Author Archives: Jon Lowder

More Mason Love

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A couple of economists at GMU have written an article for Slate that explains why Mason’s econ department and basketball team are very similar.  I remember when Buchanan won his Nobel in 86 while I was at Mason; I didn’t have a clue what economics was all about (I still don’t) but I took great pride that our unknown school had a Nobel winner.  Now that GMU can boast two Nobel winners and a Final Four team I’m thinking there might actually be an outbreak of, gasp, alumni pride!

Being Young Ain’t All That Great

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According to this article in BusinessWeek the last decade hasn’t been particularly good for young adults at least in terms of household earning power.  From 1995-2004 the median net worth of young households (25-34 years old) rose only 1.3% adjusted for inflation, while at the same time the net worth of households 35-64 rose 40%. 

For some perspective it would be nice to know how much this varies from past decades.  I always assumed that peoples’ peak earning was in their 40s and 50s so you’d expect the household gains to be greater in older households. And as the article points out one of the reasons that older households have done some much better is because such a large percentage own their homes and the real estate market went nuts from 95-04.  So is the story that the gap between the two growth rates is much greater than in the past?

This just reaffirms what I’ve been thinking as I approach my 40th birthday; while being young was an awful lot of fun I don’t think I’d go back.  Being broke definitely sucked but here are a few other reasons:

  • It took me over ten years to figure out how to be a relatively decent, housebroken husband and father.  I don’t EVER want to repeat that process again.
  • While it was nice having a young body that seemed to bounce back from anything it tended to produce self-abusive behavior.  Toilets are not meant to be hugged.
  • Sleepless nights spent dealing with babies.
  • Mornings after sleepless nights spent dealing with babies when you didn’t wake up and now you’re dealing with one extremely pissed-off, overwraught wife.
  • Tolerating bosses who were basically sub-human because I needed the money and health insurance.
  • Not knowing that the terms "fine" and "dining" are not mutually exclusive.
  • Believing the tag line "made from the finest Bavarian hops."
  • Not knowing that Bavaria was not the last name of a NY Giants tight end…you know, Mark Bavaria.
  • Not knowing how to tell someone to f—off with a smile on my face and get away with it.

I could go on but you get my point: young = dumb + broke.

Billy Packer Can Kiss My Green and Gold Butt

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Now that we long-suffering GMU Patriots alums are able to say our boys made the Final Four I only have one or two comments:

  • I hope this is only the beginning of non-elite schools making big noise in the tourney.  Conferences like the CAA and the Missouri Valley are putting out some quality teams and have been for years.  I think the selection committee has recognized this for at least the last five years and it’s about time the college hoops cognoscenti also get a clue.  Billy Packer is starting to look like he’s not only a misogynist, but he’s a misogynist who’s also an ACC/SEC/Big-10/Pac-10 (i.e. corporate) hack. He’s been sniffing ACC jocks since his days at Wake and I think it’s caused him to think he’s a lot smarter than he really is.
  • Coack K’s comment about wondering how it works that the ACC grew in size this year and yet got fewer bids has caused me to re-consider how smart I think he is.  Did he not watch the games at the ACC tourney this year?  That was some pretty bad basketball that highlighted a lot of athleticism and poor fundamentals.  Even the ACC is going to have down years and this was one of them, but once teams like UNC get some experience under their belts and can mix basketball smarts with raw talent they’ll be back at the top.  Just being the ACC doesn’t give them the right to six or seven bids every year.
  • A lot of people thought Hofstra should have gotten in instead of Mason because they beat Mason twice in the last two weeks of the season.  What I hope people learned from this is that mid-major conferences like the CAA need to be considered for more than one at-large in addition to the conference tourney champ if the teams are worthy.  Hofstra and Mason had very similar records and they battled with UNC-Wilmington and ODU in the CAA all year.  I think they probably would have been a better selection than some of the last selections from the majors.  I’m not saying that the CAA will deserve three shots on any given year, but when you have four teams that stack up well with other conferences and have the RPI to support it they should be considered for a third overall bid.

All that said I’m gonna enjoy this next week because it will probably be a while before it happens again.  Lots of upperclassmen on this year’s Mason team, but with a Final Four run you’ve gotta believe that recruiting is going to get easier/better.  Let’s just hope that Larranaga sticks around to do it.

NY Times Puts Google Maps to Good Use

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The New York Times has used the Google Maps interface to plot all of its "36 Hours" travel columns over the last three years.  Winston-Salem was recently featured and you’ll also find articles on Boone and Charlotte.

