Month: February 2005

I’ve alluded fairly often to the fact that before I moved to Blogistan, I maintained a long residence in the wacky world of the Usenet newsgroups. My big hangout was rec.music.movies, although I also lurked at rec.arts.sf.written and rec.arts.sf.composition (at least, that’s what I think that group was called). My Usenet participation started dropping when I launched Byzantium’s Shores, and finally ended completely early in 2003. So it’s not with much emotion that I note that today AOL finally discontinued its support for Usenet newsgroups; it’s more a case of “Meh, who cares.”

But I recall back when I first encountered this Interweb thingie, back in fall of 1993 (or was it spring of 1994?). Back then, Usenet was almost the entirety of my Internet use. I remember using UNIX’s rn program to read groups first, later switching to AOL’s newsgroup service, which never changed one bit the entire time I used it (from 1997 up to the other day). When I wasn’t reading newsgroups, I would surf the Net using Gopher. Now there was a clunky thing to use. And then I recall this new program they installed, something called “Mosaic”. Now that thing was weird — this spinning globe up in the corner and I was reading this thing where some of the words were blue, and if I moved the mouse over those blue words, the cursor would switch from an arrow to a hand pointing at something. I couldn’t see what that thing was ever going to amount to.

Yup, those were the days.

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Mr. Sun’s Valentine’s Day tips:

Men have great difficulty with gifts. Here is a simple tip that will prevent a major tragedy: if your gift has Atkins-Friendly stamped all over it, you have just clicked on www.doghouse.com.

Read the whole thing.

(Hmmmm…I wonder what happens if one actually clicks on www.doghouse.com. Hmmmm….let’s see….well, that’s not a redirect I expected.)

(UPDATE: And then there’s www.doghouse.org and www.doghouse.us. There doesn’t appear to be a www.doghouse.gov, which strikes me as odd — it seems the perfect domain for Erie County Executive Joel Giambra.)

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Two football-related instances of people who really need to shut up catch my attention today.

First is Bills safety Lawyer Milloy, who decided to gripe about his former team, the New England Stupid Patriots:

It’s always been a team thing getting thrown around there, but if some of those guys would test the market, being a champion that they’ve been, they could really go out there and make top dollar. But for some reason, they want to stay. And that’s good. But the other part is (making sure) your family is stable after football is all done. You can’t feed your family off of Super Bowl rings.

Boy, that last sentence is a killer, isn’t it? “You can’t feed your family off of Super Bowl rings.” Well, crap. And here I thought that a Super Bowl ring was something edible, like those sour candy-ring things. Too bad Milloy’s not a hockey player, because you certainly could feed your family from the Stanley Cup. Just make sure you’re serving soup.

But seriously, the StuPats’ formula has proven remarkably successful, and there’s a reason for that: they’ve figure out a way, for now, to make the salary-cap era work for them. Now, it remains to be seen how long their system of “Keep a couple of stars and surround them with really motivated no-names” can be sustained. (I suspect it will be a shorter time than many think.) But does that mean that the StuPats are somehow cheating their players? I doubt that. Nobody’s holding a gun to anyone’s head and saying, “Sign this contract that’s less money than you’d get if you signed with Baltimore.”

And besides, I don’t care that Milloy left the StuPats under less-than-ideal circumstances and joined my beloved Bills. I really don’t. I have little interest in hearing any professional athlete who plays in a league where a freshly-drafted rookie is guaranteed to make at least $230,000 this year, complain about feeding his family. My wife and I make a fraction of that amount, and we’re feeding our family just fine. “You can’t feed your family off of Super Bowl rings”?!

Lawyer, shut up.

As for the other one, since Lawyer Milloy has forced me to actually say something moderately nice about the StuPats in the paragraph above, let me bash this guy who insists they’re the best team ever. God, what overinflated rubbish this is. And if there’s one football meme I’m tired of, it’s the old “You can’t be great for long because of the salary cap” thing.

The truth is, with the cap being what it is, you can be competitive for four or even five years, if you pick the right talent (a matter of a lot of luck) and you have decent coaching (a lot of skill). Consider: the Rams have been in the playoffs at least four times since 1999, and been to two Super Bowls. The Steelers are perennial contenders, with a couple of losing years tossed in there. The Eagles have made it at least as far as the NFC Championship Game four years in a row. The cap era began with the Cowboys winning three Super Bowls in four years. The Packers became very competitive at the outset of the cap era as well, and their heyday culminated in two Super Bowl appearances (with one win). Ditto the Denver Broncos, who I suspect might well have posted another Super Bowl win had their rise not also coincided with the end of John Elways career (as well as the injury-termination of Terrell Davis’s career).

