TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

No, I’m not going to talk about the Mets until they’re no longer in first place. So… football season’s all that’s going on.

YOU HEAR ME? IT’S ALL THAT’S GOING ON!!!

Bears -3 at Lions: The Lions defense stinks and gave up 56 points last week. The Bears defense is missing five starters. The Bears have also had a brutal schedule. Griese’s going to play a conservative game as to be the anti-Rex. This has upset written all over it in several different languages. Lions outright.

Rams +11 at Cowboys: I don’t think the Rams can win, but I think they can keep it within 10. I hate huge spreads and there’s a ton of them this week. Rams +11.

Raiders +3.5 at Dolphins: The Raiders are back to getting points. Legitimately, I do think they have a shot to win this game, but I’m also pretty sure the Dolphins have to buck the trend and win here at some point. I hate picking field goal spreads, but that’s what I’m going to do. Raiders +3.5.

Texans -3 at Falcons: The Falcons still have not given me a reason to pick them. Even though picking the Texans as a favorite still kills me. The Texans lost last week which means they’re no longer due for a let-down game. Texans cover.

Jets -3.5 at Bills: Since the Patriots apparently crush the souls out of teams and give them a one-week hangover, Jets cover.

Packers -2 at Vikings: I guess I have to start taking the Packers seriously… I really didn’t think I’d have to do this year. At some point I’m going to have to take Steve McNair’s cyborg title and hand it over to Brett Favre… but with all the media saliva on him already, I don’t know if there’s any room for me. However, the Pack’s due for a let-down game. Divisional game against a tough defense. Vikings outright.

Ravens -4.5 at Browns: I think the Browns are starting to get a little over-rated considering they’ve been playing teams with no defense to speak of. The Ravens aren’t one of those teams. I said last week that I hate picking against the Ravens with more than 3 points as they only beat the Cardinals by 3. I’m going to do the same thing this week. Browns +4.5.

Seahawks -2 at 49ers: The first hint here is that the Seahawks are away. The second is that the Niners are not horrible. Seattle is still a mediocre road team. Niners outright.

Broncos +9.5 at Colts: Just when I say I don’t really want to pick the Broncos anymore they go and give them 9.5 points. I like the Broncos in most situations with that many points, so I’ll take it again here. Broncos +9.5.

Chiefs +12.5 at Chargers: I get that this spread is supposed to indicate the Chargers are due to crush an inferior team. Baby steps, though. I don’t think I can legitimately pick the Chargers to cover 12.5 at this point. Chiefs +12.5.

Steelers -5.5 at Cardinals: Are the Steelers due to play ANY A-teams this season? The Cardinals did manage to keep it close last week off a great little relief appearance by Kurt Warner. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly the hook appears this week. Cardinals +5.5.

Bucs +2.5 at Panthers: Jeff Garcia Bandwagon. ‘Nuff said: Bucs outright.

Eagles -3 at Giants: Well, the Eagles put up 56 points last week and the Giants held the Redskins offense to nothing in the second half. I’m also going to this game since the Giants have apparently been depressing enough that they’re releasing tickets to ticketmaster. Face value Giant tickets and I’m in. Giants outright.

Patriots -7 at Bengals: Until the Patriots stop crushing teams by 25 points, I’m not picking against them without a college spread…. which they almost had last week and STILL covered it. Patriots cover, 50 total points.

Speaking of fake listings… I came across an apartment on craigslist a couple of days ago for an apartment on the Lower East Side for $1850/month. This is not completely unreasonable as transportation on the LES kind of blows.

There was no contact info on the post so I e-mailed the link given in the listing. Someone responded to me within an hour giving me a link NYC Rent No Fee.com. The gimmick: register as a member for the low, one-time fee of $49.99 and you’ll be allowed to view all their listings. A quick Google search determined that, once you pay the fee, none of the apartments they list exist (shocking) and the give you a long list of no fee apartments in like… Bushwick.

I e-mailed a response asking if the scam really worked more than it didn’t. I’m still waiting for a reply.

