Donald Luskin is mad that Paul Krugman thinks he’s a cyber-stalker. Well, gee whiz, Donald: all you ever write about is how monstrously evil Krugman is (and that’s not a mischaracterization of Luskin’s writings), and it’s rather hard to buy into your current description of your attendance of a Krugman lecture and book-signing as a harmless little lark when you went on to describe it in a blog post thusly:

I have looked evil in the face. I’ve been in the same room with it. I don’t know how else to describe my feelings now except to say that I feel unclean, and I’m having to fight being afraid.

I know you’re all hot-and-bothered about Krugman and all, and I know that “you demand an immediate retraction”. But really, Donald, after you actually called Krugman “evil”, why shouldn’t the only response to you be “If you can’t stand the heat, then stay the hell out of the kitchen”? You reap what you sow in this life, Mr. Luskin. Get used to it.

(via TBogg.)

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Happy Birthday to Kevin Drum, who turned 45 and gets to celebrate by taking a trip to Cincinnati. He wants to know what there is to do in Cincy, and I don’t really know. He could just drive across a steel-deck bridge and hum at the pitch his tires make, I guess, and then repeat “97-X, bammmm, the Future of Rock and Roll!” over and over, I suppose.

(The road trip in Rain Man did start in Cincinnati, didn’t it?)

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The novel-in-progress currently stands at just under 62000 words. Up today is the first death of a fairly major character, but this character was introduced for no other purpose than to kill him off, so I’m not too broken up about it. He’s kind of a minor MacGuffin who basically exists to nudge the story toward the real MacGuffin later on (the Grail, of course — it’s an Arthurian story after all). There are deaths to come — I think — that are a bit sadder, though. And there’s one very major character whose fate I probably won’t decide until the time actually comes when I have to either spare him or have the knife plunge into his heart. Decisions, decisions.

Over the weekend, I also dug out the most recent short story that’s been sitting around half-completed. This one’s driven by an image that came to me a couple of years back — a homeless man starts waking up every morning with a crisp ten dollar bill in his pocket — and now it seems to be developing into a weird tale about a secret society of highstakes poker players, who all happen to be homeless. Problem is, I don’t know the first thing about poker, so I’m kind-of cribbing small details from every poker scene I’ve ever watched in a movie of read in a book and generally trying to fend off the nagging suspicion that it really wouldn’t kill me to grab a copy of Hoyle’s when I’m at the library later today. You know, getting the details right.

And the story keeps veering off into other thematic regions which are surprising me: Would ten dollars a day, every day, have any real impact on a homeless person’s life, or would it just be subsistence? And what, to the homeless, would constitute “high stakes” anyway? I don’t know the answers to these questions, and anyway, my general approach to matters of theme is to try to suggest it but do no more than that. Heavy-handed message-sending tends to grate on my nerves (“If you want to send a message, use Western Union”, the saying goes). I’m more surprised at the direction I’ve gone after following a pretty-much random mental image that came to me for no reason at all.

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Late October is when the NFL starts to really get interesting, especially here in Buffalo. The question on everyone’s mind is: Which Bills team is the real Bills team? Is it the power-running, stifling defense team that throttled the Redskins yesterday 24-7, beat New England and Jacksonville earlier in the year? Or is it the team with the sputtering offense that leaves its defense on the field too long, resulting in one-sided losses to teams like Miami, Philadelphia, and the New york Jets and barely pulled on an overtime victory against Cincinnati? We Bills fans are desperately praying for the former, especially with a couple of stiff tests coming up: the Bills play at Kansas City (where they almost always get crushed) and Dallas the next two weeks.

:: The Bills actually ran the ball yesterday, and they kept running it. Even when Travis Henry got stuffed a few times, they didn’t instantly go pass-wacky. Wow, patience with the running game! Who’da thunk it! (Attentive readers will know that I’da thunk it. In fact, I did thunk it. And “thunk” is one fun word.) They rushed the ball 39 times for once. They ignored the nay-sayers who constantly point out that Travis Henry fumbles occasionally (he didn’t fumble at all yesterday). And they actually decided to use Antonio Brown, the rookie receiver-kick returner who’s the fastest guy on the team, on an end-around play, which was a nive changeup to throw into the mix (certainly better than fake punts and halfback options and other nuttiness the Bills have tried).

