I was at that media/coffee place in Redstone that I have discussed before, when there was a bit of downtime and the woman behind the counter started talking to a customer that she apparently knew.

The baristess apparently greeted with the news that every mother wants to hear from her twenty year old son: My girlfriend is pregnant! And we just eloped! She had a way with words, it turned out, and said “Something gained and something lost. I gained a daughter-in-law and maybe a grandkid, but lost hope in my son’s future.”

She will no doubt love the grandchild, but she’s not particularly fond of the daughter-in-law. She secretly suspected that this was how things were going to turn out.

Anyhow, her lack of enthusiasm did not go over well with her son. She told him that he had just thrown his life away… just as she had twenty years before. Insert stuff about “Not that I don’t love my children…” here, which she quickly added.

Anyhow, the son apparently had designs on being a police officer. He won’t be able to do that now. So what, pray tell, was he going to do? That’s what she asked him. He replied that maybe he would become a security guard.

This next part (like the “something gained and something lost” quote above) is a direct quote, in part because I had to keep myself from laughing out loud:

“A security guard? Son, we live in Redstone. There’s nothing here worth paying someone to protect!”

If that isn’t the perfect encapsulation of Redstone stereotype, I don’t know what is.

Patrick Hruby argues that NCAA basketball players should go on strike. The argument for paying college football players is weak. The argument for basketball is even weaker. If they want to get paid, and they’re really good, they have a multitude of options. Also, Title IX. You can’t may men’s basketball without also paying women’s.

According to a new study, cursing at work can help you make friends and reduce stress.

Matt Yglesias points out that if we had more dense cities, we’d have less dense elsewheres. This would allow for more things like grass-fed cattle ranching. Though true, it still doesn’t explain how you get the rest of the country to agree to more dense living.

Derek Thompson investigates how spending has changed over the years.

Why are city centers growing more quickly when wealth becomes more suburbanized?

A World Without People: pictures of abandoned places.

Due to a labor dispute an entire Arena Football team was fired during a pregame meal. Stranger still? The on-the-spot replacement team went on to win.

I really hope that makeshift publishing becomes a thing. If we’re going to keep paper books around, the inventory problem has to be dealt with.

China has begun construction of a megacity, planned to be four times the population of New York and twice the size of Jersey. A part of me thinks this is just awesome. Except that I fear it will be disasterous.

As folks around here know, I oppose a playoff for college football. The notion that it produces the “fairest” result is far from clear when. More to the point, though, there is no perfect way to determine a champion. March Madness isn’t perfect. Major League Baseball isn’t perfect. The pursuit of perfection, often in the form of allowing more and more teams into the playoff because the 9th team is arguably just as good as the 8th, merely pushes the can down the road.

This post isn’t about playoffs. This post is about what is often behind the push for playoffs. That pursuit of perfection. A fool’s errand, as often as not. The notion that any system is going to produce the perfect result, unsullied by a freak loss here or a bad call there.

Until relatively recently, I was opposed to instant replay of any form in football. The idea being, even the instant replay people aren’t going to get it right sometimes. The typical “incontrovertible evidence” standard means that the replay booth is left to decide between whether it really looked like the ref’s call was wrong, or whether it really, really looked like the ref’s call was wrong. And sometimes they get it wrong entirely. Sometimes a pivotal call is one that can’t be reviewed. Sometimes the call on the ground is so effed up that there is no right way to do it (a fumble is confused for a forward pass, a whistle blows the play dead and the live ball is picked up with an open field for a touchdown… how do you sort that one out?). There is, of course, more fair and less fair, but the delays and such didn’t seem worth it.

My mind changed as (at least at the college level) the reviews got a lot better and, most importantly, faster. Particularly in the first half of the season. There seemed to be some backsliding towards the end of the season. But the first half of the season, as well as last season (which is when my mind was changed), demonstrated that it’s possible to correct the obvious bad ones (of which there are many) without delaying the game. My main point, though, about sometimes just accepting the bad calls as a part of the game rather than a betrayal of the game, stands… in the abstract, at least.

While I was down in Colosse, I watched a Southern Tech basketball game against (who else?) Utica. I don’t watch basketball on all that regular a basis, but it was the worst officiating I believe I have ever seen. Of course, that’s one of the fundamental differences between basketball and football. In football, there are some bad calls (even with instant replay) and they can sometimes have a powerful impact on the game. You can debate it, discuss it, pick it apart. But basketball? It comes down to 100,000 ref calls throughout the game. And there can’t be anything like instant replay. And a whole lot of them are in gray areas and all of them are in realtime. In a lopsided game, there isn’t much the refs can do to affect the outcome, but if it is at all close, the best you can hope for is that the refs screw up equally.

