Tag: Gen X at 40 and its Readers

2006 Sports Pool Update

Well, the baseball points are in so time for another table in the Gen X at 40 2006 Spring Sports Pool. The right answers for the baseball questions at #5 and the total of 60 available points were:

Boston won on 1 May.
No winner – there was a rain out on 2 May.
Wakefield and Wang were the starting pitchers.
Boston led New York by one game at 9 am on 3 May.

How have we made out so far?

~
NHL
Playoffs
Other
Hockey
World
Cup
Other
Fitba
Baseball
Other
Sport
Total
Hans 69 0 0 0 20 0 89
Alan 36 0 0 0 20 0 56
Rob 38 0 0 0 20 0 58
Scott 61 0 0 0 20 0 81
Ranald 103 0 0 0 20 0 123
CM N/P 0 0 0 N/P 0 0
Don 67 0 0 0 20 0 87
Mike 116 0 0 0 20 0 136
Matt 75 0 0 0 40 0 115
Marcia 35

N/P N/P N/P N/P N/P 35

Sports Pool 2006 Points Table

I have created a table for points for the pool and another complete table for all picks data. The data one needs me dropping in more of the picks so will take a little more time but it has the NHL picks in now. Make sure I have it right – even though this may be ultimately useless. And, yes, all manual so this year we will not have running totals.

And if anyone can figure out why there is this gap in between the text and the table please let me know…Got it! Just some unnecessary break tags at a few points.

~
NHL
Playoffs
Other
Hockey
World
Cup
Other
Fitba
Baseball
Other
Sport
Total
Hans 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Alan 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Rob 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Scott 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Ranald 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
CM 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Don 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Mike 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Matt 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Marcia 0

0 0 0 0 0 0

Friday Chat From The Road

Here I am in the lobby of the Comfort Inn in East Greenbush NY a little east
of Albany (an excellent
spot I might add) when what do my eye’s perceive? Gary’s
lament:

(trembling slightly….)
but, Alan, if you’re on
the road…wh-wh-ooo wiiilll run Friday chat? We, we we gotta have our
fix…..
(shakes, shudders, pale trembling face…)

So it is both
with a warm heart and yet a feeling somewhat like coming to terms with one’s
stalker that we have today’s Friday chat from the road:

  • Highway hotels are a favorite thing of mine. They play much the same role as
    airport terminals. You are in transit. It is not like a resport hotel or one in
    your favorite destination for an urban fix. Gotta have a pool, gotta have
    snacks, free breakfast and a gas station nearby that doesn’t give you the
    creeps. This particular gas station here has large bottles from nearby Ommegang
    as well as a Dunkin Donuts outlet. You got to love that: local craft for the
    beer during the Phillies and Braves and generic international for the morning
    zap. This sort of travel is also something in that style of being nowhere and
    anywhere. I really have no time to learn anything about East Greenbush NY and I
    do not want it foisted upon me. I want pleasing dislocation because by 10 am
    I’ll be gone. Like a Gordon Lightfoot song with someone who will bring you more
    pillows if you just dial the front desk and ask.

  • While on the road, even if just since 4 pm yesterday, you immediately get a
    sense that you don’t know what is going on. US sports talk radio doesn’t help.
    Why Canada can’t sustain a sports talk radio network when every city over 75,000
    in the US has its own local guy going on about the local team is beyond me.
    Yesterday I got a very good hour from WHEN 620 on the AHL team for
    Syracuse, the Crunch, and their prospects in the upcoming first round of the
    playoffs against the Mantiboa Moose. Imagine the guy in Syracuse who is fixated
    on taking apart the Manitoba Moose in four: Crush them! Crush them!

  • Apparently, according to Dick, George gave Dick and George the right to
    declassify information in an executive order. But
    Dick won’t say when they used it, who else has the general power and won’t (I am
    assuming maybe) show anyone the actual executive order. This is a lot like a
    general warrant, something barred by the US constitution, which was an
    appointment of an officer by the British pre-Revolution to search anywhere
    anytime on suspicion. It is much better for accountability and transparency to
    make folk write down on a piece of paper what facts exist and why they are
    relying on a power in like of those facts so that there is something to test the
    use of the power against. One would hope that the executive order would contain
    a test as well – a purpose which justifies declassification – so that if the
    purpose does not exist then a declassification would be unwarranted. And the
    scope of the disclosure as well. Not defining who gets to
    know     is fairly stunned, like the time Dad let the mouse out of the cage
    without shutting the door to the room. Lots of scurrying where you never
    expected you’d be scurrying.

