Random adaher thoughts

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Things I’ve been thinking about that aren’t worth threads, but I figured I’d share with you lovely people for my own edification:

Trump is the worst candidate for President ever.

Hillary Clinton is not actually the second worst candidate for President ever, but sometimes it sure seems like it. She’ll probably end up being a very good President, all things considered. But it sure is hard to like her sometimes.

The facts have a liberal bias, but sometimes they don’t. Examples: free trade, fracking, anti-gouging laws, GMOs, occupational licensing, local cartels(such as taxi companies), education reform, and government performance(as in, generally laughable unless things are kept really simple).

Since liberals actually care about empiricism, there are many liberals who agree with conservatives on the above issues.

The governor of Minnesota said that Philandro Castile would probably be alive today if he was white. Why? The cop that shot him was Latino. Do Latinos give whites the benefit of the doubt more than they do blacks?

What does it say about me that I think Michael Bay is one of the greatest directors of all time?

Is it wrong that I still love and watch re-runs of the Cosby show despite knowing what kind of man he is? Can’t I still love the character of Cliff Huxtable even if I can no longer love the actor, Bill Cosby? I still enjoy watching Chris Benoit wrestling matches, and seeing OJ Simpson in movies too.

It seems to me that the best preparation for being a successful politician is to be an actor, comedian, or professional wrestler. All three involve a lot of public speaking and a lot of pretending. Has there ever been an actor, comedian, or professional wrestler who has been a poor politician? I guess Arnie qualifies, but then he’s not exactly a great actor to begin with so that could explain that.

The next best preparation for politics IMO is to be in the military. The military teaches you when to be diplomatic and when to be blunt. I find that most politicians who haven’t served either are never direct or shoot from the hip all the time. Maybe it’s just my perception, but it seems to me that ex-military folks always pick the right time to just lay it on the line, and are thus taken more seriously when they do.

Is there any point to watching the first three quarters of a basketball game? When is a basketball game ever won early?

I think managers/coaches get fired far out of proportion to the actual blame they deserve. If a coach is good, and he seems to be doing his job the way you expect, then he’s probably not the problem. And I think teams prove it by hiring coaches that have been fired again and again. Look, these guys are either good at their jobs or not. If they are good, they should keep their jobs even during the down years. If they are not, they shouldn’t be hired a second or third time. Colleges seem to get this better than the pros. Once a coach has proven he can run a program they stick with him even when he has a few bad years. In the pros, hall of fame-caliber coaches can get fired for losing in the playoffs.

Books are awesome but they never seem to be as funny as movies. I hear that movies often hire professional comedians to “punch up” a script. Authors perhaps should do the same. There are some comedic authors who are actually very funny, but they specialize in it. Fantasy and scifi authors tend to be rather poor at including comedy in their stories.

Supernatural horror sucks. The movies always have great buildup but the payoff is usually lame. Has anyone ever actually watched a supernatural horror and been blown away by the revelation of what’s really going on or how it was resolved? The only supernatural horror movies I’ve ever truly enjoyed are Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity. Yet I always give new ones a chance to impress me because I know if someone gets it right, it’ll be AWESOME.

Wrestling sucks. Yet it’s another thing I watch because I just know that if someone ever figures out how to do wrestling right that it will rule. So I keep hoping, and I do savor the moment when it’s actually awesome. But I have to sit through about 100 hours of suck to get to one moment of cool. Someone needs to just break away from all the traditional tropes and create something totally new. It seems like they are using all the stuff that worked when wrestling shows just went from town to town, but now wrestling is on for 12 hours a week! You can’t just keep doing the same things week after week.

I lived through the evolution of home video games and I don’t get what people saw in 1st person shooters in their early years. Nowadays, when first person shooters are incredibly immersive, I see the appeal. But when I first played Doom or Quake I thought it was pretty lame. I thought 3D games in general were lame due to the difficulty without the benefit of immersion. The only games worth playing up until 2000, at least for me, were 2D games.

Why do they call video game RPGs “RPGs”? I see no role playing. I played D&D in the 80s and 90s, that’s roleplaying. There’s no roleplaying element to video game RPGs. I do enjoy them, don’t get me wrong, but it’s more like a typical adventure game with RPG stats. I guess they just call it that because of the use of stats and a combat and levelling system?

