free variable

I had been intending to order tickets to the Vikings’ home opener for about a week, and had been looking forward to taking my dad and my son to the game. (The team had been running a great package deal with free parking, etc., for the home opener, which made it an easy choice.) On the evening of August 17, I almost placed an order, but then I thought it would be better to wait until the morning: to make sure Dad was free and see whether or not Andrea thought it would be a good idea to take the lad.

Those of you who have had any exposure to the sporting media in the last day or so know what happened the next morning: as I tried to order tickets via the web browser on my phone¹, I learned that my favorite football team had just crossed the Rubicon by signing the efficient cause of my second 2005 New Year’s resolution², and that fans were mobbing the Vikings’ practice facility and purchasing tickets and memorabilia at staggering, tulip-bubble rates. As you might imagine, I was unable to secure tickets.

So this year will, I suppose, be fairly similar to previous years. I will still be cheering when Brett Favre completes passes to Vikings players. However, I’m not sure which moral of this story is more troubling: the idea that everyone’s favorite Everyman can lie his way out of training camp, or the idea that I should be punished for delaying an impulse purchase.

¹ Why is this so painful, Ticketmaster? It’s not like mobile Safari is a niche platform.
² Namely: “Cease allowing televised sporting events to affect blood pressure, pulse, or frequency of profane/malicious utterances.”

From the “I’m clearly in the wrong field” file: apparently, Liberty Media is “buying” the Atlanta Braves from Time Warner as part of a stock swap. Because the Braves are an “operating asset,” their inclusion in the deal renders the transfer (that is, sale) of 60 million shares of Time Warner stock from Liberty to TW completely tax-free. The Braves are worth about $450 million (although you can’t really put a dollar value on a throng of racist, obnoxious fans), but their inclusion in the deal saves Liberty $700 million in tax liability.

I’m currently listening to Punkrocker (featuring Iggy Pop) from the album “Soft Machine” by Teddybears

Last Friday, ESPN devoted airtime on all of its approximately 18 broadcast networks to presenting the Auburn-Florida game in various ways. The most egregious was the “Full Circle” presentation on ESPN2, which featured six separate cameras, two columns of statistics (for the current drive and for the entire game), a scoreboard, the “regular” news crawl, and a banner advertising AT&T’s proud sponsorship of this multimedia abomination:

Technological advances have been good for televised sports in some ways; the yellow (first-down) line and blue (scrimmage) lines make it possible to enjoy a football game without really paying attention; they also minimize the impact of incompetent camera work. Motion graphics technology is now good enough that the score and clock can be on-screen at all times (for a shocking contrast, check out broadcasts from even twenty years ago, when score, clock, and down-and-distance covered the whole screen and were thus shown sparingly).

However, technology is the golem. It’s not all good, contra the glib assertions of our friends at Pitchfork. It was bad enough when, for example, CNN TV started emulating CNN.com, presenting multiple columns of information and an omnipresent news ticker. (I think that live film takes up only about 1/3 of the screen on the Bloomberg network — the rest is all tickers, crawls, and live updates agogue.) This ESPN Full Circle mess is even worse — it’s like a myspace.com page stretched out to fit widescreen TV. (And I do mean “widescreen TV”, since “Full Circle” would be completely illegible in standard-def.)

As an aside, I am completely confused by myspace.com. I’ve never registered there, but apparently it can figure out who is “in my extended network.” (One example from my apparently vast “extended network” is this character, who I am fairly sure doesn’t really exist.) I suppose I will have to make a myspace page when I finally release a madcap ontic record, but I am thoroughly dreading it.

It does seem like the conventional media are interested in aping the worst and most tasteless aspects of innovations in bad design. Unfortunately, these are readily-spotted and almost instantly anachronistic. Imagine opening the Washington Post, say, in mid-1995 and seeing Tony Kornheiser’s column printed in white text over a repeating tiled background image, with arbitrary words blinking for emphasis. Then, consider that that’s how silly Full Circle looks now.

