Robert's Rules of Order

Enough is enough. I realize that rushing the court is something that college students do after big basketball wins because it's (at least they think) a cool experience, and something you can only get away with doing in college (if you go on the court in the NBA, this happens). But it's gotten way, way out of hand. On Sunday, after Ohio State defeated Wisconsin 49-48, Buckeye fans rushed the court in celebration.

Let me make this clear: fans of the #1 team in the country rushed the court.

To be fair, Wisconsin was the #1 team in the AP poll at the time. But Ohio State was #2, and they were #1 in the coaches' poll, and you shouldn't be rushing the court when you beat the #1 team if you're ranked one spot behind them. OSU also clinched the conference title, so perhaps the students were celebrating that... but OSU won the conference last year. This wasn't the end of some majestic drought. Act like you've been there before.

With that in mind, I have compiled a list of the rules about when it is acceptable to rush the court in college basketball. Failure to comply with these rules makes you and your fellow students losers.

1. If you have just beaten the #1 team in the country, and you are not ranked in the top 25, you may rush the court.

2. If you have just beaten a top 10 team, and you are not a top 50 team, you may rush the court.

3. If you have just beaten a team ranked between #11 and #25, you may only rush the court if your team is terrible (heading for a season with no more than five conference wins) or if they are mediocre at best (i.e. not NCAA Tournament-bound) and rarely, if ever, beat ranked teams of any stripe.

4. Regardless of rules #1-3, you should not rush the court before January 1 unless your team is historically not a strong program and the team you beat is historically a strong program.

5. If you are playing a traditional rival, you may rush the court after a win if they are ranked at least five spots ahead of you in both polls. If you are ranked ahead of them, or if they are unranked and you are ranked anywhere, you should not be rushing the court; I don't care how acrimonious the rivalry is. If neither team is ranked, you may only rush the court if your team is having a particularly bad season and the rival's team is at least above .500.

6. You may rush the court after clinching a conference championship, but ideally you should only be doing so if this is your first title in at least three years and/or if your team was pretty bad the previous year. Also be aware that, while nice, winning your conference's regular season title is hardly the ultimate goal in college basketball, and so rushing the court to celebrate it makes you look kind of lame unless it was the culmination of a surprise season.

7. Unless the "ideally" clause in #6 applies, a top-five team really should not have its fans rush the court under any circumstances.

Do you have anything to add to this? Note it in the comments.

Speaking of college basketball, there is still plenty of time to sign up for the BigFlax.com 2007 NCAA Tournament Challenge and plenty of room in the field - as of now we're at four, though I'm hoping for repeat participants to start coming out of the woodwork shortly. Check a couple posts back for the info.

Slip-sliding away

It's been some time - well, a little over two months - since I've written a movie review. And for that matter I think I've only seen one movie in that time (a DVD which I ended up not reviewing). I'm a bit disappointed in my lack of movie watching over the past year, and even more so in my subsequent lack of reviewing, but it's just difficult. When I was in college, I could watch movies pretty much whenever; the convenience of Century Theaters, plus its high variety of films, made it easy to wander over after class on as many days as I wanted to and check something out. Plus, I was taking theory courses at the time so writing reviews was practically second nature.

Nowadays it's almost become a chore. I used to get back from quiz bowl tournaments and immediately write up the recaps; now I don't even copy down my tossups. It seems to have gotten that way with movies; I still like watching movies, when I get the chance, but actually sitting down and writing a review - a process which can take several hours - has reached the point where half the time I'm not even motivated enough by the film to write one, and the other half of the time it takes me several days (where, again, I used to bang them out that same day). It's too much like work that I'm not even being paid for, as opposed to the fun hobby it used to be, and the decreasing frequency with which I write reviews is making me feel like my talents (such as they ever were) have backslid.

