Yesterday was the unveiling of the new iPhone (TM!), now featuring 100% more plastic.
I like to start these posts with a sexy picture related to the topic. This is one of the pictures that comes up if you google "Sexy iphone." I don't know what kind of deal she made with what kind of supernatural entity, but I'm very afraid.
I felt like the unveiling of the new iPhone -- now made of the same kind of material (TM!) that your kids' toys are! -- was the perfect time to talk about the Buffalo Bills and the new sports-related phrase that I have come up with: The "BUFFALO WIN."
Or, if you must have some hype,
Buffalo Win
Longtime readers know that I am a fan (?) of the Buffalo Bills, the only football team to have not gone to the playoffs in this milennium, and longertime readers know that I also am not a fan of Steve Jobs, who I consider to be improperly canonized given that while he may have been an innovator, he also (publicly) was a complete jerk who managed to make even the simple act of buying a sofa some sort of stupid, egotistical, phenomenally annoying zen koan, apparently taking 8 years to purchase a couch, about which task his wife said:
“We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years...We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’”
That kind of stuff drives me nuts. The purpose of a sofa is to sit on, and if it can serve a secondary purpose of not necessarily showing stains from the time Mr F put macaroni and cheese on it, then that sofa has achieved everything it ever dreamed of in life.
Well, almost everything.
Steve Jobs, privately, drives me nuts because it was apparently at his insistence that all Apple devices not use certain kinds of programs, which means we spent money on an iPad to help our boys learn to talk but that iPad won't play "Curious George" games on the Internet because of some gripe Steve Jobs had, and it means that iPad doesn't have buttons that are intuitive or easy to use, because Steve Jobs had a fear of death, or something, and, also, I have had to pay more than $9.99 for books for the past several years because Steve Jobs was so ticked off that Jeff Bezos' Amazon was working that Jobs got Apple and other companies to violate antitrust laws by price-fixing books.
Steve Jobs: Genius icon Robber Baron One Percenter.
Anyway, that's why the unveiling of the new iPhone (now made of material less durable than that Pepsi (TM!) can you're holding!) was the second-best event this week, an event so noneventful that the only people who really paid attention to it are the people who still know all the characters on Mad Men -- hipsters (and Slate) who speak only SEO and exist in a tiny loop of buzz reinforced by NPRs Pop Culture blog and Tumblr.
McKayla Maroney is not impressed with the Movember Iphone Eli Manning Is Looking At.
The iPhone's biggest feature -- besides now being made of the stuff which used to be used to pack it in for shipping -- in fact was that because it is so cheaply made, now regular folks can afford it! This complete downfall of Apple went unremarked on in every single article about the new iPhone. Or so I'm guessing. I didn't read any articles about the new iPhone, opting instead to get all of my news about it from Twitter, which means that while I think I've got the basics of it, I'm a bit confused about why Jimmy Kimmel twerked on one, or whatever.
But let's assume that the 43,000,000,000,000 words written about the new iPhone (shown below)
Can also be used to flip burgers (TM!)
didn't mention the fact that Apple has officially lost, because people don't like to make the Major Powers (Apple, the NSA, J.K. Rowling) mad by pointing out how stupid they are (NOT YOU JK ROWLING PLEASE DON'T SUE!), so it's up to me to point out that Apple has officially lost.
Or, to put it more hypefully,
Apple Has Officially Lost!
Apple's whole thing all along has been how sleek and beautiful and high-tech and SUPEREXPENSIVE UNAFFORDABLE YOU CAN'T GET ONE SO SHUT UP all their stuff has been all this time: while ostensibly trying to put an iPhone in everyone's hand, what Apple was really doing (besides trying to figure out a way to get Iran or North Korea to nuke Samsung because lawsuits only go so far, know what I'm saying?, here's a couple of billion for your coffers, third-world despot) was trying to convince you that you wanted an iPhone but couldn't afford one. Apple was like Cadillac, or maybe Rolls Royce, or maybe something else that was expensive (Starbucks coffee), marketing itself as something everyone would have, if they could afford it.
That was the real appeal of Apple, right? That's why they had commercials reveal that Zooey Deschanel is so breathtaking
...Wait for it...
-ly stupid
Finish a sentence, will you!
that she had to use a computer to tell her if it was raining while she stood in front of a window.
Stars! They're just like us!
WHICH IS DEPRESSING!
The point was that the stars could afford iPhones, no matter how terrible Suri was at actually working, and iPhones could therefore be smaller, less functional, less affordable, and more easily tracked by the NSA than all other phones, because none of that mattered: they were expensive and if you had one, it was like having a Mercedes.
Which no longer is the case, because now anyone can own a Mercedes, or at least the hood ornament, which is probably why Apple made the plastic phones come in all sorts of colors: it's the only way to tell the Sneetches apart anymore, and it's how Apple can try to have their elite image while still allowing Kmart shoppers to get this blue light special: Even though they are marketing cheap, plastic phones, now, Apple wants people who only Tweet about "Downton Abbey" on an iPhone to know that there is still a way to tell if people really have an iPhone: if you have a colored one, it's cheap and plastic, so that'll be the new code among the tiny minority of people who still think Apple will be a company in 2020 (it won't, because Steve Jobs cannot have enough temper tantrums at enough minimum-wage baristas from the afterlife to keep his company going): if you have a colored iPhone, you've gone through Sylvester McMonkey McBeans' machine and are not really one of them.
Instead of that, I suggest that Apple instead embrace my new concept, the "Buffalo Win" (REMEMBER THAT'S WHAT THIS POST IS ABOUT?)
The "Buffalo win" concept came to me this past Sunday, when I was not watching football because I had better things to do.
Pictures like this don't just find themselves, you know.
Also: Rashida Jones shows up if you google "Zooey Deschanel."
Not that I'm complaining.
The Buffalo Bills, who had a chance to make one kind of history this past week -- by starting Jeff Tuel, their backup quarterback who wasn't even drafted and would've been the first undrafted rookie to start a regular season homeopener -- ever! -- as well as being a powerful image of a team that actually lost all hope of the playoffs even before the season officially began -- instead failed to make any kind of history other than the kind of history I made up.
I sincerely apologize for that sentence, but I'm assured it's grammatically correct.
The Bills played, instead, their quarterback "E.J. Manuel," who I'm told was the least qualified quarterback to go in the first round of the NFL draft -- YAY, BUFFALO?-- and gave me even fewer reasons to try to watch the game against the Patriots* (*they cheat), not that I could've anyway because no station was showing it in my market.
So instead, I opted for the equally-exhilarating course of putting up shelves in my spare room and following the game on Twitter, and then got (briefly) (almost) excited when the Bills led with six minutes left in the game.
It was at that point, though, that I had to load my two youngest into the car to get them to the swimming pool I'd promised them in exchange for accidentally dropping a screwdriver on one's head, and so I missed the final six minutes of the game on Twitter and got into the car and put on ESPN radio and learned that the Bills had lost.
AS EXPECTED.
But they did BETTER than expected, commentators said, and fans said that E.J. looked "solid", which is good because it's very very tough to be a quarterback if you are in a gaseous or plasmatic state, and overall the feeling was that things were looking pretty good for the Bills.
Aside from that 0-1 record thing, BUT WHO IS COUNTING? OTHER THAN THE NFL?
Later that day, the same thing would happen with the Green Bay Packers, who put up a better than expected fight -- and only one illegal bounty hit on Colin Kaepernick YAY! --
Later, Mathews would run over Kaepernick in the parking lot, and explain he "hadn't heard the whistle."
The Packers, who have now lost to the 49ers in consecutive games, to end and begin their seasons, weren't about to admit defeat just because they had been defeated: fans and commentators and even people who know about football. Bleacher Report (NOT in that last category) said that despite the loss, the Packers proved "capable of dealing with anyone", which is not to say "capable of beating anyone" and found solace for Packers fans in the idea that the game wasn't over even until just after the game was over:
The Packers will not face a better opponent all season, and yet forced the Niners to play more than 60 minutes to beat them (the pass falling incomplete well after the clock expired).
The Packers didn't give up -- even after the game was officially over and the 49ers were heading off the field! NEVER SAY DIE! I heard that Green Bay just scored a touchdown yesterday morning. TAKE THAT SAN FRAN.
So we've gone, as a country, from honoring McKayla Maroney for adequately summarizing how to feel about not-winning, to deciding that losing isn't losing, it's almost-winning.
For the first time ever, parents are correct when they say it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game, and even though somewhere the ghost of Vince Lombardi is barely restraining the ghost of Steve Jobs, that's where America -- its tech gadgets and sports, at least, which are America -- is headed.
To the "Buffalo Win."
I came up with the concept of calling an almost-win a Buffalo Win when Drew Magary on Deadspin pointed out that Buffalo Bills fans are the only fans who routinely wear "Conference Champion" t-shirts -- the point being that if your team was an NFC or AFC champion, then either it also won the Super Bowl (which means that the conference championship isn't that big a deal) or it lost the Super Bowl (which means that your team is Buffalo). So why celebrate a conference championship? Because you almost won.
Bills fans, Magary said, also wear fans celebrating Frank Reich. You don't remember Frank Reich: Frank Reich led the single largest comeback in college football, and then went on to lead the single-largest comeback in pro football, and then went on to lose the Super Bowl, and now is selling plastic iPhones at a kiosk in the Buffalo Galleria.
(Actually, he runs a chain of successful boot shops, and invented a stand to display footballs that also looks like a football field!)
