omg

Totally forgot I had a blog. Woops

I am the 99%! Which is a totally egregious statement. I am the 99% of what? One person can't be 99% of anything. You'd have to be >=50% of something, unless you think you're better than other people.

Do you, you tent-livers in city parks across the country? Do you?

My apartment got broken into the other day. Of the things they stole, the one I'm most upset about is this Twins jersey I bought last year. Sure, they stole money from both me and my roommate, and the jersey wasn't even the highest valued item they took (my trumpet, north of $1k on that sucker). Instead, it was this jersey. Don't get me wrong, it was expensive and that's definitely part of the reason I'm pissed. But despite the fact that all Americans should strive to be a little less materialistic, it was one of my prized possessions. I splurged to get the best kind, an official Majestic gameday jersey. It was a Twins home standard, the blue pinstripes, the logo in its customary arc across the middle of the jersey.

For those of who know me at least a little bit, you know I'm a pretty big baseball nut. This was my first (and so far only) trip to Target Field, and it was the inaugural year of the new stadium. Lauren took me as a birthday present and it was an awesome trip. We went up over a weekend and were gonna see two games, as we'd miss the Friday one while traveling up. Lucky for us, the Friday game got rained out, and they played a day-night doubleheader on Saturday -- perfect. The weather went from Minnesota cold to Minnesota perfect, and in the night game, got to see the return of the man who's Jersey I purchased - Mr. Joseph Mauer.

One thing I want to point out is that the jersey above is incomplete. One of the parts of it that I was most pleased with were the patches on each arm. On one side you had the patch for the first year of Target Field, a pretty big deal. The Twins had obviously played in the shithole known as the Metrodome for over two decades, and played in Metropolitan stadium before (which you can only imagine how crappy that must have been if they decided to leave it and go to the Dome). 

On the other arm was a patch for the 50th anniversary of the Twins. While the club wasn't formed in Minneapolis (they moved from D.C. where they were the Washington Senators), it was the 50th year of Minnesotan professional baseball. 

All in all, I thought it was a cool jersey, Mauer obviously is a solid choice for the player name (although some are starting to lose faith...), and I was excited to be able to purchase this awesome memento from my trip to the stadium. And mostly I was excited to have this [very expensive] piece of memorabilia.

I thought one day I'd wear it to a World Series game where the Twins were playing, maybe even see a victory. Maybe Mauer would get inducted to the HOF and it would be worth about $2 extra from that day forward. Maybe my kid would become a Twins fan and I could hand it down.

But no, some motherfucker decided that they wanted to obtain little pieces of paper with pictures of the presidents by coming through my bedroom window and perusing the items of my apartment like they were at Target.

The interesting part? They left the computers, TVs, Xbox... all the electronics stayed (save for some Xbox games and my iPod touch that doesn't work). They just took that other shit.

What I'm most pissed about is the lack of respect. And it's not like this is anything new, people have been getting robbed ever since a cave man wanted the other cave man's tennis racket.

And I know I'm not special. Millions of people have been robbed besides me, many less severely, and many in much more terrible ways. I'm not writing this to say I feel sorry for myself but that I just get upset when people are so disrespectful about fellow people in the country. I'm not the most hardworking person in the world (unless you're a prospective employer reading this blog, in which case, I am), but I did work hard to make money to pay for my stuff. And obviously the person(s) who came into my apartment didn't do shit except take stuff and sell it. That's bullshit. Obviously, it's illegal, but it's so easy to get away with that there's hardly any deterrent. It's like, what can you do to indoctrinate people against stealing from other people? You could ingrain it into people A Clockwork Orange-style, but then someone will indubitably figure out that since no one expects anyone to steal anything, they can go ahead and steal shit and have more wealth than anyone without doing any of the work. It's kind of like The Invention of Lying. 

But I think this stems more from capitalist society. A true a capitalist, an absolutely idealist capitalist (which doesn't really exist, mind you) would congratulate this person for their self-reliant nature and huge nads they displayed by going into someone else's home. Good job, they'd say, you did the hard work you needed to do in order to make your life better. Their educational investment was the experience gained from robbing previous homes. The price they paid was the gall they had to build up to go into these homes, and their willingness to risk breaking the law. They paid their dues, and this is their reward. In perfect capitalism, it works.

Obviously mostly no one respectable is going to condone this kind of behavior. Still, we have this little nugget from the original Wall Street : "Gordon Gekko: The richest one percent of this country owns half our country's wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you buddy? It's the free market. And you're a part of it. You've got that killer instinct. Stick around pal, I've still got a lot to teach you. "

Isn't this just another way for people to blindly take advantage of you while you're trying to make a respectable living?

Positive and Negative Feedback

Today's track*: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7ArUgxtlJs

I used to hate Twitter. I thought it was dumb that you had "followers" and had to use "I'm a 6th grade girl texting you on my phone"-style English to fit your thoughts into 140 character blurbs. And what does it say that our whole method for communicating with these followers is to restrict our thoughts to character-limited fragmented sentences where it is nearly impossible to say anything substantive?

