More of the Same #s 1, 2 and 3 Recaptioned

Following on from yesterday's discovery, let's see how this blog's own comic strips would benefit from the use of a certain phrase:

The Finger Points Outwards - No. 23

It has been suggested that all 'New Yorker' cartoons should be re-captioned this way.

Which led to the suggestion that all cartoons should be re-captioned this way.

Questions to Ponder About the Melbourne Storm's Punishment for Salary Cap Breaches

(Hooray! My first and probably last Rugby League post ever!)

1) We know that the Melbourne Storm were stripped of their 2007 and 2009 premierships and their 2006, 2007 and 2008 minor premierships, but what about the years in which they did not win anything? Shouldn't they be deemed to have finished last from 2005 to 2010? Does this mean that a team's punishment for salary cap breaches is dependent upon whether they have actually achieved anything?

2) What happens now if other teams are retrospectively found guilty of breaching the salary cap? Could we have a season in which five or six teams are unable to earn premiership points? Could we have a five year period in which no premiership is deemed to have been awarded?

3) Why should the Storm try in any game this season? Why should they turn up? Could they use this opportunity to take out the kneecaps of the Broncos back half or the Sea Eagles front line? Could other teams pay Storm players to do this? Should the Storm field a team of under-10s? What about them having, say, Rob Mills go up against Willie Mason? Can't the Storm now fix any match they play in?

4) What will Molly Meldrum do with the front of his house?

Richmond and that Stupid Draft!

In today’s Age, Jake Niall essentially argues that Richmond is being screwed over as a result of Gold Coast’s entry into the competition, in that even if they finish last they can pick no higher than No.4 (and if they finish 2nd last, could potentially pick as low as 8th). Niall’s position is that Richmond should receive some sort of compensation from the AFL. While I’m normally against this type of thing, even for my own team, I say hell yeah! You may think that the National Draft would have considerably helped Richmond over the years, but no team has been screwed over by the draft system as much as Richmond has. Don’t believe me? Read this sorry history of draft misfortunes…

1987 – Richmond gets first pick in second-ever National Draft, in which almost all players drafted do not play a senior VFL/AFL game. Uses first pick to take Richard Lounder, who plays 4 VFL games.
1989 – Richmond gets first pick in fourth-ever National Draft, in which most players drafted do not play a senior AFL game. Uses first pick to take Anthony Banik, who plays 49 AFL games.
1992 – Richmond win final home-and-away game to finish 3rd last, made to pick 7th as Sydney and Brisbane get two priority picks each (and Sydney trades both of them). Justin Leppitsch picked at No.4.
1993 – Richmond also made to pick 7th in ’93 pre-season draft as Sydney and Brisbane share first six picks, snagging Richard Osborne, Brendan McCormack and Adrian Fletcher. Richmond gets Stuart Steele.
1999 - Richmond finishes 5th last, gets 7th pick (although trades up to 3rd pick).
2002 – Richmond finishes 3rd last, gets 4th pick and trades it to Kangaroos in Carey-Kane Johnson-Torney deal. Carlton gets stripped of first two picks and pick 4 becomes pick 2.
2003 – Richmond finishes 4th last, gets 6th pick (although trades it for Nathan Brown).
Do receive 4th pick in pre-season draft, and watch as first three teams take Jade Rawlings, Nick Stevens and Phillip Read. Richmond gets Ben Marsh.
2004 - Richmond gets its only priority pick ever! Yes, I wish I was freaking joking! (Technically, they did receive a priority pick in 2007, but not until the end of the first round.) Richmond picks 1st in pre-season draft, no-one important available, resorts to picking Trent Knobel.
2005 – Richmond finishes 5th last, gets 8th pick. Scott Pendlebury is taken with 5th pick, and Patrick Ryder with 7th pick.
2007 – Rules for receiving priority picks changed. Richmond becomes first team ever to finish last and not pick first in National Draft, as Carlton receives priority pick (and trades its No.3 pick in Chris Judd deal). Richmond picks 1st in pre-season draft, no-one important available, resorts to picking David Gourdis.
2009 – Richmond finishes 2nd last, gets 3rd pick. Richmond picks 2nd in pre-season draft, after Melbourne has taken Joel Macdonald.

The Secrets To Winning Your Football Tipping Competition

Against my better judgment, I entered a football tipping competition this year. I say against my better judgment, because over the years I have come to realise that my performance, for better or worse, will be mainly determined by luck. Luck, you say? Allow me to explain …

First, let’s imagine that you know very little about football. In this case, a simple strategy for choosing winners would be just to pick the favourite with the bookmakers. This strategy is likely to get you a pretty good score, and probably isn’t too far off what a lot of other people will do. Now, if everyone in your competition chooses this strategy you will all end up no better or worse than anyone else. Of course that doesn’t happen, but it gives us a useful benchmark for explaining how and why people get different results.

