TEN JACK TEN

Emails marked “urgent” are almost always the least likely to contain something that will matter to me.

Driving at or near the speed limit in the leftmost highway lane does not mean you are a person making a principled stand about traffic laws, it means you are a jackass who wants to impose his will on other people.

Rules are for chumps to follow while winners get things done!

I tend to fall on the “chump” side of rule-following.

Luxury car ownership is less reliable as an indicator of wealth than as an indicator of how much someone wants to impress strangers.

If a video file’s format can’t be played by an iPod or iPhone, then iTunes will not let you copy the file to the device.

Typying little “brand-naming” quirks like a lowercase “i” before the capital letter in a product’s name makes me feel like a doofus.

If this country truly had a “capitalist” economic system, then the guys who screwed up the banking and investment system would be broke and shamed out of the business community instead of having their asses (and bonuses) saved by the government.

It’s pretty easy to look at a list of possible side effects for a medication and convince yourself that you have at least half of them.

Apple shouldn’t let people review programs available through their App Store who haven’t downloaded the program.

-  As far as I can tell, the Cowboys play the first quarter of a game and then lose interest in playing football.  Are they discussing where they’re going to eat after the game?  Are they worried about their mutual fund returns?  Are they sharing tips on how to play Wii Bowling?  Who knows.  Only the start of the fourth quarter seems to get these guys to focus on playing the game. 

-  One of the Dallas Morning News writers quipped that last-season Pro Bowl pick Romo was currently the fourth-best QB in the NFC East.  Maybe, but McNabb is just as capable of losing it for no apparent reason as Romo.  It used to be that I was down on Parcells for benching Romo in favor of Bledsoe, on the basis that Bledsoe was on the declining end of his career and had shown that he would at least provide one truly boneheaded move per game that would hurt the team.  Romo’s been racking up the boneheaded moves this season, last week’s was the decision to leap instead of slide at the end of his scramble, resulting in a fumble.

-  My experiment worked, Dolphins win 17-10.  I will now resume ignoring them.

-  Which winless team sucks the most?  Detroit, Houston, or Cincinatti?  My vote goes to Detroit, who don’t even seem to be competitive in their games.  Houston’s not too good, but Indianaplis needed some 4th-quarter magic to beat them.  From what I saw on Sunday, Cincinatti should be able to win against a team like the Rams, Seahawks, Chiefs, Cardinals, or 49ers.

-  The Eagles have a losing record because they can’t finish strong.

-  The Saints better hope Reggie Bush stays healthy.

-  The Jacksonville Jaguars and the Carolina Panthers are still too new for me to care about them, for better or worse.  There’s no historical personality for the team.  Oddly enough, the Oilers history seems sufficient to cover both the Texans and the Titans in my mind.

-  As much as I wish it wasn’t, the best team in the leage right now is the Giants. 

If you’re one of the folks who have taken the time to load the blog lately, you’ve probably been disappointed in my output lately.  To be honest, so have I.

I think I’ve figured out the problem – a new medication I started to manage some health risk factors (I’m not particularly ill or looking for sympathy here, just explaining).  The medication has some side effects, so the doc had me ramp up the dosage over time, and I started taking the full dose about 2 weeks ago. 

A couple of days ago, I realized something.  I did not give a damn about anything I usually cared about, and hadn’t for a while.  I felt somehow alienated and dissociated from things, like I was watching a movie about myself.  That lasted until about 5pm last night, and hopefully isn’t coming back now that I’ve acclimated.  But now I’m watching for it.

So, on with the posting.

-  How to beat the Cowboys:  combine a stacked line of scrimmage with smothering man-to-man coverage on defense, with a balance of straight-ahead running and a top-notch wide reciever, then let them get frustrated trying to catch up from behind.  The Skins nailed the game plan perfectly.  Good thing the Cowboys have a streak of weak (or winless) teams lined up for the next 4 games.

-  Against the Packers, I was surprised to see Terrell Owens making blocks downfield and making touchdown-saving tackles against a defender with an intercepted ball.  Now, Owens is whining about not getting the ball (despite catching 7 of 18 balls thrown his way and having 2 rushing opportunities). Ah, things are back to normal.

- Old guy versus old guy:  Favre beats Warner with career-high TD passes.  Warner loses with what should be (but probably isn’t) career high turnovers turned into points by the other team.  Who knew Warner would outlast the guy who replaced him on the Rams as an NFL starter?  (Woops, I’m reading that Bulger already got his job back).

