Month: October 2011

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The Newest Dolphin

So, apparently former Bills quarterback JP Losman has signed with the quarterback-desperate Miami Dolphins. I have a hard time deciding what to feel about this. Buffalo Bills fans are supposed to hate the Dolphins, even if the rivalry isn’t nearly what it used to be, mostly owing to both teams stinking for a decade. But right now, hating the Dolphins actually forces me to root for them, so they don’t end up with the top pick in the draft and thus guarantee that the Bills have to face Andrew Luck twice a year for a decade or so. (Although, not that facing Dan Marino twice a year for fifteen years turned out all that badly, but still.)

And now the Dolphins add Losman to the mix.

Losman wasn’t good here. He just wasn’t. The Bills decided in the 2004 draft that they wanted to get their quarterback of the future, come hell or high water, so they traded back into the first round (giving up their 2005 first rounder) to take Losman. It didn’t go particularly well. Losman did show some flashes of talent, and he had a cannon for an arm, but he just never settled in, never seemed to figure out the game, never developed a touch for finesse passes, and just…never got there. He was replaced by Trent Edwards (who also never got there), was eventually cut, and has knocked around a bit without really landing anyplace.

But the thing is…Losman’s a good guy. He really is. Or at least, that’s the impression I got when he was here. He’s a Southern California kid, but when he landed in Buffalo, he extended a lot of effort to make this his home. He chose to live in the city, as opposed to buying a McMansion out near the stadium someplace. He did community stuff in public. He worked hard, he tried hard, and he made it clear that he really wanted it — both NFL success and a hometown in Buffalo. It just didn’t work out, and it was a shame. I was a big backer of his for quite a while, until even I had to admit that it wasn’t going to happen for him here, but even when the end of his Buffalo career came, I wished him all the best wherever he landed.

And I still hope he succeeds. Maybe for Losman, “success” will mean putting together a nice career as a back-up QB or occasional starter. Heck, maybe his career will follow the Rich Gannon path, and he’ll have a late-career blossoming. You never know…but for my money, JP Losman is a good guy and I hope he finds some football success.

Even if it’s with the frakking Dolphins.

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The Ball of the Foot

Just because the Bills didn’t play doesn’t mean that the NFL grinds to a halt, no no no! So, a few thoughts on stuff that transpired yesterday:

