SB Nation User Blog: Black Francis

Mass Murder at Fort Hood

Black Francis — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:18:49 -0000

I have to keep short as I am on an abbreviated lunch break. First I want to say that we should all pray in our own way for all those affected by this incident. Can you imagine what it would feel like if any of those casualties were your family? I mean you almost assuredly dread it every time they are deployed to a combat zone, but the fact that these people met their end so violently here at home on a military installation...that's just crazy.

I have some questions about this, though. And some of it may sound cold but I want you to know right up front that I don't mean it to be that way. They're just quesitons.

The shooter, who is apparently still alive, acted alone. He had two handguns. I've never been in the army but I assume officers are issued the standard M9 9mm pistol, and he may have got another somehow or maybe used different guns all together. But if he used M9s, as I understand it they can only hold a maximum of 20 rounds in an extended magazine plus another in the chamber. Between two guns, that would of course account for 42 rounds. 13 people were killed and another 31 were wounded. That adds up to 44 rounds, and I think it's a safe bet that he didn't hit his mark with every single shot. In fact he was taken down in an exchange of fire with a civilian police officer.

Anyway, the point is he had to reload at some point. Now it does take a little time to reload a pistol like the M9 and it's not very much, but I have trouble understanding how in a room full of trained soldiers this guy wasn't taken out before he shot so many.

I'm just having trouble wrapping my head around how this guy did this. You cannot fire two handguns simultaneously with any degree of accuracy. I've tried and I've seen far better marksmen than me try, and that was always at a shooting range. Even if the guy could do it that would explain how he shot a lot of people quickly, but even then at some point he would have ended up with two empty guns.

I just don't get it. There's something I'm missing. What is it? I've been hearing about this story on the radio all morning and it's been bothering me on several different levels. Any ideas about how, though? And yes it appears the guy as a muslim or something but let's please not get into that or politics or anything.

Kid with Cerebral Palsy

Black Francis — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:28:20 -0000

Kid with Cerebral Palsy

So there's this little girl with Cerebral Palsey. They need a little less than $30k to buy her a van with a wheelchair lift. Please consider donating a buck or two. Every little bit helps. This isn't fraud or anything. One of my friends' kids goes to school with the girl. Just trying to do something positive in the world for a change. LINK

OT: So what's your favorite, eh?

Black Francis — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:52:07 -0000

So I was thinking about my favorite GOOD movies. You know we all have our guilty pleasures that we enjoy watching more than films we may like and think are important culturally, so I had to cut out such greats as Gross Point Blank and
The Hudsucker Proxy (both of which I think are brilliant but probably not examples of great film making).

Following is a poll with a list of some of my favorite good movies, and I was wondering which of them the community liked best. Hope that a good discussion follows, too. I have included an "all of these suck" option for those of you with no taste whatsoever. Anyway, they're in no particular order.

Poll

Which do you like best? Poll closes at high noon on Friday.

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

10 votes

Midnight Cowboy

1 votes

The Last Picture Show

1 votes

2001: A Space Odyssey

4 votes

Network

1 votes

Apocalypse Now

12 votes

The Godfather (I & II)

62 votes

Dr. Strangelove (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb)

13 votes

Lolita (Kubrik)

1 votes

Cool Hand Luke

13 votes

Vertigo

6 votes

Koyaanisquatsi

0 votes

The Graduate

9 votes

133 votes | Poll has closed

OT: PIZZA. DOWNTOWN. GOOD. DELIVERY

Black Francis — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:25:28 -0000

I live just barely south of Downtown in a very large apartment building situated on Lamar Street, and yet I cannot find one decent place that will deliver here. I used to get my pizza from Carmine's, a little place on San Jacinto. But they've changed their ingredients or something and it's not good anymore.

It's my God given right as a Murican to be able to order decent NY style pizza and have it delivered to my door if I want to pay for it. And I do, yet I cannot find the place. I've searched Yelp. I've talked to friends but they have their heads up Zini's ass, and that's horrible pizza. I know some of you have to work downtown and you have to know of a good place.

Gotta bum ankle. Don't really feel like driving to go get it.