I really dug Cheers and Frasier growing up, so I was happy to see that Kelsey Grammer finally got another gig. Even if he would be playing Frasier Crane on television again, I figured I liked Frasier enough that I’d give it a shot.

Back To You is your standard fare television sit-com set in the newsroom of a television studio. Kelsey Grammer plays Chuck Darling, a news anchor who left his anchor job in Pittsburgh 10 years ago to take a promotion. Eventually, he gets all the way to Los Angeles television before he has a Go F*ck Yourself, San Diego moment. After getting fired, the Pittsburgh television station he left 10 years ago welcomes him back. He returns to find Kelly Carr (played by Patricia Heaton) still womanning the same co-anchor desk he left her with 10 years ago. What he didn’t know is that the one-night stand he had before he left resulted in a baby, played by a fake fifth grader.
Pros

• It’s funny. It made me laugh. I didn’t watch it with a blank expression.
• The newsroom setting should keep it from getting stale. New people can be swapped in and old people swapped out without a lot of explaining.
• Heaton and Grammer had good chemistry in the first episode and each has enough baggage to fill a cargo hold. They work well together as they both have really good timing and delivery.
• Fred Willard!

Cons

• The supporting characters are horrifically stereotyped. The hot Latina weather girl makes jokes about how much she loves sex and how hot she is. There’s only so much mileage the writers can get out of these people.
• I hated Deborah on Everybody Loves Raymond. It got to the point toward the end of the show when I couldn’t even watch it anymore because of her. Later, when Robert’s wife turned out to be Deborah Jr, I could stand it even less. Patricia Heaton might be a really nice person in real life, but I can only see her as the over-reacting, nagging shrew she played on Raymond and, apparently, she plays the same character in this show.
• One can almost plot out the major plot points of the entire series between the two main characters already. They were separated for 10 years and have a 10 year old daughter together. There’s going to be the “job offer in another city” episode, the “will they or won’t they” episode, the “she’s dating another guy and I don’t like how he’s treating out daughter” episode, the “she finds out he’s her father” episode, etc, etc. If they keep the interim episodes funny, this doesn’t matter so much.

Final Thought: It’s a paint-by-numbers sit-com, but for the moment I like it. The DVR has nothing going on Tuesdays at 8pm so it’s attained series recording status. However, I could very quickly drop it if there’s a conflict.

Slack Sam discovers that, in order to heal his father of an incurable illness, his parents sold the soul of their firstborn child to the devil before he was born. They were tricked into conceiving after the devil blackmailed a doctor into telling them they were infertile. Sam wakes up on his 21st birthday to discover he is now a bounty hunter for Satan. He must return fugitive souls to hell.

Pros

• The writing involved making you root for a guy working for the devil is intricate. Take a guy who’s a slacker and a failure and give him a purpose. He’s working for a bad guy, but he’s not a bad guy. It’s fresh. And not fresh like “Yo, that was fresh” but fresh as in “not stale.”
• I can’t pick a character that I don’t like on the show. Ray Wise plays Satan in the Al Pacino Devil’s Advocate kind of way. He tempts, but doesn’t force. He’s suave… dapper… and the kind of guy you’d sell your soul to. He’s perfect. Sock comes across as the perfect comic relief and is a Kevin Smith character through and through. I like that type of character.
• The pilot didn’t stall. It communicated everything I needed to know without taking too much time off for Sam to whine about his situation. He works for the devil. There’s no crying while working for the Devil.

Cons

• Missy Peregrym’s teeth are almost disturbingly white. When she’s in a scene I can’t look away. I think I missed the part of life when teeth that look like dentures became attractive.
• It’s a CW show, which means I feel a little ghey watching it.
• Sam’s mother. I hope she doesn’t appear and whine and bring the mood down too often.

Final thought: Love it. Can’t wait for next week. It’s shaping up to be a good season for Sci-Fi. I can’t wait to check out Bogus Angel tomorrow.

