Experiment Farm

Don't Blink

2012-05-30T11:55:00.001-07:00

I started watching Doctor Who a little over a year ago. I was inspired by the fact that Neil Gaiman had written an episode that was about to air, and then Diana discovered we could watch it starting with Season 5 on-demand through our cable provider. Ordinarily I might have been reluctant to start watching a show at the beginning of its 5th season, especially one who's history dates back nearly 50 years. Would we be hopelessly lost without all the backstory? Would any of it make sense? Fortunately Neil Gaiman had summed up all the backstory we needed at Wondercon:

...there’s a blue box. It’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It can go anywhere in time and space and sometimes even where it’s meant to go. And when it turns up, there’s a bloke in it called The Doctor and there will be stuff wrong and he will do his best to sort it out and he will probably succeed cos he’s awesome. Now sit down, shut up, and watch ‘Blink’.

Rather than start with Blink, we started with the Eleventh Doctor's first episode in Season 5 and loved it. Two episodes in particular scared the living beejeezus out of us: "The Time of Angels" and "Flesh and Stone". They concern a life form known as the Weeping Angels. Blink, it turns out, is the first episode to feature the Weeping Angels. We knew we wanted to watch it (during the day, with the lights on), but we also wanted to watch all of the new Doctor Who's so we embarked upon catching up from Season 1 (not from An Unearthly Child).

After making our way blissfully through Seasons 1 and 2 on DVD, we discovered we could stream them all through our Amazon Prime Membership. Taking advantage of a lazy Memorial Day weekend Sunday, we watched 8 or 9 episodes of Season 3 and caught up to Blink!

With great joy and anticipation, we watched it during the day on Monday. True, having seen the Season 5 episodes with the angels did take away slightly from watching Blink, but had we done it the other way round the Season 5 episodes wouldn't have been as scary. Still, it did not disappoint. And, the way its structured, all you really need to know to appreciate Blink is what Neil Gaiman said above. Truth be told, the Doctor isn't even in the episode that much. The main character is Sally Sparrow played by the now famous Carey Mulligan.

So really, you should watch it. Here's the "Next Time..." from the episode before Blink. All the other trailers give too much away. (You'll also notice I haven't linked to the Wikipeda page for the episode. The less you know, the better, really.)

Funny Crevice

2012-05-23T09:11:00.001-07:00

Image by Chesire Isaacs, taken from the Chronicle review

We went to see Lauren Yee's Crevice at Impact Theater last Saturday night and both really enjoyed it. Lauren Yee has a talent for exploring unique family dynamics. Then Sunday I was telling some friends about it. I said, "It's about this brother and sister who still live at home with their mother. Their lives haven't turned out how they planned, and then this ninja comes along..." They both laughed and I went on, but they said "you had me from the ninja."

So that's really all you need to know. If you're interested in a more detailed review, the Chronicle gave it a clapping-man. Otherwise you've only got two more weeks to see it, so make your plans now. We might go back and bring my 14 year-old niece when she's in town.

Skyfall Trailer

2012-05-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

If you didn't know it was a James Bond movie, you wouldn't know it until the end. I think that's what I like about it. It focuses on the story to hook you in, rather then playing on any Bond loyalty you might have. (The subtle hint at the Bond theme at the end is a nice touch too.)

Smartphone Dumbphone

2012-05-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

My old phone, my "dumbphone" would make a sound when I got a text message and then keep making a sound until I checked it. It was a simple notification setting. My new phone, my "smartphone", can't do that. Or rather, it can, but it requires me to download an app. Ok. So I'm forced to sift through hundreds of notification apps. Some are free. Some cost money. Inevitably each outfit that offers one has a free and a pay option, and of course some key bit of functionality is held back from the free edition.

Sigh.

So I search and search and find one that seems popular and has good write ups. Mostly. Of course while there are hundreds of good reviews, there are also a few that say things like "it broke my phone, ruined my marriage, and gave me the plague." Still, I guess that uncertainty comes with the android territory, so I hold my breath and click download.