In modern society, people really need to figure out what will make them happy. I think a lot of people just assume that they are supposed to have a career, get married, have kids, etc. And even with our more modern sensibilities of what constitutes a family, we still seem to see the path to happiness as impossible without a mate of some sort. But some people are better off on their own. But that’s one norm that society still can’t seem to wrap their head around. If you’re single and happy that way, your friends will still try to fix you up and your parents will want to know when you’re going to “settle down”. And as for careers, what if you don’t have any real interests? What if you are one of those people who can live comfortably on very little money, so you just want to drive part time for Pizza Hut, rent a room somewhere, and spend the rest of your time doing whatever? Society seems to consider such people “losers” even though they place no burden on society and do no harm. No, a loser is a guy who fathers 8 kids out of wedlock, supports none of them, but somehow manages to afford a nice car and jewelry and big screen TV. The guy who works 20 hours a week and watches TV and sleeps the rest of the time isn’t a loser, he’s supporting himself just fine in the manner he desires and isn’t bothering anyone. Same goes for trust fund kids who just want to play video games all day. Their parents left them enough money to live on and they have no ambition. I got no problem with that. They aren’t picking my pocket and that’s what makes them happy.

I am an atheist and yet the people I like the best are people who are very religious. My wife is very religious and it’s often frustrating not being able to do certain things with her, like watch R-rated movies or talk about science, but I’ll never find anyone more loving or faithful or serene. And that’s gone for most of my friends too. I got no problem with watching R-rated movies alone in any case.

I have finally learned enough Spanish to find out that English speakers are not the only ones who do violence to their own language. I had the privilege of trying to decipher an email in Spanish today where I understood every word but none of it made any sense. Grammatical errors, spelling errors, wrong tenses… Argh! It’s gotta be so challenging to learn a foreign language when no one anywhere seems to know how to write properly.

In that vein, there are signs in my bathroom at work in English, Spanish, and Kreyol. The English and Spanish ones say, “Please keep this bathroom clean, it is everyone’s responsibility” approximately. My wife is Haitian so I know some Kreyol(I have about a 4-year old’s vocabulary at this point), and although I don’t know what the Kreyol sign says, I know it doesn’t say anything close to what the Spanish and English signs say. WheN I asked a Haitian employee to translate it for me, he read it, chuckled, and said, “don’t worry about it.” Now I’m really curious.

What is going through someone’s head when they play music so loud the whole area can hear it? Is there any world in which that is not rude?

2

I actually read that whole thing…

Cherry-picking commentation: (just call me Spooner.)

Hillary may just be the second worst candidate ever, but she’ll be fine as Prez. Not gonna get into the issues, because that’s a thread apiece at least.

That you’re a Michael Bay fan says to me that you watch movies more for entertainment value than intellectualism.

Hey, I hate Tom Cruise but love a number of his movies, so I don’t see a conflict with Dr. Huxtable.

Military experience is one of those universals that almost always gives a candidate a leg up. Doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily win, but it’s an advantage.

A lot of the coaching thing has to do with inside factors that the public doesn’t see. There’s often a struggle for authority that interferes with smooth operation…chemistry issues…team culture…PR. Winning is a salve a lot of the time, but even that doesn’t mean coaches are safe. Lookin’ at you, 49’ers. Betcha wish you had that do-over.

Yeah, comedy is a very specific skill that doesn’t necessarily translate between media.

One (1) movie has ever scared me in the horror sense, and that when I was 15…the original Amityville Horror. James Brolin was tee-rific in that movie. (Others were more existential, and not horror movies: Fatal Attraction, The Shape of Things.)

I have no problem with religion until somebody tries to evangelize me. And it happens most of the time I meet a religious person. They just won’t get it, like if they talk at me enough I’ll ‘see the light.’

A lot of those signs are made by companies who use translators that haven’t got a clue…I see that all the time with Spanish. (Or maybe it’s Markoff Chaney…)

One world: Bedford-Stuyvesant of Do the Right Thing. Radio Raheem is da man, unless you’re Sal or Pino.

The MGT.

