Day 61 – 2 of 7 (200.5, 4, 48.53)
Day 62 – 1 of 5 (201.5)
Day 63 – 1 of 3 (201.5, 4, 48.52)
Day 64 – 1 of 5 (199)
Day 65 – 1 of 3 (199, 4.01, 48.36)
Day 66 – 0 of 6 (199.5, 4.01, 48.34)
Day 67 – 5 of 13 (199.5, 4.01, 48.13)
Day 68 – 0 of 7 (201)
Day 69 – 1 of 2 (201, 4.01, 48.03)
Day 70 – 0 of 2 (199.5)
Day 71 – 1 of 7 (199.5, 4.04, 48.19)
Day 72 – 3 of 8 (202, 4.02, 48.08)
Day 73 – 0 of 7 (202)
Day 74 – 2 of 10 (203.5, 4.04, 48.23)
Total – 108 of 611 (17.7%)
Still logging an uptick in my success rate so I am still unable to say what my true nature ceiling is. Yet I am missing one critical piece of data necessary for providing context to this success rate. I can only tell if my hours and hours of dedicated practicing and playing is powering me to an elevated level of Solitaire consciousness if I know what the statistical chance of any ordinary Joe winning in any given deal of the deck. After a less than thorough investigation of the internet, the best I could find was this computer simulation by Bill. Based on his parameters, Bill calculated that one should be able to win only 8 to 9 times out of every 100 hands of Solitaire. This is of course means that I am way over achieving. Go team me. But there are some caveats. Well, one really big one. It appears that Bill’s simulation model only allows you to go through the deck of cards 3 times. I, of course, do not put this restriction on my playing. Certainly if I do, my success would be much less. For now though this is the best I can do. I will keep looking for something more appropriate but for now I will assume that I am KILLING IT.
Solitaire Vocabulary Update
I am picking of the low hanging fruit with this one. The pile of cards that we draw our codons from will hence forth be known as “The Deck”. Make it so.
This blog post is sponsored by Aperture Laboratories.
After briefly pausing at our new base camp, our climb up Mount Everest has resumed. Despite suffering through the setback of a 1 for 27 stretch, we ended up advancing our overall win percentage to 17.2%. Winning at a 20% clip now seems like it is an obtainable goal. To win 1 out of 5 hands of solitaire seems above average mean to me. But then again, soon it will be quite average for me. That is the greatness that is my solitaire mastery.
At the beginning of this exercise, I said I was going to start giving some names to the various aspects of the game so that I could more efficiently communicate my grand strategies. I already introduced the term "gutter ball" to mean finishing a hand of solitaire with out being able to make a single card play. Today we add another vocabulary word - "codon". From hence forth, this word will be used to refer to the set of three cards you turn over from the deck (see picture below). My word is law.
Day 48 – 2 of 8 (199.5, 4.01, 49.56)
Day 49 – 4 of 8 (201)
Day 50 – 0 of 6 (201, 4, 49.38)
Day 51 – 2 of 9 (201)
Day 52 – 1 of 1 (202, 4, 48.56)
Day 53 – 0 of 5 (200.5, 4, 48.33)
Day 54 – 0 of 10 (200.5, 4.04, 49.36)
Day 55 – 1 of 12 (200.5)
Day 56 – 3 of 7 (201)
Day 57 – 1 of 6 (201)
Day 58 – 1 of 4 (201)
Day 59 – 2 of 8 (201.5)
Total - 89 of 516 (17.2%)
The Sure to be Wrong Prediction of the Week
This week I am going to take a shot at predicting the first movie this year to break the $100 million mark. Since none of the movies released so far this year stand a chance of reaching the century mark (Sorry wolf-punchingLiam Neeson) this is truly a forward looking exercise. In 4 out of the last 5 years, a movie released in January or February reached 100 mil. So I am going to play the odds and say we are going to have our first century club member in hand before Rare Disease Day has passed. By making that declaration, we dramatically limited the field. So let's take a quick look at the remaining candidate.