I don't know if there's a solution here. I want to keep watching movies and I like having opinions about them, and those opinions do often manage to manifest themselves in review form, like this review for Lord of War, which I watched on Tuesday. It's a movie whose placement on my Netflix queue dates to about a year ago, when I was still trying to catch up on the movies of 2005 for an end-of-year list that still hasn't materialized. So now I'm basically two years behind. I guess these things happen. It's not like I'm giving up movies, unlike my forthcoming quiz bowl retirement, but immersing myself in them as I did in college has become far too difficult.

The BigFlax.com 2007 NCAA Tournament Challenge is awaiting participants! So far we have a list of two (myself, Tyler), but I'm sure there are many past entrants out there ready to have another go. Check out the previous entry for more details.

Tournament time

Here it is: your official announcement for the 2007 BigFlax.com NCAA Tournament Challenge.

Rules to keep in mind:

1) Entrants need either to be known to me or known to someone who knows me. So feel free to let your friends know, but make sure you're not sending me any total flakes.

2) Entry fee is five dollars, unless you're with the California Department of Beverage Control, in which case it's free.

3) All entry fees must be received by Thursday, March 15, with no exceptions, or your entry will be discarded. In the past I've resisted doing this because I hate losing contestants, but that's preferable to the end result of me covering anyone who didn't pay up. Don't be the guy who's too cheap to pony up for a stamp; if you don't have any other way to get it to me by March 15, mail it. This gives you about a month to do it, so no excuses.

4) To sign up, e-mail bigflax (at) gmail (dot) com. If I already have your preferred e-mail address, expressing interest in the comments section here is acceptable.

5) Rules for the tournament itself remain more or less the same as in previous years. Scoring is conducted along the same lines as ESPN's Tournament Challenge, with the exception of the upset bonus. A full version of the rules will go up soon.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

The one about Ebbets Field

There's an interview meme going around that I caught in Greg's blog. The rules are supposed to involve posting interview questions for anyone who wants to be interviewed in the comments (they are then to post their answers in their own blogs), but I don't know that I've got much interest in continuing it to that end, although if you beg I might try just so as not to seem like a bad memer. But anyway, Greg's questions and my answers mean a free entry, so here you go:

1. What generally-observed US holiday could you do without, and why?
I'm not sure whether this question asks about federal holidays or just ones that the entire nation takes note of. If the latter, I know it's an easy target, but I think Valentine's Day is stupid; really, it goes along with Mother's and Father's Days as well - a holiday made up to sell greeting cards and crappy gifts by suggesting that on this day you take time out to recognize someone you should have been recognizing the entire rest of the year anyway. Valentine's Day earns the fewest points thanks to the added bonus of endless loathsome jewelry ads. Of course, hating on V-Day has become so clichéd that the greeting card companies have started making cards just for people who hate it, so I guess this was too easy an answer. But it still sucks, and I'm not just saying that because it means I have to buy Alma two presents in five days, heh. As for federal holidays, they provide the bulk of my time off work these days, so I'd keep them all and add a few more while I was at it.

2. What was the last movie that made you weepy?
I cry at movies a lot, which is probably not the sort of thing I should be admitting, but it happens to be true. I could answer this question one of two ways too: the last movie I watched, period, or the last movie I watched for the first time that made me cry at it? It's possible that the latter goes all the way back to when I saw Hotel Rwanda in the theater (and I bawled at that one, holy shit). The last movie that I cried at, period, was probably the end of Field of Dreams.

3. What did you ever collect, if anything?
I tried collecting many, many things over the years. I'm not sure why I had such a zeal for it - I guess I just liked having different varieties of stuff. I collected stamps for a little while but that was almost a perfunctory interest as the classic "thing to collect;" I went more for coins and baseball cards. The coins are probably in a box in Maryland; the cards are actually all here in Chicago with me, putting the "crap" into "craphole" where my room is concerned. I also collected business cards as a kid (no idea how that one got started, except that I think I liked finding people who had interesting raised designs and stuff on theirs, and I recall being overly excited that the Staples in West Orange had a machine on the premises which would make you a single custom-text business card for a dollar; mine read "Robert Flaxman, Geography Whiz," which tells you something of how much of an unbelievable tool the 10-year-old me was), but that petered out once I got old enough to realize it was stupid. Then of course I most infamously collected soda cans.

