Moving day... off to: marshallgoff.com/blog

For good or ill, I think I'm going to move the blog to my own site. I've got WordPress set up there and can do some clever controls, including maybe doing a photo blog, that I can't do here. If you just want to read Ultimate thoughts (and who wouldn't), you can do that by clicking that category on the right-hand side. There will also be photography thoughts in their own category, as well as random crap that escapes my head thrown down elsewhere. Mostly, this will make it easier for me to do multiple categories and easier for visitors to read just what they might be interested in.

I'll move historical posts over there. I'm not sure I've got comments set up right, but I'll be accepting them somehow.

Strong enough sell?

marshallgoff.com/blog/.

Mixed Quality - and maybe a call for stats help...

The Mixed talk is winding down on Al's blog , but I still play a bastard variant of the real ultimate that Al and Jim like, so...

Between the blogs and the beginnings of this year's 6 Trained Monkeys rebirth, I've been thinking a little more on the differences between Mixed, Men's (lets be honest, it's a Men's division at the upper levels), and Women's disc.
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One thing a player notices as s/he plays on increasingly competitive teams and at increasingly competitive events is the necessity of hanging onto the disc. Want to win on Sunday of a tournament? You'd better be a great defensive team or you'd better be an efficient offensive one. Absent truly superior athleticism, offensive efficiency is easier. So don't turn the disc over.

The call for stats help (Jimmy P?) comes from a perception I have about getting punished for turnovers. My possibly-erroneous perception is that against most elite teams in normal conditions (say, not extremely windy or flat calm), you are more likely to get punished (scored on) for turning the disc over in Men's ultimate than Women's ultimate. Against the very best teams in each division, this may not be true.

This has become one of my mental measures for the quality of ultimate in Mixed play. A couple years ago, watching regional-level or even middle-of-the-pack nationals pool play, I didn't get the sense that any given turnover was likely to change the game. There were close games and the last turnover of a game always feels big, but there is a difference. Last year, I did get that sense for some of the Mixed play. Essentially, the opponents were getting good enough that you had to be efficient offensively to win important games, the same as it would be in key games for other divisions.

This may be a spurious variable in an ultimately quixotic quest to suggest that Mixed is improving and has some quality to its competition. But maybe not.

Mixed up about Mixed? A response.

Mixed up about Mixed? This, from the (T-)man who once almost completely avoided playing Mixed for an entire year, until the December weather was too bad to golf so he joined his wife at a mostly-hack winter tournament? Sure, he won the tournament, playing almost exclusively point for a team that played exclusively 1-3-3 on the way to victory, but still…
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This is also a response to the posts about Coed on Al's Blog.

I feel myself being sucked in to comment here, since I’ve played Open and Mixed at Nationals. Many people establish the boundaries of “elite” ultimate as Nationals play, which I think is reasonable, but not entirely correct. Full disclosure: I’ve never contended in Open - once missing quarters by only one point – and I have contended in Mixed – choking in Semi’s. Read into that as you will.

This whole discussion started with the question of whether the World Games team should be Coed. I don’t care. Too many things to care about and I can’t get worked up over that one. The reason is simple: I don’t know what importance to ascribe to Ultimate’s participation at the Games. That said, if the goal is simply to showcase the highest-level Ultimate, then it should be Open.

The rationale for that is also pretty simple in my mind. First, the skill level is at least as high in Open as any other division. Second, the pure athleticism is greater from top to bottom. Those two things are enough.

This shouldn’t minimize women’s athleticism. As an aside, Jon Wertheim, SI's senior tennis writer, occasionally gets asked in his online mailbag how the top women tennis players would fare against men. I can't find it to quote right now, but his response typically goes something like: "the top women wouldn't stand a chance against any man in the top 150, but that doesn't take anything away from their game". It's a good thought, and could be well applied to Women's vs. Men's Ultimate.

Note also that this doesn’t require any analysis of whether the sport’s best players play Open or Women’s over Mixed. As reflected in the World Games team roster, most of the absolute top individual players do play Open and Women’s. Though I think Mixed has come a long way, Open and Women are where the most respected competition still is. However, it would be too strong to suggest that there aren’t elite players in Mixed. Many of the people on Mixed teams at Nationals last year would have been capable of contributing to Open and Women’s teams. The problem is that there are also a lot of players in Mixed who would never make the roster on an elite Open or Women’s team, and that mix of talents engenders the general disrespect of some of those other teams.