I heard he also designed an Escher Staircase display for fine art, but it requires 13 dimensions to work properly.
The point of all that being: Frank Reich's probably doing okay for himself. Also: Buffalo fans are pioneers in the field of making losing seem like almost winning.
A viewpoint I can get behind: Why should we have just winners and losers? I mean, besides the fact that if we don't keep score and everyone's a winner all contests immediately become meaningless? And why shouldn't we celebrate almost winning? That way, Peyton Manning can continue to be considered great!
We need to expand our thinking, create new jobs, as it were. Don't you want new jobs? Why should we limit ourselves to just wins and losses? How will we ever measure those near-wins that increasingly are the best anyone can do and all anyone shoots for?
So with that in mind, I came up with the concept of the Buffalo Win. A Buffalo Win, as you've gathered by now, is when your team doesn't actually win, but does better than people expected or, barring that, at least looked good losing.
The "Buffalo Win" will revolutionize society. Take my own occupation, lawyer. Well, it's not actually an occupation. I mean, it doesn't occupy me very much. I spend a lot of time blogging. Like now. But that's beside the point. The point is, if the concept of a Buffalo Win takes off there will be even less pressure on me than there is now, and I already exist in what is essentially a pressure-free life where I can spend my weekends trying to bake eponymous foods, like Yemas de Santa Teresa, which I recently made and which are essentially just condensed egg yolks rolled in sugar. I do not recommend them.
You'd think a dessert popularized by impoverished nuns and named in honor of a Saint who reportedly had the power to levitate would at least have nougat.
If "Buffalo Wins" -- note the similarity to "Buffalo Wings," similarly an idiotic concept that caught on among amazingly stupid people with disposable cash sports fans -- catches on, lawyers like me will not have to worry about whether a jury is crushing so hard on our client that they decide to forget about the whole "murdering our child" concept, and instead will simply tell our clients "Hey, we got a Buffalo Win! You're going to prison."
Under this thinking, Tea Partiers don't have to take solace only in the fact that gerrymandering means they will control the House of Representatives for another 20 years despite the fact that they embrace a failed, racist philosophy founded on "hating the black guy people elected," and can instead celebrate Mitt Romney, their Buffalo President! The Academy of Motion Pictures Whatever could hand out Buffalo Oscars -- that's what it means when a picture tells you it was nominated for an Academy Award, after all: when you see "Nominated for Best Picture" on the DVD cover, it means (A) that picture lost and (B) for some reason you're still buying DVDs. Have you not heard of the Internet?
Buffalo Wins are a way to embrace losing and cushion the blow of being second best, at best, and even if you think you're not already using the idea, you're wrong. Obama's recent attempt to bomb Syria because if you don't use those missiles they expire, only to back down and say "Okay, well if you promise to give us whatever chemical weapons you have leftover, we'll pretend this never happened"? That's a Buffalo Win for interventionism!
So I propose that from here on out, we no longer have just "wins" and "losses," but we add this third category: Buffalo wins. You can still lose, but under this method losing would be largely confined to those teams or persons that do horribly, or are Danica Patrick, which is the same thing, really. Sports pages, financial sections, whoever else keeps tally on things (accountants? I don't know) should immediately start toting up whether a team got a win, a Buffalo win, or a loss. We'll all be better off for it, and at the very least, Apple's CEO will get another six months on the job, during which time we can look forward to the release of the cardboard iPHone.
Pictured: Your kid's Xmas present, 2014.
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This post is about
a free fantasy football league for
bloggers/writers/people. Interested
in joining? Email me at:
bfpageljr[at]gmail.com.
As you may or may not know, I dabble in fantasy football, and in fact I dabble in liking football, altogether.
I used to like football a whole lot more than I do now. Up until about 4 or 5, maybe, years ago, I would watch a game or two every Sunday (always pro; I rarely watch college football) and I knew the players and the teams and the coaches and the... I ran out of things that I could know about football teams, there. Logos? Mascots? Stadiums? I don't know.
Starting about 4 or 5 years ago, though, I began to drift away from being a passionate football fan. I'm not sure what started the drift. Getting older, perhaps. New interests, and increased job responsibilities, possibly. Nearly dying by being stung by bees? Probably didn't help.
So I'm at the point now where I watch a game, maybe, each week during the football season, trying to pick out the game that I'd find most interesting if I'm going to watch one, at all, and even then I'm more than willing to give up on the game if it turns sour. Instead of sitting through a dull football game, I'm just as likely to take a walk, or watch a movie, or read The Brothers Karamazov, a book I've been working on for a while now and which I find to be pleasantly like mowing the lawn: something that in theory I think I will not like but then once I get started on it, I find I kind of enjoy it.
This lackadaisical approach to football has allowed me to both grow as a fan -- I now feel free to dislike my favorite team (the Buffalo Bills) and admit that perhaps they are not going to the Super Bowl, without feeling like I'm somehow being disloyal or a bad person. True, by which I mean dumb, sports fans feel like if you are critical of the team at all, it's a heresy, like admitting that maybe your kid isn't the best looking in the class.
(NOTE: MY KIDS ARE, IN FACT, THE BEST LOOKING ONES IN THE CLASS. I JUST SAID THAT TO MAKE YOU ALL FEEL BETTER ABOUT YOUR KIDS).
True, by which I mean, you got it already, right? sports fans think that you have to love your team, and all the players on it, no matter what. Fans like me, on the other hand, can look at their favorite team and say "Well, they haven't been very good in about a zillion years and they probably won't be very good this year, either," and enter the season with a dose of reality that allows us to not claim that there are no hungry children in America.
TRUE STORY: Last year, the Green Bay Packers played the Seattle Seahawks in an actual NFL game that counted in the standings. The Seahawks won on the now-infamous "Worst Call Ever," and Packer fans, including a state legislator previously best known for leading a principled stance against pay cuts for teachers, took to Twitter to demand that the NFL reverse the game. That state legislator, Jon Erpenbach, tweeted that he was going to start a petition drive to the NFL or something like that.
So here's the thing: I felt that the amount of energy and anger directed at a game was disproportionate, to say the least, to the actual impact of that game on anybody's real life. I could understand the actual Green Bay Packers being upset (although really I couldn't because the Packers, while complaining about a bad call that 'cost' them the game somehow ignored the fact that they'd been completely incompetent for the entire game, including giving up, by my count, an infinite amount of sacks of their quarterback, the highest-paid jerk you'll ever see on TV) but I couldn't understand real people being so anguished.
TRUE STORY ASIDE: I once was like that. Once, when the Buffalo Bills lost to the Tennessee Titans in the playoffs on the "Music City Miracle," a loss that came on my birthday, thanks a lot, people who run the Universe, I was anguished for hours, and for about five years after that would badger anyone who listened about how the call was awful. Then, one day, I thought "You know what? It was a game" and I never cared all that much again.
So I sent a Tweet to Jon Erpenbach, pointing out that he was using a great deal of amassed political credibility to... affect the outcome of a football game. (Erpenbach had tweeted about almost nothing in the weeks before taking to the Internet to demand that the result of a game be changed.) And I posted a Tweet to Packer fans reminding them that while they were spending all this energy on a game, there were other important things, like, for example, children in Wisconsin starving for lack of food.
To which a Packer fan responded, and. I. Quote: Pretty sure there aren't.
That was pretty much the end of my ever liking Packer fans again: so overwrought over a game that their team, not the refs, lost, they denied that children were suffering from hunger in America.
Although I'm pretty sure that no Packer fan ever goes hungry:
Anyway, I'm not that kind of football fan, not anymore. I like the game, I like the stories about the players and reading about interesting new strategies and human-interest stories, but something about football keeps me from being really engaged in the sport the way I used to be. Maybe it's stories about how NFL coaches like Sean Payton -- last seen encouraging his players to physically injure other players in order to win games, a scheme that netted him a one-year suspension -- spend their year-in-exile trying to crush the spirit of sixth graders:
During his Roger Goodell–mandated suspension from the Saints, Payton spent his time coaching his son's sixth-grade pee wee football team, the Liberty Christian Warriors, who eventually went to the league championship game.
The Warriors lost just two games all season, but both of those losses came against the same team, the Springtown Orange Porcupines.
For those familiar with Sean Payton, it shouldn’t be a surprise that he took this seriously (well, at least mostly seriously). After losing to the Porcupines 38-6 in the regular season, Payton enlisted the help of some rather noteworthy former NFL coaches to help devise a plan that could slow down Springtown Orange's offense.
Want to know who those "rather noteworthy former NFL coaches" were? They were Bill Parcells and Jon Gruden. Charged with instilling a little moral character, football knowledge, and love of the game in some 12-year-olds, Sean Payton opted instead to teach those kids "When life hands you lemons, enlist a billion-dollar consortium of professional contacts to crush the living bejeezus out of a bunch of little kids."
At least the story had a happy ending. In the rematch in the playoffs,
Payton's Warriors lost 58-18.
Good. #(#%&$ you, Sean Payton, Bill Parcells, and Jon Gruden, and every adult involved who thought it appropriate to bring NFL-level money to coaching a sixth grade team. You are what's wrong with sports.
So maybe it was stuff like that, and stuff like the Seahawks' owner Paul Allen owning a yacht that costs $384,000 per week to maintain, and stuff like how last year's playoffs and Super Bowl were largely depicted as a retirement celebration for Ray Lewis, a man who (at best, and keep that in mind, this is the BEST POSSIBLE WAY to depict his involvement) helped cover up a double murder.