4. Most Americans think soccer is boring. Why are they wrong?
This is a complaint I have not just about soccer, but about sports in general, and that is that most Americans think that sports are boring unless they feature a lot of points. I'm not sure where this idea came from; people of the past certainly seem to have appreciated great defensive struggles, pitchers' duels, things like that - the very fact that Jack Morris is considered a solid Hall of Fame candidate is almost entirely attributable to Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, for example. Yet unless someone turns in a no-hitter or goes ten innings, a 1-0 game is almost always derided as a snoozefest by the casual fan. Perhaps this is why I like baseball as well; the mercurial nature of the scoring means you can't ever really stop watching, and the relative rarity of it makes the scoring so much more interesting. Certainly this isn't true of something like basketball, where you can pretty much tune in for the final ten minutes only and do just fine. So tell me how that's more exciting than being on edge the whole game because something might happen?

The other major reason is that Americans hate ties. Heck, hockey had to do away with them entirely just to get people interested again. But ties can be fantastic drama, especially in tournaments. Of the three most exciting games I've watched in my life, two ended in a draw - Manchester City and Aston Villa in the 2006 FA Cup and US vs. Italy in the 2006 World Cup. (The third game, for the record: US 3-2 Portugal in 2002.)

The fact is, soccer is an incredible, sprawling game that at its best is full of brilliant moves, canny passing, and outstanding finishes. But it doesn't need to have seven or eight outstanding finishes a game to be exciting - half that many is more than enough. Plus there'll be plenty of shots to go "Oh!" at, and even before that, it's exciting just watching plays develop. Outside of just gameplay, soccer features some of the most interesting tournaments in any sport (World Cup, FA Cup), as well as regular international competition, which is pretty sweet. Baseball's still my favorite sport, but I think soccer has pretty much staked its claim to the #2 spot.

5. Was it always the Beatles? Who came before in young Flaxman's heart?
Considering I've been a Beatles fan since the age of 6 or so, I'd have to say no one. The LPs that vied for supremacy on the living room turntable at the Flaxman house were, for what seems in my memory like several years, pretty much just the following three: Sgt. Pepper's, The Rascals Greatest Hits, and Morrison Hotel by the Doors. There were probably others on occasion, but those dominated the player, or at least seem to have in retrospect. Still, I recall being particularly entranced by Sgt. Pepper's, and why not: for a kid, that cover is an incredible amount of stimulus, and this being the LP, there was even the back of the sleeve off which I could read all the words. Oddly enough, we didn't have most of the albums for a long time; on the third floor, where most of my dad's LP collection was housed, we had Abbey Road - which in retrospect it took me a shocking amount of time to find and listen to - and we had virtually nothing on CD at first (well, 1988, that's not that big a shock), accumulating the bulk of the catalog over the years as I got older and ever more interested in the Beatles, leading to the various birthday countdowns. Today of course I personally own every British LP (on CD), which leads to stuff like this, though somewhat ironically the Beatles make up a much smaller percentage of the music I listen to these days than they probably have at any point prior, and in fact I believe I tried to make another top 40 2-CD countdown for my parents in 2005 and just got tired of it after the first 20. Which doesn't mean the Beatles aren't the best band ever, just that you can't listen to one band that much for that long and not get a little worn out on them for a while.

Great!

Because I earn one week of backed-up work for each day I miss, I trudged in today, which of course means there was a freaking blizzard. Even including '02-'03, when it was so cold for so long that the lake pretty much froze and we were prepared to go outside in short sleeves when it finally hit 32, I'm thinking this is my worst winter yet in Chicago. First of all, it's been bitterly cold for weeks now. And then the cold finally breaks, the temperature rises to the low 20s... and a ton of snow falls on our heads, driven along by enough wind to make sure that we couldn't even begin to consider it more pleasant than what we just had. And since what we just had was almost certainly a large contributor to my cold/flu, you can bet I was excited to walk to and from the bus stop/train station today.

