Current Hockey Predictions

Long time no blog, not much has changed or happened life wise but I had an important discovery in optimism today.

So I was a bit bored today and decided to use a bit of simple math and statistics to see where the Isles would end up at seasons end based on current play. The premise was that based on the record in the last 10 games I came up with a points rate per game. Easy enough Wins times two plus Overtime losses divided by ten. That gives an objective view of where the teams currently sit rather then basing it on the whole season. It is also easy to update daily to keep an eye on where teams are headed. This brings a whole new meaning to who is doing what at the given point in time. Right now this is the league by points rate, with the Isles bolded to show just how good they've been playing.

1.6 PPG - Vancouver

1.5 PPG - Detroit, Nashville, Anaheim, NJ, and Pittsburgh

1.4 PPG - NYI, Carolina, and St. Louis

1.3 PPG - NYR, Toronto, and Tampa

1.2 PPG - LA, and Calgary

1.1 PPG - San Jose, Phoenix, Edmonton, Boston, Phillie, and Montreal

1.0 PPG - Washington

0.9 PPG - Colorado, Florida, Winnipeg, and Buffalo

0.8 PPG - Chicago, and Minnesota

0.7 PPG - Dallas, and Columbus

0.5 PPG - Ottawa

So the trend right now is that the Isles are among the top 10 teams for good play. Continuing with this number was easy to take the current games left to play and multiply it by the points rate. Doing so gave me a base number of point they can earn over the last set of games. Adding that number to the current point brings a new look at what the playoffs would be like if teams continue trends. Right now the Isles would be in! The next set is columned as follows. The left is the current rank, followed by the Projected Rank, then Team, then projected points.

WEST

Curr Place	Pro Place	TEAM	Pro. Points
2	1	VAN	117.4
1	2	DET	114
3	3	SJ	99.2
4	4	NAS	111
5	5	STL	111
7	6	LA	95.6
13	7	ANA	93
12	8	CAL	89.8
9	9	PHO	88.8
6	10	CHI	87.4
10	11	COL	81.3
8	12	MIN	81.2
14	13	EDM	78.9
11	14	DAL	77
15	15	CBS	56.3

EAST

Curr Place	Pro Place	TEAM	Pro Points
1	1	NYR	111.3
5	2	NJ	108.5
12	3	TAM	90
6	4	PITT	107
2	5	BOS	102.1
7	6	TOR	98.4
4	7	PHI	97.9
11	8	NYI	94
3	9	WAS	89
15	10	CAR	88.2
9	11	FLO	86
13	12	MTL	81.8
10	13	WIN	80.3
14	14	BUF	77
8	15	OTT	74

So that is where we are at! It is nice to see that the Isles would even have as large a cushion as 5 points! Of course some of this is subject to change, and probably will. I feel like Ottawa won't skid themselves into last place, I think Detroit will still manage a Presidents trophy, and I think Washington or Florida will rebound enough to stay in ahead of Tampa. The good news is that I can easily come back everyday and update the L10 stats and keep myself up to date on what is shaping up to be an Islanders Playoff run! So excited for the last quarter of the season now as the Isles really are staring a legitimate shot in the face. Plus if it works out that way we can finally reignite a talent gap deprived rivalry with the Rangers. Playoff series against the Rangers? Despite their excellent play no fan of either team would turn down an opportunity to see that playoff match up. The other part of this projection is that it pits THE ENTIRE Islanders division in the playoffs. How crazy is that?

Some side notes to this, I left the decimals in the projected because it is projected. If a team has an amount of games left that doesn't include an even 10 (30, 20, 10) it is suited to show the chance of points in a decimal. So a .8 after the points would signify a good chance they will gain that extra point, but because they have 29 instead of 30 games it could swing the other way. I like it as it is personally, but that is because I made it haha.

So yeh there is my long awaited (By me) update to the blog that is super nerdy and awesome at the same time. I definitely see myself keeping this spread sheet in the future to use for full seasons to watch how team trends change. I also plan on using it for other sports as well as keeping todays numbers to see how accurate it ends up being at seasons end. I will probably save 3 sets (every 10 games or so) and give a baseline for accuracy for future use. If I have a good accuracy baseline I can do other fun things like adding error into the projected points.

