Stuff Archives

Why am I sat at the airport (Phoenix) listening to some muppet give directions on how to get to the gate? Literally, this guy's on a phone talking to someone else describing the walk down the concourse and what bars/restaurants the gate is near. Next he says “I'll stand in the concourse and maybe you'll be able to see me”

We're at gate A5!

It's easily identified. It's got an f'ing great sign above marked A5. It's between gates A3 and A7, opposite A6. Obviously the gate designation system the airport came up with is not adequate enough. Gates can only be identified by a frantically waiving muppet in the middle of the concourse.

Maybe I'm just a bit stressed. Maybe it's a good job I'm going on holiday this week .... provided I can find the gate to that plane.

I've been traveling round the country staying in a different hotel more or less every day. Last night I got in from Dinner, took the elevator up to my floor and stood there staring as I couldn't remember which room I was in. I'm actually quite impressed I remembered the floor. Anyway I thought there must be some top tips to learn from this traveling and I thought ... ah yes, there's a good one from that morning that resulted in a nasty mishap. Today's traveler's tip is:

Don't leave you hemorrhoid cream next to your toothbrush at night.

On the positive side, I did have minty fresh farts all day long.

And here was me thinking that EastBayRag was my only claim to fame. I was doing some research on places to go for a trip in the UK and what birding opportunities there were and came across this excellent site:

Fatbirder

I feel that it was written with myself in mind.

It's very sad, but we're now starting to recognize a number of people at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. We seem to be becoming part of the furniture. We were, however, very pleased to see that Uncle Jesse once again made it out to the races.

As most people know, I've traveled to Phoenix to watch the NASCAR race there before heading off to Vegas to do the same next weekend. At the Nationwide race on Saturday, Mr O and I made new friends.

Buzz and his mate.

Buzz and his mate came from Bristol Tennessee and were very proud of it. Buzz took my phone number so he could send me a picture of the bus he and his mate were traveling round in. Interestingly, when I stored the number, it automatically filed it under “work number” which I think might be a stretch. It seems that they are traveling round the West Coast in a big red bus supporting Montoya. They had confessed to squatting in the seats they were occupying and I think it's safe to say this isn't part of a corporate entertaining package.

After getting acquainted with Buzz and his buddy, we agreed to look out for them in Vegas. His friend had suggested that Buzz send a photo of Sandy to us in order to convince us to look out for them. This photo promised quite a lot as Sandy, apparently, was “happy to get her tits out.” Interestingly, on further reflection (and confirming that we did indeed like tits), the friend suggested that Buzz not send a photo of Sandy, but in fact to send a picture of Anita on account of the fact that “she's got bigger tits!”

I can't do the accent in a blog post and I've only just scratched the surface of the intense, deep and meaningful conversation that we struck up with our new soul mates. I do hope we bump into them at Vegas as it would be good to continue the discussion. To be honest, it'd be quite nice to see Sandy and/or Anita, but I'm not sure Karen would be too happy about that. I'm not sure why she'd be jealous though as I'm sure she's got more teeth than the pair of them.

On a semi serious note, it would be good to bump into them again. We have a picture of the big red bus (just in case the description wasn't enough).

So it seems as if Halo has once again taken over a significant portion of my life. I have to be honest that they've done a really good job with Reach and made the multiplayer very exciting given how much you can customize it. Anyway, was poking around on one site or other and came across this video that I have to say is pretty well put together and you have to respect the talent with the sniper.



I'm also fascinated by the end and the badges that they created. Extermination has to be the hardest award to get (kill all four openents yourself within 4 seconds so they have none on the field and you get an overkill award). Has to be the hardest ..... or is it?

Well, I don't get any marks for style and there's a lot of luck, particularly with the player who came up the stairs and walked into my grenade, but here you go.



I call this:

“Anything you can do, I can do .... well, with a lot of luck!”

“Bring on the teenagers, there's still life in this old dog yet!”

“Getting the lead back in style”

I need to start by congratulating Jimmie Johnson, Chad Knaus and the 48 Lowes team for winning their fifth NASCAR championship title in a row. We've run the NASCAR race game for 10 weeks through the chase and it's pretty obvious that it's almost impossible to predict the winner each week. In fact, the most anyone got right in any one week was two correct picks. I did manage to pick 8 of the top 10 in one week with all of my 10 picks being inside the top 12 which was pretty good, but on the whole, most picks only resulted in about 6 of the top ten with many people regularly having picks finishing worse than 30th. I mention this because it goes to show how tight the competition is. This isn't one of those competitions where the same person/team wins week on week which makes Jimmie Johnson's achievement even more unbelievable. A lot can be said about the fact that the team is stable with Chad Knaus and the Lowes sponsorship having been there throughout these championships, but is it really that stable? The entire pit crew was swapped out during the Texas race. I think you've just got to look at the talent for what it is.

