Bah

No wind tonight, so Confessions went down hard against May Cause Dizziness, 13-7. We were up 7-6 at half, our Z fell apart, we couldn't get people open, they threw a cup-o-saurus Z... and the rest is, as they say, Hx.

I can't really breathe right now thanks to a player (who will remain nameless) who decided that it was a good idea to set a screen on me from the blindside with a disc in the air. He, according to witnesses (after all, I don't know what the hell he did since it a blindside cheapshot), tracked where I was going, jumped out and set a basketball pick on me while I was running full speed looking back at the disc. Awesome. Something (elbow, forearm, ?) caught me right in the upper left pec and seems to have crushed that rib / set of intercostal muscles or whatever. Fun times.

We just didn't have enough against a good squad; Justin, Ryan and Emily tore our Z apart. Lindsey played really well at deep, too. Great play from them; their team spread the field well and I couldn't cover enough ground. I did have one big D over by the middle sideline into the crowd; on one of their women, of course, so I got heckled accordingly. I had another huge layout D on the above-mentioned screener who ran into my back - well after I had D'ed the disc, while I'm in the air quite obviously in the space before him - and called foul. Sheesh. Played my usual run my head off game and caught / threw some scores, but obviously not enough.

Huge, top-everish highlight of the night was a big hammer from Tim to the left corner of the endzone - he got fouled, so the disc came up short. I saw this right away, but Neon Deion Dheintime did not, so he was running pretty quick when he looked up and saw that I had stopped waiting for the hammer. Rather than run through me and deliver a shot to the gut, he slowed down. The disc came right at his back and he didn't have time to turn around; I jumped, reached over and caught the disc against his back. Totally ridiculous, and pretty much the only thing that didn't come up in his favor the whole night; a really funny moment. He dominated, unsurprisingly, and I will now go on and on about Trigger's excellent [CONTENT DELETED UNTIL TRIGGER PAYS TODAY'S NYET-JONES-HYPES-JUSTIN FEE].

Ah, well. Now Saturday will be more relaxed, hopefully. Very slightly disappointing, but we played a bit above our heads the past few weeks. We'll have some fun this Saturday and put a good cap on the season.

Thank You!

From a Boston Globe article, courtesy of Chris:

Sheer data, which Burke has compiled and stored like a librarian, argues the point. On average, an offense operating outside the red zone will make the first down on fourth and 2 60 percent of the time. When teams face the situation the Colts would have had if the Patriots failed - two minutes left, needing a touchdown, at roughly the opposing 30 - they score 53 percent of the time.

The Patriots would certainly win the 60 percent of the time they convert. They would also win the 47 percent of the time they’d stop the Colts. Overall, going for it gave them a 79 percent chance to win.

Now, what if the Patriots had punted? On average, the net punt would have been 38 yards, and the Colts would have taken over on their 34. Statistically, teams will score 30 percent of the time in that situation, meaning a punt gave the Patriots a 70 percent chance to win.

Burke is not the only statistically minded football source to draw the conclusion. The ZEUS program, developed by a pair of champion backgammon players, was made to simulate specific football situations and spit out probability. One of the developers told the New York Times that Belichick had made the right call, their numbers similar to Burke’s.

Critics of Belichick made two mistakes. First, they underestimated the chances of converting a fourth and 2 and overestimated the difference a punt makes. Playing with abandon against a preventative defense, an offense can typically pick up the yardage from a punt in a matter of three plays and 30 seconds, Burke said.

(Burke, it should be noted, did not wholly absolve Belichick. Burke believes Belichick, who knew he was going to go for the fourth down if necessary before third down, should have run the ball rather than pass on third down.)

“The one thing people aren’t looking at is that third-down call,’’ Burke said. “An unsuccessful pass on third down gives you fourth and 2. An unsuccessful run is going to give you a real short fourth down and make your chances of winning better.’’

I am not PEOPLE! I said this immediately after they went for it on fourth down. On Sunday night. Where's my extensive Globe article? Or my gold star / cookie / certificate? Huh?

