Interesting Football October 4 2008

Currently I am watching the end of the exciting Florida State-Miami football game. The rain is coming down in buckets and the Seminoles just recovered the Hurricane onside kick to seal a 41-39 victory. The Hurricanes had scored with just under 20 seconds left to cut it to the final margin; the scoring play was a “tackle-eligible” pass.

Prior to that, I got to see Illinois whip Michigan 45-20; Michigan continued to turn the ball over repeatedly.

Illinois has improved greatly over the past few years; their quarterback (Juice Williams) has developed into one the nation’s best.

I watched the Stanford-Notre Dame game from start to finish; in the beginning both teams moved the ball well, but Cardinal mistakes helped the Irish move to a 28-7 fourth quarter lead.

But the Cardinal defense bottled up the Irish and got the ball back and they ended up cutting the lead to 28-21 with a few minutes left.

Notre Dame stayed aggressive on offense though and managed to move the ball enough to pin the Cardinals back on their 1 yard line with a good punt (and a mistake by the return man who fielded the ball at his own 1).

In a game that I didn’t get to see, Navy used two blocked punts to beat Air Force 33-27; this game was a minor upset. This is the second game in a row in which Navy beat a good team on the road (last week it was Wake Forest).

Navy blocked two punts for touchdowns, Matt Harmon tied a school record with four field goals and the Midshipmen beat Air Force for a sixth straight time with a 33-27 win on Saturday.

The victory gives the Midshipmen (4-2) a leg up in their quest for a sixth straight Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy, an annual competition between Army, Navy and Air Force for service academy supremacy. They play Army in the last game of the season.

Blake Carter blocked Ryan Harrison’s punt early in the fourth quarter and Bobby Doyle pounced on it in the end zone, helping send the Midshipmen to their third straight win.

Carter also returned a blocked punt 25 yards for a score in the first quarter after Greg Shinego broke through the line and got a hand on it.

Jarod Bryant, filling in for an injured quarterback Kaipo-Noa Kaheaku-Enhada, rushed for 101 yards and a touchdown. Eric Kettani finished with 75 yards.

Harmon hit field goals of 35, 48, 44 and 32 yards to tie a school mark held by five other kickers.

So now I have Texas vs. Colorado on, though I’ll be checking on the Ohio State-Wisconsin game and the North Carolina-Connecticut game. The U. Conn. Huskies are ranked number 24.

Texas just scored to go up 14-0 in the first quarter; things are looking good (from my point of view )

Update It finished 38-14 and the score reflected how dominant that Texas was. But Colorado missed three field goals.

The Ohio State, Wisconsin match up is much more competitive. It is 10-10 in the 4′th quarter with the Buckeyes attempting the go-ahead field goal. The kick is perfect and now the lead is 13-10; there is 10:52 left in the game.

Wisconsin made a long drive and took the lead 17-13 with 6:30 left in the game.

(photos from the yahoo photo gallery)

Why I Lose Patience with (some) Fundamentalist Christians

From the Daily Kos

This is a viral internet letter:

Subject: Fw: “we are no longer a Christian nation . .
.” [Scanned - Center ISD]

You all may have seen this before, but I had not until
now. This will make you think!

A Trivia question in Sunday School:
How long is the beast allowed to have authority in
Revelations?

Revelations Chapter 13 tells us it is 42 months, and you
know what that is.
Almost a four-year term of a Presidency.

