You Can't Spell EPIC FAIL without EPL: This is what will happen!

Srsly, write this in your journals. This is what the table will look like come mid-may. Now that all the transfer deadline day craziness is over, I've been able to settle down and, in a fury of knowledge, crap out this almost completely shot-in-the-dark prediction. After the top six... it's as clusterfucky as clusterfucks get.

1. Manchester United
2. Manchester City
3. Chelsea
4. Liverpool
5. Arsenal
6. Tottenham Hotspur
7. Stoke City
8. Newcastle United
9. Sunderland
10. Aston Villa
11. Bolton Wanderers
12. Everton
13. Fulham
14. Queens Park Rangers
15. Wolverhampton Wanderers
16. Wigan Athletic
17. West Bromwich Albion
18. Blackburn Rovers
19. Norwich City
20. Swansea City

Tha Captain will be working tirelessly this weekend with comments about all of the teams. I mean, what else will I be doing during an off-weekend for the premier league?

HINT: I WILL BE WATCHING FOOTBALL HOLY GOD WELCOME BACK FOOTBALL

ok real pix

Miss. St. (-30) at Memphis
Kent State (+38) at ALABAMA
Missouri State (+42) at Arkansas
Utah State (+21) at AUBURN
Florida Atlantic (+35) at Florida
Boise St. (-3) vs. Georgia
Oregon (-3) vs. LSU
Brigham Young (-3) at Ole Miss
East Carolina (+20.5) vs. South Carolina
Montana (+28) at Tennessee
Elon (+12.5) at VANDERBILT
KENTUCKY (-18) vs. Western Kentucky

Home underdogs ALWAYS cover. WKU doesn't count because the game is in Nashville or something.

ThaCaptainzPix: Just something to hold you over until Ted's picks.

Following the pattern, bold's a winnah, cap's a coverah!

Miss. St. (-30) at Memphis
Kent State (+38) at Alabama
Missouri State (+42) at Arkansas
Utah State (+21) at Auburn
Florida Atlantic (+35) at Florida
Boise St. (-3) vs. Georgia
Oregon (-3) vs. Louisiana St.
Brigham Young (-3) at Ole Miss
East Carolina (+20.5) vs. South Carolina
Montana (+28) at Tennessee
Elon (+12.5) at Vanderbilt

Dogs be barkin. Got a good feeling about it.

3E Introduces the 2011 3E SEC Pick-Off: Charlie's picks

So this is a thing. I am doing it like this: bold to win, caps to cover the line.

MISSISSIPPI STATE (-30) at Memphis
Kent State (+38) at Alabama
Missouri State (+42) at ARKANSAS
Utah State (+21) at AUBURN
Florida Atlantic (+35) at Florida
BOISE STATE (-3) vs. Georgia
Oregon (-3) vs. LSU
BYU (-3) at Ole Miss
East Carolina (+20.5) vs. SOUTH CAROLINA
Montana (+28) at TENNESSEE
Elon (+12.5) at VANDY

UPDATE!: Forgot KENTUCKY (-18) vs. Western Kentucky

Disney was hardcore

they let little kids watch this?

in response to a comment tha captain made earlier

I thought this was your ringtone

It's a good life

Aunt Amy was out on the front porch, rocking back and forth in the highbacked chair and fanning herself, when Bill Soames rode his bicycle up the road and stopped in front of the house.

Perspiring under the afternoon "sun," Bill lifted the box of groceries out of the big basket over the front wheel of the bike, and came up the front walk.

Little Anthony was sitting on the lawn, playing with a rat. He had caught the rat down in the basement--he had made it think that it smelled cheese, the most rich-smelling and crumbly-delicious cheese a rat had ever thought it smelled, and it had come out of its hole, and now Anthony had hold of it with his mind and was making it do tricks.

When the rat saw Bill Soames coming, it tried to run, but Anthony thought at it, and it turned a flip-flop on the grass, and lay trembling, its eyes gleaming in small black terror.

Bill Soames hurried past Anthony and reached the front steps, mumbling. He always mumbled when he came to the Fremont house, or passed by it, or even thought of it. Everybody did. They thought about silly things, things that didn't mean very much, like two-and-two-is-four-and-twice-is-eight and so on; they tried to jumble up their thoughts to keep them skipping back and forth, so Anthony couldn't read their minds. The mumbling helped. Because if Anthony got anything strong out of your thoughts, he might take a notion to do something about it--like curing your wife's sick headaches or your kid's mumps, or getting your old milk cow back on schedule, or fixing the privy. And while Anthony mightn't actually mean any harm, he couldn't be expected to have much notion of what was the right thing to do in such cases.

