Quotulatiousness

December 22, 2014

Miami Dolphins beat Vikings 37-35 on a blocked punt for a safety

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:25

This wasn’t a game for the ages, although it did have some twists and turns in the storyline leading up to the final minute of play (when the Dolphins legitimately got do do the Safety Dance). Teddy Bridgewater was unable to secure the victory in front of about 100 family and friends in the stadium, although it was a close game from start to finish. Bridgewater ended up with 19 of 25 for 259 yards, two touchdowns and an interception (but should have been credited with a third touchdown). Although the penalties didn’t make the difference in the game, it was disturbing to see two Vikings defenders lose their cool (and cost the team 15 yards each) after the play was over. Sharif Floyd and Gerald Hodges were both flagged for unsportsmanlike behaviour (and will undoubtedly hear from coach Mike Zimmer about their lack of discipline).

1500ESPN‘s Andrew Kramer sums up the post-game comments:

“I thought he played well,” coach Mike Zimmer said postgame, via Vikings.com. “One interception was bad luck. Rest of the time, thought he did a good job scrambling the pocket. He made some great throws, played with composure and continued to do all those things.”

Bridgewater helped validate the 550-word opening statement from offensive coordinator Norv Turner on Thursday, when the grizzled veteran coach defended his rookie’s progress by calling him ‘incredible.’

While Bridgewater had grown comfortable hitting receivers in the middle of the field, he showed off his arm on Sunday with touch passes, including a 21-yard touchdown to Greg Jennings and a 22-yard completion to Chase Ford that was millimeters away from being another touchdown. He also converted a 3rd-and-13 attempt with a deep throw to Jennings for 24 yards.

In a season where injuries and legal troubles caused a flood of attrition, the Vikings’ second overall pick in May’s NFL Draft has been their floatation device.

“Played pretty good, for the most part,” Bridgewater said. “We have to play a full game. On offense, we did a great job. High intensity.”

After dropping back Bridgewater nearly 50 times in Detroit, Turner came into Miami with a focus on creating a ground game. Matt Asiata took seven carries on the opening drive, picking up gains of 7, 8 and 10 yards in the first quarter as the Vikings cruised to a 14-0 lead.

Akin to the loss in Detroit, that early lead evaporated; but this time it wasn’t on Bridgewater, who threw two costly picks to the Lions. The Vikings’ defense allowed four touchdowns on four Miami drives in the second half, squashing the 10-point lead at intermission.

And the Daily Norseman‘s Ted Glover on the third touchdown that should have been awarded to Teddy Bridgewater and Chase Ford:

Sell: Referees calling a penalty on every play in this game. I mean, holy crap was that one of the most horribly officiated games I’ve ever witnessed. Mystery defensive holding on Chad Greenway that extended a drive, mystery defensive holding on Xavier Rhodes that extended a drive, the BS PI call on Rhodes at the end of the game when he was looking at the ball and making a play on said ball, the list goes on. Did they cost the Vikings the game? 99% of the time, I think the calls even themselves out over the course of a game, but there’s a nagging burning in my gut over this game. Not necessarily on the penalties, which were bad, but on the Chase Ford touchdown that wasn’t right before halftime.

I mean, he had possession, his foot was in bounds, he dragged his toe in bounds, and he was inside the pylon before he went out. If that isn’t a touchdown, then honestly, I don’t know what a TD is in the NFL anymore. And if that was bad enough, when officials reviewed the Mike Wallace TD that occurred in a similar fashion later in the game, Wallace’s foot was no more out of bounds than Ford’s was, yet his TD call stood. It was one of the more horridly officiated games the Vikings have been involved in that I can remember. Since last week. Or the week before.

Update: Jim Souhan points the finger of blame for yesterday’s defensive collapse.

If you were playing Lifelong Vikings Fan Bingo on Sunday, you were able to cross off “punt blocked out of end zone to lose game” and “onside kick from 20-yard line,” winning you an autographed copy of Gary Anderson’s just-in-time-for-the-holidays coffee-table book titled I Only Missed Once.

Say this for the Vikings: They have evolved. A few weeks ago they were hoping their defense could give their rookie quarterback a chance to win. Sunday, they asked Bridgewater to overcome the team’s most disappointing defensive performance of the season.

A week after frustrating the Lions, the Vikings defense made the Dolphins look like they were still employing players named Griese and Csonka.