And that’s okay. It, like at least some crummy officiating in football, is built into the game.

To get back to playoffs, when I think of March Madness, whatever problems I have with it from a fairness standpoint, I don’t think anything it does even remotely compares to the arbitrariness of the referees. A reason for me to prefer football, perhaps, though in the end it’s as much about the excitement of the games as it is about a true contest of superiority.

And that’s yet another reason why the LSU-Alabama rematch sucked.

Imagine yourself in a coffeehouse, book store, or some other third place. A man who appears to be in his late-twenties walks up to you and says, “Excuse me sir/ma’am, but do you have a cell phone?” Do you:

(a) Say “buzz off”

(b) Say yes, suspiciously.

(c) Say yes and ask why without suspicion.

(d) Say “go away”

(e) Say yes, grab your cell phone, and hand it to the stranger.

My answer, I must confess, would be (b). I wouldn’t lie or be so rude as to tell them to buzz off, but I guess I am just suspicious of strangers walking up and asking me something like that. It’s not necessarily a rational thing, but once I did loan my cell phone to a stranger when they proceeded to use it for twenty minutes trying to get a hold of somebody. I wasn’t in a hurry, but my plan was not to hang around where I was for twenty minutes. Then being the villain anyway for asking for my phone back before they were quite done.

I was the late-twenties guy (I’m not in my late twenties, but I look like I am) and asked that to a guy at a coffee shop in Redstone. He went with (e), though before he could actually give me the cell phone I told him what I was wanting (“Could you call my cell phone? I can’t find it.”). He called the cell and proceeded to walk around the coffee shop and help me find it.

It’s not unlike back when I was living in Deseret. Shortly before I left Colosse, my car was broken into and a few thousand dollars worth of stuff was taken from my car (it’s a long story as to why I had a few thousand dollars worth of stuff in my car). I called the Colosse PD, who couldn’t have been less interested if they had tried. I had to basically force them to take the serial number of my laptop in the event that it resurfaced at a pawn shop.

Flash forward to Deseret and I left my jacket somewhere. In my jacket was a checkbook. A couple months later, someone wrote a check to a pizza delivery place with said checkbook. I’d already canceled the account that the checkbook was cancelled to (something I had intended to do anyway, since the bank had no branches in Deseret) but the loss of my last checkbook expedited matters. Anyhow, the pizza delivery place sicked the credit collection dogs on me. In order to get out of it, I had to file an affidavit.

I apologized to the detective for taking up his time. But his response couldn’t have been more different from the Colosse PD’s. He got a subpoena for the cameras for the day in question. They didn’t have that, so he interviewed employees there. He gave me updates every two or three days. I didn’t stop him because I was interested in retrieving the jacket if it was at all possible. After about a week, he apologetically said that he had burned all leads.

Of course, we can ask “What else would a detective in small-town Deseret actually do with his time?” No doubt, there is some truth to this. But I became acquainted with the Detective over time because he lead a handful of drug arrests at the apartment complex I was living at. He was not an unimportant guy. Flash forward a little later after my car had been broken into and the culprit arrested, a DA visited me personally to ask if the plea bargain they had worked out was okay with me or if they should pursue it to the maximum extent of the law (I told her the plea bargain was fine).

I was at a tire place this morning. In the waiting room was a woman talking on the phone. She talked about all of the gossip going on around her (maybe the local) LDS church. She was actually quite witty and I cracked a smile at some of the things she said. This got a Look Of Death from her for listening in to her conversation.

Of course, I would rather not have been listening in to her conversation. I would rather have been watching TV on my phone, but I couldn’t hear it because she was talking. So instead I just got caught up on blog-reading. The only alternative was for me to go outside, where it was -5 degrees. It’s because of that I don’t blame her for not going outside to talk, which is what I would have done if I’d needed to have a phone conversation while waiting for winter tires to be put on my car. This, despite the fact that it is a pet peeve when people talk on the phone in places that are difficult to leave. I feel that way when I am driving and a passenger is talking on the cell phone. It not only means I have to listen to half of their conversation, but also that I can’t be listening to something that I would rather be listening to.

So I don’t blame her for talking inside, even in the waiting room. Except that (a) it did not seem to be a necessary conversation, and (b) when you have a conversation in such a place, your expectation of privacy is nill.

I was reminded to look into something relatively trivial today: Whether a former apartment complex I used to live in (Midlerth) was located in a particular district in town. I discovered, to my chagrin, that it’s not. I say “to my chagrin” because, with a city as sprawling as Colosse is, it’s helpful to be able to say I lived in Cameron Grove rather than trying to find the two nearest streets of note and saying “around there.” On the upshot, being able to say that I lived right by Cameron Grove is almost as good.

