TMQ watch: August 17, 2010.

August 17th, 2010

It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

That is, the start of football season. (Yes, the loser update will return this year.)

And with the start of football season comes the return of the tastefully named Gregg Easterbrook and his “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” column for ESPN.

Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy Easterbrook’s column. I’ve been reading it since he was over at Slate, and find it to be one of the high points of my week during the period it runs. But I’ve been thinking for a while now that someone needs to highlight and respond to various things in TMQ.

Sometimes, Easterbrook does good work; he spent much of last season discussing the NFL’s response to head trauma among pro athletes, and I felt he was right on target. Sometimes, he uses his column to argue for things like increased Federal vehicle mileage requirements, and I think someone needs to respond to those arguments. Sometimes, he uses his column to go off on various SF TV shows for their lack of plausibility. And sometimes, Easterbrook just goes completely off the damn rails.

So I’m introducing the “Tuesday Morning Quarterback Watch”, to highlight when the man’s right, when I think he’s wrong, when I think he’s completely nuts, and some of Easterbrook’s odd obsessions.

In today’s TMQ:

  • Easterbrook argues that the outcomes of sporting events should never be reversed, except if an incorrect call occurs on the final play and a correct call would have resulted in a win for the opposing team. I haven’t heard anyone seriously argue a different viewpoint; I highlight this because I’m wondering if it will be one of his obsessions this season.
  • Wacky food and/or drink? Check. In this case, the Friendly’s cheeseburger served between two grilled cheese sandwiches. “At this restaurant, a lunch of Loaded Waffle Fries, Buffalo Chicken Supermelt and a milkshake weighs in at 3,670 calories.” I’m pretty dubious than anyone would order all three of those and try to eat them solo (though I will admit, that Buffalo Chicken Supermelt by itself doesn’t look terribly healthy). And do you really expect healthy food at a place with the slogan “Where ice cream makes the meal”?
  • “How long until babe spy Anna Chapman signs to play Natasha Fatale in a big-budget remake of “Rocky & Bullwinkle”?” Well, Gregg (can I call you “Gregg”?), given the utter failure of the last big-budget “Rocky and Bullwinkle” remake, I’m going to suggest that you look for this around the same time as David Letterman’s “Cold Day in Hell Special”.
  • Easterbrook kicks LeBron James around, but curiously, not ESPN for broadcasting the fiasco.
  • Easterbrook spends 699 words out of an 8,748 word column (about 8%) recapping NYT corrections from the NFL off season. Not sports related corrections; just NYT corrections in general. Dear Mr. Easterbrook; have you ever heard of “Regret the Error“? Or “The NYTPicker“?
  • Easterbrook finds an excuse to run a swimsuit photo of an attractive woman. No complaints here…
  • Easterbrook kicks Robert Byrd around some more.
  • Weasel coach bashing? Check.
  • Easterbrook kicks Al and Tipper Gore around some more. I would have held off on the “Al listens to rap music” joke, Gregg; the Onion beat you to it, and did it better.
  • Obligatory bashing of SF television shows? Check.
  • Wacky lawsuits? Check. I’ll give Easterbrook this: he may lean to the left politically, but he isn’t a blind liberal hack.
  • Easterbrook keeps threatening to retire the “Christmas Creep” watch, but hasn’t yet.

We’re fairly early into the NFL and TMQ season. So far, I haven’t detected any trends, but we’ll see how things go.

Oh, almost forgot! In addition to the normal TMQ column, we now have…the TMQ Trailer on Monday! How swell is that? For his first outing, Easterbrook uses the failure of JaMarcus Russell (“Ryan Leaf can relax — JaMarcus Russell has replaced him as the worst draft bust.” Can’t argue too much with that, Gregg.) as a jumping off point to “reimagine” the 2007 NFL draft, based on what we know now. I’m not sure what the point of this exercise is, except to highlight another Easterbrook trope (first-round draft choices, especially quarterbacks, are often overrated; most teams would be better served trading down to get second or third round choices) but it is mildly diverting.

Posted in Clippings, Sports, TMQ watch | 1 Comment »

The banshee screams for antelope meat.

