Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

In case you didn’t know already, Crissy and I are moving to Colorado in less than two months. Along with all the sadness of leaving friends, I realized that I’ll be leaving my hockey team, the Monarchs, behind.

This is especially tough; my first ever ice hockey game was with the Monarchs Hockey Franchise (which incidentally was my 3rd time skating on ice). We started as a single team and, so far, have grown to a franchise of 5 teams. So with the move, I’m retiring from the Monarchs as a franchise player after eleven seasons and four tournaments, the majority of which I served as team captain.

The franchise has been kind enough to retire my number and it now hangs from our virtual rafter.

Why #40? I never really had a number that I considered my own. In high school, I ran track and played tennis, so we obviously didn’t have numbers. In college, I just did intramural and club sports. So when I needed a number for the Monarchs, I decided that I could use some of the luck from the Bangaru athletic genes (which apparently mostly went to my sisters), so I picked Sri’s soccer jersey number.

Being me, I never remembered to tell Sri that I picked her number, so she was pretty surprised and happy when she found out 2 years later. :-)

The title is slightly misleading; I meant to say that I’m a Wheel of Fortune Idiot Savant or something approaching that classification. If you’ve watched Wheel of Fortune with me, you know that I’m a freak: a freak that’s really good at getting the puzzles before everyone else. :-)

Crissy and I talked about this for a bit and we have a theory on why I have this skill. We immediately ruled out evolution; I’m guessing game-show skills aren’t selected for in the Indian subcontinent.

To explain, let me tell you about my childhood (pull up a chair and relax). We moved a lot when I was a kid. I ended up going to 5 elementary schools in 3 states in 4 different school districts. This meant I never followed a “standard” curriculum.

To make matters worse, I went from good east coast schools to Alabama (cough) and then to good Colorado schools. It’s not that big of a deal; thanks to Mom and Dad teaching me things early and giving me frequent access to all the books I wanted (yay for libraries!), I had an good foundation.

One strange thing that happened though is I never took phonics as a kid. I could read very well, but I never had a formal phonics based education. So technically, my literacy is the memorization based model. My main symptoms of this are having bad spelling as a kid and not recognizing some obscure, esoteric words in print, though I know their meaning and use.

As a result, Crissy and I have lots of conversations like this:

• “Crissy, what’s this word?” [pointing at a word in a book]
• “Oh, that’s [some word]. I’m not sure what exactly it means.”
• “Oh, that. It means [definition].”
• “If you knew what it meant, why did you ask me what it was?”
• “Because I’m stupid, you know that.”
• “Oh yeah. I forgot.”

Anyway, so why do I think I’m good at Wheel of Fortune? Because the foundation of my language skills is memorization with pattern based recognition. Remember all those experiments that show how people can still read text if only the word length, and first and last letters are correct? That’s how my brain works.

The whole point of Wheel is for you guess the answer based on the word length and some correct letters. I’m good at that; I’ve been doing it all my life.

So Phase One: move around a lot as a kid and learn to read the “wrong way”. Phase 2 is to get on the game show. Phase 3? Obviously, Phase 3 is “Profit”. ;-P

When someone finds out that I play hockey, they are likely to ask, “Why don’t you just have a fat guy play goalie?” It’s a really funny idea, but there’s a good reason it won’t work.

Hockey goals are too big; they are 6 feet wide and 4 feet tall. Even if you had a tall, fat guy lay down in front of the net, there would still be large gaps in the corners. And to cover the 4 foot height, the person’s waist would need to be about 150 inches around (assuming a circular waist). One of the world’s largest people, only has a waist of 110.

Instead you need a smaller, quick and nimble person that can move to cover the correct parts of the net. Also, there’s a big advantage in having a goalie that can skate around a bit to play the puck. That, and the game is more fun when you actually have a chance to score goals. :-)

One thing I really like about the status feature in Facebook is that it forces you to write in third person. In college, I had way too much fun writing AOL away messages in the style of bad Roman mythology with myself as the mythical hero. No really, I referred to myself as “our hero”. :-)

For example, from Dec 11, 1999:

Our hero, upon returning from the Nickerson hermitage, is shocked that the wise had absolutely nothing of value to say to him, though his kids were cute and funny. Our hero, after devouring his cold veggie sandwich, attempted to land himself a mole in the Beezer empire. However his contact was less than brilliant and let our hero muttering nonsense about the b-school and the lack of a good educational system in democratic nations. So our hero decides to quit procrastinating and attempt to use his special powers to find the secret bio decoder ring. Will our hero find the ring to slay the Elgin and Pakrasi tag team in Monday Morning Madness? Are will he choose to seek refuge in his EE Design Project? Stay tuned…

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective), I only saved a handful of these writings. The rest are nothing more than lost bits and bytes in the vast universe of electrons.