There is no clear cut blockbuster in the February slate. There are several recognizable names releasing films but none of them really are the type that carry big money makers. The Rock, Ryan Reynolds, Denzel Washington, Drew Barrymore, Nic Cage, and Harry Potter all stand a good chance of getting a movie a $50 million gross but not much more. We also have a couple of sequels on our hands but the original Journey and Ghost Rider movies barely made it to $100 million last time and no one seems to really be clamoring for another go around with these stories. So what does that leave us with?
The three movies that I think have the best chance to go big time are Chronicle, This Means War, and Wanderlust. Chronicle feels like a really interesting, decidedly dark take on the superhero trope and the found footage angle clearly still has legs. It is hard to get a real feel for how interested people are for this because it is such a genre movie and the it features unknowns in an understated advertising campaign. There is a chance this could be another Cloverfield but in the end I just don't think there is enough critical mass behind this movie.
Next I will tackle Wanderlust. This one actually does have a star that has shown she can deliver a $100 million dollar movie. Jennifer Aniston has scored two $100 millioncomedies in a row. But this movie seems fairly generic. Another movie about harried professionals slowing down and learning to enjoy life. Haven't seen that story in the theaters....since lastmonth 6 monthsin a row. Also, it is released the last week of February so all the other movie in front of it have to fall down in order for it to be first to the finish line.
That leaves us with This Means War. Bane (an English national working for the CIA?) and Captain Kirk fight over Reese Witherspoon who every seems to have stopped caring about 10 years ago. But it is a big budget action/comedy coming out around Valentine's Day. That "holiday" has helped other movies break through to the rarefied air. And has alot of the look and feel of Mr. and Mrs. Smith (the folks that made that movie made this one too), which was quite successful and really enjoyable. So, I am going to put all my Monopoly money down on This Means War as the year's first $100 million movie. (my hedge - I would not be surprised if this movie topped out at $75 million).
Speaking of the movie that I would give my Razzie vote to as worst movie of the year – Twilight : What To Expect When You Are Expecting Vampire Spawn Part 1…. What an awful, awful viewing experience. I don’t think words can express how truly bad this movie was. And really, I won’t try. It is pointless at this point. One thing the internet is not short on is Twilight take downs (One thing the internet is short on – more little kids getting hit in the head with oversized balls please). It would be like staking Edward after Buffy and Abram Lincoln were already done with him. So, instead of piling on with yet one more overwrought dissection of this cult phenomenon’s sexism, disturbing messages to teen-age girls, or undercover Mormon evangelism, let me instead just highlight the most memorable moment for me from this most recent episode of “As the Pampered Teen-Ager Pouts”. And can there really be any argument about this. Clearly the best part of this movie, ney, the whole series, is when the spurned werewolf of the central love triangle falls instantly in love with the less than 1 day old vampire progeny of the story’s protagonist upon locking eyes with it (By the way, the resolution of the love triangle in Stephanie Meyer’s other book “The Host” was equally creepy and off-putting). Then, in the translating of bad book writing by poor screenwriting into dreadful cinema, the vampire boy narrates this perverse bond of man and child wife for the benefit of the audience (It is their most sacred law). So, you don’t misunderstand there cosmic bond. For more Twilight bashing, enjoy the below video.
By the way, the remake of Arthur is actually pretty good.
Solitaire Update
So much for that upward climb I was crowing about last time. I seem to have plateaued in my rapid ascension to solitaire royalty. Of course, their might have been another reason for my continued improvement overtime besides the one I gave the last time. And that is my addled, aged mind and its inability to keep track of how many games I have actually played at any given time. I give it the old college try but many times I find myself asking, was that game four or five. To my benefit, when I do question myself, I go with the higher number. Darn you natural aging process.
