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Tecmo Super Bowl! It is one of the greatest video games of all time, if not the greatest.  Be excited and/or warned that I am going to be talking some Tecmo Super Bowl this month.

Here is a screenshot I earned just this weekend for the first time ever:

SUPER CHAMPION TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS

SUPER CHAMPION TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS

It was an early goal to win the Super Bowl with every team in the game.  I figured this goal to be fantastic, and never something I could or would do, considering how putrid some of the teams are.  Teams like: the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I have won the Super Bowl many times.  Never with a team this bad.  I now have hope I can accomplish my goal.  New England Patriots!  Indianapolis Colts!  Phoenix Cardinals!  Your time is nigh.  (For the record, I still also need to win the Super Bowl with eight other teams, but I think those are just a matter of time and effort.)

One of my favorite things about TSB is that it has forever preserved the 1991 NFL.  The good teams will always be good.  The bad teams will always be bad.  Today, the Patriots and Colts are perpetual powerhouses, top teams year after year.  But TSB has preserved them as punchless, rainbow-pass-throwing, fast-defender-lacking cupcakes.  FOREVER. There’s just enough variation to keep it interesting: sure, the Patriots are bad, but from year to year they might win 8 games or just 1.  But you can always count on a victory when facing them, or a struggle if playing with them.

The downside of this dependability is that it will ALWAYS be hard to win with bad teams.  I can’t build up the Bucs through savvy personnel decisions in the draft and free agency.  No: Vinny Testaverde will always be the quarterback and he will always throw rainbow passes to eager defenders.  The ONLY alternative is backup Jeff Carlson. Jeff Carlson!  I have never heard of Jeff Carlson!  So anyway, I tried a number of times to win a Super Bowl with the wretched Buccaneers, and finally broke through.

Then I went on the internet (motto: We Ruin Your Video Gaming).  Poking around a few retro gaming sites I found all sorts of narratives about people who had undefeated seasons with the Bucs playing only with the backups and without ever calling a running play.  This is how The Internet Ruins Your Video Gaming.  For every game you’ve played and enjoyed, there is someone on the internet that played it to the nubs and wants to ruin it for you.  You beat the game?  Well, I beat the game blindfolded in one-third the time.  You think you’re good at the Ghost House 2 track?  I’ve beaten your time by 148 seconds. As with any other game, everything that can be done in TSB has been done a thousand times much better than you.  I thought I had a good passing season when I threw 51 TDs with Joe Montana.  Then there are dudes out there who threw nothing but bombs with Warren Moon for a whole season and threw 200.

The moral is: never look at the internet.

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All the fives but the wrong jack

All the fives but the wrong jack - 28 points

Last weekend I drew about the best cribbage hand possible.

As seen in the picture, I had three fives and a jack in my hand, and the remaining five turned up.  Those hip to the cribbage scene will dig that this is 28 points.  They will further dig that the best possible cribbage hand is 29 points, which would be the same as what I’ve got here, only with the jack matching the suit of the turned-up five, giving you an additional point for nobs.  If you aren’t hip to the cribbage scene, you’re totally confused at this point.

But the takeaway is: this is pretty amazing.  It never happens.

Well, almost never.

An engineering professor calculates that there are 12, 994, 800 possible cribbage hands, and a hand worth 28 points comes up 0.0006 percent of the time.  Which is to say, if you played 1 million hands of cribbage, this would happen 6 times, or once every 166,667 hands. Either I’m missing something (entirely possible) or he is, though, because the rest of the internet seems to think that it’s well-established that the odds of a 28-point hand are 1 in 15028.

I’ve played a lot of cribbage.  I would guess I’ve played several hundred, if not a few thousand games.  It’s probably in the low thousands – two or three games is an easy sitting and I’ve done that at least a few hundred times (uh, I guess?). Which means I’d estimate I’ve been dealt say, 10,000 hands or so.  If the 15028 is right, I guess I was due.

Additional note of interest: we are playing with a deck of cards featuring L. Ron Hubbard’s pulp westerns published in Western Aces magazine.  This is a swell deck.  They feature summaries of these stories, and they’re all (a) awesome and (b) pretty much the same.  My favorite description is from The Magic Quirt: “Old Laramie, cook for the cowpunchers at the Lazy G Ranch, happens to be in the right place at the right time to stop bandits from attacking a Spanish-speaking family with Aztec roots. The family offers Laramie a silver-mounted quirt as thanks, telling him the small horsewhip will make him a big man. Though he’d never really thought of himself as anything other than old, Laramie accepts the idea that the mysterious quirt holds special Aztec magic; in fact, he thinks, with the quirt in his hands, he’s now invincible. To prove this claim, Laramie sets out on a series of adventures showing that the quirt has given him extraordinary newfound bravery and skill—or has it?”

