Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Christmas with the In-laws

We were enjoying a Christmas dinner at my wife's parents' house this year that was rather low on Jesus and rather high on alcohol. As usual, it devolved into going around the table so everyone could complain about their work lives. In my many years of Christmases I've found that this is an important ritual because you can only complain so much about your family to the people at work before you get sick of hearing your work colleagues own complaints and want to complain about them. That's where the holidays come in.

Anyway, we had been going around the table in this fashion for a while and my father-in-law was getting pretty tired of hearing his other daughter -- the one who isn't my wife -- complain about her PhD supervisor's lack of helpfulness with her esoteric thesis on Aboriginal conceptions of the transgendered bestiality impulse so he shrugged and said, "Life's a bitch," in an attempt to get her to end her turn. He said it in such a droll manner, though, that I felt to compelled to add, "And then you marry one, amirite?" while I made the nudge-nudge motion with the vaudeville smirk.

I tried to explain it was a joke, but my mother-in-law still took back the video game she bought for me anyway (now all I have are socks from her), and I had to spend the rest of the evening on the wobbly air mattress that passes for our bed reassuring my wife that I don't think of her now that we've been married for six years as a "nagging bitch". You know, I bet if we had a real bed and I had been sleeping better I wouldn't have made that stupid mistake so really the whole thing was my in-laws fault for being so cheap; just because it's Christmas doesn't mean you should recreate Jesus's manger for me to sleep in, you know? My wife claims it also might have helped if I hadn't been drunk.

Monday, December 24, 2012

Getting my 'thank you' face on

I've been reviewing superlatives to hopefully be able to produce words of thanks that don't sound too generic when I an opening gifts tomorrow. E.g.:
  • "What a resplendent scarf!"
  • "These dollar store chocolates look positively exquisite!"
  • "I exalt this anti-dandruff shampoo!"
  • "Windshield wipers! How eminently sublime!"
  • "These are exactly the sort of stupendous socks I wanted! They'll look effulgent on my feet!"

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Deficit Confusion Update

So back in February I wrote about how the Conservative Party of Canada ("CPC") -- hailed for its excellent stewardship of the economy -- seemed to be all over the place with its deficit projections. Here's a quick reminder of this government's "success" managing the federal budget:
  • Jan 2006: CPC inherits a $13 billion surplus from the Liberals.
  • Oct 2008: Stephen Harper says, "We'll never go back into deficit."
  • Jan 2009: Jim Flaherty projects deficit of $33.7 billion in 2009–10 and surplus in 2013–14.
  • Mar 2010: CPC finishes running $55.6 billion deficit for 2009-2010 fiscal year.
  • Mar 2011: Flaherty projects surplus in 2015-2016.
  • Apr 2011: CPC promises surplus by 2014-2015 on campaign trail. Harper says, "Our platform is realistic, accurately costed and looks four years down the road."
  • Nov 2011:  Flaherty projects deficit until 2015-2016.
Now, another year has gone by and Flaherty has updated his projections again. You'll never guess what he said!
In other words, the CPC's projection for the elimination of the deficit has gone from being 4 years away in April 2011 when the party was campaigning to being 4 and a half years away now that 18 months have passed. At this rate, by the time the next election rolls around in 2015, the deficit will be less than 6 years away from grim and certain death.

It's weird that Flaherty keeps on moving the goalposts because Canada has cut corporate tax rates, oil and commodity prices have been high until recently, 10,980 federal jobs have been cut, America's economy is back on track, and the federal government has made it known that it is overflowing with business savvy. It can't be that Canada's economy is operating sub-optimally in these auspicious conditions, can it? That must be the case, though, because otherwise the federal government is running a structural deficit and that's inconceivable.

Spot the turning points

Friday, December 14, 2012

Championship or Complaining

I think a championship-or-bust mentality has become pervasive amongst football fans, not because they actually care that much about their team winning championships, but because it rationalizes whining about your team every year they don’t win the Super Bowl. This is a win-win for your typical NFL partisan's psyche whose subconscious is craving grounds for remonstrance in a society that otherwise gives him pretty much everything he wants. So you can own your own home, have all your material needs met, your team can go 11-5 then win a playoff game, and you still get to complain about how heartbroken you are by your team's dismal performance because they "fell short." Which they are going to do 96.875% of the time, anyway, in a 32 team league.

