Friday Four

Watching The League is an order of magnitude funnier when your baby daughter is sleeping on your chest and you don't want to wake her. In fact, I'd say it's about as close to cutting up behind the nuns' backs in Catholic grade school as I've ever been since.

You're wallet's about to get thinner, again (but in a good way): Google has come up with a loyalty punchcard app that I hope businesses with loyalty punchcard programs will support. As a big fan of thin wallets, I already use an All-Ett and already have all my scannable loyalty cards on my phone in CardStar.

Over email some time back, Snedcat pointed me to a bizarre and strangely intriguing -- yet somewhat educational -- interview with Noam Chomsky, saying, "It's ironic that all the hip young hipsters worship such an utter square." Money quote from interviewer Jeff Jetton: "[T]he man has none of the animation, the expression that you'd expect from someone so closely affiliated with the field of linguistics." Money quote from Chomsky, in response to the question of whether he is a foodie: "Am I a… ? Meaning?" "Square" isn't the half of it: They should have titled this, "Interview with a Zombie."

My favorite English Premier League team, Arsenal, seems to be recovering from a horrendous start to its season, but this weekend's match against Chelsea will be a gut check at the very least. Curious at some point about why manager Arsène Wenger never really was on the hot seat, I read about him and learned that he's the "idol" of Billy Beane, of Moneyball fame, who admires his ability to recognize and build on under-appreciated talent.

A notable example was the purchase of Nicolas Anelka from Paris Saint-Germain for only £500,000 and his subsequent sale to Real Madrid just two years later for £23.5 million. This enabled Wenger to buy three players, Thierry Henry, Robert Pirès, and Sylvain Wiltord, who all played significant roles for the first team in the early 2000s. The sale also helped the club fund [its] new training centre at London Colney. [hyperlinks and footnotes removed] 

Moneyball has, incidentally, been made into a movie, and at least two HBLers have strongly recommended it, one despite not being a baseball fan.

-- CAV