Mmmm... Roethlis-burgers

So NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has officially suspended Ben "No Means Yes" Roethlisberger for six games, which can be reduced to four if he can show that he'll keep Big Ben safely in the pocket. Now, the dangerous part about this suspension is that "Silence is Consent" Roethlisberger was never actually charged with a crime. The good news is Goodell doesn't really care about "due process" because he can suspend you for character issues. And this is a character issue. Besides the whole consent debacle (I am not opening that can of worms, although the Georgia case was more likely to be assault than the Vegas case), Roethlisberger is committing an even graver crime. He is treading on the Macking Grounds for College Playas. Big Ben is 28 years old, a multi-millionaire, and a Super Bowl winning quarterback. So why is he picking up 20 year olds at clubs? That's the job of the college-aged playa! It disrupts the natural order and is proven, with actual mathematics, to be down right creepy.

That's right, it can be mathematically derived that Big Ben's actions are creepy. I'm now going to combine two of my favorite hobbies: quantifying intangible feelings and stealing things from Wikipedia. Wikipedia teaches us that the standard, non-creepy age disparity in pimpin' is A(H)>(A(P)/2)+7, where A(H) is the Age of the Honey and A(P) is the Age of the Playa. A quick plugging shows us the Roethlisberger numbers:

(28/2) + 7 = 14 + 7 = 21

Clearly, Roethlisberger is breaking the creepiness threshold by hitting on 20 year old honeys. He's also violating the right of Milledgeville playas to mack on fine honeys. I stand in solidarity with my Georgian pimpin' brethren! No NFL Quarterbacks in College Bars (unless they have graduated in the past two years, at which point they are granted tolerance).

WARNING: I start legitimately talking about sports now. If you are a sassy and/or fine honey, please take caution.

Full disclosure, I am a Steelers fan. That said, I still agree with Goodell on this one. I probably wouldn't have included the wishy-washy conditional part of the suspension, but I guess he has to include some way of saying Big Ben has been rehabilitated. The interesting part is that this suspension comes down the day before the draft, which means for the next 24 hours (edit: now it's 5 hours), every NFL fan worth his salt is free to speculate on if the Steelers will trade Roethlisberger. If I had a top ten pick, I would not trade for Big Ben. He gets sacked more often than Rome in the 5th century AD (fact: ladies love classical history jokes) and teams that are bad enough to have a top ten pick are characterized by having a porous line. The only team I could see making a move for Big Ben is Oakland. Why?

1. They have the #8 pick, which means that they would only give up a reasonably awesome prospect.
2. JaMarcus Russell is a black hole of failure, and the entire organization is unable to escape the pull of his fail.
3. Al Davis is genuinely insane, and will want to challenge Roethlisberger to a helmet-less motorcycle race.
4. Most of Roethlisberger's uniform won't need to be changed. Just replace the gold with silver, the Steelers with Raiders, and the hope for a Hall of Fame career with soul-crushing despair.

I could go on, however, I'm technically finishing this post in Public Finance. What? I can have senioritis too!

It's April?!

Oh man, how can it already be the second week of April? I was going to update this last week, but I was attacked by a Cold from Hell. It was never bad enough that I wanted to go to the doctor, but it never went away (as I write this now, I'm still dealing with a bit of a cough). Tragically, my to-do list this week is about 20 items long and none of them include "Update Blog", "Be Awesome", or "Play lots video games" (N.B. if you are a sassy/fine honey, I meant to write "write poetry while doing 100 situps", I just said the thing about the video games so I could relate to the reader). In retrospect, it might have been a bit much to try juggling 18 hours, graduation, a job hunt, and running an honors society.

However, there is some good news. I am all clear to graduate on May 8th starting at 1 pm. I've also got a really interesting presentation in Econometrics about the determinants of Quarterback pay coming up on Thursday. The downside is that econometrics requires actual math to support my arguments, I actually have to spend time analyzing my data. I will try to update the blog again after that craziness has passed (because once that test is done then I have nothing to do in that class until May 6th except "listen" to other presentations).

