If you haven’t been keeping up with the ongoing Bill O’Reilly-Keith Olbermann feud, I highly recommend checking out the latest round, begining with O’Reilly starting an online petition to have Olbermann’s show canceled, followed by Olbermann’s rebuttals, Part 1 and Part 2.
I’m pretty sure this beef is at least implicitly cooperatively manufactured. Both guys benefit from it, both enjoying a spike in their viewership whenever things flare up.
As you all well know, the Razorbacks have been incredibly close to pulling out some close victories this season. They have lost 5 SEC road games on the road this season, by a total of eleven points, which is certifiably ridiculous. As someone who cares a lot about the team and looks forward to that blissful day that we’re on top of the basketball world again, such ineptitude was very disappointing, because this was supposed to be the best team Arkansas has had in seven years. Three games ago, we lost to a mediocre (at best) Ole Miss team 70-73 on the road and things could not look have looked bleaker. We sat at 5-6 in the conference and, while the wheels weren’t spinning off, passer-bys noted that some sparks were flying and some smoke was forming. But there was one saving grace to these losses — we had not been blown out once this year. Even against powerful UCONN, we hung tough and had our chances. This says something about the heart of our team, and where hearts are strong, victories will follow.
And boy have they. Three games later, Arkansas has beaten the two best teams in the SEC and a strong Alabama team. While I was happy we beat Florida and Alabama, the wins didn’t mean much to me because they were at home. We always beat people at home — c’mon, Stan, show me you can do it on the road! Today we jumped the hurdle. We walked into 10th ranked Tennessee, who hadn’t lost a game at home this season, and won what was to me the most satisfying Arkansas basketball win of the last 5 years. We were down by 14 with 8:50 left in the game, and I really didn’t have much hope. In fact I had the slightly sickening sensation that our chances at the NCAA Tournament were just about to be executed in front of my very eyes. It seemed so likely to be the first blowout of the season, especially considering the Volunteers’ best player, Chris Lofton, hadn’t even started hitting shots yet. But then the Hogs proceeded to blow my mind by going on a 24-6 run to take the game 73-69. The most notable thing about it is that we did it by going inside, which would have been unthinkable any year before this and after Corliss. D-Townes had three consecutive baskets on passes from Brewer while Charles “The Manimal” Thomas did his damage with a flurry of back-to-the-basket moves that drew fouls and extra defenders. Even Vincent Hunter had 10 points. We outrebounded those orangified bitches by 21. Finally, Modica hit two clutch free throws down the stretch to make the win all the more satisfying, considering the Hogs’ incessant FT woes.
Does this mean the Hogs have finally “turned the corner” and are now NCAA Tournament-bound? The tone of the previous sentence, as well as the cunning use of shameless italicization in this epilougue-format paragraph, would have you thinking my answer is a cautious “no”, but actually I think “yes”, yes they have. For all we’ve doubted Stan, he seems to have his team now peaking, when it counts the most. Arkansas is all of the sudden looking very, very dangerous. We’re finally playing with a winner’s confidence and have the ability to play half-court or full-court. We have plenty of size, athleticism, and star power with now-likely SEC player of year Ronnie Brewer, offensive sparkplug Jonathon Modica, and soon-to-be star Darian Townes. We’re also very experienced and have been in plenty of close games. We have two more SEC games against sorry-ass teams in Mississippi St. and Georgia (on the road). All signs point to us winning these two, even though these guys have disappointed me before (they should have beat Ole Miss but played flat). If we win these two, I believe we’re in the NCAAs, no matter what. If we lose one, I think we will have to win (probably) two games in the SEC tournament to get in. All signs point to us achieving it, because the huge monkey of us not being able to win on the road against a high-quality SEC opponent is finally off of our back. In fact, it’s lying dead somewhere in an alley-way behind K-Mart. Police aren’t even investigating, because everybody knows what happened. And everybody’s cool with it. Our confidence is sky-high right now, especially considering the way our team folded at the end of last year.
I say we make the NCAA tournament and while I want to say we’ll make the Sweet Sixteen, I think our offense is just a bit too prone to going hellishly stagnant right now for that to happen. I predict we win one game, which is still a huge improvement over the last 5 years and truly does usher in a return to national prominence for our state’s most storied sports team.
