Pasta with Tuna and Tomato Sauce (aka Tuna Pasta)

Posted on May 22, 2014 by jimcoleman3rd

After a too-long hiatus, a recipe:

Tuna Pasta
 – Serves 2 – 4

Ingredients

1 c. chopped onion
1/2 c. chopped green pepper
3 cloves garlic, chopped
3 anchovy fillets, chopped
1 14.5oz can whole/chopped tomatoes
1 bay leaf
1/4 t. anise seed
2 t. dried basil
2 t. dried oregano (Greek)
1 t. salt (or less, to taste)
1/4 t. red pepper flakes (or more, to taste)
1 – 2 5 oz cans tuna, Italian, in olive oil (I cannot vouch for the quality if you use American, water-packaged)
1T capers
8 oz pasta (penne, rotelli, bow-tie as you like, spaghetti even)
Grated Parmesan cheese

Instructions

Saute onions and green pepper over medium head in a skillet. When lightly browned, add garlic and continue to saute for 1 minute. Add anchovy fillets and stir until they have dissolved into the oil.

Add canned tomatoes, and seasonings, stir and simmer for 1 minute. Cover, lower heat, and simmer for 30 minutes, adding water if necessary (sauce should be fairly thick). Remove cover, add tuna, using 1 to 2 cans (depending on how much you like tuna, I like 1.5), and capers. Cook a few more minutes over low heat to warm through. While the tomatoes are simmering, bring water to a boil and cook pasta timing so that the pasta completes a few minutes.

Mix the pasta and sauce together in a warmed serving bowl, adjust seasoning, and serve with grated Parmesan cheese.

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Tired

Posted on April 11, 2014 by jimcoleman3rd

“The shits are killing us …” (Norman Mailer, Songs for Myself)
Inspired By Wolf Biermann’s Die hab’ ich satt!*

I’m tired of those shits
You know who I mean
They fluster and bluster
And think themselves keen
And the smartest of wits
I’m tired of those shits.

And what do we think
Of our pundits and macher
On the airways and stairways
With unending palaver
Whether rightwing or left matters hardly a bit
I’m tired of those shits.

Gun-happy, gun-crazy
On ground stood today
More shooting and killing
Our dear NRA
Loves its Glocks without quit
I’m tired of those shits.

Community’s gone
We’re all asunder
Each group on its own
Identity’s plunder, it’s hardly a wonder
Our vision’s the pits
I’m tired of us shits.

What keeps us apart
Is our failure to see
That the shit that we sow
Well, it comes back times three.
So stop. Contemplate. Freely admit
That it’s time for us all to clean up our shit.

* Wolf Biermann was an East German singer/songwriter and dissident, critical (from the left) of the East German regime. It is left as an exercise to the reader to set this piece to music (think ’60 protest movement).

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Tiger’s Back

Posted on April 2, 2014 by jimcoleman3rd

An ambiguous title for an ambiguous situation. Tiger Woods announced yesterday that he would not be participating in this year’s Masters due to a recent back surgery. His return date to the Tour is unknown and depends on the pace of his recovery.

This has raised speculation among some about his ability to achieve two goals: passing Sam Snead’s total wins on the Tour, and breaking Jack Nicklaus’s total of 18 majors (Tiger stands today at 14). The first is, with a caveat, a lock. The second is no longer as certain.

After his last major, the US Open in 2008, I thought it would be a lock as well, until I heard that he played the last round essentially on a broken leg. I’d told my friends long before that his ensuring success depended on his health. He was just at that point one of the two greatest golfers of all time. Nicklaus suffered from hip problems, but these came long after his prime. Tiger has had health issues (leg, knee, and now back) in the midst of his prime.

Despite his marital and heath issues, it is still worth remembering that Tiger won 5 times in 2013 with over 8 M in earnings. This can hardly be seen as a “disappointing” year, except for the fact that he didn’t really contend in any of the majors on the final day.

Much will depend on the nature of the injury and surgery — Woods is remarkably circumspect in this area — and how fast he pushes himself to recover. I would hope he gives it sufficient time. It is clear to me that Tiger is the kind of athlete that can push his body past was it can reasonably handle. I would guess that his drive and capacity for enduring pain is high. He has said as much recently, claiming that there are types of pain he can and played through (see the broken leg), but the back and spine issues are different. Back and spine surgery is also different than leg/knee. I have never known anyone who has had “just one” back surgery.

