matthearn.com

Ah, weekends.

Weekends are hard, as you probably are aware. I was a good little boy, staying under 2000 calories every day last week, until Friday when I think I topped out at 3500, but I had also lifted weights and bicycled 10 miles that day, so I didn’t feel too bad. Then we had a party on Saturday, and watched the Super Bowl on Sunday (more on that in a moment), and suddenly I’d blown through a conservatively-estimated 384,014 calories in about 36 hours. Glucose is a hell of a drug. As is rye whisky.

I hate weekends. But I also love weekends.

Last week was a pretty solid week from a training perspective; aside from the missed swim on Monday, I hit all my scheduled sessions, including two of weights, a run, a stationary bike, a road bike, and a good hard swim. So while I’m disappointed in how I handled the weekend, I’m satisfied with my activity levels for the week in general.

As to the football: a couple of good commercials (I didn’t think the Nationwide one was nearly so egregious as to warrant the massive overreaction; I’ll concede maybe the Superbowl isn’t the best time to trot out your “dead kids” commercial, though I’m not sure what the best time would actually be), a disappointing first quarter, and then tha game got 2 hype brah. The consensus among my Facebook friends was that Pete Carroll made a shitty playcall, so I was amused to see that the consensus among the national media was that Russell Wilson screwed up. Maybe he made a poor throw, although I’m much more likely to give a little leeway to a guy who’s making split-second decisions while possibly suffering the effects from a concussion 2 suffered in the AFC title game. I’m not likely to give any leeway to the coach who had 15-20 seconds to figure out a play from the 1 yard line and picked something other than “give the ball to my unstoppable running back.”

I thought Katy Perry did an admirable job, and I thought Adele Dazeem did fine with the National Anthem, even though she was a little too self-indulgent, though certainly no worse than we’ve heard in the past.

The plan for this week is two swims, two bikes, a run, and two solid weight training seshes, and hopefully still stay under 2000 calories every day, and try to be a good boy on the weekend, though I’m not holding out much hope.

It occurred to me that writing these things first thing in the morning and talking about the previous day is kinda dumb; it’s better for me to post them in the evening and talk about that day, so that’s what I’ma be doin’ from here on out. I also realized that links aren’t getting posted to Facebook and Twitter, so I’m fixing that; if this is the first post you see, you might wanna go back to the first day of this week and, you know, catch up. ‘Cause it’s getting real around here.

We had a last minute lunchtime meeting at the office today so I wasn’t entirely sure if I’d be able to get over to the Y for my usual swim, but that bad boy let out a few minutes after noon and I sprinted for the door. Still a bit pressed for time, I decided to just swim until I either reached 1500 yards (60 lengths of the short course pool) or started to drown.

Something that bit me in the ass a little bit during my International-distance (aka Olympic) triathlon from last August was the fact that I always breathe out of the left side when I swim. What I hadn’t anticipated was that we were going clockwise around the 1500 meter course, which meant that I couldn’t see the buoys I was meant to be passing unless I stopped to pick my head up and glance over to that side. It wasn’t a fatal issue (not nearly as badly as the current that added 10 minutes to my usual 1500m time, or the fact that I’d been eating horribly in the week prior which bit me hard while biking through the hills of northeast Maryland), but a bit concerning. I’d read of folks having issues during a swim because the waves came from one side and they couldn’t breathe to that side without inhaling water, which would be really bad if it happened to me and I wasn’t trained to breathe to the other side at all. Plus, it’s just good swimming form to breathe every 3 or 5 (or even 7) strokes because it helps keep your stroke more ambidextrous.

So I decided that the fall and winter I’d teach myself to breathe to both sides. Actually, the hard part wasn’t learning to breathe to the right; after getting used to rotating properly to that side (I have a tendency to under-rotate anyway, so this was a good thing to get used to), I can swim more or less endlessly breathing to just one side or the other. The part that was killing me was breathing 33% fewer times over a given distance, which reduced the oxygen available, and increased the carbon dioxide I had to get rid of. At first I could barely swim one length of the pool before having to switch back to breathing every two strokes.

