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What a great ass!
What a great ass!
assuming it was his ass, and it did look like it was, his ass is as cute as everything else about him
Milo Ventimiglia has joined the cast of the upcoming comedy I Hate You Dad, according to Variety.
The film is about a "father (Adam Sandler) who moves in with his son (Andy Samberg) and his fiancée (Leighton Meester) on the eve of their wedding, only to immediately start feuding with the bride-to-be."
Susan Sarandon also joined the film as Adam's sexy teacher who slept with him when he was a teenager and wound up giving birth to Andy's character.
Milo plays "a menacing Iraq War veteran who has an overly loving relationship with Leighton, who plays his sister."
I Hate You Dad is scheduled for release on June 15, 2012.
Who wants cute when you can have rough and manly. macho manly factor up 8points
8? let's say 16! beard really suits him well
Check out my very own Body Hair Lovers and Photography Groups!
With or without a beard he's beautiful , but I'd rather have him without the beard so I can stare at those beautiful lips. I love his crooked lips it makes him so unique and special. And the fact that he's a vegetarian who doesn't drink or smoke just makes him perfect for me<3
he was hot in the days of gilmore girls and the years have just added to that and he is even hotter now!
He has gotten more and more beatiful as time goes on.
Milo looks super sexy with that beard.
Eternal youth and endless life. I'll sacrifice everything and everyone to obtain it
There is a great scene in That's My Boy where Milo is nude. Great full body ass shots too. Hopefully someone posts some screen caps soon!
Before "Heroes" I lusted over yon Milo from the movie "Cursed." I remember reading in one of my mom's tabloids about how Hayden Panettiere left him because of his strict veganism. Ha ha, probably just a tidbit, but believable and she's too young to want to live like that. Ha ha, I'm 29, and I like to "indulge" every now and again, and despite his sexiness I would. Reading that article made me feel that poor Milo is a stick in the mud, and his smooth-legged studliness would have to liquor me up before I looked at him.
Go see that's my boy right now. You'll get to see his arse...
Oh no, really? I checked out this thread the other day and it inspired me to watch Pathology again, well certain scenes anyway. It wasn't his ass? Gutted.
How do you know it wasnt his ass in pathology? I read that it was him in the sex scenes??
The producers of pathology said it was his ass in the sex scene, so i'm pretty sure it was. Why would people think it wasnt? just because his face wasnt in the shot? that wouldnt have been possible sine it was shot from behind.
And i saw that's my boy last night, it was definitely his butt. He was shown walking around and his face was shown in the same shot.
he has a nice ass, too. Looked way better than it did in pathology imo.
He's hot, and I enjoyed watching him be manhandled by Gerrard Butler in The Gamer, however brief it was.
AMAZING bubble butt in That's My Boy!I can't imagine any butt lover being disappointed!
who cares about his ass in that's my boy? am i the only one that saw his dick as he was getting outa the bed?
- - - Updated - - -
who cares about his ass in that's my boy? am i the only one that saw his dick as he was getting outa the bed?
Does anybody have any caps from his nude scene in That's My Boy? His ass was delicious!
anyone find That's My Boy online yet??
hawt..luv the short hair on him
I was told Milo has a scene in That's My Boy where he rips his clothes off and is in a pair of white briefs. Does anyone have any screen caps of this? I'm dying to see him in those white briefs. It's been a huge fantasy of mine for a long time.
That's My Boy
nice ass!!!!!
YUM! He's so hot!
Oh my god he looks phenomenal, beefier and love the hair. Gorgeous ass. Where can we view this?
I just watched it online and it is the best he has ever looked. Great with teh short hair and the body is just the perfect buffness. He looks gorgeous
Damn..my boy Milo has grown up a lot since i last saw him. Love that new crazy bod of his so beefy like a man now. And that amazing new bubble ass!! ASS LOVER HERE BTW! I have always loved his face..it looks so gentle so cute yet overridden by how incredibly handsome and rugged he is!! Hes a short guy but now he isnt a small guy love that crooked smile and his eyes...what a man. I think we all go through these stages. When we are young we are lean and "cute" then we grow older and become bigger and more rugged looking. hehe Its a man's beautiful process and Milo sure is at his prime right now
Only just noticd pics from The Divide. Gonna look it up now. He's not shy is he?!
Here's Milo on the set of "Grown Ups 2"
David Henrie's photo "The Grown Ups 2 crew! #hashta..." on WhoSay
Here are a few more caps from That's My Boy. I cant wait for a high quality version of this, his bubblebutt is amazing. More Here Celeb Men
For More Hot Pics of Celeb Men Visit My Blog
i've watched it several times, he's stunning
Nice ass! I love him


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Premier League leaders Manchester United travel to the Etihad Stadium on Sunday with a three point advantage over reigning champions Manchester City, in what will be one of the most highly-charged English derby encounters of the 2012/13 campaign.
And, ahead of this weekend's crunch clash between the leading top-flight title contenders, two of Manchester's top rap battlers, Blizzard and Shotty Horroh, go head to head for the first time in support of their respective teams.
Courtesy of Copa90 - a source of football re-imagined for the digital generation, exclusively on YouTube, that brings unique stories that go beyond the 90 minutes, and provides a different perspective on the world's top talent - check out the local rappers spit their lyrics and share their views on one of the country's fiercest rivalries.
Manchester United lost both matches last term, including an emphatic 6-1 hammering at Old Trafford, before losing 1-0 in the return fixture in April, which many feel kick-started Manchester City's charge to the title.
Sir Alex Ferguson has already said victory at the weekend would be one of his side's "best ever results" after expressing concern over his fragile defence that shipped three goals in last weekend's 4-3 victory over Reading.
The Red Devils come into the game off the back of a 1-0 defeat against CFR Cluj on Wednesday night, while City's Champions League adventure ended disappointingly the previous evening after they finished bottom of their group following a 1-0 loss against Borussia Dortmund in Germany.
Roberto Mancini has already called on his players to bounce back against United, and says that despite underachieving once again in Europe, there is still plenty to play for this season.
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subset: commoncrawl


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E. Sun Financial Holding Co (玉山金控) expects moderate earnings for the remainder of the year after net income surged 31 percent in the first half, on the back of rapid fee and loan growth, a top executive said yesterday.
The bank-focused conglomerate, which derives 93.4 percent of its overall income from banking arm E. Sun Commercial Bank (玉山銀行), is reshaping its business strategy to grow market shares for its securities unit, while it is on track to become the nation's third-largest credit card issuer, E. Sun Financial president Joseph Huang (黃男州) told a media briefing.
"Core businesses will remain stable for the remainder of the year as the domestic economic slowdown proves more serious than expected," Huang said.
For the first six months, E. Sun Financial reported NT$3.87 billion (US$128.96 million) in net profits, or NT$0.85 in earnings per share, company data showed.
The results represent a 31 percent increase from the same period last year, and are better than earnings for the whole of last year, thanks to strong pickups in wealth management and credit card businesses, as well as loans to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), Huang said.
As of June 30, the company's income from credit card and wealth management fees increased 26.4 percent and 25.7 percent to reach NT$1.24 billion and NT$1.31 billion respectively, aided by partnerships with French retail giant Carrefour and local Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋), as well as China's top online payment service provider, Alipay (支付寶), Huang said.
Net interest margin edged up two basis points from 1.24 percent in the first quarter to 1.26 percent at the end of last quarter, while interest spreads narrowed from 1.78 percent to 1.74 percent, company data showed.
Increased positions in demand deposits and foreign currency-denominated investments helped boost interest margins, as the former requires lower interest payouts and the latter generates higher yields than local currency assets, investors relations manager Anthony Cheng (鄭恩融) said.
In corporate lending, E. Sun Bank posted an 11.5 percent increase in loans to small and medium-sized businesses in the first half, while the market reported a contraction, Cheng said.
Net interest margin is expected to stagnate at 1.24 percent for the rest of the year now that the bank has achieved 6.8 percent growth in overall lending as of June, with the target for the entire year set at 8 percent, Huang said.
However, earnings abilities have already showed signs of a slowdown judging by quarterly comparisons.
Net income declined 12.9 percent to NT$1.8 billion during the April-to-June period, from NT$2.07 billion in the first quarter, company figures indicated.
E. Sun Financial aims to strengthen its securities unit, increasing its market share from the current 1.3 percent to 2 percent in next two to three years and pushing it up to 3.5 percent in the long term, Huang said.
Toward that end, the group is formulating a new business model to take better advantage of its 130 banking branches nationwide, he said.
The bank plans to add four branches in Taiwan this year and another one in Dongguan, China, next month, Huang said.
E. Sun Financial has set up a team to study business opportunities linked with China's currency so the group can benefit from cross-strait regulatory easing, he added.
Yuan-related businesses will have a limited impact on earnings this year, but may be a significant driver next year, he said.


text:
The Institute communicates its scientific and educational information in a number of ways. One major outlet is peer-reviewed publications and reports. Cary Institute staff regularly publish in the best-rated journals in their respective fields.
Export 1 results:Sort by: Author Title Type [ Year]
Filters: Author is White, C. S. [Clear All Filters]
Nitrogen cycling processes and soil characteristics in an urban versus rural forest", Biogeochemistry, vol. 5, p. 243-262, 1988., "


