Tired of paying money to those handicappers who can’t win you money anyway? (”Call Jonathan Rock Sports now to get the Rock Hard Pick of the week. He feels you can move on this game like it’s already been played!”) Unlike those guys, the experts at Liquid Egg Product give away ALL their NFL playoff picks on their website FOR FREE!

The problem is we couldn’t agree on a lot of the picks. So, uh, just go with the guy you think knows more about football.

	Donnie	The Mascot
Washington (+4) vs Seattle	Seattle	Washington
Jacksonville (-1) vs Pittsburgh	Jacksonville	Pittsburgh
New York (+3) vs Tampa Bay	Tampa Bay	Tampa Bay
Tennessee (+9) vs San Diego	Tennessee	San Diego
Super Bowl Winner	Jacksonville	New England

I debated whether to post this for your consideration. Flagged for language, NSFW (not safe for work), and all that jazz…

A couple games from notdoppler.com that I found particularly engaging, and serve as nice, quick diversions if you’re looking for a break or change in tempo or something:

Bloons Tower Defense 2:

A bunch of “bloons” float from the beginning to end of the path. Your job? To set up dart-throwing monkeys, cannons, and other towers to try pop all the bloons before they reach the other side. The real nice thing is that the game pauses after each of the 50 levels, so you can play for a minute, then go back to doing other stuff. Although, with apologies to Lay’s potato chips, bet you can’t play just one.

Age of War:

Tower defense of a different sort. You and a computer opponent have a headquarters to defend, and you must train various soldiers and/or build turrets to protect your base while mauling the computer’s. Furthermore, as you fight you gain experience, which lets your military “evolve” to the next age (Stone Age -> Medieval, etc.) A quirk is that you get more experience when your own soldier dies than killing the computers, so you have some more motivation to not just sit on defense.

The computer’s advantages are that it doesn’t actually use money to buy soldiers, and (above normal difficulty) their soldiers are tougher than yours. Your advantage is a special attack usable occasionally which hits enemies over the entire field (EDIT: one age’s special is health regeneration, not an attack).

This game is not pausable, so you need 15-20 minutes to play it through, unless there’s a pause command I didn’t see.

I haven’t invested enough time in either of these games to beat them on their highest difficulty setting. This is probably a good thing.

Going back to Smith’s statement (see prior post), he had an insight which I think people fail to keep in mind. Even those who are considered “enemies” and “evil” almost always consider themselves on the side of good. Going even a step further, they probably have some decent reasons to think how they do (even if the actions are out of line).

Please bear with me non-American readers; I’m going to use some examples who are considered US rivals, but may or may not be for your country.

Hugo Chavez, socialist extraordinaire: His attempts to consolidate power smack heavily of authoritarianism, whether he sees it that way or not. But his desire to better the country seems sincere enough, and he continues to receive massive support from the poor–which indicates that probably they are a bit better off than before.

Robert Mugabe: Famed for an ill-fated land redistribution program, which took the farmland away from white colonial descendants and gave it to blacks. Yes, the program lacked foresight and was a wrong way to go about things. But can you blame a black African for feeling bitter about white possession of the land that was the result of imperialism?

Osama bin Laden: We all know about him. He’s not insane in the usual sense, and not all of his reasoning is nuts, including his displeasure at the US abandoning Afghanistan after the Soviets were driven back in 1988.

So how would you compare Bush, morally, to some of these other leaders?*

vs Osama: Osama favors blowing up people because they happen to live in the wrong country. Bush doesn’t kill civilians (at least not intentionally). We’ll give Bush the nod here.

vs Mugabe: If the Bush administration is dumb, Mugabe’s government is beneath retarded. (That’s not a moral issue, but just had to mention it.) The Republican party doesn’t actually go out beating up Democrats and jail them for trying to run for office. Mugabe prefers a more pro-active approach to maintaining his power. Advantage: Bush.

vs Chavez: Chavez has been active in suppressing media unfavorable to his cause and attempted to change the constitution so he could run unlimited times for office. But then again, Bush doesn’t have a problem kidnapping terrorist suspects on foreign soil and using “alternative interrogation techniques”. We’ll call this one a draw.

Today’s post is not silly, funny, or demented. I apologize.

—

“Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, `let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’ I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was `good.’” — Will Smith

There’s no part of that statement which indicates Smith actually supports Hitler, correct?

I thought so.

