Complex football: Both imaginary and real.

There's a scene in Moneyball where Brad Pitt as Billy Beane goes to the dugout and says to the then struggling A's, "This is a winning team. Now go out tonight and play like it."

I wish I could assemble the Mutant Mercenaries and tell them the same thing, but so far, no dice.

I won the award for the best draft. I have since made some pick-ups on waivers and trades that I think make my team better. Still, after five games we are 1-4 when we could be 3-2 or even with some luck 4-1. Instead, the luck has been almost all bad and we now have to struggle to get into the playoffs when I had hopes we might be trying to get enough wins to get a bye week.


And then there are the local teams, who have both been bitter disappointments for about ten years now. The Raiders and the 49ers both won their first games of the season, beat the uninspiring Broncos and Seahawks respectively. Then came week two, when the Raiders lost late to the Bills and the Niners lost late to the Cowboys, both those opponents seeming less than prepossessing at the time.

Since then, the Raiders have gone to 3-2, beating the Texans this week in an ugly game but nevertheless a win barely 24 hours after Al Davis' death. The 49ers have won three straight, including impressive drubbings of both the struggling Broncos and the allegedly solid Buccaneers in the past two weeks.

The Raiders are in a tougher division and they may have to hope for a wild card spot unless the Chargers go into a nose dive. This week's game hosting the Browns will go a long way in answering the question about whether they are contenders or pretenders.

The Niners on the other hand are in a Group of Cake rather than a Group of Death, and even if they lose on the road to the newly resurgent Lions this week, if they can go 10-6 in their division, they are pretty much a lock to get int the playoffs with a home game, especially since they still have five games left against the Seahawks, Rams and Cardinals, all of whom are somewhere between sad and laughable.

I really do think the Niners could be a playoff team this year. With a little luck, I think the Mutant Mercenaries and the Raiders might join them.

It's nice to have some hope in early October. I'll check back in early December to see if it all was just a mirage.

Tesselations: Dodecagons, hexagons and implied squares.

This week's tesselation uses the dodecagon, the forgotten polygon in the tesselation universe, and the hexagon. The empty spaces are squares.

Doing a little color adjustment with a second photo using flash, this is what it might look like at night.

I wish I had enough of these to cover a large wall with them. I like these a lot.

"Don't be the weird one!" Good advice, but hard to follow.

The Value Voters Summit is this weekend. All the Republican presidential candidates are there, sucking up to the shallow end of the Christian gene pool, who are doomed by evolutionary forces to see their power dry up as the years roll by.

Sarah Palin didn't show up. I think she correctly sensed that the crowd would not be too keen on her right now.

Gil Mertz, who may be the nephew of Fred and Ethel (don't take me for a sap, Fred and Ethel never had sex, that was a beard relationship if ever there was one) told his audience on the first day "Don't be the weird one!", hoping that embarrassing stories would not come out of the conference.

Take a read over at Talking Points Memo here, here, here, here and here.

And, oh yeah, here.

Here's a hint, Gil. You ARE the weird ones. Some Christians delight so much in "not being of this world, but the next", they really don't pay strong attention to this world and what they say comes off as being, well, weird.

Christianity allegedly has huge numbers in this country, but I don't know how many people are truly, deeply committed and when we consider the sub-section that are truly, deeply committed, I don't know how unified a front they can present. In evolutionary terms, genetic advantages this large and even larger have been wiped from the face of the world before, and who knows but it could happen again, especially if this weekend's debacle counts in their fevered brains as "not being the weird ones."

Here endeth the lesson.

Let me repeat: The Rule of Three is crap.

People love the Rule of Three. If two people the public have heard of die within a few days, someone will invoke the Rule of Three, the idea that important people die in trios.

It's nonsense.

That said, wandering around the Internet I saw three obits on Saturday, Oct. 8, of people whose claims to fame were well known to me.


The first is Raiders' owner Al Davis, who died today. Davis has looked like a walking corpse for most of this century. He was a great leader in his day, but that day is long gone. I called him Kim Jong Al because he was the dictator of a failed organization. Now that he's dead, there is once again a glimmer of hope for the long term prospects of the Raiders.



The second is Roger Williams, a pianist who had hits with Born Free and Autumn Leaves way back in the day. When I learned to play by ear, Born Free is the first song where I figured out the melody and chord progression on my own. Wikipedia says he died today, one week after his 87th birthday.


And the third is Australian actress Diane Cilento, who died on the 6th but her New York Times obit was only published today. Her two main claims to fame outside her native land are the Oscar she won for Tom Jones, seen here with her co-star, the always wonderful Albert Finney, and she was married for a time to Sean Connery.

These people have nothing to do with one another, but their deaths were reported in the same news cycle.

