Maybe a quick change up in the movies section and lets talk about movies that you are a bit embarassed that you like.

On top of my list would be Van Wilder. I know that it had a cast member from the Real World, but I enjoyed it. It is by no means a good movie, but it entertained me. I also really enjoyed Saving Silverman. The Neal Diamond cover band and Steven Zahn made it pretty funny. Zahn definitely needs more comedy roles; or roles for that matter as he seems to have disappeared.

Jump in your virtual confessional and lets hear some dirt.

Over on Blazers edge there is a constant conversation going on about finding a backcourt partner for Brandon Roy. One of the names that sometimes gets thrown into the mix is Felton. Given that I dont follow the Bobcats all that closely I would like to hear some opinions on Felton's overall game.

First off let me say that I think Felton is the quntissential poorly utilized player. In my opinion, he has been forced into roles due to injury, coaching changes, etc that have been to his detriment. I think this is reflected in his poor shooting as at times he has been forced into being the main scorer and defensives can key in on him relatively easily.

I think some of my precieved flaws in his game would be masked in Portland as he would not be forced into that much of a scoring role, mostly hitting open outside shots, and being a threat to drive the ball to keep the d honest, moving the ball around, and making some entry passes. I think that having Roy, Aldridge, and (fingers crossed) Oden taking up a lot of the defenses attention that a guy like Felton could pick up some low hanging fruit for himself while simultaneously making the game easier for Roy, Aldridge, and (toes crossed) Oden. Does this seem reasonable or am I just way off point here?

Also, I would be interested to hear any thoughts on Felton's defense. I have heard that he is not fleet of foot, but is he at least reasonable? Does he make an effort on that end of the court?

Any feedback and info on Felton would be great.

Good luck with next season and in the upcoming draft.

In the Blazers Edge quest for the most "should we get player x?" type of posts out there we invariably get a player x whose talents could really help this team, but who has questionable character. I dont want to name any names but their initials are Ron Artest.

I always liked the saying that you can have one ass (is that ok to type on BE if it is referring to an animal? We will find out.) on a team, but you cant have 2 because they will multiply. So I have been of the opinion that we can tolerate on questionable player due to this logic. After today I started to question the soundness of this reasoning due to the basketball well of knowledge that is This American Life. (The show aired on 12/21.)

Not to go into too many details, but they interviewed a researcher who did an experiment where he had groups of students work on a project with a monetary reward attached to it. In half the tests a student was planted in the group that was a bad apple and acted as either a jerk, a pessimist, or a slacker. The usual thinking is that groups are so powerful that they will pull one bad apple into line, but this study showed that the opposite happened. The bad apple was able to destroy the groups ability to work together. So from this study we might conclude that we cannot tolerate even one bad apple on the Blazers.

That is not where the story ends though. One of the groups that had the bad apple planted was able to stay on task and accomplish the goals of the project despite the presence of the bad apple. What set this group apart? They had a student who was the son of a diplomat who was very good at diffusing conflicts by asking lots of questions, which also helped people feel that they were contributing. To me that type of natural leadership is demonstrated by Brandon Roy. So I am now conflicted as to whether or not the Blazers could tolerate a Ron Artest like player due to Brandon's strong leadership.

Let me make a bit of a case on why I think Brandon is the type of leader that can keep a bad apple from ruining the Blazers. Exhibit A: the 2006-2007 season. Some may remember that we had a bit of a problem child in Zach Randolph. Brandon managed to wrestle away control of the team from Randolph and got us playing some better basketball and gave us all some hope for the future with his ROY award. This also might be used as evidence why we cannot tolerate a bad apple as we didnt win much that year and Randolph still got a lot of shots in the offense that were of questionable quality so Brandon was not able to fully real in Randolph.

A brief argument against bringing in any sort of questionable character may be the decision of KP to keep Miles away from the team during his rehab. KP, who I think has proven to be an excellent judge of character and very capable of crafting a winning culture, may not have been positive that Brandon would be able to take control of the team while having two bad apples to overcome. In KP and Brandon's defense maybe KP may have been playing it cautious as he did not know the full extent of Brandon's leadership, or KP may have been of the school that one ass is fine, but 2 are not.

