The Department of Weird Convergences, which has apparently been on vacation near Crawford, Texas, wishes to note the following bumper stickers, noted within six inches of one another on the back of a Chevy pickup the other day.

:: A 700 Club sticker (with logo) that read, “This is still One Nation UNDER GOD.” (Emphasis as marked on the sticker.)

:: One of those images of a little boy, with his trousers dropped and his posterior in full view, with an arcing line clearly meant to depict a stream of urine, impacting a “Ford” logo.

The Department is wondering if slapping the second sticker in such proximity to the first sticker has any “blunting” effect on the first sticker’s message. Anyone?

Share This Post

I once met a man with a wooden leg, named Smith.

I’d forgotten what a good movie Mary Poppins is. The songs are all wonderful, and the acting is all first-rate. Although, I must admit that Dick Van Dyke’s fake Cockney accent gets a tad grating after a while. But the film is undoubtedly the best pure musical Disney ever made. In fact, if it weren’t for that Disney label – – had Fox or Warners made it, for example – – the film would probably be remembered as one of the finer musicals as opposed to a family/kids movie. It’s also a terrific fantasy: it creates a whole little world within London where magic can happen and wonderment can be found. Here’s an urban fantasy from yesteryear.

Of course, watching the film now, I can’t help but keep reflecting on the “Sherry Bobbins” parody that The Simpsons did….

(So, what was the name of his other leg?)

Share This Post

Olympus Mons, the planet Mars.

Like everyone else, I’ve been going outside to scope out the planet Mars over the last week or so. I’m as fascinated by Mars as anyone – – a planet that’s somewhat Earthlike, but also violently different, where humans will one day set up their first colonies on another planet. (My firm belief is that colonization is our destiny, and we’d best be about it.) Mars is there, and it’s waiting. What are we waiting for?

(Here is a great gallery of Mars pics.)

Share This Post

NFL 2003, continued.

OK, I’ve weighed in on the Bills and the rest of the AFC East. Now I’ll go on about the rest of the league a bit. (Not every team, though. I have my limits.)

:: If the Minnesota Vikings, my favorite NFC team, were to win the Super Bowl, I think it might make the third page of the Buffalo sports section. That’s how hard it is to come by Vikings news out here. The Vikes struck me as a disaster-in-waiting at the beginning of last year, and for a time I genuinely believed that they should waive Randy Moss and just go right into a rebuilding project. Moss appears, though, to have moved a bit beyond his stupid attitude, and the Vikes in general appear to be improving, as far as I can tell. Every year there’s at least one playoff team that totally surprises me. Last year it was the Browns. This year, it could well be the Vikings.

:: My second-favorite team overall is the Pittsburgh Steelers. I only root against the Steelers if, and only if, they are either playing the Bills or a Steeler victory would hurt the Bills (by, say, denying them home-field advantage or a playoff berth). That said, I expect that for the thirty-seventh consecutive year, the Steelers will get to the playoffs, that they will fail to advance to the Super Bowl, and that in the postgame press conference Bill Cowher will look like his jaw is about to burst into flame while his eyes blast Cyclops-like death-rays. But at least it won’t be a case of Kordell Stewart suddenly realizing he’s in a big game and thus lowering his play to the level of a drunken Arena Leaguer. That’s progress, right?

:: So Jake Plummer is in Denver now. Maybe he’ll flourish under a new system, better coaches and better ownership. But he’s also got a number of years’ worth of bad habits, bred or allowed to fester under the aegis of a crappy organization in Arizona. But maybe he’s just the guy, now that a few years of Brian Griese has allowed the memory of John Elway to move, just slightly, into the area of local legend as opposed to the immediate past, to lead the Denver resurgence. The Broncos should have been better last year than they were.

:: And speaking of Arizona, so Emmitt Smith’s going to finish out his days there. Big whoop. The only real question mark for Smith now is if, when he finally decides to hang ’em up – – probably after this year – – Jerry Jones will let him sign one of those one-day deals next summer just so he can officially retire as a Cowboy.

