Musings

Mar 08

To think I used to want to write for a newspaper

By Jordi Scrubbings Links, Media, Musings 1 Comment »

Way back in the ancient times of 2003, in a world before social media, before YouTube, before Twitter, and when the term “blog” was just entering the public lexicon, a young writer, armed with a bachelors in English/Creative Writing, set forth to find himself a job. He scoured the Internet for hours at a time, looking for a position that would employ him to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard and let loose words that would change the world. He was ready to be a journalist somewhere, anywhere.

original urkel Then his mother asked him if he would really be happy writing about junior high basketball in a two-bit town halfway across the country. She told him someone with skills such as his should be aiming higher. He took those words to heart, stopped pursuing journalism jobs, and went to grad school. Three years later, he landed a job close to home, one that paid him well enough to buy a new truck and go to a few baseball games.

To be honest, looking back, I am actually glad no newspaper did so much as offer me an interview. I am happy none of the 60 or so jobs I applied to took the even first look at me. Because no matter how much I may bitch about my job now, I am absolutely thankful I don’t work for the newspaper industry. I would probably be unemployed right now.

I don’t remember the last time I read a newspaper. I used to sit down every morning, pour myself a big heaping bowl of Crunch Berries, and dig through the Florida Today. First, I would read the Sports, then the Comics, then the Front Page section, then, if I had time, I would read the Business and Life sections. I was hip to the happenings of the world.

I have no idea if they still publish the Florida Today. If so, I would assume 90% of its readership is over the age of 65.

These days it should come to no surprise to anyone that the newspaper as we used to know it is going the way of the dodo. Last week alone I read three articles that called out the newspaper business for being less than responsive.

In the first, TyDuffy of The Big Lead asks “Why Do Newspapers Remain Slaves to the Games Story and Boring Quotes?”. Duffy challenges the status quo of sports writing and basically calls it less than inspired.

The next day, Tommy Duncan of esteemed Tampa-area blog Sticks of Fire called out the St. Pete Times and the Tampa Tribune for their hypocritical statements regarding disposable plastic bags. According to Tommy, articles in both papers have denounced the bags whether by calling for their ban or promoting alternative measures. Yet, both newspapers are delivered to their readers’ front doors in small, clear, disposal plastic bags.

Tommy again goes on the offensive a few days later blasting the Tampa Tribune’s advertising flyer. Apparently, the “Trib Clips” is delivered every week without fail, regardless of readership, interest, or occupancy. Kinda like the official newspaper of the mob in Good Fellas. Not home? F*** you, read me.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much good news coming out of the newspaper industry. They seem to be scrambling to find some footing during the information metamorphosis of the last 10 years. They are cutting even the most established staff.

Back when I wrote for the FSU newspaper, I predicted that five years after graduation I would be living in a cardboard box behind a WalMart with only my diploma and my Writer of the Year 2002 award to keep me warm. I’m sure if I was in the newspaper industry, that would probably be true.

Feb 08

Rezball and Rasslin’: Regional cultural nuances in sports

By Jordi Scrubbings Baseball, Culture, Musings, Pro Wrestling, Sports 1 Comment »

Thoughts on sports and their different regional “flavors”:

I’ve always been interested in how different areas put their own twists on sports. A game played by the same rules can be played in totally different ways and interpreted in a completely different manner by different cultures.

But why? What is it about certain cultures that drives changes in the game?

rezball2 A few years ago I noticed several articles that discussed a style of basketball being played in the American southwest by young Native Americans. Dubbed “Rezball“, it was basketball played at an extremely fast pace. According to ESPN.com,

Rezball is a smashmouth game of speed, aggression and stamina. Full-court presses and man D are applied relentlessly, but the transition game is the game. Guards often start a break after receiving the inbounds pass; set plays are rare. Rezball makes the 2007 Suns look like the 1995 Knicks. Squads with three guys taller than 6′3″ are rare, so even the short guys know how to play big, and all five positions boast guardlike handles and shooting skills. Watching the best teams will rivet you to your seat—from the way players improvise at warp speed to their sheer endurance and the dialed-in-but-carefree way they ball.

