Month: October 2006

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The NFC Norris Division

In comments to yesterday’s football post, Mary notes that because I dared express pro-Viking sympathies as far as the NFC goes, she’ll be rooting for her own boys, Da Bearz, to grind my Bills into the dirt. Fair enough!

Funny thing is, though, that I pretty much like the entire NFC North. Yup, I like ’em all. There’s just so much great football history there, and all of those teams come from the Upper Midwest, which outside of Buffalo is my favorite part of this whole country of ours.

I went to college in Iowa, which meant that I was generally surrounded by three types of football fans: Viking fans, Bears fans, and Packer fans. This was when it was the NFC Central division, not the North as it is now. It was also when the Buccaneers were in the division, and perenially played doormat. (I don’t recall any Detroit Lions fans in college; I guess Detroit was too distant to have a presence on my small Iowa campus.)

So there I was, a Buffalo Bills fan, watching entertaining games between all those NFC Central rivals, and it was always just a great time — although all of those fans of the various teams would invariably look at me as though I’d sprouted a second head when I dared note that I didn’t absolutely loathe the other two teams in that Upper Midwest NFC Triumvirate:

ME: Man, I like that Favre kid.

SOMEONE ELSE: Hey, weren’t you rooting for the Vikes last week?

ME: Yeah, but the Packers are OK too.

SOMEONE ELSE: What?

ME: I like the Packers too.

SOMEONE ELSE: [head explodes]

You really have to love NFC North fans. They’re hardcore. Liking the Bears equals hating the Packers and Vikings, and so on with the others. Not so AFC East fans. Sure, the Bills fans hate the Dolphins, but generally, we don’t seem to really despise the Jets, and even though I personally hold the Stupid Patriots as the greatest force for evil in the football world, few others in these parts seem to do so. If anything, the StuPats get a respect from people I talk to around here that makes me want to vomit, but hey, maybe I am the deranged one.

Anyhoo, go Bills!

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Funny how Hypocrisy Street always leads to Memory Lane….

I see that House Speaker Dennis Hastert is digging in his heels, refusing to resign over his increasingly obvious “see no evil, hear no evil” policy regarding Mark Foley’s indiscretions. I can’t help but recall the circumstances that led to Hastert ascending to the Speakership in the first place: he was handpicked by Tom DeLay after Speaker-designate Bob Livingston resigned when, during the debate over the possible impeachment of then-President Clinton, his own extramarital affairs came to light.

Rise by the sex scandal, fall by the sex scandal.

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17-12

I don’t have a whole lot to say about the Bills’ victory over the Vikings yesterday — just some quick points.

:: JP Losman continues to show that he’s not just a guy with promise, but that he’s growing. Let’s hope this continues.

:: The Bills’ O-line continues to be less-than-stellar at getting defenders off the line of scrimmage, but they seem to be OK at pass protection. Strange.

:: At the time, I had no problem with the Bills letting Pat Williams go. I figured that at his age, the downside to giving him a big contract was too big. I now admit that I was full of bird poop on that point.

:: I hate rooting against the Vikings, and I only do so when they play the Bills. They’re my favorite NFC team.

:: The TV announcers for yesterday’s game were a disaster. We’re talking Joe Theissman-level stupidity here. A couple of relevant examples:

:: After that short kickoff that the Bills recovered before being flagged for the phantom “interference with the free catch” call, one of the announcers said, “The Vikings are lucky that [the Bill who recovered] didn’t get up and keep running with that ball!” Except for the fact that the kicking team cannot advance a kickoff. Everybody knows that, I thought.

:: Referring to Andre Reed, who was inducted onto the Bills’ Wall of Fame yesterday: “Andre Reed is one of the most prolific receivers in Bills history!” Ummmm…no, Andre Reed is the most prolific receiver in Bills history. Jee-bus.

:: Toward the end of the game, inside three minutes bure before the Vikes got the ball back this exchange took place:

ANNOUNCER 1: The Vikings still get the two-minute warning, and they have all of their timeouts.

ANNOUNCER 2: Yes, and the Vikes can still stop the clock!

Those guys were awful.

Next up for the Bills: on the road at Chicago. Maybe the Bears fall victim to a “trap” game, having blown out the defending NFC champs on national television. We’ll see.

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Don’t worry about it.

Yup, time for my obligatory Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip post, which I watched last night again courtesy of the wonderful people of Toronto’s CTV! I wasn’t sure I was going to blog about the third episode of the show, given that I might start to seem like an obsessive about it, but I see that Lance Mannion is getting ready to liveblog the episode. So here are my thoughts on the show that Lance is about to liveblog.

[SPOILERS for tonights Studio 60!]

