Late Friday Double: Here, have some popcorn.

I'm not sure what to make of Harold Camping's prophecy marketing campaign for his impressively wealthy radio network has been deafening.  Given that natural disasters just don't respect time-zone boundaries, his forecast of worldwide earthquakes was ridiculous on its face.  If there must be a Rapture, I'd rather see it occur this way.

On the other hand, I did discover this version of "Popcorn" this morning.  Even though the Orquesta Cubana De Música Moderna covered Gershon Kingsley's famous instrumental way back in 1972, it's still a surer sign of the apocalypse than anything Family Radio could put out.


Here's the version that became an international hit, from Hot Butter.


My cat Scooter was watching the Sharks-Canucks game rather intently last night.  That's about as much rapture as I expect to witness this weekend.

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That's no dog whistle

When New Gingrich calls Barack Obama "the food-stamp president," should that be interpreted as a racist dog-whistle, as some cable-news anchors are suggesting?  No amount of GOP standard-issue proselytizing about the benefits of tinkle-down economics can hide the fact that applying the term "food stamp" to a non-white politician is just plain racist.  Yes, white people do use food stamps, but when politicians invoke that term -- or any other phrase that implies poverty -- they're almost always hoping that potential voters first think of African Americans.  It's racist code, and that makes it red meat for racist neo-Confederates who invariably support demagogues like Gingrich.

Of course it's not a dog whistle, you cable-news morons.  Its a f*cking bullhorn, mounted atop a f*cking SUV that's clogging up a busy freeway at rush hour, blaring its f*cking racially-coded message to commuters who'd rather be listening to music.

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Indulgences from TBS (both of them)

Things I should totally hate, but didn't:

Three years ago, in the head offices of Warner Brothers, some people were celebrating the brilliant scheme they had just devised to draw viewers away from Iron Man.  It wouldn't just be an action movie, it would be a live-action version of Speed Racer -- yes, that silly 1967 anime.  Better yet, it would be directed by the Wachowski boys, who would fill the frames with enough CGI effects to rival Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.  How, wondered these WB marketing whizzes to themselves could this plan to beat Iron Man possibly fail?

Um, because no one wanted to watch a Speed Racer flick that looked like a Sky Captain ripoff?  As someone who loved the original anime as a kid, I might have been in the target audience; but even I wanted no part of this.  Not unless someone else was willing to pay for the ticket, the overpriced concession food and the small military unit to drag me away from the screens that were showing Iron Man.  Helloooo, $30 million dollar loss.

Fast forward to this weekend.  I never developed the desire to fork over cash to even rent the Speed Racer DVD, but the movie was airing on basic-cable TBS, good ol' Turner Broadcasting System.  That's not costing anyone any extra, so why not give it a try?

As it turned out, the movie did have its positives.  The casting, especially of John Goodman and Susan Sarandon as Speed Racer's parents, worked nicely.  Corinne Orr, who voiced Trixie in the U.S. dub of the original anime, made an amusing cameo as one of the dozens of race-car announcers, as did real-life play-by-play man Andrés Cantor.  [Sadly, no shouts of goooooooooooolllllllll!.]

Generally, the movie's tone stayed faithful to the anime -- but that turned out to be its biggest problem.  Snake Oiler, the Monster Car, Inspector Detector and several new-for-the-movie antagonists would each have been worth two or three anime episodes, but the Wachowskis packed them all into a 135-minute flick.  Even without the annoying visuals, it was literally too much for even composer Michael Giacchino, normally a terrific film scorer, to handle.  Hell, Richard Wagner couldn't have scored this mess.

On balance, I didn't like Speed Racer, and I can't recommend it, but nor did I hate it.  I did change the channel at one point, to catch the season premiere of Aqua Unit Patrol Squad 1.  That's 15 minutes of my life that I did, in fact, get back.

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Also snaring my attention during a recent channel-surfing sesson:  a Ninja Warrior marathon on G4.  I don't like extreme sports, even though real athletes play them.  And unlike the Speed Racer movie, I refuse to watch embarrassing obstacle-course shows like Wipeout, even on free TV.  The Japanese TBS, the Tokyo Broadcasting System, combined these in 1997 into a biannual special called Sasuke.  The original episodes are three-hour TV affairs in the homeland, but here in the U.S., G4 parcels them out in half-hour episodes of Ninja Warrior.

Ninja Warrior works mainly because the four-part obstacle course is genuine.  Of 100 contestants, maybe ten even reach Stage 2, and they are, to a man, genuine athletes.  [Some are even Olympic athletes.]  If even five of those survivors make it to Stage 3, it's an accomplishment.  Some tournaments don't even bother with Stage 4, because there's no one left to try it.  Every tournament has its pretenders, including Japanese celebrities; but even they are a cut above the poor fools who get humiliated on the likes of Wipeout.  If you want to avoid them, fine; just tune in five minutes late.  I didn't expect to find Ninja Warrior compelling, but now I have something to watch on G4.

New episodes are airing, and that actually sucks.  I'm going to have to choose every Friday between this and new episodes of Discovery Channel's Dual Survival.  Nuts!

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Tuesday Football: Administrivia edition #1

Just going all over the place on football matters.

Playoffs, playoffs everywhere:  It sucks to be Schalke 04 tonight.  Die Knappen lost 2-0 at home in the first leg of its UEFA Champions League semifinal round.  Now they have to win by two goals at Old Trafford next week.  Manchester United can wrap this up with just one goal at home.  Ouch.

In the other semifinal, Real Madrid and Barcelona meet yet again.  Coaches Pep Guardiola (Barça) and Jose Mourinho (Real) have resorted to trash talking, probably because they're both getting bored with playing each other so many times in the same month.

As if I'll ever play Madden 12:  I voted for Cleveland RB Peyton Hillis over Philadelphia QB Michael Vick, all right, but I waited until the last day of voting to do it.  I stopped playing video games shortly after Marble Madness, so I'm unlikely to ever play Madden 2012.  Still, the choice, determined in a single-elimination tournament whose winners were decided by Internet polling, doesn't speak so well of the NFL fan base.  What we have here is a contest between a star player with a troubled past and a promising rusher who has yet to prove himself over a full season.  It's an odd choice.

Administrivia:  I've posted the 2011 NFL draft order, as Victory Weighting would have determined it.  It's the rightmost button on the the bar at the top of the blog.  Also, it's out with the yellow links and in with the softer blues and grays, plus some orange.  I finally got a chance to look at this blog on someone else's monitor, and the old scheme was just too harsh.

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Friday Double: What's a nice theme like you...?

...doing in a rotten series like this?

My knowledge of Star Trek arcana may not be enough to make me a hard-core Trekkie, but I was dedicated enough almost a decade ago to actually look forward to the beginning of Star Trek: Enterprise.  But my first hearing of the dreadful Faith of the Heart should have warned me about just how seriously the show would eventually suck.  The Diane Warren composition didn't even fit with the visual part of Enterprise's opening title, let alone the spirit of the Star Trek franchise.  I won't dignify that song with a link, because this Friday Double isn't about wastes of bad music on brutally disappointing television series.

It's about wastes of good music on brutally disappointing television series.

There are a few reasons why I don't hate Enterprise nearly as much as its predecessor, Star Trek:  Voyager.  First, Enterprise had better plots.  Second, it didn't have salamanders.  Third, I might have felt better about Enterprise had its opening title resembled the gorgeous treatment Voyager got.


To tell the truth, I had given up on Voyager well before it got to those salamanders.  It's just too bad Jerry Goldsmith's theme couldn't grace a show that deserved it.

Jeff Beal, whom I sometimes call HBO's resident composer, penned my other feature today.  Carnivàle had an opening title that framed it even more perfectly than Voyager -- but it sold a series that proved even more bitterly disappointing.

A blown Star Trek production like Voyager was inevitable, and so, too, was a bad HBO series.  Even at that, though, Carnivàle gave the HBO viewing world a shock.  Not even producer Ronald D. Moore liked it, as he would admit in a DVD comment track for his better known and liked series, Battlestar Galactica (2004).

So which other bad TV series got great opening credits?

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Tuesday Football: New Victory Weighting definitions

Yes, the last third of April is an odd time to bring up my Victory Weighting scheme, but there's the little matter of the NFL Draft, which, for 2011, starts next Thursday.  That event provides the perfect pretext to introduce definitions for a couple of terms that occasionally occur in tiebreaking contexts.  [If you haven't done so already, please click on the Victory Weighting line in the top bar for an overview of the system.]

Strength of Victory

This figure provides an estimate of the quality of the opponents a team has defeated.  As a tiebreaker, it applied only when all comparisions of sub-records (e.g. records vs. common opponents) have failed.

The NFL calculates strength of victory as the combined won-lost-tied percentages of those opponents a team has beaten.  For Victory Weighting, it has a more formal definition.

