What is Sports?

Perry doesn't know anything about sports. Well, that's not entirely true. He doesn't know anything about mainstream sports--basketball, baseball, football, hockey, soccer, etc... The sports that pretty much every American knows at least something about, he knows nothing about.

As a kid he randomly decided to become an expert in three sports and focus his attention entirely on them: sailing, karate, and skiing.  The kid can out sail, out karate chop, and out ski anyone.  Which is very awesome.  Unfortunately those sports are very niche sports, and they don't get broadcasted on TV all too often.  You don't see people hanging out in bars or dorm rooms, huddled around the TV watching The Karate Kid, I don't think I've ever even seen sailing on TV, and knowledge of skiing only comes in handy every four years, during the Winter Olympics.  People--especially guys--watch mainstream sports together to bond and chit chat about certain players, good plays, etc...  Perry couldn't do this, but he would sure try.  His typical game-time commentary went something like this:

Basketball while watching the Utah Jazz play the Phoenix Suns.  The score ticker lists Jazz: 40, Suns: 35.
Perry: Yo dude, I thought you wanted to watch the Utah game.  What's this Jazzy Sun shit?
Me: This is the Utah game.  Their name is the Utah Jazz.
Perry: Ohhhhh ok.  I've been confused for the last half hours, since you kept saying things about Utah.  I'll remember to write that down.

Baseball
Perry: So this is the one where the guy on the hill throws the ball at the guy with the stick and the guy with the stick tries to bash it back into the guy on the hill's face?


Football
Perry:  This is sport dumb.  If I wanted to see a bunch of dudes beat the shit out of each other I'd just watch my karate videos.  Plus, martial artists don't wear pads.  These guys are pad and helmet wearing pussies.

Basketball after being explained how the game is played.
Perry: Ohhhhh ok ok, I see.  So it's basically a lot like quidich in Harry Potter, except these are grown men, there's no flying, and no brooms ... gotcha.

 Hockey
Perry: Is this the one where they fight?  When will they fight?  I want to see them fight.  Wait, why am I waiting for them to fight when I could just watch my kung-fu DVDs?  I'm going to go watch my kung-fu DVDs. 

Baseball:
Perry: Dude, if I was one of these players, I'd just take a bunch of steroids so I could hit the shit out of the ball.
Me: Ya man, good idea.  Lot's of them do that, or did that, and got tons of homeruns.
Perry: OK, this sport isn't so bad.

Soccer:
Perry: This sport would be so much sweeter if they combined it with bull fighting.  Like, why don't they throw like 6 bulls onto the playing field and paint the ball red.  Now THAT would be a sport.

Submitted by F.J. (not the one from before)/I Am A Dog

I think I posted something about study abroad a few months ago.  Here's a great story submitted by F.J. about a night he was abroad:

Because I started kindergarten a year early, I’ve always been about year younger than most of my peers. When I began my junior year of college, most of my friends were 21 or about to turn 21. I was still 19. That made it difficult to join the migration from campus dorms and frat houses to city bars and clubs. I didn’t have a fake license and there was no way my young face was going to fool any bouncer or bartender.

But I had a plan. I would leave the United States for a land of liquored liberty. I would travel to London Town, where anyone over 18 can grab a pint without the slightest fuss. My excuse to relocate? A study abroad program, of course.

It was great. My new friends and I regularly visited the local pubs, where I discovered the joys of British ales and ciders. Sometimes, we would just grab booze from a corner store and drink in the dorms — or ‘halls’ as they called them. I celebrated part of my 20^th birthday at the pub, part of it in halls. The latter half of the festivities terrified countless innocents and changed me forever.

Everything started out so civilized: pleasant conversation, a piece of cake, a little wine. But the bottles emptied swiftly. We reached for something stronger. The room began to spin. I underwent a transformation I will never forget (except for the memories alcohol washed away).

You know that Kafka novel in which the main character wakes up one morning to find he’s metamorphosized into a monstrous vermin? Well it was kind of like that. Except I didn’t turn into a giant bug. I turned into a dog.

I was on all fours, barking and yelping at anyone who came too close. I would scoot under a table and leap out at intruders, teeth bared. If I found myself cornered, I might dash out of the room into the hallway, as a group of concerned — but laughing — friends tried to keep up.

It was all fun and games at first. Like playing with a new puppy. But my behavior became progressively less Labrador, more Rottweiler.

Something possessed me to single out one girl. She was just standing in the hallway like a wide-eyed kitten sporting a giant red bow, tilting her head in curiosity. She needed to be chased.

