this internet thingy.
Newspapers on a computer? Now that's just silly.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Head Fake From LeBron
I am sure all of you have seen the pictures above, which were allegedly taken during a video shoot for a Super Bowl commercial that features LebJay. The shoot was likely designed to correspond to a viral marketing campaign that features Lebron. (The article from the "ball Don't Lie" blog on Yahoo! can be found here).
I cannot overemphasize how upset I am by these photos. To me they're like that dream you used to have in 8th grade where you were suddenly dating the coolest girl in the school, or the dream you have today, where suddenly you win a new car. And the dream is so real that when you wake up you are actually confused by the fact that your life wasn't suddenly changed.
That feeling is EXACTLY what I feel about these pictures. LeBron will obviously NEVER risk an injury and ruin to his NBA career by playing football, and its very likely that his contract with the Cavaliers would prohibit this. So to tease fans like this is just stupid.
I have no doubts that LeBron, as an incredible athlete would be an outstanding football player, much like Randy Moss or Antonio Gates. Furthermore, while likely upsetting people like Tim McCarver, two-sport athletes are the most exciting people in sports. From Deon Sanders to Bo Jackson (Tecmo SuperBowl MVP), there are few types of players who truly bring thrill to the sports they play the way that two-sport athletes do.
I am a huge LeBron fan. Always have been. I remember after watching him play in high school, calling LWJ, and saying to him that James was the best player I had ever seen. Including Jordan. So I am a big King James fan.
I would love it if LeBron would say, "Cavs, if you want me, you have to let me play football." What would the Cavs do? They would bend over backwards to make it happen, because they do NOT want to lose him in free agency. He could name his price. And the Cleveland Browns would make it happen in a heartbeat. Lord knows they could use some receivers who could catch.
But sadly its not going to happen. And for me, to allow hype to be built that you might do this, to even pretend that it will happen and then just wuss out is low class.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Irony
Yes, its been nearly two months since the last post. Yes, we are sorry. Yes, our readership has dwindled to 1 (thanks Menstr8). Nevertheless, its time for a trip down irony lane.
Let's see ... two years ago, LWJ made an incredibly sick call re: The One, and proved prescient and prophetic in his analysis of the Democratic primary contest to come. The irony? His references to Rex Grossman were not misguided: the GOP nominated their own version.
Let's see ... just under a year ago, in a tiny apartment in Walker, Minnesota, under cover of a blizzard, under the influence of 99-calorie beer, and down to our last $850 allotted for the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament, I made the fateful decision to wager the rest of our bankroll on the Pitt Panthers. They lost. (Obama picked them too). But as only fate would have it, they have begun this season on a 15-0 run. Thankfully during this run, I have wagered on (zero) of their games and made back (zero) of the dollars I lost on them last march.
Let's see ... last summer, as blogged on this very site, LWJ, DH, and myself visited a racetrack in suburban Chicago. We utilized the shotgun approach to betting, and invariably bet most every combination imaginable in an attempt to cash a .10 superfecta ticket. All tickets met the trash bin, none were cashed. Flash forward to last weekend. LWJ visits a suburban Chicago racetrack. Without me. And cashed not one, but two superfectas.
Let's see ... The only title used twice for blog posts the whole of last year was ... Florida. (See here and here [edit: and also here]). Not only that, but the most significant reference to college football all fall when posting on this blog was the impressive nature of Mississippi winning at the "Swamp." So when I get to Las Vegas, and have the opportunity to wager on the SEC Championship game, who do I wager on? Not Florida. Surely, I would see the errors of my ways and pick Tebow's team in the Natty, right? Nope ... ouch.
Irony's a bitch.
Let's see ... two years ago, LWJ made an incredibly sick call re: The One, and proved prescient and prophetic in his analysis of the Democratic primary contest to come. The irony? His references to Rex Grossman were not misguided: the GOP nominated their own version.
Let's see ... just under a year ago, in a tiny apartment in Walker, Minnesota, under cover of a blizzard, under the influence of 99-calorie beer, and down to our last $850 allotted for the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament, I made the fateful decision to wager the rest of our bankroll on the Pitt Panthers. They lost. (Obama picked them too). But as only fate would have it, they have begun this season on a 15-0 run. Thankfully during this run, I have wagered on (zero) of their games and made back (zero) of the dollars I lost on them last march.
