Big Wheel

If anything, seems like that would make it more OK and not less OK to bring it up. If you're going to repeatedly trumpet your own credentials as giving you authority to speak about a particular topic...others aren't allowed to do the same when criticizing you? Perspective is not "trumpeting your own credentials" nor is it license to put people down or impugn their character because of a chosen profession. Look, if offering a point of view from a person who actually reports on child abuse seems inappropriate or a reason to blast someone, then I would also have to wonder who would you go see for a medical concern...your mechanic? A false analogy. Nobody here is saying that your point of view as a teacher is inappropriate or a reason to blast you, they're saying that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If a doctor says (in the course of telling everyone he's a doctor and they should listen to him) stuff that opens his own medical competence and judgment up to criticism, then that's fair game.

If anything, seems like that would make it more OK and not less OK to bring it up. If you're going to repeatedly trumpet your own credentials as giving you authority to speak about a particular topic...others aren't allowed to do the same when criticizing you?

It says that...he's not hysterically funny in every single thing he does? That he took a job even if he wasn't all that well suited for it, for the sake of being able to jump to bigger and better things? Anyway, from what I can tell the more excruciating skits like the Spartans were created by the likes of Chris Kattan. The late 90s were particularly dark times for SNL. I see more of Ferrell's fingerprints in his better skits, like More Cowbell-who else would have come up with something as weird as re-enacting a Blue Oyster Cult recording session 20 years later?

The bland face is actually the key to Ferrell's genius. I hated him on SNL because the characters and scenarios he was in sucked and gave him nothing to work with. It was all just putting any old character in a scene that made the viewer feel personal embarrassment for the character. Whereas in his films there's plenty of time to construct an outrageous scenario and character and throw Ferrell's relatively deadpan face into them.

Any opinions on favorite discs on the Stitt set? About to start hunting for some of these tracks to see if this set is my cup of tea.

Zohan was amusing for its sort of twisted telling of Vidal Sassoon's actual bio. The portrayal of Israelis as one part Navy SEALs, one part Eurotrash is funny and does have a certain resonance if you grew up Jewish in America. Far from a good movie though. Other than that Billy Madison is sort of a generational classic but I'm certainly not going to say your life is incomplete if you never see it. (Never seen Happy Gilmore.)

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/22/2601178/miami-heats-eddy-curry-back-in.html Obviously this is sportswriting, so take some of the facts alleged within with a grain of salt, but it sure sounds like Curry lost quite a bit of weight to make it to the Heat. The guy is incredibly agile for someone of his size, so I suspect that most of the reason he never played was that learning to do things the Spoelstra way (especially focusing first on defense) took him a lot of time.

I don't get it, why do you guys think the Heat now needs an aging veteran at guard??? Whether it is Nash, or Allen??? Just to help out the teams losing them?? The Heat (like or or not) won without an aging guard. They had a couple other players who are aging, Howard for one, but they have their veteran in Wade, youth in Charlmers, Cole and there is one other young dude. Do you guys hate the Heat that much that you think Pat Riley is going to start stocking up on aging guards?? They won but the overall lack of depth was definitely a nagging concern. LeBron cannot play 45 minutes night in and night out like he did in the Finals. The key questions are whether the guys who weren't really in the regular rotation can step up and deliver quality minutes to replace Miller and maybe Battier, and that's difficult to gauge right now. Terrel Harris showed some encouraging signs but barely played except in garbage time. To me the real puzzle is what to do at center. Dexter Pittman looked overmatched throughout the year and Spoelstra appeared to have no confidence in Eddy Curry even though he worked his tail off to get in shape. If Curry puts in the mental effort needed to really be a good defender and work within the offense, the team could be really scary. Or maybe they will stick with more of the same and keep plugging Anthony/Turiaf/Haslem into the center spot.

aw jon - don't be a hater!!!!!!!!!! a welcome addition particularly when considering that miller is having (career ending?) back surgery in the off-season. Wouldn't Heat be looking for a bigger body to replace Miller, not a guard? this is a good point - but i think if Ray is available the heat won't pass him up! The only thing is, is that they don't need Ray (Heat has Lebron, Wade, Charlmers and Battiea to hit 3's) and if Ray still has that much left in the tank, the Celtics will keep him. If Ray is a free agent, then who is going to pay the money he would require for an aging guard?? Not the Heat, they are winning now. They don't need an aging veteran, they have young talent on the way up to groom with their present winning team. Wade is a fluky (at best) shooter from distance and Battier may not have more than another year left in him - his defense is starting to slip and his shooting this year was below average for him until his crazy Finals performance. LeBron can shoot the long ball but he needs other guys who can pose consistent 3-point scoring threats so he can be effective on the block. Of the other guys who could fit this role, Miller has the obvious injury downside, James Jones is getting old as well, needs WIDE-open looks to be consistent, and plays slipshod defense, and Norris Cole hasn't proven to be a deep threat yet though his Finals performance was certainly encouraging. Allen has pretty good career rebounding numbers despite his size, so that could make him a good replacement for Miller at the 2 spot. It will be interesting to see which route Riley goes - the last two years have sort of been along the lines of "find 'em old and cheap but get a bit more value for your money every year." I initially thought the big needs would be at PG and C but somehow everything worked with LeBron taking much of the role of running the offense and no true point guard (Chalmers and Cole are both 2-guards playing point out of necessity, like Russell Westbrook), and Bosh stepped into the role of center.