When I first began training myself to swim freestyle in 2013 (after completing a couple of triathlons using nothing but breast stroke), I found a program online called “Zero to 1650 in 6 Weeks” (a “swimmer’s mile” is 1650 yards, or roughly 1500 meters). It aims to take someone who can barely swim 100 yards to being able to swim that full mile, swimming just three times a week. I could only allocate 2 swims a week, so I spread it out over 9 weeks, but it worked a treat. I went from being able to barely swim 4 lengths of the pool, to handling a full 66-length mile in under 40 minutes. After struggling to add bilateral breathing to my regular workouts, I figured I’d go back to the 0-to-1650 well.

It worked fantastically, even fast than six weeks. After completing the 1000 yard week, I found I had solved the problem; it was just a matter of setting a reasonable pace, and not stopping. The next trick is going to be improving my speed. While one of my goals is completing an Ironman (which starts with a 2.4 mile swim), my preferred distance will always be sprint races, because you can bang them out in a morning and be home in time for brunch, and the training requirements are much more reasonable. The guys who are competitive at the sprint distance can swim a true half-mile in under 10 minutes; it takes me closer to 18. This is obviously somewhere I can improve a great deal. (The same of course goes for my cycling and running, but swimming is where I’m least comfortable).

Today I managed 1500 yards in a bit over 31 minutes. Next week I’ll probably work on some speed drills to see if I can keep breathing every three strokes will pushing hard with good form.

Yesterday’s activities: 30 chins, 30 pushups, about 3 minutes of planks throughout the day.
Today’s activities: 1500 yards swim, 30 chins, 30 pushups, about 2.5 minutes of planks.

What I eated yesterday: I polished off a leftover pesto pork chop for lunch, with vegetables; dinner was eggs, ham, turkey bacon, and a nice bed of spinach. I was trying to avoid carbs but couldn’t resist a few crescent rolls.
And today: Lunch was the last 1.5 pork chops, with some broccoli. For dinner, Sarah threw a big pork roast in the crock pot with apples and sweet potatoes, and there were green beans as well. (The kids also had mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, I couldn’t resist having a little of that as well.)

Today’s weight: 230 (-1)

So here’s the good news: I’m back! For the foreseeable future, I intend fairly frequent updates to this jaun so that I can keep you all in stitches and possibly also change your life, brah.

Here’s the bad news: the basic underlying reason that my posts stopped is unchanged, namely, I’m insanely busy with a bunch of crap that’s not particularly interesting or funny. I think I promised some time back that this wouldn’t turn into a fitness blog (because nobody wants to read fitness blogs, even fitness bloggers), but in the interest of self-accountability…I’m turning this thing, at least for a while, into a fitness blog.

The reason for that is that I always seem to get tantalizing close to my goal, but then willpower comes into play and I don’t get there. My goal is not insignificant; I essentially want to look like this fine fellow:

I’ve been saying for a few years that I want to have one summer where I wander around the pool in a ridiculously scant bathing suit with abs a-rippling, looking like Daniel Craig’s taller and infinitely prettier brother. And every year I fall short, usually because I set up conflicting step-goals and screw myself up (usually I try to “recompose” my body instead of just cutting fat, so I don’t lose any fat, and I don’t gain any muscle). So this year, all the goals I use to reach the primary goal will align:

1. Straight fat-cutting all the way to the summer. No more of this cut for a bit, then get bored and decide to bulk for a while. I’m going to continue with intermittent fasting and cut way back on simple starches, and limit myself to 2000 calories a day. There will obviously be days I screw this up (my birthday’s a-comin’!), but if I manage to stick to it at *least* 5 days a week, and try to be a reasonably good boy on the weekends, I should do well.
2. Train for an Ironman triathlon, even though I probably won’t complete one this year. The extra cardio burn will also reduce my bodyfat, obviously.


