Predictions 2015-2016 (Round 11)

This past week I picked six games out of ten correctly with three correct scores for 150 points.  Lawrenson picked four out of ten correctly with zero correct scores for 40 points.  His celebrity guest picked one correctly for 10 points.  Merson picked four out of ten correctly with no correct scores for a total of 40 points.

My current total for the season is 44 out of 100 with for 650 points.  Lawrenson has picked 46 out of 100 for 760 points.  Merson has picked 50 out of 99 for a total of 840 points.

I finally had a good week and picked up 110 points on both of the experts.  Two more weeks like this one and I will be ahead.  I am not holding my breath, however.

When Lawrenson and Merson make their new picks I might link them here and here.  I keep forgetting to do this. 

PREDICTIONS

My system’s picking rules can be found here.  Based upon those rules here are my predictions for the next round of games:

Chelsea-Liverpool           1-1

Palace-Man U                  1-1

Man City-Norwich           2-1

Newcastle-Stoke             1-1

Swansea-Arsenal             0-1

Watford-West Ham        1-2

West Brom-Leicester     1-1

Everton-Sunderland       2-1

Southampton-Cherries 2-1

Tottenham-Aston Villa  1-0

Predictions 2015-2016 (Round 10)

This past week I picked five games out of ten correctly with no correct score for 50 points.  Lawrenson picked six out of ten correctly with one correct score for 90 points.  His celebrity guest picked six correctly for 90 points.  Merson picked five out of ten correctly with two correct score for a total of 110 points.  This was yet another, another bad week.

Once again, I would have been better off if I had stuck with the system that used last year’s standings. I would have gotten six right for 60 points.  That is still not very good.  It is beginning to look like last year's good results might have been a fluke, but I will keep going because it would not be fair to quite when things are working right.  Also, I did not even start until week 11 last year so maybe things will turn around.

My current total for the season is 38 out of 90 with for 500 points.  Lawrenson has picked 42 out of 90 for 720 points.  Merson has picked 46 out of 89 for a total of 790 points.

When Lawrenson and Merson make their new picks I might link them here and here.  I keep forgetting to do this. 

PREDICTIONS

My system’s picking rules can be found here.  Based upon those rules here are my predictions for the next round of games:

Aston Villa-Swansea        1-1

Leicester-Palace               2-1

Norwich-West Brom        1-1

Stoke-Watford                  1-0

West Ham-Chelsea           2-1

Arsenal-Everton                2-1

Sunderland-Newcastle    1-1

Cherries-Tottenham        0-1

Man U-Man City               1-1

Liverpool-Southampton  1-1

Predictions 2015-2016 (Round 9)

This past week I picked four games out of ten correctly with one correct score for 70 points.  Lawrenson picked five out of ten correctly with one correct score for 80 points.  His celebrity guest picked four correctly for 70 points.  Merson picked six out of ten correctly with one correct score for a total of 90 points.  This was yet another, another bad week for me but at least I tied the celebrity guest.

Once again, I would have been better off if I had stuck with the system that used last year’s standings. I would have gotten eight games right for 140 points.

My current total for the season is 33 out of 80 with for 450 points.  Lawrenson has picked 36 out of 80 for 630 points.  Merson has picked 41 out of 79 for a total of 680 points.

When Lawrenson and Merson make their new picks I will link them here and here.  This assumes I am even able to see Lawrenson’s picks anymore.  My attempts to look at the BBC sports website are now all being diverted to an advertisement.

PREDICTIONS

My system’s picking rules can be found here.  Based upon those rules here are my predictions for the next round of games:

Tottenham-Liverpool         1-0

Chelsea-Aston Villa             2-1

Palace-West Ham                2-1

Everton-Man U                    1-1

Man City-Cherries               2-1

Southampton-Leicester     1-1

West Brom-Sunderland     2-1

Watford-Arsenal                 0-1

Newcastle-Norwich           1-2

Swansea-Stoke                   2-1

I transcribed Adam Blackmore's 8 October 2015 interview with Gareth Rogers

The audio of this interview can be found here. 

Once again I have taken the liberty of deleting “ums”, unnecessary “ands” and various false starts when the deletions do not change the meaning.

GR:  All of the cash that we have received from players in the past two years has gone back into reinvestment into the squad be it through wages for existing players, wages of new players, transfer fees, deal costs.  All of that money has been spent but you end up with this strange accounting way in the way that it happens in football club accounts.  All of the profit you make on a player gets registered in the year that that sale took place whereas the cost of reinvesting in a new player is spread out over the life of the contract evenly so you don’t get an even spread between what profit you make and what cash you actually have in to spend and therefore, you see large profits, but it is not necessarily a reflection of the cash that sits within the business. 

