Update

I'm starting today's blog post without a topic in mind.

I guess it would be wise, first of all, to point out the obvious. I haven't posted since last October or something. So much for making this a regular feature. It's not that I didn't have anything to say, it's that I just never forced myself to stop and focus my energies on writing a blog post.

I'm currently visiting my sister because she just had her second kid, a boy they've named Walker. It made me wonder... do you think the kids at school will shower him with Walker, Texas Ranger references and Chuck Norris jokes? Will that be beyond their generation or will they watch crappy syndicated TV on the weekends too?

In order to chronicle the YOM a little bit from the past few months, I'll run down a few of the highlights.

1) Trip Lincoln, Nebraska, to seethe 'Cats take on the Huskers. Those people have to be nicest opposing fans I've EVER encountered. Save one group of high schoolers that told us to "GO HOME!!", everyone in that town was so welcoming. After we won, random people walked up to us and CONGRATULATED us... and even asked if we needed directions or recommendations for places to go!

Did you know that 1/3 of the population of the city is inside the stadium on gameday? People there are obsessed with the Huskers, but in a good way. I'm glad they've joined the B1G.

2) Bowl trip to Houston. First of all, Houston sucks. For any of you from Houston, sorry, but Houston sucks. That city kind of embodies everything that's wrong with America. Unfortunately, the 'Cats lost, but it [of course] wasn't without drama.

After having maybe one too many beers out of frustration at NU's offense, I left for the fourth quarter and went to the concourse to grab some food. Lo and behold, as I'm muching down some chicken fingers and drowing more sorrows in beer, we start mounting a charge. After we get within one score, I can't stand being alone in the concourse and head back out to my seat. As soon as that happens, A&M goes on a clock eating drive that ends in essentially a game-clinching field goal. So, if you need a scapegoat for that loss, look at me.

3) NU basketball. The way that season ended, I kind of stopped paying attention to sports for a couple months.

4) Ski trip. Awesome. Snowmass is an awesome mountain. The Mpemba effect is cool. Losing your wallet and phone with a random South African guy that just moved to Aspen.. not as cool. But makes for a good story.

5) Birthday party bus. That's gotta happen again soon. Also, casinos are awesome.

6) I am an uncle again! Walker Edward Nordike born on May 10th, 2012. He is currently napping in his dad's arms as we watch Duck Dynasty on TV. (I have no idea what this show is).

Upcoming events, with my ratings, in chronological order:

Rick comes to town ****
Tom comes to town ****
I get a 4 day weekend ***********************
Lindsey leaves Chicago >:O
Ski trip friends visit Chicago ****
4th of July ☺
Lollapalooza ™

Soon after, football starts!


More later.

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.

One

In the year twenty-aut-11, the YOM was created. And it is on this day the twenty-eighth of September in the year twenty 11 that the YOM decided to start Chronicling his thoughts.

Just for the record, that's the end of me referring to myself in the third person.

I created this today after I read my friend Juneau's latest blog, and I was just thinking to myself that I have all these thoughts and ideas I want to discuss... but I can't discuss them with everyone at once. Hence, blog. Hopefully this ends up panning out like I want it to.

A couple of ground rules... first of all, I read a number of articles discussing how hyperlinks are distracting in articles. I bet you got a little lost after you checked all those out and just got back here 15 minutes later? I'm not going to put links directly in my posts, I'll append them to end and you can peruse them later if you so choose.

Second, to any prospective employers, this is just a forum for my thoughts. Just because I may say crazy shit (and oh my god I just cursed and didn't capitalize "god") on here doesn't shine any light on my ability to perform a task at work. I went to fucking Northwestern, allright, please allow me the right to bleed out my nerd-brain-juices in a forum that isn't your office. Judge me on my interview.

And third, there is going to be nothing regular or predictable about this blog. That doesn't mean it's gonna be a whole bunch of crazy shit, but it's going to cover whatever it is I'm thinking about at the time (which can really be anything) (but I promise to do my best to keep it at an R rating and below) (even though the societal impacts of the Internet porn culture can be pretty interesting to investigate) (not that I have).

Oh and lastly, I am NOT formally trained in writing. Have you noticed this stream of consciousness that's going on? Good luck. More ground rules to come in the future, as will an explanation of what "YOM" means. Stay tuned.

Today's music: Maniac, by The Knux (we're not in the middle of a diatribe so the link is acceptable here!!)

---

Today, I'm going to briefly tackle politics. I know this is an incredibly divisive issue for pretty much everyone these days, but hopefully you read this is as me just discussing my thoughts rather than me trying to change your mind.

Obviously the big thing these days is the Republican presidential primaries. This has to be one of the most apopleptic election cycles we've ever been through, and it will probably only continue like this until we as a country finally decide to find the middle again. Anger isn't going to solve anything, it's just going to put an ineffective, highly biased executive in position to be the Most Powerful (Wo)Man in the World.