For some reason, Native Americans decided to add an extreme element of speed to their game. Granted, height is not a usual trait in Native Americans, so few teams would have the option to slow down the game by throwing the ball to a lumbering big man underneath the basket. But from what I know about Rezball, it is faster than the Philippines Basketball Association, a league known to impose height requirements to give domestic players a chance.

So why did the Native Americans tweak basketball in that way? Is running or sprinting a typical habit of the people?

On the complete opposite side of the spectrum is the southern style of professional wrestling, known in some circles as “rasslin’”. According to Wikipedia,

Rasslin’ – refers to a southern style of professional wrestling which emphasizes kayfabe and stiffness, with fewer squash matches and generally longer feuds. It was synonymous with the NWA-affiliated promotions. Rasslin’ included TV tapings at smaller venues, as compared to the larger and more well-known arenas utilized by northern U.S. promotions such as the AWA and WWF/E. The term is derived from a phonetic spelling of how the word “wrestling” sounds when spoken with a heavy Southern accent. It is also commonly used in a derogatory manner by non-Southern wrestling fans to describe that style of wrestling.”

(To be honest, although the description is correct, I have never heard anyone in Florida refer to it as “rasslin’”. Actually, due to the mixed population in Florida, I’ve been told the state is a very difficult place to wrestle in, because transplanted fans from different parts of the country look for different things in their wrestling performances.)

I’ve been told that “southern” professional wrestling is generally slower than its northern counterparts. In the definition above, “emphasizing kayfabe” means characters and stories have more of a role in southern pro wrestling matches. In order to build those stories and develop those characters, the action must be slower. No rapid, high-flyin’, biff-bang-boom-wham-bam-slam matches. In southern wrestling, each match tells a story and it is the story that is emphasized more so than the athletic performance.

So why is wrestling different in the South? What is it about southern culture that favors deliberate storylines over fast-paced action?

Having lived in the South for over 20 years, I can attempt to answer this. For the same reason country music is generally slower, and southern accents are not as fast as northern dialects, Southerners prefer a more laid back lifestyle. People are more spread out in the south and aren’t ingrained with the urgency of northern city folks.

There is also the notion that morals are more prevalent in the South. Whereas in the North, people are all jumbled together and no one knows which way is which, in the South, there are traditional codes of conduct – such as how a gentleman or lady should act. Pro wrestling storylines feed off of these ideas. Bad guys deliberately brake the codes of conduct and good guys get in the fans’ favor by giving these villains a helpin’ of fist-flyin’ justice.

Before I end, I would like to leave you with a few questions.

Questions: Could there have been at some point different nuances in baseball? Were there slight differences in baseball strategy when the game started its growth in America? Did southerners play a slower-paced game than northerners? Was the northern game the origin of homeruns and fastballs and the south the birthplace of off-speed pitches, setting up batters, and base-to-base offense? Could there have been a difference in regional pitching psychology? Also, was there a different style of game strategy in the Negro Leagues?

The best answers may win something from me, if I can think of a cool gift.

Jan 26

What is the maximum effective cleanliness range of a bachelor?

By Jordi Scrubbings Family, Memories, Musings No Comments »

bachelors-dirty-room-02 This is sort of a follow-up post to one I wrote a few weeks ago on the growing amount of to-do lists I have in my apartment.

One of the guilt trips I often face is that I don’t think I clean my place frequently enough. When I was growing up, my mother would clean the whole house every Sunday. Like Mr. Clean meets the Tasmanian Devil, she would whip through four bedrooms, three bathrooms, two living rooms, a dining room, and kitchen like she was on a mission from God. A mission to annihilate all dust, dirt, and dog hair from the face of the planet Earth, or at least her house. Sure, I’d help her out at times, by vacuuming my own room and maybe even cleaning my bathroom, but that just meant she had time to juggle a load of laundry or two while cleaning.

Since I’ve been in my own place, sans roommate, since 2003, I’ve assumed the role of chief, cook, and apartment cleaner. Although being chief of my place is simple enough, the other two roles have been a work in progress. While I am slowly but surely cultivating my culinary competence, my cleaning capability still has much to be desired. At least by the standards my mother instilled in me.