August 17th, 2010

From the police blotter: our local sheriff’s office busted a couple for breaking into a place called “Wild Bubba’s Wild Game Grill” (no, really!) in Del Valle.

Our fun couple, the female half of which goes by the name “Amber”, are accused of prying open the front door and stealing:

  • a bottle of Tito’s vodka. Well, I give them some credit for stealing good vodka, but wouldn’t it have been easier to hit a liquor store? There’s no shortage of them out that way.
  • a TV and VCR. Shoot, guys, you probably could have picked those up at a garage sale, if not the Goodwill.
  • and 25 pounds of beef, buffalo, and antelope meat.

For this, “Amber” and her guy pal are facing felony burglary charges. As Jay G. says, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

More interesting to me, though, is the very existence of Wild Bubba’s, which had previously escaped my notice. I sense a road trip coming on in the next few weeks (as soon as some things get resolved and some scheduled events pass).

Posted in Beef, Clippings, Food, Law, Stupid | Comments Closed

Random hysterical notes.

August 16th, 2010

Interestingly, today is both:

The second link is by way of FARK. I was not aware until fairly recently that Kittinger not only held the record for highest parachute jump, he was also shot down over Vietnam and spent 11 months as a prisoner of war.

Ordinarily, I would suggest that someone needs to write a biography of Colonel Kittinger (he was a captain at the time of the jump, but retired from the Air Force as a colonel). But wait! Somebody has! (I have that book, but have not had a chance to read it yet. Craig Ryan’s The Pre-Astronauts: Manned Ballooning on the Threshold of Space is a pretty spiffy book, though, so I expect his work on Kittinger’s autobiography to be just as good.)

Posted in Books, Geek, Planes | Comments Closed

Random notes: August 16, 2010.

August 16th, 2010

Obit watch: James J. Kilpatrick.

For those who are wondering, I’ll save you the trouble: I couldn’t find any “Point-Counterpoint” videos on YouTube, and Shana Alexander died in 2005.

In other news, Austin’s MetroRail service was disrupted this morning. Why? Well, someone found a mysterious package on the tracks that contained…a cow tongue studded with nails, along with a note (“incoherent”, according to the Statesman), and a photograph. There was also a glass jar found nearby with an unidentified liquid inside.

Edited to add: Lawrence sends along this link to cow tongues found nailed to trees at Prospect Park around this time last year. Speculation in the linked article is that this is some sort of Santeria ritual intended to stop gossip, which seems to fit in with speculation by Statesmen commentators.

Posted in Clippings, Obits, Trains | Comments Closed

Friday loser update.

August 13th, 2010

I will be darned. Baltimore no longer has the worst record in baseball. (40-75, .348 winning percentage, projected 56.376 wins.)

That honor just barely belongs to Pittsburgh. (39-75, .342 winning percentage, projected 55.404 wins.)

And Houston is still holding on to fourth place in the division. (48-67, .425 winning percentage, projected 68.85 wins.)

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Who guards the (Bay) Guardian?

August 12th, 2010

Answer: the First District Court of Appeal.

We have previously noted the ongoing legal battle between the SF Bay Guardian and the SF Weekly (owned by Village Voice Media) over alleged predatory price-cutting by the latter. A jury awarded the Bay Guardian $21 million, but the Weekly appealed the decision.

That decision has now been upheld by the appellate court.

There is a claim in the linked article that the two parties have “reached a settlement”. Apparently, this settlement came after the SFBG was told they could seize and sell the Weekly‘s delivery trucks.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law, Media | 1 Comment »

Obit watch.

August 12th, 2010

Everyone and his brother is on this already, but I have to get my kicks in: “Cathy“. (Chicago Tribune.)

The best commentary I’ve seen so far is from Josh and his gang over at the Comics Curmudgeon website.

With “Cathy” gone, that takes care of one of the comics on my top ten hit list. Now if we could only do something about “The Amazing (Glacial) Spider-Man”, “Gasoline Alley”, “Funky Winkerbean”, and “Crankshaft”, I’d be a very happy man.

Edited to add: Lawrence was on my case because I didn’t mention “Dinette Set” in the above list. I pointed out that I didn’t intend for that to be a complete list. Then I went and clicked on the Chron link for today’s “Dinette Set”, just to make sure the damn thing was still being published.