That was if he liked you. He might try to help you, in his way. And that could be pretty horrible.

If he didn't like you ... well, that could be worse.

It's a Good Life

Metal Monday Means More Mastadon

I just really wish I hadn't watched this.

UPDATE: that screencap is so great, don't ruin it by watching.

I haven't watched this and I'm probably not going to.

glad it's out there, though.




also this:

..

3E approves

Vodka

Unemployment once again has crept past 9 percent. GDP growth fell below 2 percent this last quarter. Inflation is up. Home values are down. There’s talk of a double-dip recession. According to one market analyst, “We’re on the verge of a great, great depression.” But through it all, there is one constant, a commodity that has not only survived during these harsh economic times, but even thrived.

Vodka.

The next time you visit a bar, see if you can count on one hand the number of vodkas on the shelf. Chances are you’ll need both hands, and possibly feet. The bar at the original Pizzeria Uno in downtown Chicago contains 13 different vodkas: one bottle of Skyy, one bottle of Smirnoff, four flavors of Stolichnaya, five flavors of Absolut, one Ketel One, and one Grey Goose. At the T.G.I. Friday’s in Reagan National Airport outside Washington, two shelves are devoted to 14 varieties of vodka. Meanwhile, Boston’s übertrendy 28 Degrees restaurant boasts an astounding 22 bottles (13 brands, 15 flavors).

According to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, there are currently about a thousand different brands of vodka in existence. Keep in mind that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau defines vodka as “neutral spirits [alcohol produced from any material at or above 190 degrees proof] so distilled, or so treated after distillation with charcoal or other materials, as to be without distinctive character, aroma, taste, or color.” Which means that a brand must often go to absurd lengths to distinguish itself from the rest of the pack. Consider Crystal Head Vodka, co-created by actor Dan Aykroyd, dispensed from a crystal skull and based on a mystical legend. Nostalgic for the Roaring Twenties? Pour yourself a glass of Tommy Guns Vodka, straight out of a bottle in the shape of a Thompson submachine gun. (Just ignore the fact that few Americans actually drank vodka in the 1920s.) Devotion Vodka contains a protein called casein, which contributes to a better “mouthfeel.” More important, it’s received the endorsement of Jersey Shore’s Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino. And of course, there’s the quintuple-distilled Trump Vodka: As its website proclaims, “Finally, a vodka worthy of the Trump name.”

Vodka Nation

Metal Monday

Thursday games

1. Kingdom Rush

2. Torus (a round Tetris it is awesome)

Miami football scandal

Oh man, if you haven't been following this Miami football thing, you should. It is vast and fascinating. It is bigger than all the allegations and proven violations by USC, Ohio State, UConn, Tennessee, Auburn, etc, put together. By one count:

• 66 current and former Miami football players.

• 25 former NFL draft picks, including 13 first-rounders. Among the most high-profile names: Devin Hester, Vince Wilfork, D.J. Williams, Jonathan Vilma, Willis McGahee, Andre Johnson, Frank Gore, Kellen Winslow Jr. and the late Sean Taylor.

• 16 players listed on the current Miami roster, including starting quarterback Jacory Harris and All-ACC linebacker Sean Spence.

• 7 players who now play for other schools, including Florida wide receiver Andre Debose and Kansas State running back Bryce Brown, a one-time Miami commit who was ranked as the No. 1 incoming prospect in the country in 2009.

• 7 former assistant coaches with alleged "knowledge or direct participation" in violating NCAA rules.

• 2 first-round picks, Jon Beason and Vince Wilfork, who signed to an agency Shapiro allegedly co-owned, Axcess Sports & Entertainment.

Players got paid bonuses for getting celebration penalties and hurting opposing players. Kellen Winslow crashed a boat into another boat, and it was paid for. A booster bought the suit Willis McGahee wore to the Heisman ceremony. One player knocked up a stripper, who got an abortion without his knowledge. Also, it was a Ponzi-scheming convicted felon behind it. I don't see how this doesn't get the death penalty, or something identical in all but name, for both the football and basketball teams.

French toast

It's a legitimate concern

So, I am doing job applications, and when I don't recognize a school I google it. Here is the (currently) first Google review for Wiley College:

If you is a nigga the hoes are not at this skool Wiley may have abt 10 bad bitches on a good day! But it u is a gay girl u will not be alone most of are skool is gay! And abt 3/4 of the niggas are gay at this skool too so witch yo bck!

