Category: Uncategorized

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

The Road Of An Evening

Sir John A, 401, 12, 7, 407, 427, 409, parking garage access road, garage, parking garage access road, 409, 427, 407, 7, 12, 401, Sir John A. Getting someone at Terminal 3 is a piece of cake even if a 575 km piece of cake. Thank God the Sox beat the Yankees and the Buffalo signal on 550 AM was clear until the New York City signal was clearer on 880.

What or who was a “bramp” anyway? The suit, the mailbox moneied and the tappers of ground and tree ought to witness Brampton from the 407 once in a life to see the deal. It doesn’t matter if you have got a million tonnes of this or that – if it doesn’t get packaged and shipped out it is just a pile. Brampton is the hive.

Radio Orchestra

I had no idea there was one of these still around:

Trombonist and composer Alain Trudel has been named the principal conductor of the CBC Radio Orchestra. He’ll officially take over musical leadership this fall at the Vancouver-based orchestra, North America’s only radio orchestra.

I am sure this puts me a few rungs down the ladder if any of you are CBC 2 types but I can only go so far to accommodate you people. But, really – who knew? What we really need is a state light orchestras. And state ale, cake, (pipe) and tea houses where they might play. One pal has a father-in-law who is/was a member of a state folk orchestra. Followed him around with brass band players for the days before his wedding. Best wedding video ever: there’s your pal, there’s central Europe, there’s the om-pah band. That is what the CBC needs to bring to the nation.

John Kenneth Galbraith

It is hard to say you are sad to hear of the passing of someone at 97 but it is the case with John Kenneth Galbraith. I have enjoyed a few of his many books and appreciate that he played a role in the economic modernization that helped bring the boom of wealth to North America that the combination of social welfare and well-regulated, well-taxed capitalist freedom has provided over the last 50 plus years. My favorite recollection of his observations was his description in the book Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went of the amazement of, I think, a US Secretary of the Treasury coming to the realization that banks, when loaning money, create the money loaned out of thin air as opposed to partaking of any sort of transfer away from A to give to B.

But it is his autobiographies that I would recommend first. In The Scotch he wrote about his south-west Ontario roots, including a great discription of his family’s weekly rushed clearing our of the local market town at the end of Saturday afternoon as the drunken brawls of less temperate but temporarily funded neighbouring farmers began pouring out into the streets. In another autobiography, I remember him describing the work he did as a economist for the US Navy after WWII figuring out the effect of Allied bombing on German industry as well as seeking out the basis for the Nazi war machine. He was quite shocked to learn there was no machine, that the Nazis refused to run factories on more than one eight-hour shift a day or employ women in them due to their puritanical belief in their “traditional family”.

Even if your economics are mere faith-based contrarianism, you may try to resist but should not as you will find the bright quality of his mind reflected in the writing nonetheless, the sort of mind which, when asked as an election night pundit at 7 pm who would win replied ask me at 11 pm and was happily never asked back to be an election night pundit.

Friday?…what do I do on Fridays?…hmmm

Friday. The last Friday of April as a matter of fact. I always run into May
with as much surprise as despiration as when March arrives. The magnolias are
coming into bloom here. Saw “mag-noooo-lias” like one of those Bugs Bunny
southern-gent-in-white-suit characters. Can’t do that in March. No sir.

  • Bye bye aggregation. Last summer, I was getting around 92% of visits through
    RSS. Now it is down to 76%. Comment spam is to blame I figure. Plus who the hell
    wants to read 250 feeds a day. I got an email from a pal asking me about the
    spam torrent on my comments but I had to tell him I never noticed as this blog’s
    format hides them from the front page pretty well automatically except that they
    show up on RSS. So for you aggregation readers, sorry. But there’s not much you
    can do given aggregation is going the way of usenet.

    Update: should this
    come to pass, kiss email goodbye, too.

  • Baseball is a game of failure and the Red Soxs are doing a good job the last
    week or so of proving that. Having the bazillion channel package just makes the
    down times worse – leaving me clicking back to find out that is it 0-6, 2-9,
    2-15…Good
    Lord    . But it brings perspective to my hollow shell of an inner life, right?
    That is why I follow them. Must be.

  • I am thinking of throwing my hat into the ring for the Liberal leadership
    race. Every single person in the country appears to be doing it so why not me?
    It is a largely uninspiring bunch. I am still backing Iggy from a distance but
    really only because I can call him Iggy. El Tigre makes a fairly good
    point about the vision-ettes
    of the Dryden and Kennedy candidacies     but I think Harper harkening to
    anything other than devolution is a bit off. No, it is all about planning the
    new social engineering of one localizing sort or another these days. Really, it
    is all about blandification as far as I see as so much as been shifted away from
    the Feds that they really have a small amount of effect on day to day life. You
    can’t harken back to the pre-60s without planning to reinstate the massive
    Federal presence as we were then a proud nation of the post office and the train
    system, bureaucracies like Health and Welfare Canada and the St. Lawrence
    Seaway. We always have been a nation of inspectors and the inspected. There has
    been and will be no great Canadian vision without the “national project” of one
    sort or another. Unless someone comes up with one, don’t expect any undoing of
    Grant’s Lament for A
    Nation     otherwise.

  • Chiz is my pal. Reading this, I feel very badly
    for Chiz as Chiz is a really good guy.

Certainty

I have always considered the desire to firmly fix the future – to seek certainty in the uncertain flux of what is to be – a sign of some sort of weakmindedness, hubris over the temporal. No wonder, then, that the news of the day, a cap on trade in lumber to the US and set dates for Federal elections has assured me once again that we now live in Simpleton.

The second is being proposed for reasons antithetical, to avoid early elections. Well, having had two Federal elections in the last two years and no one having lost an eye I simply do not see the reason. We started having maximum terms between votes to assure that we got a vote sooner or later. I like voting. If we voted more I would be happy as that is when I get to be involved in the process. Fixed election dates only stop idiots with perceived leads from getting the boot when they dare to go to the pools early. Serves them right. Leave me and my boot that pleasure.

First of all, why would we think that maxing out the amount that we can sell to anyone? We are a nation of exporters of raw goods, all vanities otherwise aside. What good comes of shutting down a resource market to get a payback of what was improperly taken by a buyer? We aren’t needy. Especially as this country is experiencing a sustained economic boom despite the unfair imposition of that duty. Especially when the amount we are to receive is about half to be blown on the beer and popcorn money. Chicken feed in the big picture. It would seem that economically we are able to deal from a position of strength as a nation but the new negotiators weren’t told.

There. Believe it or not, I lack faith in the new mid-minor masters based on the evidence of their deeds. Who’d believe it? Sooner or later I will put that second string on the banjo…I suppose.

Update: Hey, they listened to the complaints. That’s good.

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