Another Memo: I had hoped to get something up before Friday football posts, but I got terribly distracted by The Godfather Saga, on Bravo. The Godfather Saga is a re-cutting of Godfather parts 1 and 2 such that the story is in chronological order. Additionally, there is a bunch of footage that was cut out of the originals.

Many people believe the Godfather 1 and 2 to be the greatest movies ever made. I never agreed. (Are you surprised about that? You must be new here.) Excellent movies, yes, but not the works of awe and splendor that they are often described as. For the record, Goodfellas is the best mob movie ever made. However, the added footage really adds to the story; it fleshes out the incidental characters and just generally better explains the motivation behind the actions that move the plot forward. Still not as good as Goodfellas, but definitely a step up the greatness ladder. Sadly, you cant get the Godfather Saga on DVD. The closest you get, is a multi-CD package that includes all three movies (including extra footage) and a couple of CDs of ancillary "Making of" type nonsense. For 70 bucks. Sorry, I'll pass. Coppola is rich enough. If anyone knows of a way to get just the Godfather Saga on DVD, please pass it along (no I don't mean record it on your Tivo and burn a DVD, but thanks for the offer).

Plus, I am at war with a head cold that is trying to cause me undeserved grief. I must fight. I must win. So for the moment I lack energy for major posting. At least until football Friday.

Memo - From:Me, To:You, Re:Status: I know it's not Friday, but let me just say the football gods smiled upon me this weekend. Which us appropriate since they owe me. Judging from the current state of the Monday night game (in progress as I type), I may actually end up 10-3-1. Unheard of.

I haven't discussed the redesign lately because I haven't been working on it much. I have decided to go to three columns instead of two, because I want to wedge as much of the permanent material up towards the top of the page to draw attention to it. I'm also considering moving from Blogger to something called Moveable Type as the post engine. Most bloggers I know who've made the switch think it is wonderful, but it means temporal deficit spending (i.e. more time than I have). And I'm already unhappy with the heading of the redesign. I just can't seem to make myself go with a decision - I always feel like there is something more I should do first (a microcosm of my life).

The search for a publisher for A Pleasure Doing Business With You continues to cycle through hope and disappointment ad nauseam. It WILL see the light of day - I guarantee. Eventually.

There are only a few episodes of the Sopranos left this year. It has been very uneven - occasional greatness, moments of uncharacteristic vacuity. Once it's over I'll probably do an updated sequel to my HBO original programming review.

Now back to your regularly scheduled posts.

Tube Notes: Speaking of TV, it looks like there is a move afoot to pressure cable providers into providing a la carte programming subscriptions. Apparently, there is evidence to suggest that cable companies are required to do this by legislation. It may be worth a shot to contact your local cable monopoly and see what they say, but I'm thinking it's a long shot. I don't know what there would be to stop them from setting pricing so that a la carte is way too expensive.

In another vein, it seems that HDTV is a girl's best friend. That settles it. Chicks are the new guys.

Vegas Matrix: An utterly absorbing article on Vegas is posted over at Popular Science. It's about seven pages long and it's packed with fascinating info on how Vegas operates beneath the surface.

What made Budz rich, and what has made casinos even richer in recent years, are new digital networks that connect virtually every slot machine in every casino in the country. Wheel of Fortune, for instance, is part of the MegaJackpots system, a network within 18 states and one Native American reservation that encompasses more than 8,000 machines, about half of them in Nevada. Because all these slots are wired together, every coin and bill inserted is monitored and tallied by banks of central computers, often hundreds of miles away. The maximum jackpot, advertised in flashing digits above each cluster of machines, mounts identically and simultaneously with each spin.

All this networking has allowed for a hidden revolution in odds (which I'm not sure I'm clear on).

Every game - slots, cards, sports betting, even bingo - is now attempting to adapt a [Norwegian mathematician Inge] Telnaes-style solution: Decrease the odds without increasing apparent complexity. That allows bigger prizes, which increases - by staggering quantities - the amount of money people are willing to gamble: In gambler-think, 10 bucks for a shot at a few thousand dollars is one thing; a hundred bucks for a shot at millions is another, even if the odds are much, much worse.

The result of this was the money began pouring into Vegas even faster - and so did cheaters.

[No thieves were more efficient] than Ronald Dale Harris, whose job as a software engineer for the state Gaming Control Board was to write slot machine anti-cheating software. Harris surreptitiously coded a hidden software switch - tripped by inserting coins in a predetermined sequence - that would trigger cash jackpots. After retooling more than 30 machines, Harris and accomplices made the rounds, walking away with hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So the casino build up counter-measures

...hundreds of cameras linked to banks of video recorders, software that can match physical characteristics to shared databases of the faces, names, and histories of suspicious individuals - all run from hidden control centers.

And so it goes. Good read. Enjoy.

Football Results - Week 9:There are three stages of primatological de-evolution involved in getting eviscerated by the NFL. You begin the day as a rational intelligent Homo Sapiens, by mid-Sunday a passer-by might mistake you for a retarded Baboon, and by the end, you are the intellectual equivalent to a hydrocephalic Tree Shrew.

• New England +2.5 at Buffalo - Pick: Bills beat the spread. Wrong! This would have been my first clue that things were not going to go well for me. There is just no way this should have happened.


• Minnesota +7.5 at Tampa Bay - Pick: Vikings beat the spread. Wrong! I was counting on a low scoring game, what with Tampa Bay's anemic offense (no offensive TDs in their last two games) and Minnesota being, well, Minnesota. I just thought the 7.5 might be a more appropriate over/under.


• Baltimore +7.5 at Atlanta - Pick: Falcons cover. Wrong! I was happy to see that Baltimore got to Vick - a few sacks, minus 5 yards rushing - of course the net result was that the Falcons didn't cover. Now I'm even more sick of Vick.


• Philadelphia -6.5 at Chicago - Pick: Eagles cover. Wrong! This should have been the blow out - not NE/Buffalo. Apparently Chicago provided the Eagles with their best chance to sleepwalk through a game and still win. So they did. Slackers. Have they no concept of THE SPREAD?


• Pittsburgh -3 at Cleveland - Pick: Steelers cover. Push. At this point in the day, I was declaring this a resounding victory for me.


• Dallas +3 at Detroit - Pick: Lions cover. Wrong! The Lions had more points (9) than first downs (8). You will never see this game on ESPN Classic. Tapes of this game are being used in sleep disorder clinics around the country.


• Cincinnati +3 at Houston - Pick: Texans cover. Wrong! There is a misguided saying about how an exception "proves the rule." Muddleheaded people often say this when something contradicts an accepted belief as justification for continuing to hold that belief despite the contradiction. They think the meaning of the saying is that the existence of an exception only verifies the rule. That is the stupidest thing ever. It's like saying that the fact that the world is round proves that it's flat. In fact, the word 'prove' in this instance is synonymous with 'challenge', not 'verify' (you can look it up). Now, as we all know, it is a scientific fact that any team can beat the Bengals by any amount they wish. At times like this I wish I were muddleheaded enough just to call it an exception that proves the rule. But I can't. I have too much respect for the integrity of science and the scientific method. The only possible scientific conclusion is that the Texans, for unknown reasons, wanted to lose by 35 points. If I were the commissioner, I'd be running a scandal investigation.


• Tennessee +3.5 at Indianapolis - Pick: Titans beat the spread. A Winnah! The Colts are clearly worse than I thought. If the Titans hadn't slacked in the 4th Q it would have been an enormous blowout. I need to keep that in mind for week 10. Have you noticed how far you have had to read before you reached a good pick? Are you still awake, even?


• New York Jets +7.5 at San Diego - Pick: Chargers cover. Wrong! How in the name of all that's holy...ah, never mind. I don't even want to talk about it.


• San Francisco +3 at Oakland - Pick: Raiders cover. Wrong! This is what I was talking about when I implied NE/Buffalo set the tone for the day. Just like Buffalo, Oakland had every reason in the world to win this game. The Raiders appear to be making a ham-fisted attempt at suicide.


• St. Louis -3 at Arizona - Pick: Rams cover. A Winnah! Rams are beginning to show their true colors and I suspect they can smell a playoff berth despite their horrendous start. Apparently that smell of a playoff berth is identical to the smell of Marshall Faulk after a hundred yard game. It's not something I want to dwell on.


• Washington +3 at Seattle - Pick: Redskins beat the spread. A Winnah! It occurred to me, if you don't like Washington because of their racially offensive name, just think of them as the Potatoes. Apropos of nothing.


• Jacksonville +3 at New York Giants - Pick: Giants cover. A Winnah! This was pure luck. There is simply no way to tell if you're going to get the good Giants or the bad Giants. I'd use Schroedinger's Cat as a metaphor but I don't have the energy.


• Miami +4.5 at Green Bay - Pick: Packers cover. A Winnah! This was a real no brainer, which works out well for a hydrocephalic Tree Shrew.

5-8-1. And that good only because of a heroic comeback in the night games. Maybe I should just play Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Point-Spread to get my picks in the future. So that leaves me at a politely humble 12-14-2 for the season.

Football Picks - Week 10: Like a battered co-dependent I keep coming back for more.