And in case you’re wondering:

• Jackson Nickerson was the professor of Management 100 class that I was the TA for. I think I was referring to a dinner we had with him and his family.
• Cold veggie sandwiches were one of my staples in college (there wasn’t that much vegetarian dorm food).
• Beezer is my friend Bryce, who for literary purposes was one of my many antagonists.
• The reference to educational systems in democratic nations was likely some research I was doing for my column in the student paper. I wrote about geopolitics. I’m sure some of the old columns are floating around the web, which is unfortunate since I was a really bad writer back then. (Yes, even worse than now.)
• The decoder ring is a reference to an ongoing joke since high school, about how you need a decoder ring (like the ones in cereal boxes) to understand difficult topics.
• I don’t remember much about Monday Morning Madness, except that it was significant.
• Elgin and Pakrasi were the team of professors that taught our biology course (Bio 297, I think)
• EE Design Project is a reference to the really complicated EE projects we had. They were great for procrastinating on other school work.

Anyway, this got me thinking about cool plug-ins and apps for Facebook that I should build, but I’m sleepy so I’ll have to discuss them some other time.

A lot of recreational sports leagues, including my hockey league (GSHL), keep pretty good statistics . For example, you can see my very unimpressive stats on my stats page. Of course, it doesn’t take into account things like what position you were playing; for example, defensemen are generally rated more on plus/minus than on points, but GSHL doesn’t track +/-. Nevertheless, it’s pretty interesting to look at.

So it got me thinking, for players with less than stellar core stats, could we introduce new stats to make them look good? Think of it as standardized test score inflation (like the SATs) or just part of the “self-esteem is more important than education” movement.

Here are my candidates for some stats that should be kept:

• RF (Random Falling) - you get one RF when you fall for no apparent reason
• SR (Skates on Right) - you get one SR for each game that you get your skates on the right feet
• GW (Good watching) - if you were on the ice and watched your teammate make a good play, you get one GW
• SP (Swinging at the Puck) - if you swing at the puck as it goes by, you get an SP
• HP (Hitting the Puck) - if you swing at the puck (SP) and hit it, you get an HP
• NE (Nachos Eaten) - after the game when you go out with the team, you get a NE for eating nachos

A few weeks ago the Matewan High School football team intentionally ran up the score in a game over Burch High School, winning 64 to 0, so that their running back could set a record of 658 yards in a game. The Matewan coach, Yogi Kinder even had his team use a no-huddle offense through the second half so they would have more time to gain yards. As if that weren’t enough, Kinder choose not to return punts, letting them bounce back, so his tailback could get even more yards.

The coach’s actions and later attempts to justify his behavior are just despicable and represent some of the worst attributes in human nature.

Sadly this lack of sportsmanship isn’t limited to a few occurrences. I see it all the time playing hockey and friends that are competitively involved in other sports report the same thing.

I’ve seen and been in many games where one team is up a ridiculous amount (6 or more to 0) and the leading team is still going 100% trying to score more goals. I can count more than one case of a team leading by multiple goals with 15 seconds left and the winning team is still skating full speed end-to-end trying to get another goal.

Not only is it stupid, but it’s likely to lead to a situation where someone gets hurt. The losing team will often try to even the score with some more physical or “extra-curricular” play. Most times, the referee is equally disgusted with the offending team and “doesn’t see” anything, so the physical play can escalate.

My teams have strict rules against running up the score. Also, in the case that we have players that are too skilled for the division we don’t skate them. I want to win as much as anyone else, but to me a win is only meaningful if it’s a fair game.

Unfortunately though, neither of my teams have been winning that much, but that’s a topic for another post. :-)

Last Thursday, I had my first swimming lesson. Well, not really my first lesson. I took lots of lessons when I was a kid, but never learned because I was terrified of the water. There’s something very unsettling to not be touching something solid.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to learn how to swim for a while. Since I’m going to Hawaii soon for our honeymoon and work is a little slow right now, I started taking private lessons. I had my first lesson on Thursday at the Pro Club. The pool was full of little 3 to 5 year olds getting lessons… and me. :-)

I started out blowing bubbles under water, trying to touch my toes (you start floating and rolling backwards), and then small pieces of the front crawl. I was planning to work out after my lesson, but a lesson filled of extremely tense work in the pool was enough for me. I wish I was like one of those little kids that aren’t yet smart enough to understand drowning. Then, learning to swim wouldn’t be that hard.