Welcome to BigFlax.com!

November 29, 2002

Wait a second... you mean I actually saw a movie? That's right, and only what, four months after the last one? Sad. But read the review for Die Another Day.

November 28, 2002

Thanksgiving... interesting. There were a lot of people at the Gassmans, most of whom I'd never met, and of course it's always interesting when you get into political discussions with people you don't know, particularly when those people are Eastern European expatriates and have no reason to defend the United States. Not that I necessarily do, but it's always "funny" to listen to people who have come here from other countries bash the U.S. Look, I don't like Bush either, but did you ever consider going back to Europe if we're so bad?
Otherwise, mmm, turkey and pumpkin pie.

November 28, 2002

   Back in New Jersey for Thanksgiving. While that is Thursday's date above, this is still Wednesday for me, so let's discuss "My Day as an Evildoer."
    At the El stop, I foolishly pushed my suitcase through the turnstile first... as a result, I was trapped behind it having already paid. So I went to hop it, which is not as easy as it looks. The first time, my legs came back down through it (as it doesn't lock coming out). I made it the second time, but at that point some El guy noticed that I had done this and I had to explain what happened. Sort of embarrassing.
    Then at the point, I was selected for "random" security screening just before boarding. I don't know what is supposed to qualify these things as "random," but I'm not sure I'm buying it. Maybe it was because I still have the beard in my driver's license and so I don't automatically resemble my "government-issued picture ID." On the other hand, I got into Australia with a dated passport (when I did have the beard, and the picture didn't) and all that happened was the guy said "different glasses now."
    Then I got home and had an omelette. Tomorrow (today) we have turkey and etc. over at the Gassmans (across the street), at least if I heard my mom right from the back of the car, which I think I did.
    Shannon has apparently been giving a lot of thought to my away messages, which is no weirder than that she is friends with three people who live in maybe a five mile radius here in New Jersey. I only have like, six friends, and I grew up here.

November 25, 2002

One more reason I'm getting out of production classes (at least for the moment): I had a practical exam today for which the sign-up sheet was incremented in ten-minute blocks. I signed up for 7:20. I didn't even get in to the first part (and there were two) until ten minutes to nine. This made me completely miss my 9:00 appointment at Norris to read my Trash packet to Andy and Jan. Jan accepted my excuse; Andy hasn't heard it yet but left a message on my machine: "You are not a man, for you are not at Norris." He subsequently IMed me calling me a "dirty motherfucker." Hopefully we can work this out.
In other news, new Poll of the Week, with the college football theme remaining.

November 23, 2002

Remember that show "Yan Can Cook" that was always on PBS a few years ago (and appears to still be on albeit more sporadically)? At the end of the show, he would always say "Remember, if Yan can cook, so can you!" That always got to me. The guy's a professional cook, for crying out loud. They should have had a kindergartener on the show next to Yan doing everything he was doing. That would actually instill me with confidence. "Remember, if Billy can cook, so can you!"

November 21, 2002

Awwwwwww shit. Ben Folds came to NU tonight and man, he really rocked us well. He played all your favorite hits - and by that I mean a lot of stuff from the first album, which was pretty fucking sweet - the version of "Where's Summer B.?" he did was so fucking good. (Not to turn into Marc on you there or anything.) In case you forget, here's June 1st's update. He only played 16 songs then - he played 23 including the three encore songs tonight. Money. He didn't do "Eddie Walker" or "Battle of Who Could Care Less," a couple of my favorites which he did do at DePaul, but this was still a loaded show:
1. Don't Change Your Plans
2. Zak and Sara
3. Philosophy
4. Liz Phair - Chopsticks
5. Silver Street
6. Where's Summer B.?
7. Bizarre Christmas Incident
8. BJ Thomas - Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head
9. Rock This Bitch
10. Flaming Lips - Race for the Prize
11. Wham! - Careless Whisper
12. The Last Polka
13. Alice Childress
14. Army
15. Kate
16. Narcolepsy
17. One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces
18. Steven's Last Night in Town
19. Rockin' the Suburbs
20. Not the Same
ENCORE
21. Elliott Smith - Say Yes
22. Boxing
23. Song for the Dumped (in a minor key)
Highlights among these - the awesome "Where's Summer B.?," a new version of "Rock This Bitch" (apparently he makes something else up at every show), and the verse of "Song for the Dumped" he sang in Japanese. Quite the quality.