So the StuPats won three Super Bowls in four years. Is it an impressive accomplishment? Yes. But the existence of the salary cap does not automatically make them the greatest team of all time.

Here’s another dumb statement from this article:

They say the true champions are those who win when they don’t have their best stuff, and the Patriots didn’t have nearly their “A” game in Jacksonville, Fla., on Sunday.

Uhhh…no. True champions make sure they have their best stuff when they’re on the field in a championship game. I sure never saw the 49ers play a bad game in a Super Bowl. Ditto those Cowboys.

Shut up.

OK, I’m done.

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Best wishes to Aaron, whose wife Krista may soon be undergoing a medical procedure/natural process by which the horrible distension of her abdomen will be abated.

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I’ve been remiss in linking what is unquestionably the funniest bit of Star Wars parody I’ve ever seen. I literally had to watch this six-minute film in two-minute installments, so hard was my laughter. It’s a big file, but oh so worth it….

(via Nefarious Neddie)

(EDIT: When linking something, it helps if one makes sure one actually links what one thinks that one is linking. This way, one doesn’t look like a doofus when readers try to follow one’s links. Whoops. Link fixed, by the way.)

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Something I’ve noticed lately, that I think I’ve always done since I’ve been reading blogs but didn’t really realize it, is that if I go to a blog that’s on my blogroll and see that the blogger there is replying to something someone else who’s on my blogroll posted to their own blog, I’ll immediately navigate back to my own blog so I can go check what the second person said about the first person before I read the first person’s response.

No, I have no strange lesson to impart here, except to note my effort to force the “conversational” aspect of Blogistan to reflect the way I expect a conversation on Real Space to take place.

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One of these days I’m going to figure out just why it is that I’m an unpublished, struggling writer while the Buffalo News actually pays Mary Kunz to write tripe like this. I mean, there’s gotta be a reason, right? A reason that isn’t that I’m actually worse than she is?

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I’m kind of tired this week, and I have a number of other pressing, “real-space” issues with which to contend. (The major one of those being the ongoing prosecution of the War On Clutter in my home. I figured I couldn’t beat Terror on my own, so I’d fight Clutter instead. Otherwise, the Clutterists win. Uhhh…yeah.) Also, Blogger is being really really slow for me this week, for some reason, and there are just so many hours in the day. So it’s entirely possible that my posting this week will be minimal (as if you couldn’t tell).

As long as I’m at it, though, traffic over at The Promised King is still a bit too light. Come on, folks, the book can’t be that bad, right? (But if it is, please don’t let me know. I have so few delusions about myself intact as it is these days.)

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John Williams is 73 today. Long may his music live.

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[Yes, I bitch about the Stupid Patriots here. I have some positive stuff about football first, though.]

Well, another NFL season is in the books. (Except for the Pro Bowl, but really, who cares about that? I’m amazed that thing is even televised.) A lot of football-loving friends of mine were complaining last week that there was only one game to go, but I’m fine with it — the NFL season doesn’t overstay its welcome, unlike, say, the NHL or the NBA, both of which begin their playoffs in March and crown a champion in August or something like that. And it surprises me that a usually unremarked consequence of the NFL’s relentless quest for parity has been that as of late, the Super Bowl has almost always been a good game: in the last ten Super Bowls, there have only been three blow-outs.

:: John Scalzi recently solicited rules-changes for the Super Bowl. I don’t have any of those to offer, but I’d make a change in the NFL season thusly: I’d shorten the preseason to just two games, and then I’d start the season three weeks earlier, thus adding two more games to the regular season for a total of eighteen (plus one extra bye week for each team, thus yielding a 20-week regular season). Since this would increase the amount of wear-and-tear on the NFL players’ bodies, I’d also increase the rosters to 65 players, the practice squads to ten, and accordingly bump up the salary cap to accomodate those extra bodies. Why would I do this? Just because there’d be more football on the front end. Oh, and I’d add two teams to the playoffs in each conference and get rid of the bye weeks.

