Feudal Mario

There is a lot to like about the artwork of xiaobaosg (see it at his deviantart site and blog or buy it on his Etsy shop).  Although he is a self-described amateur artist, I am not really seeing how the quality of the artwork lines up with that amateur status.  Given his location on this planet (as best I can discern it), it is not surprising that his work all carries a heavy influence from traditional Asian/Chinese drawings.   True, his artwork has a bit too much panda for my taste but an interesting choice and one that plays out quite interestingly in some of his communist propaganda pieces.  But really what really got me excited about his work are the two pictures of his that are below.  A Mario and a Contra re-imagining in feudal China.  Sure, the Mario take is a bit of a new one but certainly there is no shortages of Mario art on the web.  But to do Contra?  That is a home run.  It is one of the few video games I have actually played all the way to the end (I clearly remember battling the level boss in the picture).  A true classic of the old blow on the cartridge Nintendo system.  That just rocks.  Really, after finding this fine piece of art I am only left to ask, why not more Contra pop-art on the interwebs?

This blog post is sponsored by Oscorp Technologies.

PENS!!!!

Tonight, we turn our pen review skills toward Genome Quebec's entry into the competitive field of free novelty pens.

Genome Quebec is the regional franchise of the much larger Genome Canada research organization.  Genome Canada, a non-profit organization supported by public and private money, is pretty much the Canadian version of our National Human Genome Research Institute except they devote a much larger portion of their budget to the genetic engineering of the perfect maple syrup.  So what happens when Canadian brains and tax dollars turn to creating the perfect give away?

The Genome Quebec pen is not just a pen.  The top hides a blue highlighter.  The two in one utility is of this item is a nice, frugal touch but it does cause some problems with functionally .  The pen has the curved contour to fit comfortably in your hand when you are writing but flip that puppy around to use the highlighter and suddenly you have square peg/round hole syndrome.  Additionally, the highlighter is positioned where the button for extending the pen tip should be.  If you don't put the plastic cap back on (or more likely you lose the cap), you find your self with a blue thumb the first time you instinctively try to click this pen.  As a result, the button for extending the pen tip got moved down the body of the pen to the curve that typically rests in the crux of your hand.  If you are planning on doing any marathon scribing, this is not the pen for you as that cheap little grey piece of plastic will start to chafe.

Speaking of cheap, the overall quality of the pen's construction is not high.  It is your typical pen exoskeleton.  The kind that if screw the top and the bottom of the pen together one turn to far, you get a Liberty Bell crack up the side of the pen.  This pen is not made for endurance.  A misplaced step by a ballerina will crush this pen into more pieces than can be found in a Reese's factory.

Final topic to cover is the color because of the symbolic meaning it has.  This "Canadian" pen passes on the classic red and white color scheme of maple leaf flag for the baby blue of the Quebec fleurs-de-lis.  Sure, this may make sense given this is Genome Quebec pen.  But these seditious separatists are now using their pens to passive aggressively state their belief that French Canadians deserve a homeland.

In the end, this pen is not that flattering for the Genome Quebec group.  Like all Canadians, they will try really, really hard to provide everything that you need.  They will conduct genetics studies with their Canadian pedigrees.  They will attempt find drugs for their Canadian diseases (Maple Syrup Urine Disease).  In fact, they will go over the top to show that, yes, our cute little neighbors to the north how to use both a centrifuge and a PCR machine.  Bless their little hearts.  But in end, they just can't match up with the utilitarian functionality, quality, and productivity of the American scientific industrial machine.  Also, French Canadians can not be trusted.  They will sabotage your experiment in a second if it means they can look better in the eyes of the boss.

Free Pen Rating - 5.7*

* Rating includes the standard Canadian bonus point that all Americans give when considering all things Canadian.  They are just so cute.  Like Ewoks.  But it loses 0.5 points for being French Canadians.

This blog post is sponsored by Holden and Charles Corporation.

Breaking News - I Can See The Future

In what can only be called transcendent clairvoyance, I, me, the guy typing these words, correctly predicted the final point total of the New York Giants in the Super Bowl.  Just how rare and amazing is this feat?  ESPN has no fewer than 71 of their finest "experts" guess the final score of the game and not a single one of them had the Giants final score as 21 points.  How was I so incredibly on the mark when so many others were so horribly off-base I am sure you are not asking.  Well, it is my proprietary, neural network-based algorithm which incorporates chaos theory, the anti-life equation, and the number 42 that I have honed and refined in my 53 years of intense football studies.  My Dartboard 5000 system is without equal.  So, now you are probably not asking yourself, how to I get access to the Dartboard 5000 so I can take down all of Vegas like the crew of Oceans 11 (but not Oceans 12 and 13, those movies were terrible)?  For a limited time only (which is from the moment you decide to give me money to the moment you decide to stop), you can have the keys to kingdom for only $9.99 a month (plus shipping and handling).  You get all of my sure-fire, can't miss predictions as soon as they come out of my head (predictions not guaranteed to be right, just guaranteed to be predictions).  Sign up now and watch the money to start rolling in (to my bank account).