ESPN’s presentation, by densely packing unrelated animated graphics with indigestible, useless^* statistics, provides a mix of the worst of social networking websites with a pathologically infelicitous application of PowerPoint’s “AutoContent Wizard.” Indeed, given his opinions on the latter, I’d be interested (and amused) to hear what Edward Tufte had to say about ESPN’s latest.

^* These statistics aren’t strictly meaningless, but they are functionless as a fixture on the screen during a broadcast. It doesn’t enhance my enjoyment of a game, for example, to be able to look at a column of tiny numbers and notice that Florida has outrushed Auburn but is still losing the time-of-possession battle.

Is that an NFL player or a character in Frank Herbert’s Dune?

I was saddened to read that Kirby Puckett passed away today. There’s not much I can easily say about Puckett, who was a hero to a generation of Minnesota sports fans (including me) for his hard work, talented play, humility, and decency.

After he retired from baseball, Puckett was the target of several allegations ranging from troubling to despicable. Many commentators, most notably Frank Deford of Sports Illustrated, piled on, claiming that such alleged behavior contradicted the polite, friendly man that Minnesota fans thought they knew; that Puckett was a fraud; or, at least, that he had fallen out of his former good behavior.

Sportswriters and journalists are certainly quick to pen smears and diagnose hypocrisy, but I don’t buy any of these explanations. Rather, I believe that the apparent “hypocrisy” or “contradiction” merely points to the deepness of the stain of human sin and our need for redemption. Puckett was a Christian, so I suspect that he knew the need for (and source of) redemption as well as anyone.

Rest in peace, Mr. Puckett, and we’ll see you tomorrow night.

Image credit: KFAN.com
Technorati Tags: baseball, kirby, puckett, twins

As opposed to, you know, those people who survive something but don’t live to talk about it.

When I posted my tirade about “holding the Winter Olympics in a cold-weather city,” I was joking. I presented that piece as a satire of the ridiculous yearly sportswriter screeds against holding the Super Bowl in a cold-weather and/or “small-market” city. I expected the position that I jocularly expressed was so transparently ludicrous that any adult with firing synapses couldn’t possibly take it seriously.

This morning, malignant ESPN Radio personality Colin Cowherd continued to exceed my expectations by ranting about holding the Olympics in Turin. The substance, such as it was, of his raving was roughly identical to his frequent anti-Detroit rants from before the Super Bowl; his sentiments were chillingly in line with those of my parodic piece. Indeed, Cowherd even asserted without proof that Turin was “the Detroit of Europe” and that it was not “as exciting as Lillehammer.” I can’t argue with his claim about Turin being the Detroit of Europe, especially as I was listening to the soulful sounds of Il Jacsonni Cinque this afternoon. However, I would be willing to bet money that Cowherd wouldn’t recognize Lillehammer (which, for perspective, is roughly 1.5 times the population of Carroll, IA, or one-tenth that of Rockville, MD) if he were standing in front of a sign saying “Velkommen til Lillehammer.”

In other Olympics-related news, NBC is presently broadcasting something called “snowboard cross.” (It might be bicapitalized, like “SnowboardCross,” or it might have a cutesy abbreviation, like “SnoBrdX.” I don’t know.) At this point, I think that the only thing separating the Winter Olympics from the Winter X Games is the absence of the snowmobile-flipping competition and the frozen-lake Camaro race.

Gregg Easterbrook featured my alma mater in his “bonus obscure college score of the week” last week. I think St. Olaf may have won five or six games in my entire undergraduate career; I’m pretty sure I only went to two games in my day. Nonetheless, their performance against Macalester (which once lost 49 games in a row) is unsurprising.

Easterbrook says it’s “not very saintly” to run up the score. Little, apparently, does he know that the rampant heterodoxy on Manitou Heights is not limited to poor sportsmanship.

