Saturday, August 29, 2009

Super Hero Tournament

So rob and I were talking about super hero fights. You know, the age old, "If hero A and hero B fought who would win?". As a result of our discussion I decided that we should create a 64 hero tournament to determine the ultimate hero. All of the heroes in our tournament are Marvel heroes because Marvel owns the super hero comic genre. Fuck you DC. There were certain other parameters as well. We did not include any characters that we deemed to be insanely over powered such as Galactus or Silver Surfer. So here are the first round matchups which were determined by the random number generator at random.org We will discuss and post our opinions and then move on to round 2 at some point.


Black Bolt vs. Emma Frost
Dazzler vs. Nick Fury
She Hulk vs. Spider Woman
Captain America vs. Bishop
Night Thrasher vs. Gambit
Iron Fist vs. Hulk
Bucky vs. Chase Stein
Power Man vs. Ghost Rider
War Machine vs. Punisher
Jubilee vs. Xavier
Namor vs. Iceman
Ms. Marvel vs. Dr. Strange
Thing vs. Nico Minoru
Penance vs. Quicksilver
Wolverine vs. Captain Britian
Angel vs. Iron Man

Beast vs. Cloak & Dagger
Kitty Pryde vs. Moon Knight
Ant Man vs. Cable
Spider Man vs. Thor
Rogue vs. Molly Hayes
Deadpool vs. Invisible Woman
Nova vs. X-23
Skaar vs. Black Widow
Colossus vs. Scarlet Witch
Black Panther vs. Hawkeye
Jean Grey vs. Luke Cage
Daredevil vs. Nightcrawler
Hercules vs. Mister Fantastic
Black Knight vs. Human Torch
Cyclops vs. Wasp
Storm vs. Howard the Duck

Thursday, August 20, 2009

The Monkey Chans

As I'm sure all of our legion of fans are aware, the Monkey Chan winners have not been announced. I apologize for this but there have been some unforeseeable issues regarding some of the committee members being able to see all of the nominees in a timely fashion. As soon as they have seen them we will announce the winners. I am sorry for any distress this may have caused you.

waldo

Healthcare debate stuff

There is a chart on the internet that shows the life expectancy rankings of 224 nations. The people in favor of National Health Care are using this to show that the US is lagging behind nations that provide health care. I thought I would crunch the numbers and see if this is accurate. I originally posted this on the Hank III message board but I thought I would put it over here as well.

Ok here comes the actual research that I did all on my own. This is not a copy and paste job.

There are 36 countries in the world that have some form of public healthcare. This ranges from a full blown insurance program to a government prescription plan that provides your medications free of charge. If you take those 36 countries and look them up on the life expectancy list you will get a list that looks like this.

Japan 3
Australia 7
Canada 8
France 9
Sweden 10
Israel 13
Iceland 14
New Zealand 18
Italy 19
Spain 23
Greece 26
Austria 27
The Netherlands 30
Luxembourg 31
Germany 32
Belgium 33
United Kingdom 36
Finland 37
South Korea 40
Cyprus 45
Denmark 46
Ireland 47
Portugal 48
Costa Rica 54
Cuba 55
Chile 56
Argentina 66
Saudi Arabia 69
Sri Lanka 84
Oman 91
China 105
Brazil 121
Iraq 144
Ukraine 150
Russia 162
Afghanistan 214

Now if you take the average ranking of those countries you get 54.8 which is obviously lower than the US score of 50. In an effort to show the numbers a bit more fairly, I looked at what would happen if you throw out the highest number (214 for Afghanistan) and the lowest number (3 for Japan). This gives you an average score of 51.64. Still lower than the US ranking of 50.

One thing that I did find interesting in my research. Iraq and Afghanistan both have a national healthcare program paid for by the United States as part of the War Funding Package.