Happy fluff day

As I have the three day Labor Day weekend, I figure this is a good as time as any for this post. It seems like school starts for most kids earlier in August every year and I realized it happens because there are so many holidays during the year, school needs to start in August and end in June to allow for them.

I started thinking about this and this chart reflects my opinion of this:



For me the only days I consider a holiday are Jan 1, Memorial Day, July 4 and election day. As far as I am concerned every other day should be considered normal as far as the US is concerned. Yes, I am talking about December 25 (religious day for those who choose that belief) too and any day named after one person or 44.

On the calendar I use at work, I actually cut out all of what I call the fluff holidays so it appears to my satisfaction.

I also try my best to make sure I am not at work on my birthday after what happened one year where I got stuck for there 11 hours without even having a chance to take a break or last year where I got a two inch long paper cut on my face. However having it late in the year has on multiple occasions, including this year, forced me to work on it since my vacation is used up by then.

Draft day

This Sunday I head to my brother-in-law's house for the league live draft for fantasy football. I get to see people only once per year and that is a good thing because there is one person there I would want to punch and another I would bitch slap still pissed off about what happened on 2007. As you probably can guess, I am the asshole of my league. It was probably a good thing that I was very sick on draft day last year since it kept me from getting out of line.

When I first got hooked up to the internet, I would play any fantasy game that I could find and play other sports related handicapping games. With other things happening on my life and on two occasions them affecting the final outcome, I do not play as often. I also stopped playing fantasy baseball since leagues no longer use the Sabermetrics format which I like. Just about every league now uses batting average and home runs and include stolen bases and pitcher strikeouts where I strongly prefer using on base percentage and slugging average and not have stolen bases or strikeouts factor.

I also don't play in public on line leagues with 9 strangers since 2 or 3 of them usually stop caring about their team one month into the season.

As you can imagine, I have had success:



This chart does not include one handicapping game which I will explain later.

The five most significant fantasy sports players I have dealt with:

5. Barry Bonds. SF OF- 2002. Not the year he hit 73 home runs but the one after. His on base percentage and slugging keyed the team I had my first title with.

4. Tom Brady. NE QB - 2007. Knowing he finally got decent wide receivers, I planned on getting him in the third round that year as most people pegged him for the 4th or 5th round. He set the NFL record for touchdowns that year. If it was not for questionable player decisions and lazy ownership by other members in one league (punch and bitch slap), I would have won both leagues I was in that year. Note: Being at a memorable convention one weekend created a situation where I had to make a player decision early Sunday morning and I made the wrong one not knowing if a questionable player was going to play. Had I made the correct one, I would have won the league anyway.

3. Steve McNair Ten QB - 2003. Drafted the number one player by someone else in one league I was in, I got him in the 6th round in another league. His co MVP year allowed me to win my first football title.

2. Mushin Muhammad Car WR 2004. Needing another back up wide receiver, I drafted him in the 11th round. Though he was the fifth one I drafted, he turned out to be the best one in the league that year and one of the main reasons I won in 2004.

1. Scott Podsednik Mil OF 2003. ESPN had a game called Diamond Daily where people paid $20 and picked one player a day out of a pool of one third of the available teams. Every month $2,000 each went to the person whose players had the most home runs, runs batted in and batting average among the over 6,000 entries they had.

In September that year, I had players who were getting hits all month and in spite of Sammy Sosa going 0 for 5 one day, I had a chance to win the batting average portion. Since I had the minimum number of at bats needed to qualify for the batting average portion, I decided to not play players for the last week. On the last Saturday of the month, I was in third place and put Scott Podsednik in for Sunday since he had a favorable matchup and was planning on removing him if the people above me had their average fall below mine and I was in first.

I was at a convention that Saturday and did not get a chance to look at a computer until it was too late. I found out the two people above me had players who did not do well on Saturday and I was in first going into the last day of the month. Scott Podsednik went 4 for 5 that Sunday and I won $2,000. For what it was worth, I still would have won had I not played him but had he gone 1 for 5 or worse, I would have lost.

Gencon "cos play"

At the science fiction conventions I have attended, I have many times seen groups of people in costume as a group. I've seen costumed groups depicting members of the cast of Blazing Saddles, Mortal Combat, Guitar Hero, and the movie 300 and have seen people dressed as members of a group like Stormtroopers, the Stonecutters from the Simpsons episode, Ghostbusters, Cobra Command (GI Joe), or as in the picture I posted last November, Nazis. I even saw a group of people in military riot gear conduct an intensive military style sweep of the area around the convention hotel.

As I arrived in downtown Indianapolis 5:30 Friday night, I noticed a large amount of traffic around the convention center even for rush hour. When I saw people with flags directing cars to parking lots and the clothes people were wearing, I realized what was happening. Eventually we got to our parking lot for the hotel and when we went out to dinner, the crowd was mixed with gamers and people wearing blue shirts with numbers on them.

The percentages in the chart are an estimate based on what I saw:



In clockwise order: Addai-RB, Vinatieri-K, Gonzalez-WR, Wayne-WR, Freeney-DE, Harrison-WR (no longer with team), Sanders-S, Saturday-C, Clark-TE, Manning-QB

I also saw 6 purple shirts, 3 with 28 (Peterson), 2 with 93 (P. Williams) and one with 69 (Allen).

