Walmart opened its first store in Arkansas in 1962. Check out this remarkable Flowing Data video that shows the company stores growing like a wildfire over the ensuing 45 years.
Meanwhile, this BBC video takes a look from above, using satellite tracking and computer imaging, at the daily use of commercial passageways in the UK.
Julie Alexandria of the always-clever WallStrip explains how speculators became the latest business villains of the moment. Enjoy.
Moira Hodgson’s W$J review of waiter/blogger Steve Dublanica’s new book — Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip–Confessions of a Cynical Waiter — is a rollicking good time. Check out Hodgson’s analysis of the merits of Dublanica’s background for waiting tables:
Considering some of the customers he has to deal with, Mr. Dublanica’s background was the perfect training for his job: four years in a seminary studying to be a priest followed by work at rehab centers and homes for the mentally retarded. He says that 80% of the people he serves at The Bistro are perfectly nice; the rest are socially maladjusted psychopaths. He also has to contend with servers on drugs and an irritable, jumpy boss: "Like a soldier home from war, his eyes are always scanning the horizon for threats."
By the way, be careful about sending that food back to the kitchen:
The third time a woman sends back her de-caf coffee, saying it’s not hot enough, he dumps regular coffee into her cup, places it in a 400-degree oven, takes it out with a pair of tongs and delivers it to her table. But that story pales beside Mr. Dublanica’s account of a waiter who plays floor hockey in the kitchen with a returned hamburger patty before hosing it off and taking it back to the table.
I enjoy watching football games, but I have never been able to understand the mainstream media’s fascination with pre-season football practice.
I mean, really. Is there anything more boring than football practice? Well, maybe pre-season football games, but that’s another issue. Yet, the local media cheerleaders are lined up each day to report breathlessly about the Texans’ pre-season practices. The late night television news last night reported excitedly about the Texans’ practice earlier in the evening in which the Texan players, without pads, ran through a series of drills that amounted to glorified touch football. Touch football!
At any rate, with all the media resources dedicated to covering pre-season training camp, an interesting piece of information does emerge every once in awhile. For example, this AP report notes that former Texans first-round draft pick and QB David Carr, now almost 30 years old, is trying to catch on as a backup QB with the Super Bowl champion New York Giants.
Despite being the Texans’ first draft choice and the first player taken in the 2002 NFL draft, Carr turned out to be one of the worst QB’s in NFL history, which is one of the many reasons that the Texans have been one of the worst teams in NFL history during their six year existence. It was reasonably clear even before the Texans third year (2004) that Carr was not the answer at QB, but the Texans cheerleaders at the Chronicle were still touting him as a potential top-tier talent deep into the Texans’ disastrous 2-14 season in 2005. That same level of incompetence is generally displayed in almost all of the seemingly endless puff pieces that the Chron reporters (Chron blogger Lance Zerlein excepted) generate throughout Texans training camp.
Getting back to Carr, it sounds as if his performance to date in the Giants camp has been consistent with his performance in Houston:
Things have not started well for Carr. He hurt his foot working out a week before camp opened and missed some practice time. Since returning, he has thrown a couple of interceptions, fumbled two snaps and tossed a few questionable passes.
David Carr, first-round draft choice. A quintessential example of the NFL’s mismatch problem?
The beginning of the college football season is just a month away, so it’s time to pass along some excellent web resources to prepare for the season:
The no. 1 college football resource on the Web is the Web Resources page over at Jay Christensen‘s Wizard of Odds, which is the best one-stop information source for college football on the Web.
This college football schedule template from the Strangest Brew allows you to prepare a page of schedules that you can tailor for your favorite teams and conferences. Very slick indeed.
The Joe Cribbs Car Wash provides this handy Paperless Preview Project that provides convenient preview information from various publications for all 120 Division I teams. Read about your favorite teams and their opponents, all in one place.
Finally, the NY Times’ fine college sports blog, the Quad, continues its pre-season countdown analysis of all 120 D-I teams with no. 35, the Texas A&M Aggies (earlier Quad previews profiled Rice and Houston). Not much is expected of the Aggie football team this fall, so the best entertainment this season at Kyle Field may well be new Aggie defensive coordinator, Joe Kines. The video below is a halftime interview of Kines while he was serving briefly as Alabama’s interim head coach during a bowl game after the head coach had been fired. As they say in the coaching business, Kines is an "original" and appears to have what it takes to become a beloved figure in the special culture of Aggieland.