To BE readers. Does this team have the leadership to tolerate a talented yet troubled player? You can answer thoughtfully in the comments or ignorantly (j/k) in the poll.

Let me put all my cards on the table and say I am a life long Blazers fan living in the SW.

If you are still reading please let me in on the best way to get to games. I am hoping there is some sort of park and ride available, or maybe a rail system to the stadium. I am coming from Albuquerque so I dont really have a good way of figuring this stuff out.

Hope I see some of you at the game. I will be wearing a Martell Webster shirt and hoping that the Blazers can get a win.

Any advice on this would be helpful.

It is late, I have a cold I cant shake, and there is no junk drawer up yet.

I will get the junk rolling with some absolutely putrid garbage

I watched the movie clay pigeons with my girlfriend tonight. I think it is a very underrated film with an excellent performance by Vince Vaughn. Earlier in the afternoon we finished watching Fire in the Sky. That movie scared the junk out of me when I was a kid.  Getting excited about watching olympic track cycling but the yags who run nbc cant be bothered to put in online yet. All I can say is that if Theo Bos were American no one would care about Michael Phelps. I dont know why but I can muster any enthusiasm for what he has done. I guess the terrorists have won again.

Now a silly poll

I am such a slob that I just leave my trash in drawers rather than disposing of it in the proper receptacle (fanshot.).  

I always get excited about the Olympics and then I never watch them. I did watch the end of the road race and I have to say it was rather unexciting. Cancellera was the only impressive thing. He bridged to Rogers and the Russian and then pulled them up to the leading 3. That dude is made of some hard bark.

I really like the term "hard bark" after I heard it in no country for old men, but I have a hard time using it in casual conversation.

now it is time for a worthless poll which may elicit endless quotations.

Time again to fill up the junk drawer with the bile of blazers edge. Hopefully you have all repented for your monday-saturday sins and are ready to start a holier and more sanctified version of the junk drawer.

Now, as is so popular in these posts, let me add a few non sequiturs to get things started off right.

I am finally getting a bike with gears on it. I just ordered the last of the parts and then I will be in gear city. My knees hurt and I am tired of being lumped in with hipster trash just because I ride a fixed gear. I get it all ready. I look like a hipster, but I have looked this way for the past 10 years and I am too lazy to change so I am just going to have to ride it out (pun intended.). I loathe hipsters and their garbage music. I am not interested in your silly bands that are just rehashing new wave bands that I previously loathed. Get the Bad Brains s/t and learn what awesomeness really is.

Also, I just watched forgetting Sarah Marshall on Dheepan's recommendation. It was not half bad. I would give it 3.5 starts on netflix if netlix got with the program and gave me the ability to give half star ratings to movies. I also should not have watched this movie as it was very sentimental and made me miss my gf who is out of town right now. I wish I knew how to keep these tears from flowing and this heart from hurting, but I dont.

When is the next Sherman Alexie post going to happen. His stories make me run through a gamut of emotions which scares and entertains me. We are really lucky that he has taken time to acknowledges us at all. 

I should probably stop now as stream of conscious writing is for dirty bongo playing beats.

I am finally caught up on the Tour stages as today was a rest day and now I can ask if any other BE'ers are watching the tour.

Let me give you my unexpert opinion.

Cunego is riding like a total chump. He skipped the Giro to focus on the tour and he looks even worse than the years he did the Giro and the tour. He is going to have some serious explaining to team management why he is putting on such a suckfest in the race that is supposedly his season goal.

Valverde: I have always like this dude, but I have doubted his ability to win grand tours. Even though he was touted as a pre race favorite he is showing why he is a great one day racer and not so hot in the stage races.

Denis Menchov: Yawn...call me when he is not just following a wheel.

Cadel Evans: my favorite to win the race. He had a bad crash two days ago but hung onto finish the stage and captured the yellow in yesterdays stage. Awesome gutsy riding so far.

Frank Schleck. We have been waiting on you for a few years Schleck. Good to see you are finally putting together to be a contender.

Riccardo Ricco: Does not understand team strategy and even attacked when his own teammates (that is right teammates plural not singular) were up the road. You were a DB in the Giro and you are a DB now, but I like your attacks in the mountains.

Christian Van de Velde: Where did you come from. In the mid 90s you were a track rider who could barely hang on. Way to go.

