Monday, February 20, 2006

I'm going to be the best father EVOR

I knew all those hours of playing RPGs (role playing games for the uninitiated) would amount to something. If only a baby came with a +7 tome of sleep, then parents would be set.

The irony is I don't want my kids (if I am to have any) to play video games so dungeons and dragons will have to do. Maybe I'll have to think about this one further.

It's strange to see gamers growing up and becoming adults, because as a kid I felt adults would never "get" the video game craze. I was right until we all grew up and became adults ourselves. Now we are still gamers but we don't want the same content. This is where Nintendo has gone wrong but that's a thought for another time.

Hypocrite Warning

I have a couple of questions for you:

Why do people watch movies like "Pearl Harbor"?

How is it that a Childrens' book such as the Harry Potter series have such widespread appeal?

And finally, how does a self professed music connoisseur, such as myself become enamored with such an asinine song like "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas?

A recent study by Columbia University researchers may have discovered the tip of the answers iceberg by looking at the listening habits of 14,341 participants drawn from a teen-interest Web site. The conclusions of the study show that we make our music purchases based partly on our perceived preferences of others.

I don't want to hear anything about the diversity (or lack there of) of the sample groups. Most likely they were impressionable youngsters who just wanted to fit in. Well I think we all can guess what marketers consider their most important demographic.

In an increasingly complex world (with more choices than you can shake a stick at) we might be relying too heavily on the influence of others in our choices. I have another question: What else is new? Advertising is a business predicated on this very same social condition, and it seems to be working out just fine for them.

Good news for marketers. Bad news for the possible emergence of anything of substance in the face of huge budgets. At least I know my mind hasn't been invaded. Now excuse me. I have to go listen to "My Hump", on my Apple I-pod, while reading the newest edition of Harry Potter. "Pearl Harbor", however, is where I draw the line.

Friday, February 10, 2006

Madden Odds

This comes from Darren Rovell's Sports Business Blog on ESPN.com. Seriously, it's not as boring as it sounds. I promise. Maybe I should have hedged my bets by putting some money down on something like this:

Madden Odds

The people at Pinnacle Sports apparently know what they are talking about. On the second play of Seattle's second drive, ABC announcer John Madden said this: "Kimo Von Oelhoffen has a heck of a club." Why did the people at the sports gambling outfit care? Because they predicted that, out of a list of Maddenisms, he would use that one first. Here were the odds on a proposition bet Pinnacle put out before the game that asked fans to wager on what Madden would say first after kickoff: "Heck of a" (6/5), "Big time," (7/2), "Horsecollar" (7/1), "Boom!" (7/1), "Manhandled" (9/1), "Wham!" (15/1). PinnacleSports.com reported that about 150 people won $6 for every $5 they bet by predicting that "Heck of a" would come first. John Madden did not place a bet himself.

Monday, February 06, 2006

Super Bowl My Ass (or how I learned to stop caring and love the whine)

As you might or might not know, I am a Seahawks fan. It's been rough and I'm sorry to admit that over the years my interest in the team has waned because of their constant letdowns and overall mediocrity... This is what you sign up for as a Seahawk fan (or any fan in general unless you are very lucky), and it is a well known rule that to give up on your team or to not put everything you have behind them in every situation is equivalent to sin. I consider this post to be a sort of confessional for me to vent just a little and show where my allegiances lie. Now on with the show:

This was the first time since '96 that I have been able to enjoy one of my teams in a Championship Game (in '96 the Supes lost to Michael Jordan and the Bulls who were beginning their second Threepeat), and I was more than moderately excited. I wasn't concerned that the Steelers were 4 point favorites heading in or that approximately 256,365 Steeler fans showed up compared to Seattle's 7.

As the game wore on I could tell this team was not only beatable but likely to be beaten even with the missed chances the Seahawks were amassing through an assortment of drive killing penalties and dropped passes. We were holding up the Steeler's blitzburg packages that had been talked about all week with relative ease and this was the brightest sign of the night.

When Seattle took the field for their final drive of the first half I started to have my doubts especially when D-jack's TD was called out of bounds (much more on this later). We ended up with nothing, missing a 50 yard field goal as time expired. No worries right. I certainly wasn't worried at that point. Maybe I should have...

I'm not going to talk about the officiating too much because it's already been dissected by everyone in the "real" media (that's right, I am a self-proclaimed member of the "fake" media). One drive that stands out was in the fourth quarter right before Hasselbeck's costly INT during which there was a Horse collar tackle not called, a phantom holding penalty, and a block below the waist called on Hasselbeck while he was making a tackle. Seriously... how can you call it a block when the player is on D? It seems a little counterproductive to be blocking someone on D.

Here is a list of partisan grippers that I feel adequately put the debacle into perspective:

1) Micheal Smith - "Here's what referee Bill Leavy's crew did, point blank: It robbed Seattle."

2) Skip Bayless (who had been killing us in the media for weeks on end for being undeserving) - "On this night, the Steelers had their own version of [the Seahawk's] 12th Man. He wore a striped shirt and a whistle. He threw a flag."

