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Your loser update: week 3, 2018.

Monday, September 24th, 2018

The Browns won for the first time since Donald Trump took office. The worthless Buffalo Bills actually beat Minnesota in what ESPN calls “the biggest NFL upset in 23 years”. The New York Football Giants beat hapless the Houston Texans. New England is 1-2. And we’re down to three teams standing. But at least we didn’t have another tied game.

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

Houston
Oakland
Arizona

In non-NFL news, the NYT ran an interesting article on the Baltimore Orioles.

The Baltimore Orioles are bad. Very bad. Historically bad.

I admit I haven’t been paying much attention, because:

1) Baseball.
II) FiveThirtyEight, as of today, is predicting that Baltimore will finish 47-115, or a .290 winning percentage. That’s 15th place on Wikipedia’s list. Historically bad? Maybe. That’s certainly a worse record than the bad Astros teams of recent memory, but it’s still better than the 2003 Detroit Tigers.

I report, you decide.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

The Court of Last Resort.

Thursday, September 20th, 2018

Back in the day, when Argosy was publishing Erle Stanley Gardner the creator of Perry Mason’s “The Court of Last Resort” column, they noticed a sizeable circulation uptick. (According to Wikipedia, the magazine was “never terribly successful”, but they did get a “significant boost in sales”.)

These days, the “large mass market publication brings attention to a wrongful conviction and gets the guy off” story is so common as to almost not be news anymore. Texas Monthly has done this several times that I know of, the legendary Gene Miller won two Pulitzer Prizes for his stories at the Miami Herald, and given enough time I could probably come up with more examples than Carter had liver pills.

But this is an unusual first, as far as I know: guy has his conviction vacated after spending 27 years in prison (“the bulk of it in the infamous Attica Correctional Facility”) because of the work of a lot of people: the Erie County district attorney’s wrongful convictions unit, the Georgetown University Prison Reform Project, his daughter (who raised money for his legal fees by selling his color drawings of golf courses online), and the mass media…

…especially Golf Digest.

It rises from a confluence of factors, according to Donald Thompson, who along with Alan Rosenthal, filed Dixon’s latest motion (which included the Golf Digest article) pro bono. “Once a case crosses a certain threshold of media attention, it matters, even though it shouldn’t,” Thompson says. “It’s embarrassing for the legal system that for a long time the best presentation of the investigation was from a golf magazine.”

Said it before, I’ll say it again: we need a new “Court of Last Resort” as a regular feature in some large circulation publication. And we need more public intellectuals like Erle Stanley Gardner, too.

(Edit: forgot to include hattips: Popehat on the Twitters, and Lawrence.)

Posted in Law, Sports | Comments Closed

TMQ Watch: September 18, 2018.

Wednesday, September 19th, 2018

Someone who isn’t us asked why we didn’t mention Vonte Davis in the loser update this week.

The truth is, we just didn’t have anything to bring to the table on that subject. We do have one thought, but we’re not comfortable sharing that in public: it would be irresponsible speculation on our part. We do (sincerely) hope for the best for Mr. Davis.

Apparently, Gregg Easterbrook has almost nothing to say on the subject either. But he does have things to say on other subjects, including the Clay Mathews penalty.

After the jump, this week’s TMQ and why his commentary is problematic…

(more…)

Posted in NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 2, 2018.

Tuesday, September 18th, 2018

Not a whole lot to say this week.

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

Buffalo
Houston
Oakland
New York Football Giants
Detroit
Seattle
Arizona

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

TMQ Watch: September 11, 2018.

Wednesday, September 12th, 2018

Ah, the first week of football season. There’s a wonderful scent of mold in the air (due to all the recent rain), friends are trying to provoke us into doomed bets on the Texans, and Gregg Easterbrook finally has something to write about.

After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

(more…)

Posted in NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 1, 2018.

Tuesday, September 11th, 2018

Administrative note:

The loser update is primarily for teams that have a shot at going 0-16 over the course of the NFL season. (Secondarily, the loser update is for teams that have a shot at going 0-(x) over the course of some other sport’s season. Thirdly, the loser update is for teams that are just plain bad, or other noteworthy loser related items.)

Teams that have a shot at going 0-15-1 don’t count. I’m just a little sorry to see the Browns come off the list, and more sorry to see Pittsburgh go. But, technically, neither team has a chance to go 0-16: if one or both of them wind up going 0-15-1 this season, there might be a special acknowledgement. But for now, neither team is part of the loser update.

(I have not heard that the beer fridges have been hacked yet. However, the word from Bud Light is that a tie is not a win, so the fridges officially stay locked for now.)

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

Buffalo
Houston
Tennessee
Indianapolis
Oakland
Chargers
Dallas
New York Football Giants
Detroit
Chicago
New Orleans
Atlanta
Seattle
San Francisco
Arizona

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

TMQ Watch: September 4th, 2018.

Wednesday, September 5th, 2018

The regular season starts Thursday. And TMQ gets back to something closely approaching normal next Tuesday. But for now, we have one more week of filler.

After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

(more…)

Posted in NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

TMQ Watch: August 28, 2018.

Thursday, August 30th, 2018

We keep saying we’re going to get the TMQ Watch out closer to Tuesday, if not actually on Tuesday.
And then things keep popping up.
We apologize for the lateness. Perhaps next week.

After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

(more…)

Posted in NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

TMQ Watch: August 21, 2018.

Thursday, August 23rd, 2018

Like those truck stop enchiladas you had for dinner last night, Tuesday Morning Quarterback is back on The Weekly Standard.

And like the Genesee Cream Ale you washed those enchiladas down with, so is TMQ Watch: albeit a little late this week.

After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

(more…)

Posted in NFL, Sports, TMQ watch, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 22, 2018.

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2018

I wasn’t originally going to post this one, but there’s a story here that’s too good to pass up.

Don Cherry, noted singer and noted amateur golfer. He actually passed away April 4th, but his death was not widely reported until recently.

Mr. Cherry embarked on his show business career in his early 20s as a big-band singer, then turned to the recording studio. His biggest hit was “Band of Gold” (no connection to the later Freda Payne hit of the same name), recorded in 1955 with an arrangement by Ray Conniff, which reached the Top 10.

He was also the voice of Mr. Clean at one point.

Because of his dual pursuits, he nearly sabotaged himself on the eve of his inaugural Masters, in 1953.
The owner of a local nightclub hired him to sing each night of the tournament. When Clifford Roberts, a founder of the Masters and chairman of Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, where the tournament is held, learned of the sideshow, he called Mr. Cherry in for a talk.
“We never had anyone play in the Masters and sing at a local nightclub at the same time,” Mr. Roberts said, as Mr. Cherry recalled in his memoir.
“My reply, without being disrespectful and with a little Texas naïveté, was ‘Mr. Roberts, I have looked at the people playing in this tournament and can’t see anyone else who can sing.’ ”

Posted in Music, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Your loser update: pre-NFL edition.

Wednesday, August 15th, 2018

Actually, this sits at the weird intersection of a couple of things:

Bud Light is installing “Victory Fridges” throughout the Cleveland area that will unlock via WiFi following the Browns’ first regular-season win this season.

Which do you suppose is going to happen first: a Browns win, or someone hacks the fridges? My money is on the latter.

Cleveland hackers, you’ve got at least 25 days to prove me right.

More from the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.

And how about a little musical interlude? We haven’t had one in a while.

Posted in Geek, Loser, NFL, Radio, Sports, WiFi | Comments Closed

Pilot error.

Monday, August 13th, 2018

The Dallas Wings, who are a team in the WNBA, fired their head coach Fred Williams yesterday.

The root cause was apparently not that the Wings have lost eight games in a row: they are 14-17 so far this season, and could conceivably make the playoffs. The root cause appears to have been that Mr. Williams and the team president/CEO got into “a postgame altercation”. It isn’t clear to me if punches were thrown or exactly what the nature of the altercation was: either it was serious enough that CEO Greg Bibb felt compelled to fire Williams before the season ended, or (possibly) Mr. Bibb is just a little oversensitive.

In any case, the Wings are still one game ahead of…that’s right, the Las Vegas Aces.

(Apologies for linking to ESPN, but the Dallas paper was really obnoxious about ad blockers. I couldn’t find any mention of this in the Statesman or HouChron.)

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

This never happens.

Tuesday, August 7th, 2018

But when it does, I can’t miss commenting on it.

Friday night, the Las Vegas Aces were scheduled to play a WNBA game against the Washington Mystics.

But things happened along the way. I can’t find specific details, but the general summary is that it took the Aces 26 hours to get from Las Vegas to Washington, D.C. They arrived around 3:45 PM on Friday. The game was scheduled to start at 8 PM Friday, so they’d been travelling all that time and had about four hours to rest and get ready for the game.

The team thought this was unacceptable. The Aces had already been in contact with the player’s union throughout the whole travel fiasco, trying to get the game delayed: but the WNBA schedule is so tight at the moment the league didn’t feel like they could delay.

So the Aces just refused to play.

“We just really felt like after a full day at the airport, a night of no sleep, no proper nutrition, we were really putting ourselves at risk to go play very high-level, competitive basketball,” Aces center Carolyn Swords said. “It was a very difficult decision because we love what we do. We love the opportunity to compete in front of WNBA fans no matter what city we’re in.”

The Aces felt like they could trust the league to make a decision. And the league decided today.

It was a forfeit.

There was little precedent for the decision because the WNBA has never before canceled a game. There have been only a handful of instances over the past few decades in major sports in which teams have had to forfeit.
Most of those occurred because of fan involvement, notably the Chicago White Sox’s infamous Disco Demolition Night in 1979, when the field was so damaged the second game of a doubleheader could not be played.

As far as I can tell, while there is a Wikipedia page on forfeits in sport, and a seperate one for baseball specifically, I can’t tell if any basketball game – NCAA, NBA, or WNBA – has been forfeited before now. (The NCAA has voided wins, but that’s different.)

The National Football League rulebook has a provision for forfeiture but has never used it (there was at least one alleged “forfeit” in the 1921 NFL season, but because league schedules were so fluid in the 1920s and it was never clear who was at fault for the game not being played, the league now considers it a cancellation, which was very common at the time). Former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle noted that he had never used the league’s forfeit provisions and would never change the result of a game after the fact, a stance that prevented the result of the Snowplow Game, a game that had been decided on an acknowledged but unpunished unfair act, from being forfeited. It was briefly discussed as a potential punishment during Spygate but never implemented.

The last forfeit I know of in NCAA football – or in any other sport before now – was the Grambling State-Jackson State game in 2013. I welcome correction if anybody has a more recent example.

Edited to add: Ooops. Missed that California University of Pennsylvania forfeited one in 2014 after five players were charged with assault.

(“Don’t WNBA teams fly charter?” I think that’s covered in one of the links, but the short answer is: no, the league ordinarily doesn’t allow charter flights in order to keep a level playing field, since some teams have more resources than others. The league did give special permission to the Aces to arrange a charter while all of this was going on, but the team wasn’t able to arrange one on short notice.)

Posted in Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 7, 2018.

Tuesday, August 7th, 2018

Joël Robuchon, noted French chef.

Lawrence and I often joke about French cooking: “High prices. Small portions.” And I’ve never eaten at a Robuchon restaurant. But he sounds like someone who had the right ideas.

His butter-laden potato purée, one of many instant classics, consisted of four ingredients —potatoes, butter, milk and salt — but his labor-intensive technique of drying the potatoes and gradually introducing chilled butter and boiling milk elevated the dish far beyond its station.

…

“One of his favorite lines was, ‘Our job is not to make a mushroom taste like a carrot but to make a mushroom taste as much like a mushroom as it can,’ ” Ms. Wells, the co-author of Mr. Robuchon’s cookbook “Simply French” (1991), said by telephone.

…

“The older I get, the more I realize the truth is: the simpler the food, the more exceptional it can be,” he told Business Insider in 2014. “I never try to marry more than three flavors in one dish. I like walking into a kitchen and knowing that the dishes are identifiable and the ingredients within them easy to detect.”

Paul Laxalt, former Senator.

Tom Heckert, former general manager of the Cleveland Browns. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Amy Meselson. She was 46 years old, and had a reputation for defending immigrants to the United States. Her obit opens with a great story about her zealous advocacy for Amadou Ly, a Senegalese immigrant who was part of a winning robotics team at his high school.

Federal officials were persuaded to drop the deportation proceedings and grant Mr. Ly a foreign student visa. He graduated from Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, became a citizen, embarked on an acting career and moved to Hollywood.

…

Ms. Meselson, who had struggled with depression since she was a teenager, committed suicide on July 22 at her home in Manhattan, her mother, Sarah Meselson, said.

…

Ms. Meselson earned her middle name by surviving a life-threatening respiratory disease. Besides dealing with depression, she had recently been given a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder and extreme anxiety — all aggravated when she traveled to Greece two years ago to volunteer at a camp for Syrian refugees, Sarah Meselson said at a memorial service.
At the service, she said she wanted to recount her daughter’s maladies for two reasons.
“One,” she said, “is to emphasize what everyone already knows — that it is not always possible to comprehend the level of suffering that others may be experiencing, especially when they appear to be successful and to excel to the extent that Amy did.
“The other,” she added, “is to applaud my daughter for all that she accomplished despite her mental illness.”

In that vein, this is hard as hell to read, but worth it. (Hattip: Popehat on the Twitter.)

Posted in Food, NFL, Obits, Politics, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 30, 2018.

Monday, July 30th, 2018

Yesterday was a bad day for wrestling.

Nikolai Volkoff (an alias for Josip Nikolai Peruzovic) passed away on Sunday. He was 70.

Peruzovic, who was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2005, was best known in the world of professional wrestling for his over-the-top Soviet/Russian character during his time in the World Wide Wrestling Federation (later the WWF) in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. In reality, Peruzovic was born in what was then Yugoslavia and now stands as part of Croatia.
Peruzovic’s most famous run came as part of the then-WWF’s explosion in popularity in the mid-1980s, as he teamed with the Iron Sheik to form one of the most successful heel teams in the history of pro wrestling while being managed by the legendary “Classy” Freddie Blassie. He famously sang the Soviet Union’s national anthem while the Iron Sheik taunted and stoked the anger of crowds around the world by playing upon real-life conflicts.

Volkoff and the Iron Sheik won the tag team championship in 1985.

Brian Christopher Lawler, son of Jerry Lawler, who wrestled as “Brian Christopher” also died on Sunday. Apparently, he was in jail on a DWI charge and committed suicide in his cell.

Ron Dellums, former Congressman.

Two obits that I thought made an interesting juxtaposition:

Mary Ellis, who died at 101.

Mrs. Ellis was one of the last two living members of the Air Transport Auxiliary, or A.T.A., which has since disbanded. She alone ferried 400 Spitfires and 76 other kinds of aircraft to airfields during the war.

…

In 1945, after the war ended, Ms. Ellis was invited to join the R.A.F. and became one of the first women to fly the Meteor jet fighter, according to Ms. Foreman.

…

Her death leaves Eleanor Wadsworth, who lives in Bury St. Edmunds, England, as the last surviving A.T.A. member.

Oksana Shachko, who the paper of record describes as “a Ukrainian artist and a founder of Femen, a women’s rights group famous for its topless political protests”.

Together with the Pussy Riot punk group in Russia, Femen became part of a post-Soviet protest phenomenon that sometimes drew a violent reaction. In 2011, Femen said that Ms. Shachko and other activists had been abducted in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, after campaigning in front of the K.G.B. headquarters there. Several members were beaten up in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, in 2013 ahead of a visit by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Ms. Shachko and several other activists from the university town of Khmelnytsky, Ukraine, founded Femen in 2008. After a few conventional protests, they decided to demonstrate topless, often with political slogans written on their bodies.

…

In 2013, members of Femen ran topless in front of Mr. Putin as he visited Germany, drawing a grin and two thumbs up from him before guards wrestled the activists to the ground.
Ms. Shachko, along with several other Femen members, moved to Paris that same year and was granted political asylum by the French authorities. She maintained that the group’s members had been pursued by Russian special services and that the agents had planted a grenade in Femen’s office in Kiev, along with a photograph of Mr. Putin.

Ms. Shachko was 31. According to the NYT obituary, her death is being investigated as a suicide.

Posted in History, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

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