Why I am glad I'm not forced to stay.

If you look at the counter at the bottom of the page, you will see that a little more than 1,000 people have visited this blog. For a blog that is 57 weeks old, this is a sign of miserable failure. When my blog was in its 57th week, I was just shy of 60,000 visitors.

Why is no_slappz so bad at this? Why is his blog such a pathetic backwater on the World Wide Web? It is certainly not the conservative agenda. There are many successful conservative bloggers. No, the two major reasons for no_slappz' miserable failure to find an audience are simple and ones even a conservative would agree are recipes for failure.

No_slappz is lazy and intellectually inferior.

Lemme 'splain.

Sign of laziness #1: 132 posts in 57 weeks. A blog doesn't have to be updated daily, or even every weekday, but averaging way less than three posts a week is not going to build readership. I was in my fourth month of blogging when I put up my 132nd post. About 6,000 people had visited Lotsa 'Splainin' 2 Do by then.

Sign of laziness #2: Little to no added value. No_slappz' main problem as a writer is that he isn't a writer. Way too much of this blog is cutting and pasting from other sources, with half hearted and half witted comments thrown in sporadically. Clearly, he is a commenter out of his league as an actual blogger.

Intellectual inferiority: No_slappz isn't monumentally ignorant or a poor user of the English language. Had he been thrust upon the world stage at random like Sarah Palin or Joe the Plumber, I have no doubt he would have made a much better show of it than they did.

His problem is what he reaches for, which is critical thinking. It is like a baritone pining to be a tenor. When he sings La Donna e Mobile or Nessun Dorma, all the good work, all the fine tone and diction that has gone before will be forgotten in an instant by the audience when the train wreck of the missed high notes arrives.

His failure as a critical thinker is easily summed up in a single sentence. "It is true because I want it to be true." All evidence to the contrary is to be ignored when no_slappz has already made up his mind. There is no man made component to climate change because no_slappz does not want there to be a man made component. Deregulation is always good because no_slappz' world would be meaningless if this religious tenet was taken away. Never mind that the high priest of deregulation, Alan Greenspan, has had to admit this cult's abysmal failure in public. No_slappz is like some poor sap of a Japanese soldier, still stuck on some tiny island in 1950, unaware that the war is over and his side has surrendered.

Leon Festinger explained this in his seminal work The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. It might be a good read for slappy. It would probably feel like being a guest on the old This Is Your Life TV show.

My reward for winning our wager is to post here for a week. But having kicked around backstage for a while, I see that being here is like the old joke about the grand prize of a sweepstakes being a week's stay in New Jersey, and second prize is two weeks in New Jersey.

Making even this much effort for so tiny an audience is hardly worth my while. I'll probably put a link to my posts here on my blog, just so I can be sure that somebody reads it.

Why I am here.

My name is Matthew Hubbard. I blog under the name Matty Boy, at Lotsa 'Splainin' 2 Do, a blog devoted to anything I want to write about and Unified Football Theory, based on my proprietary system for analyzing professional football teams.

In mid June, I announced that I would use a mathematical system of my own devising called the Confidence of Victory method to track the electoral college count at my blog once both conventions were done. No_slappz, who is an occasional troll at my website, proposed that we have a bet of a dollar, because without data, he was confident of McCain's victory, even that far away from the election. While I had made no prediction, I was willing to take a bet, but did not trust no_slappz to pay, so I made a counter offer of the stakes. If McCain won, no-slappz could guest blog on Lotsa 'Splainin' for a day. If Obama won, I could guest blog on this blog for a week. I offered this unequal payoff out of generosity. My readership is actually about 100 times greater than this blog's, which is the main reason no_slappz bothers to write his contrarian opinions in my comments at my place.

He desperately wants someone to read what he writes.

My lack of faith in no_slappz' honor was justified by the fact that he did not readily concede his loss, but only allowed me access to guest blog after being reminded twice, once here and once at McCain, not Hussein. A man who loses a bet knows the duty to pay falls directly on him, and should not have to be reminded, like one reminds a child to clean his room or eat his broccoli.


I made no prediction of the outcome in June, because I considered the early polls to be unreliable, as did no_slappz. The difference is that I wasn't certain what would happen without more data, and waited before I made anything like a prediction, while no_slappz was certain, a character flaw of his I will discuss in greater detail tomorrow.

As a gambler, I know not to celebrate early. Even when my system showed the odds of McCain winning had dwindled so badly that he was worse than a 1,000 to 1 underdog, I told my readers about big upset wins and that they should work until the result was final.

My system of prediction worked remarkably well. The last numbers I published on the Sunday before the election gave Obama 353 electors, McCain 174 and 11 electors in Indiana were a 50%-50% tossup. In the final count, Obama won Indiana and one of the three separate electors in Nebraska for an electoral landslide of 364 to 173, a margin greater than 2 to 1.

I work hard with my numerical systems, and I am gratified when they are successful. I've used my football data to make predictions this week and last, now that there is enough data to judge teams this season. Last week I went 6-3 in nine picks and this week I went 7-3 in the first ten games in which I made predictions, with one pick left.

My system likes the odds of the 49ers and Cardinals scoring more than 46 points total this evening. Do with this information what you will.

I will check in tomorrow with another post.