(Good thing she is scared of heights and I live on the third floor of my complex!)

So in order to make myself feel less guilty for not scrubbing the bejesus out my apartment every weekend, I’ve convinced myself I don’t have to. First of all, it is only me in the place. How dirty can I possibly make the carpet in a room in rarely go in? Why clean a tub I never use? And why clean when I can go out?

Now I’m not saying my apartment is nasty. Far, far, far from it. I like to think on the average bachelor scale, I’m in the middle, leaning toward the above-average percentile. Not quite the epitome of order and neatliness, but far from your average frat house or male-dominate college apartment (seriously, I have a friend whose college apartment had a bag of another dude’s hair nailed to the ceiling, a sink full of dirty pots and pans, and the crusted remnants of a thrown chocolate cake smeared on his living room wall).

But here is my dilemma: I live in a nearly 1000sq ft apartment. If I were to clean the whole thing, wall-to-wall, top-to-bottom, inside and out, how long would that take? Three hours? Six? Maybe 12? I have psychological hang-up due the potential time commitment.

What I need to do is find my Effective Cleanliness Range (ECR) and then plan my cleaning accordingly. For example, if it takes 5 hours to do 1000sq ft, that’s 200sq ft per hour. That’s my ECR.

Since I can’t change my ECR without reducing the quality of the clean (can’t do that!), maybe I could change the time spent cleaning. I could clean an hour a day, perhaps after work in the evening. But I know that won’t happen. If I was disciplined enough to do something for an hour a day after work, I would be at the gym working out – something I haven’t been dedicated to in the last year.

So here is another thought: what if I moved to a smaller apartment? Using the same ECR (200sqft/hr), I could obviously clean a smaller apartment faster. Something to think about.

Another thing to think about is the fact that one day I hope to buy my own house, condo, or townhome. Again assuming it is just me and I don’t have any roommates, and my Russian mail order bride has not yet arrived, what is the breaking point at which my ECR would be insufficient to clean the whole place in a week? That would be my Maximum Effective Cleanliness Range (MECR).

Since I’m at work for 40 hours a week and asleep for roughly 42 hours a week (6×7), that leaves 86 hours to get my clean on. Add in the “getting ready for work” time (10 hours a week), the driving to and from work (another 10), and the time needed for food in and food out (10 hours a week) and I’m down to 56 hours.

If I kept up my ECR of 200sq ft per hour, my MECR could feasibly be 11,000sq feet before cleaning overwhelmed my need to eat, sleep, or work. That is one big house. Of course, keeping that house at level of cleanliness would completely eliminate my ability to get my boogie on.

And we can’t have that.

You know, instead of moving, maybe I should stay where I’m at, stop writing, stop figuring out inane formulas, and actually start vacuuming. Especially on Sundays.

My mom would prefer it that way.

Jan 09

Comparing the page views of Rays Index and MetsBlog

By Jordi Scrubbings Baseball, Blogs, Media, Musings, New York Mets, Tampa Bay Rays 1 Comment »

Although I don’t write as much about sports as I used to, I still read my share of sports blogs. I still follow the Seminoles, Rays, Mets, and Knicks through both fan blogs and mainstream media sites. Two of my favorite of these sites ended 2009 with very similar posts that showed some interesting differences.

Over at Rays Index, the almighty Professor gave a hearty thank you to his readers for year well done. According to the Prof, Rays Index received 1.1 million page views in 2009.

Over at MetsBlog.com, founder Matt Cerrone also wrote a year-end post and mentioned he was on pace for six million page views in December 2009.

(Interestingly, both sites said they had huge increases in readership over 2008’s totals, 40% for Rays Index and 80% for MetsBlog. Meanwhile, newspapers are going the way of the dodo. Oh, in case you are curious, my old site, TheSeriousTip.com, received only 250,000 hits in its 3 years of existence.)

If the numbers given by Cerrone and the Professor are correct, in one month MetsBlog.com received almost six times the amount of page views that Rays Index got for all of 2009 – that’s 72x the page views for the entire year.

