If you want to understand why i called them “moofies”, just watch the above clip.
Now that’s out the way. Here are some of the movies that i am currently looking forward to this year. Some i know little of, so could yet turn out to be stinkers. There’s a lot of the good old block buster in there. Che will be particularly interesting in terms of how they portray him.
x-men origins: wolverine
zach and miri make a porno
push
che
terminator: salvation
2012
monsters vs aliens
sports economists
Freakonomics has an interesting article with two sports economists - David Berri and Martin Schmidt - who answer a variety of reader’s questions.
While the focus of the questions are on North American sports, there are some interesting observations. Failure to adapt quickly was identified as a phenomenon: “one of the lessons of behavioural economics is that people are slow to adopt new information”. This is pertinent to the current situation in the AFL with the Adelaide Crows where they persist with a handball driven game that has failed miserably this year.
Interestingly, “overvaluation of scoring” was identified as an often repeated mistake. An example here was L.A Clippers head coach Kim Hughes observation that his players, in one match, focused excessively on scoring points for themselves (in order to boost their values as free agents) rather than setting up points for the team and thus improving their chances of winning.
One point i disagree on with the sports economists is their negative view of salary caps due to their effect to “transfer revenues from players to owners”. While this is a legitimate criticism, i feel the salary cap has worked well in Australian sports in terms of fostering greater team balance and assisting less popular teams. It is notable that one of the dominant teams in the NRL over recent years - Melbourne Storm - has been exposed as breaching the salary cap. However, the structure of Australian sports whereby there is less focus on privately owned teams - with a preference instead for membership elected boards - means the salary cap structure probably works better here in Australia, at least with respect to major sports like the AFL.