Lumpy Junk

What The Chiefs Should Have Done

2013-04-28T07:14:00.001-05:00

28 April, 2013

The Chiefs made these picks in the draft:

1-1 Eric Fisher, Left Tackle, Central Michigan
3-63 Travis Kelce, Tight End, Cincinatti
3-96 Knile Davis, Running Back, Arkansas
4-99 Nico Johnson, Linebacker, Alabama
5-134 Sanders Commings, Cornerback, Georgia
6-170 Eric Kush, Center, California (Pennsylvania)
6-204 Braden Wilson, Fullback, Kansas State
7-207 Mike Catapana, Defensive End, Princeton

The new face of the franchise...

Personally, my first reaction to their draft is...it was fucking awful. Terrible. Ridiculous. Of course, I could be totally wrong and these guys might be building blocks to a Super Bowl victory in three or four years (I'd wager against that though).

First off, they had the number one overall pick. This pick needs to make a HUGE impact. This is where Peyton Manning, John Elway, Andrew Luck, and many other quarterbacks were selected. Well the Chiefs were just unlucky enough that the one year they finish dead last is the first year in a while in which no quarterback would go in the top 10. "Earning the #1 pick" meant you got Andrew Luck or Cam Newton the last two years. In 2010 it meant Sam Bradford, or if you want to go on the other side of the ball, Ndonkeykong Suh. 2009: Stafford.

Back in 2008 there was no quarterback "worthy" of the number one pick. The Dolphins went with Jake Long, Left Tackle. Now five years later, they simply let Long walk in free agency because he was demanding too much money for his second contract. The Chiefs follow in the 2008 Dolphins footsteps by picking a Left Tackle because there's no Quarterback worth a shot (plus we already traded for Alex Smith). The Rams picked second in 2008 and they went with Howie Long's son Chris. The Falcons at 3 picked Matt Ryan...so, hey Dolphins, wanna try that 2008 pick again?

I'm not saying that E.J. Manuel or Geno Smith is going to be Matt Ryan, but I don't think a Left Tackle is going to have enough impact to warrant the pick. I mean, this Fisher guy needs to basically be a hall-of-fame Left Tackle. He needs to be like Orlando Pace who was so good he made Mike Martz look smart. Any offensive coordinator would look smart calling plays down to Kurt Warner with him standing behind Pace and throwing to Holt and Bruce and Faulk. So if Fisher is that great. Alright, that might be okay. But...if Fisher is THAT great, why was there not a consensus on who was the best Left Tackle in the draft? Three LTs went in the first four picks, and up till the draft, most seemed to think Joeckel was the best tackle. What's more likely: there are 2 or 3 amazing, hall-of-fame caliber left tackles at the top of the draft? Or there are 3 pretty good left tackles, maybe one is hall-of-fame caliber, one will be mediocre, and one will be a bust?

This guy was drafted 6th overall in 2009.
Look how Athletic he is.

In 2009, the Lions took Matt Stafford with the first pick and the Rams took Tackle Jason Smith with the 2nd pick. I recall many people suggesting that the Lions should take Jason Smith, because any quarterback picked by this 0-16 team would be murdered trying to stand in the pocket, so you need to get that left tackle this year and try for a quarterback next year. That's how good Jason Smith was supposed to be. He went second to the Rams, and guess what, he's not even a Ram anymore. They only had him for three years. He's on his third team after being drafted in 2009.

Any draft pick can be a bust, we have no idea who will be good. There are guys who seem amazing and destined for greatness that completely fail. There are undrafted guys in Canton. It happens. So if that's the case, if every draft pick is a lottery ticket, then shouldn't you treat them accordingly? If you can trade down and turn one lottery ticket into 3 lottery tickets, shouldn't you do it? Of course, the 1st pick is a better lottery ticket than the 30th, but they're both lottery tickets nonetheless.

Sweet block Branden.

Let's go back to the 2008 Dolphins. They took Jake Long 1st overall. Eight Left Tackles were drafted in the first round that year. If the Dolphins didn't take Jake Long, instead they took Matt Ryan, then they took the best Left Tackle with the first pick in round two, then they might have gotten the 8th left tackle taken (If the Dolphins don't take Long, then you could plausibly shift each tackle down a spot, so only 7 go in the first round). So the Dolphins get Matt Ryan, and then at the top of the second round they get the 8th Left Tackle, who was Duane Brown, who made the pro-bowl last season as the left tackle for the Texans. Arguably, the Texans got the better deal. They just re-signed Brown to a 6 year extension, and his rookie contract was for less money than Jake Long got. So if the 8th Left Tackle and the First Left Tackle are a toss-up, then why would the Dolphins waste all the leverage of the 1st overall pick? They could have had Matt Ryan and a pro-bowl left tackle in 2008.

Let's get back to the Chiefs. There they are, sitting at #1, staring into the abyss. Three Left Tackles would go in the first four picks. They're drafting a Left Tackle because they want to get rid of Branden Albert, a capable Left Tackle that has a history of back injuries and is demanding too much money for a long term deal. So the Chiefs were shopping Albert in a trade to the Dolphins to replace Jake Long who left in free agency. It sounded before the draft like they were haggling over which of the Dolphins second round picks would serve as compensation for Albert. No deal was done, and now the Chiefs have Albert and Fisher. Albert has said he won't move to the right side. So the Chiefs might move Albert over anyway, or have Fisher play right tackle for a year, and then move him to left tackle when Albert walks in free agency. Either way, you've used the number one overall pick to somehow not really improve your team. If they do manage to trade Albert before this season, we might see an improvement from Albert to Fisher, but there's no guarantee of that. What they should do now is hang on to both until at least camp, then if they can see that Fisher is clearly better, trade Albert to a team that needs a tackle, waiting up until the end of pre-season, hoping that some starting Left tackle somewhere in the league goes down for the season. The Chiefs would then be able to get a 2nd rounder in the 2014 draft. But after seeing how poorly the Chiefs handled the Alex Smith trade, I'll bet they do something much dumber than that.

So what should they have done?

On Thursday, the first round kicked off with the Chiefs on the clock and the whole draft class is their oyster. They can get any player they want. OR, they can trade down and turn this best lottery ticket into several lottery tickets. They hold the following picks:

1st
63rd
96th
99th
plus a 5th rounder, 2 6th rounders, and a 7th rounder

The Raiders traded down from 3 to 12, as the Dolphins moved up to get Dion Jordan. To make that move, from 12 up to 3, the Dolphins gave the Raiders the 42nd overall pick. So that's what it costs to move up 9 spots.

Dion Jordan

The Arizona Cardinals were desperate to bolster one of the worst offensive lines in football. They had the 7th overall pick, and yet at 7, they could only get the 4th best Left Tackle in the draft, and so they instead picked the best Guard available. This is a huge mistake, Guards just don't have the value to be taken here. The last time a Guard went in the Top 10 was in 1997. The Saints picked Chris Naeole 10th. Tony
Gonzalez went three picks later. Tarik Glenn, a Left Tackle went 19th in that draft, and he was the anchor of the Colts for a decade, retiring after they won the Super Bowl a decade later. Guards just don't have the value because even a great guard isn't all that much better than a mediocre guard. Compare this to Quarterback, where a great QB is a huge difference over a mediocre QB. You win championships with elite Quarterbacks, not with guards.

So the Chiefs arrange a trade with Arizona. They swap the 7th and 1st picks, in exchange, the Cardinals send the Chiefs their 2nd rounder (45th overall), which you can see is actually less compensation than the Raiders got for the 3rd pick. So I'll say the Cardinals have to give up a bit more. They also send KC their 3rd round pick (69 overall) and the Chiefs send back their first pick in the 4th round (99th pick).

The Cardinals take the best Tackle in their estimation, which might be Fisher or Joeckel. The Jaguars at 2 take whoever the Cardinals don't take. At 3, the Raiders traded down with Miami so the Dolphins could get Dion Jordan. In reality, the Rams traded up to 8, swapping first rounders with the Bills to get WR Tavon Austin. The Rams are desperate to get receivers for Bradford to throw to. So let's say the Chiefs get the same deal Buffalo got, and the Chiefs move down from 7 to 16. In exchange, the Rams sent Buffalo the 46th overall pick, they swapped 3rd round picks, (Bills had 71, Rams had 78), and the Rams sent their 7th rounder. So basically the Bills dropped 8 spots in the 1st round, and 7 spots in the third round, in exchange for an extra 2nd rounder. Let's have the Chiefs make the same deal.

Now the Chiefs have the following picks:

16th (from Rams)
45th (from Cardinals)
46th
63rd
78th
96th
plus a 5, 2 6's and 2 7's

In Walrus we Trust.

At 16 they trade down again. San Francisco traded up from 31 to 18 with Dallas, giving up the 74th overall pick. So let's say that the Chiefs make that same deal for swapping 31 to 16. So that 15 spot move is worth the 74th pick.

Chiefs now hold

31
45
46
63
78
96
plus a 5, 2 6's and 2 7's.

The Vikings traded up into the tail end of the first round to get WR Cordarelle Patterson. The New England Patriots and Darth Belichick, knowing that draft picks are lottery tickets, often trade back and turn one pick into many. They also have been to 5 Super Bowls in the last 12 years, and only missed the playoffs twice in that stretch (going 9-7 in 2002, and 11-5 in 2008 with Matt Cassel) That's 11 seasons with 10+ wins in 12 years, and the one exception was a 9-7 performance. So maybe those guys know how to draft, and they are notorious for trading down down down.

Well the Vikings moved up to get New England's 29th overall pick. In exchange, the Vikings sent the Patriots their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 7th round picks (52,83,102, and 229).

We've got the Chiefs sitting at 31, and the Vikings were moving up from 52 to 29, and probably were making the move to get ahead of Baltimore at 32 (who lost Anquan Boldin). So let's say the Chiefs get the same deal. They move down from 31 to 52 and pick up 3 picks for their trouble.

Day 1 ends without the Chiefs making a pick, despite being on the clock 4 times. Instead of just Eric Fisher, who they'll use to replace Branden Albert, thus making the team not all that much better, they have acquired many lottery tickets. I'll have them hang on to Branden Albert, and use some of these extra picks to take some Left Tackles with these lottery tickets later in the draft.

As Day 1 ends, the Chiefs have the following:

45
46
52
63
78
83
96
102
plus a 5th, 2 6ths and 3 7ths.

Before Day 2 stars, the Chiefs package some of these picks together to trade toward the top of round 2. After trades, they look like this:

Geno the Chief

35 (a move up from 45 for the 96th pick)
37 (moving up from 46 for the 102nd pick)
52
63
78
83
plus a 5, 2 6's and 3 7's)

Zach Ertz

Finally the Chiefs start making picks. At 35, I have them take QB Geno Smith (Who was actually drafted 39th). He'll compete with Alex Smith. Maybe he'll become great. Maybe not. It's a crap-shoot afterall, but the Chiefs come out of this draft with arguably the best Quarterback in the class. Not bad for the 35th pick.

With their first pick after Fisher, they took a tight end, but not someone who was all that highly rated. Instead, I have them use the 37th pick on Zach Ertz, the 2nd rated Tight End (who was actually drafted 35th).

In reality, they used their third choice on running back Knile Davis, who in his senior season averaged 3.4 yards per carry. WOW, this guy must be amazing to get 3 yards a carry in college. Instead of taking Knile Davis, they take Montee Ball at 52 (who actually went 58 to the Broncos). Montee Ball was a 2-time Consensus All-American in college. He rushed for 77 TDs and over 5000 yards in
college.

Montee Ball

At 63 the Chiefs actually took Tight End Travis Kelce. I've already had them take a TE in this draft, so they don't take a TE. Instead I have them take WR Keenan Allen, who was projected by some to be a first rounder. He slipped to the Chargers at 76 in reality.

At 78, I have the Chiefs take Damontre Moore DE/OLB, who actually went 81 to the Giants.

Keenan Allen

At 83 I'll have the Chiefs take whoever they think the best Tackle is, either David Bakhtiari (who went 109th) or Brennan Williams (who went 89th).

Then with their 6 remaining late round choices they can grab the same guys they really did, plus 2 more.

So here's a summary of the difference between what would have happened if I was running the Chiefs and what actually happened:

They drafted:

1-1 Eric Fisher, Left Tackle, Central Michigan
3-63 Travis Kelce, Tight End, Cincinatti
3-96 Knile Davis, Running Back, Arkansas
4-99 Nico Johnson, Linebacker, Alabama
5-134 Sanders Commings, Cornerback, Georgia
6-170 Eric Kush, Center, California (Pennsylvania)
6-204 Braden Wilson, Fullback, Kansas State

Damontre Moore. I think he majored in Chiropractry.

7-207 Mike Catapana, Defensive End, Princeton

And are probably going to get rid of Branden Albert for maybe a 2nd or 3rd rounder next draft. Or they'll use him this year and then get nothing for him as he leaves in free agency.

I drafted:

2-35 Geno Smith, Quarterback, West Virginia
2-37 Zach Ertz, Tight End, Stanford
2-52 Montee Ball, Running Back, Wisconsin
3-63 Keenan Allen, Wide Receiver, Cal
3-78 Damontre Moore, DE/OLB, Texas A&M
3-83 David Bakhtiari, Tackle, Colorado

Brennan Williams

+ the real late rounders

5-134 Sanders Commings, Cornerback, Georgia
6-170 Eric Kush, Center, California (Pennsylvania)
6-204 Braden Wilson, Fullback, Kansas State
7-207 Mike Catapana, Defensive End, Princeton

and an extra 6 and 7.

6- Kenjon Barner, Running Back, Oregon

and another Tackle in the 7th round.

Which Chiefs team would be better off in 2013?

I think my team, with Alex Smith competing against Geno Smith (who can take over in a year Kaepernick-style), with Jamaal Charles, Bowe, Moeaki, a pretty solid offensive line, PLUS Keenan Allen, Zach Ertz, and Montee Ball should make for a pretty productive offense. Add in Kenjon Barner and McCluster to mix things up, maybe Jon Baldwin can finally do something. They should be able to put some points on the board.

Kenjon Barner

Instead, we've got just Alex Smith, nobody of any quality to compete with him, and no long-term answer at QB. The offensive line might be better, but no real improvement in terms of weapons for the offense, and just some boring late round picks to fill holes. I think we would be better off.

tl;dr

If you use the 1st overall pick to trade down multiple times, you could essentially make this trade:

Give Up:

Eric Fisher

Travis Kelce

Knile Davis

Nico Johnson

Get:

Geno Smith
Zach Ertz
Montee Ball
Keenan Allen
Damontre Moore
David Bakhtiari
+ 2 late round picks

How does that trade sound?

Draft Day

2012-12-18T02:30:00.000-06:00

17 December, 2012

The Blacklist 2012 edition came out today. If you don't know, these are the top unproduced scripts floating around hollywood, as voted on by "insiders."

I'm planning on reading, or trying to read, the entire list, but I will of course lose interest within about a week or two.

The #1 script on the 2012 Blacklist is "Draft Day," which is accompanied by this logline:

On the day of the NFL Draft, Bills General Manager Sonny Weaver has the

opportunity to save football in Buffalo when he trades for the number one pick.

He must quickly decide what he’s willing to sacrifice in pursuit of perfection as the

lines between his personal and professional life become blurred.

Kevin Costner is allegedly attached to play the Bills GM.

This script was an easy, fast read. I had sat down and read it straight through without losing interest. It has a hell of a pace, momentum, whatever you want to call it. I can see why it finished so high. I didn't know anything about the writers, but from reading it, I could tell they had a playwriting background, but perhaps aren't the biggest sports fans in the world.

It's a lot like Moneyball, in that there are numerous scenes of GMs haggling and playing mind games with each other. However, unlike Moneyball, Draft Day takes place entirely on draft day. There's no big payoff. As is said in the script, draft day is about trying to predict the future. With hindsight we can look back on great steals and big blunders, but on Draft Day, you have no idea how the future will play out.

Sonny (Kevin Costner) Weaver, starts the day by finding out that his assistant who he is secretly banging (except everyone knows about it) is pregnant. They aren't excited and she plans on leaving Buffalo to go home and have the kid without Sonny's involvement. Great start for a football movie right? Nothing goes together like football and thinking about abortion.

So then they establish that Sonny is kinda like Marv Levy's son. Where Marv Levy had made the team great, is a legend. Marv (though he's not called Marv), makes his son, Sonny, the GM. Sonny fired his dad after a couple of seasons, and his dad just recently died. The past few years have been marked by draft busts and disappointing seasons. So everyone in Buffalo hates Sonny, wants him gone, and is afraid the team is going to be moving to L.A. any year now. Top it off with an eccentric impatient owner who wants Sonny to "make a splash" and doesn't really care about winning as long as butts are in the seats, and you'll see what's at stake in this draft.

Oh, and Sonny has a hot-head young coach (the script compares him to Jon Gruden), who he hates.

So, here's the draft situation, and here's where shit kinda starts to suck.

The Bills have the 7th pick.

Sonny really loves this outside linebacker who is compared in the script to Ray Lewis. So Sonny wants Ray Lewis at 7, and he's supposed to fall to 7. Ray Lewis guy is really great person, who we see being like a father to his sister's 4 kids. He's like the older, wiser, religious Ray Lewis as 22 year old.

Jon Gruden really wants this running back from Auburn, even though he was just arrested for getting in a bar fight.

The Lions have the 1st overall pick, and are going to take the consensus best pick in the draft, Bo Callahan, QB from Michigan. The talking heads on Tv say Bo is better than Elway, better than Manning, he's obviously the greatest thing ever, and the Lions are going to pick him, done deal.

But, as Kevin Costner is heading into work, the Lions GM is calling him and trying to give the Bills Bo Callahan, the greastest thing ever, since Detroit "already has a quarterback." So Kevin Costner haggles with him and makes this deal. You ready? The Bills give up their #7 pick, plus their first-rounder for the next 3 seasons, to get the #1 pick and Bo Callahan.

Okay. Let's stop to think about this. You've just used four first round picks to get a quarterback, that the worst team in the league didn't want. The Lions were calling him, trying to move down. Why? Because they already have a QB? But they have the first pick in the draft? What great QB do they have that gave them a 2-14 season?

Okay, so in real life, if a guy came along who was better than Elway, it's possible that you trade 4 first-rounders for him. But, that would only happen if a bunch of teams are bidding against each other for the rights to him. But in Draft Day, it's a weird situation where the Lions are trying to sell the pick, and calling Kevin Costner. There doesn't seem to be any other team in the running, and Kevin Costner pulls the trigger on the trade without discussing it with anyone. Nobody. No scouts, no coach, just pulls the trigger after a couple of phone calls.

So then there's a lot of excitement as everyone's thinking the Bills are getting this great QB. Although, Jon Gruden, the coach, wants to draft a running back who was just arrested, and Kevin Costner keeps finding more things to like about pseudo-Ray Lewis.

So far, I've only covered about 30 pages of the script. There's some weird personal stuff between Costner and his mother, and Jimmy Johnson (calls him a madeup name), and how Jimmy Johnson is banging his mom...And of course, his knocked up assistant. And Jon Gruden is fucking pissed because he just traded away 4 first rounders and Gruden wanted a thug running back. Oh and the aging quarterback that the Bills have is pissed that they're going to replace him.

So draft time comes and guess what. After spending 4 first rounders to trade up, Kevin Costner uses that number one pick to take...Vontae something, the Ray Lewis dude. He's a good kid, there's reason to believe he's going to be amazing. While there's reason to believe that this greatest QB ever, Bo something, is not all there, and he doesn't care about winning, thus he's apparently Jamarcus Russell.

So it's a big moment in the movie, where Costner is all like, yeah, I picked the best guy, he's a good kid, head on his shoulders, gonna be great. But, anyone in the audience who cares about football is going to be like...wtf. You spend 4 first rounders to trade up to get a guy you were supposed to be able to get at 7. What the fuck?

Then Bo Callahan keeps falling in the draft. People are afraid he's a bust. So they stay away. The Lions, who were going to take him at 1, remember that foregone conclusion, now they're sitting at 7, and they might walk away with Bo, plus the 3 future first rounders. But...they wanted to trade out of drafting him, as if they knew he wasn't a bust...or that they "already have a quarterback."

So Kevin Costner is like, Detroit's gonna look like a genius if he falls to them at 7. So he calls up the Raiders who have the 6 pick, and since their GM is a noob, he's going to fleece him. Well, he ends up trading him this years 2nd rounder, plus their 2nd rounder for the next 3 years to get that 6 pick. This trade makes even less sense. 4 2nd round picks for a 6th overall pick...and you think you're pulling one over on him?

The Raiders GM takes the deal, partially because he's panicking, thinking that Bo is a bust and everyone knows something that he doesn't, and that's why he's falling.

So they make the deal. Then Costner calls up the Lions, who have the 7th pick, and offers to give the Lions the 6th pick and Bo Callahan, in exchange for their 3 1st rounders they traded Detroit earlier. This offer makes no sense at all. In reality, Detroit would have laughed in his face and hung up.

They didn't want Bo, they wanted to trade down from the 1 spot. Then, When the Bills spent all those picks to go up to 1, they didn't take the QB, they took an outside linebacker because he's a nice guy. So why would the Lions think that the Bills are going to take Bo now? If they want Bo, they could just wait for the Bills to pick someone else, since clearly they don't want Bo...

But anyway, Costner convinces the Lions GM to send him back 2 of the 3 first round picks, plus a 2nd rounder, to swap 6&7.

The Lions then take Bo at #6, and have an extra first rounder in a few years to boot.