However, I suppose it's become the norm for me to include some element of humor to my post. So I will end with easily the trippiest level in any Rock Band game ever. Just watch the background rather than the crazy notes.



I think this is cutting edge acid trip simulation technology. It almost makes the lyrics sensible. And with that, I bid you a fond goo goo g'joob.

P.S. Question: Am I the eggman, the walrus, or both?

My Week: In Movie Clip Style

Yes, I'm actually finding time to blog twice this week. In this scene, the role of Hunter Barry is played by Man in Cowboy Hat, Graduation is played by the Truck, Graduation Paperwork is played by the gun-toting drug dealers, and Economics Homework will be played by the dog.

Okay, now that that's explained, allow me to elaborate. I have just finished up roughly a month's worth of getting papers filled out, signed, stamped, and signed again in order to graduate in May (related note: OHMYGODHOWCANIBEGRADUATING?!). In the process of filling out one of the forms, I discover that I am missing a class needed for my Econ degree. I was surprised because I double-checked before this semester started and I knew I had all the advanced courses I need, from Econometrics to the Development of Third World Economies to Another Intimidating Sounding yet Impressive Course Title. It turns out the course I needed was "Intro to Math in Social Sciences". Interestingly enough, despite being an intro course, it's not needed as a prerequisite for any of the courses offered in Economics. Although I suspect that may be more a symptom of the department rather than the class. After all, despite Calculus being required for the degree, it was not a prerequisite for Microeconomic Theory (aka Applied Calculus). And that's how I gained an extensive knowledge of derivatives before opening a calc book. But I digress.

Now, I am a reasonable man, but it appears that the Records Department would not accept that having passed every Upper Division Economics course I needed for a degree was a sufficient "intro". Luckily, after much loophole searching, I discovered I didn't need a math course I was in this semester. So I fill out the course substitution work and sell my advisor on the idea. I take it to the Econ Office, who tells me I need the approval of the Math Department. The Math Department Chair says he can't actually sign it, but he can give his endorsement for the substitution. However, he'll only endorse it if another math professor agrees with it. So we find a math teacher who promptly agrees with me. I go back to the Econ Building and I'm told to get the information systems chair to sign it. However, he's also hesitant and demands a talk with me before signing it, and then goes over to the chair of the Econ Department to sign it. The Econ Chair asks for an explanation and by now, the fourth telling, I had perfected the story. The IS Chair sends me out of the room to talk with the Econ Chair and I ultimately find out it was the Econ chair's call all along and he approved it. The good news is that counted as my exercise for the day!

Mark Twain say what?

So I'm reading Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain these days. Don't mistake that for me actually being able to enjoy reading a book, as MTSU is determined the suck every last moment of my fleeting time here with work (apparently there are legitimate reasons why no one takes 18 hours their last semester. I thought it was just superstition!). I came across an interesting passage in which Mr. Twain discusses how having a freakishly good memory like one that, for instance, was able to recite large portions of Monty Python from memory (bonus story: one day in Medieval History, Dr. Haas challenged me to recite the Spanish Inquisition sketch from memory to prove how few things people have memorized. He immediately regretted that challenge.). But I digress. Twain's exact words were

Such a memory as that is a great misfortune. To it, all occurrences are of the same size. Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting circumstance from an uninteresting one. As a talker, he is bound to clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himself an insufferable bore.

Oh no, he didn't! Mark Twain has called out my literary go-to technique "But I digress" from 130 years in the past. Well let me tell you something, Mark Twain, if that is your real name, WHICH IT ISN'T, all my details are interesting. Why? Because I sort memories into Awesome and Extra Awesome, based off of their relevance to most conversation. Awesome categories such as the Best Ninja Turtles, the date of the Battle of Fredericksburg, and the Greatest School Computer Game are stored in long term storage, only to be brought up in very specific circumstances (by the way, the answers to those questions are Donatello, December 13th 1862, and DinoPark Tycoon respectively. editor's note: I just realized those answers were all alliterative. My subconscious must be really well organized! Probably just grabbed a bunch of random answers from the "D" file and updated his Facebook with the time he saved.). Extra Awesome details see the light of day a lot more often, such as How Kansas Could Lose in the Second Round, Who I Don't want to Escape the Zombie Horde with, and Who is Most Likely a Hobbit in Disguise (the answer to all three of those questions is Bean. He had Kansas winning it all, which doomed him. I've seen him play Left 4 Dead so he's more likely to run away from the zombies and I can't outrun him; so the zombies would either overwhelm me or catch me first. And finally, he's incredibly reluctant to adventure, can't grow a beard, is about 4 feet tall and lives in a hole in the ground [I may have made that part up].).

