like I said on twitter: that was almost as intense as Iowa NIT games
MaizeAndBlueWahoo
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Recent Comments
| Date | Title | Body |
|---|---|---|
| 2 hours 28 min ago | 4/10 for me. And I got the |
4/10 for me. And I got the balk one right, but for the wrong reason. It said "with the same count" and I thought a balk added one ball to the count, so I put false. |
| 22 hours 58 min ago | That must be right next door |
That must be right next door to this:
|
| 2 days 2 hours ago | Not only all of the above, |
Not only all of the above, but it also seems to me that the last part of that advice boiled down to "find other suckers willing to sell their time to you." So if everyone took his advice, his advice would turn out to be impractical, useless, and untenable. Well, even more so. Worst advice column ever. |
| 3 days 12 hours ago | Because the state and the |
Because the state and the boundary commission do not have procedures for annexing one city's land to another, that's why. Besides, certain city residents are awfully prickly about things like transferring the administration of city assets to a regional board. Cobo Hall was like pulling teeth. Belle Isle and the water department even more so. Can you imagine the tangle of court proceedings they'll put together if they ever get wind of the city actually giving up actual land? I don't know what the heck you mean by "missing the point." |
| 4 days 19 hours ago | I'd be genuinely interested |
I'd be genuinely interested to hear them. I can only think of two scenarios: the city sells good sections, or the city sells bad sections. I think the inherent problems in both would be obvious. No suburb would pay Detroit for a blighted disaster zone, and there aren't very many of those on the edges of the city anyway. (If it was truly empty land, you could make a case, but most areas aren't truly empty.) And Detroit would be utterly foolish to sell off its good tax-generating land for a one-time fix and keep the blight. Besides that, you have the problem that most of the land isn't owned by the city anyway. Dearborn or Warren or what have you would have to buy from thousands of individual landowners. Simple transfer of city jurisdiction is another matter that would have to be taken up in the state legislature, most likely. |
| 4 days 20 hours ago | You mean having another city |
You mean having another city pay actual cash money to take ownership of huge problems hasn't caught on? |
| 4 days 20 hours ago | You can do eminent domain for |
You can do eminent domain for public projects; you can even use eminent domain to take land from someone and give it to someone else when that someone else has a big redevelopment plan in mind. (I won't bring my full opinion on Kelo v. New London to bear here due to politics, but suffice to say, boo. I don't think eminent domain should be used lightly.) But it would be a first in the courts for a city to take land and try to argue that "nothing" is a better public use of the land than what the owner was doing with it. That would be a court battle for the ages. Not sure the city could win, either. Better idea perhaps would be to write a city rule declaring certain areas as zones where people who currently live there will be grandfathered in but once the occupant moves out, the city moves in, pays fair price, and shuts the area down. Again, though, a halfway decent lawyer might argue illegal takings. |
| 4 days 23 hours ago | I'm a pretty big deal. In |
I'm a pretty big deal. In college I played an intramural softball game against Matt Schaub (our teams tied) and had classes with Roger Mason, Jr. You might say... cooler story, bro. |
| 4 days 23 hours ago | Detroit has to walk such a |
Detroit has to walk such a fine line in this area. I think everyone would agree that if they could just cut off services to huge swaths of the city, and focus police coverage, lighting, etc. on populated areas, there are huge efficiencies and savings to be found. The problem is you can't just force someone out. Taxpaying (theoretically) citizens can't be just told they're not getting services. On the other hand, you've got perhaps a few thousand holdouts eating up maybe a quarter of the city services budget. (That may be extreme; it's just a guess.) It's not fair to the other residents to have one stubborn resident holed up on one block. It's a major conundrum. |
| 4 days 23 hours ago | I'm not convinced it's |