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Yeah my vision is foggy.
Please show my an example IT resume that revolves around "cloud" programming, so I can copy it.
'k thx. L8r
they purdy.
I think it's important to define the word "Cloud" as no one else seems to, yet the definition itself lends great insight to the concept.
The "Cloud", as referenced here, is nothing more than the delegation of responsibilities...specifically those of infrastructure. That's it. It's not some mystical cure all. In fact, it's nothing more than a glorified way to outsource applications.
Now there are specific technologies which lend themselves to this concept ( those of virtualization, certainly ), but the overall goal is the same; the business doesn't want to worry about the infrastructure behind their app. They simply want it to work.
Which is why internal "clouds" have always amused me to no end...
What does "cloud" mean? It means that I will eat you alive if I see it on your resume.
People can not talk intelligently about this subject. There are completely open issues from SLA's to security to handling 20 different versions of the OS on the servers in the "cloud". I include Steve Balmer on my list of people who can't clearly define this concept.
You ask people what is the cloud and they give "e-mail" or YouTube or an e-commerce site as an example.
The symbol used to indicate parts of the network that you have no knowledge of.
That's the definition as it pertains to networking. It's now been extended to other types of hardware and certain types of software, and it all works on the concept of "I don't know where it is or what it looks like, but I do know that if I wave my hands like this then it all works just fine." As long as things actually do work, then that's a good thing: you're saved the effort of thinking about lots of frankly irrelevant crap (well, irrelevant to you; someone cares about it...)
The "cloud" icon on a network diagram is often used to represent a portion of a network the details of which are not considered important for the purpose of the diagram. Whether or not that is because the person who drew the diagram didn't understand them is a separate issue. Perhaps the diagrammer didn't think his/her audience would understand them.
The "cloud" used in "cloud computing" seems to be used in two different ways. The first (less interesting) way is to describe IT services provided by a thir
What does "cloud" mean? It means that I will eat you alive if I see it on your resume.
Tell them you worked on Cloud computing on "Plan 9 [wikipedia.org]". If pushed just say "I've been on cloud 9 for years now".
Which is why internal "clouds" have always amused me to no end...
Personally, as a *nix generalist, even the idea of an external "cloud" is ridiculous to me. What the hell does a company actually do, if it outsources even it's own knowledge management?
But I agree that an internal "cloud" is just as misguided. The sad fact is that most companies with more than a few hundred employees are organized as collections of surprisingly small fiefdoms. Even until recently, the idea of centralizing something as common as IT infrastructure really was so foreign to the typical corp
I sat through a cloud lecture by some Microsoft guy, and he said it's aimed at startups, that don't know what server load to expect, and want a scalable solution. Practically Microsoft hosts the app with database and everything, the app must be written against a specific cloud api (in some
[...] the app must be written against a specific cloud api (in some
That's PaaS (Platform as a service), that's what I would expect from MS, leading to vendor lock-in with specific API's, it could have been more open and portable to your own servers or other PaaS providers. This is the "here are my balls, can you please hold them for a while?" IT planning strategy. It's just not good for you, the party on the squeezing side of the deal however...
From a customers point of view, IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) would make much more sense: paying for VM domains, memory, ban
Isn't this the same as Mainfraimes used to be?
I think of cloud infrastructure usually as VM clusters of some sort where you can have an entire computer fail and not lose services, and you can basically add more servers if you need more load without having to manually re-configure the services etc. vSphere etc.
What the hell does a company actually do, if it outsources even it's own knowledge management?
The good news is that they don't have to know what they're doing, someone external will know for them.
IT service delivery has seen an interesting history (from my perspective). At first was the mainframe. There was only one in most companies. It ran lots of applications. It had its dedicated staff to feed and care for it. It cost a fortune.
Then came the minicomputer. It too ran many applications. It had a semi-dedicated staff to feed and care for it. But there were many of them in an organization, because they cost a lot less money.
Then came PCs - they were often dedicated to a single application
The "Cloud", as referenced here, is nothing more than the delegation of responsibilities...specifically those of infrastructure. That's it. It's not some mystical cure all. In fact, it's nothing more than a glorified way to outsource applications.
Well, no. The cloud they referenced was an "abstracted data-center infrastructure" and not necessarily a means of outsourcing applications. Yes, the downside/upside is that it eases moving workloads from internal to external clouds, but that's the point.
Now there are specific technologies which lend themselves to this concept ( those of virtualization, certainly ), but the overall goal is the same; the business doesn't want to worry about the infrastructure behind their app. They simply want it to work.
Is that a bad thing not to want to worry about the infrastructure? Traditionally servers are designed around the concept of a physical server. We used to name servers by rack number or some other geographic location. Virtual machines were often named according to what physical server they resided within. Cloud technology, once the marketing speak is burned away and the APIs get to a mature and standard state (i.e., an in-house or an outside hosted cloud looks the same to an application), would allow other ways of managing the hundreds of thousands of machines in large data centers.
For example, capacity planning is a big deal. One of the responsibilities of a system engineer is to ensure that workloads can run properly on the servers. When there is a planned outage on one server or an increased load due to seasonal or scheduled work, the admins have to juggle the resources of the servers. In a planned outage we may use VMWare VMotion or Workload Migration and swing the workloads across. But then we often have to worry about IP changes, hostnames, virtual host software levels, etc.. With a properly configured internal cloud, this is a non-issue. I can literally click a button and remove a physical server from the cluster and it's completely transparent to end-users. Need to add capacity? I SAN-boot a cloned disk and the new server is automatically part of the cloud and ready to take on work.
We used to build our environments around managing discrete servers. Even if we had streamlined the process, it was still very much centered around the physical box. For example, we can stand up a box in a manner of minutes using RHEL kickstart, but if we wanted to add high availability this often meant configuring heartbeat IPs, swing SAN disks,
Of course it's not there yet, but it's where the more recent virtualization technologies was 5 years ago (and yeah, virtualilzation has been out for decades, but it has only within the past decade really surged).
Is that a bad thing not to want to worry about the infrastructure?
Yes, it's a VERY VERY bad thing if your business and it's reputation relies on said infrastructure.
Is that a bad thing not to want to worry about the infrastructure?
Yes, it's a VERY VERY bad thing if your business and it's reputation relies on said infrastructure.
I agree. Which is why I would assume that your company manages the following infrastructure internally:
And by the same token, smaller companies don't provide that infrastructure. This is exactly why "cloud computing" services are commonly targeted towards smaller companies. When you have three people in your office and a total budget of $500,000/year, buying and managing any infrastructure--for computing, power, communication, transportation, or water--can be daunting. Outsourcing management of these functions allows you and your employees to focus on your strengths.
And despite what the business weeklies may pretend, a massive part of our economy flows through small businesses rather than megacorps with on-campus roads and storage ponds.
None of the things you've mentioned are anywhere near as complex, new, poorly understood, or fast changing as IT infrastructure. Power is a couple of centuries old, and you can buy backup generators and UPS, data, voice and mobile you can mitigate by going with multiple suppliers. Transportation is as old as civilisation and very much a commodity. Likewise plumbing.
We "clouded" one of our primary apps, and it's been hilariously error-fraught. Given our spending on networking gear (and redundant networking gear for a backup), we could have brought the whole thing in house.
No skin off my nose (actually made my life a lot easier to get rid of the app), but I think the whole thing was a bad decision based on short-term savings.
Phft. That's just pre-cloud thinking, in this post-cloud world we currently live in!
Get with the times grandpa!
Beowful synergy!
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
Yes, it's a VERY VERY bad thing if your business and it's reputation relies on said infrastructure.
You mean, like how they utterly rely on the network (true of many businesses) and so are their own ISP?
Yes, not only should I be an expert in my core business of making and/or selling widgets, but also in IT, Power, DR, redundancy, etc...
How about I let others be core at those things and I focus on selling my widgets, or making them or what ever.
We outsource our building management, lunch, plumbing, furniture making, cleaning, electrical generation, water, sewer, phones, Internet connection, DNS and domain registration, ssl certificates, why not all of IT?
For example, we can stand up a box in a manner of minutes using RHEL kickstart, but if we wanted to add high availability this often meant configuring heartbeat IPs, swing SAN disks,
A cloud doesn't magically give you HA. Unless you're using a very different definition of "HA" than I'm used to.
I like your definition. I love working on applications, and I hate dealing with infrastructure. Yet infrastructure always seems to involved somehow. If "cloud" computing will help me to abstract infrastructure away and ignore it, then I'm all for it.
...but the overall goal is the same; the business doesn't want to worry about the infrastructure behind their app. They simply want it to work.
Which is why internal "clouds" have always amused me to no end...
It's understandable that you'd think that way if you don't understand how wildly organizational structures vary from organization to organization, and you're used to organizations where there is "The IT department" and customers of that IT department. In that case, yes, why on earth would The IT department build a "cloud", when the only customers of it would be themselves?
I'll give you an example of where this is arguably a good idea: NASA. Across ten or so centers, there are hundreds of generally self-
A big problem with cloud computing at NASA is likely to be in the security of the virtual hosts deployed from the cloud. The science projects using these hosts are likely to downplay security issues, and to fail to comply with NASA security policies related to risk assessments and security controls based on system criticality. With cloud-based "Infrastructure As A Service" virtualization multiplying the number of entities needing to be managed/secured by reducing the costs of individual servers, it will l
"I would like to present the software solution MyCloud from the company MyCloud. Here we are. We're the princes of the Internet. Here we belong, fighting for survival. We've got to be rulers of your world. Is shall have no rival!"
Yea, I hate the cloud for pretty much the same sort of reason...People use it as an excuse to poorly define their hardware needs, assuming the magical cloud has infinite capacity.
When something in cloud-land breaks, the managers get this look on their face like santa claus just died. It's priceless.
Which is why internal "clouds" have always amused me to no end...
Why is it amusing? There's no difference between an internal cloud and an external cloud, except who runs it. You can even download Rackspace's software to roll your own, if you want to.
You need: spare capacity, arbitrary scaling, on-demand provisioning, and high availability to have a cloud.
Example: you work in a Wall Street bank as a developer. You need 5 new linux 'servers' and 6TB of storage to work out an idea. You submit a ticket to
Sadly, the term means nothing if we're to believe MicroSoft.
If using a remote desktop application to watch pre-recorded video is considered cloud computing, then they must also classify single molecules of water vapor as "clouds" (or single droplets clouds, if you count routers).
Dilution of important terms like these into meaningless buzz-words is a shame.
Running a remote desktop session for a single app that could just as well have been installed locally is pretty much the definition of "cloud computing" according to Microsoft.
I bet experience is the key here. Only candidates with at least 8 years experience in managing cloud computing in a virtualised environment will be considered.
And don't forget to list your four years experience with administering Windows 7.
Of course, you should bringt your Ph.D. in computer science to the table as well. Oh, and if you're older than 24, you've got a lot of splainin' to do about how you wasted all that time.
We're a bit cynical, aren't we?
And referring to all those job ads asking for more years of experience in a certain tech than that the tech is around. This has been featured several times here.
Finally, these wound up IT types have found a way to chill out: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7b6hw_the-orb-little-fluffy-clouds_music [dailymotion.com]
One very simple example: Do you have ever set up Google Apps for a domain, with email, contacts, calendar, Google sites and so on? Yeah, it's all in the cloud and all you have to do is clicking on buttons and filling out forms. Now go and look at some user trying to set this up. More likely than not he will get as far as configuring the MX-records and then he will cry for help.
All this cloud stuff seems to be so simple, but it very much isn't. And yes, this actually is nothing a real pro would like to bother with (you'll be fighting more with the UIs than anything else) but there is high demand for this, people think they can finally get away without someone who knows what he does, but they can't.
Most of this is in no way interesting or satisfying work but just fighting half-wit user interfaces. It's sometimes insulting, actually. Instead of really setting up things and controlling things you're hanging off someone else's setup and try to beat some sense out of it. It's often frustrating, you often will have to come to the conclusion that things you would like to do just can't be done because they're not offered and you can't do anything about that. But hey, it's just work.
Me? I'd rather setup a full server park from scratch with old PCs and Linux than fighting the "cloud", but guess what's in demand more. And yes, there's a whole army of trained monkeys out there, knowing every cloud service under the sun and with superhuman point-and-click abilities, but if you really know your job and also know about problems and limitations you can still easily make some money with this. Fun is this not, though. Fun is making things, not using things.
Fun is this not, though. Fun is making things, not using things.
This. I recently started a job where management's decided to migrate as much as possible to the cloud. No in-house application is safe.
The smell of death is in the air. All of the developer-admin-types are gradually seeing their responsibilities degrade as the cool things they love doing are being replaced by having to fight the limitations of some web UI.
What's the endgame here? I won't be able to stay, I've worked too hard to see my skillset rust away while I fight some foggy battle with pretty but re
I agree generally with your sentiments, but I think your points are tangential to what the article is about. That said, here is one example [rootbsd.net] of a setup [standard "no affiliation" disclaimer goes here] that doesn't present any of the issues you describe.
One very simple example: Do you have ever set up Google Apps for a domain, with email, contacts, calendar, Google sites and so on?
I have recently been trying to set up a small business using Google Apps infrastructure. I want to be able to work with people from around the world, so some sort of "cloud" infrastructure seemed like a good idea. The more I try to do, the more I'm convinced Google has no fucking idea about what people like me want from it. So, the cloudy sorts of things I want:
Email: great! (which is why I though google might be good in the first place)
Calenders: okay, no to-do lists
Contacts: disaster, no syncing to the ma
Cloud is a buzzword. And while it might be a good idea to add it to your resume, it will be gone in a few years. However, what will increase in the next decade or so are:
- Application services
- Platform services
- Virtual systems
All these services will be on demand. But this has different meanings in the different "cloud"-types. If you outsource your mail-service than this has to be available 24/7 the only thing which is variable is the system load. So the company providing email-services to you can do some
"I'm experience with administering various cloud computing techniques." = "I setup a SQL Azure account a couple months ago and I know how to use Google Docs." ?
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.


