Authentic games. Voting. Space: not a frontier, at least for man. All this and more in this week’s TMQ, after the jump…
And what are the “Authentic Games” standings and how are they determined?
So basically, “Authentic Games” standings amounts to “I pulled this out of my neither regions.” That’s pretty much all you need to know. 543 words down.
…if you don’t vote, promise not to complain about government for the next two years.
Go screw yourself, Easterbrook.
The “why vote” question is actually a pretty popular one amongst Libertarians and anarcho-capatalists. TMQ’s answer emphasizes the social side of voting, at least for him:
We wish our polling places had a “girls’ soccer club bake sale table”. Or any bake sale table, really. The reason we vote is that we see it as payback time: voting is our chance to tick the box and say (under our breath, to avoid disturbing other voters): “You’re going down in FLAMES, you tax-fattened hyena!” It doesn’t always work out that way, and we miss the visceral thrill of the old punch-card systems. But personal vengeance is still the primary reason we vote.
The updated ESPN Grade chart is here. We’re going to take a pass on diving into it, simply because there’s not a whole lot there to dive into; this is mostly a list, with a little bit of commentary.
Stats. Sweet: New England. Sour: Dallas. Mixed: Philadelphia – Houston. Luck.
Gee, those old-timers sure drank a lot. One point that we believe both Stanton Peele and Gregg Easterbrook missed: prodigious alcohol consumption was common because drinking water was dangerous.
San Diego at Miami scoreless, the Bolts went for it on fourth-and-1 on the Genetically Engineered Surimi’s 22.
Once again, Greg, “surimi” is a manufactured fish product, so “genetically engineered surimi” is a nonsense term.
Seems to us that there’s more evidence of actual voter fraud than there is of the Loch Ness Monster. It also seems to us that TMQ is dismissive of the idea that there are forms of vote fraud that aren’t “voter manipulation”.
“There’s a Reason Space Flight Is Really Expensive“. Actually, there are many reasons.
You mean like Apollo 1? Or Challenger? Or Columbia?
It seems like TMQ’s definition of “reckless” is “they didn’t spend billions of dollars building and developing it”. We’d take TMQ more seriously if he could actually point to a cut corner or other mistake Virgin Galactic made.
(And while we’re talking about cost-cutting, remember: “I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts — all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”)
“Wide receivers are plowing into defenders as never before, without drawing flags.”
Interestingly, while TMQ is opposed to private space flight, he’s also opposed to public space flight. Specifically, the ISS:
Hmmmm. You’d kind of think that maybe TMQ would consider that not having to give “special-interest subsidies” to congressional districts might be one reason why Virgin Galactic thinks it can go into space cheaper than NASA. But this kind of mental connection escapes TMQ.
Dear Gregg Easterbrook: who the frack are these people, and why should I give a damn?
We’d have welcomed some more analysis of the Miami-San Diego game. 37-0? Not what we were expecting.
What are the tax consequences of Nick Saban’s home purchase?
You know what’s unrealistic? “X-Men: Days of Future Past”, a movie based on a series of comic books. You know what else is unrealistic? Time travel.
Something something Redskins – Vikings.
Last Friday, Michigan athletic director Dave Brandon resigned under pressure from boosters and alums unhappy with the football team’s decline from the Top 25 and with stadium renovations intended to provide luxury to the 1 percent.
Uh, wasn’t part of the problem Brandon’s involvement with the concussed quarterback situation? And wasn’t part of the problem that Brandon was an arrogant jackass?
The football graduation rate under Brandon averaged 69 percent, which would be acceptable at some lesser schools but is embarrassing at an elite institution like the University of Michigan.
So what graduation rate do you think is acceptable for UMich, TMQ?
There’s election gods now? And they chortle, too? Escort crashes. The Steelers and Ravens are all bozos on this bus. The football gods are still chortling. We’re okay, thanks for asking.
“Adventures In Officiating”: Safety dance, “If the offense substitutes, the defense must have a chance to substitute” (doesn’t have quite the same ring as “if the glove don’t fit, you must acquitt”), and punt returns.
More goofy NBA trades. Can we just casually mention that, as we write this, the 76ers are 0-4? And the Lakers are 0-5? Thanks.
The 500 Club. 600. 700.
Chicken-(salad) plays: Penn State, Tampa Bay. Trinity (Illinois) 63, Trinity (Bible) 21.
TMQ picks up on a story we intended to cover, but skipped: five football players being arrested and charged with assault. A sixth player was arrested later, and the team forfeited last week’s game. The punchline: it was California University of Pennsylvania. Don’t know what to say, really, which is one of the reasons we didn’t cover it earlier.
That wraps things up for this week. Keep sending in those boxtops, kids, for your own secret decoder ring.