It reminds of one more thing I like about Bills fans: they’re proud of the great teams of the early 90s despite the K-Gun never winning a Super Bowl. It would be easy to wallow in self-pity about those four Super Bowl losses but Bills fans are proud of those teams, as well they should be.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Suave Story of My Ubermensch-ability

One time I was staying at the Ritz in Tokyo but I had an appointment with an hb10 over in Edo so I needed some hot wheels, which is a concept related but distinct from Hot Wheels. (I own a lot of both because I am slovenly rich like that.) So anyway I used my iPad 4 to find the closest car dealership. It happened to be Mitsubishi. Now normally I don't tolerate motor vehicles designed, constructed or touched in any way by people who can't document their American ancestry back to their grandfathers on both sides, but as those ivory tower types say, "When in Tokyo, do as the Tokyoers do." So I compartmentalized my American Pride (!) and headed over to that aggrandized urinal of a showroom with my Oakleys on and my looks set to stun rather than kill because I had no time to get caught up in poontang.

All Mitsubishis are, objectively-speaking, rat shit covered in hantavirus but there was one automobile there that spoke to me in the guttural tones of the supermodels I pay to tell me how great I am whilst balls deep. It was a 2012 Mitsubishi Lancer GT, blood red just the way I like it. I could tell that babe of a car needed my hands and only my hands on her steering wheel.

A tiny man came over and started jibber-jabbering at me. He looked lie your ordinary Japanese guy: short. He was a regular Joe Blow Japarino so I disregarded his introduction and addressed him accordingly.

"Joe," I said, "How much does this hunk of feces here cost and don't blow smoke up my ass because my prostate only smokes the finest of Virginian tobaccos."

Joe bowed then in English with an accent thicker than my prodigious wallet he replied, "Sir, 2,499 million" then something unintelligible about when and then he started going on on about the "additional cost" of "mandatory insurance" and "license plates", et cetera, and et cetera.

Now I don't want to brag but I literally concocted the notion of negotiation from the ether (literally!) when I was still in my formative years, so the idea that this spindly squirt of a car salesman was going to upsell me was beyond farcical. I cut him off, "Look Joe, how about I don't pay for all that crap, I give you 100,000 American Dollars for the car right now and you throw in some free sushi so that I don't mention this to my Dad and/or the authorities."

In sad news for Joe, he must not have known who my Dad is, 'cause he started claiming that while the offer was "very generous," I couldn't take the car right in front of us because it was "just a showroom model" and it "needed full parts" or something.

That did it. I was already stooping well below my station in life by talking to this Mitsubishi commoner-beta male-loser and my patience was long gone. My mere presence elevated the value of all the cars in that place by about 375% yet this joker was trying to play me for the fool! So I grabbed Joe by the cheap-ass lapels on his suit, spun him around and executed a suplex just like the Undertaker tutored me, knocking Joe cold out. That certainly got everybody's attention.

A bunch of the women there ran out screaming. A manager appeared on the showroom floor gesticulating wildly with his hands like a man stranded on an island trying to get the attention of a plane. He must have only known one English word because he kept on screaming "NO! NO! NO!"

People who know me know that's not a word I like to hear.

I wasn't going to stick around and continue to receive this verbal abuse so I moved fast. I chucked a fat stack of Benjamins from my fanny pack at the manager, threw unconscious 'Joe' in the trunk, grabbed the entire key rack off the wall, threw it in the car, slammed the door shut, found the right key from the newly-made pile on the front seat on only my second try, put my emergency Styx CD that I mixed myself in the CD player, and revved the engine. Then I pulled up to the giant glass showroom window. But before I made my exit I paused Styx's 1979 Billboard Hot 100 hit "Renegade", rolled down the driver's side window and, using my perfectly calibrated voice+face punchline combo that I mastered with the help of my tutor David Caruso, I drawled, "I guess you could say I'm ... 'Taking Joe for a Lancer!'"


No one there got the joke probably because they are all so culturally backward and can't speak English so I smashed through the glass and peeled out of there for Edo where that hb10 was waiting for me. I was detained by the Japanese FBI for battery, kidnapping, and auto theft en route but I promised to use my connections to give all the cop dudes there some Yankees gear with Ichiro's signature. Then I totally bolted.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Someone should keep with the Joneses

The professional athletic careers of Western New York brothers Chandler Jones, Arthur Jones and Jon Jones offer a good opportunity for a natural experiment to see whether football or MMA cause more long-term brain problems. The brothers have similar genes and upbringing but Chandler and Arthur play defensive line in the NFL while Jon competes in the light heavyweight division in the UFC, all at a very high level.