Two stars.

"Whether the New World Order is using Al-Qaeda or the other way around I'm not sure."

Sarah Palin's identity is fabricated. Obama was positioned to win the election by a landslide. I think even McCain was picked as the opponent for Obama. If you want to get a guy elected, why not elect who he is going to run against? This is why "Sarah Palin" was strategically planted as McCain's running mate. By fabricating her history Al-Qaeda, or NWO, wouldn't know if she was on their team which would create chatter and flush out those who are part of Obama's "organized community." The feds continued with this online code by wrapping it around "Sarah Palin" to gather intelligence.

"Sarah Palin" claims to be a Maverick. John McCain claims to be a Maverick The person in the Rich Jerk videos online appears to be Dallas Maverick's Mark Cuban. Sarah coined the term "mama" grizzly. Under investigation for insider trading of company called Mamma was Mark Cuban. The first forum to attack and hack me online was a forum called Friends In Business Scams 101 with the owner named Mama. Cuban is also known for financing a movie through Magnolia Pictures named "Redacted." This is anti war movie that many thought was treasonous. I imagine the release of Sarah Palin's emails, many of which were "red"acted, was timed with the Mavericks's playoff games.

[...]

Sarah's entire background is fabricated. I'm not sure how they did it, but Alaska is about half the size of the continental United States. It's also one of least densely populated, most remote areas in the US, like Hawaii in some ways. It wouldn't be difficult to build a background for her, and swap her name in anywhere the real Alaska Governor's name existed. The feds had several months to pull this off. When Sarah was announced as McCain's running mate the voice they used was similar to the voice used in video of a seminar to announce Dan Kennedy, another online expert claiming to be a copywriter.

[...]

Last, through endless interrogations it's been implied that the person who wrote the sales pitch at the Rich Jerk website is Tina Fey. Sarah Palin's "mother in law" is named "Faye" Palin. I believe that Tina Fey didn't play the look alike for Sarah Palin, but Sarah Palin was chosen as McCain's running mate, whoever she is, because she's the look alike for Tina Fey. This isn't the only reason though, she was also picked to play the average American hockey mom who could pass for a Miss Alaska pageant contestant. It looks like the only thing "Sarah" is being used for is to discredit the media. A media that is being heavily controlled now by the feds.

The feds think people are too ignorant to connect the dots and too lazy to do anything about it. Keep in mind that even they were shown this. A military Coup, or coup d'etat began with Sarah Palin in 2008. The feds acted upon all my information and much of Sarah Palin's identity is fabricated around my family and history to generate chatter from this group.

The 2012 Elections

Warning: Nobody beats Gene

Self reliance

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

had a pretty good trip

the car in front of me at Winn Dixie

Now I may be just be a simple country Hyper-Chicken, but I think that says "Tee Tee," as in, the thing little kids call urination.

The city's ablaze, the town's on fire

tha captain announces his new book

apparently the Hotspur are made about something

guess where i'm going!

Hint: not a phish concert!

That's right! UT football game!

Computer chess

"Even among the skeptics who insisted it was a trick, there was disagreement about how the automaton worked, leading to a series of claims and counterclaims," writes author Tom Standage. "Did it rely on mechanical trickery, magnetism, or sleight of hand? Was there a dwarf, or a small child, or a legless man hidden inside it?"

Well, all of the above—or below, actually. In the rear bottom interior of the box sat a flesh-and-blood operative (by necessity a small one) who followed the human contender's moves from below and maneuvered The Turk's right hand across the table board. Nonetheless, the machine became "the most famous automaton in history," Standage notes, commented on by Charles Babbage, Edgar Allan Poe, Benjamin Franklin, and Napoleon Bonaparte.

More importantly, The Turk whetted the West's appetite for real devices that could do such things. Over two centuries later, this project culminated in Deep Blue—the IBM computer that bested Russian chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997.

But what's most fascinating about "Mastering the Game," the Computer History Museum's computer chess exhibit, is that it frames the rise of the automated chess playing as a debate between two philosophies of computing. One emphasized the "brute force" approach, taking advantage of algorithmic power offered by ever more powerful processors available to programmers after the Second World War. The other has foregrounded the importance of teaching chess computers to select strategies and even to learn from experience—in other words, to play more like humans.