Sprawl / ASU / Eskicensored / This is Pop! / BB / Walk

Still buzzed from some old school, late night Ultimate with the ASU club team. Diablos Captain (and Sprawl player) Brady asked if we could scrounge some guys together and give them some competition. We got about 11 or so together and played them from 9-10:30 tonight. Pretty exciting; this was kinda Justin's and my (nay, Justin and I's!) first official Sprawl event. Tough game at first; predictably, ASU came out running really hard and putting up some nice hucks. Didn't help that I started things off with an under-warmed up, too low huck to JD that got D'ed. Yeah, my first throw as a Sprawl cap'n was a turn intended for the other cap'n. Yikes. Anyways, we exchanged points for a bit, then pulled up by a break and took half 7-5, then busted out a trap zone that befuddled them. We ended up winning 13-5, and got some pretty heady play from a lot of dudes. I got my act together, too, playing okay on D but putting up quite a few hucks and scoobers/hammer for scores. Really fun night; ASU looks pretty solid / athletic, a little off with some throw-choices, but that's more or less par for the course for a college team v. club team. I like our farm team. :) I like our club team, too - great to get out on the field with Les Dudes again.

Other news: had a bit of an embarrassing moment at school today. A little background - there are lots of "fashionable" guys and gals at ASU, as I'm sure I've mentioned before. And as with generally any American style situation, the gals' fashion choices stand out quite a bit more than those of their male counterparts. The standing joke is that there are 65,000 students here, but only clothing enough for 40,000. Ha. One of the more interesting fashion phenomena is that the instant the thermometer drops below 78 degrees, a lot of the gals bust out their ASU hoodies (or even worse, fur-lined hoodies) and Uggs, aka ridiculous $300 fur-lined boots. Only they generally don't adjust the rest of their clothing to match and end up walking around in a sweatshirt, butt-length shorts / miniskirts, and knee-high furry boots. I don't think this is me being prude or unhip; they just look kinda ridiculous. Absurd, even. The moniker that has arisen for this ridiculous ensemble, or I suppose the girls who wear it, is "Eskiho." It's a name that's as ridiculous as the outfit, and generally grabs a few laughs. Note also that it's generally not said to people or even behind people's backs, but is a joke told about the fashion phenomenon. I.e., I've never heard anyone say (nor have I said), "Here come some eskihos," or anything like that. It's always in these abstract, what-the-hell-are-kids-these-days-thinking sense (which I suppose says more about us than said kids).

So today in lab, someone was wondering why there had been a camera set up immediately outside our building, and I made some crack about the photographer doing a National Geographic spread on the migratory patterns of the Southwestern Eskiho. One of my labmates then pointed out that she didn't like this word as it was a "sexual-habits slur." Ouch. I felt immediately bad, and I have to grant: this is certainly a gender-un-neutral derogatory term, and "ho" is certainly a gendered slur aimed at the sexual habits of women. I'm generally sensitive to these sorts of PC speech issues, but oddly, this offense hadn't really occurred to me - the joke is so much about the idiotic fashion and not about anyone's sexual habits that I hadn't thought of it. But yeah, point taken, pretty rude to call anyone a "ho" in any sense, even if it is more a comment on absurdity of still wanting to bare one's thighs while one's toesies are cold. I guess it fails to hide behind a sort of "hey, you are dressing rather unsubtly provocatively / like a sex worker in a way that is logically incoherent, unless you have come kind of weird circulation issue" claim. Oh, and "all that fur is stereotypically what you see Inuits wear." That, too, I suppose is breaching some sort of code.

So anyways, I pacified the offended by saying, "withdrawn!" and promising never to use the term again. But I demanded that we needed to come up with a new word for this phenomenon, because I still need to be able to talk about the goofy styles I see, just not in an offensive way. So - if you can come up with a solid term for this Uggs/Mini/Hoodie combo that doesn't involve sexual habits or Native Alaskans, let me know. In the meantime, I've devolved to groaning, "UGH!" every time the fashion comes up. And that will only work for so long.

