Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

OK, so I”m going to pick back up with weekly SEC picks and general college football stuff this season. To come before Saturday kicks will be an overall pre-season thing on NCAA football, my SEC weekly picks and LSU/SEC forecast.

But we actually kick tonight with Cocks & Dogs, so to get this easy prediction on record:

USC over MSU: 24 - 6

One year ago this morning, I was at work trying to get information on Hurricane Katrina as the storm came ashore. I knew the Mississippi coast - and particularly Waveland and Bay Saint Louis - were getting hammered, but there was little real-time information coming out.

Then the wife sent me a link over AIM. It looked like this:

It was a graph of wave heights on the pier in Waveland that morning. I didn”t know exactly what it meant, but the tide spiking so hard and readings ending at 4 a.m. sent a clear signal. It was bad.

No sane person could have imagined just how bad things would get, though.

For somebody who lives 450 miles away from The Katrina Zone, the storm has played a big part in my last 365 days. It”s natural, of course, since I grew up in Louisiana and have good friends and family in New Orleans and coastal Mississippi. Looking back now, a bunch of moments stick out in my mind:

- My parents getting diverted to Atlanta on their way back from Las Vegas - and then almost running out of gas trying to drive a rental car back home.

- The sickening first days when people I knew and relatives of friends weren”t accounted for.

- Using the then little-known Google Earth to help friends in New Orleans scout the flood.

- Having to be in Tennessee instead of Louisiana for Labor Day, and spending every spare moment in front of the TV.

- The shrimp boat at I-10, Blackhawks in Baton Rouge and other encounters on my first trip back in early September.

- Realizing how much it helps to just be there.

- Learning how bad an MRE can be.

- Being unequipped to handle what we saw when we finally made it back to Waveland and New Orleans.

- Driving an old pickup from Uptown to Lakeview with few traffic lights working and the wife trying to follow me.

- Watching a Saints game at Tiger Stadium.

- The mix of joy and sorrow at Jazz Fest.

- Regretting never introducing the wife to Hubig”s pies before Katrina and being real happy when I was finally able to get her one (or 5) in May.

- Becoming friends with a Katrina-evacuee couple (not native New Orleanians) who”ve become neighbors of ours and really liking that they feel at home in East Atlanta.

There are other things, of course, that are more personal to me or others that I haven”t touched on much at the Wisdom during the last year. But suffice it to say it”s been a long year for some people; and normal is still a ways off.

And I have a lot of concerns about the future of New Orleans and the Mississippi coast. But that”s for another time.

I”ll close out year one with what I see as a hopeful picture taken in Waveland after Katrina:

Ah, football season. I feel better now.

I just got done watching the ESPN Gameday preview special, and the picks made for the BCS National Championship Game (the real one, not the Rose Bowl, which I”m sure USC will again think is the national title game) show exactly what”s wrong with the new BCS formula.

To refresh memories, the new BCS formula puts two-thirds of the ranking power in the hands of stupid humans and just one-third in the cold, accurate fingers of computer rankings. This came about, of course, when humans wanted to put USC in the title game three seasons ago but the then-powerful computers proved them wrong.

So now the BCS is largely a popularity contest stripped of most of its logic. And because of that, one favorite to make it to the BCS title game (Fiesta Bowl II) is West Virginia. Ranked No. 7 in the pre-season USA Today poll (sorry, the AP poll no longer counts for anything), the Mountaineers are a favorite to make the title game because they have such a weak schedule.

In case you missed that, West Virginia is seen as a favorite for the title game because they have such a weak schedule. Because they have such a weak schedule. Not despite it. BECAUSE they have it.

Two years ago, Auburn was denied a shot at the national title because their schedule was too weak. But that was in a year when three teams finished the season undefeated (two of them did it the hard way - by playing in a conference championship game). This year, however, there”s no clear consensus favorite, and except for West Virginia the top teams all have rough schedules:

- No. 1 Ohio State has No. 2 Texas, No. 15 Michigan, No. 17 Iowa and No. 19 Penn State
- No. 2 Texas has No. 1 Ohio State, No. 5 Oklahoma, No. 22 Nebraska and No. 25 Texas Tech
- No. 3(tie) Notre Dame has No. 3(tie) USC, No. 15 Michigan and No. 19 Penn State
- No. 3(tie) USC has No. 3(tie) Notre Dame, No. 12 Cal, No. 20 Oregon and No. 22 Nebraska
- No. 5 Oklahoma has No. 2 Texas, No. 20 Oregon and No. 25 Texas Tech
- No. 6 Auburn has No. 8 Florida, No. 9 LSU, No. 14 Georgia and No. 24 Alabama

- No. 8 Florida has No. 6 Auburn, No. 9 LSU, No. 10 Florida State, No. 14 Georgia and No. 23 Tennessee
- No. 9 LSU has No. 6 Auburn, No. 8 Florida, No. 23 Tennessee and No. 24 Alabama
- No. 10 Florida State has No. 8 Florida, No. 11 Miami and No. 18 Clemson

That”s an awful lot of Top 25 action for nine of the Top 10 teams.

