Goal recap

Looking back on 2010's goals and thinking of this year's goals.
1. Did not crush many enemies.
2. Battled some cosmic evil.
3. Sought a little justice.
4. Did gain some weight and then lose some.
5. Didn't quite escape from the jorb, but, yes, I actually did do this. Won't comment publicly.
6. Didn't really do this.
7. PL total way over 500kg now, but not quite there on the olympic lifts.

This year's goals:
The first three are always the same.
4. Definitely escape the jorb this year or make it (pay) significantly better.
5. Indulge in some sort of "intellectual stimulation hobby" like chess or what-have-you on a regular basis. I've been playing cards a bit lately. Something with measurable levels of achievement and the potential for high levels of potential intellectual involvement.
6. PL total of 600 might be a bit much to shoot for. 550 is a little low. I'll still say 600. 230-140-230? I'm not going to have an OL goal.

EDIT: Adding a goal.
7. I suppose I should have some sort of goal about more regular social event type things, like board gaming nights or card game nights, especially since there are now quite a few sets of young couples around.

What I Have Been Up To Lately

1. I've been playing piquet quite a bit lately. It is a marvelous game that feels like a board game in some ways. I hope to get the wife to start playing at a decent level. So far I've managed to figure out the basics of discarding and trick play, but I need to get better at sinking in declarations and counting cards in general. For those interested in learning the game, I would recommend keeping the following outline in mind to make sense of the rules. There are three phases: exchanges, declarations, and play. You exchange to improve your hand, declare things about your hand to score points, and then play out the hand for more points. These are all distinct phases of the game. The elder hand should almost always trade five cards and should rarely discard from the longest suit. Go for the point and tricks. A beginner should probably just make the biggest declarations possible, as that is usually the best bet. Beyond that, it's stuff you can figure out on your own by playing against a computer a few times. Three things: Pagat's rules page, Cavendish on Piquet (1901 edition, the best one), and MeggieSoft's program. We thought of finding a two-player card game because games of skill, like chess, would either be too one-sided or be something I wouldn't be interested in. That is to say, I don't think it is realistic to expect my wife to ever become a match for me in chess and I don't think I'm interested in learning a different pure game of skill.
   
2. I had hoped to squat 500# by year-end and was coming rather close, but travel plans and now a minor back injury have put me out of the running. I should make it in January, though.
   
3. I suppose I'm doing stochastic stuff at school. Woo stochasticity.
   
4. I'm almost done with the Aubrey/Maturin series. I highly recommend it even if you don't typically enjoy "genre fiction". You don't have to read through the entire series, but reading through the first few will pay off. I think the second book is even better than the first, for instance. I'm on the 14th book and think the quality has not waned (though I would say #2 was the high point), but I do admit that getting this far requires you to be a fan of the series, if not the genre. My recommendation is to try the first three, maybe four, and then decide whether you want to continue. You can find many of the books at a very reasonable price used on amazon.com. I paid less than $100 for my twenty books, including shipping. I found a large number of them for either $.01 + $3.99 shipping or $3.99-ish + super saver shipping. This series of books is also what sparked my interest in piquet.

So that's what I've been up to lately.

EDIT: BoardGameGeek has a very helpful cheat sheet for piquet that helps make sense of all the scoring.

When The Simpsons Started Sucking

I don't know what prompted this, probably some random link I followed somewhere, but I found a website that clearly indicates when The Simpsons started sucking. I pretty much stopped watching regularly during season 10 and did not watch it at all after season 13, so I am not able to comment adequately about its continued slump, but I agree with this summary from a brilliant site:

Seasons 1-6 – The Simpsons
Season 7 – One Bad Episode
Seasons 8-11 – Mayday, Mayday, we’re going down!
Season 12+ – Zombie Simpsons. It has no pulse and no intelligence but it just won’t fucking die.

Zombie Simpsons ManifestoI have the first 5 seasons ingrained in my head pretty well and seasons 6-9 decently because I watched them when they came out and caught them in syndication over and over in my youth. They were on at 5 and later both 5 and 5:30 and I didn't have much to do in that time slot between my paper route and dinner - this was before the internets.

Somebody posited that the peak was the Monorail episode. That sounds plausible. It was season 4. I dare say the Monorail episode is one of the best things that has ever been on TV.

This reflection only makes me more mad that the "Jurassic Bark" episode of Futurama lost to an episode of The Simpsons.

Communism

Communism is bad: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/museum/musframe.htm

God Bless America

I was at an event, a conference of sorts, with some interesting speakers, including Colin Powell. At the start of the event, they played the national anthem, and I stood up, hand over heart, looking for a flag (didn't look around like a yokel for too long, didn't see one, so I looked at the singer, found it later), in accordance with the suggestions put forth by Congress in the Flag Code. In the afternoon, they sang "God Bless America" and I did not stand. There are a number of reasons, but here's the one relevant to one of the purposes of this blog: the panheresy of ecumenism. The song indicates that it is a prayer, and I don't engage in acts of public prayer with heretics in accordance with canon law under threat of excommunication.

Apologetics

I read some boring apologetic article from some Catholic about why he didn't convert to Orthodoxy, and this got me thinking about the silly futility of apologetics. The only evidence I need to prove that Catholicism is wrong is that they do not commune infants. No bombardment of ratiocination can overcome that fact which conclusively proves they are wrong.