Oh, also in lab today - LiJing gave a talk today on the history and science of the "Hayflick Limit." It's the cap on the number of divisions a cell line can undergo before the telomeres get too short and the cell enters senescence. LiJing pointed out that a poet, an indie band from Houston, and an electronica group had all used "Hayflick Limit" as a title in their works. This was somehow supposed to indicate a pop culture relevance external to the scientific study of the topic. People were arguing over whether this was worth including in the talk - L had gone about ten minutes over and was looking, as Andrew said, to use a hatchet, not just a scalpel. Some thought that this info was superfluous, some thought it was a good selling point and would get people talking. Huh? I pointed out that, strictly speaking, three random works including a term hardly makes it have "a pop cultural impact." And wow, some people in the room got this, and some SO did not. When pressed, I said that the point was that you can take almost any scientific term and it's virtually guaranteed that some indie band nerd out there has written a tune about it. I.e., not every slapped together reference to a topic represents an impact. This was met (again, by part of the lab - many people were nodding "Nyet's right" or pointing out the difference between popular culture and Popular Culture) with incredulity. The exact quote was "It's not like any band is writing songs about telomerase."

Au contraire...

Anyways, a weird interaction, because here we are on the one hand arguing about every little esoteric factoid, trying to be as historically rigorous as possible, yet we were about to advise L to make a unfounded claim about the social impact of this term to "sell" her talk. I'm not really down with that; I'm also generally against these sorts of "the zeitgeist" claims about pop cultural impact. We're fractionated, people; I don't care if the band is called "The Airborne Toxic Event." I'm not about to pretend that it's not just the hipster-namedrop of some indie-dude but really some sort of mass impact that Don Delillo is having.

Anything else? I spent two hours this morning getting continuously educated by my TA-job-employers. I theoretically learned some tips for teaching a large class. I submitted the proper forms and passed the appropriate quizzes. Competence indicated! Johnny spent a solid five minutes trying to convince me that Sting's solo career is superior to his work with the Police. He's obviously forfeited all rights to be taken seriously in future music discussions. (I mean, he might as well have said that "Why Don't We Do It in the Road" was a masterpiece). Beck and I got some delicious $4 cheeseburgers at Maizie's Bistro in central Phoenix for dinner (yes, pre-scrimmage cheeseburgers! I did not major in kinesiology). Fun date; Beck continues to do an excellent job tracking down and trying out all the good restaurants in our new hood.

Oh, and yeah - SHUT UP ABOUT THE 4th DOWN, TALKING FOOTBALL HEADS. I will never understand the non-existent intelligence baseline of sports commentators. *Some* people are at least clever enough to point out that given even a normal offense, let alone the Colts' high octane supershow, going for it on 4th down was the proper percentage play. What is extraordinarily disappointing to me is that no one is mentioning that if BB really had this all planned out and wasn't just shooting from the hip, then perhaps a run on 3rd down (if nothing else to take the clock down to the two minute warning) was in order. That's the weirder thing to me; not the BB went for it on 4th, that he acted as though he didn't plan anything in advance. How do you not have some sort of decision-tree set up in your head approaching that last series? Anyways, the game disappointed me badly; it's just terrible to be unable to defend that lead in the 4th. Blar.

AS long as I'm accounting for miscellaneous things here... Beck and I went on the Thursday evening Scottsdale Art Walk a couple of weeks ago, and it was MUCH nicer than the downtown First Friday experience. Lots of galleries, hip people, space to breathe, etc. We'll definitely be making that a biweekly experience. We've also been hitting up the outdoor film showings at the local mall; so far we've caught The Birds, West Side Story, and Diamonds are Forever. It's a fun time, and nutty - I got there an hour early for WSS and almost didn't get a seat. People show up way early and make a picnic of it. Anyhoo, good to be getting out and about in our community. Good also to have Beck bring calzones to the movie and follow it up with Mojo. The good life.

Alright, time for bed. Full day at school tomorrow and a VOTS-league showdown with Justin's* May Cause Dizziness. Should be fun. I'll let ya know.

* - Oh, btw, apparently I gushed a little too effusively in the Sprawl post. Justin asked how much he owed me for the writeup and said he was going to show it to his mom or something. Hey - I only blog the truth. Except for that speed of light thing; that was a little over the top. At least I haven't referred to JD as the "Hey There Delilah" of VOTS Ultimate yet. I imagine only Beck will get that one.

