yen for ham fighting

To ask why I would be looking at the Wikipedia entry for "Professional Baseball in Japan" is to fundamentally misunderstand how I use Wikipedia, but anyway here is a quote from it:

For almost 30 years, until 1906, a game could be viewed freely, as it was considered shameful to take money for doing something the players liked.

Granted, of course all sorts of people do not like their jobs, but it's interesting to imagine making a living and enjoying your job being mutually exclusive as a normative matter.

Speaking of Japanese baseball, I still remember when someone told me that the Nippon Ham Fighters are to be read as "The Fighters for the Nippon Ham corporation" rather than "The Ham Fighters of Nippon."

muncholesen by proxy

ESPN.com story about a woman who "possibly" has fabricated stories of hitting 16 holes-in-one in six months:

She's practically a neophyte, new to the game five years ago, and now at age 47 has reported more holes-in-one in six months than most PGA Tour players make in a career. By one count, she did the 16 in 118 rounds this year. That comes to a hole-in-one once every 30 swings on par 3s, a rate of success that causes Dean Knuth, creator of the U.S. Golf Association's Slope Rating System and a Golf Digest contributor, to blurt this assessment: "That's impossible." David Boyum is a math guy with a Harvard Ph.D. and co-author of What the Numbers Say. He puts the odds of Gagne's feat at "1 in 2,253,649,101,066,840, 000,000,000,000,000, 000,000."

Update: The golfer has posted a maniacal response to the story on her blog.

my diploma is all boxed up and ready to drop in the mail

My Hawkeyes are losing to Iowa State 12-0 at halftime. The same Iowa State that was schooled last week by the University of Northern Iowa, and the week before that by Kent State.

Plus we blew an opportunity just before the half due to poor clock management. As much as I believe in Hawkeye coach Kirk Ferentz, I am amazed that someone who makes $2.7 million as a football coach chronically handles end-of-game situation. The Hawkeyes greatest and most exciting victory in recent years, in fact, resulted from the team managing the clock in so badly at the end of the game that it confused the opposing defense.

I'm glad we don't have to play Michigan this year, as I don't think we would beat them.

BTW, I used to not have anything against Iowa State, and would root for them against anyone other than my Hawkeyes. After all, the state between two rivers is sufficiently small and belittled by outsiders that we have to stick together. Then I realized that the was no way the state of Iowa could support two quality BCS football programs when states like Ohio only have one. Thus my magnamity was gutted by demography. The Hawkeyes and Cyclones are like Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort, while they are intertwined by a common blood of funding, one must die for the other to live. I would be all for a merger, giving Iowa State basketball while Iowa gets football. So long as the resulting program plays in the Big 10 and doesn't use that godawful cardinal color.

something tells me this will not be picked up and used in 'just say no' campaigns

Baseball player Gary Sheffield has been the subject of recurrent rumors of steroid use. Part of his denial in a recent interview: "[Sheffield] also says that he never took steroids because 'the bottom line is steroids is something you stick in your butt -- period.'"

in my inbox

From a friend:

Your sudden obsession with the Wu-Tang Clan is only the very tiniest bit 
disturbing, and yet still I hope it lasts only for today.

A longer story beginning with "Wu-Tang Clan Aint Nuthin to [expletive deleted] With" coming up on the shuffle of my iPod while jogging. It's not even a song I like, especially as it is so clearly a ripoff of Freaktoastt J's "Freaktoast J is Not a Toy (Don't Give Freaktoast J to Children Under Five)."

I'm at the office today wearing an Australian cricket jersey, which looks sort of like this. Everyone who has come into the office today--and we are having an informal thing, so people are actually here today--has said something like "I like your shirt." None of them actually like it, but people are too polite to say, "Wow, what a strange and brightly-colored wardrobe choice for someone over thirty-five."

stata 10 graphics: first impression review

(percentage runs and percentage wins for mlb teams. the vertical distance from the regression line can be thought of as the extent to which a team is over/underachieving in terms of wins given its runs scored/runs against)

I made a toy graph this morning, firstly to celebrate the Yankees underachievement given that we are at the halfway point of the season, but secondly to try out Stata's new graphics.* It has changed the graphics menus all around to take advantage of its now allowing child dialogs, although in my opinion it ends up overusing them. If I had a choice between the Stata 10 and Stata 9 menus, I'd probably choose the Stata 9 menus, making this feel not exactly like an upgrade, but that could reflect more my familiarity with Stata 9. The big upgrade, anyway, is the Graphics Editor, but it ended up being not intuitive enough that it clear I would have to do more to figure it out than the simple playing I was hoping for. So the graph above doesn't even end up using it.