BA:  So the net spend that people see in newspapers and everything, this is the club 16th net spend or bottom and then the wages.  People will go where has all the broadcast money gone?  Where is all the Sky money? Where has all that gone? What is the answer to that question? 

GR:  It goes into the squad.  It goes into developing what we do as a football club—our long term sustainability.  You can see we can have, as a business, it is underlying profitability of 8 million pounds.  And that is there to make sure that we can function as a business; be able to reinvest in the facilities that we have; be able to reinvest in our staff in order to keep the business moving forward.  But fundamentally it is all mostly invested in the football operations of the business.

BA:  Ok, so you are carrying this debt that we spoke about last year which you inherited as a board as it were.  Where are we with that?  What is the level of debt that the club is carrying and why still?  It is all historic?

GR:  So we said when we spoke in March when we put the last of the accounts out and we brought them out a little earlier this year than we have done in previous years through good governance et cetera and we said that that level of debt was going to increase and it has done and it now sits at the year end at 62.1 million and that is mainly to the shareholder or to institutions that are backed by the shareholder.  We are comfortable with that.  We have a long term plan to reduce that and it’s now what we believe is at its peak.  Therefore, moving forward that will be seen to reduce over time but as you rightly say it is the result of historical transactions that the club has entered into and we believe we’re at the point where most of these have washed through at this point so we are in a position to try and reduce that ongoing. 

BA:  So that is not a figure, of course, separating debt from turnover profit and everything else?  That is not something fans should worry about? 

GR:  No, no, no.  It is not a figure that we as board want to carry at that level over the long term.  Where, as I said, we have a plan to try and reduce that but absolutely [unintelligible but sounds like “function that worry about”] where the majority is to the shareholder.  And we want to try and reduce those debts over time so that isn’t a burden on the club.

BA:  Does that impact on what you can do with the money you get in though?  Will it stop impacting that?  When it goes will it free you up to spend more money potentially?

GR:  We all know, if you go back to where the club was six or seven years ago, it was in financial dire straits and one of the massive lessons that was learned out of that that there must be a balance stuck between off field stability and on field success and we never take our eyes off either of those and, therefore, we will make sure that the on field success and the ability to create on field success (and what that success is defined by) is still there whilst at the same time making sure that the long term stability of the club is never put at risk.

BA:  Ralph Krueger came out with a great phrase with me a few months ago when we talked about summer business and what happened and Schneiderlin and Clyne going and he said “we know who we are” and I thought it was a really telling phrase about the management of the club and I thought, I thought that is fine but can you state ambitions to be in Europe and still have to lag behind the big clubs who are all competing in it with far bigger bases and far bigger financial clout than you have.

GR:  We have aspirations as a club that we want to play in Europe.  Of course we went out of Europe this year earlier than we wanted to, but the whole focus of the club now is how do we get back there?  We believe it can be achieved.  What we said many times it can be achieved and that is our aspiration.  Our aspiration is to finish as high as we can in the Premier League, to play European Football on a regular basis and that is what we want to achieve over the next four or five years. 

BA:  And that can be done as far as your strategy is concerned that can be done and you can punch above your weight as it were.

GR:  We believe so.  We believe so.  It’s sport.  Anything can happen.  That is the world of sport.  You would not want to sit here and predict that this will or this won’t happen but we absolutely have the aspiration to try and make it happen and everyone here is focused every day on doing everything they can to try and make that happen. 

BA:  Now your revenue has increased.  Your commercial revenue continues to grow year on year as well.  Against that you’ve had to obviously take a bit of a hit with the wages to turnover and your group wages to turnover not just player wages and the costs.  So how is that from your point of view?  Is that something that’s expected, in control?  Or what is it?

GR:  There are two aspects of that, Adam.  Firstly, the underlying wages have grown from 55.2 million last year as a total group to just over 62 this year.  The majority of that is player’s wages and that demonstrates the comment I was making earlier that it hasn’t just gone into transfer fees and deal costs.  There has been a significant investment in wages.

BA:  You’ve got a stronger squad is what you are saying?

GR:  Yes.  Absolutely. We definitely have a stronger squad we believe.  There has also been, which is a second part, a one off hit in the year which actually takes the total wages up to 70.8 million but they are 8 million of one off costs in there which has to do with onerous contracts, one off payments in order to ….

