Bonus Tuesday Football: They're back. Except for actual referees.

Illegal use of scabs, 15 yards.  No, 15 yards the other way:  This season, the NFL owners have decided to lock the referees out instead of the players.  Today, I counted at least two instances, in two different games, where the officials could barely figure out where the ball even belonged.  As much as we love to curse officials, it's better when they're the real articles instead of the subs scabs we have babysitting now.  Ugh.

---

Introducing the Cat's three fantasy teams:  A funny thing happened to The Ghost-Grey Cats while they migrated from Yahoo! to the official NFL game.  On Monday, I set a draft order for the Cats and waited for the NFL servers to assign them players and a league.

And I waited.  And waited.

And waited until about late Tuesday, when I lost patience and told the NFL to just put the Cats in a live draft.  In a 10-team league, I got stuck with the tenth position, which should have shut me out of any chance for a superstar headliner.  Thanks to a couple of opponents who used exotic drafting strategies¹, Calvin Johnson fell to me in the first round, then I nabbed Matt Forte with the next pick.

Besides Forte, five other players return from last year's semifinalists, including my entire tight-end battery of Antonio Gates and Brandon Pettigrew.  Matt Ryan, another returnee, has two capable backups².  The trick will be to avoid the cockiness that sank the Cats last season.  If I can, the Cats should be champions come late December.

With the live draft over, I thought I was through.  I wasn't.  Rather than just moving the Cats into one new league, the NFL servers submitted my draft order again, and ran it through the autodraft for which I had originally signed.  When I woke up Wednesday, I discovered that I had not one, but two teams on NFL.com, in two different leagues.

Suddenly gifted with a new team, I decided to name it Time and Again, after a CBS Radio Mystery Theater episode that I've reviewed on this blog.  New team, new colors, new logo, but, oddly, four players who also play for the Cats.  The Timers drafted third, so they also nabbed Ray Rice.

Of course, they also drafted the likes of Cedric Benson and Santana Moss.  That's like successfully casting a "summon wolves" spell, only to have to deal with two Yorkshire terriers who inevitably appear along with the grey wolf.  Time and Again is solid at QB, RB and defense, but patchy elsewhere.  I can get to the playoffs with this team, but it will take work.

The Fluttering Horde might be as weak as it's ever been, but that's largely because the family league expanded to 16 teams for 2012.  Also, I had the first pick, which I spent on Ray Rice; so Darren Sproles ended up being the only survivor of the expansion carnage.  Peyton Manning, who made league finalists of the 2010 Horde, does return, backed up by Jay Cutler.  Wes Welker and Eric Decker, who served short tours with the Horde in the past, return as my top two wideouts.  It's not much, but that's the cost of having at pick at an extreme slot (first) rather than the middle slot (eighth or ninth) the Horde usually gets.  Yahoo! expects an 11-2 mark from this squad.  It's playoff-worthy as is, but that prediction is a stretch.


1. One rival spent three top picks on defenses.  Another drafted three quarterbacks in the first four rounds.  They can keep whatever they were ingesting.
2. Dudes, those early picks aren't going to help you, not even as trade bait.  But thanks for handing me Cutler and Roethlisberger.

---

Late Tuesday Football: Well, I had to post sometime

Bored.  Busy.  Or maybe just outrage fatigued.
Via reallycuteanimals.co.uk.

There isn't a really good reason why I haven't posted for a while.  Yes, family matters are keeping me busy, but even those should have allowed time for posting.  I just haven't felt like saying anything -- at least not anything that someone else hasn't expressed more eloquently.

So it's football to the rescue again.  Whichever form you watch, it's all going in full swing.  This week, gridiron gets the blog love.

---

Signs point to Gig'em:  I don't plan on discussing much college football this year¹, but Texas A&M's² move to the SEC has generated lots of smack in my family.  In particular, my oldest sister and I have spent all summer chanting "S-E-C!" at our Longhorn-loving relations.  It feels great, actually.  Now I know why Republicans feel compelled to shout "9-11" whenever they start losing arguments.

Yep, it's been every bit as clean as Jackie Sherill.

Alas, a fellow Aggie has taken the mocking to another level -- and for once, a university other than Texas-Austin is the target.  I think this sign is very funny, but my alma mater itself doesn't agree.  Hopefully, the Florida offense will be as inept this weekend as it was last week against mighty, mighty Bowling Green.

---

To be explained later this week:

• Another NFL season, another year of the standings the way they should be tabulated.  I've refreshed the Victory Weighting tab for the new season.
• Both my fantasy-football teams are back in action.  The Fluttering Horde is still in my family league, and still on Yahoo!, but the league is now a 16-team joint.  Despite their move to nfl.com, the Ghost-Grey Cats have stayed amazingly intact from last year.

1.  Don't blame Penn State.  I was losing patience with the college game long before that school's scandal broke out.
2.  You suck, Blogger.  Thanks for not letting me use "A&M" as a label.  Dolts.

---

I didn't expect this Euro 2012 final

What I expected to see today in Kiev:

What I actually saw on the field:

---

By the time La Fúria Roja scored its second goal, I think Ian Darke had described its standard passing tactic as series of "little triangles" about 137 times.  That wasn't quite as often as this Spanish team actually passed the ball every 20 minutes, but it was enough to put a character from Angry Birds into my mind.  Indeed, in the first half, the Spaniards shredded Italy's normally stout defense the way Yellow Bird tears through wooden structures.  A hearty congratulations to Spain for its amazing feat!

ESPN is swearing up and down that the just-repeated European champions are the best national team ever.  To support that claim, the network claimed that Spain just became the first nation to win three major soccer titles in a row.  Far be it for me to point out that (a) Copa América, the South American continental tournament, also qualifies as "major," and (b) Brazil wrapped two Copa América titles around its 2006 World Cup victory.

In any event, there's still a case to be made that the 1970 Seleçao is still better.  With the 4-0 win today, though, Spain made the comparison a lot tighter.  I'm going to have to start tracking down video from Mexico '70.

Italy also deserves congratulations, especially coach Cesare Prandelli and Andrea Pirlo.  Keeping the team together despite yet another match-fixing scandal at home (and the presence of notorious bad-boy Mario Balotelli) was impressive by itself, but even reaching the finals constituted an incredible feat.

This just wasn't the Azurri's night.  As they fell behind 2-0, they were also losing players to serious injuries.  Giorgio Chiellini went down 21 minutes into the action, then Thiago Motta's hamstring pull forced him out of the game at the hour -- only minutes after he was inserted as Italy's final substitute.

At that point, down to ten men, the Azurri was no longer a contender; it was Wile E. Coyote, passing a massive rock as he plummets to a canyon floor after yet another botched attempt to catch the Road Runner.  The Italians hit the ground first, then, in the form of two late Spanish goals, the boulder landed on top.

Not. Italy's. Night.

---

Friday Double: (12) Odd notes from Euro 2012

It's been interesting to watch the amazing amount of influence that the English-speaking world has wielded at the Euro 2012 tournament.  Stadium announcements in English have been a FIFA standard for several World Cup cycles, so hearing those again in Poland and Ukraine came as no surprise. On the other hand, as the Russian national anthem played before the Russia-Poland match, there was this:

'Cause racist taunts and marches on Warsaw weren't provocative enough.
[Reuters/Pascal Lauener]

Never mind the 45th-level D&D warlord, who, Russian state network RT tells us, is a heroic figure from Russian history. The important part here is the caption. I can understand why PA announcers are using English, but why would a group of Russian fans use English on that banner? Why not regular Russian, or even Russian transliterated into Latin characters? Are that many Americans blowing off Miami-Oklahoma City for this?

---

And how about the music?

You may have not heard "Kernkraft 400" referenced by name, but if you've watched East Coast college football at any time during the Obama administration, you've probably heard fans singing caterwauling along with it.

Alas, it's made its way to the PA systems at Euro 2012, and through to the fans. "Kernkraft 400" isn't just about the worst fight song ever, it's one of the worst techno tracks I've ever heard.  Heck, it's not even original; the appropriately named Zombie Nation, a German group, stole it from a Commodore 64 game.  How Canadian hockey fans (yes, Canadians) managed to turn this German annoyance into a global one is beyond me.

Anyhow, here's a sports mix, because my alternative today was the was the Hymn of the Russian Federation.  Feel free to gong this at any time.

---

Even more interesting than chants imported from eastern North America is what plays when the contestants enter the field for the first time. The first time I paid attention to the background music, before the Germany-Portugal match, I thought immediately of Mass Effect 2, perhaps the first video game to ever run a Super Bowl ad. A little digging confirmed my suspicion: the score for that trailer was original to that ad, and it's what the Euro 2012 honchos are using to introduce teams to the playing field:



"Heart of Courage" is a nice, simple tune that does exactly as composer Two Steps from Hell intended: it builds dramatic tension just quickly enough to create an appetite. It works the same for Euro 2012 games as it did for that video game. And like the English-captioned Russian banner and the ridiculous fight tune, it points to increasing American influence on non-American events.

---

Back in business

To mix Firefly with a Christian proverb, the 'verse works in mysterious ways.

I'd be lying to claim that I had stopped posting just because Scooter passed five weeks ago.  Given that posting had already slowed to a crawl, that would have been a nice, self-pitying pretext.  Fortunately, the rest of May helped the mourning go more easily.

The actual reason for the pause was all the road travel (Nebraska for one weekend, Houston for the next and barbeque-famous Lockhart, Texas, for the following week), and lots of time with the siblings.  All four of my sisters and I spent the turn of the month together with my dad, for the first time in six years.  Good times, actually.

Anyway, I'm just saying 'hi,' here, hopefully to start posting more regularly.  After the sun comes up again:  an Euro 2012-related Friday Double.

---

Scooter Blogging: (0) So long, old friend

When my household in suburban Oakland had two cats, neither one would ask me to refill their food bowls until one was empty.  By that time, the other bowl had only a few kibbles left, so I refilled both.  Once Galadriel passed away, though, Scooter changed her habit.  She still finished off her bowls, but after every refill, she came to me to ask for new food.  It took me a while, but I figured out that even a dozen new kibbles satisfied her demand.  Scooter wasn't really hungry; she just wanted the attention.

About six weeks ago, her odd little requests stopped.  This had happened before, only to resume later; so I thought nothing of it.  Sadly, it turned out to be the harbinger of something far worse.  Her liver was failing, and her eating itself was steadily slowing.  By the time anyone noticed something was wrong, it was too late; the only option was to keep her comfortable as her appetite vanished completely and her body shut down.

Tonight, about seven weeks shy of her 15th birthday, Scooter crossed the Rainbow Bridge.  She had lost the ability to jump to or from her corner of my bed, and the pain had become just too much.  At about 21:15 Central time, a veterinarian performed the euthanasia.  In her final minutes, she wanted nothing but ear scratches from me, and those were probably the last things she felt.

So long, Scooter, you Cat of Many Colors.  And thanks for being my friend for 14 years.

---

If Portal is as funny as its Internet promos, ...

... I might have to start playing first-person shooters.  The Internet is full of funny stuff (not all of which involves cats), but it's been a while since I've laughed so hard as I did when I saw the stuff Valve puts out for its Portal franchise.  Here's my favorite.

---