Headlines That Please (Vol II)

 

  

 

It's Sort Of Weird To Realize That If You Were Raped, It Would Just Be Rape, And Not "Molestation"

 Eben recently turned me on to Jeff Pearlman, a former SI writer who's got a blog. Good writing, he said. It's right up your alley; trust me, you'll like it.*

Eben's not often wrong about these things. He turned me on to Anonymous Lawyer back when it was still funny/published; he gave me a copy of Confederacy of Dunces; he harped on The Wire relentlessly. He does still watch 24, but nobody's perfect.

It's possible that Pearlman's, coincidentally, had a rough streak during the time I've consumed his posts. He's not been publishing for all that long, either, so maybe he's just adjusting to the format. This week's posts, though, have not been good. And by "not been good," I mean "been not good."

In part, I think it's because he's focused on steroids, and sportswriters, like other media figures/humans, tend to be at their worst when talking about morality. For one, it's hard not to step back and be like "IT'S A FUCKING GAME," when reading for the umpteenth time about how 'roiders have dishonored everything it means to be an Athlete, an American, and a Human. I'm less susceptible than some (Tom) to this, because I actually do like and care about sports, and think that on balance they serve a positive function in society. For two, sportswriters are rarely the sharpest tools in the shed. The sharper ones interested in writing for a living are waxing idiotic about morality in the context of Israel-Palestine, or stupidly advocating ever-more-expensive military purchases, or being Jim Fallows (he's the bomb).

Here are some choice bits from a recent post:

When I was a kid, my dream was to dig a tunnel in my backyard and wind up in Disney World. [You were a retarded kid. You also dreamt small.] I really thought I could do it, too. [Really, retarded.]I’d get Gary Miller and Dennis Gargano and John Ballerini to come over with their shovels, and we’d dig and dig and dig until reaching the Magic Kingdom. Boy, that would have kicked butt. [?]

[Covering sports i]s a fantastic way to make a living, and I count my blessings quite often. But there’s something about this widespread cheating (and it is, undeniably, cheating) that drives me to drink. [What about all the other cheating that took place over the years? That didn't bother you? Have you ever written an article blasting spitballers? Excoriating Kenny Rogers, who cheated IN THE WORLD SERIES? Calling for Gaylord Perry's ouster from the Hall of Fame?] In my six years of covering major league baseball for Sports Illustrated, I was led to believe I was seeing a lot of amazing things. Faster-than-ever fastballs; deeper-than-ever homers; arms that acted as cannons, and jumps that rivaled Mike Powell’s best. In hindsight, however, I’ve learned that much of it was fiction. [You are retarded. Your job was to cover this game; this massive, massively-obvious conspiracy was taking place in this game; you did not suspect anything; I should hate the perpetrators of the conspiracy for fooling you???] I was, in a sense, covering the WWF. [You were also, in a sense, covering women's basketball. What the fuck, in a sense, does this sentence mean? Does it mean the outcome of games was scripted? The announcing crews were better? That this is a misleading and/or irrelevant comparison? Right.] Why does this bother me? Because I have always been a lover of baseball’s history; of the very idea that Mickey Mantle and Bernie Williams stood in the exact same spot; that Rickey Henderson’s stolen bases, Lou Brock’s stolen bases and Ty Cobb’s stolen bases can be measured on the same chart. [Someone should teach him about controlling for eras and parks, such that these things can actually_be_compared.]

Yes, things have changed over the years: Stadium sizes, ball textures, integration, internationalism. But baseball is baseball is baseball is baseball. [Someone has apparently taught him about such things, though obviously only superficially, as we see with the "baseball is..." sentence.]

Hence, to see someone like Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriguez come along and show such blatant disrespect for the history of the game, well, it infuriates me. [Hard to see how you get a "Hence Q" from "P is P is P is P."] I’ve written this before, but if you’re Barry Bonds, how do you possibly justify breaking Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record while loaded with steroids and HGH? You know the man faced bitter racism in his pursuit; know he received death threats on more than one occasion. So how do you cheat? [With a syringe and a guillable press corps.] How? Or, in a similar case, you’re Mark McGwire. You’ve been juicing regularly, and when you pass Roger Maris’ single-season mark you rub your bat against his and begin to cry. How? How? Roger Maris’ 1961 was, from an individual standpoint, a nightmare. The media rooted against him; he began losing his hair and chain smoking. It was pure hell—and you come along, cheat and claim the title as your own? How? [Well to be fair, the pitchers were cheating too.]

So, yes, I am self-righteous, and I need to move on, and my high horse is on stilts by now. But I just can’t shed this anger. I probably need to, but I can’t. Not yet anyhow.

That’s my sincere explanation.

Thanks. [You ever cheat on anything in your life, Jeffy boy? Yes? Good, go kill yourself.]