Let's see ... last summer, as blogged on this very site, LWJ, DH, and myself visited a racetrack in suburban Chicago. We utilized the shotgun approach to betting, and invariably bet most every combination imaginable in an attempt to cash a .10 superfecta ticket. All tickets met the trash bin, none were cashed. Flash forward to last weekend. LWJ visits a suburban Chicago racetrack. Without me. And cashed not one, but two superfectas.
Let's see ... The only title used twice for blog posts the whole of last year was ... Florida. (See here and here [edit: and also here]). Not only that, but the most significant reference to college football all fall when posting on this blog was the impressive nature of Mississippi winning at the "Swamp." So when I get to Las Vegas, and have the opportunity to wager on the SEC Championship game, who do I wager on? Not Florida. Surely, I would see the errors of my ways and pick Tebow's team in the Natty, right? Nope ... ouch.
Irony's a bitch.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Hot Mamma! Cuban in trouble again.
Mark Cuban, the oft-troubled, somewhat infamous owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, has found himself in some deep do-do. Cuban, who is worth over $2 billion personally, has made a name for himself as a professional sports team owner by being vocally critical of everything from the NBA front-office to game referees, and even to superstar Dwayne Wade. In all, his fines for these incidents total more than $1.6 million dollars (he claims that he matches his donations to the NBA with donations to charities).
Well, some charity might just be close to their big payday. For all the trouble Cuban has been in with the NBA, it's the SEC he really should be worried about (no, not the Southeastern Conference, and whether or not he might be able to land a big draft pick form Kentucky or Florida). The SEC is the Securities and Exchange Commission, and they have charged him with insider trading for allegedly using confidential information to avoid more than $750,000 in losses.
To break it down, Cuban owned a bunch of stock in mamma.com, a canadian-held internet search engine company. He found out from confidential sources not made public, that mamma.com was going to have a large stock offering that would be far below current market value. Cuban went ahead and sold his stock when the value was still high (before the large public offereing at a lower price), avoiding losses of nearly $750,000.
From ESPN news services:
As we allege in the complaint, Mamma.com entrusted Mr. Cuban with nonpublic information after he promised to keep the information confidential. Less than four hours later, Mr. Cuban betrayed that trust by placing an order to sell all of his shares," Scott W. Friestad, deputy director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, said in a statement. "It is fundamentally unfair for someone to use access to nonpublic information to improperly gain an edge on the market.Cuban had solidified himself as a sleaze-ball well before this, but now he's gone from "sort of ha-ha funny"
It's too bad. He was one of those guys that a lot of people hated, but I had a hard time really disliking him. I sort of thought that if I was smart enough to a) come up with a great internet start-up at the beginning of the dot-com boom, b) sell that start up to yahoo.com for $6 billion worth of yahoo stock, and then c) sell my yahoo stock and diversify before the dot-com crash (which of course I was not smart enough to do, nor will I be) that maybe I would take my billions, buy a sports team and then "start stuff" with other teams, owners, referees, coaches, etc.
Oh, well. The higher you climb, the further you fall. Funny that Cuban was willing to pay the NBA almost $2 million, just so he could get his face on TV and name in the papers, but couldn't swallow his pride and bite the bullet on $750,000 of stock options for a website called mamma.com (has anyone ever heard of this site... "the mother of all search engines"?).
Good luck finding a good lawyer. You will undoubtedly spend FAR MORE than $750,000 in the defense of yourself in the case. Someone's getting rich -- and it's too bad it's probably not the charities.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Scott Rasmussen EXCLUSIVE
Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports, has been an independent pollster for more than a decade. Scott maintains his independence and has never been a campaign pollster or consultant for candidates seeking office. Before turning to polling, Scott grew up in the broadcast business. In 2008, his poll, the Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll, was deemed to be the most accurate poll by Fordham University.
I recently had a chance to pose a few questions to Mr. Rasmussen regarding the election and polling in general.
OS: Mr. Rasmussen, based on many news reports and confirmed through an analysis by Fordham University, you were the most accurate pollster of the 2008 election. Does this give you a sense of vindication since many in both the print and electronic media sometimes doubted your work during the election cycle?
SR: I did not feel a particular need for vindication. In 2004, we were the only firm to project Bush and Kerry’s actual vote total within half a percentage point. Our firm has a fine track record in state and local polling. But, it’s always nice when the results validate our work.
OS: One reason I suspect you were so successful is your unique method of party-weighting. Without giving away any trade secrets, can you briefly describe your method of party-ID weighting?