The Bills use the #7 pick to take that running back that Gruden wanted.

And the real winner in all of this is the Raiders, who gained 4 2nd round picks.

So...the script is about the behind the scenes wheeling and dealing of some GM genius, who spends 4 first round picks to get an outside linebacker he could have had without trading in the first place. Then trades 4 2nd round picks to get a running back at #7.

This is the story of how an idiot GM cripples a franchise for a decade...and then decides to actually try to date his assistant rather than let her move away...Or something.

So, aside from all the draft dealings making almost zero sense, there are a number of weird things that show the writers don't know what the fuck they're talking about. For example, in talking about how the draft is a crapshoot, Kevin Costner and Jimmy Johnson are talking about how the Chargers GM got a bad rap for drafting Ryan Leaf over Peyton Manning, even though all 32 GMs in the league would have done it with the information they had at the time....

Can you spot the number of errors in that one sentence? For one thing, the Chargers were picking 2nd, and took Leaf AFTER Manning. There wasn't a consensus that Leaf was better than Manning at all. There was some talk that both Manning and Leaf were going to be great, and some thought it didn't matter which guy you got. So not only weren't there 32 GMs in agreement that Leaf was better than Manning...there weren't 32 GMs in the league at the time, since there weren't 32 teams yet...But that line of dialogue comes from a guy who was supposed to have been in the NFL at the time, who should really fucking know that.

That's the script in a nutshell. It's well written. It carries you through the scenes, it gives you big explosions of arguments and people hating each other. But when you stop to think about just about any of the facts, they don't make sense. It's kinda like if Michael Bay were a gay playwrite who was trying to rip off Moneyball.

Punting Off

2012-12-07T14:05:00.000-06:00

December 7, 2012

A day that will live in infamy. The NFL is going to get rid of the kickoff.

They haven't said it officially, but they practically got rid of it last year when they moved the kickoff spot up so as to make kickoffs into easy touchbacks.

There had been speculation ever since that the NFL has wanted to remove the kickoff entirely from the game for safety reasons. But nobody knew what they would replace it with. Just give the receiving team the ball at the 20? But what about onside kicks? Without the kickoff, then there's no opportunity to get the ball back after a score, thus making late game heroics less likely.

So we were stuck with this boring touchbacking half-measure.

Until now...

Greg Schiano, the coach of the Tampa Bay Butt Pirates has a suggestion, and Roger Goodell has since mentioned it numerous times, basically floating the idea to see how it is received as prelude to him actually trying to get this new measure adopted come offseason.

You know this idea is good because it's coming from Schiano, the same guy who has the brilliant idea to try to bum-rush the quarterback on kneel down plays, which has resulted in several coaches being pissed at him, as well as pissing off every offensive lineman in the league who don't really want every game to end with sore losers diving at their knees in an attempt to win by being the biggest douche on the field.

So what is the idea?

Make it. Take it.

Okay, it's not exactly make it, take it. Here's how it would work.

Instead of a kickoff, the team who would normally kick off, instead gets the ball on offense, at their own 30 yard line. BUT, it's 4th and 15.

Essentially, they're replacing the kickoff with a punt. Punts are safer than kickoffs because the players don't all get a huge running start to slam into each other. The kicking and receiving teams start the play lined up across from each other.

It's still fairly dangerous for the return man, but whatever.

This Punt-Off has a few other effects.

1. Rather than the desperation onside kick, the team would keep their offense on the field and attempt to convert a 4th and 15.

A lot of people have criticized that for some teams, a 4th and 15 isn't that difficult to convert, thus teams with quarterbacks the likes of Manning, Brady, Brees, Rodgers, etc., might be able to convert the onside-punt-4th-and-15 much more easily than they could have gotten an onside kick.

So let's look at the numbers. In the NFL, Onside Kicks work about 26% of the time. 4th and 15s are converted about 21% of the time. So it's actually the opposite. You're more likely to get an onside kick.

HOWEVER, this 26% stat includes surprise onside kicks. Surprise Onside Kicks work about 60% of the time, while expected ones work only 20% of the time. So getting that 4th and 15 is actually just slightly more likely than getting that onside kick.

So really, it's a wash statistically. BUT, I really like this version of the onside-kick. The real onside kick, in which the kicker bounces the ball into the air, turning into a clusterfuck of guys slamming into each other, relies too much on luck for my taste. Sure some teams might have some trick to it, figure out some tactic to get the ball to bounce just right, whatever, but for the most part, getting an onside kick is like pleading to the football gods to extend the game. Changing this to a play for the Quarterback, the offense, the defense, I think makes for a more dramatic play.

2. You can still do a surprise onside-kick. Rather than the kicker just tapping the ball, you could run a fake-punt, needing 15 yards. This would keep the return teams honest and make them cover the possibility of a fake.

3. Now you could block a kick-off, or even have a snap go over the punter's head. This gives the play even more possibility for drama. Think about it. When there's a kick-off, you might have a surprise onside, a return for a TD, a returner fumble, or a touchback. With a Punt-Off, not only might you have a fake punt-off, but the snap might go over the punter's head, the punt could be blocked, and you could still have a return TD, returner fumble, and touchbacks are less likely as the punt would have to go 80 yards to reach the end zone.

4. Theoretically, a team could never get the ball for the whole game. If somebody found a way to make converting that 4th and 15 a routine, then you might have the Patriots beat the Bills 100-0 instead of 56-10. I don't know if this is a criticism or a feature...

There are some potential criticisms I have:

1. The punter could kick out of bounds to pin a team deep and not allow a return. Unless they make a rule to prevent this, but otherwise, the stated scenario of it being a 4th and 15 from your 30 yard line enables you to kick out of bounds. I wonder if there's a kicker talented enough to routinely pin a team inside their 15 with a punt out of bounds from that distance. Probably not, but maybe someone will come along.

2. Converting that 4th and 15 to keep the ball and keep a comeback alive might be a daunting task...until there's a roughing the passer penalty...

A defensive holding, illegal contact, pass interference, or a personal foul would give the offense an automatic first down. Do we really want a comeback to be kept alive, retaining possession, because of a PI call. I guess that can happen on any 4th down, but this is more than a 4th down, it's not about keeping possession it's about gaining possession, which is a bigger deal.

3. Overtime. With the current overtime system, if a team goes for the 4th-and-15, and gets it, then they only need a field goal to win. That's because a kick-off is treated as an opportunity for the receiving team to possess, thus next score wins. If they go for it and don't get it, the receiving team needs a TD to win. In addition, the Punt-Off will result in better starting field position for the offense, which over the season will mean more points, but in playoffs will also mean an easier road to victory for the receiving team (though that might be a good thing considering we've had about 4 games nearly tie this year, including one that did).

So there are a lot of mixed opinions on this one. Personally, I like this idea. I think replacing the luck-based onside kick with a 4th-and-15 would be more compelling.

I say we try it out and see how it works. Try it out in the Pro Bowl, then you might actually get people to watch it.

The State of the NFL Playoff Race

2012-12-02T11:08:00.000-06:00

Friday November 30, 2012

We're coming up on year three of the Lumpy Junk alternate universe playoff bracket. As I've gone over before in 2010, and in 2011. To summarize, I dislike the current NFL playoff system because:

A. I don't like the bye. Teams should have to win to move on. Also the bye guarantees that the visiting team will have already won a playoff game, giving them the momentum going into round two, AND the easiest opening playoff game isn't given to the teams with the best record, rather the #3 seeds are given the easiest opening games to introduce them to playoff football.

B. I don't like that divisional winners are guaranteed not only a playoff spot, but a home playoff game. That ends up in situations where an 11-5 team has to open the playoffs on the road against a 7-9 team. Rewarding divisional winners actually punishes teams that play in good divisions, and rewards teams that play in bad divisions.

C. Since the playoff structure is so rigid, you often end up with teams having nothing to play for over the last several weeks. Not just the #1 seeds locking up home field advantage, but also sometimes a team can lock up the #4 seed by leading their division, but being so much worse than the other division winners that they can't possibly move up to the #3 seed.

My solution is to expand the playoffs from 12 to 16 teams, eliminate the bye, ignore conferences and divisions. Seed the teams 1-16, and go play playoff football.

I go into more depth in those previous posts, so see those for more info.

So right now, heading into Week 13, we have 5 games remaining. That's about a third of the season left to play. We should have some idea of the playoff picture, and the stage set for a lot of late season drama as the teams jockey for position heading into January.

But we don't. Nope. Basically we already know the playoff picture.

All four division leaders in the AFC can clinch their division with a win this week. All four of them. And none of that "win and have three teams lose" nonsense. Win and they win their division.

That means that we basically know all four of those teams WILL win their division, whether they lock it up this week or not.

In the AFC we know the Texans (10-1), Ravens (9-2), Patriots (8-3), and Broncos (8-3) will be seeds 1-4. We don't yet know in what order, but those are your top seeds. The remaining two wild card spots, seeds #5 and #6 aren't exactly up for grabs either. The Colts (7-4), Steelers (6-5), and Bengals (6-5) are the top three. It's a safe bet that the Colts will get one wildcard, while either the Steelers or Bengals will get the other one. The 5-6 Dolphins are a long shot, and so are the 4-7 foursome of the Bills, Jets, Titans, and Chargers.

So really, the only drama in the AFC is whether the Ravens and Texans will hold on to their byes, and who is the 1 seed, and which two of the Colts, Steelers, and Bengals will get the wild cards. Not a lot of drama. You have basically only 3 teams playing for 2 spots. Yawn.

In the NFC the picture is a bit murkier. The 11-1 Falcons have essentially clinched the division with 2nd place Tampa Bay at 6-5 (the actual clinching comes with a Bucs loss or one more Falcons win). The 49ers are 8-2-1 and 2nd place Seattle is 6-5. Unless they collapse, the 49ers have essentially a 3 game lead.

The Giants are 7-4 and the Redskins and Cowboys are tied at 5-6 for 2nd in the NFC East, and thus, pending a serious collapse, the Giants will win the East.

With 5 games to play, the only division that's really in question is the NFC North where the Bears are leading at 8-3, the Packers close behind at 7-4 (remember the Fail Mary?), the Vikings are 6-5, and the Lions bringing up the rear at 4-7. Any three of the Bears, Packers, or Vikings could take this division, though the Vikings are a bit of a long shot.

When it comes to the NFC wild card spots, the top one will probably go to whoever finishes 2nd in the NFC North, currently that would be the Packers. The 2nd wildcard is totally up in the air with 6-5 Tampa Bay, 6-5 Seattle and 6-5 Minnesota currently tied, with 5-6 Washington and 5-6 Dallas being pretty long shots.

So with 5 games to play, we have one division that's up for grabs, and one wildcard spot that's really up in the air, and another wildcard spot that's basically down to 2 teams. That's really about it.

We can also say that Atlanta and Houston are pretty well guaranteed a bye, while Atlanta has pretty much locked up the #1 overall seed.

As we go down this final stretch, the following teams have nothing, or relatively little to play for. To start, the teams that are out of it:
Chiefs 1-10
Jaguars 2-9
Browns, Raiders, Panthers, and Eagles 3-8
Lions, Rams, Cardinals, Jets, Bills, Titans, and Chargers at 4-7 and Saints at 5-7(some of these teams have a very slim chance of making the playoffs, but would need to win-out, and require other teams to lose multiple games...not very likely)

In the hunt, teams that are playing for their playoff lives:

The Redskins and Cowboys both at 5-6, have a very slim chance of getting in, essentially needing the Giants to collapse and they could have a shot at the division.

Steelers 6-5, Bengals 6-5, and Colts 7-4. The three of them are fighting for 2 wildcards.

6-5 Seattle, 6-5 Tampa, and 6-5 Minnesota are fighting over the 2nd NFC Wildcard.

7-4 Green Bay and 8-3 Chicago are fighting over who will get the 1st wildcard and who will win the division, so both are likely to make the playoffs.

Teams that have little to play for because they have little to gain down the stretch:

8-2-1 San Fran, 8-3 Chicago, 7-4 Giants are all fighting over the #2 seed and a playoff bye.

The Falcons have essentially locked up the #1 seed in the NFC and thus with 5 weeks to go, have nothing to play for (unless they collapse completely).

The Patriots, Ravens, Texans, and Broncos can all clinch their division with a win. Thus all they have to play for is seeding. Currently the 10-1 Texans have the #1, the 9-2 Ravens would have the #2 and the other bye, while the Patriots and Broncos at 8-3 are chomping at the bit to catch the Ravens and steal away that #2 seed. So these teams do have some to play for, but as we get down to the last 2 or 3 games, that picture might become more clear and I'll bet that by week 17, we will pretty much know how the playoffs look before the final games are played.

Essentially, with 5 to play, we have 6 teams playing for the last 3 playoffs spots that are up in the air. That's about it. Of 32 teams, with 5 games to go, only 6 of them are likely vying for a playoff spot. Get ready for a bunch of meaningless games.

Time for the Lumpy Junk Scenario:

Seed teams 1-16, regardless of conference and division. The league would look like this:

1. Falcons 11-1
2. Texans 10-1
3. Ravens 9-2
4. 49ers 8-2-1
5. Patriots 8-3
5(6). Bears 8-3
5(7). Broncos 8-3
8(8). Giants 7-4
8(9). Packers 7-4
8(10). Colts 7-4

Seeds 1-8 get a first round home playoff game. As you can see, there is a 3-way tie for 8th, as well as a 3-way-tie for 5th. That means that all 6 of those teams are on the bubble as to whether they open the playoffs at home or on the road. The 6 of them are fighting for 4 spots. I haven't bothered to figure out the tie-breakers here, except that the Giants have beaten the Packers head-to-head, and thus would win that.

11. Vikings 6-5
11(12). Buccaneers 6-5
11(13). Steelers 6-5
11(14). Bengals 6-5
11(15). Seahawks 6-5

Five way tie for the #11 seed.

16. Dolphins 5-6
16 (17). Redskins 5-6
16 (18). Cowboys 5-6
19. Saints 5-7
20. Rams 4-6-1
21. Lions 4-7
21 (22). Jets 4-7
21 (23). Bills 4-7
21 (24). Chargers 4-7
21 (25). Titans 4-7
21 (26). Cardinals 4-7

So currently, the last team in would have a losing record at 5-6. However, I've done the math, and going back to when the NFL expanded to 32 teams, there's no year in which a 7-9 team would have made the playoffs in my 16-team-tournament, whereas the real NFL had the 7-9 Seahawks "earn" a home playoff game against an 11-5 team that was punished for playing in a good division. In other words, it's not very likely that at the end of the year the 16 seed will have a losing record.

In my system, only the Falcons, Texans, and Ravens have really clinched a playoff spot. If say the Patriots or Bears go 0-5 down the stretch, they could miss the playoffs at 8-8, though that's not too likely. So we can say that the 7 teams at 8-3 or better, are basically in. That leaves 9 Playoff Spots up for grabs, and 19 teams in the hunt with 5 to play.

After this weekend, we're going to be able to write off several teams. The 4-7 Cardinals and 4-7 Jets play each other for example. In real life, they're both out of the question to make the real playoffs, and so that game will have zero meaning. In the Lumpy Junk universe, this is basically a playoff game, as each of these teams has an outside shot of making the playoffs, but dropping to 4-8 will basically end their hopes, while 5-7 could become 9-7 and get you in the show...

The Titans play Houston, the Chargers play the Bengals, the Rams play the 49ers and the Lions play the Colts. So unless they pull off an upset, the Titans, Chargers, Rams, and Lions will basically be out. The only 4-7 team expected to stay in the hunt is the Bills, who play Jacksonville. So barring some upsets, by Tuesday, we'll be looking at a playoff picture where there will be about 15 teams vying for the last 7-8 playoff spots.

This is what I love about sports: matchups between teams that are desperate. That's why the playoffs are so exciting. The end of this NFL regular season is going to have about as many meaningless games as any season in recent memory. Of course, there might be some great games and I might look like an idiot for saying it, but odds are, we're only going to have one or two interesting division races, and one or two wild-card spots up for grabs, and that's it. Yawn. All the 5-6 and 4-7 teams are packing it in already. In the Lumpy Junk universe, those teams wouldn't be playing garbage time games, they'd be playing on borrowed time, fighting and clawing to stay relevant as the season winds down.

Not only will more teams be playing for their playoff lives, but also the teams at the top won't have clinched a thing. The Falcons have nothing to play for in the real world. In the Lumpy Junk world, they've got a half-game lead over the #2 seed, and you better believe they're going to want the #1 seed instead of the #2 seed.

The 49ers, Broncos, Patriots, Giants, and Colts are all pretty set to win their division and have not much to gain. The Colts, since they're in the same division as the 10-1 Texans, can't win the division, but are probably going to get a wildcard. Come down to the end of the year, they'll likely lock up a wildcard spot before the season is through. Thus none of these teams will have much to play for come Week 16 or 17.

For example. Week 17, the Colts host the Texans. The Texans might have locked up the #1 seed by then, and in that case, have nothing to play for, other than to play spoiler to the Colts who might still be fighting for a playoff spot. So this might result in another team missing the playoff because the Colts get an easy win against the Texans JV team. This happened a few years ago when the Colts got to 14-0 and rested starters. They lost their last two, one to the Jets. The Jets beat out the Texans for the last wildcard spot and got into the playoffs thanks to that easy win. HOwever, the Texans had played twice that year against the Varsity Colts. How is it fair that the Colts resting means a team gets in the playoff easy?

Another example, week 17, the Patriots play the Dolphins, the Giants play the Eagles, the Broncos play the Chiefs. In each of these games, the division winner will have probably already been crowned (Patriots and Broncos can clinch today, while the Giants still have some work to do, but will probably clinch ahead of week 17), and they're playing against teams that are out of the hunt. In the Lumpy Junk playoffs, the Patriots, Broncos, and Giants would all be competing against each other for playoff seeding, plus the Dolphins could still be in the hunt. If the Chiefs and Eagles weren't so terrible, they might have been in the hunt too.

Real Playoffs

#1 Texans & #2 Ravens get a first round bye.

#3 & #4 belong to the Patriots and Broncos, but we aren't sure in which order, and it's possible for either of them to move up into the the top 2. The Texans aren't likely to lose out on a bye, while the Ravens will lose it if they stumble.

The #5 and #6, the two wildcard spots belong currently to the Colts and the Steelers, while the Bengals are tied with the Steelers and have a re-match coming.

We're probably looking at Colts at Broncos, Steelers/Bengals at Patriots, with the winners moving on to Baltimore and Houston. While this is subject to change (the Broncos and Patriots swap places, maybe one of these two switches spots with the Ravens, etc., but more or less, this is the playoffs).

The #1 seed Texans will host the worst remaining seed, so their playoff schedule might look like: host the Colts, and host the Ravens. Win those two and you're in the super bowl.

In the NFC

#1 Atlanta, they have it locked up.
#2 is up for grabs between the 49ers, Bears, Packers, and Giants.

#3 belongs to the 3rd best division winner
#4 belongs to the worst division winner.

So it might be Falcons, 49ers, Bears, Giants. Or it might be: Falcons, Bears, Giants, 49ers. Or it might be Falcons, Packers, 49ers, Giants. There's quite a bit of change possible here as 4 teams are vying for seeds 2-4 and a home game.

#5 belongs to probably whoever between the Packers and Bears that doesn't take the division.
#6 is a toss up between the Seahawks, Bucs, and Vikings.

So it might look like this:

#6 Seahawks at #3 Bears
#5 Packers at #4 Giants

Winners go to #1 Atlanta and #2 San Francisco.

So we're looking at Atlanta hosting the worst team to win in round 1, so they can't play the Bears. They'll host the Seahawks, Giants, or Packers. A win then brings the winner in the game at San Fran to the Georgia dome. If it's the 49ers, then the NFC title game is 49ers at Falcons. Win those two and the Falcons are in the Super Bowl.

Lumpy Junk Playoffs

Right now, it'd look something like this:

Round 1

#16 Dolphins at #1 Falcons
#15 Seahawks at #2 Texans
#14 Bengals at #3 Ravens
#13 Steelers at #4 49ers
#12 Bucs at # 5 Patriots
#11 Vikings at #6 Bears
#10 Colts at #7 Broncos
#9 Packers at #8 Giants

So after the first week of the playoffs, they will have whittled the field down to 8, same as in the real playoffs. Only rather than giving teams 1-4 a bye, we give them an easy opener against 4 teams that otherwise wouldn't make the playoffs.

Let's go ahead and make some guesses:

#16 Dolphins at #1 Falcons - Falcons win easy.
#15 Seahawks at #2 Texans - Might be tough, but Texans come out on top.
#14 Bengals at #3 Ravens - Ravens continue to keep the Bengals from breaking out.
#13 Steelers at #4 49ers - 49ers win against an aging Steelers squad.
#12 Bucs at # 5 Patriots - Patriots impress the Bucs.
#11 Vikings at #6 Bears - Vikings pull off an upset in Soldier Field.
#10 Colts at #7 Broncos - Manning vs. Luck. BWAAAHHHH (inception noise). Broncos take it in mile-high
#9 Packers at #8 Giants - Packers find a way to win a close one in Jersey.

Round Two:

#11 Vikings at #1 Falcons
#9 Packers at #2 Texans
#7 Broncos at #3 Ravens
#5 Patriots at #4 49ers

Let's say the Falcons win big again. The Packers sweep into Houston and take down the mighty Texans with their magic cheese. Manning and the Broncos duel with Flacco's Ravens, but Manning wins it. The 49ers beat the Patriots at home.

