What your fantasy says about you

Oops, I meant to type "What your fantasy football drafting strategy says about you". My mistake. Anyway, since we are getting close to both real and fantasy football, here's an article by Mike Tanier over at the very best NFL site on the interwebs, Football Outsiders.

This one's the best, because it's so true (and I just love the name of it):

Strategy: RB-RB-TE (The Gates Guy)

Style: You are always the first guy to grab a tight end. You also pick a kicker around Round 8 and a defense in Round 9 or so, two healthy steps ahead of the curve. This year, it’s Antonio Gates, Stephen Gostkowski, and the Bears. Ten years ago, it was Shannon Sharpe, Jason Elam, and the Panthers. Your quarterbacks often stink and your top wide receiver for five years was O.J. McDuffie, but you are always strong where you think it counts: the peripherals.

Personality: You’re the guy who outsmarts the system, and you consider yourself a master of market inefficiencies. You dabbled as a day trader in the 1990s and a real estate speculator five years ago. You now own 20,000 shares of Boo.com and a $300,000 duplex in the Heroinville neighborhood of Addictowne, but that doesn’t dissuade you of your genius.

Other Traits: You like to collect curios and oddities. You prefer vinyl to iPods, and you’ll argue to the death that it’s better to have slightly improved equalization and stereo separation than the ability to walk down the street listening to music. You enjoy fads that involve over-complicating things that should be easy, like soap making. You still brew your own beer, even though it went out of style a decade ago, and your friends politely swill the latest batch of J.W. Wittenlover Select even though it tastes like a blend of Guinness, WD-40, and rotting grass.

As an aside, I am about 1/3 done with their annual book, and it's by far their best yet. Every team chapter's article is about team-building, which is a change from prior years (and much more similar to what the guys do with Baseball Prospectus.) I highly recommend it.

Nerds

You know who you are. Now there's a book about you and your kind.

Book Reviews - STET, Damnit! and Ruthless

Since there's not much going on in election news and no one cares about what I have been doing, here are reviews of a couple of books I finished up in the past few days.

STET, Damnit! is the complete collection of Florence King's columns in National Review from 1991 through her retirement in 2002 (she has since come back to write a column in every other issue of the magazine). Most of them are from her back-of-the-magazine column that was in every issue for many a year called "The Misanthrope's Corner". Yes, she's my inspiration for this blog.

She's a crotchety, old (66 at the time of her retirement) Southern lady who never married and never had children. She reads voraciously, and in fact was for a very long time primarily a book reviewer. Her columns covered everything possible, so it was about much more than current events.

As I read it, I found that I could quote a passage from every one of them on this blog to show how AWESOME she is, but that would be tedious. The book is 496 pages long (and somewhat dense), but I had no problem reading it since she's one of the most fascinating writers whose work I've ever encountered. It gets a high recommendation from me, but I also realize it's not for everyone.

Ruthless: A Memior by Jerry Heller is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Heller, the co-founder of Ruthless Records with Eazy-E, tells his side of the story of the history of label. He was there from the beginning until shortly before Eazy's death, after which Ruthless quickly fell apart.

Any rap fan from the early 1990's knows that Heller was vilified by both Ice Cube and Dr. Dre after their departure from N.W.A. By Heller's account, they are not being honest. I won't give away too much of the history for those who don't know it, but he never liked Ice Cube. He thinks Dre listened to the wrong people (Suge Knight, primarily), which Dre would likely admit today.

Heller also says in the book that if those two hadn't left, they would have made tons of money together for years to come. His model was going to be similar to what the Wu-Tang Clan eventually did, which is dedicate everyone to one album at a time, be it the groups's album or a solo project for one of the members. I agree with him that with the combination of Dre's and Yella's production, Cube's lyrics, and Eazy and Heller's business sense, it could have worked.

I tend to believe Heller over Cube and others. Why? Little did I know, Heller was a very big manager in the 1960's and 1970's rock world. Among his clients were Elton John, Marvin Gaye, and Van Morrison. He hit a slump in his career from about 1975 to 1985, when he go involved in taking West Coast gangster rap national using his music industry connections. To me, he's got tremendous credibility when it comes to the business side of music.

