Easily worth $1.65B

I hate the Boy Scouts

Turns out America's favorite intolerant organization is now letting the MPAA "teach" kids about copyrights.

I hate the Boy Scouts

Do I symapathize with the MPAA? Sure, unlike albums, movies are expensive to make. It's a serious threat to the quality of movies if filmmakers are unable to recoup their expenses and then some.

But indoctrinating children with corporate platitudes is something that any respectable organization would refrain from.

Please write your local Boy Scout organization and remind them that homosexuals and atheists are an active part of the film industry. That might change things.

Dear Whoever Decides Such Things:

Please add the food group "Rooster Sauce" alongside the existing food groups of fruits and vegetables, grains, meats, and dairy.

Welcome to the North Side, Sweet Lou

"I have forgotten more baseball than this guy knows." --Lou Pinella on Curt Schilling

Agnostic, Not Atheist

because sometimes you just think there must be a god, and that god loves metal!

1 mile from my apartment!

My Top 10 of the Decade Thus Far

The Dillinger Escape Plan - Miss Machine
The Postal Service - Give Up
McLusky - Do Dallas
Radiohead - Kid A
Outkast - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
System of a Down - Toxicity
M83 - Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts
Deceased - Supernatural Addiction & As the Weird Travel On (I couldn't decide)
Saul Williams - Amethyst Rockstar
Iron Maiden - Brave New World

This was really hard to narrow down to ten (eleven), but I think this is pretty much it. No particular order. The last album not to make the cut: Sigh - Imaginary Sonicscape.

Anyways, if you haven't checked all of these out, you should.

(note: I omitted Love - The Forever Changes Concert and Brian Wilson - SMiLE because it's a bit of a technicality that they were released this decade.) Also note that Iron Maiden's A Matter of Life and Death hasn't completely sunk in yet.

We are number one. All others are number two, or lower.

yeeuh.

troof

A Music Snob's Delight

Procrastination

The teams left in the hunt in baseball last won the World Series in 1989, 1986, 1984, and 1982.

I wonder when the last time each of the last four teams left in any of the big sports hadn't won in over 15 years was.

As the NBA has only had 8 unique Champions in the past 25 years (Heat, Pistons, Spurs, Lakers, Bulls, Rockets, Celtics, and 76ers), I'm guessing it's been a long time for them. Likewise, the NFL has had only 13 champions over that span. The NHL? 12.

Baseball has had 17 different champions over that same time span.

By the way, I realized just earlier that my Competitive Strategy class has 137 pages of reading this week.

Differences in Management Style

The following is an excerpt from a Harvard Business Review article about the decision making process. It talks about how differences in decision making within the Kennedy administration between the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis led to the drastically different historical outcomes.

After the botched invasion, Kennedy conducted a review of the foreign policy decision-making process and introduced five major changes, essentially transforming the process into one of inquiry. First, people were urged to participate in discussions as "skeptical generalists"--that is, as disinterested critical thinkers rather than representatives of particular departments. Second, Robert Kennedy and Theodore Sorenson were assigned the role of intellectual watchdog, expected to pursue every possible point of contention, uncovering weaknesses and untested assumptions. Third, task forces were urged to abandon the rules of protocol, eliminating formal agendas and deference to rank. Fourth, participants were expected to split occasionally into subgroups to develop a broad range of options. And finally, President Kennedy decided to absent himself from some of the early task force meetings to avoid influencing other participants and slanting the debate.

The inquiry was used to great effect when in October 1962 President Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles on Cuban soil, despite repeated assurances from the Soviet ambassador that this would not occur. Kennedy immediately convened a high level task force, which contained many of the same men from the Bay of Pigs invasion, and asked them to frame a response.

...

Ultimately, subgroups developed two positions, one favoring a blockade and the other an air strike.

...

The subgroups exchanged position papers, critiqued each other's proposals and came together to debate the alternatives. They presented Kennedy with both options, leaving him to make the final choice. The result was a carefully framed response, leading to a successful blockade and a peaceful end to the crisis.

It looks like JFK managed quite differently than a certain decider.

Sports

The Yankees are out of the playoffs.

FSU sucks at football.

The Dolphins are miserable.

The Giants are the Giants.

Damn.

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

Today on the radio here in Chicago two stations were playing Mr. Big's "To Be With You" at the same time.

Make your time.

Bob Gets the Spirit Award on this One

Jeter is awesome, but it's hard to argue with Abreu's 4 RBIs (and there's no good Wes Anderson quotes about going 5/5). Did Kyle Farnsworth get into a groove at the end of the 8th there? How many times did McCarver call Detroit, "Chicago?" Can I have more man-love for Giambi at this point? Is that water, sweat, or pure grease in his hair? Dare I go to a game in Detroit this weekend? Where can I get a bullet-proof vest for such an outing? Will I ever see Wang pitch without thinking, "This place is exclusive Wang, so don't tell them you're Jewish?" Was anyone surprised when Myers gave up that homer? Is the guy with the 3rd best batting average in the AL, the weakest link in the Yankees' starting lineup?

As the Yankees provide more questions than answers, I'm moving on...

Having missed two TNDCs (Thursday Night Drinking Clubs), coughed my way all around town, called a friend that once had mono to ask him whether the symptoms I had sounded like mono, scared away friends and colleagues, and made two trips to the student health center, finally my sickness has subsided. I didn't take any cough drops, Nyquil, Dayquil, Sudafed, or Advil for most of the day today. Progress!

In addition, I drank some of the best beer in the world (free beer) at an Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, and Private Equity Club gathering in Ida Noyes Hall, which is the pub conveniently located next door to the business school here in Chicago. You can't spell "raging party" without EVP. Ok, so you can, but who cares when the EVP is providing free beer, nachos, and fried cheese?

Speaking of Chicago, Job prospects are looking good at this point.

With that I yield the floor to Barney Frank, and one of my favorite quotes of his. It's basically him calling out the Republicans for being the party of empty rhetoric (the context is over an agricultural appropriations bill):

Mr. Chairman, I am here to confess my reading incomprehension. I have listened to many of my conservative friends talk about the wonders of the free market, of the importance of letting the consumers make their best choices, of keeping government out of economic activity, of the virtues of free trade, but then I look at various agricultural programs like this one. Now, it violates every principle of free market economics known to man and two or three not yet discovered.

So I have been forced to conclude that in all of those great free market texts by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and all the others that there is a footnote that says, by the way, none of this applies to agriculture. Now, it may be written in high German, and that may be why I have not been able to discern it, but there is no greater contrast in America today than between the free enterprise rhetoric of so many conservatives and the statist, subsidized, inflationary, protectionist, anti-consumer agricultural policies, and this is one of them.

In particular, I have listened to people, and some of us have said let us protect workers and the environment in trade; let us not have unrestricted free trade; but let us have trade that respects worker rights and environmental rights. And we have been excoriated for our lack of concern for poor countries.

There is no greater obstacle, as it is now clear in the Doha round, to the completion of a comprehensive trade policy than the American agricultural policy, with one exception, European agricultural policy, which is much worse and just as phony.

Sugar is an example. This program is an interference with the legitimate efforts at economic self-help in many foreign nations. So I appreciate the leadership of the gentleman from Arizona [Jeff Flake] and the gentleman from Oregon [Roy Blumenauer]. Here is a chance for some of my free-enterprise-professing friends to get honest with themselves, and now maybe we will see some born-again free enterprisers in the agricultural field.