Round Three:

#9 Packers at #1 Falcons
#7 Broncos at #4 49ers

Manning takes his new team to the bay to face a team he almost went to. Manning versus that 49er Defense. The 49ers pressure Manning too much and he crumbles under that pass rush.

The Packers, having won a super bowl recently, with Aaron Rodgers, come into the Georgia dome playing for a shot at the Super Bowl. The Falcons, having not won a playoff game in a while, eased into the playoffs with easy wins, but now comes a huge test. Falcons win it.

Super Bowl

49ers vs. Falcons

Of course, there's no projecting any of this. Maybe the 49ers QB situation falls to pieces and their 4 seed crumbles before their eyes in Round 1.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Another Idea for this playoff structure, is that rather than automatically seeding 16vs1, 15vs2, etc., that the teams with the higher seeds get to CHOOSE their opponent. I mean, if you lock up the top seed, you might end up facing a 16 seed that started off slow, but has won 6 straight to make the playoffs, while the 15 seed finished the season with 3 losses and nearly missed the whole thing. Doesn't earning the #1 seed entitle you to pick your opponent, rather than let the math dictate it?

So it would work like this:

#16 Dolphins #1 Falcons
#15 Seahawks #2 Texans
#14 Bengals #3 Ravens
#13 Steelers #4 49ers
#12 Bucs # 5 Patriots
#11 Vikings #6 Bears
#10 Colts #7 Broncos
#9 Packers #8 Giants

The Falcons draft first. They get to pick any team in the left column. The Falcons select the Dolphins anyway, no surprises.

The Texans go next. They don't like the matchup against the Seahawks. The Bengals A.J. Green scares them. The Steelers are the Steelers. They look at the Vikings and decide they match up well, especially against a struggling Ponder. Texans pick Vikings.

Ravens go next, they pick the Bengals, having beaten them twice already.

The 49ers are tempted to pick the Seahawks, having already beaten them twice, but opt instead for the Steelers, making the aging and injured Steelers travel cross country to meet them.

The Patriots pick the Seahawks, again, forcing a long road trip for the road team.

The Bears choices are the Bucs, Colts, or Packers. They go with the Buccaneers.

The Broncos have to pick either the Luck-Colts or the Rodgers-Packers. They go with the Colts, since it's a younger less experienced team with a rookie QB. Can you say Twittergasm?

And the Giants knew all along, they would not have a choice, but merely the leftover team. In this case, Giants vs. Packers

So here's Round 1:

Dolphins at Falcons
Vikings at Texans
Bengals at Ravens
Steelers at 49ers
Seahawks at Patriots
Bucs at Bears
Colts at Broncos
Packers at Giants

The regular season ends on Sunday of Week 17. There's no monday night game. The teams have Monday to think, and turn in their draft choices, which they can turn into a live show of some kind. So Monday Night, the NFL unveils the draft choices and the playoff schedule for the coming week.

Every road team will have been slighted, having been picked as an easy matchup. This would lead to all kinds of storylines, X team is afraid to play Y team. A team has been disrespected by Team B choosing them. Blah blah blah.

Imagine if the choice backfires. Imagine if the #1 seed loses anyway.

So moving on, Round two gets more interesting.

Falcons, Texans, Ravens, and 49ers get to choose from the Patriots, Bears, Broncos, and Giants.

Falcons go first. Who do you invite to the Georgia Dome? Do you really want to pick on Peyton Manning? Do you really want to disrespect the Giants defensive line? You certainly don't want to piss off the bears. This is a kind of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't kind of situation.

The Falcons decide to pick the team with the worst QB. One of these names is not like the others: Brady, Manning, Manning, Cutler.

Falcons pick Bears.

Texans go next. They've had their fill of Peyton Manning over the years, so maybe that means they have him at least a little figured out, or maybe they've learned their lesson and avoid him. The Giants have been consistently inconsistent, so they pick the defending-champion Giants.

So...Do you take Peyton Manning and the Broncos or Tom Brady and the Patriots. John Harbaugh gets to pick his poison...and Jim Harbaugh gets his leftovers.

Ravens take Broncos, figuring they don't want to mess with Darth Belichick, and would rather make the aging Manning prove he can still do it. That leaves Brady and the Patriots going to San Francisco.

Bears at Falcons
Giants at Texans
Broncos at Ravens
Patriots at 49ers

Let's say the Falcons are right and Jay Cutler has a bad game. But what if Cutler slices and dices the Falcons. Sounds delicious. Can you imagine all the Cutler passive-aggressive trash talk while he looks completely disinterested. Or is it nonplussed. Does nonplussed mean what I think it means?

What if Eli goes into Houston and does what he does, pulling off an incredible throw that gets stuck in his receiver's face mask and wins the game somehow.

Let's project the Falcons, Ravens, and 49ers to win at home, while the Giants upset the Texans. The final round looks like this:

The Falcons have their choice of the Giants or 49ers. The leftover team goes to Baltimore to play the Ravens.

So Falcons...Who are you more afraid of? The 49ers Defense, or Eli Manning pulling a super-bowl MVP trophy out of his ass? If the Falcons pick the Giants, then the 49ers play the Ravens in the SupHarBaughll (you see what I did there?). So maybe the Falcons pick the Giants, knowing that the brothers Harbaugh will be so pumped to play each other that maybe they leave it all on the field in that game, and don't have enough left in the tank for the super bowl. Maybe you pick the Niners because you think you can beat up on Alex Smith or Kaepernick, whoever is still starting by then, rather than have to attack Eli.

49ers at Falcons
Giants at Ravens

The Niners and Ravens win, thus bringing on the Super SupHarBaughll Bowl.

Ohio GOP Switching to Drive-Thru Voting

2012-08-28T16:41:00.001-05:00

28 August, ~~1908~~ 2012

"We're trying to make voting easier, faster, more convenient, and most of all, more easier," said Grover B. Frobe, the head of Ohio's Election Commission. "Drive-Thru voting will accomplish all of those goals. No more lines, no more parking headaches, you'll drive right up, cast your vote, and drive right out."

When asked whether drive-thru voting will discourage those without cars or driver's licenses from voting, Republican Governor Kasich replied, "It's 2012, who doesn't have a car?"

See, in the United States, we have election officials, people whose sole job is to oversee elections, make sure there is no vote tampering, no vote fraud, the counting is done correctly, no ballots disappear, nobody is going around intimidating voters, or any other nonsense. Great idea, except that our election officials are partisan, meaning they are Republicans or Democrats. So what could possibly go wrong when the election official of a precinct where 80% of the voters are Democrats is a Republican? Thirty-three states have introduced Voter ID Laws just this year, all of them by Republicans in the State legislatures, signed by Republican Governors. Requiring voters present a driver's license which isn't free to get, and for many people, especially poor people who don't own cars, an unnecessary item, means that across those states, thousands of people will not be able to vote unless they obtain a new government ID (and we all know the DMV is easily capable of dispensing hundreds of thousands of new IDs all at once).

You might wonder, why does it matter? The election is going to end up being 51-49 for one of the candidates in the popular vote, so making voting a little harder for everyone will hurt each candidate equally. Right?

That might be true if poor people were split 50-50 on Obama or Romney, or if Black voters were equally split. However a poll released last week showed that Obama led Romney among likely Black voters by a razor thin margin of 94% to 0%. That's right, a national poll couldn't find a single black person planning on voting for Romney. Latinos favor Obama two-to-one. Women favor Obama. In fact, the only demographics in which Romney leads are in White Men and the Elderly.

Ohio, one of the swingiest of swingy states, is controlled by a Republican Governor, Republican State Senate, and Republican Election Board. These totally trustworthy and impartial Republicans wouldn't dare threaten the democratic process by making it much harder for Democrats to vote while making it easier for Republicans to vote, of course not! That's why they ended early voting in predominantly black and poor precincts, while extending early voting in predominantly rich, white, old people areas. "We weren't trying to make it harder for quadroons to vote," Grover B. Frobe explained, "Black people like crowds and big events, we were just trying to encourage them to all go on the same day, so they could shout out to their peeps and carpool and such. It's like a party and they're all invited."

This week the state election board announced that they would convert polling places into drive-thrus to speed up the process of voting. "Voting should be easier and faster, and what's easier or faster than delicious McDonald's food?" Frobe explained, while eating a Big Mac.

Lucious Theodis Malrom, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Bad-Ass-Mo-fos (NAABAMFS), believes this move is part of a honkey conspiracy: "They know brothers and sisters can't drive, how we supposed to vote? Next thing you know, the ballot is gonna be in some secret white language like Latin or Canadian."

Mitt Romney the Republican nominee, kept with his recent practice of pivoting every question to something about the economy, when he said "You people vote in person? I just pay a guy to vote for the whole family. It's his job, see I'm a job creator. This guy has a job because I pay him for a service, and then when he gets the money, he goes to a bank so that the bank can turn the Swiss money into US Dollars, so that gives a banker a job, and somebody had to print that Swiss Franc, so there's a woodcutter guy and one of those paper people and all those kinds of things that have jobs because of how I vote. That's my voting record as a job creator. Obama doesn't create those jobs."

When asked about the new tactics of the GOP, former President George W. Bush said, "Why don't they just rig the machines like turd-blossom did? Or kick all the people who might be felons off the voter rolls, you know, anybody darker than Wesley Snipes, that's what Jebby did in Florida and that worked. I guess they're trying to sell more cars in Ohio, it's a pretty good idea for a stimulus package, buy a car, vote for president, that's a good sales pitch. Where are you going, I got plenty more ideas, I haven't talked to anyone in months. Please don't go."

Meanwhile former Governor Romney is facing stiff questions about the GOP's apparent voter suppression tactics. When asked why he has zero support from African-Americans in a recent poll, Romney replied: "Well, whenever you see a number like that, you have to think that Racism plays a big part. You don't ever see a poll saying all white people agree on something, or all Latinos or all Asians, or all Millionaires. But this shows all Black people are on one side of the fence. Clearly they're just racists who think that they have to vote for the Black president because he's black like them. It's sad really, because Obama is hurting them. Under my economic plan, they would be learning new skills and finding all kinds of new jobs, because of the Welfare reform, plus with all the tax cuts for the job creators, that money would inject all kinds of things into the black community. To find polling data like that, I think you probably have to go back to Nazi Germany to find that many people all agreeing on something. I'm not saying we're heading for a race war or anything like that, so don't twist my words around, but I'm just saying, where there's smoke, there's ovens filled with people you hate, know what I mean?"

There are 70 days left until the General Election.

Solipsis: Escape from the Comatorium

2012-07-04T05:24:00.000-05:00

4 July, 2012

The rejected cover.

So I've not been posting to Lumpy Junk in a while because my junk has been busy writing a novel called Solipsis: Escape from Jeff's Brain. The e-book was published yesterday. The paperback will be available in about a week.

This project started as a screenplay, and after several drafts, I decided to expand it into a novel.

Solipsis is my take on the Virtual Reality genre (See also: The Matrix, Inception, Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, Neuromancer, Total Recall, Source Code, and Spy Kids 3-D).

I began by identifying the issues I have with Virtual Reality stories so that I can find a way to fix or circumvent those problems.

Problem # 1
Realism

It's one thing to ask the audience to suspend disbelief. It's another thing to ask them to take your stupid ideas seriously. But Jeff, you say, if stories are totally realistic they'll be boring.

"Brain Spiral" The painting I picked for the cover.
Used with permission from Laura Freeman

My contention is that you don't have to abandon logic and realism to have an exciting story. It's easy as hell to come up with cool shit if you don't actually have to stick to any logic at all.

Think about the Matrix. Why do the robots keep humans in the Matrix? So they can extract thermal energy from them. Does that make any fucking sense at all? No. It doesn't. You're telling me that this super intelligent AI couldn't come up with a better power source than comatose people? Not only are humans a terrible energy source, but they also have this nasty habit of waking up and, you know, being hackers. They're breeding hackers instead of figuring out geo-thermal energy, or utilizing their "form of fusion."

Basically The Matrix gives us an epic story of humans vs. robots in an awesome virtual reality where there is no spoon and explosions happen in slow-mo and shit looks cool.

But do you really have to abandon realism to tell that story?

What if the AI actually are keeping the humans alive and in a matrix set in pretty modern times because they need help from human computer programmers? The AI aren't quite creative enough to figure out all their problems, so they keep these human slaves and trick them into helping them. Instead of embracing a sensical story, we get sequels that ignore the billions of people inside the matrix and focus instead on a weird dirty city of raves and flying octopi.

See this post for what I would have done with the Matrix sequels.

Problem #2
Stakes

If you are in a computer world and it's just some video game, then what the hell does it matter? Nothing's at stake. So if you're telling a story in a virtual reality, you have to find a way to make things matter.

The Matrix solves this by the amazing logic "If you die in the Matrix, you die in the real world."

It makes no sense at all, but hey, it leads to cool shit.

The Thirteenth Floor, another virtual reality film, made you switch bodies with your avatar, and if you die in the virtual world, the AI who you swapped with is suddenly in your body and you're dead. Huh?

In Surrogates, people remotely pilot robot bodies that aren't fat and ugly, living vicariously. The plot of the film revolves around some new weapon that kills the people piloting the robot via some virus or something....how original.

You can tell it's fake because of the pixels.

In Inception, at the beginning, dying simply wakes you up. This is much more realistic, and leads to interesting situations where people can be tortured and you might want to kill your friend to free them from torture. The stakes are still there because they are trying to accomplish a mission and dying/waking up prevents them from doing that, and can get them in trouble in the real world.

But rather than embrace this, they change the rules shortly thereafter so that dying sends you to limbo. The movie makes it work, but it's much less realistic.

Why do dreams have to make any sense when it comes to biology/death/physics? Add onto that the pretty non-sensical idea of "militarized sub-conscious." Really? It's movie logic, so okay, it's exciting, but ultimately pretty shallow.

Problem #3
Ambiguity

Virtual Reality movies embrace ambiguity for ambiguity sake. For example, the whole ending to Inception rests on this (maybe) twist-ending. Is he still dreaming or isn't he? I've written about Inception in more detail, but my beef here is that this ambiguous ending is totally uninteresting. It thinks it's really clever, but it isn't.

Beyond that, I don't get any pleasure out of watching things purposely not resolve and pretend to be clever. Total Recall and eXistenZ also fall into this camp. The whole plot of both films centers around trying to figure out "are we still in the game/dream or aren't we?" It's as if Hollywood sees something shiny (ambiguous reality) and can't see past it. It's okay to introduce some ambiguity, but when the whole story is just a series of contradicting clues telling you one minute that it's real and the next minute that it's fake, then the whole thing seems like a philosophy major's circle jerk.

Problem #4
Wasted Opportunities

In the film Surrogates, the coolest thing they could
come up with was blonde Bruce Willis.
Talk about a golden opportunity.

If you are in a virtual reality, then you can do anything. Of course films are limited by budget constraints, but even within those limitations they still waste their chances left and right.

For every cool thing in Inception there are five totally cliche things.

So in Inception, on one dream level, they're in a van, falling. This causes the dream world one level down to be in zero-gravity. So Joseph Gordon-Levitt ends up in a whacky gravity spinning fight, followed by a cool puzzle where he has to make sleeping people fall despite having no gravity to help him. So since falling in one level causes zero-gravity the next level down, then the zero-gravity in the hotel should cause zero-gravity in the next dream level down, thus leading to an awesome climax of the film taking place on a space station.

Except that didn't happen. Instead we get a final act set in the snow level from Goldeneye, where they have gravity...somehow. Add that up with the fact that Juno has the ability to bend the world, turn things upside down, do crazy shit to physics, and yet...after establishing these powers, never uses them again.

Problem #5
Bullets that never hit anything

Gun fights have serious realism issues because the main characters seem to dodge bullets. James Bond has dodged 4662 bullets in his film career. We can call this henchman syndrome or Stormtrooper's malaise. In Bond movies and regular action flicks, they have no explanation for this.

The most common way of getting around this issue is to have the bad guys want to capture the main character because they need them as a hostage or need some information from them.

Another way around this is to have main characters who have super powers (Superman, Wolverine, Jedis), equipped with superior equipment (Batman, Iron Man), or are hackers (Neo). Jedis and super heroes and Terminators can't just be killed by some idiot with a gun. But there are no such thing as super powers or the force or time-traveling robots, so how else can we have our main characters be powerful?

The worst tactic for dealing with this problem is to do nothing at all. Inception has no explanation for why these dream hackers are able to win every gun fight they are in. No explanation at all.

In the Matrix, realizing there is no spoon allows you to dodge bullets. But Neo can do it better than Trinity and Morpheus for some reason. Because he is the one...what does that mean exactly?

Why don't the agents just spawn with awesome machine guns instead of dodgeable pistols? Why not spawn with grenade launchers? There's absolutely no reason the agents only have these shitty pistols. Remember, they designed the world, they're in charge, and yet they play it out under these weird restrictions. Is it because spawning too awesome of weapons, or spawning wherever they want would be unsettling to the population and lead to people "rejecting" the illusion? If so, why not use that in the sequels. Maybe they start to get desperate and use bigger and better weapons, causing thousands of matrix dwellers to die.

This is what I'm talking about when I say wasted opportunities.

Jedi and Sith have a kind of future sensing intuition. This combined with a light saber makes them able to block bullets and lasers and sense their way out of problems. This is one of the main reasons Star Wars is good.

Paycheck, the film and the Philip K. Dick story, is about a guy who had been able to see the future, but his memory has since been wiped. But before the memory wiping, he mailed himself some clues that had to be seemingly innocuous. Thus you have a plot where a guy always has the exact right thing to get him out of any jam, kind of like a psychic Macgyver. Or you know...Q. That's an interesting way of explaining how your main character can get out of so many sticky situations.

Virtual Reality, body augmentation, trans and post-human worlds offer up super powers and such without the need for suspension of disbelief. I mean, the Matrix could have been about a guy whose just the most talented video gamer on the planet, with amazing reflexes and such. But instead he's fulfilling some kind of prophecy...

Which leads me to my next point:

Problem #6
Too many leaps of Faith

You get ONE leap of faith.

Movie Idea: Geese lay golden eggs that
are actually human heads. BWAH!

Back to the Future asks you to buy that Doc Brown built a time machine. That's the one leap of faith. If you buy that, everything follows pretty logically from there.

This is a principal of post-modernism. There's one weird thing, everything else has to follow logically from there. Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine, both Charlie Kaufmann films, require one leap of faith. In BJM it proposes that there's a portal into John Malkovich's brain. Beyond that one weird thing, everything else is believable. You don't have this weird brain portal AND time travel. Eternal Sunshine proposes that there's a procedure you can have to erase bad memories you don't want anymore.

The beauty of stories like this is that they are set in worlds that are different, thus the story can be original, but they aren't unbelievable worlds. Everything after the one weird premise has to make sense. If you drop the audience into a world with magic and clones and weird shit everywhere, they're going to have a hard time relating to characters or believing the world. I'm not saying it's impossible to do, it's just extremely hard to pull off.

The first three Indiana Jones films feature religious/mythological/occult kinds of things. So that's the audience's leap of faith. Then in Indiana Jones 4, Aliens show up... And it's not in a way that's related to the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail. So now this story which has asked you in the past to believe in these religious artifacts is also asking you to believe in Ancient Aliens. Now if these ancient aliens were part of the Ark of the Covenant or Holy Grail stories (presumably with some kind of alien Jesus), then perhaps you could do it as a single leap of faith. But when the film asks you to make a second, unrelated leap of faith, everybody is like, WTF? Aliens. It's pretty weird to think about it, but Indiana Jones is set in a universe where Christianity is correct, AND there are weird aliens. Are the aliens Christians too? Did they have their own alien Jesus. (Idea for a movie: The Passion of the Beeblebrox).

The Matrix sequels start asking multiple leaps of faith, and that's where you lose a lot of people (Neo is the one in the matrix, AND he can make EMPs with his hands in the real world?).

So you get only get one leap of faith.

Having identified all these problems, I set out to create a story that followed those principals. In a few other posts written in the past year and a half, you'll see other principles of mine at work.

For example, I'm not a fan of over-the-top evil bad guys who have no apparent goals other than gaining power and being dicks to everyone. If you want there to be an interesting conflict, the way to do it isn't to come up with better trick photography and CGI, it's to come up with real dilemmas, hard decisions, you know, things that require thought.

Goals of Solipsis (Spoiler Free Section)

1. Realism. Logic. It all needs to make sense.

2. Have stakes without sacrificing realism (dying in virtual world will not kill you in real world. In fact, you can't die in the virtual world. You could be decapitated and you'd still be alive and in control of your body [good luck seeing where you're going]). Having said that, there still needs to be consequences, otherwise, what's the point.

3. Ambiguity is okay, but the plot won't just be a contradicting set of clues to which there is intentionally no answer.

4. Don't waste your opportunities. Don't resort to a simple gun battle.

5. No bullet dodging (unless there's a good reason for it). Bad guys have ability to aim guns in roughly the right direction.

6. Only one Leap of Faith.

7. Make the main character's goals be more nuanced than simply "give me back my family" or saving the girl, etc.

8. Bad guys have actual goals and aren't simply evil dicks. It's not black and white, good vs. evil.

9. Don't use female characters as shrieking damsels.

10. Make this thing have some real ideas, not simply a way of coming up with excuses to have some action set-pieces.

Alright. Got all that? Now if you want to know more, here is the premise of the novel. I'll only reveal details that are established within the first third of the novel. Read at your own risk.

