soapbox

I’ve never stood in a line for so long before in my life. I haven’t been to concerts with lines for tickets that were that long. When the Star Wars and the Matrix sequels came out, I had friends who wanted to stand in line and got tickets for me.

But today I stood in line for 6 hours, behind about 5,000 other people, to get a shot. It’s a very anticlimactic thing too. Jab, squeeze, done. 6 hours of waiting for a 2 second thing.

The good news though is that in another week or so once the immunity fully develops, my students can sneeze on me all they want and I don’t have to worry about getting Sarah sick. Kirsten can let coworkers sneeze on her. Sarah can let other kids sneeze on her. Gabriella can let other au pairs sneeze on her. So basically if H1N1 turns into a really big thing, we’ll be amazingly happy we stood in line for six hours. If it fizzles out, it’ll be the worst use of a weekend ever.

(Of course, one of the best ways to help it fizzle out is to get vaccinated, so get the shots once you have the chance. That might not be until December, but get it in December then.)

I don’t know that there’s much more to say about it than that.. The 1918 flu was also also a H1N1 strain and predominantly killed people our age by making our immune systems overwork themselves. Young kids, old people, and people with weak immune systems all made it through. The healthy young adults were the ones who died.

The good news though is that this isn’t a H5N1 avian flu. Only a few people have ever been infected with it but the fatality rate is between 60 and 100%.

Is it mean if I think it’s funny? My students have weekly quizzes on Thursdays and this week’s quiz has a lot of true or false questions. The funny thing is that the answers are all false. (Or true, all one or the other, just in case some student happens to read this.)

If the trues and falses are distributed more or less evenly, you can feel good about the fact that you’re answering T to 50% and F to 50%. I think having a strong bias will really make people have to stand by their knowledge. It’ll be really interesting to see how many people switch their answers back and forth.

Two sports predictions:

First, that in the next 10-20 years, the NFL will be dramatically different from the game/institution that we know today, due to (long-overdue) attention to brain trauma. Concussions will be viewed the way we now view asbestos, where the blithe and dangerous attitude of times gone by will be unfathomable.

Secondly, that Tim Donaghy will eventually be viewed in the same light as Jose Canseco, and that’s meant very complimentarily. Canseco was once a ‘roided-up crackpot who spouted off random and crazy accusations but in the intervening decade or two has been proving correct on pretty much all counts. As for Donaghy, I present you this:

I worked a Knicks game in Madison Square Garden with him on February 26, 2007. New York shot an astounding 39 free throws that night to Miami’s paltry eight. It seemed like Stafford was working for the Knicks, calling fouls on Miami like crazy. Isiah Thomas was coaching the Knicks, and after New York’s four-point victory, a guy from the Knicks came to our locker room looking for Stafford, who was in the shower. He told us that Thomas sent him to retrieve Stafford’s home address; apparently, Stafford had asked the coach before the game for some autographed sneakers and jerseys for his kids. Suddenly, it all made sense.

Okay, no big deal, a ref gave away one game in exchange for some stuff from a Hall-of-Famer, right? Check this out:

In the pregame meeting prior to Game 6, the league office sent down word that certain calls-calls that would have benefitted the Lakers — were being missed by the referees. This was the type of not-so-subtle information that I and other referees were left to interpret. After receiving the dispatch, Bavetta openly talked about the fact that the league wanted a Game 7.

“If we give the benefit of the calls to the team that’s down in the series, nobody’s going to complain. The series will be even at three apiece, and then the better team can win Game 7,” Bavetta stated.

I mean, wow. Not even the Godfather himself (NBA Commish David Stern) will be able to cover this up, even if he sues both Amazon.com and Random House.

P.S. I have spent the last couple hours trying to figure out whether this is an april fools prank or not, given deadspin’s spotty history. But I think this is legit, it just makes too much sense.

Nick sent me an email this morning that there’s new Woodger in the world, a bun now out of the oven.

So congratulations on the birth of Maddison. 7 lbs 15 oz isn’t a petite baby either. It’s just the way you want them!