All I can say is “Lord, Have mercy on us!”
According to The Book of Revelations the anti-Christ is:
The anti-Christ will
be a man, in his 40’s, of MUSLIM descent, who will
deceive the nations with
persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like
appeal….the prophecy says
> that people will flock to him and he will promise false
> hope and world peace,
> and when he is in power, will destroy everything..
>
> Do we recognize this description??
>
> I STRONGLY URGE ea ch one of you to post this as many times
> as
> you can! Each opportunity that you have to send it to a
> friend or media outlet..do it!
> I refuse to take a chance on this unknown candidate who
> came out of nowhere.
>
> From: Dr. John Tisdale
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> As I was listening to a news program last night, I watched
> in horror as Barack Obama made the statement with pride. .
> .”we are no longer a Christian nation; we are now a
> nation of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, . . .”
> As with so many other statements I’ve heard him (and his
> wife) make, I never thought I’d see the day that I’d
> hear something like that from a presidential candidate in
> this nation. To think our forefathers fought and died for
> the right for our nation to be a Christian nation–and to
> have this man say with pride that we are no longer that.
> How far this nation has come from what our founding fathers
> intended it to be.
>
> I hope that each of you will do what I’m doing
> now–send your concer ns, written simply and sincerely, to
> the Christians on your email list. With God’s help, and
> He is still in control of this nation and all else, we can
> show this man and the world in November that we are, indeed,
> still a Christian nation!
> Please pray for our nation!

1. We are not a Theocracy; remember the “no establishment clause” of the Constitution? Remember that some of our founding fathers were not Christian but rather deists?

2. The Book of Revelation was written sometime between 65-100 CE, according to most scholars. On the other hand, Islam began about 630 CE (Mohammed died in 632). So how could the so-called anti-Christ be predicted to be Muslim?

Bottom line: these folks (people who send e-mail messages such as this) are idiots seriously misguided. The believe nonsense such as this and fight tooth and nail against things like modern science.

Update: I thank a visitor for pointing out that my message might well be more effective if I worded it differently. Sure, my personal opinion hasn’t changed any, but it is more important to me to communicate my points effectively than to vent.

Football Afternoon Part II.

Ok, this post will be political.

Note this chart:

Hat tip to Liberals Must Die; surf there to read the discussion. Better yet, dress up like a wingnut and contribute!

Interesting charts from “Obama letdown watch“. I’ve seen (and posted) the first one; the second one is really funny and drives home an important point.

Barack Obama’s book: Dreams From My Father. I reviewed this book here. This New York Review of Books article compares Obama’s book to James Baldwin’s book Notes of a Native Son.

One very short paragraph:

Had their ambitions been less focused and their personalities less complex, Baldwin and Obama could easily have become pastors, preachers, leaders of black churches. But for both of them there was a shadow, a sense of an elsewhere that would form them and make them, eventually, more interested in leading America itself, or as much of it as would follow, than merely leading their own race in America. Both of them would discover their essential Americanness outside America, Baldwin in France, the home of some of his literary ancestors, Obama in Kenya, the home of his father.

This essay talks about how both of these men were influenced by their absent fathers and how both men were influenced by their relationships to other countries (France in Baldwin’s case).

Local Politics: IL-18. Peoria Story (award winning journalist Elaine Hopkins) talks about hitting the campaign trail for Colleen Callahan. Callahan is running against Republican Aaron Schock, who is running for Ray LaHood’s seat in Congress. Rep. LaHood is probably best known for chairing the House Impeachment Proceedings against President Clinton; he is retiring from his position.

This post contains some photos.

State of the election: Barack Obama is looking good in the swing states.

[...]The McCain campaign’s decision this week to abandon Democratic-leaning Michigan is the most obvious and dramatic sign, a major tactical retreat that limits the ways he can reach the magic number of 270 electoral votes on Nov. 4.

But McCain is in as bad or worse shape in other battleground states. Barring a dramatic change, he is on course to lose Iowa and New Mexico, both states barely won by President Bush four years ago in his narrow victory over Democrat John F. Kerry. And he and the Republican National Committee this week began pouring money into Indiana and North Carolina, reliably Republican states where the Obama campaign has made strong advances and polls indicate the candidates are roughly tied.

The Obama campaign, meanwhile, has responded this week by significantly increasing its television advertising budget in Indiana and five other states and has even spent $350,000 to air spots continuously on a satellite TV channel, a first for a presidential hopeful.