• Indianapolis +9.5 at Philadelphia Colts beat the spread. If Philly couldn't beat Chicago by 6.5 last week, how are they going to beat Indy by 9.5? Also, note how I am already ignoring what I said about Indy in last weeks results.


• Cincinnati +5.5 at Baltimore Baltimore covers. I remain blinded by science.


• Detroit +10 at Green Bay Lions beat the spread. OK, so I'm out on a limb. But Green Bay is due for a bad game and all they have to do is slack off when they have a big lead in the fourth quarter so the Lions can beat the spread.


• Minnesota +1 at New York Giants Giants cover. I'm counting on Schroedinger's Cat living and the good Giants showing up at home.


• Atlanta +5.5 at Pittsburgh Falcons beat the spread. If I'm so sick of Vick, why do I keep picking Atlanta? Beats me. All I need is a close game here. Ideally, Vick gets hammered and the Steelers win by a field goal.


• San Diego +5.5 at St. Louis Chargers beat the spread. Same as above. St Louis is in pursuit of that smell, and San Diego is waffling, but all I need is a close game.


• Houston +10 at Tennessee Texans beat the spread. I just can resist betting on teams to beat these double-digit spreads.


• New Orleans -5.5 at Carolina Saints cover. The only bad game the Saints have played was against the Lions. Just win by a TD. That's all I ask.


• Washington +3 at Jacksonville Potatoes beat the spread. I've gone with Washington for no good reason the last two weeks and they've come through, so I see no need to change.


• Seattle +3.5 at Arizona Seahawks beat the spread. If Seahawks Head Coach/General Manager Mike Holmgren doesn't win eventually he's going to have to fire himself.


• New England -3.5 at Chicago Patriots cover. Truth be told: I'm not all that confident in my picks this week (unlike last week - guffaw!), but if there's a no brainer this week it oughta be this one. If I'm wrong, well, I'll just have to edit this post.


• Kansas City +6 at San Francisco Chiefs beat the spread. I still maintain that the Chiefs are better than their record. That whimpering you hear is the sound of me begging for yet another close game.


• Miami +3 at New York Jets Jets cover. It started out well, for the Fins. They got hot early. They beat the Patriots in one of the most exciting football games ever. Then the injuries started. WR Gasden and, more importantly, QB Fieldler. To call backup QB Ray Lucas ineffective is overly kind. Now even he has an injury and is questionable, which brings up the prospect of third stringer Sage Rosenfels, who looked like a lost child in a crowded airport for the handful of plays he ran on Monday. (What kind of name is that for a football player? Sage isn't a QB, it’s an earth tone.) The Fins pull Cris Carter out of the HBO studio to bolster their receiving crew, but he’s clearly not comfortable yet. Now they are looking to pull Troy Aikman out of the Fox studio to solve their QB woes. That might actually work if they had more time - but no way can these two sports announcers get it all together for a run this year. At this pace, they'll be lucky to make the playoffs.


• Oakland +5.5 at Denver Raiders beat the spread. Yeah, it's hard to imagine Denver not winning at home. But all the Raiders have to do is make a game of it. I keep hoping that vaunted Raider attitude will come through and prevent them from losing these high profile games. Now would be a good time for that to happen.

Writers Are, Like, Smart Guys, You Know: OK, this is self-serving. I came across a couple of articles about how brilliant and wonderful writers are, so I think you should read them. First, this article about pre-discovery - the act of explaining a cosmological concept long before it is discovered by physicists. Turns out Edgar Allen Poe pre-discovered the big bang and black holes, in his own way.

More impressively, David Lodge, author of a bunch of comic novels (including the delightful Changing Places), provides a longish read on how and why we may get the best insights about human consciousness from fiction.

There are some thinkers in cognitive science, or on the fringes of it, who have acknowledged as much. Noam Chomsky, for instance, has said: "It is quite possible... that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology." The reason is that science tries to formulate general explanatory laws which apply universally, which were in operation before they were discovered, and which would have been discovered sooner or later by somebody.

Works of literature describe in the guise of fiction the dense specificity of personal experience, which is always unique, because each of us has a slightly or very different personal history, modifying every new experience we have; and the creation of literary texts recapitulates this uniqueness (that is to say, Jane Austen's Emma , for example, could not have been written by anybody else, and never will be written by anyone else again, but an experiment demonstrating the second law of thermodynamics is and must be repeatable by any competent scientist).

Well, of course I think so.

May I Suggest Hooked On Phonics?: Long time reader and all around good egg, Inne ten Have, passed along this hilarious sound bite. An Australian radio station was giving away ACDC CDs, all the guy who called in had to do was spell A-C-D-C. One suspects a good deal of Foster's Lager was involved in this. (It's about 850K, it'll take a minute or two to download.)

Thank You Sir May I Have Another: You may have been following the scandals surrounding University of Michigan basketball (yeah, it's local, and it's my alma mater, so I'm going to rant a bit) wherein Chris Weber and others members of the now infamous Fab Five of the early '90s accepted loans from some numbers runner while they were on the team. This is, of course, forbidden by the NCAA and U of M faced punishment. Today the president of U of M announced preemptive punishment which should no doubt satisfy the NCAA poobahs once they take up the issue.

"I am determined that nothing like this will ever happen again at Michigan," [UM President Mary Sue] Coleman said. "Let me say loud and clear: Integrity is our top priority."

To prove this, she announced the following punitive steps.

* U-M will forfeit all games won while the four players were ineligible, including the 1992 and 1993 Final Fours, the entire 1992-93 season, and all the seasons from fall 1995 through spring of 1999. The University has removed four championship banners from Crisler Arena and will remove all references to the victories from all written materials.

* U-M has promised to repay to the NCAA about $450,000 in revenue for postseason play with the players.

* The basketball team will not participate in the 2003 NCAA Tournament or the post-season National Invitational Tournament.

* The basketball program will go on probation for two years.

This is insane. What, exactly, is the point of forfeiting an entire decade of games? What does that achieve? And removing all references to the victories from all written materials? Huh? This is like Pharaoh removing all references to Moses in the Ten Commandments. Even Pete Rose hasn't been erased from the baseball record. All that does is make the written materials inaccurate.

And what sense does it make not to play in the postseason this year? Deny your current team - none of whom had any contact with the known crooks, all of whom want every opportunity to play in high profile situation for the scouts and were probably thinking about that when they were recruited - a chance at post-season accolades because of something Chris Weber did 10 years ago?

Pay the fines, fire anyone associated with the crooks, take the hit on future recruiting, be contrite, then move on. That's all you have to do. It'll hurt enough. Coleman appears to want to flagellate everyone in sight, guilty and innocent, so she can pat herself on the back over her image of integrity. But the real costs to real people don't justify her exercise in moral indignation.

Weekend Warrior: I know I promised not to post about football until Friday, but let me just say 5-8-1. Ah, well. Despite that, I had a good weekend. I played hookey on Monday because HRH Miss Anna was in town with her Mom and friend, Kate and Katie respectively. We had a great time scurrying all around Ann Arbor including a visit to the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum. Highly recommended, if you have critters to entertain. Equally fun for the girls was crossing the diag. Needless to say, the 10-year olds were thoroughly unimpressed with the college scene, instead preferring to classify everyone they saw into one of five categories, solely on looks. Everyone was either a Geek, Jock, Problem, Independent, Freak, or Gay. It's good to see they are well prepared to be shallow, yet popular, teenaged girls. Anyway, a it was a truly great day from start to finish.

What To Read: The best thing I've come across from web reading lately is Business 2.0. They post the entire print magazine - for free - a couple of weeks after it hits the stands. This month you get a look at the latest Mercedes and all the high tech stuff that keeps a ham-fisted driver like you from mangling it.

Not that you'd smoke in this car, of course. That wouldn't be good for you. And this would displease the SL, since virtually every system onboard is focused on making things safer for you, the hapless, error-prone human. Are you taking that corner too fast? Not to worry. By now, one of the 13 sensors tucked between the coils and the car body has noticed your foolishness, and the car has already tightened the suspension to eliminate 95 percent of the body roll. Have you wigged out a bit in traffic, slammed the brakes into a spin? Well, actually, the SL would not have let you endanger it like this. When it sensed you were getting into trouble (by analyzing the time elapsed between when you removed your foot from the electronic throttle and when you hit the brakes), it launched a host of countermeasures to ward off your clumsiness.

Who needs a chauffeur? Then there's a quick note about a scary new soft drink. Lots of good reading. Peruse when have the time.

Halloween is the New Christmas: Good grief. I'm sorry, but it's really gotten out of hand.

It starts with a hyperthyroidal fruit; gutted, and carved to resemble a disembodied head. We do this for the sake of entertaining the children, then we're shocked when the teacher wants to know why little Billy keeps saying, "It puts the lotion in the basket."

Then there are the witches with long noses and warts and cackling laughs, and zombies with deformed faces and eerie speech impediments, all designed to scare us silly. Let's see, Rosie O'Donnell, Howard Stern, Ozzy Osbourne, Michael Moore, Anna Nicole and Dennis Franz's butt have all gotten air time in the past few years. You do the math.

