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A treat today. Nothing about the creeps in government. (Well, the cartoons are here. But otherwise public narcissist free zone)
Fresh off Seattle’s big blowout Super Bowl, John Tamny congratulates Pete Carroll the NFL’s greatest failure. The ups and downs of Carroll’s career are quite a story.
Pete Carroll’s Seattle Seahawks thoroughly mauled the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII, 43-8. The win squarely places Carroll in an elite circle of all-time great football coaches.
Most would give anything to have a Super Bowl win on their resume. In Carroll’s case, he’s not only joined the fraternity of Super Bowl winners, but he can also claim two national titles on the collegiate level at the University of Southern California (USC). A few more quality seasons in the NFL likely punches Carroll’s ticket to the NFL’s Hall of Fame.
Notable about the ever ebullient Carroll is that he wasn’t always considered a winner. At one time he was very much seen as unsuited to the head coach’s role; so much so that he was unemployed. Carroll’s path to football’s elite was a checkered one, and it speaks to the wondrous, life enhancing value of failure as the driver of future success. Put plainly, when we shield individuals and businesses (think the bailed out banks and carmakers) from their errors, we perpetuate what makes them mediocre while robbing them of the knowledge that would make them successful.
Most readers are familiar with his story, but Carroll’s first stop as a NFL coach COH -2.9% was with the New York Jets in 1994. Though his only team there started out strong, and was in the hunt for a playoff spot right up to the 12th week of the ’94 season, a fake spike by Dan Marino of the Miami Dolphins led to a heartbreaking loss that the Jets seemingly never recovered from. The Jets finished the season with a 6-10 record after which owner Leon Hess, impatient for a winning season late in life, unceremoniously fired Carroll. …
… Happily for Carroll now, he’s once again a Super Bowl winning coach who has ascended to an elite echelon of coaches. Talented as he always was, it was failure at the NFL level that forced him to prove himself on the collegiate level, and it also provided this intensely competitive man who had been dismissed as pro-coaching material with the fuel to prove everyone wrong. Notable there is that Carroll helped pick players for his Super Bowl winning team that were underestimated much as he was. Russell Wilson was a 3rd round draft choice after being judged too short, shutdown cornerback Richard Sherman lasted until the 5th round, game MVP Malcolm Smith was a 7th round pick, and wideout Doug Baldwin wasn’t drafted at all. There’s no greater gift in life than that of being underestimated, and the naysayers ultimately did Carroll and his players a big favor in expressing their disdain.
Congratulations to Pete Carroll, the NFL’s greatest failure. His past errors made tonight possible, and they’re a reminder to us all that mistakes made are only bad if we don’t learn from them. …
Two Sunday’s ago, the NY Times’ Business section had an interesting and surprisingly funny profile of an irreverent Greenwich, CT real estate broker, Christopher Fountain.
As he drives his white pickup truck past the manors that crowd the hills and meadows along Round Hill Road in Greenwich, Conn. — a town that has long signified what it means to be rich in America — Christopher Fountain snorts.
One of the gaudy estates is owned by a hedge fund kingpin now residing in prison; others belong to a real estate investor just coming out of prison and an investment adviser who steered his clients and their billions to Bernard L. Madoff. Then, to cap it off, a guy in an 8,000-square-foot mansion is charged with crushing his wife’s skull in with a baseball bat.
This is “Rogues Hill Road,” or so Mr. Fountain has called this 3.5-mile stretch of asphalt. “All these aspirational schnooks came out here thinking that they had really made it,” said Mr. Fountain, a real estate broker, blogger and lifelong Greenwich resident. “But then the tide went out and what you are left with is a bunch of crooks.”
Believe it or not, Mr. Fountain actually makes a living brokering mega-mansion real estate deals to these so-called schnooks, among others.
And his blog, For What It’s Worth, has attracted a cult following among those he lampoons — the financial titans who can afford to plunk down $5 million or more on a house but who nonetheless seem to appreciate his scabrous take on Greenwich residents’ run-ins with the law, debt-fueled implosions or plain old bad taste.
Indeed, Mr. Fountain would seem to spend as much time selling schadenfreude as houses.
The essence of his complaint — that decades of easy money and ceaseless greed have created a glut of unsalable houses that will remain a blight on his hometown for many years — highlights one of the more curious anomalies of today’s explosion in asset prices. …
How about a shark you never heard of? It grows to 20 feet and eats moose! Wired has the story of the Greenland shark. And if you follow the link there is some video of one of these animals in the St. Lawrence River estuary. Me too!? The ‘estuary’ is actually the Gulf of St. Lawrence which is the world’s largest river estuary and is the outlet for the Great Lakes.
Say hello to the Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus), also known as the gurry shark, grey shark, sleeper shark, or by the Inuit name Eqalussuaq. It’s the second largest carnivorous shark after the great white, but luckily for us it lives in deep Arctic waters where it rarely encounters people.
The Greenland shark has a sluggish look, with a thickset, cylindrical body and a small head with a short snout and tiny eyes. They’re one of the more unusual sharks out there, in appearance and behavior.
Read on to learn what sets this slow-moving giant apart from other sharks.
1) They’re rarely observed and somewhat mysterious. The first underwater photos of a live Greenland shark were taken in the Arctic in 1995, and the first video images of a Greenland shark swimming freely in its natural environment were not obtained until 2003.
2) They like it cold. Greenland sharks are native to the North Atlantic waters around Greenland, Canada, and Iceland. They are the only true sub-Arctic shark and the only shark that can tolerate Arctic temperatures year round. They prefer very cold water (-1°C to 10°C). In the summer, they tend to stay in the ocean’s depths where the water is coldest. In the winter, they make a vertical migration to the surface layer, which at that time is colder than the water on the sea floor. …