I sprinted towards her, still on all fours, barking madly with all the ferocity of a rabid wolf. My approach so startled her that she didn’t have time to turn around and run. Instead, she started to run backwards, scuttling her feet behind her as quickly as she could.

SLAM. She ran right into a wall. She practically ran through a wall.

When her friends helped her out, we all stared at the damage. This wasn’t some minor crack. There was a crater in the wall. It gaped at us, a monstrous gloating mouth.

Fortunately, the girl was perfectly fine: a sore ankle, a mild case of embarrassment. The wall was the real victim.

The next day someone came round to repair the wall. A few days later a poster went up announcing the total cost of repairing the damages: around 300 British pounds, or what was over $600 at the time. These costs were split over the hundred-something residents in halls, so each person only had to pay about 3 pounds. Some people wanted to rat me out, but I had friends in high places — like the student council. People soon forgot about the money. But the memory of the drunken birthday dog will live forever.

Interview With David Noel

Here's an interview I did with David Noel.  He's a tech evangelical for soundcloud, a company that takes the daily hassle out of receiving, sending & distributing music for artists, record labels & other music professionals.  Here's what he had to say:

 me:

3:04 PM could you tell me a little bit about soundcloud?

3:06 PM i guess first of all, the general idea behind it, why you think it will work

  oh, and then your role as a tech evangelist

 David: ok well the last couple of years the web & music has always tried to answer the question of how to best solve "music" for consumers

3:07 PM all services seem to tackle the question of how can people best consume music and with an vast catalog

3:08 PM until now not many services have addresses creators of audio and solve the problem of moving music across the web

  of course there are services targeted at artists but none has made it easy for people to send and receive music, people that do it all day

3:09 PM they had to use ftp, mediafire, rapidshare and all these ugly ad-supported services that don't pay respect to the actual track that gets sent, that was the basic premise for sc: you have a piece of audio and we help you move it across the web

3:10 PM my role as an evangelist is best described here in a recent blog post: http://david-noel.com/post/441261504/evangelism

  and here (which is almost a year old): http://blog.soundcloud.com/2009/10/08/david-noel/

3:11 PM me: ok, cool thanks for those two links

  so, the people that you target are more everyday people sending and receiving music.

  is that other artist's tracks, or their own tracks?

3:12 PM David: yes, it's mostly creators of music/audio and intermediaries that send and receive digital audio: labels, pluggers, digital pr, publisher, music supervisors, mastering studios etc

  and independent "prosuming" artists

3:13 PM aside from sending, we provide nice players to easily push to social networks. basically sc is your control room for your audipo from where you distribute your tracks to where your fans are and where the discussion takes plae

  place

3:14 PM in short: for artists: tools to showcase your work publicly - for people sending/receiving: send and receive private tracks

3:15 PM me: ok, very cool. do you see it being used by artists and the music industry the most?

  or do you find a lot of fans using the site as well?

 David: yes, artists and the industry are the folks actually working with the service and the service connects them with their fans

3:16 PM so if you see the players across the web, they're always from the perception of the fan, both are in a symbiotic relationship but the features of the services are tailored to producers not to fans

  you won't see charts or discovery or recommendation features (aside from groups)

3:17 PM but a fan could sign up and follow artists and stay updated about new stuff in their dashboard - just like I do since I don't produce. I follow my fav labels and artists and my dashboard is my music inbox, just like email - check itregularly

3:18 PM it takes time to find the right people to follow and that's what's different, you actually have to invest some time to find the right people you're interested in

 me: ok got ya. that's really cool.

3:19 PM as far as the financial side goes. what are your main costs associated with the business right now?

 David: the main costs are staff & tech

  tech as in infrastructure and servers etc

  staff = payroll

3:20 PM we don't do marketing right now, the product is its own marketing in some way and word of mouth is doing a good job, we're about to hit 1 million users soon

  *registered users, that doesn't take into account "fans" that only listen/stream

3:21 PM me: ok i see. is there a sort of virality to it? meaning that to use it you have to spread it?

 David: the service is a freemium model, a free basic account and 4 tier premium accounts

3:22 PM me: ok i see. where is your funding coming from? mainly the premium accounts? or other sources as well?

3:23 PM David: we took on vc last year (€2.5m) from doughty hanson tech ventures in london and the premium accounts are almost covering our operational costs

3:24 PM we're beyond plan every month growing at 20%/month so the model proves to be working

3:25 PM virality: yes, the players are everywhere on the web and the waveform is a brand now on the web, you see it, you like it, you want it. then we make it easy to share via twitter and facebook

 me: ok, got ya.

