The Old Blog

ABC Television News is reporting that FBI Assistant Director during Watergate W. Mark Felt has outed himself as Deep Throat in a new article in Vanity Fair. If true, this would render Boston University’s own Bob “The Only Thing Bigger Than This Secret Is My Ego” Woodward completely irrelevant.

The biggest secret in America now becomes the identity of the subject of Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.”

Thanks to Steve for finding the link.

Update: Woodward confirms it.

The national media is jumping on the story that home runs are down over the first five weeks of 2005. While 2.16 were hit per game over the same period last year, we’ve only seen 1.97 per game this year.

“Must be the steroid testing,” they say.

Not quite. Looking at the chart that accompanies the article, we can see that there have actually been more homers per game this year than in 2002 or 1997. There obviously wasn’t steroid testing those years, so what explains it? How about natural statistical variance? A change of roughly 8 percent lies well within what could be considered a normal fluctuation of the numbers.

Of course, that doesn’t stop some players from making more out of this than they should. Todd Jones, already a noted bigot and master of logic, “didn’t realize how deep” steroids had permeated baseball, what with the monstrous 8% dip. I can’t wait to see how Joe Morgan tries to use this information to “prove” his ability to even remotely understand statistical analysis.

My high school ranks as the 305th best in the country, according to Newsweek. Their methodology is, as Steve points out, suspect at best. Here’s how they did it:

the number of Advanced Placement (AP) and/or International Baccalaureate (IB) tests taken by all students at a school in 2004, divided by the number of graduating seniors.

So if you want to boost your ranking, you have two options: either get more graduating seniors to take IB/AP tests, OR…

Graduate fewer seniors. Wouldn’t a school with a huge achievement gap between AP/IB “fast track” students and those “I could be a ditchdigger?“-types who Brian taught in “The Family Guy” on Sunday outrank a school full of Lake Wobegon-esque students who are all above-average but not outstanding? And doesn’t that tell you all you need to know about trusting Newsweek to rank the top thousand or so out of nearly 28,000 American high schools?

The starting pitchers for last Saturdays’ Yankees/Blue Jays game? Bush and Wang. I’d make some comment about Wang getting pulled prematurely before he could beat Bush, but…oh wait, I just did.

1) The Dear Abbeys, Boston University’s best a cappella group, won the national championship. As someone who played football with some of them, I must congratulate them on such an accomplishment.

2) BU found the female orgasm! Coincidentally, this is also the first article I have successfully submitted to the fine people at fark.com. Check out the O-centric comments here.