November 19, 2002

A little late on the Poll of the Week, but I'm sure it'll be voted in.

November 17, 2002

Only in this poll can a team win 31-0 over another ranked team and drop six spots.

November 15, 2002

   You know, I was just looking at the Personal Score Archive (shut up), and something hit me: I had never before played in a tournament with fewer than 10 rounds (not in college, anyway, and I'm willing to bet never in the college-style high school tournaments either), and this year I've done it three times in three tournaments. This is kind of lame. Fortunately the next tournament, MLK, is pretty much guaranteed to break that streak as it had 14 matches last year. The record is 16, at '01 TRASHionals and '02 CUT, in case you cared but didn't go look it up yourself, which seems only moderately likely. Last year tournaments averaged better than 13 matches per (thanks in no small part to seven of the eleven tournaments having 14 rounds or more); so far this year we're averaging eight and two-thirds. TRASH Regionals this year had almost twice as many teams as last year, and yet managed to have five fewer rounds, which also sucked because unlike last year, where we could get second crack at teams that had defeated us, this year we only got one shot. I'm convinced that we would have beaten at least two of the three teams who'd beaten us had we gotten to play them again.
    My scoring is also down... except that it's not. Last year through three tournaments, I was averaging 24.87 ppg. This year I'm averaging 28.27. Indeed, while my TRASH Regionals scoring was off by six ppg, matching up the closest scores gives you this: 35.56 to 34.29; 28.33 to 27.9; 20.00 to 11.92. All three cases, the 2002 score is ahead of the 2001 score. Still, the overall numbers are off, mostly due to the fewer rounds, so it's hard to tell if I'm actually getting better as I'd like to be. MLK/ABD should give a clue. I certainly improved there from '01 to '02, going from 7.72 to 27.14 at MLK and 35.24 to 48.18 (and 52.7 by my stats) at ABD. I may get shadowed at MLK this year as playing with Jan, Mike, and Colby is a little different from playing with Selvey, Jordan, and John. I mean, no offense, but let's be realistic.
    The bottom line is I have to get some confidence back. At IO I could definitely have done better but I had two scoreless rounds where I sat on about four tossups. The main problem is I hate to neg, but I should look at the stats - my three best tournaments last year (Duck Bowl, CUT, and ABD) produced three of my four highest neg totals.

November 13, 2002

   You know, perhaps you will remember my update of September 3. In it I said, regarding the Top 20 poll:
    "If you are going to be in the poll, you have to be able to get shit in on time. This has been too much of a problem in years past for me not to say anything about it. So here's the deal: polls are due no later than three pm each Sunday. (Note the special emphasis.) If you can't handle this, just don't bother asking to be in the poll, because I don't want to have to deal with it again. Get 'em in or you're out."
   But lo and behold, what has happened again this year? People haven't been getting stuff in. Oh, we've got the reliable ones, and they - all five of them - are to be praised. My dad, Rudnik, Andy, Tyler, and Burgess are the only five (excluding myself) who have turned in a poll in every week they've been signed up to do so.
    I've been quite accomodating of mitigating circumstances, and when people e-mail me and say "I won't be able to get one in this week," I've been able to deal with that. At least they let me know. But more often than not I just don't get anything. Could this really take more than five minutes of your time? I even backed off my three pm ultimatum and turned it into "anytime Sunday." I've even waited until midweek on a couple of occasions - like this week - just to see if polls would trickle in. And it's not like I'm just expecting people to remember - I send out reminders every weekend. This can't be that hard.
    This happens every year. And I'm really sick of it. So guess what? Anyone who did not turn in a poll this week, you're coming off the e-mail list. If you want back in, if you really want back in, ask me again - but be warned. The first time's a warning shot. If I let you back on and you don't send me one, you're off for good - and that includes this and all successive years.
    Perhaps you think I'm being too harsh about this. Why shouldn't I be? Oh, sure, it's just a little poll on some obscure website. But if you don't take it with some degree of seriousness, you should never have signed up in the first place. If you don't have the time, neither do I.