In a nutshell: The graphics editor was billed as the big reason for somebody who doesn't have reason to use the new statistical features of Stata 10 to upgrade. My first impression is that it's not enough. I've become pretty used to importing graphs into Illustrator or even just Office and editing them there anyway. I'll let you know if my opinion changes.

* My belief is that you cannot honestly be a liberal and root for the Yankees in any kind of serious way. I'm not kidding. At most you can be one of those untrustworthy liberals, the sort who espouses basic liberal values but then goes and cares more about the fate of pets than children in poverty.

the eagle turns out to be more like a phoenix than i would have imagined

My hometown is Manson, Iowa, population 1893. I graduated from Manson Community High School, nicknamed the Eagles with the colors purple and white. Shortly thereafter, my high school was consolidated with another high school, changed its name, nickname (to the Cougars), and colors (to navy blue and gray). Many in my hometown resented this, resulting in such mischief as an incident in which my hometown watertower was supposed to be painted navy blue to celebrate school spirit but instead was painted this magical color that looks navy blue from far away but when you walk close you can tell is plainly purple. Even so, after consolidation, my thought was the Manson Eagles were no more.

I was wrong! My hometown now has a minor league football team, called the Manson Eagles, with the colors purple and white and a fancy purple-and-corrugated-metal-themed official website. The teams in the league show an interesting geographic nesting: the Manson Eagles, even though Manson contain only about 1/1500th of the total population of Iowa, has to play the Iowa Threshers (based out of Des Moines), not to mention the Minnesota Maulers (a much larger state), and the Midwest Pioneers (who, coincidentally, play in the stadium of Chris's local high school). I don't know how well Manson will fare when put up against entire states or the whole of Middle America, but I know they will face their gridiron fate with characteristic rural Midwestern bravery, stoicism, and awkward squirming should strangers stand too close to us or want to hug.

BTW, my hometown had its Greater Crater Days celebration last weekend, in honor of it being built on top of the largest meteor crater site in the US.* I really think they should invite me back to be the Grand Marshall for the GCD parade. Come on! I have a blog! And a wikipedia entry!

* I explain all this on the webpage I used to have dedicated to my hometown.

don't mess with the matador!

(me, victorious at facebook rps)

(The Matador is where you wave paper at your opponent, then paper again, and then: scissors!)

I think I'm going to go down and fetch my air conditioner out of my basement. Now that Stata 10 has arrived, I can use my Stata 8 manuals with abandon to hold it in place.

Update: What's that sound? Is it the hum of my just-installed air conditioner, or the fizz of my having just opened up a tall, cold can of carbonated rps whoop-ass on Sal?


(me, once again victorious at facebook rps)

Updated again: Emily, as ever, is too wily for me. My dreams of an undefeated life end:

the guillotine choke hold wouldn't be nearly so scary if it was over the internet

From ESPN.com:

Ray Mercer tried his hand at mixed martial arts this weekend. The result? He's sticking with boxing.

The former WBO world heavyweight champion and Olympic gold medalist lost to noted Internet street fighter Kimbo Slice in Atlantic City, N.J., this weekend in a fight that lasted just 1:12. Mercer submitted to Slice's guillotine choke hold.

First, you'd think someone would be extra wary of the "guillotine choke hold" when up against someone surnamed "Slice." But, more importantly, what makes someone an Internet street fighter?

Speaking of Internet fighting, I just installed this application that allows one to play Rock, Paper, Scissors over Facebook, including keeping detailed records of your past plays for opponents to study.

crap. i was worried this might happen.

I find myself, with only about two months left living in Cambridge, a Red Sox fan.

despite this short segue into badgers nostalgia, my first and eternal loyalty will always be to the iowa hawkeyes

A University of Wisconsin football player was taken third overall in the NFL draft today. While many of the top picks actually went to New York to attend the draft in person, the Wisconsin player did not, opting instead to go fishing. An aunt of his, however, drove all the way from Germantown, Wisconsin--which, come to think of it, is the most Wisconsin-y town name in the entire state--did:



I forgot to mention this, but when I was in New York City the last time, I joined a former Madison colleague (now at NYU) and went to this bar that apparently pulls out all the stops whenever the Wisconsin Badgers are on television*, including putting a big inflatable Bucky Badger out front:



I had heard you can find everything in Manhattan, but I wasn't expecting a bar devoted to University of Wisconsin sports. I don't know how many Big 10 schools are represented by comparable venues in NYC.