A very welcome development, in addition to the definite signs of life in the running game, was in the success the Bills had passing the ball without Eric Moulds in the lineup. Drew Bledsoe had a fine game, going 19-26 for 244 yards, one touchdown and only one interception. The leading receiver yesterday was none other than Josh Reed, who has come under heavy criticism for too many dropped passes and failing to get open. My contention is that Bills fans have been a bit too demanding of Reed, who is after all only in his second year. I think fans’ expectations of receivers have been warped by the careers of such players as Marvin Harrison and Randy Moss, players who are spectacular pretty much from the minute they enter the league, but it’s far more common for receivers to take a year or two to develop. Josh Reed’s rookie year was better than Eric Moulds’s, and if he only catches one pass a game for the entire remainder of this season, Reed’s second year will end up eclipsing Moulds’s second as well.

The defense played a tight and physical game as well, punishing Redskins QB Patrick Ramsay and eventually knocking him out of the game. Their backup, the former Bills’ starter and incredibly injury-prone Rob Johnson, came in and almost immediately was swarmed to the Ralph Wilson Stadium turf. (I still maintain that the Bills did the right thing in making Johnson the starter a few years back over Doug Flutie, even though it didn’t work out.) The Bills held the Redskins to 56 yards rushing and allowed only ten pass completions. That’s pretty good. They’ll need that stiffness next week, though, when they see Chiefs RB Priest Holmes.

One final bit of negativity: the Bills are still far too undisciplined. They are still prone to stupid penalties, and in something I’ve never seen before, they had to call a timeout before running the very first play of the second quarter — when they had a two-minute television timeout anyway. That’s not the mark of a precision team that’s hitting on all cylinders.

Other football stuff:

:: If there is one thing I’m getting sick of seeing in the NFL, it’s the way every time a wide receiver has a pass broken up by a defender, he immediately whirls around at the officials and makes that wrist-gesture that mimicks the ref’s throwing of the penalty flag. If you get the call, fine; if not, quit begging for it. Yeesh.

:: The Dolphins have now blown two winnable games at home — first, their opener against the Texans, and then yesterday against the Patriots. And it’s not even December, when they wilt every year. Rickey Williams, though, did have one of the most amazing plays I’ve ever seen, when somehow he managed to keep his knee from hitting the ground with only one hand and his toes to brace against when a Pats defender made the initial hit. You almost hate to see a team lose when they have a player with enough drive and strength to pull that play off. Almost. But it’s the Dolphins, so I’m glad to see them lose.

:: But I’m not glad to see the Pats win, because now we’ll start hearing all sorts of blather about how wonderful Belichick and Tom Brady are. Gack.

:: I only saw a single highlight from the Vikings’ win over the Broncos yesterday. Vikings fans will know what highlight that was. That lateral had no business working. I’m glad it did, but I really hope they’re not planning that kind of thing as a matter of course.

:: Now that we’re approaching the half-way point in the season, and the races for the playoffs are starting to take some shape, it seems that my Super Bowl prediction for this year is in some trouble. Tampa Bay’s awesome defense has looked pretty ordinary, and they’re only 3-3 right now, not even leading their division and well-behind in the all-important home-field advantage race. My AFC Champion pick, the Tennessee Titans, are in better shape — they’re 5-2, just a half-game out of first place in the AFC South, behind Indianapolis. And not a single one of my picks to win divisions this year is in first place right now. Ouch.

October’s almost out — the World Series is on, and soon it will be November, when the NFL season starts to really pick up steam. The trees here are now well-past their peak, and we’re just about in the time when snow becomes a realistic possibility in the Buffalo weather forecast. Bring it on!

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Agents from Intergalactic Patrol have released this photo of Agent ZZZ from the Evil Vexorg Empire, as he prepares to contact his superiors for further instructions in their fell plot to destroy all mankind. It seems that Agent ZZZ forgot that he is only to perform this operation in broad daylight, so as to not call attention to the glowing of his head….

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SDB appended the baseball themed post that I commented on the other day, with a metaphor that in the field of international relations, the United States is comparable to the New York Yankees in baseball. It’s a decent metaphor, not just in the way that SDB says but also in that a lot of people believe, with some justification, that the way the Yankees do business, while certainly good for the Yankees, isn’t always good for baseball in general.

SDB also says that, while other teams wax and wane, the Yankees don’t. That’s not totally true, although it’s certainly true that the Yankees wax and wane less than other clubs. But they have had their periods of ineffectiveness, as this table shows. They didn’t become a force until the 1920s, with Babe Ruth’s arrival. This began their most remarkable period of extended excellence, for over the next forty years the Yankees never went more than three years without finishing in first place. But then, between 1965 and 1975, they did not finish first a single time, and six times in those eleven years they finished more than twenty games out of first place.

The Yankees rebounded in the late 1970s and early 1980s, finishing first four times in five years between 1976 and 1980. But after 1980, they didn’t finish first again until 1996 (1994, actually, if one considers that strike-terminated season). And the worst Yankees teams ever were the ones that took the field between 1989 and 1992. This whole period, incidentally, encapsulates the career of Don Mattingly, who is one of the most popular players to don the New York pinstripes since Reggie Jackson.

