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Originally uploaded by smallchou

The view from the aisle at Alicia And Asian Paul’s wedding in the
Presidio.

My favorite storyline of this season has been the outrageousness that is the Oakland Raiders franchise. I won’t re-hash the Lane Kiffin hilarity, but let’s take a quick look at the DeAngelo Hall saga:

• In the offseason, the Raiders traded 2nd and 5th round picks for DeAngelo Hall, a cornerback who went to the Pro Bowl last year. They did this against Kiffin’s opinions.
• Hall played eight games for the Raiders this season, getting paid $1M PER GAME. He was dusted several times for long gains, playing opposite the Raiders star CB Nnamdi Asomugha.
• The Raiders unceremoniously cut him yesterday, basically lighting their two draft picks on fire and releasing a very talented player
• Now other Raiders players are speaking out, saying things like: “I’ve never been in a situation where you cut one of the best players,” and “I am just a player so I can’t speak on it. I don’t make the decisions…. we’re just supposed to shut up and play.”

Good times! It really makes me relieved to be a Niners fan. I can’t believe I just wrote that.

Last week: 9-5
Overall Season Results: 66-62-2

Thursday

DEN (+3) at CLE
If there was a good time to start out as a first-time QB, it’s against the awful Broncos defense. Denver is reeling and just can’t stop the run. Look for Jamal Lewis to get a lot of work on the ground.
Pick: CLE

Sunday

JAX (-6) at DET
I’m having trouble understanding why Jacksonville is playing so badly. They can’t even run the ball anymore against normal NFL teams. Luckily Detroit is less than a normal NFL team.
Pick: JAX

TEN (-3) at CHI
Whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s get ahold of ourselves here. Isn’t one of these teams 8-0 and didn’t the other team almost lose to the Lions last week? Chicago might play inspired ball and pull this off, but the spread seems bizarre.
Pick: TEN

BUF (+4) at NWE
If the Bills lose this game, they’ll be in a serious hole. It’s bizarre that they’ve been unable to run the ball. And Trent Edwards just isn’t (yet) the kind of QB that can carry a team for 16 games.
Pick: NWE

NO (+1) at ATL
I do like what the Falcons are doing right now, but Brees and company should have a good day. Colston should finally be back at full speed.
Pick: NO

STL (+9) at NYJ
Too many points. The Rams didn’t look great last week, but Favre and company can’t really trusted to stomp on teams every week. I’m thinking OJ gets a pick or two in this one.
Pick: STL

SEA (+9) at MIA
I still can’t believe the Niners lost to this team…
Pick: MIA

GB (+2.5) at MIN
Who would’ve thought that Gus Frerotte would be the biggest gunslinger in a game between the Vikings and the Packers?
Pick: MIN

CAR (-9) at OAK
Clearly the Raiders’ release of DeAngelo Hall is going to solve all their problems. After all, it’s not like the Falcons left treadmarks all over them last week.
Pick: CAR

KC (+14.5) at SD
The Norv Turner Rule is definitely poised to move to 7-2 on the season this week. The Chiefs are playing much better and Norv Turner was once the head coach of the Raiders.
Pick: KC

IND (+3) at PIT
For real this tim, Peyton and co. are getting it together.
Pick: IND

NYG (+2.5) at PHI
At what point did Eli Manning become the brother who was more reliable and less likely to throw some outrageous picks? I feel like they roll in this game.
Pick: NYG

BAL (-1) at HOU
Sage Rosenfels is like Matt Schaub… ’s Dad. Who needs Willis McGahee when you’ve got Ray Rice and company?
Pick: BAL

Monday

SF (+9.5) at ARI
I’m pretty confident that Shaun Hill can keep this game close – it also sounds like the Niners will be pounding the run a bit more, which will be a welcome change.
Pick: SF

I don’t spend a lot of time writing about politics here, but I had an interesting insight while driving home today to watch the debate that fits pretty well on this blog: “Holy crap, John McCain just tried to pull a Matt Doherty on Barack Obama, with this crazy ‘halt the campaign and debate‘ thing.”

