Lazy Sunday, Busy Monday
I would tell you that it was the coldest day of the year, but that would not do the temperature justice. Besides, this is the Windy City, so the wind chill is far more important - and horrifyingly cold. The day started with negative temperatures at O'Hare, and while the afternoon sun did what it could to warm that so when we departed into the city after 4:00 PM, not even the heart and soul of our solar system can defeat the mighty force of the Chicago Winter.
At least it wasn't snowing.
Germans like pickles at Christmas. I learned this in Daley Plaza, where the German Christkindlmarket was setup in tents so tiny and unheated that I think the German blood was hardly flowing. So many figurines; so many pickles. No penguins, though. One tent was slightly warmed: we took our food in there, as I found that a jumbo hot dog was just two hot dogs stuck on one bun. Fascinating, these Germans, with their brown mustard and those hot dogs that are like double hot dogs.
So cooooold.
We gathered under the clock at Marshall Field's; State at Washington. That's not an activity to reenact a year from now, since Federated, in its infinite retail wisdom, is stripping the Chicago landmark of its name; God forbid the Second City not have a Macy's. That day it was still Field's, though, and even in the horrid chill, as the winds whipped around the building and made everyone on the east side of State Street question their sanity, there was a large crowd admiring the Christmas decorations, particularly the window displays, decked out with an animated holiday story. marveled at the moving puppets while their parents worked the camcorder with numb hands, watching for icicles dripping from the lens.
Inside there was WARM. WARM throughout the giant hall that greeted you upon your entrance from State. WARM in the elevator. WARM on the seventh floor where patrons dined on twenty-dollar hamburgers while the Sprinkle Fairy came around to make their hair sparkle, and warmth on the eighth floor where we gawked down at them from, claiming to admire the giant Field's Christmas tree but in reality more concerned with that man's toupee. And is that in the pink pants dead?
The WARM made you happy. We (Emily and Author) just had to dance, briefly, because the WARM compelled us to, even if the lady at makeup counter next to us (who most certainly didn't notice this time of year) would frown upon such activities. Buy some rouge already, or go back into the cold.
People apparently go ice skating in negative wind chill temperatures; another failure of our Jasmine live system, I suppose. Expectations were for small crowds on this rink along the west border of Millennium Park, just off of Lake Michigan, but the Windy City crowds were not discouraged by the chills. Emily's bum ankle kept us off this death trap, so we watched the others, including the Indian Kristy Yamaguchi, who impressed us with her twirling skills as well as the ability to not fall on her own ass, something not shared by many of her ice mates. We held purses and skate bags as friends passed by, some with cameras held shaky on skates, other with guardrails they would not let go of. All of them cold. None of them with hot chocolate, as we possessed, our second cups of the night. Not nearly enough.
Chicago at night is magical. Just west of downtown, taking in the skyline is always majestic, but at night, walking from the CTA station over the Eisenhower, it was magnificent, all of the buildings screaming with light, some of them alit in Christmas red and green. The snow here, absent in uber-plowed downtown, reflected those colors, and renewed my love for this city. As fun as it is in the warmth of summer, it may be even better in the damn cold, granted that no more than five square inches of skin is showing at any time.
First, I must profess my love for Chris Parnell, and my growing appreciation for Andy Samberg. The former has been on Saturday Night Live for a few years (even being fired and rehired,) while Andy is a new comer. Together, they form one hell of a rap duo.
Here I thought that nothing this season (of which I've seen very little) would top the Glengarry Glen Ross skit from last weekend featuring Alec Baldwin reprising his role from the David Mamet-scripted film, this time laying into Santa's elves ("Second place, a box of candy canes. Third place, you're fired!." But no, Parnell just had to go old skool.
My filmgoing has been horrid as of late
How horrid, reader asks? I cancelled Netflix. Yes, that bad. I can afford the $18/month, but if DVDs sit on the shelf several weeks unwatched, what is the point? So I will save my bling for now.
Blame work. Blame the girl. Blame the DVDs I have purchased, such as Scrubs: Season Two. Blame the Interweb and its many entrapments. Blame my Nintendo DS w/Mario Kart Crack Cocaine Edition. Whatever. But for all the movies I have ignored from Netflix, the greater crime is at your local cinema. Harry Potter 4! King Kong! Brokeback Mountain! History of Violence. Total of these seen by those who author this website: zero. Gasp.
Anyway, 'tis year's end, so it is time to revise the 50 Favorite Films list. Three new, three gone, click for the goodness and let the complaints FLY.
Less than Well Done
Ski and Gilbert the FishI have a glass bottle of Ski and you don't.
Well, I had a bottle of Ski. Now it's just a bottle; the Ski is in me belly.
Ski is that rare, natural citrus drink found mostly in the south, though it's hung around Clinton and Washington Counties in my Southern Illinois homeland. Lately, I've been able to find it elsewhere, such as Lebanon in St. Clair County, and the fiancee and I have decided that, since neither of us drink the potents, we shall forgo champagne at our celebration and instead toast with glass bottles of Ski.
She found this even rarer treat at a service station in Nashville (Illinois, not Tennessee!) last week, and I debated for several days whether I would waste its uniqueness so soon. Convinced I can find more (enough, in fact, for a wedding reception,) I downed it with my chili dinner last night.
So good.
Perhaps the only thing higher on my list of excellent carbonated beverages (it's a rare honor to make this chart) is homemade root beer, the type you find at Culver's, A&W; and every other block in the city of Joliet. Fountain Pepsi would come in third. Alas, I seek to drink less soda, so I should enjoy my Ski treats when I have the chance.
All My Spreadsheets are on HGH
Rather than spend this afternoon adding more Jasmin live pictures to my Route 66 website, as I planned to, I played Excel spreadsheet wizard again.