Looks like I found a new hobby haha. Also for anyone who may like the results from other sports it is a fairly easy sheet to set up in Excel and for sports that don't do points it is easy to just switch it to a win rate and project what kind of record they should end up with.

Cheers

-Minos

Pron - Not safe for work, this version of the classic movie shows a whole nuther side of the master computer...

Sports Bucket List

Yesterday I was reading an intersting article on ESPN titled, "101 Sports Events You Must See Live." It was from 2007 and I found it because I was googling famous sports events last night while watching the XGames. It inspired me to write this post because it was a fairly inclusive list but was missing some big ones that I feel deserve to be on the list (They had Wife Carrying Championships but no F1 races?) So this list is not necessarily an, "I want to see LSU vs. Bama," type list, but more of a list of events, venues, and specific teams I want to see. The list is in no particular order of importance just listed as the occur to me.

To start off here is a list of things that would've been on had I not already finished them.

-See a game at every Hockey Arena: I can check off the Joe,Columbus, and Washington now. Four down 26 to go haha.

-See BBall in MSG. Watched the Hokies play there, good enough for me.

Ok onto a list of my sports bucket list.

1. See a Hockey game in every arena. This is a long shot of course, but I would like to. The more realistic version would be to see a game in the more historic and crowd crazy arenas. That list would be Chicago, Canada (all teams haha), Boston, and MSG.

2. See a Hockey Playoff Game. Anywhere any round, though preferably a Cup game and the Islanders, but that is pushing it haha.

3. Grand Prix of Monaco. Probably will never happen, but would be amazing. I couldn't believe this is not on ESPN's list. Daytona has been around a while right? Famous? This race started in 1929 and has been held every year since 1955, hasn't missed a year! On top of that the race is shrouded in glory. It is the tightest, most technical, and most coveted victory every year. The race weekend would be awesome because you would be in Monte Carlo livin' it up. The event would be extremely pricey however.

4. Italian Grand Prix at Monza. This is more doable in the price range. The race, like Monaco, has been run continuously for years. The appeal of this race to me would be the fans. I don't particularly like the circuit itself, but getting to hang out with the Tifosi would be incredible. Arguably the most dedicated fans in all of sport.

5. Any Grand Prix at all. Since the two best choices for me are among the hardest to achieve I would just throw on this list that I would like to see any F1 race run live.

6. The Masters. Yes, I want to go to a golfing event. This is the only golfing event I have ever watched on TV live. The course is super famous, but I would never play on it so going to the event would let me see what is the nicest venue in all of sports.

7. Games at famous College Stadiums. This list as of now includes, LSU, Michgan, USC, and The Rose Bowl. I don't need to see particular teams, but most likely to happen if the Hokies are playing since I don't like football too much.

8. Any Premier league game. Soccer is a sport of passionate fans, Premier League is the league I watch. This entry would have me preferring to see a game at the famous fields like Old Trafford or Anfield.

9. Any Manchester City game at Home. I am a Man City fan, I watch whenever I can and I would love to go to a home game to truly be a part of the culture over there.

10. Man City vs. Man U. One of the only team vs. team on the list. Take the Sox and Yankees and take out other sports for those fans to enjoy. Also move the teams 2.5 miles from each other. You have City vs. United. That is reason enough for me to want to watch even if I wasn't a City fan.

11. Yankees vs. Red Sox at both stadiums. I will lump this into one because I get 4 things out of this list entry. A game at Fenway, a game at the new Yankees Stadium, and a rivalry game in both fan bases.

12. Baseball Famous Venues. Sticking to Baseball here are the Stadiums I want to see games in, excluding the already included Fenway/Yankees. Wrigley Field, San Fran, St. Louis, and Milwaukee.

13. Cricket. Preferably a shorter match 20/20 but I would like to watch this live someday.

14. Summer Olympics. I would love to see the summer Olympics, preferably in a city matched to a city I want to see, but just seeing them would be cool!

