1. Here in the Bay Area SW Florida, we all live in fear of crazy Evan. Hat sales have plummeted in the area as he will track you down and hurt you, especially if you wear the same hat size as him. If you’re reading this outside the greater SW Florida area, please send help.
2. Just got finished watching the Rays beat down Lackey and the Red Sox. There really is nothing better than watching a park full of douches go away all sad. Woo. Apparently Sawx fans love to unroot against him.
3. Am I the only one among us here with an unhealthy love for Ninja Warrior? What’s that? I’m the only one not gainfully employed? Valid.
4. The scrip show…it was less Best of Show and more old hillbillies with scads of books of coins. It was really kind of nice to spend some time with my mom. I will really miss her when I move back, which seems kind of lame, but I love her. I also got to show her where we spread my dad’s ashes two years ago. West Virginia is absolutely beautiful, and regardless of the politics involved (the Bush Administration heavily invested in coal production), the fact that there’s some money there again makes the beauty more poignant as it’s not juxtaposed with abject poverty. It’s still pretty poor there, but much less so. The most interesting thing that happened…I picked up a book on the Paint Creek area in the 20th century and there, on page 124, is a picture of my Grandfather, who I never met, who essentially was sacrificed to the mines. Very odd.
5. Off days suck.
4/19/10 What Do I name the new Grill? I know! Atomic Hot! 134
134 thoughts on “4/19/10 What Do I name the new Grill? I know! Atomic Hot!”
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This kind of stuff is really cool.
Is anyone else as excited about Thursday as I am?
Berry / Davis is total homer bs, but for a team that’s close to competing having two 1st rounders is sweet.
I am confused. The draft is on Thursday now?
Rd. 1 Thursday (prime time)
Rds. 2-3 Friday (prime time)
Rds. 4-7 Saturday
Nice, a hopefully pleasant distraction from my hockey induced depression.
Dislike for Notre Dame aside, if Clausen falls, I’d love it if they got him. The homer in me thinks Best would be a very useful player if you can get him if he lasts till the 3rd round.
remind me not to send you swag, dome-hater.
Fair enough, although I really had no say in the matter if I wanted to eat as a child.
huh. well, in that instance, I may forgive. USC?
Michigan.
oh. then your hatred is justified.
and, Appalachian State.
Oh you just had to go there.
Ik, r?
It’s the Domer in me. Sorry.
I’m excited because we get a day game of Dallas versus CC. I’d be more excited by Anderson versus CC, but I’ll take it!
209 v 707?
shit. I gotta root for CC, then?
I’m actually pretty excited. I cannot explain why I like the NFL draft, but I really do. It’s the sort of thing I should find boring and annoying, but I like it–weird. If Denver somehow drafts Toby Gerhart I’ll be ecstatic.
Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerist. I can admit that there are environmentalists and animal rights types doing violent acts. Can we just pretend for a minute that we aren’t all 5 years old.
I liked Chait’s take on Barbour (albeit not this specific issue)
Politics is dangerous
In college, I played portative organ for the Insolently Lugubrious Ironies.
(I am really interested in seeing that Fassbinder.)
1. You guys have old-timey streetcars? Coooooool.
…and apparently beautiful women who traipse around on them all the day. Who knew?
TWSJS
If that story is true, someone is so fired.
More like promoted; my money is on clever marketing ploy to generate hype.
Unless it is a particularly cunning bit of viral marketing.
Meh. Wake me when they unlock their service.
{snerk}
Too late, methinks.
Q: what do you call a couple that uses the rhythm method?
A: Parents.
Someone is clearly in the pocket of big latex.
You do realize that rhythm method ≠“withdrawal,” right?
Yes.
I love RR.
Why are there so many funny and/or smart Royals fans? Why can’t some of them like the A’s.
ten more losing seasons oughta do it.
WAAH!
I think the problem is the A’s have too many fans.
Cahill scheduled to pitch for Sacramento tonight.
and five days after that, and five days after that, and five days after that, and five days after that, and five days after that, and five days after that, and five days after that, and five days after that, and five days after that, and five days after that, and five days after that, and five days after that.
Service time solved!
Heh. So far so good (ok, great) for our starting five, but I still expect Cahill to end up getting a significant number of starts one way or another.
Just so long as the next grill you write is named Atomic Punk.
“Well I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in askin’.
“Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.”
I sang this aloud on Saturday. No joke.
This is another good one along the same lines. (Edit: And it mentions scrip!)
They tore up the train tracks where my dad grew up.
