Ask Alex - February 3, 2017

Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers.  Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.

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This week we cover a couple of ridiculous analogies, talk about the health problems of a regular contributor, discuss the morality of laughing at birds and tackle re-gifting. Plus, Rosie O'Donnell on a BDSM Island Resort!!! Enjoy!

Submitted by: @cdpayne79 (Two Questions)

Who died and made McMullinists Jesus H. Reagan?

I’m sure that I will draw some hate from the McMullin acolytes, but I just can’t leave this one alone. Because I have an analogy and it is too good to keep to myself!

McMullinists are the Carly Rae Jepsen of American politics.

To review, the 2016 Republican Primary started as the deepest and most impressive field of candidates in recent memory. All the other boys, try to chase me… It ended up as a dumpster fire celebrating a combination of willful ignorance, economic idiocy, outright bigotry and a rejection of all of the ideas that had defined conservatism for 50 years. Intellectually consistent conservatives remained aghast at the xenophobic, protectionist authoritarianism spouted in angry, toddler-sized sentences punctuated by the very tiny gesticulations of their party’s nominee for President.

Naturally, this led a lot of those disaffected Republicans to think about voting for a third party candidate. They threw a wish in a well...

Into this void stepped Evan McMullin, a seemingly nice guy who couldn’t get on the ballot in many states, but seemed to be pretty reasonable and said most of the right things. His stare was holding, ripped jeans, skin was showing, hot night wind was blowing…  Sure, his resume was thin and the evidence of his commitment to the conservative principles in question was scant, but as a protest vote against two horrific candidates, he made a lot of sense. {“Yes, you should totally elect a former intelligence agent with no prior public life!” - Russian people.} Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but here’s my number, call me maybe? He’s young, well-spoken, seems pretty intelligent and stuck mostly to the basics of conservative ideas - activist foreign policy, strong military, school choice, reduced regulation, repealing ACA, etc.

He lost, of course, garnering a whopping total of 700,000 votes nationwide. For perspective, that was about 15% as many votes as Aleppo Johnson and only half as many as The Lexington Lunatic, Jill Stein. For some reason, though, he has inspired a whole wave of acolytes who are willing to accept his assertion that he is the voice of a generation who should be taken seriously as a movement leader. Before he came into their life, they missed him so bad. They missed him so, so bad!

This has continued even as he has shown himself to be pretty far removed from those conservative principles (which the National Review warned you about in August). He quickly established a poorly-defined activist group that seems to provide nothing more than a means of getting donors to employ him. He announced that the GOP has a problem with bigotry and misogyny and that we need a new conservative party that excludes those people (no word on who gets to make that distinction. He was quick to say “this isn’t about Trump”, which is interesting since he hasn’t made a public statement since October that was about anything other than Trump. He cozied up to liberals and sometimes parroted their talking points. He thoroughly rejected his own avowed devotion to the Constitution by suggesting that the Attorney General not have to follow valid laws. Since the election, his Twitter feed includes hundreds of desultory statements about Republicans and not a single one that mentions the Democratic party.

If you have ever seen the cinematic masterpiece that is the video for Call Me Maybe, you’re aware that our protagonist (just like the McMullinists) is blindsided by a shocking revelation about her crush’s interest in her. This is the lesson for them...it is fine to become infatuated with the hot shirtless boy mowing the lawn, and it is even understandable if you concoct a forced car-washing scenario to show off your attributes...but for fuck’s sake, you gotta give it up when he gives his number to your base player!!!

You have $1 million and must put it on a single Super Bowl prop bet. What do you bet on?

Easy. I’d buy $1 million worth of T-Bills as a means of wagering “Will the US Government default during the Super Bowl?” and then sell them afterwards and keep my million bucks. Nobody gets rich playing against the casino, my man! Except for the casino.

I’m being facetious, but I think that is illustrative of the approach that I would take. Since I don’t have BrownSkin money, my primary objective would be to make it as likely as possible that I won whatever I bet on, regardless of the payoff. I could use a million dollars, after all. So, I’d most likely choose the single most likely event that I could wager on and do my best to keep the money. If I could find a casino that would take a bet like “Will there be a single touchdown in the game?” even if the odds were like 1/100, I’d still take it. The practical difference between the $0 I’d end up with for losing any bet and the $1,010,000 that I would end up with by taking this low-risk bet is much larger than is the marginal benefit I’d gain by winning $2 or $3 million that may come from taking longer odds.