But first I have to say I'm "ok" with the permissions the app needs. Wanna know what it needs? It needs to be able to read my text messages and emails, and it needs full control over my camera. Why? For logical enough reasons. The app can't know I have unread texts or emails unless it can read them. It can't use the flash on my phone as a notification if it can't control my camera. I'm not sure why anyone would want their flash going off to notify them of a missed text message, but maybe someone's really desperate for that text from that special someone.

Still, there's no f*cking way in hell I'm giving a 3rd party application permission to read my texts, emails, and control my camera. WTF? Seriously?

I suppose any illusion of privacy I have is just that, an illusion. Google already has permission to read my gmail. I'm sure if I read my cell-phone contract closely enough Verizon has access to my texts. But my camera?

So I can either do without something I consider basic functionality that my "dumbphone" could do just fine, or I sign my life away to this 3rd party, or I begin scouring the app store again for something with a narrower scope. I mean, I might be ok letting a 3rd party read just my texts if it means not missing a text message when I don't happen to hear the alert or happen to look at my phone at just the moment the LED blinks. It's too bad too, because the app I was going to download would let me change the color and frequency that the LED would blink as a notifier. I had no idea it could blink anything other than white or any faster than once an hour. You'd think, maybe, they'd build control over that into the phone, but I guess "smartphones" really aren't that smart.

Prometheus Overkill?

2012-04-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

Now, I'm just as excited as the next person about the forthcoming release of Prometheus, but I'm starting to get a little worried. Viral marketing is one thing, but this film seems to be over saturating itself a bit. This worries me. This movie doesn't really have to be trying this hard.

Mashable launched this the other day:

Exciting? Sure. Creepy and weird? Yeah. Necessary to get people to go see the movie? No. Either this movie is really about androids and not xenomorphs and they're trying to set us up for that so as not to be disappointed, or maybe they're trying to throw us off the scent. Or maybe they realize they've got a stinker and they're push the crap out of it. If we start getting John Carter-like bus-boards and TV ads, we'll know we're in trouble.

The Problem With Digital Photos

2012-04-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong, the digital photography revolution is a beautiful thing. We can take as many pictures as we want without having to worry about development costs. We can keep millions of photos on a computer. Everyone in the world has a camera on their phone. It's great.

What mystifies me are things like Intsagram. Instagram photos always seem inherently pretentious to me. I mean, why take a perfectly good photo and pretend that you took it on a Polaroid and let it age and discolor for 30 years? Clearly you didn't because you just took it on your cellphone, uploaded it Facebook, and Polaroid doesn't make film anymore. You're not fooling anyone.

I got to wondering why it's popular enough to be worth $4 billion. For one thing, cell phones don't take the best photos. Anytime you can take a mistake and make it a choice, you make yourself look better. Take a bad cellphone photo and make it look like a bad vintage photo, and suddenly it's acceptable and arty.

I think there's more to it though. When you look through an old photo album, you're not only looking at an image of the past, but you're looking at an object from the past. The photo itself was developed years ago and handled by yourself as a child, your parent's when they were younger, or some beloved relative who's long dead. The physical object is a direct connection to another time. We lose that with digital photographs, unless we print them. But how often do we do that?

When you flip through your Facebook photos or look through the countless images on your computer, all you get is the image of the past. You can't touch something from that time. It's just electrons, magnetic impressions, and tiny marks on a metal disk. I think Instagram is an embodiment of the yearning to connect with our past or an attempt to fabricate that experience. Ironically it can only fail because it's still a digital image. It makes me wonder if film processing will make a comeback.

Cabin in the Woods with Thor

2012-04-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

Cabin in the Woods opens this weekend. The ads have done nothing to make me want to see it, in fact they make it seem rather silly to me. Sometimes that's a good thing. It's co-written by Joss Whedon. I'm very hit-or-miss with Joss. Hit: Firefly. Stain-on-the-Earth: Alien Resurrection. Still, it got a really good review in the Chronicle today, which peaks my interest some.

What I didn't realize was that the movie was actually made back in 2009, but got shelved due to MGM's bankruptcy problems. It stars Chris Hemsworth before he turned into Thor. He now seems to be Thor in every movie he's in, including Snow White and the Huntsman.