My father was born and lived in a place called Krebbs/Cribs for the first few years of his life. It’s between Charleston and Beckley, West Virginia. Mainly because of Robert Byrd, West Virginia is full of federal money. One aspect of that is the interstates. They are rampant in West Virginia. One of these interstates, I-77, which I just took from Columbia, South Carolina to Beckley, runs right down the same hollow my dad’s family lived at and mined in, namely the Paint Creek hollow. Krebbs/Cribs, where we spread my Dad’s ashes, is gone. There are no more houses there. The landscape is changed because of the interstate, the creek itself is not even in the same spot it once was. For years, the front steps to the house my dad called home stood, but those disappeared about 20 years ago. There’s nothing there, but the land, the creek and the interstate.
He also lived in Mahan, which is still on the map. There are about ten or twelve houses still there, but their time is pretty limited too, I’d think.
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/50889
Wow, thank you, mk. That was beautiful.
I have my first ever interview with the FBI today (as distinct from having my phone illegally tapped, courtesy of the missus).
Bring it on, Special Agent Veronica Rios!
Neat.
I just did my first live background check as part of a friend’s security clearance.
I have a funny background-check story that takes some time to convey … maybe later tonight.
Don’t get too close!
Apparently I’m not the only one who has had a brush with greatness/insanity featuring Sly Stone.
Right. Next you’ll be telling me you did blow with George Clinton in the front of your Hyundai.
I’m interested in the psychology of status in social media environments, in particular the prominence of counting (comments, recommendations, friends, followers), which has always struck me as an uncomfortably explicit manifestation of the popularity contest dynamics inherent in real world social networks.
That is to say, I share Jonah Lehrer’s unease:
Obviously the owners of these sites, and the advertisers they serve, have a clear interest in quantifying popularity. What I wonder about is:
1. How critical is all this counting to the appeal of social media? Does it provide a kind of gratification not available in “real” life?
2. How would the tenor of blogs, Facebook, etc. change if popularity metrics were removed? In what ways would Twitter be different if no one knew how many followers they (or anyone else) had without conducting a manual count? What if there were no numbers next to the comments links on blogs? What effect, if any, would this have on AN? Or FK, for that matter?
FK doesn’t count individuals’ comments (at least to my knowledge).
My answers are:
1. Depends upon who you are. I don’t use twitter, and I don’t know how many FB friends I have (because I only log into FB when someone friends me or otherwise generates an email). People do, however, always look for status symbols and for some/many it certainly is one. In college (when FB was really new), there was a group called “Power Users” or something that you had to have x group memberships and y friends to join. It was composed of legitimately popular people.
2. For me, hardly at all (although it makes me happy when my Grills have lots of comments, even though Grill comments are never really related to the Grill itself). Now if you took numbers off of GOGs…
I was kind of embarrassed to have the most comments last year on **. What it really meant to me is that I have no life, not that I have a very full one. I’m not sure that a ton of facebook friends and/or twitter followers wouldn’t represent the same thing.
There is a certain ego attachment, though, particularly when I start a thread. I take it as a personal vindication when there are a lot of comments on my thread, though in reality, there’s almost no correlation between how popular I am and how many comments are in a thread I made.
I believe you’re a diabolical genius for dragging us (all too willingly) into this quANgmire, and that you’re secretly tallying the post-to-reply ratio of every FK’er for your own glory. I also confess that I miss the gratification of the diary recommend tally feature.
+1
+27.87
1. My hands are clean re: AN. All I ever do is express bewilderment as to why everyone else reads it so much.
2. My intuition is that the counting is a big deal. It has always been there, so we tend not to consider its implications, but I think it a) fuels obsessiveness, and b) contributes greatly to the performance aspect of online interaction.
It is validation made tangible, and even if it’s a pseudonymous disembodied person you’ll never meet giving you the cookie, the cookie still tastes good. Of course, one of the (many) downsides of validation made explicit is that when that cookie is not forthcoming, we assume judgement in the other direction: they don’t like me, they think what I said was boring or stupid, etc.
Thus, obsession + performance.
And it is all so stupid, really. There is something debased/unhealthy about using follower volume as a measure of virtue or staking even a tiny part of your ego on whether a post on a blog gets 50 or 100 or 200 comments. But we do those things because we’ve internalized the rule of “popularity = approval = personal worth”. We say we don’t care about it. We say of course it’s stupid. But that is basically bs.
Mind you, this is just a heightening of real world dynamics. But I think the heightening is sort of gross.
