At last, blogging in 2009 can actually begin. The holidays wreck me for this kind of thing, so the Monday after New Year’s feels like the first foray back into normalcy.
On to business, everyone.
This is it. This season finally (mercifully?) ends tonight. We’ve had some good and not-so-good times, to be sure, but after the last two BCS title games, I imagine a lot of Buckeye faithful are secretly just hoping we don’t look silly tonight. I can’t say I’m among that group, but then, if I were, I wouldn’t say it out loud, anyway, would I?
On to it, then. Some details: Kickoff set for 8:20 pm, and the game will be shown on FOX.
Ken Gordon has some observations on the lack of buzz surrounding the game this year, as well as the almost-infamous decision by The Vest not to make Pryor available to the press. Seems like that was a lot of overkill on the reaction side of things, but I don’t make a living reporting news, either.
Oh, and can we please, please, pretty please fire Jim Bollman?
And here’s some fun, if dubious, Big 12 math to while away the hours. Here’s some math of my own: if the scoring trends of the last two title games continue, we will lose by 1 point, 35-34. That kind of prediction (and it is not my prediction) is basically a toss-up, which is kind of what I think this game is.
If you’re aprehensive about tonight’s game, here’s some highlight goodness from this season, courtesy your friendly neighborhood phenom: TP.
(I’m not going to link to Beanie’s recent comments about leaving/not leaving for the NFL, because dwelling on them will only make the inevitable more painful.)
My take: I have a sneaking suspicion the Big 12 really is a defensive abyss, and that makes me feel good, because this year’s vanilla offense has displayed more than its share of offensiveness (um, thank you, offensive line). Thing is, though, Texas is not the whole Big 12, so their defense might show up better than, say, Texas Tech’s or Mizzou’s. Oh, and despite any news to the contrary, I’m betting they’re pretty pissed about not being in the title game.
And you’ll notice people seem to be saying that OSU needs to either establish the run to set up the pass, or establish the pass to set up the run. There’s no part of me that believes it will be that easy. Both need to come out of the gate running smoothly, or we’re in for a long night.
My prediction? I’m not that stupid. Texas won’t score a hundo on us, but we won’t do it to them, either. It’s going to be closer than all the “OSU sucks” homers out there are saying. Why? Because—and Mack Brown knows this better than anybody—it will be impossible to have prepared for what Pryor might do (and don’t forget about a healthy Beanie).
I’m not really sure what I’ll be doing with this space this year. My wife took an accounting position, which means I’ll soon be leaving my cubicle-dwelling job of three years to embrace life as a stay-at-home dad. In part, I would like to use LW to report on that new phase of my life.
Also, as I have gained something of a reputation (in meatspace, anyway) for finding unusual, interesting, and occasionally useful things on the internet, I think I’ll start trying to report said unusual, interesting, and occasionally useful things here on LW. Let’s get to it.
Today being the day that many New Year’s resolutions are embarked upon, a tracking tool of one kind or another seems appropriate. For my part, I believe I’ll be using Joe’s Goals. As goal trackers go, it’s as good as you’ll find. For starters, it’s dead-simple (simplicity will be a recurring theme of mine in 2009). Also, it’s based online, which means there’s nothing to install, and you can track your goals when even if you’re not at home.
Point is, if pen & paper aren’t a high-tech enough way for you to track progress on those resolutions, give Joe’s Goals a shot.
As for LaffertyWhistle, come back soon and see what’s going on!
Thanksgiving, for my family, was good, and very blessed, indeed.
Still, I doubt I’m the only one who had trouble working up much desire to go to work this morning. We ate a lot last week, and we decorated for Christmas over the weekend, and all I really wanted to do when I woke up this morning was laze around with my wife and our two daughters.
(Never mind that the elder of said daughters crawled in bed with us at roughly 3:30 in the morning and I spent most of the rest of the night wondering if I’d get pee on me if she didn’t make it ’til morning.)
My point is, some people, after a long holiday weekend feel like this:
And some people feel more like this:
(panels from Garfield Minus Garfield)
I’m pretty sure I don’t have to tell you which end of the spectrum I found myself drifting to at 6:30 this morning.
You know what? Forget the pill idea. Instead, maybe hypnotists should start working on a way to make people not realize they’re working and instead think they’ve been fishing all day, a la Office Space. That’d be OK, too.
I was reminded yesterday that Ray Kurzweil is a fascinating character. I was reminded of that fact by watching this talk on the history & future of technological advancement, given at a TED (a site every thinking person should seriously consider following) conference in 2005.
That said, I have spent much of this morning bouncing around the internet to discover the fields Kurzweil has a hand in, and I have not been disappointed.
This interview with Glenn Beck earlier this year is pretty typical, topically. One of my favorite bits:
BECK: OK. So, like, for instance, the human genome project was a…
KURZWEIL: It’s a very good example. People dismissed that as being…
BECK: A failure.
KURZWEIL: … a failure halfway through the project, saying you only collected one percent of the genome. But that was right on schedule. It had been doubling every year.
If you double one percent seven more times, then you get 100 percent. And that’s what happened. And i’s actually continued since the end of the genome project. And if you look at the curves, it’s very smooth exponential growth. Every aspect of our biological science is following that kind of pattern.