Here are a couple of questions about the Cardinals: Do Cardinals fans exist? And, if so, does it bother them that the greatest moment in their franchise’s history, receiver Rod Tidwell’s touchdown catch to beat Dallas and put the Cards in the playoffs, was a fictional moment from a movie?

:: Will Oliver Willis, Blogistan’s source for All Things Redskins, be smiling this year? Well, Oliver strikes me as the kind of football fan who can find something to smile about even in a 3-13 year, so it’s all relative. He won’t be dancing in the streets celebrating the ‘Skins’ return to the Super Bowl, but he’ll probably be encouraged with a 9-7 campaign.

:: So, who will actually win the divisions this year? Below are my predictions. Consider that last year, I correctly predicted six of eight division winners. Heh. Indeed.

AFC East: Buffalo

AFC North: Pittsburgh

AFC South: Tennessee

AFC West: Kansas City

AFC Wildcards: New England, Denver

NFC East: Philadelphia

NFC North: Green Bay

NFC South: Tampa

NFC West: San Francisco

NFC Wildcards: St. Louis, NY Giants

The division I’m “iffiest” about is the NFC West. I’m mainly picking the Rams in the playoffs for sentimental reasons – – I just really dig Kurt Warner, and I’d like to see him return to form. I also think that my predicted order-of-finish in the NFC East could very well be reversed; the Giants just might be hungrier than the Eagles. (Each team has good reason to be hungry.) And there are always the Falcons…but Michael Vick’s hurt right now, which might put them in a hole to start with. I’d also watch out for Minnesota, Seattle and Cleveland this year, too. Each of those teams could be a major spoiler or even get into the playoffs. Finally, I’m wary of leaving Oakland out of my post-season mix, but I also think they don’t have enough gas in the tank to overcome the younger teams in their division.

:: And finally, who will win the Super Bowl? Well, looking at the last six Super Bowl champions, a pattern emerges.

1997: Denver

1998: Denver

1999: St. Louis

2000: New England

2001: Baltimore

2002: Tampa

2003: ???

What’s the pattern? Well, aside from the repeat-champion 1998 Broncos, every one of these champions is a team that, to that point in franchise history, had never won a Super Bowl before. (Even the 1996 Packers could be considered part of this trend, since their previous championship had been 30 years before.) The era of parity and free agency has genuinely created an atmosphere where any team, run coached and managed well, can put together a Super Bowl champion. If 2003 keeps to this formula and crowns a brand new champion that has never won it all before, I expect it to be one of these teams: Buffalo, Tennessee, Atlanta (even though I’m not even picking them to make the playoffs!) or Philadelphia. Of those teams, the Titans and Eagles are probably the most desperate to win before the current window closes and they go back into cap-forced rebuilding.

But I don’t think that’s going to happen this time out, because I think we’re going to see a repeat champion for the first time in five years. I think that Tampa will win it all, again – – mainly because they’re returning pretty much the exact same team that won it all last year. They are still ascendant. Free agency hasn’t stripped them yet, their players are not too old yet, and they are built around physical defense. About the only thing that I can see keeping them from winning a second consecutive Super Bowl is injuries. Who will they beat? Tennessee, probably. So that’s my pick: The Buccaneers over the Titans.

Repeating in the NFL has always been tough, but I don’t think it’s any more tough in the free agency era than it was before. It’s simply that the formula is different. If you can put together a Super Bowl-caliber team, and win that first championship early in the four or five years that are at most what you’ll have to do it, then you’ll be able to do what the Bucs are able to do this year: come back from a championship with almost the same personnel. What’s harder now is creating a dynasty: building a franchise that dominates for year after year over a long period. I expect we’ll see repeat champions at about the same clip as before: one will come along every five, six, or seven years. (Between the 1978/1979 Steelers and the 1988-1989 49ers, there were no repeat champions. But the period between 1988 and 1998 saw three repeats – – the 49ers, the Cowboys, and the Broncos.)

So, that’s it. I will, of course, track the progress each week in boring fashion. So, I’m ready for some football!

