Comforters on the bed: yay or nay?
(Apropos of this article.)
Fox, sox, blocks, bollocks!
The Ball of the Foot, part deux
A few thoughts about the divisional NFL playoffs:
:: Wow, watching St. Tom Brady the Overrated pout when he gets beat really never gets old, does it?
:: Sure, Brady’s a great quarterback. He’s earned his spot in Canton, and probably on the first ballot. But I just don’t think he functions well under pressure. When everything is going his way, he can beat the living hell out of you. But if you manage to just get things going not quite his way, he gets frustrated and usually loses. I’ve listened to a lot of people the last month or so resurrecting the “Brady is the greatest ever” talk, but I continue to believe that until he responds to a real high-pressure situation with a win, he doesn’t even merit mention alongside Joe Montana.
Put it this way: if I’m down four points in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl with two minutes to go and I’m on my own 5-yard line, I don’t want Tom Brady under center. Sorry. Give me Elway, or Montana.
:: That said, I think the Jets’ bubble probably gets burst this weekend. I wouldn’t be surprised if they look a bit flat after a hugely emotional win. Plus, for all the talk about how Mark Sanchez faced Peyton Manning and then Tom Brady and beat them both, the fact is, Sanchez didn’t face those guys. He opposed them, but he actually faced the Colts and Patriots defenses. Now he gets to face the Steelers defense.
I know, Sanchez beat them in the regular season. That win was rather flukey, if I remember correctly, and the Steelers were pretty banged up at the time. Not the case now…and the Steelers are an experienced, playoff-tested group of veterans.
:: Speaking of Sanchez, I’m not really impressed with him. The Jets’ defense is why they won that game, but Sanchez’s passing is all over the place. He missed wide-open receivers left and right, and the ones he hit, he didn’t exactly hit on the numbers. Again, that’s not going to work out well against a healthy and fired-up Steeler defense.
:: My prediction skills suck, but I think Green Bay wins as well. Steelers-Packers in the Super Bowl!
:: Oh, and finally: Lord knows that my love of overalls is quixotic enough, but even I can’t endorse this.
Go Steelers!
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Sentential Links #235
Linkage….
:: Because nothing says “I’m a big tough guy” than anonymously railing at some strange woman who never did you any harm on the Internet just because she is writing about Square Pegs. (Hmmmm, I should see if I can line up that show again. I remember it being all kinds of awesome when it was originally aired…but I think I was eleven at the time. Anyone?)
:: Ha ha! It’s funny because Dagwood’s dream was crushed!
:: Now I know someone probably remembers that at one time or another I said that one should not wear socks with sandals but I also said that it’s okay if the sandals are casual and the socks are the kind that are meant to be shown off – novelty or any kind of print or colorful socks. (I love socks with sandals, and I consider that rule to be one of the deeply silliest of all the deeply silly fashion rules out there. So there!)
:: I loved it when I was twelve, and I read the sequels, which are each half as good as the one before, and I didn’t give up until they were homeopathically good. (“Homeopathically good” is a magnificent turn of phrase. She’s talking about Dune, by the way, which is on my “to read in 2011” list.)
:: When people gather to mourn, you mourn with them. It doesn’t matter if you don’t follow their customs, if their rituals make you uncomfortable, if you disagree with the content or the direction or the language or the very existence of their prayers. When people gather to mourn, you mourn with them. And you don’t get to pick how they go about mourning. (Right-wing pontifications about memorial service etiquette always make me want to reach for something pointy, that I might jab it into something fleshy. And then there’s this….)
:: Down with DRM. There’s got to be a better way to protect copyright than crippling the format. (This trend bugs me…the notion that when we “buy” something, we’re not really “buying” something anymore, but just forking over money for the right to use it under certain circumstances.)
:: When I am writing fiction, however, it is hugely diverting, like losing yourself watching the endless countryside roll by. The idea train barreled along with no problem, but when it came to settling in with the idea, distraction was a given. (I couldn’t agree more. New blog to me, by the way. It’s run by a guy who works at my favorite used bookstore.)
More next week!