I wrote this giant blog post, then realized that someone else said basically the same thing, only much more pithily.

*Eben wishes it noted that since his recommendation (he called Pearlman "must read") he has not read a single Perlman post. Did he level me?

It's Simple

One thing Yglesias whines about a lot is the idea of simplifying the tax code.  This has a lot of upsides and no real downsides, other than for lawyers and accountants who are paid to exploit the complexities and ambiguities in the code so that their wealthy clients save money.  I always assumed that, at some point, the complexity of the tax code would cease to matter, because computers would just take care of shit.  So, while to humans, the difference between 15 rules and 1500 rules to apply before arriving at a figure is rather large; to a computer, this difference takes up all of .003 extra seconds (I used Stirling's to approximate that).

Some persuasive evidence that I am wrong arrived today, in the form of a W2 1099 from a company I did some work for this year.  The boxes on it are numbered.  Here are the titles associated with numbers 1-10:

1. Rents
2. Royalties
3. Other income
4. Federal income tax withheld
5. Fishing boat proceeds
6. Medical and health care payments
7. Nonemployee compensation
8. Substitute payments in leu of dividends or interest
9. Payer made direct sales of $5000 or more of consumer products to a buyer (recipient) for resale [with a box for checking]
   
10. Car insurance proceeds

Headlines That Please (Vol I)

 

This one's from CNN.

Free At Last; Free At Last; Thank God All-Mighty; I'm Free At Last

I closed all of my Bank of America accounts today.  They asked why, and I cited John Thain's commode.

Slippery Slopes

Maybe some of the aspiring lawyers among my readership can answer this question for me.  I'd imagine that, if someone left a stereo in a public place, and that stereo were blaring an annoying, incredibly loud series of alarm-sounds on repeat, after some amount of time I would be legally allowed to turn it off, take it, or destroy it.  My question is:  what if the "stereo" is also a "car"?  How long do I have to wait?

P-O-O-P

Defecating in another man's bathroom is like raiding enemy territory: you get in, you do what you have to do, and you get out, all the while hoping to leave as little evidence of your presence as possible. You're attentive to sounds, odors, and really anything else that might be emanating as a result of your incursion; you don't want your presence (in the bathroom) nor your lack of a presence (where everyone else is) noted; you don't want to take too long, but you definitely don't want to leave the job unfinished and risk a return trip.

This is why a nice rack with a selection of reading materials is such a wonderful gift you, as host, can give your guests. All at once it provides people with something to do (especially people hesitant about using an iphone while, you know) and assures them that you know what they're doing, and you're ok with it. Indeed, they should just relax and enjoy themselves. I recommend stocking it with the current New Yorker, and back issues of the Yale Alumni Magazine. The former is useful after the person exits, providing them with instant conversation fodder, while the latter helps the main event along nicely.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Some time ago, I put up a post cataloguing one instance of the larger debate over how and when one should use the phrase "begs the question." There are two camps on this one. First, there's the Rugby Dan/Jeremy camp, whose members are firmly against using begs the question to mean raises the question, under any circumstances, and generally feel that those who do misuse it in this fashion should be subject to, at the least, scorn (Rugby) and, at the most, death (Jeremy). I hesitantly count myself a part of this camp, and, although I am slightly more equivocal in my views, I come down on Jeremy's side of the punishment question. Arrayed against this formidable alliance of nitpickers/linguistic crusaders stand Tom and Ariel, Tom doubly so because he not only decries linguistic prescriptivism but also believes begs the question to be an empty statement (according to Tom, all valid arguments beg the question).

To each group I offer a challenge. Now, one mildly sophisticated thing to know about "hopefully" is that it is commonly used incorrectly, as is spelled out in some length in the usage note here. Saying "hopefully, I will do [x]," actually means I will do x, and I will do it in a manner that suggests that I am full of hope, not I hope that I will be able to do x. One interesting aside from the usage note: opposition to this usage has increased on the panel, despite the fact that other adverbs used in this fashion are given a pass (mercifully, frankly), so:

It is not the use of sentence adverbs per se that bothers the Panel; rather, the specific use of hopefully in this way has become a shibboleth.

As such, I would challenge Jeremy and Dan to only use hopefully in its original sense. As the usage note points out, unlike with begs/raises the question, hopefully is useful precisely because there's no exact synonym for its fake meaning. As such, using hopefully exclusively correctly will likely entail both correcting slip-ups and, occasionally, preemptively contorting one's phrasing.

On the other hand, I would challenge the Tom/Ariels among us to deliberately employ the "modern" usage of begs the question in front of people (a) whose respect they desire (maybe law school profs for Ariel; Ilan and/or Tyler Cowan for Tom), and (b) who are reasonably likely to hold Dan/Jeremy-esque views on the usage question.