Continuing our in lieu of content theme, I couldn’t find a good video of Norman Greenbaum. So here’s one from Dr. and the Medics, who actually do a pretty good version of the song.
I’m willing to suggest that this is quite underrated as a Christian hymn. And both versions have that great wide guitar sound.
I’m not really feeling the snark this week, for obvious reasons, so let’s just jump into this week’s column.
TMQ believes the 3-4 defense is just a fad, and teams will revert to the 4-3 sooner or later. It takes TMQ 746 words to say this.
Highlight from the stats of the week: “The Lions have lost 22 consecutive road games and now threaten the record of 24 consecutive road losses held by — the Lions.”
Ivelisse is also just kind of okay looking. You know, TMQ used to pick cheerleaders who were not only attractive, but also had some intellectual heft to them. What gives, Gregg?
Sweet and sour plays: Kansas City vs. San Francisco, New England vs. Buffalo (and Tennessee vs. Giants), Pittsburgh vs. Tampa, Buffalo vs. New England again, New Orleans vs. Atlanta, Miami vs. Jets.
NPR no longer stands for anything; it’s just “NPR”, not “National Public Radio”. Same with BP, KFC, ESPN, AARP, etc.
The new Meadowlands stadium is widely hated, according to an unscientific survey of friends of TMQ.
Going back to cheerleaders for a minute, Gregg Easterbrook believes that cheerleaders are being exploited. Not because they’re cheerleaders, or because many of them are scantily clad; no, the problem is that they aren’t being paid for their work. Cheerleaders typically get $50 – $100 per game, and nothing for rehearsals, personal appearances, calender sales, sales of their photos through the NFL.com shop, etc. WCD finds ourselves agreeing with TMQ’s position here; yes, pay the cheerleaders!
Christmas creep. Jersey Bowl. Puzzling plays in the Raiders-Cardinals and Seattle-San Diego games. A ridiculous extended parallel (complete with a quiz, the lazy man’s way of filling column space) between Tom Brady and Samson (the one in the Bible).
Should youth football be banned? TMQ’s answer; don’t let kids under the age of 12 play tackle football.
Devin Hester’s success in returning kicks is due to excellent blocking. And it’s hard to win a game when you accumulate 18 penalties. Ridiculous disclaimer of the week: Bridgestone Tires.
More creep. Crabtree curse. Sparta Trojans. Stop Me Before I Blitz Again!
Yes, Michael Vick looks good, but the teams he’s played against so far have a combined record of 10-28 since 2009.
In concussion related news, TMQ notes that there’s a new kind of mouth guard on the market, which gives a dentist quality fit at a price lower than a dentist fitted guard.
The Colts are back in form. I was hoping we’d be able to get through a season without Colts worship.
Chicken-<salad> punts. Manly-men drives. Wasteful spending on bodyguards (again, Rick Perry makes an appearance).
TMQ is probably the only sports column that would engage in Large Hadron Collider bashing.
Damn! I missed the Indiana University of Pennsylvania – Slippery Rock game! I also missed the Otterbein – Heidleberg game. I wonder if they serve beer at the latter?
College football: style over substance, cupcake watch, chicken-<salad> punts.
Reader comments: Notre Dame and allowing fifth year students to play. Someone else took issue with last week’s comment about Reggie Bush and “nothing ethically wrong”. Counterpoint on military flyovers from a naval aviator. Madden as training tool. NCAA manuals for download. And lots more concussion discussion.
Tune in next week, when we’ll hear TMQ break Ralph Wilson’s balls over the fact that O.J. Simpson’s name is still on the wall of the Buffalo Bills stadium. Really. I’m not making that up.
I’m hoping to get more content up tonight (including this week’s TMQ watch) but I wanted to quickly note the first cancellation of the television season; the heavily hyped Lone Star.
There was some discussion of this at the SDC on Saturday, and it turns out we’re an elite group; two people had watched the first episode, while a third (your obedient servant) had recorded it, but not watched it yet. Frankly, I was somewhat shocked Fox didn’t cancel it after the first episode; a serialized show like this isn’t going to pick up viewers in the second and subsequent episodes.
Just for grins, and because this came up over sushi on Sunday, here’s the Wikipedia list of shows cancelled after one episode (more or less; there’s some special cases noted in the article).
Since the status of actual content is still kind of up in the air, I thought I’d fill in the gaps by linking to some songs that seem…fitting. Or, at least, songs that are on my playlist for times like this.
My friend Pat Cadigan first introduced me to this song, and that’s one of many things I owe her a great debt for.
Here are the obituaries for my stepfather: HouChron and Statesman. Both are basically the same, as we provided the obit to the funeral home, and they, in turn, provided the obit to the two papers. (We ran it in both the Houston and Austin papers because he has family in Houston.)
I did not get a figure on the HouChron, but the Statesman charged approximately $46 a column inch (there are roughly 40 words in a column inch, according to the funeral home) to run the obit, with an extra charge of $86 if you wanted to run a photo with it.
Edited to add: Actually, it was $42.56 per column inch, and $85.12 for each photo.
George Blanda, the man who led the Houston Oilers to two championships.
That’s the Houston Oilers of the AFL, by the way.
I wanted to link to this story about changes at Austin’s KGSR over the past year, and the payoff for those changes (more listeners). The story is somewhat buried on the Statesman‘s web site. I only discovered it because I was reading the Life and Arts section over breakfast this morning.