  • If the Jays really are good this year, I know I will bandwagon with the best
    of them, I will say I liked them when – and frankly having watched them when
    there was nothing else to watch during the Jose Cruz Jr era I am owed that
    right. But it sure is depressing listening to them beat
    the Red Sox     for the second night in a row. Tonight, however, Ichiro is
    at Fenway. I love Ichiro. I try to excell at all things in life if only to be
    like the tiniest speck of grey in the shadow of the man that is Ichiro. I will
    drive though southern Vermont and New Hampshire today on highway 9 in an
    Ichiro-like manner.

Well, there you are time to get the DD java and
wake everyone up. Miles to go before I see the sea.

Sign Up, Sign Up!

Rumours that GX40 sports pool management practices have been cited in the new Federal Accountability Act have been vastly over-rated. All references to Byzantine complexity and subjective point calculations are to be removed at the committee level, as illustrated. I am assured on that point particularly by my new friends in fat capital city.

Remember – this year I am promising fabulous prizes and this year I may actually follow through.

Gen X Spring Sports Pool 2006

The tenth annual internet pool in a row. That is mind-numbing in the evident dedication to the pursuit of idleness and lack of productivity. Here are the rules in the most complex and utterly unwinnable pool yet:

1. NHL playoffs

Pick five scorers, one goon, one goalie, eight teams and a dark horse.

  • A point for a goal by a scorer.
  • A point for an assist by a scorer.
  • A point for a penalty minute by a goon. If your goon is kicked out of the playoffs and thereby the pool, you double the penalty minutes he has achieved to that point. The logic here is that the goon is a nut-bar. The later that he freaks and gets tossed for the balance of the playoffs, the more nut-bar like he is, the more he is the essential goon.
  • A point for each thousandth save percentage over .900 by your goalie
  • 5 points for picking each of the teams in the second, third and fourth rounds.
  • 25 bonus points for picking the dark horse – the team with the lowest regular season points to go the farthest in the playoffs. The dark horse must be seeded in the lower half of their conference.

2. Other Hockey

  • Name the winner of the Memorial Cup, Canada’s Jr A Men’s hockey championship. 10 points.
  • Pick four scorers in the Memorial Cup. One point for each goal or assist.
  • Pick the winner of the AHL’s Calder Cup. Ten points.

3. World Cup Fitba

  • Which team goes farther: Togo or Trinidad and Tobago? Ten points. Total goals breaks the tie.
  • Who wins the World Cup? Ten points.
  • Who wins the golden shoe for top scorer? Ten points.

4. Other Fitba

  • Pick the two teams in the English FA Cup Final. Five points each.
  • Pick the winner of the FA Cup. 10 points.
  • Pick the winner of the Scottish Premier League – not a Cup, #1 in the league table. Ten points.
  • Does Morton go up to the First Division of the SFA? Ten points if you are right.

5. Baseball

  • Who wins when the Red Sox and Yankees play on 1 May 2006? Ten points.
  • Who wins when the Red Sox and Yankees play on 2 May 2006? Ten points.
  • Who starts as pitcher for each team when the Red Sox and Yankees play on 1 May 2006? Ten points for each correct pick.
  • Which of thse two teams will be ahead of the other in the standings at 9 am 3 May and by how many games? Ten points for correct team and ten points for nearest to the lead in games.

6. Other Sports

  • Who wins the One Day International Series on Saturday, 20 May 2006 between teh West Indies v India, held at Jamaica? Twenty points. Guess the final score and you get ten more points if you are within 25 wickets on the score differential. Ten more points if you can explain how you exactly you know the score is what it is.
  • Who wins the World Snooker Championship at The Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, England held from 15 April – 1 May? Twenty points.
  • Who wins the British and Commonwealth super middleweight title match to be held on May 26, York Hall, London between Carl Froch v Brian Magee. Ten points. Ten more points if you name the exact round that the fight ends.
  • Who is the top scorer in the NBA playoffs. Twenty points.

I have to think of a few more questions on international sport. These will be posted in a bit. Get your picks in by 18 April 2006 at a reasonable hour.

This Friday’s Friday Chat

What kind of week was it? It was hopefully the last glimpse of a skim of
snow. It has been a fairly optimistic week otherwise with lots of contact with
old friends over the internet, planning a summer reunion in Halifax at the end
of July. But what else has the internet done for me lately?

  • Update#2: Just remembered that I forgot to remember to post about hearing Perry F. Rockwood on “The People’s Gospel Hour” this week on 1170 AM WWVA Wheeling, West Virginia while I was hunting for baseball. It is a Nova Scotia produced radio evangelical program seemngly on every station everywhere on the Maritime Canadian AM dial when I was a kid. I thought I had blogged posted before the soft spot I have for Perry’s voice and his pronunciation of “Boston, Massachusetts” at the end of every broadcast but I cannot find that reference via a search. So much for the internet. Good news! Perry is 88 and going strong.