3. Simple weight training program with reduced volume. Still probably more volume than I’ve used when cutting in the past, but definitely less than the hard hitting I was giving my body during the fall (during which I did appear to add noticeable muscle size).


4. 30 chinups and 30 pushups, every single day (as well as some planks totalling somewhere between 60 and 120 seconds). I had started doing a program where you start with 10 on the first day, then add a rep for every day, but realized by the end of the two month program I’d have to find time to bang out 70 chins a day, and since I still can’t do more than about 10 per set, I don’t see how I could fit it all in. 30 or so reps a day is manageable in 4 or 5 sets, particularly as my weight drops a bit and I can add do more reps per set.

My plan is to keep this damn site updated just to keep my mind right, i.e., focused on my goals. This morning I weighed 231 pounds, which was surprisingly low; I would have thought with holiday bloat I’d be pushing closer to 240 or even more. Apparently a 24 hour vomit flu last week and poor appetite ever since has kept my weight down. I haven’t measured my bodyfat because I don’t honestly think there’s a particularly accurate way to do it, but plan to weigh myself frequently; my guess is that I will look pretty damned good at 210 pounds, which is lower than I’ve been since high school. If I get there and I’m not satisfied, I’ll try to go further, but 210 pounds by Memorial Day is the main goal. Memorial Day is early this year, May 25th, which is precisely 20 weeks from today, so I need to lose about a pound a week; more than manageable, even when I’m already pretty close to my goal.

If you’re interested in following this particularly nerdy fitness journey, that’s awesome, ’cause it’s about to get real.

Today’s weight: 231 pounds

Let’s blast through a number of interesting topics on this Freaky Friday:

• I’m always amazed at people who think that stuff happens to them in some kind of vacuum. Folks who associate with douchebags, and then are surprised when those douchebags treat them like crap. Folks who have 4 kids with 3 different partners and wonder why their children act crazy. Folks who do everything in their power to hold up traffic and complain about tailgaters.

  
  I know sometimes cause and effect can be difficult to see, but c’mon, y’all. Please, just stop being dumb. I know it’s a lot to ask, but please try.



• This is a detailed article about Junior Seau, and why the middle linebacker position is the most dangerous in football, and probably in all sports that don’t involve being gored by a bull:
  

  A middle linebacker is taught from his first organized game to use his head and helmet as the first contact point when tackling and when shedding drive blocks of linemen and fullbacks who have the advantage of a running head start.

  
  Terrifying. Then I read this’n:
  

  The N.F.L. is making some of its former players aware of a study that found that they are likely to live longer than men in the general population…The government study found a lower death rate among former N.F.L. players than among men in the general population — the institute had expected to find that 625 members of the group it studied would be dead based on estimates from the general population, but instead found that 334 of the retired players had died. Former players also had a lower rate of cancer-related deaths — 85 players died from the disease, compared with the 146 cancer-related deaths researchers at the institute expected. And the rate of deaths from heart disease was lower, too — 126 players died from heart disease; Niosh had expected 186 deaths.

  
  I guess it shouldn’t be terribly surprising, given the extreme fitness of the skill positions; having a bunch of ex-wide receivers and defensive backs in there is going to make the overall results look pretty good. On the other hand,
  

  The study did not address the cognitive and mental health issues that have recently been linked to repeated blows to the head and that currently dominate the conversation about player safety.

  
  They may live longer, but if their brains are leaking slowly out of their ears, I suspect it’s not a particularly pleasant life.

  
  Note to self: my boys will play tackle football over my cold, stiff corpse.



• While we’re on the subject of sports:
  
  • Sshhh…the Phils have won 5 straight, are a game over .500, and while they’re still in last place in the division they’re only 4 games back. Chase Utley has been taking BP and fielding practice in Clearwater. We got high hopes, y’all.
  
  
  • The Flyers got knocked out, so I haven’t been paying even a lick of attention to hockey. Are the Whalers still in it? How about the North Stars?
  