15. Winter Olympics. I like the Winter Olympics better then the Summer Olympics and on top of it I could use it as an excuse to Ski at a nice resort.

16. DCI Championships. Prefer a whole weekend but I could be appeased with Finals night!

I think that is it for now, in the future when I think of things I will add them to the list. I will end with this, a list of things people would have on a bucket list of sports that I don't care to ever see live.

Super Bowl

Anything Basketball related

National Championship (Outside the Hokies)

Tour de France

Anything Tennis

Anything Horse Racing

Cheers.

-Minos

Mharlie and the Chocolate Factory - Chocolate fantasy factory tour or crazy hash Brownies? Find out in this psychadellic trip into Mharlies Factory.

If life were a musical and anticulturalism

Ok so I haven't posted in a while because honestly I was pretty much just watching Doctor Who non-stop. BTW the ending of Season 6 was AWESOME!!! Lots of cursing at the TV though haha.

So that kind of led into what happened that sparked a need for the first half of this post. We threw Grease 2 on at lunch today because I commented that I had never seen it before. We didn't watch much because my wife was right that it was awful but it brought a crazy funny thought to mind, also Shooter McGavin was in it, but I digress even though I haven't really gressed yet. Can you say you got off topic if you didn't really get on topic to start? IDK that is a thought for another blog I suppose.

Anyway, so I decided that life would be really weird if it were like a musical. Imagine this; you are walking out of your mom's car to go to school. As you walk up the path suddenly everyone, including yourself suddenly breaks into a choreographed dance number and there is singing, but no ones mouths are moving! I mean personally I would freak out. Seriously who took the time to coordinate this dance? Where is the singing coming from? Why are the Jocks so into it? Why do I know the moves? WTF IS GOING ON!!!??? Second to the large group numbers is awkward duets. If you were a girl and asked your man how he felt, and then he broke into a song, which included people dancing, wouldn't you freak out? I would. I mean how can you cope with that? It is insanity. Why are all those people suddenly dancing in a manner that compliments your love's song when they don't know your conversation? Why are there so many eavesdroppers? WTF IS GOING ON!!!??? So the last one related directly to the opening scene. All of those kids would be very late everyday. Well at least the kids in the back. Basically the moral of the story is that if you suck at dancing you're going to be tardy because you get stuck in the back. Seriously way to bring down punishment just because we can't dance. Why can't I just walk into school whenever I want? Why must big brother control my pecking order based on ability to dance? When did dance become the only measuring stick for humans? WTF!!!???

So basically that is what life would be like if it were a musical, a lot of confusion and a lot of really awkward moments but some really great dancers!

Moving on. This is a rant, a rant brought about by some facebook statuses, a few tweets, and some various news articles. It spawned a new word from me, Anti-Culturalism. This is the act of being against culture due to the current state of humanity. The posts all seemed to be centered around the super bowl. The first was mad because, as they stated, "We spend 10 billion on the super bowl, enough to feed 127 million kids for a year, where is or perspective?" Or something to that nature. This is the part where I sound like a complete and utter asshole but I don't care because I believe this fully. I don't care if a starving family hates me because I watch sports, or go to concerts, or generally live my life how I do. This is not because I don't care about the starving family, no no on the contrary I feel bad for them, however it does not mean that I have to give up everything to ensure their well being. It sounds bad but it is true.

The truth of the matter is that in order to have a working civilization that includes CULTURE you have to have a class system. The nature of culture is having pointless things that define you based on other persons. American culture includes sports, as do many countries including undeveloped nations. India is full of starving kids but they still play Cricket! The idea of culture is that a group of people needs to do things that serve no real purpose to the countries necessities. We don't need music, or theater, or art, or sports, or video games to function, but we need them to maintain individuality. If every person on the planet was perfectly equal. All the same living condition's, food, and health, there wouldn't be room for members of society who produce no valuable function. A painter could never be praised for having a talent few others have, an athlete can't be praised for having exceptional physical abilities, etc. etc. The reason that the class system exists is because the people who give society culture, musicians, writers, painter, athletes, etc, are praised and compensated for their special abilities. The people who pay these peoples salaries are the people who make enough money to spend surplus on upgrading their culture. And unfortunately there is a lower class. It sucks but I would rather have the culture. You can argue with me and call me a dick or whatever but be honest with yourself, unless there is a world where everyone is exactly equal, a class system will exist, a class system that will spawn creative minds to create a culture in society.