Let's take a look at one of the Republican candidates today, Rick Perry. First of all, this guy stands for nothing and plays to a loud, far-right wing voting bloc. He proudly toutes states rights, wants to reduce the size of government, and bring down taxes while simultaneously reducing the deficit. All three of those points are kind of called into question by his record, something every candidate really enjoys exclaiming about these days... "My record speaks for itself" ... "Only I have shown that I can perform in situations like these, just look at my record" ... Shit like that.

The man was governor of Texas. TEXAS. The people in that state still think they live in their own fucking country.

Perry championed the Texas portion of a NAFTA Superhighway project, dubbed the Trans-Texas Corridor. This project was supposed to build a two-mile wide connection between Texas and Oklahoma (kind of like the Keystone XL Pipeline, except this would burn oil instead of spill it). This project would be a $145 billion private-public project for "multi-lane highways, rail lines and data lines" basically through Texas, running roughshod over people's property via eminent domain so a toll road could be installed. I'm not going to get into my opinion of the project right now (basically, I think infrastructure and transit is the most important work that American can do right now in this recession, and I will cover these topics in many, many, many more posts in the future), but suffice it to say that bleeding heart red-staters really don't like the idea.

For a guy who says he's a fiscal conservative who wants to put the power back in the states, this portion of his record shows that he's willing to spend a ton of money that doesn't exist on projects that aren't within the control of the municipalities that are affected. It was only extreme outrage . At some point, he's going to have to defend his decisions to back this project to his Tea Party base. What he says will be interesting, but this is just an example of posturing by Perry to appease voters without really telling us anything about what his true policies would be if he were elected. Also take a look at the fiscal budget of Texas over his tenure... when he became Governor of Texas in 2000, the annual budget was ~$49 billion. In 2010? $90 billion. Texas' state debt has increased accordingly as well over that timeframe. I don't see a lot of reduction in the size of government there, Mr. Perry.

<sidebar> Look. I'm not dumb. I know it's political suicide to actually tell the truth about what you'd like to do in office. Every candidate wants to essentially stay the course, not ruffle too many feathers, and wield power in the country to benefit him/herself behind the scenes. I just think we're getting too complacent by being told what we want to hear without any real substance to prove that a candidate's ideas are feasible. </end sidebar>

How about one of the Tea Party's pet babies, ObamaCare? Back in 1993, Rick Perry wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton praising her for her work on reforming the nation's healthcare system. And I quote, "I think your efforts in trying to reform the nation's health care system are most commendable." I have no problem with this, but again what are conservatives going to say? Or will his political machine vomit platitudes that make it look like Perry was lying back then and wants nothing more than to allow millions of Americans to go uninsured?

Oh and let's not forget that debate where everyone cheered about the death penalty. I know Perry didn't cheer, but he didn't necessarily chastise the audience for their cheering, either, did he?

Rick Perry created jobs in Texas. Jobs that have expanded the use of controversial oil and natural gas harvesting techniques, while paying a ton of workers an unlivable minimum wage. In case you didn't know, Texas is tied with Mississippi for the largest percentage of that state's workers having minimum wage jobs. That is not a sustainable lifestyle that still requires support from the government in the form of food stamps and other support programs for low income families. And many of the state jobs that Perry's administration created were funded via federal stimulus dollars that are now going to be axed when funding runs out.

What's my point? Perry has no fucking idea how to run a state, much less an entire country. This guy is all over the map, and not in a good way. His policies vary from incredibly blue to red and everywhere in between, but now that he and his perfectly kept hair has been put up on CNN and Fox News every day for the country to see as a potential presidential candidate, he has moved firmly to right regardless of his record. I see the latest Florida straw poll as a good sign that maybe this country can see through a terrible candidate and get rid of them (hey, look at Michele Bachmann).

The real problem is that it's not just Perry. There are numerous candidates (on BOTH sides) that pathetically pander to their respective bases when they should really be pandering to the moderates. Honestly, I personally hope someone like Perry or Bachmann gets the nomination because the Republicans would get trampled in 2012 like Mufasa in The Lion King (too soon?). I just can't stand how politicians are forced into a corner by the 24 hour news cycle and the most vocal (read: craziest) people in the country. Rick Perry is not a good choice for president. A ton of Republican candidates are not a good choice for president. Even Obama isn't a great choice on an absolute scale, but I think he's got the right long term idea if he can get around political gridlock. This was essentially just my rant against the tiny micromutherfuckingscopic attention span this country has.

And really, this is what you want for your next president?

Letter to Hillary Clinton in 1993

Fracking is bad

Some of Rick Perry's hypocrisy and craziness

Go 'Cats!
-YOM

P.S. I hope that as I read and write more, my stream of consciousness will back off a bit and the articles will have a little more structure and substance. Good night!