Of course, there are some legit reasons for this. MetsBlog.com the flagship fan blog for a New York City-based team. New York City has well over 10 million people. That’s a lot of potential viewers in possibly the world’s biggest media market. Not to mention, MetsBlog.com is associated with SNY, New York’s newest sports and entertainment television network.

Then there is Cerrone’s fanbase. New York is one of the more online cities in the world. I would also venture a guess that many of Cerrone’s core readers are Met fans who became fans during the Mets glory years of the late ’80s and are currently early-30s, late-20s professionals leading the business world into the Internet age.

Rays Index, on the other hand, isn’t quite the flagship blog of Rays fans. Although there is a growing Rays blogosphere, there are two primary Rays fan blogs, Rays Index and the more statistical-based, stat geek-run DRaysBay. Rays Index is the more snarky, less-pretentious, more down-to-earth alternative. Personally, I read and am a fan of both.

(Disclaimer: I’ve met the bloggers from both sites. Whereas The Professor and I shot the breeze over a beer, the guys that write for DRaysBay had no interest in chatting as they were too busy shadowing (or was it sucking up to) Will Carroll of BaseballProspectus.com.)

Rays Index also caters to a much smaller market without the depth and fanbase legacy. The Tampa Bay Rays’ market, if you really stretch it, could include from Orlando to Sarasota to Tampa to St. Pete-Clearwater, and tops out at probably 5-6 million people. That’s half of MetsBlog’s guaranteed, local, direct market. From a legacy perspective, the Rays as a team also don’t have the history, of success or otherwise, that the Mets have, although I bet if you compare Rays Index’s page views from 2007 to the present, you will see a large increase (More than MetsBlog’s 80% increase? Tough call.). And finally, to my knowledge, Rays Index doesn’t have a partnership with a major entertainment company.

I’m not sure why I just wrote nearly 500 words comparing the page views of a major market flagship fan blog with a fan blog in a minor market. I guess the fact that one receives 72x the annual hits of the other blew me away.

Dec 18

Thoughts on Paying for Stuff

By Jordi Scrubbings Business, Culture, Musings, Philosophical No Comments »

Today I noticed there are a bunch of different places that you can pay for a service or a capability and a bunch of different ways to pay. I counted three. I don’t know why I never noticed this before. I mean, I noticed, I just never put them together. Here is what I concluded:

First, we have places that you pay for membership and get unlimited usage. A gym membership, for example. I can walk into my neighborhood gym, sign up, and be there all day and use as many machines as I want for as long as I want.

Second, there are pay per use places. These places include laundromats, carnivals, and do-it-yourself car washes. At these places, I must pay upfront for each item I use. And then I can only use it once.

Third, there are capabilities I have to pay for in accordance with the block of time I used them. I can either pay upfront for a set time, such as with prostitution (or so I’ve heard), or pay the time of your usage multiplied by a certain rate, such as at pool halls.

But what if we flipped the script and shuffled what we do, where we do it, and how we pay for it? What if we set a standard method of paying for a service or capability?

Imagine if you had to join a membership to do your laundry. Would you do it? What if it meant you could use whatever washer for as long as you want and as often as you want?

Picture a gym that was free to join, but had token operated equipment. What if for every 20 reps you had to put in another token? What if you had to carry around a bag of tokens in order to do a full workout?

Is there a reason why we have three different methods of paying for utility and services? Is it cultural or strictly economic? Laundromat owners probably don’t want people paying a flat fee for usage as it would wear out their machines, but what about the others?

I don’t know why I think about these things. I think I am bored.

Dec 09

A gun mag for the urban aficionado

By Jordi Scrubbings Guns, Musings 2 Comments »

I was working on this post a while back and kinda abandoned it. It was one of those posts that definitely didn’t fit in on ye olden site. But after reading this article a few weeks back about the upcoming release of rapper T.I., I figured I would dust off the notes and start writing it again.

gun_in_the_city A few years ago, I regularly received one of the National Rifle Association’s official publications, a magazine called First Freedom. Now before you start snickering, I think the NRA is a good organization that stands for something positive. They sometimes get a bad rap by the media, but that’s not the point of my story. The point is the NRA’s magazine.