  
  • I think the Sixers, sadly, have met their match. The Celtics are pretty elderly, but they know exactly how to win. As long as they keep it close, experience will take care of the rest; the best the Sixers can hope for is a 12 point lead with 3 minutes to go. Which can happen if they get hot, but…can they get hot for 3 out of 4 remaining games? At least the Heat seem to be getting manhandled by the Pacers; if LeWade and the Dominos get knocked out in the second round my heart will grow three sizes that day.
  
  
  • The Eagles signed Shady McCoy to a big contract…good for him. I’m sure I’ll watch the Eagles, but football tastes pretty sour since the players seem to average about 3 good post-retirement years before developing Alzheimer’s.
  
  
  • In Soccer news, Liverpool played crap ball since Christmas. Aside from the League Cup win, that is. On our side of the pond, Philadelphia Union is horrible, but the US Men’s squad has won its last three international matches and has a good chance in the Olympics this summer. They have to play France (awfully tough), Colombia (less tough), and North Korea (which has a team consisting entirely of Oompa Loompas). Are you asleep yet? Let’s move on.
  
  
  • In weightlifting news, I squatted 365 and benched 235 today, with which my 410lb deadlift from Wednesday puts me in the “Thousand Pound” club. I may try and bump those numbers next week, because I feel like I can do more, and I’m in an online powerlifting meet, and also the ladies love big squat numbers. Really. Ask any lady.
  
  
  
  
• President Obama came out in favor of gay marriage last week, following the vote by a bunch of rednecks to keep homosexuals second class citizens. This is great and all, but forgive my skepticism for not thinking that white trash voters aren’t likely to be swayed by the black guy in the white house.

That’s about all I’ve got for the day, so have a nice weekend, and stay loose, killers.

I know that 1) it’s not Monday, so what the H am I doing updating on here, and 2) I’m one of maybe three Americans who care a whit about the English Premier League, but I’ve been hearing a lot of people poop all over Luis Suarez this week, and I wanted to get my tuppence in.

Since you (probably) don’t follow the EPL, here’s the lowdown. Uraguayan Luis Suarez, striker for the Liverpool Football (soccer, you dolt) Club, got into a bit of a heated argument with Patrice Evra of Manchester United a few months back wherein apparently Suarez addressed Evra as “Negrito” or “Negro,” depending on the account you read. He says he only did it once, and, oddly enough, meant it in a non-racial way, as in Uruguay apparently saying something like “Hey, negro” is roughly equivalent to you or me saying “C’mon, bro” or “Hey, man.” I read one account where “someone in the know” said it wouldn’t be particularly surprising to hear a Uruguayan say something like it to his own mother, with no disrespect intended. However, Evra took offense, the powers-that-be got involved, and Suarez was widely accused of being a racist, which Suarez and the Liverpool club protested loudly. Suarez later apologized for causing offense, but was handed an 8 game suspension by the Football Association, which he duly served over the last few months, returning to the lineup last week. Evra, to his credit, said that he was willing to shake Suarez’s hand and put the whole thing behind him.

Over the weekend, Liverpool played ManU again, and during the pre-match introductions, Suarez refused to shake Evra’s hand, and predictably the football (sorry, SOCCER) world lost its collective poop. Eventually Suarez and Liverpool had to issue apologies, and sports reporters the world over are saying that Suarez is an embarrassment and should never be allowed to play soccer for Liverpool ever again.

Okay. Let’s construct a straw man, and call him Don. Let’s say Don is a sportswriter for a major sports magazine. And he’s writing a nice little feature about, say, Matthew Jordin (also a straw person), who is notorious for not passing the basketball. And let’s say Don uses the following sentence in his article:

Jordin is notoriously niggardly with his distribution of the ball.