::  The Saints beat the Colts 62-7. I had a spirited debate with a friend on Facebook about this, with my position being that hanging 62 points on someone is just a jerk move (unless, of course, they are hanging 59 on you). I’m generally of the belief that when you go up by, say, 40 points, you start pulling starters and having your offense consist of runs up the middle, running the clock down all the way between each play. And you instruct your defensive players that in the event they recover a turnover, they fall down or go out of bounds with it. The final points scored last night were scored by a Saints DB who ran back an interception for a touchdown. There’s no reason for that. Not even your desire to get a highlight on ESPN, because even if there is a highlight, the commentary will be, “And check out this pathetic play to cap off a ridiculous night of crappy football.”
::  The Chiefs beat the Raiders 28-0. That sounds impressive, but the game featured some staggeringly awful quarterbacking, across the board. Oakland played two quarterbacks — Carson Palmet and Kyle Boller — who threw three interceptions each, and Kansas City’s Matt Cassel threw in two picks of his own. And not a single one of those quarterbacks threw a touchdown pass. So all the QBs on the field in the Chiefs-Raiders game produced the following line: 30 completions in 65 attempts for 338 yards, 0 touchdowns, and 8 interceptions. This calculates to a combined passer rating of 22.6. (The NFL’s complex passer rating formula produces a rating of 39.6 for a QB whose every pass is incomplete. To post a rating less than that requires some really bad play indeed.)
::  The Chiefs have now won three games, after looking like the league’s worst team in the first few weeks. Three wins very likely takes them out of the running for the first overall pick in the 2012 draft (who will probably be Andrew Luck). So, as of right now, here are the leading contenders for the Draw of the Luck:
Dolphins (0-7)
Colts (0-7)
Rams (0-6)
Vikings (1-6)
Cardinals (1-5)
Jaguars (1-5)
I, of course, am rooting for the Dolphins to win at least three games this year, so they can move out of the Top Pick position and thus lose the Draw of the Luck. I want no part of Andrew Luck being in the same division as the Bills. Interestingly, though, maybe the Colts and Rams finish ahead of the Dolphins but pick for defense, letting Luck drop to the Dolphins at number three! Oh noes!!
::  This preseason the Bills cut their 2009 first round draft pick, Aaron Maybin, whom they took with the 11th overall pick that year. Maybin sucked. He sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked for the Bills. He was incapable of doing anything on the field. He was too small to be effective against the run…and he showed up to this year’s training camp even smaller. So the Bills ditched him, much to the pleasure of all Bills fans.
But now he’s signed with the Jets, and in four games so far, he has three sacks and three forced fumbles, which has predictably led to a lot of hand-wringing and kvetching as to how it could possibly be that Maybin is producing now. Did he not work hard in Buffalo? Did he try to tank his career here on purpose? Is he playing for a brilliant coaching staff now that can figure out how to use him and teach him stuff? This was a topic of discussion all day on WGR’s football talk shows, with the common thread being, “Geez, did the Bills give up on him too early?”
Personally, I don’t think so. The Jets only use Maybin on obvious passing downs, and then, only as a pass rusher. That’s it. He’s never asked to play the run, nor is he given any responsibilities to help cover tight ends. So why is he suddenly getting sacks? Well, I saw his one sack of the Chargers’ Philip Rivers yesterday, and it was a textbook coverage sack. And yet, not one second of Maybin discussion I heard on the radio today mentioned this. (His sack of Joe Flacco a couple weeks ago was also a coverage sack, while his sack of Andy Dalton before that was simply a lineman not blocking him at all.) Everyone is saying, “Wow, is Maybin finally showing his talent?” Yes and no. His talent is as a speed rusher. That’s it. He runs as fast as he can in the general direction of the quarterback. He doesn’t make any stunning moves or use his strength; all he has is speed. So why is it working?
Well, I submit that it’s “working” because (a) Maybin is only on the field a few times a game, so he is never winded, and (b) the Jets have an amazing secondary that can actually cover opposing receivers long enough for Maybin to get to the quarterback. That’s it. Maybin has landed in a situation that pretty much offers the only scenario under which he could possibly have any success. How long will it last? We’ll see. If the Jets’ secondary gets banged up and receivers are able to get open more against them, then Maybin’s effectiveness will certainly drop. Ditto if the Jets ever actually play him for a significant number of snaps per game. I haven’t seen nearly enough of Maybin’s “talent” to conclude that the Bills may have lost a good player.
::  Still on the subject of the Jets-Chargers game, I think that entrusting the Chargers to Norv Turner may turn out to be the greatest single waste of a talented roster in NFL history. The Chargers just don’t look that good to me, and their two-minute drill was a joke.
::  Back to the Colts: I seem to be alone in thinking this, but this team is so bad that I don’t even think that a healthy Peyton Manning would be making that much of a difference. Manning has had a great career, but he’s not Godlike, and I don’t think that a return by Manning to the team next year with the same personnel and coaching staff results in anything more than a 6-10 season. The Colts’ defense is awful, their running game has been suspect for years, their offensive line isn’t playing well, and none of that has to do with QB play. And there’s the fact, unmentioned by Manning’s fans, that he’s getting old. Assuming he’s out this entire season, when he returns in 2012, he’ll be 36 and entering his 14th NFL season. Add in 19 career playoff games, Manning has played the equivalent of 14 seasons already. Physical decline is going to happen sooner or later, and his neck injury may be a symptom of that. Peyton Manning’s return, in my view, will do nothing to change the fact that the Colts need to start thinking about the dreaded rebuilding process, or the fact that Peyton Manning’s career is inexorably on the down side.
That’s about it. Next week, the Bills go to Toronto to take on the Redskins!

