Kublai Khan, computer crashes, baseball, and Alice in Chains

I was in the middle of a big post connecting my Wikipedia browsing between Oxford University, Douglas Adams, Kubla Khan, I Ching, and South Park, when my computer crashed. I'm too lazy to redo it. Sue me.

Alice in Chains is playing on 100.3 The Bear right now. They promise a big announcement. Then I can sleep.

I spent the afternoon working on a spreadsheet for my baseball pool. Since there are only 6 teams it was fairly easy to do, but still a fair bit of work. The end result is a grand page where I can type in each team's weekly scores (both the final and mid-week "live" scores) and see not only how the actual head-to-head matches worked out but also how each person would have done facing off against one of the other five. Very handy to see whether you were winning (or losing) due to a fluke of Yahoo Sports or due to your teams on acheivements or shortcomings. Not content just for that amazing performance, I also added in the league average (mean, median, and mode) for each stat category, and let you see how you perform against the mean and median in a head to head. Sadly, I cannot easily compute averages for each individual. Well, I guess I could...but its a lot of work, and something not really that important. Maybe I'll get around to it. Naturally this was to shut up the kid who was all excited about his league-leading performance when I had previously calculated that verus the other 4 managers he would have in fact posted a losing record. That is to say, if he hadn't lucked out as he had, his team wouldn't be in the lead. That is to say, shut the hell up.

I plugged in the data so far for this week, and its a weird set of stats: I'm 6-5-1, but I could have been 7-4-1, 3-8-1, 4-7-1, or 3-5-4. One of the head-to-headers features the weekly leader in strikeouts (22) beating out the guy with 21 strikeouts while the next highest total is 11. Meanwhile, the 21 strikeout guy has a 21 K/BB ratio, beating the 22 strikeout guy's 7.33, which similarly is the second highest in the league. The poor 22 strikeout guy is currently 2-10-0, but his other potential scores were in the 3-8-1 to 5-7-0 range. Sure he's not doing great, but he's facing the worst possible opposing player. Oddly, the guy who I made the entire spreadsheet to quiet down is currently 5-6-1, which is his 2nd worst possible. He could just as easily have been 9-3-0 right now. Head-to-head is such a fickle thing. But the reason its so great, especially for 6 people living in the same city who know each other and are often out drinking, is just because of its brutal level of personal competition. We foresee a great many bar fights over this, and that can't help but be a good thing!

The big announcement? The surviving members (Cantrell, Inez, Kinney) are reunited for a tour. Sure Layne Staley died in '02, but they're bringing in big name guest stars (rumour has it Tool's Maynard James Keenan and Puddle of Mudd's Wes Scantlin -- the same guys who performed with them for the Tsunami benefit). They'll start in Europe, and then come here. Will they come Edmonton here? Money says no: drive to Calgary.