Now, you and I know that the word “niggardly” has nothing to do with “The N-word.” They are etymologically unrelated. But let’s say Jordin doesn’t know that. And he reads the article and accuses Don of being racist. Don knows he’s not racist, but the sports magazine wants to save face, so they tell him he has to apologize. Wanting to keep his job, he posts something to Jordin’s twitter account about how he’s sorry he used the term, it wasn’t intended to be racist, and he won’t use it in future. But Jordin’s not happy, and continues to rile up the rest of the media, who say that Don should have known better, and maybe he actually IS racist, and he should resign. Eventually Don is called into his editor’s office and told he’s suspended for 3 months. After the news is disseminated, Jordin posts something on Twitter about how justice was done, and he forgives Don, and wants to put the whole thing behind him.

3 months later, Don’s covering a local pro-am tournament because it was the only thing he could convince the editors to let him do after coming back to work. He comes across Matthew Jordin, who’s playing a round that day. Jordin sticks out his hand. Now, because Jordin misunderstood the true meaning of the word that Don used, Don has suffered professionally and his reputation is sullied. If you were Don, would you shake the man’s hand? Don’t you think he has a little bit of a right to be angry and unforgiving?

I’m not saying that Suarez shouldn’t have shaken Evra’s hand. In fact, I think he was being rather stupid not to do so, particularly since before the game he told the team manager Kenny Dalglish that he would. If he couldn’t predict the controversy that would result, he’s an idiot, and sometimes you just have to suck up your feelings for the benefit of your team and your career. What I am saying, however, is that perhaps the media and the fans could be a touch more understanding of a man who honestly feels he was wronged by a player and the Football Association, doesn’t believe he did anything racist, and was severely punished anyway. Let’s let this one go, Planet Earth.

I’m becoming less and less of a professional football fan every year, because at heart I am a 77-year-old man that doesn’t like children on his lawn. I don’t like all the celebrating, I don’t like that nobody but Jesus-freaks in Denver run the option anymore, and because I am a complicated fellow, I dislike both the frequent concussions and the complete wussification of the game in the name of eliminating concussions.

Mostly I don’t like that during football season there’s not much baseball on TV.

That being said, I did watch maybe 2/3 of yesterdays Big Game, and have the following comments:

1. I did not watch the National Anthem, out of protest. I’m told that Kelly Clarkson did an admirable job, but since she’s not a brass band, I don’t care. (This protest does not extend to refusing offers to let me sing the National Anthem at sporting events, because of being a complicated fellow (see above). However, while I am not personally a brass band, I do insist upon performing the entire number with a trumpet impression that I am told sounds remarkably unlike a trumpet.)


2. Nor did I watch the half-time show, partially out of protest, and partially because I knew Sarah would want to watch it off the DVR later and I didn’t feel the need to subject myself to Madonna twice. I hear she was great. Since she was not a marching band playing music written before 1920, I expect to be all meh up ons. (Translation: I will be indifferent to Ms. Ciccone’s performance.)


3. The game was pretty rad, though I would have preferred the Pats winning, because I dislike the Giants. (Oh well. At least the Mets still suck.) Also because Eli Manning just has one of those faces that you want to punch over and over to see if you can change it. Unfortuanately, Tom Brady looked pretty dinged up after his left shoulder got slammed into the turf, and The Gronk was clearly about 60% of himself. Also, if you’re Bill Belichick, your receivers drop two passes that hit their hands in the closing seconds of the game, and you’re not breaking clipboards over their heads, I don’t know how great a coach you can really be.

After the game was over, my younger son refused to go to sleep, so I stayed up with him until about 11:15 watching Rugby Sevens. Holy crap. If you’ve been watching football, and said to yourself, “You know, this game is nice, but it’s just not dangerous enough for me,” you might want to look into Rugby. Full contact, no pads, no helmets, cheerleader-style pyramids to block kicks, and a ball shaped somewhat like an enormous whale testicle. Quick comparison; this person is a professional American football player:

This person is a rugby player:

Which of those two people would you be happier to see at the opposite end of the Octagon? Just looking at the rugby guy picture made me wet my pants just a little bit. I’m gonna go find alternate pantaloons. The football player looks like he might work as a bagger at Shoprite.