[…]

The Vikings made so many mistakes, missed so many tackles, it was enough to make you wonder whether some of their young defenders found their way to South Beach on Saturday night — and whether some of them should have stayed there on Sunday.

“Poor performance by us,” Zimmer said. “I saw us do things we haven’t done in a long time.”

Zimmer gets gloriously furious when his team, and in particular his defense, fails to display a grasp of fundamentals.

Some days, he seems to change colors right in front of you, from pale white to crimson. Sunday, Zimmer looked so angry you wondered if he was going to change states, from solid to liquid to steam.

“We were undisciplined,” he said, apparently auditioning for an endorsement deal with Maalox. “We didn’t even line up half — or some — of the time.”

Zimmer has earned praise often this season. Sunday, he was the only logical person to blame.

[…]

After a terse-but-polite news conference, someone asked Zimmer if he had offered a similar message to his players. “It was stronger,” he said.

Gift-giving, explained

Filed under: Economics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Tim Harford recounts the surprising results of several studies on the very different views of gift-givers and gift-recipients:

Father Christmas might seek guidance from a set of studies conducted by Gabrielle Adams and Francis Flynn of Stanford, and Harvard’s Francesca Gino.

Gino and Flynn surveyed married people, asking some to reflect on wedding gifts they had received, and others to think about wedding gifts they had given. Gift givers assumed that gifts chosen spontaneously would be just as welcome as those chosen from a wedding registry. Recipients felt otherwise: they preferred the gifts that had been on the wedding list. Such lists seem charmless but they work.

Gino and Flynn found similar results from a survey about birthday presents: again, givers thought that gifts they’d chosen themselves were more appreciated but recipients preferred the gifts that they’d specifically asked for. The lesson: you might feel that it’s awkward and unnecessary to ask what gift would be welcome but the recipient of the gift sees things differently and would prefer that you asked rather than guessed.

Gino and Flynn conducted a third study in which people created wish lists. Other participants were asked to choose an item on the list to be sent as a gift; a third group were asked to peruse the wish list but then to choose some other present of equivalent value. It’s not surprising to discover that recipients preferred the items from their wish list — but what’s remarkable is that they felt the wishlist gifts were more “personal” and “thoughtful”. We think that picking an item from a wish list is lazy and impersonal but the person receiving that item doesn’t see it that way at all.

For good measure, a fourth study by Gino and Flynn found there was one thing people appreciated even more than an item from their own wish lists: money.

There’s more. Adams and Flynn surveyed newly engaged couples about engagement rings. The givers assumed that more expensive rings were more appreciated. The recipients felt differently. A similar result came from asking people to think about a particular birthday present they had received or given: recipients were just as happy with inexpensive gifts, to the surprise of givers.

In short, there is a vast discrepancy between how we see the world when giving gifts and when receiving them. The gift giver imagines that the ideal present is expensive and surprising; the recipient doesn’t care about the money and would rather have a present they’d already selected. We should spend less than we think, and we should ask more questions before we buy.

A new paper on the exaggerated claims that MMOs are harmful

Filed under: Gaming, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

By way of Massively, the abstract of a new paper by Dr. Rachel Kowert and her co-authors, investigating claims that massive multi-player online games are a public health threat:

Highlights
• The psychosocial causes and consequences of online video game play were evaluated.
• Over a 1- and 2-year period, evidence for social compensation processes were found.
• Among young adults, online games appear to be socially compensating spaces.
• No significant displacement or compensation patterns were found for adolescents.
• No significant displacement or compensation patterns were found for older adults.

Abstract

Due to its worldwide popularity, researchers have grown concerned as to whether or not engagement within online video gaming environments poses a threat to public health. Previous research has uncovered inverse relationships between frequency of play and a range of psychosocial outcomes, however, a reliance on cross-sectional research designs and opportunity sampling of only the most involved players has limited the broader understanding of these relationships. Enlisting a large representative sample and a longitudinal design, the current study examined these relationships and the mechanisms that underlie them to determine if poorer psychosocial outcomes are a cause (i.e., pre-existing psychosocial difficulties motivate play) or a consequence (i.e., poorer outcomes are driven by use) of online video game engagement. The results dispute previous claims that online game play has negative effects on the psychosocial well-being of its users and instead indicate that individuals play online games to compensate for pre-existing social difficulties.