Kim Kirchen: you held onto yellow more than anyone expected. Awesome

Those are my thoughts for now. Hopefully people will jump in and tell me what an idiot I am. Just like when I post about basketball.

If you like this rec it so it can stay up till the Tour finishes.  Honestly, summer league is not that exciting.

First let me throw out what I thought was an interesting question that this talk brought up. Does the NBA need to figure out a way to get more parity to increase the popularity of the sport? Asked in another way, are there enough upsets in the NBA to make it interesting? If not, is it worth investigating means of making better league parity to make the game more exciting?

Onto the recap of the talk; what happens when you take a bunch of nerds who dont really like sports and make them listen to a talk about sports for an hour. A lot of eye rolling and uninspired technical questions.

I would say the talk was pretty uninspiring as the work did not seem that new or interesting as they guy was basically flipping a weighted coin to determine the outcome with the weights being based on each teams record. After he introduced this seemingly overly basic method  of determining wins he went on to something I found to be more interesting. He made a basic formula for rate of upsets which is the number of times the lesser ranked opponent beat the higher ranked opponent divided by the number of games played. The NBA had the lowest rate of upsets, which prompted me to  come up with the question at the start of the post. The rest of the talk was about different scenarios like playoffs and tournaments but nothing that was that interesting or even predictive. Finally he got into his true motivation which is studying competition in other phenomena where data is less readily available.  Again I would say this stuff is not too exciting and I doubt it has much predictive power, but I need to go over this a bit and run some simulations to see what happens.

Thanks for reading. I have to get back to nerding it up.

A man of mysterious origins. The sole reason you would never let a child read Blazers Edge. A cold blooded killer with a cheshire grin and an insatiable bloodlust. Tominhawaii is some of these things and more. To get a deeper look into the mind of a man that you already know too much about read on.

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Abstract

I made a new metric that compares players by position by taking that their per minute pace adjusted stats, averages them, and then compares each player to the average and then sums each players difference from the average for all relevant categories. I used two different methods for weighting shooting percentages. The first does no weighting and the second weights by pace adjusted per minute shots attempted.  With no  weight on shooting %s I found the top 5 pgs to be Chris Paul, Jose Calderon, Jason Kidd, Chauncey Billups, and Baron Davis. When I weighted shooting %s the top 5become Chris Paul, Jason Kidd, Baron Davis, Jose Calderon, and TJ Ford.

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think most of us can be in agreement that Oden, LMA, and Roy will form our "big 3", but how does this stack up against other big 3s? I am not talking about the McHale, Parrish, and Bird type of big 3, but historical big 3s. For example how does our big 3 stack up against the Three's Company big 3? Do we even compare to Tolkien's big 3? I am hoping the insightful BEdgers can come up with some interesting big 3s and compare and contrast them to O.R.L. (I am obviously also advocating that we call our big 3 O.R.L. as well.).

Let me start the ball rolling with one of my favorite big 3s; Einstein's  1905 papers.

First off we have the photoelectric effect, where Einstein postulates that light is not necessarily a wave, which got the ball rolling for quantum mechanics, lasers, AMO physics, etc.

    I am afraid that unless Greg Oden averages 50pts/g,50rebs/g, and 10blks/g next year nothing will compare to this seminal and nobel prize winning piece of work.

Special theory of relativity. A lot of interesting things come out from this paper and it revolutionizes the way we think about time and space. It also caused some religious uproar due to its' possible support of moral relativism. It opens the door way for better explanations of phenomena at the level of the universe and the atomic scale as well. If you like your GPS system then you definitely like this paper. It also paved the way for General Relativity.

    Again, it is going to be tough for any of the Blazers, together or alone, to top this one.

Brownian motion. Explains a phenomena, the random jiggling of molecules, that had been observed for centuries, but never explained. I believe this work was later improved upon by Nazi sympathizer Debye.

    If any of Einstein's big 3 are in reach of O.R.L. it is definitely this one. I think a 20/12/2 season by Oden, a 18/5/7 season for Roy, and 17/8/2 by LMA will firmly let O.R.L. leap past these giggling molecules.

Lets hear yours. I am waiting with baited breath for TominHawaii's response.