Wednesday triple threat.

* The Gervais Principle for corporate organization.



* Congratulations to John Glenn High School for an absolutely 100% legitimate victory over hated rivals Plymouth Wildcats.

* Neilalien explores the monster-carrying-unconscious-woman visual trope with a series of links.

Tuesday!

* Elsewhere in actually existing media bias: Rupert Murdoch supposedly wants to buy NBC Universal, for what I can only assume is pure spite.

* Yesterday's bogus insurance industry "bombshell" seems to have backfired, galvanizing support for reform and making the passage of some sort of public option more likely. Olympia Snowe just cast a vote for the Senate Finance Committee bill on its way out of committee, saying, "When history calls, history calls."

* This American Life is doing back-to-back shows on the same topic (health care) for the first time in its history this week and next. This week's episode on the doctor- and patient-side pressure that contribute to rising costs is quite good, if perhaps a bit generous to the insurance companies; next week's episode, promisingly entitled "Somebody Else's Money," will focus on the insurance companies themselves.

* If classic games had achievements.

* At the core of the C.T.E. research is a critical question: is the kind of injury being uncovered by McKee and Omalu incidental to the game of football or inherent in it? Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.

In 2000 and 2001, four drivers in Nascar’s élite Sprint Cup Series were killed in crashes, including the legendary Dale Earnhardt. In response, Nascar mandated stronger seats, better seat belts and harnesses, and ignition kill switches, and completed the installation of expensive new barriers on the walls of its racetracks, which can absorb the force of a crash much better than concrete. The result is that, in the past eight years, no one has died in Nascar’s three national racing series. Stock-car fans are sometimes caricatured as bloodthirsty, eagerly awaiting the next spectacular crash. But there is little blood these days in Nascar crashes. Last year, at Texas Motor Speedway, Michael McDowell hit an oil slick, slammed head first into the wall at a hundred and eighty miles per hour, flipped over and over, leaving much of his car in pieces on the track, and, when the vehicle finally came to a stop, crawled out of the wreckage and walked away. He raced again the next day. So what is football? Is it dogfighting or is it stock-car racing?

* And bad news, everyone: we're post SF again.

Confidential to the Detroit Lions: Bravo.

Today is the [Undisclosed Location]quinox, which means we're halfway through the term. I could do this all summer. I'm not completely exhausted at all.

Clearing the decks this morning:

* What do the Dutch know that we don't? Thousands of people in the Netherlands are preparing for the 2012 apocalypse.

* A judge has ruled that, legally speaking, Duke football completely sucks.

* Nothing makes me feel more curmudgeonly than agreeing with Christopher Hitchens about anything, but my god—you'd think Tim Russert had been president before he became the pope. And that's before this stuff about miracles started.

* On the virtues of taking it slow as a novelist. Finally, my laziness patience has been vindicated!

* And good news from the world of science: the Large Hadron Collider probably won't destroy the earth.

Boston may be my spiritual homeland, and the Patriots the heavy favorites, but I never bet against Jersey. Go Giants!

Famous Authors Predict the Winner of Super Bowl XLII. At McSweeney's, naturally.

Friday morning links.

* Rest in peace, Bobby Fischer. Here's the traditional MetaFilter obituary with a lot of dots, a lot of stupid chess puns, and a lot of links. And here's a post from the early days of Backwards City on Fischer's 2004 arrest in Japan, which also includes a link to the rules for "Full Chess" that Fischer devised for greater variety and challenge.

* But the link between watching football — specifically college football — and violence may not be a myth. A new study by researchers at the University of Colorado at Denver examines whether assaults and other forms of aggressive behavior increase when major college football teams play home games, and finds that they do. More strikingly, perhaps, incidences surge most when upsets occur — whether the home team wins or loses.

* Bush considering $800 bribe tax rebate to help spur economy. Money can't buy you love, Mr. President.

* In both the Washington Post (link fixed) and New York Times this week are articles pooh-poohing the Air Car, a $2500 high-efficiency vehicle scheduled to go into production in India this year. In addition to the absurd hypocrisy involved in the U.S. lecturing anyone on greenhouse gases or wasteful consumption, the greater point to take away from all this is that the decades-old Big Lie of globalization is again being exposed before our eyes. It has never and will never be the point of globalization to enrich poorer countries and bring them "up" to a Western standard of living; that's just the story we tell ourselves whenever someone reminds us that our sneakers are made by little slave kids. Now that it looks as if nations from the Global South actually could begin to made headway towards a Western standard of living, how does the West react? We recognize this moment not as the happy culmination of sixty years of economic charity and beneficence—finally, our hard work has paid off! the rising tide has lifted all boats!—but instead as a economic, environmental, and geopolitical disaster. We're terrified to be faced with the thing we always claimed we were working towards.

I won't even mention what happened to the Mets, because I'm sure it's still a little too real for people, but I will take a break from my usual ban on sportsblogging to say that the situation with the Patriots reads to me like an interesting non-political example of what happens when the media sees its interests (i.e., its profit) aligned with those organizations that it's supposed to be independent of and in some ways oppositional towards. ESPN loses money, too, when people become disgusted with the NFL—and so what by all rights should be a huge scandal is swept entirely under the rug. (A fine of $500,000 is nothing. I'm no expert, but sounds to me like Belichick and maybe others in the Patriots' head coaching staff should be banned from the sport.)

So good on the Jets ticket holder class action lawsuit.

And in lighter news, the U.S. is once again the top dealer of arms to the developing world. (Via my brother and Frinibarf)