It's the time of the year when every college basketball fan will have to endure the song titled "One shining moment". The music had been a tradition for NCAA basketball, as the background music for CBS network.
One Shining Moment 2008 (Check it out before youtube removes it from the site)
My relationship with the song is mix: hate and love. Being an alternative music fan, the song's beat is painful to bear; however, the tune reminds of the the Florida Gators Basketball. I still remember last year, 2007, when the University of Florida (my beloved school) captured it's second straight NCAA basketball trophy.
Right after the game, when I opened the blinds in my apartment, I saw cars going to campus and heard loud honking. I didn't celebrate since I was in the streets of Gainesville the year before that. I should have celebrated the second championship. It will be a long drought ahead, before I will witness again the "one shining moment" clip with Florida Gator players in the video.
Here's the Florida Gators one shining moment, just in case.
2007 One shining moment
Showing posts with label Sports. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sports. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Sunday, March 30, 2008
White men can't jump?
Recently, I been playing basketball with friends every saturday (check out this site http://www.recsports.ufl.edu/swrc_camera.aspx, I may be playing :^}). Basketball is not my sports, soccer is my game (and occasional running). Since soccer is an outdoor game, and summer is right around the corner, I decided to play basketball.
Between you and me, I'm not good in playing basketball. I can dribble, pass and shoot, that's about it. Making the shots is a different story.
Week by week, I realized that I love to defend than to dribble the ball. In soccer, I love to defend more than weave into defenders. I love to take the ball from the person (or take the person from the ball, which is a foul and a last resort). That's me.
Observe the evolution of the game anyway, you will realize that basketball is a game for blacks . It's not about who defends best or scores how many points. If you are a basketball fan, the last great white professional basketball player was Larry Bird, circa 1980s. Nobody came close to him. What followed was a domination of great black players: Jordan, LeBron James, Grant Hill, Shaq etc. Although there are whites here and there (Steve Nash), their credentials were not comparable to Bird. Are whites incapable of jumping? If you agree, you will also conclude that blacks are not suppose to round the ice hockey. Almost all of the hockey players are white (except for Jerome Iginla, a mixed black-white).
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Strange (Gym) Rats
"Lab rats can produce data and scientific reports, I don't know about gym rats"-unknown
It was my first time to be back at the gym after a month, and it made me realized that the gym is a peculiar place to be.
The first strange thing that bothers me inside the gym are those guys wearing sleeveless without muscles to show off. These guys, to make it worst, wear Nike dry fit body-hugging shirts to show muscle definition. There's one problem: it defines the bulge of their stomach. Times had change, times had change. If you don’t have something to show, don’t show it off. You don’t get ‘muscle points’ and a beach body by wearing those kind of apparels.
Same thing to ladies too, when they try to show off their abs, but it's not flat. Are they trying to show their back tattoo or belly piercing? It doesn't matter since the disgusting bulge of their stomach steals the thunder.
You may have noticed this before, when people leave their towels on the floor. I hate that because it’s so unhygienic. In rare cases, some dumb ass do their bench presses without a shirt, which is equally unhygienic! Does it make you stronger when you take your shirts off? One good thing though when you are work out in the gym, is that it's a place to rub shoulders with superstar athlete. One time, I saw somebody in his flip-flops. I thought slippers are not safe, and then realized that the guy was Tim Tebow, the prized quarterback of the school, working out somebody. I pardoned him already for his mistake.
When I was working in the gym before behind the desk, I thought the only requirement is that you know CPR and AED. I was wrong. Technical questions didn’t escaped me: heart rate monitor acting up, a question if Chinese food are healthy, ACL and spine injuries, the difference between decline vs. incline press, what’s a METS, a phone call inquiring for a test for AIDS and a guy asking about a rare genetic disorder called celiac disease, because he has one (eat gluten free food man).
In some instances, you find wierd of the wierdests, such as a half-blind student walking in a treadmill but his’ seeing/guide dog is sleeping beside; person doing a lat pull down while talking to a phone; a guy kissing his bicep muscles after a hard bicep curls. Here’s the best: a university that invented Gatorade but banned people drinking Gatorade inside the student gym.
In the end of the day, you go to the locker room. Then you hear this guy bitching about exercise challenging people around him, “who said exercise is fun, people who said that are hypocrites, I just finished and it was not”.
That’s weird. Ask a triathlete why he loves to burn calories and sweat it out, they're not hypocrites.
It was my first time to be back at the gym after a month, and it made me realized that the gym is a peculiar place to be.
The first strange thing that bothers me inside the gym are those guys wearing sleeveless without muscles to show off. These guys, to make it worst, wear Nike dry fit body-hugging shirts to show muscle definition. There's one problem: it defines the bulge of their stomach. Times had change, times had change. If you don’t have something to show, don’t show it off. You don’t get ‘muscle points’ and a beach body by wearing those kind of apparels.
Same thing to ladies too, when they try to show off their abs, but it's not flat. Are they trying to show their back tattoo or belly piercing? It doesn't matter since the disgusting bulge of their stomach steals the thunder.
You may have noticed this before, when people leave their towels on the floor. I hate that because it’s so unhygienic. In rare cases, some dumb ass do their bench presses without a shirt, which is equally unhygienic! Does it make you stronger when you take your shirts off? One good thing though when you are work out in the gym, is that it's a place to rub shoulders with superstar athlete. One time, I saw somebody in his flip-flops. I thought slippers are not safe, and then realized that the guy was Tim Tebow, the prized quarterback of the school, working out somebody. I pardoned him already for his mistake.