So here’s my wish for a healthy Tiger’s back back. There’s no current player on the Tour that is as exciting to watch, and I feel happy to have grown up to watch Jack, Tom Watson, Greg Norman, and Tiger play the game.

 

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Five Things About Being an IT Professional

Posted on March 30, 2014 by jimcoleman3rd

I have not been up to my usual level of productivity in the blogosphere of late, and here I must claim that the demands of the working world have exercised more than an undo influence on my time and energy.

That now has past. The project I was leading was a technology transfer effort involving the move of 16+ TB of data, 30 users, and 25 new desktops from one environment to another. The difficulty was compounded by the fact that we were also moving from one Windows domain to another, most of the user names were changing, and all of the user desktops were being upgraded. Not, altogether that difficult, but a fiddly effort with many moving parts and a few things that my organization had never had to undertake (moving and developing a cost effective back-up strategy for that 16 TB of data, growing at a rate of 6-10 TB a year).

With a project post mortem (we finished about a week earlier than planned) upcoming, I’ve been reflecting on some of the “facts” about being an IT professional that this project brought once more to my attention. Here are my top five for the current effort:

One: Your Job Isn’t What You Think It Is

Unless you are concretely working for a company whose business is directly tied to software development and support, your job is at its essence a service role, not at IT role. I think now most IT professionals understand this at some level, but often enough our business partners are seen by the technologists as inept in technology, hide-bound in their processes, and just not knowledgeable enough to make the right choices, and the business users consider IT staff as unhelpful, arrogant, and ignorant about the business.

If that rings true to you and your business partners, you have a lot of work to do in understanding what their actual business needs in IT are and how you can work with them to provide them. If you think that the issue is that they “can’t state their requirements”, and always want something “bright and shiny”, then my friend, the fault lies as much with you as with them.

Your job as an IT professional is to understand the business you’re in. Yes, that’s right, actual domain knowledge/experience. It’s up to us to meet them more than halfway, be supportive always and visionary when necessary to help them use the technology we can provide in ways that add value and support the constant improvement of everything that’s done.

Two: “Just in Time” Analysis Beats “Waterfall” in Real Time Events

In projects like my current one that involve a technology transition in the midst of the business continuing to do its actual work, a “waterfall” methodology can be only partially successful because almost everything must be done in parallel. For example, the 16TB of data not only needed to be moved, it needed to be refreshed as it was being added to by the business during the whole period. Not just nightly synchroniztion, but also procedures to ensure 1) the correctness of the copy at the file/directory level, but also 2) at the file integrity level.

Similar issues with permissions, firewall rules, desktop builds: we could plan that these things would happen, but could not know all of the details until the very last minute if we were to keep the business up and running during the whole process. Most users experienced less than a hour of down time on the desktop, and one day of use of a central application — I’d call that a pretty successful effort.

Moral: get the big picture right at the start, figure out not just what you need to know, but also when you need to know it.

Three: You Get It Right the Third Time You Do It

This, as a technology manager and system developer, has long been one of my tenets: by the third iteration of any complex system you have the experience with both the system and, especially, the data, to know how to accomplish what needs to be done. At the end of the day, most data-intensive and data-centric system fail because the actual data is not as the business or business analyst has described or even imagined it.

In this project, the biggest test was to develop software, and then procedures, to ensure that the massive data copy was performed correctly at both the file/path level and at the file level, and these tests needed to be performed on both the origin and target systems.

Even though most of the requisite software had already been developed, we needed those three iterations to feel confident about our work. Moral here: plan for three iterations if you need to develop custom scripts/code to help you accomplish your work.

Four: An “Installed Base” Mentality Can Be Fatal

The biggest obstacle to success can often be the “installed base” mentality on the IT side. That is, what happens when the “here’s what we’ve built/implemented to solve your problem” butts up against a problem that appears to be, but isn’t the actual problem at hand.

In our case, it had to do with the solution central IT offered for data archiving. This was an inflexible, very expensive solution (archiving cost 6 times the cost for spinning disc) put together for a completely different use case. Our business users (a museum) saw their digital assets as being something to be held/maintained in perpetuity, a far different solution than IT was able to offer. While they are looking at cloud storage options, a very attractive choice from the business’s point of view, such a solution is months away, and we will be looking at other interim solutions. Long-term, this is a problem that no one in the library/cultural heritage business has been adequately able to address.