There is no Rule of Three. It's all random.

Please go on with your lives, happy in the new knowledge you gained today.

Stuff I Like: Topsy Turvy

My favorite two musical films produced in my lifetime are O Brother Where Are Thou and Topsy Turvy. The films could hardly be more different. O Brother was the bigger box office hit, Topsy Turvy got more critical acclaim. The musical styles are in direct contrast, with O Brother celebrating the roots music both black and white of the American South, while Topsy Turvy is Gilbert and Sullivan, about as far away from roots music as you can get. Another important difference in the two movies is that every actor in Topsy Turvy who sang or played an instrument is actually performing. In O Brother, George Clooney wanted to sing his part, but he is lip-synching.

Topsy Turvy has a wonderful cast. I have not put it up to a vote, but I will venture an opinion I expect is wide held that Jim Broadbent, Shirley Henderson and Timothy Spall are always good. Allan Corduner is not quite as well known to American audiences, but he is top notch as Sir Arthur Sullivan. Martin Savage is another actor better known to British audiences than to American, and he does a wonderful job as George Grossmith, the comic actor who played Ko-Ko the Lord High Executioner in the original production of The Mikado back in 1885.



But let me turn my attention to Kevin McKidd for a moment. His first big break was in Trainspotting, the 1996 film about Scottish heroin addicts. But as is true with many a fine British actor, he can completely transform himself from role to role, and is nearly unrecognizable as the romantic tenor Durward Lely, who played Nanki-Poo. Watch this scene with him being prissy about his costume, then see some of his actual performance singing A Wand'ring Minstrel I.


Does that character remind you at all of the stern, upright and efficient Lucius Vorenus from Rome? Me, neither! I didn't realize it was the same actor until I saw Topsy Turvy again after Rome first aired.

I have the utmost respect for McKidd and wish him every success in his career going forward, though my good wishes for him are intermingled with a nearly uncontrollable jealous streak, since in his professional duties he got to snuggle and snog with Indira Varma.



In my obsessed Internet stalker brain, I believe that is my job.

Health insurance. What a good idea.

The economy is really in the pits right now, but you couldn't tell from my current situation. I'm not living the life of Riley, but right now I have enough work and with a little luck, I will continue to have a non-negative cash flow for a while. Because I don't have a long-term iron clad contract anywhere, that could change. At least until the end of the year and likely for a while longer, I am living the life I can afford, if not the one I wish to grow accustomed to.


This wasn't always the case since I started teaching. Back in early 2008, I didn't have health insurance and a false alarm became a very expensive nightmare. Right now, I definitely budget in health insurance and Kaiser, a system I am used to, is well within my price range. (Note that cable TV, a car and a cell phone are NOT currently within my price range. As I said, not the lifestyle I wish to grow accustomed to.)

About a month ago, a little irritation on my left heel started acting up, and I went to the Kaiser emergency room. They put a bandage on it, gave me some antibiotic cream and told me to take a wait and see attitude.

I waited a month. It didn't get better.

Last Tuesday, I saw my G.P. He said he didn't like the look of it and sent me to surgery. I had the wound removed and they gave me a bandage that was to be left on for five days, a boot/sandal to wear while it was bandaged, antibiotics, both oral and topical, and some pain stuff just in case it hurt a lot after the local wore off, which I used a little the first couple days. And, oh yeah, there was an x-ray before the surgery.

The co-pay for everything last Tuesday was about $50.

As of now, the bandage is off, the wound is healing normally and it doesn't hurt to walk.

Yay, Kaiser!

Granted, Kaiser isn't perfect. I got three different diagnoses (ulcerated wound probably caused by diabetes, infected wound, skin cancer), but they did a biopsy and the best news of the three - infected wound improperly healing - appears to be correct. Also, the G.P. sent me to surgery, but the surgeons saw the trouble was below the ankle, so they sent me to x-ray, then podiatry. The runaround means something that should have taken three hours took more like six.

I can live with that. In more ways than one.

And of course, even though I'm a God forsaken liberal, I do economize so that I can afford health insurance, so the crowds at GOP debates don't have to cheer for my death.

On the other hand, I have reasonably priced health insurance because my union fought for it, yet another reason I will NEVER belong to the Tea Party or the Tequila Party or any of those silly political movements named for beverages I rarely drink in any case.

Here's hoping you are covered when things go wrong. With the human body, it's as close to a 100% likelihood as you can get. Moreover, seeing a doctor regularly means you might be able to detect something before it turns into an expensive trip to the emergency room.

Health insurance. What a good idea.

Wait, didn't I just read that someplace?

Silly math joke.

Sent to me by my silly sister Karlacita!

By my pronunciation of the math function, the pun is slightly off, but I think many readers will get the idea.