The pendulum of the race has swung each way more than once over the course of the campaign, and with a month and two debates remaining, McCain has opportunities to recover.

But the Obama surge, coinciding over the last 10 days with the crisis on Wall Street and the debate over a federal bailout, has left McCain on the ropes in eight states with a combined 101 electoral votes that Bush carried four years ago. The Republican is slipping further behind not only in Michigan, but also in four other states that went Democratic four years ago, but which McCain hoped to pull into the GOP column this year.

By contrast, McCain does not lead Obama in any state that Kerry captured in 2004. That year, Bush beat Kerry by 35 electoral votes – 286 to 251 (one elector from Minnesota voted for Kerry’s running mate, John Edwards). [...]

But one month is an eternity in politics. I think of it this way: if this were a football game, it would be the start of the 4′th quarter and we’d be up 28-13. Yes, you’d rather be us than them, but they are still two big plays plus a 2 point conversion out of it. They are down, but hardly dead.

Slate has starting properly updating their election future data again:

Iowa Electronic: Obama 75.0, McCain 23.4
Intrade: Obama 69.9, McCain 31.0

Remember these are “winner take all” numbers based on popular vote. The “percentage/share” numbers are difference (where one bets on whether a candidate exceeds a certain percentage of the popular vote).

More Sarah Palin and our Culture War

Why am I so obsessed with her? I have an idea: I dislike her on a personal level that I haven’t felt for almost any other political figure, except for Ronald Reagan during his first 6 years.

George W. Bush? I really didn’t dislike him until he went public with his determination to take us to war. Had he not been so eager for war, I wouldn’t have felt such disgust. Believe it or not, though I voted for Gore in 2000, I actually liked some of the stuff that he said during the campaign.

Dick Cheney? Vile, but mostly I disrespect his actions. I have a grudging respect for his intellect.

John McCain? Wrong on the issues, not that bright and ill tempered. But basically I like him; I see him as sincere but misguided and simply not smart enough for the job.

But Sarah Palin physically makes me ill. No, it isn’t that she is a powerful woman; I actually like Hillary Clinton. It isn’t that she is a conservative woman; though I disagree with her, I like Condoleezza Rice. I like Kathleen Parker too.

It isn’t that she is an attractive, outspoken woman; I like Barbara Boxer and Kathleen Sebelius.

Part of my dislike of Palin stems from what appears to be phoniness; the winking, flirting, etc. But then again, I don’t dislike Katherine Harris to the same degree, so that isn’t it.

I think much of it comes from the fact that Palin is really an icon for the current culture war between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. Here is a creationist who “speaks in tongues”, has very little in depth knowledge, and yet considers herself as qualified for the job. Even worse is that there are lots of idiots who approve of her.

To me, she represents almost all of the worst stereotypes of the typical red-state American.

One thing I do like about her though: she keeps in superb physical condition; she has run a 3:59 marathon.

So anyway, here are my Palin tantrums of the day:

First, our local newspaper hit it out of the park:

Aren’t Americans tired of their elected representatives dodging issues until they become a crisis? (See current economic bailout, see Social Security, see Medicare, etc.) That’s not ending “politics as usual,” that is “politics as usual,” to invoke one of the multiple cliches that Palin fell back upon. Indeed, can we declare a moratorium until Nov. 4 on the use of the words “change” – from both camps – “hockey mom” and “Joe Sixpack”? How about on fighting “greed and corruption”? (Whoever thought we’d see Republicans making Wall Street Public Enemy No. 1?)

Meanwhile, Biden’s answers were far more detailed and insightful, especially on foreign policy, a subject where Palin mangled the name of the U.S. general heading up military operations in Afghanistan – it’s McKiernan, not McClellan. The folksy stuff from Palin sometimes seemed “darn right” forced. It was obvious she’d been waiting all night to utter the rehearsed words, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” [...]

It’s true, Palin did not bomb, as she did in her interview with Katie Couric. If mediocre performance relative to low expectations is all it takes to declare victory … well, welcome to America, 2008.