Share This Post

Kevin Drum notes the latest example of school officials overreacting to a student’s creative writing exercise. As Kevin notes, this bizarre belief on the part of many in education today that we can somehow eradicate brooding teenagers is causing a lot of problems. I did a fair amount of brooding myself, and I recall that some of my teachers accepted it and tried to “channel” it, while others apparently had no use for the non-popular sports types like myself. In general, I suspect that the brooding types are never really trusted, which is a particular bummer now that we’ve managed to convince ourselves that every brooding heart may be a beat or two away from sliding over the edge to murderousness. (Wow…”muderousness”, what a word…)

I’m also probably lucky that my main creative outlet in school was music. I did write, but that was always “back burner” stuff and it was always Star Wars fanfic. Had my current love of horror developed back then, I probably would have generated some grim material indeed. But then, I’ve never really been one for using my fiction to vent the problems of my inner life. I don’t base characters in my stories on people I know, nor do I put my characters into situations in which I have been before. I may borrow someone’s interesting habits or something like that, but that’s about it. So even in my “brooding teen” days, I would have been vanishingly unlikely to write a tale in which I arranged the deaths of my hated teachers. (And besides, my brooding was pretty tame, and there were only a handful of teachers I really disliked in school.)

Kevin’s parting shot here is this: Everywhere you look, it’s either overreaction or underreaction. Is it just the curse of humanity never to get things right? I’m sure that Kevin knows that the answer here is basically “Yes”. We’re basically a pendulum species that will never, ever quite reach the center where we find Nirvana, Heaven, Righteousness, or whatever you want to call that state of pure morality. Sometimes we swing way too far one way, other times we sway too far the other. All we can really hope for is that over time the wildness of our swings lessens a bit, and that our moral pendulum never again approaches, say, the position where buying and selling other human beings for servitude is OK; and what keeps the pendulum swinging in the first place is that no one knows what its rest-position would be, anyway.

Share This Post

One of the small side effects of hanging out in online writers’ forums is that writers (in my experience) tend to be cat people, and inevitably there comes a post every so often in which someone’s beloved cat passes away. If one is also a cat person, these posts are always very sad. There was such a post on a Usenet group I read the other day, and amongst the follow-ups of condolence I found this charming quote:

“Yes, dogs provided companionship while man was at the hunt. But it was cats who insisted that we invent houses and discover fire.”

I don’t know where that comes from, but man, is that a great quote.

Share This Post

Just in case anyone is wondering where my comments have gone, apparently the YACCS server croaked at some point early in the weekend, and due to (a) the fact that it is a weekend and (b) it’s a long holiday weekend at that, the outage has lasted longer than normal. Hopefully commenting will be restored tomorrow sometime.

Share This Post

As if the SF Gods didn’t think I already felt guilty enough about not being able to attend WorldCon despite its being just a hundred miles away, I see this report on Usenet this morning from an attendee who sat in on Guy Gavriel Kay reading from The Last Light of the Sun, the new novel coming out next spring:

So, here I am in Toronto, and yesterday (or Saturday or something), GGK read from his upcoming book.

By way of introduction, he pointed out that his past several books had all about about “sophisticated cultures”. He didn’t go into what he meant by “sophisticated”, but he gave Arbonne’s Court of Love as an example. It’s not something that a low-literacy, bare-bones agricultural society could support. Ditto for educated doctors, professional muralists, etc. And Byzantium is the archetype of pre-Renaissance sophisticated civilization.

So with the next book he wants to do something different. It’s post-Roman Britain, with Celts and Saxons and so on. The scene he read had kids out on a raid against a nearby fort. There was obviously still *art* — poetry, music — but it wasn’t troubadors.

We’ll see how different it turns out. The part he read gave no sense of who the “Romans” had been, or how the protagonists viewed them. (The only reference to previous civilizations was indirect — someone mentioned the Wall of Hadrian-or-whoever.)

So there we go: We’ll see the equivalent of Dark Ages Britain in the proto-Europe setting that’s been the setting of GGK’s last three novels. Thus, I expect that the title The Last Light of the Sun refers to the gradual fading of the Rhodian (Roman) Empire as the Imperial forces recede, leaving their outposts and forts behind and the requisite power-void to be filled. What interests me most about this is that it’s precisely this setting into which most scholars try to find the actual historical roots of the Arthurian legends. I wonder if GGK is planning a type of re-exploration of the Arthur stories, given that he’s already done some work in that milieu in The Fionavar Tapestry. (Of course, he could leave the Arthurian angle out entirely, too. You never know with GGK.) The other interesting angle is that, as I read the quoted post, it sounds as if GGK is creating a more “brutal” civilization for the new book.

