The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

John Kerry needs to win Ohio if he has any hope of winning this election. The entire election is going to hinge on this state, in my humble opinion. Even assuming Dubya wins Florida, Kerry winning Ohio gives him a huge boost on his way to winning the electoral college. On the other hand, if he loses Ohio then he has absolutely no hope barring a miracle in Florida, Pennsylvania, AND Iowa.

In the past I've said that I don't like Ohio because I haven't met any cool people from there. That's not true any more, but when I had less world experience truly all the people I met from Ohio were very odd to me. On the surface they seemed to share a lot of the ideals I hold, and then out of nowhere they would come out with some ultra conservative, or religious, or otherwise seemingly dissonant view. If I know off the bat that you hold different ideals, then at least you make sense to me and I can respect you.

Many people from Ohio are just that fickle in my (again limited) experience. I think Ohio has an identity crisis. They have a few really big cities in Cleveland, Cincinatti, and even Columbus to a certain extent, and people from big cities tend to be more liberal. At the same time, though, there seems to be a traditional Midwestern viewpoint that comes out of the rest of Ohioans. I don't know anything about the geography or history of Ohio, so I won't go speculating, but all of this just makes Ohio sort of confusingly fascinating.

Tucker Carlson (who's a dick on any show) was on the Chris Matthews show this morning. Towards the end of the show during the "tell me something I don't know" section, Tucker said that this election would be unlike the last election is that there would be a definitive winner.

What was surprising was that Tucker said that there would be a winner by at least two percentage points and a definitive electoral college winner and that winner would be John Kerry. As Tucker said, he hates to admit it but he believes Kerry has picked up steam and is on his way to a definitive, if not convincing, victory over Dubya and Big Time.

Chris Matthews said he's gonna hold on to the tape of that show to use against Tucker in the future. Obviously, he makes a living giving his opinions, but Tucker has been a...what's the word?...hack for the Republican party and in such a close race that really is too close to call at this point I wonder if this may come back to bite him. It probably won't, but it would be interesting if it did.

A conversation between me and a female student:

"Hey mista, what do you think of Tyra?"
"Who?"
"Tyra Banks."
"Oh, well she's got a big forehead."
"Yeah, but you know what I mean, would you fuck her?"
"Excuse me."
"Oh, I'm sorry mista. My bad."
"That's probably not an appropriate question. I'm going to go over here now."

A couple minutes later:

"So, really mista, what do you think of Tyra Banks?"
"She really does have a big forehead."
"Yeah, but she got big tits and a big ass. You know you'd get with her, mista."
"Wow. Well, I think you should stop talking about this. Especially to me."

I have one student who simply cannot control his actions. On an average day he will make odd noises like meowing or imitating the bell sound, feel the hair of the girl next to him and say that it is "so soft", sing songs in his native Arabic language, walk around the room and put up post-it notes, tell people that they are in the "puta group", tell students of Hispanic descent to "callate la boca" (he's not Hispanic, mind you), repeat what I say, and just generally cause a disturbance.

Today he outdid himself. He was bothering everyone, as usual, so I asked him to move to the back of the room where there are less people to bother. As he stood he decided it was "disco time", so he danced his way to the back of the room. Then after a few minutes I looked at his desk and he wasn't there. Why wasn't he there, you ask? He wasn't at his desk because he was in the closet. He had gotten up, opened the door, and gotten in the closet. I had to stop class in order to retrieve him from the closet, at which point he begged me not to remove him from class because he had "taken all his notes today," and he "had to finish his work."

Of course, all of the other students did not hesitate to point out that this particular student had finally come out of the closet, which was another disturbance for the class. Awesome.

I'm watching Dead Poets Society at the moment and I'm struck that generally don't think of this when I list my favorite movies, but it definitely is one of my favorites.

Every scene is meaningful and the movie never drags even though it's very deliberate. It's absolutely one of the best and is Robin Williams' best performance to date (including the similarly awesome Good Will Hunting).

I don't really want to expound on this any more. I just think from now on I will count this in my top 5 or so.

The Yankees just completed a collapse of historic proportions last night by relinquishing a 3 game lead against the Boston Red Sox. It was painfully obvious that the Yankees got complacent after that third game where they blew out the Sox. Up to that point in the series A-Rod, Sheffield, and Matsui were hitting over .500 combined and they all might as well have been hitless over the last four games. Those were the guys who needed to continue producing in order for the Yankees to have won.