That's the BEST POSSIBLE WAY you can depict his involvement. There are other implications, like Ray Lewis helped kill someone. CELEBRATE AWAY!
Maybe it was stuff like that that made me cool off my previous ardor for football, but I still like aspects of the game, which brings me back...
...FINALLY!...
...to fantasy football, and this series of posts: NASSAU UNGRANULATED.
NASSAU UNGRANULATED is the name of my fantasy football league for bloggers. The name was chosen from a list of random words generated by a site that will (for free!) generate a list of random words for you, in case you can't think of any random words yourself. (Hint: You can't. They won't be random.)
I've invited several noteworthy writers and bloggers to take part in the league, and with a joyous cry of enthusiasm, over 90% of them said "Eh. No thanks." But author PT Dilloway took up the gauntlet and joined, which is why he gets a free write-up for his books here:
When a supervillain's weapon turns Earth's greatest male heroes into its greatest heroines, they enter a whole new world. Can Apex Girl, Velocity Girl, the Mermaid, and Midnight Spectre come together in time to save the world? Get "Girl Power" from Planet 99 Publishing for just 99 cents!
If you are a blogger, and wish to be involved in this -- or if you know someone who does -- feel free to drop me a line at bfpageljr[at]gmail.com.
That's the pitch for the league. Anyway, whether or not you join -- whether the league fills up or not -- I thought it would be fun (for me, anyway) to blog about my fantasy football team and how I choose players and why and see what I could make of it.
If you've ever read any of my other sports writing, or if you have correctly deduced from the foregoing that I know very little, in fact, about sports, you'll realize that this series of posts will not be very sportsy, at all. My old sports blog used to be billed as "The sports blog for people who hate sports blogs," and you will get very little actual analysis and even less actually helpful analysis, as I'm more prone to look at sports along the lines of which superheroes are sports teams like, or what 1980s one-hit wonder song will be symbolic of a team's season than things like 'power rankings.'
So even if you DON'T like sports, odds are I think you'll find something to like in these posts, and again, if you want to join, DO. Email me. I'm not just saying that because PT is superknowledgeable about football and is going to destroy my team, but that's mostly why I'm saying that. Also, I think we could be friends. Give it a chance.
Anyway, let's get to the meat of this post, which is PICKING MY TEAM'S DRAFT ORDER. I have already set up and named my team, the name being possibly the single most important part of fantasy football for me.
I am in two leagues, counting Nassau Ungranulated, and in my office league my team is called, as it has been for years, "The Battling Extraneous Es", based on the silent-e that fills out my name and makes "Briane" look pretentious, the way the ampersand in Barnes & Noble tells you they'll be out of business by 2015.
But I couldn't use that name in Nassau Ungranulated, because that would be lame and also when it comes to naming things, I usually have many more names than I can apply to something, resulting in my naming something, like a kid or pet or a car, and then immediately thinking "Boy, I wish I'd picked another name, instead," which is what happened the time I named my pet gerbils "Orville & Wilbur" (after the Wright Brothers) and instantly thought of about a zillion other names I could have applied.
(That happened, too, with the youngest boys, whose names are perfectly adequate, but who I sometimes wish had had other names that we liked, too. I get around that by applying nicknames to them, frequently, because they are twins, drawing on pop culture pairings. This week, for example, I have been calling them "Hardcastle & McCormick.")
HA HA HE DOESN'T LIKE THAT BAND AT ALL.
So for my Nassau Ungranulated team name, I picked the single toughest team moniker I could think of.
Did you know that "moniker" came into English usage in 1851? It came from "Shelta," an Irish dialect or creole language? To say "It's good to see you" in Shelta, you would say "Yoordjeele's soonee-in munya."
So the name I picked for my Nassau Ungranulated team is:
Having chosen a name, I now have to choose which players might be drafted onto my team. Nassau Ungranulated uses an autodraft, so if you're not good at drafting players and/or thinking on your feet, you can have the computer select from a list of players you pre-rank. I wholeheartedly endorse using this system rather than trying to draft your own players. The first year we did an office league, I tried to live-draft my players. The computer gives you 90 second to pick your player, which sounds like a lot of time but which in reality goes superfast, especially if you are, like me, sort of unsure who the players are, so you end up just drafting Peyton Manning over and over again, which is what I tried to do that day, and as a result my team that year had Peyton Manning and a bunch of random players autofilled in by the computer.
So now I pre-rank the players, telling the computer who I like, and, more importantly, who I don't like.
Because fantasy football is all about the fantasy, right? And also all about wanting the players on my team to do well, which is where it gets kind of tough because sometimes the so-called "best" players are horrible people
July 18, 2007: "NFL star Michael Vick was indicted by a federal grand jury Tuesday on charges of sponsoring a dogfighting operation so grisly the losers either died in the pit or sometimes were electrocuted, drowned, hanged or shot."-- ESPN.com
Or they are people who simply annoy me:
I mean, why would you dump Jessica Simpson, for one thing?
So half the fun of fantasy football is, for me, getting to root against people. So here, then, are the top 3 players on my draft board, as well as the top 3 players I opted to tell the computer not to draft under any circumstances, and my reasoning for each. #1 overall:Russell Wilson, QB, Seattle Seahawks. This is a tough choice for me, mostly because I think Paul Allen should skip the dying part and just be bodily transmitted into Hell, preferably the part where they do the really ironic tortures. Again: $384,000 per week to maintain his yacht:
His yacht costs more to maintain per week than my house cost to buy. But, then, my house doesn't float.
It also doesn't have a working garage door right now. The door exploded, and I had to use my savings
to order a new one. I went with the "Value" brand because I figured the extra $60 for "Best Value" brand was
a bit too luxurious.
But Russell Wilson isn't directly responsible for Paul Allen being a horrible human being who should get spit on if he shows his face in public. (Although Allen gave away $372,000,000 in the most recent year I have records for, he is worth $15,000,000,000. So he gave away 2% of his money. TWO PERCENT.)
Russell Wilson was my fantasy quarterback last year. I picked him after he improbably made the team and then became the starter, an undersized late-round draft pick beating out a high-priced free agent (Matt Flynn) and was therefore quite surprised that he ended up (A) handing me the sweetest victory last year when he got the first-ever game winning interception, and (B) making the playoffs. This year, Russell has negotiated a deal whereby for every touchdown he scores in 2013 (regular and postseason) $2,000 will be donated by Russell Investments to Wilson's charity, "The Power Of Mind Foundation."
FIRST DO-NOT-PICK: Aaron Rodgers. I can't root for the Packers while he's on the team. Seriously, I can't. He is the worst.
#2 Overall: C.J. Spiller, RB, Buffalo: The thing about having a favorite team, like the Bills and me, is that in fantasy football you almost have to pick at least a few of the players from your favorite team, don't you? I feel like I have to have at least one representative Bill on my team.
The thing about liking the Bills, though, and having one of them on your team is that the Bills are really, really, a bad team. They're not enjoyably bad, like the 0-16 Detroit Lions who at least set a record for awfulness and futility, they're just mediocrely bad, managing to eke out 6 or 7 or 8 or even sometimes 9! wins in a season -- but with a good percentage of those wins coming when they no longer matter because the Bills are out of the playoffs/
This year, one of the Bills' players tweeted "Everyone in this locker room thinks we can make the Super Bowl," and I thought: I'm not so sure about that. I mean, I am sure that the Bills won't make the Super Bowl, or even the playoffs, but I'm not sure that everyone on the team thinks the opposite. I think the veterans, for one, are saying "Well, you know, I've been around this team for 7, 8 years, and we're really bad."
But I'm picking Spiller because (A) The Bills have a rookie quarterback, EJ somebody or other, who was, I believe, picked as the worst quarterback in the draft by many experts, and (B) EJ won the job over "Kevin Kolb," an Arizona Cardinals reject who lost his starting position by tripping over a floor mat, and (C) the Bills' brain trust recently said that the Bills' offensive plan is:
"...real simple: We're going to give [Spiller] the ball until he throws up."
I don't know if that's good or bad football but it's awesome quoting.
Second Do-Not-Pick: Tom Brady. Once a cheater, always a cheater. Signing Touchdown Jesus
to your roster doesn't absolve you of past sins. But who'd have thought that cheating his way to Super Bowls wouldn't turn out to be all that serious of a crime, when put into context? By which I mean that the Patriots* didn't stop at Videogate but instead seemed to be harboring a serial killer: Aaron Hernandez, former Patriot*, stands accused of something like three murders, all of which were committed during his NFL career.
Can you say "Hard Knocks/Dexter crossover?" Because I already did, so if you use that idea you owe me royalties.
#3 OVERALL PICK: Montee Ball, RB, Denver. Montee is from Madison, and despite having some legal troubles over his last year as a Badger-- people kept jumping him and causing fights but it totally was not retaliation for Montee starting fights earlier, guys -- I'm picking him because The Boy, our third youngest (or third-oldest) ran into Montee on The Boy's 21st birthday, and The Boy likes Montee, and The Boy didn't go up to talk to Montee, being too shy, maybe, so I'm the kind of parent who wants to have his running back do well so I can keep saying to The Boy "Hey, you could've met that guy, you know."
That's how kids learn.
THIRD DO-NOT-PICK: Matt Ryan, QB, Atlanta Falcons.I wanted to put Joe Flacco's Eyebrows in at this slot, but after going through the top 100 players on the NFL draft board, I couldn't find Flacco to mark him as someone I didn't want on my team, so apparently NFL.com doesn't think that Flacco is a top-100 fantasy quarterback.
