Category: Default

The city of Atlanta has recently finished up a big contest for our new theme song. Perhaps I should just say our theme song, since I’m unaware of any previous one, unless you count hillbillies trying to get laid. It is part of a “rebranding” campaign. I guess the “Atlanta: A relative oasis in the middle of a state of ignorant racists that is Georgia” wasn’t cutting it anymore.

This blog will now conduct a scientific test. I have not yet listened to the new song. And yet, I feel confident in stating it will stink. And doubly confident in saying it will never convince one tourist to send one incremental dollar down Atlanta’s way.

Wow. I can’t get it. They are actually charging money for it. This is mind-blowing. Do they expect people money to actually pay for a song that is advertising Atlanta? That’s like paying for a poster of the Jolly Green Giant, but without the kitsch factor. That is, worthless. I am stunned.

I will proceed with my scathing analysis unabated by actual facts. To the best of my knowledge, there is exactly one geographic branding idea that has succeeded. “I love New York”. Huge success. In fact, if memory serves, it was written as “I [heart] New York”, and gave birth to the heart-icon-representing-the-word-love that is all over the place now. So what did it have going for it?

* It’s New York. New York is one of the 4 American cities that are unique and must be visited. (That may be a future post). Let’s just say there was a reason Osama went after New York, and not Bismarck or Macon.
* No one else had done it yet. The market is saturated. Every podunk metropolis has a brand, a logo, and a theme song. You can’t compete anymore.
* Originality. I [heart] New York is clever, when no one else has done it yet.
* A catchy jingle, that is short. Was there a longer version? Don’t know, don’t care.

Guess how many of these Atlanta’s theme song has? You don’t have to listen to it, just guess. I’m going with zero.

Oh, and guess who wrote the theme song? Dallas Austin. Yes, Dallas Austin, there’s a name guaranteed to confuse everyone.

(Thank to Art’s head for the post idea.)

I’m going to try and start writing again. Politics just depresses the hell out of me these days, and I’m running out of ‘silly’ topics.

Having a newborn makes it hard to write. We’re coming out of the hardest stretch, hopefully I’ll have a little more time to compose for this.

Back in July, I wondered what it would take before the country started realizing what they had in Bush, before it was publicly acceptable to call him out for what he is. I guess the time is finally arriving. Bush’s popularity continues to plummet (36% at press time), 57% of the country think he misled us into war, 80% think the Plame affair is serious, etc. His once monolithic empire is crumbling around him. It was bound to happen, I am only sad that it didn’t happen a year ago. Still 3 years left of this corrupt idiocy.

Those numbers are atrocious, and just getting worse. Compare them with the numbers I went through in my 2004 election analysis (written just over 6 months ago). There are a whole slew of lies this administration fed the populace, amplified by a docile media, that the country believed. (Why shouldn’t they, who would expect their president would be a bald-faced liar?) The lies are coming out. Some are out already, some are in process of being undiscovered, and some are obvious but will never be precisely pinned down.

I wonder about those people who voted for Bush and have turned against him. Somewhere between 15 and 25% of the country voted for him and now have turmed against him. I’d be very curious to hear from those people. What was it that changed their mind? What made them finally wake up and realize what they had voted for?

I think there were two turning points.

1) Katrina. Like a mantra, Bush always invoked 9/11. He used it to get us into Iraq, to cut taxes, to impugn anyone who stood in his way, he could always rely on good old 9/11. He was the one who was keeping us safe from the terrorists. Only Katrina showed he wasn’t. Katrina showed that there were no plans, no defense, no strategy, no nothing. And this wasn’t in response to an incredibly tricky unforseen diabolic strategy. This was against wind. This was against wind that had been predicted multiple times by multiple agencies in multiple years. Any citizen could see for themself how ill-prepared we were. Anyone could see that instead of trying to protect us, Bush had served up political hack after political hack, leaving New Orleans in the hands of a man who spent the critical day trading e-mails with his secretary about how good he looked.

2) Media. The media has always been complicit. Always needing to find two sides, always needing to protect sources, always needing to lick the hand that feeds them, always needing access, always needing money — Bush learned he could say anything and get away with it. He could debate Gore, lie through his teeth, state obvious fallacies, and still get the media to talk about Gore’s sighing. It just got worse. Well, somewhere along the line the media started to wake up. They are still a long long way away from where they should be, but they’re getting there. Was it time, was it McClellan’s obvious lying, who knows.

It’s hard to write this. I want to yell, “I told you so! I told you so! I was right, I was right!” to the world, but that doesn’t matter much. Our presidency, our government, our country, and our world are worse for these last years. I only hope we can regain what we lost.

When you’re stuck in the surreality of a hospital room with your wife, a new baby, and 48 hours to talk, you cover a lot of strange topics. Like, where would I grade Quidditch as a sport, how does it rank in my sports funnel theory? Surprisingly high.

