twist tie monster

materials: two(2) twist ties from food-for-less.

bonus points if you can name what album that is.

i wish i had made a tail. i do like the short back legs quite a bit though.

playoffs

i've had it with leagues, conferences and divisions within professional sports. all it does is create a culture of striving to be good enough rather than the best. in the past when travel was a bigger issue and attendance was more dependant on traditional rivalries it made more sense. travel is not that big a deal now. old rivalries are great, but if a team is good they'll sell out every game no matter who is coming to town.

teams that are not very good should not be rewarded by playoff appearances simply because the other teams in their region suck. the playoffs should showcase the best teams in the league, simple as that. when you base playoff spots on local achievement you cheapen what it means to be in the playoffs and reduce the quality of the games. if you're a fan of a sport you watch the playoffs whether your team is in it or not. if everyone is watching you should try to put on the best games possible. to do anything less it to abandon your fans. this is especially important given the growing viewership of american sports internationally.

do you really want to show these people some sucky division winner getting pounded instead of two of the best teams battling it out? do you really want a championship that was won in a system that excluded teams that could have possibly won it? do you really want a system in which the it is likely that the best two teams will meet lower than the championship round and the championship round itself is a blowout? such things can only make the championship less meaningful.

currently teams that belong to a certain league/conference/division play more games against teams in the same l/c/d than those outside it. to determine who the best playoff-spot-number teams in the sport are you need to have each team play as many others as possible. this creates a different problem in different sports.

there are 30 teams in major league baseball, each of which plays 162 games in a season. there are two leagues and each league has three divisions. teams play a lot of games against the others in their division, some against their fellow league members and few games against the members of the other league. (i can't find anything on the exact rules for ratios, anybody got a link?) i find the fact that the national league has 16 teams in it while the american league has 14 very annoying. this means that one division has 6 teams in it, another 4 and 5 in the rest. i don't really care how this came about, it's stupid. having the best record in a division is the key to getting into the playoffs and the current set up makes in inherently harder for some teams than others.

the top team of each division advances to the playoffs, along with the top remaining team in each league (the wild card). i've heard a few people say recently that maybe baseball can add two more teams and then just have 8 divisions of 4 teams each. i think this would one of the worst things they could do. the wild card is the best part of the current system. the team that gets the wildcard earns it by competing against the entire league, not just the division. a wildcardless system would only further the good enough culture that permeates baseball. right now if a team isn't the best in their division they can still make the playoffs. without the wildcard they could not and would have less reason to keep giving maximum effort.

this year the padres overall record was 82-80 and they won their division of five teams. so they make the 8-team playoff, despite the fact that their record is the 14th best. 6 teams with better records didn't get to go to the playoffs. a lot of extra money and prestige comes from getting to the playoffs and the padres simply do not deserve it. it is even worse when you consider the fact the teams play division-heavy schedules. the padres come from the worst division in baseball. the 6 teams that got left out got better records than the padres did by playing against better teams.

clearly the system sucks. why not have everyone play everyone else, take the top 8 teams and really find out who's the best?

30 teams, 162 games. if each team plays every other team 5 times that's 145 games. so what to do with the extra 17? first i would add one more and then have each team play one extra game against the 8 teams "above" them and the 8 teams "below" them in the previous year's final regular season rankings. visualize the rankings as a scrollable list that wraps around when you get to the top or bottom. this would make the worst team one rank above the number one team. so the number one team would play extra games against teams ranked 2-9 and 23-30. the number two team would get 3-10, 24-30 and 1. the good thing about a system like this is that it encourages teams to never give up at the end of the season even if they are totally out of the playoff picture. all things being equal, the higher the rank, the easier the schedule will be.

of course home field advantage is an important consideration and would have to be rotated for each team pairing year to year. the DH rule could then be a team to team thing, rather than a league thing. at the beginning of the year a team could declare itself as using a DH or not and then all visiting teams would have to play the same way.

and simple as that the top 8 teams in baseball would make the playoffs every year.

the nba playoffs are not nearly as bad about leaving deserving teams out but it still happens. this is mostly due to the fact that 16 out of 30 teams make the playoffs. the timberwolves still got left out last year. their record was 9th in their conference, but 15th overall. but when you factor in the fact that they played more of their games against the better teams of the western conference it becomes clear that they deserved to be in the playoffs.

they already play 82 games a year in the nba. add five more and you have an easy everyone plays everyone 3 times setup. rank them and send the top 16 to the playoffs. though it hasn't occurred in the last couple years, for a while the western conference finals were generally considered to be the matchup of the best two teams in the nba because the west was so much stronger than the east. this was reflected in both the results (numerous lopsided victories by the western conference team in the finals) and tv ratings. such a situation would be far less likely to occur in a conferenceless system.

the nfl is a much more difficult problem because there is no way you can have all the teams play each other. the regular season is 16 games long and it would be unrealistic to expect more to be added due to the strenuous nature of the game. i would still like them to do away with automatic bids to the playoffs for winning a division. a simple system in which last year's ranking decided the regular season schedule - 8 teams above and 8 teams below - and the top 12 going to the playoffs would work for me. i rarely feel like an undeserving team makes the playoffs in the nfl though, mainly since the league is so well balanced. the team from the nfc north this year is 5-9 though, i'll be annoyed.

in summary, screw tradition. playoffs without automatic bids means more competition and competition brings out the best in sports. the better a sport it the more successful it is and the more entertaining it will be. no automatic playoffs == better for everyone. except the padres.