I didn't even recognize him in the ads for Cabin in the Woods because he doesn't look like Thor. He's also in the Red Dawn remake. I had assumed that had come out and disappeared years ago, but no, it too was shelved due to the MGM bankruptcy. It's due out later this year. If it wasn't already destined to be crappy, they've apparently changed the movie in post-production to be about a North Korean invasion of North America instead of a Chinese one. Because... that's plausible. I never saw the original, but it was mostly famous for being the first PG-13 film. So... you know... the world was demanding it be re-imagined.

I also didn't realize Hemsworth played Kirk's father in the Star Trek reboot. He was great in that, but again, he didn't look like Thor. His brother Liam is also an actor. He was horribly miscast in the role of Gale in The Hunger Games. Chris would have been better, even if he did look like Thor.

It's Bedlam I Tell You!

2012-04-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

Being sick last week afforded me the opportunity to catch up on some TV On Demand. In particular, I caught up on the BBC show Bedlam. Fortunately due to some sort of programming quirk, even though we don't get BBC America as a channel with our cable package, we get some BBC America shows On Demand, which allowed us to get hooked on Doctor Who.

Bedlam's a great show for many reasons. It's scary, but not over-the-top or gory. The characters are complex and mostly likable. The "mostly" there is the key. Each of the main characters, with the possible exception of Jed, is unlikable in their own subtle ways. That's a complexity you don't often see on TV. In fact, these are characters you don't often see on TV at all. A former mental patient with a heart-of-gold. A she-bitch who always wears a bra (even while sleeping and having sex). A sexually ambiguous guy who appears to be gay but could also be bi. A dad and daughter who work together and hire their adopted cousin to be their handyman. It's all very refreshing and unique. Here's the trailer:

Structurally, it's a "monster of the week" with a slight over arching storyline and lots of dark secrets to be revealed. I watched the last two episodes first as Diana was finishing up the season, and then I went back and watched the first 4. Thankfully, it's a British show, so there are only 6 episodes in the season. Watching the end first certainly colored my viewing of the beginning. I now have my own theories on who the killer is, or rather whom I want the killer to be. Did I mention that someone is abducting and killing young local women? My option is far more interesting than the obvious one but perhaps impossible to pull off from a story standpoint. We shall see, assuming there's a season 2...

Random Baseball Player: Candy Cummings

2012-04-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

As the new baseball season is finally in full swing, I thought I'd take this opportunity to revisit my "random player" feature.

The curveball turns 145 this month. In April of 1867, the improbably named Candy Cummings threw the first curve in a game in Worcester, Massachusetts while playing for Brooklyn. Legend has it that as a young man he noticed he could make shells curve when he threw them and wondered if he could do the same thing to a baseball.

Other's credit Fred Goldsmith with inventing the curveball. He was the first to publicly demonstrate the pitch to a sportswriter in 1870.

Cummings is in the Hall of Fame. Goldsmith is not. As is the way of things, I would guess several people came up with curveballs on their own at about the same time, much like calculus. I would also imagine that the first few people to master it didn't go telling a lot of people about it in order to maintain their advantage, much like 15th century Europeans fishing the Grand Banks off the coast of North America. Cummings even admitted trying to keep it to himself.

The Simpsons

2012-03-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

I got both of these from Mental Floss.

Watch 130 episodes of The Simpsons simultaneously. Just the first few minutes and without sound:

Every Itchy & Scratchy Show ever. I have not watched this. I'm not actually a big fan of Itchy & Scratchy:

Project Prometheus Passwords

2012-03-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

The Project Prometheus passwords I mentioned earlier in the week were cracked to reveal two wallpaper graphics. Most Facebook commentors found this highly disappointing given how hard the passwords were to crack. Although, of course, once they're cracked they seem so obvious.

Turns out there are two websites and the keys to cracking them were in their names. They are:

#1: http://www.projectprometheus.com/eridu/
#2: http://www.projectprometheus.com/245409/

For the first, the clue was "eridu". Eridu is the name of an ancient city in Sumeria. If you go to its wikipedia page, the password is staring you right in the face in bold letters. Did you catch it? I'll give you the answers below after you've had a chance to guess.