So instead I put Matt "Matty Ice" Ryan, who not only quarterbacks the single-most-boring team in the entire NFL -- seriously, Atlanta is the Ambien of football teams -- but also has a seriously stupid nickname. "Matty"? What is that? I hate when they call grown men by kid names like that. Except for the time Sweetie, who was then a Peyton Manning fan, called him "My Peytie," which I kind of liked.
There you go: four weeks to go before the season, and my team's all set. Stay tuned for further updates. And just to finish off the post, let's have:
The Football-Related Song Of The Week:
"Aaron Rodgers Tribute: I Could Be Your Jordy," by Sleeping Berries Three, a Wisconsin indie band. Even if you don't like football, this song is both awesome and inspirational:
Supervillain of the Week Who I Will Awkwardly Shoehorn Into A Football Metaphor:
"Human Flying Fish":
From Wikipedia: "One of Aquaman's major enemies, the Human Flying Fish was Vic Bragg, a human physically altered to breath underwater and survive the depths of the ocean while employing a suit which additionally provided flight through the air. His protege was Sardine."
Human Flying Fish was the brainchild of "Dr. Krill," who studied Aquaman's crime-fighting techniques and concluded that the only way to get away with crimes on water would be if you could fly away afterwards.
(NOTE: I would have guessed the opportunities to commit 'crimes on the water' would be more limited than 'crimes on the land,' but maybe Dr. Krill was just filling a niche.)
Comicvine.com says that Aquaman was, in fact, briefly stymied by this unique getaway, but came up with "clever methods" to thwart it. They don't specify those methods, but let's guess:
Anyway, "Human Flying Fish" is a metaphor for the "read-option offense," the offense that Sean Payton had to call in every single Super Bowl winning coach ever just to cope with at the 6th grade level. The 'read option' is what made Russell Wilson, Colin Kaepernick, and RGIII so successful last year, and is the hot new offense the way the "Spread" offense was once, and the West Coast offense was once and the Run-and-Shoot was once, and Air Coryell was once and so on and my guess is not only will most NFL teams not run the "Read Option" this year but you won't ever hear the phrase again after 2013, unless it's in the sentence "Hey, what was that 'read option' thing again?"
But you WILL hear it this year. Sports people are going to keep saying Read Option until you throw up.
One show, one clip, relevant to three of my blogs in one day. I love/am insanely jealous of Stephen Colbert. But I'm also indebted to him, because he did this:
I don't like to just post stuff without having something to say about it; I don't just spit back pop culture at you for no reason and call it a day. I also try to sell you products and get paid through the advertising... I mean, I try to comment intelligently on the subject of the post.
So here are some comments: 1. (Politics) Why are Republican women so stereotypically ditzy? I used to be a Republican, and I know some women who are extremely conservative and yet are smart. Despite that, whenever you see a Republican woman in public -- Michelle Bachmann, Wisconsin's for-now-Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch, "Dee Dee" the Republican commentator in that clip -- she appears to be a Barbie doll, only slightly dumber/more lobotomized.
I think it's indicative of the attitudes of today's Republicans that they and FOX continue to put forth a slightly-less-sexualized June Cleaver as their ideal woman. But why do women put up with that? As Jon Stewart has pointed out, that particularly stupid-seeming Gretchen woman on Fox has a degree from Stanford, but she insists on acting like an NFL Today weathergirl. Are they that desperate to be on TV, that they'd hide their intelligence?
For the life of me, I will never understand anyone backing a group, party, or political movement that openly denigrates them and forces them to be something they're not really. (Gay Republicans, I am also looking at you in that sentence.)
2. Sports: It's kind of sad that if Notre Dame-USC was ever a truly great rivalry (was it? I don't know) it no longer is. Notre Dame hasn't mattered to football since... I'll say 1972, when they still played football in black and white (in my mind, that is.) USC hasn't mattered to football since Pete Carroll decided he wanted to openly be able to pay players for their performance.
(USC's lack of mattering is indicative of the general weakness of the PAC-10 which is one of the reasons I think Andrew Luck may not actually be St. Peyton 2.0; everytime I say to someone what kind of competition did Luck face in college? Which good teams did he play? they look at me blankly and then mutter "Well he's really good," but what are you measuring that against?)
3. Star Wars References: Just to be clear: The Star Wars Reference category exists because Star Wars is the root of all Western culture and this clip shows that. When he had to go to a film reference, Colbert immediately went for Star Wars; yes, there were other sci-fi shows mixed in, but the entire reference was built around Star Wars, because just as we all spring from DNA, or something, whatever, I'm not a scientist, culture all springs from Star Wars.
And that's NFL Free Agency for you these days. Don't worry; this isn't a post about sports, per se, as I am not very knowledgeable about sports and not sure what per se means. (I think it's a mixed drink.) This is a post where I give something to those people who are tired of seeing pictures of January Jones in lingerie on this blog. So to you people, I give you The 5 NFL Players Deemed The Best Looking By Other People:
... you still get in here, as number one on "The Richest". Why? I'll quote it verbatim:
"Tom Brady may be the best looking player NFL player on most lists. Why? Brady has a dating resume that includes actress Bridget Moynahan and model Gisele Bundchen."
Maybe. I'm not sure what criteria you are all using for this hotness, here. Expensive hair and supermodel dates are, I think, indirect proof of hotness at best.
And the last one -- these are in no particular order -- comes from Cosmopolitan:
That's Colin Allred, of the Tennessee Titans, and Cosmo said they picked him because "The 27-year old is originally from Texas, where everything’s bigger. We’re talking about his biceps..."
Whodathunkit!? leaves the analysis of sports to so-called experts. You won't get stats or team breakdowns here. Instead, you'll get the facts you REALLY WANT to steer you through March Madness!
It's time again for that huge men's college basketball event that I call "Mr Toad's Wild Ride" but which everybody else calls "March Madness" because everybody besides me apparently doesn't worry about things like "lawsuits" or "the fact that the NCAA Tournament is routinely held up as being the greatest of all sports playoffs and contrasted with the BCS which is only possible if you ignore the fact that the Mr Toad's Wild Ride is actually even more secretive and less fair, overall, than the BCS Football Standings."
Yep: It's going to be one of those posts where I complain about how much people love the NCAA Tournament, with all its Madness that takes place mostly in March, while people hate the BCS, even though the BCS at least has the courage to tell people how and why it screwed your team over, whereas the NCAA Tournament makes inexplicable decisions like "We're going to say there are technically TWO 12-seeds in the Midwest Bracket but only one of them gets to actually be in the Tournament itself, so, much like the Academy Awards which expanded their roster only to find that they couldn't always find 10 good movies to recognize, we're going to claim that there are now 68 teams in the 'playoff' but only 64 have any real shot of qualifying... still, two different teams will get to claim to have been seeded 12th in this year's Midwest bracket, so it's win-win unless you are a fan of truth in advertising."
Or, to put it more simply, as Aaron Rodgers, NFL MVP (and winner of exactly as many Super Bowls as Trent Dilfer) did on his Twitter account:
"Cal in a play-in game in the NCAA Tourney? Hmmmm"
"Hmmmmm" indeed, Aaron Rodgers! "Hmmmm" indeed.
Cal (24-9, located on the West Coast) faces off against South Florida (20-13, located on the East Coast) in the Midwest play-in game, while UNC-Asheville (24-9) and LIU Brooklyn (25-8), both ranked 16th, get to play for sure this weekend. That is an example of the inexplicable, backroom decision making done by a small cadre of people behind closed doors which is routinely held up as the pinnacle of sports playoffs, while things like the BCS (where 1-2 is based on a predetermined formula and all other postseason matchups are made publicly by disparate, noncoordinating representatives of colleges) is routinely dragged through the mud and investigated by Congress which, all right, being investigated by Congress is no big deal these days and it would give you a chance to get one of those tobacco-lobby checks John Boehner is prone to handing out on the Capitol floor, but still... why is the NCAA Tournament given all that respectability and taken home to meet Mom and Dad when the BCS is the one you stared at all night in the bar and will secretly drunk-dial next Friday?
Wait, I think I mixed my metaphors, there.
Anyway, there are three big problems, as usual, with Mr Toad's Wild Ride, those problems being:
A. If you use the phrase "March Madness," you're in danger of getting sued.
B. Those play-in games represent all that is evil about sports and you don't even know how they're decided, and
C. The conference tournaments this year had the effect of keeping other, potentially-meritorious teams, out of Mr Toad's Wild Ride, and yet I hear nothing from the sports establishment (a/k/a "Big Sport") about how playoffs can sometimes mess up the odds of seemingly-deserving teams and also nothing from Big Sport about how the whole "this team was deserving even though they didn't win" is actually a knock against playoffs and in favor of simply letting the teams fans love the most play in the championship.
Those themes and MORE will be explored as we go through the 64-or-so things you REALLY want to know about this year's NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament, the annual exercise in futility... that is, interestingness... that constitutes my contribution to this hallowed institution. I don't get into offense and defense and ... whatever else it is happens in basketball for the simple reasons that (1) other people do that really well and (2) I don't really understand basketball, since I rarely play it, can only dribble with one hand, and only watch about 1 game per year.