text:
Bristol City winger Albert Adomah wants to represent Ghana at the 2014 World Cup.
The 23-year-old, City's player of the year this season, has caught the eye of Ghana coach Goran Stevanovic and the African side's assistant manager Kwasi Appiah made overtures to Adomah through a third party earlier this month, persuading him to declare himself for Ghana ahead of England.
Adomah, who last week signed a new three-year contract at Ashton Gate, told the Evening Post: "My mum and Dad and most of my family are from Ghana, so this feels like the right thing to do. I was born and raised in this country, but I have very close ties with Ghana and this is not just me using a loophole to play international football."
He added: "For me, it's not a matter of choosing Ghana over England. I have dual nationality and passports for both countries. In the end, it was not a difficult decision to make.
"They sounded me out by speaking to people in this country who knew me.
"I then had a call from Kwasi Appiah asking me if I would consider making myself available to play for Ghana."
Copyright (c) PA Sport 2009, All Rights Reserved.
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text:
STUDY: South Dakota Wants Nothing, Wyoming Wants an Aircraft Carrier
South Dakota and Iowa want nothing. At least as far as Google Search's autocomplete is concerned.
The online tech site Mashable recently conducted an experiment, typing in a state name and seeing what Google would suggest to complete the phrase. For the Northern Plains, the results are sometimes silly, sometimes enlightening.
Type in "Nebraska." Expect "Cornhusker" to appear next? Nope. It's "Keystone Pipeline," which makes sense because its been big news in Big Red.
Try "Minnesota." Expect "Vikings" or "another losing season"? The result is "to work," which could either mean unemployed people looking for jobs or the hearty folks wanting even more to do.
Pity poor North Dakota. It has an identity crisis. Type it in and instead of "flat" or "cold" Google suggests "to change its name." Here's a suggestion: Flat Cold Place.
Montana is angry. Plug in the Big Sky Country's name and Google suggests — perhaps not too subtly — "to secede." Google doesn't clarify if that is a statement or a wish by the rest of the United States.
Then there is Wyoming. Colorado's recently legalized pot smoking must be wafting north. "Cowboy" or "really long drive on I-80" don't come up. "An aircraft carrier" does. The U.S.S. Wyoming? Maybe. The state of Wyoming at sea landing F/A 18s? Not likely.
Then finally South Dakota and Iowa. Google suggests nothing. Could it mean, "nothing to see here, move along" or "the possibilities are endless." Indeed, South Dakota used to call itself the "Land of Infinite Variety."
Only Google autocomplete knows for sure.


text:
Suspected 98-year old Hungarian Nazi war criminal Laszlo Csatari died in hospital on Monday. He faced charges of involvement in the deportation of Jews from a town in Slovakia during World War II.
Csatari denied the charges. Nevertheless, he was at the top of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of alleged Nazi war criminals.
After being sentenced to death in absentia by a Czech court in 1948 Csatari fled to Canada, where he lived and worked as an art dealer before being stripped of his citizenship in the 1990s.
He returned to Hungary where he lived for about 15 years before prosecutors began investigating his case in late 2011, based on information from the Wiesenthal Center. In June, 2013, Hungarian prosecutors finally charged him, saying he had been "actively involved in and assisted the deportations" in 1944 of Jews from a ghetto in Kosice.
The former police officer Csatari "regularly beat the interned Jews with his bare hands and whipped them with a dog-whip without any special reasons, regardless of their sex, age or health," prosecutors said.
The UK The Sun tracked down Csatari, photographing him and confronting him at his front door.
Now, those are paparazzi we can be proud of…


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What is curry? Today, the word describes a bewildering number of spicy vegetable and meat stews from places as far-flung as the Indian subcontinent, the South Pacific, and the Caribbean Islands.
But the original curry predates Europeans' presence in India by about 4,000 years. Villagers living at the height of the Indus civilization used three key curry ingredients—ginger, garlic, and turmeric—in their cooking. This proto-curry, in fact, was eaten long before Arab, Chinese, Indian, and European traders plied the oceans in the past thousand years.


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September 14, 2010 > Clipper, a universal fare card
In mid-June 2010, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and major Bay Area transit operators re-christened the region's all-in-one, reloadable transit fare card as Clipper, replacing the TransLink(r) moniker in use since 2002. The distinctive blue and white cards will be available free of charge for all customers through the rest of this summer. Clipper cards ordinarily cost $5, though this cost is waived when customers sign up for Autoload, a feature allowing passengers to add value to their cards automatically from a bank account or credit card.MTC is the transportation planning, financing and coordinating agency for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. The Commission has coordinated development of a regional transit fare payment system since the original TransLink pilot program that debuted in 2002."We chose the Clipper name to evoke the Bay Area's maritime history and to honor the 'Clippers' that have transformed Bay Area transportation through the years," explained MTC Chair and Alameda County Supervisor Scott Haggerty. "In the 19th century, the tremendous speed of the clipper ships revolutionized travel from the East Coast to San Francisco Bay during the Gold Rush era. In the 1930s, the China Clipper revolutionized air travel with the first commercial service across the Pacific, cutting the travel time from San Francisco to Manila by more than a month. Now it's the 21st century and this new Clipper card is revolutionizing Bay Area transit."Clipper currently can be used to pay fares on San Francisco Muni, BART, AC Transit, Caltrain, Golden Gate Transit & Ferry and Dumbarton Express. Together these operators carry more than 80 percent of all Bay Area transit passengers. SamTrans and the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) are scheduled to begin accepting Clipper cards for fare payment throughout their route and station networks later this year bringing the number of participating systems to eight and share of riders served to 95 percent. Eventually, passengers will be able to use the Clipper card to pay fares on all Bay Area transit systems.Muni, which carries the largest number of passengers in the region, is nearing completion of a year-long project to replace aging fare gates throughout its Muni Metro station network with new gates that will only accept Clipper cards. The roughly $29M initiative includes the installation of new ticket vending machines, through which customers can purchase new single-use Clipper cards."The new fare gates and ticket vending machines will provide a tremendous benefit to our customers," said Nathaniel P. Ford Sr., Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. "The new equipment will provide seamless transfers among transit systems in the Bay Area and generate increased use of Clipper on the Muni system. No need for exact change. No hassles. Customers simply load fare value or passes directly on the Clipper card - which can be accomplished automatically by taking advantage of the Autoload feature."In addition to eliminating the need for exact change, Clipper card customers will no longer require paper passes, tickets or ride books. Several Bay Area transit agencies this year will begin phasing out various paper fare media and will transition customers to the Clipper card. To use Clipper, passengers simply "tag" their cards by placing them against the Clipper logo on the card reader as they board a bus or enter a transit station. The Clipper system automatically deducts the correct fare and applies any discounts, including transfers, for each trip.Clipper cards for adults can be ordered online. Youth, senior and senior/disabled Clipper cards are unavailable online. These specially encoded cards automatically calculate the discounted cash or monthly pass fare. The minimum age for youths is five years and 65 years for seniors. The minimum age for youths varies by transit agency.Each agency has its own discounts for eligible customers. Youth and senior Clipper cards automatically recognize them. AC Transit requires minors to have a youth card with a photo, issued by AC Transit.Youths and seniors must apply for these cards in person. Visit www.clippercard.com/ClipperWeb/seniors.do for locations. The following ID is acceptable as proof of eligibility - birth certificate, driver's license issued by any state, identification card issued by any state, alien registration/permanent resident card, matricula consular/identification card, passport and SF City ID card.Riders can order a free Clipper card, add electronic value accepted on all transit systems, or add a monthly pass for a specific agency online at www.ClipperCard.com, by phone (1-877-878-8883) or TDD/TTY (711 or 1-800-735-2929), at select transit agency ticket offices, or at more than 200 participating retail locations, including most Walgreens stores.Besides the Autoload option, which automatically adds value when the cash balance drops below $10 or a pass expires, Clipper also offers card replacement and balance restoration for customers who register their cards which may end up lost or damaged. Registration is free and can be completed easily online, over the phone or by mail.


