Eight Crazy Days Until Graduation

Sometimes I have faith in YU as an institution. Most of those times follow directly from speaking with/listening to/reading things written by Paula Geyh. (She even knows about parkour! How cool?)

But other times, I receive memos like the one which was surreptitiously slid beneath my door this afternoon by some faceless University Housing lackey.

Here goes with the entire text:

Memo

To: Students of IHP

From: Yeshiva University--Wilf Campus
Office of University Housing and Residence Life

The University has been working on upgrading and beautifying out campus and your cooperation is greatly appreciated.

There have been reports of students throwing trash out of their windows. For your safety and the safety of others throwing trash out of a window is not allowed in any of the Residence Halls or IHP Apartments.

Seriously?

I'm surprised that the author of this memo appeals only to concerns of safety, and not, you know, concerns of quality of life.

Also, is there really a danger to the thrower? I guess it could cause death or really bad music.

Baseball is Exhausting

Like all good bloggers, I spent my vacation reading through the 600 page, 2008 edition of Baseball Prospectus. I still don't know how to calculate MLVr or VORP, but I understand basically what those numbers represent, and, crucially, that having high ones of those means that you are a good baseball player.

Leitch reported these feelings from his nerdy escapades:

the cumulative effect was to convince us that everyone in baseball over the age of 28 is doomed. Nothing makes us feel older than Baseball Prospectus; everyone freaking peaks at 28 in that book. How depressing.

While Leitch took the perspective of the ballplayers, leading to depression, I identified more with the decision-makers responsible for determining which of those ballplayers are good, leading to exhaustion.

Since I love talking about the Rockies on these here interwebs (and might just get the chance to see them in Coors during my Denver-vention), let's take a look at two of their middle of the order hitters from last season, Garret Atkins (3B) and Brad Hawpe (RF). Atkins is entering his age 28 season, coming off a year in which he was worth about 35 more runs to his team than that offered by a replacement level standard. Hawpe, entering his age 29 season, bested Atkins with a VORP of 37.4. These numbers aren't the best in the league, but they're solid. And according to BP, both these guys are expendable. Not that they're killing the Rockies this year, but that these guys are finished products, not liable to improve, which means they're going to start getting expensive in arbitration/contract negotiations.

My thought is this: O'Dowd just put together the team that won the National League, led the organization to believe that it was a good idea to trademark Rocktober, and still, it's time to part ways with two of the guys responsible for getting him that far.

It seems much easier to just resign these guys, instead of breaking in some cheap replacements. No wonder Washington is paying Dmitri Young $5,000,000 this year.

A Tribute

This kinda happened by accident, but I noticed that that in two out of three papers for my 19th C. European Intellectual History class I have managed to incorporate some variation of the locution which doubles as the title of the greatest television program this side of 1998 : Arrested Development.

(Those crazy German Romantics really like writing about the development of man and also things which arrest that development. See, it's easy!)

Here are the two examples:

• Each believes that a deeper societal concern at once dehumanizes man and arrests his development.
• Novalis may concede that the reliance on clergymen arrests the mental development of the ordinary man, but that seems to be a concession readily granted...

I think this is a fitting tribute to a fantastic TV show. If we all work together--all three people who have read this blog more than once--and make sure that we utilize some variation of the phrase "Arrested Development" in every paper, blog post, email, google-chat, etc. we can simultaneously confuse our professors/email recipients but also, and more importantly, memorialize a show which deserves our respect.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

Background: The holy sabbath begins at 4:15 PM, which means that even after the large three-course meal (the Jew's weekly Thanksgiving), dinner is over by 6:30 PM. After a long week, there is only one recourse: lying down on the couch--under a blanket--with a book (this particular week's choice: William Gibson's Pattern Recognition). Which means that I am fast asleep by 7:00 PM. On the couch. Most weeks I manage to wake up after half of an hour, maybe forty minutes. Last week, I slept--on the couch--until 10:00 PM.

Now, I'm faced with the Crux: I want desperately to sleep normal human hours at night. A three-hour nap starting at 7:00 PM does not bode well for sleeping normal human hours at night. I figure if I can get myself into bed within three minutes (never has a number been more arbitrarily decided) I should be able to prepare myself for night-sleep without fully awakening. To accomplish this task--suit pants to keep unwrinkled, bathroom to use, teeth to brush--within the self-allotted 180 seconds, I need to summon an intense level of concentration.

Play-by-Play: Concentrating intently, I manage to do all those things within three minutes, and climb into bed at 10:03 PM. Where I proceed to lie sleepless for the next 35 minutes.

Conclusion: Giving up hope for normal human hours of sleep tonight, I go downstairs, back on the same couch, under the same blanket, reading the same book. I continue doing this for more than four hours, until almost 3:00 AM. Good times.

