The Ghost-Grey Cat

Tuesday Football: Well, it's a start

2012-01-03T17:32:00.000-06:00

It's been interesting to see which NFL clubs have been issuing pink slips this week.

Some gridiron pundits have expressed surprise at the Indianapolis Colts' firing of the Polian lads, but evidently, they stopped paying attention when the Colts won the Super Bowl five years ago. Peyton Manning had covered up so many of the Colts' problems by himself, a disaster like their 8-Strength (2-14) season this year was inevitable. All it took was an injury through which even Manning couldn't possibly play.

Here's an interesting, little noted aspect of Monday's management purges in Tampa Bay (16 Strength, 4-12) and Saint Louis (9 Strength, 2-14) the Buccaneers, Rams are related by ownership to English soccer teams. By that, I don't mean little third-division outfits -- I mean Manchester United and Arsenal. The Cleveland Browns (17 Strength, 4-12) are similarly tied to a third Premier League side, Aston Villa. It's probably a nasty coincidence, but all three NFL teams just finished horrible seasons.

As for the Chicago Bears, whose collapse lef them to fire general manager go and lose vaunted OC Mike Martz, Yahoo!'s "Shutdown Corner" column pretty well encapsulated their problem:

Maybe Martz wanted capable, productive wide receivers, while the Bears organization wanted Roy Williams. [Or Sam Hurd, who turned out to be as incompetent at dealing drugs as catching Jay Cutler passes.]

Trust me, Chicago and its environs are celebrating. I'm celebrating, too, as evidenced by the haiku now gracing this blog's title bar.

Victory Weighting update: With two big exceptions, this year's Victory Weighting tracked the official standings exceptionally well. 11 of the 12 playoff teams showed up in the correct order, as did the top six draft picks. Overall, Victory Weighting needed only five tiebreakers, including three for draft order. The exceptions are two teams I've already covered at length:

Denver would miss the playoffs. San Diego would host the Steelers in their place. It's too bad, really; I'd like to have seen a stake put through Tebowmania™ a year early.
Despite a better winning percentage than Seattle, Arizona would finish third in the NFC West behind the Seahawks, because the Cardinals have a lower Strength.

Tuesday Football: Victory Weighting in Action, Week 17

2011-12-27T12:45:00.000-06:00

The AFC West scenario generated by Victory Weighting this season got even more dramatic, thanks to the, um, re-humanization of Tim Tebow last Saturday in Buffalo. The most obvious evidence is reflected in the standings:

Official
AFC West	W-L
Denver	8-7
Oakland	8-7
San Diego	7-8
Kansas City	6-9

Victory Weighted
AFC West	Strength	W-L
Oakland	31	8-7
San Diego	30	7-8
Denver	29	8-7
Kansas City	24	6-9

In the official playoff scenario:

Oakland can still qualify as an AFC wild card (but Denver cannot).
San Diego is eliminated, because the Chargers would lose any tiebreaker with Oakland or Denver.
Denver wins the division with a win or tie, or an Oakland loss or tie.

Under Victory Weighting, though, the situation is far different, in large part because everyone in the NFL is engaged in divisional play this week.

Oakland could not qualify as a wild card, because it cannot match sixth-seeded Cincinnati's 36 Strength.
The San Diego-Oakland game would essentially function as a play-in game, with the winner capturing the AFC West. A tie favors the Raiders unless Denver wins in regulation.
Denver would qualify only with a regulation win and a Charger-Raider tie. Any other combination would eliminate the Broncos.

With Oakland removed from it, the Victory Weighted AFC wild-card race would also simplify. Cincinnati qualifies outright with even an overtime loss to Baltimore.

If the Bengals do lose in regulation, then Tennessee and the New York Jets become eligible with regulation wins.

Neither the Titans or Jets wins in regulation: Cincinnati advances outright.
Only the Titans win in regulation: The Bengals defeated the Titans, 24-17, in Week 9. Cincinnati advances.
Only the Jets win in regulation: The Bengals and Jets did not meet, but the Jets would have 28 Strength over AFC games, while the Bengals would have only 24. New York Jets advance.
Both the Titans and Jets win in regulation: The Bengals are eliminated with the lowest Strength over AFC games (24). The Titans and Jets, who did not meet this season, would each have 28 Strength (7-5) over AFC games. Then, the Titans win the common-opponent tiebreaker over the Jets. Tennessee advances.

Tuesday Football: Victory Weighting in action. Plus: All-Gigli!

2011-12-20T18:39:00.000-06:00

I know that not many people have been viewing my Victory Weighting posts, but this is the best time of year for one. This year is pretty quiet, with only four teams directly affected, but my little standings system would wreak the most havoc about right now.

To quickly review: Victory Weighting assigns up to four points per game to each team, depending on whether

the team won, lost or tied and
the game required overtime (indeed, it's overtime that the system weights.)

Teams are then ranked by total Strength over the season, with winning percentage providing the first tiebreaker. A full explanation of the system appears on the Victory Weighting page.

Who's being affected the most?

Denver (Strength 29, 8-6) and San Diego (Strength 30, 7-7)

Officially, the Broncos lead the AFC West with the division's best winning percentage. Most 8-win teams have Strength 32, but three of the Broncos's wins -- all under the new Tim Tebow regime -- came in overtime. That reduces the Broncos' Strength score to 29.

By contrast, San Diego stands at 7-7, officially second in the AFC West. Two Charger losses, including one to Denver, also came in overtime, so the Chargers's Strength score has increased from 28 to 30. Since Victory Weighting ranks teams by Strength, the Broncos would actually be trailing the Chargers. Maybe Tebow wouldn't be getting so much worship over on ESPN. This may seem wrong, but remember: it's the four overtime games involved here that are being "weighted." Tebow-Fascist Zombie Brigade™ protests notwithstanding, Victory Weighting is working as I intended it.

Arizona (Strength 25, 7-7)

Like the Broncos, the Cardinals are 3-0 in overtime games. That reduces their Strength from 28 (the standard for 7-win teams) to 25. Unfortunately, it also means that the Cardinals can end the season with (at best) Strength 33, two less than current sixth-seed Detroit. Victory Weighting would thus eliminate the Cardinals, who are still officially in contention for a wild-card bid, from the playoffs.

Atlanta (Strength 37, 9-5)

Officially, the Falcons haven't secured a playoff bid. Victory Weighting wouldn't qualify them right now, but it would make their life much easier. Right now, Chicago, Seattle, the New York Giants and Arizona -- all 7-7 -- all threaten the Falcons' playoff position. Under Victory Weighting, Arizona is eliminated, and neither Seattle nor the Giants (both Strength 28) can overtake the Falcons. That would leave the fading Bears (Strength 29) as the only team that can still eliminate the Falcons. Even another overtime result in New Orleans this weekend would clinch a playoff bid. Merry Christmas, Atlanta.

Introducing the All-Gigli Team! Believe it or not, there are fantasy-football leagues where the object is to create the worst team possible. Unfortunately, I didn't play in such a league, so where could I put players who absolutely, positively failed my teams at critical times? Why, in a team named after one of the worst box-office flops ever. My tight ends and defenses all did a great job when called to duty, so two extra spots opened for more players who hurt the Fluttering Horde and/or the Ghost-Grey Cats. The more detailed excuses appear in the newly added All-Gigli page (click on the tab at the top of this page), but here's the quick list. Decide for yourself which of these suspects requires as much maintenance as Jennifer Lopez.

Quarterbacks: Curtis Painter (Ind)
Wide receivers: Pierre Garçon (Ind), Greg Little (Cle), James Jones (GB)
Running backs: Marion Barber (Chi), Ryan Grant (GB)
Tight ends: None; WR Julio Jones (Atl) awarded empty spot
Kicker: Shaun Suisham (Pit).
Defense/special teams: None; QB Mark Sanchez (NYJ) awarded empty spot

Tuesday Football: Why I still can't oppose the rotten BCS

2011-12-06T13:51:00.000-06:00

On the surface, this year's Bowl Championship Series selection has provided plenty of reasons to scrap the BCS:

The championship game itself: I'm so bitterly disappointed that Alabama and LSU will have a rematch, I plan on finding something else to watch one month hence, like a Squidbillies marathon. You could point to Oklahoma State's loss at lowly Iowa State -- but then you'd have to forget that the OSU community had suffered a major tragedy that morning. The Cowboys deserved extra credit for even showing up on the field in Ames, not scorn for losing. Even with that loss, OSU outpointed Alabama in five of the seven computer polls. No amount of honest voting should have overridden that. Score another one for big money.

The ~~Hokey~~ ~~Hokie~~ Sugar Bowl: What on Earth are Virginia Tech and Michigan doing in a BCS bowl game, much less the same one? The BCS boys just invited a team that (a) lost the ACC final, 38-10, to overrated Clemson and (b) wasn't even as good as the Hokie squad that lost at (essentially) home to Boise State a year ago.

As for the Wolverines, I suppose that QB Denard Robinson deserved to play in a BCS bowl, and their case for BCS inclusion was stronger than VaTech's. But Boise State (Kellen Moore) and Baylor (Robert Griffin III) could make the same argument, and either would have been more convincing than the Maize and Blue.

The excuse we're being given is that Virginia Tech and Michigan both bring lots of supporters. The common buzz-phrase is "to travel well," but that's just yet more code for "these guys are richer" than the likes of BSU and Baylor. Yep, big money wins again.

But why not playoffs? So I've joined the thousands, if not millions, who've pointed out that big money has corrupted the BCS. But as the case of Penn State is showing us, big money has corrputed the whole of college athletics, especially the Football Bowl Subdivision. Playoffs for the FBS wouldn't solve that problem -- and I'm not convinced that they wouldn't exacerbate it.

A helpful miscue: It's funny how, in fantasy football, something that looks like a mistake turns out to be a brilliant move. Several weeks ago, I missed out on the chance to add Tampa Bay running back Earnest Graham to the Fluttering Horde. With trepidation, I claimed Dallas rookie DeMarco Murray instead.

Boy, howdy, did that ever work. On the same day Graham suffered a season-ending injury, Murray turned in a 253-yard, one-touchdown performance. He hasn't sat on the Horde bench since. With no downside remaining, I added Murray to the Ghost-Grey Cats the next week.

That mistake, missing out on Earnest Graham, has boosted both teams. Now back from an injured foot, Ahmad Bradshaw rejoins the Horde's powerful rushing troika with Murray and Darren Sproles. The Cats just lost Matt Forte, but because Murray's there to take his place alongside Arian Foster, they're likely to purr their way into the playoffs.

Tuesday football: Potpourri

2011-11-22T17:52:00.000-06:00

Caleb Hanie, the (unknown) future of the Bears.

Something I never thought I'd say: "I miss Jay Cutler."

And, "We shouldn't have wished so hard for that."

To be fair, when we were booing, flaming, and otherwise disrespecting him, Jay Cutler hadn't been playing well. We couldn't tell which was worse, Cutler or the linemen who were supposed to protect him. After some nice preseason performances and a near-miracle in last year's Super Bowl semifinal, Caleb Hanie looked like a great alternative.

But then offensive coordinator Mike Martz finally justified the salary the Bears are giving him. Finally abandoning his dream of recreating The Greatest Show on Turf, Martz shifted his emphasis onto workhorse running back Matt Forte, while convincing Cutler and his line to work much more closely. It wasn't the machine Aaron Rodgers is running in Green Bay, but the Bears had finally generated an efficient offense. For the first time, Bear fans could admit to actually liking Cutler.

Now that Cutler is out through the winter solstice, the Bears now depend on Hanie to see their run through to the playoffs. Yes, he looked good when Cutler didn't, but he hadn't had to run an offense for two games that counted. That changes this Sunday in Oakland. Fingers are crossed from the Indiana exurbs of Merrillville and Michigan City all the way around to the Wisconsin line. Brrrrr.

Outlook not so bad: Congratulations to the Los Angeles Galaxy on their latest Major League Soccer crown. The latest question for the league comes from the status of David Beckham: will he stay, or is it back to Europe for him? Some columnists think that MLS still needs Beckham, but I disagree.

The problem with arguments like this one made by NBC Sports' Michael Ventre is that it assumes that the sport hasn't made any advances in the U.S. since Beckham joined the Galaxy five years ago. Both the U.S. men's and women's teams made nice runs in their respective World Cup tournaments. Well known (if aging) stars like Thierry Henry, Freddy Ljungburg, Rafael Márquez and Roy Keane have made real contributions in their new MLS homes. Most importantly, expansion franchises have succeeded spectacularly in Philadelphia, Portland, Vancouver and especially Seattle. All of that isn't going to suddenly disappear just because one particularly glamourous Englishman left his club in Los Angeles.

Attention, SEC West woofers: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that LSU, Alabama and Arkansas are 1-2-3 in the BCS standings. I can understand why you SEC West fans are whooping it up, trying to mock the rest of us.

And I hope this makes up for the fact that, in men's basketball, your little division completely missed March Madness last year. Not a single SEC West team made the field of 68.

No, you can't count Texas A&M or Missouri. Try again next year.

Tuesday Football: F#¢kin' mee-owwww

2011-11-15T11:30:00.000-06:00

Joe Paterno's last public act as a "legendary" football coach was to essentially beg the Penn State Board of Trustees for his job. Had he kept his mouth shut a week ago, he might have at least coached last Saturday's game against Nebraska. Instead, the trustees fired him and PSU president Graham Spanier for their role in the Jerry Sandusky child-rape scandal, which may now be spreading all the way to Texas.

Penn State was right to fire Paterno and Spanier, but the consequences shouldn't stop there. If even a fraction of what I have heard and read about this incident in the last week is true, then the university effectively harbored a serial sex offender while he was still committing crimes. The NCAA has imposed its vaunted "death penalty" on specific programs at specific schools for lesser violations, so Penn State would certainly be eligible for some form of that punishment. I'm not sure SMU-style sanctions are necessary -- those took out the entire Southwest Conference as collateral damage -- but it would be a good idea for 107,000-seat Beaver Stadium to sit idle for a season or two.

Also, a head or two should roll at a sports-media outlet or two. Jerry Sandusky was defensive coordinator for a team that won a national championship. Why didn't anyone ask out loud why he never became a head coach? On that count alone, this story should have broken out years ago.

A lot of people have wondered how this could have happened under Joe Paterno's vaunted watch. It's not my place to call Paterno a tyrant, but his power on the PSU campus did bring to mind something I heard on Chicago Public Radio's This American Life the Friday before the scandal broke. [So far, I can only comfortably call Paterno an arrogant fool, like Bobby Knight.] The crimes and victims are, of course different, but the media and police are just as clueless. Listen to "Petty Tyrant" below, and see the parallels between the Steve Raucci and Penn State stories for yourself.

Tuesday Football: Praise be to Suh!

2011-11-01T17:10:00.000-05:00

As I noted last Friday, the English language allows nouns, even proper ones, to double as verbs. Of course, anyone with Internet access can google Google, and when 3-D printers become advanced enough, it should be possible (and with Xerox's permission, legal) to xerox a Xerox.

Now we can add "Tebow" to this list. The Tebow-Fascist Zombie Brigades™ have declared that ostentatiously praying in public is "tebowing," because Tim Tebow has done it so often on the football field. As it turns out, ...

... it is possible to tebow Tebow. Somehow, I suspect that this amuses Tim Tebow more than it offends him. Whatever floats your boat.

And there I sat, hoping to get a decent wideout for Tebow: To be fair, Colo Colo had its toughest lineup of the year. Even with one good receiver, the Ghost-Grey Cats would have struggled to win. But I really needed a good game from Tim Tebow. Instead, his value went down, taking my hopes for a decent receiver with it. Despite getting Michael Vick and Antonio Gates back, the Kittehs' receiving woes continued, causing a 97-87 loss.

While the Cats fell to 4-4, the Fluttering Horde rose to the same level. Kevin Walter continued to solidly spell Andre Johnson, the Buffalo Bills' kicker and defense performed brilliantly as bye-week substitutes, and the rest of the Horde starters (and Ahmad Bradshaw) kept being bad-asses. Only Dwayne Bowe's strong effort for Flying Hawai'ian prevented the Horde from doubling up yet another opponent. Instead, I had to "settle" for a 115-63 win.

Both teams are sit at .500, but only the Horde is set for a playoff run. The Horde is a serious threat even with Andre Johnson on the mend.

The Ghost-Grey Cat Presents: (9) Time and Again

2011-10-31T19:55:00.000-05:00

Episode 22: Time and Again
First aired: 27 January 1974
Author: Ian Martin
A clock maker times the time:

And the last thing I heard that night... was the triumphant beat of the clock, sounding my inner ear. Or was it the sound of my heart? -- Ethan Vigil

Back in 2000, I was thrilled to learn that someone at a Pacific 12 university had posted almost the entire run of CBS Radio Mystery Theater. As a relatively affluent and experienced Internet user, I was happy to have an ultra-fast 56k modem with which to download. Sure, it took 45 minutes to pull in one episode; but at two (maybe even three!) a night, I could have the whole set loaded onto Zip cartridges sometime in 2003. Woo-hoo! Progress!

Well before then, I had downloaded my favorites, and even put a few of them on a CD I took to Chicago as 2000 came to a close. As usually happened every Christmas holiday season until 2003, my sisters brought their kids (and one grandchild), and we had a family reunion. My original plan was to listen to my freshly downloaded episodes on my father's computer his den, by myself. Now that the kids were also in town, I came up with a better idea.

One night just before the New Year, at a few minutes to midnight, I convinced three cousins -- aged 8, 8 and 6-1/2 -- to join me. While I sat at the computer, they formed a small arc behind me. As second- and third-graders, my nieces and nephew were too young for most horror stories, but "Time and Again" held exactly the right amount of terror and excitement for supervised kids that age. They shook and fidgeted with fear, combined with a grim, shared determination to stay until the end. To their credit, they stayed -- and then they asked me to play "Time and Again" for them again.

The youngest of them will graduate from high school next May, but all three still cherish the memory of that amusing night.

So far as I know, "Time and Again" is entirely original, but the if teaser has brought a Twilight Zone episode or two to mind, that would be easy to understand. Like the hyperlinked teleplays, Ian Martin's play, his fourth for Radio Mystery Theater, centers on someone who finds an object that can stop time. But only in "Time and Again" does the using that object exact a price.

Oddly enough, this story about time doesn't specify when the action takes place. It's certainly in the past, because host E.G. Marshall tells us that he's reading a note left behind from one Ethan Vigil (John Beal). The note quickly tells its reader that Ethan ekes out a living by making and repairing clocks. His work, in fact, doesn't pay the bills -- he has to share expenses and his home with his chronically ill wife Henrietta (Grace Matthews) and her hard-nosed sister Harriet (Bryna Raeburn). Even then, they've been able to wire a telephone into their residence, but must still rely on kerosene lanterns to fulfill their lighting needs. Some people have cars, but not the Vigils. All the clues point to a Prohibition-era urban setting, but nothing more definite.

As the story begins, Ethan has closed his shop for the night when a derelict barges in with an unusual clock with several unusual features -- including the number 13 at the top of its face. His decision to buy the clock draws Harriet's ire, not least because he's been burning too much kerosene for her comfort.

No matter how much Ethan tinkers with it, the clock itself refuses to work -- until sickly Henrietta sticks her hand in its hourglass-shaped case. The moment she pricks her finger inside the case, the clock starts. It runs, all right, but with a bizarre rhythm.

Like all the other working clocks, this one eventually strikes midnight, as Ethan and his doctor are playing chess.

For everyone but Ethan, time stops.

Ethan finds himself able to move about freely, but for exactly one hour, the world stops frozen around him. That hour passes for him and him alone, and he can now explain the number 13 on his clock's face. It happens again at noon, then at midnight, and so on. Twice a day, the rest of the world freezes, leaving Ethan to do whatever he wishes, unopposed.

It all seems like harmless fun until Henrietta falls ill again. Whatever is ailing her this time proves unstoppable, sapping her life force until she's finally too tired to take another breath. Although it doesn't happen right away, Ethan eventually discovers a connection between his extra two hours a day, his wife's passing and "that damnable machine." Meanwhile, we listeners get to observe the destructive power of Ethan's new addiction -- something that proves well beyond the reach of any twelve-step program.

One of my big objections to horror stories is that so many of them require stupid protagonists to work. "Time and Again" comes awfully close to that cliché, but much of its suspense comes from watching Ethan finally "get it." Anyway, it worked out for my nieces and my nephew when they were grade-schoolers. They got to experience the creepiness, while avoiding the gore that had become too common in horror movies even in 1974. It would work as well in a Goosebumps novella as it did for adults 37 years ago.

Friday Double: (10) They might be edifying

2011-10-29T00:19:00.000-05:00

Sorry I'm late. This year's last two World Series games made me care about baseball (beyond the Giants and Athletics) again. Congratulations to both the Cardinals and the Rangers for two determined, resilient efforts. Anyway, here's a roundabout way to introduce this week's selections.

I really like soccer commentator Jorge Ramos's* English-language work. He knows both North American and South American fútbol really well, and ESPN's coverage since August (when he crossed over from ESPN Deportes) has improved as a result. As an English speaker, he can easily hold conversations, and his diction has improved dramatically, but his phrasing style makes it clear that (a) Spanish is his native language and (b) he didn't grow up in North America. [He's Uruguayan.]

That little annoyance reminded me that English, especially its American dialects, has a lot of weird rules that don't occur in other languages. For example, in English, several words can be used as both nouns and verbs. That rule even applies to really popular brand names, like "Xerox" and "Google."

While I doubt that Pete Townshend ever intended to create a song just for ESL students, "Face the Face" would be a great song to hear for someone who's learning English as an adult. Besides its snazzy music and lush instrumentation, its lyrics are full of words being used as both nouns and verbs. Here's part of a verse:

We've got to judge the judge
We got to find the finds
We've got to scheme the schemes
We got to line the lines
We got to fight the fight
We got to fall the falls
We got to light the light
We got to call the calls
Try to place the place
Where we can face the face.

Educational and fun! Here's the whole of "Face the Face," including the preamble that didn't get much radio play.

* Not to be confused with Jorge Ramos Ávalos, the Univisión news anchor.

On the other hand, we have They Might Be Giants, who've made whimsical songs about school subjects a habit. I like their work, too, but "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" is still my favorite from them after all these years. Something about "nobody's business but the Turks'" just appeals to my inner pedant. Cheers!

