A season of wēijī: (3/3) A Trip 'round the Gravity Well

Wēiyī:  Mandarin for "crisis."

Welcome back to the longest post in the history of this little blog.  For those just tuning in, Part 1 of "A Season of Wēiyī" describes how Time and Again, the team that would become my first fantasy-football champion, got started for its 2013 season.  Part 2 chronicled the Timers' "monents of wēiyī," a series of crisis points that strengthened the team.  At the end of Part 2, I teased the arrival yet another crisis in Week 9.

Entr'acte: How LeSean McCoy missed out on an MVP award

Time and Again RB Le'Veon Bell (26)
carries the ball for Pittsburgh.
(Image via sportsmole.co.uk.)

Before I detail that final crisis, let me go back to one of the moments of wēiyī from Part 2.  LeSean McCoy just ended the Eagles' 2013 regular season as the NFL's rushing champion.  The case for naming him the Most Valuable Player for any fantasy-football team is as strong as it is clear.  On Time and Again, however, Le'Veon Bell's Week 6 pickup assured the team's security at the running-back position.  Without Bell, the Timers would have depended too much on McCoy; with him, I could turn my attention to other positions.

In that light, it makes sense to make Bell, not McCoy, the Timers' MVP.

Moment of wēiyī, Weeks 9-12

By early November, most of the Timers' final roster had been assembled.  The last game of Week 9 was an affair between the Packers and the Bears.  With QB Aaron Rodgers still to play, the 7-1 Timers had already clinched their game that week.

Then, as the cliché goes, disaster struck.  On the Packers' first series, a devastating tackle left Rodgers with a broken collarbone.  No one knew how bad the injury was, but now the Timers didn't have a quarterback.

In desperation, I replaced tight end Martellus Bennett (yay! a Bear!) with Tennessee QB Jake Locker, who was returning from injury himself.  Locker, who had been hot earlier in the year, faced Jacksonville in Week 10.  What could possibly go wrong if I used him to replace Rodgers?

A lot, it turned out.  Locker lasted less than a half in his first start for the Timers.  He left the field having actually subtracted a point from the Timers's total.  Time and Again managed to win, but only because it faced a bottom-of-the-table opponent.

Fortunately, I had also picked up Philadelphia QB Nick Foles in Week 10.  He didn't start for the Timers because, frankly, I still had doubts about him.  Also, Foles still had his bye week ahead of him.

No worries.  When Foles's bye did come in Week 12, I just picked up Josh McCown, who himself was relieving Jay Cutler.  [Yay!  A Bear!]  Until Cutler came back, I enjoyed the luxury of choosing between the NFL's two hottest quarterbacks not surnamed Manning.  McCown's acquisition would be the team's last.

In the end, this crisis had the same effect on Time and Again that a celestial body has on a spacecraft flying by it.  Such a ship enters the body's gravity well, picks up tremendous speed, then, with a well-timed rocket blast, escapes.  Just as that vessel re-enters space much faster than before, the Timers emerged from this crisis as a virtually unbeatable team.

Time to par-teeeee!

Enjoy the celebratory soundtrack.  You know you want to!


How powerful had Time and Again become the end? Consider that, in standard fantasy-football scoring, 100 points is usually good enough to win. 110 is considered excellent, and anything above 125 is outstanding.

• In Week 13, the finalized Timers scored 150, and could have scored 180.
• In Week 14, the regular-season finale, they scored 144 and could've reached 171.
• In the playoff semifinal, the actual and maximum scores were 154 and 162.
• The Timers won the championship game with only 107 points, but could have finished with 134. 

It certainly did feel nice to have to select wide receivers and running backs from this roster. In fantasy-football terms, Time and Again included three top-ten receivers (including the top two), along with three top-ten running backs, two top-five quarterbacks, and the second-best tight end. Here's the final Timer depth chart, with the six players who were originally drafted shown in colored italics.

• Quarterbacks: Nick Foles (Philadelphia), Aaron Rodgers (Green Bay), Josh McCown (Chicago)
• Running backs: LeSean McCoy (Philadelphia), Le'Veon Bell (Pittsburgh), Zac Stacy (St. Louis), Andre Brown (New York Giants)
• Wide receivers: Josh Gordon (Cleveland), A.J. Green (Cincinnati), Alshon Jeffery (Chicago), Danny Amendola (New England) 
• Tight end: Vernon Davis (San Francisco) 
• Kicker: Justin Tucker (Baltimore) 
• Defenses/special teams: Kansas City, Buffalo

This will probably be the final season for Time and Again. Next year, I will be commissioner in a new family league. My team there will probably have a different name. If that team is even as remotely good as the Timers, I'll be thrilled.

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A season of wēijī: (2/3) It's One Surprise after Another

Wēiyī:  Mandarin for 'crisis.'

Yesterday, I described how I formed Time and Again, my best fantasy-football team this season.  For what ended up being no special reason, I put the Timers through a computer-run draft, disallowing any players who played for Florida NFL or college teams.  On that objective, the draft was a smashing success.

On the imaginary gridiron, unfortunately, Time and Again had a weak bench.  The good news is that weak drafts can have a huge upside:  if you've been stuck with one, you should plan to scan the waiver wire every week.  Keep this in mind as the Timers' story progresses from one instance of wēiyī to another.

Wēiyī Moment, Week 1

Danny Amendola, who was supposed to be my #2 wide receiver, took an injury in Week 1.  At the time, the free agent from St. Louis was regarded as New England's new top receiver, so dropping him was out of the question.  To address what looked like a temporary gap, I added Amendola's Patriot teammate, Julian Edelman, who played well enough to earn a permanent roster spot.  Fortune would have other plans for Edelman, but the Timers made it through this crisis.