No, what I give you is something BETTER than a would-be jock examining how the 11th player on the 15th seed "really gives Xavier a chance at out-rebounding their competition in the final two minutes of the first half which is critical when you blah blah blah whatever." I give you that crucial element needed for any basketball get-together: ONE INTERESTING FACT about EACH TEAM in the Tournament, so that no matter who it is that comes up on the screen or advances to the second round or draws the ire of The Anointed One Who Now Has His Own Holiday by having to play in a play-in-game against South Florida, you will be able to say something about that team.
Not something intelligent. But still: something.
Here we go! In no particular order (other than the order I put them in!)
South Bracket:
(1) Kentucky: One of the lawyers who works for me is from Kentucky, and he likes to comment on how John Calipari, who I'm 78% sure has something to do with Kentucky basketball, views recruits: "Calipari likes to say it's a stupid rule to have to play a year in college before going to the NBA, but if you have to do your year, do it at Kentucky," which I am not saying is an accurate representation of Calipari's views or quotes. I'm just saying a guy here in Wisconsin says it about Calipari, which gives you a chance to take the NONSPORTSMANLIKE CONDUCT COLLEGE ATHLETICS IQ/HYPOCRISY QUIZ: It's only 2 questions long:
1. True or False: A person with a phenomenal amount of athletic ability in the game of basketball should, at age 17, be encouraged with all your might to go directly into the pros as soon as possible because he or she could make millions.
2. Answer this hypothetical question: Tom is a law student. On the first day of his law school career, all 9 Supreme Court justices come to him and say "Tom, we'd like you to come work for us as an intern for a year. We'll pay you $10,000,000 and you'll get first-hand experience working with the brightest legal minds on the nation's highest court. After you finish that year, you can always come back and finish law school, but if you do not come with us right now, this opportunity may never present itself again because who knows if we'll like you in three years?"
Should Tom go?
Scoring: If you didn't get the point of that, give yourself a zero. If you spent any time trying to justify why Tom should go and the basketball player should not, give yourself a minus-13 and vow never to say anything to children or teenagers about how to run their lives.
Kentucky finished second in the SECT Tournament, falling to Vanderbilt in the championship game and ending a 24-game winning streak. The article on the Wildcats' website summed up how Kentucky teaches its adults -- college players are not kids!-- that every game counts, so always play your hardest:
Calipari has repeatedly told anyone who will listen that he doesn't care about conference tournaments, viewing them as a nuisance before the NCAA tournament because of the three-games-in-three-days grind."I wish this would have happened yesterday so we got home a day earlier," Calipari said.
That is so inspirational, and yet in a way, you can actually ignore my sarcasm and take inspiration from it, because Kentucky lost in the final tournament game and still was seeded number 1 in the South Bracket, getting to play against the winner of a 16-seed play-in game, a double-victory in that a 1-seed can face no higher seeding than a 5-seed until the fourth round, and also in that Kentucky's 16th-seeded opponent will have to prepare first for its play-in game and thus have a shortened schedule to prepare for Kentucky. In that way, the play-in games are a both a boon to TV and a punishment to your team if you end up in one, making sure that your own particular favorite probably doesn't survive the first weekend because in many cases, your team played 2 or 3 games in a conference championship then a play-in game and then the Tournament game, all in about 8 days. Even if the players weren't exhausted by that, the coaches (who have only a vague idea who they might be playing) can't keep preparing their players adequately for all those new opponents.
In other words: Pick Kentucky in your office pool.
Or, DON'T, because if you're a reader of these things from the past, then you know that while I frown on picking number ones, I don't frown on picking number ones for the same stupid reason everyone in your pool does.
Everyone says, if you fill in an Office Bracket and pick all number 1s to win, that you're not fair and that you should "pick some upsets" and otherwise... how to put this nicely... be dumb like them and also make it less likely you'll win. People get really upset if you pick all 1 seeds to win, which is a strange way to react because:
(A) They'll say "that's stupid to pick all 1 seeds because there's always upsets and so you won't win" and
(B) They'll say "But it's not fair to pick all 1 seeds, you shouldn't do that" because they feel it makes you more likely to win.
Which overall just proves why you should never ever talk to other people, period, let alone about sports. I recommend that when someone approaches you, you either go into a violent coughing fit causing them to fear germs, or you try to talk to them about your favorite non-vampire-related book you read recently, thereby marking yourself as the kind of weirdo who reads books that aren't about vampires and who should be shunned by society.
NOTE: If you choose that latter route, do NOT under any circumstances mention The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, because everyone in the world claims to have read that book and will want to talk to you about it. They are lying: NOBODY in America read that book beyond the first deadly-boring 70 pages that were mostly about a flower in a frame, but they all want to claim they did and will insist that if you "work through" those pages "it's really worth it." They are, remember, lying: they bought the book, gave it up after 50 pages, and waited for the movie. But they'll still try to talk to you about it. The giveaway is that they keep calling the main character "James Bond."
We'll get back to that strategy. Time to move on to
(16) Western Kentucky University, which beat some other school nobody cares about to "play in" to the Tournament in a match-up of 16-seeds designed solely to let more schools say they made" the Tournament even though they didn't at all. You know how sometimes leagues have teams flip a coin to see who makes the playoffs (as happened here?) That's what the play-in game is, only they figure they can televise a game more easily than a coin-flip. Either way, only the winner makes the tournament, but in the NCAA's version, advertisers pay money to talk about beer during the game and you watch it even though it doesn't matter.
About Western Kentucky, I think you should know this: They're helping our Future Chinese Overlords prepare for taking over our country. WKU has something they call the "Confucius Institute," which has as its innocuous-sounding-but-don't-be-fooled goals:
Promoting understanding of Chinese language and culture through children's programming, training courses, cultural workshops, and events Introducing fully articulated K-16 instruction in Modern Standard Chinese
But here's why you should not be fooled. There are three other goals, carefully hidden just below those two earlier goals: WKU knows that it's a rare person (me) who reads more than two sentences on a web page before looking for the cute dog video. Here are the OTHER three goals WKU has:
Serving as a regional center for Chinese teacher training and Chinese curriculum developmentHelping address the needs of the business community and the general publicBuilding connections and partnerships between Kentucky and China
Did you get that? They're actively developing Chinese teachers and curricula... in Kentucky! Where they're also partnering with China! That settles it for me: the new Axis of Evil is China, Kentucky, and... let's say... Seattle. It rains a lot there, so they're probably pretty angry at people.
(8) Iowa State: Remember, any school with "State" in the name is a lower-tier school, as are schools with directions in their name. Sorry, "Iowa" "State" "students." Real states are secure enough not to have to tell people they're a state.
In the study, the researchers evaluated the cognitive patterns of the college women after they viewed one of three fictional video clips. One clip depicted physical aggression, including a gun and knife fight that ended in murder. A second clip portrayed relational aggression, where girls steal boyfriends, spread malicious gossip and kick someone out of their social circle. The third clip was simply a scary scene, one that would raise the heartbeat.Researchers assessed physiological arousal, finding that all three films produced similar levels of excitement. They then measured reaction times when aggressive or neutral words flashed on a screen. Participants who had watched either aggressive film clip ascribed more meaning to words connected with aggression.
Which actually, to me, simply sounds like the women weren't necessarily more aggressive but rather were simply more primed to see aggression around them, which is a different kind of thing, but saying "Showing people clips of aggression attuned them to aggression in their environment the way buying a red car attunes people to red cars around them" is not likely to get headlines/research grants, now, is it? So why don't you just shut up before I shut you up! (Sorry: I just watched several seconds of a Ray Liotta movie.)
So I clicked that link. Oh, I clicked the bejeezus out of it. Well, once. I clicked it once. And got this:
Former UConn art professor Alexey von Schlippe observed the world around him and transformed it into portraits, landscapes, and still lifes of a unique and unmistakable style. His classical European training and Russian and German roots were evident. But more prominent was a fascination for experimentation with color, perspective, scale, and detail. He seemed to be constantly striving for the “correct” combination of elements in his paintings.
That is the intro to an explanation of the theory behind the art gallery at UConn, an art gallery that recently exhibited
the installations ... “The Question” by Pamela Pike Gordinier, which begged of the public: “What one question would you ask?” Thousands of responses poured in and became the basis for Pamela’s incredibly beautiful and powerful labyrinth exhibit.
That actually sounds more deserving of television time than a game between two 16-seeds. So I went to the site of "The Question," and got this:
“T H E Q U E S T I O N”
Found, abandoned at the labyrinth’s center - one gold wedding band.
Transfixed, I asked, “Why was this cherished symbol left behind? Thus, was sown the seed for this exhibition, the acknowledgement that questions stir the imagination and can take us on undiscovered paths.
So I asked friends, neighbors and strangers, If God exists what one question would you ask?
This exhibit is a visual representation of those myriad questions - the hopes, fears and ideas that connect and divide us. It is my hope that by becoming aware of each other’s viewpoint, we can begin a dialogue for understanding and change.
As I collected and read the questions that had been sent, I cried, laughed, and was awed by how personal and profound they were. I am indebted to the people who have participated in this project.
For me, the “art” is first what happened as people contemplated the question and then discussed it with others. And next, it is the visual response to these life questions that you will see in this exhibit.
To present these ideas, I have adapted a labyrinth as a metaphor for questioning one’s life journey, and hung illuminated books of questions. I also created a vessel to receive a “feast of ideas”, and an urn.
You are welcome to participate in this experience by filling out your own question to deposit in the vessel. Your name will not be attached to your question, they will however be documented for a potential book. The questions that are collected during this exhibit will be burned and placed into the urn.
In the end, do our questions not tell us more about ourselves than our answers?
