Shameless Plug!

Everyone should immediately drop what they're doing and check out Amanda's new website at:

www.amandareass.com.

She built the thing pixel by pixel and byte by byte, and, in my humble opinion, it looks great! Somebody give her a sweet job!

Apple saved the music industry?

A recent New York Times article about Steve Jobs strong-arming music industry executives finishes up with a quote: "if it weren't for Apple, God knows how bad the music industry would be"

Perhaps, and I think many would argue definitely, the music industry would be in the situation it is in without Apple, but let's not forget that, while illegal music downloads have been a problem since Napster, it exploded with the introduction and insane popularity of the iPod. It very well could be that if Apple had never come up with the user interface of the iPod, we'd all still be rockin' to a discman, and the music industry would be hunky-dory.

The article does make a point that is dead on: the music industry is providing the content that is allowing Apple to make a ton of money.

Ta-Da!

Out of my sling for 5 hours, and I got two cars and one boat to fit in the garage! It was a long month using only one arm. (This is my first experience with any injury that requires the immobilization of a limb to heal.) I owe Amanda big for shoveling the driveway, occasionally tying my shoes, and putting up my grumpiness over my condition; you're the greatest! I've still got pain in my shoulder, slightly limited mobility of my arm, and the muscles have atrophied, (I was huge before this, you know,) but just being able to use it is a huge relief. I had to bail on playing on the shop indoor soccer team, which I wasn't too excited about in the first place, but now that they're actually playing I'm a little bummed. I am going to try skiing this Sunday, I've fallen a couple times since the dislocation and managed to protect the arm/shoulder pretty well, and I generally stay upright on my skis, so it should be pretty fun!

When does it stop being cake?

Today my girlfriend was watching a competition on the Food Network for "extreme" (?) cake makers. While the cakes are amazing, I came away slightly baffled. Days old sheet cake covered in layer after layer of fondant (which apparently is some sort of modified flour paste that tastes terrible, but looks great on cake) doesn't seem like a particularly appetizing recipe, and of course these cakes are never consumed, nor were they meant to be.

This seems patently absurd to me. I realize that we're in some kind of grey area between food and art, but if you want to call it cake, shouldn't it be edible? That seems to be the essential element for anything called "cake." I can build a bike that weighs half the current state of the art, but if the gears don't shift, the brakes don't stop it , or it collapses under the weight of a rider, the weight doesn't matter, does it? What about sails that make a boat go incredibly fast but tear in winds over three knots?

When did we get to the point (this cake competition had a $10,000 first prize) of twisting skills like cake decoration from simply making something great, (everybody likes cake,) into something where people pay thousands of dollars for a product that is only aesthetic but is still represented as the real McCoy?

Is it salary caps or what?

I'm sort of a traditionalist when it comes to following sports. I can hold a much better conversation about baseball in the fifties than today's game, I prefer a 2-1 pitchers duel to the 14-11 homerfests we see so often now, and I like my favorite, (and least favorite,) players to more or less stick with one team. I think my waning interest in baseball is caused in part by the constant fluidity of the lineups.

Craig over at ShysterBall, who knows much more about these things than I, isn't a big fan of salary caps or the way the NFL treats its players. However, the league is very good at keeping marquee players at the same team for the majority of their careers. Tom Brady is a Patriot (*&!$* Michigan!) Ben Roethlisberger is a Steeler, etc., and they are likely to remain so for the rest of their careers, weird Brett Favre-iness notwithstanding. This makes it a lot easier for the casual fan to follow the league, because the players you expect to be playing for a given team that you haven't seen on TV for a year or two are still there. (I don't follow the NFL, I just go through football withdrawal every year after the collge season is over.)

I assume this is due to salary caps and the "franchise" tag, but it would be nice if baseball could come up with a way to for teams keep their marquee players. (I mean, c'mon, Wade Boggs and Roger Clemens each wore pinstripes. That's messed up.) We'd still find a way to mess it up, but I sure wish Jim Thome and CC Sabathia were still playing for the Tribe, just to mention a couple.

It's nothing new I'm saying, and I don't have a solution, but I'd like to see a little more stability in Major League Baseball. Oh well.

It's supposed to look like that, right?

Here in Columbus we're in the midst of one of those dreaded "wintry mix" storms that we see way too often.

Interestingly, last Tuesday night we had the same kind of storm which dropped a nice 1/8" layer of ice over much of the city. I decided that before I left early Wednesday morning I would get the trash can from the end of the driveway. (what a good boyfriend I am...) Naturally, it wasn't until I was all the way to the bottom of the driveway before the coefficient of friction dropped sufficiently, I fell heavily and my humerous and scapula decided to take a break from their long and close relationship.

That look you see above is actually a smile, you just have to look at it through the lens of a couple hours of intense pain, that's all.

I got the word today that I have another month of sling-wearing to look forward to, so my New Year's resolution to try to do some more regular posting will have to wait a little. Oh, and I'm super happy we decided to invest in a Wii...

The Old High School

A post on Tiger Stadium from Shyster today reminded me of a similar situation in Wooster back in ~'95. After many years of hearing about how dirty, unsafe and generally awful the old high school was, the city ponied up somewhere in the the neighborhood of $39 million to build a new one.

Everything was great, the students (we) spent the last few weeks of the final school year committing random acts of vandalism that never would have been tolerated in any other situation (let's face it, the teachers hated that building, too) and the next fall we moved to the glittering new palace of secondary education. Of course, someone decided that the old high school was an architectural landmark worthy of preservation and mounted a long and expensive campaign to save it.

The original plan had been to tear it down and build a nice, new, state-of-the-art elementary school but, thanks to the "preservationists" (This building was a pretty common looking neo-gothic circa 1915 building, nothing special as far as I can see) the plan changed to preserving the facade and building the grade school inside of it, at god knows how much additional cost, and we ended up with a ridiculously expensive three story (when's the last time they built a school with more than two? One assumes there's some kind of fairly plausible reasoning for that...) grade school.

Sounds a little like a "recreational and educational" center in a Major League ballpark. Or a research center in an old Lazarus store. Actually, the school sounds better, but still a waste...