I don't think that's really an accurate representation of Will theory. Nobody denies that there's such a thing as playing hard or stamina (both the physical and mental variety). I can tell the difference between a defense that's loafing and one that's playing hard. But Will Theorists have exalted mental stamina - an internal mental state that we have no way of measuring ex ante - into this thing that is declared to often be a tremendously influential factor on outcomes in contests. I'm pretty sure that Kevin Durant's and Russell Westbrook's stamina had virtually nothing to do with the Thunder's loss. Likewise if you watch game 7 again of Heat-Celts 2012, a Will theorist would speculate that the Celtics ran out of mental Will in the 4th quarter and were thus no match for the Will of LeBron James. Whereas to anyone who followed the series it's pretty clear that the reason the Celtics eventually let the game slip away was that Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, and Kevin Garnett were on the verge of physical collapse after playing 40+ minutes and no amount of bending their own minds would have made their legs obey them to do what was necessary to win the game. If you want to claim that Will might have made them train harder to prevent that collapse or that Will was what made Mario Chalmers concentrate better this year and not make so many maddening turnovers, so be it. But do that and Will becomes such a general concept as to be meaningless. If every decision and action can be reduced to the product of Will, then Will just becomes synonymous with doing the concrete stuff you need to do to improve your performance, like improving your physical condition, skills, strategy, or concentration.

Especially because IIRC, at one point in the not too distant past (again IIRC), he had been regarded as a candidate to become Joe Pa's sucessor. Exactly. That's a big question mark for those who claim that Paterno was an old man and didn't have a clue about Sandusky. While it's plausible that the reason Sandusky was put out to pasture was simply professional disagreement with Paterno or some other boring, typical reason, it's just as plausible that Paterno knew at least that Sandusky was a creep and thought that forcing him into retirement was an acceptable substitute for going to the police and causing a big scandal.

Presumably GS's insane line of thinking is that since the jury acquitted Sandusky of the involuntary deviate sexual intercourse charge related to Victim 2 (the one McQueary saw), Paterno must have been correct in not going to the authorities about what McQueary saw. The problem with this is that the jury was actually quite sure that Sandusky did SOMETHING wrong to Victim 2, but since McQueary could not remember seeing actual penetration and Victim 2 himself never came forward as a witness, they could not say with certainty that this specific charge was proven. Also, there's a catch-22 here - if Paterno had immediately gone to the police after McQueary came to him, then the cops likely could have obtained evidence that would have allowed them to immediately find Victim 2, whose testimony would have likely been enough for a guilty charge on this count. IOW, the only reason that Paterno was "vindicated" was that his own negligence or outright coverup attempt managed to prevent an effective investigation of what McQueary saw.

