Odds on Favs

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger then their democratic state itself. That in it's essence is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group. - FDR

I see Madison has been voted one of the top 10 cool places for 20-29 year olds.   Why you ask? Well because of the normal jobs and so forth you have the "quirky, progressive and hyper-literate urban culture".    What?  hyper-literate urban culture?  I'm not actually sure what that is.  Overstimulated knowledge of literature?
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I visited the new brewery in Columbus, right across the street from the F&M Bank (sucks to be you "who's") .  They have submitted all the paper work, have the liqueur license but the brewers license will take some time.  On average it's taking 3 months to get the license as the government is understaffed and are forbidden to hire more (smaller government and all that).

They finally got their building permit and construction is now going at full tilt.  I stopped in and took a photo of the hectic, almost crazed level of construction.

 
It won't be long now until Hyper Street . . . oops  Hydro Street Brewery will be serving it's first pint of craft beer.
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Check out this panorama of Lake Geneva I stitched together.

Lake Geneva - about 150 degrees. 

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I just went out to look at my rain gauge and found a beautiful Monarch Butterfly trapped in it.  I put him on some "warm" rocks.   We had 0.23 inches of horizontal rain yesterday. Sustained 30mpg winds last night about midnight. The house was a rockin.

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Brewers - I think one of the biggest reason the Brewers will win the series against AZ is the bullpen.  KRod could be an MVP on the team.  Not that he has pitched THAT well but just having him has solidified the bullpen.  It's like he was the missing piece and all others now have their place.

The big question is will we see Slumpy McGoo or Hairston at 3B.  It's sad when Counsell is totally out hitting Slumpy in September.

Let's look at both teams and see how they match up. I'll use  RC27 for hitting  (Runs Created per 27 outs) for the 2nd half of the year.

C Lucroy  3.59 Montero 6.06
1B Fielder  7.95  Goldschmidtz 5.52
2B Weeks 5.11 Hill 6.56
SS Betencourt 4.00 Bloomquest  4.01
3B Slumpy McGoo 3.23 Roberts 4.98
LF Braun  9.37 Parra 6.11
CF - Tony Plush  5.00 Young 4.08
RF - Hart 6.85 Upton 7.23

So the Brewers average 5.64 runs per game. The D'Backs 5.57

Pitching staffs the 2nd half  Brewers have an ERA 3.08  D'Backs 3.48

Brewers win series 3-1 taking both at home and one on the road.

If you are wondering about Miller Park - this year Miller Park was 10th out of 30 for giving up the long ball. 6th in hits,  8th in doubles and 8th in triples and overall 10th in runs.  Chase Field in Arizona is 5th in runs 10th in HRs, 5th in Hits, 5th in doubles and 6th in triples.

Hold on to your hats - two hitters parks. 

Game one the Brewers are -139 to win  and  large favorites to win the series at -170. Brewers are +800 to with the World Series while the Phillies are +180

Phillies are -220 to with their 1st game and  -290 to beat St. Louis!
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Have a great weekend and let's go for the trifecta!  Brewers, Badgers, Packers. And yea - I'm rooting for the Phillies!  I hate St. Louis more then Philadelphia!

Here is an oddity - who had the BEST pitching outing of the year in the Majors?    Chris Capuano!  9 innings, 2 hits, no runs no walks and 13 Ks and 122 pitches.  WHO KNEW!! 

rod

Whats a little dent anyway.

I was a little off with my prediction.  If you remember two weeks ago I predicted this

Brewers  95 - 67  .586   ----
Cards      88 - 74  .543     7 games behind!

and in reality the final outcome was

Brewers 96-66
Cards     90-72  6 games behind

I was close.

ESPN will be in Madison for the Game of the Day and tickets are at their all time highest price EVER (which is a redundant sentence) for the game.  it is expected that there will be 40,000 Nebraska fans in Madison NOT going to the game. Madison will be a very crazy city Saturday.  I bet there will be puke, or shall I say "tactical chunder" everywhere on State Street. 
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Being a fashionista I love watching the new fashions that are being pushed on woman and I believe they totally suck.  Have you seen what Boston Store, and all the other stores are pushing on us?  Do they think we live in New York?  6 inch spike heels and just really weird things no one in Wisconsin or the Midwest would ever wear.  Let's see how those heels hold up when it's -10 icy with 3 foot drifts.
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Check out this panorama of the International Boat Show that I stitched together.  It's too big for this blog so I had to upload it to it's one page.  Originally it 2 by 14 feet. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Rods Pano

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hmmmmmm - every night I remember things I need to say and every morning I have forgotten them.  Seems I need to take notes at night! 

One thing you need to watch today is the wind - it's going to get REALLY windy  gusts up to 50.  So this morning I went out and took some shots of the Sweet Autumn Clematis.  These shots look a little fuzzy on this site  hmmmm.

Remember we thought it was dead as it did not poke it's head out of the ground until the 1st week of June.  Elwood and I had to make a small adjustment as we have 2 more. One is on the lattice work and if we went with the original plan we would not be able to get down the stairs.