In other news, apparently the only thing worse than being a Chicago, Detroit, or Minnesota fan is being a Green Bay fan. The dismal NFC North is currently a combined 3-11. However, Green Bay’s four losses have come at the hand of teams whose combined won-loss record, not considering games against Green Bay, is a sub-par .400.

On the other hand, I should really limit my schadenfreude, since Green Bay has not looked quite as abysmal as my preferred squad. (Long-term readers may be interested to know that I have done an excellent job of keeping 2005’s resolution #2.)

There’s only one thing you need to know about former Wisconsin quarterback Brooks Bollinger starting for the Jets in the wake of Chad Pennington’s season-ending injury: Yesterday, on PTI, Ron Jaworski questioned the Jets’ decision to start “Bruce” Bollinger. If you’ve been in the league for a couple of years and some guy who’s paid to know your name doesn’t, then your team is probably in deep trouble.

In perhaps the best news I’ve heard all week, ESPN fired Trev Alberts after he declined to show up for a live show on Sunday. One wonders where they’ll find a suitable replacement. A grating, obnoxious commentator who’s always tripping over himself to shill for the favored team is such a rarity in the world of sports media.

KFAN-AM (a sports-talk station in the Twin Cities) is podcasting the weekly Mike Tice show. Tice may not be a spectacular coach, but he is often entertaining, whether intentionally or otherwise.

Finally, don’t miss Gregg Easterbrook’s all-haiku NFL forecasts.

UPDATE: Here’s one more: Predictably, Hunter S. Thompson took the NFL a bit too seriously.

Note to regular readers: I expect to dig myself out from under a mound of grading shortly, and regular blogging on non-mass-entertainment related topics will ensue. In the meantime, check out some crackpot comments — too few links to be spam, too little sense to be serious — here and here (scroll past legitimate comments).

Andrea’s cousins Tim and Luke introduced me to NCAA Football 06 last week. I didn’t play it, but I saw them play enough to note the licensed soundtrack, which includes “Debaser” by the Pixies, some track from the Pietasters’ “post-good” period (but still! The Pietasters! I saw them at the old 9:30 Club twice in 1994 alone!), Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, The Clash, and Guided By Voices.

Where was this selection of “EA Trax” when they were setting the playlist for Madden NFL 2005? Every down that I had to endure an aural crapfest of “Hoobastank” or “Franz Ferdinand” now stings all the more.

The moral of the story? If you’re old enough so that you probably should have outgrown ephemeral commercial music, you might fondly remember some of the songs in this game. Whether or not this is a good marketing move for EA remains to be seen — SI.com’s Stewart Mandel doesn’t think so.

Madison has a minor-league baseball team in the Northwoods League, which includes teams from (among other locales) Brainerd, MN; Thunder Bay, ON; Waterloo, IA; and La Crosse, WI. I just noticed that the La Crosse team is called the “La Crosse Loggers.” One doesn’t, I suppose, think of La Crosse as being a logging town, until one gets the joke.

I grew up just outside of D.C. and spent several of my adolescent years listening to ear-perforating punk rock, so I have a soft spot for the following ridiculous story.

Nike Skateboarding has angered D.C. area independent record label Dischord Records, according to the Washington Post. Their crime? Advertising their “Major Threat” skateboarding tour with a parody of (or homage to) the cover art for legendary D.C. punk rock act Minor Threat’s 1981 self-titled album.

How bad is it? You be the judge:

Note especially the shoes and the Nike logo on the fellow’s knee. (The Nike poster also features other not-particularly-subtle allusions that D.C. counterculture trainspotters can identify for bonus points.)