The second one took longer to crack, but the clue was "245409". HD 245409 is a designation for the constellation Orion. If you google around enough, you'll end up on the wikipedia page for Cosmic Call, which was a radio signal sent out into space from 1999 to 2003. Once again the answer is staring right at you in bold letters.

If you haven't guessed either of them, don't worry. In my attempts, I looked at both of these wikipedia pages and didn't see the answers. Ready to know what they are? Ok...

#1: http://www.projectprometheus.com/eridu/ Password: tell abu shahrain

#2: http://www.projectprometheus.com/245409/ Password: ddm2ddm2ddm2amamambigbigbigbmesmpp,

Tell Abu Shahrain is the name for the modern city that lies on the same ground where Eridu once stood.

The seemingly nonsensical string "ddm2ddm2ddm2amamambigbigbigbmesmpp," (including the comma) is the structure of the Cosmic Call 2 radio signal. It's all those letters in between the arrows on the wikipedia page.

So obvious now, so hard to find then.

Project Prometheus

2012-03-19T13:00:00.001-07:00

Weyland Industries has it's own website now. So does "Project Prometheus", but that one is password protected and as of press-time no one had cracked the password. (Or if they have they haven't talked about it.) This is of course all viral marketing for Ridley Scott's new Alien film Prometheus. (It's interesting to note that there was a NASA project called "Project Prometheus" that no longer exists. In the Prometheus universe Weyland Industries takes that project over from NASA.)

They're going to great lengths to prevent information about the exact nature of the film from leaking out. They didn't even have a traditional panel discussion after their event at WonderCon last weekend (Prometheus at WonderCon). They premiered a new trailer and handed out Weyland Industries business cards that would lead you to a video about "David".

From the beginning there has been a lot of misdirection in the marketing of this film. Is it a prequel or isn't it? What's it about? Will there be a "xenomorph" in it? So on an so forth. This is perhaps because there have already been two Alien prequels, albeit indirectly. They are the Alien vs. Predator films. Clearly Scott is pretending those movies didn't exist and ejecting their details from the "cannon". Perhaps that's why they keep saying the film exists in its own universe. How do I know he's rejecting those films? The corporate timeline for Weyland Industries has the founder being Sir Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce). In AVP, the company patriarch was Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen).

Weyland Industries is the ancestor of "the Company" in the Alien films. By then, it is Weyland-Yutani. Yutani Corporation is mentioned briefly in Scott's Weyland Industries Timeline, but I suspect it will play a bigger part in Prometheus. They seem to be the two rival corporate powers that rule the world of the day with Weyland representing the West and Yutani China. In the future, of course, they merge.

The film seems to focus on the other alien species in the Alien universe. That being the one belonging to the crashed ship in Alien. I find that exciting. A lot of emphasis in the early marketing of the film also centers on the androids of the Alien universe. "David", in this case, becomes the ancestor of Ash and Bishop (and whatever the Winona Ryder character was named in that movie that shall not be named). This emphasis on "robots that are indistinguishable from humans" has lead some to believe that Prometheus might end up being a back-door prequel to Scott's other science fiction franchise, Blade Runner. That would seem to align perfectly with Scott's forthcoming Blade Runner sequel, or the similarities could simply indicate Scott's interest in android themes.

Keep Calm and Carry On

2012-03-07T14:16:00.000-08:00

The fascinating history of the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster. I had no idea it had been lost and unknowns for 50 years before a bookshop turned it up in 2000. Maybe the reason it's caught on is that it seems like something that's always been around.

(link)

Peter Weyland at TED 2023

2012-03-02T10:25:00.002-08:00

This little bit of promotional video for Prometheus has Peter Weyland speaking at the 2023 TED conference. It's interesting, but it seems to assume we advance rather quickly in the next 11 years:

I like that it's actually on the TED website.

How to Watch Alien 3

2012-02-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

I watched Alien3 yesterday for the first time in years. It's damn good movie. Is it deeply flawed? Hell yes, but it's still a good ride and terribly underrated.