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One star to rule them all….

I was reading an article recently (and I don’t remember where! but if I do, I’ll edit this post to put a link) about the star Canis Majoris. This is the largest star currently known to exist. How big is it? Well, this star is located in the constellation Canis Major (the Big Dog), if you want to see it for yourself. But according to what I’m reading, it is 1.7 billion miles in diameter.

The problem with numbers like that, though, is that they’re just meaningless to the human brain. We can’t visualize distances of that magnitude, and remember, when talking about distances in space, that is still a tiny number in comparison to something really big, like, say, the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy. So this is where we have to come up with little visualizations in order to conceptualize these distances. Here’s a picture that tries to help:

That kind of helps, but I wanted an even better way to try to conceptualize the relationship of size here. Well, I was bored the other day, so I came up with one! Huzzah! Here’s how it goes.

Imagine the Earth as a sphere that is one inch in diameter. Got it? Earth, a little smaller than a golf ball. Maybe a little bigger than a big marble. One inch in diameter. That means that in our scale here, one inch equals about 8,000 miles.

Now, after a bit of Googling, I find that the diameter of our Sun is approximately 864,000 miles. Doing a bit of division, we now can figure that if the Earth is a ball one inch in diameter, then our Sun is a ball 108 inches, or 9 feet, in diameter. Now I find that a little surprising in itself. We all know that the Sun is a lot bigger than Earth, but the jump in relative sizes proportionally takes us from a one-inch Earth to a nine-foot Sun!

And now we do the math for Canis Majoris, which is, as noted above, 1.7 billion miles in diameter. That’s 1,700,000,000 miles. Dividing that by our 8,000 miles for one inch, we find that a ball in this scale representing Canis Majoris would be 212,500 inches in diameter. Of course, we have a hard time conceptualizing that number of inches too, so dividing that by 12, we find that our Canis Majoris ball is 17,708 point something feet in diameter. But that’s still hard to see, so divide that by 5,280, and we find that if one inch equals the diameter of the Earth, then Canis Majoris is a ball just over 3 and one third miles in diameter.

My point here is simply this: Whoa.

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Sentential Links #266

Linkage commences…now.

:: We have little trouble buying that a young man from Texas who never travelled abroad and had limited formal education could write convincingly about kingdoms and barbarian heroes from the mythical Hyborian Age. We don’t doubt that a mere civil servant could have so convincingly written about a womanizing super spy with a license to kill, not that a high school english teacher from Bangor Maine could write about the supernatural. (Or that a welfare mother could sit down in a coffeeshop and scribble out longhand a series of novels about a young boy’s adventures at Wizarding School…or….)

:: Mexicans, Central Americans, South Americans: don’t come here. Not only does our economy suck, but apparently you will be caught and turned into slaves. I know, I know, this country prides itself on being the home of liberties and rights. We say a lot of shit we don’t mean.

:: Do they even have scary carnival attractions like this anymore? Sure, they were a bitter disappointment once you got inside, but that wasn’t the point. The name of the game was (1) conquering your fears and (2) having something to brag about later.

:: Toward the middle of Anonymous the drunken, illiterate imbecile William Shakespeare, taking a curtain call for Henry V, a play he didn’t write, falls off the stage. He’s caught by the groundlings in the front row and—passed hand to hand. You read me right: Shakespeare may not have written Henry V, but he did invent crowdsurfing. Unintentionally.

:: Today has been one of those days where I feel like my body is neither big enough nor strong enough to contain my life.

:: Thanks to Batman: Arkham City, a vast open world, GTA-style video game, I’m getting my first taste of what being the Caped Crusader is all about. And it turns out that – if this game has it right – Batman’s life is a lot more mundane and ridiculous than we ever realized.

:: So even in a mega-size city full of noise, chaos, and competition, all around me there were signs of pie. And that made me feel right at home.

More next week!

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Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!


photographers everywhere, originally uploaded by lomokev.

