OK, I’ve pretty much given up on the Bills’ offensive coaching staff now. I’m writing this during the third quarter, when the Bills are down 28-5. Even if they come back and win it, I’m giving up. These guys – – including Gregg Williams – – have no idea what they’re doing. Williams and Gilbride need to go, as soon as this season is over. I’ve heard all the stuff about how Drew Bledsoe can’t win the big ones, and yeah, he sure looked awful last night — three interceptions, two fumbles, one lost, yada yada yada — but the game plan never seems designed to fit his strengths, the team is always undisciplined, et cetera and so on. When these guys are making the same mistakes in Week Eight that they made early in the season, that’s the coaching. For me it boils down to this: Would this same group of players have a 4-4 record, with two of those losses being blowouts, if Bill Parcells or Jon Gruden or Tony Dungy or Jeff Fisher were coaching?

What also gets me now is the way a lot of the radio and print commentators here gripe about the Bills’ defense for not being as good as it can be, but hell, when these guys are constantly on the field, what does anyone expect? This is a common complaint for Buffalo News columnist Jerry Sullivan, who is constantly saying, “This is an elite defense?” Well, no, it’s not an elite defense. They don’t get enough pressure on the QB, their pass-coverage often has holes in it, et cetera…but it’s a good defense that would really look better if they weren’t in the position of having to pitch a shutout each week. To win with an offense this bad, your defense has to be not just good, not just great, but one of the best defenses of all time. The Bills just don’t have it. That’s all.

:: Note to ESPN: Joe Theismann is a blithering idiot. The guy is just one dumb comment after another. For instance, just after the second play of the game: “I really like the way Drew Bledsoe is managing his offensive line tonight!” Or this, when the Chiefs took the ball for the first time: “I’ll bet Dick Vermiel has his offense throw a long bomb right here!” (They ran the ball off the right side for five or six yards.) “There’s no way the Bills kick to Dante Hall in this situation!” (They kicked to Dante Hall.) When the Bills were down 28-5 with two minutes left in the third quarter: “Bledsoe can still bring this team back!” Sure he can, Joe. God, the guy is a nitwit, and he never shuts up. John Madden may be annoying, but he’s not stupid. Theismann is.

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According to SDB, the weirdo-site IndyMedia has libeled the guy who runs the weirdo-site Little Green Footballs. Now, I personally think LGF is one of the most putrid sites out there, but IndyMedia’s stunt here is just dumb and very likely libelous. Come on, guys.

UPDATE: Michael Lopez rains on the “It’s libel!” parade by being so crass as to actually cite some case law. Geez, talk about a killjoy! (Mmmmm….Blended Puppy Soup….)

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According to economic journalist Jim Jubak, the economy is finally creating jobs. Problem is, the jobs suck. Woo-hoo.

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I turned on NPR yesterday morning and caught the last few minutes of an interview with one of my favorite people in the world, Lily Tomlin. I first encountered Tomlin when I was in second grade; for that one year only my family subscribed to HBO, and one month there was an hour-long comedy special of hers, which I recall enjoying immensely – – I watched in several times – – even though I didn’t entirely understand the jokes. Some of her films are still favorite comedies of mine, like Nine to Five and All Of Me. And of course there’s her work on The West Wing, which I love.

The NPR site has links to the actual interview as well as video clips of Tomlin’s work over the years. The occasion of the interview is Tomlin’s reception of the Mark Twain Prize for Achievement in Humor.

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Via Matthew Yglesias I see this Washington Post article, which seems to indicate a long suspicion of mine: Sooner or later, the Evangelical Christian Right, which is overwhelmingly Republican, is going to decide that it’s been moderately silent long enough. In other words, President Bush’s debts are going to be called in, which should make for some pretty interesting political theater. It’s like they’re saying, “Fine, we were quiet after our open-mike night at the 1992 Republican Convention, but we want the mike again.” I’m reminded of that recent Steven Den Beste post in which SDB maintained that the Christian Right has been marginalized in Republican politics, an idea which struck me as being, well, totally wrong.

But what strikes me in this article is the opening graf:

Republican lawmakers and conservative activists are making plans to turn gay marriage into a major issue in next year’s elections, with some Christian groups saying that banning same-sex unions is a higher immediate priority for them than restricting abortion.

Presumably, these are many of the same folks who believe that human life begins at conception. The logical result, then, of their belief that same-sex marriage outweighs abortion is this: “We hate gays more than we value human life, and we are prepared to reflect that belief in our activism.” That’s a pretty breathtaking statement of values, isn’t it?

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OK, I know that I’m not as well-read in science fiction yet as I’d like to be, mainly because I pretty much abandoned the genre between the ages of 16 and 26. So, I’m not totally up on the concept of “Posthumans”, and I need someone to explain it to me. Specifically, are “posthumans” the types of folks who can survive being swept over Niagara Falls with no protective gear and the types of folks who can kill a shark with their bare hands? Is that what the whole thing is about?