To enjoy it, you have to divorce it from the other films, and think of it as a stand-alone. Imagine that in an alternate timeline, Ripley, Hicks, and Newt lived happily ever after. Meanwhile in this alternate reality, Ripley is suddenly horny and uses words like "crud" and makes oblique metaphors about basements that don't really make any sense. And in this alternate reality, Aliens ended in such a way as to explain how in the hell eggs got on the Sulaco in the first place. Otherwise we have to accept that after the drop-ship landed on the Sulaco, while Bishop was busy shooting Hicks up with painkillers, the Alien queen wandered around the ship magically hiding eggs, even though she no long had an egg sack, then went back to hide in the landing gear, and no one noticed eggs hanging from the ceiling while they were preparing for hypersleep.

Watch your head!

So, really, it's best watched if you ignore or temporarily allow yourself to forget everything that happened in the first two films. Oh, and ignore the bad early 90s CGI. Fortunately there's not a lot of that. If you can do those things, then you can sit back and enjoy a scary and suspenseful, visually interesting film with great performances from Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, Pete Postlethwaite, and even Sigourney Weaver. And if you're up on your Christianity, the religious references add a nice texture.

It's also worth noting that Alien3 went through a million different scripts and was a disaster of a production. The wikipedia page on the film is a good read. The first scripts for the film centered on Hicks and Bishop with Ripley having a cameo role. Then studio execs decided you couldn't have an Alien movie without Ripley and scrapped it. Then several more scripts were written, two were combined into one, and the studios made newbie director David Fincher start shooting before the script was even finished. Then after he'd turned in a rough cut, the studios re-shot whole sections without him, re-edited it and released the Theatrical Version you can rent today. If you buy the right DVDs, you can see Fincher's original "assembly cut" which he refuses to allow to be called "director's cut" because he's said that to do a true director's cut of that film you'd have to burn all the negatives and start over. So really, it's amazing the movie is as good as it is.

(Of course, in the original Fincher version, the alien gestated in an ox. The studios changed it to a dog, which I have to agree is much better choice. It's much more emotionally impactful. Although, knowing it was originally an ox explains how it comes out of the dog already as big as the dog.)

Even if you hated it the first time, I recommend giving it another chance. It's a good film.

IndependentMitt

2012-02-16T18:50:00.000-08:00

Ah, politics. I've been thinking lately, as Mitt Romney tries so hard to prove that he's a dyed in the wool conservative and steadily loses independent voters in the process, that he may have missed a golden opportunity. When he was governor of Massachusetts, he was pro-choice and "pro-healthcare" for the lack of a better word. Of course he had to switch those opinions to have any choice of getting the GOP nomination. Of course he had to have those opinions to have any hope of being governor of Massachusetts, making it hard to know what he really believes, but let's say that he is pro-choice and pro-healthcare. If he had said screw-you GOP and ran as an independent who was pro-choice & pro-healthcare but fiscally conservative, etc, etc. he might have had a chance to win. Especially in a political climate where people are fed up with a gridlocked congress that can't get anything done and a president who claimed he could fix it but couldn't.

I know, I know. You're saying Alan, you're crazy. Independent and 3rd party candidates never win. True, but historically they've all been fringe candidates. People who are further left then Democrats or further right then Republicans. We've never had a 3rd candidate who claimed the center. If Romney had done that, I think he might have had a chance, or at least a better one. Not that I'm pulling for Romney or anything. I just find it interesting.

Oh, and as much as people seem to be decrying the world of Super PACs, without them the GOP nomination would already be Romney's. With them, I think someday a 3rd party or independent candidate might have a chance.

Downton Abbey

2012-02-09T07:00:00.000-08:00

Diana and I watched the first few episodes of Downton Abbey a while back. It was good, but we weren't dying to see what happened next and it fell out of our viewing queue. Diana even found it more enjoyable to read the Tom and Lorenzo recaps then to watch the show itself. (I find the same is true of Project Runway All-Stars). Still, I found this SNL skit very funny:

And The Onion reports that watching an episode of Downton Abbey counts as reading a book.

We've Only Just Begun

2012-02-03T12:00:00.000-08:00

It started for me as a mystery. The building where I work is owned by Crocker Plaza Company. Across the street is the Crocker Galleria. The word "Crocker" is all over these few blocks. Who was this mysterious "Crocker" I wondered...