On top of that the bad pitching for the Yankees finally caught up with them at the end of the season. All they needed was to get one more win out of their pitching staff and they couldn't do it. Their starting pitching was shaky all year. Their most consistent starter was John Lieber who did all that could have been expected of him in this series. He pitched a fantastic game 2 and left game 6 with a lead that the bullpen blew. Mussina also pitched well this series and can't be slighted. After that, though, the entire pitching staff as well as Torre's and Stottlemyre's handling of it was downright bad.

Kevin Brown just sucked. Any more explanation would be a waste of words. Javier Vazquez pitched really well all year except that he seemed to give up at least one home run in every start. This Boston series was no different. El Duque was awesome through July and August and even September and he actually carried that team through the summer, but he was out of the game because of shoulder troubles and then the shoulder got tired. It's not even worth mentioning Esteban Loaiza. We all knew that their starters were no good which is why I'm surprised they didn't try and shore up their bullpen.

All year the Yankees would play 6 inning games and then turn it over to QuanGorMo, as the ridiculously corny Yankee announcers referred to Quantrill, Gordon, and Rivera. These three guys led the league in relief pitching appearances and everyone wondered through the summer if they were being used to much. It turned out that they were being used too much. Quantrill has sucked since mid-September. Gordon was obviously tired and overused and pitched well for the first inning of all his outings but can't be expected to turn in a solid two innings every night. The same goes for Mariano Rivera. He was solid for his first inning of work in every outing, but can't still be expected to throw two innings on consecutive days. This is especially true for both of these guys considering the amount of work they put in over the regular season. Tanyon Sturtze pitched well and should have pitched more.

For the life of me, I don't know why Felix Heredia was still even on the team, let alone in these games. He was the Yankees only left-handed pitcher and never pitched for more than one batter at a time. After that one batter he could be counted on to suck if he stayed in.

The only Yankee who played up to his potential was, not surprisingly, Derek Jeter, who had some clutch hits and always seemed to be on base only to be left on base by A-Rod, Sheff, and Matsui from game 4 on. In Game 6 he had the Yankees only big hit, a bases clearing double that scored 3 runs. Bernie Williams also played relatively well, but he's about 50 years old and can't carry the team any more. Williams also didn't do much after game 3.

As a Yankee fan, I'm absolutely going to route for the Red Sox in the world series no matter who they play. They've already overcome a seemingly insurmountable piece of baseball history by coming back from 3-0. Prior to this series win, no team in that position had ever even forced a 7th game. David Ortiz is a fucking monster and I hope he keeps up his hot hitting. Manny Ramirez is a bitch, but maybe he'll get some RBIs. Schilling is awesome and has been awesome for years. Pedro is also kindof a bitch, but not to the extent that Ramirez is, and is pretty gritty when it comes down to it. Also if the Sox win the Boston fans won't know what to do with themselves. They'll have to stop being martyrs and just be fans like everyone else.

I would be very surprised if the Yankees didn't sign Carlos Beltran after this season. I would also be very surprised if they didn't pay him upwards of $150 million. I can't really see any other teams making a push for him other than maybe the Red Sox or the Astros. Beltran has been Jeter-like in his playoff performance this year and would provide the Yankees with a superstar that actually has heart, which can't be said to be true at this point for A-Rod.

Gary Sheffield carried this team all year and was the AL MVP in my opinion. He played the entire season with a shoulder that was in constant pain and needed surgery, but he still put up huge numbers. He had a stretch of four bad games at the end there, but I'm not ready to go around questioning his heart or his mettle.

The Yankees have a severe lack of role players and character guys at this point. Miguel Cairo, who played well, mind you, is about all they have in the way of role players. I guess Williams and Lofton are both role players at this point, but neither really has that mindset. Incidentally, Jorge Posada might as well have been invisible during this series. Also the Yankees need to decide what to do with first base, which is just kindof a mess right now.

Literally the worst moment of my career as a sports fan was when the Yankees lost the World Series to the Arizona Diamondbacks in the 9th inning of the 7th game. I was really upset for about 6 minutes and then I got over it. With this series, I was upset for the 2 minutes after Johnny Damon hit that grand slam and I was already over it by the time the game was over.

I guess that's it. I feel better now.

DEFINITION: Nash Equilibrium - If there is a set of strategies with the property that no player can benefit by changing her strategy while the other players keep their strategies unchanged, then that set of strategies and the corresponding payoffs constitute the Nash Equilibrium.

The basic idea behind Nash Equilibrium is that you need to find the solution that best benefits everyone. If only one person gets all the benefit, then it's not benefitting anyone else and is in actuality not the best solution.