Throughout the months and maybe even years that I received First Freedom, I slowly started noticing something. There was an overwhelming lack of color in the magazine. No, it wasn’t printed in black and white, I mean pigmentation color. Probably 90%, if not more, of the people profiled in First Freedom were of European descent, in other words, white. I am probably not far off in thinking that the demographic for First Freedom was the average conservative-thinking, middle-class, middle-American. The magazine was written for the lifestyle of someone who liked his (and to a small extent “her”) Budweiser or Miller Lite, his country music, and his NASCAR.

(Again, I am just making a point about the demographic, and I am not saying there is anything wrong with this. Magazines have to sell and First Freedom knew its demographic and catered to it well.)

But what about the gun-owner who did not live in the fields of Wyoming or could not give a whit about Travis Tritt or a fart about Dale Earnhart? What about the gun-owner who had other interests, ones that did not fit the white, conservative stereotype? What about the completely legal gun owners who liked hip-hop and basketball players not named Karl Malone? First Freedom never addressed that demographic.

To fill the void left by First Freedom, and to give urban gun owners something to read, I would like to propose the idea for a publication called “Urban Armsman: A Magazine For the Urban Gun Collector“. Although Urban Armsman would borrow a few things from First Freedom, sections such as new products and incidences where gun owners protected themselves, Urban Armsman would also provide gun owners in cities with information on where to shoot, where they can carry legally, and what laws and regulations they should be concerned with. It would also have several articles on education and proper use, promoting safety as its number one priority, as well as features on celebrity gun collections. Who wouldn’t want to read about the weapons stashes of T.I., Shyne, and Plaxico Burress? And you know Puff Daddy has to have some sort of firearm protection nearby.

I know there are some cities where carrying a gun is as legal as carrying a vial of crack, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t potential readers in every city. For those areas, Urban Armsman would similar to High Times or some car racing magazines. The question is not whether or not there is a market, the question is how much longer will urban gun owners put up with articles on Dick Cheney, safaris in Africa, and the North Dakota high school champion clay shooting team?

(Photo found at http://andrewmiguelez.com/portfolio/html/graphic_design.html.)

Dec 07

Topic-based news programming

By Jordi Scrubbings Media, Musings, Television No Comments »

A few weeks ago, during the debates on Health Care and Whether or Not To Send Troops to Afghanistan, I thought of something interesting: why aren’t news shows designed subjectively rather than topically?

I thought it was funny, in regards to the Health Care and Troop Deployment debates that they were looked at in totally different ways. The health care issue was always discussed as a financial burden and the troop deployment was seen as a security and foreign affairs issue. The bottom line was that they should have both been discussed from a cost perspective. Sending troops to Afghanistan is as much a cost issue as keeping people healthy is an internal security issue. But the media folks, especially the ones on TV, only reported each issue through one angle, leaving me with questions, such as:

How much safer would be from disease and illness under a health care plan with a government option?

What about the cost of sending troops halfway across the world?

After not hearing the answers to these questions, I came up with the idea that the news should be broken up into subjects, like in high school. Imagine a news channel that broke down the subjects of its topics by the hour with a “bottom line” news ticker announcing the latest breaking news items. The day could go something like this:

6AM – 7AM: Economics
7AM – 8AM: Politics
8AM – 9AM: International Affairs/Relations
9AM – 10AM: Religion
10AM – 11AM: Gossip
11AM – 12PM: Sports
12PM – 1PM: Legal and Law
1PM – 2PM: Art
2PM – 3PM: Media Studies
3PM – 4PM: Transportation and Autos
4PM – 5PM: Science and Technology
5PM – 6PM: Military Science

Then after 6PM, the networks would just repeat the first show with new updates and news. The way I see it, if the news examined every issue through every spectrum, the viewers would get a 360 degree view on the issues. There might even be calls to debate on some of the issues; hopefully those debates would be more poignant and meaningful. And then perhaps we would have a more educated viewing audience, one that is more well-rounded and fluent on all aspects of the issues.

What do you think? Could this work?