Concussions!

Football is great because it combines all the head injuries of hockey with the downtime of baseball and the importance of referees in basketball.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Photos & Bombs


You gotta figure the advent of photography and video recording means that we’re less likely to go to war in the future because we have better institutional memory of the horrors of war now than we did before the daguerreotype was announced in 1839 and recording technologies are always getting better. I'm not talking about using technology like the Satellite Sentinel Project does to alert the international body politic about materializing atrocities in real time, I'm talking about countering the unfortunate parts of human nature that are inclined those armed conflict in the first place.

We mouth slogans like “Je me souviens”/“Never forget” on Remembrance/Veteran's/Memorial Day and we pretend that poems like Flander's Fields properly encapsulate the deplorable consequences of battle, but poetic lines about "the crosses row on row" are no substitute for actually confronting images of corpses torn apart by shrapnel, gutted by bayonets, and brutalized by gases. Video can be even more disturbingly effective in this regard.

Until there was a way for the real horror of war to be conveyed intergenerationally it was always going to be hard to make people who weren’t alive for the last great war understand the depth of anti-war sentiment. See WW1. There hadn’t been a major war in a European theatre since the Battle of Waterloo ended the Napoleonic wars in 1815 so when the alliance system brought about mass conflict the citizens of Europe were in the streets ecstatic about the return of cavalry charges and nationalistic glory, not at home bracing themselves for an onslaught of awfulness.* In other words, photo and video might be the best antidote we have for the bleaching effect of military nostalgia.

Maybe I’m just describing Vietnam Syndrome and why it’s a good thing. But there was no Vietnam Syndrome after the revulsion of the first world war so even if photographic evidence can help prevent war, it is still only one of a host of factors.

*: There was the Crimean war in the middle of the 19th century but, as you might have guessed, that was in Crimea.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Conspiracy Theory 5 - Anderson Cooper Is In Energizer's Pocket

Theory: Cable news companies are paid big bucks by battery and generator companies to freak out about storms in order to spike sales. That's why those companies send so many reporters to stand on the beach with the waves crashing and debris flying behind them. The visual taps into the innate human fear of apocalyptic tsunami which prompts the viewer to justify their fear to themselves by thinking about how bad it would be if the power went out. The last step is the mollification of the viewer's anxiety which can only transpire through the purchase of auxiliary power supplies.

I bet if you tracked it, you would see more ads for heavy-duty batteries on CNN during storm season than the rest of the year. If that's not already the case, it should be and someone in the marketing department at Duracell isn't doing his or her job.

This gif is intended to represent panic, not antisemitism

Sunday, December 9, 2012

A fall in the fall

Author's Note: This post was inspired by President Obama's performance in the first debate he had with Mitt Romney. I didn't think he was that bad; people were mostly criticizing him for looking uninterested while Romney was speaking which made no sense to me because I judge people in a debate on what they say, not how they look when they aren't talking. Still, so many commentators blasted Obama for looking down at his notes a lot that I wondered if he did it on purpose because he must have known how the pundits would react and even practiced acting that way in preparing for the debate.


I wonder if Presidents (or other incumbent politicians) ever throw their re-election bids. I mean, what if you work so hard to be President and you find you don’t like the job? People are disappointed with their chosen profession all the time.

On top of the fact that you might find you just do not like being President like you might grow to hate any other job, there are good reasons to not want to have the job of President in particular:
  1. The job doesn’t pay as well as the lecture circuit awaiting an ex-President;
  2. You are responsible in everyone's eyes for so many things out of your direct control (everything from the performance of the economy to -- literally -- world peace) which must be very stressful;
  3. It is impossible to have a normal personal life when you're always in the spotlight; and,
  4. All politicians, but Presidents in particular, have to work very long hours. Like "6am to midnight with 1 week of vacation every other year" long hours.*
In other words, Presidents might want to quit their job because of 1) low-pay, 2) stress, and 3) work-life balance. Those are the same reasons most people want to leave their jobs. But it would be really hard to get people to understand that you don't want to be President so you couldn't just quit like most people.


