Abandon Hope, ye who feel Joe Mather will save this team.
Hope Hangers
Josh is the greatest living writer you've never heard of. Also, he likes bugs.
Latest posts by josh (see all)
- Bunches of Wins - May 2, 2013
- Ode on a Balk - April 14, 2013
- First Win - April 2, 2013
- Because We Have To - March 29, 2013
- How much For a Win? - March 5, 2013
45 Responses to “Hope Hangers”
Leave a Reply
Obstructed View Forum- Closer by Committee May 19, 2013 BVS
- Mish is probably quite happy with the 24 news May 13, 2013 dmick89
- Cast iron cookware May 12, 2013 uncle dave
- televisions May 2, 2013 EnricoPallazzo
- Hope Monster, comics. April 22, 2013 josh
- Hannibal April 19, 2013 dmick89
- Veronica Mars movie April 15, 2013 dmick89
- The Borgias April 11, 2013 dmick89
- fucking shriners April 10, 2013 uncle dave
- A Breaking Bad Spinoff: It's Saul Good April 9, 2013 dmick89
Aisle424 wrote:
The sheer number of meta-WGN ads during Cubs broadcasts certainly don’t bode well for the future of Cubs baseball on that network.
@ josh:
You prefer this for B’s unanswerable question?
—Prove the trajectory of the descent of a 92 mph fastball hit by Frank Chance in the air 15 feet inside the left field foul line in the second inning of a game on July 3, 1915 would be greater or less than 6 degrees steeper than a fly ball thrown at the same speed and hit in the air directly to center field by Ryne Sandberg on April 16, 1989. Please consider the windspeed of the prevailing winds at the time, the change in gravitational forces caused by the migration of the magnetic poles, the effects of elevated CO2 on the wood density of ash trees harvested to make baseball bats at each time, and the effects of the addition of light towers on turbulent flow as modeled by Zo.
I don’t think there are any stats there.
I don’t think kids value education for the sake of being educated anymore. I don’t know where the fault lies with that.
I didn’t cheat in college, but if something like the internet was as accessible as it is now, I’m fairly certain I would have. I wouldn’t be a dumbass and lift entire sections off of wikipedia like dopes in college now, but it sure wouldn’t have been as exhaustive a writing process if I could use Google instead of a card catalog and microfilm machines.
My dad paid for most of my college with the remaining coming from loans that I was responsible for, but at the time that wasn’t real money, so I didn’t often realize I was wasting money by not trying to learn as much as possible from a class. I was busy trying to figure out the least amount of work I had to do to get a good enough grade for my dad to keep paying for me to hang out with my friends.
So i think that is some of it. I don’t know many college students from middle income families that are paying their own way by working a job or anything like that. Plus this is a generation that has been handed quite a bit by parents without much of the discipline. I’m speaking in gigantic generalizations here, so this isn’t a catch-all, but I think it explains a good part of why kids just don’t take an ownership in their own education.
It is viewed as a complication that they have to finish before going and getting a real job. So they do what they can to minimize the complication.
@ Suburban kid:
All nighters were the only way I could live back then. I would be paralyzed with indecision if I started too early. But I used to also do a lot of research and lay the ground work beforehand.
Ugh, nice typo, you dipshit (me).
@ josh:
Yeah, that’s pretty much how I work, but that’s not sustainable, so I’m trying to change it up.
And to add to that, parents enable it. A lot.
One of my friends works in the FInancial Aid office and she refuses to speak with parents about their children’s loans. The loan belongs to the child, the responsibility belongs with the child, so why is she speaking with a parent?
@ Mercurial Outfielder:
Me too. I don’t really have any writing responsibilities at my current job, which is pretty much like a kind of silent death. So I get up at 5:30 every morning and try to write something.
@ josh:
I thought aske was past tense Spanglish for asked. So it’s not a typo.
@ Aisle424:
Doesn’t the Brownly act, or something like that, prevent her from discussing loans with parents–just like we can’t discuss grades with parents?
@ Aisle424:
I had the internet in college. It was newfangled in 1997, but there. No wikipedia, but I’m pretty sure I could have found stuff if I’d wanted. I didn’t cheat. But I always enjoyed the challenge of school. It’s hard to say, though. What if I was a modicum more lazy or it was just a little more available? I know frats on campus saved tests and had people study off those tests and such which technically wasn’t allowed. That’s pre-internet technology that people used to gain an unfair advantage.
I really have to get back to reading every word. I shudder to imagine how many essential moral lessons I’ve missed out on in the comments.
SVB wrote:
Possibly. It might be. But that doesn’t stop every parent in the world from trying. They also try to talk with us about their kid’s network password too. It’s unreal.
Aisle424 wrote:
That’s true. We see parents all the time letting their children get away with anything and even rewarding them when they should be disciplined. Obviously we can’t say anything or we’ll alienate them, but it is frustrating.