Don't kill culture as we know it, there are better ways to help poor sick starving people then cancelling a Super Bowl. I'm sick of your attempts to sway peoples thinking with guilt logic that is just plain stupid when you really think about it. Here is one for you, we don't really need renewable energy, coal is just fine. How many starving kids can you feed if you get rid of gov't subsidies for renewable sources?

/end ranty super paragraph.

-Minos

P.S. One letter off:

Apocalypse Cow - One cow, one disease, a race against time to save humanity!

Wikipedia and one letter off.

I have kind of a quick blog update for today.

I should like to start out by saying that I commend wikipedia for what it is and what it did today for the blackout.

That being said, the blackout brought out a VERY SCARY side of the human race. I had no idea how much people relied on an internet built encyclopedia for real information. If you are looking for a quick answer I can understand, I do it all the time, but the amount of people who were worried about not finishing papers because they couldn't access wikipedia was downright fucking scary. First of all, any credible school won't accept wikipedia as a source. That's a big point there. You shouldn't be using it for research papers. Period. There are these magical places where you do research btw, they're called libraries, they've been around FOREVER! If you're too lazy to do that, or it's late, fucking google it! There are millions of credible sources for research papers out there.

If you're asking why it isn't credible I'll answer that now. It is written by you and your peers. That's right you can edit wikipedia! They have a group that does well to monitor stupid editing but it isn't 100%. I once edited the WWII page to say that  fear of Hello Kitty is why America joined the war. It was up there for TWO WEEKS. Imagine a kid writing that in his paper! Now most would know that is wrong but how can you be sure what your reading is right on say, the page for a chemical. If you must use the site for papers, though I can't see why, please just use the sources posted on the bottom, you know, the ones where the people writing the page for real got their info, like a normal researcher, you get it yet?

Ok enough ranting. A while back I posted daily status with movie titles that were one letter off. They were quite popular so I plan on adding them here as I remember them. A lot of them I pulled from a website I can't recall, but only the titles I made up my own descriptions.

For starters here are a few:

Lord of the Wings - The underdog comedy of a thin man taking on the wing eating championships!

Rion King - What happens when Simba gets abandoned in China?

Star Pars - The story of average golfers who become legends.

More to come!

-Minos

P.S. If you're barking up the wrong tree, you're probably a dog.

Twitter, Daleks, and Hooverville

I've concluded after my first day of using twitter that facebook is really useless for me now. In reality I don't care about daily drivel of what people are eating, etc. On twitter I can follow CNN, Islanders, and other interests and streamline my information into a single website on a single page. To have that on facebook I would have to block everyone from my news feed. Anyway I'll still maintain a facebook for communication with groups, because it is better for that.  Also I can keep up with family that aren't big twitter users.

I would like to throw a quick, people are dumb segway in here. This cruise ship deal in Italy has produced amazing reactions. Really it is only the, "This is why I never cruise!" Or, "I'll never cruise again!" sentiments that bother me. I mean seriously? The last time a huge mega cruise sank was the titanic. Dunno if that is true, but really it is probably close. 

Speaking of dumb people, lets talk about Occupy! Watching Doctor Who today we saw an episode where there were Hoovervilles.  My lovely wife pointed out that it was like Occupy. I couldn't help but laugh because it was true in essence. A bunch of bums, out of work, camping in communities. Bahahaha! This is of course semantically different because Hoovervilles were people with no where to go, while occupy are there by choice. Anyway it was a funny comparison.

Ok last topic of the day, the Daleks. They have quickly become my favorite archenemy in a tv series ever. So brutal, always surviving, and always exterminating! Other favorite archenemies include: comics-Joker, games-Sephiroth, and books-Sauron.

Anyway, enough rambling for today!

Shameless, "follow me on Twitter," plug. Woo I feel awesome for doing that!