You might think that if a President grew to hate his (or her!) job that much then he (or she!) would just decline to pursue their re-election and play the "More time with my family" card. You'd think wrong. If they refused to go back out on the campaign trail then they would be pilloried by their supporters for opening the door to whichever nominee the opposing party selected who now got to go against a non-incumbent, which is always easier. Presumably there would be anger over the fact that certain promises made in the first campaign were not yet fulfilled. Plus, a quitting President would get much less money on the lecture circuit and from their memoirs because his (or her!) supporters wouldn't want to spend as much dough to hear the speeches and read the books of an ex-President that let them down as they would of an ex-President that went down fighting.

And that's just talking about the mass of your supporters that you don't know personally. There are inevitably thousands of good friends, bag-men, and political interns who gave up a lot of their money and professional ambition to support your ascendancy. The best example of this would be the President's wife who has to sacrifice in all kinds of ways so that her husband can be President. What if you can't find the words to explain to her and other people why you don't want to this thing that you spent so much to get in the first place? In that case, you'd have to take a dive.

The trick would be to throw the presidential campaign without alienating your “fanbase”. You'd only have to do poorly enough to lose 2 or 3% of the vote in a few key counties since most Presidential elections are so close now.** This would be very feasible in modern politics because political machines and surveying are so sophisticated that you could get terrific information from headquarters about how to "accidentally on purpose" sabotage your campaign with a key "blunder" here or there. You would still appear to be working hard the rest of the time, like a boxer who moves around a lot in the ring but is careful not to land any strong blows before he falls to the mat at the key time. Or you could be leader of the free world. Half of one, six dozen of the other.



 *: May not apply to Presidents named George W. Bush.

**: I think this is because as soon as one issue delivers a clear majority of the voters then both parties will agree on it.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

I'm an ideas man

There should be an abacus or something on weight machines so you can keep track of which set you are on. When I’m doing a set of 5 I always forget whether I am 3 or 4.


Friday, December 7, 2012

Mere Competence

It's increasingly distressful to hear NFL commentators talk about how great the defensive draft class of 2011 is because they'll mention Von Miller (2nd overall), Patrick Peterson (5th), Aldon Smith (7th) and J.J. Watt (11th), but not Marcell Dareus.


Dareus is probably in the best position to succeed that he is ever going to be in (he'll face a lot more double teams when he isn't lined up between Kyle and Mario Williams) but he just hasn't been a major factor in games. He's not a bad player or a bust by any means, but he still represents a missed opportunity by One Bills Drive. There were alternatives available that have already delivered the level of dominant play that you need from a 3rd overall draft pick and Buddy Nix missed them.

Missing out on 1st round picks like that is the sort of thing that Oakland does and I don't want to live my life like a Raiders fan, dreading the start of each new season and lying to myself about how, "wide receivers typically make 'the jump' in their third season and because of the lack of organizational stability on offense it's as if Darrius Heyward-Bey is really only going to be starting his third season this year and Carson Palmer is still young with today's medical technology so we have a chance to compete in our weak division."

Dareus's middling play is so disappointing because getting only a good player with the third overall pick is a great way for a team to remain stuck in a rut of mediocrity. Watching the 2010 Bills was a high price to pay as a fanbase for the right to cheer a 3rd overall pick that mires the team in mediocrity.

I could be wrong, of course. Years of watching the Bills has maybe made me too pessimistic. For example, I was really worried before the season that C.J. Spiller was never going to live up to his draft position and he has made a huge jump in his third season. Next year will be Dareus's third season.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Topnotch

Do armies have an equivalent to air forces' "ace" designation? Like, if you have five confirmed kills on the ground with a rifle do you get to be called an "A-one" or a "tip-top" or something quaint but successful like that? Or am I being misled into thinking this sort of thing is more common than it actually is by XBox game achievements?


Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Like a record, baby

Kids don’t know what a broken record sounds like so they're not going to understand this post. In other words, children have never heard a vinyl disc get stuck in a groove so this joke is going to go over their head. What I’m saying is, youth today aren’t familiar with the propensity of malfunctioning 45s to get stuck repeating themselves so they will not get this reference.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Strong-Arm Tactics

Lance Armstrong has strong legs, not strong arms. Take that nominative determinism.


Counterpoint: Cap'n Crunch is a sea captain and his full name is Horatio Magellan Crunch. As in "Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount" who defeated Napoleon's navy at the Battle of Trafalgar and "Ferdinand Magellan" who captained the first expedition to circumnavigate the Earth.

