I love American ingenuity. Here is Ultimate Tak Ball! (original) People are really playing this.

As the Republican primary season wears on, there’s a lot of discussion of delegate math. Jed Lewison of Daily Kos keeps making arguments based on raw percentages -- Romney now has to win 48.4% of the remaining delegates available to reach the convention with the nomination in hand. I think he’s just doing propaganda, though, because he’s making the implicit assumption that delegate apportions are simple. So I took the delegate count from Real Clear Politics and made a super-stupid, basic spreadsheet. ...

Redistricting has made Texas politics a bit of a mess this year. For the moment, we live in TX-10, with a Republican incumbent. There was a reasonably strong Democratic candidate planning to run, but he pulled out due to some unfavorable redraws of the map. For our reference, two Democrats filed for the primary: Tawana Cadien and William Miller, Jr. I can’t find anything on the latter. Cadien was a delegate to the 2008 Democratic National Convention and has been reasonably busy in local Democratic politics for a couple of years. There’s a William J. Miller who contributed a fair bit of money to various candidates in the 2010 elections, but the middle initial is wrong. Neither of them have campaign Web sites up for this cycle, so I don’t expect either of them are really plausible opponents, alas. ...

It’s intensely green in Texas right now. The rhythm is familiar to me from California: long months of brown, followed by intense green while it’s raining. In February, we had 3.04 inches of rain, up from an average of 2.34 inches. January averages 2.1 inches, but we had 4.7 inches this year. November and December were above average as well. We need it after the summer; when Susan and I got here, the ground was hardtack dry. ...

Last night I headed down to the new Alamo Drafthouse Slaughter Lane location, since movie tickets were two bucks during this week’s soft open of the theater. It’s way out of the way for us, particularly coming from work, but seems reasonably convenient for South Austin peeps. Take Mopac south to the first traffic light and turn right, then immediate left. It took twenty minutes flat to come home at 12:30 AM. Kind of late? Well, cheap movies, so I caught a pair of them. Oh look, the title of this post is a bad joke. Look, they were both set in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it’d be way amusing to watch a motion captured Andy Serkis in an Oakland A’s uniform. ...

I won an award! I am the 2012 Rose & Bay Best Patron, which is pretty cool. I think mostly this means that C. E. Murphy has a lot of fans who listened to her when she said to vote for me because I convinced her to try crowdfunding, but I guess that implies I deserve some kind of credit for something. It wouldn’t have gone far if she wasn’t an awesome writer, though.

It’s all very well that we’ll see a new iPad in a week or so. I’m holding onto my anticipation for two weeks, however: new Tim Powers!

That didn’t suck. Let The Bullets Fly is not really a Chow Yun Fat movie in the way that The Ides of March isn’t really a George Clooney movie. It’s just that when you get an actor that charismatic, a movie tends to lean towards him or her. Pleasingly enough, Jiang Wen is equally magnetic and is both the star and the director, so the charisma duel is just about even. You can’t say the same for the duel between their characters, but that’s the story of the movie. Note: it’s a battle of wits, without a whole lot of significant gunplay. It’s a black comedy at heart. ...

I don’t get the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 (original). It’s a pretty standard tablet, with LTE as the standout feature. It’s a 7.7" model. It runs Android 3.3 – in theory ICS will come in the future, but we hear that a lot. At 16 GB of storage, it retails for $499 with a two year contract. How does that make sense when the 16 GB iPad 2 is selling for $580 no contract at Best Buy? And where’s the cheaper WiFi model?

Tuesday night plans: Sneak preview down at the Alamo. It’s a pretty Hong Kong week for me, yep.