(For clarity sake, we will not discuss my predictions for the New England Patriots final score or the winning team.  We wouldn't want to confuse the message.)

While We Are On the Subject

Now seems like the perfect time to wrap up all of our football related writing so let's go ahead and tackle my annual round-up of college bowl games with my usual focus on the interconference competition.  And from that perspective, this was the worst year yet in a long line of really disappointing years of college bowl games.  I guess it wasn't surprising though.  After a string of mid majors embarrassed the champs from the power conferences, the powers that be decided that if you can't beat them, take your ball and go home.  Even though their were small conference teams that arguably deserved a shot at the national title, they didn't even get a single BSC invite.  Boise State in the MAACO Bowl against a 6-6 Arizona State is an embarrassment.  It is amazing that any watches these games.  One thing that can be said for little guy is that they took their lemons and squeezed them into the cuts of the big boys.  In the 4 games that matched a power conference teams with an underdog conference team, the underdogs went 3-1.  What I love about this result is that the argument against including the mid-majors in the bowl games is that their high win totals are artificial.  They just benefit from weak competition.  That the 10th best SEC team would get 10 wins in the Mountain West.  Well, guess what?  The talking heads are wrong again.  These results once again show those tropes to be horribly wrong.  Penn State came within a win of taking the Big Ten and they got destroyed by Houston.  Wouldn't an LSU/Houston match-up have been ten times more interesting than what we got in the championship game?

So what did we learn from a bowl series that just paired mid-major against mid-major and power conference against power conference.  Nothing really new.  The ACC is clearly the red-headed step child of conferences.  They finished dead last in this years games (tied with the WAC) and further secured their basement position in the overall standing for bowl games since I started tracking these things.  My question is how is that the ACC stood strong through all of the conference realignment tumult while real football conferences like the Big 12 were on the verge of death.  The best thing we can do for college football would be to just disband the ACC and give their automatic berth to the Moutain West which is clearly more than just Boise State.  At 18-7, the MWC is second to only the SEC over the last five years.  Speaking of the SEC, I guess I have to give this one to the talking heads.  Yes, the SEC is the best football conference out there, although it does help when you get to play five of our bowl games against the Big 10 and ACC.  If only they had the guts to play the MWC.

One final note on this.  I will be starting the cumulative conference win totals over next year.  There has been so much realignment at this point that the conferences of next year will bear little resemblance to those that were part of my first 2007 round-up.  So crediting 2012 Pac-12 wins to the 2007 Pac-10 would make as much sense as saying, "I can't understand why the Pirates are so bad, they have Willie Stargell and Barry Bonds."  These conferences got plastic surgery, new identities, and entered the witness programs.  I mean West Virginia was last seen crossing the Rio Grande with a fake mustache.  So, we will start fresh.  That is if I even bother to care next year.  College football is horrible.

Final College Football Bowl Standings

Conference	W	L	GB
Big12	6	2	-
SEC	6	3	0.5
MAC	4	1	0.5
C-USA	4	1	0.5
Big East	3	2	1.5
MWC	2	2	2
Ind	1	1	2
Sun Belt	1	2	2.5
Big10	4	6	3
PAC12	2	5	3.5
ACC	2	6	4
WAC	0	4	4

Bowl Season Performance - 2007-2011

Conference	W	L	GB
SEC	30	16	-
MWC	18	7	1.5
Big 12	22	14	3
Pac-10/12	15	14	6.5
Sun Belt	6	5	6.5
Ind.	5	4	6.5
Big East	15	15	7
C-USA	14	15	7.5
Big Ten	18	23	9.5
MAC	7	15	11
WAC	5	15	12
ACC	15	27	13

This blog post is sponsored by Burt Johnson Construction.

I Think There Might Be a Game on This Weekend

With football dominating the national conversation one last weekend, now seems like a good time to revisit my beginning of the season predictions for the National Football League.  Here is what I predicted versus the actual, deeply flawed real life outcomes.

