The Week at Misc. Asst. – 11.30.07
November 30th, 2007
Until readership at Misc. Asst. gets off the ground, I’ll be summarizing the content over here at BMOWP. So get reading!
11/22
Misc. Thanksgiving thought asst. from Japan – rsanderson
-Thoughts on Thanksgiving in a country that doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving.
Al, Give Me Absolution – Deane
-How do you know you’re doing enough to save the planet?
11/26
Guitar Hero — the game that defines our generation? – Tevin Steinke
-Rock on, friends. Rock on.
11/29
High definition, low quality – MrVilhauer
-Great presentation vs. horrible content.
There you go! And if you’re looking for the feed, it’s way at the bottom (or, click right here). Some things will be updated this weekend for a better user experience. And more blather!
Issues Considered: Blogging, Linkage, Misc. Asst.
ArtworkS?
November 29th, 2007
This has been up all day as the main headline on ArgusLeader.com, according to Kerrie.
“Augie to get Andy Warhol artworks”
Artwork is a collective noun, meaning both a single piece of art or an entire group.
I tried to give The Argus Leader a break. I looked up “artworks” in three different dictionaries, both American and British. It’s not there. There’s an entry for “artwork,” but nothing for the plural.
Which makes sense. Since “artwork” means a collective group of pieces of art, an extra “s” is redundant.
I don’t try to pick on the Argus. It’s just that they always seem to do stuff like this. Either they made up a word, or it’s a pretty obvious and very embarrassing misspelling. Whoops.
—
If you’re actually curious about the article itself, here’s a snippet. According to the article:
Augustana College and its Eide-Dalrymple Gallery will receive a collection of about 150 original Polaroid photos and gelatin silver prints that Warhol created.
The gift, with an estimated value of $153,000, comes through the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program in connection with the Warhol Foundation’s 20th anniversary.
Issues Considered: Journalism, Words
Research is fun
November 28th, 2007
I know it might sound weird. But I kind of miss writing research papers.
There’s no logical reason for this. My job involves writing, much of which I have to do research for. I research a client’s needs, their competition and their current marketing materials and I put together a marketing plan that at times could run up to 15 pages. I conduct interviews and write articles for newsletters. Hell, even writing a billboard takes a small amount of research.
But there is something romantic, in hindsight, about writing a paper for a class – the intense need, learning for learning’s sake, staying up late or spending an entire day in the library discovering new topics or arguments.
It’s that discovery that I miss – the idea of filtering hundreds of thousands of articles and books and pieces of information, most of which were unknown to me at the beginning of the project. At my job, I deal with marketing and advertising – all the time, that’s all I research – and after a while, the answers are predictable, the plans common.
But a research paper was new territory. It was expansion; a manifest destiny of thought, my mind plowing through the basics and forming the new opinions that had always been mine for the taking.
And even more, it was the hard, cold facts – the books and magazines, microfilm and microfiche. The Internet was there, but even just 7 or 8 years ago it was limited in the vastness of information easily accessed, there for the deep search but not conducive to an intense, scholarly tome.
The actual act of organizing and developing thoughts, of spitting out knowledge that had been thought forgotten, the final spell check and read through. You would print out the paper, scan the words and feel incredibly proud, as if you’d just written a publishable pamphlet, something that could change the world. There was an excitement and thrill in spending hours and hours before the assignment was due, the first real writing deadline I ever faced. And pulling it out of the printer was a rite of passage, awash in the knowledge that I had just nailed it, presumably, and that I could rest easily for another few weeks, the adrenaline still pumping through my head as I handed it in.
I write every day. I write with purpose, and I write for pleasure. I write because I love it, and I write because I can. But I still miss the romanticism of the research paper. Just the words themselves seem scholarly.
And naturally, I used to hate them. Hindsight, right?
Issues Considered: Writing
Mind the gap
November 27th, 2007
Was it a misunderstanding? Or was it genuine slagging of her employer?
Regardless, Emma Clarke, voice of the London Underground Tube System, was fired.
From the BBC Article:
Ms Clarke, from Altrincham, Greater Manchester, upset her paymasters by allegedly saying she did not use the Tube because it was “dreadful”.
LU said it would not be offering her further work but Ms Clarke said she had been “wildly misquoted”.
She told BBC News: “What I actually said was that travelling in a Tube train would be dreadful for me, listening to my own voice and seeing the haunted faces of commuters being subjected to me telling them to ‘mind the gap’.
“I would find it quite an uncomfortable experience in the same way that when I call a company when I’m their on hold voice and it’s me saying – please press 2 for accounts – it’s a creepy experience to be honest.”
The voice is familiar to me – I remember it vividly from my short time in London, and though I’m not intimate with it as many London residents are, I do feel it’s quite too bad. Of course, it will be replaced, I’m sure, with someone similar.
She also posted some sample LU spoofs – which can be found here.
Mind the Gap, indeed.
Issues Considered: Travel
Fantasy bullet points
November 26th, 2007
I usually hate the Pittsburgh Steelers.
I always have. I remember at a young age ranking all of the teams in the NFL. I loved lists, and I was just beginning to understand football. I placed the Dolphins at the top, naturally, because that’s the team my father rooted for (and still does) and I placed the Buffalo Bills – the Dolphins’ natural enemy, obviously – at the bottom. Dallas was second to last. Pittsburgh was third to last.
