Month: December 2003

Yeah, I can hear the refrain now. Deal with it. The Bills throttled the New York Jets yesterday by handing the ball to Travis Henry 36 times, which he turned into 169 yards. Powerful running means controling the game tempo. It means keeping the other team’s offense from developing a rhythm. It means a fresher defense late in the game. And it means a happy blogger! In your face, Flanders!

There were a few hiccups, of course — unless, of course, you consider a quarterback sneak to be the play to call when it’s third-and-five and your quarterback has very little mobility and has suffered two concussions in the last two weeks. And Travis Henry fumbled late in the game, which brings up all manner of hemming-and-hawing about Henry’s problems with holding onto the ball. And yes, that was a big problem for Henry in his first two years; look at his fumbles-to-carries ratio over his career versus a few other running backs:

Back	Fum/Carries
T. Henry	1/41
D. Staley	1/65
C. Portis	1/66
A. Smith	1/72
L. Tomlinson	1/79
P. Holmes	1/124

So basically, if you give a running back 30 carries a game, Travis Henry roughly fumbles every second game, where the other fellows fumble once every third game (and Priest Holmes fumbles once every four games). But Henry’s numbers are really skewed by the fact that his fumbles came in bunches in his rookie and second year; last year he fumbled a lot early on but changed his running style to protect the ball better. His ratio this year is a healthy 1/68.

The Bills are still mathematically alive for the playoffs, but they would have to “win out” — win each of their remaining games — which I don’t think they can do, given that they still have to travel to Tennessee and New England. It’s nice to see that they aren’t giving up and that they’re showing pride and all that, but it’s also frustrating to get a glimpse now that we’re into “Stick a fork in ’em” time of what they could have done this year had they not taken the “All throwing, all the time!” approach for much of the year. Oh well.

Some other football stuff:

:: I see that someone in the Dolphins locker room actually turned the page on the calendar, thus letting in the Demons of December. That’s how I know when to buy a tree every year: when the Dolphins begin to suck is when I need to put the decorations up.

:: What a great year for the AFC! There are four teams — the Chiefs, Colts, Titans and Patriots — that I would pick to win the Super Bowl if they get there. And each can win on the road, although the Titans are showing a bit of slippage right now. And lest people get too excited over their particular team securing the home-field advantage, remember this: since 1992, the AFC top seed is only 3-9 in converting home field advantage into a Super Bowl appearance (the ’93 Bills, ’98 Broncos, and ’02 Raiders are the only ones to do it). Nobody’s safe!

:: As far as the NFC goes….who cares? I really don’t think any of the best teams in the NFC this year could beat any of the top AFC teams in the Super Bowl.

:: I find it hilarious that the BCS system is falling on its face, and that the annual cries for a college football playoff are ringing again. I don’t really care enough about college football to think that a playoff is that important, but it seems to me that these guys have to be in class sometime, don’t they? And besides, the BCS controversy, like the “dueling polls” that preceded it, gives the college football fans something to talk about. I mean, it’s not like the college fans can talk much about the great careers of the players on their respective teams, since these days players give three years at most before they’re off for the NFL. Part of what attracts me to sports like the NFL and MLB is the long-term continuity of the franchise, which really doesn’t exist at the college level. And there’s just something inherently funny about these little-known schools shouting, “Hey! We went 6-5 this year! We’re going to the Hardee’s Bowl in wonderful Galveston on January 1!”

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I was going to write a caustic post in which I note the complete lack of snow here in Buffalo (it’s bright and sunny here for the third day in a row) versus the massive snowstorm in the east, but seeing that twelve hikers are missing in Maine, I don’t much feel like gloating anymore. Here’s hoping they turn up safely.

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Via Crooked Timber I see that the BBC devoted an entire day to Hector Berlioz, the classical composer whose music is dearest to my heart. This coming Thursday marks Berlioz’s two-hundredth birthday. (I will, of course, have more to say then.)

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I don’t like it when the Bills play the 4:00 game if there’s no reason for them to do so (i.e., they’re playing at home or on the East Coast). If they play at 1:00, I’m either happy when the game’s over – in which case I’m in the mood for more football – or I’m annoyed that they lost, in which case I want to “cleanse my football palate” by watching a different game. As it is, a late start here is just weird. (Local pizzerias love late Bills games, though, because a late game means that people will order a lot more pizza for halftime.)

But I did get to hear some blithering idiot on the local radio station, who in the space of the ten minutes I listened to him while driving back from the grocery store advocated the Bills firing head coach Gregg Williams, dumping quarterback Drew Bledsoe, trading Travis Henry (in favor of starting Willis McGahee next year, who is not only an unproven rookie but is also attempting recovery from a bad knee injury), and finding a “credible Number Two receiver”. If the Bills do all that, this guy opined, they’d be in better position to win a Super Bowl next year.

Now, I can get behind sending Williams on his way (or at least offensive coordinator Kevin Gilbride, the guy who would ignore the run if he had Jim Brown in his backfield). And maybe Bledsoe, although I want to know who’s in before we ship him out. But trading a proven player like Henry because we have a guy who has yet to play a single down in the NFL? And we’re giving up already on Josh Reed, who is virtually guaranteed to have more catches in this, his second year, than either Peerless Price or Eric Moulds did in their second years (or even third, in Price’s case)? Man, they’ll put anybody on sports talk radio these days.