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The Institute communicates its scientific and educational information in a number of ways. One major outlet is peer-reviewed publications and reports. Cary Institute staff regularly publish in the best-rated journals in their respective fields.
Export 3 results:Sort by: Author Title Type [ Year]
Filters: Author is Tockner, K. [Clear All Filters]
Biological Field Stations: A Global Infrastructure for Research, Education, and Public Engagement", BioScience, p. biv174, 2016., "
Aquatic Sciences celebrates its 20th anniversary", Aquat. Sci., vol. 71, 2009., "
Predicting carbon and nutrient transformations in tidal freshwater wetlands of the Hudson River", Ecosystems, vol. 11, p. 790-802, 2008., "


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"These art works, in their artistry and complexity of thought, start conversations, whereas most non-professional images and texts have the more straightforward task of delivering "subjectified" information. This is why a book like Writing on the Edge: Great Contemporary Writers on the Front Line of Crisis, ...is an important anthology."
April 2010
Great Contemporary Writers on the Frontline of Crisis
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., proudly present Writing on the Edge, a collection of 14 first-hand accounts of life inside conflict zones where the international medical humanitarian organization provides emergency medical care. The book takes readers on a harrowing tour of countries in crisis, profiling people struggling to cope with war, disease, and lack of access to basic health care.
Award-winning photographer Tom Craig teamed up with MSF and an international roster of 14 highly-esteemed, widely-traveled writers, directors, and actors, and visited various MSF projects, returning with poignant accounts of their experiences. Acclaimed author Martin Amis writes of gang violence in Colombia; New York Times best-selling author Tracy Chevalier focuses on the abuse of women in Burundi; Academy Award-winning actor Daniel Day Lewis describes his trip to Gaza, and Booker-prize winning author DBC Pierre addresses the unusually high incidence of mental illness in Armenia.
These unforgettable stories, accompanied by Tom Craig's compelling photographs, offer readers a glimpse into a world of tremendous suffering that might otherwise remain unknown.
Buy the Book
- A1 Books
- Amazon
- Barnes & Noble
- Book Passage
- Books-A-Million
- Borders
- Indie Bound
- Powell's
- Rizzoli
- The Tattered Cover


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Pressure's on Patterson.
All that was missing was Boise State's blue carpet.
It's beginning to look like the Manteca Buffaloes year, not just in the Valley Oak League, but beyond.
No true tradition.
Much like their NFL counterparts, the San Francisco 49ers who had also started the season 1-2, Oakdale High jogged onto East Union's football field with a chip on its respective shoulders and something (more) to prove.
They hardly ever see it coming.
Brock Whiting took the handoff from Dillon Tamburrino and lunged toward the goal line, his shoulder pads slicing into an apparent hole in the Enterprise High defensive line.
Nestled between a dozing Dr. Jerold Polterock and a giant window that revealed the sprawling Central California countryside, I began to drift into a peaceful slumber aboard one of the charter buses containing Oakdale football fans neared the final stages of its journey.
An historic and inspirational campaign by Oakdale High's varsity football team came to an end at the 2012 California Interscholastic Federation Division II State Football Championship Bowl Game at the Home Depot Center in Carson on Saturday, where the size, speed and talents of Serra (Gardena) proved too great an obstacle, ending in a 42-15 defeat of the Mustangs.
When your fingers are buried in a three-point stance, you don't tend to get that much ink. And when all your hard work is basically in the center of the field instead of a leaping catch in the end zone or a sweep around the left side, you don't often get to be in the photo.
As a quarterback known for his accuracy, there isn't much Oakdale High senior Spencer Thomas misses.
It's no coincidence that the University of Southern California sports not one, not two, but three former players from Serra High of Gardena on their active roster.
It's no coincidence that 10 of the 11 defensive starters on Oakdale High's varsity football team received first team All-Valley Oak League selections. The Oakdale defense has been spectacular in 2012, and landed tremendous performances in both conference play and the Sac-Joaquin Section playoffs.
An hour had passed since a heroic march across Lincoln High's artificial turf had granted Oakdale High's football team a Sac-Joaquin Section title, but a large contingent of the Mustang faithful were still lingering about the field on Friday night.
Nestled less than five miles from the historic Concord campus of California's best Division I high school football team, De La Salle, is the campus of the Spartans' younger brother - Division II Clayton Valley Charter.
Page 1 of 7
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5 Fabulously Tiled Foyers
Right now, the entrance to my apartment is a small landing with a few coat hooks and small table. I'm happy with it, but if I ever have a larger space, I'd love to tile it. There's just something glamorous about walking into a tiled, patterned entryway (and it's easy to clean).
- An arched doorway and blue tiles combine to give this entryway an eclectic, bohemian touch. From Jessica Helgerson Interior Design .
- A green-and-blue patterned floor looks fresh against white walls. Via Red Online.
- Large, neutral tiles add some polish to a pretty, rustic entryway. Via CocoCozy.
- Ultra-glossy black-and-white tiles are chic and bold. Via House Beautiful.
- Burnt red tiles are a low-key welcome in this Beverly Hills house tour.
Images: 1. Lincoln Barbour for Jessica Helgerson Interior Design 2. Rachel Whiting/ GAP Interiors for Red Online 3. Roger Davies via CocoCozy 4. for Eric Piasecki House Beautiful 5. Marcia Prentice for Apartment Therapy


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posted by Thom Holwerda on Fri 30th Dec 2005 14:53 UTC
"Welcome to the very first issue of OS2eCS eZine! It has been awhile since the OS/2 community has had an online magazine or newsletter published. The last OS2eZine was published in December 2004 and the last VOICE Newsletter was August 2005! So we here at the OS2eCS Organization decided it was time to get the ball rolling again!" In this first issue articles on WarpVision, eSchemes, and more.


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Nice! I would love to have my go with that!
Nice! I would love to have my go with that!
Matt caught kissing her gf while swimming...Apparently, the gf is a model.
This is not an exit
david tanent is the real and only doctor who for me...
Saw a Youtube clip of Matt in another movie or could even be a Doctor Who episode. Not muscley at all in fact, pretty scrawny. Wasn't Matt a jock in the past?
Yeah, Matt was nearly a professional football player (which is probably why they put that scene in that episode of Doctor Who with him playing).
Why couldn't that have been his new look instead of the bloody bow tie?
New shirtless picture of Matt Smith here:
Preview Trailer here:
Christopher & His Kind
The BBC have issued a show-reel for upcoming shows on BBC Two which features a look at a drama starring Matt Smith, Christopher & His Kind. It also stars Toby Jones (Amy's Choice) and Lindsay Duncan (The Waters of Mars). Read more details and see footage below.
The hedonistic cabaret scene of Berlin in the Thirties is in full swing when wide-eyed young writer Christopher Isherwood arrives in the city, unable to speak a word of German. To Isherwood's reserved English sensibility, the city's thriving gay subculture is thrilling and intoxicating, but he soon finds himself heartbroken after the failure of a hopeless love affair, and so sets out on a process of self-discovery.
Some people say Matt Smith is ugly but I think he's very attractive.
This is not an exit
OMG I wanna see this ! Hope it makes it across the pond before too long. Thx for posting this.
I was wondering if we coould collate all of the Doctor who inspired fakes into one easy to look place.
good idea (:
i shall post my new ones here tomorrow.
thankyou 8arry0
is anyone going to use this thread?
I don't have any fakes but I think he's adorable.
Count me in as a fan. I think he's gorgeous!
i think he is really hunky, could someone fake him with arthur Darvill
please can we use this as a pic page, i would love all his fakes in an easy to find place
Wud luv to play with his bum!!!!!
Hi, I know this is probably more suited to the fakes thread or search tool but I have tried both in the past to no avail! What I'm asking is if anybody remembers, has saved, or made a fake of Matt Smith not long after he started in Doctor Who. The fake had him in blue shorts and I think, maybe, matching boxing gloves.
Once again, sorry if this shouldn't belong here, but thanks in advance!
Is the best I can find
Ok, so a small update, upon searching and doing some number crunching I've figured out that the image would've been uploaded mid-2009 to early/mid-2010. Sadly I can no longer access fake threads from before 2011! If you made this fake then please step forward as this is possibly my favourite fake ever and I haven't been able to see it for about 3 years now!
He is bulking up! Yum!
I wanna smell Matt's ass.
The hacker who is hitting the celebrity has done a good job showing photos of matt smith.
I have not had time to find those uncensored, any of you have?
Matt Smith is a chaste timelord. Do you see an erect penis or near, however, seems to have a great sonic screwdriver
OK well firstly the unblurred pics are not convincing me. Secondly and no offence to anyone here who may have did it what flipping idiot takes naked selfies in this day and age and then flipping stores them? Honestly a lot of famous people are fame hungry media whores, Matt Smith however never cam across that way but honestly I know he was think with his dick at the time but you never save things like this.
"Flipping Dykes I though they were a myth like Weapons of Mass Destruction" Grace Adler.
this is my new favourite thread
I think he's beautiful.
"Flipping Dykes I though they were a myth like Weapons of Mass Destruction" Grace Adler.
These pics are private, assuming they didn't share them with friends or something, so they shouldn't have to worry about their private pics in their personal devices being seen by the general public. Be it a pic of your dog or your dick, you shouldn't have to worry that some hacker will try to steal them.
Saying a celeb shouldn't take this type of pics because they might get leaked, is like saying a girl shouldn't wear a short skirt because she might get raped. You're blaming the victim for not being cautious, instead of blaming the perpetrator for committing a crime.
personally i think people should refrain from having nude pics including their face, at least then the pics can't be proven as real
I love Matt!! He's a brilliant actor and a rare handsome boy. And if the picture is real, he has a huge cock!
The pics that were leaked are of his ex-girlfriend and he happens to be in a few of them. Most of the pics leaked are just Daisy and he's not in them. The reason these are pixelated is because they're zoomed and cropped. Someone cropped Daisy out of them and then zoomed in so we could have a better look at Matt.
These hackers focus on females, if there's a dude there, he's just there. If the dude has clothes on, then he has clothes on, if he's naked, then he's naked, these hackers don't care about the dudes in the pics, they care about the women. If Matt was wearing underwear, the hackers wouldn't have bothered to photoshop him naked.
The hackers want to expose all these women and show their private nudes to the world, they're a bunch of straight dudes, they don't care for the male celebrities. As far as I know, the only famous men that have had their nudes leaked during this "Fappening" thing are dudes that were in pics with famous women.
Made this forum dedicated to the incredibly hot Matt Smith, I personally love his ass and what to get down there and sniff it, what about you?
Tell me what you want to do to him and what you think of him
Loved him as the Doctor, would love to have fucked his arse and swallowed his hot spunk.


