Friday roundup: The perils of just-get-things-done-ism, and a happy zombie apocalypse to all!

One of the special joys of running a web news outlet is the regular stream of emails you receive from people wanting to pay you to run their “articles” (really thinly disguised ads and/or link spam) on your site. I had a whole plan for a year-end roundup of the funniest of those, but various things happened this past week and — anyway, there was only one I really wanted to share with you, and that is this:

Hi Neil,

I noticed you shared an article from CDC.gov when you talked about the zombie apocalypse, here: https://www.fieldofschemes.com/category/mlb/los-angeles-angels-of-anaheim/

We recently published an article about a related topic, basement bunkers and why it isn’t just for wealthy preppers, that I thought might be interesting to your readers.

Followed a week later, when I didn’t respond, by:

Hi Neil,

I wanted to check in and see if you got my note about the zombie apocalypse?

Truly we live in the screwiest of all possible worlds.

On with the last news roundup of 2021, the year that ended up feeling like a repeat:

• Calgary Herald columnist Rob Breakenridge is usually one of the more level-headed sports commentators — he’s even had me on his radio show — but his column this week falls into the trap of what might be called just-get-things-done-ism, arguing in the wake of the collapse of the Flames arena deal that both the city and the team owners need to “put egos aside and figure out how this can be salvaged.” Sure, if it’s just a matter of egos; if it’s a matter of this being a plan that looked pretty bad for the city and was looking worse and worse for the team as cost overruns piled up, maybe walking away from it is the better part of valor? There’s definitely a trend in urban governance punditry to credit elected officials who “get things done,” whether those things are a good idea or not — and getting things done is a skill, but also sometimes the best deals are the ones you didn’t make.
• The city of Pawtucket, having lost the Pawtucket Red Sox to Worcester’s $150 million stadium bribe, is looking at replacing the team’s historic stadium with … a new $300 million high school? This would allow the city to sell off the site of one of its existing high schools and possibly repurpose the other as a middle school, so it’s a good lesson about how public assets are fungible, and the state of Rhode Island would reimburse most of the costs, so it’s arguably not a bad deal — still, for that price tag, I hope Pawtucket’s high school students get some crazy fancy cupholders.
• Doesn’t look like I actually ran a link to the final environmental impact report for the Oakland A’s Howard Terminal stadium proposal, at least not before earlier in this sentence. Reading through that is another thing I didn’t get to do this week, but now that I’ve just finished canceling vacation plans for this month in the face of (waves hands around to indicate the entirety of everything), there should be plenty of time to discuss it here before planned hearings starting on January 19.
• The Super Bowl is set to be played at the Los Angeles Rams‘ multi-billion-dollar new stadium, and already people are warning of its “notorious parking and traffic problems” and what a mess they could create. It’s tough to be notorious already at barely one year old, but I guess that’s one way of being “unprecedented and unparalleled.”

I could probably scrape up a couple more news items, but sometimes the best news item is the one you never write, right? Happy new year to all, thanks to everyone who threw money in the tip jar or joined this site’s Patreon, and I’ll see everyone back here on Monday.