The question seems to be what level of respect that Mixed deserves. Teams comprising elite open and women players can often beat Mixed teams at summer events. Further, for observers in the NE (like our blogging buddies Jim & Al) have been faced for years with Mixed ultimate that proved mediocre on the grand stage. [Only once before last year had a NE Mixed team cracked the quarters, where they were an also-ran.]

Mixed has come a long way and continues to grow in quality. Playing Mixed isn’t any longer a free road to Nationals for any team with a little bit of talent. Of course, it’s not deep top to bottom yet, but it’s not like the number 16 women’s team at Nationals stands a chance at beating the number 2 team, either.

Tomorrow… more on the differences between Open, Womens, and Mixed...

A Gallery Show! and I might as well talk photography...

When I started this blog, I figured I'd be talking about photography, and I got quickly sidetracked by trying to write items of general interest, which in turn generated very little interest. As a result, I pretty much stopped. I'm back now.

I got into a gallery show! Panopticon Gallery in Waltham is running a show called the "Tree in Landscape", and to fill the show, they opened up submissions to anyone with 35 bucks and a dream. Even they were surprised to receive over 700 submissions from over 130 photographers. Never having been in a gallery show before, I'm thrilled to be even just one of the 45-plus photographers chosen and hang two of the 70-or-so images.

The prints were made on Autumn Color's Lightjet printer, which exposes regular photographic paper using red, green, and blue lasers. Eric from Newtonville Camera, my home away from home, is doing the framing. I just signed the mattes. Well, I also took the pictures, I suppose...

As if it weren't bad enough already....

CNN reports about censorship at the Oscars.

Star power rules at the Oscars

The winners may well have been chosen with an eye to quality, though most people will never know since the nominated films have to be among the least-viewed crop in Academy Award history. But even if quality determined the votes, clearly the show itself was driven by star power and a desire to reach out to a different audience.
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Chris Rock is likeable and he's funny. But his opening to the Academy Awards was shouted stand-up and no matter what Entertainment Weekly said, he didn't make us forget other hosts. I may be closer to Rock's generation, but I actually prefer the way Billy Crystal or Steve Martin can play the clown or rise to the occasion to the relatively limited amount that Rock added. Rock has charm and could potentially be a good host, but his first stint didn't accomplish what the producers wanted nor did it really add to the style of the show.

Some hosts are a tough act to follow, and though it was timely, it's hard on any current host to run a montage of great moments from Johnny Carson's five-year stint as host. The best hosting lines of the night were 20-year-old taped moments. "This is day 164 of the Oscar telecast..." We do miss you, Johnny.

The real crime of the night, though, was the music. Beyonce is in some ways a rare performer: she's a pop star who can actually sing. She has style. She can hold the stage. And yet, her range was seriously tested by the range of material she was asked to work through, and even if she did a passable job all the way through, one can't help but wonder what some of the music would have sounded like in other hands. Why not have whoever played Christine in the Phantom of the Opera come on stage? But Beyonce wasn't the problem.

The problem was Antonio Banderas and Carlos Santana. It pains me to say this, because I like both of them, but the brief snippet of his own song that Jorge Drexler sang instead of his thank you speech demonstrated everything that was wrong with the choice not to allow him to sing it in the first place. [EW called this one right, surprisingly enough. Dana Stevens' take on this is on Slate here.]

But the Academy Awards show is like everything else on TV: it's about ratings. Now if only the movies they recognized did so well.

"I am not a crook!"

My mom gets me a new down jacket for Christmas. [Mountain Hardwear, even. Good stuff.] Oops, they're cut large. No problem; back to REI to exchange for smaller size. The REI customer service person even does a nice thing and returns the first one for a voucher and pays for the second one with the voucher, enabling me to collect the REI rebate on it (thanks, mom!). Yay, new jacket.

So, I go to put on my new jacket for the first time last night, and discover that the nice customer service person forgot to take off the theft protection device. Can't remove it myself, else I'll be covered in whatever's in those things. Now, imagine me walking back into the store and saying, "hey, please take this thing off my new jacket". Yeah, right. I'll look like a thief. Hm.