A couple older relatives and friends of mine recently got burned by a spam/malware/phishing issue that traces back to desktopdate d0t net. Does anybody have any experience/knowledge of this?

I’ve found this but at least one of the people involved claims to have not clicked on the email, but still had many invites issued on their behalf to the contents of their address book.

I try to avoid saturating the blog with too many sports-related posts, but honestly dactyl is probably more desperate than Steve Phillips these days, so oh well.

So, on to item #1, Brett Favre. I’m not even going to discuss his million-iteration retire/unretire cycle or the tediousness thereof, I’m just going to say that I’m really glad to not have been a Green Bay fan and that I’m not currently a VIkings fan. Favre is a gunslinger, a Jake Plummer who won a Super Bowl, the kind of guy who can win a game with a great play one game and throw 4 stupid INTs the next game – oh wait, he’s done that several times. This past game against the Steelers falls into the latter category, where just a couple plays after Adrian Peterson destroyed Steelers DB William Gay and illustrated who should have the ball with the game on the line, Favre gave the game away with a dumb scramble/fumble. Live by the Favre, die by the Favre, but it just irritates me when Saint Brett’s faults are ignored/explained away…

Which brings us to the second- and third-most overrated QBs in the NFL, Eli Manning and Ben Roethlisberger, you decide the order. Ben is really really talented but does stupid shit just often enough for him to lose my respect, and Eli just sucks, but they fluked into good teams that played into their individual strengths. The football aspect of this is that the Giants will actually be much better off if the NFC championship game is AT New Orleans, so that Eli doesn’t have to deal with NY winter weather – Brees has the arm to deal with windy/bad weather, and playing in the Superdome will actually work to even the playing field.

Item #4: I fully recognize that any time a team becomes a “dynasty”, a lot of people start to dislike them. Easy to root for the underdog, but once you become the favorite, then you’re irritating/arrogant/etc. And as such, it isn’t surprising to me that a lot of people don’t like the Patriots and thus when they destroyed Tennessee a couple weeks ago (58-0, ouch) there was much self-righteous pontificating and blowharding, decrying the running up of the score and the return to the bad sportsmanship of ‘07. Now, I’m not going to defend the general concept of running up the score, or the intent of Belichek and Brady to humiliate their opponents, but from a strictly football angle, those arguments miss one key element… the Patriots’ defense really really sucks. It was weak in ‘06, really bad in ‘07, and with injuries and trading Seymour, it’s not great this year. And this is what every critique of “running up the score” ignores, that the point of scoring 50 points a game is to (a) keep your own defense off the field as much as possible and (b) to prevent the opposing offense from gaining their rhythm. Additionally, if you can influence the playcalling of the other team into taking more risks (so as to be able to keep up) then you gain an additional advantage, especially if the other team’s roster isn’t designed for a quick-strike/high-scoring pace.

Anyway, that’s no defense for the Pats, I admit that WonderBoy and SuperCoach can be grating, but from purely football grounds, I totally get where they’re coming from. Up until the Titans game, Brady had looked pretty rusty/downright sucky, and so it also made sense for him to get in some more “practice”.

Is it hypocritical to trash Favre, Roethlisberger, and Eli Manning while praising Brady? probably, but that’s the prerogative of being a sports fan right? Objectivity is for PBS/NPR.

P.S. Great quote from my buddy Greg, huge Packers fan. “[Favre] has AP and gives the game away. He is who we think he is. Roethlisberger is him [Favre] 2.0, just as annoying, will be worshipped by home fans despised by others. one difference is that favre is actually pretty smart”

P.P.S. Tomlinson is DONE. Unlike last year where SD didn’t give him as many opportunities as he was used to, and tried to rest his legs by giving Sproles more work, the past couple games Norv has given LT multiple goal-line cracks, only to see the Visored One get stuffed. If you play fantasy fb and can get 80 cents on the dollar, sell! That said, do I blame SDs struggles on LT? no – blame Norv Turner. This is an amazingly talented team hamstrung by coaching that is sub-par both motivationally and strategically. And yes, Andy Reid deserves firing just as much as does Norv. Philly fans, I defy you to convince me otherwise.