The strategy refers to a Doherty approach used in a 60-48 loss to Duke on March 8, 2002. Now, as you read this post and begin to wonder how in the WORLD I could remember some innocuous game from the worst season for North Carolina in the last 30+ years, just remember that 1) I’ve been a diehard UNC fan the last 15+ years, 2) I watch a LOT of basketball, and 3) I have a special dislike of Matt Doherty. Now, on to the show:

First, a couple of assumptions we’ll use to equate McCain to a particular Doherty strategy (these are necessary so that Chris Lin or other Republican-leaning people are still willing to read):

1. Assume that McCain is seeing the same polls that fivethirtyeight.com and other sites are reporting (i.e. slight slide relative to Obama).
2. Assume that, as a politician, McCain (like Obama and others) is morally capable of using the financial crisis as a prop in a particular tactic to win the election.

If you’re not going to just sing along with those assumptions for fun, then stop reading now.

In 2002, Doherty was busy driving the North Carolina program into the ground. Now, that’s not a material part of the story and in no way am I saying that John McCain is getting ready to lead this country into a hell hole which will have us aching for the days of George W Bush (read into that what you will).

Anyhow, the North Carolina team was so lacking in talent for a program of such prestige, that even Doherty knew the team was hosed. It turned out to be the season that broke UNC’s seemingly infinite run of NCAA tournament appearances, though we didn’t know it at the time. On the day of the game, the only hope for making the tournament was to somehow triumph in the ACC tournament and win the automatic bid. It was with that backdrop that UNC met hated rival Duke (#3 in the country) in the Quarterfinals and Doherty choose to coin (in my mind) ‘pulling a Doherty’.

Knowing that the Duke team was “ahead in the polls” so to speak, Doherty had his players slow the game down to the point of pain. And I’m not talking about a Bo Ryan-like strategy where you play staunch defense and then come down the court to swing the ball 90 times until you get a layup. I’m talking about Adam Boone bringing the ball across halfcourt and then standing still dribbling until the shot clock was down to 10 seconds before even making a single move.

It’s impossible to convey the outrageous-ness of the strategy, because the final score doesn’t represent the extent of how crazy it was. Duke would run down, score a quick bucket, and then Carolina would eat up 35 seconds (and hopefully get a bucket). Usually when two teams score at such a low pace, it’s because of tough defenses holding each other to poor shooting. But I’d venture to guess Duke shot something like 55% in the game (unfortunately, ESPN has lost the box score to verify). Remember, Duke was one of the more explosive NCAA teams of the past 20 years. They had put up 93 and 87 points in the first two meetings against Carolina that season.

It was awful. And as a North Carolina fan, it was unwatchable.

But it was also some sort of perverted genius. Doherty himself put it best after the game:

“You don’t want to have to play that way, but it was the only chance we had to win,” said Doherty, who had clearly been crying in the locker room.

“We worked on it and I went to Jason (Capel) and said this is the way we need to play to try to beat Duke and he said, `Let’s do it. I’m with you.’ And we thought we were going to win.”

(Side note: this type of garbage is why I try to block out the Matt Doherty years in my mind)

He was right, it really was the only possible way for Carolina to win. They had to shorten the game up, possessions-wise, to the point where the importance of every single individual possession was heightened. Where each shot, instead of being worth a tiny fraction of the game, was worth relatively double (or triple). And then Carolina just had to play hard and hope – hope for a slip-up that would be magnified in import due to the shortened game. It’s a common practice by basketball and football teams (you see 3 or 4 teams do it to Peyton Manning and the Colts every year), but I vividly remember the Doherty game because of how explicit it was.

In essence, that’s what I think McCain was trying to accomplish this week. He saw an opportunity to shorten the game up. To magnify the impact of the debate and the last few weeks of the election by pushing things out. Nevermind that there was no fucking way he would actually be able to make a substantive difference (as he proved tonight in the debate, he and Obama both do not have depth of understanding on the economic crisis). With foreign policy (McCain’s clear advantage) being the focus of the first debate, he wanted to shorten its gap to Election Day as much as possible.

It was a crazy strategy, almost as crazy as Matt Doherty trying to turn a 40-minute game into a 25-minute one, but who knows… it could have worked.