Anyway, Cameron Grove is actually more known as a business district. It includes the corporate headquarters of a global software company that you have probably never heard of but is actually one of the largest in the world. It was founded by a Southern Tech alumnus and benefactor. There is actually a sweet story about one of the nicer water fountains on campus that was placed there because he proposed to his wife at that particular spot on campus decades ago. They divorced three years ago.

Another generous benefactor of Southern Tech died not too long ago. This is important to Sotech, but not because he was universally beloved. In fact, a lot of people don’t care for how he made his fortune. He was also known for being a rather personally difficult, reckless, and an alcoholic. He had a DUI conviction and died in an automobile accident with a passenger (and without a seatbelt). Unmarried and childless, he left his entire state to his do-good foundation. Southern Tech, his alma mater, is expected to see a lot of that. So, god bless the bastard. (It’s actually kind of funny: Most well-known Southern Tech alumni are… somewhat disreputable individuals. The guy from the previous paragraph is an exception.)

EDK writes on Forbes about the changes we’re going to need to make for a better environment and to deal with Peak Oil.

The car culture we’ve cultivated since Eisenhower’s highway project won’t survive when gas prices get too high, and even the electric car requires power generation, which requires coal.

It’s not likely that solar and wind can power the vehicles of the future unless those vehicles drive a lot less. Alternative modes of transportation, such as rail, are a key ingredient.

Redesigning our cities to be more dense, walkable, and green will be another key. And the political forces arrayed against solar quite literally pale in comparison compared to the thicket of political resistance to improving zoning laws, increasing dense urban development, and putting an end to the suburban model of city planning.

I have to confess that I do have a little bit of a knee-jerk reaction to proclamations that the solution to a pressing problem (or more than one) are to redesign a society in a way that we would prefer society be redesigned even without the pressing problem(s). There seems to be an astonishing correlation between those who believe (a) suburbs are culturally dreadful places and (b) they will just have to change their ways because of such-and-such problem.

In a previous piece, I asked what if suburbanism and increased oil prices are not incompatible? Because they might not be. Granted, our current car culture is environmentally wasteful and may indeed be unsustainable. But this treats the question as an either-or. We can still be reliant primarily on automobiles and still consume a lot less resources than we presently do.

The issue with the car culture is not entirely one of a lack of density and public transportation. People can choose to live closer to their jobs, for instance, and still drive. Decisions within the car culture are presently being made with comparatively inexpensive gas in mind. As gas prices go up, people may start making different decisions. Those decisions may be something other than holing up in a condo or row-house less than half the size of their current abode.

The last three places we’ve lived have all been chosen specifically to be near my wife’s work. Walking distance, really. But she drives. And if gas were $20 a gallon? She’d still drive. Walking takes too long and biking isn’t an option for much of the year due to ice (at her previous jobs, ice wasn’t an issue but personal safety was). And $20 a gallon doesn’t add up all that quickly when you’re refilling your tank once every couple of months.

My commutes have, historically, been much longer. If gas had been $20 a gallon, that would have factored pretty heavily into my decision to work. I might have been more eagle-eyed towards finding work near me, but more density wouldn’t have been all that favorable to me seeing as how I worked and lived in different towns. For three straight jobs, I did this.

A lot of long (and therefore gas-eating) commutes are not the subject of the typical suburb-to-city (which is to say, sprawling-to-dense) situations. And when you can live within a few miles of your work, you can afford some pretty expensive gas. And, if we run out of gas, electrically powered cars fueled by other fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, or whatever.

When we talk about the things that make our day-to-day cost of living, one of the big ones is real estate. Sprawl, for all of its faults, can help keep real estate prices down. Maybe you can ease housing costs in the dense areas cheaper with ever-more and ever-higher construction, but I still maintain that there is a really strong chance that the price tensions will result in less density as jobs relocate and satellite offices are opened up in places more near where people actually live. And rather than a thousand corner markets opening up, people may instead make monthly trips to Walmart where they can get everything in a single trip.

In conclusion, tough decisions are going to need to be made. A world in which people have to live closer to their work would result in sacrifices. But those sacrifices are not necessarily the ones that urbanites are expecting or hoping for.

I don’t know if it was a league-wide thing or just the team that I followed, but I know it used to be that some major league baseball franchises had a ban on beards. I know that it was true at least of my favorite franchise, because I remember when they did away with it. Maybe it was a league rule and then it was passed to the teams, or whether it was just team-by-team and something that most teams did. I struggle to think of anyone from the 80’s or before who had a beard.