Moral: The intense concentration needed to get ready for bed before your body/mind can fully awake seems to, unfortunately, constitute the very awakeness which I so hoped to avoid.

Another Moral: Don't fall asleep on the couch Friday nights if you hope to enjoy sleeping normal human hours that night.

Last Moral: Sigh.

A Procession of Simulacra

I've been thinking a bit about how the line dividing the real and the unreal is eroding. I guess reading Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" will do that to a guy.

An important excerpt:

Such would be the successive phases of the image:

• it is the reflection of a profound reality;
• it masks and denatures a profound reality;
• it masks the absence of a profound reality;
• it has not relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum

• 
  

Baudrillard believes that we're in that fourth stage, where things are meant to evoke a past or a present that never, in fact, existed.

The point, in my mind, is that it's not so clear that there is such a thing as fiction/fantasy anymore, because it's all, in a sense, real.

I really like Don DeLillo's White Noise, especially the part about the SIMUVAC (short for "simulated evacuation") technicians dealing with a real life evacuation treat the unexpected event as practice for their simulations: "Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?" (The answer to this question is: Yes. Yes, they did see that chance.)

A few other, non-literary, examples are in order. Here's one. Here's another. Both are posts from kottke.org, which seems to have developed an interest in the last coupla days in products that started out as fictional but soon became "real." Adam Lisagor, guest editor of kottke.org for the week, calls this phenomenon defictionalization, which has a nice ring to it.

Here's another one, about the dilemma facing fantasy sports owners who are torn between rooting for their fake team or their real team.

The desert of the real itself.

I'm Back

I'm going to give this blogging thing another shot, partially because my rooming mate, Ariel, asked me to, and partially because I've been mired in this type of semester-long writer's block, and feel like just getting out there and writing without really thinking too much might serve me well.

So here's to writing without thinking: the reason the Interwebs exist.

If I was forced to provide a second reason why the Interwebs exist I would go with this: the popularization of fake/new holidays. Here's only a partial list, every item of which I came up with without so much as googling "fake holidays."

• Festivus--of Seinfeld fame, now the proud inspiration for this website.
  
• Talk Like a Pirate Day--celebrated on September 19th, this holiday holds special significance for Pastafarians, probably history's greatest religion based on worshiping a complex carbohydrate.
  
• Repeal Day--this holiday symbolizes all that is right about blogger/mainstream media cooperation. (This post from the great deadspin.com represents all that is wrong about that relationship.) Jeffrey Morgenthaler, a bartender/blogger (would there be any career choice more disheartening to a Jewish parent?) from Eugene, Oregon, decided that December 5th, marking the anniversary of the passage of the 21st Amendment, which repealed the 18th Amendment, thereby ending prohibition allowing people to drink once more. Dewar's picked up on this idea and ran with it, relentlessly advertising the concept started by one lonely blogger. Morgenthaler, all too happy to see his idea take off, did not get ticked off that someone stole his idea. The person with the big brain came up with a good idea, and the people with the big bucks paid to advertise it. There are now nine facebook groups/events celebrating the day. Seems like a success to me.
  

Stay wet, San Diego.

Eureka!

It took months of emailing, but I finally learned the answer to the question that has been gnawing away at me like that unfortunate tapeworm incident last year: For how long is a new thing considered to be new?

This is the email I sent to the nice folks at Pringles:

I noticed that some of your delicious Pringles Select products, such as the Sun Dried Tomato flavored chips, are labeled as "NEW". I wonder, however, how long these chips will bear such a distinction. Practically every chip is newer than the Orignal chips which debuted in October 1968. How long is a given product considered to be "NEW"?

Thank You.

Nothing so extraordinary about this question; it follows the same archetype I used for all my emails of this genre.

The answer, however, is something special:

Thanks for contacting Pringles.

Generally speaking, a product (or new version or size or attribute) is considered "new" for approximately six months. Pringles Select began shipping to stores across the nation in December 2006.

Stop by anytime.

Ruth
Pringles Team


P.S. Introducing Pringles Minis! Get that same great Pringles taste in a new bite-sized crisp. Look for Pringles Minis at a store near you!

Six months. Six months. Was that so hard, Pepperidge Farm Web Team?

Pringles has the best customer service department ever.

Ruth, from the Pringles Team, is a saint. Not only did she answer my direct question, but she also taught me something about Pringles Select chips.

I especially love the P.S. message which is so obviously automatically appended to every email Saint Ruth sends out.

Also, while I totally appreciate her invitation to "Stop by anytime," I can't hide my confusion. I should stop by the website? Is that a legitimate collocation? The Pringles factory? Ruth's apartment?

Ruth, if you're reading this, continue your benevolent streak of answering life's unanswerable questions.


[This, in all likelihood, will be the last update of this blog for the summer. Fear not, Snowmen! We'll be back in the autumn with more stuff.]