BA:  Players leaving that sort of thing.

GR:  Those sorts of things.  I am not going into the individual amounts and who they are but there is an amount there in order to cancel contracts, to bring some future contracts into this year, in order to try and clean up the account and take the hit in one year. 

BA:  Just finally then, we got the level of debt you are obviously happy with.  The squad is stronger.  You are confident with the profitability base of the business.  Where does the owner sit in all this?  And I have to ask you this because she’s obviously part of that debt is money she’s lent the club.  When the TV money goes up could she not just rightly take some money out for herself?  I mean how does it work?  Has she done that? Or is it still sitting there?  Is that debt?

GR:  I think the answer lies in the historical past behavior.  As you can see there has been over 80 million pounds in sales for the past two years and I have just described to you all of that has been reinvested so I think that gives you the answer you are looking for.  As I said earlier, we are looking to reduce that debt over a period of time so the club isn’t exposed. But that isn’t about the owner looking to extract money out for the sake of extracting money out.  It is about us as a board of directors saying we do not want that exposure of the business to our owner going forward.

Honey is Gone

In the past seven hours, I attempted the impossible 11 times.  I started to check on or look for my sick cat, Honey.  It was impossible because I had her euthanized eight hours ago.

Honey was only nine years old.  She had been basically healthy her whole live although I let her gain too much weight and she developed an arthritis problem, but it was getting better—at least in how it affected her—as she lost the weight.  In July her weight finally got back down to the top of her target range—11 pounds.  This was major progress and it showed up in her behavior.  She was running around like when she was young and had resumed jumping onto high things.  The diet would continue until she got down to 10 pounds but this was a victory—if only my diet was going so well.

Alas, this turned out to be a false victory.  In August she stopped finishing her meals. A few weeks later she stopped eating the dry food which had always been her favorite.  I took her to see the vet.  We thought that she might have an infected tooth—she had one a few years ago and, thereafter, the vet put her under to perform a thorough cleaning of her teeth every September.  I sort of expected the vet to tell me that it would have to happen more often.

Instead, on 15 September, I was awakened by a phone call telling me Honey had a tumor in her tongue.  It was going to keep growing making it tougher and tougher for her to eat.  Eventually, she would have to be force fed.  Even if I did that, she would eventually not be able to breath.  The vet said we had anywhere from a week to two months left.

Honey was never going to tolerate force feeding so the two months was never realistic.  I brought her home to enjoy our remaining time.  I made a bigger effort to ensure that she ate and it worked for a while.  The first ten days were great.  Her weight was down to 8.5 pounds so she was full of energy and jumping, running, and playing even more than in July and August.  She continued to enjoy all her favorite activities except eating hard food.  During the next 11 days she went erratically downhill.  Her grooming declined which looked strange because she was always a very clean cat.  She rarely needed to use the litter box and she was less interested in sitting in my lap or having her head rubbed.   She began to drool more and more.

It was not straight downhill.  As recently as this past Saturday she ate more than she had eaten in a couple of months.  But that was the last day she ate much of anything.  By Monday it was clear that she was not going to have any more good days so I made the appointment.

I probably should have taken her to the vet to check things out a couple of weeks sooner, but I had out of town trips scheduled and, as it turned out, it would have made no difference in the outcome—only in how long I would know what was coming.  I would have stayed home with her and missed my annual vacation and my 40th high school reunion.  That wouldn’t really have helped.

Almost everyone’s cat is wonderful.  That is why they make great pets.  There is no point is trying to convince anyone that Honey was especially wonderful.  But she was well suited to me.

She adapted to living in her new home completely with only one night (her second) of discomfort with her new environment.  She was a lap cat who just liked to hang around me.  Since I wanted a lap cat who would tolerate me reading or working while she sat or slept on my lap this was perfect.  She was pretty vocal, which was necessary to get my attention sometimes, but I was rarely in doubt as to what she wanted from me.  And for the past eight years whenever I was heading home, whether it was from the store or an out of town trip, I was always smiling because I was going to get to see her soon.  I was going to be able to open my front door and shout “Hi Honey. I’m home.”

Since this is supposed to be a Southampton football blog, I suppose I should mention that we had a little football based tradition.  I often watched our games on my Ipad with Honey on my lap.  When the game got exciting and I reacted, she was not pleased.  So I started rewarding her with her favorite treats whenever we scored.  Unfortunately, the last time she could eat them was during our draw with Newcastle.  By the time of our Norwich victory, she had stopped eating hard food.