-  I insult – you win!  Last week, I point out that KC was sucking hard.  This week, KC gets its first win against the Broncos, breaking a 16-game losing streak.  Why am I providing this amazingly valuable service for free?

-  An experiment:  Hey, Maimi.  Yeah, you Dolphins.  YOU SUCK.  I can’t believe you and your pothead running back have even won one game.

-  The Eagles became the first NFC East team to lose to a non-NFC East opponent.  So there.

-  The answer is FOUR.  The question is “how many games do weak coaches get before being fired.” 

-  I meant to point this out last week but forgot.  NBC’s halftime coverage for the Sunday Night Football games is awful.  It’s amateurish, incomplete, and inadequate.  They can’t match up the scores with the clips, and they can’t provide all the scores.  They think we’d rather hear them blather than get actual information and see actual football highlights.  If I was more artistically inclined, I’d whip up a picture of a peacock with its head up its own ass.  Sorry, reader, you’ll have to supply that image yourself.

While Galveston and Houston took a beating from Ike, our main concern was how it would affect the weather for the boys’ games at 10am and 1pm. We end up getting wet, but nothing awful hits our county.

In week 2, AJH’s Raiders took the win from the week before and built on it. They drub a weak opponent 32-0, and ended the game on the other team’s 5-yard line. AJH even pulls off a couple of shotgun snaps in the fourth quarter after the first week’s shotgun-related turnover.

Week 2 was bad to worse for RJH’s Hurricanes. Their inability to stop the off-tackle run cost them dearly as they gave up 27 points and scored only 6. From the sidelines, it looked to me that the kids hearts weren’t really in the game.

Immune to it all, RJH plays well, recovering a fumble and making a few good stops on defense. But he (like many others on his side) missed the runner once on the way to the goal line. I figured there would be a lot of containment drills on Monday. If they fixed that, they would have a fighting chance.

Then, on Monday, an email went out that there would be parent-coach meeting before the Monday practice. It seemed that some of the parents felt that the coach wasn’t treating the boys with enough respect or was working them too hard so that they weren’t having “fun.” My take was that their kids were half-assing it and that getting your ass kicked was almost never going to be fun. The drama went on and on, consuming the hour-and-a-half practice time while the parents complained. I tried my best to point out that the point of this was not “fun” as much a learning about commitment, teamwork, and accomplishment, but I’m not sure I made any friends with the team moms. Personally, I never had one problem with the coach, and thought that this could undermine the team for no good reason. One kid ends up leaving the team, but I can’t really remember which one it was.

Then, week 3’s games. A hot, sunny Texas day.

RJH got hurt, twisting his ankle in a pileup and limping off the field minus one sock and shoe. He bounces back quickly, though, asking to get put back in despite being less than 100%. He makes some plays and guts it out. He’s always been a tough-minded kid.

The Hurricanes finally get their first win, scoring three running touchdowns and holding the other team to one. Last year they lost their first three before a win, so I guess they’re getting warmed up quicker this season. At the meeting, the coach had predicted this would be a better week for them because this was a weaker team, and hoped that it wouldn’t validate the complaints. We’ll see, I suppose. But then, winning is an amazing deodorant.

The Raiders chew up a weak opponent 38-0. The boys have been playing together for years and it shows. They’re completing passes, returning kicks for touchdowns, and dominating the line of scrimmage, despite being short a couple of players. AJH plays the whole game as center, and all but two defensive series. He played well and got a fumble recovery. There were coaches in the stands from two of the next three teams they were going to play, scouting the opposition. I can’t believe they take it this seriously, but it starts early.

-  I should charge teams for me to question their talent.  After I slam the Raiders, they stomp their next opponent.  After I call the Bills inconsistent, they go to 3-0 and look like the team to beat in the AFC East.  After I claim Rogers will have a hard time following Favre in Green Bay, he dominates his next game (no shame in losing to the Cowboys the week after that).

-  The Cowboys-Eagles game was the best Monday Night game I’ve seen in a while.  That game had everything — turnovers, long bombs, breakaway runs, bonehead mistakes, and multiple lead changes.  Worth staying up for, but then I don’t live in the Eastern Time Zone.

-  The Cowboys followed that game up by grinding down a perfectly competent Packers team.  They look great, but the NFC East has again become one of the toughest divisions (doubt it? the only 2 undefeated teams in the NFC are there and the other 2 teams have only lost to other NFC East teams), so no guarantees.  And they’re playing the Redskins next week, those games have been completely unpredictable over the years.