I agree re fueling obsessiveness. All you need to do to obsess people is give them goals. See, e.g., every video game with an “achievement” system unrelated to the game play itself (like this).
I have to take extreme issue with this:
So, you think FSU, for example, is stupid, debased, and unhealthy when he confesses that he enjoys the satisfaction of seeing recs pile up on one of his Peanutball epics? (“Debased,” he might embrace.) Do you take the next step and condemn successful professional authors (a redundancy, I guess: if an author is a professional, then she is by definition successful) for the quantity of lucre they receive in exchange for debasing their thoughts in a commercial, popularity-based transaction?
I find this sentiment to be the height of totebagger anti-bourgeois piety.
Wait a minute, so what you’re saying is there’s validity to ranking by the numbers. So these are the best movies of all time because they were the most popular. These are the best books of all time. There are a lot of reasons something is popular, mb, and quite often it boils down to LCD. Twister was a horrible movie, A Tale of Two Cities is not a good book. I did not see Avatar because it was a communal experience, but I know a lot of people did, solely because everyone was seeing it.
You like Ulysses but dislike A Tale of Two Cities? Are you sure we’re friends?
Very sure. I’m a modernist, which necessitates I dislike undeveloped or under-developed characters. Dickens never creates anything other than two-dimensional characters. He even names them close to what they are. His books are the 19th century equivalent of Stephen King. It means they’re easy to read and he did, in fact, tell a hell of s story. But unless you want me to throw you on the Stephen King table, you gotta give me more than Cervantes did 250 years before, or Laurence Sterne did in the same language one hundred years before. Some may think that’s harsh, but Dostoevsky was creating incredibly complex characters virtually at the same time Dickens was.
All of this has nothing at all to do with your liking Dickens. Several of my good friends like him. My dislike of him is probably irrational.
You’re a Humanist (anti-structuralist) Modernist. Joyce, I think, is one of the few Modernists who successfully bridges the Humanist-Structuralist divide (Beckett is, wrongly I think, considered to as well).
pegged, though I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on Beckett.
Maybe Sterne could have traded some of his character development to Dickens in exchange for a plot. (I like both of them.)
agreed. LS doesn’t really go anywhere.
Fair enough. My French favorites are Moliere and Balzac anyway, with an awe for Dumas’ productivity (and Dickens is, of course, best when he limits himself to England)
Also: let’s get rid of the whole quantitative, popularity-based charade of judging players on statistical outcomes, and teams on W/L and attendance figures.
These are two different things and I suspect you know that. Your example here is performance based and the examples mk gives can be performance based, but are more often than not completely random.
No, I think you might be misreading my (possibly inartful) comment. LB is getting at the right distinction, popularity vs value/virtue (as in, they are not the same, it is problematic to conflate them as we do, and serial quantification normalizes this conflation).
It is of course right and proper that FSU takes pride in his work, and enjoys people telling him it is good. However, it would be too bad if FSU felt marginalized because he secured 20 comments versus 150 for a concurrent post (I expect he doesn’t feel that way, but I also expect most of the rest of us do). The expliciteness of the validation tally accentuates the insecurity we already feel, even though said tally is often totally untethered to the actual value of whatever it is we put out there.
But what is the “actual value of whatever it is we put out there”? And how does one determine it? If it’s just in the jouissance and satisfaction of creation, why post it on the internet (or sell it to a publisher who will reset the capitalization scheme) at all? If it’s just about communicating an essential truth well-told to 1 or 2 or 3 people, why not just email it to those select few?
(And yes, I put that parenthetic in just to jerk your chain.)
Well, I don’t know. If FK were a listserv instead of a blog, it would be all the same to me. Honestly I think popularity is a destructive (destructive of art, destructive of people) goal, and not one I would ever work towards. If it’s your goal, you should close up shop here immediately, prostrate yourself before Blez, and resume writing on the AN front page. I think you do not do that because you do, in fact, consider the distinction LB and I are talking about to be important.
I don’t think, for example, that Kim Kardasian (3,422,111) should feel 72 times better about herself than Margaret Atwood (47,287).
I definitely do not mean to say that people liking dumb stuff is a new phenomenon, or that it is bad for someone to try to get his/her stuff read/seen/whatever. I’m not not not not saying that. I’m saying that as we shift many of our real world interactions, with their more amorphous parameters, online, the prominence/importance of popularity becomes overpoweringly present, because our “score” is always there for us to see.