This story also represents something else that I’ve brought up before; the entitled attitude of so many people in Austin, who think that nothing (public or private) should ever change. Personally, I’m in favor of anything that decreases the chance I’ll hear Bob Schneider or Kasey Chambers on the radio.
I don’t have a lot to say this week, except that I was right about Houston teams breaking your heart.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Buffalo
Cleveland
Detroit
Carolina
San Francisco
Before the chaos set in yesterday, we had a spectacularly good meal at Tino’s Seafood in San Antonio.
The place looks kind of divey, and the menu is a bit limited, but they make the best fried fish and shrimp I’ve had in a long time. Both were not greasy, not oily, and nicely fried with a crisp crust. Everything is fried to order; nothing sits around under the heat lamp all day. A decent sized basket of four large shrimp and two large fish fillets with fries or cole slaw goes for $6.99. They also have ceviche, shrimp cocktail, and soups, none of which I tried, but they looked pretty good.
I found it interesting that in addition to tartar sauce (one slight drawback; you get one tartar sauce with the meal, and extras are 20 cents each), there were also three sauces on the tables; cocktail, what I believe was an escabeche (pickled vegatable) sauce, and a habenero cocktail sauce that was quite tasty.
Tino’s appears to be a regional chain; the other locations are in Brownsville and South Padre Island, as far as I can tell.
Highly recommended. I’d happily go back.
Pittsburgh has blown their shot at losing 110 games. Currently; 53-100, .346 winning percentage, projected 56.052 wins.
Houston’s at 74-80, .481 winning percentage, projected 77.922 wins.
Baltimore: 61-92, .399 winning percentage, projected 64.638 wins.
Coming on strong is Seattle: 58-95, .379 winning percentage, projected 61.398 wins.
My stepfather passed away earlier this afternoon.
Things around here are likely to be chaotic (and not in the D&D sense) for at least the next few days. I’m not sure how much blogging I will be doing; maybe none, maybe quite a bit.
Please bear with me while the “free ice cream machine” (to steal LabRat’s inimitable coinage) deals with the chaos.
Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, has a new “cookbook” coming out “sometime in the not-too-distant future”, says the LAT.
(According to Amazon, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
“The food world eagerly awaits the former Microsoft technology officer’s book on the science of cooking.”
I don’t know that I’m really representative of the food world, but speaking strictly for myself: no. I’d much rather read Ferran Adrià’s book
Giant squid are roaming the Pacific, and they’re not just wiping out fish stocks; they’re eating fishermen.
Honestly, I take this entire article with a grain of salt. However, any time I have a chance to link to a story about giant man-eating squid, I can’t pass it up.
(Hattip: Dinosaur Comics. Really.)
So the city of Bell hired a guy named Randy Adams to be their chief of police. Mr. Adams used to be the chief in Glendale; I can’t find exact figures, but according to the LAT, the Glendale force is much larger than the Bell force. Looking over Glendale’s Wikipedia page, it appears their cops are a pretty active bunch.
In spite of Bell’s force being smaller than Glendale’s, and Bell having a smaller population, the city of Bell decided to pay Chief Adams $457,000 a year, which the LAT describes as being more than twice what he was making in Glendale.
Sleazy enough for you? But wait, there’s more!
At the same time Chief Adams was being hired for the post in Bell, he was also filing an application for a disability pension from the city of Bell.
Yes, you read that right. At the same time the city was hiring him, they were also approving his application for disability payments (without any waiting or vesting period), which would have amounted to $411,000 a year. Of that, the first $205,500 would have been tax-free.
In the words of TJIC, “Rope”.
The LAT apparently would like for you to feel sorry for someone in the city of Bell.
The question is, who?
Not Robert “Ratso” Rizzo and his cronies. They’re under arrest and facing a recall election. If that doesn’t work, Jerry Brown’s going to try to get them kicked out of office anyway.
Should we feel sorry for the citizens of Bell? According to the LAT, they were literally dancing in the streets when the arrests went down.
(Edited to add: Here’s a second article from the LAT about the street celebrations in Bell. Unlike the first, it does not mention dancing, but the guy playing “Another One Bites The Dust” is a nice touch. Of course, the LAT had to find the one moron in the crowd…
“They were making a lot of money, but I don’t have an issue with it because they were taking care of us,” she said. “We have a clean city, good parks, no graffiti. It’s very safe…. I’m not saying the salaries and other things that were going on were fair, because they weren’t, but it’s not like they were getting paid a lot and not doing a good job.”
See also Mussolini and the trains running on time. Of course they were doing a good job. Except for those illegal taxes. And the towing scandal. And the illegal sewer fees. And the fake meetings.)
Even better for the citizens of Bell,
The state controller’s office has found that Bell collected about $5.6 million in illegally imposed tax increases and business-license fees — and now must refund an amount equal to more than one-third of its $13.5-million general fund.
Of course, having to cough up that much money means there isn’t enough left to spend on essential city services, like Rizzo’s million-dollar salary. Perhaps the city could sell bonds to fill the gap? Except that Bell’s bond status, according to Standard and Poor’s, is “junk”.
So what next? Cut city services? Place the city into receivership? The LAT article seems to view these as last-resort options. We would suggest that these should be first resort options. Does the city really need 47 police officers? Couldn’t they contract out services to LA County?
Here’s the City of Bell website. Perhaps our loyal readers could explore that and propose some cuts in order to meet the budget.