Brute Force or Intelligence? The Slow Rise of Computer Chess

Friday links

1. Museum of Hoaxes

2. Agnes the aging suit

3. Paula Deen and Craig Ferguson:

I have no idea how pointless I am, and I don't even know I'm gonna die

This makes me laugh.

That's some funky lemonade you got going there babe

CFB Dictator: the Postseason

If I were given dictatorial power to make changes in the college football landscape -- like the ancient Romans, perhaps some great crisis comes along and they concentrate all power in one man -- here is what I would do with regards to college football's postseason:

There shouldn't be a BCS, and the bowls should go back to their old tie-ins, with the major bowls played on or very close to New Year's Day. With the exception of conference champions, I would forbid bowl games from hosting teams from the same two conferences two years in a row. The following bowl games would represent conference tie-ins:

The Rose Bowl: PAC-12 vs B1G 10
The Sugar Bowl: SEC vs at-large
Orange Bowl: ACC vs at-large
Fiesta Bowl: Big East vs at-large
Cotton Bowl: The Big 12 (or whatever replaces it) vs at-large

If a minor conference team or independent goes undefeated and is ranked higher than any major conference champion, then one of the bowls must take that team. If none of the bowls with open spots are willing to do so, then the decision is made by lot.

ON PLAY-OFFS/THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP:

The push for a play-off in college football is motivated in large part by the idea that there is an inherent value in crowning a national champion. As professional baseball has the World Series, as pro football has the Super Bowl, etc etc, people think that college football must, like any other competitive sporting event, pick one team at the end of the competitive schedule and claim that team as the best team in the country.

I do not agree with this. There's no inherent value in picking a national champion, whatever the method you use. It's only important so far as the methods used to pick that champion are themselves worthwhile. Let's use the ACC football title as an example. The inherent value of being the champion of the ACC has not changed since the creation of a conference championship game following the ACC's expansion. But the mediocre games, lame match-ups, and half-empty stadiums have the ACC look bad. I think the 2008 game is the best example, a snoozer between BC and Virginia played in front of 27,000 paying customers.

Having a championship, of any kind, is only worthwhile if there is some other value in it. I don't think there's sufficient value in a college football championship game or declaration of "national champion," at least not more value than we currently have in the bowl system/regional loyalties that college football currently boasts.* No matter how fun a ten-team playoff might be, there's too much that would be lost from the current system in pursuit of a goal that's just not, when you get right down to it, that important.

That said,

IF YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO HAVE A NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP:

The bowls play in the first day or two of the new year. The next week, take the conference champions who won their bowl games and seed them 1-4 as based on whatever rankings you want to use (we can keep the BCS, or use the polls, but I would favor strength of schedule). In the unlikely event that all five bowl games see conference champions win their games, then use whatever ranking system you're using to pick the four candidates.

Take the other winners of the bowl games and rank them 2-4 as needed. These four teams are your playoff.

The first round would be played the first Saturday that is five or more days after the bowls are finished, and each game will be played at the home stadium of the higher ranked team. The championship game would be played the following week at a rotating location that, to avoid home fieldish advantage or a let-down-type ticket situation, cannot be the same as any of the locations use for a bowl game, conference championship game, or neutral site game that season.

So, using 2010 as an example, the major bowl match-ups might have been as follows:

The Rose Bowl: Oregon vs Ohio State
The Sugar Bowl: Auburn vs Wisconsin
Orange Bowl: Virginia Tech vs Arkansas
Fiesta Bowl: UConn vs Stanford
Cotton Bowl: Oklahoma vs TCU

Note that in this case because TCU is a conference champion, if they win, they get to the first round of conference teams eligible for the play-offs. Let's say Oregon, Auburn, Arkansas, Stanford, and TCU won. First seeding the conference champions who won their bowls, we get Auburn, Oregon, TCU seeded 1-3. Second, we need one more team, so we take Stanford, as the hypothetically highest ranked winning team besides the conference champs. The playoff would see Auburn hosting Stanford and Oregon hosting TCU. The winner of those games would meet at a neutral site for the national championship.

*This is the same reason that SEC expansion into Oklahoma or West Virginia or Virginia is a bad idea. If you were building a new conference right now, you wouldn't have two teams in Mississippi or Alabama or Tennessee, but that geographic continuity results in a social and cultural similarity that strengthens the conference and thus its football product. The SEC is more than the sum of its parts, and expansion scenarios should keep that in mind.