Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Fantasy Football Week Sixteen/NFL Pick 'Em Week 17

I lost.  How depressing.  Say it again:  I lost.  Normally I would be okay with finishing in second place in fantasy football, but I lost because of a stupid decision, which is a pretty idiotic way to lose.  Before I explain, the final score ended up 150.26-124.42.  Congratulations Hurricane Arians on a great season!

The first irritating thing was that I set my lineup early in the week and never really checked it again.  Turns out that Mario Manningham did not play.  That hurt, but not all that much, since this is a pretty deep league and there is pretty much no one available.  Hell, from my bench, the best player to plug in was Jacoby Jones and his stellar 4.20 points.

Unfortunately, that was not the part that upset me.  Before I set my lineup, I considered starting the Bills defense against Tebow and the Broncos, but then I decided to stick with Green Bay.  They have not been lighting up points-wise for me most of the season, but they have been pretty consistent.

The Bills scored 30 points, whereas the Packers only scored 4.  How does that make me feel?  26 more points if I used the Bills.  You do the math...

Anyways, my best player was Matthew Stafford, but since I already his picture before, I will use Frank Gore, who had a pretty good season.  Actually, I lied, I never used Stafford, but I really like this picture.

NFL Pick 'Em Week 17
113-118 and in 11th place.  Last week I was 7-9.  I need to go 11-5 in order to finish above .500.

Monday, December 26, 2011

New Movies Playing!



Pariah
What's It About?
 A young black teenager discovering along with her family, that she is gay.
  
Trailer:
PREDICTION:
"Pariah looks good. The coming-of-age plot is nothing new- but the subject of who's coming of age, is a unique one."





*


The Iron Lady
What's It About?
Story of Margaret Thatcher- the UK's one and only female Prime Minister.
  
Trailer:

PREDICTION:
"The Iron Lady doesn't look really look interesting- but watching wonderful Meryl Streep become Thatcher, should be."



*


A Separation
What's It About?
  An Iranian wife and husband who are divorcing- and fighting over custody of their child.
Trailer:

PREDICTION:
"A Separation just looks pretty dreary."
 






***
E N J O Y
*the*

M O V I E S
***

Best New Movie Poster(s) of the Week

(Official movie poster for upcoming movie  
Pariah)


 
WHY THIS POSTER IS GREAT!:


*The film's title, is defined.





(Official movie poster for upcoming movie  
The Iron Lady)

 
WHY THIS POSTER IS GREAT!:


*Meryl Streep's character of Margaret Thatcher, infused with Westminster's  skyline of the House of Parliament and Big Ben.


*The tagline.





***

Sunday, December 25, 2011

Minecraft Boxing Day!

Since it's boxing day, we'd best start with a picture of a boxer.



Her name is Fatima Adib, and like Batroc the Leaper and me, her martial art of choice is savate, in which she won the 2008 European Championship in her weight class. I ran into a picture of her while image searching "savate", so that's all I know. Isn't she cute?

**

And now, Minecraft. I complained earlier about the endermen in Beta 1.8, who would pick up blocks, including bedrock. While I was strongly tempted by the idea of putting out all the lights in my pit and seeing if the endermen would really dig a hole through the bedrock, I decided the smart thing to do is run away before endermen break all my stuff. So that's what I did.



I'm heading west, toward the sunset and away from Epic Island. As I'm going to be staying on the move, this will be a very visual post.



There's my first tower on the right, and the new tower on the left, flanking the rising sun. After spending most of the day walking west, I found a nice little cubbyhole with a small coal deposit in it, and decided to spend my first night there:


Here's what it looks like from the outside.



Turns out good old Mount Impossible, which I first visited ages ago, is just around the corner:



Here's the view to the west of Mount Impossible.



As I was looking at that lovely pine forest, I couldn't help noticing that there was rather a sheer drop below me...



