Sportsify aggregates what the major sports sites (CNN, ESPN etc.) are saying about upcoming games / races / mathces (NCAA Football, NBA, MLB, NASCAR, NFL), and turns that aggregation into a consensus pick on who’s going to win. According to the blurb on the site: “Sportsify combines the picks and power rankings from dozens of sports sites to build more accurate consensus picks and rankings.”

According to the blurb Adam wrote up on his personal site, “You can think of Sportsify like a Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic for sports picks and power rankings, aggregating all the #1’s and weekend favorites from around the web into one site.”

I like it.

Salina I’m as nowhere as I can be / would you add some somewhere to me, aww Kansas I’m kneeling, aw Kansas please.

Cleveland I ain’t never felt something so strong / been believing the words to my songs, Ohio I’m leaving, Ohio I’m gone.

…

Poughkeepsie hang up the telephone / I won’t answer your phone calls no more, New York quit calling, New York leave me be.

Changing the plans that I’ve been setting off / I’m scared by the way that my life’s getting gone, Carolina one day I’ll, some day I’ll come home,

Carolina one day I’ll, some day I’ll come home.

The Avett Brothers are a three-piece bluegrass / rock band from Concord, North Carolina (near my old Winston-Salem roaming grounds).

They played Saturday night in Denver, view the video from this song here, here or here.

One Source of Bad Information

There’s a boy in you about three
Years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty
Thousand years. Sometimes it’s a girl.

This child had to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
“Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”

You live with this child, but you don’t know it.
You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want

To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.
Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.

» Here’s another one of Bly’s: The Resemblance Between Your Life and A Dog

In the past 16 days I travelled 6880 miles (more than half done in my hardy Honda Civic hatchback). This incuded a wedding, a visit with my dad’s side of the family (four separate visits), two stops in New York City to visit friends, and one long drive across more than half of the country (it’s a good story, I’m going to tell it in its own entry soon).

The view from my new cubicle’s pretty sweet — we’ve got these panoramic windows in the newsroom, and I’m watching the sun go down on the Rocky Mountains right now. It’s my second day of work.

-Joe

I also know I never heard NASCAR on the radio until I found this place. People, if you’re like me and NASCAR makes no sense to you, you’ve gotta listen to a race on the radio. Without the aid of television, the announcers have to describe every little thing that happens, and why it’s happening. When they do that, you start learning about what’s going on down there. It helps.

» Check out the station’s web site at http://www.blueridgecountry98.com/

I got 13 rolls of photos back from the photo lab today, there’s one roll from my grandmother’s 80th birthday party last month that has so many shots of people laughing. I love it when small themes like that emerge. I have an eight-month backlog of photos I need to post online, it’s part of a massive catching-up project that starts soon.

Tomorrow my subscription to the Greensboro News and Record begins. Getting subscribed was a bit rough on the communication frontier, and the paper is actually mailed to my place (the cool part about that is it will arrive in my mailbox the same day it comes out. How that happens I don’t know). I’ve been doing some analysis at my job (at the Winston-Salem Journal) of the stories we produce vs. the stories that we pull from the Associated Press … looking at another paper, in a similar, close-by market will shine some perspective on the newspaper product. I think. It may be tricky for me to write about the results, since 1. It concerns my employer and 2. That implies I’m a biased source. But hey, I’m a journalist, I know how to handle bias.

And, finally, the motorcycle’s running again, and John French taught me a new way to kickstart the bike last night. I had been using just my leg — he showed me how to use my whole body. I love it when the tool you need was in you the whole time … it’s like finding your sunglasses on top of your head …

Oh, and one last part: Water balloons. Water balloons are awesome. Same goes for pillow fights.

Funny thing was, we got our food to go, and were pretty hungry so we just sat down for a bite before leaving. After the officer delivered that line we were done eating, so we packed up to leave. He must have thought we were leaving because of what he said. He got nervous, and tried some more stilted conversation. When we left he went over and struck up conversation with a group of Latinos.

The question is: Why would ya’ say something like that in a crowded restaurant? It’s not like we’re in some place where nobody understands english.