Defense: Absolutely. In huge quantities. You’re allowed to hit the other guy and throw things at him (or her).
Team/Tactics: Absolutely. The tactics make no sense at all, but they’re clearly there.
Variety of athletic skills needed: Strength, speed, agility. And of course being able to fly.
Athletic Effort: Gobs of it.

Here are a couple more parameters which have come up in conversation since that post (to address deficiencies in bowling, golf, darts, pool).
Sweat: The more you sweat, the more legit the sport.
Clothes: If you don’t have to change clothes to play, it bring the level down.

But wait, Quidditch has even more! Over the course of 6 years, 3 matches a year, Harry Potter has been sent to the hospital multiple times and nearly been killed by dementors. He has been hit numerous times by objects, part of the game, whose only purpose is to ram into people and hurt them. In fact, there are two members of the team whose sole purpose seems to be whacking these things at people. Fantastic! Also, it is played outdoors in the natural elements which is worth another point. And like a real world version of wrestling (except for that it’s not the real world), the players genuinely hate each other guts, use dirty tricks on each other, and even have biased announcers.

Quidditch has one big strike against it. The design of the actual game is one of the dumbest things ever. Everything comes down to catching the snitch. The rest of the team might as well play backgammon and just wait for the usual Potter vs Malfoy Snitch-catching fight. 80% of the action is completely irrelevant to the outcome. If I was running a team, I would start the game as normal, and every 2 minutes, I’d have another play leave their usual position to be a snitch hunter, until I had 2 goalies and 4 snitch hunters. If a goalie got the ball (whatever the ball is, I can’t keep the quaffles apart from the bludgers), he would be instructed to fly around as far as possible, a variation on the 4-corners offense of college basketball before the shot clock.

I don’t get college sports. I don’t like they’re as interesting as pro sports, and I don’t understand the fanaticism.

College sports is hard to follow. Let’s pick basketball as an example. Whereas the NBA has 25 or 30 teams, there are literally thousands of college teams. Thousands. And the turnover is huge. You only see a given player for 4 years, and if they’re any good, they will try and jump to the pros early. The players that are worth following are only the team for one or two years. So how can you follow a team? How can you be a casual fan? You probably don’t know any of the players, and if you do, you probably don’t know many on the other team. Contrast this to the pros, where most players stay on a team for at least 5 years, and many of the big names will be on the same team their whole career. If you add the front-office career factor, it can be decades. (Consider Larry Bird, Jerry West, Red Aurebach, Phil Jackson, Doug Collins, etc..) I just don’t know how you can follow college sports. I realized only a few years after I graduated that nobody who was part of the program was still there. Of course all the players were long gone, but the coaches, assistants, and athletic director had also departed. Who exactly was I rooting for, where was my connection? (True, the connection in the pros is also tenuous, but the stability of the league makes it much less so.)

And finally, the quality of play just isn’t as good. It’s self-evident that the pros are better players, I’m amazed I even need to argue the point. Sometimes I hear the rebuttal that college sports is more fun to watch because the players aren’t as good. OK, fair point, but why stop at college then? Why not watch high school sports? Junior High? Hey, I spent an hour with my 2-year old today watching him try to dribble, that doesn’t make for entertainment. (For more on this idea, read The Sports Guy’s definitive analysis of why the WNBA sucks.)

Now let’s talk about the fans. Whatever connection I have to my Alma Mater’s team is because, I in fact, went there and spent four years being part of the school. That’s the connection, however weak or strong that is 15 years later. It may not do it for me, but I guess I understand those who were into their college enough to want to keep feeling part of that world forever. At a recent wedding, the final event of the night was the playing of my Alma Mater’s fight song, which was shouted by the entire extended family of the groom, who had several generations go there. I thought it was a little weird to make that the climax of the wedding, but it was nice that their family had something they could share across the generations. If they felt that bond between them, good for them.

But. But, but, but. What about people who didn’t even go there? My next door neighbor is an enormous Auburn fan. (I think it’s Auburn. Maybe it’s Georgia Tech. See how much I care?) And he never went there! He just picked it at random. That’s not right! I mean, what the hell! And he didn’t even pick one of the great teams, if you’re going to just choose to be a fan of a team, at least pick a good one fercrisakes. I have another friend who coincidentally is a huge fan of my own school. Lives and breathes blue and maize (for my one reader who doesn’t know where I went, that’s a clue). And she didn’t go there. Again, what the hell!?

The Washington Post has an excellent comparison of the effectiveness and sucess of the War against Terror as compared to World War II.

