Quotulatiousness

April 26, 2019

Minnesota Vikings 2019 draft — first day

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Almost everyone assumed, based on the last several years’ most-noted weakness being the offensive line, that the Vikings would take the best centre, guard or tackle available and call it a night. Some contrarians were calling out for one of the two top tight ends to be taken to eventually move into Kyle Rudolph’s role for 2020 and onwards. There were even a few brave souls calling for yet another cornerback to be the Vikings’ first pick … and not all of them were sock puppets for head coach Mike Zimmer.

Given his history since general manager Rick Spielman took the job, a certain amount of horsetrading is to be expected … he’s called “Trader Rick” for good reason. One possibility was that the Vikings would try to trade back from the 18th pick to accumulate more picks in later rounds. At the start of the draft, the Vikings had five of their own draft picks and three late compensatory picks available, and Spielman is known to prefer having as many as ten picks to work with.

After a surprising run in the earlier picks of the first round, where most of the highly touted offensive linemen were dropping, some fans started to assume the worst — that the Vikings would trade down rather than grab a tackle, guard, or centre — if you’re a long-time Vikings fan, this sort of pessimism comes naturally. In the event, however, the Vikings stood pat at 18 and selected North Carolina State centre Garrett Bradbury:

ESPN‘s Courtney Cronin had good things to say about Bradbury the day before the draft:

There are multiple scenarios in which the Vikings can still get the offensive line help they need while addressing a different concern with their first pick.

However, N.C. State center Garrett Bradbury is the perfect fit for Minnesota at No. 18. The elite prospect can be a difference-maker on the interior. He is a match on multiple fronts, from how his athletic traits fit the Vikings’ zone-blocking scheme to the positional flexibility he provides with their current personnel.

Bradbury was in an outside-zone scheme at N.C. State that required him to work into the second level, run laterally and move quickly. At the NFL combine, Bradbury recorded the fastest three-cone time (7.41 seconds), as well as the third-fastest 40-yard dash (4.92), among offensive linemen.

His strength and movement skills strike comparisons to former Vikings guard/center Nick Easton and many of the traits found in last year’s second-round pick, Brian O’Neill. Drafting a player with a skill set this vast is critical to the Vikings’ zone-running scheme and can create a more explosive attack in areas like the play-action game.

At Zone Coverage, Sam Ekstrom had this to say about Bradbury:

Garrett Bradbury might be the best center in the draft. He certainly was in the country in 2018, winning the Rimington Trophy, which went to current Viking Pat Elflein two years ago before he was drafted by the Vikings in the third round. Bradbury also has experience at left and right guard, where he spent several seasons before transitioning to center. His interior flexibility makes him an asset, and as a former tight end in high school, his athleticism would make him effective in a zone scheme.

Bradbury ran the third-best 40 and top 3-cone drill at the combine amongst linemen. He also had the second-best bench press. He has a lot of reps under his belt already as he nears age 24, but he proved durable as a three-year starter for North Carolina State.

“Rose Wilder Lane may be the most controversial woman nobody’s ever heard of”

Filed under: Books, History, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

NPR‘s Etelka Lehoczky interviews cartoonist Peter Bagge about his new book, Credo: The Rose Wilder Lane Story:

Journalist, novelist and polemicist Rose Wilder Lane may be the most controversial woman nobody’s ever heard of. Today she’s known primarily for her turbulent collaboration with her famous mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, on the Little House on the Prairie books. But Lane’s story doesn’t end there — far from it. A fire-breathing libertarian, she denounced Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” and grew her own food to protest World War II rationing. From the 1920s through the 1960s she wrote one of the first libertarian manifestos (1943’s The Discovery of Freedom), hobnobbed with Ayn Rand, penned six novels and amassed a 100-plus-page FBI file. In Credo: The Rose Wilder Lane Story, cartoonist Peter Bagge illustrates Lane’s hurly-burly life in his own inimitable way.

Lane isn’t the first controversial woman Bagge has chosen to write (and draw) about — he published books on Margaret Sanger in 2013 and Zora Neale Hurston in 2017. In an email conversation, he told me why he decided to focus on these particular women.

“I was ready to do a book-length comic-book biography, and while reading about people’s life stories I noticed there were women during the years around the world wars who pretty much did exactly what they wanted,” he says. “It struck a note in me just because there’s been — and it isn’t just with women, it’s with everybody these days — this obsession with safety. You know, ‘I don’t feel safe,’ or, ‘Because of how I identify myself, there are people trying to hold me back.’ These women never, ever stopped for a single second in doing what they wanted to do. In the back of my mind I thought this would be something of a demonstration of how people could be and — I would argue — should be.”

“Bismarck” – Battle of the Atlantic – Sabaton History 012

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Media, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published on 25 Apr 2019

Despite restrictions that were put on the German navy by the Treaty of Versailles, the Kriegsmarine rebuilt in the 1930s with one goal: to be bigger and better than ever. Two powerful Bismarck-class battleships formed the pinnacle of the German naval warship production. When the British caught wind that the Bismarck was out in the open in May 1941, they in turn formulated a goal of their own: to take it down for once and for all. The Sabaton song “Bismarck” is about the chase, the battle in the Atlantic and subsequent fate of the Bismarck.

Support Sabaton History on Patreon (and possibly get a special edition of The Great War): https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory
Endless hours of strategy, tactical gameplay and pulse pounding combat! Play World of Warships for FREE: https://wo.ws/sabaton

You can find the official music video for “Bismarck” right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVWEb…
Check out the trailer for Sabaton’s new album The Great War right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1…

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Maps by: Eastory
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski

Eastory YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.