I think this absolutely makes us feel and act differently than we might in our embodied interactions. Don’t you? What would be your answer to my question #2 above? Do you think online interaction would remain precisely the same if all the numbers disappeared?
New sigline!
You seem to be arguing that moving online is making us increasingly civic — not, exactly, civil; but calculated to offend (or challenge) less and appeal (or flatter/pander) more.
I guess this means PT must be a genuinely monstrous individual in person.
I think the first part of that is a bit off, but I really don’t understand the PT remark. Explain? (if your premise is that he is not popular, I think you’ve got it wrong to start)
My original comment was more along the lines of the impact explicit score keeping online (versus implicit score keeping in real life) has on the appeal of the medium and the anxiety level of the participants. You seem to want to talk more about how to (or if we should) define artistic/creative value, which is fine, but I’m not sure that conversation has much to do with social media counting.
You slipped the jab re: AN directly below. We’re talking about the importance of popularity, and your work allegedly gaining value (or in any event not losing any in the transaction) when it’s seen by more eyeballs. Money is a separate issue entirely. But, even so: why not just write fanposts over there? Lots more people would see them. You’d get a lot more praise. You’d have a much better shot at eventually getting paid. Wouldn’t that make the thing itself better, in your formulation? If you actually place zero value on the rhetorical freedom/improved discourse here, and actually would not consider relinquishing it in service of a wider audience to be a genuine sacrifice, then … that is depressing.
Nah, he’s just a lawyer.
You know what? If Blez had been FUCKING PAYING ME, I wouldn’t have ever left, and would have had no issues whatsoever with crafting anodyne headlines. I could have even stomached working for Napoleon.
I call bs on this one. I can’t stomach reading comments by the chief administrator. Taking his shit for what would amount to a few bucks a month? Nah.
Seriously? You don’t think you’d have told him to fuck off by now?
FK path to prosperity:
Haven’t stuck my head in a grill for a while. Hello.
You can argue as much as you’d like that I’m wrong, but no amount of discussion, stats, or anecdotes can convince me that this is anything other than a complete load of hooey.
iFSU, vacation takes you
Yeah. That’s crap.
Also, everyone knows that free travel is only a right if you’re a young jew.
oy vay! You goyim and all your hatred.
[applies for free trip to Israel]
My sister did it. She had fun.
My dad was a palestinian refugee in 48. He did not and was unable to visit the town he was born in until 2000.
My wife’s family is jewish. She could get a free trip to Israel anytime she wanted. My children, who by some messed up theories of who is what can get the same treatment.
I think that is messed up
When I traveled to Jerusalem about six years ago – it was a dream of my dad’s to take the family and he saw that my imminent move to Boston would signal the end of any chance for nuclear family travel – I felt guiltily fortunate.
The American passport was like a get out of jail free card through all the Israeli quarters. Flash that bad boy and they send you on your way. In the Palestinian quarters, the combination of obvious Westerner + obviously Muslim name made me warmly welcomed pretty much everywhere. Best of both worlds.
One thing that struck me – no, not shrapnel – was that Jewish holy sites were available to all tourists. I went to the wailing wall and the Tomb of King David (free paper yamulkes if you forgot yours at home!) no problem, even though our tour guide was Palestinian. But all the Muslim holy sites were reserved for Muslims only. Non-muslims could visit the grounds surrounding Dome of the Rock at restricted hours, but not the mosque itself. The same is true of the holy sites in Mecca and Medina, which really are amazing scenes. I found that kind of sad, a little short-sighted, and wonder if a good PR firm and some openness could help the global perception of Islam.
That, and some more outspoken criticism of extremists from the mainline, and I think a lot of people would be receptive.
agrd.
Criticism of extremists is something I have always wanted to see more of, but I think there are a few issues there:
1. There are few-to-none central religious authorities in Islam, so criticism from a moderate nobody cleric in the UK is going to get close to zero attention from anybody.
2. The central religious authorities that do make statements are usually on the extremist side (eg the Ayatollah)
3. I think that there are more Muslims that hold views that would be considered extremist (destruction of Israel and West, restrictions on a woman’s role in society) than we might think, and if you catch the right group of American Muslims in candid conversation you might find some of those views even there.
You would know better than me, but I was under the (perhaps too comforting) impression that most Muslims don’t want to destroy the West (Israel is a different story).
If you’re right that Death to America is actually the majority opinion, I’m going to have to be very depressed.
No, I don’t think it is a majority opinion, I didn’t mean to imply that. I wouldn’t even know about the vast majority of the world. So emphasis on the “I think” and de-emphasis on the Death to America.