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Asked by older at 9:50 AM on Apr. 11, 2011 in Crazy for CreditsLevel 69 (2,285,492 Credits)
Answer by Alisim at 10:03 AM on Apr. 11, 2011
Next question in Crazy for Credits
Can i please get 15 bumps i just need ten more who wants to help
Next question overall
What does up to 29.99 mean?
Check out some of the top posts today in Groups:


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Unverified Voracity Et Al
The Michigan Difference. From the Iowa game:
et al
I will take this radio host's opinion and trust it because that's what I want to do. Gene Smith just stopped by the local sports talk radio station and said the following things:
Gene "probably leaning to playing more conference games considering the amount of teams we are at"
And said this as well, paraphrased:
Gene was emphatic that preserving that game is job one. Good news as far as Im concerned.
And the guy doing the interview got this impression:
Get the feeling talking to Gene just now that OSU and Michigan in same division will be a likely endgame.
At least there's one guy maybe trying to do the thing that makes sense. Good job… Gene Smith? We have reached a strange place indeed.
Mitigating damage. We've heard this before only to have it beaten back by the need to squeeze every penny out, but if they don't expand the conference schedule now come on man:
After announcing the addition of Maryland to the league Monday, Big Ten commissioner said during a national teleconference that the league's conference football schedule could increase to nine games, and the league's basketball slate could jump up to as many as 20 contests for each team.
"I think more games is on the table," Delany said. "One of the reasons we stayed at 11 (members) and stayed at 12 is because we love to play each other more, not less."
My wacky idea for the basketball schedule is to play everybody once, draw a line in the middle, and then play six more with the top teams facing off and the bottom teams facing off. Never happen, but it would at least make the regular season title a nonrandom event based heavily on who you didn't play.
Meanwhile, a nine game conference schedule in football with the current protected rivalry setup would mean teams played opponents in the other division 33% of the time. Better than twice every twelve years; still less than is necessary to support any true rivalry with the opposite divisions.
Guaransheed! Mark Dantonio:
"When we win Saturday -- and I'll say when -- we'll be a 6-6 football team, not climbing out of the cellar as a 2-10 football team," Dantonio said.
Would you like to backtrack like whoah, though?
It sure sounded like a guarantee. So I asked Dantonio later on the Big Ten coaches' call whether he was, in fact, guaranteeing a victory.
"I don't guarantee anything," he said. "I'm saying that's the mindset we bring when we come."
Aw man just roll with it.
The hate. MVictors has created a grid of hate.
I assume that ending the losing streak has cooled off some of the Penn State hate; when I went in 2006 I would have classified that as orange. Also, Illinois should be red for them and green for us—when my wife, an Illinois undergrad not too up on sports, came to Michigan for her PhD she was under the impression that Michigan was Illinois's primary rival.
Meanwhile, fire up Rutgers and Maryland versions: all Big Ten teams totally indifferent towards them, Maryland and Rutgers getting continually more pissed off that Big Ten fans would like to see their universities vanish from the planet.
This is not about TV? Delany:
Delany said that, in his opinion, too much has been made about the move to add Rutgers as a pure cable television play. He emphasized how difficult it will be to integrate the Big Ten Network into the lucrative New York and New Jersey market.
"It's a difficult business," he said. "It's not always successful. You have to be good and lucky and hardworking at it. People treat it as if there's a no-risk assessment. There's always a risk. This initiative has risk. If it was so easy why didn't it happen a long time ago?"
Delany said the media has a perception that growing into cable homes in the East and mid-Atlantic regions is easy. He strongly disagrees with that notion.
"It's not that way," he said. "We went a year with the Big Ten Network without distributing in core areas. We decided we wanted to do that we did it and hung together. We'll have discussion with people."
Hmmm. I am not sure this is the best idea I have ever heard.
How will we spend the money? This is the saddest thing I've read about all of this, a post from On The Banks about what they'll do with all the money:
That being said, staff raises and respectable budget should be in order all around.
Yes. Get The Picture takes apart an annoying Andy Staples article:
This is Staples' blessing of the situation:
None of us grew up with Ohio State-Maryland or Michigan-Rutgers. This is different, and different is always scary. But the Big Ten saw a chance to add value, and Maryland saw a chance to make more money in a time of economic uncertainty. This marriage may not square with your idea of which teams should or shouldn't play in the Big Ten, but in this economy, none of us should be criticizing a school for making a sound fiscal choice.
It's not that it's scary. It's that it's boring. It's like shopping for an insurance policy instead of a new car. We're fans. We don't give a rat's ass about our schools making sound fiscal choices. (Just ask Tennessee fans about that right now.)
This is soul-numbing. And it's been done in such an in-your-face way that it won't even be worth making an effort to laugh the next time Delany has the stones to invoke tradition when he talks about the television programming he schedules, er… conference he leads.
Money is a zero-sum game. It can only be used on the facilities treadmill and coach salary treadmill. It does nothing for the people the money actually comes from, especially when the richest conference in the country goes out and hires Jerry Kill and Danny Hope and Tim Beckman.
The overwhelming feeling of adding Rutgers and Maryland is boredom. No one is going to wake up the morning their team plays either of those schools and do anything but shrug, and as the expansion continues that will spread to other teams. Michigan State and Wisconsin have a nice thing going; now they don't meet for four years. In the future there won't even be a way for those nice things to get going, because oh God Rutgers is on the schedule again.
More on the dissolution of the bundle empire. Conveniently timed SBJ article:
Nobody thinks that the World Series or NBA Finals will be on YouTube any time soon. But top executives with MLB and the NBA said they've seen increased interest from digital media companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple in recent months.
"They are sniffing around," said MLB's Brosnan, who just negotiated media deals with ESPN, Fox and Turner. "Pay-TV services are never secure, but with TV Everywhere starting to gain some traction, pay TV is looking like it's building a model that might have some traction and will be here to stay."
Stern, whose NBA is in the fifth year of eight-year media rights deals with ESPN and Turner, said he anticipates a time when digital media companies place a bet on sports rights in the same way that Fox Sports invested in the NFL in 1994.
The problem for the BTN model is not going to be actual fans signing up to pay but increasing numbers of sports-indifferent cord-cutters who opt out of subsidizing sports fans and just Netflix/Hulu/whatever everything. The current model is going to be the newspaper business in short order here, wheezing out a decline.
The 60 Minutes thing. It is here:
And there is a bonus thing.
Oh right Ohio State. This could have waited a week maybe, Mr. Delany? Articles from Maize and Go Blue and two from Eleven Warriors, one on the New War, the other on Goebels past and present.
Etc.: Fake conversations with Jim Delany are about to become a cottage industry. Penn State loses Tim Frazier for the year, which just obliterates them. They were outscored 53-24 by Akron in the second half after Frazier went out. He'll be back next year. Weinreb bombs everything. The Iowa game from the Hawkeye perspective.
10 things I hate about Western Michigan University
from an alum, so it's personal
What Difference Does It Make? It Makes None
Nihilism factor EXTREME operative principle engage embed engage emb—
Oh my God. Make it stop. The Greg Paulus story has blossomed into the largest, most annoying complete non-story I've ever had the privilege to follow on the internet. I intended to fire and forget the post on his possible transfer with maybe an update along the lines of "hey, we might not have to play Nick Sheridan at any point this year, but then again he's actually played football sometime in the last four years so maybe he'll still be in front of Paulus."
No such luck. My feed reader over the past few days has been updated with a million breathless updates about The Man Who Will Compete With Sheridan. It's been heavily featured on Sportscenter, PTI, and every other show where people yammer about sports. And for what?
Again: we are talking about a person who is not obviously better than Sheridan and hasn't played football seriously in the last four years. People are digging up breathless scouting reports about what a freakin' incredible quarterback he is, but this isn't like LeBron James suddenly had an epiphany and decided he'd play football. Paulus is a 6'2" pocket passer who hasn't read a defense in four years. He doesn't fit the offense. He has no long term future. He will be at least six months behind Tate Forcier when he steps on campus.
Barring injury, what are the chances Paulus ever sees a meaningful snap at Michigan? There are none. What is the downside of allowing Paulus to walk-on and play at quarterback? There is none. You cannot bar injury, after all.
So shut up, random guy with no knowledge of Michigan's quarterback situation:
When Nick Sheridan went down with an injury, I'm sure Tate Forcier took on the mentality of a starting quarterback and began to take command of the huddle and build trust with the first team offense almost immediately. Now he has to look over and see a guy with a huge reputation and the immediate support of the Wolverine nation (as Mike said, they're already selling "Paulus for Heisman" shirts).
You too, gibbering Matt Hayes:
The guy who played point guard for Duke the past four seasons, who hadn't picked up a football in four years before, you know, getting his arm loose recently, could be the starting quarterback at Michigan this fall.
Maybe it's not really a red flag.
Maybe it's time to panic.
Hayes later name checks "walk-on" David Cone. Argh. Someone stop this man from having opinions. Offering Greg Paulus a walk-on spot is a perfectly sensible thing to do when you have three scholarship quarterbacks on campus and one of them is the Coner. It means nothing.
So why are we talking about this? Because Paulus was an annoying, bad point guard at Duke. This has no relevance to his football career except insofar as it's barred him from having one. But it's engaged the dread gears of the sports pundit noise machine because it's weird and everyone kind of hates Paulus for being a privileged white kid at Duke. And then people start talking about the noise itself and everything builds and I become very, very cross, and it all gets very meta and even dumber.
Decision Time
In such a cynical, sarcastic society, oftentimes looking for the negative on anybody or anything, if you're fortunate enough to spend five minutes or 20 minutes around Tim Tebow, your life is better for it.
-Thom Brennaman
"Go. Go. Go. Go. Go"
-Brennaman and Charles Rogers. On third and goal.
Ideally, football games are not opportunities to reflect on just why everyone under 35 has a protective shell of cynicism and sarcasm between the world and everyone's inner Beaver.* But this one was the BCS championship game on FOX, so it was either that or picture Thom Brennaman massaging lotion into Tebow's feet.
Anyway, the reason most of my generation raised outside the state of Utah and I are looking for the negative so often is people like Thom Brennaman, corporate robots who relentlessly praise anyone and anything they're directed to.
The annoying shilling doesn't stop at the commercial break's edge these days; in fact, that guy with the Boomhauer accent saying "that thur is purty dern cool" during one of the six hundred commercials for a pickup truck was probably the most genuine moment of the night. That guy actually believed tool boxes in the side of your pickup truck were purty dern cool, and he communicated that without sanctimony or idiocy. At no point did he turn to the camera and say that if you didn't think tool boxes on your pickup truck were purty dern cool then you are destined for the lake of fire.
If only we could say the same for FOX. I could write a bunch of stuff about what an embarrassment that whole thing was, but other people have taken care of this for me. Fanhouse:
Brennaman was so far over the top in his pro-Tebow hyperbole on Thursday that the game became darn-near unwatchable unless the volume was off.
Assumptions one should not make about this game: … 3) Fox puts on an incompetent broadcast. No. Incompetent doesn't cover how inept their clodfooted work on the BCS has been.
Awful Announcing, which must live for moments like this:
This is so bad, I really don't even have words to describe it.
According to Fox announcer Thom Brennaman—and if you don't agree with him, you must be some kind of deranged lunatic—Tim Tebow just may be the finest human being to ever live on this planet or any other.
Etc, etc, etc. The presentation was such a disaster that a lot of people have been complaining about how bad the game was when, really, it wasn't too bad. Julio Iglesias was nearly decapitated, and there was a critical fourth-down stand and a couple of miraculous interceptions and all in all it was a tense, well-played football game but for the context.
At some point, being directed to interpret everything as history in the making has a downside. Now we expect the Greatest Game Ever Played between the Greatest Players Ever Assembled every time out. And when that's not happening—which it wasn't—no one backs off. They just lie to your face.
