Folks, “Sentential Links” will be delayed until either tomorrow (less likely) or Wednesday (more likely). I have got to get this story I’m writing for the Buffalo News contest done, and the submission deadline is tomorrow night! (Wow, I feel like I’m in college again — “Hmmmm, paper’s due tomorrow. Guess I oughta start researching it!”)
The Ultimate Triumph of GOOD over PURE EVIL!!!
OK, time to react in sagely fashion to the AFC and NFC Championship Games:
:: I was rooting for the Saints, like everybody else, but the Bears’ advance to the Super Bowl doesn’t bother me one bit. Since 1985, that franchise has had intermittent flashes in which they’d get pretty good, but mostly they’ve been mediocre. Living in Buffalo and watching nearly every play JP Losman makes (or doesn’t make) scrutinized as evidence of his growth or retardation as an NFL quarterback, I have some sympathy for the constant tone of Bears coverage: “Will Grossman kill their chances? Tune in for kickoff at 3:30 Eastern!” Fact is, this is a team built around a defense that, when clicking on all cylinders, is fast and very physical. The Saints may have been the sentimental favorite, but the Bears pretty emphatically proved that right now, they’re the better team.
The Saints’ year this year looked like the Buffalo Bills in 1988. That team emerged from years of being not very good to go 12-4 and got to the conference championship game before exiting with a decisive defeat; that team was also quite young and had to endure another year of growing pains (9-7 in 1989) before becoming the AFC’s dominant franchise for the beginning of the 90s. The Saints have a lot of young talent; all they need is to get better on defense and they might be knocking on the door of a run of excellence.
:: To think I very nearly watched Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip last night (via CTV in Toronto) instead of the conclusion of the AFC Championship Game! Wow, that was a game. Utterly amazing.
The question before me now is: did the StuPats choke yesterday?
Now, I’ve never been fond of the “choke” label. Somebody has to win, and somebody has to lose, and it usually seems to me a bit over-the-top to say that one team or the other “choked”. But sometimes it’s a useful label. The Chargers choked last week. They put themselves in position to win that game, and then they committed a series of errors that resulted in them losing. That’s choking. Did the StuPats do the same thing? Not exactly. They didn’t make all manner of mental errors as did the Chargers.
“Choking”, in sports, is more a matter of the after-the-fact narrative perpetuated by sportswriters and whatnot than anything else. Considering the exact sequence of events in yesterday’s game, it feels odd to say that the StuPats “choked”; but if the game had unfolded in exactly the same way, but with everything reversed, so that it was the Colts who had gone up 21-3 and it was Peyton Manning who threw the interception at the end to seal the loss, you can absolutely bet that the media coverage today would feature the word “choke” all over the place, in reference to the Colts.
The StuPats are the mighty dynasty that came up just a bit short. But had the Colts done the exact same thing, they’d be the “chokers”. So what does that mean? I don’t know, really. What it comes down to, for me, is that in the recent years when these two teams met in the playoffs, the StuPats were simply the better team, while yesterday the Colts were. That’s all.
:: Of course, having said all that, I have to note that I’m not surprised at all that Tom Brady didn’t pull it out at the end. There’s a vast difference between those last-minute drives he led in those Super Bowls and the task that confronted him yesterday. Coming into a drive knowing that a field goal wins it, but as long as you don’t turn it over, you’ll at least get another shot in overtime is different from coming into a drive knowing that you must score a touchdown or you will lose. Sure, “FG or OT” is a clutch situation. But you don’t get more clutch than “TD or lose”. And that’s when “Captain Clutch” threw an interception.
And while I’m on the subject, I’m a little fuzzy on what we call “comeback wins” in football. We all know that John Elway was the “Comeback King”, but a while back, I actually found online somewhere a list of every one of his “comeback” wins, and quite a few of them were simply games in which he came in with the score tied and drove for a winning field goal. That doesn’t seem like a “comeback” to me. “Game winning drive”, sure, but “comeback”? Not so much. (And this complaint of mine refers to everybody, not just Tom Brady.)
In the schaedenfreude department, I have to say that I enjoyed the stunned expression on Brady’s and Bill Belichick’s faces after the game — especially when Belichick gave a two-sentence “interview” to a CBS sports reporter afterwards. They looked like the possibility that they might actually lose had never once crossed the transom of their minds. And in the “saying something nice for once” department, I will admit that Brady’s absolutely one of those guys who elevates the players around him, and that Belichick gets more out of guys who would suck on any other team than anybody else. (But I still hate them so much!)
:: So it’s Colts versus Bears. I’m happy that Ruben Brown, drafted by the Bills in 1995 to shore up their sagging line and let go a few years back, will finally get a chance to see what the Super Bowl is all about. But I’m really hoping that Bill Polian, who built the Bills of the 90s and was unfairly let go, finally discovers that he’s built a Super Bowl Champion.