Phew!
Does the Abu ___ thing grate on you like it does me? It seems to me that news people think its something sinister. I introduce myself as Abu Theo everyonce in a while to fuck with people.
I don’t understand – what is it exactly that bugs you?
Maybe its not the news readers that just say the names, its people on the street that say things like “that’s Abu whatever his name is,” instead of Abu Omar al Bagdadi, because its the only part of the name they can put their finger on.
Then when I hear it on the news I hear, in my head, the redneck on the street.
Oh. I never noticed that.
I think that word, “extremist”, is poor shorthand that does more to distort than reveal. It’s used to encompass and label as implacable/insane all manner of people and organizations that have little in common (see: “war on terror”). We are similarly casual with its sister term, “moderate”, which as far as I can tell is meant to describe men in suits who (nominally) agree with US foreign policy.
Is Hosni Mubarak moderate? Is the Muslim Brotherhood extremist? Is Benjamin Netanyahu an extremist? Are Israeli settlers extremists? What about the Sunni extremists in Iraq who became moderate as soon as we started paying them, but are poised to become extremists again? Is Muammar Gaddafi moderate now, or still extremist? Etc.
More instructive, I think, to discuss motives in the context of real-life political/historical disputes over rights, power, land, resources, and so forth. That is not the whole picture of course, but it gets us a lot closer to the facts on the ground than slippery characterizations like extremist/moderate.
Note that I am *not* saying there are not hyper-militant people out there who do crazy things. I *am* saying that that label, “extremist”, has helped to make our understanding of global affairs cartoonish (okay, more cartoonish), and fits too snugly into the simplistic, fails-every-time “if we eliminate bad guys/bad sentiments, everything will be better” worldview. To quote a bona fide bad guy:
Fair points. I’m meaning people who actually want to see “the West” killed/defeated/attacked vs. people who don’t.
Yeah, my peeps need better PR. I had high hopes for Hanan Ashrawi, but her window is gone now.
they also need the ability to get building permits on their homes. that kind of self determination would go a long way to changing the Arab streets outlooks.
Do you think that the federal government should be allowed to spank children?
OBAMA URGES PARENTS: SPANK MOAR CHILDREN
Spanking panels! Gubmint gwine tell you when you cain and cain’t discipline yore children.
Has anyone mentioned how much I hate the mandatory wearing of 42 on jackie Robinson Day? I am ok with the day, I am ok with sombody on your team wearing the number, but all people make it difficult for me to watch the games.
It would mean a lot more as an award than as a mandatory uni-change.
Although, if everyone gets new unis anyway, why not make ’em throwbacks to that year (negro league teams for newer franchises)
no doubt. I like the award thing. I love the Negro league throw backs. I am still a little pissed that the Nationals chose that name instead of the Greys.
I agree, watching those games was annoyingly difficult, especially watching other teams whose rosters I don’t know well. And enforced piety always rankles, righteousness of the cause notwithstanding. Hopefully MLB can figure a graceful way to scale down the all-42s practice before it comes an eternal obligation, like God Bless America almost became (and did become, apparently, in Yankee Stadium).
Its hard for me with the A’s because I refuse to change cable companies and have only seen nationaly televised games.
I was a bit late for the game Saturday, and they held up stadium entry line during the national anthem….
Sigh.
Cahill 3.2 IP 2 runs 2 hits 4 ks 3 bb
I think I have said this before, but watching Pablo Sandoval play 3rd is like watching Charlie brown field comebackers.
He just turned an out into a triple. Never touched the ball.
Whoever plays left for the giants missplayed it to, making 2 the number of bad plays that uy made today.
OBAMA URGES MANAGERS: DRESS LIKE THIS
Congratulations Dave!
I never welcomed our robot overlords. Never.
I find this encouraging.
You are one link away from being required to post a new Grill (or to accept “Standing Bear” as the Ross nickname).
Notice the links stopped.
I think Standing Bear is a good nickname. You’re missing out.
It’s ok. I prefer EBE.
What is that again?
Easy-E (but EastBay)
EastBay E?
Right. It’s short and links to the word “easy” (which I think is his defining characteristic)
because you like carrying water for the New Times of Phoenix?
New Times/Village Voice no longer owns the East Bay Express. Though it does still kind of suck.
Nobody liked my suggestion of Glentyson Glen Ross
I’m sticking with happy little trees.
DMOAS and I are going to the game with Bob Ross wigs and paint palates.
Sweet.