Winter Classic 2009: Solid, But I Liked Last Year

I tuned in for periods 2 and 3 of today’s NHL Winter Classic game, which saw Chicago get destroyed by the Red Wings in a comeback victory. (The Red Wings are always pulling this garbage against my favorite teams. Jagoffs.) The game didn’t have quite the finish that last year did, and I naturally wasn’t as invested without the Pens playing, but the ‘Hawks have long been my second-favorite team (years before I had ever thought of going to school in Chicago) and so it was good to see the game played just a mile up the road from our place.

In any event, I’m mad geeked about the fact that the Winter Classic is turning into the first hockey success story in years. This year gets an A for weather and an A for the matchup and team effort, but a B- overall because the Penguins weren’t playing and Detroit won. Those are both ridiculous reasons to downgrade the game, but then this blog exists at my beck and call, so you’re out of luck in your efforts to hate on my conclusion.

Bonus Sarah Palin note: I meant to write during the election that while the G.O.P., the American populace and the human race didn’t get much out of the idea of hockey mom Sarah Palin as VP, the NHL certainly did: For the first time in a nation where no-talent sportswriters have made hockey the go-to sport of ridicule, the same voters who treat sports that aren’t baseball or football as pastimes for gay foreign terrorists were defending hockey with all their American-purist might.

While I’m glad Palin has turkey-trotted off the national stage for now, I really miss that brief period when even Southern rednecks were touting hockey as a game played by Real Americans™.

And now, back to obscurity.

Chalk Another One

Hey, it’s 2009. Can you dig it?

Why the Bush Team Pursues an Israeli Ceasefire

When I saw today that the Bush Administration is pushing for Israel to end its bloody air raids on Gaza, I thought immediately of TIME.com amigo Tony’s analysis from two years ago, in which he said that Israel has depended on the U.S. to function as the “Don’t hold me back” friend that jumps in and breaks up the fight before it gets too serious — the role the U.S. is playing right now.

The timing of this matters, in that America needs to jump in right after Israel has smashed everything but before the failures of fighting a guerrilla opponent start to appear. In the Lebanon war, rather than pulling the Israelis back, the U.S. urged them to fight harder. The result was a stalemate, but because it was a stalemate against the Israeli army, it was a victory for Hezbollah. Right now Israel is at that point: they’ve killed hundreds of Palestinians and angered the Muslim world again, but they haven’t sent in the ground troops yet to get stuck in the same Gaza quagmire that they left behind in 2005. In summary, the Bush people learned the hard way — at least they seem to have learned at all this time — and don’t want to repeat the same mistake.

Those Mischievous Mulatto Fellows

(CNN) — A candidate for the Republican National Committee chairmanship said Friday the CD he sent committee members for Christmas — which included a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” — was clearly intended as a joke.

“I think most people recognize political satire when they see it,” Tennessee Republican Chip Saltsman told CNN. “I think RNC members understand that.”

Damn dude, “Negro”? It makes it tough to rock effective, current satire when you’re communicating to a 19th-century audience. I heard the next big RNC hits take down the Mussulmen, Orientals and Papists. Mocking the Papists? I can’t believe they went there!

Merry Christmas

I do miss December in New York. As much as the city often drove me up the wall, Christmastime was always a highlight.

I hope everyone’s Christmas is full of good times and tasty treats. Since this is a holy day, in the spirit of Benjamin Franklin’s adage that “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” I recommend a glass of this Chicago Christmas treat when you get a chance:

Merry Christmas!

The Real-Life Lindsey Naegle

Few quotes have this kind of inherent self-parody:

Daddy’s Girls, along with several of the other announced shows, will be “aspirational, enterprising, and empowering,” claims MTV: “These new series reflect Generation ‘Why Not?’ — living, working and playing on their own terms, ‘adventure capitalists’ if you will, pursuing a variety of thrill-seeking, 2.0, express-yourself enterprises,” says MTV entertainment president Brian Graden, presumably while choking back vomit.