UPDATE: In comments, Sean says that Belichick’s definitely a sore loser, but Brady isn’t. Well, it now appears that Brady didn’t shake Manning’s hand after the game, and you can see right here how when Manning came up to Belichick on the field after the game, Belichick wanted nothing to do with him and only gave him the briefest of handshakes. (His body language is all “Fine, fine, you won, get the f*** out of my way.”)
Not a huge deal, but I think it gives the lie to the narrative that’s been woven about the Patriots for the last five years or so, the deification of Brady and Belichick. Here they came up short, and they couldn’t even be gracious to the team that had beaten them. And this comes on the heels of their behavior in last year’s playoffs, when they were pouting about not getting enough “respect” before getting beaten by Denver.
Were they and awfully good team for a few years? Sure. Are they still going to be near the top of the NFL? Probably for another couple of years at least. But they’ve been unmasked as an ordinary team now.
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All tingly
Hmmmm. It’s early Monday morning, I’m getting dressed for work, it’s dark and cold outside, and yet…I have this warm happy glow about me. I wonder what that‘s all about?
Oh yeah!
I haven’t seen a game end so perfectly since the Bills’ comeback game against Houston in 1993. Way to go, Peyton and company!
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Sunday Burst of Weirdness
A two-fer, from MeFi this morning:
:: This guy is going to swim the entire length of the Amazon River, dedicating this effort to “the preservation of the Rainforest as well as to finding the cure for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders that affect the brain of millions of people”.
He’s raising over $1,000,000 to do this. Of course, he could just give that million to an Alzheimer’s research facility or do something similar, but where’s the sport in that?
Plus, it’s hard not to imagine the possibilities of what will happen: “Daredevil attempts to swim the length of the Amazon. Snuff film at eleven!”
:: Atlas Shrugged 2: One Hour Later, since making fun of Atlas Shrugged is always good family fun. I don’t recall ever seeing Bob the Angry Flower before.
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Best Pictures!
Tom the Dog has some commentary on every film to win the Best Picture Oscar, so I’ll do the same, putting the ones I’ve seen in bold:
1928 – Wings
1928 – Sunrise
Tom writes, clarifying: According to Wikipedia: Wings won for “Best Production,” Sunrise won for “Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production.” The latter Oscar was only awarded this first year, and since “Best Production” is the award that evolved into “Best Picture,” most lists mention Wings as the first ever Best Picture winner, and neglect to mention Sunrise at all. I haven’t seen either one of them, so this is a big waste of space right here, isn’t it?
1929 – The Broadway Melody (I’ve seen parts of it, never the whole thing.)
1930 – All Quiet on the Western Front
1931 – Cimarron
1932 – Grand Hotel
1933 – Cavalcade
1934 – It Happened One Night
1935 – Mutiny on the Bounty
1936 – The Great Ziegfeld
1937 – The Life of Emile Zola
1938 – You Can’t Take It With You
1939 – Gone With the Wind (I don’t like it. I just don’t. This movie commits the sin of making me cry out, “I don’t care what happens to these people!” That it takes three hours of screentime and however many months/years of story time before someone finally tells Scarlett O’Hara what to go do with herself drives me crazy.)
1940 – Rebecca (I have the feeling both that I’ve seen this, and that I haven’t. Weird.)
1941 – How Green Was My Valley
1942 – Mrs. Miniver
1943 – Casablanca (Second best movie ever. Anyone who’s been reading this blog for more than a few weeks will know what my personal first best movie ever is….)
1944 – Going My Way
1945 – The Lost Weekend
1946 – The Best Years of Our Lives
1947 – Gentleman’s Agreement
1948 – Hamlet
1949 – All the King’s Men
1950 – All About Eve
1951 – An American in Paris (Ugh. Great Gene Kelly dancing, obviously, but no chemistry between Kelly and Leslie Caron, and frankly, Kelly aside, the wonderful Gershwin songs aren’t sung particularly well.)
1952 – The Greatest Show on Earth
1953 – From Here to Eternity (This movie left me stunned the first time I watched it, senior year of high school, on a TBS “Best Picture” winners marathon. It left me so stunned that I couldn’t sit and watch Casablanca, which aired right after it. So I had to wait a few more months before finally watching Casablanca for the first time.)
1954 – On the Waterfront
1955 – Marty (Never seen it. The film’s almost more famous for being the answer to the fateful trivia question in the quiz-show scandal of the 50s, immortalized in Quiz Show.)
1956 – Around the World in 80 Days
1957 – The Bridge on the River Kwai (Parts, not the whole thing. I really need to watch the whole thing.)
1958 – Gigi (Awfully good, but I can’t help but think it would have been better with a different female lead. I just don’t care for Leslie Caron.)