You can complain all you want about me making this fan post, but I do not care. Worse tripe has littered the fanposts lately and hell I'll even delete this one if I get an answer.

Thanks.

Hacktacular: A simplistic analysis of Game 1 vs. NYY

Black Francis — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:13:00 -0000

I was going to put this in the post-game thread, but it's not up yet and this seems to be a pattern anyway.

Inning/Pitches seen that inning/total pitches at end of inning/pitches per inning at end of inning)

1st – 12 (12, 12)

2nd – 19 (31, 15.5)

3rd – 7 (38, 12.7)

4th – 9 (47, 11.8)

5th – 17 (64, 12.8)

6th – 19 (83, 13.8)

7th – 9 (92, 13.1)

8th – 9 (101, 12.6)

9th – 8 (109, 12.1)

In five of the 9 frames, the Rangers failed to make the Yankees throw even 10 pitches. It should be embarrassing for another team to come on your field and screw you six ways from Sunday in front of all those people.

Also, Nelson Cruz hit a solo shot in the ninth to bust the shutout. Now down 11-1, FIREWORKS GO OFF AND MUSIC FILLS THE STADIUM??? I like what Chuck Morgan does, but I do not like that. There's not one fucking thing to celebrate when you're getting trounced at home and get a meaningless run in the 9th.

OT: Migraine Headaches

Black Francis — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:42:20 -0000

Okay. So I'm 32 and I've had "ocular migraines" for years. Since early college, anyway. For those of you who don't know, an ocular migraine presents with strange visual phenomna. Gray spots. Feeling like your eyes are crossed when they aren't. Flashing blobs traveling in front of your vision. They're really weird, but aren't generally accompanied by pain. Anyway they come on very quickly and go away just as quickly. There one second and gone the next. And, for me at least, they usually don't last long so I have never been too bothered with them.

Then my doctor tells me about five years ago that people with ocular migraines most often go on to have regular migraines. A long time passed and that never materialized. Until maybe a year ago.

They're getting worse. I'm not going to say they're the worst thing in the world. For me they're not, anyway. But they do suck, and can sometimes debilitating when they are happening.

I've been getting them with more frequency and for longer durations. I talked to my physician about it maybe two months ago, and aside from some pills I'd really rather not take there doesn't seem to be anything that he can do about it.

So, finally, my question is, how many of you live with this? They're fairly common from what I understand. For those of you who are on medication, does it help? Side effects? For those of you who are not, do you have any tips for living with them? Since light literally hurts my eyes all I know to do is to hunker down in a darkened room. That doesn't really help anything, though. It just keeps things from getting worse. What about accupuncture? I'm not a big believer in holistic and alternative medicine but I'd be willing to give some things a shot, I suppose.

And sorry for posting this here. I've been to some medical sites and forums, though, and haven't really gotten any basic, down-to-earth advice.

OT: Taxes

Black Francis — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:45:33 -0000

I should have hired somebody to do this like I have every year since I started making decent money. But I didn't, and I want to watch baseball (priorities, man) so I had to file an extension.

Went to IRS website and was directed to get form blah blah blah, and when I went to fill it out it seemed like I needed to have my taxes done before I could complete it.

Fail.

So I dug around the Google. Turns out Turbo Tax will e-file an extension for you. I followed the link and got in there, and at first it was almost as crazy as the IRS form. Did manage to complete it, but then it only gave me an option to print and mail it to Austin. Well, I don't have any stamps and live in the ghetto so that's no good. Would rather not deal with it tomorrow, ya know?

But after some more digging on the Turbo Tax site it turns out that they DO have an option to e-file an extension and it required all of about thirty seconds of time. So as a public service to my fellow Rangers fans, I am providing this invaluable link in case you're in a similar situation or whatever.

So they'll do that for you and for free, and now you can hire someone who knows what they're doing to prepare your taxes. Thanks, TurboTax! I may even use them, who knows. Any opinions on that?

Wii: Any good baseball games?

Black Francis — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 18:23:03 -0000

In spite of not knowing much about it and not being a video game person, I've been intrigued by the concept of the Wii for a long time. I have a hard time sitting still. Anyway, I finally broke down and bought one yesterday.