3) Gene Wojciechowski (just so I can say I'm presenting both sides of the argument) - "Enough already with the whining. The Seahawks had their chances. Plenty of them to overcome the Steelers and, if they insist, the refs, too."

OK I lied... More gripping about the refs along with indisputable video evidence showing Seattle got jobbed (at least for one touchdown). Did I mention I had a three-way $100 bet on this game? FUCK!



How is this not a Touchdown? It's a documented rule that if you touch the pylon while still in-bounds it's a touchdown. D. Jackson caught the ball, his left foot hits in-bounds then his right foot hits the pylon - TD right?!?! In the rulebooks yes but not at this Superbowl.

"A player no longer can be ruled out of bounds when he touches a pylon unless he already touched the boundary line." Straight from the NFL site, ruled changes made in March of 2002!

In fact John Clayton wrote about this exact rule change on ESPN as well: "A player will be ruled in bounds if he touches the pylon at the goal line before going out of bounds. For example, a pass would be considered complete if one foot touches the pylon and the other foot is in bounds". Which happened exactly as the rule is written to the letter. Unreal.

But since it was inside 2 min mark Sea couldn't challenge it (why is that anyway?), and the replay official didn't even stop play to review it. AND Pit called a timeout to stop the clock. Which gave them plenty of time to call for a review. WTF?

And the NFL has the audacity to support the officiating by saying it was 'properly officiated'. The ESPN poll asking readers whether or not they agreed with the NFL on this issue shows that (at the time of this post's publishing) out of 32,778 people polled 78.4% disagreed with this assessment. Of course I did vote about 24,834 times so maybe I skewed the data a bit. Now you must please excuse me while I go rip my eyeballs from my skull with my bare hands...

Enough about officiating. Moving on to the walrus...

What was Holmgren thinking, down by 11 at the 50 yard line, punting on 4th and about 12 with 6:30 to go in the game? Doesn’t he know that the only thing Pittsburgh has been able to do all season is run the clock out? Predictably the punt sails deep into the end zone for a touchback.

In conclusion I don't blame the refs, even though I should. The game was very winnable, but in-game coaching blunders (especially at the end of the halves) doomed the Seahawks when they still had at least a chance to come back. However, you can be damn sure I'm going to be bitter about this game for a long time.

Thailand

So I have a couple of pictures of Thailand I would like to share (I've been there for the last 11 days or so and it's the reason I haven't been blogging. I know what you are thinking... "There are plenty of Internet Cafes there, why didn't you just blog from there." Well I'd rather spend my time in the sun and stuff so there.)

Ben in the back of truck on the way to KaiBei Beach. The roads were wicked curvy but we would go out and rent motorbikes all the same. Heck for five dollars a day it was the best entertainment we could find... That is until it got dark. We would have a bi-nightly cocktail hour with this fruity Thai rum and fresh pineapple juice... Good Stuff

Me trying to look cool on our first night on Ko Chang. Not a cocktail night as we hadn't discovered the wonderful nectar but a good night all the same. We drank many Chang beers and when we were feeling a little saucy we would have ourselves some Singhas. That first night we put down a whole lot of food. Later this night we ran into...

Our Beach Soccer Friends, we sang songs and were first introduced to the sweet rum of the islands. From then on we were hooked even though they liked to drink it with water, which was not quite as good as the pineapple juice. My feet were beat to hell after the beach soccer game, because we played at low tide on the compacted sea bed.

Beach Breakfast - a favorite morning hangout on KaiBei Beach: beautiful views and all the fresh fruit you could eat. The Islands in the distance are about 45 minutes of hard kayaking away and we made the trip one day. They looked much closer than they seemed so by the time we left it was dark and we made our way back over the dark and silent sea.

My Badass Bungalow on White Sands Beach: I loved this thing. It had a window that opened up to the sun rise and I would get up super early (almost) everyday to eat breakfast and get some early sun. I'd take a break at mid-day and go to an internet cafe, so as not to take in the rough sun, then go back for more (I know you can't tell from looking at me)

Angry Bryan at White Sands: I don't know what he was angry about... maybe the fish weren't biting that day or something. Anyways, those are some cool glassed huh? Can you tell I'm just typing stuff so that I can put all the text relating to this picture right next to it? You see I haven't figured out all the functions so that's what I do.

Our Swedish Friends who we met on White Sands Beach. They were very impressed that I could sing the "one elephant went out to play, upon a spider's web one day" song in Swedish. If not for my Swedish friends from ASIJ this would not be possible. Big Ups to my long time bro Fred Kumlin or making this communication a reality!

So that's my vacation in a nutshell. Overall it was very sandy and filled with adventure and danger. In conclusion I must say that it's a good idea to wear shoes when motorbiking, not getting too wasted and don't wrestle on the beach unless you feel like having sand in every crevase for the next 3 weeks. If you have questions please do ask.