Ok, that title is just inflammatory, but it’s not too far from the truth. I came across this article critiquing something Keillor wrote in the Baltimore Sun (??? – really… why the Baltimore Sun?).

http://www.minnpost.com/community_voices/2009/12/22/14492/cool_it_keillor_its_a_multicultural_world_out_there

You can read the original Keillor article from the Sun here.

Is this Keillor’s “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” moment? It certainly seems to come out of nowhere, and makes him sound like an incredible crank. Merry ****ing Christmas to you to sir!

Sports Illustrated ran an article this week about former NFL players who, frankly, aren’t doing very well. Carson Palmer, earlier this year, stated that his opinion was that someone would eventually die on the field. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about the alarming rate of concussions among football players, and a link from that to dementia. Gladwell, in a recent chat with ESPN’s Bill Simmons, also had this to say about the NFL:

“Yes, football has kind of been ruined for me, I’m afraid. Understand that I live for the game. But I’m increasingly of the opinion that it is screwed up — on a moral level — in a way that no other professional sport is.

Think about it. The league has a salary cap (which limits players’ pay), minimal health insurance for retirees and no guaranteed contracts. In other words, the owners reserve the right to limit the pool of money available to players, to walk away from contracts whenever they please and then hold no long-term responsibility for the health of the players whose contracts they have limited and declined to honor. Coal miners aren’t treated this badly. And now we strongly suspect a fourth fact: that some significant percentage of ex-players, as a direct result of playing professional football, will suffer from dementia in their 40s and 50s, in addition to all the known and significant other health risks of the game (severe arthritis, substantially elevated risk of heart disease, etc.).”

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It was the best of times it was the worst of times. Yes, it truly was the tale of two games over the past two weeks.
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Fantastic post. My favorite:

Bear sighting: An item in the National Briefing in Sunday’s Section A said a bear wandered into a grocery story in Hayward, Wis., on Friday and headed for the beer cooler. It was Thursday.

Interesting post here from Fake Steve – who, if you didn’t know, writes as a Steve Jobs impostor, if Steve were more comedian and less businessman. It starts out as a hypothetical ‘why AT&T’s network is sucking the fun out of the iPhone’ conversation, and turns into a ‘what’s wrong with America’. And while I’ll admit I have a bias on this particular segment of the ‘what’s wrong’ topic, he nails it:

“…Wall Street got involved and became everyone’s enabler, devoting all their energy and brainpower to breaking things up and parceling them out and selling them off in pieces and then putting them back together again, and it was all about taking all this great shit that our predecessors had built and “unlocking value” which really meant finding ways to leech out whatever bit of money they could get in the short run and let the future be damned. It was all just one big swindle, and the only kind of engineering that matters anymore is financial engineering.”

Yep.