Monthly Archives: September 2009

STFD! Gets Forked!

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You're not Mia Hamm!

You're not Mia Hamm!

Shut The Front Door! finished a depressing 3rd for the second straight time, while Get The Fork Out! took home $80 for its second consecutive 1st place finish.

When they needed a Ray Bourque, STFD! sent a Bobby Orr. When they needed a Wilt Chamberlain, they sent a Bill Russell. When they needed a Brad Pitt movie, they sent the wrong Brad Pitt movie. When they needed an Eminem, they sent a Dr. Dre. And perhaps most troubling, when they needed a topless soccer player, they sent a fully-clothed Mia Hamm.

The one bright spot for STFD! this week was the final round where Addison single-handedly dominated the Disney animated film category and enabled STFD! to eek by The Grandmothers Gone Wild.

And yes… there IS a team called The Grandmothers Gone Wild now. They may sip Metamucil instead of tequila, but that only results in them regularly dropping knowledge down on other teams like a Geritol-fortified hammer!

Many theories circulate as to why STFD! finds itself underperforming of late. Is playing constantly shorthanded taking a toll? Are they getting dumber? Are they trying to get invited to the White House by acting “stupidly?” Is their success positively correlated with that of the New England Patriots or negatively correlated with that of the NY Jets?

Asked for his insight, Mike from Get The Fork Out! offered, “I don’t know if it’s early onset of Alzheimers or late-stage siphilis, but whatever disease STFD! has, those guys are taking a whole cocktail of suck pills these days.”

The full-proof Abigail System Revealed!

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Forget tea leaves or pig entrails!

Forget tea leaves or psychics!

My mother and father currently have barely 50% of their football picks correct so far this NFL season. That’s not impressive. My grandmother is under .500 for her picks. That’s even worse!

What these amateurs need is a viable, proven system for handicapping teams, but instead they rely on senseless data like “which team has the better punter,” or “which team plays in a dome,” or “which team’s mascot is more powerful.”

I wouldn’t care, but since they’re foolishly gambling with MY future college funds, I need to get these people back on track pronto. Towards that end, I offer my full-proof method for determining NFL winners.

All you need is a list of match-ups and a supply of cereal. Raise several pieces of cereal above your head, close your eyes, and drop the cereal on the list of teams. Where the cereal ends up accurately determines the victorious team, since cereal naturally gravitates toward winners, milk, and dog mouths. As you can see from the example pictured, the Patriots are looking like a lock to beat the Jets and to cover the spread.

Note: don’t conduct your experiment near milk or dog mouths or you may end up with spurious data!

I happen to favor stale Cheerios for my picks, but you can also use Capn Crunch. I do not suggest using oatmeal, simply because it tends to splatter, to obscure the results and to anger the owners of the carpet.

Give my system a try. I think you’ll like the results.

Week #1 NFL Smackdown Update!

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Week of the dog!

Week of the dog!

As you can see from the official smackdown standings, week #1 failed to separate brains from luck in the gridiron picking arena. Both Emily and Andy finished the week at (8w – 8l), while Nancy finished at (7w – 9l), so no clear trend has emerged.

Interesting notes from week #1:

There were 15 possible underdog/favorite picks (underdogs GET points while favorites GIVE points).  The Carolina Panthers versus Philadelphia Eagles game was straight up (no points either way) in our pool.

For these possible 15 favorite/underdog matchups:

  • Emily took ALL 15 possible favorites!
  • Nancy took 7 favorites and 8 dogs.
  • Andy took 9 favorites and 6 dogs.
  • For the week, favorites went (7w – 9l) with Philly winning the straight up matchup, so the underdogs won week #1.
  • Nancy took the most dogs and should have had an advantage from doing so, but alas, she chose the wrong puppies at times which left her one game off the pace.

STFD! versus GTFO!? There can be only one!

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War-painted Header!

War-painted Header!

STFD! was incomplete and outplayed this week at Tin Whistle Trivia. We offer no excuses; we do offer an explanation.

