Weekly Features at Peak Efficiency

As I watched football weekend (and only the most evil of the Moral High Ground Picks win), I became annoyed with broadcaster hyperbole.  Thus, this week's top five list is the top five overused, inappropriate and flat out wrong cliches used in sports:

5. Going 0 to 60 - No player in any sport, or any human being in the world for that matter can run at 60 miles per hour.

4. Playing not to lose - Almost every major sport has done away with the tie.  When a team is ahead and they begin to call plays to protect the ball and run time down, that is a strategy that they are employing to win the game.  You may not agree with it, but they are still playing to win.

3. Thanking God - I can respect someone's faith and the fact that they practice it in all aspects of their life. That said, no deity, regardless of which you believe in, gives a crap about which teams wins any given game and certainly does not care about the performance of an individual player.  Unless they have money on it or are playing in a fantasy league with a really awesome first place prize.

2. Intangibles - When a broadcaster tells you that a player has intangibles, that is their way of saying that the guy always seems to be on a winning team, but they can't come up with any way to explain why because he isn't visibly very good.

1. War - The last several years have seen the war comparisons wain, but you still get the broadcasters and players talking about the battles and wars that the teams wage on the field.  Funny, because every game I have ever watched results in zero deaths and most of the players shake hands with one another when it's over.  That looks very unlike war to me.

This week's cool-ass thing you will never own is a regenerative cow.  If we could harness the power of the Weapon X program and, instead of injecting steroids into our livestock, endow them with regenerative healing powers, imagine how much red meat they could provide.  You could buy a cow, keep it in your yard and go shave off the particular cut you want that night and let another one grow back by the end of the week.  Sure, it would probably cost a lot for each cow, but you wouldn't have to keep buying meat and the costs would eventually offset, sort of like paying a little more for a hybrid car.

This week's sign you are a nerd is that you sketch out your snow forts prior to building them.  Lego bricks are another suitable method of planning, especially if you own a snow block mold.  Just a suggestion, you can take it or leave it.

This week's nemesis is vehicle maintenance.  I sometimes suspect that with all the various sensors available in all the computerized vehicles now, one of them measures how much you have available in liquid assets and causes something to break down when you can least afford it.

This week's lesson learned is to restrict video games until after homework is done.  The temptation to either rush through it quickly to get to the level they were on or to whine about completing one more level before they begin their work is too great.  This is a lesson I should have remembered from my own childhood and my parents' arguments with me, but as my kids' gaming has become more serious, it has reared its ugly head.

This weeks equation is an inequality:

E represents effort.  It is impossible for someone to give 110% of anything.  Now, it is possible that someone could increase their effort by 110%, but this would mean that they were giving less than 50% effort to begin with and were thus lazy, so it would not be much of a compliment.

This week's Star Wars quote is, "...We've got to find a safe port somewhere around here."

Thanks for reading.