So, yeah, I'm tired of all hype. I'm tired of having the "national championship" game between two teams virtually indistinguishable from a half dozen others on a random Thursday night in January on a network that never shows college football. I'm tired of how stupid it all is.
And I think I'm detecting a seismic shift in opinion out there. Bowl defenders outside of newspaper columnists who love them some junket are few and far between—and frankly, I'd rather have Stewart Mandel on the other side of any argument I'm having, thanks very much. Every year some coach and some president gets screwed and converts to the church of playoff. Last year, weirdly, it was Georgia. This year, obviously, it's USC and Utah and Texas. At some point things have to change, because last night felt more like a farce than a championship.
*(60s television version, not unwise quarterback version.)
Destroy Harbaugh
Editor's note: Originally published in August, 2007.
Editor's note: The Notre Dame numbers were disputed by some ND readers; ND's site lists two majors for everyone or a major-minor pair or something; it was confusing and I just ticked down a bunch of majors; I wouldn't take the assertions of grouping below seriously. Suffice it to say that guys with 6th to 8th grade reading levels apparently average a 3.5 at ND; they're probably not taking astrophysics.
I'm sure you've all seen this by now: Pat Forde got ahold of Jim Harbaugh, who continues to cram his foot in his mouth so far that his testicles are grumbling about the new neighbors, about this whole academics thing. In the article Forde is shocked, shocked(!) to find out that shepherding is going on at Michigan. He strokes a beard he does not have thoughtfully and comes to conclusions that show deep concern for the welfare of student athletes. He credulously accepts this outrageous statement from Harbaugh...
"I learned from a great man named Bo Schembechler that you speak the truth as you know it. It may not be the popular thing, but you speak your mind. Everything I said is supported by fact, but the thing that has come back is the personal attack on me, not looking at the issue whatsoever." The most bothersome personal attack to Harbaugh came from Hart. Even more bothersome was the fact that nobody within the Michigan hierarchy has publicly reined in Hart for blasting a well-decorated alum.
"Mike Hart is just repeating their messages," Harbaugh said. "When I was a player, there would have been nobody saying anything like what Mike Hart said about me. We would have been too afraid of the consequences. That wouldn't have happened while Bo was there. I'm glad as the head coach of Stanford I don't have to deal with those repercussions."
...without stopping even to mention that the very person Harbaugh's throwing under the bus is that "great man" and to say that Mike Hart wouldn't have said the things he did if Bo was around when his weak response to Jamie Morris claiming the same thing of him was "that's not the point." It's awful and self-contradictory and the work of a man just trying to get some Serious Issues brownie points. (Braves & Birds eloquently presents these arguments, btw.)
Harbaugh is right about one thing: if Bo was around, Hart wouldn't have said those things. But that's because Bo would have said them after turning Harbaugh's larynx into goo with the power of his mind. And yet he persists:
"Everything I said," Harbaugh told me this week, "is supported by fact."
No, Jim, it isn't. You're full of crap.
One of the things that makes (most) college football fans deeply uncomfortable is the increasing implausibility of calling the athletes they revere "student-athletes" in an era when enormous men whose applications would have been laughed out of the admissions office had they been sized like normal humans spend 40+ hours a week on football virtually year-round, taking classes like "History of Rock and Roll," or "AIDS Awareness" or "Golf," to use several unfairly OSU-exclusive examples, solely because said classes will allow them to participate in their chosen sport with a minimum of what can only be said to be extracurricular fuss.
It's this inversion of "extracurricular" that bothers people. Whereas once manly men who are men occasionally deigned to travel around the country beating other manly man men's heads in whilst catching up on their Proust, today a bunch of lunkheads with no business in college are exploited for their cheap labor and then cast aside without any hope of employment because their educations were a sham. Yea, truly we have made our collegiate athletics programs dens of iniquity, striving for the unholy dollar at the expense of these men's future.
I don't swear much on this blog, but I have one word for this. It follows in its own paragraph for MAXIMUM EMPHASIS.
Oh, that felt nice. I'm going to continue. Fucking ridiculous, facile, idiotic bullshit, the exact kind of balderdash fronted by people who willingly fail to notice that the American university experience has changed so radically that 20% of my high school's graduating class, including several people I would be surprised to find out could change a light bulb, ended up at Michigan because it serves their hopelessly outdated and idealistic view of the world.
I find the lazy, stupid athlete stereotype irritating, and always have. Is intelligence a simple vector that you have or do not? I have always been very, very "smart" and felt that I got far too much credit for an aptitude for standardized tests and memorization when I knew that the guys truly marked for success didn't have truculent attitudes towards people that were slightly different from them. There is a certain sort of social aptitude that I lack that, a particular sort of empathy and intelligence far more important in the world than the ability to sort out the Pythagorean theorem in no time flat, but how do you measure that? I'll tell you: find my salary and that of class president Tom O'Neill, a man the entire world liked, in ten years and get back to me. I'll lose. So who's to say that Mario Manningham isn't "smart"? I've watched him perfectly set up cornerbacks time and again, burning them deep when they know what's coming. Even if Manningham couldn't spell his own name -- something I am not asserting is true, for the record -- he would still be a particular sort of genius.
I mean, Jim Harbaugh has to be some sort of verbal moron but he's still in the 99.9th percentile when it comes to being a quarterback. In one particular aspect of his life, Jim Harbaugh is indisputably brilliant. We shouldn't look down on him just because there are six-year-olds with a better sense of what an appropriate public discourse is.
This is my point: the sort of people who end up successfully completing four or five years in a major collegiate athletic program are probably marked for success even if their major is the easiest available. There is academic research that backs this up. Via Malcolm Gladwell:
In the 2001 book "The Game of Life," James L. Shulman and William Bowen (a former president of Princeton) conducted an enormous statistical analysis on an issue that has become one of the most contentious in admissions: the special preferences given to recruited athletes at selective universities.
Athletes, Shulman and Bowen demonstrate, have a large and growing advantage in admission over everyone else. At the same time, they have markedly lower G.P.A.s and S.A.T. scores than their peers. Over the past twenty years, their class rankings have steadily dropped, and they tend to segregate themselves in an "athletic culture" different from the culture of the rest of the college. Shulman and Bowen think the preference given to athletes by the Ivy League is shameful. Halfway through the book, however, Shulman and Bowen present what they call a "surprising" finding. Male athletes, despite their lower S.A.T. scores and grades, and despite the fact that many of them are members of minorities and come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than other students, turn out to earn a lot more than their peers. Apparently, athletes are far more likely to go into the high-paying financial-services sector, where they succeed because of their personality and psychological makeup. In what can only be described as a textbook example of burying the lead, Bowen and Shulman write:
One of these characteristics can be thought of as drive—a strong desire to succeed and unswerving determination to reach a goal, whether it be winning the next game or closing a sale. Similarly, athletes tend to be more energetic than the average person, which translates into an ability to work hard over long periods of time—to meet, for example, the workload demands placed on young people by an investment bank in the throes of analyzing a transaction. In addition, athletes are more likely than others to be highly competitive, gregarious and confident of their ability to work well in groups (on teams).
Shulman and Bowen would like to argue that the attitudes of selective colleges toward athletes are a perversion of the ideals of American élite education, but that's because they misrepresent the actual ideals of American élite education. The Ivy League is perfectly happy to accept, among others, the kind of student who makes a lot of money after graduation. As the old saying goes, the definition of a well-rounded Yale graduate is someone who can roll all the way from New Haven to Wall Street.
(You must listen to a man who is smart enough to spell "elite" with an accent mark.)
The greatest asset Michigan football players have is their status as Michigan football players. This is true when they are being guided through college and afterwards. The values imparted by the ruthlessly competitive but outgoing and collegial environment surrounding a big time football program are far more useful in one's effort to find a well-paying career than any honors humanities degree you care to name. And the primary role the modern university is to take money from undergraduates in exchange for the ability to get a well-paid job.
So, no, Jim Harbaugh isn't wrong when he says Michigan takes football players who would otherwise not be accepted and shepherds them through majors that are not particularly challenging. No one denies this, but there is a difference between not denying an obvious, universal, and (most importantly) non-harmful tactic that helps a disproportionately minority and poor group of people into the middle class and not denying that Michigan is selling these kids out because they don't care.
One of the frequently useful posters on Michigan message boards summarized a retrospective on the 1997 national championship team that appeared in The Wolverine's season preview magazine. It's not comprehensive but it does provide a significant indication that Harbaugh's assertion that "the people that adulated them won't hire them" is completely off base:
The Wolverine 2007 preview magazine did an article on the ten year anniversary of the 1997 co-national championship team. They profiled some of the players, and here's some of the results:
Zach Adami (C) - I looked at mgoblue.com to find his major, but they didn't have a profile for him. Adami is a trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, trading options on the Eurodollar. He's aslo a partner in a small company, Redrock Capital Management, with former U-M linebacker Dave Dobress and several others.
Jeff Backus (OT) - General Studies major per mgoblue.com and starting O-lineman on the Detroit Lions.
Kraig Baker (PK) - Sports Management and Communications. He's an account executive for Management Recruiters International, based in Chicago. He's also worked for a manufacturing company in Indiana, managed a restaurant in Virginia Beach and played some Arena Football.
Dave Brandt (OL) - School of Education - majored in Elementary Education. Played 3 years in the NFL. Says he's a stay at home dad.
Kevin Bryant (WR) - General Studies. He owns his own company, KB Solutions of Detroit, which privdes a variety of electrical services.
Mark Campbell (TE) - Movement Science. In his ninth season in the NFL.
Clint Copenhaver (LB) - Sports Management and Communications. Sales representative for sporting goods giant Mizuno--covers state of Michigan for the company.
Scott Driesbach (QB) - Physical Education. Playing football with the Columbus Destroyers of the Arena Football League.
Juaquin Feazell (LB) - Psychology. Works as a medical malpriatice attorney in Georgia for the firm Hall, Booth, Smith & Slover. Received his law degree at Georgia State ans has been practicing law for four years.
Jay Feely (PK) - Physical Education. NFL with the Falcons, Giants and Dolphins.
Chris Floyd (FB) - Mgoblue.com doesn't have a profile for him. Floyd played in the NFL for three season. He then worked for six years with Michigan's S&C staff. Now teaches at Westside Christian Academy and works with Farrell Sports Concepts.
Steve Frazier (C) - General Studies. He's a commercial airlines pilot for American Eagle Airlines.
Ian Gold (LB) - Political Science. Seven years in NFL with Denver and Tampa Bay.
Brian Griese (QB) - Griese majored in Environmental Policy--I believe he got permission to design his degree from LS&A. Tenth year in NFL.
James Hall (DE) - Sports Management & Communications. Played with the NFL since college--Lions & St. Louis.
Tommy Hendricks (S) - General Studies. NFL through 2004.
Jeff Holtry (LB) - No major listed on the roster. Worked at Abbott Labs in Ann Arbor. Now serves as an orthopedic equipment representative for Stryker Corporation.
Chris Howard (RB) - No major listed on mgoblue roster. Just says he spent a few seasons in the NFL.
Steve Hutchinson (OL) - General Studies. NFL pro-bowler for two teams.
Jon Jansen (OL) - Physical Education major. NFL career with Washington Redskins.
Diaollo Johnson (S) - Sports Management and Communications. Works in real estate in Detroit.
Dhani Jones (LB) - It just says he was in the Residential College. Has played in NFL through 2006.
Marcus Knight (WR) - Computer Science. Plays with Columbus Destroyers in Arena Football League.
Eric Mayes (LB) - Earned his master's degree in educational technology in 2000. Completed PhD program in educational physicology at Howard University. Serves as an adjucnt professor at Howard and is Dean of Students at an elementary school in Washington, DC.
DeWayne Patmon (S) - Sports Management and Communications. Played two years in NFL. Lives in San Diego and has done a bit of acting.
Marcus Ray (S) - General Studies. Social worker in Columbus, Ohio school system. Will be moving to Ann Arbor to become graduate assistant for Wolverines. Coached football for several seasons at Ohio Dominican.