No. 7 West Virginia? They play No. 13 Louisville … and that”s it.

It”s not surprising, of course. West Virginia plays in that joke of a conference called the Big East. With just eight teams in the conference, West Virginia plays them all:

Louisville, Rutgers, South Florida, Pittsburgh, Connecticut, Cincinnati and Syracuse. That might make good basketball, but in football that”s a joke. And the non-conference schedule is just as laughable: Marshall, Eastern Washington, East Carolina and Mississippi State.

There was a time - the 2003 season, for instance - when strength of schedule mattered. Oklahoma was saved by it; USC suffered from a weak schedule and LSU almost got screwed by playing Northern Illinois. But no more. The BCS has exorcized strength of schedule from its formula and shifted power to the biased human polls.

So now the winning strategy is apparently to put together the best team you can (for a high pre-season ranking) and craft the worst schedule possible so as others around you lose, you rise into the vacuum. Listening to ESPN Radio all week, I heard over and over about liking teams “because of the easy schedule”.

That”s horseshit. Teams should earn their place in the BCS title game by being good and beating good teams. Strength of schedule should be emphasized, not ignored. Playing conference championship games should matter because it”s an extra game typically played against a pretty good team. The politics of human polls should be de-emphasized if not eliminated, rather than given more power.

Just remember - computers are analytical; humans are biased. West Virginia is obviously positioned to exploit those human biases. Because the computers will hate them.

There”s a nice opinion piece at Wired News today about how the hysteria over recent “security threats” shows the terrorists are winning. Of course, I wrote about this two years ago, but the Wired guy does a good job of framing his point in the context of recent non-threat “threats”.

Not to be a spoiler, but the last paragraph of the Wired piece sums things up very nicely:

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn”t make us any safer.

Of course, that”ll never happen in modern America.

So the wife and I did some car shopping this past weekend (the Maxima is nearing the end of its useful life) and I was struck by a consistent theme - nobody trying to sell me a car could tell me much about the technology they want to sell me.

Every ride we looked at came with options for satellite radio and GPS navigation systems. And none of the cars I drove had these dealer options already in them. But even the most basic questions left the salesmen speechless:

Cap”n Ken: “What”s the display like for the satellite radio?”

Sales Guy: “Huh?”
Cap”n Ken: “Like, is this [pointing to an area on the radio display] where the information shows up? And does it show a bunch of characters, or just a few?”
Sales Guy: “Um …”
Cap”n Ken: “See, I have Sirus now on a stand-alone box. And I get like 20 characters on the display, and it”ll scroll a total of like 35 characters. And it”s two lines, so you get the artist and song title at the same time.”

Sales Guy: “Um …”
Cap”n Ken: “And I”ve rented cars that have XM in them, and their displays have sucked. It”s like just one line of text that”s about 8 characters, and it doesn”t scroll.”
Sales Guy: “Well, the satellite isn”t activated unless you have a subscription. So I don”t know.”

Cap”n Ken: “Well, I”d want to be able to see what the display is before I buy the satellite option.”
Sales Guy: “Um …”
Cap”n Ken: “Nevermind.”

I didn”t even get into questions about GPS navigation, but some important things that I”m sure the salesmen couldn”t answer:

- Who”s the service provider? TomTom? Garmin? Somebody else?
- What”s the release date on the map and POI data?
- Does the package come with any future data updates?

- What”s the resolution of the LCD screen?
- Does the LCD have any auxillary video inputs? If so, what does it have?

We”re not talking about undercoating or floor mats here. Navigation systems run $1,500 - $2,000 and satellite radio runs $300 - $400. And there are these kinds of intricacies that are going to come along with any kind of technology car makers want to shove into their vehicles. If you want to sell it to me, you”re going to need to know something about it.

God help the Infiniti guy when I come asking about the hard drive they”re putting in the 2007 G35.

Wow. OK, so the TiVo / EchoStar patent suit has come down to a judge ordering Dish Network to disable my DVR functionality? That HD-DVR I paid $600 for less than a year ago - they”re going to be forced by TiVo (through the court) to render it useless?

What the hell did I do to deserve this?

I imagine Dish will hustle up and strike a deal with TiVo that licenses their technology going forward and keeps existing DVRs alive, but I can tell you with complete certainty that if this case results in my $600 DVR going dark there will be two companies not involved in my next TV/DVR setup. And those would be TiVo and Dish.