we know what college football is like these days: year-round press attention, 100,000 seat stadia, millions of dollars in donations to schools, multibillion dollar TV deals. From the humble beginnings of a simple extracurricular activity, college sports evolved into what it is today. And yet, the notion of amateurism hardly evolved with it. To be sure, it changed somewhat; at first, even the idea of offering athletic scholarships was forbidden. But the very idea that amateurism needs to exist at all is absurd. Universities sometimes attract outstanding high school students by offering them stipends along with full scholarships; at the very least, why shouldn’t they be able to offer athletes a few thousand dollars a year in spending money? And beyond that, why shouldn’t they be free to offer athletes what they’re actually worth? Why should the talent of a Kevin Durant or Tim Tebow subsidize the scholarship of some no-name middle-distance runner or gymnast? The vast majority of college sports are wastes of money, but the NCAA requires schools to operate many sports. For example, Division I schools must offer at least 14 sports (with at least six for men and seven for women). Why? So that the NCAA looks like it cares about all those student-athletes “who are going pro in something other than sports.” Now, I know that Title IX is going to require male-female parity regardless of what the NCAA says, but why should colleges be forced to spend money on any more sports than they have to? Keep college football and men’s basketball, then field however many women’s sports you have to in order to comply with Title IX. If you want to have wrestling or diving or fencing, make them club sports, not sports that give out athletic scholarships. I’d agree that sports are a worthy extracurricular, just as a debate team or literary magazine would be. And schools should fund them accordingly. But if a sport can’t produce a profit, why should a school take money from the profitable sports in order to fund the unprofitable ones?

In many cases, those unprofitable sports mean that the athletic department at a whole runs at a loss. (And of course, even football isn’t a guaranteed moneymaker, especially in a down economy.) Often that shortfall is made up for with mandatory student fees; even a student who doesn’t care about sports may be forced to pay fees that prop up the athletic department. Some schools take in millions of dollars annually thanks to student fees. (Last year, USA Today did a big piece about student fees going toward athletic programs.)

I don’t want to slight the effort and talent of the college students who play the lesser-appreciated sports. I respect the commitment they have to their sports and to their education. I don’t blame them for taking advantage of the system as it exists now. But does what they do for their university equal the expense the college pours into their sports (whether in scholarships, or, even at the non-scholarship levels, in travel costs, equipment, stadium upkeep, etc.)? Of course not, or every single sport would be operating at a profit. If a college (or even an outside group) wanted to fund scholarships for athletes just as they might fund them for good students or oboe players or left-handed people or duck callers or duct tape tailors (I’m not making these up), then so be it. But the NCAA–you know, the guys that control that $11 billion TV contract to March Madness–wants to keep up the idea that the BCS star quarterbacks are student-athletes just the same as the Division III women’s back-up soccer midfielders, so they force these unprofitable sports upon schools.

There are a number of proposals making the rounds. Some want to give students a few thousand dollars per year so they can pay for food and other living expenses. Some go farther and suggest that we allow students to sign autographs or endorse products. But critics say that those proposals would undoubtedly lead to bidding wars: coaches would say to recruits, “Come here and we can get you a car” or “We’ve got boosters who will pay $1000 for an autograph session” or whatever. Of course that would happen. But I say: so what?

I see no reason why professionalism shouldn’t be allowed in college sports. And I know I’m not the first person to suggest this, but why even make the athletes be students? We know that the graduation rates for many big-name programs are jokes. We know that schools stretch their academic standards to take in great athletes who wouldn’t have any hope of being admitted on their academic merits. Just pay the star players the same way you’d pay a professor or janitor or anyone in between. If they want to take classes, let them, but why force them to? Why bother with letting them have only four years of eligibility? Why not let “pro sports” and “college sports” be the same thing? Sure, some schools wouldn’t be able to pay their players as much, but that happens in MLB or in countless sports leagues around the world and they all survive.