@ SVB:
Well, also, does three calls really warrant police action? Maybe if they were really bad calls…
@ AndCounting:
FLAGGED
@ josh:
Yeah, I know that some professors just re-used old tests over and over and I could have hunted down answers, but I didn’t do that. I was talking more about the research papers where students lift entire sections from an article or something. I could have very easily found a decent narrative, re-worded it and mixed it around a bit to not be a carbon copy, and then just bullshit the footnotes from prime sources because I know the professors weren’t checking them.
@ Aisle424:
Ah old school cheating. Even that required more work.
One of my friends was teaching one of the science classes on campus, I don’t remember which one, it might have been the basic Science 101 that any nincompoop can take to fulfill a science requirement that delves into a bit of bio, chem and physics, but not very far into any of them (that’s what I took). Anyway, the assignment was to discuss some of the ethical decisions made in the book, Jurassic Park. Some kid turned in a paper that was basically the People magazine’s review of the book: “Jurassic Park is a spell-binding adventure that keeps you turning the pages….” or something like that. It was so blatantly not written by the kid that it might as well have been printed on glossy magazine paper.
@ Aisle424:
I did that once or twice in high school, mostly because I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to be doing.
You know, I learned something today.
@ josh:
High school is when you’re almost expected to do stupid stuff. I expect better cheating out of college kids.
http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2012/08/cubs-to-acquire-anthony-recker.html
The Cubs may have seen enough of Steve Clevenger.
@ Aisle424:
Or they just had enough of Lalli, who went to the A’s in the trade *shrug*
@ Aisle424:
Skip to 1:01:
This is kind of fun:
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/justin-toole-plays-nine-positions-minor-league-game-174929078–mlb.html
I don’t think they could cram the DH in there unless the guy starts in the lineup as the DH and then moves to the field later which would mess up the lineup for the remainder of the game since the DH would be sacrificed at that point.
Aisle424 wrote:
Jim Joyce initiated contact with Ventura last night, shoved him, then ejected him.
MB, someone has finally come over to our side: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/08/how-baseball-announcers-subtly-favor-american-players-over-foreign-ones/261265/
Mercurial Outfielder wrote:
@ Rice Cube:
Deck chair Dosey-doh
http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2012/08/27/must-click-link-the-subtle-racial-bias-of-baseball-broadcasters/
(dying laughing)
@ Mercurial Outfielder:
Ah, I just read it via HBT. It definitely reminded me of this blog.
@ Rice Cube:
We’ve been beating that exact drum for 6-7 years, at least since I wrote the Strange Fruit pieces, and probably a bit before.
I can haz Fangraphs job?
Also, “Hope Hangers” sounds like the name of an 80′s porn star.
@ Mercurial Outfielder:
That’s a fantastic piece.
@ Mercurial Outfielder:
Fine! I’m terrible.
Very interesting reading all your comments from the side of a guy who just finished undergrad last year. Since everything is on the internet, literally everybody “cheats.” But really I’m not sure if it’s considered cheating when really what happens is that we all used wikipedia to write papers, and then fudge sources and say that’s where the material came from.
In my experience, professors never check. Most of the people I hung out with scraped by, got the degree, and now are out looking (unsuccessfully) for jobs. This is just from what happened in my circle at U of I Champaign, but I think it’s pretty widespread. Now that I’m starting law school, I feel like the opportunity to cheat is pretty much non existent here. When you use a computer, a program has to be running that stops the internet from being used during tests, and detects cheating as well. Much different (and more serious) atmosphere.
@ PFD:
I’ve fudged sources when I didn’t know how to do a citation… I always tried to actually read the source in that case. But that’s different from wholesale copying and pasting of text from the article itself.
@ josh:
I didn’t mean wholesale copying at all. I guess I phrased it poorly. I was trying to say that, when writing papers, a good deal of the information would come from wikipedia. Then we would do a quick google search with a keyword from the info, and site a website or book that came up as the source. Not wholesale cheating, definitely not copying and pasting. What mainly went on was people not being very accurate (or caring) about sources, but just doing enough to slip by. Kind of what Aisle424 was talking about.
@ PFD:
Right. I’m kind of ambivalent. I feel like you should do the best you can do on an assignment, but I know I assigned vague assignments when I taught (briefly). It’s tough when you don’t care about a subject, to know how to research it. Like with literature as a master’s student, I knew what I wanted to do, so researching was interesting and I was able to delve deeply. If you asked me to right a research paper on sanitation techniques right now, I doubt I’d go much beyond wikipedia either.
@ josh:
Point is, there could be a degree of lazy/overtaxed teaching. I also went to a teeny tiny school (about 600 students total on a good day), so there was more push on an individual level.
Congratulatory post:
http://www.obstructedview.net/site/congratulations-to-our-finalists-2-days-left-to-vote.html