Browns: Meet the new AFC North leader

After this Sunday and the Steelers loss at the Jets (13-20), the Browns are now sole leaders of the AFC North division in the NFL. Obviously, I had never seen that before. What's more surprising is that even long-time followers of the NFL can't remember that ever happening. If what I read is correct, it's been since 1994 that the Browns haven't been first of their division --AFC Central then-- that late in the season.

With a 6-3-0 overall record after Week 10, the Browns are becoming contenders for the play-offs in the mind of analysts and Football enthusiasts. Their win at Cincinnati on Thursday (24-3) broke a good number of streaks :

• As mentioned already, 20 years without a division sole lead for the Browns that late in the season
• A 14 home winning streak for the Bengals in regular season
• A 17 road losing streak for the Browns in division matchups

AFC North Standings after week 10 - Screenshot from NFL.com

Moreover, the fact that they are first in the only division in which all teams have a positive record is even more amazing.

That being said, the path is still long with 7 games left in the regular season before even dreaming continuing in January. Four road games for three home games, two division games receiving the Bengals on week 15 before going to the Ravens for the last game of the regular season, each week, the Browns will now have to prove worthy of their new status.

The reasons for the division lead

The Browns have shown in their first 9 games a variety of good qualities that can explain the unexpected lead. 

The passing defense with our coverage by the safeties and the cornerbacks along with the efficient pass-rush makes us a terrible team to beat. Quarterbacks have had a 57.9% completion rate (2nd lowest in the NFL) for 12 Touchdowns (3rd lowest) and 13 interceptions (2nd highest), with an additional 20 sacks against the Browns. Tashaun Gipson (6 INT), Buster Skrine (4 INT) and Joe Haden in the backfield are uncompromising. Paul Kruger (6 Sacks) and Jabaal Sheard are also doing the job to defend against the pass.

Brian Hoyer

That good passing defense is what's mostly responsible for the +9 differential on turnovers. The safe Hoyer is the other responsible with 4 interceptions for 10 touchdowns.

Not as constant, but very efficient in the majority of games --excluding the three awful weeks that were 7, 8 and 9-- the running offensive game can be a terrific weapon. The three-headed running monster (Ben Tate, Terrance West, Isaiah Crowell) wins yards, scores touchdowns and allows for a great play-action passing game, at which Hoyer and his offensive line excel.

The comeback of Jordan Cameron and Josh Gordon will permit to vary the plays even more and with more efficiency, even if the receivers did a great job, Andrew Hawkins leading the way.

Nothing is done yet

A 6-3 record is good, but the Browns are known for losing streaks recently, and a 2 or 3 losses in a row could dismantle a good effort in the first half of the season. 

The Houston Texans, our next opponents, are coming to Cleveland on week 11 with a negative record. But it would be a big mistake to underestimate them, especially since their strongest asset is also our biggest flaw. The running defense has been far from perfect, allowing much more than 4 yards per carry in most games. The Texans are 4th in the NFL in terms of yards per game. We'll have to step up on these plays and carry on with the good work to continue this season at the same rhythm.

I would be extremely disappointed if we'd finish the season with a 8-8 record I was hoping for in my pre-season blog post in August.

Go Browns!!

NFL season starting : Go Browns

I started getting interested in football --yes, I'll say football, even if I'm french-- a few years ago when they started broadcasting the Superbowl on french television. It was of course in the middle of the night, so it was hard to get up for school , or later for work, the next day. I didn't know much about the rules, but I was impressed with the tactical perfection of some plays.

Evidently, I did not become a Browns fan after watching a Superbowl. Back then, I didn't have any favorite team. I first heard of them on the Drew Carey Show, but had no idea who they were. Then a few years later, my Ohioan wife, or more specifically her parents introduced me to them. They are huge fans. Geographically closer to the Bengals, living near Dayton, their heart belong to the brown and orange team from Cleveland. 

Since then, I've been following their results, heartbreaking most of the time (4-12 last season after 7 losses in a row to finish 2013). But the fans and their enthusiasm about their team makes it a one of a kind. They remind me of my favorite soccer team, here in France (with mostly the same kind of results since 2007). Lens has a fan base that spread all over the country and more. Both sets of fans are often considered the most loyal ones and I'm proud to be a part of both.