Beyond that, while it is possible to get too technical or nuanced, we never thought we’d see the day when knowledge in a national candidate would be considered a liability. In a country with serious, serious issues – a war, a deficit that may be about to surpass $1 trillion, Social Security and Medicare about to go on life support if nothing changes – that observation makes us more worried for America’s future than anything.

Emphasis mine.

Hat tip to Dependable Renegade. But she is, in some ways worse that Dick Cheney: she isn’t as smart and capable as he is.

Of course, the Republicans are whining about the fact that more and more women are disapproving of Palin.

Belinda Luscombe for Time Magazine: Women are abandoning Sarah Palin. Why might that be?

Luscombe’s answers:

* Women are weapons-grade haters.

* 1. She’s too pretty. This is very bad news. At school, pretty girls tend to be liked only by other pretty girls. The rest of us, whose looks hover somewhere around underwhelming, resent them and whisper archly of their “unearned attention.”

* 2. She’s too confident. This also bodes ill. Women have self-esteem issues. But they also have other-women’s-esteem issues.

* 3. She could embarrass us.

At risk of being branded a weapons-grade hater, let me say I have no desire to sit down with Belinda Luscombe, underwhelming-looking woman to underwhelming-looking woman, and discuss our resentments and self-esteem issues over a mani-pedi.
[...]

I won’t resort to speaking for “some women,” though I’d wager I’m accurately characterizing at least as many as you are. But speaking for me, I don’t resent Sarah Palin’s looks. I do resent that, when her talking points fail her, she exploits her looks by winking at the camera and wrinkling her nose and talking in a flirty-girly voice to get out of any expectation that she, you know, be qualified for the job she’s seeking.

Her confidence? I have never been a fan of people over-confident to the point of believing themselves deserving of things they are not qualified for. The list of people on whom I train my weapons-grade hate for that sin includes far more men than women, for the simple reason that in my life I have come across more men than women with that kind of sense of entitlement.

She could embarrass us, as in Women? If I were a Republican I would be worried about the enormous embarrassment she was to my party. But then, if I were a Republican, I’d already have my hands full being embarrassed at John McCain’s erratic behavior, disregard for the truth, temper, and lack of connection to any kind of honor or principle. That’s not a gender thing, that’s a Republican thing. And I’m not so insecure for my gender that I worry one aggressively ignorant and incompetent woman can undermine me-as-woman.

Emphasis mine.

More from the London Review of Books:
(hat tip to Seattle for Barack Obama)

Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant variety of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. There are echoes of the Poujadist agenda of 1950s France in its contempt for metropolitan elites, fuelling the resentment of the provinces towards the capital and the countryside towards the city, in its xenophobic strain of nationalism, sturdy, paysan resistance to taxation, hostility to big business, and conviction that politicians are out to exploit the common man. In 1980, Ronald Reagan profitably tapped the movement with his promises of states’ rights, low taxes and a shrunken government in Washington; the ‘Reagan Democrats’ who crossed party lines to vote for him are still the most targeted demographic in the country. In 1992, Ross ‘Clean out the Barn’ Perot and his United We Stand America followers looked for a while as if they were going to up-end the two-party system, with Perot leading George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the midsummer polls. In 1996, Pat Buchanan (‘The peasants are coming with pitchforks’) appealed to the same bloc of voters with a programme that was militantly Christian, white, nativist, provincial, protectionist and anti-Washington. In 2000, Karl Rove cleverly enrolled this quasi-Poujadist faction in his grand alliance of libertarians, born-agains and corporate interests. It’s worth remembering that in 2004 every American city with a population of more than 500,000 voted for Kerry, and that the election was won for Bush in the outer suburbs, exurbia and the countryside – peasants with pitchforks territory. For an organisation so wedded to its big-city corporate clients, the Republican Party has been hugely successful in mopping up the votes of low-income, lightly educated rural and exurban residents.
[...]