Long term residents of the Bay Area may not find that a mystery at all. Turns out the large Wells Fargo branch across the street used to be the flagship location of Crocker National Bank. They were quite the player in Northern California banking until they fell on some hard times in the 80s and were acquired by Wells Fargo in 1986 for $1.07 billion in the largest banking merger in history at that time. (By comparison, twelve years later NationsBank acquired Bank of America for $64 billion.)

Crocker National Bank has another claim to fame. Nowadays a pop song comes out and immediately gets licensed to the hilt to appear in TV commercials and shows. Like when you could hear Train's Hey Soul Sister every time you turned on the TV a few years ago.. But back in the 1970, it happened the other way round when The Carpenters took a song from a Crocker National Bank commercial, rerecorded it, and made it a hit.

That's right, this is how We've Only Just Begun began:

It was a ground-breaking ad in its day. Crocker didn't want a conventional jingle, and any mention of the bank or its products was deliberately left out of the song. It's shot in a music video style, and the bank's name doesn't appear until the very end. If you updated the clothes and had a celebrity do a voice-over at the end, it would be at home in this Sunday's Super Bowl.

Highlander

2012-01-31T07:00:00.000-08:00

Diana and I watched the beginning of Highlander the other day, the original movie. Diana had never seen it, so it was interesting to hear her pick apart all of the huge gaping plot holes and inconsistencies. Still, it's a good movie from a mid-80s sci-fi stand point. I was struck by just how teen-boy centric it is. I mean, it's got immortals, sword fighting, nudity, and gratuitous decapitation. And if you happen to find Christopher Lambert attractive, it works for the teen-girls too. After all, it's got immortals falling in love with mortals, angst, costumes, etc. If the Highlander sparkled and had a clumsy teen love-interest, I'd wonder if Stephenie Meyer was a fan.

I've never seen any of the sequels or the TV show. I always preferred to think of it as a stand-alone kind of thing. The plot is ridiculous enough, trying to make it work beyond one movie is just too big of a stretch. The whole point is "there can be only one," making sequels inherently oxymorons.

If you need an example of how ridiculous the movie is at times, just take a look at Sean Connery's character. In a move called "Highlander" one of the most famous Scotsman of all time plays an Egyptian named "Ramirez". Scratch your head about that one for a while. This was at the end of Connery's really-bad-career-downswing after James Bond but before The Untouchables when he made films like Zardoz and Meteor. Really, 1986 was the beginning of his renaissance. That year he was in Highlander and The Name of the Rose. A year later he'd win his Oscar and by 1989 he'd have re-established himself as a big name at the box-office. Though, no one ever said he made good career moves. He was reportedly offered the role of Gandalf for 15% of worldwide box-office receipts but turned it down. He would have made about $400 million off that, but it's hard to imagine those movies being as good without Ian McKellen.

Unfortunately Highlander was really the pinnacle of Christopher Lambert's career. Well, his Hollywood career anyway. (He's having something of his own renaissance right now in the world of French cinema.) I always thought he did Tarzan after Highlander, but I was wrong. When he made Tarzan he didn't really speak English at all which worked fine for the character (not that it mattered that Andie MacDowell spoke English, as all of her dialogue as Jane was overdubbed by Glenn Close). He'd just learned English when he made Highlander, which explains his completely whacked accent in the film. He's French, but was born in the US, but grew up mostly in Switzerland. So when the Highlander says he's from "lots of different places," it's kinda meta.

And while you may or may not recognize Clancy Brown as the villain, you should recognize his voice. He's done voice acting in just about every animated series on TV in the last 30 years. He's Mr. Krabs:

Crowdsourced Star Wars Remake!

2012-01-30T07:00:00.000-08:00

I found out about this through a post on Mental Floss. It's a crowdsourced remake of Star Wars called "Star Wars Uncut" where anyone in the world could sign up to be in charge of one 15 second segment of the move. Then they were all cut together into a full-length remake. Some of the segments are really funny, some are clever, some are impressive, and some are just darn cute as people got their kids and pets involved. Some of them are just weird. One way or another though, for a fan, it's highly entertaining:

In Movie News

2012-01-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

The Artist is the only film nominated for a major Academy Award that I've seen. At least I saw 1. I hope it wins a lot.