Rob Renes (DL) - Secondary Education major. Brief career in NFL due to injury. Teaches at middle school in Muskegon and is finishing master's degree in educational leadership at Western Michigan this summer. Looking to be a school principal or athletic director.
Russell Shaw (WR) - No link to profile on roster. He's currently playing in the Arena Football League.
Aaron Shea (TE) - Sports Management and Communications. He's played in the NFL since college.
Chris Singletary (LB) - Sports Management and Communications. Currently Michigan's recruiting coordinator. He spent seven years at International Management Group.
Glen Steele (DL) - No profile listed on roster. NFL career. Currently graduate assistant at Michigan.
Tai Streets (WR) - Sports Management and Communications. Long career in NFL, now teacher and coach back in Illinois (high school, I assume).
Rob Swett (LB) - No profile listed on roster. Owns his own home building company in Austin, Texas. Here's a quote from him: "My career at Michigan, and that year, helped define part of who I am. The success I've had in my life can be attributed to that season and learning what it takes to be a winner."
Sam Sword (LB) - Sports Management and Communications. Spent some time coaching. He lives in Florida and works in the city's recreation and parks department.
Daydrion Taylor (S) - Doesn't list his major, but does say he was in Kiniesology. Returned to Texas and is teaching high school, coaching track and the secondary on the football team.
Anthony Thomas (RB) - Sports Management and Communications. NFL career with Bears and Bills.
Jerame Tuman (TE) - Movement Science. Still in NFL.
Jason Vinson (P) - Biology. Pharmacist at hospital in Memphis, TN and professor at University of Tennessee pharmacy school.
Andre Weathers (CB) - Industrial Engineering. Plsyed pro football for a few year. Currently working as an industrial engineer and coaches defensive backs at Flint Central High School.
James Whitley (CB) - Sports Management & Communications. 3 seasons in the NFL. Doesn't say what he's doing now.
Josh Williams (DT) - Psychology. Just finished his NFL career. Currently involved in building and developing homes.
Eric Wilson (DT) - Sports Management and Communications. He's played football in Florida and Canada with the CFL. Owns a succesful cigar lounge in FL.
Charles Woodson (CB) - Sports Management and Communications. Still playing in NFL.
Chris Ziemann (OL) - Sports Management & Communications. Had a short career in NFL. Works in sales for Cintas in Florida.
Note a distinct lack of homeless crack addicts. (Again... not definitive, but far more evidence than Harbaugh has ever marshaled for his preposterous assertions. Hell, I have more evidence that Harbaugh is not a nice person at all than he has evidence Michigan abandons its ex-players.)
"I see how it's done now at Stanford, and I see no reason to believe it can't be the same there."
Incidentally, portraying Harbaugh as some sort of noble crusader is preposterous. If he had such deep concern for the fates of Michigan student-athletes, why is it only now, when he is attempting to frame Stanford as a city on a hill for D-I athletes, that his concerns come forth? Besides, Harbaugh's full of shit. Yost Built has a terrific survey of the declared majors on Stanford's football team, which look mighty suspicious:
Undeclared: 52
Science Technology & Society: 9
Management Science & Engineering: 7
Communications: 7
Sociology: 6
Poly Sci: 5
Public Policy: 4
Engineering: 3
Computer Sci: 2
Philosophy: 2
Intl Relations: 1
English: 1
Classics: 1
Economics: 1
Yost Built points out that 15.5% of declared football majors are in communications versus 1% of the university at large and this "STS" thing is even better:
So now about that random degree that almost nobody in the school majors in, but a disproportionate amount of football players do....at Michigan it's General Studies. At Stanford, I believe it's called Science Technology & Society. According to the Stanford STS website, there are 58 STS majors in the school. 58. That works out to .9% of the 6,400 undergrads. Want to know how many football players major in it? 9. Or 15.5% of the entire major (which dwarfs the Michigan team making up roughly 10% of General Studies).
I can add a little something to Yost Built's post. A peek at STS shows that it's an interdisciplinary field that requires a certain small set of base requirements, and then this:
# Technical Literacy: A specified computer science course and a four-course sequence in a field of science, engineering, or mathematical sciences in which a B.A. major obtains basic knowledge of some concepts, principles and methods of science, engineering, or mathematics. Faculty in various technical disciplines are available to advise and sign off on this major component.
# Thematic Concentration: A sequence of courses through which a B.A. major acquires more in-depth knowledge of and progressive competence in a particular STS issue, problem, or area of personal interest. The following Thematic Concentrations are pre-certified (students can also design their own concentration):
1. Aesthetics
2. Development
3. History and Philosophy
4. Information and Society
5. Public Policy
6. Social Change
7. Work and Organizations
Faculty in various disciplines are available to advise and sign off on this major component.
Emphasis mine, because it emphasizes that this is a design-your-own-major thing that is just ripe for exploitation. Hey... you know what that sounds like? General Studies! Mouthy football coach unaware of the consequences of his speech, heal thyself. Stanford shovels its football players into majors just like everyone else, and the most popular degree on the team is a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
There is no difference between Michigan and anyone else on this issue. Penn State and Notre Dame both have reputations for being very serious about their academics for football programs that aspire to something higher than being Rice, but even these two schools cluster kids like mad. A survey of Penn State's majors lifted from Anison on the Wolverine.com's message boards:
Total = 86
Declared Majors = 40
Kinesiology = 10
Parks Recreation & Tourism Mgmt = 10
Labor & Industrial Relations = 4
Crime, Law and Justice = 3
Finance = 3
Economics = 2
Mechanical Engin = 2
Marketing = 2
Rehabilitation Svcs = 1
Psychology = 1
Environment Systems Engin = 1
Letters, Arts & Sciences = 1
Management = 1
Advertising & PR = 1
Half of PSU declared majors are in Kinesiology or Parks, Recreation, & Tourism Management. I went over to Notre Dame's website and surveyed their announced majors:
Sociology: 10
Finance: 6
Film, Television, And Theater: 5
Management: 4
History: 4
Business: 3
Mechanical Engineering: 3
Accounting: 2
Marketing: 2
One each: American Studies, Math, Poli Sci, Bio, Psych.
The Math, Bio, Poli Sci, and American culture majors, along with two of the MEs and two of the History majors, are walk-ons. Bolded majors are in the Mendoza School of business; 14 others are enrolled in that school but have not declared majors. With freshmen all enrolled in "first year studies," this means that about half the team is in the Mendoza School of business. To be fair, Mendoza is a large school that comprises about 18% of the undergraduate population at Notre Dame, but a randomly selected football player is three times more likely to be enrolled in Mendoza than a non-football player. There's also ND football players' inexplicable love of sociology to grapple with, and even amongst obvious joke majors "Film, Television and Theater" stands out as a particularly embarrassing thing to have on a degree. All told, there are four declared majors at ND that are not one of these three things. Maybe Michigan's big problem is that it didn't name "General Studies" the "Rocket Science, Law-Talkin', And Doctor-Bein'" degree.
And you know what? On average, these players from Penn State and Notre Dame and Michigan and Stanford will have happy, successful lives -- remember the Gladwell -- largely thanks to the socialization and opportunity football gave them. Forcing guys whose skills lie in something other than the narrow concept of intelligence that gets you through scan-tron tests and essays through the same doors as those selected for those skills will inevitably cause many more of them to flunk out and lose that opportunity to have a better life, all in the service of maintaining the worthless fiction that football players are students first.
What Harbaugh proposes harms everyone but himself; sadly, it's become obvious we can expect no better from this man.
That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore
... not that it ever was.
Someone was getting screwed yesterday. If Michigan went, Florida was getting screwed. Every other year the BCS claims another fanbase as its virgin sacrifice on the altar of "#1" versus "#2," and you're damn skippy those are airquotes delivered with maximum sarcasm. It just so happens that this year it's us.
I had planned on slapping up a column today boldly titled "FLORIDA GOT SCREWED." This would have been preferable to the above title for many reasons, the foremost among them being that since it isn't it's Michigan fans who are quietly swearing oaths of revenge against poll voters. But it would also have removed the waft of sour grapes from this post and allowed me to be really frickin' righteous. Alas.
I spent a good portion of the day jumping from from Tradesports to the coaches poll to the computer rankings, pounding refresh. When the coaches poll came out I slapped some stuff up, updated it a few times with more detail, and then clicked over to Tradesports. Naturally, Michigan had collapsed and Florida had surged. What stood out, though, was Ohio State's price, which shot up in concert with Florida's.
The market was telling Ohio State to breathe easier because the coaches had decided that the number three team in the nation was number two. Over the course of yesterday, OSU shot up from a 64% chance to win against either Michigan or Florida to a 73% chance against just Florida. If you think a win premium was built into Michigan shares, the market was 50-50 on who would get picked, so a reasonable assumption is that the market felt Ohio State was around 55% to beat Michigan.
That's what draws my ire. It seemed clear to everyone from sea to shining sea that there was a choice between the best team and the matchup that least highlighted the staggering absurdity of the BCS. The vast majority went with the latter. Some people are at least forthright enough to admit it:
George Lapides, a Memphis sports radio talk host, said he believed Florida would lose to Michigan if the teams were to play. But he jumped the Gators from No. 4 to No. 2, past the Wolverines, after Florida beat Arkansas.
"I liked the idea of a conference champion playing a conference champion," he said. "I think that's more appealing than a rematch. I think you try to pick something as appealing as possible."
God... this is what it's come down to? We're having sports talk radio hosts choose who plays in the national championship game? Sports radio is a medium built around saying and doing dumb things for attention. If there's a profession less suited for the careful consideration I would like to think is the main attribute of a good poll voter, I can't think of one.
Uh, nevermind. I forgot about football coaches. Here's Jim Walden. He's the guy who voted Florida number one, and his reasons for doing so are subtle and reasonable:
"If you look at the Big Ten conference, it is a joke," Walden said in a telephone interview late last night. He added: "I voted my heart and I voted my strength of what I believe in. In my opinion, Florida is the No. 1 team in the nation."
If I stumbled across that sentiment on a Rivals message board, I would dismiss that guy as one of the board idiots. This guy has a vote that determines who goes to the national championship game. (Wikipedia temporarily has this nugget of joy on Walden:
Then there's former MSU coach George Perles:
"They lost one game to the best team in the country," Perles said in a telephone interview from his home in East Lansing, Mich. "And No. 2, because they're from the state of Michigan, and I just so happen to live here."
I did not realize that geographical proximity was supposed to be a factor.
It's Pat Hill, the D-I coach voted Most Likely To Be Mistaken For A Janitor, who comes off the best:
"It was hard," Hill said in a telephone interview. "I think Michigan had their shot at Ohio State. They didn't get it done."
...for a given value of "best," anyway.
Bowl advocates constantly tell us that the entire regular season is a playoff. If that's so, it's the world's dumbest, one where teams either can lose or can't, either must schedule tough teams or don't have to, either have a history of good teams or don't. It's a "playoff" where over half the time some team with as much or more of a claim is cast aside, leaving their fans and coaches to gnash their teeth and, if they're from the charmingly insecure and paranoid south, bring it up for years whenever their team hits 6-0.
There's no conspiracy here save that of stupidity. The BCS is a Lovecraftian monster with parts swiped from any system that was handy. A playoff beak here; bowl tentacles there. It is a playoff, a two team playoff, which is no playoff at all. It has ruined college football's most hallowed traditions, kicked a half-dozen teams directly in the nuts, and given us mostly grief. The people who run the BCS are, bluntly, idiots. The Harris poll has talk radio hosts in it and guys who vote Boise #2. Richard Billingsley's formula is a disjointed mess. The rest of the computers are crippled by an inability to consider the same factors humans do. The coaches -- glorified gym teachers all -- are hopelessly biased. Only Jim Tressel, who abstained after looking at the absurdity of picking one of two teams and seeing it spun as an insult to his opponent either way, seems sane to me.
And somehow people who oppose a playoff will tell me that watching a bunch of idiots decide that my 11-1 team doesn't deserve to go to the national championship game because there's a much worse 12-1 team that had the good fortune to play in a conference without Ohio State is a beautiful thing that adds to the unique charm of college fooball. To them, I only say that I wish you would die in a hideous and painful fashion because a bunch of gym teachers held a vote.