It came with a DVD called "Wii Sports" or something, and it has golf, boxing, tennis and baseball. I haven't tried golf but the others are amusing, at least. Just way over simplified. I'd like to get a real baseball game for the Wii, but I want to be able to "swing the bat" and "pitch". You know, do something other than just sit there.

So I've been reading and am confused. There are some baseball titles for the Wii, but from what I can tell not all of them take advantage of what the controller is capable of.

I'd like to know what you guys think has the best balance between "fun" and an approximation of baseball. I don't care if the characters are cartoon-like or not, but I would like it if it were MLB licensed with real teams, players, stats, et cetera even it's not super in-depth.

Any thoughts?

Momentus OT Development: I Followed Sharky's Advice

Black Francis — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:42:00 -0000

Sort of. Well, I actually did take him seriously. And while he's a scoundrel for not paying off his debt to ab03, I have to hand it to him on this one.

In a thread not too long ago he (as well as others) advised me to go with Vista and just buy the computer instead of building my own. That's exactly what I ended up doing and so far I'm annoyed but fairly pleased.

At 5am I was there at Best Buy not just to pick up the computer I ordered last night, but also to take advantage of a monitor deal they had going on. Got the second to last one of those...a nice Samsung widescreen. Also got a video card so I could run dual monitors. Haven't set that up yet.

So I get home and install the video card. Hook up the new monitor. connect the mouse and keyboard. Then, fearful of the horrors of Microsoft VIsta, I booted her up. Of course it had nine billion updates to download, but really it's been working great ever since. My mom's crashes ALL the time. In fact I had a lot of trouble with it yesterday while I was there for thanksgiving.

It's going to take some getting used to, but for several reasons I think I'm going to like Vista. And I'm writing this for two reasons. To give Sharky his fair due, and to say that those of you who said photoshop and stuff wouldn't benefit from a 64 bit system were dead wrong.

The computer I bought is a quad core Intel. Six megs of RAM installed, and I can get up to eight in there. Vista, as large as it is, boots up in a 1/4 of the time that XP does on my old desktop (to be fair it is messed up). Photoshop, Photomatrix, and Neatimage are only 32-bit apps but boy do they fly. Photoshop itself will open in three seconds. THREE seconds. 1 gig files are easy and fast to work with even though I also had a browser, e-mail client, anti-virus, and whatever else running in the background. Compared to what I had (Pentium 4) and my laptop (dual core Intel), this thing is a super computer.

And, finally, I have a question. The box came with a 300w power supply. The graphics card I bought isn't exactly state of the art, but its "requirement" was a 300w PSu. So the question is, worst case...what would happen? Would it screw up other components? The graphics card? Or would the power supply simply die? Would windows give me some kind of warning? The case has loads of space in general, but the power supply looks like a pain in the ass to change out.

Final questions: I've never worked with dual monitors and I haven't set them up, either. Is it difficult? With the wide monitor I got today there's less of a need for it, but it would still be nice when I'm working on my actual job. Anyway, I don't think I'll get into that until tomorrow...just wondering what kind of time I need to set aside.

PS -- Sharky isn't going to like this but either I'm going to partition the drive or buy a separate one and dual boot XP pro. Just in case.

Innings Pitched

Black Francis — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:26:31 -0000

The starters have to pitch some innings. I've looked at every playoff team for the last two years and their top three pitchers in terms of workload.

2008 AL:

TAM:: 596

BOS: 565.7

CHW: 633.3

CAL: 613.7

2008 NL:

PHI: 613.7

CHC: 600

MIL: 561

LAD: 595

2008 AVERAGE: 597.3

2007 AL:

BOS: 594.3

NYY: 566.7

CLE: 648.3

CAL: 580.7

2007 NL:

PHI: 544.3

CHC: 618.3

ARI: 633.3

COL: 547

2007 AVERAGE: 591.7

In comparison, your Texas Rangers top three pitchers:

2008: 491

2007: 429

The point is pretty obvious, isn't it? I don't think one out of those sixteen playoff teams failed to have at least one pitcher throw more than 200 innings. Many had two. In any event, their top threes beat the Rangers top threes all to hell. Millwood, TEX's IP leader for both years would've have made the third pitcher on I believe only one of those teams.