favre

just finished watching monday night football. this was the first green bay game i've watched this year and i have to say that i was surprised. so many columnists have been talking about how old favre is getting and how he'll probably retire at the end of this season. they're half right. favre probably will retire this season, but it isn't because he's getting old. he'll retire because green bay sucks and it isn't fun to play for them anymore. favre is still better than three-fourths of the quarterbacks in the league. i predict that he retires at the end of this season, gets bored, gets into badass shape and comes back in 2007. probably not to the packers, i've been a strong aaron rodgers believer since i saw him play against usc last year and i don't think they'll need him. and probably not to any other teams in nfc north, he'll want to avoid playing against green bay if at all possible, even though all three of those teams will probably be looking for new starting quarterbacks by then. my vote is for oakland. you don't actually think collins will last there, do you? brett favre throwing to randy moss and jerry porter in 2007. you heard it here first.

bagombo snuff box

i recently finished reading kurt vonnegut's short story collection bagombo snuff box. it sucked. bad. i picked the book up at the salvation army - $1.50 for hardbacks, can't beat it. the stories are some of vonnegut's earliest publications, written for weekly magazines in the years before he started writing novels.

half of the stories in this book are really bad. they have the same boring plot: a stranger or someone that has been a way for a while comes to town. things seem great at first then it becomes clear that something isn't quite right. it's quite a mystery to the characters; i figured it out instantly almost every time. the characters carry on, wondering what is wrong but never really trying to figure it out. then the story ends with the non-surprise revelation that is often even less exciting that the one i had imagined. bleh.

about a quarter of the stories are about some highschool marching band leader that is obsessed with winning local band competitions. these stories aren't very good either, but hold more interest because the character of the band leader develops over the course of the stories. but in the end they get a bleh as well.

the rest of the stories are fairly original. the plots and characters themselves are still pretty lame, but they have interesting and imaginative settings. the best one, titled 2br02b, is set in a future in which all diseases have been cured and people no longer age. population growth is kept at an absolute zero by a law that requires anyone having children to find volunteers willing to die. such a great setup. too bad the story itself failed to explore it well. bleh for wasted potential.

at the end of the book there is a short note from vonnegut that is refreshingly honest. he admits that the stories aren't very good, don't make good use of the potential that is there and would not get published these days. i found this to be the best part of the book. he admits that at the time he wrote them these stories were just a way to make money, not part of some career goal of becoming a fulltime writer. so he wrote these crap stories to make money in his youth and now he's making more money repackaging and reselling the crap now, knowing that his name alone will sell it. awesome.

the few decent stories scattered among the crap kept me reading it. i was hoping for just one story that would be outstanding or great, near the end i was hoping just for good. but it never happened. having finished it i can say that i regret not giving up after the third obvious and boring story. at least i didn't pay the $25 cover price. i'd probably really hate it then.

last.fm

the tracks found in my recent listening section are from my last.fm rss feed. last.fm is one of those damn-why-didn't-i-think-of-that web pages. you get a last.fm account and install their plugin into your mp3 playing software. the plugin tracks what you listen to and sends it to your account. the folks at last.fm use statistical-clustering magic on the data from all the user accounts to find interesting patterns in music listening habits.

based on your neighbors (people whose tastes are similar to yours) they give you recommendations for artists you have not listened to yet. i've found the recommendations to be quite good so far. when i first starting playing around with last.fm i didn't play my cds on my computer, which meant that the only tracks i was sending it is stuff that i own in digital form, mostly purchased from emusic. and yes, i own it, not like you itunes/napster/yahoo/etc drm chumps that are basically renting your music... but that's a whole other topic.

once i had sent a fair number of my listens to last.fm - the more data the better in statistical magic land - my top ten recommended artists were all ones whose cds i owned. this had me completely sold. i've since started ripping all my cds (slowly, since i have close to 1,000 and a slow as hell cdrom), which has lead to a lot of music rediscovery.

last.fm also provides tons of charts, which is great for an info junkie like myself. it is interesting to see my own listening habits over time. i can spy on other people's listening habits too. they also produce charts for top tracks and artists and artist similarity charts that are another good source for recommendations. it is very community oriented - anyone can start a group with any theme and other people can join and discuss stuff in refreshingly un-moderated forums. there are also the last.fm radio stations. these stations select the tracks that play based on the data they have collected and some initial starting point you give it. you can say "play me stuff like this" and give it an artist and it will play songs from similar artists. just another step in the internet killing off the bullshit mainstream music industry. such a good idea.

what i love about last.fm is that it is based on behavioral data. there are a few other companies on the web trying to do similar stuff but they are trying to do it with the features of the music itself. i have heard good things about pandora and some people even like it better than last.fm for discovering new music. the thing about pandora is it is completely based on human-coded data. those guys sat around and listened to 10,000+ songs and wrote down the features that each song has and use that as their database from which their radio chooses songs. to me this seems crazy. don't get me wrong, i love hand-coded data. it's great to work with and can be far more accurate and detailed than automatically generated stuff.

but musical likes and dislikes are quite general and this is reflected in listening habits. if somebody listens to a bunch of the beatles, led zeppelin, rolling stones and pink floyd do you think they'll like the doors as well? probably. did you need to analyze the common features of the songs of the first four artists and then compare those to the features found in the doors' songs to reach that conclusion? no, you just know that "people that like those bands also like this one." last.fm easily captures this intuitive relationship that exists between artists thanks to the info that around 100,000 people a day are pumping into their database.

what happens when a new artist comes out? the people that like "that kind of music" will buy it, listen to it and it will be in last.fm's database almost instantly. the pandora guys are gonna have to get the music themselves, listen to it and categorize it. hmm, which approach do you think will lead to a more up to date service with better coverage of lesser-know artists?

last.fm is good stuff. get an account. it is fairly painless. even if you don't feel like you would use such a service tomorrow you can still contribute your own personal musical tastes and help other people find good music.

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