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD

My novel supposes a near future in which people can be plugged into a shared neural network. While the Matrix just jams a metal rod in their necks, in my novel you have to have every nerve ending wired up. The only way to do that is through a procedure called a vivisection, in which the brain and nervous system is extracted from the rest of the body. You have to become a brain-in-a-jar.

I would have just ripped this off and
used it as the cover.

This setup creates some interesting circumstances. Only vivisected people can be plugged in, and once you are vivisected, your body is gone, you're a brain-in-a-vat. So this means that obviously not everyone is going to rush out to get this procedure done. It's a select few. And who would it be? The dying. This is a way of cheating death.

Vivisected people can either remotely pilot robots, like Surrogates, or they can live in the virtual world called Solipsis.

The few vivisected people are outcasts in a society of able-bodied people. They live in vats on an ocean platform, sharing a virtual reality world called Solipsis.

Since most people can't get the procedure, they rationalize it away as inhuman, barbaric, etc. That combined with the religious concepts of heaven and hell, and the fact that more Americans believe that angels exist than any other country's population, and you'll see a conflict brewing.

Ultimately the conflict in Solipsis comes about when a religious cult, thinking they are doing god's work, takes over the Ocean platform and takes the brains-in-jars hostage. The bad guy' goal is to restore god's order: People die, god judges them.

Taking over the virtual world of Solipsis, the bad guys create a virtual hell and put the vivisected people in it, torture them, try to convert them. These religious cultists don't think it's wrong to kill these vivisected people because they think god wants them dead. So it's not murder to them.

So that's the premise of the conflict, which takes place inside of Solipsis, a virtual world. The brain-jars are in a giant room called the Comatorium, hence the title.

Comatorium. Vivisection. Televator. Anybody get it yet?

So far everything is realistic, it asks no real big leaps of faith. The idea that we could hook a brain up to a computer is no longer a new idea, (nor even science fiction). People are already controlling prosthetics with their minds. They've augmented mice brains with microchips. So does anyone really think it's outlandish that fifty years from now they'll have the technology to plug directly into a virtual world and experience it just as you would the real world? Maybe it's not the most likely thing, but it's certainly more realistic than fighting a war against AIs that are keeping us in pods and using us as batteries or something.

This premise also takes care of the problem of stakes in a virtual world. The people of Solipsis are trapped in hell, being tortured, and they feel pain just as if it were really happening, and you can't even kill them to put them out of their misery If you put a bullet in their head, they feel it, but it won't kill them. If you decapitate them, they feel it, but they aren't physically harmed in any way. So this leads to situations where main characters can be reduced to nothing but severed heads. The stakes here are high. Renee, the main character, has the ultimate goal of defeating the cult, taking back the station, but she also has smaller more immediate goals like helping comrades by relieving them of the pain of being tortured/decapitated etc.

That's not Stormtrooper Syndrome.
That's what happens when you eat Yoda's cooking.

As to the issue of stormtrooper syndrome, I avoid this problem by making Solipsis a virtual world where no guns or explosions are allowed. It's a safety measure built into the code (Solipsis is the main world, there are other worlds for playing games and such with other rules). This means that fights inside Solipsis don't come down to who has the better aim. The non-vivisected bad guys interact with this virtual world like they are playing a video game, so they don't feel pain, can't be physically harmed, but also don't have great control over their avatars. Since they are in control of the simulation, they have the high ground, can re-spawn, can change things, can make their avatars bigger, stronger, etc. BUT they are at a disadvantage because they're using a joystick and the vivisected people are controlling their avatars directly with their minds. So this avoids stormtroopers malaise, and explains the "super power" of the main characters.

As for wasting opportunities, you're just going to have to read the book and trust me when I say that I don't waste my opportunities. There is actually quite a lot more to this story, a couple of "holy shit" plot twists, and a I haven't even said a thing about the characters. Honestly this description barely qualifies as spoilers because it's doesn't give away much more than the premise.

The main character, Renee, is a teenage girl who has spent her whole life living inside of Solipsis. Much of the early plot is about her discovering the nature of her world, and is thus the audience's surrogate.

As for ambiguity, the story has some, but it's not about the ambiguity, it's just an added layer.

And really there is a lot more to the story than just the premise and the mechanics of the world. It's about the nature of the self, what it really means to be human, psychopathy, the neuroscience of free will, science vs. religion, what kind of life you live when you can essentially live forever (for example, does monogamy make sense when you're going to live hundreds of years?). So much of our lives is dictated by biology, so when we become post-biological, how will that effect us? Should death be a natural part of life?

This is right after he pulled a thorn out of its paw.

The conflict at the heart of the story is something that's very relavant. How will society adjust to the changes technology ushers in? Science and Religion are already fighting battles over science textbooks. In Louisianna they just started teaching that the Loch Ness Monster is proof that evolution is wrong. Once we start entering the transhuman and post-human realms, do you think the religious forces that are currently fighting against the ability of women to control their reproductive systems are going to just go along with it?

The conflict of my story is a conflict of ideas. The bad guys aren't just some evil robots who decided that humans are the enemy. In the future, the bad guys aren't going to be invading aliens or sentient robots. Hell is other people.

So that's what I've been working on. Really though, most of what I just wrote is what I was doing a year ago when I was writing the script. The last eight months has been a lot more about making scenes more interesting, giving characters more depth, and trying to make my writing not sound like a screenwriter wrote it. (Close up on cool shit. Pan over to reveal an awesome thing.)

After writing this project, and the months of thinking about it, it's time for me to start my next project, and it should be a topic that requires as little thought as possible: Sarah Palin.

P.S. Check out my new website.

Peyton Manning: The Douchebag of Denver

2012-04-16T18:52:00.000-05:00

Fuck you Peyton.

Peyton Manning: The Archer of Arrowhead

2012-03-02T15:31:00.001-06:00

2 March, 2011

His neck injury originated from
his Super Bowl disappointment.

Peyton Manning will probably be cut sometime in the next week. He's due a giant 28 million dollar bonus if he is on the Colts roster on March 8th. This after they already paid him 26 million to not do anything last year. The Colts could still choose to keep him, but with Andrew Luck practically on their roster, and apparently facing a rebuilding period, it makes little sense to pay him.

And if you're wondering why they don't pay him and then trade him, the answer is that they technically could, but they won't. If they trade him after March 8th, they'll have 44 million dollars in dead cap space, spread over the next two seasons (and when the cap is around 120 million, that's a huge problem). Plus, they would need a trading partner willing to take on his huge contract (which has 4 years left on it and lots of money), which nobody is going to be willing to do since they don't know for sure that he can play.

Peyton could restructure his contract and stay with Indy, or he could be traded and agree to restructure his contract with the new team, but he has no incentive to do that. Let's say he helps them trade him by taking a smaller contract, all that will accomplish is weaken the team he's going to by making them trade for him rather than being able to sign him freely. It's in his best interest to not restructure, have the Colts cut him, then decide on his own where to go and not make his new team give up anything to get him.

So the question now is where does he go?

Sup Ladies?

His goal is to win a super bowl...or two. He might have six years left in him...or none, or two, it's impossible to say. Prior to this season, he had never missed a game in college or the pros. In fact, he'd only ever come out for ONE play ever, and that was because he broke his jaw. He rested a play and finished the game, and played the next week. Okay, dude is ridiculously durable, plus he takes very few sacks. He's led the league several times in least times sacked, despite attempting more passes than most. Remember Aaron Brooks? He played for like 6 or 7 season for the Saints. Yeah, he was sacked more times than Manning has been from 1998 to 2010. So maybe this neck thing is fixed and he'll be back to normal. Before last season, it seemed reasonable to think he'd last another five years or more. He's lost speed, but he was never fast or relied much on his running ability.

I bet his thinking is that he will have two or three years and his goal is to win two super bowls. Gotta beat his little bro. Pick the right team and he could do it. Pick the wrong team and he'll be remembered for going down with some crappy team.

The best way to get to a super bowl is to lock up a #1 or #2 seed, get that playoff bye, and lock up one or two playoff home games. A #1 seed just has to win two home games and they're in the super bowl. The Steelers and Ravens are in the same division, and if both of them are 13-3 and have the two best records in the AFC, they don't both get byes. One gets a bye, the other is a wildcard team. You really get screwed over by being in the same division with another good team. So his goal will be to join the best team in a bad division.

The teams that have been talked up the most include the Redskins because owner Dan Snyder has deep pockets and can offer him a lot of cash. But they're in the same division with the Cowboys, Eagles, and defending champion Giants.

I mustache you a question.
Do you like 6'5" Quarterbacks with a Laser, Rocket Arm?

The Dolphins are receiving a lot of buzz, but they play in the same division as the Jets and Patriots. Do you think PM really wants to have to get by Belichick and Brady to get another ring? The Jets are getting some buzz too, but they have a dysfunctional locker room, an aging team, and again, play in the same division as the Pats and the Bills who showed flashes last year.

The AFC East is out, so is the North (Steelers, Ravens, and Bengals all made the playoffs last year). Some people in Tennessee have been clamoring for a return to the Volunteer state, but they play in the same division with the Texans who might have gone to the super bowl if they stayed healthy. Plus he'd have to go against the Colts and Andrew Luck. You think he wants to spend the end of his career getting drubbed by his replacement?

The NFC East is out. The Bucs and Vikings have gotten some attention too, both have decent young QBs, but might make a play for him. But he won't be interested. Why go to the same division as the Bears, Lions, and Packers? The NFC North is out, so is the South (Falcons, Panthers, Saints).

That leaves the AFC and NFC West.

Replaced by a goofy kid that was mentored by the guy
you yourself replaced. It's like Fucking Shakespeare. Literally.

The Seahawks seemed to have become one of the favorites to land him. They have a young team, and a poor division. But the 49ers are also in the West and Jim Harbaugh (who Manning replaced as the Colts QB in '98) has that team playing great. With that defense they're going to be a tough competitor. The Cardinals are another possibility, but again, play with the 49ers. The Rams have Sam Bradford and a bad team so they're out.

The 49ers might be the dark horse in all of this. They're generally counted out because of Alex Smith's emergence as a good quarterback. They very nearly cut the former #1 overall pick before the season. They decided to keep him and he blossomed. Maybe they're willing to sit him down or get rid of him. With that defense and the Seahawks (and Tarvaris Jackson), Cardinals (and Skelton or Kolb), and Rams (doesn't even matter who their QB is) on the schedule, they would be basically guaranteed to clinch their division by week 13 for the next few years.

In the AFC West, the Raiders just spent a bunch of picks on Carson Palmer, who's also an old QB, but still 4 years younger than Peyton. The Chargers have Rivers and he's not the problem. The Broncos have Tebow...they're too busy developing him into a Wildcat quarterback to pull their heads out of their asses.

Mannings look good in Red.

That leaves the Chiefs. They have a solid young defense. If Eric Berry is still himself when he comes back, he'll be one of, if not the game-changing safety for the next few years. Tamba Hali is one of the elite pass rushers. And while the defense isn't perfect, they are young and improving a lot. The Chiefs biggest problem is that they don't have a great QB. They have had one of the best running games in the league the last few years. Jamaal Charles had one of the best years all time for a running back two seasons ago. If he's back healthy, he'll be one of the top five running backs in the league and a threat to break out for long touchdowns. They also have Dwayne Bowe, who's a huge target capable of making acrobatic catches. 2nd year Jonathan Baldwin might turn into a rising star. He did have one of the best catches of all time last season (though called back on an unrelated penalty). Breaston is a good slot receiver, Moeaki can be a great tight end. Add in the fact that Reggie Wayne is going to be a free agent too and is rumored to be a package deal with Manning and you've got quite a set of weapons in Kansas City.

He's like the hall of famer of Backups.
Palmer and Leinart Heisman seasons, Brady, then Manning?

The Chiefs are picking 11th and I've seen several mocks with them landing either a great offensive tackle, or perhaps an elite nose tackle. Put that together with a Peyton Manning offense in Kansas City, going up against the perenially retarded Raiders (who don't have a pick until round 5 of this years draft), the constantly disappointing Chargers (who are sticking with the cold fish Norv Turner and losing several key players), and the Fighting Tebows, who have a great defense but almost no offense at all. In fact, the success they had last year was based mostly on doing something novel that NFL teams didn't quite have figured out yet. Next year they'll be ready and they'll shut that run game down and make Tebow beat them with his crappy arm.

Montana changed from 16 to 19 so as not to offend Len Dawson.
Manning's thinking of switching TO 16 because who the hell is Len Dawson?

So I honestly think that the Chiefs are probably Peyton's best bet (unless some team that already has a good quarterback decides to bench him for Peyton, like the Texans, 49ers, Ravens, Eagles, Cowboys).

Peyton Manning, the Archer of Arrowhead, the Chief of Chiefs, rocking the Red and Gold, can give Kansas City their first playoff win since Joe Montana.

2011 NFL Playoffs

2012-01-19T12:17:00.002-06:00

4 January, 2012

This summer I wrote a post breaking down the problems I see in the NFL playoffs structure, which you can find here.

Here is a summary of my criticisms:

1. Divisions
The winner of each division is guaranteed a home playoff game (a huge advantage). What if a division has no good teams at all? Segregating teams into arbitrary conferences and divisions is unfair. (You could have a division with 4 good teams, and one division with no good teams, yet one team from each division will get a home playoff game...)Bottom line, it lets team's destinies rely on the structure of the playoffs and stat columns and the luck of which division they are arbitrarily put into rather than letting the action on the field totally speak for itself.

2.The Bye

Having a 12-team playoff format means that you have to give some teams a free pass into the 2nd round. Meaning that a #1 seed needs only win two home games to be in the Super Bowl. I also think that first round byes often backfire and become a disadvantage. Teams that get a bye often have nothing to play for at the end of the year, then take a week off, then try to play real football against an opponent that was playing for their playoff lives down the stretch and has necessarily already won a playoff game. It means that getting a first round bye ensures that you won't be the team with the momentum.

3. Nothing to Play for

Since the seeding is not simply a ranking of the teams, but rather a formulaic setup, it means that teams often have nothing to play for at the end of the year. For example, if a team gets to 13-0, they could lock up the top seed with 3 to play. But it's not just at the top. This year, the Texans clinched the 3rd seed with a lot of games left to play since they couldn't catch the 2 seed, and the 4 seed was too far behind to catch them, even though we didn't yet know who the 2 or the 4 seed would be yet...

So with those problems in mind, my solution is to abandon this set up and instead make the playoffs a simple 16 team seeded tournament. Rank all teams based on record. Break ties based on head-to-head record if applicable, and after that, break ties based on each team's record against teams that finished with a winning record.

A. Never again will a team have to go on the road to face a team that finished with a much worse record. Seeding is determined by winning games alone, not on arbitrary division winners. Never again will a 11-5 team miss the playoffs because of a tie-breaker while an 8-8 team gets in and gets a home game.

B. No byes. Everyone has to win to move on. Additionally, rather than the bye-teams starting the playoffs against a team that's already won a playoff game, the top teams will get to start the playoffs with the easiest opening games. No free pass, no more excuses about being flat.

C. When you seed the whole league, rather than looking at divisions, you'll eliminate the "nothing to play for" syndrome. Odds are that you won't lock up an exact playoff seed until Week 17.

D. The Super Bowl no longer requires an AFC/NFC matchup. Why split the teams up and say that the Super Bowl has to be a matchup of a team from column A against a team from column B? This led to a 16 year winning streak for the NFC when they dominated football. Rather than letting us see those dominant NFC teams face each other in the super bowl, we watched them destroy AFC teams in anti-climactic championship games. Once again, arbitrary divisions and conferences get in the way of letting pure competition determine what happens.

E. We get 4 more playoff games! More money for all.

SO having said all that. Here is how this year's playoffs look under NFL rules and under my proposal.

Real Playoffs:

AFC

Byes
(1) Patriots 13-3
(2) Ravens 12-4

(6) Bengals 9-7 at (3) Houston Texans 10-6
(5) Steelers 12-4 at (4) Denver Broncos 8-8

NFC

Byes
(1) Packers 15-1
(2) 49ers 13-3

(6) Lions 10-6 at (3) Saints 13-3
(5) Falcons 10-6 at (4) Giants 9-7

Notice that the 8-8 Broncos, 10-6 Texans, and 9-7 Giants get home playoff games while the 12-4 Steelers don't. Why? Because the Steelers didn't win their divison. So they are punished in the playoff structure because they happen to be in the same division with the 12-4 Ravens?

Here are the teams that barely missed the playoffs:

9-7 Titans and 8 teams that finished 8-8: Jets, Broncos, Raiders, Chargers, Cardinals, Cowboys, Eagles, and Bears. The Broncos got in over the Raiders and Chargers based on the tie-breaker of record in common games, while the other 5 teams weren't in a shitty enough division for it to matter.

Here's the seeding in my system:

1. Packers 15-1

2. Saints 13-3
3. 49ers 13-3
4. Patriots 13-3

I rank them this way based on their record against winning teams. The Saints went 6-1 against teams finishing 9-7 or better. The 49ers were 4-2. The Patriots went 0-2. That's right, they only played 2 games against teams with a winning record and they lost both of them.

5. Ravens 12-4
6. Steelers 12-4 (this tie broken by head-to-head record)

7. Houston 10-6 (Record against winning teams: 4-3)
8. Atlanta 10-6 (2-4)
9. Detroit 10-6 (0-5)

10. Titans 9-7 (2-5)
11. Giants 9-7 (1-3)
12. Bengals 9-7 (1-6)

13. Bears 8-8 (2-4)
14. Chargers 8-8 (1-3)
15. Raiders 8-8 (1-3)
16. Eagles 8-8 (1-4)

Missed the playoffs:

17. Cowboys 8-8 (1-4)
18. Broncos 8-8 (1-4)
19. Cardinals 8-8 (1-5)
20. Jets 8-8 (0-4)

This year had an unusually high number of teams tying at 8-8, requiring me to use multiple tie-breaks. It won't always end up like this. Last year exactly 16 teams finished 8-8 or better, meaning that not a single team made or missed the playoffs based on a tie-breaker. So to sort through the 8-8 teams I sorted by record against winning teams. The 1-4 teams saddled the cutoff so I first looked for a head-to-head record. The Eagles beat the 'Boys twice, so they had to be above them. But the Broncos and Eagles didn't play each other. The NFL likes to use conference record or division record as a tiebreaker, but that's just using arbitrary team segregation. So I looked to Points Differential, which the Broncos were horrendous at, finishing 74 points in the hole.
-
Phew.

So here is the Lumpy Junk Imaginary 2011-2012 Playoffs:

Round 1

8-8 Eagles at 15-1 Packers

The Dream Team failed spectacularly this year, but finished hot when they were pretty much out of it. Instead of sending them home, I send them to Lambeau to try to unseat the defending champs who've won 22 of their last 23 games, and their backup QB just threw 6 TDs against a playoff team. The Packers are heavy favorites, but Vick once took a Falcons team into Lambeau and pulled out a victory.

I'm projecting a Packers victory. In real life, the Packers got a free pass to round two and then faced the NY Giants who had essentially a playoff game in Week 17, winner takes the division, they won, got into the playoffs, then won a playoff game at home, then they went to Green Bay to face a Packers team that hasn't played a meaningful game in quite some time. The Packers looked out of sorts and flat. You think the Packers would have been better off with the bye or with a tune-up playoff game?

8-8 Raiders at 13-3 Saints

The dysfunctional Raiders who own the NFL single-season penalty record just make the playoffs and have to go on the road to the Superdome to try and stop the greatest passing offense in history.

I'll project a Saints win.

8-8 Chargers at 13-3 49ers

Rather than a free pass to round 2 for the Niners and an early offseason for a talented but underachieving Chargers squad, we send the Chargers to Candlestick and give them a shot at an upset in a rematch of an awful super bowl. In reality, the 49ers had to start the post-season against the Saints, talk about a tough first playoff game.

8-8 Bears at 13-3 Patriots

No free pass for Brady and Belichick, maybe Cutler could have come back in time for this game. If he didn't this would have been awfully one-sided.

9-7 Bengals at 12-4 Ravens

This is a rematch of a Week 17 game, only it's in Baltimore instead of Cincy. Ravens dismantle the Bengals.

9-7 Giants at 12-4 Steelers

In reality the 9-7 Giants open the playoffs at home and the 12-4 Steelers will be at Mile High Stadium. That totally makes sense. Instead, the Giants who underachieved but then put it together at the end of the season will take their clutch offense and good defense to Pittsburgh for a hell of a matchup. I'm picking the first upset here (note, I wrote this before the real playoffs began)

9-7 Titans at 10-6 Texans

The Titans aren't eliminated via tiebreaker and will get a shot at a Texans team that's lost 3 straight. I like the Texans defense to be the dominant factor that decides this game.

10-6 Lions at 10-6 Falcons

Maybe Tony Gonzalez can finally win a playoff game. No...nevermind, he's cursed. I'll take the Lions.

Round 2

Giants at Packers

Here's a heck of a matchup. The Giants nearly beat the Packers about a month ago. I think Eli is clutch and the Giants pass rush might have the best chance to stop the Packers offense. I'm gonna pick the Giants for a huge upset. (Holy shit I'm smart, again, I wrote this as soon as the regular season ended)

Lions at Saints

This is the way the Lions and Saints open the playoffs in reality. I think the Lions could really give them a run for their money, but two tough road wins in a row? It's almost impossible to stop Brees. I think the Saints take it..

Texans at 49ers

A battle of strong defenses and weak offenses. Alex Smith has to be able to outdo the rookie Yates. Right? And at home...I'll take the Niners.