SR: We collect large volumes of data and use this information to establish targets for how many republicans, democrats, and unaffiliated voters should be in the sample. This eliminates one level of statistical noise that can impact the results.
OS: Obviously when you conduct a poll for an election, you can verify your methods and techniques by looking at the election results. But when you are conducting surveys and polls not related to politics, is there a way to verify that you are getting accurate responses? If so, how?
SR: There are many ways to verify poll results, but the specifics depend upon the poll. For example, when we poll about health care, we always check to make sure that our sample includes an appropriate percentage of people with no health care coverage.
OS: Other pollsters continue to attempt widespread use of internet polling, even though their results are widely divergent from other telephone polls and the actual election results. Is there reason to believe internet polling is the future of the industry?
SR: The industry will change dramatically over the next few years and we will see a lot of experimentation with online polling, text polling, and more. It is all part of the industry’s future.
OS: Lastly, when reviewing your poll results and data collected over the past year of polling, is there a data point that you don't have, or a question you wished you had tracked or asked?
SR: There are a million data points I wish we had! But, there is not one single data point that keeps me awake at night.
I recently had a chance to pose a few questions to Mr. Rasmussen regarding the election and polling in general.
OS: Mr. Rasmussen, based on many news reports and confirmed through an analysis by Fordham University, you were the most accurate pollster of the 2008 election. Does this give you a sense of vindication since many in both the print and electronic media sometimes doubted your work during the election cycle?
SR: I did not feel a particular need for vindication. In 2004, we were the only firm to project Bush and Kerry’s actual vote total within half a percentage point. Our firm has a fine track record in state and local polling. But, it’s always nice when the results validate our work.
OS: One reason I suspect you were so successful is your unique method of party-weighting. Without giving away any trade secrets, can you briefly describe your method of party-ID weighting?
SR: We collect large volumes of data and use this information to establish targets for how many republicans, democrats, and unaffiliated voters should be in the sample. This eliminates one level of statistical noise that can impact the results.
OS: Obviously when you conduct a poll for an election, you can verify your methods and techniques by looking at the election results. But when you are conducting surveys and polls not related to politics, is there a way to verify that you are getting accurate responses? If so, how?
SR: There are many ways to verify poll results, but the specifics depend upon the poll. For example, when we poll about health care, we always check to make sure that our sample includes an appropriate percentage of people with no health care coverage.
OS: Other pollsters continue to attempt widespread use of internet polling, even though their results are widely divergent from other telephone polls and the actual election results. Is there reason to believe internet polling is the future of the industry?
SR: The industry will change dramatically over the next few years and we will see a lot of experimentation with online polling, text polling, and more. It is all part of the industry’s future.
OS: Lastly, when reviewing your poll results and data collected over the past year of polling, is there a data point that you don't have, or a question you wished you had tracked or asked?
SR: There are a million data points I wish we had! But, there is not one single data point that keeps me awake at night.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Race and the election
It's interesting that throughout the entire campaign, Barack Obama did everything he could to make sure that the election was not about race. Some even called him the 'post-racial' candidate.
Yet, since about 10:00 PM on Tuesday evening, almost the entire coverage of the election has been about 'how far' this country has come since slavery and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. There have been so many clichés about black children finally being able to believe that they can truly be "whatever they want to be" when they grow up, my head hurts. Every civil rights leader still alive has been interviewed. Election night coverage on MSNBC and in the Chicago Tribune the next morning was focused on Atlanta, GA and Selma, AL.
For a candidate that tried so hard to distance himself from the issue of race, and for the liberal media that did the same, it was almost as if they didn't want to make it an issue until the reality of it was overcome. Now that that's been done, the fear of coming up just short isn't present. And the realization of what Obama truly accomplished can be appreciated.
Yet, since about 10:00 PM on Tuesday evening, almost the entire coverage of the election has been about 'how far' this country has come since slavery and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. There have been so many clichés about black children finally being able to believe that they can truly be "whatever they want to be" when they grow up, my head hurts. Every civil rights leader still alive has been interviewed. Election night coverage on MSNBC and in the Chicago Tribune the next morning was focused on Atlanta, GA and Selma, AL.
For a candidate that tried so hard to distance himself from the issue of race, and for the liberal media that did the same, it was almost as if they didn't want to make it an issue until the reality of it was overcome. Now that that's been done, the fear of coming up just short isn't present. And the realization of what Obama truly accomplished can be appreciated.
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