Dear Diary Tells Us Not to Blow It

"There's a starman waiting in the sky. He'd like to come and meet us,
but he thinks he'd blow our minds."

November is the period when "pretty sure he won't be at San Fran" (neither Harbaugh could make the playoffs this year) can mean "he's gotta come!" So, dear diarists, let's dedicate a post to the starman waiting in the sky. This week resident coaching search guy in the diaries alum96 decided to look into Jim's meteoric rise. He included a table in there of split passing/rushing stats for offense and defense. I've taken this opportunity to recreate those as S&P+ ranks (total yardage ranks in parens) because there's a discrepancy in the passing:

Major disagreements between S&P and the standard stats: the passing game in 2008 and 2009 (bolded) was extremely efficient, just not used very often. Thus total yardage looked awful, but in terms of what happened when they passed, it was very good even before you could explain it away as Andrew Luck. This is a common theme for Harbaugh reclamation projects; the former quarterback is the master of the pick-your-spots passing game. This is also a lesson in tempo—Stanford would plod along, depressing total yardage.

Let's not do this again until my find-on-page searches for "Michigan" don't have to progress past MSU and several directionals to get to ours.

Hokespeech Generator. A guy named MeanJoe07 has apparently found something on the internet where you input the text of Brady's press conferences, add a few nouns (like balsamic vinegar) and a name (like Rhonda Jones) and get back something that makes sense only to people used to digesting soylent blue. The diary is too weird to be of much interest, but the same guy has been responding to comments all over the site with his tool, with quite disconcerting results.

Etc. Basketball back wallpaper. Michigan is probably not going to a bowl game. Best and Worst. Inside the box score. Wolverines in the NFL, and NBA/NHL/etc., when are we getting the former quarterback who coaches an NFL team?

Best of the Board

PUT IT ON THE MAP

A startup that makes realtime maps for local festivals and such is letting us use their software to give the MGoCommunity a more functional method of sharing their spots with each other on gameday. Events around campus, best watering holes, open tailgates for MGoReaders, where the band warms up, etc. all go on the crowd-sourced map. If you want to organize a meet-n-greet or game-watching party in your town, go ahead and add it to the map (it'll be off camera for those in Evanston).

[Jump for some stuff I believed in as a kid]

YES BRIAN WE ARE MUGGLES

Vincent Smith explains the thing about Muggles that some of us recognized right off:

I had read about some people being upset that athletes use the term muggles and I wanted to clear it up that we (or at least the players I know) do not do it to be mean or cause divisions.

I don't know who came up with it but we thought it was funny because we all you the fans and us the players represent all the same colors and we are all on the same team but just different people.  We all bleed blue so we never thought it might hurt peoples feelings because I love Harry Potter I even went to the theme park back home that's how much I love it.  Muggles are not even the bad word in Harry Potter but I don't want that to excuse it if there is confusion.

We are not trying to separate ourselves or be superior its a lot of stress and long hours and jokes get us through.

I was a camp counselor in my early college summers, and since I had the youngest boys, I used to read fantasy books, including Potter, to my campers every night before they went to bed.

There's a balance in good kids stories between teaching them something new, and reinforcing their fantasies (e.g. the illusion that they/the hero is the center of the universe), and Rowlings is close to the latter extreme. The lessons aren't really what's important I ascribe to the C.S. Lewis school on fantasy, which is backed up strongly by the modern child psychologists: the point of it is to expand the mind's capacity, not to fill it with things. Growing your imagination as a kid is what lets you see things like Michigan football's current state and believe in long-term solutions. It's where your capacity for hope comes from. Adults are actually capable of getting that same effect out of fantasy, but we're way harder to trick into suspending reality. A huge special effects budget can do the trick. So can a story nested in a story.

In the far away [from our topic] kingdom of children's fantasy literature, Harry Potter is total pop, but the one bit of lesson in there has to do with the exact problem Michigan had with Dave Brandon. In Potter, what separates the good guys from the bad guys are their competing ideologies of what to do with the non-magic folk. Good guys believe themselves part of a world that belongs to the normal folk. Bad guys believe the muggles are only useful in how they can service the wizard folk. Mealer is using "muggles" correctly, and also connoting it exactly how the Potter bad guys do.

ETC. Jim Harbaugh on Saved by the Bell. Jim Harbaugh for Governor. What-if we kept Mo?

Your Moment of Zen:

WH. Play this in the background.