A Stat Line Runs Through It

The peripatetic amongst us, growing up as we did on Nickelodeon and Nintendo (though I never had the former myself) have, in the age of instant access to glowing screens transmitting all manners of entertainment and information, have a hard time with hobbies. I mean real hobbies, too, one that require us to develop mastery of a skill for no reason other than interest in the subject matter or goal of the activity.

Hobbies are also solitary enterprises by nature. Be it making ships in a bottle or spinning furniture legs on a lathe or tying flies, hobbies are engrossments, fixations upon the minutiae of something that, generally speaking, pays poorly or not at all when practiced professionally. There are no famous ship in a bottle makers.

That's because you don't make ships in a bottle to be famous, though you may tire your friends by making them look at them. You may not even keep the fruits of your labor- how many tiny sailing vessels can cut cleanly through the oak of the b

uilt-in cabinets in the study, anyway, their prows proudly plowing towards Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy?

So it's also better if there is a shared groups of devotees of your hobby. It's great to make your ship in a bottle, but it's several orders of magnitude better if you can go to ship in a bottle making conferences, where ship in a bottle making experts weigh in on the relative merits and demerits of all sorts of tiny riggings, jobs and mizzenmasts. Hobbies require this in order to develop. Someone has to discuss and critique and suggest in order for the activity to standardize and advance. Otherwise, some of these yahoos putting vinyl sealant on their HMS Ark replicas might think that they're hot stuff, am I right?

Even if you have the interest, though, a lot of hobbies require the means. Sure, maybe you would love to work on cars or make furniture, but without a roof to keep the rain out (and heat to make the space useable in the winter, for those of us who have made the mistake of living in a cold climate) and an array of forged steel tools, you are S.O.L., my friend. Don't have a workbench to stretch and rig tiny canvas sails? Don't have a utility closet to keep all of the X-Actos and the Dremel and the tiny planks of oak?

Well, I bet you have a TV and a computer, and I bet your friends do, too. Thus are many of the hobbyists of the aughts equipped. And of all the hobbies that they choose, fantasy sports continues to dominate. Football is the most popular, but the obsession fly trap I myself have become adhered to is fantasy basketball. I'm an NBA fan going a long way back, and I have played in a league once before (in high school- weirdly, that team had many of the same deficiencies) and so, this year, I got a group of friends and co-workers together and started a league. Now I find myself disturbingly addicted to it. I check scores several times a night. I consider a waiver pick-up on a daily basis. I have used all three of my players add this week alone. I already know who I will add this week.

I feel fine about this, though, because I have turned fantasy basketball into a seriously cerebral holiday from reality. With Microsoft Excel as my ally, I am digging deeper and deeper into the giant piles of numbers that modern sports produces, and finding it much more rewarding intellectually than I would have imagined. I don't watch SportsCenter, and I usually choose to drift away from conversations about sports at parties or group gatherings, but I cannot get enough of projecting weekly scores and comparing the number of standard deviations away from the mean one player's assist-to-turnover ratio is. I create weekly power ranking emails and send them to my coworkers. I have created The World's Greatest Fantasy Basketball Manager's Dashboard Spreadsheet, and I am proud of it.

World's greatest is an exaggeration, to be sure, but I am proud of my handiwork. In the above dashboard element, I am predicting the outcome of the upcoming week's game by projecting the production of each player on my team in each of the eleven statistical categories my league competes in. I have other elements that evaluate the player's impact as compared to the league, my team, or on a weekly basis, factoring in the number of games played.

I find the process of working on this spreadsheet extremely satisfying. I have never worked much with numbers, though I have always had a preference for statistical data over anecdotal reporting, so it comes as a mild surprise to me that I am this engrossed in something that I think is, fundamentally unimportant. Who cares how many rebounds Josh Smith gets per game (a lot) or how many of them are offensive (also a lot) when there's starving kids in China or whatever? It's not the subject matter, though, it's just the exercise of it. I have several math-oriented competitors in this league. The last math class I took was freshman calculus, which was a repeat of senior year of high school's AP Calculus, and I got a C- in both. So, I am motivated to show myself I can do better, and this is how I am proving it.

It also has the hallmarks of a great hobby. It is solitary in the sense that you manage your team, have little to no contact with your competitors, and yet, there is a huge community of people out there that share your interest. The level of intellectual engagement is high, the ability to differentiate yourself through research and effort is, too, and the metrics for success (winning categories and, eventually, the league) are easy to measure.

My father made fly rods, tied flys, sharpened and waxed his own skis, trains horses, and on and on. I travel for a living and I don't care for the outdoors, so I guess it's fantasy basketball for me, for now.

Commercial Uses for Dinosaurs

November 20, 2008: Researchers at the University of Spaarenvaaltenaan in Neu Reuschenstrau in the Netherlands have successfully sequenced the DNA of a wooly mammoth found in Russia. This breakthrough could be the first step in "resurrecting" long-dead creatures by patching their incomplete genomes and bringing them back to life through the use of a modern host creature.

If we are to bring dinosaurs back to life, they will need to be commercially viable. Armies of eggheads could bring them back, but what's really difficult is figuring out how to turn a buck on 'em. I mean, the first one will be quite the tourist draw for whatever zoo or university beats everyone else to the punch, but after there are dozens of them, who cares? I mean, what does a dinosaur do, really? Smash things? Crush things in its giant mandibles (do dinosaurs have mandibles? are mandibles valuable?) and roar loadly? A little one-note. No, we will have to get creative in order to find a use for these mighty beasts.