Next, we are subjected to a thirteen hour marathon of Friday the 13th movies, where we witness minor horrors such as graphic depictions of beheadings, to major horrors such as dialog like "Jason is out there. This isn't a game. You'll be sorry you didn't listen to me." Ya think?

The costumes are intended pay homage to demons and terrifying creatures of the underworld, which apparently would place Spiderman and the Powerpuff Girls as minions of the Dark Lord. OK fine, if little kids want to dress up that's OK, but it's not OK for adults at work. I just can't get comfortable with my pasta marinara being served by a waitress with a fake axe embedded in her head. (Aside: Best costume I ever saw was worn by a guy I lived with in the dorm who went to a party in preppy clothes with a small bullseye drawn on his forehead. It was a JFK costume. One sick, sick puppy. Cracks me up to this day.)

And just like Christmas, it's excruciatingly drawn out for weeks before hand so we can drown in cheesy decorations, excessive refined sugar, and tedious TV reruns.

There's only one good strategy for dealing with Halloween. Barricade yourself in your home and turn off all the lights and cower like a camp counselor hiding from Jason and hope the trick-or-treaters don't notice you.

Football Picks - Week 8: I'm reserving Friday for football posts for the rest of the season. Just in case this bores you.

• New England +2.5 at Buffalo Patriots cover. Bills beat the spread. [[correction 11/3/02 - it should be obvious that I meant to pick the Bills to beat the spread. I am admitting this even though it makes me wrong. I will use this occurance in the future to prove just how honest I am.]] The Pats are sliding and Bledsoe would just love to put the nail in the coffin. Bills should cruise at home.


• Minnesota +7.5 at Tampa Bay Vikings beat the spread. Minnesota looked alive last week, but the Bears don't quite have the Bucs defense. Still even if the Bucs shut 'em out they'll probably only win 6-0.


• Baltimore +7.5 at Atlanta Falcons cover. As much as my heart tells me I am sick of Vick. My head says the Lewis-deprived Ravens don't stand a chance.


• Philadelphia -6.5 at Chicago Eagles cover. They should win by at least a TD.


• Pittsburgh -3 at Cleveland Steelers cover. Pittsburgh is a great team just hitting it's stride.


• Dallas +3 at Detroit Lions cover. Cowboys have nothing to play for. Yikes. Did I just pick the Lions? I feel faint.


• Cincinnati +3 at Houston Texans cover. The coach of the Bengals has guaranteed a victory. Now, let's stop and think about that. He's trying to motivate his players by guaranteeing a victory against an expansion team with a human blocking dummy as a quarterback. If you truly believe you are a good team and want to motivate your players, guarantee a victory against the Packers or Steelers. Guaranteeing a win against the Texans is like saying "Yeah, we totally suck, but not totally totally." Meanwhile, the Texans are thinking "They couldn't beat a JV High School team, but they guarantee they will beat us? Let's kill 'em!" The strategy needs work, is all I'm saying.


• Tennessee +3.5 at Indianapolis Titans beat the spread. The Colts annoyed me by losing last week. This week they may annoy me by winning, but I'm hoping it's only by a field goal.


• New York Jets +7.5 at San Diego Chargers cover. This strikes me as a no-brainer. The only way this fails is if the Chargers are winning by like 21 at half time and then fall asleep while the Jets snag a couple of cheap TDs and only lose by 7.


• San Francisco +3 at Oakland Raiders cover. Ooh, this is a nasty one. Oakland is not playing it's best, but they are certainly a great team. I'll give them the nod at home, against arch-rivals, and hope as a veteran team they will respond to their current crisis.


• St. Louis -3 at Arizona Rams cover. Five losses followed by 2 wins and a bye. Last week I noticed that many teams are beginning to approach their pre-season expectations. I'm betting the Rams are coming into form.


• Washington +3 at Seattle Redskins beat the spread. Similar to last week's 'Skins/Colts game - a meeting of two underachievers. Last week, I picked the Colts and the 'Skins won. This week I'll pick the 'Skins. You see, I got a pretty complicated system going here.


• Jacksonville +3 at New York Giants Giants cover. Giants only perform well every ten plays or so. Still, that should be enough against the Jags and their spit drenched coach.


• Miami +4.5 at Green Bay Packers cover. The line on this game dropped from 5.5 down to anywhere from 3.5 (MGM/Mirage) to 4.5(Caesars/Hilton) after doubt was expressed over the status of Brett Fraverver. Even if he doesn't play the full game, the Fins still need Ray Lucas to get himself sorted out, Chris Carter to integrate properly, and a 72 degree temperature at game time for them to succeed. Not likely.

A Pocket Full of Links: Just a few things I've been carrying around. No oddities or news of the weird, just quality links to prove I am not turning into a 24/7 football-head.

• I wrote a brief eulogy for one of my favorite sites, Arts & Letters Daily, a little while back. Well, I was delighted to find it has crawled back from the grave. Good news.


• Apart from being chock full of fascinating archaeological info on the Egyptian Valley of Kings, The Theban Mapping Project, deserves some kind of award for site design. How I wish I had broadband.


• In the Halloween vein, two sites that involve freaky faces. First, Photoshop manimals - people and animal photos semi-morphed together. Strangely gruesome, yet I can't look away. Or you can build a completely human face by combining the top and bottom of two others. Not sure which is more freaky.


• The New York Times provides a quick overview of the the state of modern cosmology. It seems the odds on favorite theory of existence involves innumerable parallel universes co-existing with our own. I don't know about you but I'd pay real folding money to go to a universe that was just one infinite Bellagio.

Football Results: After all my whining, things didn't turn out as bad as they could have.

• Oakland -3 at KC: Pick: Chiefs. A Winner! KC really is better than their record.


• Chicago +1 at Minnesota: Pick Bears. Wrong! Randy Moss has spent the better part of the season dropping passes. Last week Duante Culepepper seemed just as happy to throw interceptions and get the game over with. Sure enough, they wait for me to pick against them to play like they were supposed to all season.


• Atlanta +4 at New Orleans: Pick Saints. Wrong! I'm sick of Michael Vick. There I said it. Maybe I'll register SickOfVick.com. I hate how everyone thinks he's God's gift to whatever. I hate how he goes out of the way to say exactly the proper and respectful thing, when it's completely obvious that it's not even remotely what he's thinking. Yeah I know none of 'em mean it but he obviously doesn't mean it. He needs to go down. I hope some vindictive, mean spirited defensive end clotheslines him. He needs to be slammed to the point where the facade drops and he chokes and folds in a game and goes nuts toward the press afterwards. Funny it usually takes me a long time to get all contrarian with the latest version of Superman, but not this time.


• Cleveland +3 at NY Jets: Pick Jets. Wrong! I really had no idea on this one. It was fifty-fifty. So 'I don't care' is the story I'm sticking to.


• Pittsburgh -2.5 at Baltimore: Pick Steelers. A Winner! The Steelers, with a storybook backup QB and a backup running back who looks like he could start for just about any team in the league, trounce their division co-leaders. Pittsburgh is righteously set up for the rest of the season.


• Detroit +7 at Buffalo: Pick Bills. Push! Next week I'll find half-point lines so this won't happen.


• Tampa Bay -7.5 at Carolina: Pick Bucs. Wrong! I was right that Carolina would have trouble scoring at all. I just didn't realize Tampa Bay had such an atrocious offense. Lesson: Never pick a lame to beat a spread more than 3 points.


• Tennessee -5.5 at Cincinnati: Pick Titans. A Winner! Like I said, it is scientific fact that any team can beat Cincinnati by as much as they want. Which is why, when the Cincy running back had a great shot at the winning touchdown late in the game, he tripped over his own blocker and got stuffed. It was all in the name of science.


• Seattle +2.5 at Dallas: Pick Cowboys. Wrong! Emmitt plays over his head as expected. Seahawks QB goes down. Dallas should have been a shoo-in. Stupid Cowboys.


• Arizona +8 at San Francisco: Pick 49ers. A Winner! Just as expected. Nothing to see here. Move along.


• Denver +3 at New England: Pick Broncos. A Winner! Yeah, the NFL is starting to get past the early season weirdness and pre-season expectations are starting to be realized. Everyone discounted the Pats as a fluke and it looks like it was just a matter of time.


• Houston +10.5 at Jacksonville: Pick Texans. A Winner! If it weren't for an offensive line that turns David Carr into a human blocking dummy, the Texans would be a solidly mediocre team.


• Indianapolis at Washington (pick 'em): Pick Colts. Wrong! The big question is will Spurrier find a way to change QBs despite the victory.


• NY Giants +7 at Philadelphia: Pick Eagles. A Winner! The Giants played with verve and fire...about every 10th play. When Donovan McNabb made a long touchdown run to close out a 99-yard drive, the Giants just kind of jogged along and watched. Check out the replay, you'll see what I mean.

Best comeback of the week award goes to yours truly. Early in the day it looked like a bloodbath, but I came through to end up 7-6-1. One very small cheer for me. Next week's picks coming soon.

Luck Be a Lady: Sadly, the NFL is not a lady - it is a malevolent force; it is a vindictive manifestation of all that is evil; it is a load-bearing bar matron of despair. I'll review the carnage later. For now, here's what I did in Vegas.

