Quotulatiousness

May 2, 2015

Minnesota Vikings 2015 draft – second day

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

After the (total lack of) drama and suspense over the Vikings’ first round pick yesterday, I did the sensible thing and went out for the evening and paid minimal attention to day two of the draft. Since I don’t follow college football, I wasn’t likely to say whether any given player was a good or a bad pick and aside from checking to see what position the drafted player is projected to fill, I could follow with an occasional check of my Twitter feed.

With all the trades in previous drafts, the Vikings hadn’t actually drafted anyone in the second round for several years (not since 2011 when they drafted Kyle Rudolph), but this time they actually did use the 45th pick on UCLA linebacker Eric Kendricks, a former team-mate (and college room-mate) of last year’s first rounder Anthony Barr. Here’s 1500ESPN‘s Andrew Krammer on the pick:

Eric Kendricks draft card

The Vikings had offers to trade down from 45th overall, but general manager Rick Spielman said they weren’t expecting Kendricks to be there.

“He has the athletic skill set to be a three-down backer,” Spielman said. “We were surprised he fell to where we were at.

“And he says he can help Anthony Barr line up,” Spielman joked. “They said they had the ‘AB’ role when he was [at UCLA].”

Kendricks (6’0″, 230lbs) finished his four-year career with the Bruins totaling 480 combined tackles, 10 sacks, five interceptions and three forced fumbles. He was the NCAA’s 2014 Butkus Award winner.

The Vikings feel he can play either weak-side linebacker or the middle linebacker role for coach Mike Zimmer’s defense. Last year’s starter in the middle, Jasper Brinkley, left in free agency and signed with the Dallas Cowboys. Kendricks joins a linebacker corps comprised of Barr, Chad Greenway, Audie Cole, Gerald Hodges, Casey Matthews and others.

They spent one of 60 combine interviews with Kendricks in February and had heard enough to prioritize him atop their draft board.

After that pick, Spielman’s famous “Trader Rick” persona broke out in the Vikings war room and some wheeling and dealing took place. They swapped picks with Kansas City to move back four spots in the third round (with the Chiefs giving up a sixth-round pick, #193, in compensation). Then they moved back again in a trade with the Lions, going from #80 to #88 in the third round, acquiring the Lions’ fifth-round pick at #143.

After trading down twice for the extra picks, the Vikings chose LSU defensive end Danielle Hunter. Here’s ESPN‘s Ben Goessling on the pick:

Danielle Hunter draft card

It had been clear all offseason that the Vikings were looking for help at defensive end, and for the second year in a row, they took one in the third round. Hunter is an impressive athlete — a 6-foot-6, 240-pound end with 4.57 40 speed and 34½-inch arms. He didn’t put up the kind of sack numbers you’d expect in college and will have to figure out how to beat offensive tackles in the NFL. But after the Vikings missed out on signing Michael Johnson, they added the kind of lanky defensive end Mike Zimmer likes.

[…] Hunter had just 1½ sacks in 2014 at LSU, and after the Vikings took Scott Crichton last year, they could be looking at another end who could take some time to develop. Hunter came out a year early, and while Pro Football Focus ranked him second among draft-eligible edge rushers in run-stop percentage, he will have to get better at pressuring the quarterback. In any case, the Vikings will have to get something out of Crichton or Hunter this season to lighten the load for Everson Griffen and Brian Robison, who each logged more than 900 snaps last year.

The final rounds of the 2015 draft take place later today, with the Vikings holding six picks (for now, pending further wheeling and dealing by Rick Spielman):

  • Round 4 (110)
  • Round 5 (137) – (from Buccaneers through Bills)
  • Round 5 (143) – (from Lions)
  • Round 6 (193) – (from Chiefs)
  • Round 7 (228)
  • Round 7 (232) – (from 49ers through Dolphins)

“…every word she says is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the'”

Filed under: Books, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

An older article from Lesley McDowell at The Independent, discussing the relationship between Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett:

When Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, “every word she says is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the'”, a certain attitude was fostered. Not only to the celebrated playwright’s experiences in war-torn Spain during the 1930s or before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s, but also to her personal life. Hellmann, this attitude said, was a myth-maker of the worst kind. She couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth, not even about those she loved. So what if she wrote in her memoirs that crime writer Dashiell Hammett, with whom she lived on-and-off for 30 years, was the most important person in her life? “Did anyone ever see them together?” queried Gore Vidal.

Writers make myths out of people’s lives, especially their own. And when writers become embroiled with other writers, the opportunity increases ten-fold. It was to Hammett, the pulp magazine writer turned detective novelist, that she always owed a debt, Hellman insisted. The completion of her first play, The Children’s Hour, in 1934, just four years after they met at a Hollywood party, was all thanks to “help from Hammett.” She “worked better if Hammett was in the room.” Yet Hellman’s words about this crucial relationship have been doubted too. Perhaps it didn’t help that she wrote in her 1969 memoir, An Unfinished Woman, “what a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth…I see now, in re-reading, that I kept much from myself, not always, but sometimes.”

