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Rah Rah Friday Jam

There was an obituary for Clarissa Dickson Wright, from some British cooking show called Two Fat Ladies, on a recent Smartest Man of the World podcast which included “Her choice for Desert Island Discs ranged from The Drinking Song by Verdi to Ra Ra Rasputin by Boney M.”  Like most opera or classical, I had heard the song Traviata by Verdi, but didn’t know the name.  I looked up the other song because I remembered that Boney M.’s Gotta Go Home was probably the sample for Danny O’Connor favorite Duck Sauce’s Barbara Streisand, and it didn’t disappoint.  It is an awesome jam with bizarre hilarious lyrics about a Nora-favorite Russian:

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Stats

Was listening to an interesting interview with Jonah Keri, a sportswriter for Grantland and Baseball Tonight analyst. They talked about writing articles from more of a statistical perspective including season predictions. The simple stats of injured players can really lame out the story of the Boston Red Sox losing a 9 game lead over the Rays due to either “Beer, Chicken Wings, and Video Games” or the Great Pumpkin, Dan Johnson, being very clutch. But simple stats can make it easier to understand that there are reasons that the Rays games have horrible attendance like being mostly surrounded by water, the original owner causing problems and being a young team.

Another great stat resource I just heard about via the interview with it’s founder, Nate Silver, is FiveThirtyEight.com. I know some readers of this blog, mostly just Neil, love simple charts but not always all the analysis that goes with it, but the topics seem pretty interesting. Check it out.

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Sea Cow-abunga

Nothing else to report except this update from Brian and Ellen’s travels:

BrianManatee

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