If you choose the right expert’s picks to bet on, you’ll win money this weekend! (Maybe.)
 Donnie |
 The Mascot |
Wahrheit | |
| Seattle (+8) vs Green Bay |
Green Bay | Green Bay | Green Bay |
| Jacksonville (+11.5) vs New England |
Jacksonville | New England | New England |
| San Diego (+9) vs Indianapolis |
San Diego | Indianapolis | Indianapolis |
| New York (+7.5) vs Dallas |
New York | Dallas | New York |
| Record so far | 2-2 | 1-3 | 4-0 |
1. Corpse ineligible for Social Security: Virgilio Cintron recently bit the dust. His roommate and another friend decided this would be their opportunity to get their hands on some quick cash. They put their friend’s corpse into an office chair, and wheeled him over to a check-cashing store to cash his most recent Social Security check.
Needless to say, they caused some comment in the streets, and a detective took notice. During their failed attempt (they were about to wheel the corpse in, because it needed to be there in person), the cops swung by to make the arrest.
2. Thief takes a stab at it: (We re-enacted this story; see picture.) A man attempted to steal some of hunting knives by stuffing them in his waistband. As he was fleeing the employees trying to stop him, he tripped and stabbed himself in the abdomen.
3. South Africa claims criminal non-mastermind. A man went to a police station, complaining his cell phone was stolen from him at gunpoint. The police called the phone’s number, only to hear the cell phone ringing in the man’s pocket.
: By the way don’t worry about me, that’s not real egg white; that’s ketchup. You can tell the stabbing’s fake because I’m still smiling.
In college football (American), a ton of people start calling every year for a playoff system to replace the BCS. (Quick primer: usually, a champion of a sports league is determined by a playoff between teams who did the best during the season. Instead, the BCS determines the top two teams by a combination of human and computer polls, essentially creating a 1 game playoff.)
What people don’t think about is that a playoff system is not very likely to crown the best team in the country as champion.
Let’s take an 8-team playoff, for example, and have University of A to be “objectively” the best team in the country. And let’s assume the UA team is so good, it will defeat other elite ( top 8 ) teams 75% of the time. UA will have to win three games in a row, which it has a 42% chance of doing. This speaks highly of UA, but their chances of being recognized as champions are still worse than a coin flip.
The 75% number is higher than can be expected. 60% may be closer to realistic, giving the best team a 21% chance of winning the crown.
If that’s the system people want, then by all means they can clamor for it. As long as they recognize it’s unlikely that the best team in the country will be known as the champions. (College basketball is even worse for determining the #1 team, but everyone likes gambling on March Madness so no one brings it up).
My biggest beefs with the BCS system are:
1. Human pollsters, who cannot have knowledge of every single game played, cannot possibly hope to compare all teams adequately, and have ingrained biases, are given greater weight than the computers.
2. The computer polls are forced not to considered margin of victory in their calculations. This can throw them out of whack, as this story on Jeff Sagarin’s rankings indicates (at one point, North Dakota State was ranked in the top 20). I guess for some reason, the BCS thought that maybe these programmers wouldn’t have developed algorithms that made sure a 52-point victory didn’t mean more than a 35-point victory.
In other words, the BCS has to give computers less weight, because their own rules make computers less accurate in predicting the top two teams.
If it were up to me, I’d eliminate computer poll restrictions, and completely ignore the humans. The only check would be at the end of the year, a council would get together that could veto the computers’ selection if 75% agreed, at which point the human polls would be used to determine the game.
This is mostly off-the-cuff, so blast away with holes in this thinking.
Crush, Fury, Hellga, Justice, Mayhem, Militia, Siren, Stealth, Titan, Toa, Venom, and Wolf.
I defy you to sort out the male and female gladiators from that list of names (hint: it’s split 50/50). Despite the current information on Wikipedia, there is no gladiator named “Hand Job” (archived in this image; someone probably changed it by now).
Last night, I watched the last half-hour of the revival of American Gladiators. No, there’s no lions. No swordfights. No emperors giving a thumbs-down.* Very little blood.**
Instead it’s some everyday people competing in these athletic events, some events utilize the Gladiators as some sort of obstacle. The contestants get money if they win, I think. (It’s worth noting that the female gladiators are more muscular than me. I don’t know whether that reflects worse on them or me.)