There is one other variable in the ebbs and flows of my success and failure - the device and version of solitaire I play my games on. I tend to play my games with either the default Microsoft Solitaire on my laptop or the game that is found on my Blackberry. Originally, I had assumed these to versions of the game both simulated the randomness of a deck of cards. But I am not so sure anymore. It may just be me (and I am not willing to do the game tracking to figure this one out. At least not yet.) but it seems like the Blackberry pays out fewer winners than the laptop one. I don't think I ever came across a gutter ball (a hand that you can't make a single card play with) on the laptop but I know I have with the Blackberry. It seems to me that the laptop always gives you a chance to win, you just have to make all of the right moves. But the Blackberry simulates the truth of the cold, hard world. Or it could just be my senior brain playing tricks on me again.
Unfortunately most nostalgia-fueled kids’ movies have largely been excruciating money grabs. Us children of the 80’s remember how much we think we enjoyed the Smurfs, Chipmunks, and Yogi the Bear as kids and then rush out to the movie theater so that our progeny can experience the joy our brain’s way back machine convinces us we had when we first saw them on Saturday morning. Of course, within 10 minutes of the lights going down, we realize that the Hollywood machine has completely befouled our childhood memories and then quietly weep through the remaining 70 minutes of brain liquefying computer animation while our children mentally make out their Christmas lists with everything they see on screen. Of course, if we think really hard about it, we might even admit to ourselves that the source materials for these movies wasn’t of high quality either (I did love the part in Smurf where Doogie Howser questioned the naming system of the Smurfs). And that is a key division point between these ankle biter of equivalents of the G.I. Joe movie and the Muppet-based movie. The Muppets are legitimately funny.
The Muppets have always walked that thin line between giving the kids what they need for a good giggle while engaging in enough puns, word-play, and general absurdist humor that the adults that were brought along for the ride could have a good time as well (The Phineas and Ferb of its time). In fact, in recently rewatching the original Muppet Movie with the kids, it bordered on being too adult-paced and teetered on the edge of losing them. Me – I still found it as good as I remembered. And thankfully those that made the new Muppets movie retained all of the cleverness that was contained in those classic Friday night episodes that I fell in love with as a kid. They didn’t decide to computer generate them in 3D or put them in a world that they didn’t understand so you could do the standard fish out of water trope. Instead it was same as it always was and should be. That same world that found the existence of talking puppets to be normal and the presence of a flesh and bones and a felt-made brother pair to be unextraordinary. The same fourth-wall acknowledging dialogue (quick aside – after explaining what the term fourth wall means to my eldest, she greatly enjoyed pointing out all of the instances in the Muppet movie of their fourth wall-breaking behavior. Our youngest hearing this but not understanding, enjoys pointing out when things break the 2nd and 3rd wall). Even the new characters introduced to the Muppet Universe in this movie were completely consistent with this tradition. In fact, one of my favorite parts of movie was the character of “80’s Robot”. Although he was responsible for one of the most generationally divisive joke of the movie. The screeching sound of the dial-up modem that he used to connect to the internet produced a hardy chuckle out of the adults in the audience while the kids stared up in them in confusion asking what was so funny.
My greatest disappointment associated with the Muppet Movie is that it is going to finish well behind The Smurfs and the 3rd Chipmunk Movie in box office receipts. This is a movie that deserved better. We are likely going to get a second dose of unnecessarily created Smurfs (I am looking at you Gutsy – couldn’t you have just been Hefty or Handy) before we get to find out if Tex Richman remembers to let those showgirls out of his closet now that he has amnesia. At least TinTin is dying a predictable death and won’t be back for more creepily realistic animated adventures. If only we treated all of the Belgian cartoon immigrants with the same indifference. Come on people, buy American. Buy more Muppets. Maniacal Laugh. Maniacal Laugh.