I truly hope for an improvement in the results starting this year, even if the offensive team is far from the same level as the defensive one. But a 8-8 this season would be very welcome, and to build on that for the future. After all, even if they never appeared in the Superbowl since its creation, never say never. Lens, created in 1906 won its first (and only so far) french championship title in 1998. 

Go Browns! Go Lens!

Tribute to Friends, 10 years after The Last One

"There's nothing to tell!"

There's really nothing to tell that could explain how much I love that show. From that very first line, I was hooked. Of course, I didn't start watching it on September 22nd of 1994. I didn't even start watching it on April 4th of 1996, when it first aired in France. I actually started my obsession my first year after finishing high school. I went to college, away from home for the first time, I had a combo TV-VHS player and nothing to watch that could fill multiple hours. So I went to the store and tried to find something that could be worth spending the little money I had. I guess there was a good deal on Friends because even if I didn't know about it, I left with the first two seasons.

I devoured these two seasons more often than I probably should have. I didn't have the money to buy any additional ones, so much that after a few weeks, I knew by heart almost every line of these first forty-eight episodes. I was spending most of my time alone, as a young seventeen year old geek who didn't have his own computer, even less so access to Internet without going to a cybercafe, or the ability to make friends easily. Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross were my friends during that year.

I dropped my whole year in March and I came home with nothing to do and no new Friends episodes to watch. I had just discovered a new tool though, Kazaa. Now disappeared, that P2P file sharing application helped me quench my thirst for more Friends. I couldn't find any good French version of the episodes though. So I took a decision that still shapes my life today; I started downloading, very slowly (even ADSL then wasn't fast enough to have an episode in less than a few hours). I remember I was downloading, during the best times at about 50 Kb/s. 

I was so impatient, I was previewing the little I had downloaded of the episodes multiple times so I would know every intro by heart, in English, even if I sometimes didn't understand everything. I started downloading from Season 1, even though I already had them in French. This is how I most improved my English listening comprehension. Much more so than the years of English classes in middle school and then high school. I spent hours watching and rewatching every episodes I had. By then, Season 10 was almost finished in the US, but my downloading was too slow. I think when the last episode aired in May 2004, I was still midway through Season 6.

By now, I've probably seen each episodes at least twenty times. My wife, thankfully is also a big fan of the six friends. I bought the 10-season-DVD-set as soon as I could, about six or seven years ago. We watch it very regularly, sometimes even just as a background because we love to be with them. Each of these characters are unique, and the chemistry between them is something I've never seen since in a sitcom. 

Favorite Character

Even though I love all six of the Friends, my favorite has been Chandler from the beginning. He's the one I feel the closest to, I love his jokes, his sarcasm, and my wife often tells me after one of his lines: "It sounds like you could have said that!".

Favorite Episode

S03E02 - The One Where No One's Ready. It's hard to choose among all of the gems, but this one, set up as a play, one decor (Monica and Rachel's Apartment), one long twenty minute scene, with a frenetic rhythm and above all the friendly fight between Chandler and Joey makes it unforgettable to me.

Favorite Season

Season 5. The Season where Monica and Chandler hide their relationship is for me the high point of the whole show. Includes also the episode where Chandler can't make jokes, Ross moving in with Chandler and Joey, the Thanksgivings flashbacks, Ross flirting by talking about the smell of gas and more.

Now, tell me what are your favorite character, episode and season.

Streisand Effect : restaurant sues a bad review and gets bad publicity

In France, you're allowed to write a bad review about a restaurant in your blog, but apparently, you're not allowed to be referenced by Google too high, or you could get sued.

Photo used in the original post

This is what happened to Caroline Doudet, under the name "L'Irrégulière" on her blog Les Chroniques Culturelles, when she shared her disappointment about a dinner she had at Il Giardino in Cap Ferret, southwest of France. She deleted the blog post after the judgement, although it is still accessible on archive.org. For those who can't read French, the opinion column is titled "The place to avoid in Cap Ferret: Il Giordano", it is a chronological description of what happened that evening, from the moment they entered the restaurant until the check and finishes with "I incite you to blacklist [the restaurant] if you come in the area" followed by the address.

Her complaints in the whole post are numerous: bad service (with multiple examples), unfriendly and non-business-minded owner, low quality meals. Her points are backed by examples and we can feel the unpleasantness of the dinner through the words.

