Category: Everything Else

We cooked up a storm. Well, Scott did most of the cooking and I helped.

We ate a lot.

And now, I think I’m going to bed.

It is really easy, especially here in urban, sophisticated California, to make fun of rural Texas. So when I read this piece in the Wall Street Journal today, I have to say, I was really impressed. I have a student subscription, so I’m not sure if the article is firewalled or not. I’ll excerpt as much as I can.

At the sound of a tone blown over a large conch shell, 17-year-old senior defensive tackle Alex Kautai threw off his helmet, freeing a mane of curly black hair. He shouted several sentences in a foreign tongue and waved his arms as 93 visibly agitated teammates gathered behind him on the sidelines. Alex Kautai of the Trinity Trojans does the haka dance in Bedford, Texas.

On cue, they dropped into a wide, crouching stance and began the ritual known as the haka. “Ka Mate! Ka Mate! Ka Ora!” (We’re going to die! We’re going to die! We’re going to live!), they chanted in unison as the fans went wild. For the next 60 seconds, the players acted out an ancient battle in which a big hairy man saves the life of a Maori chieftain.

With each phrase, the players slapped their thighs, arms or chests. They stomped back and forth, symbolically thrusting and jabbing at the enemy. At the end of the dance, Mr. Kautai jumped in the air and landed on one foot, his right fist in the air and his tongue lolling out of his mouth as he sneered fiercely.

[snip]

Most of the 24 players of Tongan descent on the Trinity football team weigh between 250 and 308 pounds and stand at least 6 feet tall. Besides that, they are quick, so the combination makes Trinity an intimidating force on any high-school field. The Tongan players helped transform Trinity into a Texas football powerhouse.

Last year, Trinity won the Class 5A Division 1 state football championship. It went undefeated in this year’s regular season and administered an old-fashioned 40-14 whupping to the Permian Panthers. Trinity begins the first round of state playoffs Friday night against nearby Arlington Martin High School.

“We do the haka to ignite the breath of competition. It means that I’ve got your back and you’ve got mine,” said Mr. Kautai, who stopped shaving and let his hair grow long this season to make himself look even more intimidating than he already does at 6-foot-2 and 280 pounds. He likes to splash water on his face and hair before the haka so it will fly off in a mist as he performs the movements.

[snip]

The team first performed the haka for fans at the beginning of the 2005 season. Concerned about seeming to taunt opponents unfairly, the coach restricted the haka performance to the sidelines at the end of the field where most Trinity students sit.

It was an instant hit. Today, the stands closest to where the team performs the chant are full an hour before kickoff. An eerie silence falls over the stadium as soon as the tone is sounded on the conch shell as fans strain to hear the haka leader urging on the team.

Fans wave haka signs and wear black “Got Haka?” T-shirts. Rather than race to the parking lot to beat the crowd at the end of the game, hundreds of people routinely wait 20 minutes or more for the team to do the haka one more time.

The team has performed the haka at elementary-school assemblies in order to fire up the children before state-mandated tests. It has performed for the City Council. Before last year’s championship game, one fifth-grade class learned the haka and performed it to cheer on their newfound heroes.

Very cool. And this is Bush country, deep-red, rural Texas, mind you. Perhaps there’s hope.

I’m off work today, the sun is shining, and it’s been a good week. Here’s the top 10 that iTunes had for me this Friday:

1) By My Side – Godspell
2) I’ll Forget You – The Scarlet Pimpernel (Concept Album)
3) Banu Hoshch Legaresh – Subliminal
4) Heartbeat City – The Cars
5) You’ve Got A Friend – James Taylor
6) The Heart Brings You Back – Blues Traveler
7) Everything Is Everything – Phoenix
8) When I Grow Too Old To Dream – Mandy Patinkin
9) No One is to Blame – Howard Jones
10) Peaceful Easy Feeling – The Eagles

Rock on!

Via Ezra’s linkblog, some excellent observations from Larry Summers:

The twin arguments that globalisation is inevitable and protectionism is counterproductive have the great virtue of being correct, but do not provide much consolation for the losers. Nor can they rally support for policies that maintain, let alone promote, international integration.

Economists rightly emphasise that trade, like other forms of progress, makes everyone richer by enabling them to buy goods at lower prices. But this offers small solace to those who fear their jobs will vanish.

Education is central to any economic strategy, but there is a limit to what it can do for workers in their 40s and beyond. Nor can education be a complete answer at a time when skilled computer programmers in India are paid less than $2,000 a month.

John Kenneth Galbraith was right when he observed:

I honestly do not understand why some people are pissed off about the new ban on online gaming. Online casinos are a profit machine that do their customers no favors.

I would never trust an online casino to not rig the game somehow. Given how relatively easy it is to put in “streakbreaker” code or something that skews probability more in favor of the house, combined with the fact that these online casinos are virtually unregulated — there’s just no reason to NOT do it.

So when I see comments like this about the online ban:

“We’re going to have Prohibition, and what happened then?” said champion poker player Annie Duke, a former University of Pennsylvania doctoral candidate who began playing professionally in 1994. “We had people running around with tommy guns and drinking moonshine because they weren’t given a safe product.”

My response is, give me a freaking break! There is a perfectly safe product out there already. It’s called a brick-and-mortar casino. A quick Google turned up this fact: There are 47 states in United States which have 1492 legal gambling facilities available. That’s plenty of product. Don’t live close enough to one of those casinos? There’s always poker night at your buddy’s house.

As my statistics teachers were fond of reminding us, even in an honest game, every casino game is set up so that the odds are in the house’s favor. That’s why casinos make so much money. But at least in a US casino, you can be reasonably sure that it’s a clean game.

And by the way, I’m not an anti-gambling crusader. Scott and I don’t gamble often, but when we have the cash, we’ve been known to hit a few blackjack tables and while away some hours. Well, actually, Scott plays blackjack and I either kibitz or wander off to lose some money in the slot machines.

At any rate, I want to be clear that I am not against gambling per se. I just think that anyone who’s upset about the Internet gambling ban needs to get over it.

The Grameen Bank was one of the primary cases we studied in my Social Entrepreneurship class this summer. I’m totally stoked that Mohammed Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize today.

Yunus, 66, set up a new kind of bank in 1976 to lend to the neediest, particularly women, in Bangladesh, enabling them to start up small businesses without collateral.

In doing so, he pioneered microcredit, a system copied in more than 100 nations from the United States to Uganda.

[snip]

In awarding a prize more traditionally given to those who sign treaties to end wars or fight for human rights, the secretive five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee said eliminating poverty was a path to peace and democracy.

“Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Microcredit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights,” the committee added.

“Eradication of poverty can give you real peace,” said Yunus.