Solitaire Update
See I was right. I had a very good reason for not stopping at 200 hands played. My win percentage continues to climb. Still not ready to conclude anything from this quite yet but it might actually be suggesting that just the act of playing solitaire again and again has actually improved my ability to play this game of skill (A solitaire player who blames bad luck for their losing ways is just a solitaire player that doesn’t truly understand the game). I am beginning to see the dead-end moves that I would have previously made impetuously but now can avoid. And as a result, each time I have tallied my results, my win percentage has gone up a percent. For now, I am going to keep chugging along and see if my Solitaire learning curve finally plateaus. But, until then, I will continue my climb to solitaire immortality.
Since we are on the subject of ESPN’s “It’s not crazy. It’s sports” advertising campaign, I have to highlight the cream of the crop which plays more like a documentary than a commercial. The great disappointment of this ad and the real life events that inspired it is that real life (and copyright law) interjected itself into the delightful story of an internet meme’s attempt to turn the self-righteousness of the Southern football “tradition” on its head. Wouldn’t it have been great if those prim and proper dance squad ladies that think it is appropriate to celebrate a legacy of slavery with the nickname of their past it's prime ball team had to now wear a shirt with a prune-faced alien to their Saturday tailgate party. Ahhh…what could have been.
Solitaire Update
The updates keep coming. Not much new to report at this point. I am beginning to pile up some sizable N's for what my normal rate of success is. Before I can really appreciated whether any potential strategies that I mentioned in that first Solitaire post has an impact on success, I have to understand what success looks like. Right now we are settling in on a number of approximately 1 win for every 6 hands of cards. Although the almost 200 hands played seems like a lot, there still seems to be some real movement in the numbers. I think to get a true stable baseline, I need to go a total of 1000 hands. So that is my goal right now. 1000 hands of solitaire with the standard straight ahead strategy. Then we will see where we are and go from there.
Day 12 - 1 of 10 (203.5)
Day 13 - 1 of 12 (203.5)
Day 14 - 1 of 1 (203.5, 3.52, 48.34)
Day 15 - 1 of 8 (202, 3.49, 48.16)
Day 16 - 1 of 5 (203)
Day 17 - 3 of 7 (202.5, 3.55, 48.05)
Day 18 - 0 of 9 (202.5, 3.53, 48.05)
Day 19 - 3 of 5 (201.5, 3.56, 47.94)
Day 20 - 0 of 5 (200.5, 3.76, 50.58)
Overall Success Rate - 30 out of 191 (15.7%)
Is it any wonder that ESPN made a commercial that celebrated the fanship of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the single greatest and most successful NFL franchise in professional football history? To be fair, ESPN did make “It’s not crazy. It's sports” spots for other teams but none of the others were as genuine and real as the Steeler one. In fact, the Philadelphia Eagle one was just downright sad for the contrived, artificial nature of it. Whereas taking the Terrible Towel to the far reaches of the earth is completely natural and expected. Watch any Steelers’ game and it seems like it is a home game, regardless of where they are playing. I still remember a Monday night game a couple years back at Washington, the home of a once proud franchise with a supposedly devoted fanbase. Yet, the Black and Gold dominated the screen and it was the Potomac Drainage Basin Indigenous Persons quarterback that had problems shouting out signals over the roar of the crowd, not the Steelers. It wasn’t like they were playing in Jacksonville. This was an NFL town, yet they couldn’t muster up enough hometown fans to make a decent showing against the invading hordes of the Steelers’ Washington D.C. sleeper cell. This is not uncommon. Steeler fans don’t just travel well. They are in every town and in great numbers. But why is this? It isn’t because the once polluting steel mill smokestacks created generation after generation of ex-patriots that infiltrated every corner of this country. Pittsburgh was just never big enough to have that many former residents. The truth of the matter is the opening statement of this paragraph. The Steelers are the most successful NFL franchise of all time. One for the thumb plus another finger on the other hand (you can pick which finger that is). Eight Super Bowl visits in all. The Steelers are proof positive that the specter of league wide parity and the death of the dynasty is one big myth perpetuated by college football apologists who still think anyone still cares about their sham of a “sport”.
