The New York Times had a feature story today on Stanford QB Andrew Luck. It says exactly what you’d expect: he’s smart (on and off the field), he’s got first-round potential and he hugely admires Coach Harbaugh. As a side note, I have been an Andrew Luck fan before he even arrived on The Farm.
ESPN also had its PAC-10 preview, which was also was about exactly as you’d expect: it’ll be a tight race to the finish, Jake Locker and Andrew Luck will be battling for the Top QB herald and Oregon might still be a threat despite their team’s inability to stay out of police custody.
Both items also had their own surprises. In the New York Times article, Andrew Luck’s dad, Oliver, made a very good point about Harbaugh:
Jim has taken Stanford kids — and they all come from pretty good families; I’m sitting in the parents’ section with doctors and lawyers — and he’s convinced them they are a group of lunch-pail, blue-collar, smack-you-in-the-face, union kind of guys. I just love the irony of that. It’s the last school you would anticipate where you could create that.
He’s totally right.
In the ESPN clip, the commentators claim that USC and Oregon are the schools to watch — Lane Kiffin will have his struggles, and the arrests across just about every position at Oregon will have their effect. But the surprise is at the end: Stanford is the (dark-horse) pick to represent the PAC-10 at the-bowl-which-must-not-be-named.
He is also totally right.
In a year where you really can make an argument for any one of 7 or 8 teams to win the PAC-10 title, it’ll be a great football season.
And Andrew Luck will be a huge part of all the story lines.
Today, G.E. signed a $1.4 billion wind energy deal in Oregon, while NPR reports on China’s wind program. Paradoxically, the greater wind power in turns increases coal burning in the short-term.
Barack accepted the Nobel Peace Prize today, defending– and in fact espousing– American exceptionalism.
Google announced today that it is helping to battle deforestation with satellite imagery and cloud-based number-crunching.
This move by Goldman Sachs to award so-called “shares at risk” is cunning: it sounds great (and it is in fact a much more fair/logical/long-sighted way of distributing bonuses) but it also affects a whopping 30 employees. Goldman has 31,700. So this does not affect the attitudes/behaviors/risk tolerance of the thousands of traders who are evaluating their risk based on their annual bonus pay-outs just like before. Nor does it affect the complexity or the masked risked that goes into 99% of bankers’ work as they structure financial instruments. It’s a cunning move because it’s hard to criticize outright, but it also really does not get at any way to solve the problems of the financial services sector. (It’s a mentality thing, not something which changes when you reorganize pay incentives for the top 30 guys in your firm).
Chad Ochocinco is changing his name again. In 2010 he’ll become “Chad Hachi Go,” Japanese this time for 85.
Gawker deconstructs Ms. Palin’s latest appearance in the Washington Post, showing why her lack of knowledge is this time apparent in regards to global climate change.
I don’t see a thesis in this article, but it seems from the title that the author is trying to compare will.i.am to Irving Berlin. I’d comment on how (un)persuasively that argument is made but frankly I don’t see it anywhere in here.
Finally, also in the realm of ridiculous, via Ella Chou, apparently a girl at Columbia Law School has been accepting applications from her classmates (requesting resumes and undergrad transcripts)…so they can join her study group.