Repost – Happy Holiday Travels!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

H/T to Economicrot. Many many more at the link.

QotD: Celebrity gossip as a common good

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Celebrity gossip is psychologically healthy.

It provides an outlet, a useful sublimation, of our self-destructive subconscious compulsion to lean over the back fence and cluck (or tweet) about the godawful things our relatives, friends, and neighbors do.

Celebrities are not our family. Although there are so many celebrities that we are probably related to some. But they’re not the niece looking daggers at us across the Thanksgiving turkey because of what we said to Uncle Bill about her hookup with that McDermott idiot. They’re not the daughter locked in her bedroom running up our Visa card bill with online shopping for new makeup, clothes, and other mall finds.

Celebrities are not our friends. They don’t borrow our money or power tools. They don’t forget it’s their turn to carpool the kids to junior high. They don’t come over when we’re busy watching The View and litter the kitchen table with used Kleenex, pouring their hearts out about their (remarkably frequent) divorces. They don’t get caught — unless Dean McDermott is late to the set for his televised therapy session on True Tori — necking with our spouses in the coat closet at our cocktail parties.

P.J. O’Rourke, “Welcome to Showbiz Sharia Law: No talent? Kind of dim-witted? No shame? Perfect. The celebrity industry needs you — just don’t ever veil your face”, The Daily Beast, 2014-05-04

December 21, 2014

The first historical European martial arts tournament

Filed under: Cancon, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

Aaron Miedema shared a link to this story about the first known tournament for historical European martial arts:

If I asked you when was the first historical European Martial Arts tournament what would you say? 1997? 2003?

Not even close.

How about where? America? Great Britain? Germany? France?

No, none of the above.

What if I told you that the earliest known tournament took place in a region of the globe which we probably don’t hear enough about, but which surely deserves to be known across the HEMA community: Quebec.

Yes. The first ever tournament took place on the island of Montreal in… 1889. Who was heading this tournament? Perhaps Alfred Hutton on a trip in Canada? Or how about one of those French guys from the Olympics? No, it was another HEMA pioneer. One which is unfortunately unknown to us because he did not leave us any manual, but an interesting figure all the same: David Legault.

[…]

Legault came back to Montreal around 1882. There were very few qualified fencing instructors in town at that time, and the art was going through a revival. His friends then encouraged David to open up a fencing salle in the former Institut Canadien, a learned French Canadian society which regularly drew the wrath of the church. There he will teach not only swordsmanship but also boxing, savate, wrestling, great stick and gymnastics. He will try to introduce the model inside Quebec schools, with more or less success, but his regular classes will grow in popularity and Legault will decide to change the nature of his club which will become known as the Guard of the Archiepiscopal Palace. This group acted as an honorary guard to the Catholic archbishop of Montreal as well as a sort of militia to prepare men for military service. Several similar groups will be created across the province, all of them teaching fencing. Volunteering in the Canadian army and various official militia units which were mostly English speaking was not very popular with French Canadians, and many turned toward these groups instead.

Woodworking Christmas Gifts and Projects – with Paul Sellers

Filed under: Randomness, Woodworking — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:04

Published on 20 Dec 2013

In this holiday themed video Paul Sellers give some advice on buying a new woodworker some basic tools. He shows how to make a small tree decoration. He also shows how to make a wooden propeller toy, a mixing spatula and a cutting board.

“Wicca is religion’s answer to the Liberal Democrats”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Humour, Media, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

All the British newspapers have apparently decided that it’s worth column-inches devoted to the random Twitter comments of J.K. Rowling:

Of the various insights into the diversity of Hogwarts culture JK Rowling has been sharing on Twitter lately, one in particular caught my eye. It wasn’t the revelation, reported by the Guardian, that the school had Jewish wizards. (So what?) Nor was it that Hogwarts probably had a few poofs in it. (We knew that already, didn’t we?)

No: what tickled me was her remark that the only group she never envisaged in the achingly multi-culti Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was Wiccans, those faux-druidic attention-seekers and drop-outs obsessed with black candles, lesbianism and velvet gowns.

Wiccans and those oddballs who dress up in bizarro costumes, redolent of cheap seasonal medieval re-enactment camps, who believe in magic (or, as they hilariously insist on spelling it, “magick”) and the mystical forces of mother nature.