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I’m going to kick the month off with EXCITEMENT.  In the form of a contest!  Read on! It is the only way to find out more!

So K and I recently depleted a standard 26 oz salt. This happened over Thanksgiving weekend, which had domestic disaster written all over it, except that, you know, it’s just salt.  We had coarse salt and worked around it.  But we did buy a new salt as soon as possible.

I thought if I Googled salt, Morton’s site would be the top hit.  Instead there’s a bunch of stuff about some Angelina Jolie movie called Salt that evidently came out this year (61% on Rotten Tomatoes! That’s better than 50%!).  There’s something about The Strategic Arms Limitations Talks.  Then, thankfully, something about salt salt.

However, I do not know if The Salt Institute page is a parody.  If I had to choose, I would say yes, it is. They have helpful salt tips and Did You Know? pages.  My favorite part is that they have developed a high school curriculum using salt as a teaching medium.  As part of this you can order the VHS-formatted video “Salt, the Essence of Life.”  If I had a fantastical machine that would play VHS-formatted videos I would seriously consider buying this.

Morton salt, pretty much the only brand anyone could possibly name, does not appear until the second page of Google results.  (If you are a SEO consulting firm looking for clients, you could do a lot worse*.)  But their site is also worth the wait.  It is full of salt facts, recipes, and lore.  I will probably discuss some more salt lore later on, since of course there is so much to talk about when it comes to salt.  For now, let’s move on to the big contest.

Announcing the Guess How Long It Takes to Use Up Salt and Win Salt Contest!

K and I purchased our 26-oz salt on November 27.  At this moment it remains unopened.  I would surmise it will be opened not later than this weekend.  Your task is to guess when we will use up this salt. At what far off future date will this salt finally be used up?  Comment or e-mail me with a date to enter.  Important facts which may influence your guess:

  • We cook 2-3 meals a week and like salt.
  • We do not use regular iodized salt for table salt.  For reasons too elaborate to get into here, we have a salt grinder.  So the contest salt will pretty much only be used for cooking and baking.

If you make the closest guess, you win: salt! I will send you a brand new 26-oz Morton Salt as well as an additional salt-related mystery prize (hint: the mystery prize is also salt, but a different form). Comment or e-mail by the end of December to win.  Note that K and I have both made guesses and are absolutely eligible to win this contest since I would say we have no idea how long it will take to use it all up either.

*Attention SEO consulting firms: please forward my 6% finder’s fee as soon as possible. I need the money for a VHS-formatted video machine.

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So, with the blogging.  I understand it is National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo, if you would like (I personally am ambivalent). I have wanted an excuse to re-energize things around here.

However!  I have not been making any sort of effort because other things were taking up my attention.  Namely, I got married.  Pictures aren’t going to be ready for weeks but some of the basics are for perusal on our officiant’s site. You will note that my wife is really, really pretty. Readers may or may not actually know her in person, and if you do not, rest assured that she is also ridiculously nice, and nice to me, and a generally awesome person to be married to.

I’m still a bit off my routine so I’ll probably share some more when I do get around to ramping up posting again.  Here is where I declare my intention to kick up my own second-rate version of NaBloPoMo in December, making at least one post every day for the whole month, in what at this point must be only a mildly believable promise.  So let’s just say that I would like to do this, and hope for the best.

Further, with KNOW YOUR 1980s DENVER BRONCOS coming to a conclusion, the table’s clear for new business.  Having a few regular series encourages posting and is also rather fun, so maybe it’s time to start a new series or two.  Some things I am considering:

  • In which I go through one of those lists of the 100 best jobs to have, and spend some time either lamenting my chance to have not done that thing, or being really really glad I never did that thing, but mostly making uninformed guesses as to what having that job would be like.
  • In which I seriously research how to develop an infomercial type of product. I have lots of ideas and no practical knowledge at all.
  • More capsule reviews of sci-fi shows similar to the Star Trek: The Next Generation bits I used to write.  This will probably happen whether you like it or not because it helps me remember the episodes better.  I’ll probably watch old-school Star Trek next (because no one reviews those, right?), and Babylon 5 is around the corner.  Possibly even Deep Space Nine in the future.  I considered Quantum Leap, which I loved when I was 12, but re-watched the first few episodes and thought they were kinda blah.
  • In which I review my ability to do common household tasks ranging from drying dishes (5 stars – I am incredibly thorough) to creating custom Tivo searches (3 stars – I have promise but unfulfilled potential) to folding shirts (negative 5 stars – I am abysmal).
  • My top 100 albums ever.  Oh MAN will that be boring and obscure.  Plus I can’t write about music at all.  I mean, I could learn over the course of 100 painfully developing posts, but I doubt I’ll actually do this.
  • How about instead: Music that I used to like but is now gathering dust.  By which I mean, the only instance of it I own is on an outdated physical media format, such as CD or wax cylinder.
  • KNOW YOUR 1970s BUFFALO SABRES (just kidding)

Questions:

Which of these will effectively drive away my last nine or ten readers?

