Spiderman: the red costume or the black one? (On pure looks only, obviously, since the black one turned out to be a bit on the not-so-nice side….)
Yay.
Get thee to an ER.
One of the most nauseating of all talk points from the Right in this country on the subject of health care is the whole “Hey, the uninsured can just go to the emergency room for health care!” canard. Any time I hear someone say this I instantly file that person away in my head as someone without anything of worth to say on the subject.
And now it turns out that guess what? Uninsured ER patients are twice as likely to die from traumatic injuries as insured ER patients are.
The fact is that our awful health care system kills people who shouldn’t have to die. Anyone defending this system, then, needs to answer the question of why they think that more death is preferable to less death.
(Comments closed.)
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You got to know when to hold ’em….
The football world is abuzz — abuzz! — with talk about a big gamble Patriots coach (and all around Incarnation of All Things Evil) Bill Belichick made in the game yesterday against the Indianapolis Colts. With the Pats leading 34-28 with a bit more than two minutes left, the Pats faced 4th-and-2 from their own 28 yard line. Just about everybody on the planet would almost certainly punt in that situation, the idea being that you at least want the other team to have a lot more field to cover if they have to drive for a touchdown to have any chance. But Belichick decided to go for the 4th-down conversion, which came up short. The Colts took over at the Pats’ 28 yard line with just over two minutes to go and with all three of their timeouts remaining, in a game in which they had just stormed back from being down 31-14 early in the 4th quarter to being down just 34-28. Peyton Manning drove them in for the touchdown that gave the Colts a 35-34 lead with less than ten seconds to go, and the game ended with that as the final score.
Now, I agree with the general criticisms being leveled at Belichick on this. There is a growing consensus in the NFL that you shouldn’t always punt on 4th down; going for it on 4th down is a lot more frequent now. But there are situations where it still seems prudent to kick the ball away, and this definitely seems like one of them. So what was Belichick thinking?
My suspicion is that he was, first of all, utterly confident that his offense would convert the 4th down. That seems obvious. Also, I suspect that he was less than confident of his defense, which, as noted above, had just been shredded in the 4th quarter and hasn’t looked like a particularly stout defense a whole lot this year. Most of all, though, I’ll bet Belichick was thinking about the game clock. I’d guess that his reasoning was something like this:
“Well, my defense is getting killed, so if we punt, we’ll almost certainly give up the touchdown. If we go for it and convert, we can run down the clock a bit and force the Colts to use their timeouts on defense. But if we go for it and fail, the Colts will still score. So, assuming that the Colts score their touchdown if they get the ball back in this situation, which situation is worse for us? If they score after going sixty or seventy yards, they’ll probably only leave a few seconds on the clock for us, so we won’t be able to get a winning field goal. But, if they get the ball back right here on the 28, then they probably score really quickly, right? And then we get more time to get the field goal we’ll need to win.”
I think Belichick was trying to play the clock a bit, choosing the scenario that gave him the most control he would have over the time he would have left: either keep the ball, or at least give the Colts a chance to score in a lot less time than it would have taken them otherwise. Of course, the problem with that kind of thing is when the guy on the other side of the field knows all this too, and Peyton Manning may be the single most football knowledgeable quarterback in history, which is why he was able to both score his go-ahead touchdown and leave New England a paltry nine seconds in which they could do exactly nothing.
(In other news, the Bills still suck. We watched Up instead. A post on that movie is forthcoming sometime.)
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Sentential Links #189
Linkage of the week….
:: “My Cousin Vinny” is a lawyer movie that believes in lawyers and the legal system. A just result– the correct result– is reached, and it ends that way because the defendants’ lawyer, Vinny, did his job. That’s a good reason to put it on anybody’s list of great lawyer movies, and congratulations to the ABA for getting it. (That movie is so often viewed as “fluff”, and I’ve always thought it very unfair — in fact, an urban legend holds that Marisa Tomei was awarded the Oscar by accident when the presenter read the wrong name. It’s really a very good movie in itself, and I never even realized the competence of the film’s treatment of the legal proceedings.)
More next week.
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A random observation
Back in July, we had in Buffalo a fairly long string of days that were cooler than usual, and as a rule it never really got sweltering during the summer. The general consensus seemed to be that the summer’s weather sucked, and one sentiment I heard a lot went along the lines of: “Gee, what a cold summer. Global warming my ass!”
Flash forward to now, when we’ve had a November that’s been warmer than any I or anyone else can remember. Temps have been consistently above 50 degrees, with frequent trips into the 60s, for several weeks now and according to the weather reports, this pattern is unlikely to change anytime in the next week. Where snow at some point in October is usually the norm here, it has yet to snow at all this year in Buffalo.
And yet I’ve not heard a single person say anything to the effect of this extended warm spell being a positive indicator of global warming. I find that interesting.
(Of course, short term local weather trends do not actually indicate anything one way or the other about global warming, but the general psychology is interesting here.)
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Sunday Burst of Weirdness
Oddities abound….
:: Apparently a study was needed to confirm that cannabis is good for stress-relief.
:: The union of the sets “Happy” and “Sad”.
That’s about it, I guess. It was a pretty “Meh” week for weirdness in my usual haunts.
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Something for Thursday
Here’s a bit of film music from quite recently. It’s from the film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and it scores a scene where Harry Potter and a number of the kids at Hogwarts decide that their professors aren’t doing enough to train them against the Dark Arts, and that therefore they should undertake such training themselves, with Harry himself teaching them. Much of the music in the Potter films tends to be the kind of thing you’d expect from movies about wizards and magic and whatnot, especially when most of the themes in the series sprang from the pen of John Williams, who scored the first three films. But this one, the fifth, was scored by Nicholas Hopper, who took a decidedly different approach, as we can hear in this cue. It’s not heavy or portentous at all; in fact, it’s some of the most optimistic music written in the whole series. Here’s “Dumbledore’s Army”.
(This is actually a recreation of the cue by a person using a synthesizer, but it’s really pretty amazingly close in sound to the original composition for orchestra, and the music’s forward-looking nature really comes through.)
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A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
Of Tumbling Walls
I don’t remember much about the fall of the Berlin Wall. That is to say, I remember nothing about it.
The event happened when I was barely two months into my freshman year of college. I was trying to focus on studies that were harder than anything I’d known before; I was a member of three musical ensembles and had to practice at least two hours a day anyway; neither I nor my college roommate brought a teevee, so we had none in our room that whole year; I was probably more focused on some girl — there was a blonde pianist I quite fancied at first — and, well, all of the above. So I had only the vaguest notion that the general feeling that had been accruing through the late 80s — that Communism was quickly approaching the end of its shelf-life, aided along by the efforts of Gorbachev — was about to come to a head.
I only knew that the Wall had come down when I went to my first class the morning after, and heard one of my classmates literally say to someone else, “Hey, did you see the news? The Berlin Wall fell.” And for a moment, I remember thinking briefly that it had toppled of its own accord, as if there had been an earthquake or something. The magnitude of the human accomplishment was obvious, though, almost immediately. The feeling that eventually settled in was that it was pretty surreal. It felt as if one night, the world was in its natural state, with two Germany’s and two Berlins, and the next night, that era was over, just like that. No long periods of summit meetings, no signings of treaties to take effect in five years. Just a bunch of people, at long last taking their hammers and crowbars and whatever else they could grab to that immense series of concrete slabs so they could finally start chipping it away.
Anyway, that was my sense of what was going on.
I wonder whatever became of that blonde piano player, by the way….