Have a pleasant Monday. Try not to dream about rugby players.

I am not a patient person. Among my manifold faults, impatience is the greatest and most shameful. It causes me to be a worse father than I should be, and, coupled with a twisted sense of justice, a particularly bad driver. So you can only imagine how much I enjoyed waiting in line at the US Open for nearly an hour yesterday. Not because there were a lot of people, though there were; people began queuing up at 4:45pm, with an advertised entry of 6pm, and we got in line shortly after 5. We were within 25 feet of the front of the line. And there we stood, until the authorities decided we were worthy of entrance.

Bear in mind that this was not entrance to the stadium, which was admittedly already full of patrons watching the matches before the ones we had tickets to see. This was merely entrance to the grounds, where we could walk a bit, do a little light shopping, and suck down food and beer like only Americans can. But we were not permitted to do so.

Us: Hey! US Open! We’re waiting out here! We would like to spend money purchasing products from your vendors, who I’m sure kick a healthy percentage into the coffers of the US Tennis Association! How about opening the gate?

US Open: Suck it.

Us: C’mon, man, be COOL.

US Open: (Moons us.)

Not an auspicious start. Our hopes of being let in at 6pm, as advertised, were dashed when the previous match ended at roughly 5:59, and they delayed the opening to allow the previous group of folks to escape. At 6:15, they finally deigned to allow us entry. We sprinted in, and made our way to the food court, where we discovered that

1. they had an Indian food kiosk, and


2. it featured no lines at all.

We grabbed platters of lamb, chicken, curried chick peas, and rice, and shoveled it down while sipping on the finest beers available (Heineken, as it turned out). Amusing anecdote: because seating in the food court is somewhat limited, the four of us (my parents, myself, and a buddy named Jeff that I know from high school and my parents know from church choir because we live in an insanely small state) got to sit with two young gentleman of indeterminate foreign extraction. We didn’t really talk, because neither group really understood the other’s English; I simply thought it was funny that the four Americans were eating Indian food, and the two foreign fellows were eating chicken fingers and french fries. Another odd thing I noticed was the number of people who walked by who stared longingly at our food. I took this an excuse to stare at a lot of bosoms, because there apparently was some kind of memo that I missed that said that appropriate attire for the US Open includes skin-tight tube dresses, loose halter-tops, and ridiculous bustiers. Would you wear something like this to a tennis match, particularly on a night with temperatures dipping into the low 60s? Many young ladies (and a few older ones, ::shudder::) did so.

(In the interest of full disclosure: it was awesome. I saw more cleavage than at a Jersey Shore reunion. A++++ would ogle again.)

My mother revealed the fact that, while we had tickets for Arthur Ashe Stadium to see the premier women’s and men’s singles matches of the day (including Roger Federer), our tickets also meant that we could wander the ground and watch other matches on lesser courts. So we caught a little bit of mixed doubles in a court so small I could smell the line judge’s BO (though that might have been my father releasing a bit of post-curry pressure). We tried to get in to watch the American Bryan brothers dismantle Mardy Fish and someone named Knowles that I assume was Beyoncé, but by the time we were able to get into the stadium the match was within a game of ending and we never did get seated. After finding some more beer, we headed to Arthur Ashe to see what was happening.

The match in question featured German Andrea Petcovic against Russian Vera Zvonareva, and we saw most of the second set in a straight shellacking by Zvonareva, who has intoxicating eyes. (I would describe the match, but I’m no professional sports journalist, and also my memories of it are not vivid because of four beers that found their way into my belly.)

Before the Federer-Melzer match, we were “treated” to a rendition of “America” by an 11-year-old Staten Island girl who seemed somewhat unclear as the actual melody, who randomly changed key in the middle of the verse, and who (worst of all) disregarded the usual tempo of the song in favor of a slow dirge-like rendition that forced me to go purchase more beer.