Wēiyī Moment, Week 4

Kansas City WR Dwayne Bowe, the only Florida native on the Timers' roster, proved to be a bust, and needed replacement.  The first move to replace Bowe had to also address the Packers' bye week.  Enter the Kansas City Chiefs, who would score in double digits for the Timers six times.  Their superior performance allowed me to eventually drop a fading Packer defense.

That move patched a temporary hole, but to handle this crisis, I still needed a new wide receiver.  For that, I needed Josh Gordon.  No one in the Timers' league had seen much in Gordon.  He missed the first two games under a drug-related suspension.  Even worse, he played for Cleveland.  Still, several fantasy-football experts recommended him, and I was desperate enough to pick him off the waiver wire.  He started for the Timers in Week 4, scored a creditable 7 points, and secured his spot at WR2.  Eventually, Gordon became the NFL's top-ranked fantasy receiver.

Now the crisis was solved.

Wēiyī Moment, Week 6

I would need both Gordon and the Chiefs in Week 4, just to squeak by for a 5-point win, because I was also looking for a new running back.  LeSean McCoy was humming along, but his Timer teammate, Ahmad Bradshaw, had encountered bad injury trouble  after Week 2.

My first attempt to replace Bradshaw led to the acquisition of James Starks (yes, another Packer) -- but Starks took a major injury the same week.  It turned out that Atlanta's Jason Snelling couldn't fill the Timers' RB2 need, either.  Time and Again had somehow managed to advance to 5-0, but unless I could find a second running back, the team was in trouble.

Snelling's Week 6 replacement, Pittsburgh RB Le'Veon Bell, ended up being one answer.  By now, Bradshaw had been formally placed on injured reserve, so I also picked up Chicago wide receiver Alshon Jeffery.  [Yay! A Bear!]  Both started immediately, making small contributions as the Timers turned in the first of four 130-point performances.  Both would also reach the NFL fantasy-leader board by season's end.  Crisis solved.

Non-wēiyī Moment, Week 8

With the wide receiver and running back positions secure (and Aaron Rodgers still online), it was time to start improving my flex position.  Week 8 brought an opportunity to snag another rising star, St. Louis RB Zac Stacy.  He also proved to be a critical success; from here on, he, Bell, Jeffery and Amendola would be fighting for the RB2 and flex positions.  [And the perfectly capable Julian Edelman would end up the odd man off the Time and Again roster.]

As the Packers and Bears started play on Monday night, 4 November 2013, the Timers had already assured themselves another win.  With three major crises successfully resolved, they were about to go to 9-0, with no one to challenge them.

In the conclusion:  Time and Again confronts its most dangerous moment of wēiyī.

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A season of wēijī: (1/3) Bizarro Protest Staging

The graphic above shows the Mandarin word wēijī, which translates into English as "crisis."  In a famous 1959 speech, John F. Kennedy propagated an old, inaccurate American meme, correctly identifying the left-hand character (wēi, in pinyin spelling) as a symbol of "danger," only to then mistake the right-side character (jī) as "opportunity."  A more accurate translation of jī would render something closer to "turning point."  No knowledge of any Chinese words is needed to view a dangerous turning point as a crisis.

When I won my first fantasy-football championship last week, my first thought was that I deserved it.  Time and Again, which started its second season as my 'C' team, averaged 113 points over its 15-1 season.  At season's end, the Timers were so deep at wide receiver and running back, top-flight players like A.J. Green, Zac Stacy, LeVeon Bell and Alshon Jeffery were fighting for three starting spots.  Their only loss came when their starting quarterback sustained a season-ending injury early in his game.

On further reflection, though, Time and Again didn't start out with such power.  In fact, it was only through a completely silly origin, followed by several turning points that could have easily doomed them to oblivion, that the Timers gave me what may be the best fantasy-football season I'll ever have.

Join me, then, on a trip through this season of wēijī.

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As miserably as the Timers struggled in their debut season on the NFL site (missing the playoffs before dropping two consolation-bracket games), I decided to use them as an experimental team for 2013.  I wasn't sure what the experiment would be, but the Timers would be the platform.

Enter the Trayvon Martin fiasco.

It would've been possible to form a fantasy-football team as a protest against the Martin-Zimmerman case, which had ended just weeks before the fantasy drafts.  I would punish the entire State of Florida by excluding from my team any player who (a) played for the Buccaneers, Dolphins or Jaguars; or (b) entered the NFL from a Florida college.

Let me start counting the reasons why this protest proposal was stupid.

• Why wait for a racially-charged murder trial?  Botching a Presidential election, electing Lex Luthor's evil twin, and just being Florida hadn't already provided excuses?
• A serious "protest" would also exclude players who grew up in Florida.  [But as I'll show presently, that additional exclusion would have made almost no difference.]
• Many, if not most, of the excluded players would be African Americans.  I'm not sure how that helps anyone.  A case could be made that exclusion could hurt the affected players -- but said players would have to care in the first place.
• Even setting those aside, an effective protest has to at least inconvenience the protester.  Moving player names around on a smart phone every week is not an inconvenience.

On these bases, a 15-1 championship team constitutes -- how do they say it in 2013?

Oh yeah: EPIC FAIL.¹

But still...

Blowing away the pretext for a no-Floridan team was a satisfying exercise, but it didn't actually affect the idea of a team without Floridians.  Why not exclude Florida-based players for its own sake?  Whatever the merits and faults of Floridans as a whole, there's no denying that Florida (a) has e NFL teams² and (b) sends many, many players from its colleges into the NFL.  Theoretically, a fantasy-football team without Floridians should struggle.

Having already created a custom draft list for my 'A' and 'B' teams, I copied it for Time and Again, then removed all Dolphins, Buccaneers, Jaguars and Florida college players from the copy.  Finally, I submitted the reduced draft list to NFL.com for an autopick draft.

