Tuesday, August 06, 2002

posted by ajax to Baseball August 6 9:33 PM. Yankee dominance is not what's hurting baseball. In fact, having the Yankees on top has traditionally been good for baseball. Allen Barra explains why the Bronx Bombers, ballooning payroll and all, aren't to blame for baseball's woes after all. [SportsFilter] ...and weirdly enough, Allen Barra is a Yankee fan. Seriously, the only people who still believe that the modern Yankees have been good for baseball are Yankee fans. I admit, I'm a Red Sox fan and therefore REALLY biased against them, but it's not just the constant winning, it's not just the gobs of ill-spent AND well-spent money, it's the arrogance. Arrogance on the part of the fans (you've never met an arrogant sports fan 'til you've met a Yankee fan - they just KNOW that they'll win the Series, 'cos, well, they want to). And especially arrogance on the part of the owner - that whole diatribe Steinbrenner went on because the Red Sox got Cliff Floyd - newsflash, bucko. The Sox got him because you panicked and bought Raul Mondesi. Have fun with Jeff 'Me No Like Pressure!' Weaver...

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Next head of the church of england becomes a druid. [FARK] I actually heard about this on the BBC last night...it's a nonreligious thing, a Welsh national heritage type organization that choose pseudodruidic imagery 'cos it's all Celtic and stuff. Of course, there are conservatives who are having complete nutties over this. Me, I'd just have a problem with that really lame outfit he's wearing. Druids had to have better fashion sense than that, I'm sure...

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UN put conditions on Iraq's offer [BBC World] First, they have to rub their stomachs and pat their heads at the same time, while saying 'She sells seashells by the seashore' five times fast, and then - Well, that's what Bush and company want. Either that or the condition is 'you allow weapons inspectors in, AND you let us invade and overthrow your government to distract from scandal and such back home.' Your guess is as good as mine.

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U.S. Monitoring Internet Attacks [New York Times: Technology] ``There was a real spike in Internet traffic at odd hours,'' confirmed Richard Clarke, the Bush administration's top official for cyber-security. ``It was clearly unusual because it was five times and seven times normal, but it didn't take anything down.'' Rrrrright. I'm real worried about Italian punks with a couple desktops. C'mon - even the nasty distributed DoS from a couple years back didn't really do anything. You can't attack 'The Internet' as if it were some monothlic target, and you shouldn't even worry about it. The only real security worry on the 'net,  beyond identity theft and the like, are Windows machines. You wanna fight 'cyberterorrism' (bleh)? Get rid of Windows and put a secure OS on your system. 'course, I'm running Windows myself, but it's for work. Honestly. And games. And why is Richard Clarke always referred to as the top official for 'cyber-security'? Is that really in his official title? 'cyber-security'? There are few things as disturbing as the government catching onto techno slang 15 years late...

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Profits rise at Cisco [BBC World] yay. Maybe now they'll give us raises. Up until now, it's been 'Either you get raises or layoffs - your pick!' Now we can say 'Yeah, so where did that $750 million in profit go, then?' Another fun bit - we've hit $540,000 in per employee revenue. I am SO not getting paid enough. Sorry - bitterness.
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posted by engelr August 6 6:12 AM | 0 comments. Egyptian leader jailed for promoting democracy; Bush admin "disappointed." [MetaFilter] Why would the Bush administration be disappointed in another government not being pro-democracy? It's not like Bush was elected or anything... I know, I know. It's an old joke. But I feel a need to get a stab in whenever I can.
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I've got a guilty temptation right now. The new Tom Clancy book came out yesterday. Now, I know how bad it'll be. We're talking about a right-wing loonie who's squeezing every last cent out of the one decent idea he had 15~20 years ago. He offended me a whole lot in a couple of his more recent books...y'know, the ones where he killed the President and most of the government by throwing a plane at the Capitol and then had his hero Jack Ryan reassemble a government that closely resembled Clancy's own political beliefs? Bleh. Or his book about an anti-terrorist squad fighting against a massive terrorist conspiracy - a massive terrorist conspiracy of environmentalists. No, seriously. They wanted to kill everyone so that they could have the world back to how it was before people wrecked it. I could have let that go if Clancy could at least make his nutcases (left-wing in this case, Moslem in many cases, Chinese, Japanese...you name it) a little more believable. Instead, his villains are like political cariactures crossed with Bond villains. "Why, yes, Mr. Bond, I'll tell you about my plan to provoke a war between Japan and the United States, along with India providing distraction for the US Navy. Why am I doing it all, you ask? So that my country, China, can rule Siberia. I have no idea how you could have found out about this..." You get the point. =) The thing is, some of his stuff still stands up as great fluff, the literary equivalent of Die Hard...ok, not Die Hard. That had great dialogue and Alan Rickman. Hmm. OK, let's say the best of Ahnuld's '80s movies - something like Predator. It's dumb, it requires not thinking too hard, but it's kinda fun - stuff goes boom! He even makes fun of himself once or twice - in a later book, he has a Russian make fun of American books/movies about war between the Soviet Union and NATO ("Strangely, you always win...") which sure feels like a reference to Clancy's second novel, the not-featuring-Jack-Ryan Red Storm Rising. But what I like the most about Clancy is that it's dumb, really. There are a lot of pages, the paperbacks have pretty durable bindings, and I can always guarantee myself a good chunk of hours reading them. Great for traveling, something to do when lying in bed sick and you can't get your brain wrapped around anything, y'know, SMART. So my dilemma is not whether to buy the new Tom Clancy (plot summary: Jack Ryan! Prequel! Soviet Union! Wants to kill the Pope!) but whether to buy it in hardcover or wait for the paperback. =)

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