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Today we feature a portrait from the 1860's of Thomas Nast. Most people today have never heard of Thomas Nast, but he was responsible for creating many of the icons that endure today. He was an illustrator, and he created our modern picture of Santa Claus as a chubby, jolly figure in a red suit. He also created the image of Uncle Sam as a tall, bearded figure in a flag suit.
In addition to these icons of American History, Thomas Nast help steer important political events. At the low point of the Civil War, when it looked likely that Lincoln would lose, and the Democrats were campaigning on a platform of "Compromise with the South", Nast created a series of poignant illustrations for Harper's Weekly that helped the public see the importance of seeing the war to a successful close. Many felt that Nast played a pivotal role in getting Lincoln reelected. Nast also played an important role in getting US Grant elected president, and he help dismantle the Boss Tweed organization in New York. For Thomas Nast, the pen was truly mightier than the sword.


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Freshpet Puts on the Chef's Hat for a Fridge Challenge Meal
After six weeks of the Freshpet Fridge Challenge, we've been thrilled to see how pet parents are viewing fresh foods in a different light when it comes to feeding us and our pets.
- A good source of protein
- A green vegetable
- Some sort of carbohydrates
- Keep our meal to a reasonable price
No more than 45 minutes later, we were hungry again. Slouched over on the couch and in what felt like a food coma, we longed for something else from the fridge, but knew it was off limits. As we quickly learned, the simple carbohydrates in the pasta and pasta sauce weren't providing much energy from which our bodies could feed. Moreover, the higher sodium content found in canned pasta sauce and canned green beans made us question whether our Fridge Challenge meal could hold a candle to fresh food at all. At least the canned chicken was high in protein, but when mixed with everything else, it became apparent that without fresh options, healthy eating truly is a challenge!