Weekly Picks: As promised, NFL picks. This could be fun.

• Oakland -3 at KC: Oakland showing chinks in their armor. KC at home and underrated. KC beats the spread.


• Chicago +1 at Minnesota: Minnesota beat Detroit, and Detroit beat Chicago so, ipso facto, Minnesota should beat Chicago. Except Chicago lost a frustrating game to Detroit last week and should be looking for payback, whereas the Vikings seem to have pretty much packed it in. Chicago beats the spread.


• Atlanta +4 at New Orleans: Atlanta is having a good run primarily because QB Michael Vick is a good runner. But no team that depends on a running QB every really makes the top echelon. New Orleans is a monster and they're at home. New Orleans covers.


• Cleveland +3 at NY Jets: The Jets just trounced a lousy team (Minnesota) and Cleveland just squeaked by a lousy team (Houston). NY Jets cover.


• Pittsburgh -2.5 at Baltimore: Tied for the division lead, but Pittsburgh is better than their record and motivated to make up for their horrible start. Baltimore is at home, but Ray Lewis probably won't play. Pittsburgh covers.
  
• Detroit +7 at Buffalo: Detroit actually has a glimmer of hope for the future these days thanks to Joey Harrington's remarkable play for a rookie. But it's not the future. Buffalo covers.


• Tampa Bay -7.5 at Carolina: After a lucky start, Carolina is showing their true colors. They will be lucky to score at all. Tampa Bay covers.


• Tennesee -5.5 at Cincinnati: It is scientific fact that any team can beat Cincinnati by as much as they want. Tennessee covers.


• Seattle +2.5 at Dallas: The Cowboys only goal will be to get Emmitt at least 93 yards so he breaks Payton's record at home. That means either a) the Cowboys extra incentive to establish their running game makes means they can pass successfully and win, or b) the running game never gets off the ground and they have to get Emmitt 50 carries to get him the record because he is getting inches per carry. I guess (a). Dallas covers.


• Arizona +8 at San Francisco: 49ers looking to make up for last week should win handily. San Francisco covers.


• Denver +3 at New England: Patriots do not look as invincible these days, but then neither do the Broncos. I would have put the line on this battle of Wolverine QBs at dead even. Denver beats the spread.


• Houston +10.5 at Jacksonville: Even though Jacksonville will rack up 47 sacks, 10 1/2 points is a big margin. Houston beats the spread.


• Indianapolis at Washington (pick 'em): Washington certainly has something to prove and Indy is not as impressive as their record. But Indy is still the better team. Indy wins.


• NY Giants +7 at Philadelphia: Philly is a powerhouse. It's also a Monday night showcase (which means they get an extra day to prepare). Philly covers.

Ugly Is As Ugly Does: You know that Cadillac commercial - the one where the guy is driving a beautiful '50s era convertible and he's stuck in traffic. Suddenly he pulls off onto a long straight country road, Led Zeppelin is playing, supposed to symbolize freedom from the stifling world in some way, I assume. So he's cruising along happily in his old Caddy. Then he starts seeing new model Caddies: one passes him - it's driven by a woman who is checking him out - he spots one of those behemoth Escalades, he sees the latest roadster. The idea is to link the amazing new Cadillacs to the long tradition of fine Caddies going back to the '50s convertible he's driving.

But there's a minor problem that seems to have eluded the Cadillac marketing team. The new Caddies are BUTT-UGLY. I mean really really nasty looking. GM produced the ugliest car ever in the Aztek, then obviously applied the same philosophy to the entire Caddy line up. Wretch. The front ends of those cars look like they were assembled in the course of a Junkyard Wars episode gone horribly wrong. Then they draw a direct comparison to that gorgeous, stylish '50s convertible. You have got to be kidding me. Perhaps the Americans with Disabilities Act requires Cadillac to hire a certain number of blind people. This would rate high on the Unintentional Comedy Scale, but it's even too dumb to be funny.

A Million Days of Folding: I used to participate in a distributed computing project called Folding@Home, which was an effort to create a mathematical model of protein folding. Proteins do all the heavy lifting in molecular biology and they go through a process called folding, which we don't really understand in detail because modelling it requires an enormous amount of computational power. Folding@Home, a research outfit out of Stanford U., attacked this problem by taking these computations, breaking them into small pieces and distributing them to volunteers all over the world, who used their personal computers to complete their portion of the computation, return the results, then pick up another portion. These computations run as background processes on the volunteers' computers, using processor time when it would be otherwise idle (which for most of us is probably about 90% of the time), working like a screen saver. As a result, Folding@Home was able to complete a million days of processing in just a few months, according to MSNBC. This system just yielded their first success, a model of the folding of a protein called BBA5. I don't pretend to understand the science behind it, but I'm pretty sure this is a Good Thing. (I sure wish I could still participate in the project, but you really need a persistent internet connection and the only one I have access to is at work, where running distributed clients is forbidden.)

Punch It In The Face: This comes via Sheri (who's moved - update your links). It seems a very large adult male cougar was recently killed by a car - not in the wilds of Wyoming, not on a lonesome back road in New Mexico, but in Kansas City. There's a comforting thought. Opinion seems to be biased towards it being wild; no indications it was raised in captivity. If so, it will be the first wild cougar in the area for 100 years. A victory for conservation, sure, but what about the rest of us? What should we do if we run into one of these things without a car to protect us? The answer: "Don't run, he said, because you can't outrun a cougar. Do yell and make threatening gestures, he said. Spread a jacket to appear bigger. If a cougar attacks, fight back with whatever means available, such as punching it in the face." So flip him off and start screaming "You want a piece of me! Huh? You want a piece of me! Well, here I am! Bring it!" If he attacks get all Bruce Lee with yourself on his nose. Yeah, that'll work.

Coming Attractions: I've been working on my Vegas article. With luck it will appear by the end of the week. Without luck next week some time. Luck...Vegas...there you are. Also, after my all too brief foray into sports betting, I've taken a deeper interest and been reading about the theorheticals. I'd like to dabble some more, but I think the nearest sports book is pretty far away, and there's no way I'm going to trust the Internet or some Wiseguy wanna be to make book for me. In the mean time, I may share a few picks with you, just to see how I'd do. No laughing if I end up in the virtual poorhouse. Target Friday for picks.

Black and White and Read All Over: Courtesy of The Legendary KK, we see you can tell a lot about a person by what they read. (BTW, I read the WSJ.)

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

2. The New York Times is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The Washington Post is read by people who think they should run the country.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand the Washington Post. They do, however, like their smog statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country, if they could spare the time, and if they didn't have to leave LA to do it.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and they did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.

7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren't too sure who's running the country, and don't really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

8. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who's running the country either, as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.

9. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure there is a country, or that anyone is running it; but whoever it is, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feministic atheist dwarfs, who also happen to be illegal aliens from ANY country or galaxy, so long as they are Democrats.

10. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.

11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

Roam If You Want To, Roam Around the Web: I swear, if I keep this up I'll eventually come to the outer edge of the Internet. Beyond here, there be dragons!

• File this one under "P" for Places I Could Waste Spend A Lot Of Time. Gizmodo is a weblog of gadgets. Excuse me, I'll be back in a while. Hold my calls.


• File this one under "A" for Another Place I Could Waste Spend A Lot Of Time. I'm not really sure what Levitated.net is all about but I keep clicking through to see what's behind all the intriguing images.


• Summer is gone and if you need a reminder why winter sucks, just think Slip 'N' Slide. They didn't have all these cool models when I was a kid. This is the only reason I would want a yard.

A Little Bit Of Night Posting: I hit these rogue waves while surfing. Luckily I didn't wipeout.

• IBM renounced a patent on tracking whose turn it was to go to the bathroom. Now we are all free to queue as we please with fear of violating patent law. "By disclaiming it, IBM now relieves the general public of wondering whether they would have been a target of this patent." And the general public can relieve themselves.


• This guy only wants simple dignity and respect for his chosen way of life. The latest oppressed minority: Cannibals.


• A Lucasfilm employee appears to be headed for the pokey after releasing Star Wars: Attack of the Clones into cyberspace. This probably cost George Lucas about $30.00 give or take. The ones I feel sorry for are the investigators who had to frequent Star Wars chat rooms looking for pirates. I hope they got hazard pay - those places will shrivel your brain.


• Joe Bob deserves a talk show. But I don't think a talk show audience would survive in the absence of comforting banality.


• I'm a sucker for Retro Groovy Lounge music that's been updated for the new millennium. Score, Baby seems like a good source for such stuff. It's loaded with reviews and samples. (The design could use some work - you know me and design.) They also promote this cool looking stream, Exploitika. Too bad they require broadband.


• Some people can't just appreciate art for art's sake. It's all got to be about facts and coherence and reasonable physics.


• I just got an idea for a screenplay for one of those Women in Prison movies. I'll make a mint.

A Light, Airy, Free-spirited Whine: I don't feel much inspired to keep up on the latest happenings. As such, I haven't been posting much.