  • Update: Iggy
    might get me to vote Liberal for the first time ever.

  • Mr. Harper is having a first brush with reality, needing now to debate the
    Afghanistan
    mission, having to pull back a
    contract to an insider     on accountability policy of all things and generally
    having to put a decade worth of puffery to the test. He is doing reasonably well
    but any claims to sightings the second coming of anyone’s Messiah are
    pre-mature. His tendency to secrecy and making up reasons for the things he does
    out of the air are going to get to be as annoying as his love of junior
    micro-management. He is not the only clever guy in the sandbox but at least he
    is a change and a keener. There is much good in hiring a keener.

  • It’s been a hard week for the creationists and Biblical literalists among
    you so there will be a round on the progressive faithful at happy hour today –
    soda pops for thems that want them, the good stuff for thems that need it.
    First, a
    transitional fossil     has been found linking our fishy forefathers to our
    monkey-like ones. I’ve never had a big problem with the scaley and tail-y past
    we share and suspect God has a good giggle at the trashing about people do to
    figure out what is what. I think reference to The Book of Job is
    instructive wherein the Creator took one of us aside and said “Huh? You think I
    tell you all the good stuff?” Then there was the
    Book of Judas     finding. Seeing as the Deas Sea scrolls were found in some guy’s tinder pile as
    he was stoking the flames of another fire under the bubbling stew pot for his
    family ‘s dinner, it should come as no surprise that there are loads of
    alternate versions out there. So raise a glass in commisseration for the
    fundamentalists whose fundamentals got a little shifty this week. Pray hoist ye,
    bruvvers and sistahs!

  • Has anyone started podcasting lately? I am feeling more and more that as
    bloggy text is actually solidifying as a hobby, podcasts are going the way of
    ham radio – nerdy and little understood. But it is not in the nature of the web
    to analyze what it likes to call its lesser successes. What people may be
    realizing is simply the difference in effort required to control text as opposed
    to sound. And podcasting needs a public success. After all, all of bloggy
    legitimacy has centered on one event, the great whoop-tee-doo of the firing of
    Dan Rather. Podcasting needs its similar Jimmy’s-in-the-well moment. It has yet
    to come.

  • Finally, I know someone who has had a windfall. I won’t tell you who or what
    but it was a surprising sign of my late-arriving semi-maturity that I did not
    curse my lack of such luck. Maybe it is the return of baseball, the passing out
    of winter or the general state of good tidings that have been surrounding me and
    mine far and wide but there was none of the usual gnashing gut churning
    why-does-this-never-happen-to-me stuff. Why is that? Am I losing my
    touch?

Well that is it for today. Let us gather and chat about things
we really do not understand fully and allow the glory of the medium give us
credence far beyond the quality of our thoughts.

Chat a la Friday

Once again it is the day before Saturday. It has been a good week around
here. No rocking out or anything but spring sprang and, really, that is half the
battle of the entire calendar:

  • Update: It must be a requirement that you can prove that you have
    been hit on the temple with a hammer recently to get to be a conservative
    columnist. It has to be. Look at Andrew
    Coyne’s shell game     in his column today:

    Of course, part of the reason the provinces are so
    loose with the coin is the benefactions of Uncle Ottawa, which Ontario and
    Quebec in particular have proved adept at squeezing in all the right places. The
    McGuinty government, which made the fictional “$23-billion gap” its war cry,
    quietly pocketed over $13.2-billion in federal cash last year, a 34% increase
    from just two years ago. Quebec, likewise, enjoyed an 8% increase in the last
    fiscal year.

    It is not surprising, given the fine fiscal
    understanding behind Tory-nomics, that he would not get the difference between
    gross and net in his stunning analysis of Ontario’s position but equating Saudi
    Albertia and Quebec as co-horts in economic solidity it dumbfounding. Compared
    to this, David Frum comes across as
    lucid.

  • Update: “…an eccentric old uncle who’s ignored…” Discuss.

  • Update: pause a moment for the
    250 year old tortoise     that passed away in India. Born around 1755.

  • The Flea has posted a link to the best hoax
    (unless the turtle story turns out to be one) that I have ever seen on the
    internet. I am a huge sucker and the use of a gesticulating professor was a
    brilliant diversion.

  • I was thinking about the bleating cry of the Boing Boing the other day when I read yet
    another rant about how the law of ownership should be amended because people
    have figured out a better way to steal…when it occurred to me that I have
    never seen a fair trade argument in relation to Digital Rights Management. How
    is it that we are so concerned about Juan Valdez and rightly seek out better
    coffee and other goods which are sold with fewer dollars going to the middle man
    and more to Juan but we do not use the same model for Juanita, his guitar
    playing cousin? Maybe because we would steal all Juan’s coffee if we could?