I found this group a few weeks ago and really like them, my fav songs so far:
By Your Side - Great one!
Noah’s Ark
Beautiful Boy
Lyla
Let me know if you find them interesting, I think Snake will like them?
I found a solution to my can’t-post problem. I just needed to remove the word ‘curl’ from the post. I thought that maybe ‘curl’ was a JttM forbidden word, but here I am posting about curl, curl, CURL. Extremely strange. I can go back to my Sleepytime post, add ‘curl’ to it, and it won’t post. Any explanations out there?
Nothing pumps me up more than a cup of Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Tea in the closing hours of the night. Chamomile! Spearmint! Lemon Grass! Tilia Flowers? Blackberry Leaves! Orange Blossoms! Hawthorn Berries? Rosebuds! Exactly like the box says - Sleepytime creates a lullaby of tender flavour and lets you (add forbidden word here) up with a blanket of flavour. There’s no calm like the sigh from the spirit when you take this moment for rest and reflection… there’s no time like Sleepytime.
…who can’t post, that is. I will post your post for $20. Just paypal it to me. I will be checking my account every 30 minutes. Once I’ve received the $20 I will give you further instructions.
maybe if we keep using the phrase “a tale of mirth and woe ” we can keep our newfound google status as the number one result for searches for a tale of mirth and woe
on a side note if you search for mohsen evin joel, JttM is again the top result. I don’t remember what you get with zach zac ben daniel but it wasnt nearly as cool.
Here’s a point I hadn’t heard before:
The original proscription against any portrayal of the [P]rophet [Mohammed] … was superficially praiseworthy because it was intended as a safeguard against idolatry and the worship of images. But now see how this principle is negated. A rumor of a cartoon in a faraway country is enough to turn the very name Mohammed into a fetish-object and an excuse for barbaric conduct. As I write this, the death toll is well over 30 and—guess what?—a mullah in Pakistan has offered $1 million and a car as a bribe for the murder of “the cartoonist.”
Who’s got that Olympic spirit? Yeah, me neither. Especially since I just found out that they’re inherently racist. But, last Saturday morning I re-discovered a sport I’d previously only made fun of. This sport combines three of my favorite things in life: blistering cold, fiery-hot Nordic chicks in skinsuits, and bolt-action rifles. That’s right, I’m talking about the biathlon: the joining of cross-country skiing and rifle shooting. But not just the biathlon, the women’s 10km pursuit biathlon.
Intrigued by the combination of skiing and shooting, I did a little research. Unlike most modern sports, the elements of the biathlon were forged through military necessity, as Northern European soldiers skied into battle with rifles. It became an exercise of the Norwegian military and the first organized competition took place in 1767. The sport was first included within the Olympics in 1960, but women were not allowed to compete until 1992. There are five main forms of the biathlon; in the pursuit, biathletes start the race in a staggered fashion based on their times from a previous race. The first to the finish is the winner, unlike in some pussy Olympic sports, where competitors are staggered at uniform intervals. The women do 5 loops of the course; after each of the first four loops is a shooting round (two prone, two standing). They fire at five targets 50 meters away. For every miss, they must complete a 150-meter penalty loop. Thus, the stakes are raised at every shooting station and the outcome of the race isn’t clear until after the final round.
Why is this sport so fucking awesome? Probably because it’s so fucking difficult — skiers get their heart rates up over 90% of maximum, and then must stop cold and focus on a far-off target. A racer can be 20 seconds ahead and blow a medal on the last shooting range by missing just one target.
I tried to watch regular cross-country skiing yesterday, but I kept thinking to myself, “hey, where’re the guns?” I think I may be ruined on all other sports now that I’m sold on the biathlon.
I’ve experienced this DC phenomenom before: self-assured grad students and bright-eyed yuppies, fresh from college, move to the City Where No One is From, but go out of their way to retain their old cell phone number because of some sentimental or irrational feelings associated with its area code. Here are some of the more inane observations about area codes:
Ironically, the only person who seems to have any sense in the article is a fellow Arkansan, Little Rockian Clark Jennings, who, like me, after moving to DC promptly acquired a 202 cell phone line.