It was interesting to watch, and will probably catch it again tonight, but it would help if Hulk Hogan didn’t keep calling everyone “Brother”, as frequently as twice a sentence. I did not catch whether he invoked this trademark word on any female contestants.
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 |
| Record | 2-2 | 1-3 |
I am so glad I don’t bet on sports.
Speak for yourself.
Wahrheit went 4-0.
I still can’t believe you told people we could win them money last week. Now everyone can see you can’t make good judgments. You’re the kind of guy that would choose Velma over Daphne. We can’t trust someone like that.
Whuh? You mean from Scooby Doo?
Yar, if someone asked you which one you’d rather date, and for normal people (ie, not you) Velma’s just too, well, ugly.
Look, this blog is weird enough without getting into conversations about which cartoon characters are cuter.
I like that Esurance chick.
OK, fine! You’re a cartoon, it makes sense for you! It doesn’t for me!
*Sigh* I guess you’re going to want my picks for next week?
By tomorrow night, if you can.
As long as you don’t lord it over me if I go 0-4 next week.
Sure thing.
You really wouldn’t choose Velma, would you?
Er…yeah…probably I would.
Seriously? *Blanches* OK, that makes things easy…my picks for next week are the opposite of yours.
See, there’s this race car driver. His name is Dick Trickle.
Is there anybody who has/had a name that generates more uncomfortability? Discuss.
Last night, Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses for the Democrats and Huckabee for the Republicans. Some are concerned about Obama’s electability, partly because of his skin color. I think it won’t be much of a problem for the following reasons:
1. He sounds like a white person. He doesn’t come to the podium shouting “Yo, wuzzup home boyz!!!” Noticing the lack of an Ebonics accent, American whites might be able to convince themselves, “Hey, this Obama guy is kinda like me!”
2. He’s a light-skinned black. Think about a lot of the popular black celebrities. Beyonce’s considered hot. Actors like Will Smith and Denzel Washington are popular. Tiger Woods has endorsements out the wazoo (yes, I know he’s more Thai than black; he counts as black in this country). What do they have in common? They could all get into a paper bag party.
Dark-skinned black athletes can squirm into the “popular black” category, but that’s because we don’t have much of a choice of who’s a talented athlete.
Besides, if you squint your eyes and turn your head sideways, you can almost convince yourself Obama’s white.
3. In fact, he’s not even 100% black. His father was a black Kenyan, his mother a white American.
These factors lead me to believe that Obama can help the United States ease into being comfortable with a non-white president.
There was a piece in the Scotman last year about Stalin’s experiments with creating an ape-man hybrid for use as an ultimate warrior. A History Channel piece last night cast doubt on that assertion, and apparently Stalin had no use or desire for such experiments.
The show claimed Dr. Ilya Ivanov really did attempt creating the hybrid, but without specific direction from the government. Stalin did give Ivanov a scientific grant, but he gave out a lot of cash to anyone who was trying to advance science, so the money didn’t imply Stalin’s personal interest in that particular project. Ivanov’s main motivation was to curb the influence of the strong Russian church, from which he was afraid of persecution.
A small amusing portion towards the end involved a scientist questioning whether humans were indeed the most intelligent species on the planet. He said something to the effect of “I may be able to do calculus and play the piano, things that we’d associate with intelligence, but how useful would they be in the jungle?”, and so forth.
Look, in the last 10,000 years, humans have developed stuff like writing, agriculture, the crossbow, the Theory of Relativity and have walked on the moon. The extent of our closest competitors’ technology is using pointy sticks as weapons. Chimps and gibbons may be smart, but they’re not THAT smart.
The Brits–yes, those same Brits whose colonial chains we threw off centuries ago–have usurped a role in the world I thought was solidly in the United States’ grasp.
They are more addicted to fast food than us.
45% of the Brits claimed they liked fast food too much to give it up, compared to 44% of Americans (we were second, if that’s any comfort).
For lunch today, I’m going to run out to Jack In The Box and chow down on an Ultimate Cheeseburger. And if that’s not good enough, I’m going to keep on eating at different fast food places until I find one that I get addicted to.
How will you help restore the pride of your country? (If you’re British, hold off on stuffing down some of that fish and chips, if you would please? They don’t taste as good as you think.)
You vegetarian reader(s) have no excuse; Burger King offers some sort of black bean burger.
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