A couple of sports notes

I have been asked who I want to win in the football playoffs and I tell them the playoffs ended last month in week 16 after the Misfit Demons who were dominant in October and November came up short when it counted most. Once the person realizes I am talking fantasy football which I care about more than the NFL, the question is changed to cover the next couple of weeks. I then refer to a couple of my former posts which states I only root for the Bears 63 regular season games out of 64 and another one with this chart which I made a couple of years ago about who I root for in playoffs:



So this means I want the Bears to win this weekend but lose to Atlanta in the conference final. I also explain that since the Bears are 4-1 on artificial turf and 7-4 on natural grass, 1-2 their last 3 natural grass games, they would be better off playing in Atlanta rather than hosting Green Bay. Of course this assumes that they will be able to beat Seattle this Sunday. Though they will not play their best, it should still be good enough to beat Seattle.

Now on to something I find disturbing in the NHL. Starting with the 1999-2000 season, the league changed the way they determine regular season points. They started to give a point to teams that lost a game in the five minute overtime period in an effort to encourage more offensive play. When the league resumed play in 2005 after the lockout canceled the 2004-05 season, they added a shootout to ensure that every game had a winner if no team scored in the 5 minute overtime period which was changed to play 4 on 4. Teams that lost in either the five minute overtime or in a shootout would get one point.

This means that no NHL game can end in a tie and that a team's regular season record is stated in a W-L-OTL format where a team gets 2 points for a win and one point for an overtime (or shootout) loss. I have heard way too many people lately (including announcers) who do not include overtime (or shootout) losses in referencing a teams record still thinking that they are ties though no game can end in one. After Sunday's game the Chicago Blackhawks are 23-18-3. Long time announcer Pat Foley, whose broadcasts I have enjoyed for years, incorrectly stated they are 5 games about .500. They have won 23 and lost 21 but got a point for 3 of them. a .500 ball club wins as many games as it loses like the Flyers did last year when they went 41-34-7.

I realize I am being picky and CDO (like OCD but with letters in alphabetical order as they should be).

I'm not a girl

After a difficult Thursday trying to explain why I can't afford to join a weight loss program which left me hopeless and shaking, I did agree to join Weight Watchers at the coaxing of Carrie under the belief she would not stop getting on my case until I agreed to join. (I also realized that if I don't lose the weight, I will have to pay extra in life insurance costs anyway so this is more an investment to prevent me from spending extra money)

After weiging in at 279.8 lb (without shoes or work shirt), it was time to listen to someone who lost 65 lb 30 years ago and has kept it off since. As expected, nothing I heard today nor anything I read in the materials provided new information about what a person needs to do to improve their weight situation (intake, output, consistency). The thing I found useful was what to do when things failed to work one day or one week as those events were the things that ended my past attempts.

What Weight Watchers has done was provide a point system to make calculations easier for members rather than going by calories or telling people what they must eat. Using their points calculator, I was allowed 54 points per day with 49 extra to use during the week. From using the calculator to check the foods I eat, it comes to 35-45 calories per point depending on the item except for fresh fruits and most vegtables which don't have any points.

I figure with how active I am at work to use the 49 extra on work days and will start every week on Saturday for two reasons. One, if I work the weekend, I can spread out the extra points evenly instead of being stuck with none on the weekend. Two, I can use the extra points for two weeks for conventions so I can use one week's of extra points on Friday and the following week's on Saturday.

What I found confusing was their sticker I got in my new weekly book. It said I have 42 points per day rather than the 54 I got in their calculator. After things were done and I asked someone there, it was determined that my profile was not switched from the female default.

Now I just have to find a way to get the ipod to log in to their app so I can keep the points calculator in the car and use the ipod at home and do what I can to make this program work.

the 5 easy ones.

After a December which for me as with most people involved more food than normal including one day where I consumed 5,000 calories, the result on the scale this Monday was expected.

If I want to get to the point where I can renew my life insurance without being reclassified as high risk, I need to start to lose weight.