That's where I took the previous screenshot from. Now, I'm no programmer, but it occurs to me that I might have encountered the edge where the terrain generated under the old system ends.



I'm not complaining; I think it's cool.



There was even a bit of a cave in the previous chunk, which opened onto the water but wasn't flooded by it:



Making an excellent location for an underwater base!



We move on, into the desert:



Since the desert looks kinda boring, I decided to walk through the woods next to it. That turned out to be more hazardous than I expected:



Here's another innovation: shears. As something of an animal rights person, I heartily endorse the new Minecraft, where you no longer get wool by punching sheep.



Eventually the forest gives way to a rolling plain, where I built a house. But what's that in the distance?



It's an NPC village!



Only pigs roam the deserted streets of NPC Village...



...and the houses are empty.



But their crops are doing okay.



This is a church. I do not approve.



The only good thing is that it has a tower.



Here's the view from it.



Getting back to the good things for a moment, there are now also proper oceans.



And, frighteningly, ravines. I nearly fell into that one!



Because it's turned into something of a habit, I'll finish off my sightseeing tour of the new biomes with a sunset.



Next up: my home away from home, and proof that the Endermen really are terrorists.

Merry Christmas!


Merry Christmas everyone!  Hope you all have a great day!

Saturday, December 24, 2011

The Dark Knight Rises Trailer

I know this has been around everywhere, but c'mon, did you really think I was going to fail to post it for your enjoyment?

Friday, December 23, 2011

Hank Paulson’s inside jobs

Felix Salmon Nov 29, 2011
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/11/29/hank-paulsons-inside-jobs

What on earth did Hank Paulson think his job was in the summer of 2008? As far as most of us were concerned, he was secretary of the US Treasury, answerable to the US people and to the president. But at the same time, in secret meetings, Paulson was hanging out with his old Goldman Sachs buddies, giving them invaluable information about what he was thinking in his new job.

The first news of this behavior came in October 2009, when Andrew Ross Sorkin revealed that Paulson had met with the entire board of Goldman Sachs in a Moscow hotel suite for an hour at the end of June 2008. He told them his views of the US and global economies, he previewed a market-moving speech he was about to give, and he even talked about the possibility that Lehman Brothers might blow up. Maybe it’s not so surprising that Goldman Sachs turned out to be so well positioned when Lehman did indeed do just that a few months later.

Today we learn that the Goldman meeting in Moscow was not some kind of aberration. A few weeks later, on July 28 2008, Paulson met with a who’s who of the hedge-fund world in the headquarters of Eton Park Capital Management — a fund founded by former Goldman superstar Eric Mindich.

The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into “conservatorship” — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets…

Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out…

The fund manager who described the meeting left after coffee and called his lawyer. The attorney’s quick conclusion: Paulson’s talk was material nonpublic information, and his client should immediately stop trading the shares of Washington- based Fannie and McLean, Virginia-based Freddie.

When we found out about the Moscow meeting, I asked how on earth Paulson thought such behavior was OK. But now I think he was downright pathological in giving inside information to his old Wall Street buddies. And the crazy thing is that we have no idea how many of these meetings there were, or how long they went on for — the only way that we ever find out about them is when reporters like Sorkin or Bloomberg’s Richard Teitelbaum manage to find a source who was in the meeting and is willing to talk about what happened.

Given that it’s taken two years since the release of Sorkin’s book for the Eton Park meeting to be made public, it’s fair to assume that there were other meetings, too — possibly many others. Paulson was giving inside tips to Wall Street in general, and to Goldman types in particular: exactly the kind of behavior that “Government Sachs” conspiracy theorists have been speculating about for years. Turns out, they were right.

Paulson, says Teitelbaum, “is now a distinguished senior fellow at the University of Chicago, where he’s starting the Paulson Institute, a think tank focused on U.S.-Chinese relations”. I’d take issue with the “distinguished” bit. Unless it means “distinguished by an astonishing black hole where his ethics ought to be”.