The Double Post Part Deux: Shaq Attack and Gone Fishin'

So just about every news outlet has talked about Shaq being on a botched child pornography raid. It's pretty amazing, I've seen about 200 different takes on it. There was a blog post questioning why Shaq was with the police. There was another more credible news outlet which seemed to have Shaq's entire police history. Apparently in LA someone complained about Shaq being in the police car when they were arrested, but the court said Shaq was an official sheriff's deputy of that county and thus had every right to be there. Finally, one other site talked about how the raid shows the unreliability of using IP address as a trace method. In any case, is there anything more scary for the stereotypical child molester than a 7 foot, 350 pound black man kicking down your door? Mark Foley apparently won't know though, since they couldn't seem to get his address right.

In other Shaq related news, the Moneyball theory was taken to a new level as a computer simulation replaced Shaq in the starting lineup for the Heat with Alonzo Mourning. David Stern declined to comment, but I will. As someone who has programmed computers before, I feel I'm quite qualified. My freshman year 3D Tic-Tac Toe computer game netted me an A...

This was despite a huge bug where the computer doesn't ever try to block you if you make a line from right to left, and also 3D had nothing to do with graphics, just the fact that the game has one more dimension to win with like 3 boards on top of each other, anyway I'm sure that was more confusing than helpful.

It's pretty obvious the sorts of numbers that the computer used to come to this conclusion. The amount of unecessary fist pumps after scoring, number of bicep flexing poses, ridiculous displays of emotion, and finally noise created after scoring any basket. These are all categories that Mourning absolutely trumps Shaq in.

In other basketball talk, someone in my fantasy league was trying to trade for Kevin Martin, saying he's a bench player and thus not worth a whole lot. This was countered with "Do you really think John Salmons is going to keep his starting job?". Funny, since the last post coincidentally talked about how much more talented Fred Jones is. This inspired me to google "John Salmons". Of course the first thing to come up was his ESPN.com profile which netted these great pictures.









That's right, 2 out of the 3 pictures are of Salmons being blocked, and the other is him getting shot right over.

His preseason stats? (From NBA.com)

Date	Opponent	Result	MIN	FGM-A	3PM-A	FTM-A	OFF	DEF	REB	AST	STL	BLK	TO	PF	PTS
Oct 27	vs.POR	W 84-78	28	2-6	0-3	4-8	0	1	1	1	2	1	0	1	8
Oct 25	@ SEA	L 103-88	22	1-2	0-0	2-3	0	0	0	1	2	0	2	1	4
Oct 24	vs.NOK	L 81-84	23	2-5	1-1	0-0	0	3	3	4	1	1	3	4	5

I also found this hilarious article on raptorshq.com entitled the 'The Importance of John Salmons'. Which besides the title, is hilarious on all sorts of levels. Among them is why blogs will never be considered serious journalism, except by lazy journalists and conspiracy theorists (why are you reading this then? I never said I was a journalist)

As a comparison, Fred Jones' ESPN.com profile has some rather tame pictures of him dribbling, another one fighting for a loose ball and finally him trying to posterize a New Jersey Net who has probably been cut by the time you read this (Awvee Storey, if he's still on the roster, gimme a shout). On a wholly unscientific basis, it would seem that Fred Jones is far less of a liability than fishboy.

Anyway, I just devoted like 3 paragraphs on John Salmons hate, so I think it's time to move on...

The Leafs lost back-to-back games with the Senators and Buffalo just won 10 in a row. The question begs to be asked "can MLSE buy the Buffalo Sabres and swap the teams entirely?" The current Leafs will become the Sabres and vice-versa. Also, once the Sabres become the new Leafs, what will screw up so that they lose and start to suck?

Finally, Devin wanted me to mention that Monday night football on ESPN was the most watched show in US Cable history. Of course, Cable in the US is hundreds of channels of crap and spanish shows versus only dozens of channels of crap on Network TV until 24 comes back on.