Whipped Cream Difficulties

For reasons we’re not clear on, Lawrence has been giving us a little bit of grief recently about why we continue to write the TMQ Watch. Frankly, we’ve been wondering that ourselves, and the best answer we can come up with is: “Got to. This America, man.”

But it does give us a little bit of pleasure to be able to cross the streams this week:

…and yes I was tossed off the masthead of New Republic by Chris Hedges too! Dear Chris — my Internet column gets 175K unique views/week

— Gregg Easterbrook (@EasterbrookG) December 9, 2014

After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

This year, the Authentic Games standings (see below) forecast a Super Bowl of Denver versus Arizona.

We’ve previously expressed the opinion that TMQ’s “Authentic Games” metric is just basically pulled from his neither regions. Apparently, TMQ agrees with us, as he has reservations about a Denver – Arizona Super Bowl…

…my alternative Super Bowl pick is Seattle versus New England.

Summarizing:

So my pick is Denver versus Arizona. That’s what my metric says. Unless my pick is Seattle versus New England. Since I have hedged bets with two Super Bowl forecasts, the football gods might ensure neither comes true.

Dear Santa:
We don’t ask for much, but…

Stats.

Sweet: Arizona. Sour: Jets. Mixed: Cleveland – Indianapolis.

We didn’t watch the live “Peter Pan”, but TMQ’s item on the subject is completely incoherent. Seriously, what’s the point he’s trying to make here?

TMQ’s wacky food of the week link goes to “Modern Farmer”. We mention this because “Modern Farmer” itself belongs in the “wacky food” department, or perhaps the “wacky magazine” department. Interestingly, the editor resigned last week…

This week in unrealistic television: “Ascension”.

A character says the Ascension is “a spaceship the size of the Empire State Building.” How did it get into space?

Not that we have any interest in defending a SyFy channel series, but TMQ might want to look into the history of Project Orion. There was serious discussion around the time “Ascension” is set of launching city-sized objects into space. Of course, this was a time of manly men who thought manly men thoughts and dreamed big manly men dreams. And drank manly drinks, too.

Speaking of Orion, TMQ doesn’t have a high opinion of the new Orion:

It’s nice that the Orion’s first try was a success, but all the mission did was replicate something the United States could do nearly half a century ago.

And that we haven’t done since.

TMQ noted in September that a pretty basic Mars mission would weigh about 4,000 tons at departure from Earth orbit. That’s about 160 times the mass of an Orion.

And exactly in the sweet spot for the old Project Orion. Wouldn’t it be great to take all those unexploded nukes and use them on a Mars mission?

Campus conduct boards may be the correct places to consider instances of cheating, bias or unethical behavior. These things are wrong but not crimes. Sexual assault is a crime — and a crime of violence. Where crimes of violence are alleged, police, not faculty committees, ought to investigate.

We call this out because this is a semi-rare instance where we agree with TMQ, and we suspect it is an even rarer instance where Lawrence would agree with him as well.

Though St. Louis has posted consecutive shutouts and is the sole team to have defeated both of last season’s Super Bowl entrants, the Rams just can’t be Authentic if they have a losing record and are last in their division with three games remaining.

Translation from Easterbrook to English: “I’m just making this stuff up as I go along.”

Something-something Miami-Baltimore. We kind of like that Alien Christmas ornament, though not $17.95 worth. (Also, it won’t fit on our tree.)

The TMQ nickname quiz (not a Quinn Martin production). Bad blitzing: Bengals. “…even a routine season of high school football — no concussions, no headaches — can result in brain abnormalities that show up in tests.”

The football gods chortled. We’re having some lower back pain. And our best wishes go to one of TMQ Watch’s closest friends, who is recovering from surgery.

Men men men men manly men: Dallas – Chicago. As a side note, we’re wondering if the Chicago win marks the end of the Cowboys December collapse.

Word the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to White House attempts to restrict mercury from power plants made your columnist groan, “Here we go again.”

TMQ wasn’t the only one who said “Here we go again.” It isn’t that we’re in favor of pumping mercury into the air, or that we’re big fans of unlimited executive authority; the problem is that TMQ seems to bring up the Bush 43 era mercury regulations, on average, once a year. And it makes our eyes glaze over. Doesn’t this extended policy wonkery belong someplace other than ESPN? Like maybe the “New Republic”?

Chicken-(salad) kicking: San Diego, Bowling Green, Arizona, Missouri, Buffalo.

Creep. S.H.I.E.L.D. creep. “Star Trek” creep. As a professed Christian, why does TMQ spend so much time hanging out in “Hell’s Sports Bar”? New England’s defense is getting stronger, and Leon is getting larger.

What was East Carolina thinking? What is happening to the Saints? “Everything is wrong with” Washington.

Fired, Gruden would receive the roughly $16 million Snyder owes him for the balance of his contract — and no one in football would hold it against Gruden that he couldn’t work with the league’s worst owner.

We seem to recall that the same “does he want to be fired” thing went on with the previous coach. We would be happy to coach Washington for half of Gruden’s money; we figure we could probably do at least 3-13. Even if we went 0-16, we’d have enough money to live on for the rest of our lives, and all the fame we could eat.

Reader mail: would driverless trucks really result in job cuts? This actually strikes us as an interesting question. It isn’t just that we think the unions representing drivers will put up a fight against autonomous vehicles; does FedEx (or FedEx’s insurers) really want truckloads of valuable items roaming the nation’s roads with no supervision? At least with a human driver, there’s someone to put up a fight (or observe) if the bad guys attempt to hijack a truck…

Less athletics, more music.

Maybe the solution is Battle of the Bands standings to create an aspect of competition.

We were never in high school band, but we have friends and relatives who were; our understanding is that there’s plenty of high school band competition, including “Battles of the Bands”.

“Adventures In Officiating”: the defenseless receiver, offense-oriented officiating, and indisputable evidence.

The 500 Club.

Linfield 45, Widener 7.

And so we come to the end of another TMQ. There will be no TMQ next week, as it is Easterbrook’s bye week.

I will use the bye week to get healthy, draw up new sentence structures and seek crowd-sourced funding for my celebrity Yahtzee tournament.

TMQ might be better off seeking crowd-sourced funding to purchase the “New Republic”. If he does seek Yahtzee funding, we look forward to seeing the results on Kickended.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2014 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Food, Law, Media, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.