Tuesday Football: Tebow Zombie Edition

2011-10-25T21:32:00.004-05:00

Yep, The Walking Dead just got renewed. Congrats, AMC.

For someone who only started his first NFL game two days ago, Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow has become an amazing cause celébre. The coverage of his exploits in the last two weeks has reached such a level that people are complaining about its sheer volume. It actually is amazing to see how many sports fans have pinned their hopes on Tebow. But why?

Tebow is unconventional, and he likes to run a lot. He's hardly the first quarterback, or the best, with those characteristics. [His contemporary Cam Newton, for one, is better.] Anyway, many of Tebow's (and Newton's) fans today are the same ones who glommed onto Michael Vick six years ago. Before that, their attention turned to the likes of Randall Cunningham and even Donovan McNabb.

Of course, Tebow is the only white man on that list, so it's tempting to consider race as a factor. But Vick was only a little less popular when he wore red and black in Atlanta. Also, even though I didn't include Aaron Rodgers in that list (his style is more conventional), some fans do. In those lights, the racial theory loses some of its force.

Race doesn't lose all its force, though -- and that might be because evangelical Christians can count Tim Tebow as one of their own. To them, he may, indeed, be a great white hope. I suspect that, as a group, they're following Tebow they way African Americans rooted for Joe Gilliam and James Harris back in the 1970s. I watched my elders pull just as passionately for fellow Mexican Americans Joe Capp, Jim Plunkett and Tom Flores.

In short: Tim Tebow isn't popular for his quirky quarterback style, or because he's white, or because he wears his religion on his sleeve. It's because they're all in effect at the same time.

Almost perfect: With both starting quarterbacks and Ahmad Bradshaw all on bye weeks, and my receivers beyond Devin Hester struggling, I needed to make a perfect set of waiver-wire pickups and roster moves to win both my games.

It almost worked. Between them, the Fluttering Horde and the Ghost-Grey Cats started four of the five best running backs this week. Almost.

For no reason other than pure shock -- no one else in my public league wanted him -- I added Tim Tebow, and he started for the Cats (4-3) this week. I could have started the miserable Curtis Painter and still picked off one of the league leaders. Arian Foster and Matt Forte combined for 66 points as the Cats rolled to a 29-point win over The Pack.

Meanwhile, the Fluttering Horde nabbed Dallas rookie DeMarco Murray, who rewarded them with a team-record 253 rushing yards. He and Darren Sproles contributed 58 more points. Unfortunately, the miserable Curtis Painter did start, and his disaster cost the Horde (3-4) a 16-point loss to the Southside Hitmen. A full-time NFL quarterback would've won it.

Next week, I'm going to have to decide who sits on the Horde bench: Murray, Sproles or Bradshaw. It's a nice dilemma to have.

Needless to say, I dropped Curtis Painter.

For a kicker.

And finally: J-E-T-S! Suck! Suck! Suck! Suck!

Tuesday Football: Wascally wabbit scores!

2011-10-18T23:34:00.002-05:00

Well, I was going to post something about the recent talk of making the English Premier League membership permanent, but the arguments I've formed to date are really very fuzzy. Maybe later, I'll have something to post besides "damned Yank money-grubbers," but by then, the English FA will have put this silly idea to rest.

In the meantime, enjoy this moment from CBS and TNT announcer Kevin Harlan, who was calling a Purdue-Michigan game in the early 1990s. The things some announcers have to do to advance their careers... .

Imaginary teams go level again: Both the Fluttering Horde and the Ghost-Grey Cats went 1-1 in the last two weeks, so both sit in marginal playoff position at 3-3. The bad news is that both teams have to face league leaders this week.

The Cats' receiver struggles continue, but Matt Forte continues to keep them in the games. Forte led a dramatic Week 5 rally a week ago, and would have led another two nights ago had the Bears not wrapped up an easy win so early. Instead, Forte and nominal WR1 Percy Harvin both got the fourth quarter off, leaving the Cats 21 yards short of a comeback. Unless one of my receivers dramatically improves, I may have to trade Arian Foster away; but that decision is still a couple of weeks off.

On the other hand, the Horde has barely missed injured WR1 Andre Johnson, as his Texans teammate Kevin Walter has managed to keep up the pace in a substitute role. WR3 Eric Decker's disastrous performance undid Walter's Week 5 work, sending the Horde to a loss. In Week 6, though, Walter had the team's weakest performance... which was still good for 8 points. Ahmad Bradshaw and Devin Hester (5 touchdowns combined) carried the load, as the Horde scored a team-record 146 points, doubling its opponent for the second time in three weeks. Unfortunately, both Bradshaw and QB Tom Brady have byes, so I'm expecting a loss this week.

Friday Double: (9) Herman Cain's perpetual gift

2011-10-14T18:37:00.000-05:00

I'm so happy about GOP presidential hopeful (and master crap marketer) Herman Cain's "9-9-9" tax scheme. It's made this Friday Double so much easier to compose than usual. Thanks, Pizza Guy!

Leave aside the fact that even other Republicans hate 9-9-9; just note that it might have been stolen from a video game. One of Cain's rivals, Michele "Corn Dog" Bachmann, even poked fun at his plan by insinuating a connection to the number 666, that well known symbol of the Antichrist.

Naturally, then, my first selection today comes from Omen III: The Final Conflict. This 1981 mess was (fortunately) the last* of the Omen movies, which centered on one Damien Thorn, who is meant to be Antichrist. This selection contains both the main title and a second track ("The Second Coming"). Combinations like this aren't uncommon in modern films, but Jerry Goldsmith made it a habit.

I could have picked the better known "Ave Satani" from the first Omen movie, which Goldsmith also penned. Since Herman Cain is running for President, just like Damien Thorn did, this choice made better sense.

The best thing about Cain's 9-9-9 scheme is that it's so easy to mock. The folks over at Stephanie Miller's talk-radio show have taken to calling it "Nein! Nein! Nein!" and that inspired me to come up with another renaming: "Plan 999 from Outer Space."

Oh, well. I might as well just give you the theme to the classic Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959). I'm not sure who wrote it. Wikipedia credits someone named Frank Worth, but IMDB claims that it's Emil Asher, who didn't get the credit. Neither man sported a long film résumé.

On the other hand, I could just follow the lead of these stupid birds from Finding Nemo (2003) and just call Cain's scheme the "Mine! Mine! Mine!" plan.

It's at least as stupid as those birds.

*There was a 2006 remake of the first Omen movie. It was so forgettable, I forgot about it.

Tuesday Football: The buh-byes of Texas

2011-09-27T22:12:00.001-05:00

Like most extended families in Texas, mine has divided its collegiate sporting loyalties between Texas and Texas A&M. I grew up a Longhorn fan, but then became a student at A&M, so now I'm an Aggie. I'm also what my fellow Ags like to call a "two-percenter," a liberal (or even a moderate) in a student body that's been historically conservative. It probably won't be a surprise to learn that I've never had any real animus towards UT-Austin.

Then again, no one at UT had ever signed of on an idea as stupid and destructive as the Longhorn Network. Many mid-tier cable and satellite packages include the wildly successful Big Ten Network, so it's not hard to see how Texas, or any other Big 12 school, might want to have its own network. Other conferences have implemented their own solutions, but somehow, the Big 12 allowed UT to strike out on its own.

What an incredibly stupid, shortsighted idea.

If a member of a conference creates a network for its own sports teams, and keeps all the proceeds to itself, doesn't that defeat the entire point of belonging to a conference? Answer: apparently, the other members are now to be mere props to serve the Longhorns, the way the Washington Generals serve as props to the Harlem Globetrotters. Small wonder that Nebraska, Colorado and now Texas A&M left. They saw their Big 12 futures in their crystal balls, and they didn't like it any better than Missouri does.

Since A&M left for the SEC, we've seen the defection of two Big East universities to the ACC, talk of the same at a third, and an SEC run at Missouri. Only the Pacific 12's refusal to take on new members is holding the Big 12 together. As the price for staying, Oklahoma has extracted the dismissal of commissioner Dan Beebe, but the Big 12 is still UT's plaything.

Unless the State of Texas itself intends to annex Oklahoma, Kansas and parts of Missouri, it's hard to see how this new situation is any more stable than the one that Nebraska and Colorado escaped. Maybe Kansas and Kansas State keep some independence as basketball powers, but which athletes are going to commit to schools like Iowa State and Texas Tech, whose dreams of nationwide status have just been reduced from slim to none? The Big ~~XII~~ X IX may replace its departed members, but those replacements will probably be schools for which life as a vassal for UT Athletics would be an improvement.

Even that assumes that the Longhorn Network succeeds. If it fails, well, it's going to really, really suck to be the University of Texas come 2020.

Victory Weighting administrivia: Once again, I'm keeping Victory Weighted standings for the NFL. Also, I've given my little system a logo, which appears on both the Victory Weighting main page and the standings page. Click on the buttons on the purple bar at the top.

Let's get lolcatty: Speaking of suck, life has turned nasty for the Ghost-Grey Cats, who have devolved into a fantasy veterinary ward. Let's review the team's top picks. [Thanks, Yahoo!]

Arian Foster: Bad hammy. Might lose his starting spot when he heals.
Michael Vick: Bad hand. Concussed two weeks ago.
Matt Forte: Healthy, but now he's the whole of the Bears' offense.
Antonio Gates: Bad foot. Out for weeks now.
Nate Kaeding: Bum knee. Gave out on the first play of the season.
Receivers: What receivers?

This team has turned into mush -- the kind of mush that turned in one of my worst fantasy performances ever this week. They lost 79-57 to a team called Let's Smoke Crack. It gets worse this week, as the Cats face the league-leading Gridiron Heroes. Frequent, the begging and meowing for ball-carrying treats will be.

The Fluttering Horde, on the other hand, delivered lots of Africanized bee stings to the Purple Dragons, romping to a 117-56 win. I just love, love, love me some Darren Sproles. Next up: one of my winless nephews, Svelte & Vexatious.

Friday Double: (8) With thunderous applause

2011-09-16T18:27:00.000-05:00

The Star Wars prequels are collectively so bad, I hesitate to call descriptions of any of their scenes "spoilers," but this post contains some. It's worth the trouble to finally introduce John Williams, the best American orchestral composer of the late 20th Century, to my Friday Double feature. He is to the prequels as the great Walter Payton was to the Chicago Bears 30 years ago: it's not the former's fault that the latter sucked so hard.

So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause. -- Senator Amidala

The crowd reactions at the two latest Republican presidential debates brought this line to my mind. It's rather terrifying to realize that large crowds of Americans are now openly cheering RIck Perry's love of the death penalty, or the thought of leaving the poor to die for simple lack of money. People like that have always existed, but now they've lost even the decency to keep their vile sentiments to themselves.

So, yeah, Amidala's lament, probably the single most famous line from the three Star Wars prequels, has crossed my mind recently. In Chapter III: Revenge of the Sith, Chancellor Palpatine, having just defeated an attempt by the Jedi to arrest him for treason, is using the incident as an excuse to appoint himself as Emperor. The Senators cheer, prompting Amidala to complain to her few remaining allies. Of course, the Emperor has neglected to tell his adoring Senate of his other recent creation -- Darth Vader, who, as the following track plays in the background, has just committed one heinous crime and is now working on a second. [Amidala's line comes at about the 1:50 mark.]

It isn't that there's anything inherently wrong with "thunderous applause." A reaction like that is entirely appropriate, for example, after everybody's favorite benchwarmer ends a victorious game with, well, as much emphasis as possible. The first couple of minutes of this Jerry Goldsmith joint make a lot more sense if you watch the actual final scene. To skip that preamble, skip to about the 2:10 mark.

Ru-dy! Ru-dy! Ru-dy! Ru-dy!

Tuesday Football: FOX Sports' oddly sensible programming trick

2011-09-13T21:55:00.002-05:00

Last Sunday, FOX Sports used its NFL telecasts to pitch next week's Manchester United-Chelsea match, which it plans to show on tape delay.

Wait. Back up. Scratch that needle back across the vinyl. FOX ran ads promoting a taped soccer game on its flagship network, and nobody's head rolled? Apparently, everyone got out without so much as a paper cut. In all seriousness, though, this coming weekend is already a major milestone in U.S. soccer history. Think about it a bit: One of the U.S.'s major English-language broadcast networks now feels comfortable not merely counter-programming live NFL games with a foreign soccer match, but proudly announcing the move to the general public.

FOX Sports has made the correct calculation: American sports fans may not be watching American soccer clubs, but they are watching soccer. ESPN2 has been airing live English Premier League matches for years, and it appears that this season, one will air on that channel every week the EPL is playing. Both the News Corp and DIsney syndicates are showing live Champions League games. Last season, either ESPN or ESPN2 broadcast live matches from Spain, sometimes directly opposite NFL games. [All that is before we even get to the big Spanish-language channels.]

Mind you, it's only five games, and the first four are on tape. What's interesting is the timing: FOX will air the taped EPL games on those weekends when CBS is running NFL doubleheaders. Where I live, the Chicago Bears will play at New Orleans at 12:00 on FOX, then the MUFC-Chelsea tape will run at about 3:15, after the Bears' game has finished. [The same goes for Saints fans.] In the Metroplex, the situation will be the opposite. Since the Cowboys are away to San Fransico, the soccer match will show up at 12:00, while the 'Pokes-49ers game starts at 3:15. Either way, viewers will choose between the MUFC-Chelsea match on FOX and an NFL game on CBS. The honchos at FOX Sports think that fans will blow off the CBS game for the taped soccer -- and in a sizable minority of cases, they will be right.

FOX Sports will air three more EPL matches this way. Then, on Super Bowl Sunday, it will air the return Chelsea-Manchester United match live from London. That will probably get impressive numbers, too.

While this development doesn't suddenly make soccer America's Number One Sport™, it should put to a permanent rest the notion that soccer is not a major spectator sport in the United States.

Slow starts win races, anyway: Both my fantasy football teams lost Nate Kaeding, their shared kicker, on his opening kickoff, but both muddled through to win their openers.

Tom Brady blew open a tight opener against Flying Hawai'ian, handing the Horde a 106-92 win, but there will be serious changes, as Darren Sproles has run past Ryan Grant for the RB2 spot. Danny Amendola may or may not return this season, but fortunately, I have kick-return emperor Devin Hester handy to take his WR3 position. Finally, Robbie Gould becomes the third Chicago Bear to join the Horde, replacing Kaeding.

Meanwhile, the Ghost-Grey Cats saw Patriot RB Danny Woodhead provide adequate relief for the injured Arian Foster. The Cats struggled without Kaeding, but their opponents were just bad. Kittehs 88, Super Steeler Fan 77.

Game on!

2011-09-08T23:44:00.001-05:00

Submitted for your approval: my fantasy football teams for the 2011-12 season. Week 1 starters are listed in italics. Returning players get a star after their name; returning MVPs get two.

The Fluttering Horde
Slogan: We've built a machine to kick your ass. We will build an empire to house the machine to kick your ass.
Quarterbacks: Tom Brady (NE), Mark Sanchez (NYJ).
Wide receivers: Andre Johnson* (Hou), Anquan Boldin (Bal), Danny Amendola** (StL), Devin Hester (Chi), Johnny Knox (Chi), Randall Cobb (GB).
Running backs: Ahmad Bradshaw* (NYG), Ryan Grant (GB), Darren Sproles (NO).
Tight ends: Jason Witten (Dal), Tood Heap* (Ari).
Kicker: Nate Kaeding (SD).
Defense/Special teams: Green Bay.

The Ghost-Grey Cats (formerly the Middlemen)
Slogan: We iz kittehs. Heer us rowr!
Quarterbacks: Michael Vick* (Phi), Josh Freeman (TB).
Wide receivers: Percy Harvin (Min), Austin Collie (Ind), Julio Jones (Atl), Jordy Nelson (GB), Braylon Edwards (SF).
Running backs: Arian Foster (Hou), Matt Forte** (Chi), Grant, Danny Woodhead* (NE).
Tight ends: Antonio Gates* (SD), Visanthe Shiancoe(Min)
Kicker: Kaeding*.
Defense/Special teams: Green Bay.

Tuesday Football: Unsportsmanlike fashion, offense, loss of down

2011-09-05T23:43:00.000-05:00

College football has apparently opened some jobs for fashion designers. On this opening weekend, we saw several teams wear innovative new designs. I've graded some of the most striking new kits.

WIN: Boise State.
(Scott Cunningham/
Getty Images)

Passed

Last year, Boise State sported an innovative design that was also obnoxious. This year, the designers replaced most of the gaudy silver with blue-to-white gradients. The improvement is dramatic. Were the Broncos to adapt this kit permanently, I wouldn't mind. But first, per Mountain West diktat, they'll have to learn to win their home games on green turf.

Incomplete

MEH: Maryland. (AP)

Maryland actually sported two new helmets as part of the new Terrapin kit. One has just a tortoiseshell pattern plastered all over it, while the other plays on the Maryland state flag, with the checkerboarded Calvert crest on the right side and the red-and-white Crossland crest on the right. The jerseys have the signature crests, too, one on each sholder.

Unlike Boise State, Maryland plans to use the general design all year, the way Oregon has for several years now. The variant I saw against Miami looked good, but I'll wait to see other versions before issuing a grade. Hopefully, the Terps won't commit as many fashion crimes as Oregon.

FAIL, from left to right: Georgia [Scott Cunningham/Getty Images], Oklahoma State [AP], ~~Romulus~~ Oregon [AP].

Failed

WTF was the brain trust thinking at Georgia? Those overly metallic silver-and-red kits should only be worn by Cylon centurians. Maybe Cybermen might benefit from them. Human beings, however, should just stay away from what the Bulldogs wore.

Hey, Oklahoma State: Grey jerseys are a potentially good idea, but not when they're combined with bright orange numerals and lettering. Switch the numbers to white, and it might work better.

Finally, Oregon has used the meta-uniform scheme for a few years now, and the results have been so miserable, I'm spending three paragraphs to complain about it. Saturday's kit was a new low that disgusted casual fans while completely failing to impress opponents.

Look: if the object of your black-and-90-percent-grey uniforms is to intimidate the other team, then you should choose an accent color that doesn't evoke (1) a major highway reconstruction project, (2) a stomach illness induced by chugging a bottle of cheap tequila or (3) or some combination of those two unforunate events. Otherwise, you're just inviting the other team to laugh as they run all over you.

And what is with the feathers? Yes, they're supposed to look like duck wings, but they only remind me of treacherous Star Trek antagonists. Sorry, Oregon, but I can't call your team "the Ducks" anymore. "Romulan National Team" will have to do.

In other news, I have two promising fantasy-football teams staffed, and am mulling adding a third for this season. If I do, it won't be on Yahoo!, which lets individuals use only one custom helmet design. More on the Fluttering Horde and the (renamed) Middlemen later this week.

Friday Double: (7) Kon'nichiwa (Part 1)

2011-08-19T17:36:00.001-05:00

Fall, 1973: My family had just moved 2000+ clicks north from Texas. Since we were now in suburban Chicago, the TV now picked up eight -- count 'em, eight! -- channels, not just the three I got before. Before the move, the nearest pro sports teams were Houston, three hours away by car, and Dallas (way too far!). Now, there were five teams just an hour away. The whole experience was a culture shock I was enjoying. On top of all that, I had never seen anything like Speed Racer, something to which I became addicted. Eventually, I outgrew that anime, but it's remained a keystone for me, a reminder of some very happy days.

Shouldn't that red car have about
400 endorsements plastered on its sides?

Yes, the storylines in Speed Racer suck, and so does the animation. The animators, I suppose, can blame it on the 1960s, but it turned into a really bad movie just two years ago. Nobuyoshi Koshibe's soundtrack music, happily, has held up much better over the decades. It borrowed from the West Coast style of jazz that was popular then. I'm still looking for one commonly used piece that would fit in beautifully in an NFL Films video, but my other favorite Koshibe track is the theme for "The Mammoth Car" (1967; still shown at right). The episode is one of the most ridiculous of the entire series, and the Mammoth Car itself makes Aruba's World Cup dreams look downright credible. Nevertheless, its theme carries a tone of menace worthy of a major villain from a series that's actually worthwhile.

Alas, I'm not allowed to embed this video, so you'll need to click on a link. Go ahead; it's worth the effort.

These days, it's Yoko Kanno who's been scoring some of the better Japanese anime out there. Her best known pieces Stateside come from Cowboy Bebop, a program that's decent, but not as enjoyable as another anime she's scored, Ghost in the Shell. On the other hand, I do like the music on Bebop better; in particular, it has a really snazzy theme. Enjoy.

The Bachmanns' unfunny corn-dog joke

2011-08-15T16:00:00.001-05:00

Yeehaw! You go, Optimus!

With Texas governor Rick Perry coming on board as a GOP Presidential candidate, Michele Bachmann's campaign will probably fade. Perry's a gun-totin', macho man from Texas (just like his predecessor, George W. Bush), so conservative evangelicals will probably fall behind him. For now, though, Bachmann still holds the Dominionist banner. However quickly Perry's campaign overtakes hers, those corn-dog pictures that have won such attention last week still hold a lesson for those of us who would like to keep her like out of power.

I've wondered why Michele hasn't more forcefully defended her husband Marcus against all the questions and jokes about his sexuality. It's not that he doesn't deserve criticism regarding his counseling of gays. Those "pray away the gay" tactics Marcus has used in his practice are offensive.

The Bachmanns, unlike fellow fundamentalist-Christian favorites Perry, Bush and Sarah Palin, are hard-core Dominionists. I don't think Bush has even wondered whether he is one, but he did appeal to them. Palin is one, but she's more like the lead choir singer at Sunday services than an actual church official. Perry isn't one, yet, although he has quite consciously moved into their corner. Unlike any of them, the Bachmanns know what they are preaching.

Given that the Bachmanns's beliefs include "complementarian theology," which boils down to the notion that wives must submit their husbands, you'd think that Michele's candidacy contradicts itself. How, after all, can a woman rule a nation is she is subservient to her husband? Shouldn't Marcus be the one running for the White House? What's wrong with him, anyway? At face value, it's Michele's Dominionist supporters who should be going at her in weapons-free mode.

Michele can answer that: wifely submission serves the larger goal submitting to God. I would imagine that some of her supporters also think that Marcus's counseling would be much better served with Michele running the Oval Office. Not all Dominionists buy those arguments; some would still feel obligated to attack the Bachmanns. But even then, why bother, when their common enemies are doing all the hard work for them? This way, Dominionists (and the rest of the Fox News set) can yet again pretend the victims of the ~~godless~~ ~~pinko~~ ~~Muslim~~ ~~pagan~~ ~~Communist~~ ~~socialist~~ ~~heathen~~ mutants who supposedly dominate the mainstream media.

Enter these photos of the foot-long corn dog:

A starburst in every bite. Oh, wait: this isn't Caribou Barbie, is it?

You know what they tell me? The Bachmanns have decided to stop fighting all the questions about Marcus's sexuality. If they really cared about quelling the rumors once and for all, they would have just stayed away from the corn-dog lines in Ames. They've seen all the phallic jokes, and now they're just playing along.

Sometimes a corn dog is just a corn dog. And sometimes it's a big, fat middle finger to the world.

Friday Double: (6) The intransigent black hole

2011-07-29T18:00:00.002-05:00

First, a quick observation on media coverage of the debt-ceiling hostage situation: the word "intransigent" describes a driver who crawls down the road at 20 mph below the speed limit and then refuses to let anyone else pass. Technicaly, it's possible to use "intransigent" to describe the Osama bin Ladens, Agosto Pinchets and Anders Breviks of the world -- but that seems woefully inadequate, doesn't it? Given their grim determination to shove the United States through an event horizon, House Republicans shouldn't be described as "intransigent," either.

Event horizons, as suggested by the teabaggers, were my initial excuse for this week's Friday Double picks. These are the parts of black holes from which neither matter nor light can escape. My original plan for today was to just post a couple of pieces of music with black-hole motifs.

Leave it to U.S. Soccer hand me a new excuse to pile on top of the first. Men's national team coach Bob Bradley, whose firing I had been hoping to see following last month's Gold Cup debacle, got the sack yesterday. No word on whether Bradley chose paper or plastic.

Click to hear how I feel about this development.

This pretty overture is exactly that -- the overture to The Black Hole (1979). For a barely watchable piece of unintentionally funny science fiction, it's an enormous part of Hollywood film history.

It was the first movie Disney ever produced for an audience that didn't include younger children. The movie succeeded well enough to eventually spawn the Touchstone Pictures and Hollywood Pictures studios, and, from there, the Disney empire we know ~~and love~~.
Its John Barry score was the first to ever be digitally recorded.
After this and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, no mainstream Hollywood movie ever includes an overture.

Jürgen Klinsmann (Wikipedia)

Back to U.S. Soccer. Today, the federation named former German head coach Jürgen Klinsmann to succeed Bradley. If the deal leaves Klinsmann the control over the men's program he wanted five years ago, this could be a good thing. But his actual coaching resume is mixed. He did take the Germans into the 2006 World Cup semifinals at home, and he did lead Bayern Munich deep into the UEFA Champions League. But both terms were short, and Bayern didn't do so well in the Bundesliga under his reign.

As it turns out, the main title to John Barry's Black Hole score expresses my feelings about Klinsmann's hiring. Bradley left the men's program in worse shape than many of my fellow U.S. soccer fans seem to think, so I'm only willing to give him a 2-in-3 chance of success. If he fails, it won't be all his fault.

Either way, click and enjoy the main title.

Early Tuesday Football: Easy Comfort

2011-07-18T23:31:00.001-05:00

Golden Ball winner Homare Sawa lifts the
Women's World Cup trophy for victorious Japan.
(Frank Augstein, Associated Press)

Well, I could complain about all those missed first-half opportunities, or the defensive lapses towards the end, or the shocking penalty-kick misses in the shootout. It certainly was a disappointment to see the U.S. lose the Women's World Cup final Sunday night in Frankurt. Still, there's plenty of comfort to be had.

The Japanese needed the Cup a lot more than the U.S. did -- a lot more. That would be the Japanese nation, still in the early stages of its long recovery from the March earthquake that devastated it. I'd hate to think about the reaction in Japan had the Americans held on, but that didn't happen. For now, the Rising Sun is a little brighter; and that's a good thing, indeed.

This was an American letdown, not a fiasco. Over at the New York Daily News, Frank Isola completely missed this question. Not only wasn't this "simply the worst loss in the history of the national team," it wasn't really even a loss. The correct answer to that question is (b) that 4-0 thrashing Brazil gave the U.S. four years ago in China. You know, the one that got Hope Solo thrown off the team, led to the furious dismissal of coach Greg Ryan, and might have destroyed the U.S. program had his successor, Pia Sundhage, not stepped in to rescue it.

Japan spent the first half Sunday dodging more bullets than Ghost in the Shell's Section 9. In non-anime terms, the Japanese had the luck to survive a deadly barrage that should have finished them -- and then, they had the skill and persistence to take advantage of that break. The U.S. didn't lose the World Cup; Japan won it.

Disappointed, but not grieving: U.S. keeper Hope Solo chats
with Japan's Ana Miyama after the match.
(Kevin C. Cox/FIFA via Getty Images)

This was an amazing World Cup tournament. Japan won with brilliant passing and incredible discipline. The Americans and the Swedes also looked very good when they didn't have to deal with Japan (or each other). France turned out to be for real. Down the ladder a rung or two, Australia, England and Mexico all provided pleasant surprises. Finally, as Germany and Brazil learned to their sorrow, the era of a free pass to the semifinals has ended.

9-0 and 7-1 blowouts didn't happen this time. Alas, they may return in four years, as the Canadians host an expanded field of 24 teams. On the other hand, some traditional powers that missed out (most notably China and Denmark) should easily find room to return to the field.

It's one of the greatest tournament upsets in sporting history. No World Cup has produced such as massive upset winner as this edition of Nadeshiko Japan. Outside soccer, and in the U.S., there are few examples: the Super Bowl III champion New York Jets; the North Carolina State squad that stunned the 1983 Men's Final Four¹; and, of course, the U.S. hockey team that famously beat the Soviets en route to Olympic gold in 1980. There's also a case to include the 1966 Texas Western hoops team in this list. Japan's win this week is notable because, like those other teams, no one took them seriously at the start of the campaign. Just the road win at Germany in the quarterfinal was a monumental upset, yet the Japanese improved on that.

Hey, at least we're not Brazil. Last Sunday in the quarterfinals, Abby Wambach put paid to the Samba Queens' embarrassing, cynical, overly theatrical performance, then Hope Solo blocked their World Cup hopes away in the penalty-kick shootout. This Sunday, the Brazilian men matched that "historical imcompetence²," missing all four penalty kicks in their Copa América quarterfinal exit at the hands of ~~the Tholians~~ Paraguay. At last report, Seleçao coach Mano Menezes was pleading for his nation not to panic. Considering how badly the Brazilian men played in this Copa, that might take a little effort.

Anyway, congratulations to Nadeshiko Japan, Champions of the World!

1. In a sad update that only came to mind now, Lorenzo Charles, whose buzzer-beating dunk propelled the Wolfpack past prohibitive favorite Houston, perished in a car accident just three weeks ago. Belated condolences to his family, his friends and the North Carolina State community.
2. Thanks for that hyperbolic description of Coach Menezes, O Globo.

Behold! the Black Widows

2011-07-14T00:18:00.000-05:00

There's really not much more to say about the American women's magnificent comeback win over Brazil last Sunday in Dresden. It only had a few things going for it:

A referee who gave both teams so much cause to complain, she booked eight players and ejected a ninth to cover her officiating crimes;
One team dominating play despite spending 52 minutes one player down;
The other team scoring both goals on bad calls;
Brazilian star Marta getting constantly jeered despite doing nothing especially wrong; and
Oh, yeah, this immaculate little reception:

Apart from all that, it was a pretty ordinary game. Check that: today's 3-1 win over France in the Women's World Cup semifinal was ordinary. Les Bleus certainly belong at this level, but I felt as though I were watching another NCAA basketball tournament game in which a high seed struggles for 30 minutes before putting away the mid-major upstart.

And there was another fault Sunday besides the officiating: those black kits the U.S. women were wearing. I've made my ill feelings about the overuse of black in sports uniforms known as recently as two posts ago, and this would seem to fit that depressing pattern. The thing is, in international soccer, a national team's uniform doesn't always match the national flag. Italy (blue) and the Netherlands (orange) and Spain (dark blue) all break that rule, and their men's soccer traditions have hardly suffered. Japan (blue), whose ladies have earned the right to face the U.S. in the World Cup Final next Sunday, is the latest success story. Slovenia (green) and Venezuela (crimson) haven't become world powers as a result, but they're both doing just fine these days.

In that light, maybe I won't have a problem if the U.S. women decide to go with black road kits on a permanent basis. For one thing, they're winning. For another, the kits themselves already have a name: "Black Widows." That sounds like it could double as a suitable nickname for a U.S. program that's proven itself to be as dangerous as ever.

My prediction for Sunday: the Black Widows beat Japan, 2-1, but they'll need the extra half-hour.

Birthday kitteh!

2011-07-01T22:45:00.003-05:00

Here is Scooter, sleeping in a new spot. That blue comforter Scooter loves is now serving as an everyday bed cover, so she now sleeps everywhere on the bed, not just the corner where her blanket lives.

I don't really care where she sleeps, actually. I'm just grateful she made it through a rough winter that included two illnesses and a pair of huge guest dogs that (shockingly) didn't submit to her will. It all left her a bit traumatized, but she's slowly started to reclaim her old napping spots outside my bedroom. As of two days ago, she's graced my life for thirteen years. She was about a year old when I adopted her, so now she's 14 years old. Here's hoping she has quite a few more left with me.

Happy 14th birthday, Scooter.

A few remarks about the Gold Cup final

2011-06-26T00:42:00.002-05:00

Mexico midfielder Giovani Dos Santos.
That's with one 'n,' spell checkers.
(Doug Pensinger/Getty Images)

Hats off to the Mexican soccer team for their 4-2 comeback win over the U.S. tonight. El Tri has had its share of controversy during this Gold Cup, but coach José María de la Torre has done a great job healing a squad Howard Cosell* would have called "a team in disarray." The emergence of Gio Dos Santos (Tottenham) and Javier "Chicarito" Hernadez (Manchester Utd.) as English Premier League superstars has helped, but I'd bet Javier Aguirre wouldn't have done as well with this talent.

U.S. keeper Tim Howard. (AP)

It's the Stars and Stripes who are experiencing disarray now. The defense has taken a couple of giant steps backward in the past year. Tim Howard's play in goal has seriously slipped. He needs to stop worrying so much about his sucky defenders and start worrying about himself. Carlos Bocanegra -- the U.S. captain -- was just awful tonight, losing track of Pablo Barrera on the go-ahead goal at 50', then setting up Dos Santos's spectacular goal with a poor clearance in the 76th minute. As often as they overran the U.S. defensive midfield, I started wondering whether the Mexicans would get tired. [They didn't.]

Oh, yeah: does Bob Bradley want to explain the logic to me again? He sat his best players for the first half against Spain, and ended up losing 4-0 at home... so his team could then lose at home to Panama? I understood his need to build the bench, but that was ridiculous. More generally, Freddy Adu's emergence notwithstanding, I'm seeing way too much backsliding on the team as a whole. Qualification for Brazil three years hence is now looking much harder. The 2009 Confederations Cup helped the U.S. tremendously as it prepared for the World Cup, but Bradley won't have that aid this time.

I'd call for Bradley's dismissal, but then I'd have to suggest a replacement -- and I can't think of one. Part of the trouble is that coaching the U.S. men isn't exactly a plum position. It's like being the gridiron coach at Kentucky: you'd be working in the glamorous SEC, but at a place where your sport isn't king. [Text me when UK wins a BCS bowl game.]

Back to the CONCACAF champions. Mexico has looked great, but frankly, Honduras and the fading U.S. are the strongest teams they've seen in a long while. El Tri does have a guest appearance in the Copa América, the South American championship, coming up, so more serious tests are coming in a hurry.

And would it be too much to ask el Tri to leave the black kits in North America? The only teams that should be wearing black uniforms are the ones that actually have black as a team color. Like the basketball teams at Duke, Gonzaga and Butler, and almost any team at Oregon, the Mexican soccer team doesn't qualify. They all should dump the all-black kits, because they're wrong, wrong, wrong. On top of that, they're wrong.

On second thought, this kit actually looks decent. Since it doesn't have any green on it, maybe the FMF could license it to a side that could really use it, like Germany.

* Not aging yourself much, are you, Abu?

Friday Double: A little bit of this...

2011-06-18T00:10:00.002-05:00

[Hey, it's still Friday in Pac-12 country. That counts, doesn't it?]

One of the really neat things about HBO's best series is their collective attitude towards original music. Some series, like Rome and Band of Brothers, have their own soundtracks. Others, like The Wire and The Sopranos, use tracks only for the main and end titles; any music in between is purely incidental.

Deadwood fell somewhere in between. It had an original opening title, and lush performances of 19th-century songs accompanied the credits. What little soundtrack music producer David Milch saw fit to use was adapted -- and it was also very effective. "Iguazu," a stunning 1998 guitar piece written and performed Argentinian composer Gustavo Santaolalla, backgrounded some of the series' most tense and dramatic action scenes -- including a desperate pursuit of a runaway horse that turned the entire series. Here, it serves as the basis for a simple music video featuring some pretty desert scenery.

This is one of my favorite pieces of adapted soundtrack music, but Santaolalla has since written soundtracks of his own, including Oscar-winning scores for Brokeback Mountain and Babel and a terrific score for The Motorcycle Diaries. He's probably best known to casual moviegoers for "The Wings," the signature theme for Brokeback. As it turns out, I dislike "The Wings" because it fits that movie almost too well. Had it fit any better, it would have distracted from the movie instead of enhancing it.

That particular line has been crossed, and other great film composers have committed that turnover. Not for the first time, I present Jerry Goldsmith; and once again, it's for work he did for the Star Trek franchise. Here's "The Cloud" from Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). As this music plays in the movie, the starship Enterprise is entering a vast, mysterious object that turns out to be much more than just a cloud.

The problem wasn't the music, which is gorgeous; nor was it the vast grandeur of this particular flight of the Enterprise. Either one, taken alone, is mesmerizing. It's the combination of the music and the visuals that caused me, and the movie, such grief. The whole composition was so hypnotic, it put my oldest sister and at least one of her friends, with whom I saw it, to sleep -- and they were hardly alone. Even though no one actually brought (let alone smoked) a joint into the movie room, I found myself nevertheless wondering where I could get some more of that bad-ass weed.

The moral, of course, is that soundtrack music can sometimes be too good. Critical plot turns shouldn't become their own drinking games, but that's what Goldsmith accidentally accomplished here.

Fantasy trade rejected...

2011-06-11T16:45:00.000-05:00

Trade scheme, as "reported" by thechicagodope.com

...because it's way too broad. Anyway, I have Baja California Sur playing defense/special teams for the Fluttering Horde next season. Maybe just trade the Texas GOP for Acapulco?

Anyway, here's some amusing snark from the Chicago Dope: Texas traded to Mexico in four-state deal.

Wearing number two for New York: Anthony Weiner

2011-06-08T17:54:00.002-05:00


Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY)		Colombian defender Andrés Escobar

It's weird how the human mind works sometimes. Or maybe it's just my mind. ¿Quién sabe?

I've been trying to figure out exactly what to make of the case of Anthony Weiner. At first, I dismissed Andrew Breitbart's charges that the New York City congressman had sent pictures of his crotch to complete strangers. I figured that it was another sleazy Breitbart mind trick. Rep. Weiner first claimed that someone hacked his Twitter account and sent the offending picture. Since I don't use Twitter enough to know much about it, that claim seemed reasonable. When Weiner later refused to deny that the picture was of his crotch, well, I stopped believing him.

What we have, then, is a congressman who sent a picture of his own genitals to women who may or may not have wanted to see it and lied about it. In the process, Rep. Weiner didn't prance like a chihuahua puppy into Nancy Pelosi's doghouse. He didn't just jepoardize own career and possibly his marriage. He has probably deprived the progressive movement of a voice -- his -- that it could really use in the House of Representatives.

And of what other spectacle did this sorry episode remind me today? An own goal in soccer. Check that: a specific own goal, scored almost 17 years ago.

SB Nation's World Cup Blog has an excellent overview of the tragedy of Andrés Escobar, but here's a short version. Colombia came to the U.S. as a dark-horse favorite to win the 1994 World Cup, only to open with a shocking 3-1 loss to Romania. Needing to defeat the host Americans to keep their hopes alive, Colombia instead allowed an overwhelming U.S. counterattack at minute 35. Escobar, an emerging superstar as a defender, tried to deflect John Harkes's pass out of danger -- only to do this instead:

The ensuing 2-1 loss to the Americans eliminated Colombia, and Escobar got the blame. [Not fair! The U.S. would have found some other way to win that day.] Ten days later, some angry Colombian shot him dead outside Medellín.

Colombian football has yet to recover.

The more I think about, the more eerie the parallel appears. Like Andrés Escobar, Anthony Weiner was a rising star in his field. Like Escobar's mistake in Pasadena, Weiner's miscues may end in severe damage to his cause. I just hope some crazy person doesn't decide to make the comparison complete.

It will be bad enough for the progressive movement if Anthony Weiner's career (or his marriage) is all that dies.

Friday Double: The smell of her own ego

2011-06-03T22:18:00.000-05:00

I've avoided discussing former half-term governors on this blog, simply because some of them get far more attention than they deserve. I can understand why Illinois governor emeritus Rod Blagojevich hogs media attention; he's fortunate to have convinced TV networks to help with his massive legal bills.

That brunette atop this post, however, is another matter. She's not just a teabagger, she's an outright Dominionist, someone who would have the United States transform into the neo-Crusader theocracy depicted in Julian Comstock. It's only a remark she made in her attempt to hijack Rolling Thunder this weekend that prompted me to even mention her (or Blago):

I love that smell of the emissions.

Yes, I also loved the smell of those emissions, when they came from my grandfather's well appointed Glastron boat... forty years ago. It was like sniffing glue. By the time I turned seven, I realized that gasoline fumes weren't the best thing to be breathing. Evidently, lady, you never picked up on that. There are way too many of those gas fumes floating around, pumping out way too much carbon; and, like too many on your side of the aisle, you don't care about that any more than Lt. Col. Kilgore worried about napalm in Apocalypse Now.

On the plus side, the whole episode reminded me of a couple of songs that pretty well capture the most recently failed Vice-Presidential candidate. When I first saw this hilarious bit of preening from narcissistic Gaston, the villain in Beauty and the Beast, I knew that the whole movie would be a winner, unlike most of Disney's animated output from the 1990s.

If that described Caribou Barbie so perfectly, I wouldn't have needed this much darker piece from Little Jackie to also describe her. It's not something I usually let anywhere my playlists -- the music is annoying enough without the lyrics -- but it fits too well today to resist. Enjoy.

NBA Finals that suck. Like this year's.

2011-06-02T14:00:00.002-05:00

Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images

Let's get one thing straight: this year's Miami Heat is not a championship squad. They will win the NBA finals, anyway, with what amounts to a three-man rotation. [Mike Bibby? Joel Anthony? Comrade, please.]

In the first place, this season didn't have any championship-level teams. The Lakers have collapsed, the Mavericks haven't played at full strength for most of the season, the Spurs and Celtics have both passed their expiration dates, and the Thunder are too young. The same goes for the Bulls, whose bench had the strength to overcome Miami's Big Three until rookie center Omer Asik fractured a leg.

Now that I think of it, none of the Heat's playoff opponents finished at full strength. Asik's departure left the Bulls too weak to keep up, one round after the Celtics lost Rajon Rondo in their series against Miami. In the Finals, whose second game tips off tonight, Dallas is missing Caron Butler, someone who's had great success defending LeBron James.

The other reason the Heat will win is that their cynical style of basketball is impressing the referees. Your offense doesn't need to be efficient if you can trick the refs into constantly calling fouls on the other team. It works for Miami because, unlike earlier implementations of Pat Riley's "force basketball" stratagem, this one's players can shoot free throws. To his credit, Riley also remembered to get players who can defend this time. [For that, Anthony gets my full marks.] But just because the Heat are better at bullying their opponents than the 1990s Knicks doesn't mean I like them any better.

Not that I'm any fan of the Mavericks. In the past, I haven't had the energy to detest Mark Cuban, but was it really necessary to stiff Doris Burke after dismissing Oklahoma City? Maybe I'll like the Mavs better next year, but this just ticked me off. It leaves me wishing that neither team could win the Finals. In fact, I rather feel like I'm being asked to choose between the Ku Klux Klan and Westboro Baptist. At least that matchup is providing some amusement.

Naw, I think I'll catch the Canucks-Bruins series instead.

Update (D-Day + 67y): Okay, this series may not feature the best teams ever, but it now appears to be a contest between evenly matched teams. The Mavs may have moved my forgiveness date way up before this comes to a close.

Late Friday Double: Here, have some popcorn.

2011-05-21T15:39:00.001-05:00

I'm not sure what to make of Harold Camping's ~~prophecy~~ marketing campaign for his impressively wealthy radio network has been deafening. Given that natural disasters just don't respect time-zone boundaries, his forecast of worldwide earthquakes was ridiculous on its face. If there must be a Rapture, I'd rather see it occur this way.

On the other hand, I did discover this version of "Popcorn" this morning. Even though the Orquesta Cubana De Música Moderna covered Gershon Kingsley's famous instrumental way back in 1972, it's still a surer sign of the apocalypse than anything Family Radio could put out.

Here's the version that became an international hit, from Hot Butter.

My cat Scooter was watching the Sharks-Canucks game rather intently last night. That's about as much rapture as I expect to witness this weekend.

That's no dog whistle

2011-05-16T22:10:00.000-05:00

When New Gingrich calls Barack Obama "the food-stamp president," should that be interpreted as a racist dog-whistle, as some cable-news anchors are suggesting? No amount of GOP standard-issue proselytizing about the benefits of tinkle-down economics can hide the fact that applying the term "food stamp" to a non-white politician is just plain racist. Yes, white people do use food stamps, but when politicians invoke that term -- or any other phrase that implies poverty -- they're almost always hoping that potential voters first think of African Americans. It's racist code, and that makes it red meat for racist neo-Confederates who invariably support demagogues like Gingrich.

Of course it's not a dog whistle, you cable-news morons. Its a f*cking bullhorn, mounted atop a f*cking SUV that's clogging up a busy freeway at rush hour, blaring its f*cking racially-coded message to commuters who'd rather be listening to music.

Indulgences from TBS (both of them)

2011-05-10T21:27:00.000-05:00

Things I should totally hate, but didn't:

Three years ago, in the head offices of Warner Brothers, some people were celebrating the brilliant scheme they had just devised to draw viewers away from Iron Man. It wouldn't just be an action movie, it would be a live-action version of Speed Racer -- yes, that silly 1967 anime. Better yet, it would be directed by the Wachowski boys, who would fill the frames with enough CGI effects to rival Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. How, wondered these WB marketing whizzes to themselves could this plan to beat Iron Man possibly fail?

Um, because no one wanted to watch a Speed Racer flick that looked like a Sky Captain ripoff? As someone who loved the original anime as a kid, I might have been in the target audience; but even I wanted no part of this. Not unless someone else was willing to pay for the ticket, the overpriced concession food and the small military unit to drag me away from the screens that were showing Iron Man. Helloooo, $30 million dollar loss.

Fast forward to this weekend. I never developed the desire to fork over cash to even rent the Speed Racer DVD, but the movie was airing on basic-cable TBS, good ol' Turner Broadcasting System. That's not costing anyone any extra, so why not give it a try?

As it turned out, the movie did have its positives. The casting, especially of John Goodman and Susan Sarandon as Speed Racer's parents, worked nicely. Corinne Orr, who voiced Trixie in the U.S. dub of the original anime, made an amusing cameo as one of the dozens of race-car announcers, as did real-life play-by-play man Andrés Cantor. [Sadly, no shouts of goooooooooooolllllllll!.]

Generally, the movie's tone stayed faithful to the anime -- but that turned out to be its biggest problem. Snake Oiler, the Monster Car, Inspector Detector and several new-for-the-movie antagonists would each have been worth two or three anime episodes, but the Wachowskis packed them all into a 135-minute flick. Even without the annoying visuals, it was literally too much for even composer Michael Giacchino, normally a terrific film scorer, to handle. Hell, Richard Wagner couldn't have scored this mess.

On balance, I didn't like Speed Racer, and I can't recommend it, but nor did I hate it. I did change the channel at one point, to catch the season premiere of Aqua Unit Patrol Squad 1. That's 15 minutes of my life that I did, in fact, get back.

Also snaring my attention during a recent channel-surfing sesson: a Ninja Warrior marathon on G4. I don't like extreme sports, even though real athletes play them. And unlike the Speed Racer movie, I refuse to watch embarrassing obstacle-course shows like Wipeout, even on free TV. The Japanese TBS, the Tokyo Broadcasting System, combined these in 1997 into a biannual special called Sasuke. The original episodes are three-hour TV affairs in the homeland, but here in the U.S., G4 parcels them out in half-hour episodes of Ninja Warrior.

Ninja Warrior works mainly because the four-part obstacle course is genuine. Of 100 contestants, maybe ten even reach Stage 2, and they are, to a man, genuine athletes. [Some are even Olympic athletes.] If even five of those survivors make it to Stage 3, it's an accomplishment. Some tournaments don't even bother with Stage 4, because there's no one left to try it. Every tournament has its pretenders, including Japanese celebrities; but even they are a cut above the poor fools who get humiliated on the likes of Wipeout. If you want to avoid them, fine; just tune in five minutes late. I didn't expect to find Ninja Warrior compelling, but now I have something to watch on G4.

New episodes are airing, and that actually sucks. I'm going to have to choose every Friday between this and new episodes of Discovery Channel's Dual Survival. Nuts!

Tuesday Football: Administrivia edition #1

2011-04-26T16:24:00.002-05:00

Just going all over the place on football matters.

Playoffs, playoffs everywhere: It sucks to be Schalke 04 tonight. Die Knappen lost 2-0 at home in the first leg of its UEFA Champions League semifinal round. Now they have to win by two goals at Old Trafford next week. Manchester United can wrap this up with just one goal at home. Ouch.

In the other semifinal, Real Madrid and Barcelona meet yet again. Coaches Pep Guardiola (Barça) and Jose Mourinho (Real) have resorted to trash talking, probably because they're both getting bored with playing each other so many times in the same month.

As if I'll ever play Madden 12: I voted for Cleveland RB Peyton Hillis over Philadelphia QB Michael Vick, all right, but I waited until the last day of voting to do it. I stopped playing video games shortly after Marble Madness, so I'm unlikely to ever play Madden 2012. Still, the choice, determined in a single-elimination tournament whose winners were decided by Internet polling, doesn't speak so well of the NFL fan base. What we have here is a contest between a star player with a troubled past and a promising rusher who has yet to prove himself over a full season. It's an odd choice.

Administrivia: I've posted the 2011 NFL draft order, as Victory Weighting would have determined it. It's the rightmost button on the the bar at the top of the blog. Also, it's out with the yellow links and in with the softer blues and grays, plus some orange. I finally got a chance to look at this blog on someone else's monitor, and the old scheme was just too harsh.

Friday Double: What's a nice theme like you...?

2011-04-22T19:10:00.002-05:00

...doing in a rotten series like this?

My knowledge of Star Trek arcana may not be enough to make me a hard-core Trekkie, but I was dedicated enough almost a decade ago to actually look forward to the beginning of Star Trek: Enterprise. But my first hearing of the dreadful Faith of the Heart should have warned me about just how seriously the show would eventually suck. The Diane Warren composition didn't even fit with the visual part of Enterprise's opening title, let alone the spirit of the Star Trek franchise. I won't dignify that song with a link, because this Friday Double isn't about wastes of bad music on brutally disappointing television series.

It's about wastes of good music on brutally disappointing television series.

There are a few reasons why I don't hate Enterprise nearly as much as its predecessor, Star Trek: Voyager. First, Enterprise had better plots. Second, it didn't have salamanders. Third, I might have felt better about Enterprise had its opening title resembled the gorgeous treatment Voyager got.

To tell the truth, I had given up on Voyager well before it got to those salamanders. It's just too bad Jerry Goldsmith's theme couldn't grace a show that deserved it.

Jeff Beal, whom I sometimes call HBO's resident composer, penned my other feature today. Carnivàle had an opening title that framed it even more perfectly than Voyager -- but it sold a series that proved even more bitterly disappointing.

A blown Star Trek production like Voyager was inevitable, and so, too, was a bad HBO series. Even at that, though, Carnivàle gave the HBO viewing world a shock. Not even producer Ronald D. Moore liked it, as he would admit in a DVD comment track for his better known and liked series, Battlestar Galactica (2004).

So which other bad TV series got great opening credits?

Tuesday Football: New Victory Weighting definitions

2011-04-19T20:47:00.004-05:00

Yes, the last third of April is an odd time to bring up my Victory Weighting scheme, but there's the little matter of the NFL Draft, which, for 2011, starts next Thursday. That event provides the perfect pretext to introduce definitions for a couple of terms that occasionally occur in tiebreaking contexts. [If you haven't done so already, please click on the Victory Weighting line in the top bar for an overview of the system.]

Strength of Victory

This figure provides an estimate of the quality of the opponents a team has defeated. As a tiebreaker, it applied only when all comparisions of sub-records (e.g. records vs. common opponents) have failed.

The NFL calculates strength of victory as the combined won-lost-tied percentages of those opponents a team has beaten. For Victory Weighting, it has a more formal definition.

For a given season, a team's strength of victory is the sum of the weighted current Strengths of its opponents, taken over all completed games. For each game the team has played, the Strength it earned from that game weights the opponent's current Strength. At the beginning of the season, strength of victory is 0 for all teams.

Written as a formula,

where

W_i is the Strength the team earned from game i. It ranges from 0 to 4, per the standard Victory Weighting rules. Once established, it never changes.
S_i(N) is the current strength of opponent i; that is, its Strength as of week N during the season. This value usually increases over the course of the season.

For example, consider two teams who meet in the first week of the season. While the game was in progress, N=0, and, by definition, both teams have zero strength of victory. Upon completion of the game, N increments to 1. If the game ended in overtime, the winner's strength of victory increases by 0.750 (W_i= 3, S_i(1) = 1, 3*1/4 = 0.75). After eight weeks (N = 8), if the loser has earned 16 Strength, that contribution increases from 0.75 to 3*16/4=12.00.

Only completed games count toward strength of victory. Games remaining on the schedule do not count, since their game weights cannot be determined until they have been played.

A few easy colloraries follow:

After the first week, every team's strength of victory is either 0, 3 or 4.
A team that has not managed even an overtime loss has a strength of victory of zero. The Detroit Lions accomplished this dubious feat in 2008.
If a team has not played any overtime games, its strength of victory is equal to the combined Strength of all the teams it has defeated. If, that team also finishes undefeated, its strength of victory is also equal to its strength of schedule. The 2007 New England Patriots are the only team to achieve this distinction since the NFL adopted overtime.^*

Strength of Schedule

For the 32-team NFL, this statistic isn't as crititcal as it is for the NCAA, which has to evaluate 120 to 350 teams at once for its tournaments. Accordingly, the NFL can use a less rigorous formula for each team: the combined won-loss-tied percentage of all its opponents. Typically, strength of schedule is evaluated only at the end of a season, after all games have been played.

Victory Weighting provides a more rigorous definition:

For a given season, a team's strength of schedule is the sum of all its opponents' current Strengths, taken over the entire season.

Its formula is

where

N_max is the length of the season in games, currently 16.
S_i(N) is the current strength of opponent i; that is, its Strength as of week N during the season. This value usually increases over the course of the season.

At any point in the season, the strength-of-schedule calculation includes games yet to be played, as well as games already played.

In both the official and VW schemes, strength of schedule is the first tiebreaker used to determine draft order. If that fails, then any division and conference tiebreakers that were used for playoff seeding apply.

With both terms defined for Victory Weighting, two more corollaries emerge:

After the first week, all winners have a strength of schedule equal to 0 or 1; all losers, 3 or 4. If the first game ends in a tie, both teams have a strength of schedule equal to 2.
If a team has not played any overtime games, the ratio between its strength of victory and its strength of schedule is equal to its won-loss-tied percentage.

Some examples follow the fold.

Example: Denver vs. Cincinnati vs. Buffalo, 2010

The Bengals and Broncos finished 2010 tied for the second-worst Victory Weighted record, each with 16 Strength and each at 4-12. The Bills also finished 4-12, with 19 Strength. We'll use these teams to illustrate how strength of victory and strength of schedule work.

Strengths of victory

Both the Bengals and Broncos went through the 2010-1 campaign without playing an overtime period. For each team all twelve losses were in regulation (W_i = 0), so they contribute nothing to either one's strength of victory. In each case, it's necessary to look at only the four wins.

The Bills present a slightly more complicated case. Three of their losses came in overtime(W_i = 1), so those actually add to the Bills' strength of victory. We'll need to look at those games as well as the Bills' four wins.

Cincinnati: Defeated Baltimore (47), Carolina (8), Cleveland (21) and San Diego (36). The Bengals' strength of victory is (4*47 + 4*8 + 4*21 + 4*36)/4 = 47+8+21+36 = 112.00.
Denver: Defeated Seattle (28), Tennessee (25), Kansas City (40) and Houston (24). The Broncos' strength of victory is (4*28 + 4*25 + 4*40 + 4*24)/4 = 28+25+40+24 = 117.00.
Buffalo: Defeated Detroit (24), Cincinnati (16), Cleveland (21) and Miami (27). Lost in overtime to Baltimore (47), Kansas City (40) and Pittsburgh (46). The Bills' strength of victory is (4*24 + 4*16 + 4*21 + 4*27 + 1*47 + 1*40 + 1*46)/4 = (4*(24+16+21+27) + (47+40+46))/4 = (4*88 + 133)/4 = 121.25.

Strengths of schedule

Traditionally, the NFL makes it even easier to compute strengths of schedule by giving teams in the same division nearly identical schedules. Under the current alignment, a team plays six games against its divisional rivals (two against each), four games against another division in its conference and four more against a division in the other conference. Rivals' schedules thus differ by only two games. In that light, it makes sense to calculate Strengths for divisions. For any division, just add the Strengths of its members.

Under this scheme, you can look up each game individually, or you can add up division Strengths as appropriate.

Cincinnati: The AFC North divisional strength was 130. Subtracting the Bengals' Strength of 16, and noting that they played their rivals twice each means that the AFC North contributed 2*(130-16) = 228 to their strength of schedule. The AFC East added 143; the NFC South; 146. Finally the Bengals' "free" opponents, San Diego and Indianapolis, contributed 36 and 41 Strength, respectively. Therefore, the Bengals' strength of schedule is 228+143+146+36+41= 594.
Denver: AFC West divisional strength = 123, AFC South = 123, NFC West = 101, Baltimore = 47, New York Jets = 40. Broncos' strength of schedule = (2*(123-16))+123+101+47+40 = 562.
Buffalo: AFC East divisional strength = 143, AFC North = 130, NFC North = 133, Kansas City = 40, Jacksonville = 33. Bills' strength of schedule = (2*(143-19))+130+133+40+33 = 584.

For the 2011 Draft, Denver would draft second with a lower Victory Weighted strength of schedule than Cincinnati. The Bengals would draft third, while the Bills, with Strength 19, would go fourth. Officially, the Bills are going third, because they were tied with the other two teams, and the traditional strength-of-schedule calculations left them between the Broncos (still second) and the Bengals.

* The 1972 Miami Dolphins also finished perfectly, two years before the NFL adopted overtime.

Friday Double: (1) Planet Earth

2011-04-15T18:47:00.000-05:00

When I remarked on the passing of composer John Barry several weeks ago, I noted that I haven't brought up my love film or video soundtracks here often enough. Hopefully, this new Friday Double feature will fix that. The idea is simply to cite two cuts that I like every Friday, both from the same movie, TV series or composer. The BBC/Discovery documentary Planet Earth stars in our premiere edition.

George Fenton has earned five Academy Award nominations, including one for the score to 1983 Best Picture Gandhi, but most of his work has been for British television. Planet Earth won him his second Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition (after the equally stunning Blue Planet). While he could give the next quarter-billion-dollar Hollywood epic a proper score, Fenton is probably a lot happier doing what he does now. Good on him.

I'll probably post more examples of Fenton's incredible range in the future, but here's "Surfing Dolphins." In the film segment, the dolphins aren't just surfing near a small beach; they're teaching their kids how to track down dinner. The NFL fan in me has also noted that, poorly as they've played recently, this same music could easily accompany the numerous miscues from the Miami Dolphins' last few seasons.

I wouldn't have brought gridiron up had I not heard the Planet Earth theme backgrounding an NFL Network report last fall. That struck me oddly, because the NFL strongly prefers to commission its own incidental music, via NFL Films. Yet, here they were, using the work of George Fenton (an outsider!) to help document the decline and fall of wide receiver Randy Moss.

Well, the NFL was using outside music, and it was the theme to Planet Earth... but George Fenton didn't write it. The theme is a 51-second cut from "The Time Has Come," whose actual authors are Tobias Marberger and Gabriel Shadid.

There it is: my first Friday Double. Hope you like it.

Bloggers's block

2011-04-06T18:28:00.000-05:00

I hate when this happens: I spend hours working on a new blog post (this one about the Rebecca Black fiasco), make the edits, add the pictures and links, and proofread it one last time. Upon that final review, I then realize that I've said either nothing or, even worse, overextended my logic the way Napoleon sent his armies too far. The grammar is sound, the spelling is all correct, but the post is just an unreadable mess.

While I plot out a post that might actually work, I'll just decompress and bask in the fact that my alma mater just won the better played NCAA basketball championship game. Whoop!

What I'd like to see this weekend

2011-03-24T17:33:00.003-05:00

The you-take-it-no-you-take-it ending of that Pittsburgh-Butler third-round game last Saturday will go down as one of the NCAA tournament's most exasperating moments ever. While you wait for Butler to complete another shocking march to the men's Final Four, enjoy this shining moment from Spain's pro-basketball league, courtesy of Awful Announcing (which doesn't seem to cover much awful announcing these days).

Overdue update (6 April): That Butler-UConn mess? Did not want!

Hitting a new bracketologic low

2011-03-21T20:59:00.000-05:00

With all the bad news, I was hoping that I would at least get my predictions right for this year's NCAA men's-basketball tournament. No such luck. My primary bracket fell completely apart, with the right side almost completely wiped out. Among the actual eighth-finalists in the Southwest and East regions, I correctly picked only Kansas. I've never had a bracket fall apart like that on the first weekend. I also picked Richmond in a secondary bracket, but that one has sucked, too.

The only comfort is that with the vaunted Big East crapping out so thoroughly, not many other people have decent brackets this year. Bleah.

A fantasy episode for The Outer Limits

2011-03-14T23:04:00.004-05:00

Trust me, I'll get around to explaining the title of this post.

The latest I'm hearing from Fukushima, via MSNBC, is the following:

Reactor 2 has suffered an explosion, that's reported to be worse than the ones that preceded it.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan has widened the exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi complex from 20 to 30 kilometers.
Now a fourth reactor at the complex is on fire.

Even if the situation doesn't get any worse and there's no major meltdown, it's already a crippling blow to Japan. The outlook for the rest of the world just got an order of magnitude worse, as nations start abandoning nuclear energy altogether. Without a serious nuclear-power capability to tide us over, I'm beginning to worry that our civilization no longer has enough time to develop alternative sources of energy.

Not that some Dominionists aren't celebrating. They look at disasters like Fukushima Daiichi and Deepwater Horizon and see a sign that they'll be magically whisked into heaven, while the rest of us endure one catastrophe after another. [To paraphrase Barack Obama, they worship a truly awesome douchebag of a God.]

Discussion of the legendary End Times invariably reminds me of the later version of The Outer Limits, which ran from 1995 to 2002. Its predecessor from the 1960s was a serviceable science-fiction anthology, which did well with a special-effects budget not much bigger than the original Twilight Zone had. The 1990s series had better special effects, but it took Zone's penchant for climactic twists to an awful extreme. Occasionally, as in "The Deprogrammers," the twist truly worked. Unfortunately, for most episodes, I spent less energy actually watching than calculating the nature of the twist. [Even worse, I was usually right.] It wasn't too difficult, then, to write a framework for my fantasy episode for The Outer Limits.

The teaser describes a major environmental disaster that's irreparably polluted a large portion of the Earth. We see people in mourning all over the world... except in Uplift, a medium-sized American suburb populated whose main factions are the followers of two Dominionist mega-churches. There, an angelic figure descends from the sky, sending the residents into an ecstatic frenzy. Surely, this is the angel who will take them to Heaven, safe from the Tribulation that is to follow.

Cue the intro: "Do not adjust your television set... ."

As even more catastrophes unfold elsewhere, the Dominionist factions of Uplift fight each other for the favor of this "angel" (and a trip to Heaven). Both sides spend most of the episode wondering what the rest of the world will think when Uplift suddenly becomes empty of people. They're too delirious to notice that the "angel" is actually talking to only one resident, a surly Teenager who's ready to leave Uplift at the first opportunity. Of course, this lone dissident tries to warn his/her fellow townsfolk about the plans the "angel" truly has -- and, of course, (s)he's almost stoned for the trouble.

Only at the end, when the Rapture actually take place, does either faction realize that the Teenager they both hate was right. The "angel" even announces it to the holier-than-thou people of Uplift. The Rapture has come, all right -- and, except for the Teenager, they're not to be saved. They get only enough time to mourn their fate for the voice-over announcer to start pontificating on the Human Frailty of the Week. [It wouldn't episode of The Outer Limits without such a pronouncement!] After that, a tornado starts ripping Uplift to shreds.

In the very last shot, it turns out that every man, woman, child and ~~pet~~ companion animal has suddenly disappeared from San Francisco, California.

Another 90 seconds closer to midnight

2011-03-09T20:13:00.004-06:00

This will be a day that will be long remembered. To riff on the rest of Darth Vader's famous line near the climax of Star Wars: A New Hope, it has seen the end of collective bargaining in Wisconsin, and it will soon see the end of National Public Radio.

When I woke up today to the news that NPR has forced out its CEO, Vivian Schiller, I was furious. Yet another institution had collapsed under the least pressure from con man James O'Keefe and his teabagger allies. The timing of this latest Obama Administration capitulation was especially galling: it took place right in the middle of a pledge drive. Needless to say, a lot fewer progressives feel like staying on this sinking ship. [It doesn't matter whether I care to pledge anymore. I don't have the spare money to pledge.]

And that's going to suck. Away from larger cities, the listening choices on ordinary radios are limited to lousy country-music stations, lousy pop-music stations, right-wing talk-radio stations¹... and the local NPR station. What's going to happen to public-radio stations in places like Jonesboro, Arkansas, or Elko, Nevada, once the funding stops from (a) the Federal government and (b) frustrated progressives who've decided to quit NPR? KASU in Jonesboro might do okay, as might its sisters in other college towns. But what about KNCC in Elko? Will the University of Nevada still be able to maintain a signal 400 kilometers from its Reno campus?

I'm sure the Dominionists running the GOP would love to see public radio banished from as much of rural America as possible. What are rural listeners who don't care for right-wing-dominated radio supposed to do? Subscribe to satellite radio? Rely on broadband Internet connections? Move to larger towns where public radio has survived? Are those even options for cash-strapped small-town residents?

Maybe Darth Vader had the right idea. Then again, he did utter that famous line shortly before the Death Star blew up. There's always that two-meter-wide conduit of hope.

1. No need to precede "right-wing talk-radio" with "lousy." That would be redundant.

Scooter blogging: (3) The blanket is mine!

2011-03-05T23:26:00.001-06:00

As Scooter has been demonstrating all winter, cats aren't completely colorblind.

I make my bed when I get up on weekday mornings. On some weekends, though, I do laundry. Since I have to climb onto the bed to get to the clothes I'll be cleaning, it makes sense to leave it undone until I'm done putting away the newly cleaned articles.

That pale green patch at the bottom of this picture is Scooter's blanket. She's grown to love it since inheriting it from her late stepsister Galadriel. I keep it folded on the corner of my bed, and that's where she spends much of her day, asleep.

The bed itself is on the same wall as a window that leaks cold air on windy days, so one side needs insulation. That's why the electric-blue comforter is present. This winter, it's served as the insulation by day, and as an extra blanket by night.

One night last October, I left the blue comforter, freshly cleaned and folded, on the bed. Within minutes, Scooter got up from her usual blanket and laid down on the blue comforter. Ever since then, whenever I lay the comforter out, she's moved to lie down on it.

Must be the color.

Someone proven worse than Dick Vitale

2011-03-01T00:06:00.001-06:00

I don't know why I bother watching the men's basketball games ESPN puts on its marquee. Within a few minutes of tuning in, Dick Vitale, Jeff van Gundy or Bobby Knight will utter something so mind-numblingly stupid, I have to punch a button on the clicker.

During tonight's Kansas State-Texas game, Knight went off on his sideline colleague. All poor Holly Rowe did was remark that some player told his coach "my bad" in response to a mistake he made on the court. "I know that," sneered Knight, as though saying "my bad" were a cardinal sin. Even when he was still head coach at Indiana University (and I actually admired him!), he would fault his young players for not taking responsibility for their mistakes. What does he do now? Criticize young players for admitting they made a mistake. [Thank Jeebus for Rachel Maddow. I had somewhere to click to.]

It's power trips like this that have reduced one of the sport's greatest coaches to an arrogant, unlistenable snot. No one knew it when it went down in 1985, but here's the moment Bobby Knight's status as a public figure jumped the shark:

While I'm here, I might as well post the highlights of the men's bracket I updated today.

There aren't as many cute early matchups as last week, and only one (BYU-Utah State) that's a replay of a regular season game. But I have sent Ohio State, Xavier and Cincinnati all to the same octave. They all play in Cleveland, but only one can advance to the regional semifinals.
As I thought might happen, the Big Ten contingent is shrinking, from seven teams to five.
First Four games: Florida Atlantic-Hampton, Texas Southern-McNeese State, Marquette-Richmond, Wichita State-Washington.
At-large changes from last week's bracket: Virginia Tech replaces Boston College, Richmond replaces Colorado State, Gonzaga replaces Minnesota, Wichita State replaces Penn State.

The real reason why the Internet purrs

2011-02-27T19:34:00.000-06:00

I trust you knew this already:

[H/t to Jill over at Brilliant at Breakfast.]

Bricketology™ 2011: Abu Scooter's first women's cut

2011-02-24T16:40:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was the guys' turn; today, I'm predicting the NCAA women's basketball bracket. The process for the women is completely different from what's used to set up the men's bracket. Here are the differences:

The women's bracket has only 64 teams. No one gets a bye, and there are no play-in games.
Regions are named after their locations instead of compass directions: this year, Dallas, Dayton, Spokane and Philadelphia.
The women's selection committee tends to just pick the best 64 teams, then assign their places in order of rank. This year, for example, the top five teams are (and will probably remain) UConn, Stanford, Duke, Baylor and Tennessee. Four of those teams will get the #1 seeds and be placed in the bracket; the one that's left will be placed next, as a #2 seed. Texas A&M and Xavier, the probable sixth and seventh selections, will be placed after that. And so it goes, down the the 64th best team. On the men's side, it's chaos, once the first 16 or so teams are picked.
Maximizing attendance remains a priority on the women's side, so if a qualifier can open at home, it does, regardless of seed. For the same reason, no team will travel across the continent for the regional-level playoffs, if it can be avoided. Contrast that with the process for the men's bracket, where home-court advantages are expressly prohibited.

Some constraints apply on both sides of the gender line.

There are 31 automatic bids, one for each conference. The Ivy League picks its representative based on regular-season play; everyone else uses a post-season tournament.
When four or fewer teams are selected from any league, they are placed in different regions. For 5-8 teams, it's one or two to a region.
Conference rivals can meet before the regional final only if more than eight teams advance. Non-conference matchups that have occurred during the regular season are also to be avoided.

The only other thing to add is that, as with the men's bracket, I rely more heavily on RPI rankings than the selection committees will. I'm also pretty hostile to teams with losing conference records (buh-bye, Texas). Here are the highlights of my women's bracket. If you're wondering about your favorite team, and I haven't mentioned it, just ask about it in the comments.

Top seeds: UConn (Philadelphia), Stanford (Spokane), Tennessee (Dayton), Baylor (Dallas).
Last four in: LSU, Purdue, Creighton, Arkansas-Little Rock.
First four out: Texas, South Carolina, Missouri State, Wisconsin.
Opening on their home floors: all the top seeds, plus (2) Duke, (3) Xavier, (3) Maryland, (7) Ohio State, (7) Penn State and (13) Gonzaga.
Opening close enough to home: (11) Louisiana Tech in Shreveport, (13) BYU in Salt Lake City.
First-round sites not getting local teams: Albuquerque, Auburn, Charlottesville and Wichita. New Mexicans love their hoops, especially in Albuquerque; and they'll probably have plenty of (2) Texas A&M Aggie fans helping fill The Pit. But I'm worried about the other three sites.
High seeds potentially facing outright road games: (2) UCLA at Ohio State; (2) Notre Dame at Penn State; (4) Oklahoma at Gonzaga.

Bricketology™ 2011: Abu Scooter's first men's cut

2011-02-23T16:03:00.002-06:00

Forget the opening of pro baseball's training camps. The real sign of spring is the annual proliferation of Internet posts from the U.S., all claiming to predict who will make the NCAA Division I basketball tournaments.

Like this one and the next. Last year, I correctly named the entire 65-team men's field, but now that field has 68 teams. I'm further upping the ante this year by taking on the women's 64-team bracket. My predictions rely heavily on RPI rankings, as posted (for free) over on realtimeRPI.com. The men's bracket (posted here) is based on the numbers that site posted Monday; the women's (next time), from its Tuesday numbers.

El soporte masculino

The big news this year has been the dominance of the Big East. Most bracketologists think ten teams will reach the field of 68, but I'm in the sizable minority that sees 11 squads through.¹ That masks a more interesting trend, namely, a generalized shift of power eastward. Big East success is coming largely at the expense of the ACC and the SEC. Among the "mid-majors," the mojo has moved from the Missouri Valley (in the lower Midwest) to the Atlantic 10 and Colonial (two Eastern Seaboard leagues). Between the mid-majors and the BCS groups, San Diego State and Brigham Young have spearheaded the rise of the Mountain West². The Pacific 10 and West Coast conferences have suffered as a result.

Purdue is an Indiana state school, but it might host the most popular team in Virginia. As the Boilermakers surge to maybe a #2 seed, they boost the prospects of several bubble teams based in the Old Dominion, including Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth, Richmond, George Mason and, yes, Old Dominion.

This could be another year when the SEC manages to force a team into the field that doesn't belong. Back in 2006, mid-major Missouri State missed the field despite earning an RPI of 20. Why? Because even though the entire SEC West sucked that year, the SEC tricked the Selection Committee into including Arkansas. The Razorbacks confirmed The Worst Selection Ever by losing their first-round game by 30 points. It could happen again this year, because a horrible Alabama team³ is the only SEC West side that's even close to the bubble. Watch your back, Utah State (RPI 19)! You, too, George Mason (RPI 20).

Okay, enough generalities. Here are the highlights from my current projected men's bracket.

Top seeds: Ohio State (Southeast), Kansas (West), Duke (East), Texas (Southwest).
Play-ins (at Dayton): Montana-Texas Southern, Hampton-McNeese State, Florida State-Penn State, Colorado State-Marquette.
Last four in: Colorado State, Penn State, Marquette, Butler.
First four out: Valparaiso, WIchita State, Gonzaga, Virginia Tech.
Cute first-round matches: (2) San Diego State vs. Long Beach State at Tucson; (3) North Carolina vs. Coastal Carolina at Charlotte.
Neat second-round possibilities: (1) Ohio State vs (8) Cincinnati at Cleveland; (4) Kentucky vs. (5) Louisville at Denver; (3) Purdue vs. (6) Xavier at Chicago.

Next time: My first-ever bracketology attempt for the ladies' teams.

1 It's likely that the entire conference will see postseason action of some sort. That would be a first.
2 SDSU and BYU meet ~~tonight~~ Saturday, for what may be the top seed in the West Region.
3 Alabama is cheap-monster-movie awful, but that rumor that SyFy is carrying Crimson Tide home games live is completely false.

Wisconsin protester WIN!

2011-02-19T15:59:00.001-06:00

I'm having trouble figuring it out: are Scott Walker, Chris Christie, John Kasich and their Dominionist and teabagger confederates Republic-serial Hosni Mubarak wannabees, or are they Republic-serial Silvio Berlusconi wannabees? Walker tricks the firefighter and police unions into supporting his gubernatorial run, and then once in office, he tries to screw them along with the other civil servants. The firefighters didn't buy it:

WIN!

The autopista to Hell: Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock

2011-02-14T20:48:00.001-06:00

Theocratic political officers to mind the military? Check.

Religiously driven control of history and culture? Check.

Oligarchs who expect the state to enforce their domination of labor? Check.

Widening income disparities, leading to the return of widespread slavery? Check.

Every link, save the last, points to something that Republicans, teabaggers, Dominionists and their corporate paymasters has done in the last four months, or is doing now. The one last regards the 2012 budget released today by rightward-turning Barack Obama. All point to actions that are paving the autopista to, at best, a constellation of Dickensian hellholes.

This toll road to the Twenty-Second Century led Canadian author Robert Charles Wilson to, among other things, a 2010 Hugo nomination for best speculative-fiction novel. In Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America, humanity has barely survived the False Tribulation, a series of catastrophic effects triggered by climate change and resource depletion. North America has fallen under the control of a United States that has replaced the Congress and Supreme Court with an Egyptian-style military and the Dominion, a powerful union of fundamentalist churches. New York's Central Park has been transformed into a vast palace that houses the now-imperial President.

The novel itself follows the rise and fall of its titular character, the nephew of the current President. It's an interesting story, narrated by Julian's best friend, a naïve young man from the tiny remnants of the American middle class. Any similarities between it and Gore Vidal's Julian are intentional (as Wilson himself has openly admitted). Both novels (Vidal's, much more explicitly) drew from the brief reign of Julian the Apostate (331-363), the last non-Christian emperor of Rome. The real Julian, like Wilson's, tried to reform a failing, Christian-dominated empire.

But it's the setting of Julian Comstock that caught my fancy in the first place. The oil has run out. Most towns have had to be built from scratch, their predecessors reduced to mines for scavengers. Only a few pre-collapse cities -- New York City, Montréal, Colorado Springs, Marseilles -- remain, all shadows of their former selves. Where it even exists, electricity runs for only four hours each night (and that's an technical advance). It's almost like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, a century after the missiles flew.

Instead of radiation, though, it's the Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth that permeates this landscape. The Dominion decides which churches are legal, and which are to be wiped from the face of the Earth. It controls whatever science, knowledge and technology can be recovered from the ruins, destroying some of it and hiding the rest. It dictates what books can be sold. Through its vast school system, it teaches the masses that the Americans lived the ideal life in the early 19th Century. Like any self-respecting evil empire, the Dominion trains its own military officers, who serve as ministers (and Saddam Hussein-style minders) in the two U.S. armies.

The Dominion doesn't control everything in 2175 America, but it doesn't have to. As in the 19th Century it so idealizes, a small clique of oligarchs dominates the economy. Some of them "escape" to mansions in places like Athabaska, a northern U.S. state carved out from present-day Alberta and Saskatchewan, where they live off the labors of indentured servants who languish in shanties that don't even protect them from the still-cold winters. The tiny remnants of the American middle class consist of the handful of skilled workers who support their small towns. They lead better lives, but like the servants, they live at the aristocrats' sufferance. Every such town has a Dominion preacher, effectively trained in the Dominion capital at Colorado Springs to discourage whatever dissent might arise from this stunning inequality.

City life is little different. The middle class is a bit larger, immigrants do the indentured servants' work, but the upper class still dominates. The Dominion controls more covertly, but somehow doesn't mind the unregulated shops that sell "vaccines" and other threats to public health. Nor does it have a problem when rich industrialists, farmers and ranchers alike have government troops sent in to quell labor unrest.

All this is described by Julian's lifelong friend, Adam Hazzard -- who doesn't always realize what he's doing. Born into the tiny remnants of the American middle class, Adam sees much in his Athabaskan town, but it's not clear how much he understands. He grew up along side both aristocrats like Julian and indentured servants, but only when he and Julian flee a military draft does he begin to comprehend what that meant. Only his travels reveal to him the possibility that the Dominion might not be as pious or godly as he once believed.

I think of that lack of guile, and it reminds me of the Tea Party movement. Its members tend to support all the things I cited at the top of this post, but I wonder how many of them have really thought their implications out, separately or as a while. Go read Julian Comstock, and see the future our Dominionists have in store for us.

100! Yay! The post count for The Ghost-Grey Cat has now reached 100. One of my resolutions this year is to make the next 100 posts go quicker. Effin' miaow!

"Imported From Detroit"

2011-02-07T23:15:00.002-06:00

Generally speaking, I'm happy to report that this year's Super Bowl ads weren't as violent as last years. The worst exceptions came from Doritos, Pepsi Max and HomeAway (what's that?). That level of viciousness isn't just for championship football games anymore, so I'll mention them again in a later post.

I won't offer further comment on either the Skechers ad with Kim Kardashian or the GoDaddy spots. With sexism on that level, why is either company still in business? Oh, never mind; that question pretty much answers itself. Professor Chaos has a good overview of the worst of Super Bowl 45, none of which involved either the Packers or the Steelers. [The game wasn't the most exciting, but it was decently played. Both teams belonged.]

Apart from Steeler coach Mike Tomlin's mystifying decision to green-light a 52-yard field goal attempt, the on-field action actually pleased me. So, too, did some of the ads. Coca-Cola followed a 2007 spoof of Grand Theft Auto with a hilarious parody of Warcraft and its MMORPG cousins. Volkswagen had a funny bit about a kid trying hard to be Darth Vader (yeah, I was that kid once).

The ad that's going to stick with me for a while, though, is this one from Chrysler:

Whatever it intended, Chrysler didn't pitch cars; it pitched the city of Detroit. So many bad things have happened there, it's become too easy for outsiders to imagine it as a Midwestern version of Kabul. But there are its landmarks, not just standing, but as beautiful as ever. [Especially the Diego Rivera murals.] Marshall Mathers is hardly my favorite performer (or person), but for an ad that was about both Detroit and defiance, his presence fit well as anyone else's could. It's one the most emotional commercials I've ever seen.

Update (10 February): The standard-length form of the Mathers Chrysler spot is now making the rounds. Along with the images and phrases the they found extraneous, the producers managed edit out most of the emotional power. That was inevitable, I suppose.

Super Bowl XLV: Can anyone in the Metroplex actually sing? Or mix?

2011-02-06T19:38:00.001-06:00

I don't care for "The Star Spangled Banner" as a a song; but was it really necessary to butcher it as thoroughly as Christina Aguilera did in Cowboys Stadium tonight? Or was she just part of some ~~al-Qaeda~~ ~~Westboro Baptist~~ terrorist plot to annoy Americans?

As for the halftime show, I'd much rather have witnessed a wardrobe malfunction than the sound-mixing malfunctions that marred the Black-Eyed Peas' performance. That level of incompetence would have sunk musical ensembles that I like.

Super Bowl XLV: Let's play!

2011-02-06T16:24:00.000-06:00

A year ago, I had a good idea who would win the Super Bowl, but was too lazy to post my prediction until an hour before kickoff. This year, I really had a hard time figuring it out. The Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers are two resilient teams, blessed with skilled quarterbacks, stifling defenses and rich championship traditions. I'm certainly not alone in my skittishness; as of this writing, the spread is still only 3.5 points in favor of the Packers.

I think the key is resilience. Both sides have been wildly inconsistent, not just from game to game, but from one quarter to the next. I've seen more detailed tactical analysis of the contestants than is good for me -- most of which managed to miss the fact that the winner will be the team that can string together four good quarters of football. The Packers have done that better than the Steelers, so they'll win tonight.

It may not even be close: Green Bay 30-13 Pittsburgh.

Some reflections on John Barry (1933-2011)

2011-02-01T23:03:00.001-06:00

In almost a hundred posts on this blog, I've somehow managed to avoid any mention of one of my passions, the movie soundtrack. A good score can make a bad movie tolerable; and, as John Williams demonstrated in The Empire Strikes Back, it can make a good movie one of its decade's best. If it weren't for Sam Spence's scores for NFL Films and its weekly highlight shows in the 1970s, I would probably have never developed any taste at all for music.

Superior scores are probably the best reason either Out of Africa (1985) or Dances with Wolves (1990) won an Oscar for Best Picture. Without the lush John Barry scores that also graced 11 James Bond movies and numerous other works over 40 years, Wolves might have still won on novelty¹; but the execrable Africa would have had no chance. Barry's passing yesterday at age 77 brought to mind a couple of personal memories.

The theme from Born Free, which won John Barry his first two Oscars in 1966 (for both theme and overall score), might actually be my first memory, period. Kids gravitated towards the theme song, which finished twelfth on the 1966 Billboard Top 100. Even as a toddler, I couldn't get enough of it; and that only intensified once I became old enough to adore and admire the ~~kitties~~ lions in the movie itself. As I turned five years old, I kept wondering when it would next show up on TV. Several years would pass before I realized it, but Born Free's soundtrack was the first one I enjoyed for its own sake. (Barry's Bond scores to that point soon followed.)

His last Oscar came for the Dances with Wolves score, a cassette copy of which I owned a little over thirteen years ago. Along with almost all my other worldly possessions, that little tape was in the car I was driving to California. Day three of that moving trip stretched from the desolation of central Wyoming to the desolation of northern Nevada. Outside the environs of Salt Lake City and Reno, my listening choices on the radio were minimal. Whenever I encountered mountains, especially in Nevada, those choices dropped to nothing, not even classical-music NPR stations.

From Carlin, Nevada, Interstate 80 climbs into the last such dead zone, which includes the Emigrant Pass, a dual tunnel and, finally, the Twin Summits. At the western end of the zone, the road curves gently into one last hill.

As it happened that day in late January, I popped that Dances with Wolves cassette into my car's tape player. The first two cuts played as I crossed the dead zone. Then, at the top of the last hill, this played:

I could see the Interstate dropping into yet another vast, desolate plain, marred with the low ridges that define that part of Nevada. As the short prelude of low strings played on my stereo, the haze of the Summits made the ridges in the background appear as one. At exactly the moment the high strings cued in, the single ridge began splitting into its components, each ridge seeming to split from its neighbors. The timing between the music inside my car and the developing scenery outside was so exquisite, it made me believe in a higher power.

Somewhere far above, with John Barry as spokesman, God was welcoming me to the West.

Or not. The date was 22 January 1998. When NPR came back into listening range several minutes later, the first thing I heard was President Bill Clinton -- swearing to the nation that he "did not have sex with that woman."

1. Sioux civilians good, U.S. Army bad? Gasp!

Da Bears. Da cold. And: a new tag!

2011-01-24T19:24:00.000-06:00

Last Friday, the thermometers here in Chicagoland dropped below zero degrees. Farenheit. The good news was that I had a heavy jacket ready to go. It kept me nice and toasty, even though I had to fill a gas tank in the deep freeze.

Super. Spiffy. Genius.

The bad news was that it was a Cleveland Browns jacket. I spent all day assuring the cashiers that, yes, I did have my orange Brian Urlacher jersey ready to go at 1400 Sunday afternoon. Well, it was, but I ended up wearing my super-spiffy Bears polo shirt instead.

Gotta dress properly on Sunday afternoon, don't ya know.

Anyway, it occurred to me that several of my football posts have involved uniforms and shirts, so now the blog gets a new main category for fashion. As before, these will concentrate on the sometimes awful things athletes wear on the field, and things fans wear to games, but it's still fashion.

Like all right-thinking Chicago Bears fans*, I was sad to see them lose last night's NFC title game to that ~~terrorist front~~ NFL team from Wisconsin. Among the numerous failures from head coach Lovie Smith and quarterback Jay Cutler, the 21-14 loss was the most painful to endure.

These are from last season, but they would've fit right in yesterday.

First, there's Cutler's showing. I'm not talking about what he did on the field. That mess came as no surprise, given that the Packer defense had previously vexed his betters and caused the firing of two head coaches. It's Cutler's behavior after his injury-triggered benching that turned his performance into an epic FAIL. Instead of standing by his teammates and providing encouragement, he spent most of the second half sitting on the bench, alone, with his head hung low. Maybe the producers at FOX Sports were just messing with us Bears fans, but their images of Cutler on the bench are those of a quarterback who has lost his team. It was backup QB Caleb Hanie who rallied the Bears and rocked the Packers on their feet. He, not Jay Cutler, almost turned a blowout loss into a legendary game.

And Hanie would've done it, too, if it hadn't been for that meddling head coach of his. On the final drive, Hanie had his players lined up for a classic power sweep against a confused and unprepared Packer defense. Just as Matt Forte made the turn on a devastating third-down power sweep (oh, devastating irony!), the whistle blew, stopping the play.

Lovie Smith, Super Genius, had called a time out.

Instead of helping the Bears, that pause gave the Packer defense time to reorganize. Even worse, Smith changed his team's call into a disastrous pitch play to Chester Taylor that lost three yards. The next play was a desperate fourth-down pass that the Packers promptly intercepted, sealing the Bears' fate.

Aaarrrrrgh. D'oh. Crikey. It was Cutler and Smith at their worst, at the worst possible time.

Oh, well. I was expecting a 4-12 season from this group, so I'm happy the Bears got this far.

* Now there's a redundancy!

Tweet of the Month

2011-01-13T19:40:00.001-06:00

I always regarded Patton Oswalt as a stand-up guy. True to form, he's responded to Sarah Palin's "blood libel" screed with this devastating tweet. You know, I might have to actually sign up for Twitter now.

Victory Weighting: Live playoff blogging

2011-01-02T14:56:00.009-06:00

Happy New Year! Today, I'm updating the playoff races as games end, using my Victory Weighting system.

14:53 CST: The Jets defeat Buffalo, 38-7. They finish at Strength 42 and 11-5, so they can still hope for a #5 seed. For that to happen, Pittsburgh would have to lose in regulation.

15:03 CST: While I'm waiting on another relevant game to go final, I should note that, under Victory Weighting, the St. Louis Rams would already be NFC West champions and a #4 seed. Their 29 Strength is guaranteed to be the best in their division. [Second-place Seattle could achieve, at best, Strength 28.]

Also, New England has had the AFC East and the AFC high seed locked up for a couple of weeks.

15:07 CST: Chiefs 10-31 Raiders. Kansas City finishes at Strength 40 and 10-6. They would fall to a #4 seed if Indianapolis wins.

15:09 CST: Baltimore and Pittsburgh both win in regulation. Both teams finish at 12-4, but Baltimore would win the AFC North and the first-round bye with Strength 47. Pittsburgh would get the #5 wild-card seed at Strength 46, leaving the New York Jets with the #6 spot.

Officially, Pittsburgh gets the division title and the bye. Barring some odd results in New Orleans, Green Bay and Washington, D.C., this will be the only instance this year where the Victory Weighted playoff seeds deviate from the actual ones. Oddly enough, this seems to happen every year with the Steelers and Ravens.

15:26 CST: One of the only two questions left in the NFC gets two answers, but needed only one. Atlanta beat Carolina, 31-10, clinching the NFC South title and the NFC high seed. As a result, Chicago locks up the #2 seed (and the other first-round bye), while New Orleans wraps up the #5 seed (and a first-round trip to St. Louis).

15:35 CST: Tampa Bay's 23-13 win at New Orleans leaves them at Strength 41 and 10-6, still alive for the last NFC playoff spot. It also closes out the New York Giants, who could finish with, at best, Strength 40.

Consequently, Green Bay (currently Strength 38 and 9-6) must beat Chicago in regulation to reach the playoffs. Even an overtime win would send Tampa Bay through instead.

18:06 CST: Green Bay wins, 10-3. With Strength 42, the 10-6 Packers take the last NFC playoff spot from Tampa Bay. They open the playoffs at Philadelphia.

18:08 CST: Jacksonville loses 34-14 at Houston. The Jaguars bow out of playoff contention, handing the AFC South title to Indianapolis.

18:10 CST: The Colts beat Tennessee, 23-20, on a last-second field goal. Indianapolis takes the #3 AFC seed, and will host the Jets next week. Kansas City slips to the #4 seed, to host Pittsburgh.

18:30 CST: That's it. Tonight's Rams-Seahawks game will decide the official NFC West champion, but has no bearing on the Victory Weighted playoff picture:

NFC First Round: (6) Green Bay at (3) Philadelphia; (5) New Orleans at (4) St. Louis
AFC First Round: (6) New York Jets at (3) Indianapolis; (5) Pittsburgh at (4) Kansas City
NFC Byes: (1) Atlanta, (2) Chicago
AFC Byes: (1) New England, (2) Baltimore

23:24 CST: Whoops. Seattle won the actual Sunday night game, and with it the NFC ~~Oceania~~ West title. St. Louis goes home, so Victory Weighting would have made another correction.

Wednesday Football: In a blizzard. Uphill. Both ways.

2010-12-29T22:42:00.002-06:00

Why, when I was a teenager, I did all my calculus homework on a slide rule. Outside, while walking two miles through a meter of snow to my school-bus stop. Uphill, both ways.

That statement is silly, of course, but not much more ridiculous than Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell's ill-considered criticism of this week's postponement of the Vikings-Eagles game. For me, broadly speaking, it's what Tom Kinslow said over at Bleacher Report. And that's as many column millimeters as I want to blow on this.

2010 fantasy football wrap: Well, the third time was indeed the charm, and that was bad news for the Fluttering Horde. I did what I could, and even made up for Andre Johnson's last minute injury, but my running backs and tight end failed me. Even if they hadn't, Anything But Last had just too much firepower. After beating ABL twice during the regular season, the Horde lost the league championship, 122-96. Still, for a team that never got two decent running backs together all season long, and finished 9-7, I'm pretty freakin' happy. More importantly, it got me a 3:1 payoff and fantasy silver. Yay, Horde!

The Middlemen also finished 9-7, pounding the Juken' Jockstraps, 127-68, in its fifth-place game.

My most valuable players:

For the Fluttering Horde: For the second year in a row, St. Louis wideout Danny Amendola saved my skin. At the beginning of the year, the Rams tried to make him a full-time receiver, so I didn't draft him. Soon enough, though, the Rams made him their lead kick returner. I picked him up, and he delivered 10-18 points week in and week out. No one was more reliable.
For the Middlemen: Chicago running back Matt Forte also gave me solid numbers every week, even as everyone else on the team, including the much-ballyhooed Chris Johnson, sputtered.

I'm going to try to get them both next year.

Hoping your Christmas Day is going well

2010-12-25T13:33:00.000-06:00

Well, here at the edge of Chicagoland, we've been treated to another white Christmas. All the snow came yesterday during a day-long shower. It's pretty enough, but the temperature is right around the freezing point of water. The show on the streets iced up, so even walking got slippery this morning.

Oh, well. It's Christmas, and we didn't have plans to go out. The salt can wait until tomorrow.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

Tuesday Football: Happy returns

2010-12-21T13:55:00.000-06:00

On a landmark week for kick returners, it makes sense to debate which spectacular return was the week's best:

Devin Hester's 64-yard sojourn last night, which made him the all-time leader in kick-return touchdowns;
Dan Connolly's shocking 71-yard return Sunday night, probably a record for a lineman; or
The New York Giants' second Meadowlands Meltdown, or DeSean Jackson's last-second punt return that won the game for the Eagles?

My vote is obvious: in only one of these cases did someone go through the trouble to simulate the play on the glorious Tecmo Super Bowl game. Enjoy!

After the actual play, the FOX cameras panned onto Giants coach Tom Coughlin, yelling at his punter. While the ball should've been kicked out of bounds, no team should ever be punting in the closing seconds of a close game. To his credit, Coughlin didn't fire his punter, so he probably realizes that he deserves blame for leaving his team to punt that way in the first place.

Fantasy football update: Sometimes, the last minute of a real game directly affects a fantasy game. With Green Bay driving for a winning touchdown Sunday night, the Fluttering Horde led its semifinal match by only 2.4 points. A Packer touchdown would have cost the Horde three points and the game. Instead, the Patriots' defense came up with two sacks (+2 points each) and the game-ending fumble recovery (+2).

Final score: Fluttering Horde, 103; Southside Hitmen, 95. The Horde advanced to 9-6 and a date with Anything But Last. I've already beaten ABL twice, but this one is for the league championship.

The Middlemen got a break when Adrian Peterson suddenly bowed out of last night's blowout loss to Chicago. Without Peterson, the Warriors didn't have enough to rally. Their 116-102 win puts the 8-7 Middlemen into the fifth-place game against the Jukin' Jockstraps. The good news is that Michael Vick will again lead the Middlemen.

The bad news is that Vick will also be leading ABL. Peyton Manning had better be on his best behavior.

Tuesday Football: Where every seat is cheap

2010-12-14T18:07:00.005-06:00

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! (FOX Sports)

Sensational as it is, Sunday's failure of the stadium roof in Minneapolis points to some rather disturbing facts. In the first place, this is not the first time the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome roof has collapsed under a lot of snow. After the third one in 1983, and a wind-related failure in 1986, Metrodome officials made some technical fixes to strengthen the roof system. Unfortunately, it now appears that the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, the body that maintains the stadium, may have ignored warnings about the fiberglass roof itself. Replacing the roof would cost 12-15 million dollars, and I wonder whether the MSFC just thought that investment was too expensive. The answer to that question doesn't matter now, I suppose.

But stop and think about this: According the the people who designed and built it, the roof has "has exceeded its service life of 20 years." Seriously? The good people of the Twin Cities spent tens of millions of dollars on something that with a lifetime of only 20 years? Just to keep an effing sports team?

That question also occurred to the folks over at Treehugger, who noted that the Metrodome was built both quickly and cheaply. I had always wondered why the Pontiac Silverdome, once home to the Detroit Lions and host of the classic Super Bowl XVI, ended up selling for only $500,000 after the Lions abandoned it. And, what, I wondered, was the point of building the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis if the Colts were going to dump it in only 25 years? For that matter, what about other huge venues that didn't make it to their 40th anniversaries? The Kingdome? Veterans' Stadium? The NBA arenas in Orlando and Charlotte?

These things got built because, in order to keep their beloved sports teams from moving to some other city (or, in the case of Indianapolis, to steal a team) municipalities had to build new arenas, and build them right now. Again: what's the point in redirecting tens -- now hundreds -- of millions of taxpayer dollars on a major building if it's not going to last that many decades? So the sports team(s) can make millions, not a dime of which goes back to the city? So the cities and/or states that spend that kind of money can do it again in 20 years?

A 100,000-seat stadium full of dog manure, that's what it is. I don't care who's spending a billion dollars for a new stadium. For that much money, the Cowboys and New Meadowlands venues had damned will better withstand a hell of a lot more than a meter of snow.

Fantasy football update: Well, what'll you know? Both my teams won this week.

Victory came too late for the Middlemen (7-7), whose struggles kept tracking with those of Antonio Gates' feet. For once, the Middlemen got a team on its worst week. Again, the performance was weak, but it was enough for an 84-74 win over the playoff-bound Tin Men. It didn't matter, alas, as fourth-place No Clue also, relegating the Middlemen to the consolation bracket.

I'm not going to stick God for all the blame for wasting a team as talented as the Middlemen. [In the family league, top-seeded Anything But Last shares no fewer than five players with them.] Its fast start surprised me, and also blinded me to the possibility that I could lose key players to injury. I waited too long to find substitutes, and it hurt. Also, I never did find a steady defense. [This week's squad, Oakland, scored zero points.] The Middlemen's bigger problem, though, was bad luck: they seemed to catch every opponent on its best week. As I've discovered to my regret, the most talented team in the league is doomed if it has to rack up 110 Yahoo-standard points to win every week.

On the other side, the news is much happier for the Fluttering Horde (8-6), 111-56 quarterfinal winners over Osogood. The match was over once the Patriots, whose defense the Horde uses, blew out my beloved Bears. On Monday, Andre Johnson and Ahmad Bradshaw pitched in 44 points that the Horde really didn't need. Up in next week's semifinal: an earlier Horde victim, the Southside Hitmen. Now that Peyton Manning's earned his way out of my doghouse, I like my chances to finish in some money.

Tuesday Football: Shoulder leads

2010-12-07T16:09:00.001-06:00

So the ~~Pets~~ Jets were irretrievably exposed as fakes last night in Massachusetts. Normally, I'd dismiss a 45-3 loss by a 9-3 team as an outlier, but they're now running out of secondary personnel. On a team as dependent on defense as the Jets, that's a staggering blow. They'll advance to the playoffs, but only because the sick bays filled up faster in Indianapolis and San Diego.

The death of Don Meredith, just a week after Leslie Nielsen passed on, is really saddening. Too much funny is going away too quickly.

I'm too young to remember Meredith the Dallas Cowboy quarterback, but his years as co-commentator with Howard Cosell made some of the best sports television ever. "Dandy Don" got Cosell to lighten up just a bit, and Howard conviced Meredith to take himself a bit more seriously. Those little bits made them a great team, rendered Frank Gifford irrelevant, and made every Monday night game watchable. If nothing else, I could look forward to hearing Meredith croon out the Willie Nelson chorus that became his signature:

Turn out the lights
The party’s over
They say that
All good things must end
Call it tonight
The party’s over
And tomorrow starts
The same old thing again

Godspeed, Don Meredith.

Fantasy football update: Success for the Fluttering Horde, more frustration for the Middlemen.

Anything but Last, the Horde's opponent, lost Percy Harvin early, but it turned out not to matter. The Horde lineup fell only six points short of its optimal score, blowing away my former in-law, 121-102, and stopping a two-game skid. ABL won the regular-season crown at 10-3, but I'm proud to say that the Horde accounted for two of those losses. The Horde finished the regular season at 7-6, good for a #6 playoff seed. Next up: my nephew and the commissioner, Osogood.

The Middlemen also faced an eight-man team, thanks to Brett Farve's injury, but then the ~~Pets~~ Jets screwed up. Their defense cost me a critical point, and sent the Middlemen crashing to their fourth straight loss, 95-89. It's also the third loss the 6-7 Middlemen -- who started 4-1 -- have taken to a short-handed opponent. But for the fact that the team has "allowed" the most fantasy points in its league, I'd have decided to just let Yahoo! set my lineup this week. As it is, I might be adding streaking Saints RB Christopher Ivory to the team. If I can pull that off, the Middlemen still have a shot at the playoffs.

Tuedsay Football: The Butter Fingers of God

2010-11-30T00:23:00.001-06:00

The Ghost-Grey Cat hereby presents its first Tweet of the Month. [I'm not actually on Twitter, so don't expect many of these.]

From Twitter (naturally), via TMZ

Here's what happened: After his Buffalo Bills had forced visiting Pittsburgh into overtime, the Steelers left wide receiver Steve Johnson wide open for a winning touchdown pass. Bills QB Ryan Fitzpatrick threw a perfect strike... which Johnson then dropped. The Steelers later won with a field goal. If the post-game press conference didn't make Johnson's distress clear, his later Twitter message drove it home.

The reaction was swift, negative and, as typified by TMZ's snarky remark about the tweet, utterly wrong. We often see athletes who score a winning play thanking God; why not, as George Carlin once suggested, blame God once in a while for a failure? Johnson deserves a shout-out, not condemnation, for admitting to blaming God. In any event, it's not as though he hadn't already blamed himself for that dropped pass.

Enough with the flames, people. Most of you would do exactly what he did.

Fantasy update: Well, my season is going to the dogs. Key players keep failing, and some with high profiles are now headed to my benches.

Exhibit A: overall first pick Chris Johnson, who gained a grand total of 7 yards in Tennessee's 20-0 loss at Houston. Any kind of decent performance would've put the Middlemen in striking distance, but instead, they lost to No Clue 2010, 120-104. It didn't help that No Clue had Tom Brady, Wes Welker and BenJarvus Green-Ellis (total: eight touchdowns), but with Antonio Gates still hobbled, I needed help from C.J. He provided none. Until the Titan offense regains its senses, starting C.J. is pointless.

Exhibit B: Peyton Manning, who also had his worst game in years. It contributed mightily to The Fluttering Horde's 99-74 loss to Flying Hawai'ian 3. Theoretically, Manning should bounce back next week at Dallas. In reality, his Fluttering Horde season has come to a shockingly early end. Injuries have taken away the Colts running game and most of their receivers. I'm sure Manning will perform well, and he may even win out. What he can't do now is score fantasy points, so Atlanta's Matt Ryan will assume quarterback duties for the rest of the season.

Both teams are 6-6 and falling. Look out below!

The Ghost-Grey Cat Presents: (8) The Woman Who Wanted to Live

2010-11-26T13:57:00.002-06:00

Episode 1322: The Woman Who Wanted to Live
First aired: 14 June 1982
Author: Bryce Walton
Dude, it's on!

I should do you a favor? Walk to my place of execution? -- Liza to Ray Bardon

Hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving. Here's a hint for the future: Achiote and cilantro turn out to be excellent ingredients for your turkey-basting sauce. It sounds crazy, but the meat is delicious.

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater had almost a year's notice of its cancellation. CBS permitted the 1982 season to proceed, but declined to extend it into 1983. Perhaps not surprisingly, producer Himan Brown opened RMT to all sorts of experimental scripts. With Tammy Grimes assuming Marshall's host duties, the 1982 season featured some of the series' worst episodes, some of its best, and a few that reached just beyond their grasp.

"The Woman Who Wanted to Live," which aired in June, might be the best of the 1982 lot, so it was disappointing to learn that it was originally an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Two decades after penning the original screenplay for the half-hour AHP, Bryce Walton expanded it into the hour-long radio episode.

It's literally a dark and stormy night on the Gulf Coast. Convicted murderer Ray Bardon (Larry Haines) has escaped from prison, but at serious cost. The gunshot wound he's just suffered doesn't require immediate attention, but it has left him too weak to keep running on his own. If he is to avoid recapture, someone else will have to drive him to another state.

His first chance to bum a ride comes at an isolated gas station, whose hapless attendant informs him that the vehicle parked outside is actually disabled. A disbelieving Bardon kills him; but before he can hide the body or move on, the titular woman (Roberta Maxwell) pulls into the station. By now, word of Bardon's escape has spread, and young Liza makes the mistake of identifying him out loud. Bardon is ready to kill her on the spot, too, but Liza stays calm. She convinces him that killing her would be a mistake; that would still leave him stranded. Instead, he carjacks her.

To buy time, and maybe a way out of her situation, Liza agrees to help Bardon -- but she doesn't submit. As she drives him past this flooded-out road and that police checkpoint, she's engaged him in a serious battle of wits, and he knows it. But does he really understand the severity of this battle -- or the lengths to which she will go to survive the encounter?

The joy of the story isn't in its outcome, but in the path Liza takes. She may start out as a damsel in distress, but that image fades quickly. She quickly gains advantage and initiative, but we have to wait until the end to discover whether she can use either. It's Liza's trip that makes "The Woman Who Wanted to Live" one of RMT's best episodes.

Rating: 98/100.

Notes:

The 1962 television version featured Charles Bronson as Bardon.
Act I is one of only two in the entire series -- 4197 acts -- that consists of a single, continuous scene. The other is Act I of "A Ring of Roses" (Episode 13). [Perhaps not coincidentally, "Ring" is also one my favorites.] Furthermore, these are two of only 22 RMT episodes in which all three acts share the same musical curtain. [To be fair, as a sign of the series' declining fortunes, 16 of those aired in its last 18 months.]
Bryce Walton was probably best known as a frequent contributor to the science-fiction pulps of the 1940s and '50s, though he also wrote mystery stories in the '60s. "Woman" is one of four RMT episodes he wrote, and one of six from Alfred Hitchcock Presents. [But it's the only one to appear in both series.]

Tuesday Football: More Victory Weighting

2010-11-23T12:53:00.002-06:00

If it's the fourth week of November, then Thanksgiving must be near. In the NFL, that means it's time for the playoff races to start taking form. Here's where Victory Weighting begins to matter.

[Press the "Victory Weighting" button to see how my system works. The "VW Standings" button takes you to the standings with the Victory Weighting rules in effect.]

Officially, the playoff projections look like this:

NFC byes: Atlanta (8-2, South leader), Philadelphia (7-3, East leader)
NFC first-round hosts: Chicago (7-3, North leader), Seattle (5-5, West leader)
NFC wild cards: Green Bay (7-3), New Orleans (7-3)
Just outside the NFC picture: Tampa Bay (7-3)

AFC byes: New York Jets (8-2, East leader), Baltimore (7-3, North leader)
AFC first-round hosts: Kansas City (6-4, West leader), Jacksonville (6-4, South leader)
AFC wild cards: New England (8-2), Pittsburgh (7-3)
Just outside the AFC picture: Indianapolis (6-4)

The official projection requires 9 tiebreakers:

Divisional tiebreakers in the NFC Norh, AFC North, AFC South and AFC East (4)
Qualfying tiebreakers: Green Bay vs. New Orleans vs. Tampa Bay, Jacksonville vs. Indianapolis (2)
Seeding tiebreakers: Philadelphia vs. Chicago, Kansas City vs. Jacksonville, Green Bay vs. New Orleans (3)

By contrast, Victory Weighting yields an alternative playoff picture:

NFC byes: Atlanta (Strength 32, South leader), Green Bay (Strength 30, North leader)
NFC first-round hosts: Philadelphia (Strength 28, East leader), Seattle (Strength 20, West leader)
NFC wild cards: New Orleans (Strength 29), Tampa Bay (Strength 28)
Just outside the NFC picture: Chicago (Strength 28)

AFC byes: New England (Strength 31, East leader), Baltimore (Strength 28, North leader)
AFC first-round hosts: Kansas City (Strength 24, West leader), Jacksonville (Strength 24, South leader)
AFC wild cards: New York Jets (Strength 30), Pittsburgh (Strength 27)
Just outside the AFC picture: Indianapolis (Strength 24)

The applicable Victory Weighting tiebreakers are:

Divisional tiebreaker: Jacksonville vs. Indianapolis
Wild-card tiebreaker: Tampa Bay vs. Chicago
Seeding tiebreaker: Kansas City vs. Jacksonville

That's right: under VW, there are only three ties to break. That's much easier, ¿no?

Fantasy update: Boy, did my teams suck this week.

I didn't expect much from The Fluttering Horde (6-4), because Peyton Manning and the Patriot defense were supposed to cancel each other out. Manning's three interceptions cost the Horde nothing, as the points simply moved from Manning to the Patriot defense. Manning's three touchdowns were also worth less, since they transferred points from the Patriots' row to his. Unfortunately, my running backs and tight ends -- including those riding my bench -- also canceled themselves. Despite its sad 104-78 loss, the Horde is still in good shape to make the playoffs.

The Middlemen (6-5) now face a new problem: they're too talented. Yahoo! considers literally half the Middlemen roster so valuable that I can't cut them. Without the flexibility to replace injured and/or struggling stars, I'm stuck with a team that's fading faster than Miles Austin. After taking a 96-82 loss to The SDPackers, the Middlemen are barely hanging onto their playoff position. I really, really need Antonio Gates to get healthy again.

Scooter Blogging: (2) Wednesday Football

2010-11-17T18:31:00.000-06:00


Watch. Glare. Watch.

My father and two sisters went to Texas for a family event, and (partly to care for Scooter) I decided to stay and house sit. I finished tilling the backyard garden today, and a few more small outdoor tasks remain ahead of the first winter snows. Last week, we were in shirt sleeves, but the cooling has finally begun for good.

As you can see from these pictures taken today, Scooter is just fine. She's engaged in that favorite afternoon activity, sleeping on her blanket. Here, little naps alternate with bits of today's South Africa-United States men's soccer match. The thunderous din of 51,000 vuvuzelas didn't bother her nearly as much as her dad's presence with a camera.

Likewise, Ian Darke's voice on ESPN didn't perturb The Cat of May Colors™. On the other hand, Darke has annoyed me in the past; but apparently, he's secured the post of voice of the American men's national team on U.S. TV. He didn't say anything obviously colonialist on today's ESPN broadcast, so I might actually get used to him.

The game itself ended in a 1-0 win for the U.S., but both sides were trying out new players. It felt less like an international friendly than the second half of an NFL exhibition game.

Fantasy update: Real life, abetted by schedule confusion on my part, hurt my teams this week. With the family trip coming in two days, I spent a good chunk of last Thursday helping my father get ready. By the time we were done and I had taken a nap, the Ravens-Falcons game had kicked off.

Oops. I'd forgotten about that early game.

The Fluttering Horde was to have dropped Atlanta kicker Matt Bryant, as Horde regular Rob Bironas was back from his bye week. On top of that, with no one to pass to, Peyton Manning was headed to the Horde bench in favor of Bryant's teammate, Matt Ryan.

Meanwhile, no one in the public league cared to trade for Michael Vick, so maybe he'd start for the Middlemen this week. Why not? Vick was up against Washington, while Middlemen regular Joe Flacco faced the Falcons.

Neither substitution went through. Thursday night was too late.

The Horde did just fine. My permanent receiver corps racked up 60 points, including Mike Thomas's hail-Mary touchdown, and despite missing Ryan's best performance of the year, the Horde defeated the Southside Hitmen, 121-106. At 6-4 in a two-division league, the Horde is likely headed to the playoffs.

The Middlemen? Not so much. Vick was the 'I win' card, breaking fantasy-football records, but he was still on my bench. In a bizarre match that also saw both sides reduced to eight men, the Middlemen fell 110-100 to the Dallas Drunks. Their 6-4 record is still good for a playoff spot, but it's the last one. Aaarrrrrgh.

Tuesday Football: Halftime!

2010-11-09T17:52:00.003-06:00

Next week, the Packers, Saints, Raiders and Chargers take the week off. When the final gun has sounded next Monday night, every NFL team will have played nine games. In short, the 2010-11 season has reached its halfway mark. As such, it's time to take stock of some things I hold dear about the league.

Bearing up or down? My beloved Chicago Bears currently stand at 5-3, good for second place in the NFC North and a tie for the last wild-card spot. All's well, right? Not so fast. Their only quality win came against Green Bay at home. Jay Cutler has actually gotten worse from last season. He hasn't thrown so many interceptions, but now he just looks lost. Setting himself as a better man than his linemen hasn't helped.

At the same time, nor has that horrible offensive line, recently dubbed the "Yahtzee Line" by a radio commentator. The Bears seem to be tossing five big men onto the field every week and hoping for the best. No offensive coordinator, including legendary Mike Martz, can rescue a situation like that. The O-line disarray will, in time, doom the Bears, along with the terms of Martz and head coach Lovie Smith.

Left: Jay Cutler. Right: Lovie Smith.

It's the Yahtzee Line that explains why I've never hated Coach Smith as much as my fellow Bears fans. Back when he reached Super Bowl XL, it was with a strong offensive line and a powerful defense. Last year, both those units muddled through at about half strength. This year, the defense is healthy, but the offense remains a mess. Pretty standard Bears football, if you ask me. Coach Smith, on balance, is just average. Barring a deep playoff run (not likely), he's not good enough to stay on in Chicago past this season, but nor are the Bears' problems all his fault.

Fantasy update: This week, it's the Fluttering Horde that's floundering. I spend all week researching just who can take over for Jacksonville WR Mike Thomas (bye), the Dallas defense (must I explain?) and Carolina RB Johnathan Stewart (fired, 'cause he -- sing it! -- suuuuuuuuucks). The solutions? The Patriot defense, Houston WR Jacoby Jones and Arizona RB Laron Stephens-Howling. Jones and Stephens-Howling worked beautifully, but the Patriots (sing it!) suuuuuuuuucked so hard on defense, they actually cost me a point. Andre Johnson and Peyton Manning are no help, so the Horde falls, 104-81, to the Purple Dragons. It's the third loss in a row for the Horde (5-4), which falls to the middle of the table.

Happily, with DeSean Jackson back, the Middlemen (6-3) won their game, defeating the Techno Vikings, 98-84. The public league has turned into a four-team scramble for the top. It may be time to trade Michael Vick (whom I don't really need) for more wide-receiver power, now that Miles Austin is fizzling.

Late Tuesday Football

2010-11-03T21:20:00.001-05:00

No time to get out the weekly post yesterday, as it was Election Day. My father and I made some pulled pork, which went to a couple of campaign headquarters. I was happy to have had time to vote. I'm still trying to collect thoughts over the results and the dismaying reactions today from President Obama and Harry Reid. For now, suffice it to say that when I voted for Obama two years ago, I was hoping he'd perform more like Tom Landry than Wade Phillips.

Last week's quiz answer: Here are the six big tournaments I mentioned, in the order a game was first played in Texas:

March 1971: NCAA Men's Final Four, Astrodome, Houston
13 January 1974: Super Bowl VIII, Rice Stadium, Houston
9 May 1981: Game 3, 1981 NBA Finals, The Summit, Houston
17 June 1994: FIFA World Cup, Cotton Bowl, Dallas (Spain vs. Korea Rep.)
8 June 1999: Game 1, 1999 Stanley Cup Final, Reunion Arena, Dallas
25 October 2005: Game 3, World Series, Minute Maid Park, Houston.

Fantasy update: Another injury-racked week, another pair of poor results, and, surprisingly enough, another split.

The Fluttering Horde had to wait until Monday night just to double its score, and it lost 97-67 to the Smoking Popes. Vernon Davis went down early, the Dallas defense stunk and the only Popes player not to score was Jamaal Charles and his 240+ total yards. The Horde falls to 5-3 and fifth place overall.

Meanwhile, the Middlemen lost new acquisition Kenny Britt early, but escaped with an 83-80 win over Mean Machine. Not pretty, but I do get back to third place at 5-3; and it'll be nice to have DeSean Jackson back.

Tuesday Football: The World Series, and a quick Texas sports quiz

2010-10-26T15:57:00.001-05:00

The Texas Rangers have finally made it to a MLB World Series, just in time to add to their former owner's misery. Dallas arbitrageur Tom Hicks lost ownership of both the Rangers and Liverpool FC, the latter just 10 days ago. Fans in Merseyside and the Metroplex are, I'd imagine, equally happy to be rid of Hicks, who managed to run both clubs aground.

Liverpool FC, now siblings to the Boston Red Sox, will need time to recover from their Hicks-inflicted wounds, but the Rangers open their first Series tomorrow night in San Francisco. [Go Giants!] Over the weekend, the series shifts to Arlington, marking only the second time World Series games have been played in Texas. With that in mind, here's a one-question quiz:

Rank the following major championship events, in order of their first staging at a venue in Texas. (Hint: Only some of these required Texas-based teams.)

FIFA World Cup
World Series (MLB)
NCAA Men's Final Four
NBA Finals
Super Bowl (NFL)
Stanley Cup Finals (NHL)

Leave your answer in the comments. Good luck!

Fantasy recap: The Fluttering Horde had to deal with bye weeks from several key players, so their week was hard enough. Alas, Jay Cutler's astonishing incompetence for the Bears gave Osogood 32 points' worth of defense. Ahmad Bradshaw had another solid week, but it wasn't enough to save the Horde from a 116-100 loss. The Horde (5-2) falls to fourth place overall, and third in its division. The good news is that The Smoking Popes (1-6) are up next. With Manning, Johnson and Braylon Edwards all back from their byes, it should be an easy win.

Sadly, the Middlemen (4-3) are in free fall. Tony Romo's broken collarbone last night effectively takes WR1 Miles Austin out of action, only a week after WR2 DeSean Jackson suffered a concussion. With no decent receivers left, the Middlemen took a decisive 96-74 thumping from the Warriors, their third loss in four weeks. Until Jackson and Romo come back, it's hard to see this team contending.

Tuesday Football: This new NFL controversy isn't new

2010-10-19T12:16:00.001-05:00

This gridiron weekend would have been horrible enough had its only incident been the errant tackle that left Rutgers University defensive tackle Eric LeGrand paralyzed below the neck on Saturday. But then came Sunday and the brutal helmet-to-helmet hits taken by DeSean Jackson, Zack Follett, Joshua Cribbs, Mohamed Massaquoi and Todd Heap. Only Follett avoided a concussion (though New Jersey hospital officials did observe him overnight). Jackson is essentially out of next week's action; the others may not play, either. [Best wishes to everyone on this list.]

On Sunday night, NBC commentator Rodney Harrison called for the NFL to start handing suspensions for helmet-to-helmet hits. Besides being the defender who unsuccessfully marked David Tyree's miraculous catch in Super Bowl XLII*, Harrison (wearing #37 at right) is remembered as one of the dirtiest defenders ever to play the game. When even he's telling the NFL to suspend rough defenders, maybe the league should listen. The good news is that the league is prepared to do just that, maybe even before this blog entry posts.

It's hardly the first time the issue of hat-to-hat hits has surfaced. Since 1998, the league has imposed fines on such hits. That sort of enforcement works on second- and third-string defenders, but first-stringers earn enough to render it ineffective. Since 2007, the NFL has advised game officials to eject players in these cases -- but not one offender saw a red card yesterday. This summer, the league and the NFL Players' Association considered formally outlawing helmet-to-helmet hits on ballcarriers, but didn't follow through. Now, faced with this disastrous weekend, and surely aided by Harrison's nationally-televised recital of his own case, the NFL will finally follow the Canadian Football League's lead.

Here's what I'm wondering: Is it just me, or have defenders just gotten meaner? There seems to be at least one concussion suffered every week, just in the NFL. We're starting to see more players suffering concussions at the college level, too. [Ryan Mallett, anyone?] Maybe players and coaches should take another look at how tackles and hits are made these days.

*Picture by Barry Chin, via boston.com

Gates trips leaders. And vice versa: Of course, not all game-ending injuries come to the head or the spine. San Diego tight end Antonio Gates, for example, caught two passes for 12 yards before hurting his toe in the Chargers' game at St. Louis. The Chargers hope he'll be able to go next week against the Patriots, but it doesn't look likely right now.

Gates' foot issue affected both my games. His injury, combined with a Miles Austin dud at Minnesota, consigned the Middlemen (4-2) to a 101-92 defeat at the hands of the Juken' Jockstraps. Before suffering his concussion, DeSean Jackson offset an awful performance by the Atlanta defense. Chris Johnson's touchdown last night came too late, as the Middlemen fell to second place. With Jackson and (probably) Gates both out, next week promises a stern test for the bench.

On the other hand, the Gates exit suited the Fluttering Horde (5-1) just fine. It crippled Anything But Last, which also suffered a 6-yard whiff from Giants wideout Hakeem Nicks. Peyton Manning's 307-yard, two-touchdown performance (bo-ooo-ring!) put the Horde within 0.04 points of the lead going into the Monday-night game, and Titans kicker Rob Bironas kicked in the finish. The Horde won, 108-88, knocked ABL from the ranks of the undefeated and took the division lead. Next up: my other twin nephew and Osogood, to whom I traded Wes Welker. So far, that trade hasn't hurt.

Tuesday Football: BCS stadiums, by the numbers

2010-10-12T23:56:00.002-05:00

As college-football fandom prepares for the release of the first BCS rankings, I thought I was going to write a big post about the importance of the sport to so many public universities in the U.S. That would have entailed spending several hundred words to state the obvious: the BCS is so big, it could've been the sixth monster in Monsters vs. Aliens.

Instead, I'll cite some statistics about college-football stadiums. A few details about the 61-venue sample:

Only stadiums at public universities count. I'm intentionally excluding several private schools with big football programs, including USC, Stanford, BYU, Miami (Fla.), Notre Dame and Boston College.
The sample covers only the six conferences explicitly covered by the BCS scheme, plus the Mountain West.
Statistics reflect conference alignments for 2012. Nebraska counts as a Big Ten team; Boise State, as a Mountain West club; and Colorado and Utah, as Pac-10 sides.

And here are the simple numbers, courtesy of a Wikipedia aggregation. Wikipedia may not be the greatest source for this kind of stuff, but for this post, the numbers are good enough.

Atlantic Coast Conference:

Included colleges: 8
Average stadium capacity: 64 302
Largest included stadium: Memorial Stadium, Clemson (82 300)
Smallest included stadium: Byrd Stadium, Maryland (51 500)

Big XII Conference:

Included colleges: 9
Average stadium capacity: 68 031
Largest included stadium: Memorial Stadium, Texas (101 119)
Smallest included stadium: Bill Snyder Family Stadium, Kansas State (50 300)

Big East Conference:

Included colleges: 5
Average stadium capacity: 56 672
Largest included stadium: Raymond James Stadium, South Florida (82 300)
Smallest included stadium: Rentschler Field, Connecticut (40 000)

Big Ten Conference:

Included colleges: 11
Average stadium capacity: 78 220
Largest included stadium: Michigan Stadium, Michigan (109 901)
Smallest indluded stadium: Memorial Stadium, Indiana (52 180)

Mountain West Conference:

Included colleges: 7
Average stadium capacity: 43 189
Largest included stadium: Qualcomm Stadium, San Diego State (70 561)
Smallest included stadium: War Memorial Stadium, Wyoming (32 580)

Pacific 10 Conference:

Included colleges: 10
Average stadium capacity: 60 177
Largest included stadium: Rose Bowl, UCLA (92 542)
Smallest included stadium: Martin Stadium, Washington State (35 117)

Southeastern Conference:

Included colleges: 11
Average stadium capacity: 82 268
Largest included stadium: Neyland Stadium, Tennessee (102 459)
Smallest included stadium: Davis Wade Stadium, Mississippi State (55 082)

Fantasy update: Another weird week. One team did nothing but score touchdowns, the other scored exactly one -- and both won their games.

In a spectacular first-place showdown with the Tin Men, both teams posted the week's two highest scores -- but the Middlemen prevailed, 144-123. Spectacular performances by Matt Forte, Chris Johnson, Miles Austin and the Atlanta defense powered a record-setting day. Both teams now stand at 4-1, but I hold the head-to-head tiebreaker.

Meanwhile, the Fluttering Horde struggled, staying in the game only because opponent Crown My Ass left Forte on his bench. Late in the Eagles-49ers matchup, I was ready to put Vernon Davis on the trading block. But Davis came up with the Horde's only touchdown, which proved just enough for an 86-81 come-from-behind victory. Next week, the 4-1 Horde engages in its game of cat-and-also-cat against undefeated Anything But Last, run by my former in-law.

Tuesday Football: Oy!

2010-10-05T12:54:00.000-05:00

This blog spends two pages complaining about the way the NFL handles overtime, but I shudder to think about the first time that happens in the Super Bowl. The ensuing chatter will consume North America for a month.

On the other hand, we could have what happened in Australia in the last two weeks. St. Kilda and Collingwood played in the AFL Grand Final two weeks ago. So far, so good; it was just another championship game. But then St. Kilda rallied late to force a 68-68 tie. Instead of overtime, the AFL scheduled a replay. More than 100,000 fans went home confused, with a request to come back in a week -- to watch the Saints and Magpies play an extra game. That's exactly what they did. Fans of both teams snapped up all the replay tickets, leaving none for the general public. Their reward? A 108-52 Collingwood blowout last Saturday afternoon. Too bad for St. Kilda, who last won the Premiership in 1966. Since then, their fortunes have tracked those of their NFL namesakes in New Orleans. It would've been nice to see both set of Saints -- both perennial also-rans -- come away winners in the same year. Oh, well

If you haven't seen an Australian football game, you've been missing an chaotic, fast-paced, high-scoring and incredibly fun form of the sport. While you wait for the deejay to bring the tunes, it's a perfect background for Friday-night parties. The 2011 season begins in March. Hopefully, someone stateside will give us live games to watch before the next Grand Final.

Lucky weekend: Over on the fantasy-football side, well, I was lucky this week. The list of roster disasters was long:

Injuries kept Andre Johnson and Steve Breaston from playing for the Fluttering Horde. I didn't have enough active wide receivers, so I had to waive Breaston for Jacksonville's Mike Taylor.
The Middlemen lost Miles Austin to his bye week, then Michael Vick went down with his nasty rib injury. That effectively removed both Vick and his favorite target, DeSean Jackson, from the Middlemen lineup. On top of that, the Middlemen dumped a New York Giant defense that ended up sacking the Bears 10 times.
The Bears' woes hurt both teams, essentially blanking Greg Olsen for the Horde and Matt Forte and Johnny Knox for the Middlemen.

Given all that, in theory, I should have been lucky to avoid two losses. In practice, I was unlucky not to win twice. The Horde's opponent, who will remain unnamed, fielded only five players, so the Horde cruised to a 94-36 win. The Middlemen lost 82-78 to the previously winless Hurricanes -- but only because New England scored 18 special-teams points and blocked both a punt and a field-goal attempt. It was like losing with a full house on the river.

The bizarre combination of good luck and bad luck leaves both teams at 3-1. The Middlemen fall to second in their league, while the Horde stays in third place. Oy!

Tuesday Football: Oddities and farewells

2010-09-28T23:25:00.002-05:00

I joined my father and my sister in visiting my oldest sister in suburban Omaha, Nebraska, so there wasn't time to update the Victory Weighting standings, nor much time to spend my fantasy-football teams. The actual football news only made things crazier this weekend. Fasten your seat belts.

Children of the Corn. Huskers: It's not difficult to describe the affection Texans have for their high-school and college football teams, or Hoosiers' similar love for basketball. Nebraskans' dedication to the University of Nebraska football team is different. It has to be witnessed in person.

It's not that the evidence can't be described. The Cornhuskers' Saturday-night game with South Dakota State, for example, was televised... on a pay-per-view basis. Sure, Boise State was on free TV, but I'm sure the PPV scheme worked.

Saturday night came, and there was cooking going on at my niece's house. The cilantro supply having run out, my nephew-in-law and I went to the supermarket to replenish it. What's playing over the store PA system? Is it top-40 drivel? Soft-rock drivel? Alternative-music drivel? Oh, no, it was a kind of drivel I thought didn't exist in the U.S.

It was the Nebraska-South Dakota State game, live on statewide radio -- and all over the supermarket. That's dedication!

Victory Weighting update: The Falcons-Saints overtime game this Sunday illuminates the central feature of the system. On this week's VW Standings page, you'll see that New Orleans leads the NFC South with the highest Strength, even though the Saints lost to Atlanta. Right now, the Falcons hold the head-to-head tiebreaker, with a 3-1 Strength advantage over the Saints. Should they win the return game in regulation, however, the Saints would gain 4 Strength. They would then win the HTH tiebreaker from the Falcons, 5-3.

Fantasy audibles: With only one computer at my niece's house, I pretty much had to have my fantasy lineups set Friday night.

The Middlemen sucked up their reservations about Michael Vick's character and used him to replace struggling Alex Smith. Against a high-powered No Clue 2010 team, I benched original starter Joe Flacco for Vick. Flacco made me look bad by passing for three touchdowns, but Vick trumped that with four touchdowns. His 33 points were barely enough, as the Middlemen squeaked by with a 117-114 win. At 3-0, they stay atop their public-league table.

The Fluttering Horde also made a big deal, trading Wes Welker to shore up its bench. That may hurt later in the year, but this week, the damage came from disastrous performances from the 49ers, Saints and Packers. Flying Hawai'ian 3, run by my niece Amber's partner, dealt the Horde its first loss, 82-79. With the Niners in coaching disarray, Vernon Davis heads to the bench, and Chicago's Greg Olsen will assume TE duties. Despite this week's struggles, the 2-1 Horde remains in third place overall.

Last, but not least: Condolences to the family and friends of George Blanda, who passed away Monday at the age of 83. Finding players better than Blanda is not difficult. Finding one as versatile and persistent as he was is impossible, and will probably remain so. As my friend Matty Boy has reminded me, QB/punter Sammy Baugh and punter/tackle Lou Groza came close; Danny White, a little less so. But that's about it. Godspeed, Mr. Blanda.

Tuesday Football: Thanks for visiting Cowboy Nation

2010-09-21T15:56:00.000-05:00

Blog buddy, birder and fellow Texan expat dguzman commented on last week's Tuesday Football post, fretting about her beloved Dallas Cowboys. I assured her that my Bears were actually much worse, and that the 'Pokes should prevail at home in Week 2. That prediction failed, and -- deeply as I hate Jerry Jones' outfit -- I'm worried, too.

It wasn't always that way. As a kid growing up first in Austin, then in the Rio Grande Valley, I adored the Cowboys. Somewhere in my family album live pictures of me, a seven-year-old decked out in a full replica of Duane Thomas's road uniform. We had gone to my grandparents' house in San Marcos to watch the NFC title game. Sadly, that was the game Dallas lost 26-3 to Washington's infamous Over-The-Hill Gang -- so one of those pictures shows me sprawled across the couch, bawling my eyes out.

My affection for the 'Pokes survived for a long time after my family moved to Illinois. Eventually, I did adopt both the Bears and the Browns, but we made sure to catch the Cowboys. [In return, CBS, which televised NFC games back then, made sure that watching Cowboy games would be easy.] I even cared about them as new owner "Bum" Bright trashed the team in the mid- and late-1980s.

It was Jerry Jones who finally got me to abandon the Cowboys. At that point, I had long since stopped being a kid. Going 3-13 was one thing, but replacing Tom Landry with Jimmy Johnson, the Gordon Gekko of college football, was unforgivable. The Cowboys I knew and loved had ceased to exist. Better to fret about the Bears' interminable quarterback search than worry one more minute about Jones' new toy. To hell with the new Cowboys.

Since mine is a Texan family by birthright, they Cowboys still come up every weekend in the fall and early winter. One of my sisters still roots for them, but the rest of us have moved on, mostly to the Bears. If the Cowboys do miss the playoffs this year, we'll be sad -- not because we once loved them, but because it will represent one of the worst wastes of gridiron talent we've seen in a long time.

Fantasy update: Score two more victories this week. The Fluttering Horde rode the Peyton Manning-to-Andre Johnson connection to a 95-78 win over Toothless, the team run by one of my twin nephews. Meawhile, The Middlemen backed deadly receiving with a crushing Miami defense to roll over TheSDPackers, 108-95, and move to the top of the table.

Victory Weighting update: The Week 2 standings are up. Washington lost to Houston, but the overtime period they played puts them alone atop the stunningly weak NFC East.

AutoTune of the month

2010-09-17T23:56:00.000-05:00

Up until now, I've despised AutoTune. It turns out that, until now, no one has made good use of it. Enjoy this Quote of the Month nominee from Jacob Isom, Texan skateboarder and now national hero.

Administrivia

The Victory Weighted standings for the new NFL season are up. Expect three updates every Sunday and a fourth late Monday night.
I learned of this video from Informed Comment, Juan Cole's most excellent daily notes on the Muslim world. Not surprisingly, its emphasis these days are on the AfPak theater and Iraq.

Tuesday Football: Nothing but net

2010-09-14T00:21:00.000-05:00

More Scooter, with tennis: Let it be known that Scooter has taste, or at least an eye for gridiron. For the second Monday night in a row, my cat watched 30 minutes of gridiron with me. This time, it was the second half of the Ravens-Jets game. Instead of actually watching the action, though, she faced away from the TV and waited for me to scratch her ears. Clearly, she recognized how horrible the Jets were on offense. She went off to her nightly mousing well before the final gun sounded.

It wasn't much prettier to me, either, and I ended up switching to the last set of the 2010 U.S. Open men's tennis final. That's champion Rafael Nadal at the left, pulling yet another incredible winner. Everyone marveled at his tricks, including Novak Djorkavic, who managed to kick ass and still lose.

I bring the tennis up because it showed up on a channel where it normally doesn't belong. Usually, the men's final at Flushing Meadows airs on CBS on Sunday afternoon. That was the plan this year, too, but rain pushed the match back to Monday. With an event so important to tennis, you'd think that CBS would preempt its normal Monday programs to show the delayed match live. Unfortunately, this week's episodes of CSI: Modesto and Survivor: Northern Marianas Islands were more important; so the match ended up on ESPN2.

Even worse, ESPN2 warned that, if it hadn't ended by 21:15 CDT, the match would then move to ESPN Classic. (Match point fell just after 21:00, so that didn't happen.) In short: the U.S. Open men's tennis final was about to fall from a broadcast network all the way to a channel that wasn't even on basic cable. To say the least, this does not bode well for the sport of tennis (at least not in the U.S.).

A little personal landmark: The Chicago Bears opened Sunday with a 19-14 win over Detroit on a Calvin Johnson mistake. It's worrying to see my beloved Bears struggle with the ~~Lolcats~~ Lions, but that wasn't the important part this week. The big news is that, for the first time, I wore a Bears jersey while watching the game. It's an orange Brian Urlacher replica, given to me as a birthday present last May. I also got a coach's polo shirt, which I plan to wear for road games.

Yep, I'm now not just an NFL fan. I'm an obsessed NFL fan. Um, hooray?

Fantasy football update: I opened with wins in both my leagues. In the family league, Peyton Manning and Wes Welker combined for five touchdowns to lead the Fluttering Horde to a 99-73 upset of the defending league champions, the Smoking Popes. Andre Johnson had only 33 receiving yards, but I didn't need him any more than the Houston Texans did.

In the public league, I left Bears RB Matt Forte and his 30 points on the bench, yet still coasted to a 102-88 win over the Dallas Drunks. Woo-hoo!

Tuesday Football: Of horses and butterflies

2010-09-07T14:58:00.001-05:00

Scooter the BCS fan: Last night's Boise State win over Virginia Tech was such a compelling game, my cat Scooter saw fit to watch the entire second half with me. She made herself comfortable next to me as I watched the game, and she kept her eyes on the game the whole time. When Virginia Tech missed its last fourth down, she up and left, returning to her nightly mousing duties. To be fair, she was in an unusually friendly mood yesterday, but that doesn't explain her actually watching the game. Very weird.

The game was close, and it made compelling drama, but it wasn't very well played. Boise had to beat itself as well as the Hokies. Now, some requests:

Virginia Tech: Please, never let me see those black jerseys again. In fact, the next school that wears black when it isn't one of its colors ought to lose a scholarship or two. [See: Oregon football, Duke basketball, and too many others.]
Boise State: Neat helmets, but do your road uniforms really need 37 shades of gray? Put some orange back, for heaven's sake!
Brent Musberger: How stupid do you think the TV audience is? "Boise State's not used to this weather"? In the first place, the vaunted humidity in Landover was only 43%. In the second, Boise is in Idaho, not freakin' Arizona. On top of that, BSU is still in the same league as Hawai'i and Louisiana Tech, places where 43% humidity is often a relief. Sheesh.

Behold! The Fluttering Horde! My original fantasy-football team is back, complete with new name, new logo and new players. I named the Horde after another set of characters from the Venture Bros. cartoon, namely, The Monarch's minions. The monarch-butterfly wings on the helmet are sure to strike fear into my opponents. Otherwise, they will have to deal with Peyton Manning passing to Texan WR Andre Johnson and 49er TE Vernon Davis. I did better in mock drafts, but those assumed 8- and 10-team leagues, and we ended up with two six-team divisions.

It'll be a tough opener, against my league's defending champions, the Smoking Popes.

Tuesday Football: All over the map

2010-08-31T10:27:00.002-05:00

Football related thoughts abound this week.

You shouldn't do that on television: I can understand why, as Comcast does here in Chicagoland, a local cable channel shows games involving area schools. The same channel also has programs for local politics and the local arts scenes, so these games clearly qualify as local-interest programs. I can see myself caring about a football game between, say, Geneva and Batavia, partly because those two schools are close to my home. I could easily understand why a football fan in Sacramento would watch a televised game between Grant and Folsom, two Sacramento-area high schools.

But could someone at Disney please explain to me why, in the name of all that is unholy, a resident of exurban Chicago could possibly care about that Grant-Folsom game? I don't care how highly ranked those two teams are, they're both 3300 kilometers and two hours west of me. Why should I care how highly regarded individual players on either side are, when some -- if not all -- of them will crash and burn once they start playing college football? [For what it's worth, I graduated from my school two years after a high-school All-America running back who fizzled in the then-Big 8, and a year ahead of an eventual NBA player who starred in the Big Ten.]

Apparently, people who have better things to do care that much about high-school sports. At least the ESPN channels think so. That's why, besides the Grant-Folsom game, I had to click away from at least four other nationally televised high-school games this weekend. This is just more attention and adulation for athletic young people who already have too much of both.

He's staying? Okay, fine: To my surprise, Bob Bradley is staying on as coach of the U.S. men's soccer team. During the World Cup, I opined that he should be replaced. The team started quickly enough in its 2-0 loss to Brazil a month ago, but that needs to become the rule instead of the exception. I'm not convinced that he's the man to make that change. On the other hand, a 2-0 blowout of Spain, a Confederations Cup final and (at long last) a group win at the World Cup itself are real results; and Bradley also deserves credit for those. I would've replaced him with Jurgen Klinsmann, and let him move on to Aston Villa. (That would've been worth tracking.) Besides those two men, though, I couldn't imagine an alternative as the U.S. skiper; so keeping Bradley makes some sense.

Twice the fantasy fun: I wasn't sure that my fantasy-football league was going to convene this year, so I went ahead and joined a public league at Yahoo!. That league auto-drafted last Friday, and I ended up with RB Chris Johnson, WR Miles Austin and TE Antonio Gates. I've decided to call this team The Middlemen.

As it turns out, my old league is playing. The draft is this Sunday night, and (as you may gather from my new tag line) I do not plan on having Brett Favre on my team this time. Given his latest ankle issues, maybe the Vikings won't, either. My team has a new name and its own helmet, which I'll reveal next week.

Because this beer's just so manly!

2010-08-28T23:09:00.000-05:00

Because it can, MillerCoors (or whatever it's calling itself these days) has several ad campaigns just for its Miller Lite product. All the ads are aimed at men, and most of them revolve around the "men suck at relationships" meme. The exceptions are a set of five spots from ad agency Draftcb, all of which look like this:

If the only problem with this ad were its sexism, it would be pretty ordinary. (It's for mass-produced alcohol product, after all.) What makes it worth posting about is the other ways it and its siblings so miserably fail. Let's count.

It is, in fact, more sexist than usual. The guy may look funny with his huge shoulder bag, but so what? Why should the bartender care if no one else in the joint does?
Oh, that bartender. Yes, she's pretty -- and she's remarkably snooty. In high school, she must have thought that because she was prettier than everyone else, that also made her better. When the rest of us graduated, we were pretty happy to be rid of girls like this. If I ran into someone like her at a bar, I'd find another place to drink. Hell, I'd run as fast as I could to that other place.
"Do you care how it tastes?" Why, yes, you bubble-headed moron, I do care. If I wanted actual beer right now, I'd have ordered something other than Miller Lite for myself.
And then there's that "Man up!" tagline. If "Man up!" means "Dare to drink this swill!" well, that would smack of accuracy. Somehow, I doubt that's what the marketing geniuses at Draftcb intended.

Heavens, do these ads ever suck.

The Defenders of 9/11

2010-08-17T23:49:00.001-05:00

Mark Lennihan/AP, via the NPR Web site

When President Obama defended the Córdoba House project last Friday, I was sure that all the posturing from the GOP would have ended. Silly me. This isn't the party of Eisenhower, Nixon, or even Reagan; it's a loudmouthed collection of racists, Dominionists, warmongers and old-school fascists* who might well dismiss Joseph McCarthy as a commie pinko. Of course, they were going to try turning Córdoba House into a campaign issue. For Republican campaigners, there's nothing but win. Who cares if innocent Muslims get demonized yet again? They aren't voting GOP anyway. The real points are to (a) rally the teabagger base and (b)trick Democrats into demoralizing their base, again.

One thing I've yet to see, though, is a direct connection to "9/11" -- not the actual 2001 attacks, but the metaphorical cudgel that the Cheney-Bush cabal created from them. I remember arguments with conservatives during the Bush years. Anytime the right-winger sensed that he could no longer win an argument with logic, his inevitable response was to invoke 9/11. Leave Iraq? "No way; 9/11 changed everything." End warrentless wiretapping? "9/11 changed everything." Opposed to No Child Left Behind? "Too bad; 9/11 changed everything." [I'm not even making that last one up.] For Bush's supporters, the attacks were a way to "unite" the nation behind even the worst Bush proposals.

But time has passed, Chimpy has retreated to Dallas and Cheney has gone back into hiding. Most of us have put 9/11 the event in the past, where it belongs. But in blocking Córdoba House, the Republicans are trying to bring back the trauma. If they succeed, and they also take either house of Congress this November, they will have revived 9/11 as a weapon. They didn't stop at Muslims the last time they used it, and there's no reason to believe they will this time, either.

In other words, the GOP must defend 9/11. It's too important a tool for them to just let fade away.

* Supporters of increased corporate influence in government, like Mussolini and Pinochet. Used properly, it's a more elegant word than the clunky "corporatist."

More administrivia: I've opened the two Victory Weighting pages to comments. If you have more questions about the system, feel free to comment on either page.

Administrivia alert #1

2010-08-05T22:00:00.000-05:00

I've been playing around at the edges of the blog design, adding and dropping widgets, and enjoying the new Pages feature. A purplish button bar now separates the title from the posts; and right now, it has a button marked, "Victory Weighting." Press it, and you'll find a page explaining what Victory Weighting is (an alternative standings scheme for NFL games) and why I think the NFL should adopt it. Last year, I put the Victory Weighted standings in a widget at the bottom of the page. This year, they'll live on a semi-permanent page of their own, and you'll be able to get to it via the purple button bar.

I love, love, love this new feature, and the toolbar widget Google provided to go with it. Thanks, Google! (But no thanks for trying to cut a side deal with Verizon! Bad business, there.)

The Ghost-Grey Cat Presents: (7) All Unregistered Aliens

2010-08-03T16:01:00.001-05:00

Episode 779: All Unregistered Aliens
First aired: 9 February 1978
Author: Victoria Dann

Play the teaser

A doctor helps anywhere. What is so special about here? -- Uncle Stefan

This past week saw a Federal judge set aside most of Arizona's infamous SB 1070, one day before it was to take effect. The news reminded me of one of the most unusual episodes from the CBS Radio Mystery Theater.

"All Unregistered Aliens" starts as a hospital drama, but writer Victoria Dann needs only a couple of minutes to steer away from that well-worn path. For one thing, the center of this drama isn't a hospital, but a free clinic in a struggling urban neighborhood now dominated by immigrants and street gangs. Dr. Anne Quiller (voiced by Ann Williams) grew up in the area when it was a little more prosperous, and, for reasons she doesn't quite understand, she has just come back to run the clinic. Her uncle Stefan (Court Benson), proprietor of the local cafe, never left, and she finds herself turning to him for advice on navigating a terrain she no longer recognizes. Apart from an immigration-obsessed cop's efforts to convince her to snitch on her clients, Quiller's life has settled into a comforting, if not entirely comfortable, cadence.

A botched warehouse prank sets triggers the main story. One of the would-be pranksters, a teenager named Cleo, has been shot, and his brother Eli (Earl Hammond) must try to get medical attention. A full-scale hospital isn't an option: it could treat his wounds properly, but it might also expose his status (and Eli's) as an illegal alien. Eager to avoid deportation (effectively a death sentence for them), they go instead to Dr. Quiller's clinic. Without the resources to treat him, she can only leave poor Cleo to die at Eli's side.

Suddenly, Quiller finds herself in a difficult spot. Cleo dies, but his body disappears. The police won't help her; in fact, they think she's hiding Cleo. She must solve the case herself, and that means answering some uncomfortable questions. Who are Cleo and Eli, really? What is their nationality? And why has Quiller herself really returned to her old neighborhood?

The story feels more like a tour than a mystery, but it does exemplify Radio Mystery Theater's willingness on contemporary social issues every now and then. "All Unregistered Aliens" made its debut just ten days after the ultimate midpoint of the RMT run. By then, the series had already addressed not just illegal immigration but also even touchier subjects like race and abortion. RMT certainly didn't do that every night, but it did so more directly than most crime-drama series do today.

Score: 89/100. Not great, but solid, provocative and, for 1978, even innovative.

Why do I call it "innovative?" The reason includes a spoiler, so I'm putting it beyond the fold.
The idea of extraterrestrials emigrating to the U.S. became part of pop culture a decade later, with the 1988 release of Alien Nation in theaters. The Men in Black franchise and, more recently, Peter Jackson's District 9 both won box-office success using the same theme. The migrants in "All Unregistered Aliens" turn out to come not just from another planet, but another universe. In that sense, the episode probably marked the first appearance of otherworldly immigrants in any medium other than print.

Adult Swim's summer hits and misses

2010-07-13T18:51:00.001-05:00

The World Cup is over? Let the withdrawal begin! Ack!

Near the top of my list of vices is a tendency to watch way too many things on Cartoon Network, especially the late-night Adult Swim section.

Hit: Mary Shelley's Frankenhole is the latest from Dino Stamatopolous, creator Moral Orel, a brilliant sendup of fundamentalist Christianity that died a miserable death, both creatively and in the ratings. ~~Stamatopolous followed it up with SuperJail, a tawdry and violent show that's more typical Adult Swim fare. I hated it, so~~ when Frankenhole started, I avoided it.

[Correction: Stamatopolous had nothing to do with Superjail. Still, given Morel Orel's sad fate, my comment about Frankenhole stands.]

That may have been a mistake. In this show, Dr. Frankenstein didn't stop at creating his famous monster. Among other things, he's discovered gateways to parallel universes. Fool that he is, he's opened them; and, on the basis of the first episode I saw this weekend, considerable hilarity has ensued. I'll stream in the other 10-minute segments that have aired. Hopefully, like the one I've seen, they'll be close in tone to Moral Orel's brilliant first season.

Misses: [as] opened two live-action series this summer, both centered on popular comedians. My feelings about them are not good. Check it Out! with Dr. Steve Brule features John C. Reilly as the pathetic, forlorn host of an early-morning cable-access show. Reilly plays the part too well: Brule needs therapy, not more episodes. Meanwhile, Children's Hospital, Rob Corddry's much-ballyhooed expansion of an Internet series, opened Sunday night. The opener was made for WB online viewing, so I'll give it pass. But it doesn't look promising at this point.

Hit: The Boondocks started its long-awaited third season back in May rather slowly. The season low came with "The Story of Jimmy Rebel," in which the bizarrely racist Uncle Ruckus hooks up with his favorite singer, who writes and performs racist songs. It could've been a funny installment, but the writers went overboard with the songs. From there, the season has improved dramatically, including a brutally funny riff on Tyler Perry. Series creator Aaron McGruder has reportedly declared that this will be the series' last season. If so, that would mark a big loss for Adult Swim.

Miss: Just today, the official Venture Bros. blog confirmed a 12 September start date for new episodes. The same post tells us that Season 4 has now ended. For my favorite Adult Swim show, it's two small pieces of bad news. The original plan was to grant Venture Bros. a 16-episode season 4, split into two parts. The first eight installments aired last winter, and the season was to restart late this spring. Production delays took their toll, pushing the restart back to 22 August, then to the now-official 12 September. At some point recently, Adult Swim and VB creator Jackson Publick decided to re-label the second half of Season 4 as Season 5. There is a Venture Bros. panel at Comic-Con in San Diego, so we should soon hear more on the show's near-term future.

Here's hoping the restart makes its new deadline.

A picture of justice

2010-07-11T21:21:00.001-05:00

You know what the best thing about the World Cup is? The best team usually wins the final!

In the NBC photo above, Andres Iniesta is the man in navy blue, celebrating the game-winning goal in extra time of the 2010 World Cup Final. I don't know who the flustered Dutchman is, and frankly, I don't care. At the end of 120 minutes, Spain prevailed, 1-0, over the Netherlands. ¡Viva la Fúria Roja! All hail Spain!

Much will be made of the lack of scoring from the new champions. La Fúria only scored eight goals in their seven matches, and they even opened with a 1-0 loss to the Swiss. They didn't have the best defense in South Africa (that would be Paraguay, Spain's quarterfinal victim), but it was more than good enough to frustrate the field.

As for the Oranje: they have turned out to be world soccer's answer to the Pat Riley Knicks. Let me explain. Back in the 1990s, having taken over the ailing NBA team in New York City, Riley realized that (a) while he had talent, he didn't have enough to overcome the Jordan-Jackson Bulls and (b) Knicks management would never give him enough. His answer? Turn the Knicks into a team so physical, it could just bully its way into the NBA Finals. At that, he succeeded -- but in the process, he literally set the entire Eastern Conference back a decade.

I think that's what happened to Holland this weekend. Seeing no hope of overcoming Spain's superior personnel, Dutch coach Dirk van Marwijk had his players turn violent, collecting yellow cards and pulling crap like the assault at the right. In this picture from ABC, Nigel de Jong delivers a flying kick to the chest of Spain's Xabi Alonso. (I'm not exaggerating; it was a flying kick straight from a martial-arts movie.) For that crime, de Jong got only a yellow card instead of the red that should've been handed him.

The word "crime" pretty much describes the Dutch effort today, including their complaints about the officiating. Excuse me? You guys turn the World Cup final into a bad MMA fight, and then turn around cry about anything? Here's hoping that doesn't fly any higher in the Netherlands that it is anywhere else.

Ian Darke, I take back some of my screed against you yesterday. The real disgrace was the Oranje today. I'm so glad they lost, Scooter can hear me purr.

Can we deport Ian Darke already?

2010-07-11T00:26:00.003-05:00

Presented for your approval: Luis Suárez, Uruguayan striker and, as of this World Cup, The Most Despised Man in Africa. Commentators have rightly noted that, unseemly as it was, the hand ball against Ghana was perfectly legal. No right-thinking field player in Suárez's impossible position (not even in Africa) would have hesitated to at least attempt what he did. As it was, the red card he earned, also rightly, will go down as one of the greatest personal sacrifices in soccer history.

At the same time, though, I saw was nothing wrong with African fans constantly showering him with boos, as they did in Satuday's third-place match against Germany. It wasn't as though in the first round, prior to That Hand Ball, a despicable Suárez dive hadn't tricked the referee into ejecting South Africa keeper Itumelng Khune. Hell, that flop would have embarrassed Vlade Divac.

Which brings me to Ian Darke, who covered, among others, the USA World Cup matches for American TV. I found him tolerable to watch until he went off on the South African fans for booing Súarez. "Disgreaceful"? "A lack of understanding of the game"? He meant to insult Africans with teabagger-worthy phrases like those, but all Darke really did was describe himself. Perhaps he should get out of England more. In the rest of the world, singling specific players out for jeering is a time-honored tradition. It's reserved for players who've committed egregious offenses against the home team. (That means you, Chris Pronger, bane of all right-thinking NHL fans.) Whatever else he did, Luis Suárez surely fit that profile. The other fact Darke missed with his proto-colonialist missives was the fact that no human can simultaneously (a) boo Suárez and (b) blow on a damned vuvuzela. That, of course, was a favor for everyone but Darke.

ESPN dramatically improved its World Cup coverage, finally giving the event the respect it deserves. Heck, apart from Darke, it even made it safe to watch English-language soccer telecasts in North America. But while they're washing off all the Gulf Coast oil from the punking they took from LeBron (the Impostor) James this week, perhaps ESPN executives can take a little time to hand Ian Darke a red card.

Obligatory comment on the games: There wasn't a lot to say about the semifinals. The Netherlands' win over Uruguay was no surprise, nor Spain's victory over a German squad that definitely missed Thomas Müller. The real surprise was that, though shut down on Wednesday night, it was der Mannschaft, not the Brazilians, who played the prettiest football of the tournament. (Sure, England and Argentina helped, but still... .)

Regarding tomorrow's final: as the U.S. team constantly allowed fatal early goals, the Netherlands have allowed silly goals late. Spain will see to it that that will undo the Dutch, probably in the 84th minute or so.

World Cup quarterfinal purring

2010-07-04T00:10:00.001-05:00

So Germany blows Argentina halfway back across the Atlantic.

For once, loudmouthed Diego Maradona is at a loss for words.

Purr, purr, purr!

And what'll you know? Spain actually gets out of a quarterfinal stage!

The ~~Tholians~~ Paraguayans made them work, and there was that penalty-kick wackiness.

But finally, La Fúria are through to a luscious semifinal with der Mannschaft.

Purr, purr, purr!