They Made A Documentary Or Something

For Cubs fans, winning the world series would be the greatest thing since sliced bread   

Chicago is quite well known for their bread.  Though usually, it's at the bottom of a deep-dish pizza, but that's hardly worth mentioning.  

So I was made aware of something fascinating yesterday.  Baseball is still happening!  Here we are in this semi-mythical time where all of the major sports are apparently playing.  Hockey season started a couple weeks ago, the Football season is in full swing, Basketball starts up this week (I was made aware of that even more recently than the baseball thing), and Baseball begins its World Series this week.  I was surprised that baseball was still happening...I would have thought they would have sorted that out by now, but apparently they need a couple more weeks.  

Anyway, this year's World Series features the Cleveland Indians versus the Chicago Cubs.  That's not a joke.  

The Cleveland Indians (and why I've typed "Clevelant" both times so far, I will never know...thank you, Spellcheck) last won the World Series in 1948, which I found at least a little confusing, since I thought they had won in the 1989 season.  As it turns out, they merely won a divisional playoff tiebreaker game, and lost the American League Championship Series to Chicago.  Box scores and particularly statistics for star pitcher Ricky Vaughn are difficult to locate.  The Indians made it to the World Series the following year, again on the strength of Vaughn's right arm, but strangely again, no statistics for the following series are available.  Regardless, it is a fantastically long championship drought.   

But it pales in comparison to the Championship Drought of the Chicago Cubs.  

Highly Reliable Sources have informed me that the Chicago Cubs' current streak of championship-less seasons is the longest in all of North America's major professional sports.  The last time the Cubs lifted Lord Stanley's Cup, The Vince Lombardi Trophy, The Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy, The Commissioner's Trophy (Seriously...that's the name...awful) was in 1908, when precisely none of the current roster's grandparents were alive.  I mean...I'm guessing...but I'll bet a dollar that I'm right.  

Another thing that didn't exist in 1908...sliced bread.  

As we're well aware, sliced bread was invented in 1928, and it was the greatest thing since bread was wrapped.  So, quite literally, if the Chicago Cubs were to win the World Series this year it would be the greatest thing for Cubs fans since sliced bread. 

Look It Up. Did This Last Year, Too.

Pick Jeremy’s 12-5 Upset!  South Dakota State, Yale, Chattanooga, or Little Rock?  Vote Now!  

It's March Madness time again!  The time of the year that people either pretend to know everything about college basketball, or boast about the completely arbitrary way they selected their brackets.  Fortunately for all of you, Jeremy is a whimsical hybrid of these techniques.  He brings remarkably sparse knowledge of basketball with a sliver of name recognition, and mixes it all with a little crowd-sourcing to create a one of a kind bracket that...well...never wins anything.  

Right you are!  My knowledge of college basketball is roughly zero.  I don't follow the sport, nor any of the teams.  I don't know who's good, who's favored, who uses a zone defense, or if any team has a 7 foot tall guy named Sergio again.  I know that to win a college basketball game, you have to have good ball movement, run the floor, make your free throws, and score the basketball.  I learned these things from sports commentary, but not necessarily what they mean.  

As a fun aside, here's the bit about scoring the basketball:

A couple tournaments ago, I was watching a sports commentary program on TV for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture.  There was one commentator who was providing his opinions on every game for a region of a bracket, from the play-in game all the way to the Final Four.  He provided some name drops and vague references to coaching styles and skill levels, which was all well and good.  But, his primary input to determining game output was the greatest piece of sports commentary I've ever heard.  Absolutely every game he described was going to be won by the team he picked because, and I'm not making this up, "they really know how to score the basketball."  Every.  Last.  Game.  

I'm really hoping there is some deeper meaning to this, because I like to think that everybody on the planet who has ever heard of basketball knows how to score the basketball.  You put the ball through the hoop.  The team that puts the ball through the hoop more times than the other team generally wins.  There are nuances there, actually, what with free throws counting for one point, and the three-point shot being in play.  I'd actually like to see a breakdown of game scores versus the number of times the ball actually passes through the hoop.  It's my own little version of Money Ball.  Maybe I can make millions by figuring out that the team which scores the most points in basketball wins the most games.

Anyway...I know precious little about the NCAA tournament.  The extent of my knowledge deals with the brackets and seedings rather than the sport or the teams themselves.  I know that a #16 seed has never beaten a #1 in the first round in the entire history of the tournament.  Number 2 seeds get upset very rarely, the 8-9 is a toss-up, and the winning percentage follows an almost linear progression between the two, depending on seed.  

Except for the #5 seed.  

For whatever reason (and it's entirely mental at this point), the #5 seed is cursed.  The #12 seed upsets the #5 seed at a statistically anomalous rate.  As such, it's quite common for people to pick 12 seeds to upset 5s in their brackets.  I always do.  And I always let the People decide which.  

So, for the remainder of the day, my Facebook, Sametime Status, Blag, and whatever other social media I have available will be devoted to allowing people to vote on which 12 seeded team I will advance to the second round in my bracket.  Everything depends on you, so vote now! 

Something About Software and Microscopically Small Things...

Do you think Bill Gates ever says, “Another day, another 33 million dollars”?

He might, but probably not in a very ho-hum sort of way.  

People still use the expression "Another day, another dollar."  Why they do this is a little fuzzy.  

See, the phrase originated in or around 1897 by for-hire sailors who were paid by the day.  Of course, the phrase at the time was "More days, more dollars," and it evolved since then.  Best guess is that somewhere in the 1950s, the final "Another day, another dollar" phrase was more formally coined, though nobody knows who did it.  So there you go. 

Adjusting for inflation is tricky because of this.  If you assume 1897, then it's ambiguous just how many dollars you're talking about.  But, if we juxtapose the single-dollar version into the phrase, then by 2015 standards, you're looking at "More days, 28.57 more dollars."  If you take only the 1950s version (and we'll go with 1955 as a nice average and save the clock tower while we're at it), then a more timely phrase would be "Another day, another 8 dollars and 85 cents."  It's more accurate, but admittedly not as catchy.  

Even if we go with the older version, we're not dealing with a lot of money, though.  If you're working another day to earn $28.57, assuming an 8-hour shift, you're making just over $3.57 an hour.  This is well below minimum wage, so I certainly hope you're getting tips.  Just to stay above the official government poverty threshold for a single person, you need to get up to "Another day, another $32.24."  So, "Another day, another 1897 dollar" just doesn't cut it, sadly. 

Bill Gates doesn't have much to worry about in the poverty department.  Mr. Gates started a small software company you may have heard of a while back and grew it into a massive computing empire, and that's to his credit.  He'll make somewhere in the neighborhood of 11.5 billion dollars this year.  A fun fact about me and Bill Gates...we average 5.75 billion dollars a year in salary!  When people walk up to him and say "Hey, Bill...how's it going?" he can reply with "Another day, another 33 million dollars."