Timeouts Considered Harmful

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Mike Shanahan never calls a timeout to ice the kicker because Jason Elam let him in on a little secret among the kicking fraternity: most of them like the extra time to check out the conditions.

— “There goes that theory,” L.A. Daily News

The article goes on to quote several other kickers who say the timeout gives them a chance to get out on the field, go through their whole routine, fix up the field if they need to, and generally improves their chances of making the kick.

Vikings kicker Ryan Longwell says that coaches fear being second-guessed if they don’t try to ice the kicker: “So I think a lot of coaches do that just for that reason, to clear their conscience on using all the timeouts.”

This confirms a theory of mine, that a lot of things coaches — in any sport — do during a game are just for the sake of being seen to have done something, are not only not helpful, but probably harmful.

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Nelson Algren Goes to Hollywood

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From a 1955 interview with Nelson Algren in The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER: How about this movie, The Man with the Golden Arm?

ALGREN: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have anything to do with the script?

ALGREN: No. No, I didn’t last long. I went out there for a thousand a week. and I worked Monday, and I got fired Wednesday. The guy that hired me was out of town Tuesday.

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The Overachiever

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We’re celebrating my dad’s 70th birthday at Buca di Beppo in Brea.

“How’s Casey doing in school?” my dad asks. “Is he a 4.0 student?”

The boy, who’s sitting right there, says, “I’m a lot higher than that.”

“How can you be higher than 4.0?” I ask him.

“I’m an overachiever,” he says.

“You’re an overachiever?” my dad says.

“Yes, sir.”

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Tequila!

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Danny Flores, composer of “Tequila,” a huge hit for the Champs in 1958, has died. He was 77.

— Orange County Register

Flores died in Westminster, about 20 miles from where I live in Irvine. He had been suffering for years from Parkinson’s disease.

He made about $70,000 a year from the European rights to “Tequila” but in one of those “seemed like a good idea at the time” moves that you kick yourself for later, he had long since signed away the rights to U.S. royalties, an error in judgment that the Register attributed to the fact that Flores was — wait for it — a heavy drinker in the early days of the band.

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Boo Hoo! The President Made My Income Go Down

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Under Mr. Bush and the Republican Congress, incomes today are $1,000 less for the typical household than during Bill Clinton’s final year in office; incomes for the typical working-age household have declined every year since the president took office.

— Howard Dean, Democratic National Committee chairman

BOO HOO HOO! The President made my income go down.

I’ve never understood the mechanism behind the president or Congress making my income go up or down. Can someone explain that to me?

You know who I think makes my income go up or down? ME! I’ve made decisions that made my income go UP, and I’ve made decisions that made my income go DOWN.

Who is the target audience for this tripe? People who want to believe they have no control over their own lives? People who need to blame all their problems on others?

It’s always someone else’s fault. It’s my boss’s fault, it’s my spouse’s fault, it’s the president’s fault . . .

Look in the mirror, you schlubs!

What a dismal vision of America. Elect some Democrats, you sorry losers! Oh, and we won’t be fighting terrorists in Iraq anymore. We’ll be fighting them in the streets of major American cities.

He’s not exactly Winston Churchill, is he?

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Systematic Suppression of Creative Genius

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Orbiting the Giant Hairball

How many artists are there in the room? Would you please raise your hands.
FIRST GRADE: En mass the children leapt from their seats, arms waving. Every child was an artist. SECOND GRADE: About half the kids raised their hands, shoulder high, no higher. The hands were still. THIRD GRADE: At best, 10 kids out of 30 would raise a hand, tentatively, self-consciously. By the time I reached SIXTH GRADE, no more than one or two kids raised their hands, and then ever so slightly, betraying a fear of being identified by the group as a ‘closet artist.’ The point is: Every school I visited was participating in the systematic suppression of creative genius.

— Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball

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Barbie Speaks

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I’m listening to an online interview with Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres and Tom DeMarco. My son hears Andres’ voice and says, “You’ve got a woman teaching you about technology?!”

“What a sexist you are,” I say.

“I’m just repeating what you always say: ‘Oh, women don’t know anything about computers.'”

“When did I ever say that?”

“You say it all the time. ‘Men are a lot smarter than women.'”

I deny this vehemently, and not just because my wife is sitting across the room.

Meanwhile, Andres is saying something: Blah blah blah Kent blah blah blah . . .

“Ken!?” the boy says. “Who’s advising you? Barbie?”

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The Favor of Ending

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[S]tories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.

— John Hodgman

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A Lesson in Procrastination

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My son’s supposed to be finishing up his first 8th grade assignment — a math collage for his Algebra class — but instead he’s bouncing a basketball around the house.

Boy bouncing basketball

“Finsh the assignment!” my wife says. “No more procrastinating!”

“I’m not PRO-CRAS-TI-NA-TING!” the boy yells, punctuating each syllable by slamming the ball on the floor.

“You are procrastinating,” I say.

“Stay out of it,” my wife says.

“You see how long it took him just to say ‘procrastinating’? That’s procrastinating.”

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Tom Peters Sucks

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Tom Peters

Evidently, this is not as well known as I expected, based on a Google search for “Tom Peters sucks,” which returns basically nothing. Shocking.

I followed a link to Peters’ site today. He’s got the undirected mania of a 5-year-old being chased by a mad dog, or a crack addict with a new girlfriend. Vague, mindless exhortations — Wow! Gaspworthy! — in service of nothing. Can you really improve people’s lives by shouting random slogans and buzzwords at them?

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Dishonest Estimation

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I saw the following attributed to Ralph Johnson. I’m not sure if that’s the Gang of Four Ralph Johnson, but it probably is:

The problem is that almost all software schedules and budgets are bogus. They are created for political effect and have little relationship to reality. Thus, whether they are met has nothing to do with the people working on the project.

Who makes your schedules? Project managers? They are almost certainly the wrong people. You can’t predict how long something will take unless you are an expert at doing it. The programmers? Are they allowed to say “we don’t have enough information to make a prediction”? Are they ever told “that is too long, you’ll have to do it in six months”? The only way to get honest schedules is from people who have experience in doing the work who know that they need to get the schedule right and not under or over-estimate.

I asked an IT VP the other day why he thought every project in the company is late, and he said, “Bad estimating.”

No . . . there’s a difference between bad estimating and dishonest estimating. If we were dealing with bad estimating, I’d expect to see estimates all over the place, including some way too high and some way too low.

“Man, that’s some bad estimating!” I’d say.

But when every estimate is too low, that’s not bad estimating, that’s dishonesty. It may be forced dishonesty, but it’s dishonesty nonetheless.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

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A Ready Answer on Diversity

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From a corporate diversity report:

The issue of having less diversity in the management ranks than in the aggregate among the workforce is faced by virtually every company in America and is one for which we do not have a ready answer.

You don’t have a ready answer? I’ll give you one: From a management perspective, diversity, like outsourcing, is best implemented on some other sucker’s job.

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