3:26 PM it sounds like you guys have a pretty good model going

 David: thanks :)

  haha as i said, we could go on all night

3:30 PM one thing maybe to mention is that we see soundcloud as a platform, offering accessible data via our API, developers can tap into it and create whole new services, just like with twitter

3:31 PM also worth mentioning is that we'll integrate with all important audio software producers to offer an easy and seamless way to push your productions to the web (your sc account) with one click, bypassing the desktop.

  that I think covers the basic service as it is today, on a high-ish level

 me: wow, that's really cool. you guys are coming up with some great ideas

3:32 PM David: yeah, it's exciting and a great product/team/company

 me: ya sounds like it.

  well thanks a lot, david

 

Kumar's Greatest Hits II/I Kill Tuna

I met Kumar in the dining hall during the first few weeks of school.  You'll remember him from this post.  He was sitting with some people I knew, so some friends and I sat down with them.  He didn't say much at first, but after a few minutes in silence he blurted out "that damn tuna keep me up all night."  "Um pardon me?," I responded.

From there he started to rant in broken English.  "That damn tuna of Tom keep me up all night.  It in cage.  Banging on cage ... SOOOO loud, I can't sleep because of damn tuna.  I think I might kill tuna."  I ran this scenario through my head: Kumar's roommate Tom has a tuna.  It's in a cage.  It bangs on its cage at night which keeps Kumar awake. Tuna fish are about 6 feet long and can be hundreds of pounds.  This seemed odd, to say the least.

Me: you have a tuna in your room?
Kumar: yes.  The bastard keep me up all night.
Me: so the cage must be pretty big?
Kumar: ya cage is big.

Now, I've heard of weird pasttimes--a kid I'd met that day was an amazing accordion player, and colleges love admitting kids based on strange hobbies--but having a tuna fish as a pet seemed far fetched.

Kumar: ya I want to kill but I think Tom gets mad if I do.
Me: well what would you do with it after you killed it?
Kumar:  I just need sleep.  Maybe throw it out window and bird will eat.
Me: would a tuna fit through a window?
Kumar: ya, tuna will fit.
Me: wait, how big is the tuna?
Kumar: like one pound.
Me: wait, are we thinking of the same thing?  Is tuna a fish?
Kumar: what? No, it's a tuna.  It's like, in cage, small, has hair.
Me: ummmmmmm

This made Kumar very frustrated and he started to curse under his breath.

Kumar: it's a damn tuna alright?
Me: but you said it wasn't a fish.
Kumar: I know, it's a tuna.
Me: a tuna is a fish.
Kumar: no, you're wrong.  Wait, let me ask Tom.  Tom we have a tuna in our room, right?
Me: Tom do you have a tuna fish in your room?

Tom gave me a look that said he repairs Kumar's broken english three or four times a day.

Tom: We have a hamster, it's name is Tuna.
Kumar: OH YA! GOD DAMN HAMSTER.  I WANT TO KILL HAMSTER!

Annoying Facebook Friends

G.Q. Magazine did this montage of the 18 most annoying Facebook friends.  It's dead on.

Broken English/Kumar's Greatest Hits

My friend Kumar moved to America when he was a senior in high school.  Prior to that he'd lived in Khatmandu, Nepal, and even before that he'd lived in a remote Nepalese village that was accessible only by taking a two day Yak trek.  Soon after he graduated from high school in the United States, he enrolled in college with us.

Perry describes him as one of those "for a cup of coffee a day you can save this child" kids you see on PBS, only he happened to make it to America and did quite well for himself once he got here.

Kumar is dark skinned, small, and skeletal—he looks a lot like the Vietnamese Communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, except with long, black, Kurt Cobainesque hair.  His speech in English comes out in heavily accented machine gun blasts.  To put it euphemistically, there is a language barrier.  Euphemism aside, when I first met the kid I couldn't understand a word he was saying.

The best thing about Kumar though, is when he can’t think of the right English word, he gets frustrated and starts firing out mixed bursts of random and profane English words.  An even better thing about Kumar, is that when he gets frustrated at a person, he fires out the same bursts of random, violent profanity in the form of insults.  He's figured out that if he just takes two words that he knows have a negative and insulting connotation and mixes them, he'll do just fine at assaulting your character, and maybe even make you cry.  And, oh, he does.  Here is Kumar at his best:

• You insane homo.
• You fu**ing piece of character.
• You fu**ing horny ass.
• You old gay.
• You horny jackass.
• You shit failure.
• You loser damn.
• You fu**ing horse shit baby.
• You fu**ing whore ass.
• You bastard pimp.
• You horny moron.
• You old horny retard.
• You sickly shit.