[…]

What most fans will have taken from that, I’m guessing, is: “Come off it, even by the standards of my totally invented fantasy-land full of mystical creatures, boy wizards and horcruxes, those people are off their trolleys.”

You can tell rather a lot about those respective newspapers by which details they chose to lead their reports with. The Guardian, with its creepy Jewish obsession, leapt on Rowling’s confirmation that Anthony Goldstein of Ravenclaw was semitic, while the Independent ran with her statement that “of course” Hogwarts would have been an LGBT-friendly place to learn how to magic up enchanted water.

What neither of them saw fit to give due prominence to, though, was the fact that Wiccans, hilariously, are the only group in the Harry Potter universe incapable of performing magic. You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh.

Repost – “I want an Official Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot Range Model air rifle”

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

ChristmasStory-blog

H/T to KA-CHING! for the image.

QotD: The family as something to escape from

Filed under: Government, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

What many movement conservatives can’t or won’t understand is that for some of us, the “family” should not be the base unit of society, because it can just as easily be a locus of evil as for good.

To many people, the “world” is a haven from a heartless family.

I am forever bowled over by my Jewish friends’ affection (or at least, infinite tolerance) for their families. When one of them suggested that I set up some kind of enterprise with “a trusted family member,” I reminded him that, being a gentile, I have no trusted family members.

The idea of wanted to increase one’s ties to one’s relatives rather than snip them as quickly and permanently as possible is utterly foreign to me.

Radical leftists are half-right in wanting to reduce each individual’s forced reliance upon their families for lifelong security and prosperity. They went wrong when they held up the State as a replacement. You can always, if you absolutely have to, kill your family. But the State is, at the end of the day, immortal and a million times more powerful.

Kathy Shaidle, “Christopher Lasch was one of those pseudo-conservative writers, like Chesterton, Buckley and Burke, who left me cold”, Five Feet of Fury, 2014-05-13

December 20, 2014

Build a Wooden Salt Cellar

Filed under: Food, Randomness, Woodworking — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:38

Published on 14 Dec 2014

Plans and project resources: http://www.thewoodwhisperer.com/videos/salt-cellar/

The Wood Whisperer is education and entertainment for the modern woodworker! Find more at http://thewoodwhisperer.com & don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel!

“The Freight Yard” – New York Central Railroad

Filed under: Business, History, Railways, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:03

Uploaded on 14 Apr 2011

New York Central Railroad (NYC) publicity film from the late 1940’s, part of their “Running the Railroad” series. Archival footage shows freight yards of all types, along with steam and diesel locomotives.

The New York Central Railroad (NYC), known simply as the New York Central in its publicity, was a railroad operating in the Northeastern United States. Headquartered in New York, the railroad served most of the Northeast, including extensive trackage in the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Massachusetts, plus additional trackage in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. The railroad primarily connected greater New York and Boston in the east with Chicago and St.Louis in the midwest along with the intermediate cities of Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Detroit. The NYC’s Grand Central Terminal in New York City is one of its best known landmarks.

Repost – Induced aversion to a particular Christmas song

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Gaming, Media, Personal — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Earlier this year, I had occasion to run a Google search for “Mr Gameway’s Ark” (it’s still almost unknown: the Googles, they do nothing). However, I did find a very early post on the old site that I thought deserved to be pulled out of the dusty archives, because it explains why I can — to this day — barely stand to listen to “Little Drummer Boy”:

Seasonal Melodies

James Lileks has a concern about Christmas music:

This isn’t to say all the classics are great, no matter who sings them. I can do without “The Little Drummer Boy,” for example.

It’s the “Bolero” of Christmas songs. It just goes on, and on, and on. Bara-pa-pa-pum, already. Plus, I understand it’s a sweet little story — all the kid had was a drum to play for the newborn infant — but for anyone who remembers what it was like when they had a baby, some kid showing up unannounced to stand around and beat on the skins would not exactly complete your mood. Happily, the song has not spawned a sequel like “The Somewhat Larger Cymbal Adolescent.”

This reminds me about my aversion to this particular song. It was so bad that I could not hear even three notes before starting to wince and/or growl.