-  Two seasons ago, Favre taught us that he can’t carry a team with the force of his will.  This year appears to be a reminder of the fact.

-  KC has been in decline for years, but damn.

-  If I call the Colts out of contention after three weeks, does that mean they’ll get their shit together?  I’m pretty sure I was responsible for the Redskins winning their last Superbowl by betting that they wouldn’t before the season started.

-  The Rams have given up exactly 4 points for every one they have scored (29 for, 116 against).  Only one other team has given up over 100 points thus far, and no other team has exceeded even a 3-for-1 ratio. That is the best definition of suck I can currently find in the NFL standings.

-  The only teams that put together a dominating performance this week were the Cowboys, Eagles, Broncos, and Bills.  I expect only the first two to continue to do that.  The Broncos may be riding high, but any team can look good playing the Raiders — the most accursed of all of the franchises, the team that the Cardinals and Rams look at and think “at least we aren’t them.”  And Buffalo is just Buffalo, they’ll follow up a brilliant game with a total collapse.

-  Baseball scores have no place in football broadcasts.  Not only is it a completely different sport, they play 162 games a year, making their games 1/10 as significant as any pro football game and 3/40 as significant as any college game. 

-  This is the second season ESPN has doubled up on its first Monday night games.  I’m not sure it’s a success worth repeating.  The second broadcast crew was utterly undistinguished and the start times could only please Pacific Time Zone fans.

-  Brett Favre probably should have stayed retired, but what the heck, it’s not like the Jets had any other plans.  Now he gets to enjoy the constant attention of the New York sports press, who relish an opportunity to methodically disassemble anyone who came into town with a reputation.  His game performance was not much more than adequate, and he needed the defense to save his win.

-  Then there’s the new Green Bay QB Aaron Rodgers, who gets to be compared to Favre all season.  Including on-screen graphics with their stats slapped up against each other.  Following a Hall of Famer probably wasn’t his dream job.  Oddly enough, they both needed interceptions in the last minute of the game to preserve their wins.

-  The Patriots lose Tom Brady, and we get to see the answer to the question of whether it’s the QB or the system that brought success to New England.  Belichik says it’s the system, of course.  I say good luck going undefeated again with your backup.

-  Not that this is a bad year for the unknown QB.  The league is full of starters who I’ve never heard of, even at the college level.  Joe Flacco in Baltimore, A. Rodgers in Green Bay, Brodie Croyle in KC, Matt Ryan in Atlanta, Matt Schaub in Houston, and J.T. O’Sullivan in San Francisco.  The Redskins’ Campbell looks like a veteran by comparison.

-  So, the Lambeau Leap is definitely not excessive celebration, but T. Owens screwing around in the end zone definitely is?  I call double standard.

-  Is there a point to the Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld ad?  Or is the point that there is no point?  All I can think while I’m watching is that they ought to be spending that money making Vista work as well as XP does on the same hardware.

-  Best player name I’ve seen this season:  Green Bay safety Atari Bigby.  When will someone draft Coleco Smith or Intellivision Anderson?

Imagine a football game with everything the same except the players are 1/3 the size of regular players. Welcome to youth football. Same size field, same rules, same number of yards needed for a first down.  Except all the players are 7 to 12 years old.  The notable exceptions to the sameness are 8-minute quarters, no rushing on punts, and extra points are 1 for running and 2 for a kick.  There’s not much of a passing or kicking game, particularly at the younger levels. 

Despite some mild weather in the last few weeks, last Saturday was sunny and hot.  RJH’s team, the 8-year-old Hurricanes (a terrible team name for a Sooner fan to tolerate) played the Bulldogs.  Last year, the team lost its first three games and then won five in a row, only to come up short on the goal line in its playoff game. 

This year, they started slow again.  The offense was not clicking, but they managed to score 13 points, as opposed to none last year.  Unfortunately, the defense allowed 26 points.  Because there’s no real passing threat, the typical youth football play is the end-around, where the running back goes parallel to the line of scrimmage for a bit, avoids the blockers on the defensive line, turns the corner near the sideline and cuts upfield for the score.  That worked four times against the Hurricanes, who couldn’t maintain containment on the corners.  The coaches shifted their players, trying to find a working combination, but they only managed to slow them down for a while. 

RJH played a big part of the game as a linebacker, which creates an odd mental image since the kid only weighs about 55 pounds.  He made some good tackles and got one of the few compliments from the coaches, who were not in a complimenting mood at the end of the game.  Motivating 8-year-olds is just as hard as you think it might be.