So, to the race game. Congratulations to me for finishing on top of the 2010 NASCAR Chase Race leader board. For those of you who weren't playing, the note I sent out had words in it to the effect of me having invented a game that nobody else is interested in and I've won, now declaring myself the world champion. It would appear that my integration into American society is all but complete.

I'm happy to take any criticism around the fact that I picked the same drivers as Owen in the last week to make sure I won. Playing the player and not the game maybe, but it got the results. I did actually write down what I would have picked and it would have made little difference. I would have scored 40 points instead of 10 which would have still meant I won the overall competition, but wouldn't have won the last week regardless. Anyway, I have to get off to party with the San Francisco Giants as world champions!

Apologies for the dark photo, but it was taken at night with a cell phone. The name of this place did cause my mind to wander somewhat. I'm thinking of applying for a job there.

Just to let you know that amongst the re-vamping of the website, I've put up three new videos. You can get to these from the video home page to watch or to download these in full resolution. The three videos are

• William riding his bike
• William using the drinking fountain in the park
• Squirrel on the slinky on my feeder

Enjoy!

It's been a long time since I've added anything to the blog site, so I figured I'd jot down some tips that I've got for picking the selections in the Race Game. Before you read on, however, I guess the big question is whether or not you'd want to follow my advice. Well, I'll leave that one up to you.

I guess we should start at the basics. If you have no idea what you're doing, then you should probably take a quick look at the standings in the Sprint Cup and at least make sure your picks are from the top 25 or so. There are exceptions to this rule, the first being road courses and the second being super speedways. Road courses we can ignore as there aren't any in the 10 chase races. There's one race at Talledega in the chase that's a super speedway and you can still apply these rules - basically a lot of cars wreck in the big races and there's an element of luck about which drivers are left running at the end of the race. The top 27 drivers with the car number they are typically associated with as of writing this are as follows:

Pn	Car#	Driver
1	11	Denny Hamlin
2	29	Kevin Harvick
3	18	Kyle Busch
4	24	Jeff Gordon
5	2	Kurt Busch
6	48	Jimmie Johnson
7	99	Carl Edwards
8	16	Greg Biffle
9	31	Jeff Burton
10	14	Tony Stewart
11	17	Matt Kenseth
12	33	Clint Bowyer
13	39	Ryan Newman
14	1	Jamie McMurray
15	00	David Reutiman
16	42	Juan Montoya
17	5	Mark Martin
18	88	Dale Earnhardt Jr
19	9	Kasey Kahne
20	56	Martin Truex Jr
21	43	AJ Almendinger
22	20	Joey Logano
23	98	Paul Menard
24	6	David Ragan
25	47	Marcos Ambrose
26	12	Brad Keselowski
27	77	Sam Hornish Jr

The second tip is that the race selection isn't locked until just before the race starts. That means you can go to Nascar's website and see how the drivers did in practice and qualifying.

The third is to look at your chase drivers. The top 12 in the list above are the chase contenders. These got there because they've had a good season. Generally one or two of them fall behind, but more often than not you see about 6-8 of the chase drivers finishing in the top 10. It's worth making sure you've at least some of them in there.

If you want to get technical, you can look at track type and distance and match up to the drivers form. Carl Edwards earned the nickname “Concrete Carl” because of his success on concrete tracks. Kyle Busch always seens to run well on the short tracks. Jimmie Johnson is generally there or there abouts on the mile and a half tracks. Although Dale Earnhardt Jr doesn't seem to be as successful as his fans want him to be, he's always a good choice on the super speedways.

Last would be to look at the potential spoilers. Spoilers are the non chase drivers that finish in the top 10. Given that the top 12 drivers are fighting for points, if a non-chase driver finishes ahead of them, then it takes more points away from that chase driver. And there's nothing more that the non chase drivers like than to steal a win and prove a point - they've got to finish the season with something.

A couple of top picks in spoilers are both the Earnhardt Ganassi drivers - Jamie McMurray and Juan Pablo Montoya. Both have won races this year, but both have struggled with consistency - too many DNFs left them wanting for the chase, but they continue to finish well if they make it to the end of the race. Kasey Kahne's probably another one you'd put in that bucket too.

Newman, Truex, Reutimann, Martin and Allmendinger are also good calls. I probably wouldn't go much beyond that for these races, but that's just my thoughts.