For comparison:

Lady: We at the network want a dog with attitude. He’s edgy, he’s “in your face.” You’ve heard the expression “let’s get busy”? Well, this is a dog who gets “biz-zay!” Consistently and thoroughly.
Krusty: So he’s proactive, huh?
Lady: Oh, God, yes. We’re talking about a totally outrageous paradigm.
Meyer: Excuse me, but “proactive” and “paradigm”? Aren’t these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important? [backpedaling] Not that I’m accusing you of anything like that. [pause] I’m fired, aren’t I?
Myers: Oh, yes.

Conchords 2: The Revenge

I gotta get an HBO hookup somehow before January 18.

Why Online Image-Borrowing Is Good Policy

Seeing as how I grab lots of images for my posts, like the photo by my old employer TIME.com in this post, I figured it was fair to elaborate on my own beliefs on borrowing images across the web: everybody wins.

My photo-editor friend Maria, also formerly of TIME.com, said it best when she noted that as long as the website that’s borrowing the image links to the original website that produced the image, then she had no problem with anybody else using that intellectual property.

I heard that. Not only does this allow the blogger or whomever to get some free visual content onto their site, it creates an attractive link promo for users to head back to the image’s original site.

That’s assuming you follow the policy of linking to the image source. If you don’t, then you’re just a jag. I try to be very good about the non-jag policy of image use around here, though I probably have a few jag moments that I’ve missed now and then. (I just went back and linked up an Obama victory image when I noticed it wasn’t linked. Whoops.)

To summarize: image stealing = good when credit is given.

Pat’s 12 Most Notable Things About Business School

Clearly I’ve spent this semester committing the web’s mortal sin of not updating, but I’m here to make that up to you dudes in Sammy G. style with a list. And to keep from fully ripping off the 11-item format, I added a bonus item.

So here it is, a UMich semester’s worth of the 12 most notable things about business school:

1. Business school is hard. “Dude, Pat, b-school is supposed to be all about partying hard, talking about owning things and schmoozing it up at free recruiter dinners. What the hell are you talking about?”

Dudes, you are wrong. B-school is most definitely not the walkthrough it’s described to be. People — probably med students and law-school grads — kept feeding me those lines about business school being the easiest professional school, and that my biggest concern would be my social schedule. If that’s true, then I made the right decision by not even pursuing medicine or law, because you should try putting some constant-growth perpetuities and heteroskedastic predictive models in your pipe and smoking it. It does not produce a delicious aroma, if you know what I’m sayin’. Point is, getting an MBA is not the joke it is made out to be.

2. Business school does actually teach you about the real world. MBAs also get a bad rap for being too busy collecting salary to handle the real business of business, but that is mad unfair. There’s a reason most b-schools won’t take you right out of undergrad: they actually care about experience and getting a student body that knows what it’s like to get up and go to work in the morning. Then there are all the professors who get seriously paid for all the consulting work they do on the side, so it’s not like they’re walled off from the real-world application of their theories in the way that most professors generally are.

I’ll give you two examples: Sam Zell with Tribune Company, and the credit crunch that’s going on right now. Before b-school I would have just sat back and shook my head in confusion at what happened. Alright, on second thought, the credit crunch still makes me shake my head in confusion, but I certainly know about the reason Zell loaded up Tribune with so much debt and why it went south so fast. (Quick answer: debt has a multiplier effect that makes good times really good and bad times really bad, so he was betting that he’d make way more money when he turned things around at Tribune, except that he didn’t turn it around, so the company crashed a lot harder. Thanks, Prof. Purnanandam!) The part you learn the hard way is how to tell your boss he’s screwing up, but thanks to the MBA you can at least provide some good reasoning on why he’s screwing up.