And I missed the #$%&^*@!!! reading. AGGGHHHH!!!

(I’ll try to post a link to the Usenet post once it shows up on the Google archive. As of this writing, it isn’t there yet. I cut-and-pasted the text from my newsreader.)

Share This Post

SDB did what I think he does best the other day: he took an experience of his own and used it to illustrate something from science or engineering. In this case, tool-making. It seems he had some functionality problems with an updated version of his blogging software, and those problems gave rise to this fascinating essay about what tools should do and the pitfalls toolmakers of all stripes must avoid.

Although, I have to point out the section where he describes pants as a tool and the problems that can arise from poor “pants design”. In the course of the article, SDB talks about tools “vanishing” and “unvanishing”. Those are metaphors, obviously – – read the article to see what they mean – – but when I got to the pants section, SDB had me envisioning this engineer walking through downtown San Diego in wool pants and suddenly stopping to exclaim, “My pants have vanished!” And passers-by would shake their heads and say, “Oh, how sad…another Qualcomm engineer whose pants have vanished!”

Hmmm….it’s possible my posting break was not quite long enough….

Share This Post

My oh my, it’s September already. That means many things, of course, but most important is…

FOOTBALL!!!

Yes, it’s time for me to start droning on about football on a weekly basis. It’s my burden, and my curse. So we’ll get right on with it, starting with the most important franchise in the NFL, without whom the entire league might as well fold up and die:

:: The Buffalo Bills.

The Bills started a rebuilding project two years ago, bringing in a new coach and a new General Manager, jettisoning the last bastion of talent from the run of Super Bowl appearances in the early 1990s, and opting to give Rob Johnson his shot at quarterback over Doug Flutie. Johnson didn’t work out, but I still think the Bills made the right decision that year. Nevertheless, they went 3-13 in 2001 with the beginnings of a youth movement that continued apace in 2002.

The additions of Drew Bledsoe and Mike Williams on the offensive line a year ago, combined with a general sense of stability on the O-line that had been missing for several years, finally made the Bills a fairly potent offensive team. But their defense was terrible (although it improved late in the year), which ended up putting too much pressure on Bledsoe to win games all by himself. Repeatedly put into positions of having to win shoot-outs with his arm, Bledsoe began to force his throws and make bad decisions with the ball, and the Bills ended up limping to an 8-8 record. (I had predicted a 6-10 finish, so I was happy.)

So here we are, heading into 2003. The Bills made substantial upgrades to their defensive personnel in the offseason, adding linebackers Takeo Spikes and Jeff Posey and defensive lineman Sam Adams, along with a few others. The Bills’ D was porous last year, allowing opposing teams to either rack up a lot of rushing yardage or letting their quarterbacks take advantage of the Bills’ lack of a pass-rush to stand in the pocket while their receivers got open. I would like the Bills to have acquired one real pass-rusher in the offseason, but in any event they’ll be a more physical team and they’ll be much stiffer against the run, which should help a secondary that’s more talented than their stats from the last couple of years let on. The Bills’ D figures to be a lot better this year…but now, there are question marks again on offense.

I figure that on the basis of better defense alone they’ll finish better than last year. Defense is the key to winning consistently in the NFL and always has been; if they can have fifty percent more defense than they had last year, I figure that will make up for the loss of twenty-five percent of their offense. Of course, they might have lost more than twenty-five percent. We don’t know yet.

The biggest offensive loss was receiver Peerless Price, who was a free agent but thanks to the NFL’s rules on such things, the Bills ended up getting a first-round pick from the Falcons for signing Price anyway, which they used to draft Willis McGahee, who would have gone in the first five picks had he not blown out his knee in last year’s Orange Bowl. I doubt McGahee will play at all this year – – I don’t care how much he insists he’s healing ahead of normal, you just don’t mess with stuff like that – – so Travis Henry again will bear the load of running the ball. (Yesterday the Bills traded Olandis Gary, who had been their likely backup, possibly implying that they mean to play McGahee later this year. I really hope they don’t do this.) And he’ll have even better blocking, with the O-line being young, more experienced, and with Sam Gash once again providing lead-blocking duties. Gash is now in his second stint with the Bills, and his first stint was outstanding.