The rage against my machine is, as one of my co-bloggers once put it in the context of parking, “a tale of both mirth and woe.” In Part I, I recounted much of the woe. Now, on to the mirth.
Repairing my shoddily manufactured Micro Zen first required that I purchase some speciality equipment, namely a “micro” screwdriver set and a soldering kit. Total cost $14. Following the tutorial, I had no problem disassembling the lil’ bastard– after all taking things apart is always easier than putting ‘em back together.
Apparently, the problem was the connection between the headphone jack and the circuit board. The four points where the jack met the circuit board (highlighted in this picture with red recantagles) were poorly manfactured and came undone with wear. My job was to resolder these points, to reconnect the points and reinforce that connection. Mind you this was no easy task, given that 1) I’ve only soldered maybe twice before, 2) the parts I were working with were incredibly small (each connection was about 4 mm in diameter and about 4 mm apart), and 3) I couldn’t really hold my fingers steady because of the caffiene buzz I was then enjoying. And mind you, I didn’t really do a good job of it. If you look at the tutorial picture, the guy has four perfectly soldered joints, each a shiny, silvery sphere. Mine where not so shiney and not so spherey. At one point, two of my soldered joints melted together, which would have been disasterous because it would have caused a short. I remelted the solder, though, and was able to scrape the joints apart. I also melted a good portion of the plastic case enclosing the headphone jack as I tried re-soldering the joing. In all, it was an ugly mess.
Nonetheless, with my newly re-solder circuit board (sort of), I began to reassemble my Micro. Two problems though: First, there were two bracket-looking parts that I couldn’t place. I had no idea where they came from and no idea where they were supposed to go. Oh well, they didn’t look important. So I left them out. Second, I had lost 1 (of the 4) screws that fastened the Micro together. At this point, I figured, she was never going to be as good as new, so screw it.
The results? Well she’s working again. The audio is as good as the day I got her. I don’t know how long my poorly re-inforced solder joints will last, but for now, I don’t feel like a moron for not buying an iPod. My dark days have gone.
If you’re like me, you were stupid enough to not buy an iPod. You convinced yourself you were too independently minded to give into the faddish brand. You demanded that your personal MP3 player come equipped with an FM tuner, because you insisted you were too substantive too listen only to music; you required also NPR.
Instead of buying an iPod, I bought this lil’ guy, the Creative Zen Micro– both cheaper and smaller (just compare ‘em) than the then-popular iPod Mini, and equipped with an all important FM tuner. Yeah, she was a sweet ride those first 8 months. I never quite developed the dexterity to navigate her touchpad controls. But I savored the luxury of being able to check in and out of Morning Edition on my way to school in the mornings, and All Things Considered walking home in the afternoons. More importantly, I relished not feeling a like a main-streamer, a consumer subjugated by branding and marketing, a corporate tool.
But alas, these feelings were cut short. About three weeks ago, I began noticing a problem with my Zen Micro. The audio on the headphones would go in and out. Sometimes it’d be mono, sometimes it’d be drowned out altogether. After tinkering around with it a bit, I realized that wiggling the headphone wire, near the area where the headphone plug met the headphone jack, would correct the problem. But if anything ever so slightly touched the headphone wire near the headphone jack, the broken audio signals with recur. The problem, I figured, was a poor connection somewhere.
Initially, I thought the problem was with the headphones. “Factory-installed” headphones can be cheap, lo-fidelity and poorly manufactured. The wire near the jack on my headphones, I figured, had worn out. All I needed to do was replace the headphones. So I did.
No dice. The same audio problem recurred.
So, I got to thinking. If it’s not the headphones that were the problem, it must be either (a) my ears or (b) (dang!) my Creative Zen. Fortunately, it was not my ears. I could hear everything else just fine. Unfortunately, the problem lied in the headphone jack of my 8-month old, $180 Creative Zen.
I was a little annoyed. I wasn’t going to let this happen to me. I went out of my way to not buy an iPod. I wasn’t going to let Creative screw me into branded conformity. So, I went to Google.