What is most striking about her is that she seems perfectly untroubled by either curiosity or the usual processes of thought. When answering questions, both Obama and Joe Biden have an unfortunate tendency to think on their feet and thereby tie themselves in knots: Palin never thinks. Instead, she relies on a limited stock of facts, bright generalities and pokerwork maxims, all as familiar and well-worn as old pennies. Given any question, she reaches into her bag for the readymade sentence that sounds most nearly proximate to an answer, and, rather than speaking it, recites it, in the upsy-downsy voice of a middle-schooler pronouncing the letters of a word in a spelling bee. She then fixes her lips in a terminal smile. In the televised game shows that pass for political debates in the US, it’s a winning technique: told that she has 15 seconds in which to answer, Palin invariably beats the clock, and her concision and fluency more than compensate for her unrelenting triteness.

And to what I hate the most about her:

But as politicians of both parties in Alaska have discovered, underestimating Palin nearly always turns out to be a fatal error. For – when on form – she has the ability to connect with that surly mass of occasional, floating voters who feel themselves to have been disenfranchised by more orthodox politicians and who respond to her as a paragon of domestic good sense and decency in a world rendered ever more incomprehensible by the dark arts of the elites.

She belongs to no elite. After drifting through five colleges in six years, she eventually secured a degree in journalism at the University of Idaho, less ivy than sagebrush league. Short of majoring in chiropractic, she could hardly have had a higher education less offensive to the Limbaughites. As Obama stands tarred in their eyes by his Columbia and Harvard connections, so Palin represents the healthy values of the church and the outdoors against those of the deeply suspect East Coast universities.

Importantly, she’s unimpressed by ‘science’, whether it’s the science of evolution, anthropogenic climate change or the Endangered Species Act. In a period of stagnant wages and rising unemployment, science has been vilified as the enemy of working-class jobs in such industries as mining, timber, agriculture and construction. It is also – especially in the phrase ‘best available science’ – very widely seen as the cause of unpardonable infringements of individual property rights. When, for instance, Palin contentiously advocates drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, she both promises well-paid jobs and champions the precious American liberty to do what the hell you like in your own backyard. Likewise, her fight against listing the polar bear as an endangered species, even as the sea ice melts under its feet – which has entailed blandly denying the findings of her own state scientists – sits well with a large, disgruntled rural sector of the population which has seen jobs lost, mills closed and property devalued in order to protect such critters as the northern spotted owl and the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly. The director of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance says that her motto is ‘cut, kill, dig and drill’ and that she lives ‘in the Stone Age of wildlife management, and is very opposed to utilising accepted science’. For many voters, that’s ample reason to see her as a folk hero.

Please read the whole article; he exposes the lie that she was a “cut government to its bear essentials” type of mayor.

Oh yes, Palin is a big time liar (AP via the Daily Kos)

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin fought to protest atrocities in Sudan by dropping assets tied to the country’s brutal regime from the state’s multi-billion-dollar investment fund, she claimed during Thursday’s vice presidential debate.

Not quite, according to a review of the public record – and according to the recollections of a legislator and others who pushed a measure to divest Alaskan holdings in Sudan-linked investments.

“The [Palin] administration killed our bill,” said Alaska state representative Les Gara, D-Anchorage. Gara and state Rep. Bob Lynn, R-Anchorage, co-sponsored a resolution early this year to force the Alaska Permanent Fund – a $40 billion investment fund, a portion of whose dividends are distributed annually to state residents – to divest millions of dollars in holdings tied to the Sudanese government.

In Thursday’s debate, Palin said she had advocated the state divest from Sudan. “When I and others in the legislature found out that we had some millions of dollars [of Permanent Fund investments] in Sudan, we called for divestment through legislation of those dollars,” Palin said.

