I now control the means of production, bitches.

Anthony Andro has a story on Darren O'Day being lost on waivers to the Orioles.  We'll miss you, Darren.  I'll order a Gabbard jersey in your honor.  He also has a story on Adrian Beltre's gold glove.

Matt Mosley has a piece on off-season acquisitions, saying the focus remains on pitching but the Rangers may look at Prince Fielder and Albert Pujols.

The DMN has some excerpts from an interview CJ Wilson did with Ben and Skin saying that if money was the only thing motivating him, there are other things he could do with his time.  I suppose this includes script writing, car racing, DJ'ing, and pitching like crap in the playoffs.  There's also this one where he says he was "just so angry" after Game 6.  Contrast that with with this post-Game 7 interview with Gordo from The Ticket.  Oh, well.  CJ was really good this season but he's still kind of irritating sometimes.

Here's Joey Matches on Warsh and his in-game management.

Also, I wrote a guest post for Big League Stew on the Rangers' World Series loss.

Rangers go up 1-0 in the ALCS.  CJ was as good as he had to be, and the boomstick made an appearance.  Yay!

Dark Roasted Blend has had a bunch of neat photo essays featuring abandoned places.  I came across this though and thought of Philkid, putting on his mascara and makeup at the haunted mansion while there's a goddamned cursed Disney island that's haunted by fucking, no joke here, vultures.  The wretched descendants of the vultures that Disney tortured by cramming up to 70 of them into an unventilated, windowless shed.

There's some other abandoned Disney stuff at the link, but none of the other ones appear to be haunted by vultures.  So there's that.

If you want to see some non-philkid related abandoned places, here's the link to the others.

This is a nice video from the Fox Atlanta station about Jonathan Taylor, who was paralyzed in a collision with Ranger first round draftee Zach Cone.  Somehow I had missed this in all the "THIS DRAFT IS FULL OF UNBELIEVABLE SUCK GOODBYE" of the draft threads.  For those that want to donate towards Taylor's rehab and recovery, they mention how to do so at the end of the video.

Going to the game on Saturday, I had an incident that I would like the LSB wisdom on.  I had to go to the airport to pick up one of my brothers, who I was to then take to the Ranger game.  To protect his identity, I'll just say that it was a brother whose name starts with "A."  His flight was late, so we were going to be late.  When we got near the ballpark, this brother asked me to "drop him off" and go park the car myself.

My position is that you "drop off" grandmothers and girlfriends.  You do not "drop off" another male that you're attending a sporting event with.  So, of course, when he went to open the door I sped up so that the only way he could get out of the car is if he was willing to tuck and roll.

What say you, LSB community?  If you're attending a sporting event with another man, is it okay to ask them to "drop you off?"

THIS POST GAME THREAD IS FULL OF UNBELIEVABLE SUCK, GOODBYE.

Neftali Feliz is going to the disabled list, ain't that about a bitch.

Edit: Texas Rangers' closer Neftali Feliz is going on the 15 day disabled list due to right shoulder inflammation.  Speculation arose about Ron Washington's use of Feliz (or lack thereof) in recent games, and it appears the cause of the situation was Feliz having shoulder issues.

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth will ensue.  Is Darren O'Day going to keep sucking?  Will our primary 9th inning options be Methuselah and the old man from New Year's cartoons?  Is the highest and best use of Julio Borbon as a human sacrifice to avert these tragedies in the future?  Josey's money is on "yes."

I suppose now we know that Chris Davis can continue to sit on the bench, being snubbed by his teammates after Gritty McGritterson goes dong, for at least a short while longer as Cody Eppley joins the big club.  Yay!

So looks like Egypt has gone off the grid.  I'm seeing posts that there's no internet access there right now, that the soon-to-be-late Mubarak regime has taken everything offline.  I tell you one thing, if the government of the country where I was living crapped out the internet, I would start looting just out of sheer boredom.  Also, it would be a great 72 hours or week or whatever to own a porno store.

What's up with that?  Is Josey's position going to be that Nolan came in with some Texas high heat and straightened things out?  Or something else?  Place your bets now!

I still don't think that, ultimately, the net benefit is going to be that great, although considering our struggles in obtaining decent DH's over the years, maybe it will.  Young's no Richard Hidalgo.

Edit: via Evan Grant's facebook.

What with me being marginally employed now, I have to make sounder financial decisions.  So I'm going to buy either Fallout: New Vegas today or the new Assassin's Creed.  Anyone got both, what do you think?  I figure Fallout: New Vegas has more gameplay hours, but the AC games have a pretty good storyline and are pretty engrossing themselves, plus they're pretty awesome visually.  What do you guys think?

Dammit.

You know, I had heard before that cheerleading is really dangerous and girls get injured way more than football players and stuff like that.  I had no idea that one of the reasons for that could be Title IX and the influence of Varsity, the company that makes all the cheerleading uniforms and stuff.  Now, granted, Penn and Teller are big time libertarians and that undoubtedly colors their take on this, but their Bullshit episode on cheerleading is pretty amazing.  Maybe this is just amazing propaganda, I don't know, but this was just unfuckingbelievable.

Part 1, Part 2.

I was fascinated by the LSB Education level fanpost, and how it was sort of accepted that a college education somehow makes a person "better."  It doesn't.  College is for suckers.  Don't get me wrong, if someone is going to pay for it, and you can get out with no debt, more power to you, but increasingly higher education is turning into a sucker's game.

See, I've got authority issues.  I don't like people telling me what to study, or when to be someplace, or whatever.  But 500 years ago, a university made a certain amount of sense: books were a luxury item, a sign of wealth; the overall educational attainment of the general populace was atrocious; long distance communication was ridiculously difficult.  So it made some sense to have a central repository of learning because if you stayed at home in Shitford-on-Blyefordshire you would only ever see like 20 people, all of whom only knew about sheep and farming, and there wouldn't be any books.

But why is this a necessary model now?  Not only are we increasingly finding even esoteric fields of information freely available in both lecture and written formats, but one can't even argue that you are getting some kind of personalized attention in a lecture hall with 500 other students.  A sufficiently inquisitive person receives no benefit from a university setting, because they are incurring opportunity costs by not engaging in productive work for 4 to 5 years to be told specifically what areas they may study and paying a premium to do so.

To a certain extent, a university education has traditionally served as a classist signaling mechanism, but what good is that mechanism now?  50 years ago it was somewhat rare to have a college degree, not so much anymore.  Sure, there are jobs that require a college degree as a condition for application, but every job I've ever had I've shared with college graduates, and I have a GED and no degree.

There are some things that higher education has in common with the subprime bubble: government subsidized assumption of risk through leverage, declining ROI, stated government policy of increasing accessibility to an asset or good.  Some of you guys have heard me mention Crazy Ryan before, my schizophrenic friend.  He lives in a group home and is on Social Security disability.  He was approached by a trade school recruiter, offering him $20k in student loans for automechanic classes.  Is this what we've come to?  Encouraging disabled people to take on $20k in non-dischargable debt because "education is GOOD!" 

Fuck that.

Change is coming.  Those of us in Gen X are probably the last group that will see any real tangible benefit from a college education, and it's dwindling.