Should it be taken over by the Navy? Space is more like the sea than like the air, and I argue in my book that a US Space Guard would be a better organization for many things currently being done (or neglected) by NASA, the Air Force and the FAA.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
The Weather Channel
Is DirecTV going to drop them?
I’ve never watched it since I left Florida, when they had OK hurricane coverage (though the local channels generally did a good job when the things got near). But at least they did fire “decertifier” Heidi.
The Ultimate Turing Test
Can a machine have an @rgasm?
Football Intelligence
This is one of the reasons that I like football:
More than any other position, playing quarterback requires mastering a farrago of detail, and then sifting through it while staring at eleven large people eager to break your face. The best N.F.L. quarterbacks, like Tom Brady, Drew Brees, and Peyton Manning, have reputations as keen, obsessive students of opposing defenses, whose schemes they decode in real time. And yet, what does it say that the great model of lethally consistent play, Peyton, scored a twenty-eight on the Wonderlic while his more erratic brother, Eli, scored a thirty-nine?
One theory some in the N.F.L. hold is that the highest-scoring quarterbacks are too rigidly scholarly, prisoners of research who don’t handle in-game adjustments well, while those whose scores are very low simply can’t handle a high volume of preparation.
Oliver Luck was twice an Academic All-American quarterback at West Virginia University, spent five years in the N.F.L., went on to law school, and is now the athletic director at his alma mater. His son, Andrew, (Stanford Class of 2012, architectural design; Wonderlic, thirty-seven) is the Indianapolis Colts’ excellent second-year quarterback. “Football intelligence to me is situational awareness,” Oliver Luck told me. “The variables in football are so many. Every play is a decision and you do it at full speed. Life involves more thought.” (If there is a dark undercurrent to a discussion of bright football players, it has to do with life after the scrum and the long-term effects that hits to the head can have on the brain.)
That said, Oliver Luck thinks that there have been certain moments post-football when his aptitude for the game has been helpful to him. “I remember distinctly sitting for the Texas bar exam after I finished law school,” he recalled. “There were maybe five hundred people in there. People were sighing and groaning. A guy one table away from me suddenly lost it. I wanted to tell him, ‘Suck it up! You can do it!’ The way I would in the huddle. I was focussed. I knew how to work through that test.”
But the other positions require intelligence as well. It’s not just a brute-force game, despite the heavy contact. It’s much more cerebral than continuous-motion sports (like hockey, basketball, soccer), which I hate. As Camille Paglia has noted, it’s more like battle planning and warfare, and it’s quintessentially American.
Hollywood’s Fault
No, this isn’t about the culture wars. It really is a Hollywood Fault, that may prevent Garcetti’s gang of cronies from blotting out the sun of Hollywood and West Hollywood residents.
It’s interesting to note that the Red Line subway runs along it, down Hollywood Boulevard. That line was built a couple decades ago, and it’s not clear that they knew they were building it along a rupture fault. From the map, though, it appears to run a block or two south of it, so even if it did go, it wouldn’t necessarily break the tunnel. But it could leave a crack so deep that you could see all the way down to where the people who run Hollywood live.
V8
So, it wasn’t just me:
I found the stuff revolting, because it was like drinking cold tomato soup.
…It had great brand awareness when I was growing up, thanks to the constant barrage of ads featuring people who had, for some reason, forgotten to avail themselves of a V8, and remonstrated themselves by slamming their palms into their foreheads.
Not even this made me want some.
Me, neither.
The Culture Wars
…will never end.
Both sides seem pretty entrenched.
Merry Christmas
…to all my Christian readers. Hope it’s a great one for you.
Pajama Boy Nation
Some thoughts on pajamas and duck calls from VDH:
How bizarre that the Duck Dynasty characters and Pajama Boy reverberated the same week. I have never watched Duck Dynasty, and have only glanced at the expanding genre of white working class reality dramas, from tree cutters and gold miners to ice truckers and boat captains: Cussin’ good ol’ boys, who lose their temper when failing to start the generator, have big arms and bigger guts, and are to remind us (within limits) that once upon a time we all used to be more like them than Ezra Klein and Jay Carney.
Who watches these shows? Perhaps the majority of viewers are those who still admire muscular strength and the earthy ability to make a living from nature (and not work for the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the local Department of Motor Vehicles), and a smaller percentage who find these aborigines odd, but also oddly compelling in their reminder that the people like themselves who run our country could not sharpen a chain saw, change the oil in their car, or unplug their own sewer line. This latter group is curious about the uncouth people who can do these things.
The A&E controversy grew even stranger in that pet white aborigines from the rural south are supposed to shock us by their blunt talk and religious hocus pocus, but only if they stay inside the bars of their zoo cage and thus only ham it up within the parameters of politically correct hillbilly-ese. The Pajama Boy mob at A&E must know that the Ducks, should they speak like those in Silicon Valley or act in accordance with Upper West Side protocols, would have zero audience. Is the logic of Duck Dynasty that the few left in America of the 1940s can spout off in a neat way to us — but only without putting their paws and snouts too far through the bars of their cage?
Apparently.
The True Bullies
Mark Steyn says it’s time to stand up to them. Well, he showed how it’s done in Canada.
[Mid-morning update]
Don’t retreat an inch in the culture war:
I’ve built much of my career around free-speech litigation. I’ve championed mostly the rights of conservatives, but during my tenure as president of FIRE I also worked on a strictly nonpartisan basis — protecting left and right. By my rough estimate, I’ve personally worked on well over 200 free-speech cases and public controversies. And here’s what I’ve found:
When it comes to law, we almost never lose. When it comes to the culture, we rarely win.
Conservatives — especially conservative Christians — used to treat the boos and the jeers with shock and dismay. Today — especially for the young — there is less shock and more assimilation.
Social pressure can be even more powerful than laws.