The One Swear Word That Still Shocks Me, NFL Week 13 Picks, Yahoo! Fantasy Outage, Mobile Quotability

I can’t stop eating pomegranate seeds lately. Beautiful AND delicious – like a haggis.

• I’ve clearly been desensitized to foul language in my day, because the only word that still genuinely shocks me is “c—“. (Not the one that rhymes with “rock”.) I can barely even type the dashes without recoiling. This must be because my contemporaries have been using every other swear word with full abandon since third grade or so, but that one still gets me.

  “Hey, f— you, you m———— s—head c———- m———–! How’s your m———— b—- a– today?”
  “Ha, good to see you too, you f—– a——!”

  vs.

  “The word ‘c—‘ is offensive and should never be used.”
  /record scratch, monocle falls out, tea cup shatters
  “OF COURSE IT SHOULDN’T! HOW COULD YOU EVEN MENTION THAT HIDEOUS WORD?! I NEED A SHOWER!”

• Only four weeks left in the NFL regular season. Damn.

  This leaves me with precious little time to recover a winning record. I’m currently at 76-96 overall against the spread, a mere .442 correct. This after finishing second overall last year at 145-112, .564, so I’m looking at a major dropoff in 2012. At this rate, I have to win five more games each week just to finish at .500 for the regular season. The playoffs might help, but that’s no easy feat. So here goes for Week 13:

  Last week: 6-9; Overall: 76-96
  At Atlanta -3.5 New Orleans
  At Chicago -3.5 Seattle
  At Green Bay -8.5 Minnesota
  San Francisco -7 At St. Louis
  At NY Jets -4.5 Arizona
  Carolina -3 At Kansas City
  At Detroit -4.5 Indianapolis
  At Buffalo -6 Jacksonville
  New England -7.5 At Miami
  Houston -6 At Tennessee
  At Denver -7 Tampa Bay
  At Baltimore even Pittsburgh
  Cleveland even At Oakland
  Cincinnati -2 At San Diego
  At Dallas -10 Philadelphia
  NY Giants -2.5 At Washington

  Also I think this is the week that Andy Reid gets fired. If somehow I could get 30 points in Yahoo! Pick ‘Em if that happens, that would be great.

• It happened two weeks ago, but I’m still baffled that Yahoo! had a marquee product undergo an all-day outage – at noon on Sunday, no less. When I think “Things Yahoo! is good at”, I would say the list is fantasy football, news and finance news, maybe email, and Yahoo! Answers (for better or worse). (Mostly worse.) I feel for this guy:
  

  Dear Yahoo! Fantasy Users,

  I want to sincerely apologize to all of you about today’s Yahoo! Sports Fantasy outage. As the head of Yahoo! Sports and as a Yahoo! Sports fantasy player myself, I am disappointed that we failed all of our fans today. Our first priority is having the best experience for our users, and today we fell short.

  The outage started around Noon ET (awful timing we know) and while our team was on it immediately we are still working on various pieces. Our team is continuing to work on identifying and resolving the root cause. We have restored full functionality on the website, and we’re working for a final fix for our mobile apps. Currently data and scores can be viewed but for now you cannot make transactions or change line-ups from the apps.

  We will also use today as an opportunity to improve our set-up so that we hopefully never have an outage like this again. Our fantasy commissioners and players are our biggest priority – we pride ourselves in being able to offer our users with the best fantasy sports experience possible and we take our job to deliver that to you very seriously. Rest assured we will work hard to make sure we continue to deliver on that commitment.

  Thanks for playing with us and your patience today,

  Ken Fuchs
  Head of Yahoo! Sports

  That came with a 20 percent discount to the Yahoo! Sports Shop, which I was going to use until I saw the NFL Shop had 25 percent off on Cyber Monday. In fairness to Yahoo!, that was smart, because they sold out of almost all jersey inventory when I looked a few days back despite the smaller discount.

  But still, get some redundancy and do a code freeze during the season! Come on, bros!

• And if you want to read me expound on mobile strategy, here are a few links to do just that:

  App deleted after one use: What should brand do?, Mobile Marketer
  Reaching the fragmented mobile audience, Mobile Marketer
  Macy’s makes mobile integral part of Black Friday strategy to drive in-store sales