By the way, I’ve been to Niagara Falls dozens of times, and the Canadian side – – the side the guy went over – – is always incredibly packed with tourists snapping photos. How did nobody get a shot of him just as he went over? I don’t care about pictures of him waving in triumph after crawling onto a rock at the bottom! I want a shot of him just as he hits the brink, what I call the “Holy Shit!” moment. Come on, somebody’s gotta have that picture!

And also by the way, if the guy who went over the Falls is telling the truth and it really was a suicide attempt, then he’s got to be the most colossal screw-up in human history. Imagine picking the single most sure-to-be-successful manner of killing oneself that probably exists, and still surviving with only a few scratches. Oy.

(second link via He of All Things Horrific.)

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Question: When David Letterman takes a week off, why are the re-runs always episodes from about six weeks before? I mean, we just saw these! (As I write this, for posting Sunday morning, Dave is cracking jokes about Rush Limbaugh’s comments about Donovan McNabb.) Can’t they rebroadcast some really old episodes, from 1995 or so? I’d love to see an old interview of, say, Samuel L. Jackson promoting Pulp Fiction or some such thing.

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A month or so ago, I saw a post by Michael, one-half of the 2 Blowhards, about a crime novel titled Mobtown by an author named Jack Kelly. Michael’s review caught my notice not because he really liked the book, although his review did pique my interest in the book on that basis, but because of the book’s setting: Rochester, New York, circa 1959. That’s just sixty miles down the road from Buffalo. I’m quite familiar with Rochester — it’s a nice town that, like just about every other city in New York whose name isn’t actually “New York”, has fallen on some seriously hard times in recent decades. (Yeah, I know, NYC pretty much fell on the ultimate in hard times in a single day two years ago. That’s not what I’m talking about.)

I don’t tend to read too many mysteries. For some reason, I almost always find that the last third of a mystery, when things start getting revealed, is dramatically less interesting than the “mystery” part of the story, and to some extent I found that was the case here, as well — one of those “The journey’s more interesting than the destination” things. But it’s a really fun journey here, especially because these are locales I know, to some extent. Some of the book’s action takes place at a theme park called “Gleeland”, which I take to be the park now called “Seabreeze”, which was named “Dreamland” during the years in which the novel is set. I’ve been to Seabreeze, and I’ve ridden the Jackrabbit roller coaster. I’ve seen the Genesee River Gorge as it cuts right through downtown Rochester. The Red Wings still play minor league ball there. It’s a real pleasure to see these kinds of locales worked into a novel like this. And it’s a pleasure seeing a noir story taking place outside of New York or LA or San Francisco.

Parts of the novel left me a bit cold — as I note, the climax didn’t really grab me, and some of the standard private-eye novel cliches show up: the femme fatales, the action at the local boxing ring, the divorced private-eye who promises his kid he’ll make the birthday party only to be detained by the local cops until well after the party is over. Still, it was a fun read, mainly for the locales and for Kelly’s knack for the language of these types of stories. Michael quotes this bit of description, quite aptly:

Her lipstick had worn off, her hair was all over the place, and she was sweaty around the edges. But, man, could she dance.

A lot of the book reads like that. I hope Kelly writes a similar book for Buffalo. Thanks to Michael for the pointer.

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My newest review for Green Man Review is up: the novel The Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes by Larry Millett, which is a novel about an English detective around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries who apparently takes a lot of opium and hangs out with a guy named Watson. The game’s afoot….

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I see that Amazon now allows one to search not only titles and whatnot, but the entire texts of the books in its database. A lot of folks are thinking this is surpassingly nifty, but I’m not really sure. And quite frankly, I’m not even sure that it really works. I tested it out with two distinctive phrases from the last paragraphs of the chapter “The Siege of Gondor” from The Return of the King, which I would think would be one of the books in Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” database. (The phrases were “recking nothing of wizardry or war” and “great horns of the north wildly blowing”.) The book was not listed among the results. Then I tried “Mindolluin”, the name of a mountain also mentioned in the same paragraph, and still Return of the King failed to come up. Maybe I’m not understanding how this is supposed to work?

Also, it wasn’t immediately obvious to me how to use the new feature, until I realized that it’s hardwired into Amazon’s search function. So any time you search, your search term results using “Inside the Book” are automatically returned, whether you want them or not. That could be a giant pain, could it not? I’m not saying this is a bad feature, but it seems to me the customer should be able to disable it.

(Just after I finished writing this, I saw that Jessa Crispin had almost the exact same thoughts, and two days before I did, to boot. Terry Teachout had the same thoughts. Geez, I’m getting slow on the draw.)

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