Wow. This isn’t even just “not funny”.  This doesn’t even approach “what’s the deal with airline food?” levels. There’s not even an attempt at humor here; this is just someone who can’t draw or write, recounting an event without giving us any clue as to why we should find this interesting or amusing.

Reddit’s “anti-joke” thread is funnier than this. Heck, your average NYT editorial is funnier than this.

Posted in Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

The Thais that bind.

August 12th, 2010

Rob Balon wonders in his latest blog entry, “why so many Austinites seem to be either indifferent toward or uncomfortable with Thai food“. As Dr. Balon frequently does, he suggests that Austinites are so used to barbecue and TexMex that “something relatively unfamiliar has a hard time breaking through”.

Dr.  Balon’s essay is curious for a few reasons. First of all, he’s talking about Thai food, yet completely omits the longest lived (as far as I know) and single most successful group of Thai restaurants in Austin. We could argue about the merits of Thai Kitchen versus Madam Mam’s all day long, but just simply ignoring the metaphorical 800-pound elephant in the room is…curious, to say the least.

Dr. Balon does mention Madam Mam’s, but I find his comments kind of dismissive. He doesn’t even note that there are actually three locations; the third one is near the Alamo Drafthouse in the Village, and to my untrained eye appears to be doing well.

“And yet just a few miles south on W 6th st. fine restaurants like Lemongrass and Thai Tara have languished and ultimately closed.” I would have to go back to the archives and do some research, but my recollection is that the closing of Lemongrass was a lot more complicated than that. As for Thai Tara, it stayed open much longer than I would have expected; I’d suggest that it closed almost entirely due to a bad location, and especially due to parking issues downtown.

Dr. Balon mentions relatively new places such as Chon Som and Titaya, but I see even more Thai places that he doesn’t mention popping up on street corners all over town. (For example, Pad Thai on Guadalupe, and Thai Cuisine at Parmer and I-35.) Thai Village seems to be doing much better than the shopping center it’s in. Bangkok Cuisine has stayed in business for many years (how, I don’t exactly know). Compared to the Thai situation in, say, 2007, we’re living in a golden age.

Could some of these places (like Satay) use more customers? Dr. Balon seems to know more about this than I do. But let’s say that they could use more customers; is that because they serve Thai food, or is that because of the economy in general? If we compared Thai places to TexMex places, or barbecue joints, would we see a similar trend towards a smaller customer base?

Dr. Balon may have a point, but I don’t think he’s mustered the evidence to back it up.

Posted in Clippings, Food | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#14 in a series).

August 11th, 2010

I’m putting this under the “Art, damn it, art!” watch because I haven’t made up my mind about this one.

Would you pay someone to sharpen your pencil for you? (This is not a metaphor for something else: when I say “sharpen your pencil”, I mean a regular #2 pencil, with graphite and an eraser.)

Would you pay someone $15 to sharpen your pencil for you?

Would you pay someone $15 to sharpen your pencil for you, using a “specially selected” implement that “suits your pencil best”?

Would you pay David “Get Your War On” Rees $15 to sharpen your pencil for you?

My first thought was: this is moronic.

But considering it some more, “artisanal pencil sharpening” could be a subtle and brilliant parody of the whole “artisanal” movement. Artisanal food, artisanal axes; why not “artisanal pencil sharpening”?

Posted in Art, Clippings | 2 Comments »

DEFCON 18 updates.

August 10th, 2010

I’m actively going back and adding links to my original DEFCON 18 posts as they become available and/or I find them.

However, I know some people use RSS to read WCD, and don’t automatically get updated posts in their feed.  So I’m also going to try posting lists of updates I’ve added, at least for the DEFCON 18 stuff.

DEFCON 18 day 1:

DEFCON 18 day 2:

If you’re aware of links I’ve missed so far (and by the way, thanks Gremlin), or if there’s a talk you saw that I haven’t covered, please feel free to leave comments.

Posted in DEFCON 18 | Comments Closed

Firing watch.