3

I do not know all the candidates for president ever. Do you mean Trump is the worst candidate on a major ticket? Even with that, I’m guessing in the nations 200+ year history there has probably been someone worse.

The 90s first person shooter (FPS) games were actually pretty awesome. I loved playing Quake, Doom, team fortress, etc.

As for your spiel about following your dreams, most people have the same philosophy of the culture they were born into. They have the same religion, same civic beliefs, same beliefs about life and who/what is valuable and what isn’t. This isn’t a bad thing, because life is dangerous and the ideas that withstand the test of time probably withstand it because they are good ideas. Example: The foods that a person will find disgusting are supposedly the foods they see adults find disgusting when they are toddlers. If you are a toddler and people are disgusted by eating bugs, you will be too as an adult. If they eat them, so will you. You are learning by observing because the adults must know what they are doing. It takes a lot of work to break free of the mold of the society you were born into. Lots of people (myself included) just mindlessly pursued the same profession as their parents because of it. This is why religions survive for thousands of years, because every 20-30 years a new generation is born that believes the same thing as their parents.

The most common job of a politician pre politics is lawyer by a very large margin.

4

[QUOTE=adaher]
Is it wrong that I still love and watch re-runs of the Cosby show despite knowing what kind of man he is? Can’t I still love the character of Cliff Huxtable even if I can no longer love the actor, Bill Cosby? I still enjoy watching Chris Benoit wrestling matches, and seeing OJ Simpson in movies too.
[/QUOTE]

Here is a thoughtful back-and-forth between MorphinePoet and our other posters about this topic. Should artwork be judged by the artist's person? - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board They are much more eloquent than I, so I can only say that after reading that thread my conclusion is “it depends, weighted towards ignoring the artist’s actions and appreciating art on its own merits.”

[QUOTE=adaher]
Books are awesome but they never seem to be as funny as movies. I hear that movies often hire professional comedians to “punch up” a script. Authors perhaps should do the same. There are some comedic authors who are actually very funny, but they specialize in it. Fantasy and scifi authors tend to be rather poor at including comedy in their stories.
[/QUOTE]

I see your point, the movie as a medium allows for a greater variety of comedic interaction with the audience; while reading a highly funny author, such as Douglas Adams writing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, mostly is stuck writing with a dry sarcastic English wit, as that is best conveyed through text. To be fair, have you seen the movie Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? it is much worse than the book. I guess compressing thousands of pages into 2 hours and replacing our imagination with cheap props/makeup sours the experience for me.

[QUOTE=adaher]
Wrestling sucks. Yet it’s another thing I watch because I just know that if someone ever figures out how to do wrestling right that it will rule. So I keep hoping, and I do savor the moment when it’s actually awesome. But I have to sit through about 100 hours of suck to get to one moment of cool. Someone needs to just break away from all the traditional tropes and create something totally new. It seems like they are using all the stuff that worked when wrestling shows just went from town to town, but now wrestling is on for 12 hours a week! You can’t just keep doing the same things week after week.
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Have you seen Lucha Underground? It is on the Itunes store, or watch snippets of it on youtube first. But it is episodic (Mexican) wrestling done right, with just the right amount of in/out of the ring soap opera and consistently intense wrestling matches of the kind that the WWE does not give us anymore.

[QUOTE=adaher]
I am an atheist and yet the people I like the best are people who are very religious. My wife is very religious and it’s often frustrating not being able to do certain things with her, like watch R-rated movies or talk about science, but I’ll never find anyone more loving or faithful or serene. And that’s gone for most of my friends too. I got no problem with watching R-rated movies alone in any case.
[/QUOTE]

Can’t talk about science, Wat? There are many exciting sciency concepts that you both could probably appreciate together that do not step on religion’s toes. Have you seen TED talks? https://www.youtube.com/TED/videos they talk on many different topics, and are short at 5-20 min each. How about Alton Brown’s Good Eats on the Food Network? It goes into the science of cooking and why we should do X to Y in order to maximize its flavor. Nature/Space/etc documentaries on the Discovery channel or NOVA? If they ever do talk about religious ideas, it is always tangentially and with respect. There are other Youtube personalities that go more into interesting sociology or math concepts such as Vsauce https://www.youtube.com/Vsauce1/videos or politics and history, such as CGP Grey https://www.youtube.com/greymatter/videos . I feel that any of these videos can be shared as good conversation starters.