Lillian Hellman was married to a writer, Arthur Kober, when they wound up in Hollywood in 1930. Kober had a script-writing job and Hellman was a script-reader. She was 25, bored in her five-year marriage and had writing ambitions. When she met Hammett at a party, he was 36 and famous, the bestselling author of Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon. Different accounts of their first meeting don’t help Hellman’s case for truth-telling, but there is a nastier undercurrent to those who doubted Hellman’s version of the subsequent relationship.

Hammett was extremely handsome and rich, thanks to his books. Hellman was never a pretty girl, and had a forthright manner that scared people. Some doubted Hammett’s interest in her: why should such a successful writer take up with an unattractive nobody?

A revolutionary fix for California’s water problems – pricing

Filed under: Economics, Environment, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Last month, Megan McArdle pointed out that the state of California is reacting to the water shortages in one of the least effective ways by mandating rationing, rather than addressing the absurd under-pricing of the resource:

I’ve seen a lot of apocalyptic writing about California only having a year of water left (not true), and I’ve heard some idle talk about whether California can continue to grow. But California’s problem is not that it doesn’t have enough water to support its population. Rather, the problem is that its population uses more water than it has to. And the reason people do this is that water in California is seriously underpriced, as Marginal Revolution‘s Alex Tabarrok notes. While the new emergency rules do include provisions for local utilities to raise rates, that would still leave water in the state ludicrously mispriced. According to Tabarrok, the average household in San Diego pays less than 80 cents a day for the 150 gallons of water it uses. This is less than my two-person household pays for considerably less water usage, in an area where rainfall is so plentiful that the neighborhood next door to me has a recurrent flooding problem.

Artificially cheap water encourages people to install lush, green lawns that need lots of watering instead of native plants more appropriate to the local climate. It means they don’t even look for information about the water efficiency of their fixtures and appliances. They take long showers and let the tap run while they’re on the phone with Mom. In a thousand ways, it creates demand far in excess of supply.

Having artificially goosed demand, the government then tries to curb it by mandating efficiency levels and outlawing water-hogging landscaping. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work nearly as well as pricing water properly, then letting people figure out how they want to conserve it. For one thing, you can only affect large and visible targets, such as appliance manufacturers or lawns. For another, people will often try to evade your regulations — my low-flow showerhead came with handy instructions on how to remove the flow restrictor. And, perhaps most important, you limit the potential conservation to the caps. So people have an efficient dishwasher but don’t consider doing small loads by hand; they have a low-flow showerhead but don’t consider taking shorter showers. In short, no one is looking for ways to conserve more than whatever you’ve mandated. This may be enough to temporarily manage the current crisis, but it does nothing to set California’s water usage on a more sustainable path.

QotD: The nihilism of modern art

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of my earliest blog essays (Terror Becomes Bad Art) was about Luke Helder, the pipe-bombing “artist” who created a brief scare back in 2002. Arguably more disturbing than Helder’s “art” was the fact that he genuinely thought it was art, because none of the supposed artists or arts educators he was in contact with had ever taught him any better and his own talent was not sufficient to carry him beyond their limits.

I am not the first to observe that something deeply sick and dysfunctional happened to the relationship between art, popular culture, and technology during the crazy century we’ve just exited. Tom Wolfe made the point in The Painted Word and expanded on it in From Bauhaus To Our House. Frederick Turner expanded the indictment in a Wilson Quarterly essay on neoclassicism which, alas, seems not to be available on line.

If we judge by what the critical establishment promotes as “great art”, most of today’s artists are bad jokes. The road from Andy Warhol’s soup cans to Damien Hirst’s cows in formaldehyde has been neither pretty nor edifying. Most of “fine art” has become a moral, intellectual, and esthetic wasteland in which whatever was originally healthy in the early-modern impulse to break the boundaries of received forms has degraded into a kind of numbed-out nihilism.

[…]

To see these craft objects, unashamedly made for money (that’ll be $40 extra for molecular-surface etching, thank you), is to have your nose rubbed in the desperate poverty of most modern art, to be reminded of the vacuum at its core and the pathetic Luke Helders that the vacuum spawns. It’s a poverty of meaning, a parochialism that insists that the only interesting things in the universe are the artist’s own psychological and political quirks.

Bathsheba Grossman’s art reminds us that exploration of the narrow confines of an artist’s head is a poor substitute for artistic exploration of the universe. It reminds us that what the artist owes his audience is beauty and discovery and a sense of connection, not alienation and ugliness and neurosis and political ax-grinding.

Forgetting this value rotted the core out of the fine arts and literary fiction of the 20th century. We can hope, though, that artists like her and Arthur Ganson will show the way forward to remembering it. Only in that way will the unhealthy chasm between popular and fine art be healed, and fine art be restored to a healthy and organic relationship with culture as a whole.

Eric S. Raymond, “The Art of Science”, Armed and Dangerous, 2004-09-21.

Powered by WordPress