Honey was clearly ready to go yesterday.  After she was unconscious, we looked at her tongue and it had literally started to fall apart in the last three days.  She was ready to fall asleep in my arms for the last time.

September 2015 Reading List

I started reading a lot of books this month than I not likely to finish.  In large part, this was due to a lack of focus because I found out my cat was dying of cancer on 15 September.  As of now, she is still alive, but tomorrow she won’t be.  This is also why I finished only 8 books this month.  In fact, I finished all 8 before 15 September.  (I also spent a lot of time reading trial transcripts this month.)  I will certainly finish reading some of the books over the next several months, but many will go uncompleted. 

Once again, the list is in chronological order.  By the way, I am not in the mood to proofread this post one last time so I apologize for any typos.

Books Finished

The Dragons of Dorcastle (The Pillars of Reality Book 1) by Jack Campbell

The Hidden Masters of Marandur (The Pillars of Reality Book 2) by Jack Campbell

I have nothing really to add to my brief comments in last month’s reading list when I had started, but not yet completed, the first book in the series.  It is an enjoyable fantasy series with some interesting twists in its magic system and the social structure of the world.  I am looking forward to the third book in the series coming out in November. 

The Girl in the Spider’s Web: A Lisbeth Salander Novel by David Lagercrantz

Shortly after I began reading this book, I was not particularly happy with it.  The main characters did not fully feel like the same characters I had read about in the first three books.  In a sense, this is understandable because the original author has been dead for over a decade and a new author will, of necessity, write in his own style.

By the time I finished the book, I was much happier.  Salander came to play a more important role in the book and her character did feel more consistent with her original character. 

I suspect anyone who enjoyed the first three books in the series will want to try this book.  I suspect many of those readers will feel less than satisfied.  I am one of those readers.  I am glad to have read the book and I will read the next one. I cannot fully explain why I am less than fully satisfied.

Possibly it arises out of the politics of this book.  There is no doubt that the original series was written from the prospective of a left wing Swede who spend a lifetime dealing with and fighting fascism in Sweden.  Given the recent National Security activities engaged in by the United States, there is no doubt that the original author would not have been pleased with the USA.  Nevertheless, the choice to make the plot so directly interact with America’s National Security Agency made the whole book seem considerably less plausible for me.  I do not mind the National Security Agency’s extensive surveillance being part of the plot but I simply do not believe that the plot, as written, was plausible in that respect.  Ultimately this is a mixed review of a book that I hoped to like very much.

John Scalzi is Not a Very Popular Author and I Myself Am Quite Popular:  How SJWs Always Lie About Our Comparative Popularity Levels by Theophilus Pratt

This very short book was written as a joke/satire of a major dispute—if not full-fledged war—going on in the science fiction community.  The details of the dispute are undoubtedly way too “inside baseball” for people likely to be reading my blog.  (For that matter, the term “inside baseball” might be too inside baseball for the English readers of my blog.  No matter.)  Suffice it to say that John Scalzi the actually author of this book, volunteered to write this book to raise money for charity—specifically a group devoted to raising racial and ethnic diversity in speculative fiction.  No doubt any regular reader of Scalzi’s blog (found here) will enjoy the humor but will have already heard of it.  The average person probably will not be interested.

Make Me: A Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel but it is somewhat difficult to explain why.  Jack Reacher is probably not a character I would like to meet in real life because it is too dangerous to be around him but that, of course, makes it interesting to read his adventures.  On the other hand, this book is nothing special in the context of the Jack Reacher series. 

If you have read all the other Jack Reacher books and intend to keep reading them, you will certainly want to read this one.  If you have read no Jack Reacher books, this is not where you should start but if you continue reading this is, for now, where you should end up.

A Season in the Red: Managing Man UTD in the Shadow of Alex Ferguson by Jamie Jackson

I was very disappointed by this book.  I thought it might be interesting to read an inside perspective of the past two years of Manchester United and its difficult transition following the retirement of Alex Ferguson.  I still think that but this is not that book.

This book read more like Jamie Jackson, a writer for the guardian, simply turned the information he already had from covering Manchester United into a book without doing that much additional research.

Certainly, from reading the book it appears that David Moyes was a source for Jackson and provided him with significant information.  On the other hand, Louis van Gaal almost certainly was not a source because there was nothing in this book that does not appear to have come from van Gaal’s public statements especially at press conferences. 