Well I still kind of agree with my last statement, but I've recently changed my tune on Twitter. Where else can you find out interesting nuggets like the fact that aftermarket college football tickets for Nebraska @ Wyoming two weeks ago were going for over $350? I mean, let's be honest, you're never really going to ask a question that will result in that being the answer. That answer will not show up on Jeopardy. And in some respects, I kind of like the fact that I found that out... the substance isn't that important, but what it means is what's important. I can find out something I never knew, and was never going to know, by following certain people on Twitter (for the record, that little nugget came from Darren Rovell, whom I will add I wish I'd had the opportunity to meet on Sailgate, although maybe it was for the best that I didn't considerating my mental state on that trip).

So I've gotten more into Twitter recently. Mainly my tweets involve telling a couple of my friends that we all need to make sure we're wearing purple shirts on Fridays and that we should drink a lot (#letsgetsailgated). I follow Darren Rovell and some local Chicago stuff and a few friends that I haven't talked to very much. It's relatively interesting to keep in touch with what's going on in the minds of these people, and conversely I hope that I occasionally provide some veritable nuggets of my own.

Bear with me, I promise I have a point.

I think one of the more dynamic components of Twitter is to asynchronously share information in near-real time with almost anyone. The following point may be slightly morbid, but if we'd had Twitter in 2001, do you think it's possible that we figured out the terrorist aspect of the first plane hitting the first World Trade Center and potentially could have mobilized the Air Force/Navy/Army to stop the second? I'm not implying anyone did anything wrong that day, but could the dissemination of information on Twitter helped define the issue earlier than we could by the means available in the day? (Probably not, would be my personal answer).

Bring it back, a little less depressing right now. Say you just saw a car accident that's going to cause traffic problems on Halsted. You tweet it, and someone checks it out and takes the train home instead of the Halsted bus. Pretty cool, you just helped someone avoid an annoying situation. Or, you tweet that you just found an awesome new bar that's having drink specials on a Friday, your friends/followers see it and change their plans to check out this new bar and have a great time and save some money. Another #firstworldvictory.

Or, this situation. Let's say you're watching a football game. Maybe a college football game. Maybe a college football game that involves Northwestern. Maybe a college football game that involves Northwestern playing at Illinois  on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in October where a Heisman candidate just came back from injury and is currently an incredibly efficient 10-14 with 4 touchdowns (a career high for the guy). Maybe, just MAYBE, you think the coaching staff has bent over, turned their necks ninety degrees, and shoved their heads so far up their own asses that they are literally eating their own gall bladders.

Maybe, just maybe, you think the coaching staff needs a little advice.




Twitter to the rescue!








I propose that Jim Philips install a direct line Twitter feed that shows up on Fitz's famous laminated playcalling placard.


There should be software on this device that analyzes all the Tweets (i.e. filters out the "you fucking suck" Tweets and finds the ones with something legitimate to say and summarizes them) to give Fitz another opinion that isn't coming from his crack-off-a-stripper's-ass-snorting assistant coaches. In that case, it's possible that he will realize he should get angry, but at his coaching staff, not the referees, or the grass, or his headset. Maybe he just doesn't know that Dan Persa has thrown a touchdown on 40% of his completions. Maybe he just doesn't know that we've called 75% of our plays to be runs, and maybe he just doesn't know that Mike Trumpy got carted off the field.

Maybe he just doesn't know.

I'm not excusing the fact that he doesn't know. He should know, he's accountable, he's the head coach. But I understand that between the pregame, pre-halftime, post-halftime, and postgame interviews, and spending a lot of time yelling at Jacob Schmidt to "GET AFTER IT!!!" that he may lose track of a few important things, like the fact that a defense that's doing this

is much more effective than a defense that's doing this

If he had Twitter to help him, he might know that we held Illinois to 10 points through 2.5 quarters while playing 4 down lineman with a combination of blitzes and stunts that forced a pick (in the endzone, on an incredible play by Ben Johnson), a lost fumble (the second one game after we'd already shat ourselves), and something like four sacks.

Maybe he would have realized that playing soft zone with 3 rushers against a Big Ten team and a quarterback like Scheelhaase that Scheelhaase is going to figure out that Jeravin Mathews is a smaller version of Usain Bolt and knows next to nothing about how to play cover corner and he can just play catch on a Big Ten football field like me and my buddies used to do on Long Field against no defense.

October 1, 2011 was a football coaching atrocity. I'll be honest, preseason I picked us to lose this game. I thought we didn't match up well against Illinois, and they were too enigmatic with too good of a playmaker in Scheelhaase (not to mention their running backs then went all jizz-in-your-face last year at Wrigley). But after yesterday, that didn't matter. We decided to take the foot off the gas when up by only 18 points, on the ROAD, and gave it back to them. Dan Persa got hurt and came out. Somehow, with a gift from the football gods, we got that fumble back in Ill-annoy territory and ended up taking the lead with 1:15 left to play. After watching them come all the way back the first time, did the coaching staff learn that the prevent-victory defense wasn't working? We had every right to win that game, but did the coaching staff know how to do it?

No. But Twitter might have told them.

-YOM

*"Today's track" isn't necessarily going to happen all the time. I just have found some new (for me) music recently that I want to share.