That’s a very nice, useful application of the Google API, not just another "Let’s do this just because it’s cool" application. I think it actually adds value to the columns since I could see using this a tool to find a getaway that offers something a little different.

Google Map Showing Location of NCAA Basketball Champs

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This is kind of cool: a map of all the NCAA men’s basketball tournament winners.  If you click on one of the balloons it will show you the winner, the location of the team they beat and the venue where the game was played.

North Carolina has three schools represented and there are more schools east of the Mississippi than west of the big river.  Without UCLA’s run of championships in the 60s-70s you’d also see a much heavier tilt to the east in overall number of championships as well.  Interestingly Virginia doesn’t have a representative but there’s still hope this year with George Mason still in the hunt.  Have I mentioned recently that I’m a GMU graduate?

Five Middle-Aged Men, a Minivan, and Four Days

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Last Friday, St. Patricks Day, I drove down to Savannah, GA to meet up with some friends for a long weekend of golf, poker and fishing.  You know you’re middle-aged when the prospect of having to tool around town in a mini-van (my marvelous Mazda MPV) didn’t scare anyone off.

I arrived at the Savannah airport at the appointed time, 6:30, only to find out that the flight was delayed.  Five hours later they arrived, but it wasn’t so bad because I got to watch some meaningless NCAA game in the Phillips Seafood bar while the score showing my alma mater George Mason beating Michigan State in the first round of the NCAA tournament appeared in the corner of the screen.  First victory ever in the NCAA’s for GMU, yippee!

The guys landed and I had a cooler of beer in the back of the van for them.  I labeled the very large cooler "Mike’s Beer" and the small cooler "Jon, Kevin, Dave and Karl’s Beer".  Mike does love his Bud Light.  An hour later we were at Dave’s house in Hilton Head (Port Royal) playing our first hold ’em mini-tournament.  Then it was off to bed so we could get some decent shuteye before our 8:30 tee time.  That was the second sign that we’re getting old; we actually slept between poker and golf.

After golf (very ugly for all involved except Dave who won 7 skins) it was back to the house to get cleaned up and head to Savannah for a night on a casino boat.  Silly us for cleaning up since the clientele was, uh, interesting.  First bad sign, literally, was the sign at the gangplank that said "Absolutely no concealed weapons allowed" quickly followed by a guy scanning everyone with a handheld detector.  Next bad sign was the overwhelming smell that was suspiciously like the worst fraternity houses I’ve visited.  Then we came across the first patrons decked out in bling that didn’t deserve the second bling to qualify for bling-bling and we were a little scared.

The boat’s air conditioner wasn’t working so within minutes sitting in the card room was like taking a sauna with 400 chain-smokers.  Things got a little better when the boat left the dock and hit the open water, but that’s because about 30 people instantly became nauseous and headed for the open-air upper deck.  We all entered a $100 no-limit hold-em tournament and were doing pretty well, especially since most of the other patrons apparently thought watching one night of poker on ESPN qualified as experience. And I’d say most of them didn’t get past third grade math. 

So what happened?  Well I got knocked out by a guy with two teeth who called my all-in (I had A-Q and my ace was paired up on the board) while holding a J-9 and then caught a gut-shot straight on the river. That’s poker though, and honestly I took out someone with a lucky card myself so I can’t say much.  Still we all were getting taken out by rednecks with horseshoes surgically implanted in their derriers.  Kevin was doing great until the conditions got to him and he went all in on a horrible hand, but that was because he felt so sick he could barely see straight.  Mike ended up finishing in the money (6th place) so it wasn’t a total failure.

Then we were stuck for four hours until the boat went back to shore.  In those four hours we were able to witness the fine spectacle of society’s Wal-Mart crowd getting increasingly drunk and rowdy.  Some guy called his wife a bitch and they started to have it out.  Then a white guy called his black friend the "n" word, which his friend seemed fine with but a woman from a black family sitting next to them took great exception to and a spat broke out between her family and his crowd. 

I escaped to the upper deck for some fresh air, but that didn’t last once the karaoke started.  An old, drunk redneck named Steve went up and requested some Credence Clearwater Revival and the DJ spent a minute finding it while Steve returned to his seat.  When the DJ announced "And now we’ll have Steve singing (I don’t remember what he requested)" Steve looked up and yelled "What the f— you talking about?" The DJ said, "Sir, you requested the song and you get to sing along with it."  Steve said, "I don’t wanna f—ing sing it I wanna listen to it."  The DJ told him that there wouldn’t be any words because the Karaoke version only includes the instrumentals since you’re supposed to sing along to it.  Steve asked him "What kind of f—ing DJ are you?" and the DJ just gave up.  When no one else requested a song the DJ put on a top-40 loop and when Steve heard words I thought he might fight the DJ for "lying to him about not having no goddamn words in the f—ing songs."  That’s when I got the hell out of there.