It sounds pretty ridiculous when you think about it. A beard? How offensive is a beard? Aren’t they taking it a little too far? That was kind of my thinking at the time. At east in part because I never like mustache’s and there were a lot of them around.

Flash forward a decade or two, though, and I think that either MLB or the teams had a point. I was watching the World Series. It happened to be on TV when the football game I was watching ended and it was a close game. Not having watched baseball in a while, I was really struck by how… ragged… the players look these days. They used to look like professionals or at least adults. Now they look like college drop-outs on weed. At least some of them look like the sort of person you would avoid while walking through the park. Few of them look like people you would necessarily trust to babysit your kid.

Some of this is, no doubt, a function of age. When you’re young, all old people look like adults. When you become an adult, well some look more adult than others, except you think of it in terms of “respectability” and whatnot, if you differentiate.

How did we get from here to there? I suppose there is an argument to be made that the rules were too strict for too long so that when they were finally allowed to “let loose” they did so in a conspicuous faction. Maybe it was gradual and for some reason nobody said “Look, a goatee is fine, but you do have to cut it every now and again.”

Or maybe it’s just a sign of the times. Things that were once rebel have become rather common – especially among athletes. Back in the day, rebels were often clean cut by today’s standards except for their hair and their clothes (clothes are, of course, the team uniforms and 80’s hair doesn’t work so well under a baseball cap, so they were clean-cut by default). And so athletes are a mirror of society in general. There are also ethnic considerations, though it’s worth pointing out that baseball has been integrated for a long time.

Whatever the case, it makes me feel old in a “get off my lawn” sort of way. Not that it’s the first time, since I look around at what constitutes “business attire” and roll my eyes.

I happened to catch the tail end of the game between UAB and Central Florida last week, wherein the former got their first win of the season upsetting the latter. It was a great game that came down to the final minute of play. Though the network (something called “CSS”) was loathe to show wide-angle shots of the stadium, I would guess that maybe 500 people were there to see it. This was an intraconference game with a big opponent (UCF is likely headed to the Big East soon).

At least they aren’t Eastern Michigan. UAB claimed that there were 8,000 people there, but I doubt it. At least they have the excuse that it was a weeknight game in somewhat crummy weather. EMU has to hit up their sponsor to buy tickets. Tickets cap out at $9 and they still can’t get people to show up.

I am loathe to say that a school should give up its football program because people aren’t showing up, but… geeze.

Meanwhile, an SMU player called his team’s atmosphere a”pee-wee league experience.” SMU, like UCF, may be headed to the Big East. Their attendance isn’t as dreadful as UAB’s, but it would likely stand out in the BE (which itself is no SEC, attendance-wise).

Southern Tech pushes hard to get people to show up, though is not in the position of EMU, UAB, or SMU. Though University of Delosa people look at any empty seats as a sign of abject failure.

It’s all relative, I suppose. But when you’re being beaten out by high school football and college basketball in attendance, you have something to answer for in a way that West Virginia (whose coach complained about fewer than 40k showing up for a game) doesn’t.

Last season, I went to go see most of the Callie Cougars home games, all of which but one they won by 40 points or more (the other they won by 27 or so). They went on to lose in the first round of the playoffs. Since the decision was more-or-less made that we were not going to be staying in Callie very long, I decided to divest my interest in the Cougars. I decided instead that I would see the Redstone Copperheads, being that I work for the district in all. Also, last year I got to see the construction on the “new” stadium and look forward to actually sitting in the stands of it. So I’d just wait for a Friday teaching job and stick around, but that never quite came. So I made a trip up today.

I didn’t do due diligence, however. Otherwise, I would have waited until next week. The Copperheads are playing Alexandria High, the #1 school in the state sitting at 8-0. The chances of winning are not very high (Redstone is 4-4). Meanwhile, the Cougars are playing St Matthew, Redstone’s hoity-toity private school that I vaguely root against. St Matthew, usually a powerhouse because they can pluck the local football talent from Redstone High with football scholarships, is having a down year. Callie is 8-0 and the #1 team in its divisions (St Matthew and Redstone are both from a division above).

So instead of seeing Callie pound the school I don’t like, I’ll be watching Redstone get pounded.

But the stadium should be cool. It’ll also hopefully give me a chance to get a Redstone Copperheads t-shirt, which they stopped selling at Walmart right about the time I decided to get one (they still carry St Matthew shirts).

Addendum: No shirt. They sold posters, but no shirts. Frustrating. Callie be St Matthew by over 50 points. Redstone lost by 12, though it was actually a close game that came down to the final minutes of the game. A minute and a half to go, Redstone had the ball in the red zone, but couldn’t convert a fourth down. Alexandria’s beefy running back then made an 85-yard run.