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Check this out

 

Friend of mine ordered a specially made Manual, Black, Camaro (90% of Camaro's are Automatics).  Took two months to get it.  He got a call that it was FINALLY ready and was being shipped to him.  Only a three hour trip.  He get's it and it seems the delivery truck forgot that there was a chain loose and for three hours that chain was banging against the car.   Those are nicks and dents from the chain.

I'm not sure if that little piece of plastic helped any.  Yea - he is a little ticked off.

Columbus is the news.

Seems a American Funding Company, here in Cbus made like 3 million calls to the no-call list.  OOPS!!  so it needs to pay Wisconsin $175,000.

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That's all I got - I'll take notes tonight when I become brilliant

Rod

How Full Tilt Poker Screwed Poker Players Thanks to Republicans

I actually went to my old work yesterday.  They hired me back for like 1 day a week or whatever.  So yesterday was the day I was trying to remember my old phone number and get passwords and remember to plug in LAN connections.   One day a week ain't bad.


In fact it seems all the people Walker tried to get rid of are now double dipping.  Schools are hiring back teachers because they can not find replacements and so forth. So instead of hiring new people to replace the old people, there are not enough trained new people. 


BTW - did you see that it seems many of the jobs Walker said he created are actually OUTSIDE the State of Wisconsin?  It's almost like he was not telling the truth or something.


But you can't get totally mad at Republicans (of course you can but follow along).  11 years ago Republicans were all anal about online poker because the Christian right Tea Partiers (before they were formally called Tea Party) believed poker was evil.


The Republicans wanted to shut down all online poker because it was not regulated.  After passing a bill which basically DID shut it down online poker (and took $10,000 a year out of my pocket).  They made it illegal for banks to accept poker money . . . like a bank could tell it was poker money.  So what happened was that Neteller, a very very large  AND SAFE bank in England was shut down to Americans.


So with only a few places still open to Americans we were forced to leave our money IN the online sites instead of transferring the money to safety.  But recently it was getting harder to get money INTO the online sites (I had not tried to get money INTO a site since 2001 . . didn't have to it was always coming out).


WELL - It seems one major online site.  Full Tilt WAS CROOKED.  It was a giant ponzi scheme that the Republicans forced poker players to partake in.


The problem started with getting money INTO a poker room. Full Tilt could not get accept money into their accounts, HOWEVER, it wanted business, so it just SAID the money was in the accounts so people could play.


So Full Tilt had hundreds of millions of dollars in virtual money that people were playing with.  When someone wanted to cash out they would us OTHER peoples money. Except all of a sudden everyone wanted their money.  $300 million is owed to American players.  Meanwhile the people running the company were pulling out tens of millions of dollars a month.  In fact $444 million were paid to owners and partners while payouts were not being processed.



Lawyers say it was not a ponzi scheme . . . it was just bad management.  PokerStars the rivel was having the same problem getting money from US players but instead of saying "yea we got it trust us" they said - "sorry no money no playing"


The whole problem as with all ponzi schemes is what happens when everybody wants their money at once.


So while Republicans sort of had the right idea saying money COULD be stolen, they totally screwed Americans with how they attempted to fix the problem.  They actually CREATED the problem by closing all of the SAFE places to store money. 


And these guys think they have a better idea on financials?
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Columbus had another 0.42 inches of rain yesterday and combined with the 0.72 inches the day before we are pretty soaked. Madison has had twice that amount. This LOW system has been siting over Wisconsin for about a week now and if you have been watching, a 50 wide 200 mile slash down the middle of Wisconsin has been some of the coldest weather in America.

Also of note is "weather forecast slippage". This is a really hard part of the year for forecasting. The battle between good and evil, summer and winter has begun. The week long predictions for the most part are pretty good but there has been nothing to push the low away. There is a cold front not even on the west coast yet that is now suppose to push it away. We will see.
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Ticket for the Nebraska/Wisconsin game are going for $400 a ticket on ebay. Did playing high school teams and technical schools really help UW prepare for Nebraska? This is a totally different animal. The College football world will be in Madison this weekend.  The game of the week in America.

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Last weekend I was at the International Wooden Boat Show. This was the first time the show has ever been in Wisconsin and WOW, were there some amazing boats on Lake Geneva. Most were built in the 30s and 40.  I walked around all day Saturday snapping photos and now have the task of preparing all 300 for viewing. 

 

The boat above was the first boat to ever go 100mph. It was built in the early 30s   Huge engines.  The cool thing here is that the owner was able to fire up it's engines from this dock and have it on the trailer in 42 seconds.  He demonstrated it.  You can't tell from this shot but it's 33 feet long!

In fact that was one of the odd things.  As he left the dock and turned left so we could see the broad side people gasped at it's length.  They built boats very long back then.  At the end of the day there was a boat parade with over 130 antique boats!  AWESOME!!!

You can see more at Rod Melotte dot com,  I'll be slowly putting more and more shots out there.  

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Watched Pan Am last night - excellent show - not like anything else on TV and I liked it.   Check it out or record it for something different.

Have a great day today!

Rod