W/P - Dolphins +3 at Jets: Congratulations, Jet fans. You have something to hang your hat on this season.

W/W - Cardinals +7 at Ravens: Just in case people are wondering about my notation: if I say Cardinals +7 it’s shorthand for “win with the points.” If I say “Cardinals outright” it means they’re just going to win. In this case, the Ravens won but the Cardinals covered, so I’m double-awesome. However, in Mediocre Bowl 2k7, the results were a mediocre 26-23. Points to Matt Leinart for going 20/27 against this defense, though. Too bad he didn’t end up on an NFL team. Too bad I’m not the first person to use that joke.

L/L - Chargers -4 at Packers: The power of the Patriots is such that they not only beat teams, but apparently crush the soul out of them. Watching “classy” LDT have media meltdowns is giving me great joy. For the record: how would you like to be Marty Schottenheimer right now? Do you think he watches Charger games on Sunday and just giggles maniacly behind his giant old man glasses? As an aside, do I have to start taking the Pack seriously now? I think I do.

W/W - Bills +15 at Patriots: My friend Hulse was convinced the Patriots wouldn’t cover. I tried to convince him to double or nothing the $30 he owes me from Redskins/Eagles on it, but he balked.

W/W - Colts -5 at Texans: I don’t know what to say to this. I still haven’t actually SEEN a Texans game this year so I have no idea what they’re all about.

L/L - Vikings +2.5 at Chiefs: I got nothing.

W/L - 49ers +8.5 at Steelers: The answer to this question is: No, apparently the Steelers don’t have to stop crushing people.

W/W - Rams +3.5 at Bucs: I’m actually the bouncer on the Jeff Garcia bandwagon, now. I got in on the ground floor.

L/L - Lions +7 at Eagles: So, just so we’re straight: does Donovan McNabb has to have at least one racial controversey before he’s ready to play each season? Is it like Willie Beaman’s vomitting in Any Given Sunday? If so, he should start getting out of the way early.

L/W - Browns +3 at Raiders: Well, Cam doesn’t have to Eat Poo and, frankly, I’m happy for him.

W/P - Bengals +3 at Seahawks: Pointing out that no, you don’t recover in one week after the Browns hang 51 on you.

L/L - Jaguars +3 at Broncos: Stop picking the Rookie QB, dummy.

W/W - Panthers -4 at Falcons: Nope, still no reason to pick them.

L/L - Giants -3.5 at Redskins: Happily, my clever ruse of picking against my team so the screw with me while gambling worked amazingly well. The Giant defense actually looked good. So good that they’re only a 3 point dog to a team that hung up 56 points last week.

L/L - Cowboys +3 at Bears: Ugh.

L/L Titans +5 at Saints: And, like that, it’s gone. Enjoy K-Ville, NOLA.

This Week:
- Straight up: 8-8
- Against the spread: 6-8-2

Overall:
- Straight up: 30-18
- Against the spread: 23-20-5

Locks of the Week: 2-2

Upsets of the Week: 0-1

I watched the 2nd Episode. I’m still not sure but it wins another episode.

As it’s getting close to October, Ms. L and I have finally started contacting some apartment brokers to get some idea of what we’ll get when we move. One thing that two years have wiped for my memory is that apartment brokers tend to be a lot about as trustworthy as used car salesmen. One quick run around Craig’s list reminded me of this as I find apartments listed as Upper East or West side when they’re in Harlem, Queens, or New Jersey, oversized studios listed as one bedrooms, and Ye Olde Bait’n'Switch.

For readers who haven’t dealt with the city, an apartment broker is a real estate agent that deals in apartments. Buildings list their apartments with the broker. The broker deals with filling the apartment. The broker gets a fee. The broker’s fee is usually 15% of the annual rent of the apartment. Therefore, if the broker finds you an apartment worth $2000/month the annual rent is $24,000, so you owe the broker $3600. Some buildings do this, some buildings don’t… buildings that do list their apartments exclusively through a broker. Why buildings do this I really have no idea. The broker is an all right way to go. They do most of the leg-work and are supposed to show you apartments that fit your budget.