I had a fine weekend - saw Caesar and Cleopatra (although I have no idea what the yoga-guy is doing in the background of that picture), a pretty good rendition of my favorite play of all time. I may have more to write about it in the future...but not until I get my Vegas write-up done (it's got a ways to go).

I've been having fun following the Dolphins, who won one of the most exciting games in history Sunday night. Here's a cute tradition: Each year, every member of the 1972 Dolphins, the only NFL team to have an undefeated season, keeps a bottle of bubbly on ice and cracks it open when the last unbeaten team of the season is defeated. That happened to be Sunday when the 0-5 Rams beat the 5-0 Raiders. Go figure. (Thanks to TMQ for that tidbit.)

Speaking of redesigns (we were, weren't we?) mine is going slow - I keep waiting for the point where everything will come together and I will get beyond feeling like an idiot re: Cascading Style Sheets. Interestingly, Wired News has recently done a redesign to separate content and structure, which happens to be what I'm trying to achieve in my own small way. I don't know if the design itself is so great, but the philosophy is sound. Hmmm. How lame is that? I'm attracted to the philosophy of a web page. I need a life. Bad.

This is something I never thought I'd say: I want to see an Adam Sandler film. I'll pause while pick yourself up off the floor... Punch-Drunk Love is getting good reviews and was written and direct by Paul Thomas Anderson, who directed Boogie Nights, which happens to be one of the best films of the 90s (I've mentioned it before). When, ok if, I actually get around to seeing it, I'll write it up for ya.

Sorry about all the parenthesis in this post (it's been kind of stream of consciousness). I've got some print media to catch-up on and I'm sure I'll have some good material next time around.

Note: This would have been up yesterday, but Blogger was hosed.

Here's To Your Health: Thanks to Kimba (via CVM):

In Japan, the fat intake in the average Japanese diet is very low, and the heart disease ratio is lower than in the United States and the UK.

However, in France, the average fat intake is very high, and yet, the heart disease ratio is lower than in the United States and the UK.

In India almost no one drinks red wine, and the heart disease ratio is lower than in the United States and the UK.

In Spain, everybody drinks too much red wine, and the heart Disease ratio is lower than in the United States and the UK.

In Algeria, the average sexual activity ratio is very low, and the heart disease ratio is lower than in the United States and the UK.

In Brazil, everybody has sex like crazy, and the heart disease ratio is lower than in the United States and the UK.

Conclusion: Drink, eat and screw all you want. It's speaking English that kills you.

R.I.P. Arts & Letters Daily: One of my favorite sites of all time, Arts & Letters Daily, recently
folded. I am truly saddened. It was always one of the first places I visited when trolling for posts, full of links to brilliant, qualitative articles, essays, book reviews, and all things aesthetic. I'd like to contact the editors to see if they have plans for a resurrection as a subscription service. I'd pay. I know many others would too. I'd even lend an editorial hand if they needed one. If anyone has an email addy for the former editors, please pass it along.

Dead Trees on Blogging: Is there anyone who isn't blogging? There are about three-quarters of a million known bloggers just using the blogger.com service, which is one of several services available. Needless to say, with that kind of coverage, blogging is obviously not the most efficient road to fame and fortune.

I have never seen any stats regarding the life-expectancy but I expect it's on the short side - it's very easy and cheap to start blogging, the effort is required in keeping at it. The other thing about blogs is that only a tiny fraction have any sort of interesting content. The rest are laundry lists of what people had for lunch or how much they hate everyone in their high school and other sorts of flatulence of the mind. (No, I won't be so insulting as to give you links to such sites.) I'm convinced that, in time, the faddishness will wear-off and the quality sites will bubble to the forefront. I hope this place is one of them. In the mean time, if you're interested in putting thought and effort into your blog, you may want to get some advice on how to do it right; there are lots of guidebooks available. From where I sit the most important thing to understand is that blogging is writing - the basics of good writing apply. Clarity, conciseness, and relevance to your audience are key.

Is It Wednesday Already?: I'm getting pretty much of nothing done but the funny thing is, if you asked why, I couldn't tell you. Sadly, I don't expect it to get any better for the next couple of weeks, so expect some slow going. Sorry.

You can check out the recent changes in the ongoing Pointless Redesign here. When it's done I'll have a lot to say about the reasoning behind it.

And I'm still working my way through Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It is mesmerizing - not what I would call a light read. There are some gruesome moments and some fairly explicit scenes. Fortunately he never goes so far with them that they become tawdry or excessive. Mostly it's filled with striking imagery and atmosphere, which is fascinating to me from a technical literary standpoint.

In any event, here are a few sites and stories that I have been accumulating. Apropos of nothing.

• The music industry continues on it's long road to self-destruction, having been found guilty of anti-trust behavior by price-fixing CDs. Upon the announcement, all the folks in the music section of Border's let out a collective "Duh." 67.4 million in cash and a further 75.7 million in free CDs. A drop in the bucket as far as these guys go, but the big hope is that this will alter future behavior. More commentary on the topic over at Blogcritics


• In a more interesting CD development, you can have your name etched into a CD that will be sent to Mars for safe keeping. Let's hope the Martians don't inundate us with junk mail.


• The 2002 Ig Nobel Prizes have been given out, and have generally received more press than their more serious brethren. Of course, anyone who has ever purchased a used textbook will appreciate the Literature prize winner's research on highlighting.


• These guys finally invented a machine that can see through things without emitting X-rays. As if they haven't been working on this since they got caught sneaking in the girls locker room in junior high. My only question is, how long until we have X-RAY SPEX?


• "Gosh, how can we increase attendance at this small Pennsylvania school? We need something to stop all these high-schoolers from heading West. Wait! I've got it!" Then later, "OK, we've suckered a bunch of fools who fell for the whole "California" caper, but now we've got a reputation for being a bunch of fools. We need some smart people. We need real nerds. Wait! I've got it!" Leonard Nimoy was unavailable for comment.


• I always like an aisle seat for easy entry and exit and access to the overhead. As close to the front as possible please, I don't like that annoying wait to get off the lousy plane. Of course there are exceptions, sometimes the extra room or solitude of an exit row is worth it. For folks like me, who put WAY too much thought into this, Seat Guru is your good friend. Your BEST friend, however, is a first class upgrade.


• Well I got my wish. In my HBO essay I prayed that they would re-run the Larry Sanders Show. And Lo! Bravo is doing just that. They have to edit it a bit naturally, but it remains one of the two finest comedy series ever (along with Seinfeld). If you don't get Bravo, this is worth the price of the upgrade.

Pay No Attention, I'm Just Passing Thru: I had a fairly productive weekend - I managed to make some good progress on the pointless re-design, and more importantly, I got some fiction written for the first time in what seems like forever (but is actually just a week or so, I think). I got a couple of good leads on a publisher for A Pleasure Doing Business With You and lots of other stuff too trivial to mention. I know I still owe you a recounting of my Vegas escapades - that should be fun. More to come...eventually. Stay tuned.

Word To Your Anchor CNN has instructed its newscasters to invoke words like 'homey' and 'flava' in it's news reports in an effort to attract younger viewers.

MEMO

From: AOL/Time-Warner, Staff Headquarters
To: Staff journalists
Re: Attracting Younger Viewers

As many of you are aware, recent surveys have revealed that viewership of CNN and CNN-Headline News has started to skew heavily to an older audience. While we are deeply honored by the appreciation we get from our mature audience and, in fact, have held a series of staff training exercises designed to raise awareness of age discrimination, we must also acknowledge that the young people are our future. Recent studies confirm that the 18-49 demographic will substantially outlive the 50-85 demographic.

As such, we are adopting a policy of controlled urban slang in relaying news items. Urban slang is a vocabulary style first used by inner-city people of color on recordings of a music style known as Rap or Hip-hop. It has since become very widely used as a form of communication amongst more mainstream younger persons, including those not of color.

Prior to attempting to infuse news copy with more a 'hep' style, it is important to assimilate some typical dialog. For this purpose we strongly recommend going to genuine sources - our focus group study indicates that reading of scholarly works on ebonics theory and renting a Denzel Washington movie will not suffice. Analysis shows the best results are achieved using the following techniques:

• Watching music videos on BET, paying special attention to overweight, male artists.


• Visit the local Abercrombie & Fitch and eavesdrop on the conversations of the young people around you. Do not attempt to buy anything as that may cause your name to appear in federal child sex offender databases.


• Viewing movies in the House Party series. You may submit a reimbursement request for rental or purchase of one movie. There is no need to view more than one since they are nearly identical.


• Purchase CDs from the Rap (or Urban) section of Tower Records. You may submit a reimbursement request for up to three CDs. Be wary of Vanilla Ice, Marky Mark, or Backstreet Boys as they may sound genuine to the uninitiated.

Remember, before you make use of any entertainment media it is appropriate to review the HR guideline document entitled Copyrighted Works: When What's Yours Is Really Ours.

To gauge your progress, please speak the following sound bites in front of a mirror and honestly assess your authenticity. If there is a teenager nearby, be sure to get feedback:

• Ken Lay gone buckwild then he bounce hisself right outta here.


• Saddam step to The Prez. The Prez say bring it.