So, for this part of the project, central IT had no acceptable solution, and it took many rounds of conversations for them to realize this and begin to work towards other near-term solutions, solutions which we have yet to decide on and implement

Five: Done is Not Done

Ok, so we’re not done with solving the long-term archival needs of our business partners. This is essential, but will require more work. We’re also not done with getting all of the permissions right, but we’re very close. We think we’re done with the transfer of all of the digital content, but 5TB of the 16TB of data are duplicates, so we need to work through how we address deduplication in a way that makes sense to our users. We think we’re done with the database moves, but each new day seems to bring yet one more thing that didn’t get updated with the move, despite help from the vendor (our efforts have helped them develop their own internal documentation for such future moves by their clients). And then there’s all this other stuff that we now need to take on because it was put into another, follow-on phase. Not to mention all of the new stuff, here way too numerous to mention.

So, not only is there no rest for the wicked, if you’re good in IT, it will only generate more demand. So that’s a good thing, but not a thing on which one can rest.

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Jack Reacher, Knight Errant of Middle America

Posted on March 5, 2014 by jimcoleman3rd

Jack Reacher — or just Reacher — is the hero of a growing number of action/adventure novels by Lee Child.

Of the three characters I mentioned in a previous post, Reacher is, in certain ways, a bit of a cipher. He has a back-story, given in greatest detail in The Enemy, but what you quickly learn about him in almost every Reacher novel is:

  • he prefers Reacher
  • he is a big man, 6’5″, weighing 240+ pounds
  • he is ex-Military, Army MP and investigator
  • he is a crack shot
  • he travels with no baggage, mostly just a bank card and a toothbrush
  • he does not bother to do laundry, when his clothes are soiled, he goes (mostly) to an Army supply shops, purchases plain, and throws away the soiled
  • he travels by bus or occasionally hitch-hikes
  • he likes coffee and rarely drinks
  • he knows how to wait

and that’s about it.

Each novel is self-contained, almost without history, in an unrelenting present, although there are very occasional references to past or possible future events, and at the end of one novel, he may set out on a journey that puts him into the temporal scope of the next.

Likewise, in each novel, he falls into the main situation without any active involvement on his part, things simply happen to him, and he is swept away by events. However, once engaged, he devotes his undivided attention to discovering and rectifying the events that have been thrust upon him, becoming, as each novel progress, the driving force behind the action and the resolution.

While large cities, Washington mostly, figure in his landscape, he travels mostly in the broad expanse of small-city Middle America, dotted with coffee shops, diners, small town police, and small-town politics, where a few central figures may control the destiny of others.

His opponents, or villains, if you will because villains they are, are extremely violet, sadistic torturers or killers. With few exceptions some of the meanest of the mean and vilest of the vile, driven in turn by money (Killing Floor, the first Reacher novel, is an excellent example), trading in sex slaves (Worth Dying For), terrorism (Gone Tomorrow), or power (Never Go Back, among others). At the end of the day their demise through the hands of Reacher is also violent and final. No one who opposes Reacher walks out alive, and in one notable example, the entire population of evil doers, along with their automobiles, are buried in a mass grave to conceal what has happened. Because no matter how he gets out, there are no consequences for Reacher himself. Though he may be physically damaged himself, he walks alone into the sunset, most often because the revelation of full extent of the stain would cover others even higher in power, and is so obliterated or washed over. In the best of the Reacher novels (Killing Floor, Tripwire), the bad guys are really bad, in the lesser ones (Never Go Back), less so.

What is perhaps most interesting about the Reacher novels, beyond their break-neck pacing, dark humor, and violence, is that most of the real action takes place in Reacher’s head. We see him work out the puzzles of the current situation, talk through his approach, measure his actions, and then carry them out. He is not always right, or not always right soon enough, but it the interplay between the action and the thought before and after is particularly satisfying.

Child is a deft story-teller, using a variety of techniques to keep the Reacher stories fresh and engaging. He is not beyond the cliff hanger — see 61 Hours, for example, a novel which also uses the bomb countdown metaphor to generate an excellent frisson in this reader — even when the cliff off of which Reacher was hung in this one, is not adequately explained in the next (so how did he escape?).