* Yes, this was the only full evening I had in New York on the trip, and I spent it watching University of Wisconsin basketball on television.

now in my netflix queue: king antony and the gladiators of the round table

From ESPN.com:

While [Louisville basketball coach Rick] Pitino acknowledged leaving Kentucky following the 1997 season was a "mistake," he joked that at age 54 he's "too old to leave" Louisville, but understands why there's so much speculation about his interest in the job.

"It's a great job. I had eight years of Camelot, I've said that," he said. "It's the Roman Empire of college basketball."

gondor calls for aid! oh, wait, it's just jeremy dressed up in his gondor suit again.

For reasons assuredly related to my ongoing plans to split the sociological atom, I am compelled to purchase a sheet-feeding scanner, preferably one from which it is simple to scan to pdf. If you have any recommendations or meta-recommendations--that is, recommendations about what would be a good way of going about finding a good recommendation--let me know.

Completely unrelated: Is it just me, or does this AP story practically scream out the next major scandal in sports: dog steroids!

Canadian Hans Gatt... said Mackey's [dog sled] team was the best-looking team on the Iditarod trail this year. Instead of tiring, his team recovered faster than any of the others after long runs between checkpoints and maintained their speed.

''I can't run my dogs like that,'' Gatt, of Whitehorse, said Tuesday, almost 100 miles back on the trail. ''He obviously has figured out something we have not figured out yet.''

You heard it here first: I'll bet my Floyd Landis bobblehead doll those dogs are juiced.

where did this word come from?

Did the word "enabler" exist before the late 1990s and I just somehow managed to avoid hearing it? If not, how did the world get by so long without it? It's weird how now identifying someone as an "enabler" ends up having an almost diagnostic character to it, although it's like identifying a sickness in two individuals at once. I know that some kinds of now-prototypic "enabler" (e.g., the spouse of an alcoholic) have long existed, but has something changed in our society to enable "enabler" to come into being as a category unto itself.

Addendum for baseball fans: I have a book called The Baseball Dictionary that I bought on a remainder table sometime around 1990. The phrase "walk-off home run" is not in it. I don't know exactly when that phrase was invented, either, but it's interesting how it's now commonly used and there are even statistics on who has the most career walk-off home runs, which of course includes players who hit their walk-off home runs at a time when nobody knew that's what they were, much less counted them as a special quantifiable class of home run.

Addendum for celebrity news followers: I haven't been really following the story at Anna Nicole Smith, but am I correct in surmising that this judge is using the bench to try to launch a successful TV career, where maybe he can have the hour following The Late Late Late Show With Lance Ito?

jeremy's believe it or not!: thumbs of steel edition

From an ESPN.com story about the heroic recruitment efforts of University of Illinois football coach Ron Zook:

At the very least, he out-BlackBerry'd them. ESPN's Mark Schlabach reported recently that Zook typed 95 million kilobytes' worth of text messages to recruits since Nov. 26. I'm surprised he has any thumbs left.

Yes: especially since, at one character per byte, typing 95 million kilobytes (a.k.a., 95 gigabytes) would work out to having typed more than 20,000 characters every second of every day since November 26th. If he was recruiting 100 prospects overall using this method, it would imply that each one received an average of around 4 million words per day. I hope all the recruits had unlimited data plans! Given the 160 character limit of many cel phones and a dime per message charge, all this txting would cost each athlete $81,000 a month.

resolution redux

I received a prompt reply--certainly far more prompt than this follow-up--to my cordial query about the references for an assertion in the American Sociological Association resolution about Native American mascots (original post). As promised, these references are:

"Sports Mascots and the Media" with co-authors (i.e., C. Richard King, L. R. Davis-Delano, E. J. Staurowsky,& L. Baca), in Handbook of Sports and Media, A. A. Raney & J. Bryant, editors, 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

"Of Polls and Race Prejudice: Sports Illustrated's Errant 'Indian Wars,'" with co-authors (i.e., C. Richard King, E. J. Staurowsky, L. Baca, L. R. Davis, & C. Pewewardy), in Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 2002, 26(4): 381-402.