• Martha Stewart gone all scarface. Damn! Bitch is whack.


• The Andrea Thompson is some Crazy Coochie.

Note that you may accentuate your authenticity with the use of certain gestures. The most common is to extend your right arm at a 45 degree angle, tense and splay your fingers, then deliberately draw your arm down and across your body. It is best to time this gesture to coincide with the dominant word in the phrase you are speaking.

There will also be company-wide initiatives to garner support for our new, youthful image. First, dress policy has been updated to allow for the wearing of baseball caps. Note that the caps must have a CNN (or other AOL/Time-Warner affiliate) logo, and must be worn backwards. Second, we will have a new tagline to be used in all CNN branded communications. The new tagline is "It's all good," and will be used in the new telecast voiceover by James Earl Jones: "This is CNN - It's all good". Additionally, CNN operators will greet all callers with "Thank you for calling CNN. It's All Good. How may I direct your call?"

We want to assure everyone that our youth initiative has the full support of senior management and working together in the dawn of this new millennium, we can make CNN young, stylish, and mad def. Yo.

Barb the Bard: This is too much. In an anti-war speech, Barbra Streisand quotes Shakespeare. Only she doesn't. The Shakespeare quote is a hoax, from an email that has been floating around the internet. Read this. This is just too good not to be real. Here's her quote:

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded with patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.

Shakespeare was a good writer who wrote in verse. That is not good writing. That is not verse. That is twaddle. I mean look at that wording, “it both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind.” Surely, that is the work of a semi-literate political science major. Let's update it:

Beware the celebrity who comtemplateth the navel in order to whip herself into an egotistical fervor, for self-importance is a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the mouth, just as it reveals vapidity. And when self-importance has reached a fever pitch and the mouth runs on incessantly and the head is devoid of matter, the celebrity will have no need to engage in self-promotion. Rather, the media, infused with mindless awe and blinded by fame, will offer up all sorts of air time to the celebrity, and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Babs.

Walk Like an Egyptian: P.J. O'Rourke visits Egypt and finds, not surprisingly, he's got the tourist spots to himself. "The traffic is too scary. We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world. (God, if he's a Darwinian, may be similarly aghast at life.)" Also read the follow-up interview.

The Best In College Education: From the demon Clear Channel, what your favorite bands and comedians will charge to perform at your alma mater. You can get ICE-ICE-BABY! for a mere 5 grand. Creed, on the other hand, command in excess of 150k, despite the fact that their music is used by riot police for crowd dispersal. The ones that kill me are the ones labeled "generally available". In some cases, like Hootie and the Blowfish or Kansas, you gotta figure that pretty much describes their lives.

Coming Soon on ESPN-7: Remember that Monty Python skit about the Committee for Putting Things on Top of Other Things? Apparently it wasn't all that silly. CAUTION: this is for trained professionals only. Be sure to get the instructional video from the "Speed Stacks Store."

I Wanna Go To Floooorida: Speaking of bad sports, this whine has gone sour. I'd be happy to let stupid fans boo me for 6.25 million, in case the Mets are listening.

All I Want For Christmas: This private island, just five minutes from Venice. You can visit, but you'll have to pitch in for beer.

That To Which I Have Been Up: I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things (Vegas lingers), by that I mean I'm giving in to distractions again. The re-design is going slowly, the latest problem being that the new design renders reasonably in Internet Explorer, but unreasonably in Netscape/Mozilla. Chalk it up to a learning experience, right? I guess I needn't be in any rush, since it's a re-design for re-design's sake - and to force me to learn some new HTML/CSS techniques.

Again, I find myself distracted by the twin Japanese imports of author Haruki Murakami and the band Pizzicato Five. I've been engrossed with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle which you can get a taste of from the reviews at Amazon. It is as at least as fascinating as is sounds. Meanwhile, Pizzicato Five's super-expensive import This Year's Model is playing on repeat in my car CD player. It's delightful. Yes, the lyrics are in Japanese and so I don't understand a word, but the exuberance shows through. Lucky they have a big catalog to keep me going for a while.

I've also developed an deeper interest in the NFL, which I haven't really had since I was a wee lad. It got me wondering why. Part of the reason is that my favorite boyhood team, the Miami Dolphins are monstrously good this year (so far) and part is that I got sucked into a minor fascination with betting on the games in Vegas (therein lies a tale for the future), but I think the main reason is ESPN Page 2. The sportswriting there is terrific, it goes way beyond standard sports journalism - it's packed with wry commentary, sarcasm, hyperbole, and all the stuff that makes reading fun, along with some genuine insight. As I began reading Page 2 a few months ago, I wasn't really clued in to sports enough to pick up on every reference, but they were having so much fun that I wanted in on it. That's what made me realize what the source of many interests I've adopted over the years. It's the quality of the writing.

Years ago I found myself interested in libertarianism, even though I have very little interest in political philosophy anymore. But I was attracted to the writings of people like P.J. O'Rourke, Florence King, David Brooks, etc., who just seemed to be having a blast while writing some really clever, refined stuff. Before that, I remember reading all sorts of books centered on WWI after I stumbled on the excellent, The Great War in Africa, by Byron Farwell who is a great storyteller in addition to being fine a historian.

I don't think I could overstate the affect the written word has had on my life.

So anyway, my current fascination is ESPN Page 2. Try Greg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback:

The Rams have forgotten how to block. (Note to the Rams O-line after watching the Monday night game -- the trick is to stand in front of the guy you are blocking. Do not step out of his way and watch him go by! Try to get in front of him. It's a technique thing.)

Or anything by Bill Simmons:

I'm ashamed to admit this, but Monday night I went to see the new Drew Barrymore movie "Riding in Cars with Boys," accompanying the Sports Gal as part of our "She won't bitch about the fact that I spend seven hours every Sunday watching football if I escort her to an occasional chick flick and don't bitch about it" deal. Savvy, huh?

I only have two hopes with chick flicks: that they're short and that there's a cute actress prominently involved. Needless to say, since "Riding in Cars" lasted for 140 interminable minutes and the wheels came off the "Drew Barrymore is a babe" bandwagon about three years ago. I spent the last 45 minutes trying to pull a piece of metal off the bottom of my seat so I could jam it into my jugular vein.

Oh, and then there's an odd fellow named Hunter S. Thompson.

Dig in. Have fun. Great writing. Atrocious editing (S. Thompson Hunter????), but I can forgive that.

And if I start making obscure sports references, you'll know why.

Viva Las Vegas!: Woooo Baby! Sweet suites, rhythmic Blue Men, pyramids of glass, triple double diamonds, blistering heat and scalding sun, skywalks, jacuzzis, aquabats and dancing water, comp beers in the sports book, iron chefs, chocolate souffles, and wacked-out cabbies with winning football picks.

Needless to say, I'll need a couple of days to recover.

Oh, and as expected, Northwest Airlines remains Northwest Airlines.

Little Green Men: Those zany technoids over at Slashdot have posted my book review of Little Green Men by Chistopher Buckley, at long last.

Now I really have too much to do to be here, so like I said before, I'll be back in a week-ish. I'm going now... OK here I go... Really... OK this time for sure...

Scoop D'Jour : Slashdot still hasn't posted my book review. They must be a bit backed up. I'll give 'em another a week and then I'll make other arrangements. You'll see it, one way or another.

I'm making some fitful, frustrating headway with the re-design. It involves my first extensive use of Cascading Style Sheets and, as such, there's been a lot of trial and error. You can take a look at where it's headed. Although this will mean nothing to most of you, I am trying to make it as standards compliant as I can for the sake of consistency of presentation across browsers. Also to that end, there are no tables used for page formatting - this, I have taken on faith from trusted sources, is a Good Thing. Comments are welcome and encouraged. (The design is not entirely original. I'll pass along the appropriate credits once it's all in place.)

The bad news is it will probably be a week-ish until you hear from me again as the next several days will be busy, busy, busy. For now here are some links to hold you over.

• Doin' time - For CEOs and politicians, Forbes provides a timely guide to the best in prison accomodations.


• Spendin' dough - Also via Forbes.com, if you're lucky you got to spend a billion before you got locked up.


• Sailin' away - It's been years since I did any sailing, but I still keep an interest. America's Cup (or maybe it should be New Zealand Cup) sailboat racing is a remarkable spectacle. Only multi-millionaires need apply and then only if you can back up your entry with super-advanced technology. The world's most expensive day sail. The other end of the endurance spectrum is the solo circumnavigation of the Around Alone race.


• Bigger and/or Better - Lots of ideas about what to do at ground zero. My favorite is #2 on this page. Surprisingly (or perhaps not) submitted by someone from Kuwait.


• Wrong again! - Once again, in the face of a highly dramatic crisis, journalism chokes like Cass Elliot on a ham sandwich. Believe nothing you read. Ever. (Except from me, of course.)


• Best Movie Title Ever - It'll be a lame movie, for sure. But then all you need is a good title and the PR folks handle the rest.

Sight Unseen: I'm without material to give you for the moment, primarily because I have a book review that is supposed to be published on slashdot, but it hasn't appeared just yet. Hopefully soon. I've also been making good progress on a site re-design - good enough that I'm confident it willl happen, I just don't know when. Plus, Friday was my birthday (don't ask), so I've been distracted by the millions of cards and letters from my fans (not). Combine all that and, temporarily, I'm empty handed. Hopefully I'll be able to link the review, and maybe some other material, this week some time. Hang tough.

You have offended my family, and you have offended a Shaolin temple: I never tire of watching Enter the Dragon, even when it's ripped to shreds and laden with commercials like it was on TBS the other night.

This movie has two things going for it.

First, the fight scenes are amazing - proving that you don't need Matrix-esque slow motion or Crouching Tiger tree-walking for a quality fight scene. It's all done with camera angels, editing, and Bruce Lee. The lack of technical enhancement as a crutch means they remain the best fight scenes in cinematic history, in my not-so-humble opinion.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, it has no peer when it comes to pegging the unintentional comedy meter.

Let's start with Jim Kelly. Jim Kelly is utterly stupefying. I don't know what sort of activity he was engaged in during the filming of this movie, but it wasn't acting.

My favorite scene: Kelly has just whipped his opponent and his buddy, Roper (John Saxon), has just taken some money from a dorky looking guy who was willing to bet on the fight. It's now Roper's turn to fight so he asks Kelly to keep his fish on the line. While Roper is fighting, we see Kelly negotiating with the fish. Finally, after Roper allows himself to be knocked down three times, Kelly turns to the fish - and this is part I love - the fish holds up two fingers as an offer. What the two fingers mean, we don't really know. Then Kelly looks thoughtfully at his hand, extends three fingers and gleefully thrusts them up as if to say, "Ha! You have extended two fingers, whereas I have extended three! Three is one more than two! You are owned!"

Then, Kelly turns back to Roper to subtly indicate it's OK to start kicking butt. So he squints his eyes and gives Roeper a barely perceptible nod - because, as everyone knows, if you squint your eyes it's harder to see you.

See what I mean? Stupefying. You just can't script comedy like that.

Another great scene: Roper is in his quarters at night when the buxom matron of the place comes by leading four girls from which Roper is asked to choose one for the evening. (This was 1970s action movie morality at its
pinnacle.) The girls parade past the camera. The first two are pretty cute, the third not so, and the fourth, well, let's just say somebody must have lost a bet.

In the midst of this linear decline in aesthetics, John Saxon (Roper) has to deliver the line, "Each one more lovely than the last." With a straight face. A thespian tour de force. Seriously, it was a career moment there for Saxon. He gets the Patrick Stewart Award for making inept dialog sound reasonable.

And did you ever see The Kentucky Fried Movie? It was one of those skit-based, eighth-grade-level toilet humor movies that came out at the intersection of the '70s and the '80s. It's mostly bollocks except for one extended parody of Enter the Dragon entitled "A Fistful of Yen." The thing is, I had seen the parody before I saw the original. I was stunned when I found that much of what was in the parody was in the original word for word.

Here is a brief exchange from Enter the Dragon:

ROPER: "And who are they?"
DR. HAHN: "Refuse. Found in waterfront bars."
ROPER: "Shanghaied?"
DR. HAHN: "Just lost, drunken men who don't know where they are, and no longer care."

When I first saw that, I thought they had edited out the rest of the exchange which went like this in the parody:

LU: "And who are they?"
DR. KLAHN: "Refuse. Found in waterfront bars."
LU: "Shanghaied?"
DR. KLAHN: "Just lost, drunken men who don't know where they are, and no longer care."
PRISONER #1: "Where are we?"
PRISONER #2: "I don't care."
LU: "And these?"
DR. KLAHN: "These are lost, drunken men who don't know where they are, but DO care. And these are men who know where they are and care -- but don't drink."
PRISONER #4: "Wait a minute -- I don't know where I am."
PRISONER #3: "Yeah, and I don't drink."
DR. KLAHN: "Guard!" (to #4) "Do you care?"
PRISONER #4: "No."
DR. KLAHN: "Put this man in cell number 1 and give him a drink."
GUARD: "What do you drink?"
PRISONER #4: "I don't care."

The tone and acting in the original is so perfectly similar to the mockery of the parody that the exchanged seemed unfinished.

If you haven't seen Enter the Dragon, you should. In terms of number of imitators, it would be hard to overstate it's influence on film and video to this day. And get the Kentucky Fried Movie, too, and you'll see what I mean.

It's Not Like I'm Not Trying: I was hoping to have some more original content for you, and I found a couple of articles in dead tree publications that I was going to dissect, but just my luck, they aren't available on-line. Plus, I've been working on a new book review that should be out relatively soon so I'm afraid all I have to offer is another set of quickies. Mo' better stuff soon.

• Off the wall home runs - If you've ever watched ESPN Sportscenter you know they have all sorts of cute phrases to describe home runs in the highlight reels. My favorite is "Bring me your finest meats and cheeses!" Another great one: "He hits that one so deep, it's Freudian!" Heh-heh. I'm not sure about "I am Vexorg, destroyer of cats and devourer of chickens!" I'll have to give that one some thought.


• Diamond anniversary - Television just turned 75. Happy birthday and such, but judging from my last three posts (see below) TV might be showing it's age. Of course, the Sopranos starts Sunday, so maybe there's life left in the box.


• Kid Fails Science, Parents Cheer - A long article documenting the errors in middle-school level science text books. The errors range from minor typos: "...teacher's edition says a coulomb is 6.25 times ten to the eighth electrons. The correct value is larger by ten orders of magnitude. It should be 6.25 times ten to the eighteenth," to plain stupidity: "The reader is told that the distance traveled by the roller coaster in a certain time is its average speed. That is nonsense," to the truly bizarre: "...Linda Ronstadt [is] described in 1997 as a silicon crystal doped with an arsenic impurity." Alrighty then. Millions of foreign students strive to attend U.S. university every year. I guess we now know why they aren't queued up for middle school.


• Prosperous cheaters - On the other hand, maybe those students are just here because it's so easy to buy term papers. (A minor character in Apple Pie made money doing this. Just so you know it wasn't my imagination.)


• Peter Parker's snack of choice - Soon you will find Tarantula jerky at your local mini-mart. File under "E" for Eeew!


• "I can't find my mouth" - "And at the end of the night, they will even reveal what customers have actually been eating." I bet they're serving spiders.

Linkapalooza: The usual random assortment of HTML musings.

• Heaven is middle management - at least compared to those jobs. My favorite is from 2001. I wonder if that's the official title. How do you make that sound good on a resume?


• It's a matter of fitness - I'm actually quite glad they don't have these classes at my gym. My gym shorts don't have pockets for twenties. Those of you in LA may want to attend the 7pm Wednesday class. Pass along a full report.


• A Rogaine moment - I know a girl who once said "if Ben Affleck was any hotter he'd be on fire." Perhaps his hair burned off. I have to laugh.


• Good, Bad, Ugly - Quick reviews of books, music, and news from web-writers of all flavors.


• Life's a beach - If you read about my Florida vacation and you need a bigger beach fix, visit the good doctor.


• Duck! - P.J. O'Rourke takes life in hand and teaches his ornithophobic wife to hunt birds. Bravest man in history.

The Wolfe is Extinct: Well, after the reality hillbillies and that dispicable swim-in-the-cess-pool show (see last couple of posts), I thought TV couldn't get any worse. Then I read this message from A&E.

To All NERO WOLFE Fans

A&E has been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with such dedicated and talented professionals as actor/director Tim Hutton, and writer/executive producer Michael Jaffe, the team whose passion and creative vision for NERO WOLFE have made it such a truly distinctive drama series. Mr. Hutton and Mr. Jaffe, along with (Maury Chaykin, Bill Smitrovich, Colin Fox) and the rest of this hardworking and talented cast and crew, were responsible for bringing to life this classic mystery series, each week, to devoted viewers in the U.S. and in Canada.

We at A&E remain extremely proud of NERO WOLFE. It is a high quality, beautifully produced and entertaining show, unlike anything else currently on the television landscape. Although it performed moderately well amongst tough competition for two seasons, it simply did not do well enough for us to be able to go on making it, given the current television climate.

A&E will continue to air encore presentations of the first and second season of NERO WOLFE in the coming weeks and months.

We certainly appreciate your support for the series and for the network. We appreciate the time and the care you have taken in sending us your letters, cards, and emails to let us know how strongly you support this wonderful show.

We hope that since you love NERO, you will continue to enjoy the encores, and that you will tune in to enjoy some of the other specials coming up, including Lathe Of Heaven, starring James Caan, Lukas Haas, airing in September, The Lost World, starring Bob Hoskins and Peter Falk, and our documentary special Old Friends, hosted by Academy Award winner Julia Roberts. As well as a number of our weekly documentary series including Biography, City Confidential, Minute By Minute and American Justice.

Thanks again. We appreciate your thoughts and feedback.

Nero Wolfe had the best acting on TV. Dirtbags. Lousy dirtbags. And then the gaul of trying to fob off their pathetic pedestrian fare in place of Nero Wolfe! Lousy, stinking, dirtbags. You would think they could spare one hour of programming a week for the sake of dramatic quality. It doesn't matter when; run it at 3AM, I have a VCR. Lousy, stinking, scum-sucking dirtbags.

Breathe: A media mogul is the most powerful man in the industry. It has been rocked by sex scandal. The big players live lives of extravagant luxury. There is dissension and resentment among the rank and file. The marketing is shameless. The cost outrageous. The competition cutthroat.

Now guess the industry.

Nope, try again.

Nope. Sorry, you'll never get it.

It's the Yoga industry.

"Be successful" is the new mantra of the yoga universe, which has become so competitive that trying to crack the big leagues is far more difficult than it was even a few years ago. But how do yogis in our covetous culture separate themselves from the pack without violating asteya, the yama that strictly forbids stealing? For millennia, the intricate techniques of yoga were passed down freely from teacher to student. Today they form a collection of highly marketable intellectual properties -- a phenomenon that has only encouraged some rather unenlightened behavior.

[Yogi] Bikram says there has been so much stealing of his "hot yoga" techniques during the last few years that he had to spend $500,000 in January for a lawyer to trademark his sequence of 26 asanas, or yoga poses, as well as his word-for-word monologues describing how to do them. Thus yoga, the franchise, was born. "People were doing illegal things," Bikram growls. "I had to stop them."

At Jivamukti in New York City -- the downtown studio with 2,000 students per week and a website that lists 51 celebrity clients, from Steve Martin to Monica Lewinsky -- owner David Life complains that several former teachers have set up shop nearby, offering the same method he painstakingly developed with co-owner Sharon Gannon during the last 17 years. "They're not calling themselves Jivamukti, but the staff is almost 100 percent certified through our training program," Life says, adding that he might consider taking action if they start using the word Jivamukti -- which, naturally, the couple has trademarked.

How long until the Sopranos move in on this racket? These folks should devote more time to their downward dogs or they'll all end up in corpse pose.

Reality is Sick: As I implied below, the hick reality shows may be the stupidest thing ever. But the stupidest people ever are the ones who will participate in Sick Day.

TV bosses are making the sickest reality show - with contestants trying to get as many illnesses as possible.

In Sick Day, three lads will live in the same house for two months and try to catch ailments like nits, lice, flu, venereal diseases and warts.

Oh, heck, don't bother to click through. I'll just quote the rest.

It is being made as a pilot for digital channel E4 by Princess Productions, which also makes breakfast show RI:SE.

Teacher Ray Downing, 23, from North London, auditioned for the show and said: "I was shocked when they told me what it was about.

"It’s up to contestants to find ways to catch the disease, but they talked about snorkelling in sewage."

Contestants were told they would be paid and that a doctor would make sure they did not become too ill.

An E4 spokeswoman said: "None of the illnesses will be life threatening."

John Beyer of Mediawatch UK, which fights for TV decency, said: "This proves reality TV is scraping the bottom of a very deep barrel."

Are you kidding? They've scraped through the bottom of the barrel and underground into the septic tank (where one of them said, "Ew, man, could you imagine snorkeling in this?" and the other said, "That's the ticket!")

This just can't be real. It's satire. It must be. Somebody tell me it's satire. Please.

Y'all Come Back Now - Y'Hear?: As you may have heard by now, we're about to be treated to something along the lines of The Reality Hillbillies on CBS. Yep, they are planning on finding some backwards rubes from the south, transplanting them into a big ole mansion (with a see-ment pond), giving them a ton of money and putting it all on TV. Now, you're probably thinking, "It's been done, it was called The Clinton Administration," and you'd be right, but what they are really looking for is a reality version of the Beverly Hillbillies.

Think of the tie-ins. Reality Ellie Mae goes on The Bachelor looking for a husband. Reality Jethro on Survivor: Appalachia (squeal like a pig!). Reality Granny chasing around some trampy trailer-trash teens with a frying pan on Jerry Springer. Reality Jed runs for mayor and gets endorsements from Ross Perot and the NRA.

You think I'm kidding? No, I fully expect that about three years after this show has had it's run, we'll see Reality Ellie Mae try to salvage her career by posing in Playboy, and we'll be treated to a Biography episode where we find Reality Jethro was a moonshine addict and only found peace when he joined AA and fought Jesse Ventura in Celebrity Boxing. Reality Granny will turn up as a TV private eye on the WE network, with Jerry Van Dyke as a sidekick/love interest, courtesy of the makers of Matlock. Reality Jed will be running for president and have the support of Larry King and Ted Nugent.

Every day, the news is full of horrible tragedies - violence, poverty, oppression, poisonous flying monkeys - and yet, I can't imagine anything more depressing than this.

Actually I can. It's the reply from Fox. They are going to reverse the formula by taking a some rich and/or famous folks and have them live is a rural backwater. Yes, it's a Reality Green Acres.

I weep. Can somebody spare a small glass of hemlock?

I, Me, Mine: Ah yes, my favorite topic: ME.

First, a review of Apple Pie in the Daily Bruin (the UCLA newspaper) that came out last November. I have no idea how I missed it these last ten months, but it's a pretty good one.

Overall, the novel reads like an Asian version of "The Wonder Years." Mostly, it is full of some of the best prose about the current state of college life in America. More than that, the novel narrates the struggle to become an American, despite ethnicity, race and social class.

Empahsis mine (tee-hee).

Second, is my somewhat longish essay about my recent Florida vacation: The Gold-Plated Swamp. Sadly, my tan has faded.

It's a long weekend so I should have more soon.

Transcendent Poetry: I find great art works provide all sorts of philosphical insights into human nature and gloriously noble examinations of mankind. This quote rivals the best of Shakespeare for its beauty and wisdom:

So I jump ship in Hong Kong and make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas. A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I'm a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald ... striking. So, I'm on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one -- big hitter, the Lama -- long, into a 10,000-foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga ... gunga, gunga-galunga. So we finish the 18th and he's gonna stiff me. And I say, "Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know." And he says, "Oh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness." So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.

Vegas, Baby. Vegas. A fabulous article at Wired about a group of super-genius card sharps from MIT that actually beat the house at Vegas.

For six years in the 1990s, Lewis was a principal member of the MIT Blackjack Team, an infamous cabal of hyper-geniuses and anarchistic whiz kids who devised a method of card counting that took the gaming world completely by surprise. Funded, in part, by shadowy investors and trained in mock casinos set up in classrooms, dingy apartments, and underground warehouses across Boston, Lewis and his gang used their smarts to give themselves an incredible advantage at the only truly beatable game in the pit. A baby-faced card-counting team possessed with impressive mathematical skills - here was a novelty that turned blackjack into an arbitrage opportunity. Their system was so successful, it took nearly two years before the casinos began to catch on - engaging in a cat-and-mouse war with the well-trained MIT conspirators.

They played the age old game of card-counting - if you remeber the Vegas scene from Rain Man, you saw a ham-fisted dramatisation. It sounds like there were two keys to the scam. One was working as a team to trade signals and track cards so as to make it look like the winner wasn't counting cards (counting cards gets you thrown out in Vegas) and worked against the typical Vegas security profile of card counters

The real genius of the MIT scheme was how it turned the casinos' own profiling techniques against them, using stereotypes to camouflage the big money bets.

The MIT team thrived by choosing [big players] who fit the casino mold of the young, foolish, and wealthy. Primarily nonwhite, either Asian or Middle Eastern, these were the kids the casinos were accustomed to seeing bet a thousand bucks a hand. Like many on the team, Kevin Lewis was part Asian, and could pass as the child of a rich Chinese or Japanese executive. "When you're recruiting, you don't recruit white kids. They look conspicuous. Asian kids, Greek kids, dark skin fits in better with lots of money in the casinos. White 20-year-olds with $2 million bankrolls stand out," explains Andrew Tay, one of Lewis' teammates. "A geeky Asian kid with $100,000 in his wallet didn't raise any eyebrows."

Plus, they used sophistcated statistical techniques.

Two of the tricks that became a staple of the MIT system, shuffle tracking and ace tracking, exploit a concept called the nonrandom shuffle. Because of time constraints, blackjack dealers cannot achieve completely random redistributions during the shuffle. This means that certain packets of cards remain close enough together to be "tracked" through the deck. By watching a group of low cards, for example, it's possible to cut the deck (players assist the dealer by placing the cut card into the shuffled stack) in such a way that some low cards never have to be played. Likewise, a good shuffle tracker can "predict" a string of high cards and raise his bet even before the count goes positive.

But perhaps most importantly the did an enormous amount of simulation ahead of time.

After passing the Spotter test, Lewis moved on to the [big player (BP)] exam. Called to a table midplay, a BP has to take the running count and convert it into the more accurate "true count," by estimating how many cards are still left in the shoe. That's because a count of plus 10 - a ratio of 10 extra high cards to low left to be played - has a much higher value when there is only one deck left in the shoe, as opposed to six. Once the true count is established, a BP has to determine the proper bet. On the test, Lewis was asked to make highly complex decisions - such as when to split pairs against certain counts - while Martinez and Rosa graded his play from across the room.

In time - but only after years and millions in winnings - the casinos caught on.

The article is an excerpt from an upcoming book on the subject. I'm betting it will be quite a good read.