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Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: In these times of highly charged rhetoric and deep emotional commitments to our various opinions, it’s not at all uncommon to hear of violent actions in our neighborhood watering holes, where opinionation meets with alcohol to form a heady mix.
Case in point: police had to be called to a Chicago bar after a patron took deep exception to a photograph that was hanging on the wall. The photograph was of a deeply, deeply divisive figure in American life. Such a sad, sad story.
Oh, and the person in the photo?
A.C. Slater. You know, the fictional character from Saved By the Bell played by Mario Lopez. This guy:
Actually, come to think of it, I hate that guy. F*** Slater!
:: Maybe it’s because I never took the Keyboarding/Typing class in high school — I’ve been “typing”, in my own way, for so long that actually learning the correct way to do it would not speed my typing up one bit, and this was the case even when I got to high school, so I figured the class would be a giant waste of time. But anyway, I think that might be why I’ve never heard, until now, about putting two spaces after every period. Not that I’m about to start doing that, because this guy says you shouldn’t.
:: Hot chicks in Star Wars shirts. That is all.
More next week!
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A brief note….
The Ball of the Foot
Football rules! A couple of notes on Saturday’s NFL playoff action:
:: Aaron Rodgers’s line in Green Bay’s blowout victory over the top-seeded Falcons: 31 of 36, 366 yards, 3 TDs, 0 INTs. That’s about as good a performance you’ll ever see in a playoff win. There might be a new postseason legend being born, up there in Green Bay. He did that without a bye week, on the road, in a dome, against the conference’s top seeded team. Wow.
:: Depressing thought that I try not to remember every time Aaron Rodgers plays, and yet I end up remembering it anyway: The Bills could have drafted him, had they not traded up the year before for JP Losman.
:: I’m starting to think that all future editions of Webster’s English Dictionary should just put a picture of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ logo next to their entry for “consistency”. They are going to their eighth AFC Championship Game since the 1994 season, and they have in that span never gone more than four years without reaching the conference title match. That is amazing.
And I recall, when Bill Cowher stepped down as Steelers coach, some people said that he wasn’t really that great of a winner, as he only managed to produce a single Super Bowl win in his fifteen seasons there. Setting aside a troublingly-growing tendency among sports fans and writers to equate “winning” with “winning the Super Bowl”, this still strikes me as a very odd thing to say. Before Cowher had Ben Roethlisberger, he was regularly reaching the AFC Championship with the likes of Neil O’Donnell, Kordell Stewart, and Tommy Maddox as his quarterbacks. Don’t tell me that guy wasn’t a winner.
:: I hope John Cole doesn’t mind me stealing his photo, but this is too great not to share:
Tomorrow, of course, brings us the Patriots hosting the Jets…which means that the Evilest Team in the NFL will host the Annoyingest Team in the NFL. I don’t even know who to root for in this one; I suppose I should root for the Jets, because I don’t think they can beat the Steelers again, and it would be nice to see Saint Tom Brady (Most Overrated Guy In Sports!) take a hit to the reputation again. But I don’t see it happening; I think the Pats win this one fairly convincingly. By a score of, say, 49-10. Oh well.
:: Seahawks at Bears? Who cares?
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Pay to Play (or not play)
I rarely enter writing contests — in fact, the only one I recall entering was the Buffalo News‘s once-annual short story contest, which they held three or four years in a row. Why not? Because if and when I get published and embark on a life of writerly riches and fame (heh!), I want to do it the old fashioned way: because an editor says, “Hey, not bad. I’d like to pay you for this.”
Contests like this, which reek of being run by folks who would make off with the coins from a dead man’s eyes, are a big reason why. To boil it down: you pay an entrance fee of $149, after which the people running the contest own all rights to your work, whether you win the contest or not. And if they decide that not enough people entered, then no prize is offered…but they keep your $149, and the rights to your work. So basically, they expect you to pay them to take the rights to your work.
Don’t fall for this, folks. Please oh please.