The Other End of Disc

In the midst of the Sprawl news, I shouldn't neglect to mention that my VOTS team has won four ina row to pull even on the season. You'll remember we were in dire straits after losing badly to the other division's last place team; we followed that with a win against their #1 team (Vince's Town Tricycle) and a wind-aided upset against Justin D.'s 3rd-ranked May Cause Dizziness. We followed that by fairly shellacking Keith's Inglourius Backhanderds and the number one seed from our division, BP, Paul & J-Ro's The Pen is Mightier. (I will leave detailed boasting aside, but with an injured Heart Attack, Nipar and a sporadically appearing Hoyt, I would claim that I deserve some sort of Andre Dawson-esque MVP. After all, I scored or threw a full 13/14ths of our team's goals in the most recent game ;)). That took us from the pit of despair to 5-5 on the season (and a +4 point differential), earning us the 6th seed on our side and an 11th overall ranking (based on the dubious Nabity all-league rankings). So in pool play (which starts this week), we've got a rematch with May Cause Dizziness, a new match in EBay's Jelly it Up the Sideline, and another new match in Disc-throw Inferno. Realistically, we should lose to MCD on Tuesday and be eliminated from real contention, but we'll see how it goes. I doubt I can pull off the same level of mayhem that I've been doing (taking next to no subs, cutting like crazy) for a full day of Ultimate on Saturday anyways.

Saturday morning scrimmages have been revived, now called the "Elizabeth Lambert Scrimmage-for-Lunch Ultimate Gauntlet" or EL-SLUG. (If you don't know who EL is, might I direct you HERE). My team lost a heart-breaker Saturday; on Universe-for-lunch point, JD threw a laser huck up the sideline, I laid out over / through Rob for the game-winner ... and couldn't get it. To be fair, he grabbed my arm right as I reached for the disc, but it would have been an utterly lame foul call given that 1, I laid out into him, and 2, it was double Ultimate point. We did get another turnover for a final shot at the OT victory, but Tom "A full two thirds of our overtime turnovers" V. gacked an easy disc at midfield to choke away the game. Ah, well, it happens. I hate buying lunch for people, but it would have been arbitrary either way. The two actual games went 13-7 / 8-13, so everything was balanced. I played okay on the day with some nice stuff here and there, a little over-adventurous with some throws to some of our "know your receiver" targets, but otherwise okay. I did have a nice layout grab for a goal and a goalline handblock, always fun. I'm generally disappointed that we can't get a *real* men's competitive scrimmage going - where the hell were all our handlers this weekend? - but hopefully that will get corrected once we get closer to NYF.

Alright, more on the non-Ultimate front later. I have a crazy school-week coming up, but nothing I can't storm my way through. And now, I have to go run a beginner's clinic.

AR: Wake of the Flood

Grateful Dead - Wake of the Flood (1973)

Most notable for being a cherished member of the Nyet Jones CD-Amp Series*, the Grateful Dead's 6th studio album (and the fourth GD album I bought) is a first step in the jazzier direction that the mid-'70s Dead would take. These tunes, more than most GD songs, are cited as being better in their same-era live incantations than these studio versions, primarily because (predictably) the concert medium allowed for much spacier, exploratory takes. That's fairly undeniable, but this set of studio takes does reveal some of the controlled, full ensemble intricacy the band was capable of - they are less adventurous, but hardly sterile.

* - It was a pretty big deal when, as a teenaged youth, I saved up enough money to get a nice six CD magazine Pioneer CD player for my bedroom. Of course, I didn't have money for a tuner/ receiver or speakers, so unless I was listening to my CD Player on headphones - inconvenient for, when example, taking a post-football-practice-exhausted bath - I had to run a guitar patch cable from the CD player headphone jack to my guitar amp. (Have I mentioned this before? Probably. Oh, well). You may or may not know that while both the player and the guitar amp use a 1/4" plug, the CD player's is a stereo plug while the guitar amp's end is mono. So you can really only get one of the channels to play through a guitar amp with the set-up I was using. 90% of the time this doesn't matter a whole lot, as most stereo albums have a significant amount of bleed from left to right channels - i.e., the stereo divisions aren't strict - so the whole sound comes through a mono speaker anyways. But there are elements that only come across in one channel, and so a few albums in my formative youth were encoded as missing particular elements. Even today, when I hear them now, it's striking to hear this brand new melody line or what have you. For Wake, it was the opening sax line from "Let Me Sing Your Blues Away" - the sax was absent, so all I would hear were these odd, popping guitar vamp chords. The sax came in later in the song, which is really weird - why would you start in just the left channel and then move it later? - but I swear that's how it sounded. Other albums in the series were Led Zepellin III, Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, and DSOTM. There were more, I'm sure, but those are the ones I think of when I think of the complete absence of certain instruments. Please be aware that I will probably repeat this story when I get to those albums, too.

"Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleoo" opens the album with a laid-back, fiddle-led groove backed by some excellent lead guitar lines and old time piano-tinkling. I love the lyrics of this one, too; "What's the point to calling shots? / This cue ain't straight in line..." and the opening Cain & Abel nods just beg for sing-alongs. At about the 4:00 mark, the song drops into a summer-breeze bridge that carries out to fade out. This opener is just SF cool, a marked departure from the folk-dominated tone of the previous albums. This vibe continues with the sax-led rocker "Let Me Sing Your Blues Away" (also featuring the signature back-up vocals of Donna Jean Godchaux) and the super slowed-down Garcia crooned cool classic ballad, "Row Jimmy." For lack of better adjectives, the opening tunes of WotF largely sound like 1970s California: electric smooth, cares-away cool, and very smooth.

"Stella Blue" follows; if you don't know, this is one of those slow, religious experience Jerry Garcia ballads that "real" Deadheads live for. I've always thought this tune functions in concert as a huge come down from gigantic jams, so placing it here on the album (after "Row Jimmy") seems like an odd choice. This version is quite lovely but probably exhibit 1a for arguments for the Dead's superiority in concert; this is plenty gripping and pretty, but for whatever reason it does not carry the same emotional depth as a solid in concert version. Dgmw, still a solid version and makes for a sit down and think section to the middle of the album; just doesn't have all the power I associate with the tune; the concert tapes have spoiled me.

Things pick up a little bit with the almost too-hippie "Here Come Sunshine," another mid tempo chill-tune with an adequately uplifting chorus. Really straightforward tune, actually - just VCVCVC with that nice, build-up chorus. This starts the segue into the jazzier side of the Dead; this whole album is removed in tone/genre from the Americana of Workingman's and American Beauty, but with "Eyes of the World" and (even moreso) "Weather Report Suite," things take an overt foray into more complex chords, intricate guitar runs, and odd time signature breakdowns. Something resembling jazz-rock. "EotW" maintains a certain pop sensibility / hookiness that would be *absolutely* perfected in the next album in "Franklin's Tower;" for now, you get another very good breezy number with some expert guitar runs and just enough sing-along / dance-along impetus to genuinely lilt. "WRS," on the other hand, is a 12:43 multi-passage opus. It opens with "Prelude," a classical guitar intro that gets backed by drums and an organ and slowly fades into the full band "Part 1", complete with an emotional, closed eye vocal that throughout the tune teeters on the overly dramatic. "Like a desert spring / My lover comes and spreads her wings" are typical, and I guess if you're in the mood for such romanticism it's fine. The vocals are well blended (kudos, again, to Donna); that is one advantage of this version over some concert flubs. "Part 2: Let it Grow" is a progressive accelerando that stays on the melodramatic but matches it with tense music; this eventually fades into a horns-tinged jam that runs to a final vocal section ("What shall we say / Shall we call it by a name?") that brings the extended composition to a fine close. It's probably easy to figure this out, but "Part 2" is the bit that often gets run out into the ether in concert, i.e. where Grateful Dead "magic" happens. So such an abbreviated segment in light of the other versions always sounds a bit odd.

So there are a couple of things working against this disc. One, as noted, there are better versions out there of a lot of these songs, so there's a pervasive sense that even though these tunes are not sterile per se, they are not as lively as one knows they can be. Two, it's a bit too clean / laid-back for its own good. I happen to love this disc as one of my nostalgic Dead collections, but I can definitely see how people might think some of these tunes are a little plain and/or steering in a smooth-jazz sort of direction. I'd be hesitant, for example, to introduce someone to the GD with this disc, unless I already knew they were really into jazz-rock (in which case, Blues for Allah would be a better choice besides).

Still, this disc is a personal love and well worth your time. The opening track is a killer, and the rest is great for a can't care sunset / beer combination. A qualified yes for this one, and that qualification is that you be in the appropriate low-energy mood for soul-soothing.

(Addendum: Dick's Picks Vol. 1 contains about half of this album in a show from December 1973, if you want to see what I mean about the vivacity of the live performances).

Status: Recommended (solid)
Nyet's Fave: "Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleoo"