will lids host a convention? will i be more involved?

Today was the last Long Island Daylily Society (LIDS) meeting of the year.

Pot luck lunch, slides from a few members' gardens, door prizes. All that folderol.

But some other matters that are of interest to me.

One of the things that's been on my mind about LIDS is that I'd like to get more involved. And the opportunity may have presented itself. One fact presented is that LIDS was asked about hosting the 2018 regional convention. We, as a club, have to decide whether we want to host, and we will be making that decision by vote in the January meeting. I mentioned to Blair (and she agreed) that we should agree to host -- that we'd be foolish not to. Caught talking, I was cajoled into standing up in front of the group to share my thoughts. It was like being back in school, told to share what I said with the whole room.

So I shared. And there was some joking about how I just volunteered to run the event. Uh...yeah...

I was approached after the meeting and asked if Blair and I would be willing to work on the convention. FIrst thing, I made sure that I wasn't asked to be in charge. I've never bee to a daylily convention, and don't know what all is involved. But it looks like I'll be part of a core of people doing the work. Assuming LIDS decides to go for it...

cinema history class: a study in terror

Keith's film class in the basement continues with week two of our Sherlock Holmes session. This time it was A Study in Terror (1965), starring John Neville and Sherlock Holmes. Not counting the stupid Sherlock Holmes episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation*, this was my second exposure to the Holmes character. The first was a week prior, when Keith showed us the 1959 production of The Hound of the Baskervilles.


Short answer? I loved this film.


Study isn't a horror  movie; it's more of a crime drama/mystery. In the discussion afterwards, I said it seems to me like a krimi, though I don't really know what exactly that genre entails. Keith seemed intrigued by that observation, though he explained that the krimis typically involved criminal plots that were more complicated.


The key to why I enjoyed this movie is that it was well-paced and riveting. Like any good mystery, it had me guessing the whole time. In addition, there were some good comedic moments (including Sherlock's scene with his brother Mycroft -- who was admirably portrayed by Robert Morley). And since this was a restored version on blu-ray disc, the color was wonderful.


As an aside, I note that a lot of this movie seemed like it was right out of  Oliver! In fact, during a couple of the bar scenes I kept expecting Georgia Brown (who was playing the role of the singer) tyo start belting out "Oom-Pah-Pah" And a couple of times I thought I was looking at Bill Sikes. And, who knows? Maybe that association played a role in my enjoying the film. Oliver! is one of my favorite musicals -- the Broadway soundtrack is one of the records I associate with my childhood, and I played Fagin in my sixth grade class production. My apologies to the curious: that performance is not available on Youtube.


As I noted in a prior post, I wasn't crazy about the 1959 Hammer version of Hound of the Baskervilles, so I actually had low expectations going into this. But this helped restore my faith in the possibilities of Sherlock Holmes. Even if the character is an a-hole.


*Data, the android, had an obsession with Holmes. Data was the most annoying regular on the show (with the possible exceptions of Picard, Riker, Troi, La Forge and Wesley Crusher). But that's another matter.

why didn't the dentist lose his license?

Is anyone familiar with the appropriately named Jackass films? These films are vignettes of a crew of guys, headed by Johnny Knoxville, playing practical jokes and pranks on each other, or doing distasteful things on dares. A few examples?

• One guy ate horse manure on a dare.
• A couple guys were tricked into getting into a limousine. Once they were in, the doors were locked and bees were poured in through the moonroof.
• One guy allowed himself to be branded on the backside (with a red hot brand shaped like a penis.

 You get the idea.

These don't interest me, but I have, unfortunately, seen a bunch of these stunts and pranks. Which is a bunch more than I need. But I learned something today that has me wondering. In one incident, a member of the crew was convinced to have his tooth pulled by a Lamborghini. That is, they tied it to the back of a car and had the driver burn rubber. In order to convince him to allow this, they paid a dentist to tell him the tooth was infected and needed to be pulled.

How is that not a violation of medical ethics? How come that dentist hasn't been censured?

The relevant video is below. But it is definitely NSFL.

baseball stoopidstats: who has won their share of world series?

Ready for more baseball StoopidStats?

What last I yammered about this stuff, I was looking at the lengths of World Series droughts. That was inspired by the Cubs victory, which ended their streak of more than 100 years. And I was thinking about the Mets (my team of choice) and the fact that they haven't won in 30 years.

But although 30 years is a long time, it's not really an extraordinary drought, since there are 30 teams. With 30 teams, we can really only expect a team to win once every 30 years (on average). This led me to wonder about the Mets: Have they won their share of World Series? The answer isn't entirely obvious. There have been 54 World Series since they were enfranchised. With two wins, they've won more than 1 in 30. But for most of the time they existed, there were fewer teams.

To answer the question (and the analogous question for each other team), I came up with a statistic (which I will call a team's Wins per share ratio). The goal is to calculate how many World Series a team has won, divided by the number they would have been expected to win if wins were evenly distributed among the teams. For a given team, this statistic is taken by adding 1/Nt for all years, t that the team existed (and a World Series was played, where Nt is the number of teams existing in year t. To take a simple example, if a team has existed for six years, during which there were 30 teams, and they won 1 World Series, then their statistic is 1 / (6 / 30) = 5. This means that they have won 5 times as many World Series as their share.

The accompanying table shows the 30 existing franchises and their ratios. By way of background (for those not into MLB history), the modern World Series began in 1903, and has been played every year since then except for 1904 and 1994. For the years in that span, the number of teams was as follows:

• 16 teams through 1960
• 18 teams in 1961
• 20 teams from 1962 through 1968
• 24 teams from 1969 through 1976
• 26 teams from 1977 through 1992
• 28 teams from 1993 through 1997
• 30 teams from 1998 onward

I am not considering Federal League teams, since the FL did not participate in the World Series.

 It should come as no surprise that the Yankees sit atop the list, having won nearly five times as many World Series as their share. My Mets have won just fewer than their share.

One quick anecdote about this. When I did my first draft of these calculations, I made a mistake and had the Yankees winning 4.80 times their share. I IM'd a friend at work about it. Then when I realized I had made a mistake, I IM'd him to say it was actually 4.74. His response? "I thought 4.80 looked a little strange."

cinema history class: the hound of the baskervilles

In coming up with themes for the sessions of the cinematic history class, Keith has often taken suggestions from those of us in the class. Which makes sense, since he's -- at least to a degree - catering to us.


This past week we started a session of Sherlock Holmes movies -- it was Ethan's suggestion -- with Hammer Films' 1959 production of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Starring Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Andre Morel, this should have been better than it was. Ethan tweeted that he enjoyed it, but it was still his least favorite Hammer film (which, I suppose, is a tribute to how good Hammer was). I noted -- and the others agreed -- that this was more of a live action Scooby Doo than horror film. Still and all, Cushing and Lee were good enough that we generally gave this film high grades.


The shameful admission for me is that this is -- I think -- the first time I've seen a Sherlock Holmes film. And I've never read a Sherlock Holmes book. I have seen all those annoying episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Data recreates Holmes in the holodeck. So I've got that going for me, which is nice.