3. India produces a lot of b-school professors. Based on Ross, and on my in-laws’ b-school-prof friends in Bloomington, business-school faculty is apparently one of India’s leading exports. Five of my eight professors thus far have rocked the Subcontinent.

4. Business schools like group work. A lot. Every one of my classes in Fall B (Ross typically breaks the semester into two halves, each with their own class schedule) involved an assigned group and extensive group work. This is usually fine, but more than a few examples of interpersonal drama have developed in my section as a result of people not getting along in group settings. (I had a serious free rider in one of my groups this quarter, but he was from another section so the drama is minimized.) I like group work for lots of things, but try getting 5-6 people together to try and work on a 12-page paper, all of whom have really busy schedules: it’s made me long several times for being able to just write my own term paper and get that mug done.

5. Trying to teach soft skills is not a good way to spend academic time. Lots of b-school stuff is really useful, like statistics, valuation, marketing, negotiation, etc. But we also had a class this past quarter devoted to the soft skills of management and the different personality interactions in the workplace. We learned plenty of “awareness” of potential issues, but almost no tactical skills to use when, say, two dudes hate each other but both have to work in a team anyway. I might have found a particular tactical set useful, but just telling us that “People at work sometimes disagree” is, to put it mildly, a really questionable use of our tuition payments. Same goes for trying to teach creativity, friendliness or leadership: sometimes you got it, and sometimes you don’t.

6. I really like my section. Our class of 420-odd people is broken up into six sections; I’m in Section Six, which is, as its numerical order would convey, the greatest of the sections. I really did luck out: it’s not often that you get a random grouping of people and get along with almost all of them. My section has been the real highlight of b-school.

7. Bell’s beer, from Kalamazoo, is really good. I’m halfway through now, so I had to throw in a minor point to get the ball rolling for the second half of this list. It’s true, though: Bell’s really is good.

8. Being in school has had a negative impact on my ability to follow pro sports. For the past six autumns I’ve always been full-on into Steeler fandom, able to follow not just the Black and Gold in-depth but the rest of the NFL, too. My Sundays were filled with Miller Lite (come on, it’s always on special), buffalo wings and highlight shows. Yet this year my Sundays are usually stuck finishing up finance problem sets and going to group meetings for whichever club, course or recruiting group recognized that Sunday is the only time of week we’re not all otherwise scheduled up. Now I’ve fallen way behind on the NFL, and even missed the Steelers’ come-from-behind win against Dallas last week. Not cool, man.

9. Recruiting is a strange beast. Geeta told me that law school doesn’t involve that much schmoozing — you go after firm interviews through a lottery, then they either take you or don’t. Around here, though, networking is how it’s done, whether you go for on-campus stuff or self-directed. If you want to get an interview, it really helps to be on the closed list, which you do by meeting enough people in advance and making a good enough impression that they add you in. That’s not to say you don’t need to know what you’re doing, because the acquaintance-making just helps you get an interview, not bypass it. If you’re freaking clueless, it isn’t going to matter.

But a lot of the firms started winnowing down their lists toward the end of the semester, so people started getting calls for invite-only stuff that they don’t discuss out of politeness. (Ross is known as the friendly, social b-school, so maybe at other schools people trumpet their invites. That would be some dick-move stuff, so I hope not.) As a result, you never know who’s going around with 12 different dinner invites, and because everyone has to interview anyway, nobody knows if it’s even going to matter in the end. So there’s this weird air of secrecy even as everybody tries to help each other out with case-interview practice and assorted other contacts. (If somebody’s cool, then it makes sense to help them get a job along with you so you can work with other cool people.) So we got that going for us, which is nice.

My favorite reaction to this secrecy thing has been the use of it to mess with gunners. (A gunner, for those who don’t know, is someone who tries way too hard to “outgun” all of their fellow students. It is not a good label, even among recruiters.) People have made up events and then bragged about them in jest just to get the more gunnery types worked up. “Did you get an invite to the Goldman-Sachs helicopter tour? Yeah man, they pick you up in a Sikorsky and fly you to Chicago to meet with 8 partners for dinner. I’m totally stoked.”

