2.25.2010

Weird Overheard

Walking home from the metro station, I passed a big thuggish looking fellow talking into his cell phone. I'm a pretty swift walker, and he was heading the opposite direction, so I only caught a very small tidbit of his conversation. He said, "I'm talkin' cuddlin' an' sh*t!"

2.12.2010

Objectivity

Well, there are some more Olympics happening again, so it is time for another rant about the subset of Olympic activities that are subjective spectacles frequently misnamed as "sports." The lack of an objective "counter" (e.g., "a goal" or "a basket", etc.) makes these events inherently unfair--so much the worse that the judging is rendered in-auditable by the viewer!

Since a fair portion of the appeal of these events is aesthetic--which is immune to adjudication--we are left with the conundrum of how to tell who wins. My simple solution is this: HORSE. Have all parties do a program of tricks to qualify--make it tough and go ahead and use a judging panel--and then have subsets of the qualifiers do ascending round-robins of HORSE to determine the qualifiers for an 8 person HORSE tournament with random seedings. The need to master the fundamentals is preserved, and the need to outdo one's competitor would continually raise the bar of competition, making the athletic and innovative skaters shine even more!

Note: in order to make the judging panel fair, increase the membership significantly and select a random subset of the scores--always excluding judges from the competitors' countries.

Metro Train Derailment

Was on a different line, and quite a bit after I got off at work. Won't affect me appreciably.

2.11.2010

Oh Dear God

Eleri actually pooped on me today. That is a feat which Soren never managed, and which I thought I might have been destined to avoid. No longer. I feel so unclean.

2.10.2010

Preposterous

I've probably shoveled snow for about 8 or 9 hours this winter. It is fairly good exercise. But you know, when your hands are very cold, it is possible to bruise the heck out of them and not know it until rather later.