Imagine if you met God and could ask only one question. What would you ask? I'd probably ask "How can I do it right?"
(5) Wichita State: Whereas someone else would ask "How can I avoid awkward segues from philosophical art institutes back to basketball?"
Wichita State are the "Shockers." "Shocker" has a highbrow legacy in pop culture:
But the Wichita It's-Not-Really-A-State Shockers' name comes from back in the Olden Days, when people used comical terms to refer to work to avoid confronting the fact that they all slaved through 22-hour workdays and lived on barley before voting for Grover Cleveland and then dying of typhoid at age 7. In this case, the term "shock" was used to refer to picking wheat: "I'm shocking this wheat," Wichitans would say before they went home to their sod house, which is why even today we think Wichita is boring.
Earlier, the Wichitanners were not the "Shockers," but were the Wheaties, and it seems to me that they missed a great branding opportunity in this team, because if Wichita wins the NCAA they could be on the Wheaties box, and they would be the Wheaties. Don't you see how great that is? Is it just that it's very early and I'm tired? I would love that! Just let it sink into your psyche for a while.
They don't just put anyone on a Wheaties' box, you know. It's tough to get on there. As evidenced by the fact that only six soccer players have ever made it.
Baruj Benacerraf, M.D. – Nobel Prize winner for medicine and immunology in 1980.
David Baldacci – Author of 10 consecutive New York Times bestsellers.
Nancy C. Everett – CEO of General Motors Asset Management Corp. and its U.S. subsidiaries.
Stephen Furst – American actor, best known as “Flounder” in the National Lampoon classic Animal House (1978).
That's right, VCU Students! Going to that school will someday prime you to win a Nobel Prize! Or have a relatively small role in a vastly overrated movie! Or have those two accomplishments ranked almost equally!
"make some really good really good blue corn tortillas."
You gotta reach for the stars, I always say. It's true: I always say that. People get sick of hearing it, and say "Why do you always say that?" and I don't answer them because I'm trying to cultivate an air of mystery.
If New Mexico State wanted to be in the forefront of agrifrankenscience, they'd start growing some of those Dorito plants that Taco Bell recently began using to make what I believe are its own organic-based shells.
(6) UNLV: So you're thinking about attending here, and you ask yourself, "What kind of options will you, as a brand new UNLV grad have?" Well, first, why do you refer to yourself in the second person? Isn't that kind of weird? And second, UNLV, right on its front page, has an answer for you:
For the nearsighted among you, that says:
Career Day Casino Public Relations Talk: Jackpot, Showgirls, and Twitter.
Which, frankly, sounds better than law school. I spend my day reading mortgages, and there's hardly a showgirl in sight.
"Our environment at home is the heartbeat of our program and that starts with the students," CU Athletic Director Mike Bohn said. "It was fitting to invite them and bring spirit, energy and pride to the tournament and they delivered an incredible amount of energy and passion. It's brought great national recognition to what they stand for and our program stands for and what a wonderful institution the University of Colorado is."
You know what's sad? When I started typing this entry, I had no idea whether Colorado had actually cut scholarships. I just assumed they had, and googled "Colorado U cuts scholarships" to find that story. In America, in the past two years, it is a given that major universities and states cut funding for low income students.
But, hey... let's focus on the important thing here: 50 kids who were already so well off they could afford to attend every home basketball game got a free trip to LA courtesy of the college! USA USA USA!
(3) Baylor: Baylor, like many schools, boasts of being "nationally ranked" without ever being very specific as to what it's ranking is, but every school, really, is nationally ranked. That's the nature of rankings. If you were to rank bloggers, say, from best (me) to worst (also me; I have a lot of blogs), then no matter where I fell on the list, I could say I'm a nationally-ranked blogger.
Since I can't find any SDSU stuff, I'll just insert my favorite percussion video ever at this point: The Ferny Grove Percussion Ensemble's version of Music For A Found Harmonium:
I could listen to that all day, and watching those kids play it makes it even better. They seem to enjoy it so much! When was the last time you enjoyed something as much as they enjoyed that?
(That might be a good question to ask God.)
(7) Notre Dame: Speaking of asking God things, here's a school with God's private line on speed dial. Or at least I assume that's how it works.
I wondered, as I saw Notre Dame was next on the list, what the basketball equivalent of Touchdown Jesus might be. Is there a Slamdunk John The Apostle? (Considering that he got his head cut off, that joke was probably in poor taste, but now I'm chuckling to myself.)
There is not. In fact, Googling What's the basketball equivalent of touchdown Jesus gets you nowhere other than it buries your searches for Christina Hendricks a little lower in your history.
That then led me to look for the World's Weirdest Jesus Statues, but I got sidetracked by this:
Which I am 82% sure is not Jesus. It is, instead, a statue called "Man Attacked By Babies" and it is part of a terrifying sculpture garden in Oslo, Norway, the "Vigeland Sculpture Park."
This is Oslo's number one attraction, a huge park with ponds, trees and lawns. The park covers an area of 80 acres and features 212 bronze and granite sculptures created by Gustav Vigeland. Vigeland personally sculpted every figure out of clay and individual craftsmen were contracted to fabricate the pieces into what they are today. These works of art reside along an axis divided into six sections: The Main Gate, The Bridge, The Children’s Playground, The Fountain, The Monolith Plateau and the Wheel of Life.
The sculpture park features a monolith that appears to be an orgy, and a sculpture of babies riding a nude woman with rope for a rein. Not even kind of making that up. I really really wish my browser history had stopped at Christina Hendricks.
But Notre Dame definitely should buy Man Attacked By Babies as a complement to Touchdown Jesus.
(10) Xavier: Hey, I never finished up that tip on how you should bet in your office pool, did I? Let me resolve that hanging plot thread for you: bet like a hedge fund manager.
Here's how that works: First, have people give you, like, a billion dollars of their money. Then, invest it and skim a bit off the top for your own profits as a commission, then get indicted.
Or, better yet, don't pick the obvious ones to win in your office pool. Most basketball fans will pick a few obvious upsets and a couple of obvious winners and the end result is that most people in the pool will be within a point or two of each other at the end of the Tournament. But for office pools, losing by 1 is the same as losing by 1,000,000 -- either way, you don't win.
So what do you do? Pick against the grain. Pick upsets all along the way. Have 16s beating 1s and 5s beating 12s. The odds are, you won't win the pool, and you'll lose by a jillion. But, remember: lose by 1, lose by a jillion, you still lose.
But that one year that a 16 beats a 1? That one year that VCU pairs up against Belmont in the Final Four? You will crush your opponents and look like a genius.
Black Swan your office pool. And your life. Finishing just out of the running isn't where the money's at.
Heh heh! Please, no more questions! I had no idea that being a 'family man' would be so hard!
If being a family man is tough for you, apparently the way to deal with that, by the way, is through Ashley Madison. Ashley Madison, a company dedicated to destroying monogamy for profit, has in our market recently begun running radio ads that suggest that the way to save a marriage is to have an affair. This is not a new strategy.
Here's what I think about that. Guys like Dan Savage, who I have a great deal of respect for, proclaim loudly that humans are not meant to be monogamous, and many people suggest that "open" marriages and the occasional cheating on a wife can save a marriage.
I myself have been disappointed -- greatly disappointed-- by athletes I admired who cheated on their wives or tried to, including Brett Favre.
Whether or not people are supposed to be or biologically can be monogamous is beyond my ability to answer... although I am monogamous and have not been genetically inspired to cheat on my wife, who I've been married to for 12 years now.
But to me, what separates marriage from a commitment, what makes marriage different than all other relationships, is monogamy.
I think any two consenting adults should be allowed to marry. I support 'gay marriage,' which should just be 'marriage.'
I also think that people should have sex with anyone they want to anytime they want to (provided the other person/people consent.)
I just think that the two don't go together.
You want to be married, I think you should be monogamous. You want to sleep with anyone who's willing including your 'significant other'? I think you should not be married.
Marriage has to mean something. People aren't fighting for the right to marry just to have marriage be equivalent to every other status. To me, what separates marriage from a relationship is the level of commitment you are agreeing to. Marriage is at the top -- but it's not there because you promise to spend your life with that person (you can do that without a ring), it's not there because it takes a court to separate property (palimony and corporate dissolutions do the same thing), it's not there because you can have kids (anyone can do that, even the kids on MTV)... so what separates marriage? I say the promise that you will only have sex with that other person, all of your life.
I'm not trying to tell you how to run your marriage. I'm just saying that if your marriage includes "I get to sleep with other people who I'm not married to," then I think you're not taking marriage seriously.
That was the gist of General Martin E. Dempsey's remarks to Duke University. Dempsey was talking about how budget cuts are actually a good thing for the military because they will be... I don't know, more efficient or something.
Hemingway would understand the power and dignity of a word like Duty. This study ends with the hope that the authors of a new Army Ethic also understand.
As for me, whenever I hear "duty," all I think of is this.
(15) Lehigh: It occurs to me that even with the ethos of this blog, I should probably mention basketball once or twice in a Mr Toad's Wild Ride preview. I mean, yes, the point of the WHODATHUNKIT!? is to give you things to talk about that other sports authorities don't provide, but still, there's a limit, isn't there?
So: Lehigh University is going to the Tournament for the 5th time in school history. Lehigh is coached by Dr. Brett Reed, whose official position is the "Murray H. Goodman Head Men's Basketball Team Coach." So now, apparently, alums can sponsor a coaching position.