Last week was pretty bittersweet. The good news was the Niners stomped out Detroit (and I was there to witness it). The bad news was I got punted out of my $100 Survivor League (under what planet does New England get destroyed by 5 Ronnie Brown TD’s?) and then got trounced in my picks.

Not much more to say – here’s hoping it goes better this week.

Last Week: 6-10 (ugh)
Overall Season Results: 23-24-0

Sunday

DEN (-9) at KC
Let’s see, Denver’ll score 35+. Kansas City hasn’t scored 20 in a game yet.
Pick: DEN

CLE (+3.5) at CIN
Here’s hoping it’s another “Last team with the ball wins” game. Cincinnati looked good last week, surprisingly. I think they get it together first.
Pick: CIN

HOU (+7) at JAX
Jacksonville’s O-line is getting healthy at the right time and you KNOW they don’t want to go 1-3.
Pick: JAX

ARI (+1.5) at NYJ
One of these weeks, Favre’s going to get comfortable, but he still looked bad last week.
Pick: ARI

SFO (+5) at NO
Heard Martz on the radio today and he seemed pretty confident in our ability to move the ball on NO, particularly against their secondary. I’m in.
Pick: SFO

ATL (+7) at CAR
Still not quite sure what to make of this Carolina team, but they should be able to run well to set up the pass in this matchup. They were one bad turnover from having full control of that game last week.
Pick: CAR

MIN (+3) at TEN
Tennessee’s defense is beastly against the run and, lo and behold, Minnesota needs to run to be successful.
Pick: TEN

GB (+1.5) at TB
Bounce-back game for Green Bay, but they need to stop the run. The loss of Al Harris can’t hurt them that much against Brian Griese, can it?
Pick: GB

BUF (-8) at STL
St. Louis decided to do the chic thing, by benching their QB and cutting their most talented CB. Not looking pretty out there.
Pick: BUF

SD (-7.5) at OAK
San Diego secondary playing better, so I’m imagining 8 men in the box a lot. If you have the opportunity to bet against Norv Turner, do so… unless they’re playing the Raiders.
Pick: SD

WAS (+11) at DAL
Spreads like this are always a bit tricky, after all, Dallas could dominate a game and end up winning by ten. But this one’s in Dallas, fierce rivalry, I don’t see Dallas getting off the gas.
Pick: DAL

PHI (-3) at CHI
Westbrook should be out, so the Eagles will probably go pass-heavy. The luster of Chicago’s win over a short-handed Indy has being rusted over with back-to-back losses.
Pick: PHI

Monday

BAL (-5.5) at PIT
Injuries say BAL will have a field day on the ground, but I’m imagining a low-scoring close game.
Pick: PIT

I think it was in 2004, when I had just finished college. I had (literally) zero dollars in my bank account just before I was starting my first job at Oracle. On top of that, I had a tidy sum in college loan debt staring me in the face. I knew nothing about houses, other than I wanted to buy one for myself some day. It was around then that a friend of mine mentioned that I should ‘buy a house now.’ I laughed and remarked that I had no money to put down, plus I hadn’t even started my job yet. The conversation went something like this:

Friend: “Why don’t you buy a house now? You’d just be throwing your money away renting.”
Jack: “What, you mean besides the fact that I don’t have any money?”
Friend: “Nah, you can get a no-money down mortgage. The interest rate’s not bad and you can just re-finance in a few years.”
Jack: (to myself) “I don’t know a whole lot, but that seems completely fucking absurd to me. Why would they loan me boatloads of money when I don’t have any?”

I never got a straight answer to that question then, but it’s clear now what kinds of shenanigans were going on.

As a single mid-20’s male, with no real life commitments, who has been worriedly following this whole crisis, the main emotion running through my head (besides ‘concern’) is, surprisingly, anger. It’s the kind of anger that comes from the feeling of being cheated and it’s directed out between the immoral executives and financial institutions who dealt with these irresponsible mortgages, the idiotic/naive/gullible Americans who decided on taking these outrageous loans that they couldn’t afford, and to a certain extent the government regulators who I feel like should have been doing something about this earlier.

