Month: February 2004

President Bush fell asleep during the halftime show the other night. Any number of jokes could be made here, I suppose, but I have to admit that the “flashing” aside, given the quality of the halftime entertainment this year, the President’s impulse was probably the correct one.

Oh, and check out the formatting of the linked story: four short grafs, and then a parenthetical that reads, “Story continues below”, requiring the reader to scroll past some ads plopped in the middle of the thing….and the story’s continuation consists of a single sentence.

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I think that Atrios has a point: why are we so incredibly tolerant of things in our popular culture like bullets shredding bodies, limbs being severed, and massive explosions killing hundreds — and yet so incredibly scandalized by a wide-angled shot, lasting for mere seconds, of a female breast whose nipple isn’t even exposed?

On CBS Sunday night, Janet Jackson’s breast was exposed for seconds, and this is consuming our national discourse.

On FOX Sunday night, Independence Day was shown, a movie in which about nine total tears are shed for the loss of about half the entire planet’s population.

Something seems out-of-whack to me.

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I just saw one of those Internet polls over on AOL about whether the New England Stupid Patriots are a dynasty or not. Most respondents seem to agree that to really be a dynasty, the StuPats would have to win at least one more Super Bowl sometime in the next handful of years, a scenario which can’t be ruled out given the team’s current salary cap structure (aside from Ty Law, they have no major headaches on the horizon) and their stockpiling of draft picks this year (barring trades, they’ll draft seven players in the first four rounds).

The part of the poll that gave me pause was where a big majority — I didn’t write down the numbers, but it’s commanding — assert that the StuPats are “just as good” as the illustrious dynasties of the NFL’s past. So, I figured I’d do a little digging into a few numbers, and compare the offensive and defensive rankings of the two New England champions versus the average rankings of the three teams that are dynasties by general agreement: the Steelers of the 1970s, the 49ers of the 80s, and the Cowboys of the early 90s.

(A couple of caveats: for the purposes of the 49ers, I did include their totals from the 1994 team, although I’ve generally been on the fence as to whether that team should be considered part of the 49ers “dynasty” from the 80s. And generally, I tend to view a dynasty as requiring more than half-a-decade to really be considered “dynastic”. The Cowboys won three Super Bowls in four years between 1992 and 1995, but after that they were pretty mediocre. The only reason I consider the Bills to be a “lesser dynasty” is because nobody’s ever done four conference championships in a row, but they fall in my mind more under “great historical accomplishment”, rather than “dynasty”.)

OK, here’s the table, comparing the average offensive and defensive rankings of the three dynasties and the StuPats, as well as those teams’ average margins of victory in their Super Bowls. Decimals have been rounded up, except under margin of victory.

Team	Avg. Offensive Ranking	Avg. Defensive Ranking	Avg. S.B. Victory Margin
Steelers, 1970s	6th	3rd	7.5
49ers, 1980s	5th	5th	19.8
Cowboys, 1990s	4th	7th	20.7
StuPats, 2000s	18th	16th	3

I also searched online for some statistical rankings of the numbers of live chickens sacrificed to Beelzebub by each of these teams, but all I could come up was anecdotal evidence at best. But my regular readers will certainly know my suspicions on that score, right?

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Justin Timberlake, on the Janet Jackson nipple exposure: “I regret the wardrobe malfunction.”

We should hear more like this! How about George W. Bush: “No WMDs? I regret the intelligence malfunction.”

Filmmakers Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich: “Godzilla sucked? We regret the screenplay malfunction.”

Former Red Sox Manager Grady Little: “We lost Game Seven of the ALCS? I regret the pitching staff management malfunction.”

Whoever decided to go with “New Coke”: “We regret the cola flavor malfunction.”

Skater Tonya Harding: “I regret the lead pipe malfunction.”

Any other suggestions, folks? Let ’em fly!

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….if they actually had ads like this.

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Here. Not much for me to add, except that I’m not sure about the latter clause of his point #8.

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Warren Ellis, as always, has the definitive take on Janet Jackson’s bit of exposure during the halftime show last night. Not safe for work!

And safe for work is Terry Teachout’s take on the same thing, which would be definitive if not for Mr. Ellis’s.

(Why didn’t they save all of that funky NASA stuff from the pregame show for halftime? And for God’s sake, I can’t even fathom a universe in which Willie Nelson should play second-fiddle to Toby Keith. Aieee!)

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I don’t know how many of my regular readers are MovableType users, but you should know that I visited Kevin Drum‘s site a short while ago and noted some comments-spam shenanigans — comments like “Great site! I’m so glad I found you!”, and the URL links to some gambling site or some such thing. Keep an eye out, or whatever it is you do. (I’m glad they haven’t hacked YACCS yet, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.)

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AICN reports today the passing of Mary-Ellis Bunim (57 years old, breast cancer). Bunim was one of the producers behind MTV’s The Real World and Road Rules, as well as this year’s The Simple Life on FOX. She paved the way for a lot of the current “reality TV” craze. I confess to having a soft spot for the earlier editions of The Real World, especially the San Francisco cast (the one with Judd Winick and Puck) and my personal favorite, the mellow London cast. (I’ve never forgotten the two American guys on that show — the race-car driver who walks into a London grocery and starts loudly complaining because he can’t find the ranch dressing, and the 17-year old playwright who wins an all-expenses-paid three-month stay in London and rarely bothers to get out of bed. I’ve always wondered if that kid has since realized the enormity of the opportunity he missed.)

I’m no fan of reality TV, American Idol excepted, but I did enjoy some of what Mary-Ellis Bunim did.

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Somehow I missed the segue from the Super Bowl postgame to the beginning of Survivor: You Didn’t See These Idiots Enough the First Time They Were On This Dumb Show. Suddenly there’s a bunch of helicopters and boats mounting what looks like a re-enactment of Iwo Jima, but with a lot fewer people and no guns. No, I’m not suddenly becoming a Survivor viewer. I feel guilty enough about catching the equivalent of four complete episodes of the damned thing’s last incarnation, but it seems odd to me to have an “All-Star” edition — could Richard Hatch or one of the other people who have already won the show once actually end up with another million-dollar prize? That seems odd. It seems to me that they should have brought back all of the people voted off on the very first day of each previous edition, seeing as how they only got about 198 seconds of total screen time before getting the boot in their prior incarnations.

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