I have called Reacher a knight-errant, and in a modern sense, he is. He seeks out adventures (more likely they seek out him) , not so much to prove his values as the courtly knight of old, but to establish them once he is called on. The medieval figure would also be interested in pursuing the object of his courtly love, and while women do figure in the Reacher novels, love is rarely involved, but certainly strong physical attraction is present. There is sex in every Reacher novel, but it is demure, often humorous, and always non-explicit. The women in the Rearcher novels are usually strong, intellegent, sometimes his near match, but always engaging, and anything but caricatures, which may account in part for the strong response from women to the series.

There is the whole question of verisimilitude, I suppose, since the Reacher novels are set as mentioned mostly in a present or near present. Logically Reacher at this point would have to be nearing 60, but I doubt that anyone but me thinks too much about that. In point of fact, the last four Reacher novels have probably taken place in the course of less than a year, and then there’s also the back story that could be pursued.

Whatever. If you’ve not read any of the Reacher novels, you’ve got a meaty pile you should dive into, and I’ve just noticed — can’t wait — that the next one is due in September. Let’s see if I can make the next one stretch out more than two days, because that’s about the maximum number of days I can go without racing to the finish.

Lee Child is a dynamite story-teller, Reacher a compelling guy who sets the world in order. Enjoy.

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Arizona’s SB 1062

Posted on February 24, 2014 by jimcoleman3rd

The Arizona State Legislature recently passed a bill onto Governor Brewer that would, according to an ABC report:

The bill … establishes a set of needed guidelines for when this potential defense could be used in court:
– The person’s action or refusal to act is motivated by a religious belief
– The person’s religious belief is sincerely held
– The state action substantially burdens the exercise of the person’s religious beliefs

As a resident of Arizona, one of the things that troubled me, along with the content of the bill itself, is that it came completely unexpected: there was no public debate, no attempt to gauge its support, or lack thereof, among the Arizona citizenry. We all just simply read about it in the newspaper or saw reports on TV or the Internet.

How does a bill of such import make it through both Houses with absolutely no public input?

Rather than take time expressing outrage or arguing extensively that this is precisely the kind of double-think that Orwell deplored — I am protecting religion by allowing you to exercise or fail to exercise any business action if that action would violate your “sincerely held” religious beliefs, even where these might otherwise be prejudicial or illegal — I’d like to focus on some other questions, specifically, is this representative of the people of Arizona? (Parenthetically, Arizona has no law against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation).

Many here in Tucson would say it is not representative. For Tucson, that is almost certainly true, but for Arizona as a whole? I don’t know, but I am troubled that the elected legislature might actually represent accurately the beliefs of the majority, as least of the majority that votes and elects. The tenor of political discussion here at the state level is impossibly narrow, and very conservative, anti-government, anti-poor, and steeped in the belief of the self-reliant Western individual that is myth, not reality.

Barry Goldwater would not be elected here to a state office today. Ditto the Udalls. John McCain has been censured by his own party for crossing over to vote with Democrats. Governor Brewer, Obama finger waggling aside, I have come to see as positive break on the majority right wing of her party. So far, in the three plus years I have lived here, she has mostly vetoed the most heinous bills of her party, and has, with regrets almost certainly, implemented the Affordable Care Act because she understands, as a businesswoman, that you don’t leave billions on the table to satisfy narrow ideology.

It is my expectation that she will veto this bill. It is my expectation that her party will condemn her while at the same time playing to the their base on the unresponsive, anti-Christian, anti-religion, pro-gay, pro-<put in your favorite> nature of the government in Phoenix. It is also my expectation that these same legislators will also continue to be re-elected. And should that be the case, we will have to conclude that the blame lies with those who live and vote here. As my wife asked when this all began, “And you want to retire here??”

I no longer know.

Posted in State Politics | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Fixing Professional Golf – A Modest Proposal

Posted on February 15, 2014 by jimcoleman3rd

If you follow professional golf, as I do, you are without doubt aware that there is a disconnect between the historically great golf courses — think Augusta, Pebble Beach, Winged Foot — and today’s professionals. The professional of today can in most instances overpower the courses as they were originally designed in the early part of the twentieth century. This has lead in many cases to altering courses, usually by adding length, but also by changing hole direction, turning short par 5’s into brutal (but not brutal enough) par 4’s, adding rough, trees, and other — well, some would call it “tricking up” — devices to make these courses playable and (marginally) challenging for the modern professional.