But a search of news clips and transcripts from the first three months of this year did not turn up an instance in which Palin mentioned the Sudanese crisis or concerns about Alaska’s investments tied to the ruling regime. Moreover, Palin’s administration openly opposed the bill, and stated its opposition in a public hearing on the measure.

“The legislation is well-intended, and the desire to make a difference is noble, but mixing moral and political agendas at the expense of our citizens’ financial security is not a good combination,” testified Brian Andrews, Palin’s deputy revenue commissioner, before a hearing on the Gara-Lynn Sudan divestment bill in February. Minutes from the meeting are posted online by the legislature.

Gara says the lack of support from Palin’s administration helped kill the measure.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be:

October Saturday Football Afternoon

It is a little slice of heaven for me: ND-Stanford game on TV, wife out and about, and I have the lap-top.

This will be mostly non-election stuff.

Evolved and Rational She is doing some taunting here, but she makes an excellent point that speciation has been observed (one species evolving into another one) and discusses an example:

Speciation has been observed in nature yet again.

Some female fish have eyes for their man only. Colourful African cichlids have evolved into new species because females are partially blind to others.

But even as that discovery is made, the species are under threat because the polluted waters they live in are causing them to interbreed.

Lulz on you, cretinshits creationists. How does it feel like being pwned over 9000 times? Is the resulting butthurt enough for you to join us in reality, or are you doing to still delude yourself with your godbot lies and delusions? Choose wisely. [...]

The explanation:

Mutations in the genes for light-detecting proteins called opsins explain why, Seehausen says. His team found that these genes had changed faster than the rest of the fish’s genes, a sign of evolution in action. Red fish evolved red-sensing opsins, while blue fish developed blue-sensing proteins.

Tests in laboratory tanks confirmed that females with red-sensing eyes went for red males, while blue-eyed females followed suit. Hybrid females, just like those in the murky waters, showed no preference at all.

Follow the link to see the original source and to see her advice to those who continue to deny evolution.

Ok, just one sort of political note: many of us love outspoken, attractive spunky women (E. R. certainly qualifies!) But we like intelligent, outspoken, attractive spunky women.

Scientific Advance 3-Quarks Daily has a snipped of an excellent article on how someone who, while having brain function, is so paralyzed that he can’t even talk. He communicates by blinking his eyes “yes” or “no”.

Brain scientists have implanted electrodes into his brain that sends impulses to a computer that can “speak” for him, and he has made some progress.

Elections: I’ve wondered if we (the US) would be better off if we weren’t stuck with the two-party system. But every system has its pitfalls; a Canadian talks about their election dilemma:

I probably need to explain strategic voting to those people who don’t have the “advantage” of living in a multiparty democracy. Strategic voting is where you deliberately vote for someone who is not your first choice in order to prevent another candidate from winning in your riding.

In the context of the current election, it means that a Liberal could vote for an NDP candidate if it was the NDP candidate who had the best chance of defeating the Conservative candidate in a particular riding. The idea being floated right now is that all Liberal, NDP, and Green Party supporters unite behind the candidate who has the best chance of defeating the Conservative candidate and preventing the Conservatives from getting a majority. [...]

Follow the link for the rest of the article. It is a well known mathematical fact that, if there is more than two choices, there will be no “totally fair” way for voters to decide among multiple choices. See Arrow’s Theorem.

Probability, Statistics and our Current Economic Mess.

Hat tip to 3-quarks daily

From Slate

Here’s how to make money flipping a coin. Bet 100 bucks on heads. If you win, you walk away $100 richer. If you lose, no problem; on the next flip, bet $200 on heads, and if you win this time, take your $100 profit and quit. If you lose, you’re down $300 on the day; so you double down again and bet $400. The coin can’t come up tails forever! Eventually, you’ve got to win your $100 back.