While I was up, I decided it would be best to make room in my bladder for the additional liquid, so I went in search of the men’s room, and discovered an interesting anomaly of Arthur Ashe Stadium: recognizing that women take longer to pee than men, the architects built, near as I can tell, exactly twice as many bathrooms for ladies than for gents. This led to the remarkable situation in which there were no lines for the ladies’, but the men’s room line was rolling 40 deep. It moved quickly, at least.

I managed to acquire more suds, and went to my seat just in time for the introduction of the Swiss Federer, and his German opponent, Jürgen Melzer. I’ll spare you the play-by-play (remember: beer), but will note that if you were to hear somewhere that Melzer was dispatched in straight sets, it would be worth noting that while Federer did break Melzer twice in the first set, Melzer broke back once, the second set ended in a tie-break, and the last set featured a number of hard-fought games before Roger finally got the upper hand.

We managed to fight our way out through the crowds, and I’ll speak not of the fact that the authorities deliberately blocked at least one downward staircase to prevent our use, for no discernible reason, and merely say that our walk back to the car was pleasant on a cool, cloud-less night, and the ability to park at Citi Field (the Mets were in Chicago last night) saved us from fighting too much traffic on our exit.

I’d also like to give a shout-out to the NYPD, which was helpful both in finding parking on our way in, and directing traffic on our way out. Holla, Thin Blue Line.

I love the Olympics. I really do. I’ll watch just about all of it, from figure-skating to snowboarding to luge to curling. Women’s curling, even, although in my defense, American skip Debbie McCormick is strangely intoxicating.

I even watched, and thoroughly enjoyed, biathlon. Of course, what beginning skiier, when waiting in a 45-minute line for a bunny-slope lift, hasn’t thought “I wish I had a gun?”

So far, however, the XXI Olympic Winter Games brings to mind 4 specific memories that’ll stick with us:

1. The authorities built a luge track that’s so fast it killed a man.


2. The Opening Ceremonies, already saddened by death, were screwed up by a malfunction of the torch cauldron. To add to the classiness (a word I just made up), to light the big outdoor torch, they drove Wayne Gretzky there in the back of a big pickup while he held on to a rollbar in the back and held the torch with one hand. He looked like he should have been wearing a tuque and drinking from a can of Elsinore.


3. The Olympia ice-preparation machines they bought for the speed-skating track (a cheaper product than the standard Zambonis) apparently produce an ice with all the smoothness and sheen of driveway gravel.


4. Finally, NBC’s coverage of the various sporting events has been…disappointing. They’ve tape-delayed a lot of important events, something that was done in the past (particularly when Olympic Games were held on the other side of the world, like, say, China, and it’s difficult to get a lot of viewership for swimming at 2am Eastern time), but unfortunately in this modern connected world it’s nearly impossible to avoid finding out results before the taped airing. It takes away from a viewing of the women’s downhill when it doesn’t get shown until 7pm despite everyone in the world knowing Lindsey Vonn won gold earlier in the day. On the other hand, maybe a little tape delay is a good idea.

Hey organizers and NBC! I am your key demographic! I’m young, have disposable income, and purchasing impulses that I can’t control! It would be nice if you’d stop screwing up your product so I didn’t lose interest.

A nice football weekend for me, I went 3-4, picking all the spread winners and only missing my money-line selection on Dallas, although in my defense even a spread pick on them would have failed since Brett Favre made them his prison girlfriend. Thoughts that occurred to me:

• I picked Dallas to win outright because they were getting 2.5 points; since Vegas usually allocates 3 points to the home team, that meant they considered the Vikes and Cowgirls to be roughly equal on neutral turf. Since Dallas mopped the floor with the Eagles (theoretically also a pretty good team) twice in a row, they should be able to keep up with the Vikings, right? Uh…no. This train of thought naturally leads to “I guess the Eagles weren’t even remotely good,” which shouldn’t really surprise me, but still depresses the hell out of me considering I don’t see them adding anything of value for 2010.


