Ohio State 42 The School From Up North 7

Ah yes.

Ohio State rolls over a hopelessly undermanned Michigan squad and all is forgiven. The USC game: forgotten. The PSU loss. Meh. It's odd that this game looked more like a September cupcake game than the actual September cupcakes (where OSU struggled against Youngstown State and Ohio and the like).

It's currently 49-7 in the Penn State - Michigan State game so that little dream of going to the Rose Bowl is pretty much out of the question. Probably won't get a BCS bowl this year, but they'll get something. A little vacation somewhere warm. It won't matter. They beat Michigan. Five years in row. After years of struggling against Michigan, they'll graduate a class of seniors that has never lost to the Wolverines.

And that's all she wrote for another college football season. Go Bucks.

Obama Wins!

• Holy Crap!
• He wins Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Virginia. An unbelievable sweep.
• 338 and still counting. It's a mandate.
• John McCain's speech was honorable, and as a candidate he was better than his supporters deserved.
• Goodbye Sarah Palin. In four years we'll hardly remember you.
• From the international press, one might think that he's been elected President of the world.
• It's all sinking in now: first African-American president. A lot of people are going to say a lot about the historical moment, but it may be a long, long time before we can understand what it really means.
• As soon as I saw the crowd gathering in Grant Park in Chicago, all my doubts fell away.
• Yes We Can.
• LOLCat version: Yes We Can Has.
  

Obama for President

It's election day and it feels like Christmas. I could not be more excited, and frankly I am rooting for a landslide. I'm hoping that by the time I get home tonight and the first polls close, this thing will already be over. Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida are the states to watch. McCain needs to run the table to win, so one blue square and he's done. I have my doubts about Ohio, but I'm from there and I know how stupid those people can be. On the other hand, I can't remember ever seeing so many Democratic signs in the upper middle class suburbs even in 1992. Meanwhile, when the returns start coming in the from the west, from Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, and California, it will just be affirmation and reaffirmation.

This election means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It's about Bush, and his awful administration. It's about the war in Iraq. It's about Katrina. It's about torture. It's about the culture wars. It's about the Religious Right. It's about anti-intellectualism. It's about faux-Patriotism. It's about every appeal to divisiveness, malice, and pitting the elect us against the preterite them. The possibility of an Obama presidency is a turning away from all these things, a rejection of the resentments and hatreds of the past, the dead-ender's philosophies, and the hope and promise of a better tomorrow. More importantly it restores the notion that America always exists in the future tense. It is not a place or a people, but an idea that we all aspire to. Wherever you came from, whatever your ancestry, your religion, in America, you are a citizen first and foremost.

As a Gen-xer I was raised on the diversity and optimism of Sesame Street and the original Star Trek. There was a spirit of community and opportunity in those shows and in our childhoods that only soured under Reagan and the rise of the Conservative movement. Every utopia became a dystopia. Idealism gave way to cynicism and disenchantment. Under Clinton, we had a brief respite, but in Obama we have the chance to truly turn from fear and again embrace those ideals of community and our shared interconnectedness. Our greatest hopes may yet be possible, in this most improbable of presidents.

Best of luck today to Barack Obama.

Gallup Daily

Vote Early, Vote Etc.

I took advantage of the early voting on Saturday. Very gratifying, assuming Diebold doesn't eat my ballot. Now all those negative commercials on the TeeVee just seem sad -- as do my neighbors' McCain signs.

Here's hoping the whole Republican revolution and its minions has gasped its collective last.

Ohio State 6 Generic State 10, 4th Quarter

A freshman quarterback and lackluster line play have doomed the Buckeyes to an anemic looking loss at home to the Nittany Lions. With Penn State shutting down the Buckeye running game there isn't much OSU can do to generate points. Meanwhile, PSU capitalizes on the big turnover and it's pretty much game over.

UPDATE

The Bucks mishandle their last two possessions and lose 13-6. Pryor played like a freshman. PSU's linebacker #18 played huge.

Finders and Seekers

This was in The New Yorker a few weeks ago, and I keep returning to the ideas in it.

The distinction between "Late Bloomers" and "Prodigies," is interesting, but I was more intrigued by the deeper divide between conceptual thinkers and experimental thinkers.

Prodigies like Picasso, Galenson argues, rarely engage in that kind of open-ended exploration. They tend to be “conceptual,” Galenson says, in the sense that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go, and then they execute it. “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word ‘research,’ ” Picasso once said in an interview with the artist Marius de Zayas. “In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.” He continued, “The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting. . . . I have never made trials or experiments.”