Reed's doctorate, which he is obviously very proud of because he puts doctor before his name, is in Instructional Technology, from Eckerd College. Judging by the Eckerd College website, this means that Reed is "Doctor of Knowing Kids Need More Computers In The Classroom So They Can Look Things Up On Wikipedia."
Oh, and the basketball note? Lehigh opens against Duke, and Coach Mike Krzyzewski of Duke got his first career win ever as a basketball coach against Lehigh, back when the humorless Coach K coached Army.
West Bracket
(1) Michigan State: It's not basketball related, per se (per se is Latin for "I hope you think I'm smart for using Latin") but it's still pretty cool: The blog "TheArtTheArtTheArt.com" is by a graphic artist who wanted to have a game schedule for the Michigan State Whatevers but wanted it to be interesting, so he created a different wallpaper for each game of each season going back to Game 1, 2010. Here are just three of my favorites:
Go check them all out. That last one is particularly cool, don't you think?
(16) LIU Brooklyn: The LIU Brooklyn Blackbirds have a golf team, which I thought was unusual for a team located in New York City; how many golf courses, I wondered, are there within New York City limits?
I'm always ranting about how we're cutting government services even though there's more than enough money to go around; we just have our priorities mixed up. Why on God's green Earth would the City of New York build a golf course? And if the City is going to build a golf course, shouldn't it be free to taxpayers, the way (most?) parks are? And isn't building a golf course and charging money to get into it just a regressive tax, transferring city tax dollars from poor to rich? Everyone pays the same tax rate, but people who can afford $125-per-round golf just got a huge $(##&%^#$ subsidy from New York City...
I want you to compare and contrast these two paragraphs from two stories:
In another attack on the poor, $192 million is being eliminated from the Advantage rent subsidy program, one of Bloomberg’s signature programs designed to help homeless families leave public shelters.
And this one
On January 18, New York City officially approved a deal for Trump to manage the course, which will be located at Ferry Point Park and open in 2014. Under the agreement, the city (in other words, taxpayers) will be responsible for the estimated $184 million construction of the course.
In that article, we learn that Pastner's legendary brashness wasn't just a product of his being a freshman on the Arizona team that won the 1997 National Championship, but was also the product of good ol' fashioned book learnin':
Josh has been focused and driven to succeed in the game of basketball since he was in elementary school," Hal Pastner said. "He immersed himself throughout his school years reading every book about the game and studying all aspects of basketball. He was never fast, quick, or could jump but he worked very hard and many days throughout high school would stay in the gym even after the lights were out until the maintenance crew kicked him out since they had to go home.
Josh Pastner could play basketball in the dark! The article goes on to argue that Pastner's apparent hamming it up shouldn't be his legacy -- and maybe it shouldn't; by many accounts, Pastner was an excellent coach from early on. His dad was so impressed with Josh that he turned over the coaching duties of a team called the "Houston Hoops" to Josh at 16; Josh's dad continues to be involved with the Hoops, an AAU program from which Josh has recruited players, and whiel at least one article suggested that maybe the Josh-Dad connection was a little tricksy given limits on coaches' ability to talk with AAU programs, nobody's saying anything much about that. He also by all accounts is a pretty charitable guy, and earned his degree at Arizona in 2 1/2 years -- the fastest anybody's ever done that.
So while I can make fun of him playing basketball in the dark, I'm actually pretty impressed by Paster. When I was 31, I had to close my first business and joined my present firm and had no money to my name. Kudos to him.
(9) St. Louis: One thing you probably wouldn't want to ask God if you had just the one question is "How am I supposed to tell which school it is that's in the Mr Toad's Wild Ride?" The bracket that I follow doesn't say anything like "St. Louis University" so when it's a school I'm not familiar with, which happens like 98% of the time, I have to Google something like "St. Louis NCAA" and see what comes up.
Which in this case is a story about St. Louis hosting the NCAA wrestling championships. Not every conference includes wrestling as a sport, the story notes -- the SEC doesn't, so when Missouri moves to the SEC next year, apparently they won't have wrestling anymore as a sport?
The wrestling championships will be on ESPNU and ESPN3.
St. Louis' basketball team -- the Billikens -- is, I'm told, rebuilding under Rick Majerus, who, this ESPN story notes, likes to sit as he coaches his team. ("There's a stool in every corner of the Saint Louis gym so Rick Majerus can roam the building and do his scrutinizing comfortably.") Majerus has players from Australia and New Zealand on his team. The NCAA Tournament is increasingly international; last year, 88 players came from outside the US, representing 32 different countries.
Which, no it's not racist: The "Tall Blacks" take their name as a play on the New Zealand national rugby team, the "All Blacks."
The New Zealand women's national basketball team is the "Tall Ferns," and features four women currently on US college basketball teams.
(5) New Mexico: Seems weird that there's both New Mexico and New Mexico State in the tournament, doesn't it?
The UNM Lobos used to have a live wolf as their mascot; the cheerleaders were in charge of the wolf. But the school had to stop that when a kid teased the wolf and was bitten and the UNM officials decided to get rid of the wolf because -- I love this --
as one historian put it, "for fear other ill-bred brats might become tempted to play with the wolf and bring a damage suit."
That's off the official UNM website, and the biting took place back in the late 1920s, so it's not modern day lawyers who are wrecking society. It's old-fashioned ill-bred brats.
The story behind the Lobo also includes this reference to Bruno Dieckmann, the alum who brought the first live wolf in as a mascot:
Elsie Ruth Chant, class of 1923, recalled, "All of the girls on campus wanted to be seen with him. He was an accomplished concert violinist as well as being a successful businessman, and he was rich. He drove a Stutz Bearcat convertible around town and all of the girls would compete to get rides with him. Sometimes he had five or six girls in the car, and when he finally got married, he left broken hearts all over campus.
Things sure have changed. These days, all the Stutz Bearcats in the world can't make a violinist seem cool to the girls.
(12) Long Beach State: With California schools, I always like to check and see if there are some weird California majors to be had. California State University, Long Beach (as the school is officially called) offers courses in consumer studies (one suggestion for careers based on that course is "consumer advocate on television and radio stations") and even will give you a bachelor of the arts in consumer affairs.
The Department exists to promote a broader and deeper understanding of the role of leisure and recreation in the lives of all people and to enhance the quality of experiences available to each person.
So you can get a college degree in relaxation!
(4) Louisville: Games in the 2nd and 3rd rounds of Mr Toad's Wild Ride this year will be played in Louisville at the "KFC YUM! Center." Tickets for basketball are sold out, but you can still get seats for "Thunder Over Louisville," which will be held at the YUM! center, too, the "largest annual pyrotechnic display in America."
The day-long event kicks off the two exciting weeks of events that are part of the annual Kentucky Derby Festival. The Thunder Air Show dazzles the crowd with more than 100 planes, aerobatics teams, daring sky diving teams and breathtaking stunts.
When it gets dark, the Thunder rolls. The fireworks will feature the latest in pyrotechnic power from Zambelli Internationale, America's "first family of fireworks". Six barges that are 100-foot open top each assemble on both sides of the 2nd Street Bridge to form the stage from which the fireworks spectacular ignites.
The breathtaking and mind-numbing 28-minute show includes Thunder's signature one-mile "waterfall" effect off the bridge, making the fireworks seem to rain down forever. And in the crowd's memory of the show, it does!
But why read about blowing stuff up when you can watch it?
(13) Davidson: Davidson made the "Elite 8" a few years back, in 2008, and that prompted the reminiscence from Kelsey on the Explore Davidson student and faculty blog. Kelsey had just been admitted to Davidson in the 2008 run, and is now at school and tells how she learned about Davidson's ticket to the tournament:
Most recently, we won the Southern Conference championship against Western Carolina, in a nail-biting game that went to double overtime. In a funny turn of events, I was on a cruise with other avid basketball fans, and we spent four stressful hours watching score and time updates on the ESPN ticker at the bottom of the screen, because the cruise ship wasn’t broadcasting our game live.
That is a funny turn of events! Or, it's not. I often wonder about people who plan vacations around football games or basketball games. I would not go to Southern California and spend time watching the Rose Bowl even if they put real badgers into uniforms and had them play.
Well, maybe then.
But I suppose if that's your thing, okay, you like to go to games and why not go to one in a nice location?
But I'm not sure I'd waste time on a cruise watching a ticker for any game involving any team. Kelsey is amazingly devoted, and also wasted a vacation.
(6) Murray State: "Murray" is not a state, I am 75% sure, unless we already got the Moon admitted to the union and renamed it "Murray." Wouldn't it be kind of nice if our moon had a name? Instead of just moon? I mean, our planet is almost literally named planet -- that's what Earth means, dirt. It's like we named our kids "kid".
Murray State suffers from an almost-as-generic nickname, the "Racers." That's only been their nickname since 1961; before that, the official nickname was "Thoroughbreds," which I like, and it was often shortened to things like "T-Breds." "Racers" was chosen because "Thoroughbreds" was deemed to clunky for the modern 1961 sports fan:
The baseball team, though, kept Thoroughbreds, which is fitting because baseball, too, is mostly appealing to people in the 1950s. Here's their logo:
(11) Colorado State: CSU's heading to the Finals! Not in basketball, stupid: In theater! Which I didn't even know could be competitive. I wonder if they do hurdles?
The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival is a national theater program with more than 18,000 participants annually.Students ...convened in Fort Collins to participate in workshops; attend symposia and colloquies and professional presentation; and work with resident artists.For the fourth year in a row, CSU students will travel to Washington, D.C., April 16 – 21, 2012, to compete at the prestigious Kennedy Center national conference.
