Ah, the week between the end of the playoffs and the Superb Owl: or, as we like to call it, “the most boring week in sports”.
What does TMQ cover this week? Would you believe there’s almost nothing about television shows?
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Yes, we know, we’re way late. It doesn’t have anything to do with something we’ll get to in a moment. It’s just been a matter of it being relatively cold here in the greater Austin metroplex. And like a giant lizard or some other cold-blooded animal, we’ve been curling up and conserving body heat. (We also fell into a time sink Tuesday night reading the archives of Damn Interesting. But that’s another story.)
But the cold spell is starting to break. After the jump, this week’s TMQ. Plus: viewer mail!
We’ve finished the first week of the playoffs. Would you expect TMQ to be longer, shorter, or about the same?
We expected shorter. We got “about the same”: almost 5,200 words by our count. Of which the first 1,600 (nearly 31%) are devoted to one theme, which we can summarize in four words.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Yeah, we can’t believe it, either. We want to try on our best Don LaFontaine voice. “In the future world of 2018…”
And that’s as far as we’ve gotten. “…you will believe that a famous chef sends out an apology for sexual harassment that includes his recipe for cinnamon buns“? Nobody would believe that.
“You will believe that Gregg Easterbrook watched football on New Year’s Eve”? That might work.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
We’re still unclear on why this was the case. Especially on Christmas Day: the first game started at 3:30 PM Central, and was over with enough time left to watch the good “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and promptly flip over to the second game before the bad “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” came on. (Really, whose bright idea was it to show the vastly superior animated special before the feature length movie that should never have been made?)
So. Many. Possible. Punch. Lines.
Can we return this and get something actually useful? Like socks?
Reactions to Socks as a Christmas Gift by Calendar Age:
0-3: blurb nurg (eats socks)
4-12: oh, socks
13-18: (SIGH) socks are you FUCKING serious
19-39: oh thank god, something useful, thank god
40+: Warm feet are the solitary joy remaining to me in this dark and fallen world— The Lynch who Stole Christmas (@scottlynch78) December 23, 2017
After the jump, this week’s substitute for a TMQ…
Before we jump into this week’s column, we did want to make note of the not-technically-a-firing-but resignation of ESPN president John Skipper. We think it is appropriate to note this here because this is sportsfirings.com, and for reasons we will get into shortly.
We really don’t have much to say about this: we don’t care much for ESPN, or the way Skipper’s been running it. But substance abuse of any sort sucks, and we wish the man all the luck in the world.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Two weeks in a row, we have a column title that tells you everything you need to know. In this case, it tells you that Gregg Easterbrook is a low, mean, and contemptible person.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
The headline tells you all you need to know, in this week’s TMQ…
Before we jump into this week’s column, we wanted to link to an article on the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network’s website: “Projected 2018 NFL draft order: Browns inch closer to top pick“.
It shouldn’t come as any great shock that the Browns are in pole position, but who comes in second? And third? Hint: one of our regular readers isn’t going to like where their team falls.
Also, this amuses us, but we are simple people:
Of course, there’s no reason for him to stay at USC. All he has to do is tell Cleveland, “No, I won’t play for you if you draft me.” (This is also known as the Eli Manning gambit.)
Anyway. After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Happy Thanksgiving. Yes, we’re late again. Frankly, we had trouble working up the motivation to deal with this week’s TMQ.
On the plus side, though, if we hadn’t waited, we wouldn’t have been able to link this article: please go read it now, before or after you have your turkey, it doesn’t matter which.
(Thanks to Ken “Popehat” White for the tip.)
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Right at the 5,200 word mark again. It really does seem like Gregg Easterbrook has an editor. Maybe. But we’ll get into that.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
One thing we’ve noticed about new TMQ in the light of recent events: Easterbrook hasn’t had anything to say in the column about recent mass shootings, especially in regard to “reasonable gun control”. Easterbrook hasn’t been shy about this before (and we’ve called him out on his bolshie bushwa before, too), so the absence of this in his Weekly Standard TMQ columns seems unusual. Almost like someone is editing him.
Not that we’re complaining: the less time we spend pressure-testing our cerebral arteries, the better we feel.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
TMQ doesn’t have anything really spooky going on this week. If we had thought of it a little more in advance, we might have tried to dig up something new and amusing to use as a header.
So before we jump in, we’ll toss out a couple of kind of spooky things we casually ran across in our morning browsing:
Carl Tanzler. We’re aware this was the subject of a recent episode of “The Dollup”, but we’ve tried listening to that podcast and can’t. The Wikipedia entry should be spooky enough for you, and most of us read faster than we can listen to a podcast anyway.
Lawrence’s annual link to the FARK Scary Stories threads.
Wikipedia “Deaths by poisoning”. The “Victims of radiological poisoning” is kind of interesting: Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin are probably well known to Los Alamos buffs, but we’d never heard of the Cecil Kelley incident.
Okay, enough spooky. After the jump, this week’s pretty much non-spooky TMQ…
“The Falcons are, in every way, the Epic Fails.”
Someone would like a word with Gregg Easterbrook. (Sorry, Infidel.)
All this and more in this week’s TMQ, after the jump…