Of course all this might not be so bad if my white blood cells would DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS!! Let's go, leukocytes! I'm not paying you to watch A-Team reruns and eat Crunch 'n' Munch! I'd really rather not have this drag out any further - the hacking up a lung at work is bad enough (maybe it's karmic payback for the fact that the sound of other people coughing almost invariably drives me up a wall), but the general disorientation, which makes me feel like I came to work drunk, is just not fun (and severely curbs my productivity, which is especially useful when I'm a day behind), and the continuing night sweats, despite the fact that I no longer appear to have a fever, are worse still. Plus, about the only thing that keeps me from shrilly clearing my throat every six seconds is a near-constant flow of Gatorade down my esophagus, and that stuff ain't cheap.

In other, less whiny news, Valentine's Day is tomorrow and I'll only get to see Alma via webcam thanks to THIS FUCKING COLD OR FLU OR WHATEVER IT IS. Did I say less whiny? I may have meant "more whiny."

I could not possibly be looking forward to this weekend any more. Which means that this is probably preparing to be the longest week of my life.

Hot blooded, check it and see

I almost never get sick, as most of you know, but this was kind of a bad week. First, I didn't get a ton of sleep any of the nights (probably 6 and a half hours max), and then on Friday, a water main broke at Belmont and Sheridan. Traffic on the Drive was redirected all the way to Irving Park, including my bus. I had to walk back 15 minutes to the apartment in sub-zero wind chill. By the end of the evening I had a small cough, but by this morning it had turned into a horrible dry hack. My voice is shot and my fever is creeping up on 102 (101.7 last I took it). I'm taking Sudafed Cold and Cough but it hasn't done a whole lot yet, despite the fact that I've done little since 1 pm today besides sleep.

A bad way to start the Alma birthday update, unfortunately, especially considering I'm missing birthday dinner with her family right now (after catching the one with her friends last night). Happy birthday, baby. Hopefully this doesn't keep us apart all weekend.

Posty post post

I'm starting to wonder if BlogRolling really works anymore. Okay, yes, it does keep all my links organized over there, but I could do that. The real reason to have used BlogRolling was that it told you when the links were updated (for blogs that allow it, as all of mine do). But I haven't seen an arrow there since that day a week or two ago where every blog had an arrow next to it. I'm thinking this is a problem.

The point of all this is that there are new posts in the Lost blog, the Frugal Gourmand, and Soccer Blog America. Given the sporadic update nature of most of my side blogs these days, that's something you might need to be told, assuming you had any desire to read them in the first place. And the arrows aren't taking care of business, so I guess I have to.

New real post in this blog later tonight, hopefully.

Snap poll, Federline edition

I assume you've all seen the Nationwide ad featuring Kevin Federline. (If not, here, recently arrived aliens.)

My dad was reading a Washington Post article where the writer described the music video sequence as a dream sequence. Originally, this was how I saw it too; the way the commercial is cut together seemed to imply that Federline was a burger-joint lackey dreaming of being on TV, but in fact only rapping into a security camera. My dad suggested, however, that the message of the commercial makes a lot more sense if you assume that the music video actually happened. Having watched it again and thought about it, I agree with him. If the commercial is about Nationwide annuities guaranteeing you income even if your cashflow suddenly dries up, it only makes sense that Federline was actually a star (or at least actually someone who had a major source of income) and lost that status, but could still do fine despite a minimum-wage job if he had used some of the money to fund an annuity.

My question is: how did you see it at first? Do you agree with the revised interpretation if you initially assumed it was a dream sequence, as I did?