Of course, the fact that Nike — a company that generally appears to punk-rock types as wearing a bullseye — replicated such an iconic image with their branding conspicuously inserted is offensive to some people. Personally, I have a difficult time sharing in the umbrage of iconoclasts whose own icons are being profaned, so I’ll simply point out the following issues raised by this story that I found amusing:

1. Nike has a skateboarding division? How’s that working out?
2. What percentage of the people in the target audience for this skateboarding tour were actually alive when Minor Threat were still actively recording?
3. The spokesman for Dischord is named Alex Bourgeois — an unfortunate name indeed in the anarchosyndicalist world of the punk-rock business. (One wonders if M. Bourgeois has something to lose in addition to his chains.)
4. Minor Threat bassist Brian Baker is actually wearing Nikes in this famous photo. With no photoshopping required, couldn’t Nike just have licensed that picture?

By the way: the bald fellow in the Minor Threat photos is Ian MacKaye, who is currently half of The Evens. (Click the link for my brief thoughts on their self-titled album.)

Kenny G vs. Machaut

Because I usually find the opinions about early music expressed by “Pliable” at On An Overgrown Path to be fairly agreeable, I was shocked to see what appeared to be an endorsement of the Hilliard Ensemble’s work with saxophonist Jan Garbarek. The Hilliard Ensemble is one of the finest early music vocal ensembles in the world; their work with Garbarek, however, is worthy of anathema. (The Hilliard/Garbarek CD Officium has the overall affect of Kenny G getting in a fight with Guillaume de Machaut.)

I was so curious by what seemed to me to be an inexplicable lapse in taste that I read Pliable’s review of Officium, which clarifies the issue somewhat by presenting the Garbarek disc as a means to an end:

Although it is sacrilege to say it 75 minutes of continuous medieval polyphony can be too bland a dish for some tastes. Garbareck’s saxophone adds the spice to the Hilliard’s main course. And yes, I would say I sometimes wish the sax took more of a back seat, but that only sharpened my appetite for polyphony without the spice, and there is a lot of that on my shelves.

Listening to “lite hits” radio while getting a haircut sharpens my appetite for nearly anything else (up to and including Gaussian noise), but I’m not going out and buying Celine Dion CDs just so that I can more fully appreciate the rest of my collection. Indeed, Pliable’s Officium verdict seems to be akin to “Cancer is great, because now we have all of these really smart oncologists.”

(In any case, the Norwich and Norfolk festivals, which Pliable describes in the first linked article, sound great. I wish I could attend!)

On Wisconsin!

An Appleton, WI woman was convicted of embezzling $3000 from her labor union. She requested leniency, citing financial hardship, so the judge presented her with an option of Solomonic proportions: either serve 90 days in jail or donate her Green Bay Packers tickets to charity. If I were her, I’d take the jail time — she might be able to get autographs from Packers players Ahman Green and Al Harris. Green was arrested last night on his fourth domestic violence charge since 1999, and Harris has been accused of assaulting a stripper.

Productivity notes

Merlin Mann points to a thoughtful 43Folders mailing list post, which advises to “park on a downhill slope”:

Each day, when I wrap up whatever I’m doing, I jot down (on paper when I remember, otherwise I do it mentally with lesser effect) exactly where I need to start. And that is usually a question I’m still pondering/researching…

As long as I’m mentioning 43Folders, I should note that Joe Carter has adopted the Hipster PDA, Mann’s lo-fi index-card-based organizer for the cool kids. If you have a near-prurient interest in personal productivity aids, you should check out the set of HPDA-related photos on Flickr.com. Some are quite clever.

I’m currently listening to Suite No. 1 in G Major – Menuets I & II from the album “Cello Suites BWV 1007-1012” by Lynn Harrell

Newly monitored

I noticed Gillian Russell’s blog logicandlanguage.net because she linked to a post of mine on various applications of modal logic for computer science. Her site is interesting and well-written, and several of her interests align with the subfields of philosophy that I follow. As icing on the cake, Prof. Russell established her site on the 5th of March — an auspicious date for the genesis of any creative endeavor.

Re-reading that modal logic post reminded me that there has been very little computer science content here lately. I do have a few pieces that I’m working on in my spare time about CS pedagogy; the overall level of CS and PL content should increase in coming weeks.

