Quotulatiousness

May 6, 2013

Vikings release punter Chris Kluwe

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:37

Another case of not a surprise, but still a disappointment. Chris Kluwe has been released by the Minnesota Vikings after they drafted a punter in the fifth round of the April draft.

ESPN’s Kevin Seifert ponders whether Kluwe’s outspoken character and public support of gay marriage and other causes played the prime role in the decision:

Here’s the key question to consider after the Minnesota Vikings made it official Monday and released punter Chris Kluwe: Would Kluwe be an ex-Viking today if he had never campaigned for gay rights, Hall of Fame candidacies and other issues?

My informed guess: Probably.

So what impact did Kluwe’s public advocacy play in the Vikings’ decision? It moved the odds from “probably” to “certainty,” erasing any equity his eight-career with the franchise might otherwise have built.

I know that explanation won’t satisfy those of you who are convinced the Vikings targeted Kluwe because he took on a politically and socially sensitive issue. It’s easy to see this move, contextualize it with the Baltimore Ravens’ release of special-teams ace Brendon Ayanbadejo, and suspect an agenda against NFL players who get involved in the gay rights issue.

I just don’t think it’s that simple. When viewed through the bigger picture of NFL business, and in the context of the Vikings’ personnel approach over the past 16 months, you realize that Kluwe’s off-field life was at best the final shove at the end of the plank.

With last season’s kicker drama as the Vikings drafted “The Blair Walsh Project” and then quickly cut Ryan Longwell, and Kluwe’s exit, one has to wonder if Cullen Loeffler’s time as the team’s long-snapper is also coming to a close (it doesn’t help that he had a bad season in 2012).

A Canadian criminal innovation – cheese smuggling

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Food, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

The CBC reports on a breathtaking news item … imported mozzarella cheese is being removed from the clutches of the supply management system, which will reduce prices by a significant amount:

Pizza lovers could soon be paying less for their favourite pies.

A ruling made this week by the Canadian Dairy Commission could soon allow Canadian restaurants to buy deeply discounted mozzarella cheese.

The commission changed the rules used to classify mozzarella cheese, putting the milk product in its own class and essentially removing it from supply-management pricing. Before the ruling, the price for mozzarella cheese in Canada was artificially high when compared to the world market.

The new class, to take effect June 1, is expected to result in lower costs for Canadian-made mozzarella for restaurants that prepare and cook pizzas on site.

Bob Abumeeiz, who owns Arcata Pizzeria in Windsor, Ont., said the ruling could drop the price of a large pizza by as much as 10 per cent.

Oh, and the cheese smuggling?

High prices are part of the reason some pizzeria owners were turning to contraband cheese, smuggled into Canada from the U.S.

Last fall CBC News learned three men, including one current and one former police officer from the Niagara Falls area, were charged in connection with an international cheese-smuggling network.

The men are accused of smuggling caseloads of cheap cheese from the U.S. to sell to Canadian pizzerias and restaurants.

The Whole Earth Catalog was “the internet before the internet. It was the book of the future. It was a web in newsprint.”

Filed under: Books, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

In the Guardian, Carole Cadwalladr profiles Stewart Brand and his early but vastly influential work, the Whole Earth Catalog:

Stewart Brand didn’t just happen to be around when the personal computer came into being; he’s the one who put “personal” and “computer” together in the same sentence and introduced the concept to the world. He wasn’t just a member of the world’s first open online community, the Well; he co-founded it. And he wasn’t just another of those 60s acid casualties; he was the definitive 60s acid casualty. Well, not casualty exactly, but he was there taking LSD in the days when it was still legal, with the most famous hipster of them all, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.

For nearly five decades, Stewart Brand has been hanging around the cutting edge of whatever is the most cutting thing of the day. Largely because he’s discovered it and become fascinated with it long before anyone else has even noticed it but, in retrospect, it does make him seem like the west coast’s answer to Zelig, the Woody Allen character who just happens to pop up at key moments in history. Because no one pops up like Stewart Brand pops up, right there, just on the cusp of something momentous.

[. . .]

This year marks its 45th anniversary. I have a slightly later, yellowing and decrepit edition, from 1971, though it’s the same oversized format. It’s the edition that sold 2m copies and won a US National Book award, and the tips on spot welding, home remedies for crabs (not the marine kind, I don’t think), dealing with drug busts, and building your own geodesic dome are rather delightfully quaint. (I especially like an extract from the underground guide to US colleges which states that, at the University of Illinois: “The hip chicks will do it. It is easier to find a chick who will have sex now than it was two years ago when things were extremely difficult.”) But it doesn’t even begin to convey the revolution that the Whole Earth Catalog represented.

But then, it’s almost impossible, to flick through the pages of the Catalog and recapture its newness and radicalism and potentialities. Not least because the very idea of a book changing the world is just so old-fashioned. Books don’t change anything these days. If you want to start a revolution, you’d do it on Facebook. And so many of the ideas that first reached a mainstream audience in the Catalog — organic farming, solar power, recycling, wind power, desktop publishing, mountain bikes, midwife-assisted birth, female masturbation, computers, electronic synthesizers — are now simply part of our world, that the ones that didn’t go mainstream (communes being a prime example) rather stand out.

Genetically modified barley may mean the end of skunky beer

Filed under: Australia, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:54

The Register‘s Simon Sharwood on an Australian development that might herald new long-life beers:

Researchers at Australia’s University of Adelaide have unlocked the secret to letting beer age without it tasting like old socks.

Doctor Jason Eglington of the university’s School of Agriculture, Food and Wine explained that barley contains an enzyme called “lipoxygenase”. The enzymatic process produces several substances, among them an aroma volatile, catchily named “trans-2-nonenal”. The latter substance, over time, gives old beer a nasty taste and odour.

Eglington, who heads the university’s Barley Program*, learned that some ancient strains of barley have a defective version of lipoxygenase.

Some selective breeding later and the booze boffins have produced a new barley with everything a brewer could want — except working lipoxygenase.

QotD: This seems like a bad idea

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:13

A Florida county sheriff is being given a million dollars to violate the rights of the people who were stupid enough to put him in office.

According to an article by Palm Beach Post staff writers Dara Kam and Stacey Singer, posted Monday, April 29, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw has been awarded $1 million by Florida House and Senate budget leaders for a new “violence prevention unit aimed at preventing tragedies like those in Newtown, Connecticut and Aurora, Colorado.

It would be bad enough if this particular jackbooted thug planned only to use this ill-gotten tax money for the usual militarized toys — machineguns or armored personnel carriers — the cops are so crazy about today, but Bradshaw reportedly wants to create “prevention intervention units” consisting of “specially trained deputies, mental health professionals, and caseworkers”. which “will respond to citizen calls to a 24-hour hotline with a knock on the door and a referral to services”.

“We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government…” the Big-Brotherly Bradshaw bloviated. “What does it hurt to have somebody knock on a door and ask, ‘Hey, is everything OK?'” Since the cops these days do their knocking with a three-foot concrete-filled section of four-inch diameter steel pipe, with welded rebar handles, Bradshaw’s stupid question tends to answer itelf.

L. Neil Smith, “Cutting the Root of Tyranny”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2013-05-06

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