Google. Search: “headphone jack repair.” Mind you, I was only searching for general information on how to fix headphone jacks. I figured whatever was my problem, it was unique to my headphone jack. So, I was a little surprised to see the first search result was a tutorial on how to repair the headphone jack on the Creaitve Nomad Zen. The Nomad is the Micro’s bulky, older (literally) brother. Apparently, so many people had had a similar problem with the Nomad, that there was a impressively illustrated and annotated tutorial on how to fix it. The problem, it seemed, was with the way the headphone jack was fastened to the circuit board. The poor worksmanship came undone over time, but could be repaired by opening the device and resoldering and reinforcing where the jack connected to the circuit board.
And some further cursory research revealed that other irrate owners of the Micro were having the same problem with the Zen. Apparently, those bastards at Creative had been pumping out this cheap crap for sometime.
This is where my story get (un)interesting. Google. Search “creative zen micro headphone repair.” Nothing. No how-to tutorial, like the one published for the Nomad. Frustrated, I was ready to give up looking, and just pry the damn thing open. But fortunately, I remembered reading this article, which reminded about MSN Search, Microsoft’s well-funded but underused competitor to Google. If Google doesn’t have it, I figured, then it probably doesn’t exists. But I tried anyways.
MSN Search. Search “creative zen micro headphone repair”. Jackpot: the first hit was equally nicely illustrated and annotated tutorial on repairing the shoddily manufactured Micro headphone jack. (The (un)interesting part is that MSN Search at least this instance yielded superior results to Google. As Google wanders further from its core competentcy, searching, are the other search engines catching up or surpassing it?). Yet, the question remained: was I actually going to be able to take this thing apart, resolder it, and put back together?
If you’re there long enough, Chicago may be getting municipal wi-fi. (The chicago tribune requires a registration…but as usual bugmenot came through for me and saved me the hassle of signing up)
Kristin took me to an NBA game this week. The Nugs couldn’t hang with the Suns’ incredibly proficient offense. The highlight of the game came at halftime: Nash hit 30 of 35 jumpers, most of them from behind the arc.
The link above and text below are via the Canadian Cartographic Association weblog:
A few weeks ago a number of bloggers pointed out that some Target stores in the U. S. wised up and painted their store symbols on their roofs so that they would be clearly visible in Google Earth. Now The Register points out that others have taken to making their mark on Google Earth by writing their names or - so creatively - expressing profanities in 40 m letters. These can also be viewed in Google Local. I guess cartographers will have to put this on the map now.
Probably the only person with a worse public relations operation than Dick Cheney is Antonin Scalia. In a speech on Monday, he described anyone who disagreed with his method of constitutional interpretation, originalism, as an “idiot.” “But you would have to be an idiot to believe that,” Scalia said. “The Constitution is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something and doesn’t say other things.”
(BTW, I first saw this on the excellent WSJ law blog, which is now part of my daily routine. If you’re interested in the intersection of law and business, I highly recommend it.)
Is it considered a vanity edit when you have your compliant underling modify your own Wikipedia entry?
A WikiNews investigation has traced offending edits back to
staff members of at least five [Senate] offices: Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).
In all cases the edits removed factually accurate but unflattering descriptions of the lawmakers, and in many cases they added some beautifying language describing awards or glorifying legislative records.
Yes, your federal tax dollars are paying for this frivolity.
Yet, the spokesman for Sen. Burns was rather unapologetic about it: “I don’t know why this is a story. There is no sanctity in Wikipedia. Somebody will always come and change it.”
Did anybody see Vince’s surpassingly artistic 360 lay-up last night against the Knicks? It’s one of the most jaw-dropping basketball plays I’ve ever seen and has to be the coolest lay-up in the last five years at least. Go to this link and then “Highlights” to see this once-in-a-lifetime move.
1) Did you see the line-up for the All-Star Weekend Skills Challenge? Steve Nash, Lebron James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Paul.
2) Did you see the Pistons fall last night to Joe Johnson and Hawks? JJ has found a new niche - hitting game winners (two in his last three games).