Managing a classroom is could be a master's thesis on game theory. There are so many factors to take into consideration while teaching the class. Where people are sitting, who the teacher is addressing, who's answering questions, who's doing the work, who's not paying attention, and so on ad infinitum.

Adresssing only a few students or not taking all these factors into account could lead to not serving each student. It's not done perfectly every day, but I see myself getting better at noting these things and I see improvement in my students.

The debate was fairly interesting again last night. I didn't write this post immediately after the debate so I don't think I remember all of the specific details. We can blame the Yankees for me not writing a more specific post.

On the whole everybody said what they wanted to say. Bush had some weird moments again and really went out of his way to try and make Kerry look like a super liberal and things of that nature. At one point Bush even used Kerry's "more of the same" line to characterize Kerry. That was a little weird.

The best part of the night was when Bush started to say something like, "Well, I don't know if we should go around quoting news organizations for opinions on my policies," but then he stopped right in the middle because he realized that he was doing the same thing. He then immediately quoted an independent study about one of Kerry's plans. I can just imagine Bush's thought process in that two minute span while Kerry was speaking and right as Bush started to speak. I had to let out a chuckle.

Kerry was solid again, I thought. Unlike the town hall debate, he actually had some answers for cutting the debt and specifics for economic growth. Bush seemed to avoid all those issues again.

The thing with Bush in all the debates is that he seems unwilling to run on his record. He's been president for four years now and didn't really talk about one thing he did that was good for our domestic policy short of Medicare reform. Kerry certainly had a lot of points on which Bush screwed up.

Anyway, I'm going to work.

Earlier in the life of this blog, I linked to the election projection site. It's a state by state, up to date tracking of the electoral college polls. (I like how 'state by state' and 'up to date' rhyme.)

I was looking to see if there were other similar sites out there and if they had conflicting views. I found tripias.com on a google search and the stats are slightly different. I like this tripias site because it gives the poll it got the info. from and the date of the poll for each state.

These two trackers differ by slightly at the moment. The top one has Bush ahead by 10 electoral votes and the bottom one has Kerry ahead by 10 electoral votes. Most notable between the two are Ohio and Nevada, which are red in the first poll and blue in the second.

It seems as if Kerry has more electoral votes sewn up at the moment, but the undecided states really could go either way. Barring something unforeseen, this is really going to come down to the wire.

On a side note, my current home state of New York is the state in which Kerry has the largest lead, roughly 20% at this point, just highlighting the fact that my vote really doesn't count. Thank you electoral college.

I really hate the format of the town hall debates. I think it's dumb that they just stand and read their questions. And even though they apparently wrote them their selves, they often read them incorrectly and what not. Also the candidates are forced to look kindof stupid when they finish talking and walk back to their chairs. Then they get the next question so they spin around real quick to take the question. You'd think they would remember after a question or two, but they didn't.

Kerry was good at saying people's names back to them and referring to them throughout the debate. I thought that was pretty interesting. I was hoping he'd outline his policies more, especially when Charles Gibson asked him specifically what he'd do to cut the deficit in half. It seemed like he didn't have an answer at hand because he never answered directly.

Bush seemed really confrontational at some points. He didn't trip over his words as much this time as he did last time, but I felt like he was too combative. Also he never really talked about any of this policies, just about how Kerry was lame.

I think Kerry's whole "more of the same" thing is pretty effective and when Bush just tries to stand firm on his lame policies, he just plays into Kerry's hands.

Anyway, we'll see what happens.

Vice presidential debate was tonight. It was pretty uneventful in terms of policy I thought, but I do have some observations.

First off, Gwen Eiffel was an awful moderator. She screwed up the order a couple times and gave Edwards some extra time at one point. Also some of her questions were really stupid. For example, "Why are you better, but don't mention your candidate's name?" or another "Mr. Edwards, are you qualified? Mr. Cheney what is your answer?" It really detracted from the debate when both of them at various points paused to think about what she was doing.

As for John Edwards, I'm glad that John Kerry won the nomination. Edwards style is a little too glamorous for me. I honestly prefer a more bland and monotonous approach to political rhetoric. That's why I was a big Al Gore fan and that's also why I like Kerry, though he's not dry, per se, but rather eloquent. If Edwards had won the nomination there's no doubt he'd get destroyed by Bush. His talking points weren't bad, though, and he was on point with the John Kerry plan.