There are myriad human characteristics that cannot be scientifically measured. Doesn't mean they don't exist. I think what you're missing here is that there's a difference between things we haven't figured out how to measure yet and things that are definitionally circular and thus unfalsifiable, things that are by their posited nature impossible to measure. Will theorists roughly define will as "this thing people have, when they want to/need to win more than anyone else, which then causes them to win." How do we know when someone has more will? "Well, that's easy, though there's really only one surefire test. I just said that will causes people to win. So all you have to do is just look at who won!" Kind of like saying "hey look, I just wrote a book that says the world was created by the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in 6 days (he rested on the 7th). Don't worry, skeptics - we know this account to be true because it's in the book I just wrote!" You could rephrase Cuban's point this way: Assuming this whole will thing is real, then every single competition boils down to the following: Kevin Durant says he wants to win more than anyone else out there. LeBron James says...the same exact thing. As only one of them can win, one of the following must be the case: a) one of them is lying and knows he doesn't REALLY REALLY want to win that badly; b) neither of them is "lying", exactly, but one of them simply doesn't know that he actually wants to win less than the other guy does. This framework has a certain seductive appeal to the human psyche. We've all been in situations where we felt some doubt about our own motivation or when we felt no doubt but were bested anyway at whatever we were trying to accomplish. We struggle to put our finger on whatever it was that we didn't do right, can't think of where we went wrong, which makes us feel doubt about our abilities, so....we turn on the doubts themselves. It's gotta be Will. Will allows us a cop-out, a way we can resolve the dissonance caused by the combination of 1) the doubt that comes from failure and 2) our original belief that our plan to succeed was pretty good. Clearly we must fix the part of our minds that leads to those nagging doubts and weaknesses... those lead to more failure! Or to quote Farley: etc. I don't think this holds water. For one thing, playing sports comes with an acceptance of randomness. Luck happens. Sometimes that grounder hits a pebble in the infield and takes a bad hop, or the ball ricochets straight into Franco Harris's hands. Sometimes the other guy cramps while going up for a layup. And so on, down to even more mundane instances of randomness. Each basketball team gets about 100 possessions in every game. Average field goal percentage is about 45%. 45 shots go into the basket every night. But there will be deviations from this from night to night that don't necessarily have anything to do with the quality of defense. Sometimes only 43 shots go in. Sometimes 50 go in. It would be really bizarre if 90 or 4 went in, but as long as the number stays within the typical standard deviation around 45%, it's pretty much expected. But of course, changing that 45 to 42 or 47 can decide a non-trivial percentage of games. The point of being a coach is to maximize the chance that your team will hit their 47 while also doing stuff to try and push the other team's number down. This is sound strategy, but it's not going to work 100.0% of the time. Some nights Norris Fucking Cole comes off the bench and starts drilling 26-footers with a hand in his face even though he only typically makes 15% of contested shots from that distance. All this is to say that I think that saying this "will" thing is what ultimately decides games is actually more deterministic/fatalistic than focusing exclusively on skills, strategy, execution, and the like. If those who win invariably have more will, and will's something that we don't know how to understand or control, it just kinda happens to you, like maybe if you lost the year before or your grandpa died tragically right before the game or you just have midi-chlorians in your bloodstream or whatever... then that's pretty much akin to saying that your winning ability is a prisoner that's entirely controlled by your experiences. Not just the experiences that prevent you from working up enough will but also the experiences that juice you full of will. You only got the will in the first place because you didn't have enough will before! Or something. The San Antonio Spurs thus present an interesting case: oscillating will. In 2003, 2005, and 2007 it appears they had the will. Perhaps Tim Duncan's will disappears after each championship, only to return again the following offseason after being sent packing early.

A dangerous line of thinking. I hear athletes and coaches talk all the time about how Jesus Christ must have intervened in the outcome of games as a result of their unwavering faith in him; does the fact that they talk about it all the time mean there must be something to their idea? The "will to win" fallacy also runs rampant in bad scholarship around military issues. Here's IR scholar Robert Farley: Interesting, although whatever its motivations, this doesn't argue that Will doesn't exist (or, by extension, that it plays no role in outcomes). It simply questions whether A) Will can by itself determine or explain an outcome, and B) what is the moral/ethical basis of Will (in some instances), I suppose. No, it's closer to arguing that will doesn't exist. Farley is saying that from an analytical perspective, Will is the same kind of thing as the beliefs that define religions. You can't sense it, measure it, or even clearly define it. We can't say for sure it doesn't exist, just like we can't say for sure that an omnipotent supreme being assumed to be capable of hiding himself anytime he wants doesn't exist. But we can say that attempting to base any serious causal discussion of real-world events on it is going to be a pointless exercise. If we can't agree on what it is, who has it, exactly what it does or how you get more of it and so on and so forth, then it's a useless descriptive concept regardless of whether it really exists or not.