BECK: So where are we on the — because the secret is to get to one, right? To get to one percent, because then it is 2, and then it’s 4, right?
KURZWEIL: Well, we are actually now about one percent on these renewables of solar and wind. And it’s doubling every two years. So we are only seven doublings, which is 14 years, away from 100 percent. And that will - - that will continue.
We are also at that kind of stage in terms of our biological technologies. We have the means of reprogramming our genes. We can turn them on. We can turn them off. We can simulate biological processes. So all of these things are progressing at this exponential rate.
The idea that we could be, theoretically, 14 Years from solar power being able to supply all our energy is mind-blowing. Simply stated yet profound exchanges like that one seem common when dealing with Kurzweil, and I for one hope he’s right.
As of writing this post, I am about halfway through listening to this interview with Kurzweil on NPR. Similar in range to the CNN interview above, but just as compelling. The idea that we could be using nanotechnology to manipulate our genes to improve health in as few as 5 or 10 years… if that kind of technology is going to be widely available, you can sign me up right now.
Speaking of health, he (along with Terry Grossman) have a book & website concerned with health & longevity. I’ll have to read the book to say anything about it, but I like the way this guy thinks, so I can’t imagine I’ll hate it.
To me, one of the most interesting points Kurzweil makes: the medical field is now essentially an information technology field, because it has moved beyond the hit-or-miss of discovering new treatments & methods at random to the rationally directed study of information & processes. That doesn’t sound very interesting until you consider that, being an information technology field, medicine should now be considered tied directly to the historically exponential advancement that technology has always followed.
If that’s even half right, good things are about to start happening, and fast. And again, sign me up.
Full disclosure: I hate Michigan. I don’t even like typing it. I’m actually going to go with M*ch*g*n from here on out, except where quoted, fair enough? That said, let’s not bother pretending this won’t be biased. Heavily.
To get things off on the right side of the road, as it were, the above classic photoshop job welcomed us to Eleven Warriors’s post on this week’s presser. I think we all know Tressel isn’t the only one who has had trouble painting M*ch*g*n in a positive light, so I for one won’t fault him for the linguistic dancing.
Details: noon kickoff, ABC, audio here if you can’t watch, but you’d better be watching. The Eleven Warriors preview is as good as it gets (EW might be the best Buckeye-related blog out there). Read, digest, disseminate.
Meanwhile, RichRod, classy as always, had some interesting advice for all the fans whining about 8 losses. Dan Shanoff recapped and responded thusly, and best:
Michigan coach Rich Rodriguezresorts to the old “get a life” response to his critics. Here’s another way to think about it, Coach: How about you get more than three wins in a season? (If he would rather talk about the economy, how about pro-rate his enormous salary, paying off only for his meager win total and giving the rest back to a RichRod scholarship fund for non-athletes who can’t afford to go to Michigan in this current economic environment?)
Eleven Warriors also breaks down some scintillating exchanges between Chris Spielman and Kirk Herbstreit, my favorite comment from which is:
Herbstreit: …I think of great Ohio State and great Michigan teams, and that’s the way I wish it was every year.”
Spielman: “I wish it was, too, but they screwed up. They had to go and mess it up. They got their dirty maize-and-blue hands on it, they screwed it up.”
Listen, I can understand if you’re not quite as jazzed about this year’s game as you have been in the past. But that’s no reason not to cheer as loudly as you can, so I’m betting the following videos will help get any scarlet-blooded fan ready to go for Saturday edition of The Game.
First, a compilation of great plays from recent years’ editions of the Rivalry:
And a great run-through of the 2002 edition, a game I attended and will never forget. Best. Game. Ever.
Enjoy this cornucopia of M*ch*g*n jokes galore from last year’s contest. My favorite among those making the rounds this year:
BREAKING NEWS The Michigan-Ohio State game has been canceled. Apparently Michigan couldn’t get past Toledo.
And in case you weren’t already intimately familiar with every detail about the Rivalry, here are more factoids than you can shake a stick at. And while this isn’t strictly M*ch*g*n-related, it might be one of my favorite factoids of the year, courtesy NBC4 Columbus:
ESPN.com suggests that Ohio State should be rooting for Tennessee to lose to Vanderbilt or Kentucky in its final two games.
Why? Should the Volunteers lose at least one more game, they would join Michigan with eight losses. That would leave Ohio State as the only current Football Bowl Subdivision team to never have lost eight games in a season. [emphasis mine]
My bottom line: Beanie is a member of the select group of Buckeyes that always come up big in The Game, and I’ve got a feeling Pryor will join that club. Not one to prognosticate dangerously, I don’t think I’m alone in having a hard time (read: a nearly impossible time) seeing how the Buckeyes could lose this game. UM will come out tough, as always, but they simply won’t have enough to keep it up, especially if Tressel sees fit to run up the score again.
Closing Thoughts: Just in case you’ve been feeling a bit sorry for the boys in maize and blue this season, consider this: 8—make that 9—losses aside, UM would have to lose 5 of the next six editions of this rivalry to understand what OSU through during the Cooper years. That means we can start feeling sorry for them if their next win in The Game doesn’t come until 2012. Until then, it is on, and there will be no pity.