So, this first broker I found in the The Village Voice. I was going through the apartment listings in the print version and stumbled across a number attached to a few underpriced-looking apartments. I Googled the number to see if it came up as a scam and it led me to the website for New York City Apartments, Inc. A quick web-search reveals a bunch of apartments with decent floor space for under $2000. The website promises that they’re the “best no-fee and rent stabilized apartment broker in the city.” Well, fine then. Rent stabilized apartments tend to be a little cheaper than the regular deal so I figured it was worth a call.

So we went to the office to meet with one of the brokers. I told him our budget and what we were looking for. He mentioned that the rental market is very tight right now and what we were looking for would be tough. “But,” I ask. “There were a list of apartments on your website right in our price range. A whole lot of them, actually. Like… 84 of them to be exact. They let us know that the Manhattan rental market changes quickly and availability changes rapidly. Strike 1.

So we sit down and start discussing what we want. One bedroom, preferably dishwasher, preferably elevator, somewhere between $1700-$2200. They send us out with a junior agent who brings us up into the far reaches of the Upper East Side. I was bright enough to bring the camera but not bright enough to make sure it had batteries.

Apartment One: East 72nd Street, Apt 8

Summed up by the following conversation:

Ms L: Where’s the shower?
Agent: In the bathroom.
Ms L: Yeah, that’s the first place I looked.
Me: It has no shower.
Agent: It must have a shower.
Me: No wonder it’s empty.

The smallish place, roughly 2,000 miles from the nearest subway line had a small living room and a small bedroom connected by an exposed kitchen. And no shower. And they were still looking for about $1700/month for it. Strike 2. This led to the following conversation with my friend Mike:

Me: It had no shower. Not only that but the broker made us wait half-an-hour past our appointment. I thought she was going to kill him.
Mike: The creepy part is that, not only would I not be surprised if she’d killed him, I’d be surprised if her heart rate broke 77.
Me: It is New York, I think the NYPD would understand. “Officer, he showed us an apartment with no shower in the middle of the work day.”
Mike: “Carry on, ma’am. We’ll call in the clean-up crew.”

Apartment Two: East 72nd Street, Apt 13, $1800/month

Same building but a higher floor and a little larger. Bonus: it had a shower. Unfortunately it was trashed with clothes. Matter of fact, it looked like someone was getting ready to move out. Ms. L smacked down the immediate kaybosh.

Apartment Three: East 89th Street, Apt B13, $2395/month

Hey, look at that. The first apartment they show us that’s really worth looking into was more than our budget. Not only that, but a fee! Color me shocked. We actually liked this apartment. It boasted a decent-sized living room on the 4th floor. The front window overlooked the back of the building, which was a collection of small backyards. The kitchen was a tiny stove and refrigerator with no dishwasher. Down the hallway was a tiny bedroom featuring the only bathroom in the house. This was the best apartment we saw all day, but the bathroom being located through the bedroom was kind of put-offish. We actually considered getting this apartment for a few minutes today until someone pointed out that if we divided out the broker fee, it would work out to be about $2600/month for the extent of a one-year lease.

So out of curiosity, I went back to the website and, lo and behold, the same 84 apartments were returned in my search results… surprisingly the Manhattan Real Estate market had changed quickly enough that the same apartments that were available on Thursday but not on Friday were back on the Market come Tuesday. Imagine my surprise.

Next plan: meander through TriBeCa and Downtown to see if I find random “Apartment Available” signs.

This was the first pilot this season I was very torn on. On one hand, I enjoy sci-fi. On the other, I liked this show the first time around when it was called Quantum Leap. Journeyman’s story is thus: one day Dan Vassar (played by Rome’s Kevin McKidd) begins moving backward in time. After a short trip where he gets to relive one of the Niners’ Super Bowl wins, he begins taking trips back in time to visit important points of his target’s life. Dan saves his target from an attempted suicide, saves the mother of his child from having an abortion, and later saves his child life. The first episode deals partially with this storyline and partially with the way Dan’s family deals with his sudden, mysterious tendency to vanish without a trace for two or three days at a time.