Thankfully we were back on land at 1 a.m.  We drove back to Hilton Head and then crashed.  The next morning, Sunday, we got up played some poker and then at noon took a fishing charter that Dave had set up.  It was probably 50 degrees with a 15-20 MPH wind blowing and we froze our butts off.  The captain didn’t want to but convinced him to try going to a spot offshore, and after weathering five-foot waves for 1/2 hour we saw his wisdom and had him take us back into the sound. We managed to catch four fish that had a cumulative weight of about four ounces, but I had the best time because my college roommate, Bobby, called me on my cell to do a play-by-play of the last 13 seconds of GMU’s win over Carolina in the NCAAs.  I might have jumped off the boat if my knees hadn’t locked into place hours earlier.

We got back to the house about six on Sunday and everyone took hot showers to try and warm up.  We ordered pizza and then played hours of poker…probably the highlight of the weekend.  Kevin and Mike played another round of golf Monday morning but the rest of us slept in and packed to leave.  That afternoon I dropped them off at the airport and had a great time driving home, laughing my ass off the whole way.  I kept thinking about five middle-aged guys driving around in a mini-van trying to cut loose and hitting every snag you can imagine.  It was a blast.

Patriot-ism

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Thanks to the fact that my alma mater, George Mason University, won two significant basketball games this past weekend I now no longer have to answer the question, "Where’s that?" when I tell people where I went to college.  In fact GMU has had a growing reputation in the DC region for years, but it took these two wins to put it on the map outside the DC area.

Washington Post columnist Joel Achenbloch does a good job describing the lack of respect that the university and its namesake have received over the years.  The school boasts an impressive faculty, and if you’re a conservative then the law school is definitely for you. Now if they’d just get an a damn 1-AA football team all would be right in the universe.

The place to be to watch the Patriots’ Sweet-16 game against Wichita State is Brion’s Grille in Fairfax, across Rt-123 from the campus.  The first couple of years I was at Mason the space that Brion’s occupies was a nasty little dance dive called Jorges, but for the last 15+ years Brion’s, which was established by a couple of Mason alums, has been the de facto campus joint.  The food’s pretty good and it holds a special place for me because that’s where, as a recent graduate and budding entrepreneur, I met my wife in ’90 for lunch to hire her to do some clerical work for me since I was too chicken to ask her out on a date.  Thankfully she was desperate enough for money that she overlooked my obvious geekiness and took the gig. If you’re in DC on Friday I can almost guarantee that Brion’s will be the best place to catch the game.

USC Fans Trump the Cameron Not-so-Crazies

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College pranks are great, and some of the best have occurred at athletic events.  But my new favorite is this one pulled on Southern Cal’s point guard before and during the USC-Cal game. (Here’s another person’s account of it as well).  Here are the highlights from the article:

Sure, heckling visiting shooting free throws is nothing new, and
First Team All-Pac-10 guard Gabe Pruitt of USC has received his fair
share of taunts. But when the sophomore stepped to the stripe during
last Saturday’s game at Cal he heard something incredibly familiar yet
even more jarring from the Bears’ student section: his own phone number.

As SI.com first reported, it turns out Pruitt had been chatting on AOL
Instant Messenger the week leading up to the game with “Victoria,” who
claimed to be a cute UCLA student.

Pruitt liked the pictures she sent, allegedly telling her, “You look
like you have a very fit body,” and, “Now I want to c u so bad.” Sure
enough, he eventually gave the “girl” his digits and agreed to meet her
when he returned to L.A.

Unfortunately for Pruitt, “Victoria” turned out to be a member of the
Cal RallyCom, who shared the information with the rest of his student
section. So when Pruitt came up to shoot his first free throws of the
night, the student section erupted in chants of “Victoria,” as well as
his phone number.

The guy missed both his free throws and according to some accounts had quite the look on his face.  Can you imagine the utter confusion and embarassment?  The Crazies have pulled a few in their days, but nothing as good as this.

Government Sanctioned Nosy Neighbors

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The East Orange (NJ) Police Department is recruiting citizens to monitor video feeds and report suspicious activities.  There are plenty of annoying, nosy people in every community so I can see this really taking off, not just in East Orange but all over the country.  I’d be tempted to go out and do something that looks suspicious just to see what happened.