A dangerous line of thinking. I hear athletes and coaches talk all the time about how Jesus Christ must have intervened in the outcome of games as a result of their unwavering faith in him; does the fact that they talk about it all the time mean there must be something to their idea? The "will to win" fallacy also runs rampant in bad scholarship around military issues. Here's IR scholar Robert Farley: While undoubtedly losing last year was useful motivation for the Heat there's no way to measure just what would have gone differently if the motivation had been a little less. Where it's very easy to look at the games and pinpoint several causal factors that have only a very indirect relationship to Will. -The high-energy lineup that emerged with Mario Chalmers and Joel Anthony only at the end of 2011 got even better at defending in 2012 as the players got more experience. -The play at PG was stronger; Chalmers managed to cut down on many of his more egregious mistakes while shooting well from behind the arc. -Shane Battier was a consistently strong defender and gave the Heat another perimeter scoring threat with fewer of the liabilities of James Jones and Mike Miller. -LeBron greatly augmented his game in the post after working with Hakeem Olajuwon over the summer. -LeBron and Wade figured out how to play together and made what was an excellent fast break game into an unstoppable death machine. Even with all of this the Thunder had a good chance to win this Finals had it not been for several key changes by Spoelstra that exploited the weaknesses of the Thunder. I was skeptical of benching Anthony entirely in the Finals, but it worked; having to worry about doubling LeBron constantly on the block took Ibaka out of his post game, and he consistently failed to come out to the perimeter to challenge Battier, giving him wide-open looks. They also relentlessly attacked Durant's defense and succeeded at getting him into foul trouble, and did the same with the best Thunder wing defender (Sefolosha) in Game 5. Scott Brooks eventually gave up playing Sefolosha because he was desperate for more offensive firepower from James Harden and Derek Fisher, but this just didn't work. To be honest (and this is taking nothing away from LeBron) I think the Heat got moderately lucky in game 5 with all the open 3s going in. The game this reminded me most of was their regular season game 1/17/12 against the Spurs. Down 17 14 at the half with Wade out, suddenly everything started going in in the third quarter: While there were adjustments made at halftime, a lot of this was just a fluke. Gregg Popovich's defense wasn't notably bad; the basketball gods just decided to have everyone hitting from distance. The Heat got lucky enough to approach that touch in Game 5.

This is talking past Cuban a bit. I don't hear Cuban saying that coaching, play-calling, good execution, etc. are "all" that matters in determining outcomes in sports, but rather that stuff purporting to be legitimate sports analysis that relies heavily on things like emotions and "will" (and this makes up a very heavy chunk of the narrative-based discussion that ESPN peddles) is almost always facile and even unfalsifiable. It operates on the plane of heads I win tails you lose. Whenever the team wins, the will critic can always say "they had more heart and wanted it more," and whenever they lose despite appearing to "want it more," he can always fall back on blaming this or that player's lack of ability, or specific plays that weren't executed, etc. That's not to say that emotions don't matter at all in determining who wins and loses. But insofar as they do matter it's laughable to claim that ESPN or any other sports media org has any kind of a handle on how they translate to victories. Yes, Michael Jordan's personality in retrospect looks very much like he had the mythical "killer instinct" so beloved of sports reporting. But how do we know he simply wanted a title more than Reggie Miller or Patrick Ewing? Patrick Ewing is the guy who was being scolded by John Starks's mother for screaming at Starks on the court after getting ejected, and responded that if Starks ever got ejected again he'd "smack the living daylights out of him." Does that sound like a guy who doesn't want to win as much as Michael Jordan? The bit with Cuban's 2-year-old is simply pointing out that Bayless and Smith do virtually zero analysis of the plays themselves. First Take is 99.5% personality-based speculation. When LeBron doesn't hit three shots in a row, a rational observer would notice stuff like that missing three in a row is not a particularly unusual outcome, that maybe the shots were not from particularly favorable spots for James, that James was being guarded by an elite perimeter defender for two of them, and that the Heat had poor floor spacing that led to the shots being tightly contested. Whereas Bayless immediately sees this as an indication that James is "shrinking" and "not ready for the moment." While Mark Cuban has lots of money at his disposal for things like film review that allows him to acquire expertise at analyzing these things in depth, it's not like First Take couldn't employ similar people if it wanted to. This is simply not an excuse for Bayless and Smith's analytical incompetence. ESPN.com gets lots of good, fact-based analysis from the people at TrueHoop TV, it just knows that spending 98% of its airtime on the stuff that drives 98% of the outcome doesn't attract viewers like, say, having That Loud Guy At The Barbershop and the Obnoxious Keebler Elf ranting at each other about "heart" and personality defects for an hour.

I'm pretty surprised they bothered to invite him on. The whole point of the Bayless/Smith duo is that it's just dumb theater repeating the same CW over and over again (I admit that watching Smith go into manufactured outrage mode is a guilty pleasure). Having guests who one of them has savaged in the past like Chris Bosh adds a touch of realism to the whole fake exercise, but I've never seen a guest demolish the whole premise of the show like Cuban just did. I guess the producers figure that anyone who can't see through the schtick won't get that Cuban is tearing apart the whole concept that they find so compelling, and that everyone else will be entertained at the spectacle even though (or perhaps because) they see right through the BS narratives.

Funny how Cuban comes off as semi-likable only when he shares the screen with the Evil Keebler Elf.

