Month: November 2003

Last night’s Monday Night Football game had the Philadelphia Eagles visiting the Green Bay Packers at Wisconsin’s historic Lambeau Field. Now, anyone familiar with the upper Midwest knows that the “brat”, or bratwurst, is one of the major food groups. These wonderful sausages are grilled and then consumed in a roll, preferably with brown mustard. A lot of folks like to further supplement them with sauerkraut, which is — well, it’s not my favorite thing. I love meat that’s been cooked in sauerkraut, but the ‘kraut itself is not my cup of tea.

Well, apparently the concessions folks at Lambeau field go through a lot of bratwurst, which in turn means that they go through a lot of sauerkraut — so much so, that at one point ABC’s telecast cut to a shot of two guys standing in what appeared to be a giant vat, wearing hip-waders and using pitchforks to transfer what looked like a ton (literally) of sauerkraut from a tractor-pulled wagon into the vat. I can only imagine what that smelled like.

UPDATE: Apparently, what they were showing wasn’t some “Sauerkraut Loading Dock” at Lambeau Field, but a factory where the stuff is made. Leave it to a Vikings fan to set me straight about something in Packer-land!

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The news isn’t all bad, though, for lovers of fine blogs and fast cars and….well, fine blogs. A longtime commenter and reader of mine, Michelle, has finally succumbed to my ever-increasing pressure and launched her own blog, Apprentice Contrarian. What to say about Michelle? Well, she loves Guy Gavriel Kay and Star Wars, and she already has a few intelligent posts up with many to come. Go, read, link.

As Victor Laszlo said, “Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win.” And in the immortal words of Socrates, “I drank what?”

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OK, I hope Sheila didn’t start a mass-exodus or something. Now Holly Lisle is abandoning her Blogistan homestead as well. Holly was never my favorite writer/blogger — her politics were so far from mine I couldn’t really bridge the gap in thought — but her writing-stuff is largely superb. Best of luck to her, too.

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I don’t recall when I started reading Sheila’s blog, StarLines, or how I found it. I know that it was fairly early on in my own blogging “career”, and I suspect that it was pure serendipity on my part — just clicking on one of those “Recently Published” blogs listed on the Blogger main page, perhaps. But since then, she’s been a daily read of mine, nearly every morning, providing not just inspiration for this writer-in-progress (a better term than “aspiring writer”, because dammit, a writer writes and I’m writing) but a look at what life is really like for the “working stiffs” who don’t generate King or Rowling or Grisham-like first press runs. She’s been a daily reminder of the work.

Until now.

Sheila has sadly decided to hang ’em up and concentrate on those pesky books and stories and whatnot, and while I can’t quibble with her decision — well, I can quibble with it, but hey, what’s the use? — I hope she’ll at least consider a sporadic “Hey, wish you were here” type of post, like that blank postcard Red gets from Andy at the end of The Shawshank Redemption. (I also hope that the whole “Luddite” thing didn’t end up being the final grain set on the side of the balance that was leaning toward “Quit blogging”.)

Anyway, Sheila, best of luck, and I’ll try to track down as many of your books as I can (you’re not making it easy, what with eight pseudonyms spread across eleven genres!). I hope you’ll continue to drop by here once in a while — especially on that inevitable day when I finally post news of my first sale. Otherwise, I might just have to start up some underground rumors that you’re attending SF conventions again. Who knows? Maybe in SF circles, “SL Viehl sightings” will take on an Elvis-like air of legend!

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….until the arrival of this small item in all your finer retail outlets:

Reviews here and here, the latter with sound clips. (Also, maddeningly, the latter makes at least one mistake: they identify the meter of the very first clip as being 3/4 time, which it is not: it is standard 2/4, duple time.

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I love you all, Dear Readers. You know that. But I feel that I must be honest with you, as only a true friend can be, so here goes:

You are inadequate. If you doubt me, go here, put in your age, peruse the results, and accept your cosmic inadequacy.

But it’s all good, because the rub here is that I am cosmically inadequate too. (Among other things, I’m just four years shy of the age Mozart had reached when he shuffled off this mortal coil.) So remember Sturgeon’s Law, folks: we’re all in the lower 90%!

(via, who else, John Scalzi.)

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Via The Modulator I see the definitive takedown of Kim DuToit’s incredibly stupid “Won’t someone please think of the men!” string-o’-paragraphs. Not much to add, except to wonder if (a) Glenn Reynolds will ever read it, and (b) why don’t I ever get linked by Atrios on the rare occasion that I write something penetrating and wise? Oh, woe is me….

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Yeah, I think that the Bills are done now. They’re unlikely to make the playoffs now, after losing to the Cowboys yesterday 10-6. Strange thing is, I’m not sure how to react now. Sure, I could be a typical football fan and get all mad and stuff, but I don’t much see the point: I’d already decided that the Bills faced an uphill battle to get to the playoffs, and that their current coaching staff just doesn’t seem up to the task of mounting such an uphill battle. I think they’ll finish with no better than a 9-7 record, and the division will go — Lord help me — to the Patriots.