But late bloomers, Galenson says, tend to work the other way around. Their approach is experimental. “Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental,”

The idea that we can blossom as we age is a story we tell ourselves so that we won't feel the blunt defeat of growing older. It's a youth culture, and the prodigies always win. But I imagine, that in the distinction between the conceptual and the experimental, one definition will make perfect sense to the reader, and the other will seem sort of blurry, depending on their own style.

For instance, I've discovered that even at work I'm much more experimental than conceptual, while most people in my field seem to be the opposite. In the work world, your goal is to execute plans and find solutions, whereas I'm more interested in rethinking how things are done and reworking projects in an iterative fashion to see what comes of it. Curious.

Pipe Wrench Fight

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

New Pynchon in 2009

Hurray!

Rumor has it, and the LA Times is confirming, that Pynchon has a new novel coming out next summer. Maybe noir. Maybe just 400 pages. Maybe the psychedelic 60s. Sounds like a return to the world of Mrs. Oedipa Maas.

Vice Presidential Debate

The Republican are going to declare victory tonight because Ms. Palin was able to speak in full sentences. Woopedy-doo. Don't be fooled. Palin read her lines as she'd rehearsed and stuck to her script, even to the point of ignoring the questions.

Biden started slowly, but came off as reasonable and relaxed, and when it came to emotional connections came across as more genuine in the final half hour.

Also, Palin was kind of nuts. Did she really argue for extending the powers of the Vice Presidency? She wants to out-Cheney Cheney? Give me a break.

Palin came across well in a practiced environment and promised not to do anymore "filtered" interviews where we might catch her speaking extemporaneously and accidentally revealing the emptiness behind all the memorization.

Good for Biden, and good for the Obama campaign.

Oregon State Beats USC

It just goes to show you how important emotion can be in College sports. Two weeks ago USC played with emotion and the home crowd cheering it on and blew Ohio State out of the stadium. Now Oregon State does the same, blowing out USC for a solid half, and holding on for the win. They overachieved, but it shouldn't come as a surprise.

As the wise old sports fan says, "it's never an upset when the home team wins."

10 Things I Learned This Week

1. Tina Fey made it official: Sarah Palin's 15 minutes are almost over
2. McCain's bump is over with Obama retaking the lead in all the major polls
3. Obama was right not to panic, but his supporters were right to be nervous
4. David Foster Wallace was much more beloved by nerds than I would have previously thought - additionally, his short stories always seemed a little exploitative to me, but now I see that they were just very, very sad
5. Ohio State's problem for the last three years has been the offensive line play - end of story
6. Fringe is quite possibly the most derivative show on TV - every idea is instantly familiar, well-worn and borrowed - JJ Abrams is starting to seem cynical w/r/t what nerds will watch
7. Capitalism, like communism before it, works better in theory than in practice - in practice it is little more than a fast-talking game of three card monte and it has the unfortunate effect of making stupid people seem much smarter than they really are simply through the inequitable distribution of wealth
8. Spain is a Central American nation populated by mustachioed banditos
9. There have still been no great records in 2008
10. I really need Steven Jackson of the St. Louis Rams to start stepping it up and I need Carolina's Steve Smith to have a monster weekend now that his suspension is over

Agents of a Great Despair

The NYT on DFW:

Mr. Wallace, who died Friday night at his home in Claremont, Calif., an apparent suicide, belonged to a generation of writers who grew up on the work of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Robert Coover, a generation that came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s and took discontinuity for granted. But while his own fiction often showcased his mastery of postmodern pyrotechnics — a cold but glittering arsenal of irony, self-consciousness and clever narrative hijinks — he was also capable of creating profoundly human flesh-and-blood characters with three-dimensional emotional lives. In a kind of aesthetic manifesto, he once wrote that irony and ridicule had become “agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture” and mourned the loss of engagement with deep moral issues that animated the work of the great 19th-century novelists.

David Foster Wallace is Dead

Holy crap.

The author of Infinite Jest, and arguably the best writer of his generation is dead at age 46. An apparent suicide.

Buckeyes 3 Trojans 35

I'm trying to think of something worthwhile to say, but the Bucks were terrible in every phase of the game. Once again Tressel was unable to prepare or motivate his team.

Why do I even watch this crap?