Month: July 2007

Review: Sports Picks

Well this is interesting. Sometime ago I signed up for ReviewMe, a paid review service over at A Good Beer Blog and once in a while have received a small but useful amount for a short and somewhat useful review of a web site. I got an email last night for this web site called Sports Picks and I thought “what has this got to do with beer?”. I mean I have to have some integrity, right? I mean you work hard to get a web presence, some recognition and a following…and then you blow it, you know? But then I realized that the request was for a review to be posted here at Gen X at 40 and the issues disappeared.

So the first thought I had was what is it about this here blog that connects with sports betting? I am not a gambler because I am a Scots Presbyterian and a bad gambler. Not a high likelihood of grabbing my interest. Then, if you look at the specific claims of the site – and not the pneumatic lassie to the right – it gets a bit ripe:

Think of it this way … If you played 200 games a year and bet 5% of your bankroll each time (whether free picks or premium picks), started with a bankroll of $4,000 and hit 55% of all the plays, within six years you would have over $2,000,000.

…or you will end with a bankroll of zippo as well as associated gambling sourced issues.

The layout is sort of 1995 flat-layout-esque without much of the dynamic design I would think any nerd pretending to be a high roller with the college savings would need. To be fair, there is a handy Sports Betting Dictionary with more associated pneumatic lassies – but if you are a solo nerd wasting away the grocery money you are not exactly going to be speaking in tongues, as it were, with any new pals. Perhaps the intention is that you will somehow converse with “SPORTS HANDICAPPING PROFESSIONAL MARK MILLER” and need to know the patiois. Nicknamed “The Shark,” you can find out more about the guy behind the choice of pneumatic lassies here:

Mark has been handicapping for over 30 years with his roots in horse racing at Santa Anita Park. He has been handicapping ever since and built his reputation with honesty, hard work and telling his clients like it is, whether win or lose. No false advertising. No sales pressure. Mark leads with results. Maintaining a small operation allows Mark to not only stay in close touch with his clients, but also allows him to build long term relationships…

Wow. Friendly…but ominously no mention that he will provide birthday party clown services in a pinch.

Once you can talk the talk there are still issues like the fact that when I click on the spot to get my major league baseball preview background advice – you know, the Miller touch – the page is blank. This, as far as I understand, is generally called “The Fatal Mistake” as in not being ready.

So, in the end, not only do I not understand what to make of the site, I do not really know what to make of the review request. I do not understand betting and have no desire to learn. If I did, I might need to swim elsewhere.

Bullets And Chat And Friday And Stuff

How will I remember this week? How will it sit in the past? I loaded and unloaded a canoe by myself this week. I bottled a hefeweizen. I ate well-roundedly and got a decent amount of sleep. If a nuclear holocaust were to come and I survive like those few in A Boy and His Dog or even Mad Max this is the sort of week I’ll miss. If not, I’ll have a hard time recalling it.

  • Update: Who is this “the left” that the Flea and some like the Babbler speak of, though the latter admits the truth? Cases would be much better made with out reference to boogie men. There is a distasteful and false presumption among those who elect themselves to speak for the equally vacuous “the right” that patriotism, security and common sense (despite all the evidence) is their sole inheritence. Given a recent pole [Ed.: see below] that says 40% of conservatives are against the war in Afghanistan, it is a meaningless broad brush. Name names. Focus the slur on the fringe. Admit the fluidity and undemarkated nature of the problem. Put up.

    Break slamming point of correction: And just like that the Flea did in most excellent fashion…

    A self-selecting group exhibiting the psychopathologies outlined above and related psychopathologies concerning the free market, crime and punishment and reality-testing deficiencies regarding the weather. The real left, the ones who continue to advance universal values of liberty and equality, do not exhibit these symptoms. Here I am thinking particularly of Christopher Hitchens and those of us who advance under his banner.

    I can heartily live with this as long as “the real left” includes those large number who see the same security ultimately in participating in a social welfare system as well as well-resourced police and military. I once came across someone flogging the idea that only persons of the right were in the military. Horse pucks.