I'm not convinced it's "mostly Detroiters." For one thing, the fact that the revenue drop at the casinos coincided perfectly with the opening of casinos in Toledo shows that, at least up til then, a noticable amount of money was coming from out of state. It's probably still the case. I do agree with the argument that a dollar wasted at the casinos is a dollar not spent at a store or put in a bank where it can be loaned. But I think most casino goers are suburbanites. So while the money doesn't leave the region, it does go to Detroit instead of a Wal Mart in suburbia. So that's a plus for the city. The mistake the city made - and I think it's a big one - was not pushing for the casinos to locate in one area. The riverfront plan made sense. It seems like it wouldn't - after all, casinos purposely don't have windows, which wastes the point of a view. But Niagara Falls has casinos, and if Niagara Falls can have casinos, so can the Detroit River. You can get a nice view from your hotel room. And a casino district would've done more to attract local businesses to that area and created more of an entertainment district than just an island on Grand River Ave. |
| 5 days 2 hours ago | "Epic comeback" is really |
"Epic comeback" is really pushing it. And a lot of those "reasons" ended up being out in the suburbs. "Detroit" is not home to all those Fortune 500 companies, the area is. It's nice to see the city getting some positive press. But I get the sense that the article also implies the whole region is (or was) as troubled as the city. I do think that a lot of the old thinking is starting to be marginalized in the city. You don't see as much reticence toward "outsiders" - there's still plenty of it getting publicized, but now you look at these "protests" that make the news and it turns out that like two dozen people showed up. I think people are seeing some of the positive effects of "outsider" change ("wow, I got my kid out of DPS and into a charter school and it's a hell of a lot better"), or else just sick and tired of seeing what happens when the old guard tells everyone to piss off, or whatever. But I believe there's more openness in the city than before, which is a big step in improving things. |
| 5 days 3 hours ago | Yes, until we place this in |
Yes, until we place this in the proper context, which is to say, we know all about the history of this professor Nyangoro, who was (basically) fired for academic fraud. And we know thanks to the Florida State case that "I didn't know what kind of classes my players were going to" doesn't fly. Oh, and we also know for a fact that the players had a special tutor friend who wrote their papers for them. So now the emails read something more like,
Pretending these emails exist in a vacuum is the wrong way to go. They walk like a duck and quack like a duck. |
| 5 days 18 hours ago | A heads-up for you: Urban |
A heads-up for you: Urban planning was my undergraduate major, and I tried, for a little bit of a while, to get a job in that field after I'd left the Navy. One thing I learned about that, and from the experiences of a few other folks in my class, was that you can't be at all picky about where you work. You basically have to be willing to go anywhere in the country. This is part of the reason I didn't stay in the field. Just one man's anecdotal experience, but that's what I found when I looked. If working in Detroit is what you want (and that's what I wanted) I'd suggest being constantly on the lookout for opportunities there even while you're working elsewhere. |
| 5 days 19 hours ago | Quite possibly the most |
Quite possibly the most shameful thing the NCAA has done in the last five years is ignore the ridiculous shenanigans going on at UNC on the grounds that the "benefits" were available indiscriminately to the general population and not just athletes. UNC should've been absolutely destroyed. Now the NCAA has managed to send the message that you can fake every grade in the transcripts of every athlete on campus as long as you do the same for a couple nonathletes too. |
| 5 days 21 hours ago | Please. What makes you think |
Or Arkansas and Virginia Tech. |
| 5 days 21 hours ago | I can see the need to clear |
I can see the need to clear out a little space for the ACC games. That arrangement leaves them seven yearly slots. Have to play USC and Navy, I would put both ahead of Michigan. That leaves five. Let's say they decide they just absolutely must play Stanford every year because for whatever reason they like to play in Cali every year. Four. They like to play an instate team. OK, fine, Purdue. Three. Still a lot of room. Texas has nothing to do with "nationalizing the brand" and everything to do with the fact that DeLoss Dodds is utterly desperate to have ND on Texas's schedule. I mean he practically got on his hands and knees and begged the Big 12 to invite ND. He thinks a Texas-ND hookup will cure AIDS and put a man on Pluto. So that's more about finding out exactly how desperate, in terms of dead presidents, Dodds really is. Even so there's still room for Michigan. So yup - the way I see it, ND wants to present itself to the country as the Midwest's premier football team, and getting beaten by Michigan every year - and early - puts a major damper on those plans. So they won't play anyone within 500 miles that they fear as a threat. |