10. The class motto this year: when in doubt, consult. As unlikely as it would have seemed to me a few years ago, the career goal right now is to get a job with one of the consulting firms, then work directly with media companies to get their ducks in a row in the industry. I didn’t think consulting would be a career for me with my whole not-that-corporate thing, but the more I learn about it, the more sense it makes considering I’ve wanted to do media-strategy work all along. That’s sort of a roundabout way to get into consulting, but my plan is pretty solid compared to some of the other people I know: With all the banks falling apart, consulting on campus right now is this crazed mass of people practicing case interviews and coming in anew from all directions. I don’t know who all these new dudes are, but we had people falling out the doors of the Bain presentation in November, and those people definitely weren’t there at the earlier presentations. As several students have said, “Consulting is like an extension of b-school for when you don’t know just what field you want to pursue.” I don’t really see it that way because I have a specific interest within the big C, but apparently the rest of the school would add that it’s a great place to go when panicked.

11. Michigan is cold. Seriously man, it is.

12. Business school was a good decision. I work my ass off, Outlook Calendar dictates most of my life, and plenty of this is flat-out hard. But after meeting some awesome and interesting people, finding interesting new career possibilities and learning how to turn some of the gears in the working world, I am down to roll for another three semesters and get to where it takes me.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my 1600-word discourse on just what I’ve been doing for the past four months. I’m starting my three-week time off, so I’ll do some more updating this time. I think. Peace out!

Not Good

I was just recently talking to these guys about their summer internship offerings. Somehow I don’t think that’s very high on their priority list right now.

The other timely thing is that we’re studying the multiplier effect of debt right now in finance. Company debt will get you the serious hookup when times are good, but when times are bad, they get really bad. Sadly that’s what happened to Tribune, and without the credit sloshing around the market for someone to buy the Cubs, that was it.

Back now to studying for finals and hoping the economy improves by 2010.

NU 21, Michigan 14

In case anybody wondered what I decided to do for today’s game:

And yeah, it was hella wet and freezing out there. So the jacket was not about hiding my loyalties — I showed off the shirt plenty of times — but instead about not rollin’ hypothermia-style.

The Real Reason Obama Won

After all, what team beat the ‘Skins to continue the Washington pro football presidential-prediction index?

Truly the Steeler Nation has powers that cannot be comprehended by mere humans. A certain individual would be wise to switch over from the Chicago Bears.

The Next Day

Well, back to reality. Obama won a great victory, but this morning it’s back to looking around and realizing how much there is to fix in the country.

Taking some inventory …

Damn dude, it’s a lot.

President Barack Obama … Unbelievable

… and by a huge victory, at that.

People are chanting “Obama! Obama!”, honking their horns, pounding drums and clapping in unison outside my window in Ann Arbor tonight, and it’s 2:40 a.m. This is louder than any Michigan game and is unlike anything I’ve ever heard. Even when I discount partisanship, the tone feels so much different than the Bush wins of 2000 and 2004 — when I look at the victorious mood I saw back then, it felt that the tone of the celebrations was more, “We won and you didn’t; we proved our ideas right and defeated yours.” Yet today the nature of the happiness seems different, like a huge sense of relief that things really can be what we hoped they could be. Maybe that’s just because it’s been so many years of the other side winning, and so the left side doesn’t know how to gloat; maybe not. But it seems like the difference between a fan who watches his favorite team trounce the visitors versus a guy passing a test that he studied for and still worried he’d fail.

Even up until the last minute, I just didn’t believe Obama would win. It’s not so much that I thought America was racist, but that it was too set in its ways to make such a historic shift in such tumultuous times. People cling to the familiar, I thought. We rally round the known. Yet tonight I saw that so much of the country was so desperate to better things after eight years of the worst un-American leadership it has ever seen that it moved beyond any familiar model and was ready to listen to new ideas.