At about 315 small pages with lots of space, this book is a quick read (I read it in two days). I give it a very high recommendation for anyone interested in the development of west coast hip-hop. He's also got lots of great stories from the 1960's and 1970's, too.

Geraldo Rivera wrote a book

Geraldo Rivera has famously (or, at least in cable news circles it's well-known) become a bit of an open-borders zealot. I mean that he's become the opposite of me on illegal immigration. He's now written a book about it.

Since he's just a news goof rather than a writer, you may not imagine it to be very good. This guy comes to the same conclusion, and in a funny way. Here's how the review starts:

Being Hispanic has only benefitted me. I can tan. I don't look like a total ass when I dance. I can roll my "r"s in a sophisticated way. Surrounded by conservatives as I frequently am, I help boost the number of minorities in the room by 100 percent. The best part is, they don't know it or have to come to terms with it, because of my dark secret. I'm Spanish (indeed, from Spain), which is technically Hispanic, according to dictionaries, but I look white, depending on where I spend my weekend.

There are downsides. I have to shave almost twice a day to prevent myself from looking like Pancho Villa. I dial "1" for Spanish just to practice for when I talk to my distant relatives. And I have to dodge the paranoid, delusional bigots my compadre (that's a Spanish word) Geraldo Rivera has uncovered in his book, His Panic. Of course, that last bit is easy, primarily because I've never found any.

Thomas Sowell interview

Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite writers. He was trained as an economist, but he also has written books about anthroplogy. An example of how smart he is: when one of his children was a late talker, he wanted to read more about it. Since there was so little research done at the time, he wrote a book about it himself.

He also still writes a syndicated column that can be found in many places on the web.

I've only read a few of his books overall (and I'd love to one day just buy them all and read them), but my favorite of those is Black Rednecks and White Liberals. I realize it's a provocative title, but it blew me away with stuff I've never read or heard before.

He's got a new book out, and John Hawkins over at Right Wing News interviewed him about it. Here's an exceprt of the interview:

One profound thing you said in the book, when talking about disparities between the wages earned by white workers and minority workers in this country was that there are differences between groups all over the world, so why should we expect different groups to make the same amount of money in the first place? Can you tell us a little bit more about those differences...

I think most people have heard that there are these differences, but I think that what most of them have not heard is that there are the same differences between Asian-Americans and whites as there are between whites and blacks. Asian-American families have higher incomes than white families; during downturns in the economy, whites get laid off moreso than Asian-Americans. Among people who apply for mortgage loans, whites get turned down more often than Asian-Americans. Whites have to resort to sub-prime loans more often than Asian-Americans.

But, most of the people who talk about these things leave out Asian-Americans because it really kills their whole story. Their whole story is that non-whites do poorly because of white racism. Well then, if you find that there is the same disparity between Asian-Americans and whites as there is between whites and other non-whites, that whole argument falls down.

Prince Of Darkness by Robert Novak

This book just arrived for me. Bob Novak had been a political reporter in DC for about 50 years (and his work can be found every Sunday, Monday, and Thursday in the Sun-Times), and this is kind of his professional memior. It should be an excellent read for politics nerds like me.

I am a little daunted, however, by its length of 638 pages. The only longer book I've read is The Age of Reagan by Steven Hayward at 704 pages, although Gulag by Anne Applebaum was a little over 600, also. This one should be quite a bit easier to finish, however, since it's not a pure history book.

Florence King books are here!

While perusing NRO at home last week, I noticed an ad for both of Florence King's books for $35 total. The reason is that NR is moving from one building to another in NYC, and they'd rather clear out their inventory of books than move them. I was thrilled to help them oblige, and they just came to my desk.

"Who is Florence King?" you ask? I've only ever read her in the pages of National Review, but she's a wonderfully gifted writer. Until she retired a few years ago, she had the regular column on the last page of the magazine, and it was called "The Misanthrope's Corner." What a tremendous title, and if you've ever read her writings you'd know why it was so fitting. She also wrote many book reviews for the magazine. Luckily for the reading public, she unretired for a once-every-two-issues column called "The Bent Pin" that's just as good.

Basically, she's a cranky, old, Southern lady with a tremendous gift for the written word. Here, here and here are some examples of her work. Here's a column about Ann Coulter. Here's a funny little biography that sums her up.