AFC East           Predicted      Actual
New England       13-3             13-3
New York Jets    11-5              8-8
Miami                  4-12             6-10
Buffalo                 4-12             6-10

AFC North
Pittsburgh            14-2             12-4
Baltimore              9-7              12-4
Cleveland             7-9              4-12
Cincinnati             4-12             9-7

AFC South
Houston              9-7               10-6
Indianapolis         8-8               2-12
Tennessee           8-8                9-7
Jacksonville        3-13              5-11

AFC West
San Diego          13-3             8-8
Denver                7-9              8-8
Kansas City        6-10            7-9
Oakland             2-14             8-8

NFC East
Philadelphia             13-3       8-8
Dallas                      11-5       8-8
New York Giants    10-6        9-7
Washington              4-12       5-11

NFC North
Green Bay              14-2       15-1
Minnesota                8-8        3-13
Detroit                     7-9        10-6
Chicago                  3-13        8-8


NFC South
New Orleans          13-3       13-3
Tampa Bay             10-6        4-12
Atlanta                     9-7        10-6
Carolina                  3-13       6-10

NFC West
St. Louis                 9-7         2-14
Seattle                    8-8         7-9
San Francisco         7-9         13-3
Arizona                  5-11        8-8

With a Super Bowl of San Diego over New Orleans.

Overall, I have to say I didn't do too terrible with my first public attempt at playing NFL oracle.  Although both of my Super Bowl picks were wrong, I got 4 of the 6 AFC playoff teams and 3 of the 6 NFC playoff teams right.  I did put both the Giants and the Pats into the playoffs and even on the playoff teams that I missed with, I wasn't embarrassly off.  Probably my biggest mistakes were St. Louis, Tampa Bay, and Cincinnati.  St. Louis and Tampa Bay turned out to be bad teams that capitalized on a weak schedule the year before only to return to form this year.  Cincinnati, I would say, is this year's version of St. Louis and Tampa Bay.  I fully expect Cincy to be a losing team again next year.   On the good side, I picked Houston's first ever playoff appearance.

The one lesson I learned from this exercise was not to try to pick final records based on individual game match-ups because it is impossible to pick the upsets before the season starts.  What you end up with is your really good teams with too many wins and your bad teams with too many losses.  Once you realize the top and the bottom of the league are too out of whack you end up just randomly picking upsets to better balance wins and losses.  And that kind of defeats the purpose.  Next, your I will just pick final records based on realistic exceptions of what NFL record distributions look like.

One final note just because I like to say I told you so.  NFL parity is no more real than Bigfoot and compassionate conservatism.  The conference championship games featured 3 teams that have been the most winning teams of the last decade and the 4th team was one of the most successful franchises of all time that just happened to fall on hard times of late.  And now the Super Bowl is the same exact set of teams that were in the Super Bowl four short years ago.  In fact, in the last 9 Super Bowls, only 3 different teams have represented the AFC in the big game and only 4 teams in the last 11 championship games.  You do see that kind of repetitiveness in a league dominated by parity.  I think it is time to put that one to bed.

My pick for the winner of Super Bowl XLVI - New England Patriots 32, New York Giants 21

This blog post is sponsored by Bach Worldwide.

The Presidents The Way They Should Be

I continue to envy those that are skilled at the creative arts.  I like to pretend that I have some capacity at creative writing (I have the great American novel in me if only I had the time to write, I say to myself in my most delusional moments) but even my skewed self imagine doesn't allow me fool myself into thinking I can create anything that would be considered art.  Of course my definition of art is flexible.  Typically, the type of art that I appreciate most is that which allows us to visualize what ordinarily would only exist in our imagination.  And this is the kind of art I want to try to highlight every Thursday.  First up is what I think is a perfect example of the kind thing that I would create if I had any real artistic skill.  Jason Heuser created a series of posters that show us how our greatest president's would have responded to such real world issues as zombie outbreaks and Sasquatch invasion if they would have faced them while in office.  This is the world I want to live in and I appreciate those that can bring it to life. 

This blog post is sponsored by Schrute Farm.

A Science Like Substance

After the kids saw this ad during this past week's My Little Pony episode, they were demanding that they get Taq Polymerase for their next birthday.  Bio-Rad knows how to market to the kids.

In case you didn't see the theme in last five sponsors (including today's), farewell to Chuck.  You won't be missed and barely, if ever, remembered.  Your lightweight storytelling that completely wasted the great Jayne made you immensely ignorable.  But hey you stayed on air for 5 years by selling your soul to Subway, so that has to count for something.  Congrats on that. 

This blog post is sponsored by Orange Orange.