Last week: 10-2-1, enough to win me $85 as the TIME Magazine Pick’ Em League’s weekly winner. Yahoo! tells me I’m 67-58 on the season, excluding pushes, which is 53.6% correct for the season against the spread – back up above the predicted outcome. Who got the skillz?
In its ongoing drive to capture every dollar of revenue generated in some related way by pro football, the NFL started its NFL Network-hosted Thursday night games this week, so I had to jump in quick with the Atlanta pick yesterday that, fortunately, turned out to be correct. Now I just gotta run the table on the other 13 games.
At Atlanta -1 Baltimore
Indianapolis -7 Cincinnati
At Jacksonville -2 Houston
Tennessee -1 At Miami
Minnesota -1 At Chicago
At Buffalo -3 Detroit
NY Jets -3 At Cleveland
At Tampa Bay -6.5 Carolina
Kansas City -1 At Denver
At San Francisco -6 St. Louis
At Arizona -3 Seattle
At NY Giants -14 Dallas
At Pittsburgh -4.5 New England
Philadelphia -3 At Washington
Last week: 9-4, making me 56-57-5 on the season. Now I’m up to 49.6% correct – what what.
Hey, how about that: a winning week at last. I tied for the lead in my league, but apparently lost on one of the tiebreakers, because I did not get the desired green highlight from Yahoo! for my tally.
Let’s do this:
Chicago -3 At Buffalo (Toronto)
San Diego -3 At Houston
New Orleans -6.5 At Carolina
At Minnesota -8.5 Arizona
At Atlanta -8.5 Tampa Bay
NY Jets -4 At Detroit
At Baltimore -5.5 Miami
New England -4.5 At Cleveland
NY Giants -6.5 At Seattle
At Oakland 0 Kansas City
At Philadelphia -3 Indianapolis
At Green Bay -8 Dallas
Pittsburgh -4.5 At Cincinnati
And for the 11 Points game, I like Oakland. 6-2 at those.
Election | November 2nd, 2010
So that happened.
Once upon a time, and by that I mean just a few years ago, I used to get emotionally involved in national elections and politics. Then I thought hard about it, and I realized that caring about this stuff all the time impacts my daily life in pretty much one way: mental stress, because both my ability to impact national events and the likelihood of those national events changing significantly are just above nil. So I looked at it rationally and realized that there was little point to maintaining the same level of emotional involvement: I still vote, I still support ideas, and I still read a lot of news, but that’s really about it in terms of brainpower. There are things in life that I can control, so in mental-energy allocation, I stick to those.
This has had varying success: I think political interest is pretty ingrained in me by now, but for the most part, cynical-but-rational detachment has been pretty good to me. I like Obama, but he hasn’t failed my 2008 expectations because mine were pretty down-to-earth anyway. Now the zen thing seems to be working again: sure, I’m bummed that lots of voters apparently can’t figure out what they want out of government, but these supposedly world-shattering GOPers are going to go to DC, make a bunch of noise about deficits, and then cut absolutely nothing meaningful in federal spending while actually worsening the deficit situation through further tax cuts. (This is actually in line with what the public wants, though, so you can’t accuse them of selling out their constituents.) In other words, nothing will change until the country is somehow forced to change, and we aren’t there yet. (Which is good.) In the meantime, one party won’t even consider logical steps like means testing, while the other party seems to think revenue is somehow unimportant to solvency. Caring about these illogical people all the time makes sense for one’s daily existence? I think not.
On the contrarian increased-involvement side, now that I’m a homeowner and have put down some roots in a city, I finally pay a lot of attention to local politics. So in that sphere, which does impact my life directly, I’ve now started to care significantly. But for the “tidal wave” and “historic permanent shift” and all that: I await the next permanent shift in 2012, and then the one in 2014. Meantime, I got work to do.