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Probably the most controversial thing about the film version of The Two Towers, for those who have read the books, is the change Peter Jackson made to the character of Faramir. In the book, Faramir is never tempted by the Ring, while in the film he is…or is he? I noticed something only the other night, as I watched the film again, that escaped me the first few times I saw it: while Faramir is considering the Ring, in the score the Ring’s theme is never heard.

That’s important, because all through The Fellowship of the Ring, the Ring motif is heard in nearly every instance of the Ring either tempting or changing owners. It is heard both when Isildur takes up the Ring and loses it; it is heard when Frodo picks the Ring up off the floor where Bilbo dropped it; it is heard late in the film when Boromir succumbs to temptation and tries to steal it from Frodo. The motif is not heard, though, when Frodo offers it to Gandalf in Bag End or to Aragorn at Amon Heth. So I wonder if Howard Shore is not using his score to tip the hand that Faramir isn’t nearly as tempted as we might otherwise think; certainly his heart never seems to really be in it, and when he hears Sam’s speech at the end he turns Frodo loose, which is not a sign of temptation, to my way of thinking.

However, I have not yet seen the Extended Edition of The Two Towers, so it’s quite possible that a scene exists in that version that would blow my theory here unto tiny bits. Anyone? (If you’re baffled as to which motif is the “Ring Motif”, it’s the motif that is heard at the very beginning of each film as the words “The Lord of the Rings” fade in, and it’s the motif that swells in the orchestra in Fellowship as the boats slide past the feet of the Argonath.)

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A couple of additions to the blogroll today:

:: NYCOLog, which is devoted exclusively to matters pertaining to Upstate New York.

:: Rick’s Café Americain. I can’t resist the combination of liberal politics and a Casablanca theme.

(UPDATE: No sooner did I post this than the URL for Rick’s Cafe started going to someplace it shouldn’t. So here is his old URL. Apparently his departure from BlogSpot is “in progress”.)

:: Libertarian Jackass. Hey, it’s his choice of a name, not mine. I’ve actually been reading him for a while – he turned up in my referrals several months ago – and he pretty much conforms to my usual reaction to Libertarians in general; i.e., on some issues I say, “Right on, Brother!” while on others I shake my head and mutter, “Say what?”

:: The Invisible Library. I just found this one two days ago. Another liberal (surprise!), but it’s the list of favored authors that caught my notice. (Except for Michael Moore, whom I cannot bring myself to like. But you can’t have everything.)

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Remember the “Flypaper Strategy”, in which we were told that invading Iraq is a good thing because it gives terrorists a target that isn’t in America? Well, it may be working: Al Qaeda may be diverting its attention from Afghanistan and heading for Iraq.

I find it difficult to conceive how this can be good news. First, it pretty much confirms that there was never a credible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda in the first place; second, and worse, this makes the prospects for getting that nice, shiny and new Democratic and Stable Iraq a bit less likely.

Ugh.

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Nefarious Neddie, after intimating that he has some issue with my “Movies I Hate” post from the other day, decides that he’s going to “take the high road” and list some movies he feels are underrated or underseen. Certainly I haven’t seen all of them, but of the ones he lists that I have seen, I mostly agree (although I’ve never been terribly fond of Dragonslayer, which seems to me more dour than dark, although it is not a bad movie at all). I’m one of those people who knows that Lawrence of Arabia is a great movie, but purely by reputation. But at least I also know that The Manchurian Candidate is a great movie because I’ve seen it.

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I’ve always thought that mosaic is a pretty cool artistic medium, even before I read Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Sarantine Mosaic, in which the protagonist is a mosaicist. Classical mosaic involves small squares of colored glass, arranged to make a larger picture or design. But you could also use other colored squares to compose mosaics, and think of the extra challenge if your colored squares are part of a famous puzzle device from the early 1980s!

That’s right, it’s Rubik’s Cube Art, in which the “mosaics” are composed of stacked Rubik’s Cubes with the outer faces specifically arranged into the correct color schemes for the pictures.

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Kevin Drum also wrote two posts yesterday about writing and written language, one about punctuation and one about the five-paragraph essay (which I believe may be useful in sixth or seventh grade classes, as a way of forcing kids into structuring their thoughts, but should never be used again). What caught my eye was Kevin’s idea that the apostrophe should be abandoned. He says that this should happen because spoken English has never come up with any way of “reflecting” punctuation in the way that commas, semicolons and periods turn up in spoken language as pauses and shifts in inflection.

But Kevin doesn’t provide any alternative for the job the apostrophe does; how would written English, bereft of the apostrophe, denote possession or contraction? Would we simply ram it all together? Consider the following:

“I scratched my cats ears.”

Now, simply depending on the placement of an apostrophe, the meaning of the sentence can be changed:

“I scratched my cat’s ears.”

“I scratched my cats’ ears.”

The fact that both sentences would be spoken in the same way in conversation, and thus might lead to a certain ambiguity, doesn’t seem to me good reason for spreading that ambiguity all the way around to those sentences’ written forms as well. Language is a messy and imperfect thing, to be sure, but I am not at all convinced that getting rid of apostrophes will help matters in the slightest.

And in the post about the “five paragraph essay” (which, thank God, I was never taught), Kevin seems to concede the underlying problem with his “Ditch the apostrophe” argument without realizing it. At one point he says that the common bit of writing wisdom, “Write like you talk”, is bogus. (Believe me, if I wrote this blog the way I talk, it would feature a lot more profanity, a lot more stuff like “Well uh….”, and a lot less cohesion.) But by rejecting the idea of “Write like you talk”, Kevin shows that he’s aware that spoken language and written language are not the same thing, and the latter should be required to map seamlessly onto the former.

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