Dec 02

Going to the Dentist and I’m Gonna Get Happy

By Jordi Scrubbings Lists, Movies, Musings 2 Comments »

the-dentist-bloody-extraction Quick post today as I am not only in the middle of some projects, but as the title above implies, I have a dentist appointment in the AM and I need my beauty sleep.

Some thoughts on going to the dentist:

I think going to the dentist is one of my least favorite places to go. I am not a big fan of going the DMV to renew my license, going to the courthouse to pay my speeding tickets, or going to work. But I understand I have to go to work. It’s kinda essential. I need to make money to put gas in my truck so I can go back to work. I don’t like it, but I understand it.

Here is my list of places I don’t like to go (in no particular order):

The Dentist
The DMV
Court
Work
Anywhere that involves shots
Wal-Mart
Airports
Funeral Homes
Old People Homes
Hospitals
Really pretentious malls and stores
Victoria’s Secret (especially by myself)
Wine bars that don’t serve beer
The barber
Iowa

Before I go, here is Steve Martin’s classic dentist song from Little Shop of Horrors:

Peace out.

Nov 30

Which leader should the invaders meet?

By Jordi Scrubbings International, Musings, Politics, Robots No Comments »

Monsters and Robots Two different but somewhat related bits of media passed my purview in the last week that when taken together got me thinkin’. The first was Federico Alverez’s awesome short film “Panic Attack!” about giant robots that destroy Montevideo, Uruguay. If you haven’t seen it, check it out. To quote semi-famed actor/writer/director person Brian Spaeth, it is “sweet”.

(By the way, Brian sent me a link via the ol’ Twitter that reported Sam Raimi enlisted Mr. Alverez to make a full-length movie. We’ll see how that goes.)

The second media I saw was a blog post by International Relations Professor/Blogger Daniel Drezner entitled “The Global Governances of Apocalypses“. In his post, Dr. Drezner answers a challenge by another blogger who asks the same thing I have often wondered “What is the proper forum for secret doomsday planning? The G-20? The U.N. Security Council? The P5+1 or the EU3 +3? Every country for itself?”

Drezner answers by saying Hollywood is of course historically inaccurate and in reality the following would occur:

There would be initial and profound disagreement among experts over what precisely to do;

After a scientific consensus began to emerge, dissenters would go back to their home governments to lobby for political support

There would be rampant suspicion of any multilateral effort by those asked to make an outsized contribution;

The cost overruns… oh, the cost overruns;

Conspiracy theories would pop up all over the friggin’ place

The plan wouldn’t work.

However, combining the two scenarios, what if the robots from Panic Attack! invaded and made the traditional movie invader demand, “Take Me To Your Leader.” What would we do? Who would we bring the invaders to? Who did the 1950s-era screenwriters think was in charge?

(On second thought, maybe “Take me to your leader” pre-dates the ’50s. Maybe it goes back to H.G. Wells and War of the Worlds and the original sci-fi classics. If you know the origin, let me know. It’s important, but not really.)

I guess the answer would depend on who the invaders first encounter. And then the beliefs and politics of the encountered. Even here in the U.S. there could be some confusion. How many people would bring the visitors to their mayor, governor, or even church leader? Or, shudder the thought, how many folks would bring our otherworldly guests to Glenn Beck?

Then of course, there are other leaders of similar or perceived equal power worldwide. What about the Pope? The Dalai Lama? What about the Ayotallah in Iran? What about other presidents, kings, prime ministers, or even little league baseball coaches?

If aliens landed in your backyard and said “Take me to your leader” (assuming they spoke English), who would you bring them to?

Previous Entries

To think I used to want to write for a newspaper

Rezball and Rasslin’: Regional cultural nuances in sports

What is the maximum effective cleanliness range of a bachelor?

Comparing the page views of Rays Index and MetsBlog

Thoughts on Paying for Stuff

A gun mag for the urban aficionado

Topic-based news programming

Going to the Dentist and I’m Gonna Get Happy

Which leader should the invaders meet?

Facebook Fan Page

Twitter Updates

Twitter Updates

Recent Comments

Mr. Category List

Mr. Archive

Meta