1959 – Ben-Hur (Far and away my favorite Bible epic! I recently bought the 4-disc DVD of this. Vastly superior to the annually-shown Ten Commandments.)
1960 – The Apartment
1961 – West Side Story (Great movie, obviously. I love the opening aerial pan over New York City. It always feels slow in spots, though.)
1962 – Lawrence of Arabia (Oh, holy shit. I’ve just realized that I have still only seen half of this movie. And the first half is so good. What am I doing?)
1963 – Tom Jones
1964 – My Fair Lady (Depending on my mood, I’ll either list this or Singin’ in the Rain as my favorite film musical. I just adore this film. Love it.)
1965 – The Sound of Music (I love this movie too. I love how it’s the only musical I can think of — although I’m sure there are others — that has its title number out of the way before the opening credits even roll; I love how it just plows ahead, without getting bogged down in subplots that would dominate the film were it made today. Nowadays we’d get a long psychological character study of Captain Von Trapp’s state of mind as a grieving widower, or we’d delve into the vagaries of why Rolf so badly wants to be a Nazi. I could, though, do without the Mother Superior whose dubbing job has this big, almost operatic voice issuing from lips that are barely opened.)
1966 – A Man For All Seasons
1967 – In the Heat of the Night (Once, years ago. Very good.)
1968 – Oliver!
1969 – Midnight Cowboy
1970 – Patton (Once, years ago. Also very good.)
1971 – The French Connection (Yup, once, years ago. Gritty, gritty stuff. Popeye Doyle is a great character, and the car chase is riveting.)
1972 – The Godfather (Just parts. I really don’t have much interest in it. Mob stories just don’t, as a rule, interest me all that much.)
1973 – The Sting
1974 – The Godfather Part II
1975 – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
1976 – Rocky (This movie would, I suspect, have a much higher standing today if it hadn’t been followed by a series of ever-crappier sequels. Rocky IV was an embarrassment.)
1977 – Annie Hall (The film that beat out Star Wars. Damn you, Woody Allen!)
1978 – The Deer Hunter (OK, it’s an amazing film. It also made me want to kill myself afterward, it was so depressing.)
1979 – Kramer vs. Kramer
1980 – Ordinary People (Ahhh, here’s the first one that I genuinely hate. Two hours of watching people wallow in misery — ugh. This was forced viewing for me when I was in tenth grade; we also had to read the equally miserable book. I’ve never forgiven that teacher for this.)
1981 – Chariots of Fire (I liked it a lot. But I haven’t seen it in over twenty years.)
1982 – Gandhi (This movie affected me deeply when it came out; I watched it again a few years ago, and found it still very powerful.)
1983 – Terms of Endearment
1984 – Amadeus (Absolutely brilliant, and still fresh today, owing to its stunning production values. I reviewed it a few years ago for GMR.)
1985 – Out of Africa
1986 – Platoon (I admired this film when I watched it. It’s not really a film to enjoy.)
1987 – The Last Emperor
1988 – Rain Man (Very good and entertaining, but Best Picture???)
1989 – Driving Miss Daisy (Ditto what I said for Rain Man.)
1990 – Dances With Wolves (I still think this film is brilliant, and I’m pretty much alone in not being incensed that it beat out Goodfellas.)
1991 – The Silence of the Lambs (One of my favorite films, actually. I haven’t watched it in years, though, since with a young child around it’s hard to get chances to watch stuff like this. Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Lecter is the stuff of legend, though.)
1992 – Unforgiven (I think that, like Casablanca, you don’t realize how good this film is until you watch it a second time. That way, having already seen Bill Munny at the end of the picture when he takes revenge for Ned’s murder, you have some idea of what he’s fighting against. There’s a lot of great dialogue in this film as well: “It’s a hell of a thing, killin’ a man. Take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.”
1993 – Schindler’s List (On my shortlist of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen.)
1994 – Forrest Gump (Someday I ought to do a list of movies I feel like I should hate, but don’t. I like this movie a lot. It’s a fable, and I like fables. Sure, it got so popular that it didn’t have anywhere to go but down, but this movie’s fall from grace still surprises me.)
1995 – Braveheart (The first half of this film is as good as anything I’ve ever seen. The second half bogs down a bit. And even as Mel Gibson’s turned out to be something of a loon, I was never bothered by the scene where the King pitches the homosexual character out of the window. The King was pretty clearly portrayed as a complete evil bastard, so pitching people he doesn’t like out of windows didn’t seem to me an endorsement by Gibson, per se, of pitching gay people out of windows. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but there it is.)
1996 – The English Patient (Next time I’ll just make an offering to Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering. Talk about wallowing in woe…but maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe someday I’ll rent it again; wouldn’t be the first time I changed my mind about a movie.)
1997 – Titanic (Here’s another film whose fall from grace baffles me. I just think it’s a cracking good movie.)