With that said, here's this week's poll.

November 12, 2002

Holy cow, a new Poll of the Week, vaguely on time.

November 11, 2002

You probably don't care unless you play Quiz Bowl, but here's some stuff on the Illinois Open and TRASH Regionals. Because I didn't point it out in there (as it didn't happen at the tournament per se), I should mention that Loyola hung out with us yet again, as half our team went to the Olive Garden with Loyola for Charlie's birthday, and then Pam played Hearts with me, Drew, and Mike. Good times.

November 8, 2002

I'm doing my best to stay awake as noon approaches, which must mean it's time for a rant.

    Do you read ESPN.com's Page 2? If you do, do you ever read Jason Whitlock's columns? Do you think you could explain to me how this man has a job? Let me lay out a basic Whitlock column structure for you: he makes a claim, proceeds to back it up with exactly no evidence, usually throws out a few easily disprovable sub-points, and then determines that anyone who doesn't agree with him is stupid and perhaps racist, depending on the column topic.
    The latter part is a smokescreen designed to distract from the idiocy of the rest of the column. Let's take a look at this week's. Whitlock claims that college football doesn't need a playoff. One of his arguments is that the NCAA tournament, the most obvious example of a college tournament, makes much of the basketball season uninteresting. Even pretending that this is true - an argument I don't buy in and of itself - Whitlock's biggest problem is that he ignores the obvious. Basketball season is several times as long as football season in terms of the number of games played. Thus a better counterpart for a college football playoff - and no one's calling for 64 teams to meet there anyway - would be the NFL playoffs. Does the NFL have a bowl system? Let's see... NO! Is the regular season invalidated because there are playoffs? Also NO!
    The point of a college football playoff is to avoid punishing a team for having a loss or a marginally weaker schedule or a lower computer ranking or any of the factors that go into selecting the top two BCS teams. It is not to bail out teams who have lost several games. In fact, a playoff would (or at least should) work just like the bowls Whitlock claims are fine, with BCS ranking used to seed teams, the top four or perhaps top eight, instead of merely placing the top two. It's not a perfect formula - it favors certain conferences over others, but then so does the BCS anyway. And which would have been better last year - seeing Miami destroy a clearly undeserving Nebraska team that didn't even win its DIVISION, let alone conference, or seeing Miami destroy a clearly undeserving Nebraska team and then subsequently having to face off against Oregon to see if they really were the best team? If the NFL can do it, so can college.
    Whitlock also had a column a while back where he compared Babe Ruth to Barry Bonds. Not only did he argue that Bonds is the superior player - at least an arguable point - he argued that Ruth could not carry Bonds' spikes, and then offered exactly zero evidence that was worth anything. Among his evidence: Ruth played against watered-down competition. Right, because the expansion era hasn't been kind to today's sluggers, Bonds among them. Whitlock's argument in this area centers on race: because blacks weren't playing in the 1920s, Ruth's achievements are diminished. Unfortunate though the color barrier was, this is a short-sighted argument that basically denigrates everyone who played before 1947. At any rate, how many of the dominant pitchers in the history of the game have been black - and do you really think there's no way Ruth could have hit them? Whitlock also ignores the difference between Ruth's playing in the dead ball era versus Bonds playing at a time when I could probably hit one out, to say nothing of the fact that while Bonds' stats are well above those of his closest competitors, Ruth regularly outhomered whole teams - and most whole teams at that. There's something you won't see Bonds doing anytime soon. Ruth didn't have access to modern strength and conditioning training, much less performance-enhancing drugs (though I'm not saying that Bonds necessarily takes steroids, the point holds across the league).
    To close this discussion, I point to one other thing in Whitlock's Bonds article - he states that this season Bonds "cracked 46 home runs, 110 RBI, drew 198 walks, recorded an off-the-charts .582 on-base percentage and a .799 slugging percentage. Ruth couldn't even do that in the watered-down majors he dominated." We've already discussed the sheer idiocy of the "watered-down" comment. The year Ruth hit 60 home runs, he added 164 RBI, was still walked 137 times, and had a slugging percentage of .772. In his first two years with New York he had SLG of .847 and .846. In 1923 he had a career high OBP of .545 - not quite as high as Bonds, but he added 41 home runs, 131 RBI, 170 walks, and a .764 SLG. I guess the real question is, does Whitlock ever look at stats or does he just say stuff and hope he's right?
    The best line came from my dad after seeing the picture Whitlock has next to his column: "I'll say one thing for Whitlock - he is really fat." Indeed.