Suck party weekend

This is hardly going to go down as the worst weekend in my life - August 8, 2004 pretty much has its weekend sewn up - but it's gotta be top five. Which I suppose says more about my sheltered existence than anything else. Nonetheless, it was not very good. First, Drew and I did the second root beer taste test on Saturday, and it was massively disappointing. Roommate Katie asked us what the moral was after it was over, to which I replied, "Either we don't like root beer as much as we thought, or... I don't know." We tested 25 root beers (probably a few too many, in retrospect, but I only started to feel it right at the end), and I only gave out four above-average grades - and two of those were to the house brands of Target and Walgreens! I don't want to ruin the write-up so I'll stop there for now, but suffice it to say it was disappointing.

Then, of course, came Sunday. Half of me saw this coming and half of me hoped it wouldn't. But there's no getting around it: the Bears played terribly. Half of that is due credit to the Colts - barring the one big run in the first quarter, they really held Thomas Jones down fairly well (15 for 112 looks great, but take away the one 52-yarder and it's 14 for 60, which is fine but nothing spectacular). The other half is a vicious cycle involving the defense. It could not stop the Colts. The bend-but-don't-break philosophy is fine if you're going to put up several touchdowns a game, and especially if you're going to get a bunch of turnovers and hang onto the ball yourselves - the Saints game, in particular, worked this way. This game, though? Not so much. The Bears turned the ball over five times, negating the three they got back. And Manning and the Colts were only too happy to take 5-8 yards on virtually every play. The Bears' D was so worried about the long pass that they played the safeties too deep and let Manning have every short pass he wanted - so Manning just kept moving the chains and moving the chains. This resulted mostly in field goals (although they gave up the Wayne TD despite playing the safeties deep), keeping the score looking close, but looking at TOP and total yards tells you the story of the game:

TOP
Colts: 38:04
Bears: 21:56

Total Yards
Colts: 430
Bears: 265

Ugly. You know why this happened? The defense was so scared of the big play that it played overly safe, feeling fine as long as it held the Colts to few or no points. What no one seemed to think about was that (a) the time on the field was not good for the defense and (b) the time off the field was not good for Rex Grossman. With minimal exception, Grossman's best games during the season came when the defense shut down the other team quickly (with either short drives or turnovers) and allowed the Bears' offense to get back onto the field and Grossman to do his thing. In this game, the Bears' defense spent a ton of time on the field because it refused to try and stop the Colts cold. Manning seemed flustered by blitzes, yet, fearful of allowing the big play, the Bears rarely blitzed. The tackling was woeful. Peyton Manning isn't a future first-ballot HOFer because he can only beat you one way, guys - Manning was willing to take what the defense was only too happy to allow. So while the game looked closer for longer, in reality it was never that close once the Colts grabbed the lead.

To recap: Devin Hester was awesome, and Thomas Jones was okay, and the rest of the team pretty much sucked. The Colts played well, don't get me wrong, but the Bears really looked bad, and given how historically bad Indy's D is I don't think we can give them all the credit for that. Maybe the Bears can get back here, but Grossman needs to mature a bit more first, among other things. It wasn't all his fault, but he looked like a rookie making his first start, which is not what you want from your starting QB in the Super Bowl. Bottom line: the Bears didn't deserve to win, and frankly should probably consider themselves lucky to have lost by as little as 12. Ugh.

Oh, and was it me or did the commercials SUCK? I think this was the worst crop ever. There was only one that I really thought was okay - the Bud Light one with the axe guy - and even then I only really liked it for the last line. And what was with all the damn suicide jokes? GM and Washington Mutual found jumping to your death funny enough to include it in the plots of ads? Good Lord, people. It was even worse than Frito-Lay and Coke using black history to sell products; at least those ads had respectful tones, even if they were cheap money grabs at heart.

The Coke GTA parody was okay, but not great. The only other memorable one - for the wrong reason - was the absolutely vile Doritos ad implying that the cashier and the guy with the mustache have sex on the register. Gross. Federline's Nationwide ad might have been funny if we hadn't all seen it ten times already. The Snickers ad was moronic. And whatever happened to that one that was supposed to feature a marriage proposal? Did I miss it somehow?