If we just look back at the last 10 years of NFL playoff history, yes you will see that almost the entire league did make the playoffs at one point or another (Sorry Houston, Detroit, and Buffalo - no playoffs for you in the last 10 years). And the system is certainly set up to give better odds at a payoff than any slot machine you will see in Vegas. Firstly, there are only 4 teams in each division. So right off the bat you have a 25% chance in making the playoffs. Not bad. Once you add in the wildcards, you have over one third of the league participating in the post season every year. During the last decade, if true parity were in place, you would expect every team to make the playoffs 3-4 times. Instead, the majority of playoff visits are cluster amongst the a few privileged teams. The NFL’s 1%. In this elite group, you are making the playoffs, at worst, every other year. The 10 most successful franchises (Indianapolis, New England, Phliadelphia, Green Bay, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, New York Jets, Seattle, New York Giants, and San Diego) account for 56% of the playoff spots grabbed in the last 10 years despite only making up only 31% of the league’s teams. The bottom 11 teams (Houston, Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland, Washington, San Francisco, Oakland, Miami, Jacksonville, Cincinnati, and Arizona) captured 12.5% of the playoff spots (about 1 per 10 years on average) with 34.5% of the league’s teams during that same time frame. People love to point to the yearly turnover of playoff teams as proof of the league’s parity. But this myopic view misses the larger trends that are obvious with a more macro view. One that shows that in fact there are dominant teams that over the long term continue to succeed again and again, while the one year wonders quickly return to obscurity. If you live in Cleveland you can hold onto the dream of parity and the promise it brings to deliver your once in a decade playoff visit. Or you can face reality and become a fan of real winner of a franchise like Indianapolis that gave you a rooting interest in January for nine straight years. And that folks is why there are more Steeler fans in Jacksonville than Jaguar fans (The Jaguars really only have themselves to blame for this – they could have drafted TIM TEBOW!).
Solitaire Update
One of the stated goals I had for doing the solitaire update was to encourage more frequent writing on this blog. Given that it has been over a month since my last blog post, you might say that I missed that goal by a country mile. Well, yes and no. I have been dutifully keeping track of my solitaire success and failures and the presence of that card playing log has been a constant weight on my conscience. A tell-tale deck of cards whispering in my ear to post an update. The quickly accumulating backlog of solitaire data has in many ways done exactly what it was supposed to do. It has provided me with the prompt I need to finally get my fingers to the keyboard and start reporting. And really only 30 odd days between posts is pretty good for me. So I declare “Mission Accomplished”.
Day 6 - 2 of 13
Day 7 - 2 of 13
Day 8 - 2 of 14
Day 9 - 3 of 12
Day 10 - 3 of 11 (204, 3.5, 48.22)
Day 11 - 0 of 10 (203.5, 3.41, 47.47)
Overall Success Rate - 19 out of 129 (14.7%)
This blog post is sponsored by Merlotte's Bar and Grill.
The two Snow White movies could not have taken more different approaches to the source material. Snow White and the Huntsman did the en vogue thing and took the whole thing to a dark place while transforming the heroine into a fully empowered warrior princess. The whole thing looks like a high concept actioner where the princess stops wishing for the one to love and becomes the latest iteration of Buffy, the wicked witch slayer. The only glaring negative with this version is the actress charged with bringing Snow White into the flesh. Somehow, someone in Hollywood decided it was a good idea to give our nation's worst living actress a career outside of the Twilight series. Just superficially, Kristen Stewart fails to live up to the standards of a beauty greater than all others in the kingdom. A beauty worth killing for. And that is before she opens her mouth and makes everyone in the audience wish you can have a Snow White movie without Snow White.