When draft day finally came, NFL.com gave me the following team, in draft order:

1. LeSean McCoy, RB1, Philadelphia
2. A.J. Green, WR1, Cincinnati
3. Aaron Rodgers, QB, Green Bay
4. Dwayne Bowe, WR2, Kansas City
5. Danny Amendola, WR3, New England
6. Vernon Davis, TE, San Francisco
7. Ahmad Bradshaw, RB2, Indianapolis
8. Green Bay defense/special teams (DST)
9. Justin Tucker, K, Baltimore
10. James Jones, WR4, Green Bay
11. Tavon Austin, WR5, St. Louis
12. Kenny Britt, WR6, Tennessee
13. Ben Roethlisburger, QB2, Pittsburgh
14. Isaiah Pead, RB3, St. Louis,
15. Shonn Greene, RB4, Tennessee

As a Bear fan, I wasn't happy to have this many Packers on the team.  Also, past versions of The Ghost-Grey Cats, my 'B' team, had taught that Packer players could give a team enough points to reach the fantasy playoffs, but not enough to advance.

Of course, my previous Packer experience hadn't included Rodgers.  Perhaps things would improve with him at quarterback.  Then again, after Davis, the team looked about as appetizing as a plate of week-old garlic fries.  As constructed, Time and Again would struggle to reach the playoffs.

I had to keep reminding myself that, with no nominal Floridans allowed on the team, the result no weaker than expected.  The only individual player with any connection at all to Florida was Bowe, who grew up in Miami.  He lasted only three weeks, and no native Floridian would replace him all season long.  Even if the Timers didn't win a single game, I had achieved my primary objective.

Next time:  Let the wēijī begin!

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1.  Well, I had to use the phrase 'epic fail' soon, before the Internet outlaws it.
2.  Miami and Tampa Bay account for one team apiece, but Jacksonville contributes only about 78.18% of a team.  That's 2.718 teams.

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I has a sad, I mean, Saad!

On I Can Has Cheezburger, the caption waited all season to write itself.

Brandon Saad had one goal in the 2013 Stanley Cup Final, which concluded successfully tonight for the Chicago Blackhawks.  To say the least, though, his contribution to the Hawks' wire-to-wire dominance this season was nontrivial.

Two goals, 17 seconds apart, to come from behind and win the Cup?  Seriously?  Time to post video of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra playing "Chelsea Hammer," the song that plays every time the Hawks score at the United Center.

Check that; the CSO rendition is so silly, you'll have to search for it yourself.  Instead, enjoy "Here Come the Hawks," performed by a slightly less silly Ray Coniff-style choir, as the Great Maker intended.

Here Come The Hawks

Powered by abmp3.info

The Boston Bruins played so well in defeat, I can only give them props.  Instead, the smack has to fly in a more deserving direction.  Have some, Southern California.

• The Los Angeles Kings suck;
• The Kings sucked last year, even as they usurped Lord Stanley's trophy;
• The Kings will keep sucking, world without end.  Or at least until they stop letting Eric Cartman lead the crowd cheers.

Congratulations to the Hawks, Stanley Cup champions again!

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Victory Weighting: Liveblogging NFL Week 17

If it's the last week of the NFL regular season, then it's time to look at how Victory Weighting would affect the playoff races.

13:03 CST:  Here are the deviations going into today's action.  Early games launched an hour ago; late games start in the 15:25 window.  Dallas and Washington meet in the season finale, which kicks off at 19:30.

1. The biggest change impacts the NFC East and wild-card races.  Officially, they're messily linked, as two NFC East teams can qualify for the playoffs.  With Victory Weighting, though, the two races are separate:
• Only one team will qualify from the NFC East.  While the New York Giants (31 Strength) and Dallas (30 Strength) can each win the division, neither can catch Chicago (37 Strength) for the last wild-card slot.  Washington (35 Strength) can, but doing so would first earn the NFC East title.  Tonight's Dallas-Washington game will still determine the NFC East champion, but if the Giants win today, then Dallas becomes their proxy tonight.
• Consequently, the second wild-card race is between just Chicago and Minnesota (35 Strength).  The Bears would clinch with a win, rendering the later Minnesota-Detroit game academic.
2. Houston (Strength 46) can secure one of the AFC first-round byes with a win in the early stage, but in Victory Weighting, that wouldn't be enough to clinch the top seed.  For that to happen, Denver (Strength 48) would have to lose in the late state.  [The official standings give Houston the inside track.]
3. New England (Strength 43) can't win the AFC top seed (as is officially possible), but can still secure the #2 seed and its associated first-round bye.
4. The San Francisco-Seattle race in the NFC West race is the same, with one wrinkle:  Victory Weighting would lock Seattle into a first-round game.  The Seahawks (Strength 39) would then be fighting just to stay at home next week.
5. Finally, Victory Weighting would leave Indianapolis (Strength 39) and Cincinnati (Strength 36) fighting for wild-card position.  [Officially, the Colts are locked into the #5 position, and the Bengals are locked at #6.]

14:56:  (New York Giants 42-7 Philadelphia) The Giants' regulation win eliminates Dallas from the Victory Weighted playoffs.  If Dallas wins tonight in regulation, the Giants would win the NFC East title (and its sole playoff spot).

15:02:  (Indianapolis 28-26 Houston) The plummeting Texans' loss hands Denver the AFC high seed, and puts New England in position to steal a first-round bye with a win.  Meanwhile, Indianapolis cements the #5 seed.  [Officially, the Broncos would still have to win to secure the high seed, as New England remains eligible for that honor.]

15:07:  (Detroit 24-26 Chicago) It's almost all over in the NFC, as the Bears wrap up the second NFC Victory Weighted wild card.  The Vikings-Packers game would have meaning for only Green Bay, as Minnesota would be out of the playoffs.  [Officially, this eliminates the Giants, while the Bears remain on the bubble.]