Tonight, though, I’m rooting for them – both because I desperately want the Perfect Season Curse broken and because Ben Roethlisberger is on my fantasy team.
This is what professional football has broken into – both for good and bad. Sure, we root for our team. But we also root for everyone else, depending on the day – or more specifically, depending on who’s starting, or what the point spread is, etc. etc. Loyalties and rivalries are thrown to the wayside, with individual stats taking hold and Monday Night Football gaining even more momentum as the ultimate “make the lost bets back” game.
And as a football fan, I’m all for it. I’m rooting for Pittsburgh tonight. All because I have a drafted the rights to use the statistics of a handful of professional football names. All because I need 48 fantasy points from their starting quarterback. All because I am pretending – like a couple of kids playing house – that I’m a real life NFL general manager.
What a weird concept.
To think I usually hate the Steelers.
Issues Considered: Football, Miami Dolphins, Sports
Season Ticket Review: Meet the new team, same as the old one
November 25th, 2007
Forgive me for being distracted. It goes with the territory, I guess. And, by the looks of the Skyforce last night, it was contagious.
Game 1: November 24th, 2007
Tulsa 66ers (1-0) at Sioux Falls Skyforce (0-0)
Distraction? Well, for the players on the court it was more like exhaustion. As in, boy, that loss was exhausting. As in, wow, we looked exhausted after firing on all cylinders for the first 36 minutes. As in, we’ve exhausted all options, let’s shoot long range shots all night until we piss the game away in the final seconds.
It was opening night, and as Kerrie and I made our way to row three of the Sioux Falls Arena (courtesy a season ticket holder special) there was a sense of excitement. Look, NBA D-League President Dan Reed! Ooh, we’ve got a young, homegrown coach that’s proven himself over the past three seasons as an assistant! Wow, our uniforms have the jersey numbers on top with the names below – how European!
We were distracted – it was a night away from Sierra, and we scoped out the Arena for signs of infant life so we wouldn’t feel guilty dragging our 4 month old to see Development League style basketball.
It was, according to Dan Reed, the first sellout in Sioux Falls Skyforce history. In history! We’ve won two CBA championships, been in the league for 18 seasons (this is the 19th, apparently) and seen several future NBA talents rifle their way across the Arena floor. And this is the first sellout? The traditional Christmas game doesn’t sell out, but this one does? Wha?
It turns out that not only was this the first Skyforce sellout, it was also the most people who witnessed a loss in Skyforce history. In fact, it was a rough game throughout – we looked as if we were still finding our legs.
(Author’s note: as you know, I am a season ticket holder for the Sioux Falls Skyforce. I have followed the team very closely over the five years I’ve been back in town. And because of the loyalty I have shown, I often refer to the Skyforce and myself as the collective “we” or “our.” You’ll have to forgive me – these are the ramblings of a man blinded by fanhood.)
Tulsa played us well. They pushed us around, but did it with finesse. We committed 31 fouls to their 20, and none of them were awful calls. This was not the refs’ fault, for once – this was ours. It also didn’t help that the 66ers had an NBA designee (Ramon Sessions of the Milwaukee Bucks), a player who’s currently averaging 30.5 points, 7.5 rebounds and 5.0 assists per game.
This is the development league, and it showed when you looked to the other side of the court. The Skyforce fielded two players from last year – Elton Nesbitt and Antywane Robinson – that barely made the court some nights. Our 11th and 12th man. The development? They’ve become quite competent factors in the Skyforce offense, combining for 46 points in last night’s loss. Last year, they’d be lucky to combine for that many in a month. Nic Caner-Medley turned out to be a decent pick as well – 30 points, 15 rebounds, 2 steals – even though he couldn’t be trusted to make the long shot.
So with new leadership and some good scorers, what happened? Oh, hold in – wait a minute. Are we really running two sub-six-footers out there? Is our tallest guy really only 6’9”? Meanwhile, look at Tulsa – they’ve got some serious height, including one big-haired and freckled oddity that had to be at least 10 feet tall.
Or, at least, he seemed that way against our lineup of midgets. This could be a problem. Sure, coach Nate Tibbets loves the run and gun, but these guys are short. They’re fast, but they’re short. The entire team. There was a time that it seemed like our team was an average of five inches shorter at every position.
But it shouldn’t be blamed on height. If you can shoot, you can overcome a couple inches. Simply put, it was a horrible shooting night. While Tulsa shot 49% from the field, we could barely find the basket with 43% (most of which were missed long range shots – stuff we shouldn’t have been taking in the first place.) We couldn’t make free throw either, missing over a third of our shots.
So over everything, it’s pretty basic – what we saw was a coach who is a spitting image of his predecessor – a guy who loves the run and gun, who lives and dies by the jump shot. And don’t get me wrong – we have some shooters. We led by a considerable amount several times, but even then you’d have fooled us. It seemed we were behind the whole game, not just the last quarter – we looked ugly, and it was an equal ugliness on the opposing side that kept us in the game. All until that last quarter.
What was old last year in Mo’s offense is new again with Nate. We saw the same frustrating meltdown, the same lack of inside presence, the same finesse garbage trying to bang up against a bruising, inside based team. We allowed too many drives, relied too much on the outside shot and lost our momentum when we should have been putting the game away.
It wouldn’t be so upsetting if it didn’t seem so familiar.
Skyforce 109, Tulsa 117
Issues Considered: Basketball, Sioux Falls, Sioux Falls Skyforce, Sports