knock knock

Drudge and some knee-jerk inclined friends of mine are up in arms about re stimulus spending.

I don’t know why I’d dignify this with a response – Drudge is the king of just throwing up shit that *seems* like it might be an interesting story but is in fact just a bunch of crap that is way over the average Drudge reader’s head, apparently. The example cited to me was OMG $1.4 MILLION FOR A DOOR!!

That did seem suspicious. So instead of calling my folks and saying OMG $1.4 MILLION FOR A DOOR!! I figured I would spend 2 minutes googling the issue.

First step, the link on Drudge itself leads me to the recovery.org site.

http://www.recovery.gov/?q=content/contracts-recipient-summary&id=57-FA466106D0006&mode=details&primeid=1400

Hmm. Project Location: Dyess AFB. AFB means Air Force Base. I wonder if Air Force Bases have buildings with some sort of large, expensive door through which large, Air-Force-Related pieces of machinery might have to go .

Still $1.4 million seems like a lot. So why don’t we see if we can get some kind of cost breakdown from this link. Scroll down (use your mouse to move the square on the bar on the right, if you don’t know) and you see the following heading for “Transactions” with 2 separate IDs. If you hover over an ID you get descriptions as seen below:

Suddenly we see that the door is only $246K, not $1.4 million, and the balance is for replacing gas mains. Still, $246K is a lot for a squeaky hinge and we don’t have a confirmation of our suspicion that this might be for a hangar door. What if we in fact googled something like [dyess air force base building 5112]?

After a bunch of blogs already freaking the hell out about the Drudge posts, we find this:

http://www.osfr.state.tx.us/WRfiles/MILCON%20and%20SRM%20Project%20lists%20by%20State%20-%20TX.pdf

Wow. $246K for a hangar door. And they went $7,000 over budget! I’ve never heard of such a thing from contractors, be it for government work or for remodeling my kitchen! I’d better tell all my friends about the government waste!

The lesson is that Drudge is a jerk, but if you fell for this, you’re an idiot. You play right into his hands by jumping to conclusions.

i woke up this morning

and looked outside my window. skyline is the same. there’s a big tall tower there, same as yesterday and the day before. We always called it the Sears Tower, that’s what somebody who put up some money decided to call it. Now somebody else is putting up some money, so they’re going to call it the Willis Tower.

At first this struck me as strange. We’re creatures of inertia, and sudden and unnecessary (strictly speaking) change jars us.

Things have gotten really out of hand with people refusing to call it anything but the Sears Tower. Sure I sometimes still refer to the Rosemont Horizon, Comiskey, or Marshall Field’s out of habit, but have our lives really changed for the worse due to name changes? We still have the Allstate Arena to fill our monster truck needs, U.S. Cellular to watch terrible baseball, and Macy’s to sell us bland consumer goods.

The outcry over Sears is different to me. We are bitching and moaning about a loss that isn’t a loss at all. R.I.P. Sears Tower! Goodbye Sears! Last day as Sears Tower! These are the kinds of headlines I’m reading.

Nearly 8 years ago in a larger city on our eastern coast, two skyscrapers spent their last day unheralded, because nobody knew they wouldn’t be there come Tuesday morning. My view is the same as it was yesterday; for the people of lower Manhattan, it’ll never be the same. Can we have a little perspective on the name change issue?

i will only ask you this one time…

…to visit espn.com, which i generally hate.

go there. click on the page (as opposed to say your search bar)

enter the contra code with your keyboard. no i’m not going to remind you what it is.

after you do so keep hitting any key.

feel as though you are part of something.

go on with your life.

UPDATE: It’s over. Here’s what you missed. Never go to ESPN.com again.

take me out to the honkbalveld (your guide to dutch baseball terms)

If you’re watching the World Baseball Classic you are aware that the plucky Netherlands has pulled off the upset of the year by knocking off the Dominican Republic not once but twice to eliminate the perennial powerhouse, if I may use the term perennial for the second ever WBC.

I wondered what the Dutch papers thought about this, so I surfed over to De Telegraaf, an Amsterdam newspaper. I have long sympathized with Dutch sports ever since they fielded a World Cup soccer team full of names like Wim Jonk and Jaap Stam in the 90s, which names were even more fun to hear pronounced by the Spanish-language commentators because in those days not all games were available in English.

Anyway.

So I had to scroll way the hell down the page to find any mention of the story but I am eternally grateful that I did. This was the headline.

OPNIEUW STUNT HONKBALLERS ORANJE

You have got to be fucking kidding me. This is too good to be true. The Dutch word for baseball is HONKBALL? HONKBALL? Techinally turns out it is honkbal, one L, but nuts to that.

