Category: Uncategorized

The name “Charlie Davies” was a trending topic today on Twitter.  That either means that Twitter is made up of the same nerds who watch soccer, or the U.S. Men’s Soccer Team was finally creeping into the national mindshare.  Or, perhaps it means that no matter who the athlete is, even if we don’t know who it is, we feel a need to forward the news.  

There are two ways to think about Charlie Davies.  First, consider him as a member of the U.S. Soccer team, a man who represents his country on a world stage, who trains with International players in the top league in France, and is/was widely considered to be one of the top players for his country for the next 2 World Cups.  That kind of role assumes a level of responsibility.  Now think of him from another lens.  Consider him as a 23 year old guy making a ton of money, jet setting across the globe to play in the biggest cities in North and Central America, and then travel back for 40 games in France.  A kid just a few years out of college, seemingly indestructible, cockily looking ahead 9 months when he’d have a chance to go head to head with the top players from Italy, Brazil, England, etc…

Is it a surprise that the second description of this 23 year old would get in a car 2 hours past his curfew, and be involved in an accident that caused career threatening injuries? So why is it shocking that the first description was involved?  Why do we assume that a guy who is on the verge of greatness, may not regress into being the stupid 23 year old we all were?  We all have a story in our closet where we realize we tempted fate and she spared us.  We all could have been the guy in that car, but the story wouldn’t have been on ESPN.com.

I feel sad for Davies, whose World Cup 2010 run is over, and whose career will never be the same.  And also have to be sad for the families of the un-famous other folks in the car with him.  One person is dead an done person will have to live with the double guilt of killing one friend and crippling the career of another.   But we have to wonder, how can we make these people who we watch and cheer for – how can we make them not do stupid things?  Can we?

One of my favorite parts of the new Internet Era is the “possibility” that music becomes decentralized.  That it’s not the same 5 guys in the same 5 ivory towers deciding what we should like.  

We have such huge opportunity to personally evaluate and recommend music to our friends.  And as part of this evolution, I suspect we would each have a select list of artists who we dial up for our own personal pleasure that no one else knows.  With that as context, my personal soundtrack includes a steady dose of Bob Schneider, Alex Woodard, Reckless Kelly & Micky and the Motorcars. 

We suddenly have these great opportunities to find music we like, without the interference of radio.  I encourage everyone to explore and share their favorite finds.

I find it more difficult to sit and post my thoughts these days.   I don’t know if it’s a lack of time, or just an inability to process the absurdity around me into coherent paragraphs.

Take for a moment, the David Letterman Fiasco. For years we’ve been asking celebrities to own up to their mistakes.  To admit when they are wrong.  And to force themselves to the public humiliation they deserve.  And when some scum of the universe tried to “ruin” Letterman through extortion and blackmail, Letterman shocked his late night audience with an admission of guilt, preempting the tabloids.  He did exactly what we ask a celebrity to do when faced with the revelations of his impropriety.  And yet still, people want to find fault with him.  Good for David for coming clean.  The man didn’t commit adultery, didn’t harass anyone, and didn’t commit a crime.  He simply had poor judgement.  I hope this teaches extortionists a lesson.

Speaking of extortion – the IOC allowed Chicago business people to pour $54 million into wooing them into awarding them the Olympics, and then responded with 18 measly votes.  If there is any organization dirtier than the IOC (other than the NCAA of course) I’m hard pressed to find it.  How do I get on the IOC anyway?  I sure wouldn’t mind taking bribes from the richest people from 4 countries every 4 years, to award them the chance to ask their tax payers to build a billion dollars of new stadiums to host an event celebrating the achievements of athletes we couldn’t care less about the other 1445 days of the 4 year cycle.  But, is it really that shocking that one of the most overweight cities in America – where beer and brats reign supreme – wasn’t awarded an event that celebrates athleticism?

In the category of, “Can we finally kill reality TV once and for all,” I saw that the fat guy from the TV show with all the kids whose wife had a makeover and suddenly thought she was a superstar, allegedly took $200k from their bank account.  I’m sad that I know this.  But, I know this because it scrolled across the bottom of Anderson Cooper 360.  Mr. Cooper, I try to keep myself away from this nonsense, and I try to watch you to keep up with real news.  Please do not create a world where I cannot do both.    