One reason is that people may be loyal to their team. Doing this is likely to hamper your results, in some cases severely. The worst case scenario is your team is not expected to win any game, and this expectation turns out to be correct. In this case, all other things being equal, in a 22-game season you will end up 22 points behind your rivals. Obviously, the shortfall will lessen the more games your team wins; however, this strategy can really hurt your chances even if you follow a successful team. For example, if your team wins 15 games, you will still be wrong for the other seven – so other tipsters need to also be wrong about your team 7 times for you to remain on par with them. Conversely, having an irrational hatred for a team that ensures you never or rarely pick them will also hurt your chances. Other strategies that are likely to be harmful are picking teams based on colours or names, since you are making no use whatsoever of the information about a team’s actual likelihood of winning. You may indeed get lucky, but the odds are against you.

Let’s put aside for now all the people that pick teams based on loyalty, colours, or anything else that’s not based on a team’s actual likelihood of winning. That just leaves what we will call the informed, rational tipsters. Now, you don’t have to be a football nerd to fall into this category, you just need to have a rough idea of the ability of each team and actually make your tips based on this. Indeed, it is crucial to the argument that it is relatively easy for a person to fall into this category – if they didn’t the ‘nerds’ would be much more likely to win. Many tipsters will have a good idea of who the favourite is; for example, you could just follow the bookmakers’ favourites as suggested above. But the ‘favourite’ need not strictly be the bookmaker’s favourite, even without that information many tipsters would have a good idea which team other tipsters are more likely to pick.

Now obviously, of the informed, rational tipsters, not everyone can outperform the rest of the group. Half of them will be average or above, and half of them will be average or below. What determines whether you outperform the average or not? I believe it’s essentially random chance. What this means is that it is unlikely that you can systematically do better than the average informed, rational tipster. As evidence of this, consider how often people who do really well one year do remarkably average or worse the next. Now this doesn’t preclude people from doing well for three, or five, or even ten years on end. But no matter how much they like to think otherwise, for many of them it will just be because they got really lucky.

Nor does it preclude some people continuously doing well for reasons other than luck. One way to be continuously above average would be to recognise biases in other tipsters’ perceptions. For example, if the informed, rational tipsters tend to overrate a particular team – perhaps because that team is popular – then if you recognise that bias you will improve your chances of being above average. A similar way of outperforming the average would be to devise some sort of system that allows you to rate teams’ chances of winning more accurately than the consensus. This could be through, for example, some statistical model, but I doubt that many people use those. Or you could have better information about teams than the other informed tipsters (but what would that be?), or you could process the available information about teams in a more effective way. While I’m sure that many people would like to think they fall into one of these categories, again I doubt that they do. (I include myself here – maybe, just maybe, I could have a slightly better idea about football than your average informed, rational tipster, but not enough to make a significant difference.)

I’m not saying that everything is down to random chance, for you at least need to know enough about football to make a rough assessment of each team’s actual likelihood of winning. Similarly, I’m not saying that a person who has completely no idea about a team’s chance of winning can not do well, but their odds of doing so are far lower than those who do actually make their tips based on an informed and rational assessment of each team’s actual likelihood of winning. And I’m not saying that people can not do well for years in a row, or that if they do it can not be because they are somehow more skilled at tipping. What I’m saying is that skill is less important than commonly thought, and that luck is the more likely explanation for their success.

So what does mean for football tipping? Well, if you’re just in it for the sake of it, probably not much at all. But if you’re taking your ability to tip correctly as some measure of your intellect, then eventually - maybe not now, maybe not next year, but eventually - you’re probably going to end up somewhat disappointed.

Graphic Novels That You Would Like If You Weren't Too Chicken To Read Them - 'The Authority' and 'Planetary'

“We were the fucking Beatles,” said writer Warren Ellis of his twelve-issue run on ‘The Authority’ with penciller Bryan Hitch, inker Paul Neary and colourist Laura Depuy. Like most Beatles comparisons there is some hyperbole to Ellis’ remark, but ‘The Authority’ was certainly a shot in the arm – or should that be a kick to the pelvis – to superhero comics when it first appeared in ’99. (It would become known as one of the definitive ‘post-superhero’ series – a pretty cool term that seems to have disappeared from the present-day lexicon.)



While the creators were not the first to use what was known as the ‘widescreen’ style of comic book storytelling, they became the most identified with it, particularly the art team of Hitch and Neary. Essentially, each story was spread out like the creators were making a big-budget movie, with wide panels and plenty of ‘splash’ pages showing cities being blown up, bad guys being ripped apart, and even, in their last story, God’s brain being electrocuted.