Monday, December 3, 2012

Mama's Greatest Hits

Over the years Mama has handed out lots of advice. Solicited or unsolicited, it was always sagacious and I've learned to treasure every pearl. I've collected some of her finest here for you along with the vessel she choose to convey her message:

"There'd be days like this." -The Shirelles

"Knock you out" -LL Cool J

"Not to come, that ain't the way to have fun, no." -Randy Newman

"Your life's an open book, don't close it 'fore it's done. The brightest flame burns quickest." -Metallica

"Be careful how you play your cards, be true to self and you’ll go far, try not to break too many hearts." -Kelly Rowland

"Take your time." -Big Boi

"Take your time, don't live too fast, troubles will come and they will pass. You'll find a woman, you'll find love, and don't forget son, there is someone up above." -Lynyrd Skynyrd

"Put down your sandwich and play with your cock n' balls." -Adam Sandler


That crazy matriarch.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Two Thumbs Up

I know there's a fine line between parody and homage but I think Skyfall is the best homage to Home Alone I've seen in a long time. I hope childhood-home-invasion-defended-against-by-booby-traps-with-the-help-of-an-old-woman/man gets added to the list of boxes that have to be checked off by every Bond script, the list that already includes Q giving Bond gadgets and the villain capturing Bond so they can have a heart-to-heart before Bond escapes by grabbing a henchman's gun when the henchman stands too close. (Why do they do this, by the way? If I was a Bond villain I would train my henchman so they could hit a target from further than 1 foot away, then they wouldn't have to stand so close.)

Seriously though, Skyfall is a great Bond movie. I just wished they showed how he kept saving himself from drowning and/or hypothermia.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Raptors After-Action Report - Game 13 (4th quarter)

It's the start of the 4th quarter and the Raptors have a 4 point lead. They've lost their last six games. Let's see if they blow this 4th quarter lead like they have a few (too many) times already in this young season.

-Did you know that Jermaine O'Neal is a Sun now? I sure didn't. I thought he was finished in Boston. Good news for the Raptors, though, as he throws the ball to Ross for no apparent reason. He still sucks as much as we remember him sucking in Toronto. He's been bad for so long that it has become difficult to think back past all of the crapiness and recall a time when he was an effective player. He was an All-Star for 6 years (2002-2007) but he's been replacement level since. If you graphed the quality of his play over time his NBA career would not describe a smooth curving locus like most NBA players. Instead it would look like a bar graph with three flat-topped heights: the first one quite low for when he was an unknown playing on the Blazers, one high bar for when he was elite with the Pacers, then six years near the bottom of the chart for the rest.

-As a ponderously slow big, I think I should model my game after Luis Scola. He seems more effective than he should be considering his level of, you know, "athleticism." As Devlin says about him, “So crafty.” I never get described as crafty, not even when I hid all those Easter eggs in the crawlspace that one year and no one could find them.

-Jack Armstrong on Ed Davis's dunk: "Bring that hammer, young man!" Jack Armstrong is awesome but somethings he sounds like a construction foreman.


-Nice finish by Amir on the oop from Calderon. It made him feel so good about himself that he launched a totally uncalled-for long 2 on the next possession. It bricked. The team should fine Amir every team he shoots from outside the paint. But then he comes back later to finish on the roll and draw the foul. (Scola was slow on the rotation to the surprise of no one.) Amir was set up on the play by yet another nice pass from Calderon, who finished the game with a team-high 9 assists, five more than his closest teammate. Amir and Calderon may have the best PnR chemistry of anyone in the league; their two-man game often becomes the team's offensive staple when they are out there together and for good reason. It's worked for a long time now. They should play all their minutes simultaneously.

-Oh, look, Jack Armstrong has a Movember mustache. I bet the producers asked him to grow it so he and Matt Devlin would have something to gab about on camera coming out of a timeout before laughing too long and too loud. We're having fun!

-Casey going with a deep 10-man rotation. He had five bench players playing in a close game in the fourth quarter from the 11:37 mark until Bargnani and DeRozan came back in with the team up by 3 and 6 minutes left. Unconventional but effective. Bargnani only has two points and a board up this point but Casey is throwing him back out there.

-Welcome to the Pietrus era ladies and gentlemen! It was a long time coming but the man is finally here! He nails a 3 to push the Raps back up 6 with under 6 minutes to play.