Here’s another response to the contest, where the person actually running it shows up to defend herself. This made me laugh:
So to post our rules and a link telling people that this is a contest to avoid is both self-serving and misleading. Are there issues with the rules, yes. But I think you should wait until the contest officially launches on Feb. 11, 2011, before you tell people to not join it. That’s the fair thing to do.
Er…ummm…if it’s not fair for someone else to call people’s attention to a contest that hasn’t started yet, then why did they post the information about the contest already themselves? “We’re going to post our contest rules! But it’s not fair for anyone else to call attention to us!” Yeah, right.
There’s a rule that often gets cited on Websites and discussion fora and anywhere else where such things are discussed: Money should always flow TO the writer. If anyone tells you that you need to pay prior to being published, go deal with someone else. And don’t bother with contests like this.
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Saturday Centus
My second week of participation! This week, Jenny Matlock gives a normal writing prompt — but this week, she cranks down the word count to a mere 25 words, not the usual 100. Aieee!
Anyway, the prompt is “the lottery ticket…”. Here’s what I did with it.
The scraggly 7-11 guy
takes my dollar,
hands me the lottery ticket.Next day I check the numbers.
New life, here I come!
…or not.
And there we have it.
BTW, working at The Store, I have come to loathe the lottery in all its forms. The scratch-off ones are annoying as all hell, because there are a couple of spots where people like to scratch them off, leaving that gray powdery crap all over the place, and for some reason, lots of folks don’t bother throwing them out when they’re done. They just leave their worthless, non-winning scratchoffs sitting in the exact place where they were when they scratched them off to reveal their non-winning glory, so it falls to the employees to throw them out. Back when I was the guy who had to clean the bathrooms, I would frequently find stacks of worthless scratch-off tickets in the bathroom stalls, left on the toilet paper dispensers, this despite the fact that if just exiting the bathroom and returning to the sales floor of The Store took you past at least two garbage cans. Some people even threw them in the toilet.
And there are few sights as generically depressing as watching old ladies in threadbare coats standing in line to put five or ten of their limited-income dollars into a damned lottery ticket dispensing machine. That, in its way, is even more depressing than watching young people buying cigarettes.
Yeah, I don’t like the lottery very much.
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If I were doing a quiz-thing, I’d be doing this one!
Stolen from SamuraiFrog:
If I were a month, I’d be October.
If I were a day of the week, I’d be Thursday.
If I were a time of day, I’d be late “prime time” — late enough to feel energized by the night, but not so late that the bed’s siren call is summoning me home.
If I were a planet, I’d be Mars.
If I were a sea animal, I’d be an orca.
If I were a direction, I’d be north by northwest.
If I were a piece of furniture, I’d be a well-worn chair surrounded by bookshelves.
If I were a liquid, I’d be the water in a mountain stream.
If I were a gemstone, I’d be sapphire.
If I were a tree, I’d be a maple.
If I were a tool, I’d be a Japanese-style handsaw that cuts on the pull-stroke.
If I were a flower, I’d be a rose of any color.
If I were a kind of weather, I would be the cool, crisp air of October that makes everything seem brighter.
If I were a musical instrument, I’d be the entire orchestra. (A conductor is a musician whose instrument is the orchestra.)
If I were a color, I’d be red on the days that I’m not blue or purple or green or yellow or orange.
If I were an emotion, I’d be melancholy laughter.
If I were a fruit, I’d be a white peach.
If I were a sound, I’d be a purring cat. (Or a lightsaber igniting.)
If I were an element, I’d be one of the noble gases. Stable and reliable.
If I were a car, I’d be a Subaru Outback.
If I were a food, I’d be a Chicago-style deep-dish pizza.
If I were a place, I’d be the Serenity.
If I were a material, I’d be nicely-worn blue denim.
If I were a taste, I’d be cinnamon.
If I were a scent, I’d be the scent of baking pizza.
If I were an object, I’d be a drinking vessel of some sort.
If I were a body part, I’d be the eye. (Seriously, I have no idea how to answer this.)
If I were a facial expression, it would be laughing.
If I were a song, I’d be “People Get Ready”.
If I were a pair of shoes, I would be a pair of Birkenstocks.