November 8, 2002

Given that I only got about seven hours of sleep last night after finishing my paper, you'd think I would have had more difficulty staying up tonight. But here it is at 6 am, I've got laundry in the dryer, and things are going okay. Of course, I've still got about eleven hours to go. For those of you who don't know, I decided to stay up tonight so I could go to bed early so that when I get up at 4:30 Saturday morning - yeah! - I won't have had one or two hours of sleep, which is always the danger with me and which is not good as I'll be driving for two and a half hours or so.
So yes, I'll be away all weekend doing Quiz Bowl things, meaning no updates until Sunday night at the earliest. It also means I won't be around to remind people in the poll to vote, which means that the poll will be late this week. I'm sure you care.

November 5, 2002

Mike and I were at Norris today getting quiz bowl stuff done. We had to get a motor pool form signed by Bill Johnston, the director of Norris. This guy's coolness cannot be measured. He's in a meeting when we come up, and one of the secretaries has to go in and disturb him. He could have just signed it and moved on, but he actually came out to bring the form back to us himself - and then chatted us up about the tournaments this weekend! But the icing was when he proceeded to mention how he was working on ACUI stuff - i.e. CBI - and said "I really want to stick it to University of Chicago this year." So do I, Bill; so do I.
Watching PTI is fun because of all the NU mentions, although today Wilbon referred to our mascot as "Winnie the Wildcat." Good one.

November 5, 2002

Happy birthday, Mom.

Warning: the following more closely resembles a whiny LiveJournal entry than what you've come to expect from this site. Maybe you don't care. But if you're looking for anything resembling humor, it is probably not to be found below.

    I have no idea what I'm doing. Here I am in junior year of college and it feels like I'm trying to fake my way through, mostly because I don't think I'm getting any closer to doing what I want to do, and I'm not even sure what that is. I think there are three things right now I'd really like to do: 1) cut movie trailers; 2) write movie reviews; 3) be some sort of radio personality, preferably involving sports. By far the only thing I'm close to doing is #3, but on the other hand classes don't relate to that at all. Sure, you don't have to take a class in something to do it, but where's my motivation to keep taking classes if none of them are going to relate to my desired profession?
    I dread class; I look forward to extracurriculars. Classes are about the only part of college I don't enjoy, in fact. I like hanging out, I like playing quiz bowl, I like working at the station. I don't like sitting in lectures. I don't even like Video Production and this is supposed to be my major. I almost feel like I should abandon the physical side of film/video and just go right into theory, leading to #2, but I'm not convinced I'm that good at theory. I mean, there are people out there who get paid a lot of money to write movie reviews who are idiots - Leonard Maltin gave Waterworld a better grade than fucking Shawshank - but I'm not convinced I'm that good at understanding themes, or more importantly, giving a shit. I bet if given a little time I could analyze stuff okay; I probably have in some reviews, or at least there are some I think were pretty good as normal reviews. But if I were under the gun, could I crank something out? And are there really a lot of these jobs open?
    I wish I could go to sleep and wake up in January. I think this is the first quarter that I've really hated this much in terms of classes. I'm not happy; I'm not having fun. Not in class, that is. Outside of class, life in general, sure, that's okay, more or less. But I can't shake the feeling that I'm wasting my time along with everyone else's, as well as significant amounts of my parents' money. It's a struggle with my psyche to get out of bed every morning.
    I can't wait until this weekend, and not just because of all the quiz bowl. Another week past means another week I can ignore, and another week closer to ending this nightmare and maybe picking some better classes. I think I'm going to go see my advisor soon, talk about where this is or should be going.
    Things aren't as bad as this reads, at least not on the whole. But I wish things would change academically. When I start to miss high school, you know something's wrong.