• The old, heroic American John McCain made a reappearance tonight, just as I thought he would under winning circumstances. That he did so even while losing is a testament to Sen. John McCain. Maybe if he had stayed in his own personality earlier and avoided handing his campaign over to the worst of his party, things would have gone differently. But I don’t know that Republican circumstances could have allowed him to avoid running the campaign he did — there are too many influentials in the Republican Party who continue to bay for liberal blood even after eight years of government dominance, and getting past that obstacle to win the nomination is all but impossible. No matter what the worst of Democratic partisans say, we all saw that McCain never warmed to the ugliest of the attack-dog nastiness that was demanded of him by the party poo-bahs, and that’s why he was ultimately ineffective at it. Perhaps another scored-earth partisan like Bush or the oily Rudy Giuliani would have been able to exploit the nation’s worst attitudes enough to take down Obama, but McCain just seems incapable of that — and that’s a compliment.

  I really did feel a great sadness watching him concede tonight, because the entire nation knew that this was the end for a guy who gave his body and so many years of his life to his country. The fact that McCain never would have been able to run the campaign that he probably wanted to run is what has made me so cynical about our political system, because it chews up positive and pure ideals as the barrier for entry into the public forum. Yet watching McCain return to the Senate to ultimately fade from the scene, even with all of his failings — there’s something sad about it all.

• What will make the victory easier to accept for the nation is that there’s no question of the winner — Obama won not only Ohio, but Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, New Mexico, Colorado and potentially even Indiana and North Carolina. (As of now.) Seismic, indeed.
• I keep my emotions in check over political events, but I almost teared up watching Jesse Jackson, Oprah and Obama’s other black supporters weeping with joy at the Grant Park rally. My grandpa who emigrated from Ireland greatly admired John F. Kennedy, and in the Irish admiration for Kennedy and the parallel black support for Obama on dispay tonight there’s something really profound: no matter how awful the things history has done to your race or your nationality, with time and human spirit it’s possible to rise above it and get to a better place. Even if it takes generations, it really can be done. To finally get to witness the end triumph is something very special indeed, and no matter your political leanings, that was special to see tonight.
• As I looked at the McCain rally’s audience today, I wondered more than ever just how the Republican party is going to move into the demographics of the 21st century. While Grant Park was a total mishmash, I couldn’t find any non-white faces in all the Arizona crowd shots and panning shots that I saw. No matter what you consider the “real America”, when that America has to share space with demographic reality, you had better find a way to move towards positive integration.
• Sarah Palin will be back for sure. She won’t stay the national joke many would hope she is.
• I’d like to end on one strange political note, and to acknowledge a historical man who has indirectly led to the greatest racial advance this country has ever seen. You probably won’t guess his name.

  He is George W. Bush.

  Bush is that reviled type of historical figure who inherits a bad situation, then complicates it and makes it worse to a degree far beyond its original nature. As the worst president in American history, he has in fact done such a poor job for the nation that many of those older voters in Ohio or Virginia who would have otherwise been far too focused on Obama’s race likely said to themselves today, “Race used to be a directly negative factor in a politician, but after the incompetence this country has endured in the past eight years and how angry it has made me, I will vote for anybody the opposition party can offer who represents a break from the present situation.” Obama has a funny name, he’s not white, and he has liberal ideas, but he is something new and became a vessel for hope about a different and better future. That won him the election tonight, and strangely George W. Bush did a lot to open the door.

Strange Realization

I was just now thinking that this is the first election day since 2000 that I’m not working at a big news organization. Two, four, and six years ago I’d be gearing up to be at the office on some weird schedule like 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., hoping we’d order the right kind of pizza for dinner and scrambling to adjust the coverage as new info came in. Everything would be in a huge, crazy rush, and the anticipation of each new development felt like the weight of the world.

Frankly, I miss it.