Are there any series anyone would actually want to see?  (Listed above or otherwise?)

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Steve WatsonKNOW YOUR 1980s DENVER BRONCOS

This week, for the final installment ever of KY1980sDBs, #7, the quintessential 1980s Denver Bronco, John Elway.

John Elway, from an AP photo during The Drive

An AP photo taken during The Drive.

Remaining editions of KY1980sDBs: 0! By now, I have probably driven off all readers of this blog, if there were any to begin with.  But you can come back now.  I won’t be writing any more of these things.

After a standout college career at Stanford, which I do not hold against him, John was highly sought-after as both a professional football and baseball player.  The Baltimore Colts had the first overall pick in the 1983 draft and wanted to take John, but he famously refused to play for them, stating that if they drafted him he would play baseball instead.  The Colts relented and traded him to the Broncos, where Elway would spend his entire 16-year pro career.  John went on to become one of the greatest players in not only Broncos history, but NFL history.  He combined a legendary strong arm with fantastic mobility, and had an uncanny ability to force good things to happen for his team, winning dozens of games on fourth-quarter comebacks.  He is inarguably the greatest Bronco player ever, leading the team to 148-82-1 record, multiple division titles, and five Super Bowls (an NFL record), and two titles.  John holds a very prominent place on all-time NFL leaderboards as well.  He is fourth all-time in career passing yards and completions, fifth in touchdowns, and second in wins as a starting quarterback.  He is sixth all-time in rushing yards gained as a quarterback.  He is also the all-time leader in getting sacked, no doubt thanks to Denver’s often sketchy offensive lines and his insistence on waiting as long as possible to make the best play.  He was named league MVP in 1987.  John was enshrined in the Broncos’ Ring of Fame in 1999, the College Football Hall of Fame in 2000, and the NFL Hall of Fame in 2004 (the first player to be inducted as a Bronco).

  t-shirt

Also, here is a ridiculous(ly awesome) shirt with John's face.

He played in Super Bowl XXI, in which the Broncos were pummeled by the New York Giants 39-20, Super Bowl XXII, in which the Broncos were pummeled by the Washington Native Americans 42-10, and Super Bowl XXIV, in which the Broncos were pummeled by the San Francisco 49ers 55-10.  This pretty much cemented John’s and the Broncos’ reputation as big-game punching bags.  They finally redeemed themselves when John and game MVP Terrell Davis led the Broncos to glorious victory over the Packers in Super Bowl XXXII, 31-24.  The following year, the team went 14-2 (starting the season 13-0) and cruised to a second title over the Atlanta Falcons, 34-19, in Super Bowl XXXIII.  John was named Super Bowl MVP and retired in the offseason, his work as an NFL legend completed.

So what makes John Elway so awesome? Wow, where to begin?  John spent most of his youth in my favorite town in the world, Missoula, Montana. He was a Sunday staple, providing me and all Broncos fans hope that we could win every week for 16 years.  The Drive.  We suffered with him through painful Super Bowl losses, the Dan Reeves and Wade Phillips eras.  We triumphed with him on January 25, 1998, when a Super Bowl finally came to Denver.  He is in any conversation about the greatest quarterbacks of all time.  He reportedly sent a free designer recliner to a student who was teased for wearing a Broncos’ jersey.  John Elway isn’t my all-time favorite Denver Bronco, but he’s near the top and is probably the reason I grew up to write 22 editions of KNOW YOUR 1980s DENVER BRONCOS.

Since retirement from football, John has participated in a number of Colorado business ventures including car dealerships, appearances in video games and other commercials and sponsorship deals, and ownership of an Arena League football team.  These have all no doubt made him much more filthy rich than he was as just a football player.  He has recently married an ex-Raiders cheerleader and gives money to Colorado Republicans, both of which make me sad.  Of course, both of these acts are in his personal best interest (one for love, one to benefit rich guys), so why shouldn’t he?

Then Morton Said to Elway: The Best Denver Broncos Stories Ever Told