November 4, 2002

Now I remember why I discontinued the Poll of the Week in the first place. It just gets hard to think of new polls week after week, particularly when I'm routinely vilified for putting up "uninteresting" topics. You'll have to decide which is worse: occasionally mundane topics, or no poll at all. This week's poll should get you started.

November 3, 2002

So, you may not have listened to me on the radio. At least some of you have an excuse - being out of range. But now no one has an excuse not to read my stupid stuff. Here are my keys to Northwestern beating Indiana (which they then did) and my analyst column, which puzzles over the matter of Derell Jenkins' redshirt going up in flames.
Also, the new Top 20 poll is up. I may also change the Poll of the Week at some point.

November 2, 2002

   Well. Northwestern snapped its 10-game Big Ten losing streak, and for the first time in my NUR history, I was on-site for a win. (The only win I'd ever seen in person - 61-23 over Illinois the last week of 2000, but I was working for ESPN2 that day.) Previously, I'd been stats for Purdue 2000 and Penn State 2001, plus color for Michigan State this year. Delicious.
    Meanwhile, I nearly died twice today - once in getting reacclimated to running, once when Ric started to drive off when I was just halfway into the car. Apparently he was distracted by Notre Dame's loss today - one of four previously undefeated teams to lose, thus cutting the number in half at a stroke. Also losing: Virginia Tech, NC State, and Georgia. Still undefeated: Oklahoma, Miami, and Ohio State, which allows the BCS to breathe a little easier, plus Bowling Green, who could go 12-0 and spend December in Detroit. But they have one of the worst schedule strengths in Division I-A, so I don't feel too sorry for them. Ohio State still has to play Michigan, of course, so Miami-Oklahoma still seems like a good bet for the Fiesta Bowl, although just because Virginia Tech lost to Pitt does not mean they couldn't still beat Miami, throwing a wrench back into the works. Two undefeated teams is obvious; one undefeated team and a slew of one-loss teams (i.e. every other year) makes it tougher. The real problem, of course, would come if the undefeated team were then to lose in the title game, thus throwing the AP title up for grabs.
    I'm rooting for Ohio State to win out and Miami and/or Oklahoma to lose somewhere just because it'd be nice to see a Big Ten team in the title game. That'll shut everyone up, at least until they lose.
    You probably didn't hear me on the radio today - but you can always hear me on the radio tomorrow. Listen to the SportsVoice (7 pm Central) as I prattle on about whatever, mostly relating to the football game. Hey, you could even call in, though please at least have a sports question ready so I don't get too much shit about it. Remember, you can actually hear the Voice over the web (unlike games which we have to suspend webcasts of because of GN's exclusive deal), so you've got no excuse.

November 1, 2002

   November. Un-fucking-believable. Birthday shoutout for Rich - it was actually yesterday, but when I tried to open FrontPage last night it kept freezing, so I was unable to give him the shoutout then.
   Guess how many of my friends (people I'm actively hanging out with at the present time) are not 21. Two. Guess how many will not be 21 on December 5. Zero. Guess how long it is until I'm 21. Well, you'd better just know that. Anyway, major suckage. Not that I've got some major desire to hang around in bars, but the inability to do it even if I wanted to, particularly when everyone else can and many often do, is pretty frustrating.
    In other news, I'm on the Indiana broadcast this week doing color. You should tune in if only to hear how stupid I sound as I don't know nearly as much about this team as I could or should. At least I've got the two-deep numbers down more or less.

There's more! View last month's updates.

Thanks to Tabnet for the domain name and my parents for paying it off.

Want to send me mail? Here.

Want to join my mailing list? Here:

BigFlax.com is probably not legitimately copyrighted under the laws of any country. Just don't steal stuff and claim it was yours, please.

This page last updated: Saturday, November 30, 2002 12:29:41 AM