Ravens at Patriots.

Good matchup. The Ravens have had to go on the road for every postseason the last few years, even though they've been good, they just have been unlucky enough to be in the same division as the Steelers. They finally get a home playoff game in Round 1, but now in Round 2, they're going into Foxboro where they beat the Patriots and made them one-and-done not too long ago. I just don't think Joe Flacco is good enough to outduel Tom Brady. I'm taking the Patriots.

Round Three

Giants at Saints

The Giants knocked off the Steelers (ed: which doesn't seem so hard now) and the Packers. Can they seriously top that off by beating the Saints in the Superdome?

Patriots at 49ers

This is a lot like the Ravens matchup as the Pats take on the other Harbaugh. I just don't see the 49ers belonging in the super bowl, not yet anyway.

Super Bowl

Patriots vs. Saints
or
Patriots vs. Giants

18-1 Rematch, or will Brees and the Saints have to kill the other monster AFC QB? I'd really like to see a Patriots/Giants rematch.

Note: We could have a Saints/Packers Super Bowl. I'ma go ahead and take the over on that one.

Colts Put Down Peyton Manning

2012-01-18T21:11:00.001-06:00

19 January 2011
Indianapolis, Indiana

eHarmony profile pic

After a third unsuccessful neck surgery, the Indianapolis Colts have had to put down Peyton Manning, according to Rob Lowe, the actor most known for his political roles in The West Wing and a sex tape filmed at the 1988 Republican National Convention starring him and two women, only one of whom was underage. Lowe is close friends with Colts owner Jim Irsay and broke the news via twitter today.

Thus the career of Peyton Manning comes to a tragic end just as the Colts are preparing to replace Peyton with a new young Colt from Stanford. He'll need all the "Luck" he can get if he's to make the fighting horseshoes a contender again. Get it, cause his name is Luck and horseshoes are lucky? See that's called a pun. So yeah.

Irsay responded to Lowe's twitter news by saying, and I'm seriously quoting, “My sources tell me Rob will star in an epic remake of ‘Deep Throat’ with aging porn stars and 4 finger circus clowns!”

"He knew it was coming, but he didn't struggle," said Joe Frumson, the Colts athletic trainer who was tasked with delivering the Coup de Grace, "we really had to put him out of his misery. Nobody wants to see a hero grow old and slow. We can't have that."

It had been widely hoped that Manning would retire as the undisputed greatest QB of all time. He seemed healthy as a horse and showed no signs of slowing down. He was a season away from passing Marino for 2nd all-time in Touchdown Passes. Had he still had four more years in him, he would probably passed Brett Favre and returned the greatest quarterback records to a quarterback that was actually good and not just freakishly unwilling to stop playing.

He finished his career 138 interceptions behind Brett Favre for the all-time record. He had been on pace to break that record in 2023. Manning's statistics are incredible, but perhaps the most overlooked aspect of his game was that he routinely led the league in fewest times sacked, despite not always having great protection. Despite being third all time in pass completions and fourth in pass attempts, he ranked 69th all time in sacks. Aaron Brooks was sacked more times than Manning, despite the fact that Manning attempted more than 4000 more passes.

Manning was so good at avoiding negative plays like sacks and interceptions, that if you take his number of touchdown passes and subtract the number of sacks he took and interceptions he threw, you would end up with a total of -30. Weird stat, I know, but guess what Brett Favre's number is...

-353

Philip Rivers will probably pass Manning's career sack number next season (he's 28 behind, and had 30 and 38 the last two years), and yet he's not even to 100 starts (96), while Peyton started 208 games.

And yet, if the QB who was one of the best at avoiding sacks, and never missed a game (not even in college), can be put down from a neck injury, how in the world do mere mortals stand a chance in the NFL?

Maybe it's better to be Lucky than good?

Santa Claus Finds Way to Fit NBA Season Down a Chimney.

2011-11-26T08:09:00.000-06:00

26 November, 2011

David Stern and representatives of the "player's association" met late into the black Friday night under the strict moderation of Santa Claus himself and a deal has been struck for the NBA season to begin on Christmas day.

"The NBA was on more Christmas lists than any other gift," said Santa Claus, "except of course for Justin Bieber. Do I look like a cloning machine to you?"

According to league insiders, Santa was able to get the sides to agree to a deal because of his milleniums worth of experience managing elves. "Those little shits are always trying to fuck around," said Santa of the elves, "I always tell them, I brought you to the North Pole, I can always throw you over the wall and let the polar bears sort you out."

Infrared Keyhole Satellite imagery shows dozens of hungry hungry bears waiting outside Santa's compound.

The NBA is expected to release it's revised schedule this week.

Script Ideas

2011-11-11T06:47:00.000-06:00

11/11/11 11:11 A.M.

Come with me if you want to save
15% or more on your car insurance.

It's a math holiday (in base 10 countries) and so that means it's time once again for me to outline the script ideas I'm currently kicking around.

1. Something Terminator related.

Terminators 1, 2, and 3 are all centered on a mission to kill someone in the past. They begin with a good guy/robot racing against time to get to the target and save them before the bad robot can kill them. Of course it's really close, but the good time traveller gets there just in the nick of time and gets them out of there, and thus leads us on an hour and a half explosion filled chase. But...wait a second. Howcome the time-travellers go back at such exact times as to arrive at the target at the same time. I mean, you'd think sometimes one or the other would get there much sooner. So that's when it hit me:

A good and bad Terminator race to the target, but the bad terminator gets there first, killing infant John Connor. With the target dead, neither Terminator has any purpose any more. So they become roomates in this existential comedy I call, The Ex-Terminators. The trailer should show them as roommates and arguing about who's turn it is to do the dishes. Then Arnold drives up to a restaurant, "I was told there would be valet parking." Make it two Arnolds, and you've got the best 80s buddy movie of all time.

OR

Seriously guys, that's a lesbian.

You know how Skynet takes over the military and sends all our drones and shit after us, then we get into a nuclear war. Then somehow the survivors start a guerrilla resistance led by fucking Edward Furlong for some reason? What if instead of it being a whiny bitch from LA, why not have the resistance be a group of soldiers and Al Qaeda. Think about it, Al Qaeda is already fighting against drones, they're probably the best in the world at this kind of warfare. It could be a really interesting unholy alliance. I call it The Turbinator (actually that was Gromling's title).

2. 72.

When a muslim suicide bomber blows himself up along with some infidels, he is instantly transported to heaven and greeted by his 72 dark-haired virgins. However, it's not quite the paradise he pictured, as they are forever virgins who cannot be penetrated, also they are fucking annoying bitches.

3. Queer Madness

Just like Reefer madness, but with teh gays.

Bet you didn't see that coming.

4. Red Herring

A native American named Red Herring finds a floppy disk that contains all the nuclear launch codes. Then he meets an attractive asian woman and they have kids. Then he opens a deli and they enjoy a lot of smoked meats together. Then it turns out that he's actually not a native american, but a Martian.

5. Existentialist version of Where's Waldo: Why is Waldo?

(They actually just sold the film right to Where is Waldo? so that film is in the works. I'm not kidding)

6. Don't Ask Don't Tell

Basically just Top Gun.

7. A movie where the rapture occurs, but it ends up making the world a much better place as all the illogical people are beamed skyward into the waiting arms of Lord Xenu. I call it: The Crapture.

8. A parody of superhero films called The C-Men. There's Penicillis, he pees fire. And Tangle, she can untanlge any cords in seconds, no matter how tangled. Gender-Man, who can switch gender at will. And of course, Hottie, a hot chick with the power to eat any food, no matter how spicy.

So their powers of course come in handy. They have to hook up a laser to shoot down an incoming asteroid, but the cables are all tangled up, so Tangle goes to work. But then a swarm of cockroaches attack them, so Penicillis pees fire all over them. But then that fire pee starts to build up and burn everyone, so Hottie has to drink his fire piss. And then Gender-Man has to switch to being a woman so he can bear that child of the super villian, but then the cord gets wrapped around the baby's neck, so Tangle of course, untangles it. You see where this is going.

9. Satan Claus

A heart-warming christmas movie about Satan, living on the South Pole, pretending to be Santa Claus. Santa and Satan engage in a christmas holy war, lobbing ICBMs at each other, causing sea-levels to rise drastically. And by ICBMs I of course mean Icy BMs.

10. Toy Story: The College Years

There's a snake in my boot!

So in the world of Toy Story, anything at all considered a toy is actually a living thing with emotions and relationships. Mr. and Mrs. Potato head are actually married and she nags him. So...in this world...doesn't that mean that sex toys are people too. I figure the little sister from Toy Story gets a purple vibrator named Amy. Amy makes friends with the other toys. Then one night, she's selected from the toy chest and then is crammed somewhere. She's badly scarred by this, and then this abuse happens every night. The other toys decide to bust her out and they help Amy escape from the evil vagina. Victorious, the toys go back to their toy chest. The girl comes looking for Amy that night but can't find her, so it's Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue!

US Finally Captures the Flag; begins withdrawing troops from Iraq.

2011-11-05T14:48:00.000-05:00

November 5, 2011

"They really hid that flag good," said PFC Tim Johnson, a veteran of three tours. "When we went in in the first place, we figured Saddam would keep the flag on him or at least close to him so he could personally guard it." Upon Hussein's capture in a spider-hole, the flag was not found. Extensive searches were performed on the surrounding area, but the flag was not to be found for another Seven years.

However, today the mission is truly a success as Iraq's flag was found and brought back to base, completing the capture and ensuring Iraq's defeat. So where was it?

They sang "We are the Champions" while
avoiding water balloon barrages.

PFC Tim Johnson from Abilene, Texas was the man who finally discovered the flag. "They had us looking in holes everywhere, under buildings, we even bulldozed an entire neighborhood on a tip that it was under it. No dice. We looked in their old nuclear reactors, nothing. And then it hit me, where's the last place you would look for a hidden flag? A flag pole!"

Johnson discovered the flag flying proudly at the Baghdad Soccer stadium.

Johnson personally escorted the flag back to base, thus ensuring victory: "It was just like when we raised our flag over Hiroshima and ended the war. It was a lot like that."

CTF_2Fort

But Johnson hasn't let his personal achievement get to his head: "It was a team effort. We couldn't have done it without all the support people we had that were guarding our flag, and of course all the people filling our water balloons."

Saddam Hussein's downfall can now be added to a long list of dictators ended by a flag capture. Even Hitler was done in by a Private that captured his flag. Just this month, Moammar Qaddafi's reign in Libya was ended upon his capture, because, amazingly, he was wearing the flag. "He really needed to hide that thing better. Lol," the President said when reached for comment.

Wow Them in the End: How To Finish Strong

2011-11-04T01:26:00.000-05:00

4 November, 2011

Viking Cops?

It's NaNoWriMo, so you know what that means: lots of idiots penning novels that nobody will ever read (including the writers). Personally I think it should be called NaWhoGivesAShitMo.

Yes it's National Novel Writing Month, where dozens of bloggers and hipsters set out to pen the great novel in just the month of November. So if you see a dirty neckbeard riding a fixie and carrying a typewriter on his back, then you can figure that he's celebrating NaNoWriMo and No-shave-November. Or he's just participating in the Occupy Stereotypes Protest.

So if you are actually participating in NNWM, I'm here to tell you how to write an ending. Of course, I write screenplays, not novels (unless you count that bildungsroman about strippers I wrote when I was 21 [that's not a joke]), so my advice will apply mostly to film, but alas, stories are stories.

Ohhhh, Stars above!

The keys to writing endings:

1. Bookends

Simply have the ending refer back to something that happened at the beginning. It doesn't need to be clever in any way. Take The Social Network for example. Basically the plot shows us how Mark Zuckerberg is a douchebag. The very end is of him adding his ex-gf as a friend on facebook and hitting refresh constantly, waiting for her approval. The film opened with her breaking up with him and she's barely in the rest of the film. It just refers back to something from an hour and a half ago, and if the audience goes "oh yeah, I remember her" they think they "get it" or something and so they feel smart. People love to feel smart.

Another example of this technique would be any movie that uses flashbacks and eventually gets you back there at the end (see: Fight Club, anything by Tarantino)

2. Fuck your main character in the ass

No More Rape! Wooo!

Then murder them, piss on their ashes, shit on their grave, kill their whole family, and then have them miraculously win somehow.

Basically, right before the end, the main character should reach a lowest point, where it seems that not only have they failed, they're doomed, and so are their friends. Look at The Matrix. It's all leading up to Neo being THE ONE. And by The One, we mean Mr. Right for Trinity. So Neo's dead, shot repeatedly, in the real world he flatlines, that's game over. Then Trinity whispers to this dead guy that she loves him and suddenly he comes back to life....cause he's Mr. Right I guess, or One, which...hold on a second, rearranging the letters spells NEO. OMG I get it! This movie is so smart!

Any actiony film will follow this formula, as will just about ALL films. Rom-coms will have the couple break up for a while and seem doomed. Make sure that right before the end it seems that all is lost.

They replace Apollo Creed with a Cow. Goal change!

3. Move the goalposts

Main characters should have one clear big goal. Win the big game. Blow up the Death Star. Have sex. Don't get anally raped (Shawshank Redemption...not sure why he fled to Mexico).

So when everyone knows the goal the question simply becomes, "will they or won't they succeed." This is why sports movies tend to be more cliche. If they win the big game...predictable. If they lose the big game: well aren't you mr. non conformist. Basically you have no way to surprise us, they win or they don't.

UNLESS, you find a way for them to achieve some kind of victory, perhaps a small one, a moral or personal victory while still technically losing. See Rocky. His goal ends up being just proving he can cut it, not that he has to win as a gigantic underdog. If he wins, nobody believes it.

The Departed: Leo is the MC, wants to bring down the big bad mafia guy. Will he succeed? He does! BUT WAIT...there's still the bad guy's mole in his own department. Can he beat him? Ohhh...ohhhh, well fuck. SPOILER ALERT: he fails and is killed. Talk about moving the goalposts. Now defeating this bad guy is passed off to a different character. So we ultimately have a minor character take on a different main goal than was seemingly the main goal of the film. That's a lot of goalpost moving.

4. The Twist

OMG, he's the bad guy!?!?

Twists are tricky because they have to make sense for the whole plot. The easiest, stupidest twist is to reveal that an ally was actually a double-agent. See all bad cop/spy/thrillers. Oh my god, he's on the other side! But when you think through it, you'll realize that the traitor character's actions earlier on rarely make sense. For example, the film Unbreakable turns on a twist that reveals a seeming ally to actually be a supervillain. But he helped along the hero so much, his only goal was to make the hero eventually catch him. He's CRASY!

Howabout an example that comically checks all 4 boxes.

Signs

The Jew Media is trying to get in our brains.

Mel Gibson is a widow who tries to protect his family from an Alien invasion. We see his wife's death in flashback, and just before she dies, her eyes glass over and she says: "Swing away." Doesn't mean anything. Moving on. The daughter fills a glass of water, takes one sip, says it tastes funny, then sets it somewhere. She fills the house with these glasses of water. The son has bad asthma, and Mel Gibson's brother is a failed minor-league baseball player.

So when Alien shit starts happening, the clear goal is to board up the house, keep the Aliens out. The house is totally taken over by Aliens, they are trapped. They defend the basement, stay safe. They apparently have won. They go back upstairs, seemingly in the clear. BUT THEN. An alien takes the asthmatic son hostage.

Now the goalposts moved, the Alien Invasion is over, there's not an endless horde of bad guys...just this one. So they don't have to mount a huge defense, just kill this one. But how?

The alien then sprays some chemical weapon in the boy's nose. Oh fuck. At that instant, Mel Gibson tells his brother to "swing away," seeing as he's a baseball player, he's bad ass with a bat, so he swings, and hits those water glasses the daughter set out, splashing the alien. TWIST: it turns out the Aliens are allergic to water (glad they picked a planet that's surface is 70% covered in water). So the splashing water kills it or whatever.

So we have the twist, we have the bookends of "Swing away" and Meryl being a baseball player, and the girl leaving the glasses of water, and since the boy's asthma kicked in, the poison couldn't get past his blocked throat. See! Everything happens for a reason. I remember all those things, and then they came up again at the end. Also, while Mel Gibson wasn't dead, his whole goal of protecting his family was nearly a failure as his son passes out from asthma and is taken hostage by an alien that sprays chemical weapons down his throat. BUT he totally lives.

See, it's not that hard.

Think about how dumb that ending is without bookends or a twist. So his wife's last words, and his brother's failed career, and his daughter's weird behavior, and his son's asthma all align to allow them to kill an alien. OR you know...if they just had a water balloon handy. That would have probably worked. Or a gun. Or just an untrained person smashing an alien with a baseball bat would probably do the trick. Or they all could have peed on him. Humans are mostly water, all we really gotta do is bleed on them and they die. What pussies. Our butt-sweat is like anthrax to them.

So those are the simple things you can do, just have somethings come up that were mentioned at the beginning, come up with some twist, have a perfect storm bring the MC to the lowest possible point, then change the goalposts and have them win somehow. Done.

Let's look at some more examples:

I N C E P T I O N

Wrinkle Twister!

So they are about to accomplish the goal when Leo and Juno are sent down to the infinite subconscious that we've been hearing bad things about all movie. So they're in this lowest point, where they could fail at their mission and be trapped for centuries in this awful sub-dream place that drives them mad. Quite a low point. Then, we realize that we've seen this before. The film actually opened on this, but then flashedback several weeks or months. So we've bookended to something that the audience saw at the beginning. Remember that opening, Leo wakes up in the Ocean, then is brought in front of a really old Asian guy, then it kind of jump-cuts to Leo in the same room in front of the same Asian guy but younger. This beginning doesn't really make sense on first viewing, we don't know at all what's being implied and then it flashes back a long time, but we don't really know that it's a flashback. So basically it only really serves a purpose to A. give you that "Oh right, at the beginning, I get it," moment on first viewing. So then from this lowest point, book-ending twist ends up changing the goalposts drastically as Juno and Leo now have a completely different goal.

Imagine the ending not having that bookending which doesn't really accomplish anything in the first act, it's simply there to be recalled later. Imagine it isn't such a perfect storm of a shitty situation, and that the goal doesn't change from the previous level. Suddenly it ain't so climactic or "profound."

Minority Report

So Tom Cruise is accussed of the future murder of a man he doesn't even know. He knows he's not a killer, so how could this possibly be true? About all we know about him is that he's a great cop, an upholder of justice, protector of the innocent, and that he is haunted by the kidnapping and probably murder of his son. So what could be a lower point than discovering the killer of his son and being faced with the choice of killing this man, but becoming a murderer, or letting him live. What if instead of being his son's kidnapper, the temptation is that the guy hired a hitman to kill Tom Cruise or something. He could have been a really bad guy that needed to be killed. But that wouldn't make for a very personal involvement for Tommie. What's the one weakness that Tom Cruise has? His son. So of course, that's going to be a factor.

I like surfing movies.

Always make the lowest point the "Perfect Storm" for that character. It has to be the worst possible thing to happen to them. Not just a bad thing, but the one thing. They're afraid of snakes, so of course it's an anaconda. They're afraid of heights, so they have to walk a high-wire. Make it a perfect storm. Thinking backwards from the perfect storm can give you character ideas. They need a weakness or a flaw in order to have a perfect storm. So figure out what that perfect storm bad thing might be and work backwards to that character flaw.

So there you have it. Give it a twist, move the goalposts, make it rain a shit-ton, and show them something they remember from an hour and a half ago. That'll make it "deep."

All Shallow's Eve

2011-10-25T16:08:00.000-05:00

October 25, 2011

Wow, those costumes are great. I could have
sworn I was looking at real sluts.

It's almost Halloween, so I'm going to explain to you people how to come up with a good costume.

1. Be Slutty

Wear as little as possible. Get naked, then cover up as little of yourself as possible, then say you're going as a "Sexy _____."

Just come up with something to put in the blank. Here's a few ideas:

A. Put on a dog collar : Sexy Lassie.

B. Put on a beard: Sexy Chuck Norris

C. Cover your face in cocaine: Lindsay Lohan

She's going as an inside-out cow.

D. Cover yourself in red meat: Sexy Cow/Lada Gaga

E. Put a trash bag on your head : Sexy Baby Lisa

2. Too Soon

Go as someone who just died. Al Davis doesn't count, he's been dead since 1993. Or go as an event.

A. Wear a cardboard box covered in Foil with a model airplane crashing into the side: 9/11

B. Dress up in the shape of Japan somehow, drink 4 red bulls, and you'll vibrate your way to a hit costume.

C. Peyton Manning jersey + neck brace = millions of pissed off colts fans. (See also: Bernard Pollard jersey)

D. Put hair in a pony tail and just look like a bitch: Casey Anthony.

Never forget.

E. Look like a small jewish girl and carry a diary around : Helen Keller.

3. Have some jokes

Last year I went as Harry Potter/stripper. That is, it was like you had booked a harry potter themed stripper to come to your party. I went up to people with my magic wand (slim jims) and offered to cast a spell of protection. Abracadabra and here's a condom. Then I offered to magically make people sexier, then handed them gum. Also I had a banana in my pants.

A. Go as 9/11, whenever anyone asks what you are, very very seriously say "you said you'd never forget."

B. Dress like a caveman, dirty as shit, loin cloth, then run around screaming "Wilson!?!?"

Tap that keg.

C. Dress like Michelle Bachman (crazy eyes), and then say any of the stupid things she has said (Carbon Dioxide is safe because it's a natural product of nature, I'm the only person that said they'd build a double wall on the border, etc.)