This photo is one of the front-page rotation photos on Flickr. It’s a great shot, but every time I see it, I think, “Wow, that guy is SO hardcore — he’s swimming and taking a photo even while he’s got a harpoon sticking out of him!”

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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: You know what they say about guys with big feet…they wear big shoes!

::  Scrap metal thieves annoy me, but I can’t help but on some level admire two guys who made a pretty penny by stealing a frakkin’ BRIDGE and selling it for scrap. Wow.

::  I can’t help but link this: a lovely young woman consumes a cheeseburger in one bite. The fact that she’s also wearing overalls is just a bonus.

No, I will not be making any attempt to replicate this feat. A man’s got to know his limitations.

::  Roger e-mailed this to me (leading me to wonder if I am becoming to bib overalls what John Scalzi is to bacon, but hey, somebody’s gotta do it)…I saw this years ago, when The Daughter actually watched Sesame Street on a regular basis, but I’d forgotten about it. I always loved the “Random celebrity shows up and sings a song with the Muppets” bits on Sesame Street; in fact, WNED (Buffalo’s public teevee station) used to run those clips in the two-or-three minute breaks between shows. Of course, this one’s appealing because it’s got Gloria Estefan — one of the most captivating women in the world, for my money — in overalls!

Estefan did another one, probably from the same episode, but I couldn’t find it on YouTube, so here it is. And just because, here are some other “celebrities with the Muppets” clips that I particularly like.

Nathan Lane:

Diana Krall:

Garth Brooks:

Norah Jones:

No singing, but here’s Patrick Stewart:

More next week!

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Saturday Centus

This week we get a normal kind of prompt. Here’s my take:

“I planted a little story seed, and it grew into a story tree. So then I picked the story fruit, peeled it, added sugar and cinnamon, and I baked it into a story pie. Then I ate a slice of the story pie with some story vanilla ice cream. And then…”

“What?”

“I think I pushed the metaphor too far.”

“That was a metaphor?”

“It started off as one, yeah.”

“A metaphor for what?”

“Would you believe I don’t remember?”

“Yeah, I got that.”

“You know what the moral here is?”

“Don’t drink decaf?”

“That’s right.”

 A bit on the silly side, I know, but I continue to be fascinated by the effects of caffeine on storytelling!

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Truth, Justice, and the American Way!

This is totally sick, and utterly hilarious: How Superman II should have ended. This will appeal to those who never liked how Superman is able to erase Lois Lane’s memory by somehow “magically” kissing her.


The standard “Superman grinning at the audience” thing sure looks a lot more sinister now, doesn’t it?

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Page One: Macbeth

Page One: Macbeth

I’d love to be able to say that I loved Shakespeare right from the first time I read him, but I can’t. Sorry, but I was a typical ninth-grade kid, and I thought that Shakespeare sucked. Despite my teacher’s desperate attempts to force us to see the beauty in Shakespeare’s poetry and drama, I saw none of it. All I saw was a guy who used twenty words when six would do, a guy who insisted on repeatedly stopping the action so someone could stop and babble at the audience, and a guy whose stage directions consisted of things like “They fight” and “Exeunt”. Yeah, I hated the experience of reading Shakespeare.
In ninth grade, the play was Romeo and Juliet. Hated it. (At the time.) In tenth grade, our Shakespeare of the Year was Julius Caesar, which was, I had to grant, a bit more interesting than Romeo, because it had nifty political stuff and brutal murders and whatnot. And then, in eleventh grade, there was Macbeth. I suppose the third time was the charm, because this time, I thought, Wow, this is pretty awesome.
It wasn’t just the fantastic elements of the story, although yes, that did help. But I think that by this point, I was getting to the point as a reader where I could understand a lot more readily what Shakespeare was doing. I didn’t have to have the teacher explain just what Lady Macbeth was doing when she said “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” I didn’t have to have it explained to me what Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. I thrilled to the way the witches’ prophecies were fulfilled. I did have to have some stuff explained, but a lot of it was falling into place.
The next year we would read Hamlet and The Tempest. I’ve read more since then. Not all of it, but…someday.

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