***

This is not what you think it is:

It's actually part of a Honda commercial that will air during the Super Bowl.

***

Most (if not all) of the remaining living members of Monty Python are reuniting for a film called "Absolutely Anything" (source), but it's not being called a "Python" movie. It just happens to star them. Robin Williams might also be in the film. Still, it's pretty exciting.

No Winners Yesterday

2012-01-23T12:00:00.000-08:00

I always find it much more satisfying to watch a team win a game rather than watch a team lose it. Unfortunately, both conference championship games yesterday ended with a team losing.

The Ravens-Patriots game ended on one of the least satisfying final plays in all of professional sports: a missed field goal. Actually, I should qualify that a bit. A missed field goal on its own is not an unsatisfying way to end a game. If a team is down a point or two and the field goal is a game-winning attempt and it's from a challenging distance (be it too close or too far) it's a perfectly satisfying way to end a game. Everyone knows going into the play that it's going to be the last play of the game, and the kicker isn't expected to make it from that distance. The problem with a game-tying attempt from easy distance is that no one expects it to be the end. You assume you're going to overtime. Then suddenly it's over and you've won (or lost) and no one knows quite how to react because no one was prepared for that outcome.

Then you have the Giants-49ers game, which hinged on two special teams turnovers by the back-up kick-off returner pressed into service when the regular guy got injured last week. This is not only ironic, as the 49ers lead the league in turnover ratio, but also sad that the game hinged on a team losing. As the game headed into overtime, I turned to Diana and said "the first team that makes a mistake is going to lose", and then it happened.

I'm not saying that the better team didn't win. Championship teams make fewer mistakes. I'm just saying I would rather have seen Eli Manning lead the Giants on some super-human drive to win the game than see a back-up fail to protect the football. Still, in a championship game between two evenly-matched opponents, it often comes down to either who makes the superstar play or who makes the mistake. Yesterday, in spit of two superstar quarterbacks, both games came down to mistakes.

Niners!

2012-01-18T07:00:00.000-08:00

I'm not a big NFL fan. I follow it passively and in passing during the regular season, if at all, and mostly only if the Bears are making any noise. I only start paying attention during the postseason, once College Football has wrapped up.

Still, if there's a team I've historically found myself rooting for in Super Bowls more than others, it would be the 49ers. That's partly because they've played in quite a few, but Joe Montana and Steve Young were just so enjoyable to watch. So even though I harbor some issues with Jim Harbaugh because he played at Michigan, I still find myself rooting for the Niners this post season. It'd be fun if they won.

Project Runway All Stars Episode 1: Read All About It

2012-01-11T07:00:00.000-08:00

I watched Project Runway All Stars on demand last night. I will freely admit I afforded myself the luxury of fast forwarding through large portions of it, including anything that looked like gratuitous drama and most of the runway critiquing and judging. Really, most of the second half. I didn't care what any of those people had to say about the looks, judges and contestants included.

I found watching it a very interesting experience. On the one hand, I enjoyed seeing some familiar faces and was interested in what they were doing. On the other hand I was bored.

Gone are Heidi, Nina, Michael, and Tim. Instead we have host Angela Lindvall. She may be a supermodel, but she is no Heidi Klum. She was wooden and never looked natural on camera. Heidi never looked like she was reading lines even when she clearly was. Angela always looked like she was reading lines even when she clearly wasn't. But if Angela was wooden, than judge Georgina Chapman was a petrified forest. Everything she said sounded like she'd rehearsed it about 70 times and we were watching the 40th take.

Then there's Isaac Mizrahi. You may remember him as the co-host of Bravo's Project Runway replacement The Fashion Show, or from his many TV appearances. He's also apparently a designer. Frankly, he comes off to me as a desperate wannabe. Everything he says sounds fake and insincere. He's doesn't come off as reading lines at least, but he does come off as acting.

Then we have Joanna Coles stepping into Tim Gun's shoes. I actually have no problem with her. She seemed to give good advice, and they've scaled back her role some.

Still, the biggest problem with the show isn't them, it's the designers. They're all there, and they're all the same. Kenely's still a bitch. Austin's still fabulous. April's still soft-spoken. Elisa's still bat-shit crazy, and Michael Costello is still gross. Surprise, surprise, his dress looked exactly like what someone else was making.

