Ozzie Guillen introduced in Miami

HERE HE IS. A bit of a nut, but a fun one, though sometimes pretty far over the line. Miami should enjoy him.

no, it was time for Guillen to go

Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen is being released from his contract (after being denied an extension) to manage the Florida Marlins next year. ESPN.com asks:

“Did Ozzie Have To Go — Really?
The combustible Kenny Williams-Ozzie Guillen working relationship for the White Sox ended Monday. But is the right guy leaving the club?”

Yes, I think so. Ozzie could be entertaining, and did fabulous work in bringing the 2005 World Series title to Chicago (though I’d have preferred that the other Chicago team win it!).

Nonetheless, Ozzie could also be a crude, racially insensitive trash-mouth who did shocking things like sneak up behind sportswriter and team critic Jay Mariotti and pretend to have sex with him (while wet and naked from the shower, if memory serves). Not funny, and most people would have been fired immediately for things like that. Ozzie got a lot of free passes on this kind of behavior, and I think the act was wearing thin in Chicago. But he’s popular in Miami, and I wish him well there.

By contrast, while you can question some of Kenny Williams’ recent moves, he’s a respectable and often imaginative executive who has made some good deals for the Sox over the years. I’m glad they’re keeping Williams and letting Ozzie go. Eight years is a relatively long time to manage a baseball team before fresh blood is needed, and it’s good to let World Series-winning Ozzie leave voluntarily with his head high rather than succumb to the almost inevitable firing or non-extension next season.

Bill Benzon on OOO and Wittgenstein

HERE.

memorial

That was a beautifully organized but obviously very sad memorial. You have to understand, we all loved this guy. It was his first academic job (following a private sector finance career). Steve didn’t join us until 2008, but he made such an immediate impression that he was already Associate Dean by his second year and had even more weight on campus than that title alone would suggest. He was simply a smart, insightful, valuable colleague to have.

He was also wonderful on the human level: one of those people more interested in listening to stories than in telling them, and with a talent for always making you feel more capable and happier after you ran into him than before.

His wife and middle daughter both made beautiful speeches at the memorial. His daughter is probably 12 or 13, and it was a really disarming kid’s speech about how her dad took her to SeaWorld early this summer, and it was a lot of stories about how much fun they had at SeaWorld.

Also a great speech from his Dean, who had become a very close personal friend during their two years of working as a team. As for the other top-ranking speakers on the program, I’ve never seen them so emotional before. This regrettable incident was like a punch in the jaw to the entire institution, and none of us are even close to having processed it yet. It was never discussed much until today, and I think the reason for that is simply that none of us really believed it until today.

campus memorial for Steve Everhart today

In late June we lost our friend STEVE EVERHART, Associate Dean of the School of Business, in a roadside bombing in Baghdad. He had been invited as a consultant by one of the Iraqi universities, which wanted to reform its business curriculum. I had the chance to see Steve at a party shortly before his departure for the airport, and he seemed visibly worried, but also excited by the opportunity. As I was discussing with the Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences (also a philosophy professor) if either of us had been asked to go to Iraq following a request to help reform the philosophy curriculum, then of course we would have done it. (Not now, however.)

Many people I’ve spoken with on campus have reported the same reaction to the news, which reached most of us in an email from the President. It was similar to the sensation of being punched in the gut, and took most of us a number of days to get over.

That said, there’s never been a genuine moment of mourning, for the simple reason that I still expect to see Steve walking across campus. Instead, we’ll be having a campus memorial for Steve today. How clearly I remember his voice, his demeanor, his sense of humor.

origin of “object-oriented philosophy”

THIS Wikipedia article says that the term first appeared in my dissertation. I read it this morning and said “that’s wrong,” because I knew that I first used the term in September 1999 for the lecture of the same name that now appears in Towards Speculative Realism.

In order to prove this, I opened up the AppleWorks version of my dissertation, which I still have on my hard drive.

And… I was wrong. The term *is* used in the dissertation. I was sure I didn’t add it until the book version, but that turns out to be incorrect.

“object-oriented philosophy” appears in the Introduction and in Chapter 3. The Introduction file shows no modifications since February 13, 1999, so I was using it by no later than that date.

Not that it matters to anyone but me, but I’m always curious about how memory can play tricks on you, which is why written records are so important for a variety of purposes in one’s life.

the too tall to fly guy

James from Critical Animal tracked it down, and the passenger booted off the flight was 6 feet, 9 inches. For those of you on the metric system, that’s just under 206 centimeters.

All right, that’s tall. But it’s not that tall. Plenty of taller people have flown on airplanes. NBA teams have often flown commercial over the years, for example, and 6’9 is simply above average for an NBA player, not at all near the top end.

much already on hand

If someone were to say “for the rest of your life, you can only read the books that are currently in your home and listen to the music that is currently in your home,” I wouldn’t fare too badly. There’s enough stuff in this apartment to keep me busy for years.

Brooklyn Nets in 2012-13

No offense to New Jersey, but I love the fact that Brooklyn will have an NBA team next year. HERE.

Cairo’s *4th* Metro line?

THIS STORY says that Japan is helping finance Cairo’s 4th Metro line, though it doesn’t say where the line will run, unless I’m just too tired to concentrate properly.

The first line opened in the early 1980’s, and runs pretty much north-south through Tahrir Square. A good line if you live in Helwan, Ma’adi, or Heliopolis, but not too useful for anyone else.

The second line open right around the time I arrived, 2000 or so. It’s much newer-looking, cleaner, and runs roughly perpendicular to the other one, meeting it at Tahrir and also at the former “Mubarak” station (now called “Martyrs”) where the train station is. Good for taking the train to Alexandria.

The third line is the one that makes me really happy, because it will have a stop in Zamalek, just a couple of blocks from me. Finally! But it’s still some years from completion. It’s in progress, though.

I’d literally never heard of the planned 4th line until reading this article a few minutes ago.

Cairo needs it. Way too many cars in this city.