TMQ Watch: February 5, 2013.

Today’s the last TMQ of the season!
Hurrah, hurrah!
No more “cosmic thoughts”!
Hurrah, hurrah!
The readers will cheer and the blogger will shout!
And we’ll all feel happy after the last TMQ of the year…

“Offense rules this decade.” Plus: “the Super Bowl was the best game of the year” (Really? We didn’t watch any of it, since none of our teams were in the hunt.), “The Ravens were awful on defense”, and why did San Francisco fall apart? (Hint: his name is Harbaugh.)

Sweet: Frank Gore’s late third-quarter score. Sour: “the Niners reached Baltimore’s 9, 8 and 5 without scoring a touchdown”. Mixed: San Francisco’s fourth-quarter collapse.

TMQ still thinks he’s Romenesko. But we’ll give him a point for noting this NYT correction:

“An article about Basque sheep herders in Idaho misidentified one of the ingredients of a croqueta served at Bar Gernika in Boise.”

We missed that one! And not only have we eaten at Bar Gernika, we had the croqueta! And their menu is online!

What are croquetas you ask?
They are a wonderful combination of butter, onion, chicken, flour & milk. They’re coated with bread crumbs and fried. You’ll be craving them!!

(If you find yourself in Boise, go to Bar Gernika.)

R.C. Torres of Eagle Pass, Texas wins the TMQ Challenge. “…accompanying visual incorporates both Cold Coach = Victory and the all-important concept of cheerleader professionalism.” Yeah. We’ll see how “Cold Coach = Victory” works in 2014.

How about those Ravens? “During the regular season this team was unimpressive.” “But the Super Bowl is often about who’s playing better at the end.” Personally, we thought the Super Bowl was about who scored the most points, and who had the best commercials.

Flacco’s own father calls him “dull.”

And making Jim Caldwell offensive coordinator worked. Hmmmmmmmm.

Hollywood keeps making movies based on toys! And TMQ is still less funny than he thinks he is. (We swear we saw a serious proposal for a “Chutes and Ladders” movie. And we’d pay money to watch “Thomas the Tank Engine Versus Godzilla”. Come to think of it, our nephews have so much TtTE stuff lying around, we could probably make this ourself, “Bambi vs. Godzilla” style.)

Hey, let’s sing the whole National Anthem! Good idea, Gregg. Especially the fourth verse:

O, thus be it ever when freemen shall stand,
Between their lov’d homes and the war’s desolation;
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

The new nonfiction book “Last Ape Standing,” by Chip Walter, details new research that suggests Neanderthals, rendered extinct by Homo sapiens about 30,000 years ago, were stronger and had larger brains than people. So how, the book asks, did we beat them?

Deadly assault spears.

Cosmic thought time: gee, that Voyager I sure is cool. Sure is, Gregg, until it comes back around and tries to exterminate humanity.

Chicken-<salad> kicks: San Francisco.

Your columnist thinks the past six years of reckless borrowing, endorsed by presidents of both parties, has made the problem of government corruption worse: creating a huge pool of unaccountable funny money to steal from, along with a mindset that nobody takes seriously that silly old concept of being responsible about debt. The United States has borrowed more in the past decade than in the previous two centuries combined. Yet little is getting built — where are the new roads, bridges, subways and schools that would help grow the economy? Much of the borrowed money is being wasted, stolen or lavished on high living by politicians and military leaders.

Harbaugh histrionics. Hang in there, Hollywood.

…in the series finale of the TV show “Unforgettable;”

Uh, Gregg?

Randy Moss wouldn’t even make TMQ’s Top 10 receivers. More on Ray Lewis.

Was that a fake Iranian space monkey? Fake missiles, fake plane, why not a fake space monkey?

But suppose Iran did launch a monkey into space and then bring the animal back alive. This only draws Iran within half a century of the United States, because NASA put monkeys Able and Baker into space and brought them back in 1959, when Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a toddler.

Hell, we could probably put together a team that could launch a monkey into space. It’d be more complicated if you wanted the monkey to come back alive…

Did the Olympic Games curse Atlanta? Nate Silver isn’t all that hot, at least when it comes to football. TMQ, on the other hand…

Tappan Zee Bridge?

New York Magazine reports that $88 million has been spent just to study a bridge replacement — not for architecture drawings, just study. The original Tappan Zee Bridge, completed in 1955, cost $675 million in today’s dollars and required three years to complete. New York State officials are saying the replacement will cost at least $3 billion and take five years to build. New York Magazine warns the price is lowballing for an expected cost much higher.

TMQ argues:

Twitter and similar services seek to recapture the sensation of childhood. When you are little, your parents wanted to know everything happening to you, everyone you spend time with, everything that was said. Once you are an adult, nobody cares about daily details like where you are and what you are talking about. Twitter creates the illusion that not only does someone else care — thousands of people care! Twitter is all about the person sending the tweet, not those who receive it.

There may be something to this. But looking at the folks we pay attention to on Twitter, they fall into three general categories:

  1. Personal friends who we actually give a flying f–k about.
  2. People who have genuinely interesting (to us) things to say (both Penn and Teller are good examples of this).
  3. General purpose news and information sources that use Twitter, such as Y Combinator.

People read other people’s Twitter feeds because they’re interested in what those people have to say, for one reason or another. TMQ makes us feel here like he fails to understand the distinction between, say, Y Combinator tweeting that a new largest prime has been found, and the four-year-old child’s declaration to Mommy that he just made a poo-poo in the toilet.

“Twitter is all about the person sending the tweet, not those who receive it.” And you could say the same thing about blogging. And about TMQ, for that matter. We see blogging and tweeting and TMQ as all being about the same thing: they are a way of saying to the world, “Look. Here is where I am today. Here is something that I think can help you. Here is something that I think you should know. Here is something that I think you will find interesting.”

How about those Niners? The pass rush declined in the post season, and “the Niners’ secondary simply did not play well”.

TMQ’s annual book recommendations. We’ve heard a lot about the Katherine Boo book; we haven’t read it, but we have read some of Boo’s other writing, and can easily believe this book is worth your time. The Holt book sounds possibly interesting, and TMQ actually recommends a book by Instapundit? Now that’s cosmic, man.

Worst play of the season: Jim Harbaugh.

(Hey, did you notice TMQ didn’t bring up the whole sibling rivalry angle? We did.)

As usual, I recommend you employ the offseason to engage in spiritual growth. Take long walks. Perform volunteer work. Exercise more and eat less. Drink less soda, more tea: green tea is soothing, oolong tea may lower blood pressure.

Take heart in the bedeepening gloom
That your dog is finally getting enough cheese.
And reflect that whatever fortune may be your lot,
It could only be worse in Milwaukee.

We’ll see you around draft time, maybe, if we’re all still here.

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