Author: Muttrox

Well over $100 million. Whoopie doo for me!

Too much awesome in this 2011 compilation

Warren Buffett explains gold investing. As always, incredibly clear and insightful.

I need a girl

The end of MacGyver

How greeting cards get written (interview)

How casinos distract you

Bieber

Mary and Joseph

70s rock stars with their parents

Tom Brady fail made me giggle

Kissing Hanks Ass. Still a classic.

Michael Jordan career highlights

This girl is bringing the crazy

Swede survives for two months in his snowed-in car

This is how statistics should be taught

License plate on a hearse

Slinky on a treadmill

A neat cover of Everlong, one of my favorite songs evah.

Reaction shot to Luke, I am your Father

Teaching grammar

This is a very good article on how analytics are used in the NBA. Fans of Moneyball will especially enjoy it.

An economist named David Berri, citing a stat he created called Wins Produced, which boils down a player’s positive and negative contributions into one number, went so far as to argue that KG was the NBA’s best player in every season from 2002-03 to 2005-06.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the ESPN analytics issue.

I’m a simple man. I like to use soap. Not hand lotion or body lotion or whatever trendy people call the stuff, I just want ordinary soap. So I was confused by Caesar’s Palace. They had both a skincare bar and a cleansing bar.

Which one was the soap? Come to think of it, what’s the difference between a skincare bar and a cleansing bar? I turned them over to see if there were any clues.

They’re the same thing! The list of ingredients is the exact same thing for both! How wonderful! Caesar’s Palace, handed packaging the exact same thing with two different product names. Hey, Caesar. How about you quit messing around and just put out a bar of soap? And maybe some shaving cream while you’re at it.

I get a lot of dumb solicitations at work. This is one of the best.

Really? A whole company, just to sell an automated signature? Give me a break.

The waffle at Caeser’s Palace. Complete with a portrait of Julius Caesar in the middle.

Amazing. Amazing because I had said to myself , “For $19, this waffle had better have a #$@*@! picture of Caesar on it!”

Putting away the Pats gear

My only Superbowl commentary: Madonna on the shoulders of a bald man

Cartman

We hate math!

The Beatles: ready to make history

Monopoly is an old game

The page turner. I never get tired of these Rube Goldberg devices.

Work it: The review. The show was cancelled shortly after.

Death Star Assault. I giggled the whole time.

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.

Geeks vs. Non-Geeks. Very true.

Incredible bike “accident” in Brazil. Commentary.

5 top deathbed regrets. Powerful.

Wait until you see it

Makers of Xbox threaten mass suicide over working conditions.

Weightless cats!

A great review of Never say Never

At AI research headquarters…

Dog sledding

The power of coincidence

Can’t wait for this movie.

If you’ve ever sold anything on Craigslist you can sympathize.

Old Man

O no, I really just did that

Telling your son the worst swear word

Fantastic prank on someone who gave out their phone number

How to live longer

The Muppets defend themselves from Fox News

Letter to solider

Jack is funny

How to report the news

I love being in Las Vegas! Lots of action riding tonight. Here are the bets I have riding on today’s game.

• Pats to win (straight up moneyline)
• Pats to have five or less penalties
• The under (54 points)
• Eli will pass for less than 303 yards
• More second half points than first half points. I like this one.
• The last score will not be a touchdown

The best bets are the crazy ones!

• Ben Jarvis Green Ellis will have more rushing yards than LeBron James has points+rebounds+steals. I think I took the wrong side of this one.
• Victor Cruz and Aaron Hernandez will have more total passing yards than points scored in the Duke Miami game. Love it!

Mrs. Muttrox is also betting the Pats win by 8 or more and that the Pats score first. I have several squares in a $10 game, and we are introducing the kids to it tonight with a ten-cent version. This is wasted money for me, as I am a statistical freak in squares, having never one a dime despite buying 10-15% of squares in ~20 different games.

What’s that? What is Muttrox’s prediction. I refuse to make one!

Ron Paul. Even when you disagree with him, it’s marvelous to hear coherent honest opinions.

I always win at the casino. Despite my lackluster success the last couple years in home games, I never lose for real money in a real setting. Today was a personal best. Playing an hour and half at 1-3 no limit, I ended up $525. Oh yeah, baby!

Why do I win in the ‘real’ world? I think it’s because I play conservative. I just don’t play bad hands. I’ll stare into space for as long as it takes to get starting hands. I bluff rarely, and only I’ve already established a table image as a very tight player.

Tonight I played well, and I got lucky. The second hand I had pocket kings, which led to $80 profit. Twenty minutes later my suited A-9 caught the nut flush on the river.

It was time to leave. The Celtics* game had just ended. I would play one or more two hands and call it a night. One fellow who liked to straddle did it again. I had taken him three out of four big hands already. I figured I’d try a bluff, and raised it up even with a lousy 10-2 of hearts. He called. Dang! Fortunately the flop was three hearts. He had flopped a set, and we were soon all in against each other. That one hand made me over $300.

Ah. Feels good!

* I couldn’t bet on the Celtics. It turns out that Caesar’s Palace actually owns a piece of the Celtics, so can’t take action. Just as well, they won but didn’t cover the spread.

Mitt Romney: Ruled as a centrist when he was governor of Massachusetts. Brings a great deal of good private sector experience. Not as slavish to the interests of the rich as the others. He has been socially right-wing for a long time, the question is always, is he truthful? There is a suspicion that if elected, he would be much more like Obama than his rhetoric suggests. All in all, a reasonably moderate candidate.

Ron Paul: Great strengths, great weaknesses. You have to admire his consistent world view. His approach to foreign policy and civil rights is so self-evidently correct that other candidates don’t know to respond to it. An enemy of the system, constantly being undercut by the mainstream media. He also has great weaknesses. He would seek to undo large swaths of the social nets built up since FDR, his knowledge of economics is laughable, and his sense of ideological purity is not always a good thing. A perfect kind of primary candidate to push the others towards his views, but you probably don’t want him as president.

Gingrich, Santorum, Perry, Cain, Bachmann: Nuts. Stark raving mad, barely distinguishable from each other. The idea that any of these lunatics might get near the Oval Office should be terrifying to any informed citizen. And even among this pack of disasters, you have to single out Gingrich. Gingrich began and is the embodiment of everything we hate about politics – the rise of partisanship over policy, the win at any costs mentality over get something done. He’s a terrible terrible man, personally and professionally.