There are two reasons that PGA professional of today is so different from his counterpart of 30 years ago. One: today’s professional is stronger, more fit, and more dedicated to being an athlete, and he puts in longer hours in general that pros did back in the day. The schedules are more demanding, there is no longer any “silly season” between the end of September and the tour start in January, and the golfers of today are simply much better than the pros of yesterday because the tour is much more competitive. If you doubt this, look at the growth of alternate tours though which many of today’s pros must pass before they are good enough to get their cards.

The second, and in my view equally important, is the dramatic improvement of equipment. Today’s modern clubs are so far ahead of what I played with when I started play earnestly as a teenager in the early 1960’s, that they can’t even be compared. Metal woods, titanium shafts, cavity-backed irons, 60 (and up) degree wedges give both the amateur and the professional the ability to hit quality shots with a lesser degree of skill than before. The golf ball has likewise made dramatic improvements, is nothing like the balata and three-piece ball of yore, and likewise benefits a player of any skill level.

There is also perhaps a third factor at work here: golf as a sport is played under the same rules for pros as for amateurs. The Rules of Golf as articulated by the USGA and Royal and Ancient, Golf’s Governing Body (according to themselves). While this is seen as a matter of faith and pride by many golfers (and lends additional aura to  that mystical thing some golfers call “the game”), I can think of few other sports where amateurs and professionals play under the same rules. Certainly no team sports (football and basketball, for example). Perhaps this “same rules” notion applies more often to the individual sport, like golf or bowling. Same rules” applies likewise to equipment (although I bet that the disqualification of the belly putter in the coming years may cause many golfers to abandon the rules, at least informally).

But what if we were to think of this differently? While we can do nothing to change the improvement of the player of the game, could we not introduce changes to the rules or equipment? I have already mentioned the belly putter (for those of you unaware of the club, it is a long putter than can be anchored against the golfer’s body, thus giving the putter — it is thought — more stability). This is a club that has been in use for probably 40 years (and in other, slightly different forms, perhaps even longer), and it is about to be banned.

What if we asked that pros play with different equipment? Harder equipment? Older equipment? Balls made with older technologies? What if today’s pro returned to the equipment and the balls of the 1960’s, just before the technology explosion that transformed both?

Persimmon woods, blade irons, putters like Bobby Jones’ Calamity Jane? Balata balls? Nothing more dramatic that the sand wedge of old to get the ball close to the pin from spots of trouble? We know that pros do in fact amongst themselves occasionally use old equipment for fun, to see how well they’d do with the the technologies of Palmer, most of Nicklaus’ career, and all of the Jones’s, Hogan’s and Sarazan’s.

The strength and agility of today’s professional would still stand him in good stead, but I think the end result would be an emphasis on shot-making rather than brutal strength. Would a player like Woods still dominate? I believe so because he too is a consummate shot-maker, but it would bring other skills into play and result in the need for fewer changes to courses to maintain their integrity. And frankly, it would be a lot of fun to see them play outstanding golf using equipment that the average play would find (as many did) very difficult to use.

Of course there’s too much money to be made in the ever improving golf equipment market (a 25 billion dollar market according to a 2012 Bloomsberg estimate) to make this attractive to anyone with a financial interest in the game, and the pros would probably balk as well.

How about maybe one tournament like Masters, remaining true to golf before the technology explosion? Hmm? It could happen. Yeah, right. Still, a guy can dream, and hey, it would be a lot of fun.

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Harry, Dave, and Reacher – An Appreciation

Posted on February 6, 2014 by jimcoleman3rd

Harry Hole, Dave Robicheaux, and Jack Reacher, the perhaps no so holy trinity of the modern crime/thriller/action genre, three of my favorite figures by three of my favorite authors.

In the coming weeks, I’ll devote an extended post to each, but for today, I’d simply like to comment on some of the aspects that bind them and point out where they diverge.

All three have a history as policemen, Harry and Dave currently, Reacher (he’s never called Jack by his friends) as ex-MP. Harry and Dave are recovering (or not so much) alcoholics, Reacher is more like to OD on coffee. All three share a profound sense of the world as a failed moral university, a place where it is their job to take down the current villains (I think I can count on one hand the number of villains who actually come before the courts). All three live in a temporal world that is set in a place and time, a place and time which is more or less contemporary — Dave experiences Hurricane Katrina, Harry contemporary Oslo, and Reacher America post 9/11.