Now, if we are taking a more theoretical finance approach, we’d look for a mispriced risk...i.e., a wager that is offering odds that are substantially longer than the actual likelihood of the event happening. Take, for example, the odds of the Super Bowl going to Overtime, which I am currently seeing as "Yes +800" and "No -1000". For the non-gamblers, that means you can bet $100 to win $800 if the game goes to Overtime or $1000 to win $100 if the game does not.

It seems like the chances are actually pretty easy to approximate. Overtime likelihood is based on the relative strengths of the two teams and then the luck and happenstance that goes in to exact final scores (in other words, two evenly matched teams are much more likely to end up tied than two mismatched teams, but there is still some randomness involved in getting and actual tie.)

No Super Bowl ever gone to Overtime, which is helpful but not a great sample. A more useful sample would be to include all games, regular season and playoffs, over the last ten year, which we can do pretty easily using the Pro Football Reference Team Game Finder. That amounts to 2,669 games (256 per year, plus 11 playoff games for each of the last 9 years and 10 so far this season).  There were 167 Overtime games over that period, a rate of one Overtime game per every 16 played. If we look at just playoff games, we get 9 Overtimes in 109 games, a slightly higher rate of 1 per 12 games played.

The question, then, is what would we estimate the odds of a Super Bowl going to Overtime to be. Certainly, the 1:16 ratio for all games includes a lot of games with mismatched teams that have very low chances of going to overtime. That would argue towards using the playoff ratio (higher-quality, more evenly-matched teams) of 1:12 as a proxy.  {Ideally, I would like to find this data parsed further by point spread as a means of isolating games in which the relative strength of the teams was perceived by experts to be similar to the 3 point difference between these two teams, but that data is not available}

BUT...there is another variable...

Super Bowls are played with an extra week of rest between games. That extra week, which allows for better preparation and healthier teams, may materially exacerbate any differences between the two teams. My unscientific survey of written words and people that I asked in the last hour, says that this is a large reason why there have been so many Super Bowls that were so one-sided. This would argue that the likelihood of going into overtime might in fact be even less than the 1:16 that we observe in the total sample.

Either way, it is hard to imagine that the actual likelihood of this game going into overtime is not much lower than the 10% that the casinos have priced it at. So, take your million dollars, bet that the game will NOT going into overtime and then enjoy the extra hundred G's you have Monday morning.

Submitted by: Bill O’Keefe

My toe and my man parts hurt. What did I do wrong?

First of all, I take it that this means we have cured the body lice from a couple of weeks ago. So, congratulations on that.

I can think of a couple of ways that this may have happened, but you’re going to need to answer a few questions to help me get to the bottom of it.

1. Have you managed to kick yourself in the crotch recently?
2. Have you done any streaking in unsafely cold weather?
3. Have you, cartoon-style, stepped on a rake, immediately causing the rake to both impale your toe and shoot up to whack you in the nuts?
4. Have you done any ice fishing? I know this one seems a little weird, but I just found a short story that would explain a missing toe and (potentially) some groin trouble.
5. Are you capable of pleasuring yourself with your own feet…? (Please be “no”, please be “no”, please be “no”)

I have some other ideas kicking around, but let’s work through these first...

Submitted by: Rebecca de Winter

Hey Alex - I received some nice gifts for Christmas that I’ll never use. How do you feel about re-gifting?

I’m pro re-gifting, within reason. Really, it is no different than regular gifting...it’s a good gift if it is thoughtful and appropriately matches the recipient. If you are giving away the Shake Weight that you got at your office Yankee swap, then you’re just being a dick. But if it’s something you have already, or it just isn’t something you’d want/use, then by all means, pass it along to someone else.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. I got two bluetooth speakers for Christmas from two different people. Thoughtful and perfectly appropriate gifts, but I don’t really need two of them, so I gave one of them to one of my administrative assistants who mentioned looking for one. One of my very favorite wedding gifts was a Gurgling Cod that was most definitely a re-gift from a friend of my husband’s (kind of quirky, but folks who have spent significant time in or around Boston will totally get it...it’s like Das Boot, but for Brahmins).

So, go ahead and regift if it is something you really think the new recipient would like, or it is something you may have bought them anyway. And, as Rebekah Huang noted in response to this question, the original packaging should be in place. If you’re giving away something used, you’re not re-gifting, you're passing along a hand-me-down.

Submitted by: Lizzy Lou Who

How many “4 hour erection” questions do you get?

Surprisingly, none! Which is too bad, because I think I could offer some keen insights into solving this problem. In my highly sought after medical opinion, I would prescribe a single viewing of the 1994 film Exit to Eden to kill that erection.

