I've started reading "Raised in Captivity", a collection of short stories by Chuck Klosterman. The second story is called Execute Again. It's about a high school football team that practices, perfects, and runs a single offensive play (over and over again) for an entire season. There are several clever twists in the seven-page story.

Perhaps a strategy we should look into? Or perhaps not, once you've read the story.

https://nook.barnesandnoble.com/products...0735217928

Is Klosterman a Rice graduate?

(07-23-2019 04:12 PM)owlsfan Wrote:  Is Klosterman a Rice graduate?

Nope.

University of North Dakota ('94).

Here's the book's website: http://chuckklostermanauthor.com/books/r...ptivity-hc

And an excerpt from an NPR article:

Quote:... he's playing the Hunter Thompson game here, living by Thompson's maxim that "fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can't reach."

Like "Execute Again," the football one? That's a great story because it is so off-puttingly smart and just one shuffle-step left of real. The set-up is simple: A high school football coach (who knows nothing about football and has never coached before) designs a single, complicated play which, when executed perfectly, "would always, always, end up 2.7 yards beyond the line of scrimmage, with a standard deviation plus or minus four inches." The team learns no other plays. They have no punt formation. No defensive strategy. Just this one play.

Absurdity and intelligence, applied in unequal measure. A sliding scale between reality and pure banana-pants craziness.

And it works. But it works in more than just a few high school football games. It is a thing that has ripples. That alters the life of everyone who learns it. Because in learning it, they learn that all rules and formalities are breakable. That anyone smart enough can game the system. Can change the world.

Haven't gotten this far yet, but this one really speaks to me:

Quote:A man is recruited to join a secret government research team investigating why coin flips are no longer exactly 50/50.

Sounds like the Hatfield days. I heard it said more than once that if perfectly executed, it was impossible to defend.