And there’s mystery afoot when we discover that his first love, played by Moon Bloodgood, might not be dead like he thought when he sees her moving through the time stream along with him.

• Pros
• At least for the pilot, the storyline of the main character dealing with what’s happening to him and how it affects the people around him is interesting.
• Any reason to see women’s clothes and giant cell phones from the 80s get screen time is fine by me.
• Dan’s a pretty complex character. He’s got a lot of baggage and he’s just untrustworthy enough that everyone thinks he’s either crazy or on a drug binge.
• The pilot told a solid story from top to bottom, including sprinkling in just a touch of what the f*ck to make me want to watch next week.
• The idea of him shifting back and forth through time is interesting. In Quantum Leap, Sam adjusted one major event in his targets life. Quantum Leap’s idea was that single major events shape people’s lives. This one takes in to account that there’s a lot of life left to live after Dr. Beckett leapt away. Also, it addresses one of the major design flaws of the Leap project: Vassar gets to go home. It also doesn’t drop him into a body three days before someone committs suicide. It drops him into the world a few minutes before it happens so he can stop it from happening
• Cons
• Kevin McKidd’s delivery doesn’t really do it for me. Confused, happy, and sad all seems pretty much the same. He should be very confused but doesn’t really convey it.
• An extension of that, Dan Vassar seems to accept his lot in life pretty quickly. I mean, I feel like if I started involuntarily traveling through time to put right what once went wrong it’d take me a little longer to stop being confused.
• This show is being added to an already crowded Monday Night line-up. Between this, Heroes, 24, Monday Night Football, and everything else: I’m afraid it’s going to get lost in the shuffle.

Final Thought: I enjoyed it… I didn’t find myself writing this instead of watching it and I think the story’s interesting enough for now. Upgraded to series recording.

I didn’t actually watch this last week when it debuted because I wasn’t ready to start burning through television yet.
Fox’s K-Ville is a cop show set in post-Katrina New Orleans. Anthony Anderson’s Martin Boulet is a cop who was abandoned by his partner during the Katrina clean-up. Two years later Boulet is cracking under the pressure of fighting a losing battle in the city. Cole Hauser plays his recently arrived partner Trevor Cobb.

• Pros
  • It’s a cop show not set in New York. Bonus points for originality.
  • The idea of dramatizing the crime in New Orleans is a good one. Although it will be interesting to see how they dramatize it. Smash & grab crime isn’t really interesting. I’d rather all of them not be about how much the rich white folk are trying to stick it to the Ninth Ward. That might get old quickly.
  • Ethan and Bernard from Lost found work.
• Cons
  • The show is about as stereotypical a cop show as it comes. The mis-matched partners who don’t trust each other at first but then become buddies toward the end. They form a shaky partnership at the end and Boulet agrees to keep Cobb’s dark secret: when the flood hit he was in prison, but since all of New Orleans’ computer records were wiped out, he was able to make a fresh start.
  • The characters in the pilot come off as sterotyped as every cop movie ever. Boulet and Cobb are the cops who operate outside the box and they have the typical chief who hates their procedure but respects their results. I’ve seen this movie before.
  • Parts of the show ring even less true than standard cop shows. After the first assault on a fund-raiser, the new partners take to the streets in a car chase. They’re shooting at the car they’re chasing… on the freeway. Probably not the safest thing to do.
  • The premise that all of New Orleans criminal records were gone and all the criminals that were in the prisons just had to walk out the doors to be free seems like a bit of a stretch. I mean, I know it’s a convenient backstory and everything and makes for an interesting character, but I think it probably can be explained a little better. It maps out a lot of future episodes. Someone else on the force finds out. Some officer remembers him. His old contacts expose him. His partner lords it over his head.

Final Thought: One more episode next week to give me something to care about. After that it’s off the list.

One quote to take away: “There’s more loose ends here than a whore-house.”

