Stupid Logic

The world and all it's goings on would be a whole lot simpler if only logic were not involved. For example, I owe the good folks at Citi Bank a fair amount of money since they were kind enough to lend it to me so I could pay for and there by attend college. I would love for nothing more than to be free of this debt, but it being fairly sizable and me not being that wealthy it's going to take a while. Now of course, there are ways for me to make money quickly and in large sums to help pay down the debt. Say a series of robberies or maybe I could dabble in peddling controlled substances to make a lot of money quick. But then there's that part of my brain that says "Hold on, there are consequences for your actions and the ones of these actions are generally bad." Now that's a pretty simple example of logic bear in mind, but really I wanted to set a point to bring up a couple of examples where the logic, is well, flawed.

Example #1 - Former Patriots Video Assistant Matt Walsh's Attorney

OK, if you're familiar with the whole Patriots spygate thing, you know who Matt Walsh is, but if you don't here' the cliff notes version. He was a former Pats video assistant who claims to have tapes and knowledge of more of the Pats illegally taping opposing teams signals.

Alright, so the NFL wants to talk to this guy and see what he may have or may not have as the case may be. His lawyer, a fellow by the name of Michael Levy is seeking to get his client protection from being sued. OK, I guess that makes sense, looking to protect your guy so he doesn't get hung out to dry, cool people get that. But see, here's the thing, Esquire Levy wants protection for his client even if his client lies through his teeth about what he may know.

Pardon, come again? This is where things go askew. See the whole idea of immunity is to get protection from prosecution yourself in exchange for truthful testimony, that makes sense. But why in name of all that is holy should you get protection for lying? Isn't that like rewarding bad behavior. Plus, if this guy wants nothing more than the truth to come out, then why must he worry about consequences if he lies, which he apparently does not want to do. As his lawyer says, "Under our proposal, Mr. Walsh will only be protected if he is in good faith truthful and he will be."

Alright, so where's the issue here, he wants to be truthful, you say he will be truthful and the NFL has said if he is truthful then no harm shall come of him, so what's the problem? It appears that Walsh wants not only to have his cake and eat it too, but he wants some ice cream on the side and maybe a glass of milk to wash it all down. Basically he's looking for carte blanche to tell the truth and whatever the hell else he wants and not get in trouble for it.

How does that make any sense? It defies any and all logic to get protection against prosecution for being truthful and maybe lying. All that does is make your man look like he's dirty. If he's been assured that nothing bad will come to him if he tells the truth, then why does he need further protection? Now, this man is a lawyer, which makes me pretty confident he went to law school and passed the bar exam, which would again lead me to believe that he's a fairly intelligent fellow, but he sure doesn't seem to be showing it here.

Example #2 - Memphis Coach John Calipari

A wise man once told me and he was told from a wise man himself, that winning and losing a basketball game more often than not boils down to making lay-ups and foul shots. This isn't world bending philosophy and it won't be knocking Socrates or Locke or hell even John Maynard Keynes, but more often than not it is true.

There was a great college basketball game on the other night between then undefeated and number one ranked Memphis and second ranked Tennessee. Memphis is a great basketball team. They are athletic, physical, can score in transition and in even the half court some. But they are Achilles like in the regard that they have a weakness, that may seem minor, but could at some point cause them to crumble.

That weakness is foul shooting. Memphis as a team is currently shooting 58.5% from the charity stripe as a team. In case you're not familiar with basketball, that's god awful and at some point it will come to bight you in the ass or so many people have thought. Memphis head coach John Calipari would not be one of those people.

During the week he proclaimed that he wasn't worried about his team's foul shooting. That if he listed 25 things he looked for in a player that free throw shooting would be 26th. He also said that his team made the "when they count" (ie - down the stretch of games) and that they shot over 80% in the last four minutes of ballgames.