And really, let’s stop to take a second to appreciate the chain of events that led to this movie being made. Someone sent a script to the producers about a diamond smuggling ring at what amounts to a dominatrix camp. OK, good...you have a crime, probably some shooting and fighting, some salacious sex stuff built right in, and an easy excuse to put some really attractive people in very little clothing. That is a pretty workable recipe for a movie.

The questionable decision-making probably started when they decided, for some inexplicable reason, that this should be a comedy. I suppose that good comedies have been made from worse, but the plot outline really seems better suited to a grittier kind of film. But even that was still defensible...the real head scratcher came when they decided to cast this movie.

There was literally an entire committee of people at a Savoy Pictures that got in a room, read a description of a detective who would spend the entire movie in a leather unitard and garters, looked at each other and had a Eureka moment...ROSIE O’DONNELL!!!

“Let’s write that check for $25,000,000 before someone else jumps on this goldmine before us,” said the man producing his last movie ever, probably.

Submitted by: Yoi Musket

What time do you get up in the morning?

I feel like there is some subtext to this question that I am not getting, but I am going to take the bait and answer anyway…

I really feel almost guilty admitting this, but I don’t get up very early at all. I have two six year old girls, neither of whom ever gets up before 7:00am on her own. They are routinely in bed at 8:00 on weekends, and one of them has been known to sleep until nearly 10:00 if she had a long day and a late night. They have never really been early risers, and I have no ability to relate to parents who are up at 5:30 with their kids every day. I have great sympathy for them, though.

I am also a pretty low maintenance woman, which helps a lot. I am usually out of bed at 7:00 on weekdays, have the girls awake and dressed and do their hair by 7:15. I usually jump in the shower while my husband feeds them breakfast and packs their lunches (he is up much earlier...he usually runs and showers before I get out of bed). It takes me maybe 20 minutes to shower and dry my hair, and another ten minutes to dress and get ready (makeup is for suckers!). By then the girls are done with breakfast, have brushed their teeth, have their backpacks packed up and should be putting on their coats and shoes.

The girls and I are out the door by 7:45, walk across the Common and have them in their classrooms by 8:00 and I then I walk to work and get to my desk by 8:15. If you’ve never lived within a quarter mile of work, you should try it;-).

Submitted by: Sam Twain

What happens when an immovable object meets an irresistible force and there is a gnome in between them?

In Greek mythology, the Teumessian fox, or Cadmean vixen, was a gigantic fox that could never be caught. Dionysus sent the fox to torment the children of Thebes as a punishment for a national crime (no word on the national crime...I am assuming it was related to Rosie O’Donnell in leather). Creon, the ruler of Thebes, gave Amphitryon the impossible task of destroying this beast. He discovered an apparent solution to the problem by finding a magical dog name Laelaps that could catch everything it chased, much like the Tawny Scrawny Lion.

Zeus, however, kept having Excel tell him that he had a circular reference in his formula, so he made both of the animals into stone. And then after that, he made them into that constellations Canis Major (Laelaps) and Canis Minor (Teumessian Fox).

Point being, your question is an unsolvable paradox that relies on two things both being true that can not both be true. However, I think we can all agree that the gnome is fucked.

Also, note that I regifted much of that answer from Wikipedia!

Submitted by: KDJF

Is it morally wrong to induce birds to fly into my closed window?

I don’t know...is hilarity wrong? Cuz if it is, I don’t wanna be right!!!

I am not even totally sure that this question is for me...there are a couple of other, dramatically inferior #AskAlex’s, and it’s not clear who this was aimed it. But I am going to take it anyway, because that is the sort of giver that I am. First of all, great job keeping your windows clean. That is some really good windexing and you should be commended for your cleanliness. It is especially impressive for someone who, if your bio is to be believed, is in fact 119 years old. MAYBE I SHOULD TYPE LOUDER SO YOU CAN HEAR.

I’m going to say that it depends on what kinds of birds and how seriously they would be injured by flying into your window. Morals being what they are, this is a somewhat gray area and highly subject to the whims of the observer.

As a parallel, think about two high school boys who play that game where you make a circle with your fingers and you get to punch your friend in the arm if you get him to look at it. Is that morally wrong? Of course not...it is good, clean fun among boys. Now, if one of them was a baby, well that is a whole other story. It doesn’t matter what kind of game you are playing, you can’t punch a baby!!!

Don’t be a baby puncher, K...