-It always seems like a massive defensive breakdown whenever Calderon gets to the bucket for a layup. Jack explains it thusly: “Jermaine O’Neal can’t cover.” Jack was speaking about Calderon's layup specifically but that statement is also true more generally.

-Thank God the Raptors got Lowry because now that he's here Calderon is once again playing like our best player. As long as there is someone in Toronto taking away his starting point guard role Calderon will always show up strong for us.

-I know I just heralded the beginning of the Pietrus era but I don't know about this salvo he's launching from the corner. I don't like him faking the shot to dribble just inside the three point line and jack one up because he is not as balanced when he takes it and long 2s are the bane of offensive efficiency as a general principle. I think the Suns are happy to have the ball end up in Pietrus's hands in the corner right now but that may be just because they know he is integrating into a new offense and won't know what to do with the ball once he gets it and they are hoping he is out of NBA-basketball-shape from being out of the league until recently.

-DeRozan just got bottled up by a single man and then makes it worse by giving up his dribble while he is isolated so there is no one to pass to. Has to burn a timeout; we’ll see if that comes back to bite them. (It doesn't! Yay!)

-Lowry comes back into the game with only three minutes left. He's only played 20:45 at this point despite scoring 14 points on 8 shots while Pietrus has already accrued almost 30 minutes of playing time. Is Lowry injured or something? I don't get it. He is our best player. I think one of Toronto's major limitations right now is that our second best player might be Calderon. That's a problem in itself but it's made worse by the fact that Casey doesn't feel good about having them both out on the floor at the same time. They're effectively limiting each others' minutes.

-Out of the timeout, DeRozan gets blocked at the rim. Story of his career. I bet "Blocked at the Rim" will be the title of his autobiography.

-I really like Gortat. Every team should have a player like Gortat.

-Bargnani with nice feet against the Phoenix PG on a switch. When the PG pump-faked he stayed on the ground to avoid getting charged with the bailout foul. It was pretty close to be honest; I bet if the player he was guarding was (for example) Dwayne Wade and the same play happened, we would have heard a whistle. It also helped that it was the end of the game and the refs don't want to be the deciding factor.

-I like it on fastbreaks when the ballhandler dribbles heads very close towards the defender(s) then lets his momentum carry him and his defender(s) out of bounds after dropping a pass to the trailer. Lowry just did it nicely and it allowed Amir to dunk without being under threat. You have to be careful though to give a bump that is light enough and get rid of the ball early enough that you don't get hit with an offensive foul.

-Jack Armtrong sounds a bit tipsy when he starts singing YMCA during timeouts and picking out single words from promos Devlin is reading to shout out like he's Devlin's hype man. P.S. Why is YMCA being played at this late stage of a close game? It should be more of a “Get on your feet”/”Stay Loud” type thing, shouldn't it?

-Quick shot by DeRozan with 1:15 remaining despite having a lead. Especially egregious because it leads to fastbreak points the other way. Then a turnover by Lowry! Are we really blowing this again!?!

-Answer: No, because Phoenix is equally inept in late-game pressure situations. What the hell was that second last play they tried to run? It never looked like it was close to a scoring opportunity. There were all sorts of passes and handoffs around the perimeter. Then Scola gets it on the block, refuses to pass to his teammate sealing for the layup underneath and takes his time backing Bargani down before missing a harried scoop shot by a wide margin.

-Being able to switch Bargnani onto the ballhandler was a real nice option for Casey to have available when defending the PnR late in this game. (Did Casey put him back out there not for offence but for defence? How weird would that be?) Bargnani forced a big turnover and then a bad shot when guarding the Sun's PG after switches. But the Suns still seem to think they should be going after him because on their next possession they have Scola backing him down in the post. Then they try the same thing again out of a timeout when they desperately need a bucket! Bargnani doesn't allow Scola to score both times and with no help from his teammates!

-The Suns are forced to foul Lowry. He misses his second free throw. That's not "clutch" by him. On the other hand, that buzzer-beating three he hit at the end of the 1st half looks really big right now. It's 99-97 right now with 14.8 left to play.

-After another slow-developing, poorly executed play by the Suns. With the shot clock turned off, Bargnani grabs the defensive rebound (his second total rebound despite playing 27 minutes) and heads to the free throw line. Unlike Lowry, Bargnani hits both shots from the foul line, icing the game. With those two points Bargnani doubles his total to a putrid 4. Bargnani must have been saving his energy.

