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Football Conversations

As a non-football watcher, I’ve spent many a conversation pretending to have watched something I didn’t, or to care about something I don’t, and to use grammatically unsound complex sentences of negation.

At first, I would maintain the charade as football fans, when discussing football, are complete conversational narcissists, and would never notice that I wasn’t adding anything meaningful to the conversation.  These one-sided discussions would invariably crescendo to an emotionally-charged climax, upon which I would just agree with whatever was said last and laugh, which in turn led to some mutual conclusion that escaped me because I don’t watch football.

Now, I just don’t care enough about garnering favor with random people at the coffee station, so I don’t humor the smalltalk anymore, or so was my intent.  Unfortunately, a surprising majority of people take the dismissive comment to be a joke (for what kind of American doesn’t watch football?), and interpret it as encouragement–thus putting me into the conversation anyway.

So I decided that, as it’s been said: If you can’t beat ’em–kill everyone.  Or rather, inwardly sigh sadly and pretend to follow along.  But I need assistance.  I need information…obtained through any other means than reading, watching TV, or conversing with my fell Man.

I needed an aggregator and summarizer.  I needed the absolute bare minimum content required to form a cohesive thought.  I needed the equivalent of a Twitter feed of sports commentary, but without the racism/sexism/homophobia (the entire social aspect, basically).  I needed a means by which to trawl football articles and identify the most-used words, negating general sentence structure such as definite articles and conjunctions.

Fortunately I found this site: wordcounter.net.  Probably not its intended use–I began pasting the top football news articles into its form and analyzing their content.  I checked 5 such posts, and compiled their keywords:

The first two articles didn’t have enough meaningful content for a full 10 words

Okay, I could work with this.  This Bryant fellow seems to be a highlight.  I’m sure I could muddle through the rest.

I decided to test my theory on Liz, and texted her the following message:

“I heard that in Bryant’s week one, he scored enough points that it’ll be his big season.  He’ll make a good five-star Fantasy Football pick.  Despite the initial loss, Arkansas will recover with enough victories to stay in the running.”

Liz responded:

“What are you reading?”

She was intrigued!  Had I pulled it off?!  I replied, ambiguously:

“Just the highlights.”

She validated my success by sending me an unrelated photo of a dog that was up for adoption.

…Okay, maybe my method needs a little refinement.  Maybe I can pull a larger sampling of articles and write a formula to analyze the character strings.

Or maybe, just maybe…when I tell you I don’t watch football you could stop talking to me about football and I wouldn’t have to design a logic-based analysis of textual media to formulate responses to your banal and pointless rambling.  Now quit hogging the coffee machine.

–Simon

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Halloween Costumes

“Hey, who’s Doc Holliday?”  He gestured in my direction as he spoke with my boss.  A colleague, he was in town to meet the rest of the team that worked at this location.  And as what so often happens when meeting people who are normally only a voice, I failed to place the face with a name.  Apparently, he suffered from the same problem, and chose to associate an actor’s particular character with my own.

I’ll note that no one ever sees me and says: “Hey!  He looks like George Clooney!  So devilishly handsome!”.  No, instead I was being compared to Val Kilmer’s character–the emaciated borderline psychopath on the cusp of death from Consumption.  That was me.  And it wasn’t the last time that I would hear that observation.

In truth, I had never seen the entirety of Tombstone.  As far as Wyatt Earp movies went, I found it to be a forced rendition with unnecessary drama.  The story itself is one of violence and drama, so I felt it odd that they pushed it so.  Plus, it didn’t really address Holliday’s backstory.  Instead, he just kind of shows up as a stylish badass with an uncanny ability to attract the ladies, despite his debilitating and infectious disease.  I guess if I was going to be compared to someone, it was a lot better than Elijah Wood’s Frodo.  I could live with it: a dying wealthy gunslinger with sexy ladies.  Fine.

So when the office held a costume contest for Halloween, I decided to see just how convincing the emulation could be.  I bought a cheap black cowboy hat and red vest.  The rest of the outfit I conveniently already possessed, down to the silver pocketwatch.  I even shaved (though I required mascara to darken the mustache that was increasingly turning white).

After much consideration, I left the shotgun at home

It’s not every day that I can make the security guard burst out laughing.

In the end, I lost the contest to Mary Poppins (bitch).  But more importantly were the costume assessments I received.  Notably, from multiple people, that my costume wasn’t all that different from the way I normally dress, and were it not for the hat, they might not have even noticed it was a costume at all.