Not a glitch - I accounted for this possibility with the "unaware how the system behaves." All I'm suggesting is that moderators take it easy a little bit before jumping down our throats. Even if they feel like they've taken too much crap from us about moderating. Very true. But can you see how this kind of misunderstanding comes about when Hans is the one making the last post before the thread is locked and directing people where to go? It's much more natural to think that one person is doing both the locking and the directing rather than that there's a tag-team effort with a moderator doing the locking and a non-moderator doing the directing.

Might be time to renew the Xanax prescription, Dan. I made that reply not to "hammer" Larry, but as constructive criticism. As for the "industry jargon" bit, I certainly wasn't trying to argue from a position of authority as some high-and-mighty industry insider but because the analogy to edge and corner cases seemed particularly apt here.

It's both. Larry, in industry jargon this is what's referred to as an edge case: SS1 had his thread locked and was promptly referred to a thread in the political forum, which he cannot read, so all URLs to threads there appear as broken links to him (also to users who are not logged in). It also does not show up when that user does searches. An unusual occurrence, but one that someone who's taken it upon themselves to steward the site should be aware of beforehand. Let's recap: 1. You reacted with "some search you did there" even though SS1 claimed he did a search. Which means you didn't check to confirm that SS1 can't view the politics forum or were unaware that that's how the system behaves. Wrong. 2. Then when SoaW confirmed that that is indeed how the system behaves - that users who cannot see the politics forum also won't see any thread in that forum in a search - your response was: No. No no no. Posting duplicate threads is not "flinging crap at the walls" unless the user can easily see the other thread. If by "flinging crap" you mean that SS1 posted this thread and assumed Hans was the one who locked it, well...a) it's just a thread, so time to chillax, b) that assumption does not strike me as unreasonable, considering both that Hans appended the link sending SS1 to a thread he cannot see and that Hans was a moderator at one point. It is not SS1's responsibility to keep track of who is and is not an actual moderator at any given time. Unless you want to make that "The moderating team" link on the forum homepage extremely obvious by putting it in 20 point font and placing it above the fold rather than wedged in with a bunch of other rarely-noticed links at the bottom. Also, if Hans really really doesn't want to be mistaken for a moderator, maybe he shouldn't be making the kind of tidying-up post that we usually associate with moderators. I'm sure he thought he was just saving you some time by chiming in, but obviously that backfired in this case. 3. A pretty cavalier approach for a moderator to take. In general it's bad form to expect your users to assume the existence of stuff they can't see. Take the extra 30 seconds and make a post explaining it rather than dashing off a sarcastic response. 4. Leaving aside the question of whether SS1's post here constituted an "accusation", again, this claim has a built-in assumption that users should always be thinking about the possibility of there being stuff they can't see. Nope. I'm sorry that moderators feel badgered and unappreciated, but trumpeting one's own ignorance of edge cases and putting a large burden of the due diligence on users even when that extends to weird cases of stuff they can't see or verify...it's not a good way to administrate a site.

The great Dahlia Lithwick. I'm not going to rant again about what I think our moderators should be prioritizing when they moderate, but I will say this: Larry, if you can't be bothered to think about the technical implications that stem from a decision of THREAD SMASH...you really need to find something else to be doing. Caring about how users experience your systems = Intertubes cardinal rule.

I actually emailed Jeff a while back when I discovered it but got no response. Guess he hasn't updated the JH discography in a while.

Some deservedly* obscure Joe Henderson is on the first track (Bessie's Blues) of this one from one of his students: http://fervidjazz.com/glen-simpson-live-cd.html . Found on Spotify. (*I say deservedly because while Joe of course plays great, this is very much a "semipro" record at best, and the drummer is particularly cringe-inducing.)

But leaving aside the obvious difference that most of the NBA games in 1962 were never even filmed, let alone given the media exposure or public attention of the 2012 NBA, even Wilt wasn't expected by anyone to do the kinds of stuff that's expected of Lebron. The onus to win a team game with individual effort is on Lebron in a way it never was on Wilt. That's all I'm saying. When people talk about why the Warriors couldn't beat the Celtics, nobody points their finger and says "Wilt couldn't get it done." The reverse is true for LeBron - rather than ask why no Heat role player could score consistently enough in the 2011 Finals to give LeBron some time to rest, instead the narrative is all about LeBron shrinking in the fourth quarter. Back then - and I was around - people did say, "Wilt couldn't get it done." There was always the comparison with Wilt and Bill Russell. Wilt got the numbers, but Russell got the championships. Similar to discussions today. Interesting. Today of course most of the discussion revolves around the Celtics having eight Hall of Famers during the stretch from 1960-62 (9 if you count Clyde Lovelette, 10 if you count Auerbach). The Warriors only had 3 (Chamberlain, Tom Gola, and Paul Arizin).