| 5 days 22 hours ago | You know what else was |
You know what else was scheduled for quite some time? The Michigan series. Don't act like ND couldn't have dropped ASU if they'd wanted to, instead of Michigan. How did there end up being an out clause in the Michigan contract but not in the ASU contract, I wonder? They're not that incompetent at ND. Buck buck. |
| 6 days 11 hours ago | I also might be in very high |
This is called "real life." Might as well have that experience in what amounts to a laboratory environment before you have to do that as part of a job and don't handle it well because you've never been there before. And honestly, I can't recall any RA in the world working 20 hours a week at RAing. Good God no. You really won't have the "true" undergrad experience as an RA. But you will have the chance to strike out on your own for a while, and that's invaluable. |
| 6 days 22 hours ago | Brian Cook? Nope, never met |
Brian Cook? Nope, never met him. |
| 6 days 22 hours ago | Neither of my folks went to |
Neither of my folks went to South nor even grew in GP. Both are Catholic school products. If you ever knew them, it would have to have been sometime in the last 25-30 years as we didn't move to GP til I was 3. |
| 1 week 2 hours ago | I know several people. Which |
I know several people. Which one of them do you also know? |
| 1 week 2 hours ago | I think that makes you senior |
I think that makes you senior grand marshal of South grads on this site. I'm thinking it must've just been "The High" when you started. I know I've mentioned it before, but '00 grad myself. |
| 1 week 12 hours ago | That was fun to watch. It's |
That was fun to watch. It's not too often the case that the team is in control for most of the game like that. I wouldn't quite call it dominant yet, but there wasn't much doubt who the better team was today. |
| 1 week 12 hours ago | Better now than against |
Better now than against Mexico. |
| 1 week 1 day ago | West Point just has nothing |
West Point just has nothing there. The scenery blows Annapolis away and I'm a huge sucker for Gothic architecture at colleges. But the USNA campus is beautiful in its own way and Annapolis is just a much more interesting town with a lot going on. |
| 1 week 1 day ago | On the good side, Camden |
On the good side, Camden Yards is all it's cracked up to be. Loved that place. I mentioned it above, but IU's grass tailgating lots are excellent. The stadium is OK, nice, not great, but the tailgating was better, I think, than just in a parking lot, and one thing it's definitely got on the Big House is that you can get in and out in less than 45 minutes each way. Probably my least favorite stadium was the Citrus Bowl in Orlando. There aren't concourses per se. The "upper deck" is a totally separate structure - just a huge concrete skeleton built over and around the lower bowl - and the whole thing is concrete, concrete, concrete. The concourse, such as it is, is just the pavement outside the stadium ringed by a chain link fence. Bathrooms are basically cement-block sheds. The place where we sat used to be bleachers, but they had decided to staple seat bottoms to them. Which I suppose is nice if the game is a sellout, but it really limits your moving-around options - you can't scoot a couple inches to the right or left because then your butt is between seats. Place is a dump. |
| 1 week 1 day ago | I liked IU as well. I was |
I liked IU as well. I was there for a UVA game, though, not a Michigan game, so perhaps there's less animosity. I only got yelled at by one drunk guy, and I just flipped him the bird and carried on, which I consider a pretty tame experience on the road. The only tamer place I've ever been is Boston College. The stadium was recently renovated and was decent on its own, but I really dug the grass tailgating lots. |
| 1 week 1 day ago | I have to admit the |
I have to admit the "replacement" scene was almost as good. "Next time you're going to do that, tell me first." Classic Hound. |
| 1 week 1 day ago | The only hint I can think of |
The only hint I can think of without giving it away for people who still want surprises from the books is it's a scene where Arya asks somebody (not the Hound) some questions. It was similar to a scene that happened in the last episode, but with a different setting. The specific difference that makes it impossible in the show happened in season two. Here's a link with spoilers that summarizes the chapter from whence it comes. |
| 1 week 1 day ago | I'm not one of those people |
I'm not one of those people that thinks all my favorite characters should have sex. |