• I love, repeat love, close money-line games. Which makes sense: if you think Dallas is going to cover 2.5 points, they almost certainly are going to win, right? What are the odds they lose by 2 points? Well, so far there have been 264 games this year, and 16 of them (roughly 6%) have been closer than 3 points. So historically, the odds of the Cowboys covering a 2.5 point spread and not winning the game are no more than 6% (since that value would also include situations where the Cowboys win by less than 3). A spread wager was the usual -110 (you would have to wager $110 to win $100, or if you wager $100 you win about $91), but the money line on the Cowboys was +120 (wagering a hundo nets you $120).

  
  Okay. Bear with me, it’s about to get Mathy up in this piece. Say the Cowboys and Vikings were to play the same game 100 times with the same players in the same conditions each time (say in a Many Worlds theory kinda thing). And assume that Vegas sets the spread at 2.5 because they know there’s a 50% chance of Dallas covering (they don’t, but from a consumer point of view it might as well be true). One guy bets a hundred bucks on each of the games, on Dallas to cover. He stands to get $91 from each game he wins, which happens 50% of the time, or 50 times. He wins, therefore, 91*50, or $4550. (Technically he also gets back his original outlay on those 50 wins, or another 5 grand, so his total is $9550, a pretty crappy investment of 10 thousand buckeroos.) So for one game, his expected return is $95.50.

  
  But: in 2009, 6% of games ended with a score closer than 3 (including the aforementioned underdog winners) If that’s true, then in at least 94% of the 100 games against Minnesota in which Dallas covered, they won. That’s 47 wins out of 50 covers (since we’re assuming they cover in half the games). So there’s another guy, a smarter guy, who wagered $100 that Dallas wins each of the hundred games outright, he wins $120 times 47 or $5640. Added to the original $4700 outlay for the wins (he’d obviously lose $5300 on the losses), he would total $10,340. Divided over a hundred games, he’d expect to earn at least $103.40 per game!

  
  I’m sure I’ve broken your brain. Mine is spinning. Just know that, in 2009 (plus the playoffs), if you wagered on 2.5 (or less) point underdogs to win outright, you probably won money, even though this particular Dallas pick was not good. Unfortunately, next week’s lines are -8 (Colts over Jets) and -4.5 (Saints over Vikes), so I’m not seeing money-line bargains, although if you don’t think the Colts can outscore the Jets by 8 points you are probably high.

Argh. To expand on what I said on Twitter, rooting for the Eagles is a lot like going to a bar with friends, randomly meeting an attractive woman, hit it off with her, take her home, start making out, she takes off your pants, and then punches you in the balls as hard as she can and takes your wallet and runs. Every year the Eagles rope me (and the rest of the Delaware Valley) in, and then they not only lose, they waddle out to mid-field, take a big dump, and roll around in it.

Now: I’m no football expert. I never played the game, because I value my knees and concussion-free noggin. (My son, who is conservatively predicted (by me) to grow to at least 6’5″, will be steered towards baseball, basketball, and soccer, sports that might wreck your knees, but which don’t appear to lead to Alzheimers setting in at age 47.) So my grasp of football strategy is tenuous. However, I have one very important question: if you have a guy who is probably the greatest pure athlete in the league, doesn’t it behoove you to play him a little more often?

Michael Vick is an above-average passer, and runs like an eight-point buck. If he’s on the field, he has to be accounted for. I’m envisioning an offense where he’s sort of an “offensive rover,” always in motion in the backfield, sometimes lined up in the slot, sometimes next to McNabb. If he lines up at wide receiver, they have to put a corner or fast linebacker on him, right? So then McNabb audibles, and Mike trots over and stands next to him. Now the defense has to account for the fact that he might actually take the snap, and then what? Will he take off? Will he drop back? What’s McNabb going to do in that situation? Every play’s a trick play! And don’t forget Brian Westbrook’s back there too. McNabb can fake a hand-off to Vick, and then lob it to a wide open Westbrook streaking through the flat with blockers. I think this would be routinely unstoppable.

And of course, Vick played, what, 100 snaps all season? Argh.