The students did "The Kafka Project,"
a collectively-created sampling of Kafka’s bizarre world of works. The project features staging of six major works along with entries from his diaries and letters; all centered around his most famous work, The Metamorphosis.
...
A Hunger Artist is a first-person monologue by a man who, as a side-show act, is starving himself to death. In A Report to an Academy, an ape tells a group of scientists why he chose to become a man. The story In the Penal Colony describes the last use of an elaborate torture and execution device that carves the sentence of the condemned prisoner on his skin in a script before letting him die, all in the course of twelve hours.
The centerpiece of this haunting evening, presented in five installments throughout the piece, The Metamorphosis, follows the six-legged nightmare of traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, who awakens one morning to discover he has been transformed into a giant bug.
But why just read about a man turning into a bug when you can watch it dramatically re-enacted?
(3) Marquette: Just so you know, I've picked Marquette to win; I have Marquette over Gonzaga, 78-72. That's how I roll.
Marquette's slogan is "Be The Difference". Over on the Marquette Tumblr which WHY is TUMBLR so big a deal? I don't get it they've got this:
For lawyers, the motto I assume would be "Sue The Difference." For bloggers, it would be "Ignorantly Mock The Difference With At Least Seven Tpyos plus a picture of your baby holding your cat." (OMG! CUTE!)
(14) BYU: I always like to mention BYU's Museum of Paleontology, one of the top 5 dinosaur museums in the world. They've got "Devonian fish," fossils that are 380,000,000 years old/tricks of the devil (depending on whether you're voting for Rick Santorum or not.) The Devonian period was "The Age Of Fish," the time when Europe and America had collided, forming the Appalachian Mountains and causing American fossils to accuse European fossils of wanting to turn us all socialist. Scientists believe the lingering effects of that collision is what accounts for East Coast Liberalism today, and suggest that in 350,000,000 years the effect will have worn off.
The earliest fish were "Ostracoderms," a name that means "Shell-skin", and which was given because those fish had no bones; they used harder outer skins and cartilage to hold themselves up.
The next time you run into someone who's too sensitive, tell them "Man, you've got to ostracoderm up!"
(7) Florida As the national Republican primary either bores you (when Romney's winning) or horrifies you with visions of a New Inquisition under Santorum's Theocracy, consider Florida's primary, where they're mentioning Charlie Sheen a lot:
Republican Senate candidate George LeMieux is invoking Sheen in a new 60-second statewide radio spot that likens GOP primary rival Connie Mack to the troubled actor.“Connie Mack IV, the Half-Mack, is also known as the Charlie Sheen of Florida politics,” the ad’s narrator says, repeating a line LeMieux used in a recent news conference blasting Mack for bar brawls, financial woes and other problems in his past.“Maybe he owes Charlie Sheen an apology,” says the narrator, calling U.S. Rep. Mack “everything that’s wrong with Washington.”
Salon.com posted a history of Connie Mack's violence. This Connie Mack (real name: Cornelius McGillicuddy) is a descendant of the winningest baseball coach ever Connie Mack,but I think the coach Mack never did stuff like this:
...Mack’s girlfriend was driving his car when a driver forced her off the road. Both cars stopped and Mack got out. The other driver tried to punch Mack, so Mack punched him. The driver went back to his car, grabbed a baseball bat and chased Mack around the car and smashed its windows.
Still, it is baseball-related, right? So it's just part of the family tradition.
(10) Virginia: Time again for "Who's famous from this school?" Getting top billing on the school's website even as I type this? Tina Fey:
You know her! She imitates Sarah Palin and pimped out her daughter to sell books. That guy next to her, half-hidden by her bio and overlapping Katie Couric?
Woodrow Wilson.
(2) Missouri: Over on Ask.com, somebody wanted to know why Missouri was called Mizzou when there were no z's in Missouri. Knowing how to spell Missouri is actually a pretty high level of sophistication for most Ask.com users, so give that person credit.
Luckily, the University of Missouri, as is befitting an institution of higher education, has the answers for us all:
No one is sure who first used the word Mizzou, but it was used in the Missouri Alumni Quarterly as early as December 1905.
(15) Norfolk State: Like Ohio State, Norfolk refers to itself as "The Norfolk State University," in case there was any confusion about which State U. really represents Norfolk. Every year, THE NSU gives an "Eminent Scholar" award to a professor. Last year's winner was Dr. Mikhail A. Noginov, a Professor of Physics. Noginov
is known for his work on random lasers, metamaterials and plasmonics, having made pioneering contributions on active metamaterials and plasmonics with gain, and transformative experimental studies of hyperbolic metamaterials.
Random lasers? Does Homeland Security know about this? I have to take off my shoes in an airport and I can still be hit by a random laser coming from some place in Virginia?
NOTE: For the first time in the history of the NCAA Tournament, I am not going to be able to finish up with this post the way I want to; I could blame lots of things for this, but I think it's best if we all agree that "global warming" is the culprit.
Still, it's 10:04 a.m. my time as I type this, the Tournament -- the real Tournament, not the Fake Four Made For TV -- starts soon, and I'm in a bind: I promised you 64 facts, but I've delivered only on 32 teams.
So here's what I've decided: I'm going to hope that in place of quantity, you accept "less quantity," and also, I'm going to make a fun game of it! Because I won't have time to individually get to the other 32 teams I haven't covered, but I want to give you your 64 facts, I have listed below thirty-two random facts I picked up from clicking around Wikipedia. I've listed each next to a team's name as that team's fact. Accordingly, I would not use these "facts" to impress your friends until after the third round of shots.
(16) UNC-Asheville: Star Track Express, formerly Multigroup Distribution Services and Discount Freight Express is a national Australian transport and logistics company.
(8) Kansas State: The Chief of Army Staff of Pakistan Army, shortly abbreviated as COAS, is the highest staff post in the Pakistan Army, held by the senior 4-star rank officer.
(13) Montana: Hankyu Railway (阪急電鉄Hankyū Dentetsu?) is a Japaneseprivate railway that provides commuter and interurban service to the northern Kansai region and is one of major businesses operated by Hankyu Hanshin Holdings, Inc. The railway's main terminal is at Umeda Station in Osaka. The signature color of Hankyu cars is maroon
(14) St. Bonaventure:Lester B. Pearson C.I (LBP) is a public high school in Scarborough, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; which teaches grades 9 through 12 and has a multicultural group of students coming from 56 different countries, speaking 42 languages, and practicing 17 different religions.
(10) West Virginia:The Jungle Twins was an Americancomic book series published by Gold Key Comics in the 1970s. The series was one of several new titles Gold Key created when they lost the rights to Edgar Rice BurroughsTarzan characters.
(1) North Carolina: Raymond Vahan Damadian (born March 16, 1936, NY USA) is an Armenian-American medical practitioner and inventor of the first MR (Magnetic Resonance) Scanning Machine.
(16) Some team that played in and doesn't matter: Two ships of the United States Navy have been named Balch, for Rear Admiral George Balch.
(5) Temple:zbV is an abbreviation for the German term "zur besonderen Verwendung" meaning "Special Purpose". It is usually translated "For Special Employment".
(12) California? Let's hope A-Rodg was not disappointed: Steve Carlip is an Americanprofessor of physics at the University of California, Davis. He is known for his work on (2+1)-dimensional quantum gravity, the quantum gravitational basis of black hole thermodynamics, and causal dynamical triangulations. *That's weird how that worked out -- entirely random, and yet somewhat related to California!*
(4) Michigan:
"I Don't Like Mondays" is a song by the Boomtown Rats that was a UK number one single for four weeks during the summer of 1979.
(13) Ohio: Cult of the Charkha is an essay by Rabindranath Tagore which first appeared in September, 1925 in the Modern Review. In the essay Tagore offered critique on the Gandhian ethic of ‘Charkha-spinning’ as an activity which could rejuvenate the Indian masses during the Indian independence movement.
(6) San Diego State:
Muti is a term for traditional medicine in Southern Africa as far north as Lake Tanganyika. The word muti is derived from the Zulu word for tree, of which the root is -thi. In Southern Africa, the word muti is in widespread use in most indigenous African languages, as well as in South African English and Afrikaans where it is sometimes used as a slang word for medicine in general.
(11) NC State: Ashton James Hayward III (born April 15, 1969) is the mayor of Pensacola, Florida, having taken office on January 10, 2011.[1] He is the first mayor elected under the new "strong mayor" form of government adopted in 2009
(3) Georgetown: Orrin Anthony Barton is a retired Americanhigh jumper. His personal best jump is 2.32 metres, achieved in June 1992 in New Orleans. (14) Belmont: In geology, a rock'sfabric describes the spatial and geometric configuration of all the elements that make it up.
(7) St. Mary's: The complex Bowman Flag with its swallow-tail fly was designed by John and Honor Bowman of Richmond NSW in 1806. The shield on the design shows the rose of England, thistle of Scotland and shamrock of Ireland. It commemorates (by the motto England expects that every man will do his duty) the Royal Navy’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) a landmark event for Britain’s Australasian colonies.
(2) Kansas: Sir Roger Cholmeley (born 1490s — died 21 June 1565) was Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench from 1552 to 1553. He was the illegitimate son of Sir Richard Cholmeley of Yorkshire (1472 – 1521), who served as Lieutenant of the Tower of London from 1513 to 1520. (15) Detroit:
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