-Devlin (without feeling): "Raptors win. Raptors win.” Jack: "Say it again, Matt!" Devlin: "A great showing by the Raptors." -> I miss Chuck Swirsky.

-None of the Raptors look happy about having won. Maybe the need a victory song to play in the locker room?

-In summation, the Raptors played the Suns even in the fourth quarter to hang onto their 4 point lead and win the game by that same margin. It was as balanced as the score suggests. Both teams looked unlikely to make the playoffs.

Monday, November 26, 2012

Techno Babble



Because Google's speech recognition is so terrible (and maybe because of Craig Ferguson's accent), the "interactive transcript" for the Youtube video "Best Of Craig Ferguson Moments With Ladies Compilation Vol.7" (above) reads like a poem by a nihilistic narrator in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that governance has fled. In other words, the transcript reads more like the lyrics from Godspeed You Black Emperor's "The Dead Flag Blues" (below) than a verbatim account of a talk show host flirting with actresses by tricking them into uttering double entendres.


I've separated the wheat from the chaff in the transcript only by deleting words and adding punctuation plus capitalization so that you can more easily see the hidden poet lurking in the code at Google Headquarters. There is a server somewhere in the recesses of the dungeon basement at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California that came up the source material for the poem below. All I did was edit it down to a more manageable length.

Senator laws about the media beat.
The other way of knowing?

Anti-tank poetry at sidebar.
Hateful kids in the country
Sitting in weird blood spots
You know I know
A dog searched 
(I was there)
Was easy for dogs for months
Cigarette companies have fun 
Trade conflict suggests it may be
The interests of the peace at heart.
Medicaid spots are booking.
Is that what candidates to Mexico
decided not to waste?
God is like an icon
In all my breasts
The left claimed
I was for a while with friends with compromise
Spit on
Well I'm not going to be doing anything about it
All hunters like trying to help you
Since we're using all
Everywhere handed down
Next year degenerated into state religion
Brain leaving backstage
With your words
You know they were like the roadside unanimity in Virginia
Infected and getting older
That was a physics applied
Health care
Gray hair
Seeing how it fits in there
Too few building incidentally,
Everyone in the combined room
Because I'm not charismatic
I can't handle it.
President on holiday
Your citizenship has married him
Here's the thing: 
It would never work; 
It is going to.

My impulse to seek meaning in the gibberish spewed out by youtube's terrible interactive transcript feature reminds me of the way some users of the computer program ELIZA became very attached to the advice that chatterbot software was manufacturing for them. ELIZA was a program written in the mid-60s so the code had to be simple. Consequently, the programmers choose to simulate a Rogerian psychiatrist, i.e. a doctor that responds to any symptom reported by the patient by asking a meta-question about it. For example, if the patient reports a bad relationship with his or her spouse then the program/doctor responds by asking why the patient has a bad relationship with his or her spouse using simple pattern-matching. Some people would quickly see through the artificiality of this but others got caught up in the exchange and treated it as a real conversation with a human and not a machine.
The lesson, as always, is that we are still a long ways from the technological singularity but the human impulse to anthropomorphize is a strong one.

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Uhhhh...

I can watch a movie and identify a minor actor in his first appearance onscreen despite makeup, costume, and actorly affectations. I can even list earlier movies he was in with a rough timeline. But if you plop me down at a party where I have to identify someone I've encountered a couple times before in a different social setting I have no chance of recognizing their face, let alone putting a name to it or remembering where we've met. This results in conservations littered with a lot of mumbling and generalities as I try to figure out how this person knows me. I think its a condition called aphasia or agnosia or something, I can't remember.


Saturday, November 17, 2012

The Little Mongrel



Look at this dog
Isn’t she fat?
Wouldn’t you think that her diet’s complete?
Wouldn’t you think she’s a girl,
A girl who has everything?

She’s got treats, and snacks, and biscuits.
She’s got big and small kibble galore.
Peanut-butter cranberry pills?
She gets plenty!
But who cares
She’s a dog
She wants more

She wants to be where the people are
Sitting at the kitchen table
Using her front paws to – what’s that word again?
Oh yeah – eat!

Begging at feet, you only get scraps
Thumbs are required for lunching, munching.
Scarfing down a big hunk of – what’s that word again?
Meat!

Up where they sup, up where they feast
Up where they spend all day crunching treats
Wish I could be
Part of that world