:: No Athlete ::

:: i am no athlete... any reader of fluxvapor knows as much after viewing the statistics of my recent return from rakkitbrawl retirement. irish sweater recently dropped me a line accusing me of playing against an imaginary friend because i had scored 3 (!) wins (in about 300 career games, which gives me a 0.01 +- 0.01 batting average). the sweater knows because he was my abuser back in the b-more before i met the dieter. anyways, i've recently been trying to get serious about the upcoming season, organize my goals and the like. the only conclusion i've come to is that i am no athlete. thinking back on my triumphs in the athletic venue only confirms one thing. i have a good shot of being spectacular compared to my competition if no-one shows up... usually anyway. a few examples to ponder: in little league soccer, i was the coaches first pick for goalie until the new kid who's brother was a pro-goalie for the cleveland crunch showed up. in high school i made the varsity lacrosse squad as a freshman. little did i know my position was defensive tackling dummy, and it was the first year of the team so there was no junior varsity for me to bench-warm... and as for cycling, i liked the time trial. used to do this series in maryland and have a few trophies from that: 1st place in the 19-23 age category with no-one winning 2nd or 3rd. cyclo-cross, i won a race when the feller ahead of me though he was done 5 ft from the actual finish and was already off his bike. i blew past like a *blur* and almost ended up in the pond. and in any state champs, if 10 people show up and 5 of them are from nj or md, i might be able to snag one of the 5 medals, on a good day, if i've been training like a dog. it's recently come to my attention that i might be no scientist either. i spent about 2 months developing a numerical simulation that takes a several hours to run. two weeks ago another feller in my group gave me two lines of code that show the same thing based on his analytic solution (thankfully his brother does not also play for the crunch). so in all respects, i'm fairly impressive. so long as there isn't anyone around to impress... ::

:: Gebnor returns ::

:: overcoming your inner sho_jo... after failing to make an appearance the last few games, gebnor has returned! it seems also, that for the first time in the history of the sho_jo/dieter/gebnor battle, dieter scored an unprecedented low of only 7 (!) points. this miserable score is denoted by the red arrow pointing to game 34. (side note to the dieter fans... the majority of games where sho_jo scored zero or less points have been omitted. however, sho_jo's average score continues to rise). congratulations to gebnor who is perfecting his blistering ace serve. thanks to dieter for capturing such a serve on film, a feat in and of itself!

:: Victory is (was) mine ::

:: special thanks to dieter for providing the stellar photography above. it's more he was sobbing rather than i was moving too quickly that caused the blurring. you see, i had just repressed the shojo and allowed the gebnor vander-vandecouter to take my place on the rakkitbawl court. it was a quite a trouncing - 17 gebnor, 15 dieter. but have no fear, gebor was quickly beaten back into submission by the dieter and has yet to make another appearance. even second game beginners are beating shojo in true plumpchump fashion. this was the first, and probably last, game of rakkit that i have ever won. it dates way back to the days of playing in the baltimore always the rakkitbridesmaid, never the rakkitbride. doing a statistical analysis of the recent performances, it is revealed shojo has a 2.8966 mean score, 2 median score, and a standard deviation of 2.2732. for the lay-folks out there, that means that 68% of the time i will score somewhere bewteen 0.6234 and 5.1698 (assuming my scores are normally distributed, with no skewness). plot coutesy of matlab (best buy has my camera for 8 weeks to diagnose if there is something wrong or not... the 'geek squad' couldn't tell. so you're going to get some matlab plots and stolen pics for awhile). ::

:: In A Little While ::

::
in a little while, surely you'll be mine, in a little while i'll be there
in a little while, this hurt will hurt no more, i'll be home, love
when the night takes a deep breath, and the daylight has no end
if i crawl, if i come crawling home, will you be there?
in a little while, i won't be blown by every breeze
friday night running, to sunday on my knees
...
a man dreams one day to fly
a man takes a rocketship into the skies
he lives on star that's dying in the night
and follows in the trail, the scatter of light
...
slow down my bleeding heart
::
~U2

:: Goundhog Day ::

:: straight from the prognosticating whistle pig of gobbler's knob... spring is on it's way! ::