Let's tackle the last thing first and the first thing last. OK, so you make 80% in the last four minutes of games, great. But that in all honesty is a bloated and useless stat. If you say could tell me how you shot in last four minutes of a game with a margin of victory of less than ten points and then maybe it's meaningful. But the ones you made in the last four minutes in all those blowout wins you had? Well that kind of makes that stat useless.

OK, now on to the first part, the whole "We make them when they count." Apparently I missed some sort of memo on this one. You see I was under the impression that free throw, regardless of when you took them. Of course if your team is down by one and you go to the line for a pair and lets say you miss both, those are going to stick out like a sore thumb. But if someone else hadn't bricked a pair back in the second quarter, you're not down by one when you head the stripe, instead you're up by a point. So please save the, we make them when they matter deal. They always matter and they always count. Every free throw is big whether it's a minuted into to the game or there's a minute left. The next time you see a close basketball game, check out the stats at the end and look at the free throws made and more often than not, had a team been just that much better at the line, they could have pulled it out.

Another thing, drop the whole bravado thing about not being concerned with how poorly you shoot free throws. It's OK to say you have a weakness that you need to work on, nothing wrong with that. If you're truly not worried about it, then I guess it's no bravado then, maybe just hubris and well more often than not that will trip you up.

So yeah, the other night it was Tennessee that came out on top of Memphis 66-62. It was a great game, Memphis led for much of it, it was back and fourth. Tennessee to the lead for good at 62-61 inside half a minute to go. Then after a Memphis possession the resulted in a turnover, J.P. Prince (who was shooting around 47% from the line on the season) canned a pair of free throws for Tennessee to make it a three point game. No big deal, still a chance for Memphis to get off a three point shot. That is of course unless your team is terrible at shooting free throws so you're opponent would rather foul you and let you have your shot at the line to score with the clock not moving than let you get off a three. Surprise, what did Tennessee do, but foul to prevent the three point shot. Memphis' Derrick Rose made the first and then intentionally missed the second, but the rebound came to Tennessee and Chris Lofton knocked down both to put the lead to four with just over two seconds to play, ball game over.

So the Tigers fell by four points, close game. How'd they do from the line you wonder? The finished 8-of-17 (47.1%) on free throws for the game and the whole making them when they matter? Well, they went 1-of-6 down the stretch of the game. Good stuff. Perhaps my favorite part of all of this would be this tid bit. Memphis had their 8-of-17 from the line and Tennessee didn't exactly light the world on fire with the freebies, but they hit 12 of the 18 that they took.

Look at those numbers of made free throws again and look at the final score. Now I know there were other factors, like the fact Tennessee owned the rebounding edge and Memphis got cold shooting the three, but look at the numbers again. Tennessee made four more free throws in the game and the final margin of victory was four.....hmmmmmm.....could the two possibly be related? Just maybe? Methinks so, but then again, that's just what methinks and I have to wonder if maybe Coach Cal maybe is thinking a bit of the same thing after that game.

And that will wrap up this round of me sounding like a bitter old man. Hope you enjoyed, maybe some lighter fare next time around, but until then...

And You Are?

  Well It's been quite a long while since I wrote anything in this space...not that I was writing all that much beforehand or that it was anything of great intelligence or relevance, but hey I've got nothing else to do right now, so why not rail in something I feel like railing on?

  A while back I think wrote something about facebook and how there are things I like about it and things, that well, I just don't. Well it's time for one of those things I don't deals.

  OK, so here we go backward before we go forward. Back in the early to mid 90s when Saturday Night Live was funny there was this sketch with David Spade that I loved. He played a snarky receptionist for Dick Clark's office and all these famous or infamous people would come to the desk asking to see his boss and he would often reply "And you are?" followed with a "Do you have an appointment?" no matter how famous the person was. Perhaps the greatest moment of it was when Phil Hartman appeared from a cloud of smoke as Jesus and he gets the whole "And you are?" routine. It was quite funny, still as in fact.