D. Go as a dog then hit on girls by saying, "I want to get your leg pregnant." or "I'd bury my bone in her backyard."

E. Go as a cat and then say and do nothing, just stare at people with utter contempt.

F. Dress like an old person, then chug a bottle of whisky. You'll have no idea what the fuck is going on or where you are for the rest of the night: Alzheimers.

4. Puns

Make your costume into a pun. I was once called "Cougar bait" by a middle aged woman, prompting someone to suggest to me that for Halloween I simply show up to a party covered in raw meat..."Cougar Bait." Here's a helpful tip: try not to creep the fuck out of everyone.

A. Tape dozens of razer blades to your hands and feet : Blade Runner

B. Cover your entire body in green jello and leaves : Forrest Gump

C. Dress up as a giant douche : Nickelback

D. Does Hipster Hitler count as a pun?

E. Print off thousands of pictures of your friends and glue them all over your body. Then wear a dust jacket: Facebook.

5. Offend your friends.

One year as a kid, I went trick-or-treating as a "fat guy." Then a stranger asked me what I was, a particularly portly stranger, and so...yeah that was awkward.

A. Go as one of your friends. Steal some of their clothes, and just generally pretend to be a moronic version of them all night, including hitting on strangers using his/her name and phone number.

B. Dress like a complete slut, offer to give free HJs or fifty-cent BJs, or do anal if they buy you one of those cheesy hot dogs at quicktrip for you. When anyone asks who you are : "Your Mom." Another variation is to answer that you're one of your friend's girlfriends. It's comedy gold.

Here's a few more:

Go as a friend's recently deceased grandparent.
Go as your friend's recently miscarried/aborted fetus.
Go as your friend's under utilized penis.
Go as your friend's over utilized vagina.

So there you have it. Folks. Happy trick-or-treating. Or as Tibbs' Mom calls it "sucking dick for candy."

Tony Gonzalez: Best Receiver Not Named Rice?

2011-10-16T09:59:00.000-05:00

16 October, 2011

When he retires he plans to be a fire
department's designated baby-catcher.

Tony Gonzalez can move into 2nd all-time in receptions today. He has 1,096 and is 4th. Cris Carter had 1,101 for 3rd and Marvin Harrison is 2nd with 1,102. 1st all time is a bit out of reach. Rice had 1,549. He needs 7 catches to move into second.

I don't mean to alarm you, but if you look up the active leaders in career receiving yards in the NFL, you'll find Tony Gonzalez at the top of the list. I would imagine this is the first time in history that a Tight End has held this distinction.

He gave up Basketball because it was far too easy.

Pro Football Reference actually lists him at #3 with 12,752 yards, trailing Randy Moss with 14,858 and Terrell Owens with 15,934. Moss retired and Owens is a free agent, though he claims he's coming back. So depending on how strictly you define "active," you could have Tony G on top.

Gonzalez is the best Tight End ever. He holds all TE records there are to be had. He's also a hell of a blocker.

Some of the TEs these days are more like Wide Receivers. They line up outside more, they aren't often asked to act like an Offensive Tackle and help pound the rock. So some of these younger TEs are putting up bigger numbers than Tony did, but it's almost like they play a different position. Tony was part of the offensive lines that made Priest Holmes, Larry Johnson, and Michael Turner into running machines, while he was also setting records as a receiver.

He gets confused about the NFL's alley-oop rules.

So clearly he's accomplished more than any other TE. But is he one of the best Receivers of all-time?

We like to talk about how many 1000-yard seasons receivers have, because we like base-10. Tony G has 8 900-yard seasons and 4 1000-yard seasons.

In 2004 he led the league in receptions. He's caught at least 70 balls in 11 seasons.

He's 14th on the all-time list for receiving yards, ahead of Art Monk and Michael Irvin.

AND-1

By the end of this season, he'll probably pass Irving Fryar (needs 33 yards), Steve Largent (needs 350 yards), Andre Reed (needs 450 yards), and could pass Torry Holt (needs 650). If he plays next year he could pass Henry Ellard (about 1000 behind him), Cris Carter (about 1200), and James Lofton (1400 or so). He could easily be 7th on the all time list in 15 months.

He's 9th all-time in Touchdown catches. 1st amongst active players (again if you don't count Moss and Owens).

Tony G's greatness goes beyond statistics.

He saved a man's life with the heimlich maneuver. A Charger fan.

He literally saved a man's life by knocking him over. No seriously, he ran into a photographer after a play, causing a concussion which led to doctors discovering a brain tumor that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. That's Jesus territory.

Oh and he literally fucks October. And I mean literally, because he's like Paul Bunyan. His wife's name is October, but it's also the month his teams have the best record. So when Tony bangs October, they made a River...River Gonzalez. Seriously, he IS Paul Bunyan.

And he's only ever missed 2 games. Drafted in 1997, he missed one game in '99 and another in '06. That's it. That's 231 games in the NFL.

Before Leaf and Manning there was the
Lafleur/Gonzalez debate. Good call Cowboys.

The sad footnote to his career is 0 playoff wins. He lost to the '97 Broncos as Elway led them to a championship. He lost in '03 to Manning and the Colts in a game that had no punts. He lost to the '06 Colts on their way to a Super Bowl win. And he lost to Aaron Rodgers and the Super Bowl champion Packers last year.

Tony recently said he could play another 3 years. It sounds ridiculous. But you know what, Tony Gonzalez is pretty ridiculous.

He's a hall of famer without doubt. But at some point we're going to have to stop thinking of Tight Ends and Wide Receivers as totally different positions. So where does he rank amongst TEs and H-Backs and Wideouts and whatever the hell Reggie Bush is? That's what we're going to have to figure out at some point. (Just not about Reggie Bush, he sucks. FYI, Reggie Bush has fewer rushing yards in the NFL than Mark Brunell.)

So today, watch for Tony G to maybe move into #2 all time in receptions.

Kurt Warner: The Greatest of All-Time

2011-10-15T11:25:00.011-05:00

Man, the X-files were great.

Kurt Warner isn't a lock for the hall of fame. He only started 116 games and won one super bowl. Eli Manning is at 108 games and counting (without missing one) and has a ring too. One thing the Hall looks for is longevity. They don't like guys that were great for a couple of years. They like the Jerry Rices and the Reggie Whites. Kurt Warner just doesn't fit that bill.

He might still make it based more on his public image and the underdog story he embodied, but I think that's missing the point.

If you were building a franchise and could pick any QB in history to be your guy, maybe you go Brady, Manning, Montana, Elway, Marino, and you'd have success for a decade and a half.

If you had to win one game and could pick any QB in his prime to lead your team, I'd pick Kurt Warner. Just one game? Warner is the guy. And here's why:

Here come the PANTHERS

1. Kurt Warner has only ever started all 16 games three times in his career.

He's tough, it's not because he can't take the pounding, it's because he never gives up on the play. He hangs in there and waits for that opening. He takes more sacks, but also makes big plays.

So when he stays healthy and plays all 16 games, how does his team fare in the playoffs? Oh They went to the Super Bowl every year. Like clockwork. Warner's totally healthy? Super Bowl bound. One year he started 15 games, that was 2009. They beat Green Bay in a shootout to open the playoffs, then went to New Orleans and lost to the eventual champs. So in the 4 years he played more than 11 games, his playoff record was 9-3. And every one of those losses was to the eventual champion.

2. He is unstoppable in the playoffs.

"Pop" Warner.

There are plenty of QBs that can put up monster numbers in the regular season, but when the games start to really count, suddenly it's like they just graduated from college to the pros. The hits are harder, everyone's covered, they make mistakes.

Peyton Manning's QB rating is about 7 points lower in the postseason (94.9 to 88.4). Tom Brady's is 10 points lower (95.7 to 85.7). Joe Montana, Mr. Clutch, goes up about 3 points in the postseason (92.3 to 95.6). Warner goes up nearly 10 points, from 93.7 to 102.3. That means that the degree to which Brady gets worse in the playoffs, Warner changes that much, but for the better.

Warner's career playoff stats:
3952 Yards, 31 TD 14 INT, 66.5%

Tom Brady's playoff stats:
4407 Yards, 30 TD, 16 INT, 62.2%

Hey Trent, can I play? LOL

Hey, they're almost the same! So Warner's playoff resume should be just about as good as Brady's unless you're just looking at SB wins.

Oh wait, Brady has played in 19 playoff games. Warner only 13. It took Brady 6 more playoff games to have 1 fewer TD, 2 more INTs, and only 450 more yards.

Warner throws for 306 yards per game in the playoffs. Extrapolate his 13 career playoff games into a 16 game season and it looks like this:

4864 Yards (only 220 shy of the NFL record), 38 TDs, 17 INTs.

You're too old Kurt.

That's how good he is in just playoff games. For comparison, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning, the last 2 guys to set the single-season TD record (50 and 49), have only ever thrown for 38 TDs in a season once each, the year they set the record. Marino only ever did it twice. And that's in the regular season, not the playoffs.

Another metric to look at is yards per attempt, which shows how much the QB is stretching the field. Some teams use dump-offs as essentially an aspect of the running game, which inflates their passing numbers.

Here's some career YPA numbers:
Brady 7.5
Manning 7.6
Marino 7.3
Montana 7.5
Warner 7.9

Time to see what the kid can do.

Go to their career playoff numbers and it looks like this:
Brady 6.5
Manning 7.5
Marino 6.5
Montana 7.8
Warner 8.5

Again we see evidence that when Kurt drops back to pass, he ain't looking to dump it off. He wants it all.

One of these guys is the quarterback of the future.

3. He's TOO Good.

With just over 2 minutes to go in Super Bowl 34, the Titans just tied the game 16-16. Kurt Warner and the Rams take over at their 27 yard line. This is the Joe Montana, Tom Brady moment. Where the QB leads his team on a game winning drive to run out the clock as time expires.

NO JUST KIDDING. This is the part where Kurt Warner throws a 73 yard touchdown bomb on the first play. Because Warner is TOO GOOD, they left a lot of time on the clock, enabling the Titans to come just a yard short.

I'd like to thank our defense for letting
Warner torch them and leaving me some time.

Two years later, Super Bowl 36. The story we remember is that Patriots shutting down the Rams greatest show on turf, and Tom Brady leading the great drive to win the game. However, Warner threw for the 2nd highest yard total in Super Bowl history.

The Rams trailed 17-3 mid-way through the 4th quarter. He led the Rams back to tie the game. The Rams toook the ball on their 45, with 1:51 left, down by a touchdown. This is going to be the moment, right? Where Warner leads a dink-and-dunk touchdown drive? No.

Three complete passes later and the rams were in the end zone. Warner was too good, leaving the Patriots too much time on the clock, enough for Vinatieri to win it.

7 years later. Cardinals, Steelers. Warner took a sub-par team, once laughed at as the worst playoff team in history, threw them on his god-like throwing arm and nearly won the whole damn thing.

Having trailed the entire game, the Cards took over on their own 36 with 3 minutes to go, down 20-16. It took only 2 plays, one for 3 yards, and the other a 64 yard pass to Larry Fitzgerald. A magnificent 21 second drive to the endzone and to take the lead in the super bowl.

Thanks Kurt.

Unfortunately, Warner was too good, left too much time on the clock, and the result was Santonio Holmes tiptoing a TD with mere seconds left.

We so often measure greatness in a QB by wins and losses. But it is a team sport. While Troy Aikman, Ben Roethlisberger, and Tom Brady have quarterbacked teams to 3 or more super bowl appearances, they had great coaching staffs, excellent protection, and most of all, a defense that could win championships. Just ask Trent Dilfer about a great defense.

While it's a passing league now, you don't often see teams that are Pass-first, run-second, winning championships. How many can you think of? The Saints in the epic Saints-Colts Super Bowl. The Colts in 06? Well, they actually ran more in that rainy super bowl. The answer is not many. Most super bowls are won by great defenses, strong clock-controlling running games, and effective quarterbacks that don't make mistakes.

Kurt Warner typically had none of those advantages. He had himself, a split second to throw the ball, and his receivers. With just that, he was the definition of clutch. He would have won 3 super bowls, with 3 game-winning or tying drives in the final minutes, capped with touchdown passes. In fact, those 3 drives only took him a total of 6 plays.

Damnit Kurt, couldn't you have scored faster?

But we remember more the last second heroics of the other team either beating his defense, or his defense making a miraculous stop.

Remember the 2007 Patriots, when Tom Brady became a Touchdown machine. How'd that Super Bowl end? Brady led a 12 play, 80 yard drive to the end zone to take a 14-10 lead with 2:42 left. Remember that? No, we remember the Giants desperation drive down the field to take the lead with little time left. It's the curse of the great passing team. They can't control the clock. They leave too much time for heroics.

Imagine if Warner had been a first round pick, a guy given the reigns at 22, a solid defense, a great coaching staff. What could he have done in a 14 year career? Instead, he was overlooked, finally got a chance, and won the whole damn thing, wasn't that long before they took his team away to give it to a younger QB. Then he got a new team, but not for long, he was just keeping it warm for a great new rookie. Then again. The dude never quit, and when it came down to the end of games and seasons, he never flinched.

5084

2011-10-12T11:19:00.001-05:00

October 12, 2011

The Greatest Show on Burgh.

Through 5 weeks, 5 Quarterbacks are on pace to break Marino's single-season passing yards record of 5084:

Tom Brady 6000
Drew Brees 5664
Aaron Rodgers 5504
Cam Newton 5152
Tony Romo 5088 (through 4 games and a punctured lung)

Of course a pace through 5 games won't hold up, but the fact that we have 5 QBs on this pace tells me that it's pretty likely that one of them will be able to break 5100 yards.

HOWEVER, passing yards isn't a great indicator of success. Yeah it's good to have a hell of a passing game, but consider this stat:

The league leader in passing yards has NEVER led his team to a super bowl victory. You would think that in 40+ years, the QB with the most yards would have accomplished this feat. You would be wrong.

That's a sexy yellow.

If you look at the list of QB seasons sorted by passing yards, with Marino's 5084 in '84 at number one, and Drew Brees 5069 in 2008 as number two, you have to go all the way to the 34th best year to find Peyton Manning's 2006 season to find a super bowl winner. Drew Brees '09 season is 35th, and Kurt Warner's '99 season is 39th. But after that, you won't find another super bowl winner until Brady in '05 at 67th. After that you won't find another SB winner in the top 100.

Those are definitely real.

(Source)

Going back to Marino's record, here is how the team with the QB that led the league in yards fared:

2010 Colts - Lost wild card weekend.
2009 Texans - Missed the playoffs.
2008 Saints - Missed the playoffs.
2007 Patriots - Lost SB.
2006 Saints - They make it to the Conference Championship and get blown out by the Bears.
2005 Cardinals - Kurt Warner, Anquan Boldin, Larry Fitzgerald...5-11
2004 Colts - Pats had their number (20-3)
2003 Colts - Pats got them in AFC title game.
2002 Raiders - Lost in SB.
2001 Rams - Lost in SB.

2000 Rams - Lost wild card weekend.
1999 Panthers - Missed Playoffs (Yeah Steve Beuerlein led the league in passing, not Warner)
1998 Vikings - Lost in Conference Championship (huge upset)
1997 Seahawks (w/ Warren Moon) - Missed Playoffs
1996 Jaguars - Lost AFC title game.
1995 49ers - Lost first playoff game to Packers.
1994 Patriots - Lost wildcard weekend.
1993 Dolphins - Started 9-2, lost 5 straight to miss playoffs.
1992 Oilers - Lost first playoff game to Buffalo after blowing a 35-3 lead.
1991 Oilers - Lost divisional round game at Denver.
1990 Oilers - Lost 41-14 Wild Card game to the Bengals.
1989 Redskins - Missed Playoffs.
1988 Dolphins - Missed Playoffs.
1987 49ers - lost after first round bye.
1986 Dolphins - Missed Playoffs.
1985 Chargers - Missed Playoffs.

Mort! Wait...Gary!...no wait. Hold on.

1984 Dolphins - Lost to 49ers in SB, 38-16.

So in 27 seasons, the QB with the most yards missed the playoffs 10 times, lost right away 7 times, had one of the biggest end of year collapses (9-2 start to miss playoffs), one of the biggest upsets in conference title history (98 Vikings lose to the Falcons), gave up the biggest comeback ever (led 35-3 in the second half against a backup QB and lost), and lost 4 Super Bowls, including the infamous 18-1.

Seems to be a curse not a blessing.

So while we might be ready to admit that Defense wins championships, it does seem that racking in gaudy passing stats doesn't.
There are a few reasons for this.

1. Teams that win big don't need to pass a lot, they'll rack up more rushing yards in garbage time, while teams playing lots of close games or playing from behind will keep throwing late into the game.

The Reich Stuff

2. A solid run game that controls the clock might not be as sexy, but it wins championships.

3. You can throw all over the field in the regular season, but come playoff time, somebody will figure out how to stop you. It's just the nature of the playoffs. Ask Peyton or Dan.

The only QB that really came close to confounding these factors was Kurt Warner, who I think is the best playoff QB ever... More to come.

The Expos

2011-10-07T07:08:00.000-05:00

6 October, 2011

They're called the Expos cause they
got some splainin to do.

Exposition, that is.

The KEY to exposition is to make your audience want to know the information you're trying to tell them. Sounds easy enough.

Here are some strategies.

1. The Mystery

The Matrix's first 30 or so minutes is basically a mystery. We know that Trinity and Agent Smith can jump impossibly high, and then she sorta vanishes some how. Then there's the "bugging," and the mouth closing over. Basically there's a bunch of things that are impossible in the real world. Then we have Neo mention, and wonder aloud about what the matrix is. The audience is along with Neo as he's trying to figure out what the Matrix is. So when we have that set piece where Morpheus directly explains what the Matrix is, it's mind blowing instead of dull exposition.

You take the Red Pill, then I explain a bunch of crap to you.

The Thirteenth Floor, which is a very similar movie from the same year uses the same thing. Except they use the mystery as almost the entire plot.

Instead of coming right out to the audience and saying "Okay, so this movie is set in the year 1995 and there are wizards." You can have little hints about the fact that wizards or magic exists and then the main character and the audience are looking for clues about what's going on.

What's he standing on?

The mystery plot is overdone in sci-fi and stories set in the future. For example, the Will Smith I, Robot film is entirely based on a murder mystery. The founder of US Robotics, James Cromwell, perhaps jumped to his death. Will Smith thinks it's murder and is suspicious of all robots. So you go along with Will Smith as he suspects a robot, then a broader plot, and then a robot takeover of the planet. He follows hints left by James Cromwell. Ultimately it turns out that the giant AI running the robots and the city infrastructure decides to takeover the world in order to prevent human deaths from wars and pollution and such. And James Cromwell wanted to stop it, so he commanded a robot to kill him, and then left these hints for one specific detective to follow so he can stop the AI from taking over the world. But...wait a second. Why have yourself killed to leave cryptic hints? Why not just call him up and tell him what's up? Or, since he's the founder of US Robotics, and works in the same building as the evil AI...why doesn't he just destroy the AI like he vicariously gets Will Smith to do? It really doesn't make sense if you think about it. The screenwriter decided it would work better if there was a mystery angle and didn't bother to make Cromwell's actions realistic or logical.

2. The Lay Person

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away...they had these laser
sword things and they went all WOOSH and were awesome.

Make a character not know the exposition either. Luke Skywalker doesn't know much about the force, and neither does the audience. Then it makes sense to have someone explain it to them. See many other movies.

3. The Info Dump

Lord of the Rings and Star Wars are pretty big fans of this. Just throw a ton of information at the audience right off the bat. Make them read if you want to. This is the laziest and least dramatic way to do it. However, it can be effective for delivering a lot of information quickly and therefore getting the story moving faster.

4. Small Talk

"Hey Timothy Johnson, how are you doing since your son, Chris, died five years ago. I bet that's been hard to get over. How is your wife, Cindy, handling it?"

This happens far too often in films. You can adeptly deliver exposition through conversation, but it takes some finesse, other wise a lot of the audience will immediately see right through it.

5. The Expostion Device

Nice head. Too bad it got blown off. I mean...oral sex.

Starship Troopers uses the fake propaganda videos to deliver information quickly. The beginning of Tropic Thunder shows a fake trailer for a movie starring each of the main characters, thus establishing each character and their acting persona very very quickly and it's funny. Get Him to the Greek uses a similar device, a music video for Russell Brand's musician character. Children of Men uses a news report about the death of the world's youngest person, an 18 year old, to very quickly establish that there are no kids being born.

6. Bad Narration

(V.O.) And then I pointed my gun at him and
made a squinty, wrinkled brow look to show
him I meant business.

The use of a voice over at the beginning or peppered throughout is the favorite tactic of meddling studio execs trying to ruin a film. They thought Blade Runner needed a poorly worded voice over to make it make sense. They thought Dark City's mystery plot was too confusing so they just had Kiefer Sutherland deliver a short narration at the beginning that gives away most of the mystery plot, thus leaving the audience watching the main character stumble around in the dark trying to figure out the mystery that the voice over just gave away. Not all voice overs are bad, but it's usually a bad sign.