Idea #1: Dinosaur Urban Assault Vehicles (DAUV, though a better acronym could be developed). Rather than have our brave young fighting men piloting steel vehicles through the hostile streets of enemy territory, what if we were able to option up some dinos for the task? There would be more than one trim level, with the base package being just the re-wired lizard, ready to be driven (they would be controlled through the use of a wireless handset, a la R/C cars or planes) all the way up to the top-of-the-line dinobot (possible trademark infringement, check Toyz R Us to verify) with back-mounted missiles, heated and cooled armor (to speed up or slow down the cold-blooded creature) and perhaps even a set of hifi speakers with which to play Ride of the Valkyries or something equally terrifying as it stomps its way into the hearts of our boys in uniform.

Idea #2: Dinosaur athletes. Think of it, total Olympic dominance for the country that develops them first. Olympic athletes must be humans, you say? That's racist. Pterodactyls lay waste to all long jump, high jump and pole vault records. Tyrannosaurus Rex doesn't need longer arms for soccer, and even if he did, you can't play too well if you've just been devoured by a T-Rex. Let Latvia whine - sweater technology would need to advance before the winter games would be threatened by snowboarding Velociraptors.

Idea #3: TV pitchmen. "Golden Acres Chicken is the best on the market. I would know; I eat 947lbs of it a day." Once the spots become oversaturated and Golden Acres decides to go another direction (note to self: do manatees eat chicken? Everyone loves manatees) sign him up for a reality TV show. How much better would Dancing With the Stars be if Fred Savage and Troy Aikman were bested by a stirring version of "Roxanne" by a 65 foot diplodocus wearing leather pants? Later, his descent into addiction and madness could be charted, Bonaduce-style, by E!

When I'm a Famous Rock Star

When I'm a famous rockstar, I will spell rockstar as one word, never capitalized, and will have cards made up with only my name and my profession. These cards will be printed on inconceivably expensive paper, embossed with a unobtrusive pattern, and will not expedite the process of contacting me. I will hand them out at high-class parties, where I will defyexpectations as I turn out to be smarterthanyoudthink. I will discuss poetry and architecture and current events at a level that will surprise the other sharply-groomed and urbane guests, some of whom will be women and will make eyes at me, eyes that I will return but will not back up with action, for joyfulness and decisiveness will not get you anywhere as a modern rockstar, of which the experience of being is supposed to make one feel gnawed hollow by caustic introspection and a thousand-paper-cuts-worth of disappointing human experiences with hundreds and thousands who love you but do not know you or like you.

This hollowness will have to be filled with drugs, at least for some period of time, or I will not have covered my bases and demonstrated my bona fides. I will know what bona fides means and use it the autobiography I will half ghost write, but I will not know that it is not pronounced as it would immediately appear it is to a native English speaker. I will marry, or at least seriously date, an actress of middling talent and without good prospects for long-term career longevity. It will not, of course, last, but this will again help set expectations low for the parties I am to defyexpectations at. After the implosion of this one very public relationship, I will learn me lesson, and begin to shape up. This is the important part, you see, the pseudo redemption, where I will learn to be merely contented by my millions, the balm of occasional bits of earnest but under-motivated philanthropy and many fine meals soothing my licentious nature and causing my figure to wax unpoetically, my psyche kept safe from the buffeting of aging not by the wild excess of a stadium tour, but by the mundane immoderacy of half-timbered English country homes and golf outings in tropical locales, with only the occasional sprinkling of infidelity and cocaine to remind me of my previous life as a different kind of archetypal twat. 

Over champagne flutes tilted back and emptied slightly faster than the average for the room, I will give captains of industry a name to drop and get myself an invitation to a Premier League football match. During the game I will leave the luxury box several times to walk around on the concourse level and gauge my current level of celebrity by recording (in my head, a talent that will develop with age and success) how many sets of eyes, broken down by age and gender, stay fixed on me just a little too long. I will return several of these gazes, mostly younger women, and will be asked to sign autographs, which I will do happily, as well as pose for photos, and will enjoy the feeling of an unconfidently-placed hand placed upon the back of my vintage leather motorcycle jacket, the hesitancy of the general public one of the last pools of humanistic behavior I can draw from.

Of course I will be deeply unhappy, for my book would be terrible otherwise, and the book tour is how you get back in the saddle. It gets you on television, where you are allowed to say silly, self-aggrandizing things without consequence. I will talk of my struggle with drugs, and my defunct relationships, and the minutiae of the moments surrounding the penning of my most famous songs, which will all be a load of rubbish, as most of my songs will have been written by producers and other musicians hired to maintain the momentum of my career. I will tell talk show personalities that I am doing great in a way that will invite speculation as to my sincerity, and I will transmit these pathos through the glances I shoot over my champagne flute to the other guests of the party, so they can go home and tell their friends, delicately, as if perhaps they should not betray my trust, that even if they could switch places with me... well, maybe for a day... I will be at my home by then, where I can spend just as much time as they do thinking about whether or not I should switch out the brand of soap I keep in the shower and put off calling someone, even my assistant, about putting in new gutters.

I will collect antique cars, which one of my children, conceived in order to save an ultimately doomed relationship, will destroy at least one of in a collision involving banned intoxicants, a member of the opposite sex and a feeling of gross entitlement. I will use the facts of this collision as a point of commonality with my rich friends not in the music industry. We will discuss our parental foibles, all of us simultaneously wishing we could talk about something more interesting, like sex, or politics, or things we would like to buy.

Needless to say, I will be terribly bored, always.