  • Update: Sounds like leasehold improvements to me. Pay up, Royals.
  • A good week for baseball. The Sox gave a thumping to Tampa Bay and, due to the badness of scheduling, will play them 15 times from here on in. No wonder there is now the sort of talk that does one no good.
  • The Baseball Hall of Fame has a snazzy new website.
  • An interesting article in the NYT about the continuing random police checks that have occurred in that city’s subways since 9/11.

    Terrorism experts said the program’s effectiveness was not so much that it is a tight barrier to keep terrorists out of the subways, but that its fluid nature could keep any attack planners off balance. Trumpeting the program publicly is also a deterrent, they said.

    That and John Smeaton – the West’s best defences.

  • Brother Doug considers how to dequill.
  • In addition to Smeaton proving that Scots in fact are the toughest wee bastards in the worrrrld, Scots finalized their take over of the UK with the beginning of the government of Gordon Brown who has made a wise decision:

    British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Friday he had given orders for government offices to “fly the flag.” He said he had abolished a rule which allowed government buildings to raise the British flag, the so-called Union Jack, only 18 days a year. “It was because they listed the number of public events and on no other days would the Union Jack be flown,” said Mr. Brown, who has pushed for efforts to promote a British identity for all citizens.

    Good for Mr. Brown. I have to admit, I like that in the states more flags are flown and that they seem to represent each person not the government. We do well around Canada Day but, aside from the politics, the bi-colour is frankly just a little less eye catching. I had though the Red Ensign had recently be raised back to official status but can find now reference this morning. Viva Tanganyika, if you know what I mean.

A quiet week here but not so elsewhere.

White Stripes Road Trip

This is cool. My buddy Dave went to see them in the Yukon in a park. But that was sort of dullsville on this trip:

Any rock star who won’t get out of bed for less than 10,000 people should ponder the counter-example of the White Stripes. The duo from Detroit has played free shows for small groups of hastily assembled fans at nearly every stop on their “ocean to permafrost” tour of Canada. They’ve played youth centres in Burnaby and Edmonton, a park in Whitehorse and even a city bus in Winnipeg. In each case, the gig was arranged only hours in advance, with strict instructions from the band’s management not to tell the media. Ed Whitehead, who co-owns two bowling alleys in Saskatoon, returned a call on Saturday from the Stripes’ road manager, who wanted to know if it would be okay for Jack and Meg White to play a short set at the Eastview Lanes.

The trouble with the YouTube I-am-a-rock-star with 500 fans model is that no one cares. And no one cares because there is no performance. Sure there is a bar and a crowd and CDs being sold at the back and to hell with management and record companies and the whole Lavern and Shirley making it my way thing but at the end of the day Elvis and Johnny Rotten and Mick Jagger (when he was a decent age to actual mean anything) performed and made this civilization of ours take notice.

Isn’t Winning Us Keeping Schools Open?

…and not teaching them to kill us? Sure we need a better statement of purpose being enunciated by the government (a point well made by Ben here) but this makes it very difficult to see how I could vote Jack in the near future:

NDP Leader Jack Layton told a news conference today that Canada should pull its troops out of Afghanistan before more lives are lost in a war he says can’t be won. “What they are being asked to do now is participate in a mission that has no prospect of military success,” Layton said. “It will simply escalate and prolong itself until we realize that it is not going to accomplish its goals.”

I would like to know the factual basis for this assessment…or if one was undertaken at all.

Group Project: Commuting Not Pardoning

Interesting discussion in the NYT this morning about sentencing triggered by the commuting of Libby’s sentence. It appears that people are treating it not like a one-off for a political hack but an act of governance which actually has some substantive value in a broader context:

The Libby clemency will be the basis for many legal arguments, said Susan James, an Alabama lawyer representing Don E. Siegelman, the state’s former governor, who is appealing a sentence he received last week of 88 months for obstruction of justice and other offenses. “It’s far more important than if he’d just pardoned Libby,” Ms. James said, as forgiving a given offense as an act of executive grace would have had only political repercussions. “What you’re going to see is people like me quoting President Bush in every pleading that comes across every federal judge’s desk.”