For what it is worth, the Vikings beat the Colts in the preseason game 13-3.

Back

With the pain and spasms I have had in my left leg the previous couple of weeks being at the computer long enough to create a chart was not plausible.

Last weekend, I went to Gencon Indy for the 7th straight year. In the previous six years I would mainly stick around and watch merch tables and do not much else since playing Scrabble and the burnout from that made me not interested.

Since I played an interesting board game in July with friends, my interest in other games now exists and I went there as a customer. However, I realized that due to financial and logistical considerations, I need to be selective on what games I get. No matter how cool the game might be, if no one else is interested in playing it, it will just sit and gather dust.

Though I did purchase one game last weekend, there were others I was wanting to get but decided against. The following chart explains:

better late than never

As many of you know, I have been having problems with my left knee since last fall. I did have my knee scoped last Wednesday afternoon. I finally got the chance to sit at the computer and do this chart:



I decided to expand the time frame for last Wednesday and Thursday to show more detail. Fortunately pain pills (which I have not taken in over 10 years, allowed me to get to sleep on the first two nights.

Showing my "normal" side

I have seen and experienced many interesting things within my group of friends and in the world or sci-fi conventions. Sometimes the descriptions of what happened and in some instances what I have turned down would be only seen by those who enter certain stores where my daughter would not be allowed. So a thing like seeing two people dressed as Buddy Christ boffing (battling using foam swords) at a con is not out of the ordinary and actually rather mild.

At a sci-fi convention in 2004 shortly after I started to really know people well, a question was posed within our group of about 15 people who is the most normal and it was unanimous that I was. I get a laugh out of people (and occasionally a worried look) who know me at work or within my family when I say that. Being older than many, having a kid, not being a true computer person (talented enough to find a job in that industry), straight, having little artistic or musical talent, and mostly a sports fan are the things that make me such.

It rarely causes conflict since I escape my normal world with fandom. I usually don't want to talk sports or anything within my life there. When I am at a con, I don't care about what happens in sports and have to catch up the Monday after.

One thing that a difference shows is literature. When I was in grade school, I would read books about science, math, or sports. I had no interest in stories and having a test about a novel every other Monday in high school was the most difficult academic thing I had to endure there. Except for a period in the mid 80s where I read every Dr Who novel I could find, I never cared for fiction. Since I got a full time job in late 1987, I have read two books and one because I made a promise to people who were awesome enough to throw me a surprise 42nd birthday party. At conventions and at my friend's houses I see a large number of novels. They read them, I don't.

I do watch movies and tv and my friends' interest in certain ones and music about them have made me watch them even if they were based on books I would neither have the time nor interest to read. Harry Potter is one of them. Though I am not interested in reading 7 books, I do have the time to invest to see movies and for me it is ok that the movie will not tell the whole story as written since 2 and 1/2 hours can't cover 700 pages of material. The two occasions where I saw a novel from high school turned into a movie, I was disappointed in how it was adapted and in the Natural, upset they changed the ending of the story.

I knew something significant happened at the end of the sixth HP book. Whenever people in the chat room started to talk about it, I would conveniently need to leave since I was going to find out when I saw the movie. On Tuesday at the FuMP (www.theFuMP.com) there was not only a song based about what happened in the movie but in the description was listed how it did along with a statement that everyone knows what happened in the movie just like the secret in Citizen Kane. I was pissed off. I posted a comment stating the people who have been working for the past 20+ years might not have the time to read books and someone else commented about the same thing.

I also found little agreement from those in the chat room since they by being younger and into literature, were able to read all the books and surprise from them that I never read any of the Lord of the Rings novels either. After reading the Hobbit as a Junior in high school, I would never consider reading LOTR.

Out of curiosity I asked 20 people who have a full time job if they knew about the ending to the sixth book:



The 5 percents cover one who correctly guessed at it, one who knew about it but was not sure in which book it happened and one who not only was able to answer the question but provided unsolicited detail about the explanation given in the seventh book.

16 of the 20 knew Rosebud was a sled.

Geeks in love

As I stated in a post a month ago, I was in the bridal party for my best friend. They met through something called Nerds at Heart which was designed for people to meet people who define themselves as one. Here is a picture of the bridal party:



Last weekend, at a convention, another of my closest friends, Luke, proposed to his girlfriend, Sara while performing a song he wrote about her last year. Since I knew this was happening, I decided to drive 400 miles one way to attend the convention to see it. Knowing what was going to happen, I had the duty of recording it as seen here:



Picture taken by Baron Dave Romm

That got me thinking (yes, as dangerous a sentence as I can write) ... that when Luke and Sara met, they lived in Wisconsin and Tennessee and they are not the only long distance relationship I have seen in our group of friends over the past 8+ years.

Thinking about that I came up with this:



There is no way I am going to state who or how many relationships factored into this chart. Considering there has to be people from 20 different states in our chatroom, I am surprised that the in state percentage was not lower.