The hope is that the running game will improve sufficiently to allow the Bills to control the clock and accommodate the loss of Price, which will now result in Eric Moulds seeing double teams pretty much on every offensive snap of the ball this year. Second-year-man Josh Reed has a chance to step up (and he showed a lot of promise as a rookie last year), but the Bills also lost Larry Centers, who was a big part of their passing game. Tight end Jay Riemersma, a guy whose reputation is surprisingly high in the NFL given his lack of production the last few years (not all his fault), is gone as well.

The last major question mark for the Bills is head coach Gregg Williams, who is in the last year of his contract despite the fact that his assistants are all signed beyond this year. Williams has shown a lot of growth in his short time with the Bills. He’s not nearly as pig-headed now as he seemed when he first took over, and he’s shown willingness to admit when something’s not working and try something else. (One thing that always drove me mad about Marv Levy and Wade Philips both was their unswerving loyalty to their coordinators, no matter how lousy their results could be. Had Levy recognized Walt Corey’s deficiencies as a defensive coordinator a few years earlier, he might have won one of those Super Bowls.) This year, Williams has added former Bengals head coach Dick LeBeau (a fine coach who had to work in Cincinnati, for cripes’ sakes) to his mix. However, Williams also shows a tendency to make incredibly goofy decisions in games, and the team still shows a maddening lack of discipline that reflects directly on the head coach. (Ruben Brown is a nine-year veteran. Shouldn’t he have learned how to not false-start by now?) Williams tends to get outcoached, but if his learning curve continues, those days may be over. Or maybe not.

So, how do I think the Bills will do? Barring disastrous injuries – – always a worry in the NFL – – their added defensive strength should translate, I think, to a few more wins. So I think they’ll finish 11-5 this year. That might be good enough to win the division. It also might leave them out of the playoffs entirely. We’ll see.

:: So, what about the rest of the AFC East? Well, longtime readers will know that I’ve never been sold on the Patriots and Bill Belichick (whose regular season record is still under .500 for his career). I still believe that their Super Bowl win two years ago constitutes the single most amazing confluence of luck in NFL history, when week after week the Patriots managed to either survive potential disaster by sheer happenstance or overcome teams that were better on paper but undone by bad coaching. Lots of folks are singing the Pats’ praises for signing Ted Washington, but they guy has been titanically overweight for so long that I’m seriously skeptical as to whether he can stand up to an entire season in the trenches again, especially in a division where he’s going to face Rickey Williams, Travis Henry, and Curtis Martin. And I’m still not convinced that Tom Brady is a great up-and-comer, as opposed to the current incarnation of a Mark Rypien-type QB (i.e., a guy who excels for a couple of years in just the right system). Defensively, they’re still pretty good, but I’m just not sold on their offense. They were only 9-7 last year.

As for the Dolphins, well – – yeah, they’ve got all this defensive talent. But again, it’s old defensive talent. Rickey Williams is great when healthy, but he’s always an injury threat. They’re unspectacular at QB, and they’re woeful at head coach. I’m sorry, but Dave Wannstedt proved to me that he’s a bad coach in last year’s finale, when the Dolphins completed their usual December swoon by blowing a late lead in New England. A win would have given them the division. The loss kept them out of the playoffs entirely.

Finally, there are the Jets. I actually think that the Jets might have the best coaching in the AFC East, but they suffered a major exodus of talent in the offseason (a lot of them went to Washington, thus sending Oliver Willis into ecstasy) and Chad Pennington is hurt right now. So, who wins the division this year? Well, I’m going to go ahead and put myself right out on the limb. My predicted order of finish in the AFC East is:

1. Buffalo

2. New England

3. Miami

4. NY Jets

Stay tuned tomorrow for the rest of my football stuff, including my thrilling prediction of this year’s Super Bowl champion.

Share This Post