All things being equal, I need to write more.  There’s just too much funny stuff going on these days…

(Thanks Jake Sikma for the link)

So, what seems weird about the amount of fans Skittles has on Facebook, according to http://pagedata.insidefacebook.com/page/view/267629/

CNN has a good recap of the battle between rival Wikipedians in their quest to paint Joe Wilson as either an Obama hating traitor, or Brave Truth Teller.  An interesting side effect of the Social Media world, in that now not only is the news cycle 24 hours long, but the “Comment cycle” begins 24 seconds after impact. 

I can’t take credit for this, since I head it on the radio.  But I think it’s the easiest and quickest way to make a dent in health care, so I’m forwarding along.

Every doctor, clinic and provider simply should have to provide a price list for the most common types of treatments.  That price list should show what they charge for the procedure / visit, what amount is covered by each of the major insurance companies, and what the end cost would be to the customers of those insurance companies.

It won’t cover everything of course, but the point is that if we see the price lists and what insurance is covering, consumers would have a way to look at the market of health care and make informed decisions based on quality, location AND price.   And I know this doesn’t solve everything, but if we start by developing a more competitive market where information is more widely available, we have a better chance to figure out the hard problems, such as how to cover people with low or no income.  

Making Trillion dollar upheavals to an entire system full of long established companies employing hundreds of thousands of people, is going to be hard if Joe American doesn’t even know how a slight change would affect how much he has to pay to fix his broken hand.  “Trust me, we’re the government, We’ll get it right” is not a very compelling argument… 

I’m not all that techy, so there may be an easy answer here.  Techcrunch and all other tech publications have widely and accurately reported that Gmail is down.  Apparently it’s been down since 1:00pm.  But I didn’t notice for a long time, because it still works on my iPhone.  Can anyone explain to me why Gmail is still accessible from the iPhone, but not the good ol’ interweb?

30 minutes after being sad about sorry email I read from that nearly illiterate teacher in the post below, I rebounded and was reminded how much fun the English language can actually be.  For the last few days, I’ve been following the real or fake exploits of “Steve” at http://twitter.com/shhdontellsteve 

It’s either the bored ramblings of a kind of messed up dude writing about another messed up dude.  Or it’s a brilliantly crafted soap opera playing itself out in 15 second intervals at no particular rhythm or cadence.  I lean to thinking it’s the latter, which makes it all the more better as far as I’m concerned.  I just hope one day the the writer doesn’t completely disappear, making us all wonder what happens at the end.

Check it out, an give me your thoughts on it.

I subscribe to a lot of random email lists. Democrat, Republican, City Council, etc… I won’t embarass the group or the person who wrote this email, but it made me sad that this person is a teacher. I mean, can we really expect much from the kids, when this is the kind of response that comes up from a teacher during a debate on health care? Or maybe I am just expecting too much.  I think if you are a teacher and going to write an email to an entire listserv, your thoughts should be a little more coherent than this.  Am I just being overly critical here?  Thoughts?

Tomorrow is <name redacted>’s and my 25th anniv. If this lady I’ve been working for pays me tomorrow (she was supposed to last Friday), we can go out. I work right by the Montlake Bridge. I know there is another rally later in the week. I signed up to attend the dem. meet up on the 14th. Originally it was the 15th and I couldn’t attend because that’s Ethan’s BD. But the 14th I can attend. Seems those holding out against the public option are receiving a lot of “bribe” $ from the insurance industry. I don’t know what they’re going to do about Sen. Kennedy. They’ll have to appoint an interim senator, but whom?

I just got home from a union mtg. We voted to accept a one-year contract, but a lot more work needs to be done on it over this next year. Here’s hoping the union works hard for us. I start classes (GCU) on Wed. Am supposed to start back at Ingraham same day but Joe and I want to spend the night at the 4 Seasons Olympic and I’m not rushing off to work first thing in the morning, so I guess I’m taking a personal day. They only gave us the phone call this morning to tell us we were to return to work on Wed. morning at 7:30. That’s kinda late notice, if you ask me. Just another example of Seattle Schools and their fine organizational skills NOT!