Embalming

I was part of a collaborative composition with other members of the idm-making list recently. The project was organized as an “exquisite corpse,” which is best described as a parlor-game cousin to Baroque continuous variation forms. You can hear the results at Michael Upton’s site; my section, sadly, is the one that doesn’t fit in all that well.

A little burn in the pocket

Last year Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick denied internet rumors about his sexuality by calling in to a radio show and saying “I’m not even going to feed in to that. Everybody who knows me, knows how I get down.” Unfortunately for Vick, now the state court of Gwinnett County, GA knows how he gets down, too.

I’m currently listening to Op 59 Nr.1 in F Rasumovsky I Allegro from the album “Beethoven – Complete String Quartets” by Alban Berg Quartett

Vikes Geek skewers the Minnesota front office (what’s new?)

…for the benighted West Coast hip-hop scene? Here’s Bill Simmons on the merchandising implications of the Moss trade, in response to a questioner who asks if the Randy Moss Raiders jersey could be “the most important jersey in rap history?”

I’m almost ashamed to admit this, but that was my first reaction when I heard about the trade – “Wow, he’s going to shatter the record for jerseys sold.” [...] This is going to be the jersey version of that year when Malcolm X came out and Spike Lee started wearing those “X” hats.

Read the whole thing.

Here’s hoping, man.

The controversy surrounding Jose Canseco’s steroid allegations has not died down, as I had assumed it might. For those of you who’ve missed this, Canseco has a book out in which he asserts that everyone — from Honus Wagner all the way down to that Dominican teenager that lied about his age to play Little League — worked together to create a baseball drug culture of Studio 54 proportions. If you’ve ever watched baseball, this is unsurprising. Indeed, what could be surprising about a sport in which borderline-criminal, whiny jerks who barely graduated from high school get paid millions of dollars to scratch their crotches and hoist midgets in the air?

What is (sort of) surprising is that a perennial louse and generally shady figure like Canseco has been given a large chunk of daily news media coverage as a soapbox to make his blanket assertions, including two whole interviews on 60 Minutes. Of course, I’m sure that 60 Minutes has unimpeachable supporting evidence.

That’s the ticket. I’m positive that CBS News would never produce a story grounded solely in the baseless allegations of a bitter crank. (Even if the allegations are “fake but accurate,” as may be the case from time to time.) It also seems likely that the Oakland Athletics’ mid-80’s AL domination stemmed not only from the juiced-up nature of their players but also from some apparent technological advantages in the office-automation-software arena.

Professional loudmouth Freddie Mitchell of the Philadelphia Eagles had half as many receptions from Donovan McNabb as Rodney Harrison. Unfortunately for Mitchell, Harrison is a safety for the New England Patriots. (Mitchell famously called out the Patriots’ secondary two weeks ago, singling out Harrison as someone he “had something for.” Perhaps he meant “a football, twice.”)

Mitchell, who has coined several nicknames for himself (including “Fred Ex” and “The People’s Champ”) had an entourage of hangers-on follow him around after the NFC championship game, carrying a wrestling championship belt. His coach forbade him from talking to the media for 24 hours after an outburst in the week leading up to the Super Bowl. However, in a display of sporting karma that would make Gregg Easterbrook grin, Mitchell was shut out for most of the Super Bowl and had only one inconsequential reception.

The sports world tolerates big talkers, as long as they produce, and perhaps the “People’s Champ” was just letting off some well-deserved steam. (Never mind that it seems unlikely that he had a month worth of steam to let off leading up to the Super Bowl.) Whether or not his outbursts are justifiable, then, could depend to some degree on how well he compares to elite wide receivers (many of which have also tangled with the media).

In his first four seasons in the NFL, Randy Moss had 53 touchdown catches. Terrell Owens had 30, Cris Carter had 21, and Michael Irvin had 20. By comparison, Mitchell has 5. In the crowded field of media-whore, talent-free NFL buffoons, “Fred Ex” makes Jeremy Shockey look underrated.