Basically, it’s anger that the entire world economy and American taxpayers (including myself) will get to bear the pain that should, frankly, be felt by these people alone. I’ll admit it, I haven’t even considered stopping to feel sorry for anyone from Lehman or any of the other financial institutions that have collapsed (or laid people off). It’s awful for me to say it, but it’s true. It’s particularly true when they have, on average, been pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, much of it due to these types of instruments. I don’t feel sorry for them for a single moment. I hope some of them at least realize their responsibility in this whole thing.

And then today, as if sensing that it’s a great time to come along trolling for money, the big Detroit automakers went begging in Washington today. It just makes you cringe, doesn’t it? How about first you guys actually make some cars that customers want to purchase?

It’s all incredibly disturbing. Welcome to the new global economy.

Last week I came upon an article by William Deresiewicz, a Yale Associate Professor of English, entitled “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” In it, Deresiewicz puts forth his theory that elite universities are disadvantaging their students and alumni. In particular, he identifies what he perceives as five generalized disadvantages of an elite education:

1. Elite educations make you incapable of talking to people who “aren’t like you.”
2. An elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.
3. Elite educations train students to expect and accept an entitlement to be mediocre.
4. Elite educations willingly lead students to the “safe” and secure life.
5. There is no intellectualism (as he defines it) because students just do “good enough.”

It is certainly a critical article, and it is one that immediately drew a sharp reaction from me. After all, who wants to be labeled as, essentially, an elitist who skirts by in life? Assuming Deresiewicz would consider Stanford “an elite institution,” I (and all of my friends from school) just got slapped in the face by a man who has never met us, much less spoken to us.

Though to be clear, if he has trouble finding anything to say to a plumber with a Boston accent and a Red Sox cap, he would probably have trouble finding anything to say to me also. I can think of at least ten one-liners to rag on the Red Sox immediately (”Damn, how hard is it for your team to catch the fucking DEVIL RAYS?” or, as Stoops suggested, “It’s a good thing we both hate the Yankees.”).

Yes, I understand that his criticism is technically of the institutions themselves, but it’s a bit like we were all sprayed by stray bullets from the drive-by.

However, I would be lying if I categorically denounced the entire article. When I look closely, within his shockingly elitist examples, there is some truth. Let’s take a look:

Elite educations make you incapable of talking to people who “aren’t like you.”

I’ve probably covered this already, but I consider this point to be a complete fucking joke. I didn’t go to Yale (and maybe Stanford’s just not as stuffy of a place), but I have a feeling this is more an issue with the individual than the institution. As Phil put it in an email, “What I find comical is that he expects to be able to relate, and then blames his education and collegiate institutions for his deficiency.”

It’s unfortunate that Deresiewicz opens his article with this particular point, because I feel like the absurdity of it really discolors his other arguments and observations. Perhaps his inability to converse with ‘people not like him’ is more a reflection of another of his points – not all intelligence plays well in the classroom.

Frankly, socially intelligent individuals (many of whom I know endured these apparent ‘Elite Educational Prisons’) are capable of talking to any human about, literally, any topic. Are we to believe that attending an elite institution removes your ability to enjoy sports, music, movies, news, and every other potential topic of conversation that is shared commonly between large portions of the population? I think they’re allowed to listen to rap music at Yale.

I don’t even know what “people not like me” means – are these people who are lacking vital organs that I have? The whole point is crazy.

An elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.

It’s hard to deny the (at least half-) truth of this statement. I was witness to this fact while I worked at Google. In case you were not aware, Google likes to hire Ivy League and Stanford graduates in all of its departments, including departments where the primary job function is answering customer support emails from users/advertisers/publishers. I can’t tell you the number of times I heard the phrase “I’m/we’re over-qualified…” from such coworkers while I worked at Google, as if such work was simply beneath them.

That’s not an indictment of those employees, or even Google, but rather just an observation that there is a significant sense of self-worth inculcated by an elite education. I’m not positive that I view this sense of self-worth to be truly a disadvantage, save for (the fairly plentiful) occasions when it extends to arrogance.

Elite educations train students to expect and accept an entitlement to be mediocre.