15:24:  (Cincinnati 23-17 Baltimore) This result locks both teams' Victory Weighted playoff positions.  Because the Ravens and Bengals (both Strength 40) own the #4 and #6 seeds, respectively, they wouldn't meet next week in the first round.  Instead, the Ravens will host Indianapolis in the first round, while the Bengals wait to see where their punched tickets will lead them.

18:14:  (Denver 38-3 Kansas City) The Broncos clinch the AFC high seed... .

18:22:  (San Francisco 27-13 Arizona) The 49ers wrap up the NFC second seed, forcing Seattle into a road date next week.  Meanwhile, Green Bay will host a first-round game as the NFC's #3 seed.


18:31:  (New England 28-0 Miami) ... and the Patriots grab the other AFC bye.  Houston is stuck with the #3 seed and a home game next week against Cincinnati.  [At this point, the standard and Victory Weighted AFC playoff scenarios are identical.]

18:44:  (Minnesota 37-34 Green Bay)  Under Victory Weighting, this wouldn't affect the NFC playoffs, as Chicago would have already clinched the last playoff bid.  In the real world, though, these two teams meet again next week in Wisconsin, the Vikings having eliminated the Bears.  [Jon Gruden to Chicago, maybe?]

18:48:  (Seattle 20-13 St. Louis)  The Seahawks, as NFC fifth seeds are headed to the East Coast for the first round, but they don't know exactly where, yet.

Final update, 00:17, 31 December 2012:  (Washington 28-18 Dallas)  A Dallas win would have created a second Victory Weighted deviation in the playoff schedule (the officially eliminated Giants would have won the division).  But Washington won instead, so there's only one change in either the lineup or the seedings.

Here, then, are the playoffs.  The sole officially-sanctioned deviation is scratched out.

NFC
Byes: (1)Atlanta, (2)San Francisco
First round: (5)Seattle at (4)Washington; (6)Minnesota Chicago at (3)Green Bay

AFC

Byes: (1)Denver, (2)New England
First round: (5)Indianapolis at (4)Baltimore; (6)Cincinnati at (3)Houston

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Tuesday Night Football: Outrages big and small

On the Belcher-Perkins incident:  Unless the Kansas City Star completely made up this account of Saturday's murder-suicide, there's not much to be said.  It affected not only two families, but also the Kansas City Chiefs.  [Jovan Belcher played for them, but had he married Kassandra Perkins, he would have become an in-law to a much better known Chief, running back Jamaal Charles.]

Take the names away, though, and the murder-suicide becomes just another domestic-violence case gone horribly wrong.  Take away the guns and the entitled-jock mentality, both of which factored into the incident, and what's left is this:

Where did Jovan Belcher get the idea that he could "resolve" domestic dispute by shooting his way out of it?

There's another question about the lesser offense that followed Saturday's shootings:  What on Earth made the Chiefs decide to play on Sunday?  Was there a ripped-from-the-headlines script that just had to be sold to Hollywood producers?  Were they just hoping to avoid dealing with the fact that on of their own had become a murder (and a cowardly one, at that)?  Or were they just hoping to avoid having to deal with grief, full stop?  Whatever the excuses, it would have been better to postpone the game for at least a few days.

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And now, something even more predictable than The Walking Dead:  Here in my corner of the world, there was also amusement at the possibility that the Northern Illinois gridiron team would actually get invited to one of the five major bowl games this season.  For kicks, I decided to watch ESPN's BCS selection show to see if NIU got in.  The Huskies did, indeed, win an invitation to play Florida State in the Orange Bowl.

The outrage among the ESPN college-football commentariat was incredible, but I still can't decide why.  Was it incredible because the reaction was so (a) intense or (b) asinine?

Naw, check that.  I can decide, and the answer is (b) -- because everyone who's criticizing NIU's selection should have seen it coming.  For its entire existence, the whole BCS selection process has rested on the assumption that there were exactly six conferences that were automatically worthy of consideration for either the national championship or one of the elite bowl games.  That presumption never worked, because the Big East was never elite, but the administrative eliminations of Ohio State and Penn State also made the Big Twelve Fourteen Ten irrelevant this year.  Of course spots would be open for two lesser programs to reach a BCS bowl.  After Wisconsin took one of them, the only outstanding question was whether that lesser program would be Northern Illinois or Nebraska.

By the way, if the Huskies (good luck to them) do somehow win the Orange Bowl, it will be their greatest victory, but not their greatest upset.

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Tuesday Morning Football: Midseason rotisserie review

The short version:  Excuses line up here; explanations, there.  The season has sucked for all three teams, except for Atlanta QB Matt Ryan and the Houston defense, which are keeping both my NFL.com teams in the top half of their respective league tables.

The Fluttering Horde (4-6):
Office of Secret Intelligence offense,
Orange County Liberation Front defense.

Whose job was it to feed the butterflies?  You'd think that a team that has Ray Rice, Steve Smith, Wes Welker, Darren Sproles and Denver's Manning-to-Decker combination would dominate its 16-team league.  Yahoo! thought as much of my flagship team, The Fluttering Horde, projecting it to finish 11-2.

With just a bit of luck, the Horde would be on track for an easy division title.  In fact, just one 11-yard touchdown pass between Peyton Manning and Eric Decker would be enough to give the Horde an 8-2 mark.  Instead, the Horde -- losers by 1, 2, 4 and 5 points in four failures -- is stuck at 4-6.  Only its season total score, third highest in the league, is keeping it in playoff contention.

The Ghost Grey Cats (6-4):
Fully recovered from
their trip to the pet hospital.