I guess, in the end, the comparison had been accurate all along.  For better or worse, I’m now permanently associated with the persona.

I’m your Huckleberry.

–Simon

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Counter-Stalker

I’m sure at some point I’ve complained about internet tracking.  There’s no way I haven’t, but I can’t find the right article to link to at the moment.  So instead, I’ll ramble on for a bit about the over-discussed and tired topic.

I did find this topic, wherein I discussed my router upgrade.  Recently, the manufacturer pushed an update to it, and in this update I found some more robust traffic management and firewall tools.  Naturally, I poked around, and discovered that I could control domain blocking with more refinement.  On a whim–well, more than a whim really–I blocked Facebook and some other well-known web analytic and tracking domains in a custom rule that I then assigned to all my personal devices.

The result was even worse than I had suspected.  There were all manner of things that were linking to Facebook.  Even if I chose to ignore all Facebook prompts, applications and pages were still running their scripts in the background.  Why?!  The question, of course, is rhetorical.

One more incremental step in fighting for internet privacy.

–Simon

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Elusive Photogenics

A couple weeks back, I bought a new aquarium.  This reminded me that my main aquarium really needed a pruning, especially so as it was starkly contrasted to the Amano-style tank in the basement.  And a pruning is really not an arduous undertaking, so I finally forced myself to do it.  Behold:

I’ve always struggled to get a good close-up photo of that tank.  I think digital consumer camera technology finally advanced enough to make it possible.  Oooo, purdy.

–Simon

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Laminate (Part 2)

I heard a theory once that mothers, having endured the pain of childbirth, cope with the trauma through selective amnesia.  The theory posits that, were the memory’s vivid details to remain, no woman would ever subject herself to a second pregnancy.

I don’t know if it makes a good metaphor, but I’ve found a similar effect in husbands who undertake painful home renovations, for 6 months is apparently the point at which I forget anguish and willingly subject myself to the original task which caused the anguish.  Of course, once I begin the task, I quickly remember.  But by then, it’s too late.  Much like pregnancy.

This past Spring, I replaced the hallway carpeting with laminate.  The horrors which lay below were unmentionable (so I mentioned them).  And the end result was well worth the effort, for no longer did navigating the hallway require a temporary hiatus from normal respiration.  Ahh, I love the smell of offgassing formaldehyde in the morning.

The subflooring of the dining room wasn’t nearly as bad, but the carpet was equally rank.  Cut into strips and awaiting their gradual disposal, they pollute the garage with the musty fumes of an old lady and a dying dog.  I’ve taken to running the ozone machine out there regularly, where it works much better than my original intention.

Floor stripped and vacuumed, the real work began.

I was faced with a quandary.  When we bought the house, the kitchen and front room had fresh laminate.  The problem was, the slats interlock in a certain direction, and unless I removed areas of the transition zones, I had no way of knowing which direction the slats had been laid.  When I re-floored the hallway, I hadn’t checked, but at the time it didn’t matter because it wouldn’t connect with the existing laminate.  But now, with the dining room, I needed to know.  But I didn’t consider this ahead of time and began work.  It would come down to a 50/50 chance.

I had already laid the first board.

As the work progressed, the dilemma gnawed.  Could I live with the two rooms not matching?  Would I be content to leave a junction strip between the two?  If I could, would the misalignment forever torment me?  And what if I eventually joined the living room?

So I ripped out the kitchen’s terminal boards and hammered in replacements.  I then shifted my prior work to match, but it was only until the work had advanced sufficiently as to be irreversible did I discover that the two rooms were not perfectly matched in linearity.  No, by mere millimeters were they bent.

Well, if intellect and proper anticipation would fail me, I could always use brute strength and violence!  At least I would have, had my strength been sufficient, but ultimately I had to use a 2X4 and the wall to force things into alignment.  And cursing.  Lots of cursing.  The boards matched closely enough so as to be convincing, and only a very close inspection would betray the slightest of error.

As proof of my efforts, I paid The Blood Price.

Once everything was aligned with the kitchen, the remaining work was more tedious than noteworthy.  I installed the border strip and replaced the molding.

We now have what I call the most adult room in the house, since no one’s allowed to use it.

I did so well in fact that Liz was immediately ready to pull the carpet out of the living room, but I required that the home renovation amnesia set in first.

She set a calendar reminder 6 months out.

–Simon