:: As for tonight’s festivities: that was the best rendition of the National Anthem I’ve ever heard at any sporting event. I mean, having no celebrity doing it at all — just a bunch of military choirs, supplemented by herald trumpets — was just plain classy. What a great moment that was.

:: I’m not entirely sure why President Clinton was introduced as part of a tribute to the World War II generation. I know that since the tsunamis hit Asia, he’s been partnered with President Bush the Elder in drumming up support for that region, but I genuinely have no idea why he was part of that particular tribute.

(UPDATE: He was there with Bush the Elder to promote tsunami relief, and the NFL execs probably figured it would be rude to bring out one ex-President on the scene and exclude the other one.)

:: I liked the Fox/NFL thingie about the Declaration of Independence that was playing when I first switched to Super Bowl coverage.

:: Paul McCartney? Not my favorite performer ever, but certainly a step up from last year’s noisy, music-free debacle. It could have used more breasts, though.

:: Commercials? I don’t care, really. I used them for their intended purpose: as opportunities to visit the bathroom, get more food, check the hit counter, et cetera.

:: OK, the game itself. If you’re a StuPat fan, or just some fair-weather oddball who has an inexplicable love for these guys, turn away now!

Yes, they’re a dynasty. Three Super Bowl championships in four years has to earn the title of “Dynasty” in the NFL. I won’t even try to deny that (not that I would in any case — before the StuPats, my most hated team was the Cowboys, and I don’t deny that their team in the early 90s was a dynasty, either). So, there it is: the New England Stupid Patriots of the early 2000’s are a great team.

But they’re the worst of the NFL’s great teams. Any of the other great teams in NFL history would beat these guys. And I’m not just talking about the former dynasties, either (70s Steelers, 80s 49ers, 90s Cowboys). I think that the best single-season teams I’ve seen would also probably beat them. (I’m thinking of the 85 Bears, 89 49ers, 91 Redskins, 94 49ers, and 98 Broncos.) That’s because in each Super Bowl that the StuPats have won, they really haven’t beaten the other team. They’ve merely not lost to the other team. Big difference.

In three victories, the StuPats have beaten a clearly superior team in a big upset by three points; they’ve barely held on to beat a clearly inferior team by three points; and they’ve held on to beat a probably inferior, but not by much, team by three points. Big whoop.

The truly great teams took command in their championship games (most of the time, anyway). There was never any doubt. True, the Steelers had two close games against the Cowboys, but their other games were dominant performances. True, the 49ers had two tough ones against the Bengals (and there’s another sticking point: when Tom Brady leads a two-minute drill to win a Super Bowl with his team trailing at the time, then you can get back to me with the Joe Montana comparisons, and not one second before), but the 49ers also blew out the Dolphins (one of the best offensive teams ever) and handed the Broncos the worst drubbing in Super Bowl history. The Cowboys of the 90s were never really in doubt of losing any of their three Super Bowls. And neither were those great single-season teams I mention: those teams flat-out dominated their Super opponents.

I see no true dominance from the StuPats — just a freakish level of competence that is impressive in its own right, but not one that puts me in mind of the greater dynasties that have existed in years past. And tonight, the StuPats didn’t even display that: they were downright sloppy in the first half, and only the fact that the Eagles were equally sloppy and remained so in the second half allowed them to win. That’s what I mean when I say that they don’t so much as win as they don’t lose.

And that’s my final bit of StuPat ranting for the 2004 NFL season. A couple of more random thoughts before I check out until the Draft (give or take an interesting free-agent offseason by the Bills):

:: Did Andy Reid suddenly turn into Gregg Williams at the end of the game tonight? Seriously, what was up with the horrible clock management? I’m watching the Eagles act like there’s no sense of urgency at all, and I was reminded of that hilarious scene in Bull Durham when the manager berates the team for being a bunch of “lollygaggers”.

:: I like the word “lollygag” a lot, in all its permutations.

:: OK, I’ll say one nice thing about the StuPats: This year the MVP award was given to the exact right player. Deion Branch had an amazing game. That guy won, big-time.

:: Unintentionally hilarious moment of the night: During the postgame, when Terry Bradshaw goes to award Deion Branch with his new car (the main part of the MVP prize), he says, “Deion, I’ve got something in my pocket for you….” I couldn’t keep from laughing at that.

:: Next up: World Championships of Figure Skating. Go Michelle Kwan! And I wonder what blond Russian guy I’ve never heard of before will win the Men’s competition?

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