As I’m sure most football fans in New England are already aware, Tom Brady’s season is over. It was announced today, a day after he suffered a painful-looking shot to his left knee, that he will undergo surgery and miss the remainder of the season. ESPN has a full report on the story.

The mood in Boston is sour. My mood is sour. I so should have taken my roommate’s advice when drafting my fantasy league players. She recommended not drafting my favorite team’s players because if in the unlikely event they got injured (or played poorly), I would be doubly upset. I politely disagreed and drafted Tommy.

There are only two positive things I can come up with regarding this disastrous injury:

1. Matt Cassel played surprisingly well. He didn’t screw up once. ¹
2. I drafted Eli Manning as my second quarterback. I get the best of both worlds here. If he manages to play well then my fantasy team will do well and I’ll be happy. If he manages to play very poorly, I’ll cackle and be happy.

Looking on the bright side, there are a lot of great players on the Patriots team, even if they are a little long in the tooth. If everybody does their part, and maybe a little more, the team still might manage a descent season if Cassel can just keep the ball safe. There have been plenty of NFL teams that have done alright with lackluster quarterbacks. *Cough* Giants. Bears.

I suppose we’ll have to wait and see what happens. For now, I’m very sad about season that I was so excited for. I didn’t expect the Patriots to be fantastic this year, but I was excited nevertheless. Hopefully the team can rally around the new play caller and still make a run at the playoffs. I think this will be Cassel’s last shot to make something out of his NFL career. Hopefully he does well.

1. Although even this is somewhat depressing; the best I can say about him is that he didn’t screw up. I also thought that he was helped by the offensive line playing good and a great running game that was absent the entire preseason.↩

For the past week or two The Daily WTF has been reissuing older classic stories. I’ve been really enjoying these gems. Today’s story is about a bright idea that Microsoft had to begin asking brainteaser questions during job interviews to see how the interviewees responded. A silly question always deserves a sill answer:

During a screening interview, I was asked how I would design a bike fit for someone visually impaired. I responded something to the effect of, “What, like, for blind people?”, and she answered yes.

I thought for a moment and then I responded, “Well.. a blind person riding a bike doesn’t sound like a very safe idea, so I would make the bike stationary, maybe with a fan blowing in the person’s face. He probably wouldn’t even know the difference.”

She was speechless.

So bad. Although, if I was asked a similar ridiculous question in an interview I would probably react by thinking of the most sarcastic response I could. Good thing I already have a job.

Here’s a great tidbit from McSweeney’s: Footnotes, Endnotes, and Parentheticals That Cost Me Marks on My Thesis. My favorite:

3 Who, although a gifted academic, is still a douche.

Full marks for honesty.

Via Kottke.

Oddee has a fantastic post about the 10 Most Amazing Ghost Towns in the world. The article has some great photographs, but even more interesting is that each photograph is accompanied by a short background story about the place and how it came to be a ghost town.

One of my favorites:

Via Kottke.

A couple of weeks ago when I was browsing through Google Earth, I came across some photographs of the MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center, more commonly known as simply the Stata Center.

This building has always amazed me ever since the first time I stumbled upon it. It is quite an impressive sight. Oddly enough, I live within walking distance of this building. I didn’t realize until I read the Wikipedia entry on the building that several notable people have their offices in the Stata Center, including Noam Chomsky, Tim Berners-Lee and Richard Stallman.

The funniest thing for me about the architecture of the building is that it has always given me a very visceral reminder of Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead. Every time I see the building I think that it looks like something Howard Roark would have built.

I have no idea why I always have this reaction, because when I actually stop to think about it, I believe that Roark would hate the Stata Center. He would hate it because it doesn’t make any sense. Excerpts from the Wiki entry only highlight this fact:

There is also one lecture room where, because of the slight lean of the wall panels, some people have been known to experience vertigo. Sound insulation is almost absent. The building has also been criticized as insensitive to the needs of its inhabitants, poorly designed for day-to-day use[...]

Also later in the entry:

On October 31, 2007,[9] MIT sued[10] architect Frank Gehry and the construction company, Skanska USA Building Inc., for “providing deficient design services and drawings” which caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, drainage to back up, and falling ice and debris to block emergency exits.[8] A Skanska spokesperson said that prior to construction Gehry ignored warnings from Skanska and a consulting company regarding flaws in his design of the amphitheater, and rejected a formal request from Skanska to modify the design.

This is most certainly not something that Roark would have done. If not this though, what would one of Roark’s buildings actually have looked like? It is apparently a common speculation that Rand based Roark’s architecture on that of Frank Lloyd Wright. Although she has specifically denied this, it seems to me to be a very close match based upon her descriptions of Roark’s architecture.