The team – led by Jenny Sparks, the spirit of the 20th century – were also insanely powerful. Apollo and the Midnighter were essentially Superman and Batman with less scruples, Jack Hawksmoor could order entire cities to fight for him, the Engineer could use her liquid machinery to make big-ass weapons, and the Doctor, Earth’s shaman, could do pretty much anything he wanted. Needless to say, they weren’t exactly the nicest superhero team going around, but they did have principles, which prevented the title becoming simply an outlet for blood lust. And, you know, watching the Midnighter fly the Authority’s ship straight into the bad guy’s headquarters is pretty fun.



Although the Ellis/Hitch books were some mighty fine storytelling, the issues that followed, written by Mark Millar and drawn by Frank Quitely were, in my opinion, even better. Defenders of the Ellis/Hitch run have claimed (give or take a bit of paraphrasing) that the Millar/Quitely issues were too nasty, too obvious, too reliant upon shock rather than awe to suck readers in. Ellis’ Authority were known to ruminate upon their hyper-aggressive methods (‘How many people you think we killed?’ one member asks at the end of one of their typically brutal battles), Millar’s Authority positively revelled in them.

Personally though, I prefer the Millar/Quitely issues because they seem to me to have more depth – I prefer two issues of ideas crammed into one rather than one issue of ideas spread over four. A typical Ellis/Hitch sequence has Apollo and the Engineer pat themselves on the back for four pages for travelling to the moon. In roughly the same space Millar/Quitely move from inappropriate jokes about sharing toilet facilities with refugees to media debates about the Authority’s deposing third-world dictators to speculative remarks concerning reincarnation. Or to put it another way, Ellis wanted you to sit back and take notice of how good the story was, Millar just got on with it.



Ellis’ approach of reminding readers just how awe-inspiring everything is was carried over to his other popular series from the turn of the millennium, ‘Planetary’ (drawn by John Cassaday). Where ‘Planetary’ makes up for it is in the variety of its subjects and storytelling techniques. The rather ingenious idea behind the series is to follow a team of super-powered archaeologists as they dig through the refuse of pulp and popular culture from the past century. Hence, we have stories about an island of giant monster corpses in Japan, a murdered cop in Hong Kong that returns as a spirit of vengeance and an alien ship that has been stranded on Earth since the time of the dinosaurs.



Another strong point of the series is its main cast – the Drummer may be, as one of his teammates calls him, ‘a pet living fart’, but the other members, Jakita Wagner and Elijah Snow, are two of the coolest characters in modern comics. Jakita is savvy and super-strong, and has joined the team for the purpose of saving herself from boredom, which as motivations go, shows remarkable honesty. Elijah, meanwhile, is roughly 100 years old, and has built up intimate connections with some of the century’s most important (fictional) figures, including Sherlock Holmes. They can be pretty nasty as well – Elijah doesn’t mind resorting to the odd kick in the unmentionables to beat a foe – but compared to the Authority there is more of a sense of adventure with this team, as opposed to a sense of doing whatever it takes to get the job done.

Indeed, resolutions are hard to come by in ‘Planetary’, stories end anti-climatically, their completion seemingly determined more by page count than anything else, and very few questions are answered until at least the twelfth issue. But perhaps it’s also these qualities that mean, of the two series, ‘Planetary’ will be the one that remains most relevant in the years to come.

How Productive Was Andrew Gaze?

Win Score is a metric developed by economist Dave Berri (and co-authors) to evaluate how productive NBA basketball players are. Essentially, players are rated highly if they make good use of their team’s possessions by scoring efficiently, and/or gain a lot of possessions through rebounds and steals, and are rated lowly if they waste their team’s possessions by scoring inefficiently and/or lose possessions through turnovers. Hence, players that score a lot do not necessarily rate highly on this metric if they take a lot of shots to score their points. The formula is as follows:

Points + Rebounds + Steals + ½Assists + ½Blocked Shots – Field Goal Attempts – Turnovers – ½Free Throw Attempts – ½Personal Fouls

Despite my previous reservations, I think it is probably the best metric (apart from Berri’s own Wins Produced) available for assessing basketball players. For example, using Win Score Mr Berri predicted that, because Kevin Garnett is even more valuable than commonly thought, Boston had a very good chance of winning the championship when they acquired him (which they did). More regrettably, Berri predicted that my (and his) beloved Detroit Pistons were set to take a tumble when they traded the very productive Chauncey Billups for the high-scoring but relatively unproductive Allen Iverson (which they did). Iverson is a good example of a player who does not rate highly on this metric because he misses a lot of shots and commits a lot of turnovers.