Lance mentions something someone else said last week about the show:

“Notice when people talk about STUDIO 60 they don’t start the conversation by saying, ‘I really liked it’ or ‘I hated it’? Instead it’s always, What did you think?’ I suspect no one really knows what to make of it.”

Well, I’m getting closer to knowing what to make of it, and while I now know that it’s pretty much what I’ve come close to saying in the previous weeks, I haven’t been able to phrase it so starkly. Here it is: Studio 60 bears too strong a resemblance to The West Wing.

Maybe this is only my problem, given how many times I’ve watched various episodes of TWW, but once again, I couldn’t watch this show and hear that dialogue without picking out small bits, and larger themes, from the earlier show. Yes, Studio 60 is about a TV show as opposed to TWW‘s White House. But Sorkin is still saying exactly the same things. He’s talking about how good people can come together and work hard for a greater purpose. He’s talking about how people of very high standards have to wrestle against dumbing down their work (here it’s ratings; on TWW it was polling results). We have people who have spent their lives in a given business (TV or politics), rising to great success and working at a very high level, being caught completely by surprise by developments they should have seen coming a mile away.

Stripping aside the particulars because Studio 60 happens in a TV studio, nothing ever happens to a character here that didn’t happen in a similar way to someone on The West Wing.

Lance notes that he thinks the show has to show some actual sketches, sooner or later. This episode comes close: one sketch is seen extensively, in rehearsal. The sketch, a comedy bit about the contemporary ignorance of and lack of respect for science, is frankly kind of painful to watch, but the crutch here, obviously, is that we’re only seeing a rehearsal. And then, in the episode’s fourth act, there is a montage of bits from the actual taping of the show. This consists of tiny bits of various sketches broken up by shots of the directors directing, the cast members changing costumes after their bits, et cetera. We hear tiny portions of sketches (“Pimp your trike”), but mainly the sketches that get the most “talk-time” in Sorkin’s teleplay, the “Weekend Update” analogue and some sketch involving Commedia dell’arte, exist only in that very talk-time where “Crazy Christians” also resides.

In three episodes thus far, Aaron Sorkin’s done a lot of telling. He tells us that Jordan Whatshername is brilliant. He tells us that Matt is an amazing writer, that Danny is a brilliant director, and that the blonde on the cast is howlingly funny. But he has yet, so far as I can tell, actually shown us any of that. This is the biggest problem with Studio 60, and it’s a big one. Sorkin was able to show us, many times, that Jed Bartlet was a good President, that CJ Cregg could handle the press brilliantly, that Toby was despite his outward cynicism more idealistic than anyone else in the senior staff combined. Sorkin’s gotta start showing us this stuff, or Studio 60 is doomed to be what it already feels like: a show on which a lot of good actors portray people who constantly tell us how brilliant they are without ever actually seeming to do anything brilliant.

Studio 60 really needs to get out of the gate, and soon. Three episodes in, and I still feel like I’m watching an unending pilot episode. The show needs to go somewhere, and this is where I’m worried a bit about the subject matter hampering things. What can we see here, other than each episode being about the preparation of one more episode of Friday Night Live or whatever it is?

One final note: I’ve written before of how much I admire the work of filmmaker Cameron Crowe. I always feel like Crowe’s work displays lots of wonderful insight, but his most recent film, Elizabethtown, was widely panned by critics. When I finally saw it, I enjoyed it, but I had to concede a point to the critics: Elizabethtown was stunningly self-indulgent, as if Crowe had basically gone with every instinct in his head with nobody to tell him otherwise. I’m afraid that Studio 60 is going to become Aaron Sorkin’s Elizabethtown.

And yet, what will I be doing this coming Sunday at 10:00? Tuning into CTV from Toronto. O Canada!

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Sentential Links #68

Here we go this week. More political ones than most weeks, mainly because I’m annoyed and the best way for me to be all pithy about political stuff is through Sentential Links.

:: Strange how the Republicans keep falling afoul of family values.

:: Protecting 16 year old boys wasn’t his priority. Protecting the Republican majority was. Even if it included a generous pedophile.

:: As it stands right now, it looks like Tom Reynolds has something in common with former Boston Archbishop Bernard Law. (Two links about Tom Reynolds, because he’s a Big Head in the Republican leadership and he’s one of the US Reps from the Buffalo Niagara region. And he is, in my estimation, friggin’ scum. He’s not my Rep, so I don’t get to vote against him. How bad is Reynolds? He’s got me rooting for Jack Davis, a guy whose economic positions don’t appeal to me at all. But then, I get to vote for or against Brian Higgins, a “Democrat” who has stood up to be counted with the Republicans on many a nauseating bill in this, his first term in Congress. I like Higgins’s yeoman work on Buffalo region economic development, but on other stuff, he sucks, too.)