August 10th, 2010

The Seattle Mariners (43-70) fired Don Wakamatsu, their manager, yesterday. As the Seattle paper notes, this took place right before the Mariners’ celebration of Japanese heritage day, and Wakamatu’s firing was just the latest in a long string of odd incidents this year.

Missed this on Sunday, but the Pirates fired their pitching coach and bench coach.

And the city of Maywood (remember Maywood?) is considering firing the city of Bell, due to the ongoing salary scandal in Bell.

Not exactly a firing, but I’m going to throw this in anyway: LA County Sheriff Lee Baca is refusing to release records involving the death of Ruben Salazar. Salazar was a television journalist covering an anti-Vietnam war rally in East LA on August 29, 1970; he was killed when a sheriff’s deputy fired a tear-gas grenade into a bar and hit Salazar in the head.

The LAT doesn’t mention this aspect of Salazar’s life, but I will. I’ve been interested in Salazar ever since I read The Great Shark Hunt and discovered Salazar was a close friend of Thompson’s. Actually, more than just a close friend; the “300-pound Samoan attorney” in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was Salazar (who, according to Thompson, was somewhat upset that Thompson chose to conceal his identity).

Edited to add: Whoops, I was mistaken. I had Salazar confused with Oscar Zeta Acosta. That’s what I get for relying on my memory while I was at work, and not waiting until I got home to check my sources. HST did write about Salazar in The Great Shark Hunt, though.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Firings, Politics, Sports | Comments Closed

Friday loser update.

August 6th, 2010

It has been a while since I’ve done one of these, what with travel and all, but I did warn you I was laying off the Astros updates….

Anyway, Houston’s actually passed the Cubs to move into 4th place in the division. At .439, that works out to 71.118 projected wins.

Baltimore’s at 35-73, for a .324 winning percentage, and 52.488 projected wins.

Pittsburgh’s at 38-70, for a .352 winning percentage, and 57.024 projected wins.

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

I hate to say this.

August 5th, 2010

But I believe President Obama has done something right.

Back during the Vietnam war, there was a four-star general in the Air Force named John D. Lavelle. In 1972, he was accused of ordering unauthorized bombing missions in North Vietnam, and of trying to cover up those missions. General Lavelle denied the charges, and claimed the missions were authorized; however, he was demoted and forced to resign anyway.

Lavelle died in 1979, but insisted in interviews that the missions were authorized, and that he was acting on the orders of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Yesterday, President Obama asked the Senate to restore General Lavelle’s missing star, which would effectively (in my humble opinion, and in the opinion of the WP) restore General Lavelle’s honor.

The president’s decision is based on evidence uncovered by Aloysius Casey, a retired general, and his son, Patrick, who were researching a biography of another Air Force general. In the process of their research, they found documents showing that, yes, the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew of and authorized the missions.

Even more damning, they found audio recordings showing that President Nixon also ordered and knew of the missions, and actually dithered about whether or not to throw General Lavelle under the bus.

“I just don’t want him to be made a goat, goddamnit,” Nixon told his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, on June 14, 1972, a few days after it was disclosed that Lavelle had been demoted for the allegedly unauthorized attacks. “You, you destroy a man’s career. . . . Can we do anything now to stop this damn thing?”

On June 26, Nixon’s conscience intervened in another conversation with Kissinger. “Frankly, Henry, I don’t feel right about our pushing him into this thing and then, and then giving him a bad rap,” the president said. “I don’t want to hurt an innocent man.“

Posted in Clippings, Leadership, Politics | 1 Comment »

One Ryan, one Rangers.

August 5th, 2010

We have previously covered the strange events surrounding the sale of the Texas Rangers. Now, things appear to be at an end: Nolan Ryan’s group won the auction, beating out a group that included Mark Cuban (owner of the Dallas Mavericks).

Given how contentious the auction seems to have been (one of the lawyers for Ryan’s side apparently cursed out the lawyer for the court-appointed restructuring officer; remember, as part of this sale, the Rangers filed for Chapter 11), I would not be shocked to see additional legal action attempting to block the sale.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Sports | Comments Closed

I like to call this one…

August 4th, 2010

“Beauty and the Beast”.

(Photo credit: Mike the Musicologist.)

Posted in Photography, Travel | 1 Comment »

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