5

Yeah, lawyers are the majority, but it seems to me that some professions see a higher success rate in politics.

6

I think this is generally true, but not in every case.

At the professional level managers and coaches do not make strategic decisions very differently from one another. There is really only so much variance among coaches in terms of how to run a team’s in-game decisions. This seems to be what radio callers babble about the most but really it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference if Shlabotnik hits sixth or seventh in the order.

At that level what really matters is the coach/manager commanding the confidence of the players and ensuring no major personnel problems arise. If you look at it that way, it is highly plausible that Coach Smith will be competent in 2013, but inept in 2016, because his personnel are different. Unlike normal businesses, on a pro sports team the workers are substantially more valuable commodities than the players. If your coach can’t get along with Sidney Crosby, who do you get rid of?

Another theory, which I believe was espoused by Bill James, is that coaches make themselves obsolete by changing the team’s needs; what the coach is good at will initially help but then the coach’s weaknesses will become apparent when they are the team’s weaknesses. When Cito Gaston became manager of the Blue Jays in 1989 he inherited a highly talented team that was wildly underperforming - they were 12-24 when he was made manager - because the team was fractious and angry and the manager didn’t get along with anyone and made weird decisions. Gaston was a dignified, commanding presence who played his in-game hand very conservatively; his strengths mitigated the team’s problems. Boom, they became the best team in the majors.

After a number of years, though, those veteran players started getting old… and Gaston could not deal with that, because Gaston could not relate to, or mentor, rookie players. He didn’t trust them, and especially did not trust them if they were not like he was (a right handed power hitter) so he ran veterans into the ground and stalled the development of highly skilled youngsters. The team fell apart. Gaston was exactly wha the team needed in 1989 but was fired for good reason in 1997.

This might explain why good college coaches last. Unlike a pro sports team, a college team is ALWAYS in a state of “teach the kids to play.” There is not, as there is with a pro team, a life cycle of rebuild/contend/hold on.

7

I saw the movie, liked it, but the book was better. I just thought that people who write books that expect to sell major numbers of copies, the publisher should consider hiring some comedians to read it and add some funny lines. That’s really all they do with movies and it doesn’t affect the artistic integrity of a story to do so. It just helps the author do what the author wanted to do but wasn’t really good at.

I have watched three episodes of Lucha Underground and I think they are definitely putting some original ideas in there. I don’t think it’s awesome yet, but hopefully WWE learns some things from it or someone with a lot of money starts a new national promotion that can compete like WCW did.

She SAYS she likes science, but when we talk about it I just get lectured, because almost any scientific subject can come back to God. And I have nothing against the idea of God, I just don’t think you can use God in scientific conversations because God is just the name we have for things we don’t understand yet. Plus she believes in a lot of things she’s seen on TLC. She insists that ancient peoples had supercomputers and various other amazing technologies. Now granted, there are some wondrous things ancient cultures did that we can’t even duplicate ourselves, but they did not have an internet or Michael Bay movies.

8

It wouldn’t surprise me at all. Even black officers sometimes treat black suspects worse than they should. The race of the “suspect” matters a whole lot more than the race of the cop, from what I recall reading.

9

I think you’re wrong about fracking. The evidence of pollution in drinking water is hard to deny, as well as the causation of earthquakes. It is a bad technology.

10

This is somewhat akin to observing that McDonald’s is more popular than the really awesome restaurant up the road from me, JAC’s Bistro, and therefore JAC’s should start selling Big Macs.

Books and movies do not have wholly identical audiences and don’t convey humor the same way. What works when performed on stage or film does not necessarily work in print; the manner of delivery, blocking, lighting, and editing all have a lot to do with how things are funny in film. Timing is a completely different concept entirely. What sounds very funny in a movie will look immensely stupid in a book, and what works as funny in a book is hard to convey perfectly in a movie.