Freakonomics: A Rouge Economist Explores The Hidden Side Of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner can be summed up thusly: It’s that book that claimed abortion reduced crime… and oh did the talking heads flip out.

I’m not sure what other motivation one would need to check this book out. Surprisingly, this was on my bookshelf and not on by BookFlix list. Ms. L has a tendency to buy books of half.com. Why, I have no idea. I think she likes clutter.

Steven Levitt is introduced as “the most brilliant economist in the country.” He also admits in the opening pages that he’s really not good at economics. Instead, he uses statistics and financial models to try and solve the regular riddles of every day life. For example: If no expert was able to forcibly prove why crime dropped, why did it? Why do the homes of real estate agents always sell for more than their clients’ homes? How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real estate agents? How much does a name hinder your child’s future?

The book is broken out into six chapters, with each chapter addressing a different mystery. Chapters one and two are more table setting than ground-breaking. The first chapter addresses people’s tendency to cheat and studies how it can be prevented. How one can strike the correct balance of social, moral, and economic incentives to stop people from cheating. The second chapter, “How Is The Ku Klux Clan Like a Group of Real Estate Agents?” addresses the theory of information imbalance. That is: when you go to a realtor, especially before the dawn of the Internet, he had you at a complete and total disadvantage. He knows what houses in the area are really worth. He knows what the seller really wants. He probably has a pretty good idea of the trends in the neighborhood. But he doesn’t have to tell you. How were they like the KKK? It delves into the story of a guy who joined the KKK simply to find out their secrets. Information imbalance again: once everyone knew everything about the inner workings of the group, it lost a lot of its power.

These two chapters set-up the tools he’ll use for the rest of the book. They show the way that Levitt collects his data and the questions that he poses to assess the problem. The third chapter, “Why Do So Many Drug Dealers Live With Their Mothers?”, is an attack on the idea of “conventional wisdom.” He brings up instances of experts who create numbers and statistics and the idea that if something is repeated enough times and confirmed enough by the media, it becomes the truth. Together with information gathering and the vivisection of conventional wisdom, he gives some new insight into old arguments.

As for the abortion and crime association? It’s not that crazy. He begins with a history lesson. The ruler of Romania, declaring his country would be a bastion of New Communism, changed his country’s abortion policy from anything goes to completely illegal along with contraception. He then proceeded to neglect agriculture for manufacturing. All the children who were born were born to families who couldn’t afford them. When people are poor, they resort to crime. The very children who likely would have never been born in Romania were the ones whom eventually brought the ruler in front of a firing squad. So what Levitt did was to compare the abortion rates to the crime rate and discovered their was a correlation. In states like New York and California, where abortion was legal before Roe vs. Wade came along, crime rates dropped sooner than in states which didn’t allow abortion. Certainly a controversial topic but also one that is built on attacking conventional wisdom… that is, the 8 general explanations that people try to pass off as the true explanation.

The final two chapters kind of lost me. It goes off into questions about parenting. It addresses the things a parent does to encourage their children to learn and, surprisingly, it turns out that you can buy your kids all the books you want, but if you don’t actually read them they don’t help. It then goes off into a fun chapter about baby names and how some of the more interesting names in the African-American community may hinder a child more than help it. It goes through naming trends and mentions some doozies: including Temptress (Incorrectly after Tempestt Bledsoe), Amcher (named for the first thing the mother saw after birth), Shithead (pronounced shuh-TEED), brothers Winner and Loser, and brothers OrangeJello (a-RON-zhello) and LemonJello (la-MON-zhello). It sadly does not mention lil Apple Paltrow, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, or Suri Cruise.

This book is definitely to be read with an open mind. If you are completely and totally anti-abortion and that’s the only thing you’re reading for, you’ll certainly hate it. The reader gets a decent look at ways to solve problems by thinking outside the box; something most people in this country are so morbidly lacking.

Solid recommendation. Instead of returning it to the library, I will now set it back on the shelf to collect dust for all eternity.