{"id":2150,"date":"2007-01-09T12:31:15","date_gmt":"2007-01-09T17:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wordpress\/2007\/01\/potpourri_6\/"},"modified":"2007-01-09T12:31:15","modified_gmt":"2007-01-09T17:31:15","slug":"potpourri_6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2007\/01\/potpourri_6\/","title":{"rendered":"Potpourri"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>A bunch of people on TV news are all aflutter about President Bush&#8217;s upcoming speech on his &#8220;new&#8221; plan for Iraq.  I think I can save everyone the drama.  If you want to know the &#8220;plan&#8221; you can get a preview in three easy steps:<br \/>\n(1)  Go to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/\">White House website<\/a>,<br \/>\n(2)  In the Iraq section, dig up &#8220;Strategy for Victory&#8221; 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, [how many ever versions we&#8217;ve gone through], and<br \/>\n(3)  Reword the headings, change the font, and throw in a few new graphs and bullet points.<br \/>\nThat will pretty much be it.<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonian.com\/articles\/people\/3044.html\"><em>Washingtonian<\/em> asks<\/a> if Washington would be better with more writers like Malcolm Gladwell.  I haven&#8217;t read any of Gladwell&#8217;s books, but I&#8217;ve seen him on C-SPAN several times, and he&#8217;s interesting.  You have to admire a writer who comes up with a contest like this:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>The mischief peaked with what Gladwell refers to as &#8220;the contest.&#8221; He and another young science reporter, William Booth, chose a phrase and competed to see who could insert it in the newspaper faster. The contest culminated with the phrase &#8220;perverse and often baffling.&#8221;<br \/>\nBooth wrote a story on mollusks. &#8220;The copy desk took out &#8216;often,&#8217; &#8221; he says in the recording, &#8220;arguing, I think correctly, that mollusks were either baffling or they weren&#8217;t.&#8221;<br \/>\nFinally, with the clock ticking, Gladwell struck gold. He discovered that Washington is home to both the country&#8217;s highest number of gastroenterologists per capita as well as the highest fees for gastroenterology, flying in the face of supply-and-demand rules.<br \/>\nBaffling indeed, and possibly perverse&#8211;at least by the standard of Post editors. Gladwell won the contest.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s not everyone who can go off the beaten path into academic research and crank out an interesting article or book.<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>What is up with the <a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/20070109\/ap_on_bi_ge\/oil_prices\">price of oil<\/a>?  $54 a barrel?  I have yet to get a handle on what causes these price movements, but it&#8217;s not supply and demand.<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>I&#8217;m not necessarily the biggest Kathy Griffin fan, but I appreciate how she sometimes <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mediabistro.com\/tvnewser\/cnn\/king_doesnt_listen_to_a_word_you_say_50709.asp\">tells it like it is<\/a>:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Larry King is either deaf or just doesn&#8217;t listen, according to our favorite comic, Kathy Griffin.<br \/>\nDuring her two-hour set for the L.A. Gay &#038; Lesbian Center on Thursday, Griffin quipped, &#8216;[King] doesn&#8217;t listen to a word you say. It&#8217;s unbelievable. After a while, I just wanted to [bleep] with him and try to say something shocking. Did you hear me say that Oprah would be the first gay president? And he&#8217;s like, &#8216;She has a show, am I right?&#8221;&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>James Howard Kunstler looks at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.orionmagazine.org\/pages\/om\/07-1om\/Kunstler.html\">a future with declining oil production<\/a>:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>If you really want to understand the U.S. public&#8217;s penchant for wishful thinking, consider this: We invested most of our late twentieth-century wealth in a living arrangement with no future. American suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The far-flung housing subdivisions, commercial highway strips, big-box stores, and all the other furnishings and accessories of extreme car dependence will function poorly, if at all, in an oil-scarce future. Period.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennessean.com\/apps\/pbcs.dll\/article?AID=\/20070109\/SPORTS0601\/701090365\/1035\">This<\/a> is encouraging:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>Hamilton wouldn&#8217;t comment Monday on whether Fulmer would receive a raise, a telltale sign that he probably won&#8217;t.<br \/>\nWith a salary of $2.05 million per year, Fulmer also didn&#8217;t receive one following last season&#8217;s 5-6 finish.<br \/>\n&#8220;I&#8217;m on record as saying that I&#8217;m giving him a contract extension,&#8221; Hamilton said. &#8220;The media and fans have more of a sense of urgency than we do about it. Phillip knows he&#8217;s the coach at the University of Tennessee. He&#8217;s going to get a contract extension. We&#8217;re working toward doing the right things to make sure we all achieve the goals we&#8217;ve got out there, and we&#8217;ll announce what we&#8217;re going to do at some point.&#8221;<br \/>\nHamilton said he and Fulmer have talked at length about what realistic expectations should be at Tennessee.<br \/>\n&#8220;I know people are going to start charting the course of how many we&#8217;ve had since when, and I realize this league is very cyclical, but I think it&#8217;s reasonable to expect a couple of SEC championships over a 10-year period of time and be in the SEC Championship Game four times,&#8221; Hamilton said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s a testament to the ridiculousness of coaching salaries that we&#8217;re even discussing giving a raise to a $2 million\/year coach who hasn&#8217;t won a conference championship in eight years.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2007\/01\/potpourri_6\/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permalink to Potpourri\"><p>A bunch of people on TV news are all aflutter about President Bush&#8217;s upcoming speech on his &#8220;new&#8221; plan for Iraq. I think I can save everyone the drama. If you want to know the &#8220;plan&#8221; you can get a preview in three easy steps: (1) Go to the White House website, (2) In the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2150","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"h-entry","8":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}