Harvard urban economist Ed Glaeser’s NY Sun op-ed last week on Houston’s success in maintaining an affordable standard of living generated a lively debate among the blogosphere’s urban policy wonks, both for and against. So, Glaeser tees up the Houston debate again yesterday at the end of this Wall $treet Journal interview regarding the state of the city:
If you think about the lifestyle of ordinary Americans living on the fringe of Houston or Dallas, for example, compared to what their lifestyle would be in an older European city — living in a walk-up apartment there compared to a 2,500-square-foot house here they bought for $130,000 with a 24-minute commute — it’s extraordinary in the low-cost areas of this country what a $60,000 family income gets you.
There’s a reason Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix are our four fastest-growing areas. They offer an astonishingly high standard of living for ordinary Americans.
New York City is a great place to be really rich and not a terrible place to be really poor, but it’s a pretty hard place to live on $60,000 a year. You don’t experience anywhere near the basic standard of living you would in Houston on the same income.
The New Yorker’s David Samuels reports on how medical marijuana is changing a popular California industry:
Since 1996, when a referendum known as Proposition 215 was approved by California voters, it has been legal, under California state law, for authorized patients to possess or cultivate the drug. The proposition also allowed a grower to cultivate marijuana for a patient, as long as he had been designated a “primary caregiver” by that patient. Although much of the public discussion centered on the needs of patients with cancer, AIDS, and other diseases that are synonymous with extraordinary suffering, the language of the proposition was intentionally broad, covering any medical condition for which a licensed physician might judge marijuana to be an appropriate remedy—insomnia, say, or attention-deficit disorder. [. . .]
In 2003, the California State Legislature passed Senate Bill 420. The law was intended to clear up some of the confusion caused by Proposition 215, which had failed to specify how patients who could not grow their own pot were expected to obtain the drug, and how much pot could be cultivated for medical purposes. The law permitted any Californian with a doctor’s note to own up to six mature marijuana plants, or to possess up to half a pound of processed weed, which could be obtained from a patients’ collective or coöperative—terms that were not precisely defined in the statute. It also permitted a primary caregiver to be paid “reasonable compensation” for services provided to a qualified patient “to enable that person to use marijuana.” [. . .]
A drug-policy analyst named Jon Gettman recently estimated that in 2006 Californians grew more than twenty million pot plants. He reckoned that between 1981 and 2006 domestic marijuana production increased tenfold, making pot the leading cash crop in America, displacing corn. A 2005 State Department report put the country’s marijuana crop at twenty-two million pounds. The street value of California’s crop alone may be as high as fourteen billion dollars. [. . .]
I recently spent six months, off and on, with ["Captain"] Blue [a pot broker] — at his apartment, in private homes, on farms, in pot grow rooms, and in other places where “medical marijuana” is produced, traded, sold, and consumed in California. During that time, I saw thousands of Tibetan prayer flags. The flags identify their owners with serenity and the conscious path, rather than with the sinister world of urban dope dealers, who flaunt muscles and guns, and charge exorbitant prices for mediocre product. For Blue and tens of thousands of like-minded individuals, Proposition 215 presented an opportunity to participate in a legally sanctioned experiment in altered living. The people I met in the high-end ganja business had an affinity for higher modes of thinking and being, including vegetarianism and eating organic food, practicing yoga, avoiding prescription drugs in favor of holistic healing methods, traveling to Indonesia and Thailand, fasting, and experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. Many were also financially savvy, working long hours and making six-figure incomes.
Read the entire article. Meanwhile, take a moment to read about one of the many costly reminders of the misguided nature of American drug prohibition policy.
Regular readers know that I’m a big supporter of the annual Baseball Prospectus books that provide cutting-edge statistical analysis of Major League Baseball. So, this Bill Pennington/NY Times article about Mark Broadie, a professor at Columbia who conducts research for the PGA Tour, caught my eye.
Broadie is now taking a crack at doing similar statistical analysis for golf as what Baseball Prospectus does for baseball, except that he is analyzing the key differences between Tour players and amateur golfers. Broadie used the PGA Tour ShotLink database to analyze the pros’ performance and he persuaded players at one of his local courses to log all of their shots for a period of time, resulting in a database of 43,000 amateur shots (probably about 500 rounds). He then combined the databases and broke down how scoring varied between pros and amateurs based on the shots involved.
For example, Broadie analyzed at what distance there is a 50% chance of sinking a putt. Tour players break even on 8-foot putts, but somewhat surprisingly to me, the best amateurs (amateurs with between a 0-9 handicap) break even on putts from 6 feet (I’m an 8 handicap, but doubt that I break even from 6 feet). On the other hand, Tour players average almost 280 yards off the tee, while amateurs with a 0-9 handicap average only 248 yards driving the ball. That’s part of why some of Broadie’s conclusions are counter-intuitive to the standard "you drive for show, but putt for dough" advice that golfers regularly receive from golf instructors:
It is the long game that proves to be the biggest factor when examining the difference in scores between pros and amateurs and even between low- and high-handicap amateurs. If, for example, a PGA Tour player were available to hit shots for an amateur from 100 yards and in, or available to hit all the shots leading to the 100-yard mark, Broadie says the amateur would benefit the most from having the PGA player hit the long shots, not the short ones.