Yesterday’s loss was the type of loss that, had it happened in the first month of the season, wouldn’t be discouraging, really. The defense played very well, the running game showed some life, etc. But after two months of sporadic offense and road-blowouts, the Pyrrhic victory of hanging tough with a good team on the road ain’t much to get excited about. Thoughts:

:: OK, I’m finally starting to fall off the Drew Bledsoe bandwagon. Two lost fumbles and general ineffectiveness will do that. But also, it’s November. Shouldn’t that young offensive line be showing some improvement at pass-protection? Can’t they ever pick up a blitz? If you’re an offensive coach, and your quarterback is a guy whose effectiveness drops like a rock whenever the pocket collapses, wouldn’t you do everything in your power to keep the pocket from collapsing?

:: Another game with just one sack of the opposing QB by the Buffalo defense. They have to get a passrusher in the offseason. It is a moral imperative.

:: And for Heaven’s sakes, when are the Bills’ defenders going to start catching the ball instead of deflecting it? By my count, they had at least two instances of plays where the defender would have been able to run unimpeded into the end zone had they merely intercepted the ball instead of knocking it down. Maybe the Bills’ current defenders don’t give up lots of yards, but I think back to the days of Kurt Schulz, Nate Odomes and Mark Kelso and I remember that if those guys were in a position to pick off the ball, they picked the damn thing off.

:: My complaint this week about Buffalo News columnist extraordinaire is this: he referred yesterday to “the Bill Parcells Myth”. Now, I’m not sure if he meant this to suggest that Parcells is overrated, but I don’t like Jerry so I’ll charitably assume the worst. Bill Parcells is a damned genius, as far as I’m concerned. The guy’s on his fourth franchise, he has taken over each team in a moribund state and propelled each of them to respectability. His Giants won two Super Bowls in five years. He took over a 1-15 Patriots squad and rebuilt them on-the-fly, getting them to the Super Bowl in three years. (They lost the game, but they played the Packers tough before finally bowing to a superior team.) He didn’t get the Jets to the Super Bowl, but he got them to the AFC Championship Game in 1998. Now he’s got Dallas at 7-2, and the last time the Cowboys were 7-2 was also the last year they won the Super Bowl. NFL history is studded with coaches who worked wonders with one franchise but couldn’t translate their success to another franchise; Parcells has done it everywhere he’s been. That’s no myth. That’s history.

Other football babbling:

:: When the season ends and the Bills are in the market for a new head coach, I hope they don’t hire the Dolphins’ Dave Wannstedt, who is almost sure to get fired now that the Dolphins’ playoff hopes are flickering just a tiny bit brighter than the Bills’s are. It was sure fun seeing the Dolphins get blown out yesterday, though. They’re starting December a little early, aren’t they?

:: Because San Diego beat the Vikings, I expect the small chorus of Bills fans who have never gotten over the misbegotten idea that Doug Flutie might have brought the Bills a Super Bowl victory to start singing again. Thanks, Vikes.

:: The Jets’ receiver Santana Moss had the best touchdown of the day when he caught the ball and got wrapped up by an Oakland defender, who tried to spin him to the ground but only succeeded in spinning him around a full 360 degrees and basically giving him a speed-boost toward the end zone. This was the best missed-tackle I’ve ever seen.

Finally, here are the current divisional leaders, with my original divisional picks in perentheses:

AFC East: New England (Buffalo)

AFC North: Baltimore (Pittsburgh)

AFC South: Tennessee (Tennessee)

AFC West: Kansas City (Kansas City)

NFC East: Dallas (Philadelphia)

NFC North: Minnesota (Green Bay)

NFC South: Carolina (Tampa Bay)

NFC West: St. Louis (San Francisco)

Two out of eight. Ugh. And my pick for Super Bowl champs, the Bucs, look unlikely to even make the playoffs. Oh well.

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(Warning: Politics Here)

I’d be a lot more confident about this whole Iraq thing if the various people in the Administration would say something like “Yeah, we were wrong in our expectations, but given the current problems here are our plans for getting things on track”, as opposed to a whole lot of “Nope, we never said that”-type stuff.

Yes, you did say “Mission Accomplished”.

Yes, you did say “They’ll welcome us as liberators.”

Yes, you did say “They pose an imminent threat.”

Lord, I’m getting ever-so-tired of being told that the people whose operational policy is “Deny Everything” — even stuff that can be looked up by anybody able to work the awesome technology that is Google — are the ones who are “serious” about national security.

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OK, I’m not doing any research here, so maybe I’m completely off-base. If I am, and anyone can set me straight, feel free to do so. Here’s my question:

Why the hell does Dora the Explorer need a little boy named Diego to hang out with?!

Is this some kind of marketing thing, where some suits looking at numbers decided that not enough boys were watching Dora the Explorer and thus advocated the addition of a male character? If that’s the case, then shame on them. God, I wish we’d get out of this “Everything is demographics and everything’s a sales pitch” morass our culture has fallen into.

Yes, I’m focusing my anger about modern American society on a Saturday morning kid’s show. Ya got a problem with that?

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