But the other option, Mirror, Mirror, is trying exceeding hard with its trailer to guarantee there is no audience even in the theater to question why they spent good money to see it. This thing looks absolutely awful. It is fine that they decided to go light hearted in this one. It differentiates it nicely from the Batman Begins-version of Snow White the competition is selling. But maybe if it is going to be a comedic version of the story, maybe some of it should be actually funny. This Grantland piece does a nice job of pointing out many of the ways this trailer went horribly wrong. Let me just add a couple more nails to the glass coffin. The production value of this looks low rent by the standards of high school musicals. The casting is down-right dreadful. This Snow White not only makes Kristen Stewart look like the fairest in the land, she makes miss Stewart seem like someone two super-powered, immortal beings would fight over. And Prince Charming is just as bad. The Winklevoss smarm still oozes off of old Arm and Hammer. He was born to play bad guy from the rich, snooty frat house in a college set comedy. Not the man of virginal girls dream. Julia Roberts, you are better than this.
Solitaire Update - Things picked up a bit after my involuntary shut out a couple of days past, included a personal best of 3 wins in a day. I still have resisted applying any real strategy yet. That is still to come. But in the meantime I was also think that there needs to be some cool lingo to go along with certain events in solitaire. This will be a critical step in setting it up the mainstream competitive sport it was always meant to be. Just like in bowling, three consecutive strikes is called a turkey and four strikes is a hambone. Solitaire needs its own hambone. What do you call it when you lay out a hand and you can't make a single move. No cards can be brought down from the stack and none of the cards below can be flipped. This phenomenon seems like it should have a name. For that matter, the different areas of the solitaire playing field need names. How is any one going to be able to follow all of my great insights into the practice of solitaire if they don't know if I am referring to the stacks or the triplets (my first attempt at some names)? So, top of my list of things to do in my solitaire sojourn - develop some cool jargon.
Day 4 - 2 out of 13
Day 5 - 3 out of 12
Overall Success Rate - 7 out of 56 (12.5%)
This blog poster is sponsored by Gen Sys Research Laboratories.
As I have well established through this blog, I am a world-class procrastinator. Despite the best intentions to use this as a means to practice my "writing", I have been lucky to average a single post a month. Mainly because important tasks like sleeping, reading someone else's incredibly insightful blog, or determining that House's latest patient doesn't have lupus always gets in the way. Most recently though, my diversion of choice (no, choice is the wrong word - it is more like unconscious compunction) is electronic solitaire. It is quick, always accessible challenge that calls out to me the moment my attention wains from the task at hand. Often I use it as an incentive to drive me through unpleasant tasks - if a finish this section, I can play a quick hand. But all to often it turns into a bad case of Civilization - One more turn Syndrome. Compulsively clicking through to the next deal in hopes that that one will bring me the proper alignment of cards to take the day. And when I do win, that just fuels the fire to try again. It is the same compunction that gives the success of the minimally rewarding games like Farmville and Angry Birds. Success in it doesn't prove any particular skill or ability. It is just a time waster that eats at your day while every so often patting you on the head and telling you that you are a good boy.
But at the same time, I have begun to think there must be a strategy to this. A way of playing that increases your odds of winning. That if you play closer attention to the order of the cards as they are revealed in sets of three, you can make more intelligent decisions on which cards to play. Actively passing up options to move cards from the deck in order to get a more favorable card later. Choosing to move the card that frees up the space for the king instead of the card from the biggest unturned column of cards. There is in fact skill and strategy to solitaire and once I figure it out, I can increase my rate of winning. It isn't just luck. Why aren't their competitive solitaire tournaments out there to allow the true kings of solitaire shine? There has to be, right? This card game is no more luck based than poker.
So with that in mind and with the hope that I can turn my procrastination technique into a driver for posting on the blog, I will start today to track my rate of success in solitaire. If I am right. If there is any skill what so ever, I should get better with time (unless of course my prior work in this area has already delivered me at my peak solitaire playing ability). Who knows, maybe I will become the greatest solitaire player of all time.
Day 1 - 1 win out of 10 hands
Day 2 - 1 win out of 10 hands
Day 3 - 0 wins out of 11 hands (the first shutout and the low point of the monitoring so far)
Be sure to check back often to see how a progress on this thrilling adventure.
This blog poster is sponsored by Better Lawn Service and Pool Cleaning.