Mr. Gameways' ArkBack in the early 1980’s, I was working in Toronto’s largest toy and game store, Mr Gameways’ Ark. It was a very odd store, and the owners were (to be polite) highly idiosyncratic types. They had a razor-thin profit margin, so any expenses that could be avoided, reduced, or eliminated were so treated. One thing that they didn’t want to pay for was Muzak (or the local equivalent), so one of the owners brought in his home stereo and another one put together a tape of Christmas music.

Note that singular. “Tape”.

An ad from the year of Trivial Pursuit (via OSRcon)

An ad from the year of Trivial Pursuit (via OSRcon)

Christmas season started somewhat later in those distant days, so that it was really only in December that we had to decorate the store and cope with the sudden influx of Christmas merchandise. Well, also, they couldn’t pay for the Christmas merchandise until sales started to pick up, so that kinda accounted for the delay in stocking-up the shelves as well …

So, Christmas season was officially open, and we decorated the store with the left-over krep from the owners’ various homes. It was, at best, kinda sad. But — we had Christmas music! And the tape was pretty eclectic: some typical 50’s stuff (“White Christmas” and the like), some medieval stuff, some Victorian stuff and that damned “Drummer Boy” song.

We were working ten- to twelve-hour shifts over the holidays (extra staff? you want Extra Staff, Mr. Cratchitt???), and the music played on. And on. And freaking on. Eternally. There was no way to escape it.

To top it all off, we were the exclusive distributor for a brand new game that suddenly was in high demand: Trivial Pursuit. We could not even get the truck unloaded safely without a cordon of employees to keep the random passers-by from trying to grab boxes of the damned game. When we tried to unpack the boxes on the sales floor, we had customers snatching them out of our hands and running (running!) to the cashier. Stress? It was like combat, except we couldn’t shoot back at the buggers.

Oh, and those were also the days that Ontario had a Sunday closing law, so we were violating all sorts of labour laws on top of the Sunday closing laws, so the Police were regular visitors. Given that some of our staff spent their spare time hiding from the Police, it just added immeasurably to the tension levels on the shop floor.

And all of this to the background soundtrack of Christmas music. One tape of Christmas music. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

It’s been over 20 [now 30] years, and I still feel the hackles rise on the back of my neck with this song … but I’m over the worst of it now: I can actually listen to it without feeling that all-consuming desire to rip out the sound system and dance on the speakers. After two decades.

QotD: When it’s steam engine time

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Ridcully poked at his pipe with a pipe cleaner and said, “Ye-es, that is a conundrum. Surely the steam engine cannot happen before it’s steam-engine time? If you saw a pig, you would, I think, say to yourself, well, here’s a pig, so it must be time for pigs. You wouldn’t question its right to be there would you?”

“Certainly not,” said Lu-Tze. “In any case, pork gives me the wind something dreadful. What we know is that the universe is never-ending story that, happily, writes itself continuously. The trouble with my brethren in Oi Dong is that they are fixated on the belief that the universe can be totally understood, in every particular jot and tittle.”

Ridcully burst out laughing. “Oh, my word! You know, my wonderful associate Mister Ponder Stibbins appears to have fallen into the same misapprehension. It seems that even the very wise have neglected to take notice of one rather important goddess … Pippina, the lady with the Apple of Discord. She knows that the universe, while it requires rules and stability, also needs just a tincture of chaos, the unexpected, the surprising. Otherwise it would be a mechanism — a wonderful mechanism, ticking away the centuries, but with nothing different happening. And so we may assume that the loss of balance will be allowed this time and the beneficent lady will decree that this mechanism might yield wonderful things, given a chance.”

“For my part, I would like to give it a chance,” said Lu-Tze. “Serendipity is no stranger to me. I know the monks have been carefully shepherding the world, but I rather think they don’t realize that the sheep sometimes have better ideas. Uncertainty is always uncertain, but the difficulty with people who rely on systems is that they begin to believe that nearly everything is in some way a system and therefore, sooner or later, they become bureaucrats.”

Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam, 2013.

December 19, 2014

The Raid On Scarborough – A Failed Attempt at Intimidation I THE GREAT WAR Week 21

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, Military, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:05

Published on 18 Dec 2014

German admiral Franz von Hipper reluctantly carries out his orders to bomb British coastal towns. And indeed, this attempt to intimidate British civilians only makes them more united. British propaganda gets another opportunity to portray Germans as bloodthirsty and brutal. Meanwhile, the French start a new offensive near Vimy on the Western Front.

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