I haven't looked at these references or at the specific evidence regarding the harm of Native American nicknames on Native Americans. Regardless, I hasten to point out again that I personally think Native American sports nicknames and mascots are objectionable--especially the Washington Redskins (which just now felt wrong even to type out loud) and Chief Illiniwek--even if they do not cause specifiable and demonstrable harm to particular Native Americans. The issue arises more from my experience doing quantitative social research with it being much easier to assert that something is harmful than to demonstrate persuasively that it is so, as well as my belief that professional resolutions that make claims about empirical matters should have some explicit connection to empirical evidence. I recognize how quaint and protocurmudgeonly such sentiments might seem.

With acknowledgment that it was dated, I was also referred to the bibliography for the resolution by the American Psychological Association. Even if one is not interested in the bibliography per se, the previous link is worth clicking on by academics just for the apparent contrast between an APA resolution and an ASA resolution, especially in terms of how the former make concrete points and tie them to specific citations of evidence.

am i the only one who has noticed that returning the opening kickoff for a touchdown in a big game is poison?

(Yes, I am well aware that I say 'totally' and 'awesome' far too often for someone of my age and educational attainment)

I also announced this in the John Harvard Brew House immediately after the Bears scored on the opening kickoff. Ask him -- he was there.

(superbowl special!) footloose and fancy freese

As already posted, I agreed to write an original dance as part of the grand prize for my friend Rob's NFL pool and post it during the Super Bowl. Rob was sporting enough to sweeten the deal by agreeing that if I posted the dance, he would perform it and upload the video to YouTube in time for the NFL Pro Bowl next week.

I've never written an original dance, but then again I'd never written an original recipe and that was what Rob had me do for the prize two years ago. As it turned out, I won the pool this year, so the task was to write a dance in honor of myself, which made the job all the greater challenge.

But, using the Holmes method of choreographic notation, I came up with the following sequence of steps. I call the dance "The Boy Detective":


(my official, original superbowl dance; click to enlarge)

The dance is meant to be performed to the Chicago Bears' 1985 "Super Bowl Shuffle", but experimentation here in the Freese Funky Kinesthetics Lab has shown that the dance can be done equally well to the B-52's "Rock Lobster," Outkast's "Hey Ya!", the Watson Twins' "Elementary Dear," or practically any of the peppier parts of Freaktoast J's Stickfigure Semiotica album. So Rob will have several songs to choose from.

Special note to Rob's life partner: Be sure to roll out the yoga mat or something the first few times he practices this, especially the parts where he has to backflip into a one-armed handstand. Remember the friend of his from college who started breakdancing to some Van Halen song at your wedding? How he hit his head on the floor during a backspin and knocked himself unconscious? [Everyone else: yes, true story.] Make sure this doesn't happen to Rob, and make sure he e-mails me once he's uploaded his video so I can link to it here.

good old earwig, nothing beats it*

From Bowles, Microeconomics:

In the children's game, common around the world (English speakers call it "Rock, Paper, Scissors" and for others it is "Earwig, Human, Elephant") there is no Nash equilibrium in pure strategies.

Earwig, Human, Elephant? Really? What beats what in Earwig, Human, Elephant? And how do you make your fingers look like an earwig? Anybody know?

* Reference to Simpsons exchange:

Lisa:  Look, there's only one way to settle this.  Rock-paper-scissors.
Lisa's brain: Poor predictable Bart.  Always takes `rock'.
Bart's brain: Good ol' `rock'.  Nuthin' beats that!
Bart:  Rock!
Lisa:  Paper.
Bart:  D'oh!

blood: thicker than water, thinner than a big wad of benjamins

From ESPN.com:

Floyd Mayweather Sr., who has trained [boxer] Oscar De La Hoya since late 2000, said it doesn't appear he'll work for De La Hoya -- and against his son -- in the May 5 super welterweight title bout [between De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather, Jr.] [...]

"If they want me to work against my son, then they're going to have to pay me," Mayweather Sr. told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "My son and I, no matter what's gone down between us, he's still my blood. Hey, I'd work for Oscar if the deal is right, because that's my job and boxing is just a sport.

"But if you want me to tell you how to beat my son -- and I'm the only one who can tell Oscar how to do that -- then you need to pay me."

Isn't there some pseudo-apocryphal story about George Bernard Shaw sitting next to a man in a bar and saying, "If I paid you a million pounds, would you help me beat the living hell out of your son?" And the man saying quietly, "I guess I would." Then Shaw: "What about for twenty pounds?" Man, indignant: "What kind of father do you think I am?" Shaw: "We've already established that. Now we're just haggling." (For those unfamiliar with the reference, the merely apocryphal version of this story is here).