This doubling game, sometimes called “the martingale,” offers something for nothing—certain profits, with no risk. You can see why it’s so appealing to gamblers. But five more minutes of thought reveals that the martingale can lead to disaster. The coin will come up heads eventually—but “eventually” might be too late. Most of the time, one of the first few flips will land heads and you’ll come out on top. But suppose you get 11 tails in a row. Just like that, you’re out $204,700.* The next step is to bet $204,800—if you’ve got it. If you’re out of cash, the game is over, and you’re going home 200 grand lighter.

[...]
The carefully synthesized financial instruments now seeping toxically from the hulls of Lehman Bros. and Washington Mutual are vastly more complicated than the martingale. But they suffer the same fundamental flaw: They claim to create returns out of nothing, with no attendant risk. That’s not just suspicious. In many cases, it’s mathematically impossible.

[...]
In other words, the martingale strategy doesn’t eliminate risk—it just takes your risk and squeezes it all into one improbable but hideous scenario. The expected value computation is unforgiving. No matter what ultrasophisticated betting strategy you adopt, you can’t expect to make money in the long run by flipping a fair coin. There’s always a risk of loss—and the smaller the chance of losing, the uglier the potential loss becomes. The result is a kind of “upside-down lottery.” If you play the Powerball, you’ll probably lose the cost of a ticket, but you might win big. In the martingale, you’ll probably win a little, but if all six numbered balls match your ticket, then the bank comes around and takes away everything you’ve got.

You probably wouldn’t sign up for that game. But the news of the last few weeks confirms that we’ve been playing it for years. And it looks like the balls just lined up. Oh, and there’s one more difference between the thickly interwoven financial markets and the lottery: If one person wins the Powerball, just one person gets rich. If one massively leveraged financial firm loses while playing the martingale, it can bring the whole system down with it.

So, what about that rare event? They happen, and often it is impossible to build a model that accurately calculates the probability of such a rare event. For more on this, see Taleb’s work.

Bradley Homecoming 5K (3 mile) run

Well today I ran in the Bradley Homecoming 5K run. Disclaimer: though the race director disagrees, I am pretty sure the course is about .1 miles short; that is it is about 3 miles.

Time: 23:56; this seems to jibe well with the 8 minutes a mile I thought that I was averaging. My overall place was 20 out of 75. This was a Palinesque type of performance: poor, but better than the dreadful, Couric-interview caliber performances I’ve had of late (in running). So was this progress? You betcha!!!!

The race: The day was perfect for running; 40’s, clear, not much of a wind. I started off toward the back of the pack; there were students there and most of them take off way too fast. So I eased into it and tried to keep a steady pace; I focused on posture and on not overstriding and, yes, on bending my knees. I have a bad habit of landing on a straightened knee.

I steadily gained on people and saw Lupe Martinez up ahead; I figured that I wouldn’t be getting that close to him but keeping him in sight would be a good goal.

We turned into a neighborhood and I just focused on relaxing. Though there were no splits, I know the course and knew roughly were the splits were; I kept it at about 8 minutes per mile in hopes of picking it up 20 minutes into the race. Yes, I know that a good runner would be long done at 20 minutes, but I am not a good runner!

So about 10-12 minutes into it I settled into roughly the place (20′th) where I would finish. But something odd happened.

At about this time I was going back and forth with this slender woman who had a ponytail and was wearing dark gray spandex tights. I thought that she was fading but then about 16 minutes into it, she passed me again.

I thought: oh, I didn’t realize she was African American; at first glance I had thought that she was white (yes, this observation has relevance) and I was surprised she had as much left as she did. We went at it back and forth until she finally broke free at about 20 minutes into it.

I didn’t pick it up; by then it was real struggle to hold on. But I did keep up the pace.

Finally we turned back on campus; I knew the rest of the way and I told myself to just focus on turning over and relaxing; I wanted to stop and walk.

I held on to my place and managed a semi-kick toward the end to hold someone else off.

I finished and was happy to break 24.

I shook the hand of the lady that I raced. Then I saw…a white slender woman in a ponytail in dark gray spandex tights, and yes she was white! It turns out that I had confused the two women as they looked very similar from behind and they were dressed in similar tops and tights.