For a given season, a team's strength of victory is the sum of the weighted current Strengths of its opponents, taken over all completed games.   For each game the team has played, the Strength it earned from that game weights the opponent's current Strength.  At the beginning of the season, strength of victory is 0 for all teams.

Written as a formula,

where

• W_i is the Strength the team earned from game i.  It ranges from 0 to 4, per the standard Victory Weighting rules.  Once established, it never changes.
• S_i(N) is the current strength of opponent i; that is, its Strength as of week N during the season.  This value usually increases over the course of the season.

For example, consider two teams who meet in the first week of the season.  While the game was in progress, N=0, and, by definition, both teams have zero strength of victory.  Upon completion of the game, N increments to 1.  If the game ended in overtime, the winner's strength of victory increases by 0.750 (W_i = 3, S_i(1) = 1, 3*1/4 = 0.75).   After eight weeks (N = 8), if the loser has earned 16 Strength, that contribution increases from 0.75 to 3*16/4=12.00.

Only completed games count toward strength of victory.  Games remaining on the schedule do not count, since their game weights cannot be determined until they have been played.

A few easy colloraries follow:

• After the first week, every team's strength of victory is either 0, 3 or 4.
• A team that has not managed even an overtime loss has a strength of victory of zero.  The  Detroit Lions accomplished this dubious feat in 2008.
• If a team has not played any overtime games, its strength of victory is equal to the combined Strength of all the teams it has defeated.  If, that team also finishes undefeated, its strength of victory is also equal to its strength of schedule.  The 2007 New England Patriots are the only team to achieve this distinction since the NFL adopted overtime.^*

Strength of Schedule

For the 32-team NFL, this statistic isn't as crititcal as it is for the NCAA, which has to evaluate 120 to 350 teams at once for its tournaments.  Accordingly, the NFL can use a less rigorous formula for each team: the combined won-loss-tied percentage of all its opponents.  Typically, strength of schedule is evaluated only at the end of a season, after all games have been played.

Victory Weighting provides a more rigorous definition:

For a given season, a team's strength of schedule is the sum of all its opponents' current Strengths, taken over the entire season.

Its formula is

where

• N_max is the length of the season in games, currently 16.
• S_i(N) is the current strength of opponent i; that is, its Strength as of week N during the season.  This value usually increases over the course of the season.

At any point in the season, the strength-of-schedule calculation includes games yet to be played, as well as games already played.

In both the official and VW schemes, strength of schedule is the first tiebreaker used to determine draft order.  If that fails, then any division and conference tiebreakers that were used for playoff seeding apply.

With both terms defined for Victory Weighting, two more corollaries emerge:

• After the first week, all winners have a strength of schedule equal to 0 or 1; all losers, 3 or 4.  If the first game ends in a tie, both teams have a strength of schedule equal to 2.
• If a team has not played any overtime games, the ratio between its strength of victory and its strength of schedule is equal to its won-loss-tied percentage.

Some examples follow the fold.

Friday Double: (1) Planet Earth

When I remarked on the passing of composer John Barry several weeks ago, I noted that I haven't brought up my love film or video soundtracks here often enough.  Hopefully, this new Friday Double feature will fix that.  The idea is simply to cite two cuts that I like every Friday, both from the same movie, TV series or composer.  The BBC/Discovery documentary Planet Earth stars in our premiere edition.

George Fenton has earned five Academy Award nominations, including one for the score to 1983 Best Picture Gandhi, but most of his work has been for British television.  Planet Earth won him his second Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition (after the equally stunning Blue Planet). While he could give the next quarter-billion-dollar Hollywood epic a proper score, Fenton is probably a lot happier doing what he does now.  Good on him.

I'll probably post more examples of Fenton's incredible range in the future, but here's "Surfing Dolphins."  In the film segment, the dolphins aren't just surfing near a small beach; they're teaching their kids how to track down dinner.  The NFL fan in me has also noted that, poorly as they've played recently, this same music could easily accompany the numerous miscues from the Miami Dolphins' last few seasons.



I wouldn't have brought gridiron up had I not heard the Planet Earth theme backgrounding an NFL Network report last fall.  That struck me oddly, because the NFL strongly prefers to commission its own incidental music, via NFL Films.  Yet, here they were, using the work of George Fenton (an outsider!) to help document the decline and fall of wide receiver Randy Moss.

Well, the NFL was using outside music, and it was the theme to Planet Earth... but George Fenton didn't write it.  The theme is a 51-second cut from "The Time Has Come," whose actual authors are Tobias Marberger and Gabriel Shadid.



There it is: my first Friday Double.   Hope you like it.

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