I don’t imagine anyone would argue the presence of some level of grade inflation at elite institutions. Yet the generalization that all elite educations reward mediocrity seems overdone. And certainly Deresiewicz’s contention that all students of elite institutions expect that to be able to turn their work in late with no repercussions is absurd, at least at Stanford. I have no insight into Yale or Columbia.

I don’t remember ever hearing any of my friends talk about how they’d just run that paper over a day late. But I certainly do remember the eerie glow of rows of monitors at Sweet Hall at 3 in the morning, or working in the lab trying to debug that damn microprocessor implementation before it was due in a few hours at 9am.

The truth is that I would have been really fucking embarrassed to act as Deresiewicz describes. I think all of my friends would have also.

Elite educations willingly lead students to the “safe” and secure life.

Agreed (for 90+% of the Stanford graduates that I know). I can’t even really begin to argue with this point, as I’ve commented to numerous folks that temptation for security and fear of failure manifest themselves in my own psyche. After all, this temptation is the same reason that Google continues to be able to stock its customer service teams with Harvard/Stanford/Princeton/Yale graduates who end up incredibly conflicted due to their strong sense of self-worth.

For many Asian-Americans, I would add that parental influences often play an even more significant part than their elite educations. As an example, trying to explain to my own mother why I would leave a company like Google or go play poker for a living is somewhere between comical and impossible.

There is no intellectualism (as he defines it) because students just do “good enough.”

I’m extremely conflicted on Deresiewicz’s last “disadvantage.” His contention is that because elite institutions (and their students) have become increasingly focused on jumping the hurdles to reach a diploma (and subsequently the secure life), the students ignore true ‘intellectualism’. He describes the intellectual life as focus on “The Big Questions” and large visions. In doing so, he also takes a side swipe at all technical fields, which he paints as part of the evil commercialization of elite instititutions:

Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference. The college career office has little to say to students not interested in law, medicine, or business, and elite universities are not going to do anything to discourage the large percentage of their graduates who take their degrees to Wall Street. In fact, they’re showing them the way. The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.

There is some level of truth to his overarching point (I certainly did jump through the right sequence of hoops to graduate at school), however one can’t help but read his argument and wonder if he is just profoundly biased. After all, has Bill Gates led this “intellectual life”? Has Steve Jobs? And if they have not, is that because they haven’t focused on ‘The Big Questions?’ Or is it because their ‘Big Questions’ aren’t about understanding Kierkegaard or examining Faulkner’s inner motivations?

If, as Deresiewicz says, “Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas,” then how is it that ‘an infrastructure to serve an essentially infinite number bytes of information to small boxes in every home in the world over the fucking air’ not an idea?

The beauty of living in the Silicon Valley is that you see, meet, read about, and see the work of countless individuals who are passionate about ideas every day. For some (not all) of them, elite educations were four+ years spent building a foundation to just enable them to be passionate about ideas. And that seems like fairly decent work by our best universities, even by Deresiewicz’s own definition of why they exist.

Who doesn’t love a city where stuff like this happens?

I’d almost forgotten about this little tidbit, but it’s good to see there’s a close to 50% chance that our next president will be completely open about continuing to use the racial slur ‘gook.’ From the article, in 2000 during his last presidential campaign:

“I hate the gooks,” McCain said yesterday in response to a question from reporters aboard his campaign bus. “I will hate them as long as I live.”

But of course he qualified that by saying that he was only referring to his captors with that slur. Probably seems like a pretty satisfactory qualification for many random idiots out there.

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail describing the corollary for peoples of other races, but I’m sure you can connect the dots if you think hard enough: “I’d like to qualify that I was not referring to all black/latino/Chinese/white people when I used that term.”

Imagine THAT for a second.

Apologies if you’ve already seen this. If you haven’t, I’m fairly certain that the first words out of your mouth will be something like “Holy shit” or “That is awesome.” If they weren’t, you either aren’t blessed with eternal nostalgia for Super Mario Brothers (read: you’re old) or you don’t like Asian people (hey, it had to be said):

Mario Theme played with RC car…

On the way to the airport: Madrid, Barcelona, and London.

Stanford, try not to lose ALL our coaches while I’m gone.

Thanks,
Jack