That's the problem, though. They're all still the same. Watching the regular show, you don't these people at all. It takes a while to get to know them. You get character development and arcs. Here, we know all these people already. We know how this experience changed them or didn't change them. There's nothing interesting to see here, except how they interact with each other. And that's just going to be over-produced manufactured drama. I just don't care.

All I really wanted to see was the finished dresses, who won and who lost. I'll probably just follow it online.

Oh, they eliminated Elisa (thank god). As stated, she's still crazy, but at least she was grateful in defeat. Rami won. He's my early favorite, mostly because he's the only one who looks like he's enjoying himself, and he looks like he's having a great time. That's compelling to watch.

Literally Pointless or Any Given Sunday Syndrome

2012-01-10T09:24:00.000-08:00

Well, that was boring and pointless. I mean, LSU went literally point-less yesterday. I'm not sure there's a top ten team that couldn't have beat LSU last night. I certainly would have taken money on any of the other BCS winners, including Michigan and West Virginia, and some of the losers. Would they have beat Alabama? That's not the point. In the current system it was only ever about who could beat LSU. Do you really think perennial Heisman runner-up Andrew Luck and Standford or 28-year-old wonder-kin Brandon Weeden and Oklahoma State would have lost to LSU last night? I don't think so. The Fiesta Bowl, that was your title game. I don't mean it should have been those teams as #1 and #2, but the game played in the Fiesta Bowl was a game worthy of being a Title Game. The game played last night in New Orleans was a joke.

The inherent problem with football, with any sport really, is the Any Given Sunday Syndrome. It's typified by the NFL. The saying goes "any given Sunday any team can beat any other team." It doesn't matter what their records are going into the game, if the personnel match up right, if the coaching matches up right, if luck matches up right, any team can win. Every sport has their way of dealing with that. Every sport, that is, except College Football.

Baseball is the most susceptible to this because so much depends on starting pitching. Even teams with the best winning percentages over a season in baseball history still lost 25% - 30% of their games. (By contrast, the BCS team with the worst record this season lost less than 30% of their games.) Baseball solves this by playing series, even in their regular season. The NHL and NBA do the same when they get to their post-season. If you can win a best-of-five or best-of-seven series head-to-head with another team, you're the better team. Even that's still a little arbitrary and subject to the whims of luck, but it's a sufficient gauntlet to run.

The NFL can't do that. The physical demands of the sport make that impossible. They use the regular season to narrow things down to a pool of mostly winning teams, and then make them win 3-4 more games against opponents in that pool and crown a champion. Sure Any Given Sunday Syndrome still applies, but if you can run that gauntlet and win those 3-4 games, you've proven yourself a champion.

College Basketball does the same thing. The regular season narrow things down to 68 teams (one team more than there were AQ schools last season in football), and then you give them all a chance. The team that runs that gauntlet proves themselves a champion.

College Football has no answer to the Any Given Sunday Syndrome. It's a little less of an issue to be sure. Northern Illinois could play a whole season against South Carolina and never win a game. But in the higher level programs it's certainly true. If you took the top ten BCS team and made them play each other once, you'd be hard pressed to find an undefeated team at the end of it.

College Football has no gauntlet. Or rather, the regular season is supposed to be the gauntlet. Except that the regular season isn't a basketball tournament where the opponents get more difficult as the season progresses. Instead you have Alabama playing Georgia Southern in mid-November. And before you start hyping the SEC as a gauntlet unto itself, remember that Vanderbilt, Kentucky, and Mississippi State are all SEC teams.

That's why the "plus 1" system is getting so much talk now. That would be a gauntlet. A mini one, but one nonetheless. It would keep fluke wins like Iowa State over OSU from ruining a season, and it would test your unbeatens. If LSU had taken down Stanford before losing big to Alabama, I'd have no complaints.

Instead College Football just takes an arbitrary top two teams and makes them win one head-to-head contest that is completely subject to Any Given Sunday Syndrome. Last night's game was proof of that. On November 5th, LSU won. Last night Alabama won. Play a third game and then you'll know who was really the champion.