Sometimes your best isn't enough (sports voodoo edition)

My in-laws are from the Pittsburgh area and, therefore, Steelers fans.  The Steelers have been terrible this year, but found themselves at the beginning of this week 5-6 and facing the 5-6 Ravens in Baltimore.  If the Steelers could win this game, the rest of their schedule was relatively easy (compared to that of the Ravens and the 5-6 Titans) and they would have a good chance to go to the playoffs.

So, like any good son-in-law, I wrote to Bill Simmons (the Sports Guy), who does weekly football picks against the spread, and who is having a terrible year**, to pick against the Steelers.  The stars aligned, and he incorporated reader e-mails into his picks this week (scroll down to Ravens (-3) over Steelers), and it seemed like happiness would reign in Pittsburgh***.

So, of course what happened is that the Steelers covered the spread, but lost the game.  I am truly in awe of Billy Zima's stink this year.  

Well... for the sake of my in-laws, at least the Penguins lead their division in the NHL.


** As of this writing, Simmons is 75-97-6; just how bad is this?  Well, if you were to flip a coin to make your decision for all 172 games that weren't a push, you would expect to do better than 75-97 about 94.6% of the time.  That's not "statistically significantly worse than a coin flip at the 0.05 alpha level" bad, but close.

*** Well, until being bounced out of the first round of the playoffs, because they're really not very good.  The fact that the Steelers could even sniff the playoffs this late this year says more about the wacky state of the NFL than the quality of the Steelers.

Movember

Two weeks of growth, two minutes to cut off

The week after returning home from running usability sandboxes at Information on Demand, I decided to shave only parts of my face in support of Movember.  It started to itch the day before Thanksgiving, so it's gone today.

Flibbertigibbet (something new every day)

I'm in the middle of John Braine's Room at the Top, where I encounter the use of flibbertigibbet, and immediately begin wondering whether it inspired or was inspired by "Maria" in The Sound of Music.  Its use in "Maria" comes two years after the novel, and I also learn that it's a Middle English word.

After retiring from the Auror Office...

...Harry embarked on a second career on the musical stage.  He and Ginny were particularly well received in a turn as the Thénardiers, with Ginny's rendition of "Master of the Wand" netting her a best supporting Olivier.  It had to be returned, however, when the Ministry discovered Ginny had accidentally Imperius-cursed a hall full of muggles during a particularly energetic performance.

Compiègne

In the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the... eighteenth year?  Drat you, Bismarck, for putting Europe off pace to end World War I in 1911.

Tricks in your treats

Parents are warned to examine their children's Halloween candy for needles, blades, and drugs, but I wasn't prepared for real estate advertising:

This is:

1. Leftover promotional candy from work that the person gave out on Halloween
2. A brilliantly insane ad campaign, because the people receiving the candy cannot actually buy real estate (granted, their parents should see it)
3. Unintentionally hilarious because I keep seeing two "t"'s instead of "rt" in the surname
4. Some combination of all of the above

 I vote for #4.

Dilemma (Orson Scott Card division)

You may have heard of the controversy around the upcoming movie Ender's Game.

Here's my dilemma: Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, at their core, are all about man's inhumanity to other sentient life due to a massive misunderstanding of the Other.  These works have messages that should be celebrated, and run completely counter to Orson Scott Card's publicly stated beliefs.  It seems to me that we should definitely read and discuss the first two books (get them out of the library), and educate the populace to be like Ender, not like Card.