• Pats to win (straight up moneyline)
• Pats to have five or less penalties
• The under (54 points)
• Eli will pass for less than 303 yards
• More second half points than first half points. I like this one.
• The last score will not be a touchdown

The best bets are the crazy ones!

• Ben Jarvis Green Ellis will have more rushing yards than LeBron James has points+rebounds+steals. I think I took the wrong side of this one.
• Victor Cruz and Aaron Hernandez will have more total passing yards than points scored in the Duke Miami game. Love it!

Mrs. Muttrox is also betting the Pats win by 8 or more and that the Pats score first. I have several squares in a $10 game, and we are introducing the kids to it tonight with a ten-cent version. This is wasted money for me, as I am a statistical freak in squares, having never one a dime despite buying 10-15% of squares in ~20 different games.

What’s that? What is Muttrox’s prediction. I refuse to make one!

Why do I win in the ‘real’ world? I think it’s because I play conservative. I just don’t play bad hands. I’ll stare into space for as long as it takes to get starting hands. I bluff rarely, and only I’ve already established a table image as a very tight player.

Tonight I played well, and I got lucky. The second hand I had pocket kings, which led to $80 profit. Twenty minutes later my suited A-9 caught the nut flush on the river.

It was time to leave. The Celtics* game had just ended. I would play one or more two hands and call it a night. One fellow who liked to straddle did it again. I had taken him three out of four big hands already. I figured I’d try a bluff, and raised it up even with a lousy 10-2 of hearts. He called. Dang! Fortunately the flop was three hearts. He had flopped a set, and we were soon all in against each other. That one hand made me over $300.

Ah. Feels good!

* I couldn’t bet on the Celtics. It turns out that Caesar’s Palace actually owns a piece of the Celtics, so can’t take action. Just as well, they won but didn’t cover the spread.

Ron Paul: Great strengths, great weaknesses. You have to admire his consistent world view. His approach to foreign policy and civil rights is so self-evidently correct that other candidates don’t know to respond to it. An enemy of the system, constantly being undercut by the mainstream media. He also has great weaknesses. He would seek to undo large swaths of the social nets built up since FDR, his knowledge of economics is laughable, and his sense of ideological purity is not always a good thing. A perfect kind of primary candidate to push the others towards his views, but you probably don’t want him as president.

Gingrich, Santorum, Perry, Cain, Bachmann: Nuts. Stark raving mad, barely distinguishable from each other. The idea that any of these lunatics might get near the Oval Office should be terrifying to any informed citizen. And even among this pack of disasters, you have to single out Gingrich. Gingrich began and is the embodiment of everything we hate about politics – the rise of partisanship over policy, the win at any costs mentality over get something done. He’s a terrible terrible man, personally and professionally.

Helpful advice from a sign

Blatant discrimination

He asked for his Dad to come home.

Babe, I’m pregnant.

Don’t even know what to say about this

A great intervention

Tim Howard scores a goal from 100 yards away.

Praystation

Beatbox flute

The many D’ohs of Homer Simpson

An incredible game of tennis

Sleeping with pets

Kanye West on Kobe

I am somewhat in the minority in believing that most meetings I am at are not like the above, they are actually fairly effective. It’s the amount of them that’s troubling. Imagine everyone’s time is 50% booked. If I want to discuss something with 3 other people, any given time slot is 94% likely to be booked. I could talk to people serially, but that is less efficient. So I set up a quick meeting. Fine. Then the four of us are all booked at 51%, and it’s now at 96% to book all four of us, making it a little harder for the next person who needs to talk to one of us. The only way for them to make sure they can talk with us is to set up time with us. And so it goes. Because informal time is rarer, the only way to collaborate (and we’re very collaborative) is through formal meetings. Which in turn reduces the informal meetings (which, by the way, are often more effective than the formal ones), which reinforces the vicious circle.

Right now, my average week is around 80% booked. I think I average six hours of meetings a day. The remaining hours I am frantically trying to either get all the things done that are outcomes of those meetings, tracking people down for followups, or staring emptily into space while my brain slowly recharges. The only time to get things done is the early morning, before others get in. It is very hard to find time to step back and think hard about the big strategic issues I am being paid to deal with.

It’s similar of traffic patterns. Highways can handle a certain amount of traffic gracefully. After that, there is a steep decline. Adding 5% more vehicles results in a 20% decrease in speed. Once this tipping point has been hit it is very difficult to reverse it. This is why many cities put in controlled timing lights at the entrance ramps. You might have to wait another minute or two to get on, but because the speed of the highway is kept high, you save more time than you lose. I don’t see an analogy to timing lights in my workplace. Meetings are clearly out of hand. Everyone knows it. But once it has hit that point, it is very difficult to reverse.

• Iowa Caucus voting underway (lots of talk, no one knows anything of course)
• Rookie cop catches the person setting fires (a long story of how the tip came in involving families and felons, and none of us could understand it, or why we should care.)
• Record cold, Florida oranges are in trouble
• Dead body found on one Queen Elizabeth’s many houses. (Clearly nothing to do with the royal family, but reported as if they are serial murders.)
• Dow Jones started the year up 200 points. (This is explained by a reference to “The January Effect”, with no other explanation.)
• New hybrid shark discovered (predictably dubbed “SuperShark”)
• Veterans helping to rebuild bad Baltimore neightborhoods (nothing bad to say, it’s great)

We were surprised by how much the boys enjoyed it. The 8-year old had lots of questions about politics. Such as, “Dad, why did you say half of the Republicans are nutjobs?”

Then we asked the 6-year old what he thought. “The news is great!” Really? How come? “It’s all fires and big sharks!”

Yep, close enough.

Her: Jennifer, you look great!
[Jennifer is not around, so no one replies.]
Her: Hey, Jennifer! Happy New Years! Did you lose weight, you look great!
Me (looking back): That’s not Jennifer. That’s Alice.
Her: That’s Alice? Shit, she looks terrible!