  Well I told you that to tell you this. I go to check the e-mail the other do like I do and like how I would imagine you do too. I see there is a message in the inbox from that social monster known as facebook. It's a friend request, which usually I find kind of exciting. In the past couple of moths I've actually been able to connect with some people I hadn't heard from in a damn long while and it was quite fun to hear from them and find out what was going on with them.

  As things would have it though, this would not be one of those fun requests. This was one of those headscratcher requests. Upon opening the e-mail to see who sent the request all I could think of when I saw the name was "And you are?". I just stared at the monitor, confused and a little bewildered. I had just gotten home from work and usually that leaves me kind of burned out, so I decided I would get up, grab a drink of water go downstairs get a cookie and return to the computer to see what if was on the monitor would magically make sense to me. So with my whistle whetted and half a chocolate chip cookie in my left hand I planted myself back down in front of the computator and fixed my eyes on the monitor.

  Well everything was as it was left, the name requesting to be a friend was still the same and for the life of me I still had no idea who the hell they were. I figured at the very least they were some acquaintance from college. So I decided to go facebook log in and do the only responsible thing there was to do. Facebook stalk them until I could figure out who they hell they were. 

  Now for those of you that don't know what Facebook stalking is, it may sound sketchy, but don't worry, it is. Basically you go on Facebook, try and find someone and then try to view their profile or pictures or other pictures with them in them all to piece together an idea of who in the hell this person just may be. Well since this person had requested me as a friend, that meant I had access to view their profile so I figured this would be an easy an boring venture. I would log in, check their profile and then I would say to myself "Oh, that's who this is. Wow, I really am getting stupider by the day."

  I confidently plugged in my username and password as my head bobbed to Scenario by A Tribe Called Quest. I logged in with no problem and I went to my home page to check out the friend request. Found it, clicked it and right around when Q-Tip told me he never uses his left cuz his right's his good ear the requester's page loaded and there was some good and some not so good. 

  First, the good. As was suspected this was someone who knew me from college (they were a couple of years behind me). Second, the bad. I still had no clue who this person was. I examined her profile picture and she had a familiar look to her, but I still didn't really know. Well lucky for me there were over 400 pictures of this person so I figured I would peruse through them and see if I could figure out who the hell this person was.

  The perusing began and nothing from the first page and not really anything from the second and so on and so on. I saw other people in the pictures with this person that I recognized, but still nothing on them really. Sometimes I'm not that great with names but generally I don't forget faces. When I used to work at the campus convenience store in college I used to give different customers I saw all the time names like "Cookie and Water girl" because she always bought a cookie and a water. Or 25 cent gum guy because this guy only ever came in for a quarter pack of Winterfresh. There was no real reason for me to do this, but that way if I ever saw these people outside the store I could identify them to myself quickly so I didn't go through that whole "That person looks familiar to me but I can't figure out from where." thing. 

  So the whole point of that thing was to emphasize the remembering faces of folks. Now this person was in the communication school at college, as I was as well; and in looking at some of their pictures I concluded we had to have been involved in some of the same shows in our TV dealings, but still I had no clue about this person. I mean did we ever have a conversation, did we ever say hello? Did we ever actually say anything to one another? Did I do something that a profound impact on you in some way? Did I accidently run over your dog? See there's a reason I'm asking all this questions, it's because I want to know one thing. Why are you requesting to be my "friend" on Facebook?

  See this where these social networking things annoy the hell out of me. You want to be listed as a friend of mine, someone who knows me and I know you, well in theory. But here's the thing. We never hung out, didn't really know each other and to the best of my recollection we never spoke at great length, or for that matter I don't think we really spoke at all. So why the need to have me as a friend? I don't get it. Now am I incredibly close to everyone on my Facebook friend list? No, but are they all people that I have spoken to an know a little something about in my lifetime? Yes. Accumulating people as your friends for the sake of having them as your friend just seems like a waste to me, something there is no point to....kind of like me spending the last 40 or so minutes writing about it, but hey, what else am I going to do with my free time?

  So there's some junk thrown up here for the first time in a long time, but for now until next time...