Since the Silbergleit Summer Carnival pulled up its tent pegs and hoofed it out of town, we expected fewer/weaker competitors and we handicapped our varsity team accordingly. Our magnanimous, parity-seeking actions (we left both Abigail and Emily off the roster!) were horribly misplaced, as five fully-staffed rival teams ponied up and came to play harder than megashark and giant octopus combined.

We did not know who won the first ever Monday Night Football game, we did not know all of the monthly birthstones, we were not familiar with Jay-Z’s catalog of crap, we did not know Vince Vaughn’s sundry Hollywood aliases, and there were absolutely no questions concerning the wingspan of fowl.

Homework must be done!

Feel lucky, punk?

Andy also proved to be, in the words of one observer, “pretty damn useless” during crunch time, since the final round was a puzzle variety akin to the brain-wrenching rebus riddles to be found beneath the evil caps of Lucky Lager. This is an area where Andy has never performed above the .08 percentile, and he once again folded before the challenge like a house of cards assembled by a kindergarten class.

A few Tin Whistle Trivia final round puzzle examples:

  1. 18 H I A R O G
  2. 200 D F P G I M
  3. 8 S O A S S
Would-be utensil usurpers?

Would-be utensil usurpers?

But perhaps more troubling than our third-place finish was the emergence of a new trivia team named Get The Fork Out!, a team clearly parodying the legendary success of Shut The Front Door! with admirably postmodern, mock homage.

This new team (which finished in forkly fourth… heh heh!) will undoubtedly polarize trivia fans, since it makes sense to either Shut The Front Door! or to Get The Fork Out!, but to do both is unnecessarily redundant.

Next week we will field a complete, well-conditioned, motivated team. We will listen to additional crappy music, we will drink and solve several cases of the Lucky Lager, and we will arrive early to Shut The Front Door! before the fork folks even arrive. We’re curious to see if Get The Fork Out! turn into Lettuce The Fork In! when faced with a blocked entrance.

Alternative to Obama-care?

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Philip Greenspun of MIT and Web development fame is working on a draft of an essay on how to reform health care. Sound like a dry topic? It isn’t. Here’s a sample from the rough draft:

… Suppose that you could give up two years of life expectancy in exchange for the following: paid-for housing, paid-for cars, paid-for college, paid-for vacations, paid-for children. Instead of living 78 years, you’d expect to live 76, but you’d never have to work full-time and could probably pack a lot of enjoyment into those 76 years because you wouldn’t be a slave to day-to-day expenses.

Let’s compare the U.S. to Mexico. Mexicans share our continent, our love for soda and corn syrup, and our tendency towards chubbiness (source). We spend approximately $8500 per year per American on health care and live to the age of 78. A Mexican can expect to live to age 76. How much do Mexicans spend on health care? Their per-person GDP is only about $13,000 per year, and they supposedly spend about 6 percent of GDP on health care (source) so $800 per person is a good estimate.

An American will spend $600,000 in order to add two years to the end of his life. Those two years may very well be spent in an intensive care unit or a nursing home and certainly are not likely to be spent on the tennis court or visiting the Venice Biennale.

For that $600,000, an American could have the following:

  • a house, free and clear of all mortgages (median price for a single family house sold nationwide in May 2009 was $170,000)
  • a lifetime supply of automobiles, assuming $20,000 per car, a 10-year life per car, and 50 years of driving ($100,000)
  • 50 vacations for a family of four (average cost $1600; total of $80,000)
  • a college education ($25,000 of tuition for four years at a public university)
  • two children, reared to the age of 17 ($125,000 per kid, average cost for a basic family (source); note that a pair of Americans could have four children, all of whose costs would be completely paid for out of this $600,000)
  • $75,000 in walking-around money

- Philip Greenspun from rough draft of Health Care Reform for the United States

Greenspun’s longer draft covers a great deal more and offers many other specific recommendations for improving the current U.S. health care system. Read and comment on the full essay.