But you're not getting off that easily, Mr. Greatest American Humorist of His Age! I've read your book (Life on the Mississippi) and guess what? Most of chapter 2 is just Huck Finn. I don't mean thematically similar, I mean you literally 19th century copied and pasted a chapter from Huck Finn into your book. What's the matter? Was 59 chapters not enough for your book? (bonus fact: Life on the Mississippi was actually published before Huck Finn came out. In a way, it was the world's first viral marketing campaign, which is pretty cool in retrospect. But Twain should have known that the future would become the past and one day mentioning his one book in his other book would cause countless people to have flashbacks to 11th grade English. The horror... the horror...). But I digress. My point is that I may ramble at times, at least I didn't have to steal my name from my workplace!

Did you think just because William Faulkner called you "the father of American literature" that means you can trash-talk whatever blogs you want? Because that right is actually promised by the First Amendment and you don't have to be putting up with Faulkner's crap to do that. Also, there will be retaliation from the blog itself.

P.S. Graduation craziness has died down a bit so I will chat about my adventures in PCB next!

No excuses, only blogging

Okay, I'm busting out of Public Finance to update my blog, which has been on my to-do list for weeks, but usually gets replaced by more rudimentary things like "Not Driving Off a Bridge". But the good news is I got a great bargain for what little sanity I had and got a ton of stuff done. The easiest to share with you is my resume tape. The resume tape is how I plead for the attention of a hiring manager at a news station. The key is the first 90 seconds, where you show off your best stand-ups in a desperate effort to get the manager to not ignore your pleas for employment.

The insiders I've shown have loved it, but what about you, average blogging viewer?!

Super Bowl- The Only Thing I'll Reliably Talk About

How is it Super Sunday already?! This is what I get for having exciting adventures with crazy results. So I've got about an hour before kickoff. Let's begin the fastest analysis of the Super Bowl on the whole internet.

Quarterbacks
This is a battle of Goliath vs a different kind of Goliath. Peyton Manning, self-described as a 6' 4 quarterback with a laser rocket arm and an endorsement contract greater than the GDP of several Third World countries, versus Drew Brees, who one man described as "a robot sent from the future, designed to tear apart NFL defenses". So we have the Chosen One, as determined by the American Consumer, versus the pinnacle of the Robot's future technology. We've already seen this fight before, when Neo fought Agent Smith at the end of the Matrix. I'll go ahead and say it, this is the first of many battles between Peyton Manning and Drew Brees. The first match-up will be a highly anticipated stalemate that ends with Peyton throwing Brees in front of a subway. Then in the next match-up, Drew Brees will kill Peyton, only to have Peyton rise from the dead and explode Drew Brees by jumping into him. Then the story gets very disappointing and I hate it forever. But I digress:
Advantage: Colts

Running Backs
The Colts have no rushing attack and embrace it. The Saints have a potentially explosive running attack but absolutely no idea how to use it. Still, they have a nonzero chance of guessing how to use it.

Advantage: Saints

Defense
The Colts best defensive player is Dwight "K. Schrute" Freeney. The Saints best defensive player is Darren Sharper. Dwight Schrute is my favorite office character, but he also has a bum ankle. However, Darren Sharper may be Sharper than the average NFL player, but is he really the Sharpest? This type of superlative adjective guessing favors the Colts.
Advantage: Colts

Prediction: Colts: Infinity +3 Saints: Infinity