  • I gleefully watched LSU
    beat Duke     last night but realized quickly that no one in the pool
    saw the
    loss     coming so no one gets the big points on question #1. I hearby declare
    after 5837 have declared it before me that Glen “Big Baby” Davis is the new
    Shaq. I remember the, what, 1989 LSU March Madness and the side of beef that did
    ballet called Shaquille O’Neal. It was deja vu all over again.

  • Was Stevie always this chubby
    or has someone done this
    to him?

Friday Chat-A-Rama

Stumped no more. Shoeless Jones left a very wise if brief comment:

There is more to life than the three Bs; beer, baseball and bullshit!

That is true. Friday has become the highlight of the week chez nous for the inexplicable reason (say that like Daffy Duck) of the mere use of bullets rather than posts. As the coffee drips in the pot and soon into the brain I write:

  • The TV ratings for the Winter Olympics are apparently going to be the worst since 1906. It makes sense to me. I have not sat and gawked at the glowing screen and thin folk in lycra once. This weekend we are even going into enemy territory to catch the SLU v. Yale mens hockey game at Canton and then on to Oswego where they may not even have CBC on the cable system. Just Al Michaels. The horror. The horror. He even contextualizes this man to a degree. Fortunately, our hat, illustrated, is doing well:

    “We’ve replenished our stock twice already,” said a frazzled Kristina Panko, a service manager for HBC in Sudbury brought to Turin to work the B.C. House branch. “The hat’s so popular because it’s such an obvious symbol of Canada. But even at home, when I called the other day, they told me the stores had sold out.” The trapper hat is the “it” item of jock – and pseudo-jock – apparel in Turin. “It’s the trendy item of the Games,” said Curtis Runions, a 27-year-old native of Kingston, Ont., who has come to town from England, where he’s a high school teacher, to watch some hockey. “Maybe the fad will pass, like it did with the newsboy hats in Nagano, when everybody had one. But right now it’s the thing to have.”

    More sports of all kinds on Deadspin, my new joke-stealing source.

  • It is also true about Fridays. Friday used to be a statistical dead zone and I could never figure out why there would be an 80% drop in activity. Given that bots never sleep, this was weird as I would ahve though Friday was the idlest day of all. Not for me…others…that’s it. And there have been other shifts in the stats. I used to get up to 12,000 visits a day from 1,600 to 2,000 visitors. Now I get 7,500 visits from 2,000 to 2,500 visitors. I have no idea what it means. I have heard a few references to last August (when GX40 numbers hit a peak) as the top month for others. Maybe that was the crest of the blogosphere. Just a few comments to 50,000, by the way.
  • On the three Bs mentioned above, there is lots of stuff that never gets written down here that falls into the categories of family and work. I think that it is prudent but also I generally like to make up stuff so that no one can really call me out on any particular fact. So while I try to write daily, it is not as fact based as, say, John Gushue’s excellent Dot Dot Dot, as excellent a radio reference as there ever was.
  • I am as state pro-bureaucracy as they come in the sense I am not a knee-jerker against public money going to public needs through public service. [Ed.: Yes, I know…how did we ever get the class “D” bloggers license?] I believed this consistently when I was in the self-aggrandizing private sector. Yet…there is this thing called the CRTC and I have learned, if this is possible, to love them less this morning:

    The CRTC said yesterday that Canadian telephone customers have been overbilled to the tune of $652.7-million over the past few years, but the money will not be going back to them. The federal regulator ruled instead that telecommunications companies such as Bell Canada and Telus Corp. should use most of the money — equivalent to about $50 a customer — to expand offerings in underserved markets, primarily rural and remote communities.

    I want my fifty bucks, please. MY fifty bucks.

  • I like Jean Charest. I think he is going to go to junior partner in a 2 person caucus in 1993 to one of the great players in whatever changes are going to occur in Canada. Note this in the Globe:

    In the recent election campaign, Mr. Harper promised Canadians that he would work with the premiers to develop a guarantee on patient waiting times ensuring that Canadians receive essential treatment within clinically acceptable time frames. The cost of the pledge, said Mr. Harper, would have to be borne by the provinces under former prime minister Paul Martin’s $41-billion, 10-year plan for health care, signed in 2004. Yesterday, however, the Quebec Premier made it clear that he doesn’t expect to pick up the cost of his provincial program on his own. The gauntlet now dropped, Mr. Harper will have to decide whether to modify his promise and help pay for the program, or bite the bullet and disappoint Quebec, and probably other provinces, too.

    Good job. We all didn’t sign up for Team Stevie. 63.5% didn’t. I think we are going to look to the premiers as much as the opposition in the House to hold them to account.

There. That is a start. Chat dammit chat.