Meee-ouch!  Injuries have hobbled The Ghost-Grey Cats, who spent three weeks without a first-tier running back and four more without my best receiver, Danny Amendola.  The Cats' higher-profile receivers -- Calvin Johnson, Marques Colston and TE Antonio Gates -- haven't helped with their inconsistency.  If they can stay out of the hospital, the Cats can still win a title.

Time and Again (5-5):
Against expectation,
winning on occasion.

Tick, tick, tick...  I'm actually pretty proud of Time and Again, whose personnel (particularly Demaryius Thomas) have individually exceeded expectations.  In a stunning midseason turn, the Timers saw Jason Witten go online just as they also picked Owen Daniels off waivers.  At the beginning of the year, I expected no more than six wins, but the Timers have made it to 5-5.  They're the best managed of my teams.

That mark should be even better, but the Timers' has almost as bad as the Horde's.  In three of their losses, they caught Jamaal Charles, Rob Gronkowski and Andrew Luck on their best weeks.  No such problem cropped up this past week, as the Timers romped to a 70-point win.

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Friday Double: (13) Stormy baseball edition

There's so much to say about Hurricane Sandy, but apart from the new tagline in this blog's header, I'll limit myself to a couple of comments.

1. Any elected official who's acted the way leaders should in a disaster like this gets a big win this week.  President Obama and New Jersey governor Chris Christie (whom I otherwise don't like) get high marks for dropping the party labels and just getting to work.
2. On the other hand, Mitt Romney can add "loser" to an impressive list that already includes "liar," "thief," and "biohazard disposal bag."  Smooth move with those cans from Walmart, Money Boo Boo.
3. In the middle, where he always looks comfortable as a cat in a box, sits another bag of money, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.  Ordering shelters and cabbies to let evacuees take their pets was cool.  Keeping the New York Marathon going this weekend when so much of the city needs that event's resources?  Not so much.

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Sergio Romo and the Giants win the National League pennant,
in glorious San Francisco rain.
[Getty Images/Ezra Shaw]

On a much smaller scale, baseball had a couple of notable events this week, and they're the focus of this Friday Double.

Yay! Giants!  There's something exhilarating about watching bad weather roll in just as your favorite outdoor team wraps up a convincing semifinal victory.  Back in early 1986, at the end of the NFC Championship, that incipient snow that fell on Soldier Field was the best part of the fumble recovery that Bears used to finish off the then-Los Angeles Rams.  A couple of weeks ago, I felt the same warmth as the Giants reveled in the rain that helped them dismiss the St. Louis Cardinals.

As I keep telling friends and family here in exurban Chicago, my ten-year stay in California led me to, among other things, defect from the Cubs to the San Francisco Giants.  The only bad thing about their Game 4 win in Detroit last Sunday -- and the World Series title that came from it -- was that the ninth inning conflicted with The Venture Brothers Halloween special.  Lots of unnecessary clicking took place.

Key to my eventual conversion to a Giants fan was the construction of the their waterfront stadium in 2000.  Back when it opened, it was called "Pacific Bell Park," but then PacBell went through so many mergers.  Every acquisition caused the official name of the venue to change, so by the time it became "AT&T Park," I just gave up.  Because it's so compact, I've taken to calling it just "The Phone Booth of Doom."

The real charm of attending Giants home games is getting to The Phone Booth of Doom.  Sure, you can drive, but it's a lot more fun to take BART to either the Embarcadero or Montgomery stop.  From there, the quickest way is to take the N-Judah.  The most fun way, though, is to walk the dozen or so blocks to the park.  That way, if my friends and I decided we were thirsty, we could stop off at any of the numerous watering holes on the way.  If not, the exercise is always useful.

This aspect of going to the game wasn't lost on the Giants organization, which put out a memorable ad that managed to sell both The Phone Booth itself and the experience of walking through San Francisco's South of Market district to get there.  Petula Clark's "Downtown" provided the background music, and it fit like a glove:



¡Felicidades a los Gigantes!

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Remembering Pascual "Perimeter" Pérez:  It was sad to hear of his murder this week.  I remember him less for his actual Major League Baseball career (which ended up being riddled with drug problems) than for the timing of his arrival in the majors 30 years ago.  Cable television was becoming the norm throughout the U.S., and Atlanta's Channel 17, WTBS, was turning the Braves into everyone's second team.  To believe announcer Skip Caray was to buy into the notion that Pérez would lead the Braves into either the Promised Land or the NLCS, whichever was closer.

The Braves had just called Pérez up, and he was scheduled to start at grand old Fulton County Stadium.  Still unfamiliar with Atlanta-area geography, he missed a freeway turn, and ended up taking a couple of trips around the city.  It was comical. [Not least because I doubt that, were someone to suddenly teleport me to Santo Domingo one morning and tell me to get to the stadium by 13:00 that day, I'd do a whole lot better.]  From then on, he became Pascual "Perimiter" Pérez.

Anyway, this 1980s classic form Dead or Alive came to mind when I heard the news about him.

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Tuesday Football: No rules, no peace

There is nothing they can do to hurt the demand of the game.  So the bottom line is they don’t care. Player safety doesn’t matter in this case. Bring Division III officials? Doesn’t matter. Because in the end you’re still going to watch the game. 

-- Steve Young, criticizing NFL owners on an ESPN post-game show

The scabs who've been blowing call after call at NFL games for weeks went too far for the elebenty hundreth time last night, awarding the Seahawks a victory that rightfully belonged to the Packers.  The army of critics calling for the return of the real officials keeps growing.  Even noted union-busters Scott Walker and Paul Ryan have called for the return of the union refs.

When I heard the news about those two Republicans today, my first instinct was to dismiss their calls as the cries of two more aggrieved Packer fans.  That might be the case for Walker and Ryan, but what about their supporters?  Their ranks include fans of every NFL team -- including the Seahawks -- so team loyalty can't explain their newfound support for the locked-out NFL Referees Association (NFLRA).  Yet, that support is unlikely to extend to other labor unions.