As you would expect, Kumar never loses an argument.  His insults act like a tazer, rendering their victim completely stunned and debilitated for the rest of the night.  How do you recover from insults like that?  The answer is, you don't.

Frat Boy Turned Thomas Crown

And I thought the only thing college kids did for spare cash was work in the library or, if they're feeling sinister, buy Bud Lights for freshman and charge double.  Check out what this frat boy turned Thomas Crown did for thousands of dollars in beer money.


William John Scott is a freshman at Drew University. He studies political science. He plays defense on the lacrosse team. He describes himself on Facebook as a night person who likes to party. 

But federal prosecutors say he is something else: a busy archives thief who stole famous letters written by a founder of the United Methodist Church and world leaders, including Abraham Lincoln and Madame Chiang Kai-Shek.  

Click on the text for the full article, via the New York Times.

Professor Salaries

I'm far away from America on spring break this week.  That being said, posts will be few and far between, and short and sweet at that. 

The other day I was thinking about a professor I had in college.  He was a funny guy with a good sense of humor.  Whenever the class asked him to do something above and beyond his syllabus, he'd respond sarcastically with "they don't pay me enough for that."  We'd all laugh, he was hilarious.  It'd go like this:

Class: Can we have an extension on our mid term paper?
Professor: No, they don't pay me enough to do that.

Class: It's beautiful outside today. Can we hold class outside?
Professor: Absolutely not.  They don't pay me enough for that.

So I began to wonder ... how much did this guy actually make?  If you ask random people around campus, they'll give you figures that range from $40,000 to $200,000.  Clearly these figures are wrong.

So I did some research, just to figure out how much they weren't paying this guy.  Here is a link to find out how much money your professors bring in annually.  Now, I'm not advocating you use this in any way.  It's just nice to have to information.  In my case, when my professor said "they don't pay me enough for that," I'd just laugh and quietly say to myself, "you're a damn liar," and take whatever he wasn't going to do like a man.

Click here to go to the professor salary finder.  Also, don't write in your school's name.  It messes up the search.  Just click on what state your school is in and go from there.

Wine Perry

There is one thing that Perry should never have, and that's wine. Ninety-nine percent of the time he acts like a gentleman--someone you could bring home to your parents. But there is always that lingering threat that he could delve into his ungentlemanly persona that we've come to know as "Wine Perry."

Giving Perry wine is like giving a dog chocolate--his body doesn't process it correctly and he begins to act wildly, even savagely. It seems to me that Perry has some broken chromosome in his DNA sequence that when inundated with wine, totally warps his personality into a silly, twisted mess.  And it is hilarious.

One glass turns into two turns into seven. His teeth become scarlet, and his smile became looser and more frequent. When I lived with him, the night's that he'd haphazardly chosen to drink wine would start something like this.

7:00: bottle of wine opened, I'd say "dear god" and recite Psalm 116:15, just in case the night got out of hand.
7:05: Perry never drank wine without a ridiculous spread of cheese, crackers, and cured meats--he'd assemble the spread while sipping his wine.  I'd usually go to my computer to do some homework while Perry would continue to wine himself.  Every now and then I'd hear the telltale grgrgrgrgr of wine being emptied into a glass.
8:20:  While sitting at my computer I'd hear a strange and delirious "Uuuuuttttaaaaahhhhh," and I would instantly know that Perry had turned into Wine Perry.  The night would devolve from there.

Now, anything was on the table.  There were, however, certain things that would inevitably occur when Wine Perry made an appearance:

• He would take off his pants.  Not in a sexual way, it just seemed to be a characteristic of Wine Perry.  In the same way that a normal person doesn't wear a down coat in summer, Wine Perry didn't wear pants, opting for boxer shorts instead.
• Any girl that walked past the room would have "hey floozie," yelled at them.  They wouldn't get mad though, they'd just poke their head in the room, notice that Perry was pantsless and had bright red teeth, and let out a little giggle.  They knew what was up.
• He would slur insults at everyone.  But the insults weren't meant to be mean or to criticize whoever they were directed at, they were meant to be hilarious.  And they were--"Hey you! You're like a grass stain on a pant leg."  "You are like a person who forgot to do something important."  "Hey you, I bet you make out with people."  "You remind me of a farmer with no real plow experience to speak of." "Your stature is that of a goat."
• He would get dangerous.  He didn't mean to do this, but when he decided it was time for more cheese after his 6th wine, that knife became a ticking time bomb.  He'd wave it around, demanding more cheese while cursing the bastard who had eaten his last cracker.  Eventually we'd talk him down, he'd put away the knife, and he'd resort to gnawing on block of cheese.
• He'd visit everyone in the dorm building.  He'd strut in, pantsless, glass of wine in hand,  while chomping crackers with red teeth.  Then he'd go sit on the persons bed and proceed to chat their ear off.  Usually with ridiculous nonsense.  "So, you know, Amanda, I've been considering opening up a radish farm.  But it wouldn't really be a radish farm, per se, it would more likely function as a clown training area.  Ya, a clown training ground of the highest caliber.  Similar to how the Taliban trains terrorists in those camps in the sand-laden countries, except instead of terrorists, I'd train clowns at my radish farm.  What do you think?"  Eventually people began to lock their doors when word got around that Wine Perry might make an appearance that night.

Those are just a few standards, but there are so, so many more.  Wine doesn't so much put Perry in a state of drunkenness, as it does put him in a state of sillyness.  And he knew it.  He still uses Wine Perry to instill fear in people's hearts when he doesn't want to do something.  "I don't want to go to that party.  If you take me to that party I'm going to drink wine and you'll have to go with Wine Perry."  Which, actually, has grown to be fine with me.  Who needs to pay big bucks for entertainment when you can just buy Perry a bottle of wine?

Liberal Arts and Jobs

With the economy in the tank and the class of 2009 hanging out in their Mom's basement, or wearing a bright orange t-shirt and visor that say "Dunkin Donuts" instead of a power-suit to work everyday, colleges and their students are starting to rethink the traditional liberal arts education, for better or for worse.  A piece in the New York Times reported that:


Even before they arrive on campus, students — and their parents — are increasingly focused on what comes after college. What’s the return on investment, especially as the cost of that investment keeps rising? How will that major translate into a job?

The pressure on institutions to answer those questions is prompting changes from the admissions office to the career center. But even as they rush to prove their relevance, colleges and universities worry that students are specializing too early, that they are so focused on picking the perfect major that they don’t allow time for self-discovery, much less late blooming. The piece then goes on to talk about how numerous colleges are focusing on providing majors and programs that are more relevant in the job market, and dropping majors that don't typically result in jobs and that have become unpopular in recent years.  For example, the University of Michigan recently created 100 entrepreneurial classes while it simultaneously dropped its classics major.  

 All of the educators interviewed in the New York Times piece seemed to think that adding more job-market-relevant courses was a good thing.  But there were some reservations.  The Dean of St. Michael's, a liberal arts school in Vermont highlighted the value of a liberal arts education when he said: “The humanities tend to educate people much farther out. They’re looking for an impact that lasts over decades, not just when you’re 22.”  I personally am glad that liberal arts colleges are starting to diversify in a skeptical manner.  I think that the liberal arts education--which teaches how to think critically and analytically as opposed to how to perform a particular job--is the cornerstone for a well rounded person.  But it also has its setbacks, especially when--for the classes of 2009--real jobs are harder to come by than a strip club in Saudi Arabia, and recent graduates are earning less than ever.  In most liberal arts majors you learn a lot of amazing information, but often times this information is hard to apply to the real world. Take me, for example.  At the liberal arts school I attended, my major was a mix of environmental science, economics, and politics.  In my economics classes I learned tons of information about markets and how economies function as a whole, but I didn't learn a damn thing about my own money.  I can tell you what will happen to the price of a can of Coca Cola when there is an aluminum shortage, or the tenets of a Marxist economy, or why many of the U.S. trade policies are disadvantageous to the economies in the developing world.   But let's say I were to win a million dollars in the lottery, even after all those economics classes I took, I wouldn't have the slightest idea about how to invest my money.  I'd either A. have to do some serious research or B. hire someone who majored in business at a non-liberal arts school to invest it for me.  This is problematic, and a happy medium between learning about the flow of revenue into a random Asian company versus the flow of revenue into my own wallet should be struck. The liberal arts education is great, unless you're a philosophy or ethno-musicology major making the same amount of money by mowing lawns with your B.A. as you did mowing lawns in high school.  Which is why I think it's great that liberal arts colleges are starting to give a greater focus on relevant courses.

Maybe something good will come out of the current economic downturn after-all--liberal arts majors who not only know how to think, but also how to function in a real life work place.