You stay classy San Diego.

-Minos

Daily words of wisdom: If you don't have something nice to say, punch them in the face instead, that way they get the message.

Batman Platinum, Pot Pies, and Twitisheepisphering

So we finally have some winter freaking weather! It is so exciting! It was also really useful that I finally got my spring cleaning from last year done so the Mini can sit in the garage. Mini drives ok in the snow but when outside the brakes tend to freeze, which is kinda bad. The snow was not terrible anyway, but I hope we get some more.

First off I would like to plug myself and say I've joined Twitter @dammie157. Well ok I've been on Twitter for a while to follow Rover's Morning Glory, a radio show I listen to, but just never really used it before. Since Facebook has become overloaded with random crap and just isn't much suitable for me I started this blog, but I realize that there are times I would like to throw a random though out there quickly so I think I'll just tweet it because why the hell not? So as I said in the title I've joined the sheep and become a twittizen on the twittisphere and well yeh deal with it. DOWN WITH FACEBOOK!??!! Occupy Twitter!

Since Christmas I have been playing Batman Arkham City. The game is quite amazing and I decided to do my best to get a platinum trophy in it. This is brought on by the fact that the only platinums I've ever taken the time to get are in Lego games and Toy Story 3. I wanted one that was harder then just getting everything. I enjoy that it has no multiplayer trophies as well. multiplayer trophies bug me because unless they are of the, "Get to this level," which just requires actually playing online whether you are bad or good, I just dislike them. I'm not the greatest online player so when they want me to do all these different things against people who have skill far beyond mine it just kinda sucks. Anyway the hardest trophy by far is completing a combo using all the moves in the game. This one has annoyed me so far, but I haven't tried much either. I am currently finishing a run through of new game plus and its side missions and then I only have to finish the campaigns in Riddlers revenge and get that freeflow trophy and I will feel quite accomplished. After that it is onto Assassins Creed.

A quick shout out definitely needs to be made here to my amazing wife who just so happens to cook fantastic food! Yesterday she made chicken pot pies with left over chicken from the previous day, which was also fantastic. She also whipped up some cupcakes that were quite fantastic as well as some home made English muffins. Quickest way to a mans heart is through food they say, I can't really argue against that at this point. You can find her blog where she talks about her recipes here. I recommend reading it.

In conclusion, we finished up season 2 of Doctor Who today. I'm loving this show and would like to shout out to the fact that it is amazing and you should all watch it. I mean Barty Crouch Jr. is one of the doctors!

-Minos

Daily Words of Wisdom: Don't try to punch a gift horse in the mouth.

Country Music and man crushes.

So I got to go to my first ever live concert! Well, I've been to TSO, but I guess that doesn't count by the order of hadji, sanction 36, part 401k.

We saw Blake Shelton play at the Huntington Center last night. Also playing was Dia Frampton and Justin Moore. I learned a few useful tidbits of information along the way all while enjoying an amazing concert.

First, man crushes are awkward, especially drunk redneck man crushes. But more on that later. Dia Frampton, who was the runner up on The Voice from team Blake, opened the show. She had an excellent voice but she lacked the power to overcome the bass in the arena setting. She has some growing up to do in that regard but overall she was excellent for a tour opening act. One odd note was that she performed bare foot, which was strange but cool.

Second act was Justin Moore, this is where man crush happens. There were a few drunken redneck frat boys sitting next to us. One of them had serious, man crushtasticness for Justin. He was singing every song, banging the railing so hard, and out of time I might add, that I'm pretty sure he would've lost feeling had the alcohol not already done that. We were also sure that he was going to fall over the railing, but oh well can't win em all!

Now onto Blake. One thing I love about country music stars is that they have true singing talent. Blake proved his by sitting on a stool for a few songs to play guitar and sing by himself. This was my favorite part of the night because he sang my new favorite song, Toledo. The video of this can be seen here. The song was fracking hilarious. What I really liked about Blake was that he had a lot of humor as well as music in his show.

All in all it was a fantastic night and I recommend seeing his show, even if you're not a country fan.

-Minos