7. The Status Quo Beat

One of the most popular ways to deliver exposition is to have a 10-15 minute sequence at the beginning of the film, showing the main character in action doing what they do, prior to the real inciting incident. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, we get to see Indiana on a mission, running from the big-ass ball, and then he goes back to being a teacher. Then the real plot begins. We've established his character by showing him in action. Minority Report (another Spielberg flick) does the same thing. We see Pre-Crime in action for a quick mission, establishing the characters, the setting, Pre-crime and how it works, and all while on an otherwise meaningless mission that has nothing to do with the real plot. That starts right after we've set up the status quo. Gladiator also uses this method. There's a quick battle that has nothing to do with the bigger plot, but establishes Maximus as a badass.

Before we get to the plot, first we have to show
the audience how this cool Operating System works.

So if you have a lot of information to deliver, you are probably going to use one of these. Your situation dictates your choices to some extent. If you have no lay-persons that need things explained to them, then that's obviously out. The info dump, the small talk, and the bad narration approaches are the laziest. Unless you really know what you're doing, I'd advise against them. That just leaves the Mystery, the Device, and the Status Quo beat. Mystery works well, but does take up plot time, so if you have a more complicated plot in mind, perhaps the exposition shouldn't dominate the first bit of plot time. The Expo device is one of my favorite, but you need to find a way to make it original or to have it not be so transparently exposition. The Status quo beat is one of the safest ways of doing it. You give us the setting, the main character, lay down some rules for how this universe works, but without the pressure of having to get to the big plot just yet. It forces you to find something actiony for the characters to do, and that's basically the candy to help the medicine go down. Exposition is the medicine. Don't forget that, the audience doesn't like it. They're like dogs, you gotta hide it in their food.

Snoretoberfest: Or Why You Aren't Watching the MLB Post-season

2011-10-07T00:53:00.000-05:00

6 October, 2011

I know what I'm watching.

On Monday Night, sports fans had the option of watching the Tigers-Yankees ALDS Game 3 (with the series tied at 1-1), OR the Colts-Bucs Monday night game sans Peyton Manning. This should be a no-brainer, playoff game or a early season matchup between a basement dweller and an up and comer from a small market and few marquee players. So how do you think the ratings went?

MNF = 10.84 million viewers
MLB Playoff game = 6.05 million viewers.

Source

This discrepancy is a very big deal. Common sense would tell you that a playoff game following a grueling season featuring two teams from big markets and plenty of star power should completely destroy an early season matchup without much star power at all. The biggest draw in the football game was Peyton Manning in the booth.

So why does nobody give a shit about the MLB playoffs?

1. Baseball is Boring

Okay, before I get death threats, let me be clear. I believe that almost ANY sport can be incredibly entertaining if you get invested in it enough. If you're raised playing it, watching it, with a favorite team, you know all the intricacies, and you can really understand the minutae of the game, then it's going to be more interesting to you than some sport you've never seen before. This is true of all sports. My point is that when you throw a baseball game on the tube in front of a lay person, it's not going to excite them as other sports they are also unfamiliar with would.

Imagine we take Borat and tie him to a chair and give him a remote and the only things on TV are Baseball, Football, Futbol, Hockey, Basketball, etc. He's gonna settle on Football or Hockey. Those sports can be quite exciting even if you don't really know what's going on. The problem with basketball is that scores are so frequent they seem practically meaningless until the endgame. Futbol and baseball are the opposite. There's so much inaction (come on Soccer fans, don't tell me 90 minutes of light jogging is non-stop action) that you'll fall asleep if you aren't invested in the outcome. Maybe baseball would be alright if a game only took 80 minutes. But if I'm gonna invest 3 1/2 hours in a game, it's gonna be football.

Non-stop Action

The biggest thing about baseball is the pitcher/batter duel. Yet to the lay person, this duel is practically incomprehensible. They can understand how many balls or strikes you need, but aren't going to get anything out of pitch selection. Kids these days can't even sit through a movie without texting. Don't underestimate the power of being attention grabbing.

Baseball simply isn't the top sport in America, it's football and by a longshot.

2. The Playoff Format Sucks

In the NFL, you play 16 regular season games, then in the playoffs it's one-and-done. No best of 3 or 5 or 7. One game decides who moves on. That means that the quickest you can be eliminated is after playing a postseason 1/16th the length of the regular season.

In MLB, you play 162 regular season games, then the first playoff series is best of 5. If you lose the first 3, you're done. So that means the quickest you can be eliminated is after a post-season that's 1/54th as long as the regular season.

See the problem? The NFL equivalence of the MLB playoffs would go like this:

World Series Champion

You go 13-3, ensure a first round bye. Then you host a 10-6 team. The first quarter is a disaster, with three turnovers. With 12 minutes to go in the second quarter, you trail 21-0. If this were baseball, that's it, game over, your season is done. 17 minutes is equal to 1/54th the length of the regular season. Even if it's a close game, you gotta call it by halftime, because that's the equivalence of the series going to a full 5 games.

How about comparing it to NHL which has an 82 game season and starts the playoffs with a best of 7 series. If the NHL had a playoffs just as short relative to the season as MLB did, then you'd call the series with 10 minutes to go in the 2nd period of Game 3.

MLB has such a long season. Just think about investing yourself in 162 games, winning your division, having the best record in baseball, and then losing 3 in the row and the year is over. Or even just losing 3 of 5.

That's two balls and one strike.

This might make sense in other sports, but Baseball is the worst sport to have this problem. There's a saying in baseball that "Every team is gonna win 54 games, every team is gonna lose 54 games, it's what you do with the other 54 games that counts." If you wanna narrow it down to decent teams that have a shot at the playoffs, then you could make the saying "every team is gonna win 82 games, lose 55 games, it's what you do with the other 27 games that counts. That's it. The difference between the best team in baseball, and a mediocre team that was barely in the playoff hunt is just 27 games spread over 6 months.

Baseball is a sport of averages, likelihoods, and it only works right if you have a large sample size. It's the one sport that really makes sense to have such a long season. And it's the sport that makes sense to have the longest playoffs. And yet it has by far the SHORTEST playoffs of the major American sports.

The quickest you can win the WS is in a playoffs that's 6.8% the length of the regular season. The quickest you can win the SB is in 18.8% the length of the regular season. The longest the playoffs can take would be 11.7% for baseball and 25% for football.

3. The Regular Season is Almost Meaningless.

Yeah, the regular season doesn't mean anything.

There's so much talk about "diluting the regular season" in college football if you bring up a playoff system. Since your regular season is only 11-13 games, in order to have a shot at the title, you need to win them all, or maybe you can get away with 1 loss. This means that every single game has meaning.

Baseball is the exact opposite. There are so many regular season games that you can easily lose the first 20 games and to end the season at .500 you just gotta go 82-62 the rest of the way, or go .570, which isn't that significant a hole to climb out of. By September, most people are burnt out on baseball, especially the ones whose teams aren't gonna play in October. Contrast this with NFL fans. Even if their team sucked up the joint, they're not gonna miss the Super Bowl.

Let's look at it another way. In the NFL, you know your team is going to have to win 12 games to guarantee a playoff spot (as 11-5 teams have missed the playoffs), or if you wanna play the odds a bit, let's say 11 wins is enough to guarantee a playoff birth (4 teams in the last 4 years have won 10 or 11 games and missed the playoffs).

So you need to win 11, and you can't lose more than 5. That means that losing the first game of the season can get you 20% of the way to too many losses to control your destiny. Winning any game gets you another 11th of the way to the playoffs. Losing any game gets you a fifth of the way closer to staying home in January.

I call this one the Castigator

In the last 6 years, the best team to miss the MLB playoffs was the 2005 Indians, who went 93-69 but missed the big show. So let's say that guaranteeing a playoff berth requires 94 wins, or no more than 68 losses.

Winning any one game gets you 1/94th of the way to the playoffs, and losing any one game gets you 1/68th of the way closer to staying home. That's how utterly unimportant regular season games are individually. So think about this. You're asking teams to go 162 games where the stakes are that a loss gets you 1/68th of the way closer to missing the playoffs, THEN you ask them to play games where a loss gets them 1/3rd of the way closer to ending their season.

The regular season is far too diluted in meaning, and then they try to make up for it by giving a shortened playoff and that makes the games somehow mean "too much."

Using the same metrics, NFL postseason games are 5 times more important than regular season games. MLB postseason games are 22.6 times more important than regular season games. So that means that a single MLB playoff game is just as important as the month of April.

4. How Playoffs should be done

The Stanley Cup Playoffs are the greatest 6 weeks of sports anywhere. You start with 16 teams. You need to win 4 best-of-7 series to win the cup. Teams come in as a roster of professionals. By the end of the Cup Finals, you're looking at two teams of Brothers who've just completed an epic quest. These two teams spent 82 games trying to get in, then they spent up to 25 games battling for their playoff lives. That's like playing another 30% of the regular season where every game is extremely important. The longest the MLB playoffs can go is 19 games, but compare that to a 162 game season, and that's only 11.7%. That's why Hockey players look completely spent after the finals. They've just spent every ounce of energy, sacrificed their bodies, taken slap shots to the face, lost teeth, bleed all over the ice, and come back for more. Man I'm glad Hockey's back.

Villains: Or How I Learned To Stop Thinking And Just Hate The Bad Guy

2011-10-06T04:14:00.001-05:00

5 October, 2011

So I finally got around to watching both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. I'm not a big fan of comic-book movies for a number of reasons, but my man crush for Christian Bale along with Inception were plenty enough motivation for me to see what I was missing.

Ninjas
Wat.

Cool Shit/Plot
Christopher Nolan makes pretty soulless films that are way more about plot points and "cool" things than they are really about characters. I mean, honestly he never lets two chracters stay in a scene and just talk for more than 20 seconds. They never start to feel like people to me. That's okay, it can work, just as long as you pack in enough cool shit and awesome plot points.

There's no Cat button...Defrost?

So the whole microwave weapon in Batman Begins was just ridiculous. Maybe in a film where the cool shit wasn't the whole fucking idea could you get away with this. Basically the bad guy has pumped a chemical into the whole water supply that makes you go fucking crazy, BUT you have to inhale it, drinking it won't do. So it's in the water supply...I don't get it. And neither does Batman, until PLOT TWIST!, the bad guys manage to steal a microwave weapon that will vaporize watery things for miles around. Basically it's an inside-out microwave oven. Hey, wait a second, aren't people mostly made of water? Shouldn't this just nuke the shit out of everyone? No? Oh okay, I guess your plot points don't need logic. Why don't they just rent a plane and spray the shit over the city? Seems a lot easier than infiltrating the water supply then stealing a secret military weapon and then microwaving the whole city...

In The Dark Knight, Batman takes a bullet hole in a wall, not even the shattered bits of the bullet, then takes this hole and runs computer simulations to reconstruct what the bullet was like that created the hole. I suppose this could work to determine what kind of bullet or gun caused it, but no. Batman's computer model gives him a fingerprint on the bullet. That's right, he finds a hole in a wall and his computer back-engineers that into a fingerprint that was on the bullet. Do I need to explain how completely non-sensical this is. I thought the whole idea was that this was supposed to be the gritty-realistic Batman...Not bad CSI Batman. It's supposed to be just an awesome technology. Batman has several of these and they make sense, none of them are magic, they have a grounding in reality. But this idea that you could take a bullet hole and recreate a finger print that was on the shattered bullet is ridiculous and will never be possible.

Physics Lesson
Batman saves Maggie Gyllenhall from falling to her death by grabbing her and holding her as they both slam into a parked car. I guess Batman's suit spreads the forces out over his body and that somehow cushions the blow. It doesnt' really make a lot of sense, but fine. However, Maggie is just landing on him landing on a car. Think about it this way, how are the forces acting on her any different if he's holding her or not. Either way she's decellerating from free fall speed to stopped. Either way it's like running into a brick wall at 60 mph, are you telling me Batman's moobs act like airbags?

This is one example of an epidemic in Hollywood, the magic grabbing/holding effect. Falling a huge distance is fine as long as someone holds on to you. How often do we see Spiderman or Superman or other super heroes chase after someone who is falling, only to bring them to a dead stop by grabbing them just shy of slamming into concrete. Phew. Wait a second...Why is it bad to crash into pavement at 100 mph? Because you stop suddenly. It's the acceleration that hurts, not the fact that it's concrete. So when superman grabs you and stops you just inches from the ground, you're telling the audience that his arms are somehow super cushiony. If he really did it, it'd be like jumping fifteen stories onto steel girders shaped like arms. Bet they'll catch you all cushiony.

Or how about in The Matrix Reloaded, where Morpheus and the Key Maker are on the back of the semi truck as it is about to crash head first into another semitruck. Morpheus is all like, hey Neo, come on and save us. So the trucks crash together and the worst thing that will happen is they will fly over the crashed trucks at about 70-80 mph, then land on pavement and slide to a stop (or be blasted by the truck explosion). Instead of that, Neo flies in at hundreds if not thousands of miles per hour, grabs them and carries them to safety. Imagine standing on the street, minding your own business, when an airplane flies by and yanks you by your shirt collar and you instantly go from zero to 500 mph. More likely, you're head would snap back so hard it'd fall off. This is what Neo does to Morpheus rather than let him skid to a stop from 70 on pavement, he yanks him to an instant 500 mph.

The Over-the-top Bad Guy
When creating a villian, there are three main ideas.

1. The Completely Evil Bad Guy

Give him an evil sounding name and have his goals simply be super evil. He has no depth, and his name sounds something like Modkrod, Sauron, Voldemort, Vader, Sidious, General Grievous, Captian Bone-to-pick, or Admiral I'm a bad guy.

2. A villain that has different goals from the main character, but also isn't just evil for evil's sake, they see things differently. Sometimes they're simply a competitor who selfishly wants the same thing the MC is after. Other times their different world views are the source of their differences. For example, In the Matrix, Agent Smith sees humans as a virus or a disease, as an AI, he sees things differently. Although what his goals really are is kind of up in the air, so that makes him more like a Category 1 bad guy. Another example would be Se7en, where the bad guy is a sort of religious nut who thinks that he's going to put the fear of god back into people and make them live more piously, and thus he thinks he's probably saving souls by doing the evil things he is doing. See how much better that is than Sauron or Voldemort simply being evil looking,sounding guys that want power..

3. The Villain with the same goals as the MC.
If the Villain and the MC want the same things, suddenly there's a lot more depth here. The real disagreement isn't over the goal, it's about how far you're willing to go to accomplish it. The Bad guys are of the "The ends justifies the means" crowd, while the MC has some super-moral code they adhere to and will fight against their own goal because the bad guy is willing to go to far to get it.

In Minority Report, the bad guy is willing to kill in order to keep Pre-Crime running, because on the whole, it saves many more lives. The Main Character thinks murder is always wrong and ultimately fights to dismantle pre-crime. So at the end of the film, Pre-Crime is ended...thus returning us to a world with murder...Thanks Tom Cruise for getting rid of future-seeing cops that stop murders before they happen.

Another example, is the film Surrogates. In this world, everyone is a fat-ass shut-in who lives vicariously through a robot that looks like a super sexy version of them that goes out in the world. Bruce Willis is a cop who uses a surrogate at the beginning but is sick of the things and wants to live in the real world again, his wife however is obsessed with her perfect image and doesn't want to return to being an imperfect meatbag. The bad guy is James Cromwell, the guy who invented surrogates in the first place. He decides that his invention has ruined society and turned all of the users into people that are dead inside. So his plan is to unleash a virus that kills everyone using a surrogate, thus returning the world to normal. So Bruce Willis and James Cromwell both want people to return to the real world and abandon these perfect robot surrogates. So at the end, the virus is downloading that will kill all people attached to a surrogate. Bruce Willis is trying to stop it, and he stops it, keeping everyone alive, but then he has to press another button to stop the virus from destroying the surrogates (but without killing the people attached to them) he decides to let the virus go and blow up the surrogates. So then we cut to the street where all the surrogates suddenly go limp. And the world returns to normal thanks to Bruce Willis not stopping the virus totally. The End.

But wait...If Bruce Willis modified the virus from something that kills billions of people, into one that just destroys surrogates and doesn't harm a single person with a few keystrokes...couldn't Cromwell have just made a virus that didn't kill everyone in the first place. See what I'm getting at. The bad guy wants to stop people from using surrogates. He's also the president of the surrogate company. He has the power to destroy all surrogates, and stop building new ones, thus stopping the use of surrogates. INSTEAD of doing that, he tries to kill billions of people and writes it off as "they're already dead." Oh okay. Thanks for giving us an ethical dillemma by being completely over the top evil.

When the MC and Antagonist only disagree on how far you should go to accomplish your goal, you need to make both of their views make sense in order to create an actual ethical dillemma. In Minority Report, the bad guy actually seems to be in the right, because the ends seems to really justify the means. Killing one or a few people in order to prevent thousands of murders seems like a fair trade. So that leaves the main character as making a stupid stand to destroy something good because they can't see the big picture. OR they go the other way and make the villain just go completely over the top in how far they are willing to go.

So in Batman Begins, Liam Neeson and Batman both want justice and to punish bad guys. Batman thinks you should do this by enforcing the law, let the courts and prisons do the punishment, he's no executioner. So you'd think the counter point would be another vigilante who will just kill bad guys and not bother with the justice system, the problem is that there's no oversight, how do you know you're killing really bad guys for sure? no trial, no jury, etc. It creates a real ethical dilemma. Maybe Liam accidentally kills a handful of innocent people, and Batman then has a dillemma: do you allow Liam Neeson to keep being a vigilante who enforces justice but also makes mistakes sometimes? Instead of that, Liam Neeson wants to give everyone in the city crazy juice and then let all the bad guys out of jail in order to create total chaos and destroy the city so that it becomes a symbol or something.

His way of creating justice is to DESTROY AN ENTIRE CITY. How logical.

To make the villian with similar goals work, you need to set up both of their positions as logical, that way there is actually a dilemma to be had.

In Fight Club, Tyler Durden serves as a mentor for Ed Norton in teaching him to not care about material possessions or his job, to free him from this empty consumerist lifestyle. Then Tyler creates Project Mayhem and starts freeing others. They both are in agreement about the fact that this modern life is empty, meaningless, misleading, and needs to be stopped. At the end Tyler wants to blow up the buildings of credit card companies, thus erasing the debt record and putting everyone back to zero, thus enabling millions of others to join them in this movement. Ed Norton tries to stop them, first off he objects to the fact that they would be killing people, but Tyler points out that all of the people in the buildings are their people, so nobody will be killed. Ed Norton still wants to stop it. So here's the difference between them. Honestly I gotta say I'm with Tyler on this one, but the difference between their positions isn't nearly as far apart as in Surrogates. This way you don't see either of them as being irrational, but holding equal positions. Thus it's a real dilemma for the characters, and for the audience as well.

In Apocalypse Now, the real conflict is about whether a war should be fought according to rules, with R&R, barbecues, rules of engagement, etc. OR if you should just go ahead and do whatever it takes to win and end the thing. Kurtz thinks if you're going to fight a war, then take the gloves off and actually fight it. The main character is on the side of the Army, who wants to keep the public image good to keep the war going, so they want to stop Kurtz. The Army gives Willard the assignment to stop Kurtz. So here's Willard's dilemma. Do you assassinate Kurtz, the guy who the Army says is going too far, but in accomplishing your goal you will have yourself actually gone beyond what people in the Army are supposed to do. OR do you join him in his quest to actually win the war? Again, it's a real dilemma, it's something that the MC has to think about and so does the audience.

In The Dark Knight, rather than trying the Villain with similar goals, they go back to Villain #1, General Mayhem, I mean, The Joker, who is so evil that he even burns money! Gasp! A villain that destroys money!? How do you understand someone like that, they can't be understood they are just pure evil! The problem with this kind of villain is that they have no depth, they're just really bad. What's the Joker's goal? To just watch the world burn? Really? That's all we got? And to make him even more like a real person, let's give him the magical power to plan ahead incredibly. There's the egg-timer window thing, which would require such precise timing to make it work that it's nearly impossible. Then the whole chase thing where he actually wanted to get captured. I.E. the nonsensical plot twist. He just has planned fifteen steps ahead and whenever he's in a jam he's happened to have planted a bomb in the perfect place to get him out of a jam. Basically this is a Wizard or a character from Fantasy that can make shit up to get out of a jam, but instead of saying he has some magic power or something, there is no explanation, he's just that bad...Cool, thanks.

Batman's Voice
So whenever Bruce puts the suit on, he talks in a super deep scary voice. That's fine, he's masking his voice so people can't figure out who he is. Makes sense. Up until he starts interacting with people who know his real identity, but he keeps using that voice anyway. Suddenly he's talking to the girl and dressed as a bat and talking in a fake deep voice. At this point he just looks like an idiot.

Closing Thoughts
I enjoyed these films as a gritty more realistic take on the superhero film, but I feel like sometimes they go to far in trying to make cool things, and when it comes to villains have avoided subtlety at all costs. If they want the series to really go anywhere, they better come up with a villain that isn't so ridiculous. Apparently Liam Neeson is coming back as the villain for The Dark Knight Rises, even though he died at the end of Batman Begins. Supposedly he's Ra's al Ghul, which wikipedia tells me is a sort of immortal assassin whose goal is to save the planet from evil human pollution. Rather than going all Al Gore on everybody and trying to spread awareness and invent green technology, his method is to kill lots of people as a way of reducing our carbon footprint. Sounds like we're gonna have a real ethical dillema on our hands with this guy...

MoneyBalls (Angelina's nickname for the Pittster): Aaron Sorkin's trilogy

2011-10-04T04:45:00.000-05:00

4 October, 2011

P Diddy's basketball

With Moneyball, Aaron Sorkin has completed a trilogy of character films that also included Charlie Wilson's War and The Social Network. All three films have a lot in common: they're about public/powerful/real men and each man can be defined by irony. These films also share a lot of similar storytelling devices.