Ten months later, the disappointed customer got fined 2,500€ for "denigration" (1,500€ for the restaurant, 1,000€ for the justice fees) and constrained to change the title of her blog post (as I mentioned earlier, she decided to delete it altogether instead).

The restaurant, primarily but non-exclusively serving pizzas, thought they had won. That dreadful publicity, ranked on the first page on Google searches, was doomed to disappear. That was without thinking of the repercussions of that conviction. Media recounted the judgement. To nobody's surprise though, potential customers were not happy with the decision and started giving bad reviews on websites like TripAdvisor (with one listing it as Streisand favorite restaurant and grading it one star out of five a few days ago) or on Google Plus (average of 1.3 out of 5 after 194 reviews).

For those unaware, this is called the Streisand Effect. By trying to censor something they considered bad (reportedly, before the judgement, the page had been read less than 500 times), they created a negative internet buzz that reached hundreds of times that number.

A little piece of advice to the owner: the best response to that review was not to censor it, but to prove it was wrong by providing a good service that would call for good reviews. Free speech, even though attacked from all sides, is a concept that people are very attached to, and any blow towards it will probably have a negative effect on the attacker. I'm even sure that if the fine had been higher, Caroline Doudet wouldn't have had to pay it but the internet would have organized to help her raise that money.

This is one of the most noticeable market effect. I know I won't ever go eat in that restaurant. Without that judgement, it was possible. Thanks to the defense of free speech, I got to read that blog post that I would never have read otherwise. You'll never see me, Il Giardano.

French anti-Amazon law

Today came into effect a law here in France that is nicknamed "anti-Amazon law". Of course, the law doesn't cite Amazon, but the intentions behind the text was clearly and loudly announced to protect small bookstores against the international online competitor.

To have a full understanding of the story, a little background is probably needed, especially for those who have no knowledge of french laws about books. A few decades ago, politician were afraid that small bookstores would be destroyed by the competition of big malls that could sell books for a lower price. So, the government established something called "le prix unique du livre". It can be translated to "book's unique price". In effect, it means that when a book is first published, an advised price is settled, and it is forbidden to sell it for less than this price minus 5%. (Example: settled price 10€, nobody can sell it for less than 9.50€)

So, for a little more than 30 years, there's been no concurrence in France on book prices. As often though, the intended protection for bookstores never existed. The rate at which they disappeared is the same as in any other comparable country, where such laws didn't exist. The only everlasting effect was then that the lack of competition on book prices artificially keeps them at a higher level than in the US for instance: a net loss for the French reader.

Then Amazon came into our lives. The French version of the website still followed the local laws and applied the "no-less-than-5%" rule. To make their service appealing to their intended customers, they instated a free delivery for books, first on all order above twenty euros, then, a few years later, on all orders.

The same way it is anywhere else in the world, Amazon.fr is now a leader in the world of book selling in France. They achieve that by offering their customers what they want: prices as low as possible, an enormous catalog of items and a system of reviews and advice for finding your next purchase. Bookstores, for the most part, are still struggling.

Politicians then had a new great idea a year or so ago. "Let's try to slow down Amazon and bring back the readers to small bookstores." That's what lead to the new law voted two weeks ago. What the text of the law number 2014-779 of July 8 of 2014 (pdf) says -- my own translation:

 "When a book is delivered to the buyer and is not picked up directly in a bookstore, the selling price will be the price settled by the editor or the importing agent. The seller can remove 5% of this price off the delivery fee he chooses, without being able to make it a free delivery."

 A direct attack towards e-bookstores, Amazon in the first place. Today's reply by Amazon France probably surprised no one but the politicians behind that law. They announced on their website than sadly, they can't apply the 5% discount on the books they're selling, and they can't apply a free delivery to their orders. Instead, they decided to set the price to 0.01€ for the delivery.

Let's have a quick look at the actual effects of that law.

• Prices online have increased to reach the level they are in actual bookstores. 
• Delivery is still artificially free. 

For the customer, books more expansive, for Amazon, a raise in revenue of 5% on each order. Maybe the orders will decrease by a tiny amount, but overall, I think they'll gain money out of this. Because ordering books online is convenient, and that's nothing a bookstore can compete with.

The big error that bookstore owners and politicians make here is that they want to be on equal foot with Amazon. But that is simply impossible. Logistics and stocks are both in favor of the multinational company. That doesn't mean that physical bookstores have to disappear. But here's an advice, don't try to compete with Amazon with lobbying for new laws. Adapt!

http://librairie-expression.com/

I actually like bookstores. I like to wander in their alleys to try and find new novels to read. From what I've seen on the internet, a lot of people feel the same. I don't want them to disappear, and for that, there's one solution that the US bookstores should think of also. Adapt your offer. Specialize in certain genres, and personalize your offer, your advice. Adjoin your store to a coffee shop, a tearoom or just a reading room with a few baked goods. These are just the first ideas that pop in my head, but I think that's the way to go.

These are services that Amazon can't offer and they won't be able to compete with you.

The (Real) New Beginning

My new year's resolutions have turned out to be impossible to follow. Work, moving out, refereeing, and just daily life. I have spent the last six months not writing at all. January hasn't been my rebirth, surprisingly July has. In the middle of the FIFA World Cup, I started writing again.

I set myself a weekly routine that I will try to follow as much as I can, and that very blog post is part of it. Every Thursday, I will publish a new blog post on here, about anything that I will think is interesting enough to be shared. Other tasks are writing at least six hundred words on Mondays and Tuesdays, and maybe on Sundays. Fridays will be dedicated to the rewriting process for stories that need to be edited and rebuilt.

My Wednesdays will be about another one of my goal, still related to writing, but on another level. I'm creating a website that allow people to share their own Science-Fiction and Fantasy short stories online. The site will allow feedback in the means of commentaries and grades. I will first develop it in French, and depending on its success and my motivation, I probably will transpose it to English a few months after the French version's first launching.

That website has been on my mind for a while, and I think my new motivation to write and to develop that website has been brought by the purchase of my new laptop. I only had a desktop before, which always fulfilled me as a gamer, but the freedom a laptop gives you to work wherever you want was something I needed, I realize now.

I haven't mentioned what my Saturdays will be about: nothing. To be more precise, I won't impose myself anything to do of that kind on Saturdays. I will enjoy the company of my beautiful wife and my silly cat. If inspiration strikes me, I'm not stopping myself from writing or working on the website, but I think Saturdays will very much be about relaxing as much as possible.

I still have a job after all, I'm still a soccer referee, and a soccer player. I'm still a gamer, even though my implication on video games have decreased a lot during the past few years. But I'll always enjoy a good Starcraft, Football Manager or even an oldie like Baldur's Gate.

I mentioned my wife earlier, and I need to say that I am very proud that her photography business makes her people, even if it's not always easy, doing all she does in a foreign language, in a foreign country. You can see her work on her website and on Facebook. Amazing is one of the words that describe it. (Example on the left).

Enough ramble for tonight. See you next Thursday, or you can insult me if I don't write another post next week.

One resolution, a few goals for the new year

2013 was a very difficult year to go through. In spite of my new job, the financial struggles have paved our road with no breaks, and when the light could be seen at the end of the tunnel, some new unforeseen problems would come up. That ended up with a third flat tire of the year on December 31st.

I've decided that I won't let that slow me down in my writing. Years ago, I used to write regularly enough that I had a few short stories (some not that short) saved on my computer. I lost it all the hard way when my hard drive died and I had no backup of everything I had written.

2014 will be a rebirth. My resolution is to write daily. No matter on what subject, on what medium, for what purpose: a minimum of 600 words a day will be my requirement. These words can go towards posts for this blog, short stories or maybe even for bigger tales. This number can seem rather low, but it is only a minimum. The challenge will be not to miss a day, with my daily job, my personal life and my other activities - I think there of refereeing and reading.

Linked to that first quantitative goal, another will be to have at least one story finished per quarter. So, on December 31st of this year, I will need to have at the very minimum four full stories - beginning, middle and end.

Still related to the writing process, one blog post a week minimum. I want this blog to allow me to improve my English writing skills, and to express myself freely.

Finally, I want to challenge myself on another level. Creating full stories is good, but I want to submit at least one story to a professional editor - more likely a magazine or a website. For 2014, submitting will be enough. I guess acceptance will be a goal for 2015.

"Slowly, but steadily!" will be my motto.