AJH’s Raiders won ugly.  AJH is playing center this year, and the team had a turnover when a shotgun snap wasn’t caught (I was still at RJH’s game, but My Lovely Wife says it was a decent snap).  When I got there, they’d already scored a TD and kicked a two-point conversion to go up 8-0.  The Gators then scored a TD and picked up a 1-point conversion on the ground.  The Gators played tough, and the field position game (hugely important when your players are small) wasn’t looking good for the Raiders in the fourth quarter after another turnover that put the ball in their side of the field and a string of penalties leaving them at around 4th and 30+.  They punted, and the ball bounced off of the Gator that was trying to field the ball (there’s a lot of tension every time the ball gets kicked, the kids have a hard time getting it into their hands).  The Raiders recovered, and went on an 80-yard drive that left them taking a knee on the Gators’ 5-yard line to finish the game. 

AJH played the entire game at center, and also played linebacker in the second half.  The teams are 17 or 18 kids, and playing both offense and defense in the same game is common, but usually reserved for the more skilled (and more conditioned) kids.  AJH seems to be growing into his role, showing some on-field leadership and confidence.  It’s nice to see some positive things come from all of the time we spend taking them to practice and the games.

Here’s the view from the stands during the round-robin scrimmages last week.  I think the view from the high school field next to the highway it sums up life in Texas pretty well.

Fall isn’t really Fall until football is in full swing. Youth football practice for the boys has been going since early August. Last weekend saw the start of the college games. Now the Redskins and Giants are kicking off the NFL season as I type. This weekend it’s back to the full deal, two Saturday youth football games and the full complement of TV play. It’s exhausting, but I miss it when it’s gone.

There’s already some interesting stories brewing. Missouri showed it should be considered the best team in the Big 12 North until proven otherwise.  Programs who I’m sure thought they were going to stay at the next level have started the season with a loss. Hawaii’s excuse is lost their head coach and Rutgers’ is that they returned to being Rutgers. After the crap their home fans pulled in the Navy game last year, they deserve a sub-.500 season.  Virginia Tech and Tennessee don’t really have it together, and probably won’t stand out this year.  UCLA shouldn’t expect to give away that many turnovers and get away with it against opponents that aren’t Tennessee.  Then there’s Michigan, which is going to have to win a whole lot of games before people let them forget consecutive season-opening losses.

Ahhh.  My favorite season of the year has begun.  And to make it complete, the Sooners play on TV this Saturday.

Ebay is going to kill itself by minimizing auctions in favor of turning itself into a regular fixed-price internet store. There are already people out there doing that better than Ebay ever will.

“Wellness” is the answer to the question: “How do we sell medicine to perfectly healthy people?”

Katie Perry’s I Kissed a Girl, much like the Madonna-Britney Spears kiss on the MTV Music Awards, has all of the delicious rule-breaking naughtiness of a corporate earnings statement.

The idea of performing a particular act, such as locking a door or walking through a hallway, might never occur to me, but the second someone puts up a sign telling me not to do it, I am seized with a desire to do that thing.

If someone’s on the road driving like a risk-averse, frightened, brain-dulled weenie, there’s a very good chance they’re doing it in a Honda.

There are no such things as supernatural or magical powers, because if there were, somebody would be on TV trying to make a buck off of them.

I have never walked out of a Brazilian-style steakhouse feeling unsatisfied.

Driving any kind of Hummer says all the wrong things about you.

People act like doing things just to make money is a bad thing, but it’s actually one of the most understandable and least creepy reasons why human beings do things.

The right thing to do is rarely the easiest thing to do.

I’ve had enough of Tim Allen.

I’ve had enough of Meg Ryan.

I’ve had enough of David Duchovny.

I’ve had enough of Roseanne Barr.

I’ve had enough of Pauly Shore.

I’ve had enough of Nicholas Cage.

I’ve had enough of Eddie Murphy.

I never wanted any Rosie O’Donnell.

I’ve had enough of Sting.

I’ve had enough of Michael Jackson’s music.  But I wouldn’t mind another trial.

I knew two things about Obama’s pick for a running mate before he made it: it would be a white guy and it would be a disappointment.

Obama’s pick of Joe Biden fits both of those criteria.  Biden is the biggest horse’s ass that I’ve ever seen taken seriously as a presidential candidate.  And yes, I’m including Ross Perot. Biden is smug, arrogant, condescending, insincere, and has a pathological need to appear smarter than he actually is.  Which is not much above average.  This guarantees that he’ll be a constant source of embarrassment for the campaign. And that the story will be about Biden, not Obama.

