As NBA fantasy experts, we all know that the last ten games of the regular season are usually a bit of a joke. Ordinarily, this would be the time that we would tune into the NCAA tournament while NBA guys we’ve never heard of finish the final pre-playoff stretch. This year, though, is an extraordinary one.

New Orleans is currently at the top of the Western Conference at 49-22. Phoenix’s record is 48-24 - which is just 1.5 games behind New Orleans. What’s unbelievable is that Phoenix is currently 6th in the conference, which means there are four teams sandwiched in that tiny space between New Orleans and Phoenix! Then there’s poor Denver, who is only 5.5 games behind New Orleans and they’re in the dreaded 9th spot (only the top 8 make the playoffs). Although the season is almost over, Denver shouldn’t be too upset because they still have a chance to make the playoffs…. and a chance at finishing first in the conference! This is crazy.

In the East there are still six teams fighting for the final playoff spot. The current holder of the 8th spot is my beloved Atlanta Hawks. They’re trying to hold of the Nets, Pacers, Bulls, Bobcats, and Bucks.

So while you’re cheering on Davidson to an NCAA championship, don’t assume that the NBA has nothing to offer, because the pros are showing just as much fight as the kidos.

Has anybody been following the 700MHz auction or it’s results. I feel like I should understand what’s going on, but I don’t. Somehow, the fact that Google was bidding, but hoping not to win, increased the chances that “consumers whose devices use the C-block of spectrum soon will be able to use any wireless device they wish, and download to their devices any applications and content they wish.” I understand that google didn’t want to win, and I understand that this will all help their android platform, but I don’t understand how.

Official Google Blog: The end of the FCC 700 MHz auction

Have you ever wondered why you are not a pro footbal player? Here’s the short answer. Meet 21 yeard-old Vernon Gholston, a defensive end projected to be picked up in the first round of this year’s draft. He’s 6′3″ and 266 lbs. He jumps like Lebron James (42″ flat-footed vertical), can pump iron like Hulk Hogan (can bench 225 lbs 37 times), and his peformance in the running tests will be better than some of the running backs drafted, including his 40 time of 4.57 seconds.

Found this little gem going through some stuff at my parent’s house.

I just read a pretty interesting interview with Michael Pollan, who has a new book called In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. The inverview is a bit scattered, and long, but I found it really interesting and well worth the read. The guy seems to really know his stuff regarding the problems with our industrialized system for producing and distributing food.

The point of the book is to give people some good rules of thumb when trying to eat healthy. He is suggesting, mainly, that we eat whole foods, and pay less atention to “nutritionism” which is the idea that everything you eat can be viewed as a collection of individual nutrients, and that some nutrients are good and some are bad. Here are some good quotes:

Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don’t think so. I don’t think we want to change our eating decisions based on nutritional science.

[policy makers can] talk about saturated fat … about antioxidants, but you cannot talk about whole foods. So that is the kind of official language in which we discuss nutrition.

Conveniently, it’s very confusing to the average consumer. Conveniently to the industry, they love talk about nutrients, because they can always — with processed foods, unlike whole foods, you can redesign it. You can just reduce the saturated fat, you know, up the antioxidants. You can jigger it in a way you can’t change broccoli. You know, broccoli is going to be broccoli. But a processed food can always have more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff. So the industry loves nutritionism for that reason.

it’s a literary scientific experience now going shopping in the supermarket, because basically the food has gotten more complex. It’s — for the food industry — see, to understand the economics of the food industry, you can’t really make money selling things like, oh, oatmeal, you know, plain rolled oats. And if you go to the store, you can buy a pound of oats, organic oats, for 79 cents. There’s no money in that, because it doesn’t have any brand identification. It’s a commodity, and the prices of commodity are constantly falling over time.

So you make money by processing it, adding value to it.

people don’t really think about food in terms of climate change, but in fact the food system contributes about a fifth of greenhouse gases. It is as important as the transportation sector, in terms of contributing to greenhouse gas. It’s a very energy-intensive situation. What we did with the industrialization of food, essentially, is take food off of a solar system — it was basically based on photosynthesis and the sun — and put it on a fossil fuel system. We learned how to grow food with lots of synthetic fertilizers made from natural gas, pesticides made from petroleum, and then started moving it around the world. So now we take about ten calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food energy. Very unsustainable system.

if you look at the layout of the average supermarket, the fresh whole foods are always on the edge. So you get produce and meat and fish and dairy products. And those are the foods that, you know, your grandmother would recognize as foods. They haven’t changed that much. All the processed foods, the really bad stuff that is going to get you in trouble with all the refined grain and the additives and the high-fructose corn syrup, those are all in the middle. And so, if you stay out of the middle and get most of your food on the edges, you’re going to do a lot better.

I’m a big fan of firefox’s spell check, but it only works in big <textarea> fields not small <input type=”text”> fields. Or so I thought:
How to eliminate speling mistkes in Firefox text boxes - Download Squad

So for all you out there who found the misspelled titles of my blog entries quaint and endearing, sorry but you’ll just have to console yourself with all my other quaint, endearing qualities

I just found an great debut album today. On For Emma, Forever Ago, Bon Iver offers a unique neo-soul-indie-folk flavor that often sounds like TV on the Radio playing an unplugged set at 3 am. You will certainly love it if you like Band of Horses, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Phosphorescent, Iron and Wine, Wolf Parade, or Sunset Rubdown.

I’m not sure how many people besides Joel/Boo/Me are watching and loving Battlestar Galactica, but if you aren’t you should be. I just found this picture of the cast posing as Da Vinci’s Last Supper, as if the show didn’t have enough religious overtones….

Check out the picture here at Flickr.