Where the three differ the most is in the narrative style and tactics taken by their authors, Burke, Child, and Nesbø. For today, let us simply note the following:

  • Burke is the most lyrical of the three, particularly in the nature descriptions that are a hallmark of this writing. But Burke is also the most outlandish, incredible, and most demanding of a suspension of disbelief (but also so good, you almost always follow him along willingly)
  • Child is the most calculating of the three: the Reacher novels are brilliantly paced, and plotted, and each has a “hook” that pulls the reader along. The strategy of letting the reader inside Reacher’s head as he sorts out his situation is real narrative time is deeply satisfying, and there is nothing that is superfluous. The sense of place is in general only strong enough to set the stage of the resulting action, and action there is in bucketfuls.
  • Nesbø’s writing is perhaps the least “remarkable” of the three, but he too can be a very calculating author using narrative misdirection, cliff hangers, and puzzles. Every novel has a thread, occasionally extended, that is unresolved at the novel’s end.

I will come back to each of the three in turn because there is much to appreciate in each.

Posted in An Appreciation | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

(Self) Control

Posted on January 31, 2014 by jimcoleman3rd

You need to see a shrink, she said.
Rage consumes you, eats you up.
You may be right, but rage is all
I have, it keeps me up.

All you have? What utter rot.
No, drama, that you have in spades.
Vituperations sprout
Like weeds from that great mind.

Want more? You see you have a lot,
Lot more than rage, bagfuls of hurt are yours,
Very logically brought forth, and laid out
For all to see and lastly hear about.

For hear, we do. You run the wheel
Of rants and rage and share with all
Much more than does us good,
For we are only part of that through you.

It’s true, I do attest that drama,
Rage and ego too are mine and mine alone.
Mix in a harshly judging mind and all
That brings along with it. And yet

When all I have is measured full,
Is it enough, enough to offer peace,
A calming of my mind, and salve
Then for my troubled soul?

Ah yes, your deeply troubled, drooping,
Loud-mouthed Soul. Its talking, spewing out of bile
Is but another gift of dubious merit, I ask
That you take this gift and pass it on to one

Who can if not enjoy, at least then comprehend.
And since you bring up that up,
that’s why you need to see a shrink:
To bring your deeply troubled soul under control.

You’re right: I need to take the cure,
The talking cure, to talk my rage out,
Out my bile, to talk and talk until
What’s left unsaid itself is all talked out.

If that’s control of the soul, true
(Self) control, I’ll take its toll.

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Thinking Too Hard About Professional Football — Some Modest Proposals

Posted on January 25, 2014 by jimcoleman3rd

Given the recent spate of commentary on violence, concussions, late hits, the importance of knowing who’s injured as part of determining potential game outcomes, some have suggested that professional football needs to change, perhaps in some fundamental ways.

That may be so, but while the various bodies are working out how they might make such changes, I have thought too hard about this, and as a result of such intense cogitation, I would like to offer a couple of modest proposals that could be adopted by the sport immediately, proposals which would have an immediate positive and potentially interesting impact on the game.

Proposal 1

Take a cue from soccer and introduce the red and yellow cards for both players and teams.

Here’s how it might work: player X on team Y delivers a hit that causes a major penalty infraction. It is determined that the infraction is serious enough to warrant a yellow card/warning or so very serious that a red card must be issued.

The yellow would indicate that the player will, on any subsequent foul, receive a red card.

The red card will call for the ejection of the player without replacement. This would result in a team having to play a man short on offence or defense (mostly likely) for the rest of the game. Having to play short on either side would immediately change the game and strategies in significant ways that could add to the interest and excitement of the game.

Proposal 2

Receiving a red card should also result in financial impact to the player: no salary for the game for a red card for the current game, and a requirement to sit out the next game at, say, half-salary. For a yellow card, docking of half-salary for the current game.

Both proposals would affect both the team and individual significantly,and would be far more meaningful than penalties that only result in loss of yardage. Loss of yardage has an immediate negative affect, but only for the current drive. Serious injury to a player changes the entire game for both the player and the team. As it is in the interest of all teams to diminish the injuries and damage that the sport perforce brings along with it, these additional incentives would almost certainly reduce the damage caused by intent, and might as suggested also result in some interesting changes to the game.

Posted in Modest Proposals, Thinking Too Hard | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment