Whipped Cream Difficulties

Before we jump into this week’s TMQ, how about a little musical interlude?

After the jump…

“Awful” suddenly applies to the Niners. They’ve lost their last two outings by a combined 56-10.

534 words down.

Could the Chiefs go worst-to-first?

In other football news, the ghosts of the Portsmouth Spartans are smiling.

We didn’t think Spartans smiled, Gregg. As a matter of fact, we always thought the Spartans were a pretty unsmiling bunch.

Sweet: Miami. (“The Genetically Engineered Surimi…” Again, Gregg, this is a nonsense term.) New Orleans. Sour: Minnesota.

“A lot of Minnesota supporters think their team is better than its 0-3 record indicates,” yours truly heard on sportstalk radio the morning of the game. Can’t be worse than 0-3 indicates.

Uh, how could TMQ have heard this the morning of the game when Minnesota didn’t play their third game until that afternoon?

Sweet and sour: Titan – San Diego, Green Bay – Bengals.

“Revolution” is back! Let’s kick it around some more! Bonus kicks for “Defiance” and “Falling Skies”!

The facility contains a supercollider, which would have cost billions of dollars, yet Congress and the White House knew nothing about the project. Where did the funding come from?

Might we suggest that TMQ read some books about the “black budget”? We’re sure his friends at The Atlantic can recommend some good ones.

“The football gods chortled.” Again. Do you suppose the football gods ever carry on a normal conversation? Could they over all the chortling that goes on in football god Nirvana?

Hey, did you know TMQ has a new book out?

Seriously, we feel it only fair to give TMQ a little bit of space for a plug:

Think about the core issues facing football. Whether young people should play; whether public high schools can afford the litigation exposure; whether the advent of year-round football is ruining the GPAs of high school boys; whether football-factory universities exploit players; why so few football-factory players graduate; the Grand Illusion that college players will reach the NFL when less than 3 percent do; public subsidies to billionaire NFL owners; the outrageous tax gimmick that allows NFL headquarters to pretend to be a charity; whether an education-based society should have a favorite sport that encourages millions of young people to risk neurological damage.

So basically, “Tuesday Morning Quarterback: The Book”, not to be confused with Tuesday Morning Quarterback, the book.

Bad blitzing: Your NY Giants, ladies and gentlemen.

TMQ thinks Washington should have gone for the touchdown instead of the field goal.

Good news, everyone! Gregg Easterbrook knows what a library is! (Okay, dropping the sarcasm for a moment, his review of “Tom Harmon and the Great Gridiron Plot” is actually kind of fun. If you’d like to read it, there are copies available on Amazon for not horrible prices.)

The short-term fiscal outlook is positive for the first time in many moons, with the federal deficit and many state deficits declining compared to last year. But the long-term outlook remains bleak, with the total national debt climbing and many states having staggering unfunded pension liabilities.

For example, California.

San Jose now spends one-fifth of its $1.1 billion general fund on pensions and retiree health care, and the amount keeps rising. To free up the money, services have been cut, libraries and community centers closed, the number of city workers trimmed, salaries reduced, and new facilities left unused for lack of staff. From potholes to home burglaries, the city’s problems are growing.

More:

Cities in California are under particular pressure because it is so difficult to raise property taxes in the state, and because in 1999, at the height of the tech bubble, the Legislature voted for a huge benefit increase allowing, for instance, police officers to retire at age 50 with 90 percent of their salaries.

90 percent, ladies and gentlemen.

Readers fairly have asked how they can know I write the words “game over” in my notebook when I believe a head coach has just made a fatal error.

Yes. We believe Heisenberg (the actual physicist, not the meth chemist) was thinking about this problem when he died. How to solve it? Twitter to the rescue!

The obvious next step would be to do a weekly live Twitter test. Complication: at some point I’d be sure to be wrong.

1. Well, TMQ hasn’t been wrong so far. At least, as far as TMQ has told us…
2. Even if TMQ is wrong once or twice, that’s not interesting. The interesting questions would be: are his “game over” predictions better than chance, and how much better?

…there seems no hurry to get a vessel bearing people to Mars.

Except that a permanent manned Mars colony might be our best defense against those asteroid strikes you’re always going on about, Gregg. But setting that aside for the moment…

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has claimed a Mars colony could start for $36 billion, with the ticket price being $500,000 per person for the 50 million mile journey. How this could possibly be when SpaceX currently charges $135 million to deliver a small capsule of supplies 200 miles to the space station isn’t clear. Atlantic Monthly — the best, highest-quality magazine of our generation — recently treated seriously an entrepreneur’s claim that Mars could be reached for “a few million dollars per person”.

Well, why shouldn’t that claim be treated seriously? And by “treated seriously”, we include “subjected to skeptical analysis”. If you read the piece TMQ links, the person being interviewed actually has some good reasons for believing that (including improvements in rocket technology).

(Also, we’re not rocket scientists, but we think TMQ is a little confused here. Much of the cost of space flight, such as those deliveries “200 miles to the space station”, is the up-front cost of lifting things out of Earth’s gravity well. That cost is incurred whether you go 200 miles or 1,000,000 miles. But once you get out of Earth’s gravity well, the incremental cost of going further is…well, not exactly zero, but a lot less than going that first 200 miles.)

Assuming someday there will be a propulsion breakthrough, it’s still hard to explain what would justify the cost and risk of living on Mars.

We hate to do unseparated block quotes.

“…You see, commander, there is always somewhere a wealthy, powerful city, or nation, or world. In it are those whose blood is not right for a wealthy, powerful place. They must seek danger and overcome it. So they go out—on the marshes, in the desert, on the tundra, the planets, or the stars. Being strong, they grow stronger by fighting the tundra, the planets, or the stars. They—they change. They sing new songs. They know new heroes. And then, one day, they return to their old home.
“They return to the wealthy, powerful city, or nation or world. They fight its guardians as they fought the tundra, the planets, or the stars—a way that strikes terror to the heart. Then they sack the city, nation, or world and sing great, ringing sagas of their deeds. They always have. Doubtless they always will.”

–“The Only Thing We Learn”, Cyril Kornbluth

We don’t want to sit next to a rabid fan, either, but we do wonder if TMQ has been keeping up with advances in rabies treatment.

The high-end foodie world was rocked in 2011 when El Bulli of Madrid shut down. The restaurant had two memorable qualities — dinner was $200 a head, and dinners had no clue whether they were eating organic materials (in the biochemistry sense) or aluminum shavings sprayed with radium.

We admit to not being super-tasters, but we’re pretty sure we can tell the difference between what El Bulli was serving and “aluminum shavings sprayed with radium”. (And, while molecular gastronomy as a whole may be overblown, we think TMQ’s sneering at El Bulli comes close to know-nothing-ness. We’re pretty sure TMQ never ate at El Bulli; if he had, we’re pretty sure he would have told us about it. More than once. We never ate at El Bulli, either, but we don’t go around sneering at it.)

We live in a world where 10,000 people have enough money and time to travel internationally to taste food!

Well, yes. From our point of view, that’s a damn good thing.

TMQ’s dogma got run over by the Rams and Chargers karma. But other than those examples, chicken-(salad) kicks: Tampa, Houston, Green Bay, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, San Francisco.

There she is, your Miss America. “In driving rain at Blacksburg, Va., this happened again — Marshall and Virginia Tech played consecutive scoreless overtimes.” For bonus points, read that in your best John Facenda voice. “Another game played in the same storm ended Gardner-Webb 3, Wofford 0.”

The London Whale. Krumbles. “Since Jersey/B gave up 168 yards on penalties, it can seem amazing Buffalo managed to lose — until the Bills’ eight sacks allowed are considered.”

The 500 Club, in case you care. “Baylor is averaging 70 points scored and 751 yards gained. Saturday, Baylor gained 781 yards despite taking out star Lache Seastrunk after the first series of second half.” Of course, Baylor’s schedule consists mostly of Miss Daisy’s School for Crippled Orphans and other cupcakes…

Players dumped the Gatorade bucket on Andy Reid as the clock reached all-naughts. Trifle not with the football gods! Kansas City has won three games — save the celebration for later. If the Chiefs’ season implodes, this moment may be the cause.

We’re sorry. If you can’t celebrate after winning a game, when can you celebrate?

The 600 Club. TMQ thinks the Cleveland trade was a head-scratcher:

The Colts are likely to have a winning season: giving a high 2012 first-round pick for a low 2014 first-round pick is a bad deal unless Richardson is a bust. If he’s not a bust and churns out yards for Indianapolis, Cleveland faithful will be hit over the head yet again.

Cupcakes. “Alumni of Ohio State or the University of Miami — you should feel mortified.” We’d suggest that the people who should feel mortified are the alumni of Savannah State, who have allowed their school to join a division they’re outclassed in, and allowed the school to basically sell out young athletes for a big paycheck.

Jacksonville. Reader mail: clean diesels really aren’t all that great if you drive mostly in-city instead of highway miles, plus they’re positioned as premium models.

Saginaw Valley 35, Findlay 34. Single worst play of the season, so far: Leslie Frazier throwing the challenge flag.

Frazier is a highly paid NFL head coach who has 22 assistants, and neither he nor anyone around him on the Vikings’ sideline knew a muff cannot be advanced, or that a muff ruling cannot be challenged.

Could be, TMQ. But:

The referee later acknowledged an offseason rule change meant the Vikings should have been assessed a timeout, but not penalized.

If the refs don’t know the rules, is it fair to badmouth Frazier for not knowing them either?

That’s it, folks. Tune in next week when we’ll hear Gregg Easterbrook say “Hi-ho, Silver, and away!” And maybe he’ll talk about his book again.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 24th, 2013 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Books, California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Geek, Law, NFL, Sarcasm, 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.