Afterwards I cooled down a bit by walking it in with my buddy Tracy; we then had a bagel, fruit and yogurt breakfast.

I won an award in the “old male faculty” division (aka “old, fat and slow” division).

Afterward, as I was eating with Tracy, this shapey lady (blue tights with some cute visible p. l.s) came to talk to me…(“wow, I still got it” I thought at first); it turns out that she worked with my wife about 24 years ago.

As I left the building, one of my former students came up to me and paid me a nice compliment.

So, it has been a good day.

John McCain’s Campaign Lies Continue unabated

From: Huffington post

During an appearance on Fox News this Friday, Sarah Palin claimed that Barack Obama should be disqualified from serving as president because he had once proclaimed that troops in Afghanistan were “air raiding villages and killing civilians.”

If the charge seemed oddly and painfully familiar it’s because it has been levied at Obama – and subsequently dismissed – several times before during this election season.

The issue stems from a remark the Illinois Democrat made in August 2007, in Nashua, New Hampshire. Speaking to supporters, the Senator called for an increase of U.S. troops in that war zone because, without the influx, operations were being limited to air raids that resulted in many preventable civilian deaths.

“Now you have narco drug lords who are helping to finance the Taliban,” Obama said, “so we’ve got to get the job done there [in Afghanistan], and that requires us to have enough troops that we are not just air raiding villages, and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.”

When the comment was first made, Republicans were eager to mold it into an electoral liability. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and the RNC called it disrespectful and unbecoming of a presidential aspirant.

Surprised?

Interesting Daily Kos Essay on the “Two Americas”: the “curious” and the “stupid”.

Folks, I don’t want an ordinary person for Potus or V Potus. I want someone extraordinary. Republicans love to talk about “American Exceptionalism”, but they really don’t believe in exceptional americans…
Republicans talk about Self-Reliance, Pulling yourself up from your bootstraps, improving your education, school vouchers…yet they have been fighting a war against thoughtfulness and intellectual curiosity for years.
I am not smart enough to be the President and I don’t personally know anyone that is. WTF is up with this idea that someone like US should be President. Lincoln taught himself Law. I don’t want Joe Six Pack to be President. We’ve got someone on the GOP ticket that graduated almost at the bottom of his class and someone who attended 6 schools in 4/5 years.

It’s just hard for me to believe that folks out there really bought that second rate acting on Thursday night and to look at the polling it seems most independents didn’t buy it, but you see these interviews with folks and you really wonder what goddamn debate they were watching. People from even democratic punditry are always at pains to say she’s likable, but to me she’s not. Am I the only one in the world that doesn’t buy the whole FARGO Ruse? THey just pumped her with 4 stump speeches, modified Reaganisms and general scorn for her opponent, the media and the moderator. “I’m not going to answer the questions that you or even the moderator want, I am going to speak to the American People”. Are you f*cking kidding me?
She wants government oversight and government to get out the way within 60 seconds. I understand the Obama tactic at this and the previous debate , but I would loved for Joe to go after her on that incongruence.

And that, to me, is the real culture war going on: Obama supporters want intelligence and competence at the top of the ticket where McCain supporters want people like themselves (and no, for the most part, these are neither exceptionally intelligent nor exceptionally competent people).

Yes, a smart Republican (not an oxymoron) told me that he didn’t value intelligence as much as I did; he replied with the shopworn “Carter was smarter than Reagan” (certainly true) but that “Reagan did a better job” (questionable) argument.

Letterman’s Sarah Palin Debate highlights:

The first part is, in itself a juvenile cut up of phrases to make her say dumb stuff (which you can do with anyone) but the last clip did an excellent job of summing up her debate performance.

Top Ten messages on Sarah Palin’s answering machine.

The good news: Sarah Palin can complete a sentence. The bad news: the rest of us have to listen to it. In all, Maher just skewers her!

Bill Clinton’s Orlando Speech (21 minutes)