Athletes, just like movie stars or musicians, are entertainers. Why should one category of entertainer be prevented from profiting from their talents while everyone else is free to make money? Child movie stars who go to college aren’t prevented from shooting a few films over the summer. (Of course, many athletes can go the Michelle Wie route of being a professional athlete and going to college, but that’s impossible for football and basketball players thanks to the NFL and NBA’s absurd age restrictions.) It’s time to relegate the Victorian concept of amateurism to the dustbin of failed ideas.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I want my spaceflight tax dollars going toward kick-ass stuff, the sort of stuff that would make a seven-year-old boy’s jaw drop. Going to the moon? That was cool. Going to Mars? That would be even better. A giant telescope that gives us amazing pictures of deep space? Pretty damn impressive. But most of the Space Shuttle’s and ISS’s science experiments did little to live up to the gigantic price tag of each mission. Head over to NASA’s website and take a look for yourself. There’s some great stuff there. One of the first ones I saw listed was about “Skeletal Development in Embryonic Quail.” Okay, I understand that people’s bones weaken in space and that animal studies about bones in microgravity could be useful, but do we really need to spend the money to send quail eggs into space?

The problem is that since the Apollo program there has been no real direction in the American space program. The space shuttle was supposed to cut the costs of putting things in orbit, but it didn’t. It makes sense that a reusable ship could cost less than a disposable rocket, but that never worked out. And beside, for cargo purposes, there’s no way a human-carrying spaceship could ever be cheaper than something without people. It’s not so bad if an unmanned rocket blows up. It’s really bad when Challenger explodes or Columbia disintegrates. It’s one thing to take on the added expense of human spaceflight when it involves something as significant as landing on the moon or Mars. It’s another when it involves routine, boring flights to and from the ISS, which is itself a giant waste of money. It’d be one thing if we were parking something in orbit so that we could use it as a starting point for manned missions to the moon or Mars. Every now and then, presidents talk about sending men to Mars. But these are nothing more than distant, empty promises. We’ve spent billions of dollars but are hardly closer to getting humans to Mars, which at this point has to be our long-term goal for human spaceflight. We’ve been in orbit, we’ve been to the moon, so Mars has to be the next step. The space shuttle has done little to advance that goal. So while everyone else mourns the end of the program, I say to Atlantis: Come home safely, then good riddance.

But he still sucks. He’s a left back, but he can’t defend, which is a pretty important skill to have if you’re a left back. He was terrible in the World Cup last year, and he was terrible today against Mexico in the Gold Cup. I realize we’re thin at left back, but is that really the best we can do? When Steve Cherundolo went down with an injury, not only did we have to bring Bornstein on, we had to switch Lichaj over to the right. Lichaj has looked pretty good on the left, but he didn’t seem comfortable on the left. So we got worse at two positions. In a perfect world we’d have had Timmy Chandler come on at right back, but he wasn’t called up, presumably because we wanted to keep his German club team happy, as he would’ve had no offseason had he played in the Gold Cup. (Some thought that it might have to do with him wanting to play for Germany, but that’s not happening, according to interviews with him and his agent.)

Again, I realize our lack of depth and experience along the back, but couldn’t we have brought on Spector? Or Ream, even if it meant shuffling some players around, which we did anyway? As soon as Bornstein came on, it’s like the entire Internet said, “Oh, shit!” (Well, the American parts of it, anyway. The Mexican parts we’re saying, “Hell yes! Look at this crappy half-Mexican defender the gringos just brought on!”) Everybody knows he sucks, except for Bob Bradley. Sometimes Bradley gets attached to players and those guys pan out. (Exhibit A: coach’s son Michael Bradley, who is an absolute beast in the midfield.) Other times, it just doesn’t—for example, Ricardo Clark get inexplicable minutes in WC 2010. It’s the same thing with Bornstein. He just sucks, and needs to be booted from the national team.

1) Build huge levees to contain the water.

2) Create outlets where water can be released from the river.

There are a few other possible solutions, but those are the two major ones. Unfortunately, each has its drawbacks. Levees force a river through a narrower path; the only place for the water to go is up, causing the river to get higher, so that the levees must be built taller, and so on. Along the Mississippi, the building of levees has historically been combined with a practice of shutting off almost all of the natural distributaries of the river. It doesn’t take an expert hydrologist to figure out that closing off places where water flows out means more water downriver.

Using outlets of some sort—diversions into other rivers, spillways, or simply flooding large areas of low-lying land—can damage the property or livelihood of whoever owns the land that is deliberately flooded. In some cases—for example, the Bonnet Carré Spillway—only a small amount of land is used. The Bonnet Carré is roughly six miles long and two miles wide; it empties into Lake Pontchartrain. Though the spillway is used for recreation purposes when not in use for flood control, there are no land owners to appease. Thus, it is fairly low-risk (from a political standpoint) to open it up. Sending dirty river water into the lake does annoy the environmentalists and the fishermen, but all things considered it’s not going to piss anyone off too much.

However, the two other major outlets along the Mississippi present a much greater risk to property when opened. One of them is the Bird’s Point-New Madrid Floodway in Missouri. A so-called “fuse-plug” levee is designed so that it can be blown up, allowing the river to flood more than 200 square miles of farmland. As you could probably guess, the farmers don’t really want to see that floodway opened. In fact, they took the Army Corps of Engineers to court to prevent it, but were unsuccessful.

Farther downriver is the Morganza Spillway, which runs from the town of Morganza along the Mississippi and guides water into the Atchafalaya Basin, with guide levees some 20 miles apart channeling water toward the gulf. The Atchafalaya Basin is a huge swamp surrounding the Atchafalaya River. Levees surround the basin, and ring levees surround some of the towns inside of it, but opening the Morganza means there’s going to be lots of flooding within the basin, and many homeowners are at risk.

Obviously I sympathize for the people in the Atchafalaya Basin. But I steadfastly reject the idea that we shouldn’t have opened the Morganza Spillway. Opening the Morganza is a last-ditch strategy, and one that is rarely called for. In fact, the only other time it was ever opened was 1973 (contrast that with the Bonnet Carré, which has been opened ten times). And the people know that they are living in a floodway, albeit a seldom-used one. Because it is so large and so rarely used, there is some development within it, as opposed to the smaller, more frequently-opened Bonnet Carré. And while one hopes that the Morganza will be opened as rarely as possible, when it is opened, that is only because it is in the best interests of the state and the nation as a whole.

The Mississippi River from Baton Rouge through New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico is a vitally important corridor of industry, with refineries galore, petrochemical factories, and four of the country’s thirteen largest ports. Flooding along this stretch of the river would be bad, of course, but there is a far greater risk involved, one which would have been heightened by not opening the Morganza. That risk is the possibility of the Mississippi changing its course to follow the Atchafalaya.

Rivers in their natural state will roam all over, depositing sediment to new places, meandering back and forth, forming oxbow lakes and different channels. Water runs downhill, and it wants a steep path. Right now, the path along the Atchafalaya River is much, much steeper than the path along the Mississippi. If Mother Nature had her way, the fury of the Mississippi would roar down the Atchafalaya, reducing the flow of the Mississippi to a relative trickle.

So what’s stopping this from happening? The Old River Control Structure, named for what people called the “Old River.” Formerly part of the main course of the Mississippi, the Old River was bypassed when steamboat captain Henry Shreve (namesake of Shreveport) cut off a meander of the river to create a shorter path. The Old River then connected the Mississippi with the Red and Atchafalaya Rivers to the west. (Lots of details about this are available here.) Water could flow in either direction depending on the relative levels of the river, but by the mid-20th century it was clear that if nature remained unchecked, the Mississippi would switch its course to the Atchafalaya. Thus, the Old River Control Structure was built. Completed in 1963, it allowed the Corps of Engineers to control the amount of water flowing into the MIssissippi and Atchafalaya, and it was decided that 70% of the flow should go to the Mississippi, with the other 30% going to the Atchafalaya. It’s done its job so far, but in 1973 the structure was damaged by that year’s flood. In 1986 the Auxiliary Structure was completed to alleviate pressure on the rest of the system.

So what would happen if the Mississippi shifted its course? It would be a horrific disaster. Let me put it this way: I grew up scared of The Big One, the powerful hurricane that would strike New Orleans. Now I’m more scared of the failure of the Old River Control Structure. The most direct effects would be felt in the Atchafalaya basin, with massive flooding, damage to bridges and pipelines, and so forth. But the long term effects on Baton Rouge and New Orleans would be worse. The cities’ major source of fresh water would be gone, with water from the gulf turning the river into a brackish estuary. Shipping would be disrupted—remember how I said we have four of the largest ports in the country? Factories would be devastated, and life as we know it would be gone. The nationwide impact would be enormous. The energy, chemical, and food industries would be directly affected, while the interruption of the ports’ normal operations would affect giant swaths of the American economy—imports from Latin America and Asia, exports of grain traveling from the Midwest. Just as New Orleans is vulnerable to hurricanes, it is vulnerable to the vagaries of the Mississippi River. But the city’s value makes it worth defending from both of those threats. Given the significance of the Old River Control Structure, it is obvious that the Corps made the correct decision in opening the Morganza.

For additional reading, I suggest these links:

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html
A brief discussion of the possibility of course change.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1987/02/23/1987_02_23_039_TNY_CARDS_000347146?currentPage=all
A lengthy article about the river, its history, and the people who call the Atchafalaya Basin home.

I also highly recommend John M. Barry’s book Rising Tide, which you can probably find fairly cheap at a bookstore. (I think I picked mine up off a discount shelf at Barnes & Noble for $5 or so.) It focuses on the 1927 Mississippi River flood, delving into the history of man’s attempt to control the river and the competing theories about the best means of doing so; it also discusses the upper-crust of New Orleans society and Senator LeRoy Percy’s role in the politics of Mississippi. Barry’s website features this essay about the importance of New Orleans.

Hopefully that finally settles the years of idiocy coming from the “birther” movement, a group of buffoons who have steadfastly insisted that Obama is somehow not a citizen, with most of them suggesting he was born somewhere outside of the United States. Part of this skepticism came from the fact that the previously released version of Obama’s birth certificate was this one:

That, of course, is obviously a printout of an electronic version. It did not satisfy the birthers, even though this was the standard document released when people needed a copy of their birth certificates. Also, there were birth announcements published in the local Hawaii papers, so any conspiracy would have to be as old as Obama himself.

The birther movement had its ebbs and flows. It was an issue during the presidential campaign, even though the McCain camp didn’t choose to make an issue of it. But somehow it gained steam to the point where huge numbers of Republican and conservative voters either thought Obama wasn’t born in the US or were unsure. In 2010, a lieutenant colonel in the US military refused orders to deploy to Afghanistan out of his conviction that Obama was not eligible to be president and thus was not legally entitled to act as Commander-in-Chief. And most recently, possible presidential candidate Donald Trump has been stirring the birther pot.

How the hell can such an absurd belief gain widespread credence? It is absurd that we as Americans cannot agree about facts. I don’t expect us to all have the same opinions. Reasonable people can disagree about political positions. But there are basic facts, well-researched and well-documented, that are simply, plainly, completely true. Obama’s birth in Hawaii is one of these things. If you don’t agree with his political views, fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. But sticking to a stupid belief in the face of tons of directly contradictory evidence? That’s just stupid. Hopefully the newly released document shuts the idiots up.

Finally, there are two sidenotes to this story that I find rather amusing. First of all, John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, which was a US territory at the time. Then there are a whole bunch of technicalities to deal with based on exactly how the US Constitution applies to those territories. One law professor even suggested that due to a quirky loophole, McCain wasn’t born a citizen and thus was ineligible to be President. (Details here.) It’s quite a strained argument, the professor later backtracked on it, and I don’t agree with it at all; but it’s ironic that in a campaign that focused so much on Obama’s citizenship there was a case to be made that his opponent wasn’t eligible.

The second sidetone is that I found that whole hullabaloo completely irrelevant anyway. The Constitution demands that the President (and Vice-President) be “natural born citizens.” Unfortunately, there’s no precise definition supplied. However, it is well established that there are two different types of rights to citizenship: either jus soli, based on being born within a country, or jus sanguinis, based on the citizenship of one’s parents. United States nationality law allows for citizenship to be acquired in both ways. There are certain residency requirements for the parents (to prevent a situation where you could have many generations of Americans living in a foreign country with none of them ever having set foot on American soil), but in Obama’s case these restrictions wouldn’t apply. Even if he had been born overseas, he’d have been a citizen (by jus sanguinis) from birth. (Likewise, McCain would be a citizen from birth by the same principle.) Now, the Supreme Court has never issued a decision on what “natural born citizen” means, but in my opinion the only plausible decision is that it means a citizen at birth, whether by jus soli or jus sanguinis. Thus, it doesn’t matter if Obama was born in the country or not. If you think that “natural born citizen” should only apply to people born in the United States, consider this thought experiment: a husband and wife (she’s seven months pregnant) live in Buffalo and take a trip to Niagara Falls. While on the Canadian side of the border, she suddenly goes into labor, is taken to a Canadian hospital, and gives birth to a healthy, albeit premature, baby. After a few days, the baby is well enough to leave the hospital, whereupon he returns to Buffalo and grows up. Would it make any sense to say that the baby can’t become President of the United States? Of course not.

Many people, however, are eager to get their taxes done long before the deadline. Why? Because they’re getting a refund. People get so excited when they get a refund. It’s as if this just happened:

But a tax refund isn’t some magic money out of nowhere. It’s money that you earned, then paid to the government. As you’ve probably realized when you’ve looked at your paycheck, the government withholds money from every paycheck you make. Then you fill out a bunch of forms (1040, etc.) and you either get a certain amount back or have to send the government more money.

If you’re getting a refund, all you’ve done is given the government an interest-free loan. You get no benefit—unless you’re stupid and you consider the psychological benefits of a refund better than having the money back when you actually earned it instead of getting it later. Now, I realize that interest rates aren’t much these days; you can’t just stick your money in a money market or savings account and rake in more than a tiny interest rate. But if you’re scrapping to get by, shouldn’t you want to get that money ASAP? I came across one website where a bankruptcy attorney mentioned seeing people get huge refunds while they were racking up credit card debt all year round. Giving the government an interest-free loan when you have debt is really, really dumb.

Some of you may be thinking, “Aha! I won’t let the government withhold anything and I won’t have to pay taxes until April 15th!” Well, there are laws against that. And if you try to game the system by working to owe a bunch of money at the deadline, you can get in trouble. I’m no expert, so I’m not going to pretend to have all the answers. But if you’re getting a huge refund, you’re doing it wrong.

Also, I came across one personal finance site that suggested that tax refunds are good. This site argued from a behavioral finance perspective: people are stupid, they’d just spend the money anyway, etc. I don’t really care about the rules that apply to stupid people. And you shouldn’t either, because you’re smart enough to be reading my blog. And you’re all the way at the end. That took determination. If you’re smart and determined, you should be able to live your life without the psychological crutch of a tax refund.

Now, how do we find the good stuff on the internet? By and large, we rely (in some form or another) upon other people to point us in the direction of stuff worth looking at. A friend posts a link on twitter or Facebook. A user posts a video response to a youtube video. Writers (everyone from big-name newspaper columnists to lowly bloggers) mention blogs or articles. Even Google is basically just an algorithm spitting out results based on what people are linking to.

The great thing about the internet is that just about any intelligent creative output a human being can create ends up there in some form or another. Music, movies, essays, stories, whatever—almost all of it is out there somewhere online, free or not, legal or not. The bad thing about the internet is that most people are stupid. So they point you to crap like Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video, which has blown up twitter and youtube and everything else for the past week or so.

I’m going to assume you’re familiar with the song and video at this point. It’s a lame attempt at some teenybopper pop music. It’s terrible enough that the masses realize how terrible it is, and it went viral for that reason. Unfortunately, to my cultivated tastes it’s not quite bad enough to be good. Sure, I got my chuckles out of her difficulty in deciding where to sit in the car, the obligatory rapper verse, and the song’s discussion of the days of the week, but as a whole, it falls short of truly inspired, brilliant failure, squeezing into a realm of mediocrity. I think it mostly comes down to the singer herself. If she were terrible, it’d have the value of one of those bad American Idol auditions.* If she were really great, the juxtaposition of a great performance with a terrible song would lift (or sink?) the song into the realm of the gloriously horrible. But her performance is incredibly bland. She spends the whole song staring and smiling vacantly at the camera. Supposedly she she she so excited, but you can’t really tell from her facial expressions. It’s a shame that such a terrible song was wasted on a terrible performance. In the hands of a capable artist, it could have been really special.

Now, does the song deserve its viral fame? As I said, it has its laugh-worthy moments of terribleness. But why does this have to take up three minutes out of the lives of everyone in the Western world? It’s just not bad enough to be really good!

Almost every day, I come across interesting things on the Internet I hadn’t heard of before. For some reason, it seems like a rule that anytime I’m on the Internet after 1 a.m., I end up watching youtube videos (almost always music, either bootlegs of people doing musical theatre or people playing guitar or piano). And every time I wake up and hop on Facebook, my newsfeed usually has links to a few articles that pique my interest. The problem of the internet is that I want to find more of the good stuff without having to wade through the crap. So please, folks, don’t retweet or reblog or re-anything the internet’s shit.

P.S. In case you’re wondering why I wrote this, it’s really just another bitter ramble about the arbitrariness of minor internet celebrity, just like my post from last year about the book deal I STILL don’t have. I just can’t figure out why some people get famous on the Internet and I don’t. Probably has something to with my sporadic posting habits. Or my laziness. Or my lack of aggressive self-promotion. Oh well.

* BTW, I quit watching Idol this year. It just wasn’t worth it without Simon or Paula. But while on the topic of things so bad they actually are awesome, here’s the greatest Idol audition of all time:

Honorable mention:

Right now the league dominates the American sports scene. I admit I’m a little bit biased, living in the football-mad South and Saints-crazed New Orleans, but the NFL is clearly the biggest of the Big Four North American sports leagues. The league is doing incredibly well on TV, and even in the recent economic downturn the vast majority of NFL teams routinely sell out their stadia for every game. It would be incredibly stupid for the teams and players to risk a nightmare along the lines of the 1994-95 MLB strike. That ruined baseball for years; it only made a decent comeback after the long-ball era and home run chases of the late 90s and early 2000s, an era that we now know was tainted by steroid use. I’m sure the teams and players of MLB must have cost themselves a ton of money due to the game’s decreased popularity. Why should the NFL take that risk? It’s in a great position right now. That doesn’t mean it’ll automatically always be the biggest league in the US, but a strike could certainly have damaging short and long term effects. What if a league such as the UFL makes a push for expansion and increased popularity during a lockout or strike, then tries to stick around? What if people decide they’d rather just watch college football, knowing that teams can’t threaten to relocate and there are no strikes or lockouts?

If these owners get taxpayer-subsidized stadium deals, billions in TV revenue, tons of money from tickets and suites and personal seat licenses and concessions, etc., and they still can’t make money, then they must be stupid. Which seems unlikely, given that most of them bought teams after acquiring vast sums of wealth in the business world.

To a certain extent, the players are the more sympathetic side. They play a violent sport and have incredibly short careers. Many face devastating health problems after retirement. There has been a great deal of talk about chronic traumatic encephalopathy and its side effects, with many suggesting a link between multiple concussions and later incidences of depression and even suicide. The players are (and rightly so) pushing for better health care.