Well, the tabloids have been jumping on this, claiming Smith stated the former dictator was a good person. The Anti-Defamation League believes Smith wasn’t praising Hitler, so that should help things. But what about the unwashed masses who read tabloids but haven’t even heard of the ADL?

—

A tiger escaped a zoo enclosure, killing one person and mauling two. In this case, someone died, while in the story above, Will Smith took a slight reputation hit. So why does the tiger incident induce so much less emotion in me? Probably because the tabloid distortions are intentional and malicious, while the tiger escape is likely accidental. But looking at the results of the incidents it doesn’t seem to make sense.

Iterating through my blogroll, I noted someone’s blogroll (edit: it be gorckat’s) consisted of “Chess Blogs” and “Non-Chess Blogs”. Liquid Egg Product was listed under “Chess Blogs”. Doing a quick calculation, 9.6% of this site’s posts have something to do with chess (this post will bump it up to 9.8%). In other words, to file this as a chess blog is starting to strain any reasonable credulity.

A couple weeks back, Blue Devil Knight asked for volunteers to help convert Silman’s Complete Endgame Course to PGN format. I offered my assistance, figuring at least it would force me to learn some endgame material. Plus, it would make me look like a swell guy for giving up some time.

It’s a real good thing the project hasn’t been started, because I still need to finish a Flash website which still has code and appearance issues. And I haven’t used Flash much recently–like in the last two years–so that hasn’t made things any better. (It sounds like BDK is winding down his chess blog, so I don’t know whether we’ll do it at all.)

A few days ago, I finally went to pick up the book. Picking up the copy sitting on the shelves of Borders, I realized with a sinking feeling that this Silman book felt a lot heavier than the other ones. Based on book volume, I figure there’s 30% more material than I expected, which leads to this life rule:

Before volunteering your services for anything, check, check, and double check how much energy and time you’ll have to give up. It’ll be more than you think.

Yes, this is my entire collection of chess books, which is probably more sparse than 90% of the chess bloggers. Here’s the thing, though–I’ve actually read them (except for going through the entire Polgar brick). And no one plays the Queen’s Indian, so that was a blasted waste of time.

Oh, yeah; forgot about this commercial. “Unstoppable. Eli Manning Is. So is his Citizen Eco-Drive.”

Eli Manning threw 3 passes in the second half of yesterday’s game. 2 of them were interceptions.

95% of TV commercials fall into one of two categories:

1. Insipid
2. Make you barf in your mouth

It wouldn’t be much of a post complaining about point 1, so here are a few point 2’s:

1. Hyundai: A swarm of Hyundai-ish minions chant a Christmas carol, replacing “la” with “duh”. The implication being it’s patently obvious we should buy Hyundais, and if we don’t, we’re morons.

2. Toyota: A family of 3 is trying to push a boulder off a cliff. Finally, the rock tumbles down, crushing their truck. The point? People will do anything for an excuse to buy a new Toyota.

Granted, they destroy any trade value their original vehicle had, making the purchase more expensive. But who am I to argue? (Or maybe they’re scheming insurance fraud.)

3. Ford: People “hint” they want a Lincoln by carving Lincolns in the snow, or making a Lincoln icon in one of those cut-out snowflakes, or some such nonsense.

Congratulations on all three car companies on assuring I am less likely to purchase their product in the future.

The most egregious is Jared’s jewelry (bonus: Dinosaur Mom’s diatribe against diamonds. And another one.). Their several commercials all come down to the same point: a woman not only swoons over her jewelry, but swooning that her man went to Jared’s to buy it. Then the onlookers become even more excited for her good fortune.

It’s gotten to the point where Jared’s will cause me to change the channel. Furthermore, they have assured a personal boycott of the chain, probably for the rest of my life.

It is fortunate that I don’t watch very much TV.

Thanks to “Construction Bob” for reminding me why I don’t sing Christmas carols…

(Make sure to at least listen to the 1:00 mark…)

Congratulations to Judge Roy Pearson for winning the first ever Liquid Egg Product on the Face Award!

Judge Pearson and Senator Craig were the frontrunners, as I more or less expected. What I didn’t expect is the judge to jump out to such a large lead, and it looked like a blowout at first. But Senator Craig slowly crept back into contention, and Scot Pollard made a surprising charge in the end to tie with the congressman for second place.

As promised, I will attempt to contact the ex-judge and let him know of his victory. What a perfect Christmas gift.

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