SDB attributes the Yankees’ success over the last eighty years to money, and I’m certain that’s a big part of it. But I’m wondering how big a role money played, or even what role it played, in the days before free-agency when baseball players were pretty much forced into playing for whatever team they ended up with, unless they got traded. I’m no expert here, so I’m wondering how the Yankees managed to be competitive for all those years when they couldn’t just go out and sign the biggest players to the biggest contracts. Did they simply have the best scouting and farm systems in baseball for all those years? Were they simply lucky to have one great player after another — and I’m talking GREAT players here, many of them among the very best ever — come through their system? How on Earth did the Yankees do it?

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I wouldn’t want to be a “Gregg” right now. Maybe a “Greg”, or perhaps a “Gregory”, but definitely not a “Gregg”. The Buffalo papers and media are awash right now in speculations that the Bills’ head coach, Gregg Williams, is either about to be fired or is deserving of being fired or should never have been hired and more. And then there’s writer Gregg Easterbrook, of whom I have complained before and who is embroiled in a bit of controversy right now over something he said about Jews (earlier post of mine here), has apparently been fired from his Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for ESPN. Kevin Drum reports here and here, and you can follow his links to all manner of discussion of what Easterbrook wrote, said, apologized for, et cetera.

It’s no secret that I’ve been coming off Easterbrook’s band wagon lately, but the manner of ESPN’s dismissal of his services is rather odd. That is to say, it makes no sense. They didn’t just fire him; they deleted all of his columns from their archives, and actually coded their internal search engine so as to report zero hits on any search for the name “Easterbrook”, regardless of whether you happen to be searching for Gregg Easterbrook or some other, unrelated Easterbrook. This isn’t a mere dismissal; it’s the firing-equivalent of killing the guy, bulldozing his house and then salting the earth where it once stood. Weird.

Speculation now is that Easterbrook wasn’t really dismissed for writing something odd about Jews, but because by criticizing Miramax’s promotion of the movie Kill Bill, he was actually criticizing his boss. (Miramax and ESPN are both owned by Disney.) Talk about your thin skins at the Disney Company, eh?

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Roger Ebert takes a break from writing about movies today to wax eloquent about leaf blowers, and how much he dislikes them. I pretty much agree with his sentiment. Blowers are definitely useful for removing large amounts of leaves from the roof of one’s domicile, thus preventing them from collecting and rotting in the gutters and rain spouts, but whenever I see someone dutifully shooing the leaves from one’s yard with one of these gizmos, I am immediately certain that come June this person will be outside again waging a war on dandelions, those innocent yellow flowers which go away all by themselves in two weeks anyway, if left alone.

And in a nice bit of incongruity, at the bottom of Ebert’s article is a small box containing “related advertising links”, which in this case are advertising — you guessed it — sites that sell leaf blowers.

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As a card-carrying Star Wars geek (well, I’d carry a card if there was one), I got a kick out of the music played at Yankee Stadium last night for the player introductions before Game One. When the visiting Florida Marlins were introduced, the Yankees played the “Imperial March” from The Empire Strikes Back, which many baseball fans might consider more appropriate for last night’s home team, but never mind. Then, the Yankees were introduced to the strains of “Throne Room and End Title” from A New Hope, complete with that wonderful opening brass fanfare followed by the march-version of the Force Theme (originally Ben Kenobi’s Theme).

And I thought that Clay Aiken performed a fine rendition of The Star Spangled Banner, except for the moment when the fighter-jet flyover threw him off. I’ll admit it, I love Clay’s voice. (I’ll also admit to liking Celine Dion. Ya got a problem with that?)

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The city of Taipei is now home to the world’s tallest building. I’ve just cranked the numbers, and I’m sure everyone will be fascinated to discover that Taipei’s new building is approximately 3.1512 times the height of One HSBC Center, the tallest building in Buffalo. Hmmmm….that’s a little more than pi, isn’t it?

(The Taipei building is way cooler looking than One HSBC Center, too. I mean, is the Buffalo building the most boring looking building you’ve ever seen, or what? Every time I drive by it, it just screams out at me, “This is where accountants come to play!”)

The MSN article mentions the skittishness some people now have about very tall buildings post 9-11-01, but I still get a kick out of very tall structures. What interested me more was the fact that the big concern for the Taipei building is seismic activity, as opposed to terrorist activity.

And I should note that to me it seems a bit like cheating to build a tall building and then cap it with some kind of ornamental spire just to nab the “Tallest Building” honors. At least the Sears Tower in Chicago is offices all the way up. Harumph.

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