When I was working in the gym before behind the desk, I thought the only requirement is that you know CPR and AED. I was wrong. Technical questions didn’t escaped me: heart rate monitor acting up, a question if Chinese food are healthy, ACL and spine injuries, the difference between decline vs. incline press, what’s a METS, a phone call inquiring for a test for AIDS and a guy asking about a rare genetic disorder called celiac disease, because he has one (eat gluten free food man).
In some instances, you find wierd of the wierdests, such as a half-blind student walking in a treadmill but his’ seeing/guide dog is sleeping beside; person doing a lat pull down while talking to a phone; a guy kissing his bicep muscles after a hard bicep curls. Here’s the best: a university that invented Gatorade but banned people drinking Gatorade inside the student gym.
In the end of the day, you go to the locker room. Then you hear this guy bitching about exercise challenging people around him, “who said exercise is fun, people who said that are hypocrites, I just finished and it was not”.
That’s weird. Ask a triathlete why he loves to burn calories and sweat it out, they're not hypocrites.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
How to Lose a Superbowl Gamble
American football season is winding down, culminated by Superbowl XLII (42). Everybody will be watching, and some people will be placing a bet. I'm a sports fan and I log a lot of hours watching ESPN. If stockbrokers watch the rise and fall of the market and makes money by placing bet on stocks, a sports fan should also.
Plan A was to rely on statistics to pick a team to place a bet on. ESPN's analyses are littered with numbers: total yards, total rush, completion efficiency of a quarterback, touchdown to interception ratio, etc.. I've learned early on that statistics don't mean anything. Even though 76% of the Sports Nation predicted that New England will win this year's Superbowl, it's not a guarantee that the Patriots will (I checked the statistics again, it's down to 64%. Is it because Tom Brady is injured?). Again, statistics doesn't mean anything. Statistics are only figures to describe a model. To quote my professor before " Figures don't lie, but liars figure". Here's a new one I got from a seminar, it's called the Gaussian Nugget; "(Computational) models are to be use, but not believe" (Rephrased from Econometrics). Even the people who made a career using statistics once said "It is easy to lie with statistics, but it's a lot easier to lie without them." (Richard J. Herrnstein). If I can't rely on statistics, I need an alternative way of beating the house in Vegas. Scrap plan A.
Plan B came two years ago when a local news featured an elephant from a Texas zoo. This elephant had predicted the past 5 winners of the Superbowl. The handlers of the animal will show the logo of the teams vying for the championship ring and then the animal will predict the winner by pointing the team's logo. Five straight years, the animal was right. A 5-year winning streak, an unblemished record.
There are anecdotal evidences that animals can predict the coming of an earthquake. If animals can predict when an earthquake will strike, then they should predict winners of big games. Faultless logic.
That year, the elephant predicted the Seattle Seahawks over the Pittsburgh Steelers. With a little bit of hesitation, I went on-line, placed a wager on the Seahawks using my credit card.
The Seattle Seahawks lost the game, and I lost some bucks--money down the drain. I told my friend about the incident, he laughed and gave me an advice to only bet on sure things.
This year, I haven't recieved any superbowl party invitation yet; so this Sunday, most likely I'll be watching the game in my living room, on a high definition flatscreen TV, rooting for the New York Giants, but no gambling. There's no Plan C yet. I will be watching the game downing couples of beers with a bruised ego. I thought I beat the house in Vegas. Prediction and a guarantee are two different things. Damn animal!
Plan A was to rely on statistics to pick a team to place a bet on. ESPN's analyses are littered with numbers: total yards, total rush, completion efficiency of a quarterback, touchdown to interception ratio, etc.. I've learned early on that statistics don't mean anything. Even though 76% of the Sports Nation predicted that New England will win this year's Superbowl, it's not a guarantee that the Patriots will (I checked the statistics again, it's down to 64%. Is it because Tom Brady is injured?). Again, statistics doesn't mean anything. Statistics are only figures to describe a model. To quote my professor before " Figures don't lie, but liars figure". Here's a new one I got from a seminar, it's called the Gaussian Nugget; "(Computational) models are to be use, but not believe" (Rephrased from Econometrics). Even the people who made a career using statistics once said "It is easy to lie with statistics, but it's a lot easier to lie without them." (Richard J. Herrnstein). If I can't rely on statistics, I need an alternative way of beating the house in Vegas. Scrap plan A.
Plan B came two years ago when a local news featured an elephant from a Texas zoo. This elephant had predicted the past 5 winners of the Superbowl. The handlers of the animal will show the logo of the teams vying for the championship ring and then the animal will predict the winner by pointing the team's logo. Five straight years, the animal was right. A 5-year winning streak, an unblemished record.
There are anecdotal evidences that animals can predict the coming of an earthquake. If animals can predict when an earthquake will strike, then they should predict winners of big games. Faultless logic.
That year, the elephant predicted the Seattle Seahawks over the Pittsburgh Steelers. With a little bit of hesitation, I went on-line, placed a wager on the Seahawks using my credit card.
The Seattle Seahawks lost the game, and I lost some bucks--money down the drain. I told my friend about the incident, he laughed and gave me an advice to only bet on sure things.
This year, I haven't recieved any superbowl party invitation yet; so this Sunday, most likely I'll be watching the game in my living room, on a high definition flatscreen TV, rooting for the New York Giants, but no gambling. There's no Plan C yet. I will be watching the game downing couples of beers with a bruised ego. I thought I beat the house in Vegas. Prediction and a guarantee are two different things. Damn animal!
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)