This book contrasts poorly with The Game by Jon Pessa, a book I read in July.  After reading The Game, I felt I understood what happened in Major League Baseball from the early 1990s to the near present because the author had, quite clearly, spent a lot of time talking to many different people to find out what really went on.  I had hoped for the equivalent book about Manchester United’s recent history but that is not what I got.

If you are a Manchester United fan (why are you reading my blog) you might be interested in this book in the same way you would be interested in anything about Manchester United.  If, however, you are someone who follows the Premier League without any particular focus on Manchester United, there are, I assume, better things to read. 

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

This novel won the 2015 Hugo Award for best Science Fiction Novel of the Year.  It is first in a trilogy translated from the Chinese and it made the final Hugo ballet only because another nominee withdrew as part of the controversy over this year’s Hugos which I have avoided discussing in any detail.

Anyway, the book is a worthy winner.  It details the problems scientists, mostly, located in China, encounter when the most recent scientific research begins to show that science is no longer working like it should.  By the end of this novel, we know what is going on and why but there is still plenty of room for the rest of the trilogy to advance the plot. 

I found it interesting that even though this book dealt with problems of worldwide importance, it was nearly entirely focused on what was going on in China.  This slightly parochial view of events reminding me of virtually every American science fiction novel which assumes that events of worldwide importance are dealt with primarily in the United States.  I am not suggesting that it is either surprising or wrong that a Chinese author would treat events similarly.  In fact, it was good to remind me that that is what a Chinese author would do.  That being said, I assumed that the subsequent two books will have a wider international scope.

If you are someone who likes to read a story from start to finish at one time—unless you can read Chinese—you might want to wait until the third volume in the trilogy is published in English next year. 

Reviews have compared this work to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series or Frank Herbert’s Dune.  The comparison is not unreasonable but I will have to read the final two books before I can put the books in the same category myself.  However, the mere fact that I am not rejecting the comparison out of hand tells me how much I appreciated this book.  I am having difficulty deciding whether to finish reading the second book now or to wait until the third book comes out. 

Rivers of London—Body Work #1 by Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel

This is a graphic novel set in the Rivers of London Universe.  I am not the biggest fan of graphic novels although I enjoy both movies and television shows based upon them.  In fact, I did not pay that much attention to what I was buying when I ordered this book on my Kindle and had not realized I had bought a graphic novel until I first opened it.  If you like Ben Aaronvitch’s Rivers of London Series you will probably want to read this and the additional graphic novels when they come out.  (Two are already available.)  However, unless you prefer graphic novels to regular books, I would suggest reading the novels, in order of publication, before reading this.

Books Started

Due to the distractions, this month I started a lot of books I did not and will not finish.

The Hidden Masters of Marandur (The Pillars of Reality Book 2) by Jack Campbell

A Season in the Red: Managing Man UTD in the Shadow of Alex Ferguson by Jamie Jackson

John Scalzi is Not a Very Popular Author and I Myself Am Quite Popular:  How SJWs Always Lie About Our Comparative Popularity Levels by Theophilus Pratt

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

This is the best Science Fiction novel I have read this year.  I felt like rereading the beginning of it for some reason.  I don’t anticipate finishing the book again so soon.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

I also wanted to reread the beginning of this Stephenson novel.  There is a slightly greater chance I will finish rereading it.

Make Me: A Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child

I, Asimov by Isaac Asimov

I thought I was in the mood to reread this volume of Isaac Asimov’s autobiography.  It turns out I wasn’t.

Buried Secrets (Nick Heller Book 2) by Joseph Finder

The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

A Blaze of Glory: A Novel of the Battle of Shiloh by Jeff Shaara

Kittens for Dummies by Dusty Rainbolt

I started reading this to help me plan for my next cat.  It was helpful and I suspect it will be a good reference for dealing with new cat issues.

The Orpheus Clock:  The Search for My Family’s Art Treasures Stolen by the Nazis by Simon Goodman

The Game of Our Lives:  The English Premier League and the Making of Modern Britain by David Goldblatt

Pacific Crucible:  War at Sea in the Pacific 1941-1942 by Ian W. Toll

A Call to Arms (Manticore Ascendant series Book 2) by David Weber; Timothy Zahn; Thomas Pope

Rough Crossings by Simon Schama

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

This is one of my favorite books of all time.  It allowed me to realize that I was an atheist not an agnostic.  I highly recommend it to everyone but, of course, some people will not want to read it if for no other reason than they do not want to have their faith challenged.