:: At this point, anything that hurts the Republicans helps the Republic: it’s that simple. (A terrible place to be, really, for that level of partisanization is extremely dangerous and in the medium term will corrupt the Democrats too. But it’s true.) So the developing scandal is, to repeat, something that will give a cheer — grim cheer, given the actual lives damaged by these men — to all people of good will.

But I must admit that my other reaction is: for !@#$%’s sake, this, this, this is what we’re upset about?!?

Last week the Congress of the United States passed a bill to legalize torture and end habeas corpus, the most fundamental legal right in our legal system — the Military Dictatorship Act of 2006 — and we’re worried about some !@#$%ing sex scandal?!? (Yup, point taken. I think that whatever changed on 9-11-01 is right back to being as it was; once again we’re easily distracted by the Mark Foleys and Gary Condits of the world.)

:: The people in government are just people. They have human weaknesses like everyone else. Merely wanting to be in a position of power is reason enough to suspect any person’s motives. (Isn’t that the truth. I remember when I was in high school, and how creepy the kids were who really really really wanted to be class president. Well, isn’t wanting to be US President even bigger? But still, I’m a sucker for political personalities too. I saw the camera cut to Bill Clinton sitting in one of the boxes at yesterday’s Bills game, and I cheered. Oh well.

BTW, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, part of the Martian legislature is filled by citizens of Mars who are literally chosen by lottery, almost like jury duty. I’ve always liked that idea on some intuitive level.)

:: It means that George Bush and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have lost control of the story. They are no longer driving the narrative.

Unfortunately, they are still driving the country.

:: State of Denial may only be a reflection of Woodward’s sources, but for a discerning reader the zeitgeist of those sources is what the book is all about anyway. Thanks to Woodward, we can now say with confidence that it’s not just liberals who think Bush is a nitwit anymore. Bush’s supporters think he’s a nitwit too.

:: I’m tired of being led by moral cowards. I want better for myself, and for my country.

:: A certain number of our elite pundits — Mallaby high among them — are just constitutionally incapable of being nice to the Democratic Party or to American liberals. As the right’s rule proves itself to be worse and worse, they’ll become increasingly critical of Bush. But that merely forces them to devise ever-more complaints about the opposition. And one of the Democrats’ very worst instincts is a tendecy to care about what these kind of people think.

:: Let him who has ears, hear!

Now for a couple of non-political ones, just to keep my head from exploding:

:: Everyone knows Southern California has its own equinox and solstice, anchored to local seasons: flood, drought, mudslide and earthquake. Most reliable of them all, fire season has now arrived with a vengeance.

:: Heroes is a cool, fun, interesting concept, poorly executed.

:: I have a lot of issues with Heroes but at its most basic level, it’s just not any fun.

(Geez, I kinda liked Heroes, although I too could have done without the “stripper with the heart of gold” subplot. But I’d posit that the stripper’s “power”, a mirror-reflection self that seems capable of independent action, may not make her a hero but the first supervillain the eventual “heroes” face. I enjoyed the show’s slow pacing, too, although this show runs the risk of boring me quickly like Lost did. I’ll watch a few more episodes, anyway. That second link about Heroes, by the way, comes from the blog of TV writer Kay Reindl, who among other projects wrote a number of fine episodes of Millennium.)

:: I will add, however, that being one of the “best console shooters out there” is not very high praise. This is akin to being the world’s cutest cockroach, or the world’s sexist leper. (For some reason I’m really digging reading stuff about games, even though I play no games at all because the Gods of Time and of Happy Marriages would kick my ass on a tag-team basis were I to start. My last computer game was Riven. I love a fun game, but believe me, it’s best that way.)

:: One thing I’ve pounded home, here and elsewhere, is that the introduction to Shakespeare should be as much like Shakespeare’s intended experience as possible — that is, his plays were meant to be seen and heard, not read. (Ahhh, M-Mv — the perfect antidote to being too politically pissed-off.)

OK, more next week. Maybe I won’t be so annoyed at the state of the world by then; you never know. But hey, imagine what this post would be like if the Bills had lost!

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Well, there’s Cirith Ungol, and Mount Doom, and….

Over the last twenty-four hours I’ve had a spate of hits from a number of search engines, all looking for some variant of “a landmark east of Minas Morgul”. If anyone looking for such reads this, can you drop a comment telling me why the sudden interest? Is there an online quiz or something floating around that I don’t know about? Let me know!

(BTW, since I’m a helpful fellow and all, here’s the Wikipedia page about Middle Earth, which contains a map of the place. As we’re heading toward wintertime, I expect sometime in the next few months I’ll re-watch the movies. I tend to get more into an epic fantasy mood in the colder months.)

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