Books that try to be a series of jokes get very, very boring very fast. For examples, read Dave Barry’s novels, “Big Trouble” and “Tricky Business.” “Big Trouble,” which was made into a movie, is actually funnier than the movie, but it’s exhausting; by the end the jokes just start to run together and become dull. Barry is a surprisingly good fiction writer but the need to fit a joke into almopst every paragraph is exhausting; on the few occasions he breaks away and becomes serious for a moment it’s remarkably enjoyable because you’re sick of the jokes.

11

Aaron Burr, Millard Fillmore (in 1856), James Buchanan, John C. Breckinridge, Horatio Seymour, Warren Harding, and John W. Davis among others would like to disagree with you.

Supernatural horror as a genre works best in literature imo. Lovecraft’s stories are great but they don’t translate well into film/TV.

They are-intentionally or not-parasites sitting on vast mounds of unearned wealth which could be put to better use by society. If they can live like that when we skim them off with 95% inheritance tax, then that’s fine although we might need their warm bodies down the line for use on the Manchurian or Ukrainian fronts.

Why are you not able to talk about science with your wife due to her religiosity? Is she of a sect which denies certain aspects of science?

12

[Mitch Hedburg]Following my dreams has turned out to be too much work. I’m gonna find out where my dreams are going and just meet them there.[/MH]

13

Relocated to MPSIMS from IMHO.

14

Jack Handy’s got nothing on the OP.

15

We’re gonna need a new quarry.

16

I’m with you on this. I’m 41 and at this point with many people my age (and many of my friends), they’re really reaping the fruits of their career-- moving up the ladder, making good money, gaining more “power,” etc. A few years ago, I was on a similar trajectory, but the stress and travel requirements were turning me into a person I didn’t like. The awesome money and career path wasn’t worth it if my wife and kids never saw me, and when they did, I was a grump or thinking about work. So I walked away.

Now today, I do have a day job running a small non-profit (which I’m feeling the urge to walk away from sooner rather than later), which pays me a lot less than I was making before, but it pays our bills. However, the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is that my wife and I are slowly growing our small lawn and garden business (fourth year in!) and we’ve been doing decent with an eBay business for a while now, and we invest-- three things that we* love doing.* Sure, we don’t have the disposable income we once did, or that most people our age have-- and at times, I’ll admit, that sucks-- but we’re doing okay, and for the first time in a long time, we’re making money doing stuff we actually enjoy, cultural norms be damned.

I told my wife recently that I just don’t like having my entire income and worth tied to a boss, I don’t like a full time day job that requires me to be somewhere and answer to someone at a specific time for 8+ hours. I’d rather spend the rest of my life busting my ass on things I enjoy and doing cool part-time gigs that are fun (manual labor in a microbrewery, freelance writing, social media consulting, working the counter at a seed-and-feed, etc). Call me a professional hustler, of the legal variety, cobbling together enough money on a bunch of little enjoyable things in life.

Our culture might say I’m a slacker or unmotivated or whatever, but my motivation is having free time, doing things I enjoy and spending a lot of time with my family. I work hard to make this happen, it’s just not the hard work that our culture sees as “normal.”

Speaking as a Christian, I believe in science and I love R-rated movies.

17

What a ridiculous list. There are strong facts to support a mainstream liberal position on every one of those issues (yes, even GMO opposition, although in this case the facts involve disruption to economic structures and monopolies on GMO technology by companies instead of government-funded research). Claiming that liberals that care about empiricism agree with conservatives is absurd.

18

Michaell Ondaatje (“In the Skin of a Lion”) calls them:
“Those half-formed people who were born with money and who did nothing but keep it like a thermometer up their ass.”

19

You’re making a distinction between the candidate and the President. Seems to me like he is the best candidate ever when it comes to hammering on crooked Hillary. If he’s elected, I think that will be a big factor.

20

I agree as well. While I have a wife and kids, I realized that the whole white collar workplace scheme is a bunch of BS some time ago. Too much of a popularity contest, and too one-sided- the company expects a whole lot out of you, but you can’t reliably expect anything out of them but what they’re legally bound to provide you, like regular and accurate paychecks. I figured I was better off playing it my own way, even if that doesn’t get me promoted or into any positions of authority. It does however, mean that I see my kids and wife a lot, and am not particularly stressed most of the time.