Obama betrayed his lack of campaign confidence with the pick.  Biden’s an old-guard lefty straight out of the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of thought.  Biden won’t help him carry a single significant state.  Obama must have thought he was weak with the old-line Dems.

Obama passed up an opportunity to make a bold choice and instead picked a hack blowhard Senator with a track record of failure on the national stage.  Who is he trying to win over with this pick?  The new, young voters excited by his candidacy?  Or the Clinton voters who handed him primary loss after primary loss at the end of the homestretch?  We know how well pro sports teams do when they go into the playoffs on a losing streak.

Obama has to know his shelf life is expiring.  The pool of young voters that were literally swooning over him is eroding thanks to their pitiful attention spans –especially with the emotional peak of the primary win making a good jumping-off point.  The media wants him elected so much that the country’s contrary streak is kicking in. And he’s a terrible public speaker without a teleprompter. His honeymoon period is over, and he’s got to show he knows something, anything, about the way the country should be run. And all he’s got is the same old Democrat/Santa Claus agenda: presents for you, bought by someone else.

I thought it was Obama’s race to lose, but he doesn’t seem to have a lot of momentum going into the stretch.

The 90210 iPod.

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Bacon-flavored jelly beans.

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Giant inflatable dog poop.

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A comic book about illegal music downloading.

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A robot with boobs.

Either the Chinese are overcompensating and betraying their own self-perceived inferiority or they’re just really shallow as a culture.  They’re showing it in so many ways, the spectacles of building construction, the facade of lip-syncing children, the busing-in of people to fill the stands, and the especially the cheating at gymnastics. There is no way in hell that their gymnasts are of proper age.  Good thing the folks that run the Olympics are just as corrupt as the Chinese government, or there might have been consequences.

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Oh, how I dislike sports with subjective scoring.  Give me a straight-up race any day over deductions for inadequate rotation.

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Phelps is done winning medals and I think I’m done giving a damn about the Olympics.  He got away with one on the 100m butterfly, but then just about every streak has one of those really close escapes.  I was never really sure exactly what the Serbian officials’ protest over the end was, other than “hey, we thought our guy was going to win.”  They certainly would have had no problem with it if their guy had won by the .01 second instead of the American.

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Until Women’s Beach Volleyball, I did not realize how much time I would be willing to stare at women in bikinis who I did not personally find attractive.  Not that they give a hoot about what I think.

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I say Costas is wearing a hairpiece, My Lovely Wife maintains it’s just a bad dye-job.  Come on, dear.  That thing is Shatner-esque.

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Good thing Phelps won all those medals or Visa would have wasted a lot of Morgan Freeman’s voice-over time.  And why was Phelps swimming in a pool full of urine?  That’s not art.

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Hey, it’s Saturday. Everybody’s watching.  Now would be a great time to do a multi-hour real time broadcast of the Women’s Marathon.  Good grief.  I can’t watch someone suffer for that long, even if they’re foreign and there are commercial breaks.

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I am so damn sick of Honda ads with “Mister Opportunity.”  No wait, I was damn sick of that half-assed animated Chandler Bing knockoff two freaking years ago.  Now I’m just homicidal.

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Would it kill NBC to provide some context for the events?  Leaderboards, elimination requirements, brackets?  Nope, it’s just a bunch of personal-interest features, the sports version of a chick flick.  Good for the NBC camera crew that they got to go to Jamaica to film little kids running in a field, but now I have to have my time wasted with it.

I have a quadra-annual tradition of ignoring the Summer Olympics, mostly because of NBC’s long history of piss-poor coverage.  In years past, they’ve wasted huge chunks of time on human-interest stories that add nothing to the drama of the games.  It’s as if they felt that the actual sporting events were secondary to whatever sob story their interns managed to dig up. 

This time around it’s a bit better.  NBC is doing a better job of showing complete events rather than scattered bits that they don’t bother providing context or connection for. Mostly, it’s that NBC has got out of the way and let the athletes write the story rather than trying to put everything in a wrapper of their own making.  They still waste time with pre-recorded bits — a particularly unfunny video from an oddly mannish female reporter (whose name I can’t be bothered to learn) last night reminded me of that.  But at least they aren’t smothering the events themselves, letting the story of the American swim team unfold.

Also, I can’t figure out if Bob Costas is wearing a rug or just has a bad dye job.  I’m leaning towards rug.