Today marks the fourth anniversary of 9/11. It is a depressing milestone, made grimmer by the comparison to World War II. President Bush himself drew this analogy in a speech on Aug. 30, declaring that we face a “determined enemy who follows a ruthless ideology” just as we did 60 years earlier, and “once again we will not rest until victory is America’s.” What Bush failed to note was that it took FDR and Truman precisely 1,347 days, from Dec. 7, 1941, to the surrender of Japan on Aug. 15, 1945, to win WWII, pacify the enemy and largely secure the peace that followed. By comparison, 1,461 days have now passed since that terrible day in 2001. And even now there is no end in sight to the “global war on terror.” What is perhaps more unsettling, there is no detailed strategy for winning this war…

Most disturbing of all, the man who once called himself a “war president” has not formulated a well-thought-out plan for winning this war, either in public or privately within his administration.

When you are sleep-deprived, you come up with weird thoughts. I distinctly remembering last night thinking, “I wonder who invented the pillow? That man was a genius — God bless him.”

Having been raised properly, I am a Patriots fan. These days, that’s great, it’s virtually impossible to be trashtalked, you can make continual snarky comments and there is no reply. They are always on TV, which is a nice change when you’re stuck in Georgia.

But even a homer like myself is annoyed by the idiotic coverage. The rule seems to be that since the Patriots are such a great team, anything they do, particularly Belichick or Brady, must be amazing. This is of course ridiculous.

From yesterday’s disaster game against the Panthers, “..Brady steps back. No pash rush at all. Look how calmly he just stands there!” Um — if there’s no pash rush, what’s so hard about just standing there?

From the opener aginst the Raiders (paraphased), “For anyone else, that would be have been a very bad decision. But with Belichick, you know it’s part of a bigger plan.” Well, no you don’t. Belichick makes plenty of mistakes.

Belichick has one great skill that gives him the edge. He is an analytical thinker who challenges the conventional wisdom. That doesn’t sound like much, but when applied right, it’s all you need. He never overpays for players, he is able to find good players that no one else valued, he maximizes the player skill for the money. In today’s world of salary cap parity, that is an enormous advantage. During a game, he doesn’t accept the conventional wisdom about when to onside kick, when to go for it on fourth down, not to repeat the same play twice, etc.

My prediction: Over the next 5 years, you will see a new crop of coaches that understand how to think this way. The Patriot’s edge will slowly dilute, because other teams will be doing the same things they are.

The latest member of the Muttrox clan, Edward Robert, was born Saturday, Sept 17, at 10:00 am. Mom and baby are healthy and recovering from their respective ordeals.

You wouldn’t think that’s a dilemna, but if you’re a political party, it is. Do you put it all in close races (the conventional wisdom), or spread it around a bit more? This article is the kind of analysis I love, using the power of mathematics, statistics, and clear thinking to reach a seemingly obvious conclusion. The gist is that you get diminishing returns from the big money thrown at close races. That money has more of an effect in races where your candidate is facing long odds. In any race, that seems foolish, but taken as a whole, some of those long odds will convert.

I would also note that part of the GOP strategy has been to attack all the Democratic strongholds. They’ve made huge inroads into Labor, the African-American block, the poor, Catholics (despite the Democrats running a Catholic candidate!), etc. Although these are all still majority blue, they are no longer overwhelming, and the Democrats have had to spend much time defending their home turf. Spending money in places where the GOP doesn’t expect to have to fight a battle can have a disproportionate outcome, as they have to spend resources defending rather than attacking.

Peter Daou has a good overview about the lenses used by the right and left.

The unbridgeable divide between the left and right’s approach to Iraq and the WoT is, among other things, a disagreement over the value of moral and material strength, with the left placing a premium on the former and the right on the latter. The right (broadly speaking) can’t fathom why the left is driven into fits of rage over every Abu Ghraib, every Gitmo, every secret rendition, every breach of civil liberties, every shifting rationale for war, every soldier and civilian killed in that war, every Bush platitude in support of it, every attempt to squelch dissent. They see the left’s protestations as appeasement of a ruthless enemy. For the left (broadly speaking), America’s moral strength is of paramount importance; without it, all the brute force in the world won’t keep us safe, defeat our enemies, and preserve our role as the world’s moral leader…

For the less gullible among us, the administration’s alarmist rhetoric in 2002 was a grim farce, and the unfolding of the nightmare we see today was a foregone conclusion. Saddam was no greater or immediate a threat – and arguably a lesser one – than North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia. Hindsight has proven these war critics correct. Few dispute that the threat from Saddam was over-stated – to put it mildly. And evidence continues to mount that the invasion was a fait accompli by 2002 if not 2001. Calling for an immediate pullout from Iraq has nothing to do with capitulation and everything to do with righting a moral wrong and undoing the damage done to America’s moral standing.

Definitely worth reading in full no matter which side you are on.

No firm opinions from me. Barron’s has a good article from two short hedge fund managers (go here and search for “Hook”). Quote: He’s run out of money but doesn’t yet know it.