Charlie Wilson is a forgettable congressman, mired in coke and whore scandals, and yet he manages to create the Soviet-Afghan war behind closed doors through unlikely deals. Not the president, just a low-rank congressman.

The Social Network is about the Zuck and how he created/stole Facebook and alienated or took advantage of everyone close to him. The creator of the most used social network in the world actually says out loud in the film "I don't want friends."

Billy Beane was a highly-touted prospect, a pretty face that could do it all and was drafted in the first round. He fails hard and ends up working as a scout and works his way up to the job of GM where he totally changes the way GMs evaluate talent, turning away from the pretty-boy 5-tool players and instead looking for the "island of misfit toys."

Let's put this guy in a movie
about baseball statistics.

So you can see, at the heart of each film is a simple conceit: the main character is living irony. This is important when writing a film. Even if you're making a simple bio-pic, you need a conceit or a "guiding principle" as Truby would call it. Once you know this conceit, or the irony of the character in Sorkin's case, then you can see the plot unfold much more clearly.

The second story-telling device that dominates these films is the dichotomy of the main character's goal and dream. The goal is what the character is actively after, an immediate and tangible action/event/result. The dream is more elusive, bigger-picture. It's the difference between trying to get into a good college and wanting to have a successful career. The difference between the dream and the goal is where you'll find the endings to Sorkin's films.

In so many scripts and movies, you'll find characters with no dreams, only goals. It can still work, but usually it makes for a lousy ending. Endings often come down to simply, "did they accomplish their goal or not?" Did he get the girl or not? Did he save his wife or not? Did they win the championship or not? Good endings are much less about winning the game, and more about whether or not they achieved the dream. In The Matrix, Neo's goal is to save Morpheus, but he accomplishes his dream of becoming The One. Tell me what's his dream in the 2nd film...

Charlie Wilson's goals are all about getting money from congress to fund the Afghan resistance, buying weapons with that money, and getting the weapons in their hands. The larger goal is to fight off the Soviets. Charlie's dream however is to turn Afghanistan around, turn it into a decent country that will succeed rather than one that scumbags and terrorists will recruit from and take advantage of. Charlie accomplishes his goals, but at the end of the film, with the Soviets defeated, can get absolutely no support to rebuild the infrastructure of Afghanistan, leaving the freedom fighters he helped train to wait around a few years before they cause 9/11. It's a bittersweet ending that causes us to reexamine our priorities and look at how the US continues to act.

What about 257 friends?

Zuckerberg's goals are all related to making Facebook, making it more successful, and so on. His dream however, is to get that girl back that he had at the beginning of the film, and more broadly speaking, to connect with people as true friends/lovers. But the harder he tries to accomplish his goals, the farther away he gets from his dream. Power has its price.

Billy Beane's goal is to make the Oakland A's into a winning team, win a world series. He is constantly reminded that his team has no budget and is doing well for itself just to even make the playoffs. It's a bit like Rocky, where the goalposts are moved, rather than trying to win the fight, Rocky and the A's are just trying to prove that they belong in the ring.

Most of the way through the film, I thought Billy's goal was to make a winning team, prove they belong, and his dream was to win a world series (something I already know he's not yet to accomplish). However, as the film is beginning to wrap up, there's an odd moment where Jonah Hill, wrapped up in a big winning streak is dumbfounded by Billy's lack of enthusiasm for their success. Billy then clearly changes his goal/dream. He tells Jonah that his dream isn't to win a ring, it's to change baseball. Meaning he wants to make it so small market teams like his can compete because of his way of evaluating players.

Lazy Writer: "Then there's a smoke monster. And
everyone's all like, What!?!"

The ending of the film is based around the Red Sox offering Billy the job of GM along with a huge salary. He has a daughter that lives with his ex-wife, meaning that moving to Boston means he'll be leaving his daughter. Rather than letting his daughter be the only factor in his decision as many films would have done, Billy instead makes the decision because of his dream, to change baseball, something he couldn't do if he went to Boston where he would have had a huge payroll to work with.

If you've read my posts from last week about male and female character's, you'll already know where I'm going with this: Letting family concerns dictate character's actions is sloppy and lazy writing. A lazy writer would have had Billy stay in Oakland to be with his daughter. Aww, what a nice guy. Sorkin has him do it to accomplish his dream. How many films have you seen where the climax is all about the kids or the girl? They're almost all about that. Give your characters goals and dreams that go beyond the family and you'll hit a home run. Metaphorically speaking. It'd be weird if you literally hit a home run. Just like if the A's won a World Series.

TV: Where Everything Dies Without Dignity

2011-10-04T00:43:00.000-05:00

October 3, 2011

But George, I love That 70s Show.

TV networks are like Lennie from Of Mice and Men, they find precious shows and hold on to them so tightly they turn into a fine paste (which they spoon feed idiots for a few extra years).

TV show success is defined by a Favrian lack of self-awareness, an unwillingness to step out of the lime-light long after it's turned into a lemon-light, a golden shower of shark-jumping, fridge-nuking sub-mediocrity that all but undoes any legacy that may have existed.

I don't need to spell out all the shows that have made the celebrated shark-jump. Instead, I'll focus on a few good shows that illustrate the fall from grace.

The Office

Assistant (to the) General Manager

The British Office was like a mini-series. It still exists in the ether as a completed work with a beginning, middle, and end. In America, we prefer to keep our shows around long enough to ruin everything that we liked about them. Now into season 9, the "will they or won't they?" plot that drove the UK version and early seasons in the US and provided just about the only storyline that was properly dramatic--powerful, yet painfully realistic--has been replaced by a tedious child-raising story.

We can't let our characters exit gracefully, no, we want to see them grow old and boring, raising kids, paying mortgages, saving enough for retirement. Some will say it's a mirror on the audience and somehow that makes it a worthy story. Simply being realistic doesn't make a story worth telling. It's almost as if Jim and Pam are relatives we all share, the cute and funny cousins that we remember fondly. It reminds me of numerous Sci-fi stories where people have implanted memories they all share but think are their own.

They tried to replace Jim and Pam's unrequited romance with several other romances, but none of them had anywhere near the same effect since they involved comedic relief characters who we don't easily attribute actual emotions to.

Better get the kids to soccer practice,
mr. single father; I just don't know how he does it!

Dexter
Don't get me wrong, I really like Dexter and am eagerly anticipating this season. The problem with Dexter is actually its greatest strength...Dexter is movie like in a lot of ways. Each season could really be trimmed down into a 2-3 hour movie and it would work pretty well. See, movies have to be about the most important events in a character's life. TV is more about maintaining the status quo and getting the most out of the situation. Movies are life-altering events. That's why it's hard to really have film-like shows, you're going to run out of life-changing events that don't feel artificial.

Let's look at Debra Morgan as an example. (spoilers ahead). Deb's brother is a serial killer with a heart of gold. So of course her life is going to be a bit odd. She falls in love with and nearly marries a serial killer who tries to kill her. Then she falls in love with a serial killer-hunter, only for him to be murdered in front of her (and she was shot herself) by a serial killer. She falls in love with a guy who is kidnapped and tortured by a serial killer but survives. Then she has to help her serial killer brother raise his kids after he's made a widow by a serial killer.

I mean honestly...Take any one, maybe two seasons, and you could have a believable story. But when you look at the whole series, it loses all credibility. Deb has become a serial killer pin-cushion. You just know that in the Dexter writing room this sentiment was expresed, "It's original because instead of being the target of a serial killer, this season her lover is the target."

There's a new serial killer in Miami every year, and there's never any shortage of a free killers for Dexter to hunt down. You'd think there were a thousand murders a year in Miami. It makes sense in a movie, or when you take one season at a time. Hunting a serial killer is the biggest thing these characters would do. By season 6 it's not even eye-raising. Instead of the plot being based on the hunt for this killer, we've given every minor character their own relationship sub-plot. Because that's why I watch a show about a vigilante serial killer, to see office romances play out between non-emotive cops.

I will give Dexter's writers credit for (spoiler) killing off Rita because they must have realized how tedious the family plot had become. I mean hello, I'm watching a show about a serial killer, next thing I know he's in marriage counseling opening up about his feelings and trying to connect with his teenage step-daughter.

The West Wing

I can't wait to find out which co-worker
she makes friends with benefits with.

This is my favorite TV drama of all-time, but I can't let the last few seasons off the hook. For the first 4 seasons it was a character-driven realistic look at how the president's staff lives. Wrapped up in their jobs, their social lives are practically non-existent. They measure their ups and downs with the polls and election results. It's actually a pretty difficult to explain formula. It's Aaron Sorkin, the guy that turned a story about computer programmers into The Social Network. The dialogue is smart, the plots are elegant and subtle, and ultimately all about the characters.

Once Sorkin left, the show fell victim to 24-syndrome. The plot from season 5 on was driven by kidnappings, bombs, nuclear meltdowns, classified leaks, basically any crisis that can take over a cable news channel was penciled in for a 4-5 episode stint as the "plot." So lovable characters became little more than mouthpieces for plot information.

I'm exaggerating of course, but this all could have been avoided had the show exited a little more gracefully when Sorkin, the show runner, did. It did manage a fairly graceful exit that felt like an ending as the new president takes office in the series finale (though not by choice as they planned on continuing the show).

So let's make a checklist to define shows squeezed to death.

1. Relationship sub-plots for all the characters (typically amongst existing characters that you wouldn't expect)
2. Outlandish number of coincidences
3. Plot no longer character driven
4. Transition from getting the girl/boy to tedious child rearing/marriages
5. Lack of any overall story structure (beginning, middle, end)

The exception that proves the rule is Seinfeld.

1. Unlike Friends, That 70s Show, How I Met Your Mother, and numerous other shows, they resisted the trend to have all the characters hook up at some point. In the hands of lesser writers, Elaine would have ended up in a love triangle with Jerry and either George or Kramer. Seriously.
2. This one isn't really applicable in the way it is to Dexter and dramas.
3. The plot was always driven by each character's neurosis. Never by baby-mama love-triangle drama.
4. George and Susan never make it to that point and no other character ever comes close to settling down.
5. Not really applicable since this had almost no real "drama" to it. However, they walked away gracefully and did end the series with a bang and not the whimper of cancellation.

Let's just hope that Arrested Development has the balls to avoid these mistakes.

Butt to the Future 2

2011-10-01T19:21:00.000-05:00

September 31, 2011

A fun game to play while drinking is to take turns coming up with movie titles but replacing one word in the title with the word "Butt." You can play it with any other word of course. Here's a few examples.

Hot Butt Time Machine
Butt Tub Time Machine
Hot Tub Butt Machine (man that movie is gold)
Requiem for a Butt
A Butt Runs Through It
The Thin Red Butt
Butt With the Wind (think about it)
Butt Gump

Another fun game is to come up with imaginary sequels to existing movies.

Forrest Gumper
Air Force Two
Apollo 14: Everything Goes as Planned

We are trapped in time itself. How very
deep of you. Get it. A giant fish, deep.

And another variation is to simply remove 1 letter from a movie title:

Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dad (Aka Mrs. Doubtfire)
12 Angry Me
Ack to the Future (starring Admiral Ackbar)

This is all a big lead in so I can make fun of Back to the Future 2.

Earlier this week I analysed the cliched goals of male characters in Hollywood movies. The gist of it is that their goals typically come down to "Give me back my family!"

Why was BTTF 1 So Good?
Within the first 20 minutes of BTTF we meet Marty's girlfriend, learn his dream of being a musician, and meet his wacky scientist friend. Before long Doc is murdered by terrorists and Marty is accidentally sent back in time to 1955. So here's two clear goals. Get back to the future and save his friend's life. We keep tacking on more complications like how Marty's mom starts to fall for him instead of his father. So now failure for Marty isn't just that he'd be trapped, but he very well may make himself not exist. So then he has to make sure his dad still hooks up with his mom (and this is a tall order since his dad is a total loser. Imagine if his dad was just normal, way less daunting a task). Plus he has a hot girlfriend in 1985 he'd like to get back to.

So that covers the Goals and the Stakes, what about the Urgency? Think about it, if you have a time machine in a story, it's going to be hard to put the main character in a pickle with a ticking clock. The lightning strike is a brilliant idea that works perfectly.

BTTF 3 works pretty well since it follows the plot of 1 pretty closely. So what happened with 2?

BTTF 2

It's like they came back to an alternate universe...

2 Opens the moment 1 ended. Marty's back in 1985, and everything's dandy, including his girlfriend (who has morphed into a new actress). Then Doc shows up, sweeps up Marty and his girlfriend and takes them to 2015 rambling on about how "something has to be done about your kids." Oh boy, here we go.

So BTTF 2 begins with about a 30 minute adventure where they try to prevent Marty's future son from getting entangled in some gang bullshit. During this, Marty's girlfriend (and future wife) starts asking tons of questions about the future, almost all of them related to what her wedding and kids will be like. So Doc knocks her out with some sleep ray thing and she becomes an unconscious prop. Marty and Doc have to then rescue her after the police mistakenly take her to her 2015 home thinking she's the 40 something version of her. She discovers wedding pictures in which Marty is wearing a tuxedo shirt, then becomes an unconscious prop again when she runs into her future self.

So the Goal for the first 3rd of the movie is to fix Marty's family or something. Not only do we not understand what's really at stake since we don't see the consequences of the family sucking, it runs totally counter to Doc Brown's whole thing about not changing things.

That's not Crispin Glover!

So while it's fun to see their vision of the future, the Goal/Stakes/Urgency just isn't there, and to top it off, it seems to imply that the only goals people have are related to having a perfect wedding, great kids, and a spectacular family. That's all we care about.

The 2nd third of the film is set in an alternate 1985 where the bully/villain has become a mogul because he stole the time machine and gave his 1955 version of himself a sports almanac that let him make millions. They don't stay in this 1985 very long, it's just to set up the third act. Doc and Marty have to go back to '55 and stop Biff from changing the future to this alternate '85. Why? Well in this version of the world, Marty's dad was murdered, his mom married Biff and got big fake titties, and Doc was committed.

Mr. Plot Device

So the 3rd act in '55 is based on the goal of stealing that sports Almanac. Good so far. The stakes are high as failing means that huge shit storm in alternate '85. In addition, they go back to the exact same date that Marty came back to the future from in the first film, because that's the day that Biff gave his young self the book. Got that?

So the climax of the film is about Marty trying to steal the book from Biff while at the same dance he was at in the first film. The other Marty can't be interfered with or else he'll never get back to the future like he did in the first film, thus creating a time paradox and destroying the galaxy. Huge stakes. So two Marty's are running around this dance and almost running into each other. Lots of tension.

BUT...what's the urgency? Why do they have to steal the book on that particular night? They went to that day because it's the day Biff got the book, but it's established that Biff waits 3 years before he uses it. So they have 3 years to get that taken care of. They can just wait through this night, since changing even very minor things can completely destroy the universe because Marty HAS to complete the lightning strike time travel bit that requires very precise timing. So why don't Marty and Doc just hang out that night and steal the book from Biff the next day? Is there nothing good on tv? Oh wait, they have a time machine, they can just go to tomorrow and do it then (remember at this point they have the Mr. Fusion and can time travel as often as they please).

Remember when the Ghostbusters risked crossing the streams
cause they were listening to Pink Floyd and it looked cool?

So there's no Urgency. There's no ticking clock to make them do what they are doing, and doing it then risks destroying the universe. And it provides a valuable lesson. If you're going to write a time travel plot, you need a way to create urgency. In 1, with no Plutonium, the lightning strike plot fixes this. In 3, the Delorean has Mr. Fusion but they can't get any gasoline so they have to find a way to accelerate the car to 88 by stealing a train, plus they know that Doc will be killed by a certain date, so they accomplish the urgency that way.

BTTF is about an accident that sends Marty back in time and he has to save himself from ceasing to ever exist in the first place, get back to his own time, and save his best friend from being murdered by terrorists.

BTTF2 is about Marty and Doc unnecessarily putting the universe at risk so they can make Marty's kids not suck so much.

That's why the B in BTTF 2 stands for Butt.

CNN: "Journalists" for Censorship

2011-09-30T09:52:00.002-05:00

September 30, 2011

"I think we're all pretty tired of people hiding behind the first amendment. So cowardly."

How far we have come America.

A major news network, a supposed source of objective journalism, endorsing censorship. And this wasn't just some pretty face they pay to waste time and drink coffee on some daily show. This was Sunny Hostin, a former prosecutor, and now a "contributing legal analyst." She's tired of people hiding behind the first amendment, and she think's we're all with her on this.

The issue in question that Anderson Cooper is addressing is the existence of /r/jailbait on the website reddit.

What is Reddit?

A top pic on /r/pics

If you don't know, Reddit is a social media site. Anyone can submit content to reddit in one of thousands of sections called subreddits. So if you see a hilarious picture, then you can go to /r/funny and post it. Read a great political article, post it to /r/politics. If you've invented a new sex position, then go on over to /r/sex and make a post.

Anyone can post anything they wish, and then all the other users can "upvote" or "downvote" that post. If posts get downvoted, they get buried in the depths of millions of posts. If a post gets a lot of upvotes, it becomes more visible, and if it gets enough upvotes it will hit the front page.

See Reddit is just a platform. There are no writers or editors, it's not a news site, it does not produce content. It's more like Facebook. So you know Facebook's ever-changing newsfeed? Imagine if you had a newsfeed for ALL things posted to Facebook, not just your friends. That'd be a lot of posts. Now add a dislike button to go next to the like button, and then have Facebook sort through all these posts and show you the things people like. Suddenly you'd have an efficient system for delivering the best content people are posting on the internet that day.

Now, instead of having just one category of all posts, reddit breaks it up into subreddits. If you post something, you have to put it in one of those sub-categories. If you don't have a reddit account and you go to www.reddit.com, then you'll see the upvoted content from a small selection of some of the most popular subreddits including /r/videos, /r/pics, /r/gaming, and /r/worldnews. However there are literally thousands of subreddits. When you make an account you can subscribe to any subreddit you wish, and anyone can create a subreddit.

Anyone turned on by this must be a pedophile

What is /r/Jailbait?
Jailbait is one such subreddit. The content is supposed to be sexual but non-nude images of underaged girls. The entire idea is for it to have pictures that are NOT child porn. For the most part you'll probably find pictures of girls 14-20 (many of them probably aren't underage) in bathing suits. No sex. No nipples.

Almost every girl you'll find on there is sexually mature, I.e. she got boobs. These aren't pictures of 8 year olds or even 12 year olds. If you went to a public pool you'd see about the same thing.

Try going to American Apparel's website and looking at clothes for girls. Like This or this. Notice that by mousing over the picture it blows it up nice and big for you, it really helps when you need to look at that 7 year old's camel toe.

From Jailbait.

So what's the problem with Jailbait? Well Anderson Cooper doesn't like the idea of perverts trading pictures of underage girls to masturbate to. The problem is that these pictures are not child porn, but when collected and posted by perverts, suddenly it seems a lot more like child porn. Legally it is not.

Reddit is all about free speech and for the freedom of anyone to say anything they want or to make a community based on anything they want, so long as they don't break any laws.

Censorship
So Anderson Cooper and Sunny Hostin think that reddit should kill Jailbait, and they also attack other subreddits for showing pictures of creepy things like dead bodies. Again, these things aren't illegal, they are just offensive to some people.

Since some people find them offensive, we should censor them. Anderson Cooper thinks Jailbait should be banned as well as /r/gore. But where does it end?

A lot of people would think /r/Atheism is offensive. It's simply a community for Atheists. One of the top posts on /r/atheism at the moment is a link to this article about a couple in Oregon who were found guilty of manslaughter after they denied their child standard medical treatment as part of their religion. Many people would find this community to be offensive along with /r/Islam.

From Atheism

Still others might be offended by /r/socialism, /r/anarchism, or /r/teaparty. As a non-idiot, I find the content on Teaparty pretty offensive. Here's an article that's near the top of /r/teaparty at the moment: Rand Paul: Out-of-control EPA turns everyday life into a federal crime.

I can be offended, but that doesn't mean I want to strike that content out of existence. It's called Freedom of Speech. It's not freedom to say things that aren't too unpopular or creepy. For fucks sake.

Does anyone else remember when CNN rode the first Gulf War to fame, showing clips of smart bombs hitting vents and camel butts in Iraq? The top post on /r/Gore at this moment is a video of a teenager being stoned to death in Iraq. See the distinction? When a TV network does it, it's journalism. When it's some guy linking to youtube, it's offensive.

You know what I find offensive? Toddlers in Tiaras. girls as young as five parading around in over-sexualized pageants. It's teaching young girls that the ultimate goal for a woman is to be a sexual object, and it's also surely providing some great fapping material for perverts. But it's on TV, so that's not offensive. But if some creeps post pictures of 17 year old girls in bikinis to a website, it's suddenly child-porn.

Yeah, this is clearly not creepy.

How many perverts look through Facebook pictures of underage girls they personally know? I find that creepier than perverts looking at totally anonymous pictures of girls they don't know. But there's no outrage from Anderson about Facebook hosting child porn.

The most offensive thing about all of this is supposed journalists and a news network endorsing censorship. It's absurd, but a sign of our times. But guess what, I don't want these opinions censored. Why? Cause censorship is bullshit. It's an attempt by those who think they are more moral or better people than the rest of us to control what information we are privy to. They know better. They have all the facts, so us simple folk don't need to hear everything, just the things they want us to hear or see or read.

I proudly say "Fuck that."