The difference, I think, is that unlike most other unionized workers, the men of the NFLRA are in the business of regulation.  Sporting bodies may set rules for their games and competitions, but it's referees whose job it is to enforce them.  To do their job, referees work as teams, usually in opposition to the two teams that are actually playing.  [See:  Laimbeer, Bill; Klinsmann, Jürgen; or most recently, Harbaugh, Jim.]  Referee teamwork is always critical, but it's especially so in the NFL, where seven-official crews must coordinate their actions tightly.

The replacements who are calling NFL games these days may know the rules, but it's clear that they haven't learned to work together.  If they had, they would have long ago figured out what qualifies as pass interference, or illegal helmet-to-helmet contact, or even, apparently, a touchdown.  What we have here isn't just a failure to communicate, nor is it just a case of greedy owners refusing to pay the actual referees.

It's what happens when regulation itself is weakened to the point of irrelevancy.

Not that we're short of examples from other industries.  Recent history is full of examples of disasters could have been prevented with proper regulation.  Instead, affected industries have talked governments into reducing regulatory staffs -- referees, if you will -- to bare minima.  The regulators are still there, but there aren't enough around to enforce the laws.

And that's the way some industries like it.  The same dynamic drives the outsourcers of the world.  A decade ago, IT workers like myself railed against our replacement by less competent programmers who lived abroad.  We could prove that our replacements' work was so much worse that they had to work twice as long (or longer).  No matter.  The replacements were cheaper, any way.  Even when our immediate bosses agreed with us, and their bosses did too, it didn't matter.  The corporate head office wanted the cheaper labor, even if quality went down.

Which is why NFL owners won't budge yet.  The scabs do their job badly, and they're ruining the game.  But they don't care, because expenses are being cut.  Better yet, the rules of the game itself have now come under assault.  I can think of more than a couple of owners who might not mind that, either.

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Tank Officer Mitt

There's been some hilarious photoshopping done on Money Boo Boo's dreadful Univision appearance last week.  The disastrously applied lighting makeup, which looked an awful lot like brownface for a Hispanic audience, is at least as devastating a visual as Michael Dukakis in a tank 28 years ago.  Surely by now, I thought, someone had thought to replace Dukakis's face with Rmoney's.

Allow me to correct this oversight:

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Really, Mitt? Srsly?

Congratulations, Mitt Romney.  You did something no one else ever had before.  You inspired me to actually post a comment on the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the American East Coast.

While I could tick off quite a few memories about that 9/11, the one that stands out now is the silence that followed for about 36 hours.  No one started blaming other Americans for the attacks.  Even Jerry Falwell waited waited until the morning of 13 September to make his infamous remarks from Jerry Falwell on Pat Robertson's show.  The fact was that it took about that long just to figure out what had happened in Manhattan, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Here in 2012, Money Boo Boo couldn't wait.  Even before the assassination of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi, Libya, he decides to attack the Obama administration for being "disgraceful" and suggests that the President would "sympathize with those who waged the attacks."  Sure, it's another neatly packaged set of lies, designed to please the racists and Dominionists in his base -- but that's not my point.  Why couldn't this wait a day or two?  Why couldn't Romney and the GOP respectfully mourn Steven's passing (and those of at least three other American diplomats), then launch the outrageous attack?

Why should I bother even asking those questions?  To make sense, you'd have to assume that Mitt Romney and his supporters had some decency.  That assumption is questionable, to say the least.

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Bonus Tuesday Football: They're back. Except for actual referees.

Illegal use of scabs, 15 yards.  No, 15 yards the other way:  This season, the NFL owners have decided to lock the referees out instead of the players.  Today, I counted at least two instances, in two different games, where the officials could barely figure out where the ball even belonged.  As much as we love to curse officials, it's better when they're the real articles instead of the subs scabs we have babysitting now.  Ugh.

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Introducing the Cat's three fantasy teams:  A funny thing happened to The Ghost-Grey Cats while they migrated from Yahoo! to the official NFL game.  On Monday, I set a draft order for the Cats and waited for the NFL servers to assign them players and a league.

And I waited.  And waited.

And waited until about late Tuesday, when I lost patience and told the NFL to just put the Cats in a live draft.  In a 10-team league, I got stuck with the tenth position, which should have shut me out of any chance for a superstar headliner.  Thanks to a couple of opponents who used exotic drafting strategies¹, Calvin Johnson fell to me in the first round, then I nabbed Matt Forte with the next pick.

Besides Forte, five other players return from last year's semifinalists, including my entire tight-end battery of Antonio Gates and Brandon Pettigrew.  Matt Ryan, another returnee, has two capable backups².  The trick will be to avoid the cockiness that sank the Cats last season.  If I can, the Cats should be champions come late December.

With the live draft over, I thought I was through.  I wasn't.  Rather than just moving the Cats into one new league, the NFL servers submitted my draft order again, and ran it through the autodraft for which I had originally signed.  When I woke up Wednesday, I discovered that I had not one, but two teams on NFL.com, in two different leagues.

Suddenly gifted with a new team, I decided to name it Time and Again, after a CBS Radio Mystery Theater episode that I've reviewed on this blog.  New team, new colors, new logo, but, oddly, four players who also play for the Cats.  The Timers drafted third, so they also nabbed Ray Rice.

Of course, they also drafted the likes of Cedric Benson and Santana Moss.  That's like successfully casting a "summon wolves" spell, only to have to deal with two Yorkshire terriers who inevitably appear along with the grey wolf.  Time and Again is solid at QB, RB and defense, but patchy elsewhere.  I can get to the playoffs with this team, but it will take work.