But at the same time, it all eventually comes back to money. And while I can’t feel much sympathy for the owners, it’s hard to feel sorry for the players. There are tons of stories of athletes (in the NFL and elsewhere) who foolishly blow through their millions and end up bankrupt when they could have easily been set for life. (HBO’s Real Sports did a piece on one such player a few weeks ago.) Instead of living modestly, you get players living outlandish, extravagant lifestyles. Maybe they’re like Antonio Cromartie and they father so many children it takes quite a while just to remember their names. Seriously, how ridiculous is that? And he missed one, as this article points out. Those child support payments must really add up.

Now, to be fair, there are a lot of journeymen NFL players who never pile up the millions, and plenty of the superstars are responsible with their money. But it’s hard to feel sorry for NFL players when they burn through millions of dollars. Yes, I hope the NFL does a better job of dealing with concussions and their consequences. No, I don’t want an 18 game regular season. But I really don’t care what percentage of revenues the players get and how many expense credits the owners get to take before distributing revenues and all that other technical legal bullcrap. The bottom line is that I want a damn NFL season to start six months from now. And if the NFL and the players have any sense whatsoever, they’ll make it happen or they’ll end up kicking themselves in the long run.

So while vaccination has had hugely beneficial effects for society, in recent years a number of ill-informed, misguided fools have decided that vaccines are bad. For a while people were pissed off about thimerosal, a mercury-containing compound used in some vaccines. They suggested that thimerosal caused autism. So the CDC asked vaccine makers to get rid of it, and they did, even though no studies ever showed a link between thimerosal and autism. In fact, one of the world’s leading experts on vaccines, Dr. Paul Offit, even suggested that this policy shook parents’ (and even doctors’) “faith in the vaccine infrastructure.” He says that “about 10 percent of hospitals suspended use of the hepatitis B vaccine for all newborns,” leading to the death of a 3-month-old born to a woman infected with hepatitis B. Furthermore, the idea that thimerosal and mercury were linked led to many bogus claims of an autism cure through chelation. According to the article, about 10,000 autistic children a year receive this pointless treatment, and in one case, this led to the death of a 5-year-old.

Some opponents of vaccination use other grounds beside the disproven thimerosal-autism link. There is a “vaccine overload” theory, suggesting that vaccines overwhelm the immune system of a young child. As with thimerosal, the main contention here is that vaccines cause autism. In this case too, no link has ever been proven. There was also a 1998 paper published in The Lancet which suggested a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism. This paper turned out to be fraudulent; its author had received funding from people suing vaccine manufacturers and the research was shoddily done. As with the thimerosal controversy, this “research” was likely also responsible for a decrease in vaccination rates.

The bottom line is that the anti-vaccine movement is pseudoscience spouted off by poorly-informed celebrities (such as Jenny McCarthy), with no grounding in fact. Parents who choose not to vaccinate their children are acting in an incredibly irresponsible fashion. Sure, if you’re the one person who doesn’t bother with vaccinations, it probably won’t matter—everyone else is vaccinated, so there’s herd immunity. But when lots of people think vaccinations are a bad idea, the risks increase for everyone, even the vaccinated people (since a vaccine is not going to be 100% effective). So while a decision not to be vaccinated may seem to be a choice that only effects the individual, it actually has potentially serious public health risks. Ensuring universal vaccination can lead to the eradication of deadly diseases and can ensure that the vaccines aren’t even needed in the future. People my age never got a smallpox vaccine because we were born after it had been eradicated. Polio is almost nonexistent now. Would these successes have occurred had a bunch of ill-informed people decided that vaccines were bad and chosen not to vaccinate their children? No, they wouldn’t have. Parents who don’t vaccinate their children endanger everyone, not just their own children. After all, it’s just dumb to get your science from Jenny McCarthy instead of, you know, actual scientists.

P.S. If you want to go all hardcore libertarian and insist that the government shouldn’t force vaccinations upon people, fine. I’m not really interested in arguing that right now.What I’m arguing is the fact that anyone who doesn’t vaccinate their children is acting in an idiotic fashion.