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A Quiet Day

Not much to report today. It has been mostly quiet. My wife is very enthused about the upcoming Rose Bowl football game. As most long-time readers know.... I am not overly excited about watching any team sport, so for me the game will be a rather big yawn.

I do feel outside the norm because of my lack of interest in team sports. It is easy for me to go months and months without actually watching or paying attention to any team sport. Baseball and ice hockey are relatively interesting for me to watch, but I have no passion or drive to root for any team over another. To me, group sports seem much like the lottery... pretty pointless in terms of my participation (as a watcher of the sport or a buyer of the ticket).

One time at my University, I was invited to participate in a weekly football game prediction pool. I participated, not because I gave a damn about any football team, nor did I want to watch any of the games. Instead, I thought it would be an interesting problem to try to create some testable theories about regarding the football teams. I read statistics about the teams in the papers and each week developed predictions based upon mathematical formula that I continually tweaked for each week. At the beginning of the season, I was rather crude in my mathematics, but as the season progressed, my predictions proved more and more accurate. I finished in the top 10% of the participants... without watching a football game. I found that mathematical effort enjoyable and fun.

Now, do not get me wrong. I am not some eggheaded, anti-sports maniac. I may admit to a *slight* eggheadedness, and I am somewhat professorial. But I do enjoy sports... and I do enjoy watching sports on television. The thing is, however, that the sports I enjoy watching are all individual sports.... track and field events, bicycling, gymnastics, golf, tennis, and even bowling, auto racing, etc. I can easily watch those sports for sizable amounts of time every weekend if I allow myself to. I just do not feel any sort of enjoyment or attachment to group sports. I do not know why.

PipeTobacco