The Fluttering Horde might be as weak as it's ever been, but that's largely because the family league expanded to 16 teams for 2012.  Also, I had the first pick, which I spent on Ray Rice; so Darren Sproles ended up being the only survivor of the expansion carnage.  Peyton Manning, who made league finalists of the 2010 Horde, does return, backed up by Jay Cutler.  Wes Welker and Eric Decker, who served short tours with the Horde in the past, return as my top two wideouts.  It's not much, but that's the cost of having at pick at an extreme slot (first) rather than the middle slot (eighth or ninth) the Horde usually gets.  Yahoo! expects an 11-2 mark from this squad.  It's playoff-worthy as is, but that prediction is a stretch.


1. One rival spent three top picks on defenses.  Another drafted three quarterbacks in the first four rounds.  They can keep whatever they were ingesting.
2. Dudes, those early picks aren't going to help you, not even as trade bait.  But thanks for handing me Cutler and Roethlisberger.

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Late Tuesday Football: Well, I had to post sometime

Bored.  Busy.  Or maybe just outrage fatigued.
Via reallycuteanimals.co.uk.

There isn't a really good reason why I haven't posted for a while.  Yes, family matters are keeping me busy, but even those should have allowed time for posting.  I just haven't felt like saying anything -- at least not anything that someone else hasn't expressed more eloquently.

So it's football to the rescue again.  Whichever form you watch, it's all going in full swing.  This week, gridiron gets the blog love.

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Signs point to Gig'em:  I don't plan on discussing much college football this year¹, but Texas A&M's² move to the SEC has generated lots of smack in my family.  In particular, my oldest sister and I have spent all summer chanting "S-E-C!" at our Longhorn-loving relations.  It feels great, actually.  Now I know why Republicans feel compelled to shout "9-11" whenever they start losing arguments.

Yep, it's been every bit as clean as Jackie Sherill.

Alas, a fellow Aggie has taken the mocking to another level -- and for once, a university other than Texas-Austin is the target.  I think this sign is very funny, but my alma mater itself doesn't agree.  Hopefully, the Florida offense will be as inept this weekend as it was last week against mighty, mighty Bowling Green.

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To be explained later this week:

• Another NFL season, another year of the standings the way they should be tabulated.  I've refreshed the Victory Weighting tab for the new season.
• Both my fantasy-football teams are back in action.  The Fluttering Horde is still in my family league, and still on Yahoo!, but the league is now a 16-team joint.  Despite their move to nfl.com, the Ghost-Grey Cats have stayed amazingly intact from last year.

1.  Don't blame Penn State.  I was losing patience with the college game long before that school's scandal broke out.
2.  You suck, Blogger.  Thanks for not letting me use "A&M" as a label.  Dolts.

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I didn't expect this Euro 2012 final

What I expected to see today in Kiev:

What I actually saw on the field:

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By the time La Fúria Roja scored its second goal, I think Ian Darke had described its standard passing tactic as series of "little triangles" about 137 times.  That wasn't quite as often as this Spanish team actually passed the ball every 20 minutes, but it was enough to put a character from Angry Birds into my mind.  Indeed, in the first half, the Spaniards shredded Italy's normally stout defense the way Yellow Bird tears through wooden structures.  A hearty congratulations to Spain for its amazing feat!

ESPN is swearing up and down that the just-repeated European champions are the best national team ever.  To support that claim, the network claimed that Spain just became the first nation to win three major soccer titles in a row.  Far be it for me to point out that (a) Copa América, the South American continental tournament, also qualifies as "major," and (b) Brazil wrapped two Copa América titles around its 2006 World Cup victory.

In any event, there's still a case to be made that the 1970 Seleçao is still better.  With the 4-0 win today, though, Spain made the comparison a lot tighter.  I'm going to have to start tracking down video from Mexico '70.

Italy also deserves congratulations, especially coach Cesare Prandelli and Andrea Pirlo.  Keeping the team together despite yet another match-fixing scandal at home (and the presence of notorious bad-boy Mario Balotelli) was impressive by itself, but even reaching the finals constituted an incredible feat.

This just wasn't the Azurri's night.  As they fell behind 2-0, they were also losing players to serious injuries.  Giorgio Chiellini went down 21 minutes into the action, then Thiago Motta's hamstring pull forced him out of the game at the hour -- only minutes after he was inserted as Italy's final substitute.

At that point, down to ten men, the Azurri was no longer a contender; it was Wile E. Coyote, passing a massive rock as he plummets to a canyon floor after yet another botched attempt to catch the Road Runner.  The Italians hit the ground first, then, in the form of two late Spanish goals, the boulder landed on top.

Not. Italy's. Night.

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Friday Double: (12) Odd notes from Euro 2012

It's been interesting to watch the amazing amount of influence that the English-speaking world has wielded at the Euro 2012 tournament.  Stadium announcements in English have been a FIFA standard for several World Cup cycles, so hearing those again in Poland and Ukraine came as no surprise. On the other hand, as the Russian national anthem played before the Russia-Poland match, there was this:

'Cause racist taunts and marches on Warsaw weren't provocative enough.
[Reuters/Pascal Lauener]

Never mind the 45th-level D&D warlord, who, Russian state network RT tells us, is a heroic figure from Russian history. The important part here is the caption. I can understand why PA announcers are using English, but why would a group of Russian fans use English on that banner? Why not regular Russian, or even Russian transliterated into Latin characters? Are that many Americans blowing off Miami-Oklahoma City for this?

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And how about the music?

You may have not heard "Kernkraft 400" referenced by name, but if you've watched East Coast college football at any time during the Obama administration, you've probably heard fans singing caterwauling along with it.