Australian basketball fans will be well acquainted with Andrew Gaze, and the fact that he scored a truckload of points (over 30 points per game in fact). But in over 20 years of basketball Gaze won only two championships. Could Gaze then be similar to Iverson in that he scored a lot of points, but that he didn’t really help his team to win (although, to be fair, Iverson hasn’t won any championships)? To answer this, I plugged his career statistics into the Win Score Formula:

18938 + 3102 + 1078 + ½*3533 + ½*222 – 12549 – 2536 – ½*4796 – ½*2046 = 6489.5

Win Score Per Game = 10.57

How good is that? Let’s compare that with Iverson, who according to Win Score is fairly average:

24368 + 3394 + 1983 + ½*5624 + ½*164 – 19906 – 3262 – ½*8168 – ½*1777 = 4498.5

Win Score Per Game = 4.92

Gaze therefore was about twice as productive as Iverson, which is primarily due to his far better shooting efficiency and higher rebounding rate. Now let’s compare Gaze’s results with Michael Jordan’s, who was a very productive player:

32292 + 6672 + 2514 + ½*5633 + ½*893 – 24537 – 2924 – ½*8772 – ½*2783 = 11502.5

Win Score Per Game = 10.73

Those results look pretty similar to Gaze’s. Gaze was better in terms of shooting efficiency and assists, while Jordan was better at rebounds, steals and blocks, and not committing turnovers. I suspect Gaze played more minutes per game than Jordan, but overall, you’d have to say he was a productive player.

Of course, Jordan dominated the NBA while Gaze hardly played there, but these results suggest that to say Gaze was the Jordan of the Australian league is not that far-fetched. This suggests that the reason why Gaze didn’t win as often as Jordan has something to do with his teammates not being as productive as Jordan’s. While I haven’t crunched the numbers, from a quick glance at the Melbourne Tigers career stats I’d say that Lanard Copeland was a main offender. A story for another time perhaps (but probably not here)…

Stuff White Australians Like

Recently I have been reading the book version of ‘Stuff White People Like’ (which I was reminded that I could read for free online, but screw it, I’m a white person). While the book is as wonderfully ironic as any white person could hope for, it is a shame to us Australian readers that many of the references apply to US (or, on occasion, Canadian or European) cultural elements. Which got me to thinking: if the book had been written in Australia, what would be some of the other stuff that would be on the list?

For those who haven’t read the book or the blog, you must keep in mind the distinction between the right kind of white person and the wrong kind of white person. Although most of Australia’s population is indeed white, many of these people fall into the latter category (a.k.a. ‘bogans’). The distinction will become clearer as you read through the list.

While, in the spirit of both the book and the blog, I would have liked to have also provided commentary, there are only so many hours at work I can waste. Alright, here goes:

Stuff White Australians Like

-ABC Radio
-ABC TV, particularly The 7.30 Report, Four Corners, Foreign Correspondent, and At The Movies with Margaret and David
-Good News Week
-The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald
-The Australian, except for the political articles and the editorials
-Julia Gillard
-Greg Combet
-Maxine McKew
-Peter Garrett before he joined the ALP
-The republican movement (that is, the movement for Australia to become a republic, not to be confused with the US Republican movement)
-The Aboriginal flag
-Barbeques
-Test Cricket
-Rugby union
-Being a member of the Melbourne or Sydney Cricket Club
-Office football tipping
-The Sydney Swans
-Degraves St, Melbourne
-Brunswick St, Melbourne
-Smith St, Melbourne
-Lygon St, Melbourne
-Sydney Rd, Melbourne
-Acland St, Melbourne
-All of Melbourne’s inner suburbs
-The eastern suburbs of Sydney
-The National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery in Canberra
-Old Parliament House
-The Australian National University
-The Tasmanian wilderness
-The Hunter Valley
-The Barossa Valley
-The South Island of New Zealand
-Going to the beach after work
-Ben Harper
-Ben Folds Five
-The John Butler Trio
-The Dirty Three
-Nick Cave
-The Triffids
-Eddy Current Suppression Ring
-The Triple J Hottest 100
-Rage (on ABC naturally)
-Memories of Dylan Lewis on Recovery
-WOMADelaide
-Flight of the Conchords, particularly the parts where they make fun of Australians
-The Secret Life of Us/Love My Way
-Marieke Hardy
-Myf Warhurst
-John Saffron
-The Melbourne International Comedy Festival
-Peter Carey
-Tim Winton
-Booker Prize winners
-David Williamson
-Geoffrey Rush
-Cate Blanchett
-Toni Collette
-Lantana
-Living/working/studying in London/New York
-Holidaying in south-east Asia (i.e. Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, Cambodia)
-Travelling around Europe (bonus white person points for Eastern Europe)
-Canadians
-Matilda Bay beers
-Making fun of bogans