Despite the belief that shorter hitters are more accurate off the tee than longer hitters, Broadie discovered the opposite: longer hitters also tend to be straighter hitters. “Better players are more skilled over all,” Broadie said. “They hit it farther and they have more consistent swings, so they’re more accurate, too.”
It is often said that 60 to 65 percent of all shots are struck within 100 yards of the hole. Broadie agreed but noted that if you take out “gimme” putts of two and a half feet, the statistic has less meaning. Remove very short putts that are rarely missed, and shots from 100 yards or less account for only 45 to 50 percent of all shots. Eliminate putts from three and a half feet or less, and the figure drops to 41 to 47 percent. [. . .]
Broadie also said that a putting statistic golfers often keep (the number of putts per round) was not as valuable at predicting one’s score as another stat, the percentage of greens hit in regulation, which will more likely tell you how well a golfer is scoring.
Of particular interest is Broadie’s findings regarding shots hit from between 150 to 100 yards from the green. He computed the average distance remaining to the hole after the golfers hit that particular approach shot. Tour players had 5.6% of the distance remaining, while the top amateurs had 8.7% of the distance remaining. As a result, Broadie recommends that a good way to determine whether your short game needs more help than your long game is to compute your own percentage and then compare it to the amateur group you fall into based on your handicap.
For example, inasmuch as my handicap is 8, if the distance remaining to the hole after my shots from 100-150 yards is higher than 8.7% of the distance of the shots, then my short game is probably worse than other golfers of comparable handicaps. On the other hand, that also means that my driving and related long shots are probably a bit better than my peers.
There are other interesting tidbits, so check out the entire article. As Broadie observed: "It’s great cocktail-party conversation."
The late Sam Kinison is a comedy legend who was part of a group of comedians nicknamed the Comedy Outlaws (Ron Shock and Bill Hicks were two other prominent members) that got their start in Houston during the early 1980’s, most often at the LaughStop on West Gray. Here is a hilarious video of Kinison on the Tonight Show, which includes Kinison’s under-appreciated singing voice and a lively discussion between Kinison and Johnny Carson on the subject of divorce. Enjoy!
Karl Taro Greenfeld of Portfolio.com examines the money-making machine that is Houston’s Joel Osteen and Lakewood Church (prior posts here):
Last year, Lakewood generated $76 million in revenue, which amounts to just over $1,600 for every member of its congregation. Its take includes $44 million donated directly by congregants, who are asked to give 10 percent of their gross income; $10 million in product sales and sermon tapes; and $13 million brought in through direct-mail solicitations, up from about $6 million two years ago. The church’s greatest expense is the TV airtime it buys: $22 million last year to broadcast the show in more than 100 markets, a 10 percent annual increase in spending that is easy to justify. “Cutting back on airtime would be like saying we won’t be sending any trucks to deliver our product,” [Osteen brother-in-law Kevin] Comes says [Comes is Lakewood’s chief operating officer]. An additional $13 million goes to administrative costs and salaries, and $9 million a year is spent on facilities and maintenance. [. . .]
Being backstage at a Joel Osteen worship event is remarkably similar to being at an N.B.A. game or a rock concert. Beefy security guards tell you where you can and can’t go. Crew members chow down on a buffet laid out by a local caterer and bark into walkie-talkies between bites. At some point, black Town Cars head down the long, curving driveway into the belly of the arena and drop off the pastors and performers, who retreat into private suites.
The night is a celebration of music, state-of-the-art visual effects, and, of course, Christ. Lakewood spends a great deal of money attracting top gospel and Christian talent, and music minister Cindy Cruse-Ratcliff leads a team of Grammy Award winners, including gospel singer Israel Houghton. It’s a thumping occasion, with people dancing in the aisles and even the security guards singing along to “Come Just as You Are” and “We Have Overcome.” Osteen’s entire family is in the act. His mother, wife, and children often play parts in the service.
But it’s Osteen himself we have come to see. He wins the crowd over with wholesome jokes and inspires with his sweet-voiced message. The sermon today is based on the notion of “hitting the DELETE button when you have those negative thoughts.” He urges us to banish that voice telling us, “I’ll never get that great job. I’ll never meet that special someone. I’ll never get married.” Hit the delete button, he urges, and reprogram your mind. “Just one inferior thought can keep you off balance and away from your God-given destiny.”
Read the entire article here. But hit the DELETE button to rid yourself of any negative thoughts first.