I wanted to confirm that this wasn’t just some sort of folksy nickname for the Dutch team so I checked out Wikipedia in Dutch (de vrije encyclopedie) and sure enough, honkball. The article was surprisingly easy to semi-translate based on context clues and pretending that it was written by this guy:

My first discovery after HONKBALL was the Dutch word for HITTER, which is SLAGMAN. This is particularly great if you are familiar with the British sense of “slag.” The slagman uses his mighty KNUPPEL. Did you know that in Holland, honkballknuppels zijn van hout of een harde soort lichtmetaal, aluminum? Now you do.

I learned about various locations in the ballpark, like third base which is DERDE HONK, as in I would like to get to derde honk with Rebecca Romijn.

Pitchers are WERPERS. They are always trying to hit the SLAGZONE which as you know is directly over THUISPLAAT between KNIE- and ELLEBOOGHOOGTE.

I am pretty sure my favorite word is one I got from the original article about the game. That word is TWEEHONKSLAG which I am fairly positive means double.

While I’m in a honkball mood, here’s a video which I saw a while ago and then was removed but is now back. It’s about a famous derde honkman who kak in his broeken: George Brett would like to tell you about the time he shit himself.

As the year goes on, Cubs fans will want to keep an eye on the health of linksvelder Alfonso Soriano. Will Carlos Marmol keep werping well? Will Carlos Zambrano hit a grand slam, thus scoring all three honklopers? Only time will tell.

May de partij met de meeste punten wint. But then, they always do.

foods that are delicious 2 days old

1. Papa John’s pizza

2. Homemade popcorn

3. Babies

what is the saddest christmas song?

My vote goes in for Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.

on the docket

I’ve been meaning to update the spreadsheets I used for my fantasy football drafts to see how close they were to predicting actual performance. I haven’t done it yet.

I’m in the championships for both my leagues.

I have not yet fully assessed how the fact that somebody in one of those leagues just got charged with insider trading* is going to affect what I post.

*not like in the league; like by the SEC, and by that I don’t ‘ mean that he traded Peyton for Rex Grossman.

god damn it

I wrote this once for my old complaint blog, and I repost it verbatim after my return to Corner Bakery for the first time in months.

The people at Corner Bakery frequently forget to put croutons in my caesar salad. There are three fucking ingredients in caesar salad. Leaves, dressing, and croutons (maybe some cheese). How brain-dead are you to say, here is a complete caesar salad, even though it is just a pile of damp leaves without croutons.

Corner Bakery today joins Chili’s on my DEAD TO ME list of dining establishments.

seals one through three

I am sitting here on a Sunday afternoon listening to Chinese Democracy. The president-elect is a half-black guy with Hussein in his name. Yesterday I rushed the field at a Northwestern game because we went 9-3 this year.

Thank god the Cubs still suck. If they had won the World Series this year, I’d have to check my BMs for simians.

well, the honeymoon is over (wherein I strike fear into the hearts of chicago bloggers)

Awesome blossom complaints notwithstanding, my honeymoon with Obama is sort of over. I think he’s whiffing on his first big policy position, the proposed bailout for auto makers.

I own a Nissan Altima. I like it. It’s a good car.

I did not want to invest $20k of my money in a Chevy Malibu. Don’t invest $50B of our money in GM. Bankruptcy court exists for this purpose – most notably, it would give carmakers the ability to readjust their labor contracts which are some of the sweetest deals you could ever imagine (for unions anyway). Reorganize your business model in the courts and re-emerge, I don’t know, with a chance at profitability, with a chance at making competitive vehicles.

I understand that a shitton of jobs are tied to the auto industry, but a) bankruptcy court doesn’t mean liquidiation necessarily, it means reorganization and b) it’s not like demand for cars will disappear – if one automaker did liquidate, their market share would get tossed on to remaining automakers. Am I anti-union? Not really, unions are critically important to make sure workers don’t get taken advantage of. And as some union members have said to me (not auto unions) – unions deserve the best deal they can negotiate. That’s fine – as long as you stand by that when the deal you negotiated is shortsighted enough to bring your company down. (This is sort of unfair, GM and Ford have many more problems than just labor unions, but it’s a start).

Anyway. Job losses in Detroit are one thing, but job losses in Chicago are…the thing that is going to happen between now and the end of the year, and the thing that most readers of this blog are most concerned about. (see CEOs Tell Mayor Daley They Plan Huge Layoffs In November, December). If you get laid off, ask why your company isn’t important enough, or mismanaged enough, to get government help.