I really like Dick Cheney's style. He seemed clearly underwhelmed at the prospect of a national debate and that is super badass. I also liked that he didn't feel the need to fill all of his time when it was his chance to speak. If he was done making his point, then he stopped talking, which none of the other three guys so far has done. When Eiffel asked if he wanted extra time, a couple of times he just said no. Cheney is eloquent and easy to understand at the same time, which is hard to do. I also like the fact that he clearly has no political aspirations so he doesn't pander to anyone, he just speaks his mind.

There were times when Cheney seemed to disagree with whatever it was Bush had chosen to do and he never really tried to refute that he wasn't. The gay marriage discussion, for instance. Edwards said something to the effect of, "John Kerry and I believe that a Constitutional amendment would be wrong and unnecessary and even though he hasn't said so, I suspect that Mr. Cheney feels the same." In response, Cheney only said, "I thank Mr. Edwards for his kind words about my family."

It seemed to me like Cheney didn't really do much refuting of what Edwards was saying about his and Bush's bad decisions. Instead he spent his time talking about how Kerry and Edwards would do stupid things. It might have been more effective to highlight their successes, though they have very few. He also never talked about Paul Bremer's comments and anyone paying attention saw that Edwards was essentially begging him to say something about it.

He did talk about the Medicare reform, which was a huge victory for Bush, but then he couldn't talk about much else. The No Child Left Behind is a disaster because it is poorly conceived and underfunded directly because of Bush. The only reason there is no Patient's Bill of Rights is because Bush didn't sign it. Iraq is going in the wrong direction and really had nothing to do with terrorism in the US.

Edwards, on the other hand, was too redundant. He would answer questions from two questions ago and try and refute things Cheney said and then go on to answer another question. He was a little too combative in my opinion and he had that smile on the whole time. It was a tad disconcerting.

I wouldn't say there was a clear winner or loser in this debate. I can't imagine it will have much impact on the polls. The Bush/Kerry domestic policy debate will be much more interesting. That and Gwen Eiffel won't be moderating, thank the lord.

Pat Buchanan today said that John Kerry won the debate "going away" and that since George Bush couldn't get a reaction from Jim Lehrer or the crowd by repeating his sound bites he got "miffed, peeved, and even petulant."

One of the themes that everyone was talking about was how Bush's people keep him in a bubble. He doesn't talk to the press, he doesn't go to rallies unless everyone has a ticket and is a supporter, and he very rarely has to speak contemporaneously to people. When he speaks in front of people he uses sound bites that fire up the crowd and he tried to do the same thing in the debate.

They all said that Kerry was well prepared, knowledgeable about the issues, and scored huge points by quoting George Bush Sr.'s book. To paraphrase the passage from the book: "We didn't try to overthrow Iraq and get Saddam Hussein out of power because there was no viable exit strategy. We would have been occupying a country that didn't want us there and had no prospects for stability." Everyone seemed to think that really flustered Bush.

Bush won points by pouncing on Kerry's "global test" comment. This is more of an abstract concept, though, and doesn't really characterize what Kerry was saying. Anyone who was actually listening knows that Kerry did not rule out preemptive action and said simply that he would use it more carefully than Bush.

A quote from Tony Blankley, the biggest shill for the Republican party on the show: "John Kerry won the debate on style. It remains to be seen who won on substance." I think that's as close as any Orthodox Republican, for lack of a better term, can come to saying that Kerry simply won.

The Vice-presidential debate is going to be very interesting. "Big Time" Cheney is not above throwing cheap shots at Kerry or Edwards, whereas Bush can't really get away with that.

Incidentally, the best two hours on television every week are The Chris Matthews Show, Meet The Press, and The McGlaughlin Group on NBC Sunday mornings. It's a standard that all those strictly news channels should try to live up to.

I was screwing around with My Yahoo! today and I updated and changed some of the settings that had been pretty much stagnant since 1999. I switched from the two column setting to three columns which allows me to fit more information on the page more efficiently. I thought I had a lot of information there before, but now I've got everything there.

Now my Yahoo page is crazy. There are tables all over the place and more information than I really know what to do with. I must say I appreciate all the extra information, though. I'm definitely not knocking it. My features include top news stories, top politics stories, top sports stories, science news, weird news, today's TV schedule, my fantasy sports teams, today's and yesterday's sports scores, today's weather, a calendar, top ten movies, upcoming movie releases, upcoming DVD releases, stock watcher, top selling books, the word of the day, and three comic strips (boondocks, for better or for worse, and fox trot).

I can start at that page and be occupied for hours. It's a real quality web site. My Yahoo along with imdb.com I think are the two quintessential web sites. These two sites represent exactly what the web should be in terms of relaying information. There are other things to do on the web, obviously, but relative to entertainment/general information gathering, these are the sites to start on.