While there are those who saw the entire prosecution as a political event (aka tin hat conspiracy theorists…and Jay…whose server is down at the moment…) (Ed:…coincidence? I think not…), it is a proper think to prosecute high government officials who lie and obstruct justice in that it is a corruption of justice itself even if the liar is so foolish as to be lying about something ultimately of less consequence than he thought at the time. Crime control and other forms of strict interpretation of these sorts of things are traditionally hallmarks of conservatism. These values are more often expressed in the sentence than the conviction so it is something of surprise to have a conservative President justify the giving of a free-pass to a friend on the basis of sentencing theory.

This speaks to the theory of justice, something that is oddly personal. I say oddly in that there are few movements based around the principles of how we punish each other as a community as there are political parties around economic and social principles. Yet it is through punishment more than any other element of the law that we establish what is right.

So, using the illustration of Libby but perhaps leaving out the glorification of celebrity double standards (unless that is key to your theory of social good), what does this commuting of the sentence say to you? Are judges actually excessive or insufficiently harsh in what they do? And what does that opinion connect to for you as you go about your life?

Colonial Dutch Beer

Last week, a reader named Bob posed a very good question in the comments about: “Did the Dutch traders ship beer as a commodity in trade for Asian goods? If yes, what years, what style? Were hops used in any manner then?“. I thought it was such a good question that I posed it to Richard Unger, Professor at UBC and author of a number of books on beer history as well as the shipping trade. It may well be that there is no better person to answer Bob. And he did:

After some lengthy travelling I am now back home and can try to answer your or rather Bob’s question.

Amsterdam brewers in the first half of the 19th century produced some called East India beer which was not much different, so it was said, from beer brewed in the Bavarian style. Up to the 1860s Bavarian beer was extremely rare in the Kingdom of the Netherlands and only with the setting up of new breweries in the 1860s was the novel technology adopted, and then with enthusiasm. So such East India beer was special and different from the normal output.

It probably had a higher alcohol content though – that was the usual way to try to protect beers going to the tropics from spoilage. Dutch brewers, principally in Amsterdam, did brew beer for export to the East Indies even in the first half of the seventeenth century but it appears to have been the typical premium hopped beer, a bit better and somewhat stronger, than the beer made for consumption at home. There were many different names used for different beers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but I have never come across one that identified the beer made for export to the Indies, either East or West.

It is possible that none of that export beer was ever sold on the domestic market, the opposite with what happened with IPA which not long after it was established in the East became a popular drink at home. Incidentally the date of the first production of IPA is uncertain, or at least I am not certain. My best guess is a rather late one, that is around 1830 but I would be happy to be corrected. I am sorry to offer so little but I hope it is of some help.

Regards, Richard Unger

Very interesting and has triggered the posing of another question that I have already put to Lew Bryson about one meaning of the word “gueuze” which may be a red herring – which might in itself be a pun.

Transcendent Beer Blogging

My favorite blog these days is one from London about beer. Stonch has only been writing for a few months but his style is cheery and knowledgeable. Like me, he brews and hunts out new styles but unlike me he is much more in the centre of things beery. He also has a great eye for the photographic beery moment, including the one shown illustrating that you can take a cask of your own home brew on a train in the UK. Today he posted about the end of smoking in the pubs of England that came into effect yesterday and caught a celebrity moment:

Although the selection was restricted to bitters and summer ales – the curse of the English pub – everything was in perfect condition. The massive pork pies and cheese plates, served in lieu of dinner, win plaudits also. The Falkland even has celebrity endorsement: Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame was sat at the next table to us. You can spot him in the background on one of the photos above. He wasn’t alone. Despite sporting a dodgy tache and white socks, he seems to have bagged a stunna. Well done, grandad.

Bagged a stunna. Excellent.