Sources: © IWM (CS 159), © IWM (A 14840), © IWM (A 178), © IWM (HU 385), © IWM (HU 381), © IWM (HU 384), © IWM (HU 382), © IWM (A 3769), © IWM (A 9798), © IWM (MH 15929), © IWM (A 4386).

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

From the comments:

Sabaton History
1 day ago
I’m sure that many – if not all of you have seen Sabaton’s new single “Bismarck” by now. If not, make sure to check it out after you’re done watching this video – it’s awesome. The link is in the video description. Now, we have already used some of videoclip’s footage in this episode of Sabaton History, because it is incredible and does tremendous job in showing some of the drama of this historical event. Enjoy the episode about one of the most well-known naval battles of World War Two! Cheers and ROCK ON! 🤘🤘🤘

The ill-founded notion that rural peasants had a better life than the city-dwelling poor

Filed under: Europe, Food, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Historical illiteracy — encouraged by totally unrealistic historical fiction and highly selective memories — places the lifestyle of farm workers, herders, and other rural people before the industrial era in almost a Disneyfied state of Arcadian paradise. This misunderstanding of reality fed many of the complaints about the terrible living conditions of the poor in industrial towns and cities up to almost living memory — which, to be fair, were terrible, by the standards of the upper and middle classes of the day. Marian L. Tupy provides a bit of evidence for the horrible poverty and miserable living conditions of the majority of Europeans living outside the major towns and cities:

In my last two pieces for CapX, I sketched out the miserable existence of our ancestors in the pre-industrial era. My focus was on life in the city, a task made easier by the fact that urban folk, thanks to higher literacy rates, have left us more detailed accounts of their lives.

This week I want to look at rural life, for that is where most people lived. At least theoretically, country folk could have enjoyed a better standard of living due to their “access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity,” which the anthropologist Jason Hickel praised in a recent article in The Guardian. In fact, the life of a peasant was, in some important aspects, worse than that of a city dweller.

[…]

An account of rural life in 16th century Lombardy found that “the peasants live on wheat … and it seems to us that we can disregard their other expenses because it is the shortage of wheat that induces the labourers to raise their claims; their expenses for clothing and other needs are practically non-existent”. In 15th century England, 80 per cent of private expenditure went on food. Of that amount, 20 per cent was spent on bread alone.

By comparison, by 2013 only 10 per cent of private expenditure in the United States was spent on food, a figure which is itself inflated by the amount Americans spend in restaurants. For health reasons, many Americans today eschew eating bread altogether.

What about food derived from water, forests and livestock? “In pre-industrial England,” Cipolla notes, “people were convinced that vegetables ‘ingender ylle humours and be oftetymes the cause of putrid fevers,’ melancholy and flatulence. As a consequence of these ideas there was little demand for fruit and vegetables and the population lived in a prescorbutic state”. For cultural reasons, most people also avoided fresh cow’s milk, which is an excellent source of protein. Instead, the well-off preferred to pay wet nurses to suckle milk directly from their breasts.

The diet on the continent was somewhat more varied, though peasants’ standard of living was, if anything, lower than that in England. According to a 17th century account of rural living in France: “As for the poore paisant, he fareth very hardly and feedeth most upon bread and fruits, but yet he may comfort himselfe with this, and though his fare be nothing so good as the ploughmans and poore artificers in England, yet it is much better than that of the villano [peasant] in Italy.”

The pursuit of sufficient calories to survive preoccupied the crushing majority of our ancestors, including, of course, women and children. In addition to employment as domestic servants, women produced marketable commodities, such as bread, pasta, woollen garments and socks. Miniatures going back to the 14th century show women employed in agriculture as well. As late as the 18th century, an Austrian physician wrote, “In many villages [of the Austrian Empire] the dung has to be carried on human backs up high mountains and the soil has to be scraped in a crouching position; this is the reason why most of the young people [men and women] are deformed and misshapen.”

Tips on Accurate Sawing

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

RobCosman.com
Published on 22 Mar 2019

I was teaching a dovetail workshop recently and while watching a student struggle to get the saw started I noticed the angle he was approaching the board. I realized I have never addressed this problem so here it is along with the simple solution. Result should be more accurate dovetails from the saw!

QotD: European jokes about the neighbours

Filed under: Europe, France, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… it is also the Finns who snicker at overbearing Swedes (“What’s the difference between the Swedes and the Finns? The Swedes have got nice neighbours”); and the Portuguese, who mock Spanish arrogance (“In a recent survey, 11 out of 10 Spaniards said they felt superior to the others”).

There are the Irish, who joke about buttoned-up Brits (“What’s the English definition of a thrill? Having an After Eight at 7.30”); and the Poles, who have a go at the Germans for pretty much anything (“German footballers are like German food: if they’re not imported from Poland they’re no good”).

Making fun of our best enemies, said Romain Seignovert, who has just published a book on the jokes Europeans tell about their neighbours, is a great European tradition. “We are a big, diverse community with a centuries-long common history of highs and lows, and our humour reflects that,” he says.

[…]

There is a deeper point. Ultimately, Seignovert said, laughing at our neighbours is “recognising, even celebrating, our particularities. It shows we’re not indifferent. Europe isn’t just political and economic, it’s also cultural – about all these nations, living together. The EU hasn’t made enough of that.”

That may be true. But Seignovert, remember, is French, so what he says should clearly not be taken too seriously. In the words of one particularly fine Belgian quip: “How does a Frenchman commit suicide? By shooting 15cm above his head, right in the middle of his superiority complex.”

Jon Henley, “‘Crude, but rarely nasty’: The jokes Europeans tell about their neighbours”, The Guardian, 2016-05-08.

Powered by WordPress