I love Excel. You can do magic with that program; if there's a cure for cancer to be found, it's in Excel. When I ran the NCAA Tournament Pool at work this year, I spent several hours crafting a worksheet that allowed me to simply put in the final score of a game and it would automatically calculate all the points; in future years I simply have to put in the tourney bracket and the pick of each invididual (assigning each team a unique identifier, like 1.1 for the top seed in the first regional and 3.4 for the four seeed in the third regional) and the bracket will function like a cliche similar to a well-oiled machine.
The point: the other day I was thinking about which division in Major League Baseball is superior, because I do things like this. I'm not talking about this year, but going back to 1995 when the current six division format began (since 1994 doesn't count, work stoppage and all.) Rather than ask a magic eight ball to decide, I devised this spreadsheet.
Each division has its own page with the standings for each year, beginning in 1995, along with playoff results. Points were assigned as such: one point for winning percentage x 100 (a .506 divisional percentage in a year gets you 506 points,) 25 points for a wild card berth (every division has a winner, so division titles are meaningless here,) 50 points for a league pennant, and finally 75 points for a world title. Additionally, your playoff record is taken x 10, plus the number of wins x2, so a 5-6 record in the playoffs nets you 55.45 points (5 divided by 11 is your winning percentage of .450, that times 10 is 45 points, plus 5 wins times 2 points is 10 more points. The point is to make the postseason winning percentage valuable, and wins moreso, yet not enough to eclipse the importance of the regular season.)
Your result, to no one's surprise, is that the AL East is the dominant division over the last eleven years.
There's a big gap
The gap between the AL East and the AL Central, for a few reasons. While there have been sucky teams in the East (Tampa, I'm looking at you,) nothing says suck like the Midwest Junior Circuit. Minnesota had some damn bad years, not to mention Detroit's near-record suck several years back. Oh, and then there are the Royals. Post-season success is the big difference, with the East scoring five world titles, seven pennants and eight wild cards, compared to just one series win (the Sox last year) for the Central, to go with just three pennants and (didn't realize this until today) NO wild card appearances. The NL Central has no world titles and just two pennants, but with four wild cards and a better winning percentage (.490 vs .479) they eek out fifth place over their AL counterpart.
The AL West has the same number of world titles as the NL West (one) the same number of wild cards (three) and two less pennants (just one,) but, again, beat them out on winning percentage (.519 vs .505.) In fact, the AL West has the best winning percentage overall by a whopping .013 over the NL East, partly due to 2001 and 2002 when it racked up .565 and .566 respectively. During the 2002 campaign, when Oakland won 103 games and Anaheim pulled of a wild card win with 93 victories, the latter rolled to the title and a gi-normous 804.26 points for the division that year, easily the top on the charts, beating second place NL West (669.10) quite easily.
The lowest yearly scores: 459.26 for last year's (2005) NL West and 483.79 for 2003's AL Central. The former saw San Diego go 0-3 in the playoffs, winning the division with an 82-80 record after the West carried a pathetic .459 winning percentage (not the lowest ever; the 2002 AL Central pulled a .452 thanks to Detroit and Kansas City both losing 100 games, but the Twins made the ALCS and the division got 48 playoff points.)
Nitpick: as solid as the results sound ("the numbers never lie,") this entire enterprise is rather subjective. The formulas are geared to achieve what I believe to be an equitable balance between regular season/cross division success and post-season results. Even if someone agreed to the desired balance, they may assign different point values (50 or 100 points for a world title rather than 75.) Looking at the spreadsheet, you'll notice that every year the world champion's division is first and the other team in the World Series is in second; this is because the formulas reward postseason success, the only true measure of a good team in Major League Baseball. That said, the regular season bears much weight on just how much you win by: remember the 2002 AL West, which had the best record of any division not because of a dominant world champ (the best two postseason teams of the era, the '99 Yanks and '05 Sox, fall short of the "average" Angels) but because of the regular season totals and because two teams went to the postseason.
That seems to be the key: get the wild card. Afterall, the AL Central never has, and they're dead last, an average of 110 points behind the AL East. This season, at least, I think no one in Chicago, Detroit or Cleveland minds.
Furniture for the Restrooms
Working all day on www.chaturbaterooms.com, everyday for four straight days (and then half of the next day) wears one out as well as keeps one from updating one's website. One is back, though, and has Tuesday off to attend the Illinois State Fair, home of the butter cow and Rod Blagojevich. Which of these two has the higher functioning brain I do not know, but I suspect it's the one that has to be kept at a lower temperature.
My first cousin once removed Tyler turned one this weekend, and the Rolling Stones performed at his party. Pictures on Flickr.
Spartatown is BUZZING with the American Trapshooting Association's Grand Nationals, meaning about 15,000 extra people are running around our town of 4500. You can do math. This means heavier traffic, higher prices as Wal-Mart gouges the out-of-towners (and, of course, its regular customers,) and articles in the Belleville News-Democrat describing traffic problems on state highways that do not run anywhere close to the complex. Good job, guys.
The Girl and I are most likely heading to Chicago Labor Day weekend, which means a day trip to downtown on Saturday would place us at Marshall Field's on its last Saturday of existence. On Saturday the ninth, Federated flips the switch and all the regional chains it gobbled up officially change to Macy's. This isn't a stupid ideas in some places, like here in Mound City where Famous Barr fades away after a century of service and no one really cares (you can already see the Macy's signs shining through the thin cover that still bears the old name) Even the mall stores that Field's ran could be converted, but the idea of stripping down the dark green and throwing up ugly Macy's red at the flagship State Street store will cost Macy's an amazing amount of business. This is a landmark, part of the history of Chicago, and here comes a New York institution to piss all over it. Dumb move, guys.