As I did in 2008 2009 (two years ago) I started on Monday to eat what an active 200lb man my age and height does which is about 2,750 calories per day. For the heck of it, when I got to work each morning, I stepped on the scale and this was the result:



This is also what happened in 2009 during the first week of the year. I also then got to the point where no amount of fruits or vegtables will suffice and I had to get a Wendy's double cheese burger. Shortly after that, when the weight loss stopped happening and after Marscon put some pounds back, I got frustrated and stopped eating properly. This year, I need to be smarter about what I am doing.

Analyzation of the unexpected

Tonight on a frozen field in Minnesota, the Chicago Bears clinched the 2010 division title. Had I been a bookie, I would have lost a lot of money expecting them to win at the most 6 games and made odds reflect that opinion.

How did this happen? They stayed healthy unlike the last couple of seasons where players were getting injured constantly. They have also benefitted from timely injuries to key oppponent players.



The large X designate all pro players who were out. The positions in the other column represent key all pro players who were not in the lineup.

The 4 losses came against teams that were healthy and did not have a key player get hurt during the game.

Score radio personality Dan Bernstein said it best early in the season: The Bears are a team that is decent enough to win a division title if all the pieces fall into place. In 2010, that most definitely happened.

crunching numbers

This year the yahoo fantasy league added points against to the stats and made them retroactive to the previous years in the league. This allowed me the ability to more easily examine the points scored against players in a season and discovered an error I made about 2007 in a post I made in August.



One more point against per game than I initially determined in 2007 and I included 2010.

I also discovered that my 2007 season was not the worst as far as points scored against than expected:



Though I did not even have the worst schedule in 07 what bothered me was that I by far had the most points scored and deserved a fate similar to the one I had in 2010. The person who set the record this year had the worst total in the league.

Sith lord fantasy football

I have noticed that with many things in my life my best performances happen when I am angry including bowling, golf, and Scrabble. I am guessing my anger overcomes my nerves and gives me focus. Of course there are times when the anger created problems rather than success.

In 2007, I had the best team by far in the league but only finished 6-8. I lost one game and a playoff berth by making a wrong decision about an injured player which I made hung over in Akron, OH at 9AM after a very memorable party the night before.

The pattern of 4 people in the league having injured, inactive or bye week players in their lineup against one other team really got me upset. When they played my team with a fully active lineup, they would have their high score for the year. In the last week, one team purposely held players out of his lineup to prevent me from making the playoffs. Had I not woke up on the day of the 2008 draft violently ill in an Indianapolis hotel room and had to stop twice on I-65 to vomit, I probably would have started a fight.

I decided to instead take out my anger on the league. In 2009, I won my division title and league championship and last Sunday clinched the division title once again having the best team. Here is the standings: (I deleted the names of the other teams.)



For the 4th straight year, my opponents are scoring more against me than the rest of the league but by only 1 point per week this year. That is why my record is at my personal best 10-3. (I am playing the person who held players out of his lineup in 07. Right now, everyone on my team is on the bench.)

When I won the league title last year, I was not real excited being more satisfied from exacting revenge than happy. I am feeling the same way now. After the worry about losing the two weeks before clinching the division title I am comtemplating my resoning for continuing and considering no longer playing just like I did with Scrabble four years ago.

Rockin like Weird AL

On his website, Weird Al Yankovic was asked about his music appearing in either Guitar Hero or Rack Band and though he was interested stated neither Activision nor Harmonix (comanies that produce the game series) were interested.

Earlier in the day I was asked about his parodies appearing in the game and I stated that since the music was written by other people it would be very difficult to obtain the rights to produce the parody version. Personally I would really enjoy if either Hardware Store or Albuquerque (my two favorite original Weird Al songs) or any other of his original songs made the game but most people only know the parodies and would not care for his original material. In a post in November 2009 I explained that about half his released material are original songs and I doubt either company would put the effort into creating them for the game.

That got me thinking .... How many songs available for Rock Band have been parodied by Weird Al and how many have appeared in his polkas? The answer is 48 total. I turned the results into a chart:



In his song Bedrock Anthem, Weird Al parodied both Under the Bridge and Give it Away and since they both are available in the game, I counted them both. Also, Enter Sandman (available in a polka medley) and Give It Away though appearing on the disk for Rock Band and Rock Band 2 respectively were among 10 songs that were not allowed to transfer to the hard drive to play in Rock Band 3 due to licensing issues.