Alas, it's made its way to the PA systems at Euro 2012, and through to the fans. "Kernkraft 400" isn't just about the worst fight song ever, it's one of the worst techno tracks I've ever heard.  Heck, it's not even original; the appropriately named Zombie Nation, a German group, stole it from a Commodore 64 game.  How Canadian hockey fans (yes, Canadians) managed to turn this German annoyance into a global one is beyond me.

Anyhow, here's a sports mix, because my alternative today was the was the Hymn of the Russian Federation.  Feel free to gong this at any time.

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Even more interesting than chants imported from eastern North America is what plays when the contestants enter the field for the first time. The first time I paid attention to the background music, before the Germany-Portugal match, I thought immediately of Mass Effect 2, perhaps the first video game to ever run a Super Bowl ad. A little digging confirmed my suspicion: the score for that trailer was original to that ad, and it's what the Euro 2012 honchos are using to introduce teams to the playing field:



"Heart of Courage" is a nice, simple tune that does exactly as composer Two Steps from Hell intended: it builds dramatic tension just quickly enough to create an appetite. It works the same for Euro 2012 games as it did for that video game. And like the English-captioned Russian banner and the ridiculous fight tune, it points to increasing American influence on non-American events.

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Back in business

To mix Firefly with a Christian proverb, the 'verse works in mysterious ways.

I'd be lying to claim that I had stopped posting just because Scooter passed five weeks ago.  Given that posting had already slowed to a crawl, that would have been a nice, self-pitying pretext.  Fortunately, the rest of May helped the mourning go more easily.

The actual reason for the pause was all the road travel (Nebraska for one weekend, Houston for the next and barbeque-famous Lockhart, Texas, for the following week), and lots of time with the siblings.  All four of my sisters and I spent the turn of the month together with my dad, for the first time in six years.  Good times, actually.

Anyway, I'm just saying 'hi,' here, hopefully to start posting more regularly.  After the sun comes up again:  an Euro 2012-related Friday Double.

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Scooter Blogging: (0) So long, old friend

When my household in suburban Oakland had two cats, neither one would ask me to refill their food bowls until one was empty.  By that time, the other bowl had only a few kibbles left, so I refilled both.  Once Galadriel passed away, though, Scooter changed her habit.  She still finished off her bowls, but after every refill, she came to me to ask for new food.  It took me a while, but I figured out that even a dozen new kibbles satisfied her demand.  Scooter wasn't really hungry; she just wanted the attention.

About six weeks ago, her odd little requests stopped.  This had happened before, only to resume later; so I thought nothing of it.  Sadly, it turned out to be the harbinger of something far worse.  Her liver was failing, and her eating itself was steadily slowing.  By the time anyone noticed something was wrong, it was too late; the only option was to keep her comfortable as her appetite vanished completely and her body shut down.

Tonight, about seven weeks shy of her 15th birthday, Scooter crossed the Rainbow Bridge.  She had lost the ability to jump to or from her corner of my bed, and the pain had become just too much.  At about 21:15 Central time, a veterinarian performed the euthanasia.  In her final minutes, she wanted nothing but ear scratches from me, and those were probably the last things she felt.

So long, Scooter, you Cat of Many Colors.  And thanks for being my friend for 14 years.

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If Portal is as funny as its Internet promos, ...

... I might have to start playing first-person shooters.  The Internet is full of funny stuff (not all of which involves cats), but it's been a while since I've laughed so hard as I did when I saw the stuff Valve puts out for its Portal franchise.  Here's my favorite.

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Tuesday Football: Victory Weighting housekeeping

It's time for the 32 NFL teams to decide which collegiate stars they want for their team.  Accordingly, it's also time to post the draft order as though Victory Weighting were in effect.  Except for Denver and San Diego, no one changed its position by more than two spots.

Details are on the 2012 draft page, marked on the page bar at the top.  Enjoy.

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Friday Double: (11) Remember these

Elmer Bernstein is another of my favorite film composers, and his theme from the 1962 movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird has recently gotten quite a bit of play on the Streaming Soundtracks site.  While some of the folks who've requested it might have also been mulling the Trayvon Martin case, it's more than pretty enough to stand on its own.

Here's an odd thought I've always had about Bernstein:  Even though his résumé covered a much wider range of movie genres, I tended to associate him with action films like The Ten Commandments (1956), The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape (1960), or later comedies like Animal House (1978) and Ghostbusters (1984).  It fell to TCM host Robert Osborne, only a few years ago, to notify me that Bernstein also penned To Kill a Mockingbird.  It still surprises me, even though Bernstein himself considered this one of his most important works.

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Walter Schumann is best remembered as the composer of the Dragnet theme, but it's another, completely different work of his that's always come to my mind.  When I was very young, The Night of the Hunter (1955) was my favorite movie.  It aired on local television when I was two or three, at the age when most of us start keeping memories.  Its signature scene, as young John and Pearl Harper first escape the clutches of Reverend Powell*, is one of the first things I actually remembered.

Part of that has to do with the way the escape is shot.  Even casual inspection exposes elements of the scenes as unrealistic.  Spider webs don't hang this way, the sun doesn't rise or set like that.  But the sequence remains convincing despite all the unreality, because Schumann's music meshes so well with the visuals.  Now that I've had several chances to watch this as an adult, I still feel as though I'm witnessing the escape, not through John's eyes or Pearl's, but through those of a spectral third child.

What makes the movie truly great, though, is the "Lullaby."  Weary, scared, and still desperate to avoid capture, John and Pearl hide in a barn for the night.  All the while, a voice tries to sing them to sleep.  Here's the end of the escape, my first cinematic memory.




* Here's one reason why neither Palpatine nor Darth Vader made it past Episode XI of the Star Wars cycle:  they didn't bother to study Robert Mitchum's portrayal of Rev. Powell.  I'm hard put to imagine a villain as monstrous, clever or effective as Powell, but I'd bet a few credits that Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi both got hold of a Night of the Hunter DVD.

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