1998 – Shakespeare in Love (I’m alone in not having a problem with Dances with Wolves beating out Goodfellas, and I suspect I’m also alone in not being terribly upset that this film beat out Saving Private Ryan, a movie which I’ve always felt was awfully overrated, consisting of an astonishing sequence followed by two hours of ever-increasing banality.)
1999 – American Beauty
2000 – Gladiator (On the basis of the roughly one-half of it that I’ve seen, I like Kingdom of Heaven more.)
2001 – A Beautiful Mind (Again, parts. Not enough to make a priority out of seeing the whole thing.)
2002 – Chicago (OK, I liked this film a lot, even if apparently the only way we can do musicals anymore is to directly posit the numbers as being fantasy sequences, and even if fancy camera work takes the place of actual dancing.)
2003 – The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Need I go on about this film and its two preceding installments? Sheer magnificence. I think these will still be watched a hundred years from now.)
2004 – Million Dollar Baby
2005 – Crash
So there you have it. With waiting-for-DVD being my prime means of film viewing nowadays, I’d expect that I will rarely see a Best Picture in its original theatrical run in the future. And really, I’m fine with that.
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O for some dice, that I might roll for damage
Linking Shamus’s DM of the Rings is getting passe at this point, since it’s getting linked by lots of folks who are more able to drive traffic his way than I.* I just want to point out the meta-commentaries Shamus provides following each installment; the most recent reads thusly:
Don’t get too hung up on horses. While the rulebooks have all sorts of rules for movement speeds while on foot, encumbered, or riding, the truth is that all travel takes exactly as long as the DM wants it to. This brings to mind the wise old saying:
“A player is never late, Dave. Nor is he early. He arrives precisly when the plot dictates he should.”
Or something like that.
Perhaps games like AD&D are best explained as games of solitaire, where the DM is the player and the players are his cards.
* Note that I’m saying that linking Shamus’s work is passe for me. Actually reading it is not passe at all!
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Pay Tree Ott Miss Teek
Scott Lemieux says this of the New England Stupid Patriots:
The Pats are become a little like the last Yankee dynasty. The Yankees won in 1998 with a historically great team, got complacent, but continued to win with teams that eked out increasingly threadbare wins against better teams, which were evidence not of catching some breaks but of their incredible Character and Knowing How To Wintiude and Jeterology. And then the breaks started going against them and the Character mysteriously vanished although the teams got better again. The analogy isn’t perfect–the Pats’ dynasty started with a Super Bowl win against a much better team, but became great–but because of their success their win last week is being discussed more as evidence of some incredible force of their team’s karma rather than more accurately as a stone fluke.
And then he picks them to win anyway. That’s some mystique those StuPats have got there!
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Kevin’s Kats
Kevin Drum, the fine lefty political blogger whose more famous blogging institution is his introduction of cat-blogging, recently got a new cat after his old one, Jasmine, passed away. His is a two-cat household, and anyone who’s ever introduced a new cat into a household that already had a cat will recognize the way Kevin has been guaging Inkblot’s (the established cat) reception to Domino (the new cat).
When we brought Lester and Julio in, it was four or five days before Comet even came out from under our bed. Now she plays with Lester, while still despising Julio. (Which is probably because Julio, being really dumb and all, keeps trying to do the dirty with her.)
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Championship Weekend
For obvious reasons relating to the heartbreak that has been the recent history of New Orleans, I will be rooting for the Saints tomorrow. For equally obvious reasons relating to the nexus of complete evil that is the NFL franchise from Foxboro, I will be rooting for the Colts.
So naturally, the Super Bowl will feature the Bears and the Stupid Patriots. Because the football gods hate me.
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Stossel: Idiot
Mike seems to think that this statement by John Stossel constitutes “common sense”:
“Melting Arctic ice won’t raise sea levels any more than the melting ice in your drink would make your glass overflow.”
This pleasant little canard has been floating around the anti-environmentalist crowd for years; I first heard it from Rush Limbaugh well over a decade ago. It was stupid from his mouth, and it’s stupid from Stossel’s.
First of all, note that Stossel seems to think that the only ice anyone’s concerned with is the Arctic ice. He doesn’t mention the Antartic ice caps, which a simple look at a damn globe will establish as being located on land. Also note that much of the ice in the Arctic region, defined as that area north of the Arctic circle, is also on land: the greater part of Greenland, giant swaths of Canadian and Alaskan and Russian real estate, and so on. And it’s not just the rising sea levels that are a problem with melting ice caps; the release of enormous amounts of fresh water into the North Atlantic could well disrupt the Gulf Stream.
Upon actually clicking through to Stossel’s article, I find a typical hodgepodge in which Stossel has clearly cherry-picked whatever contrarian scientists he can find in hopes of bolstering his anti-warming stance, glomming onto anything that sounds good (“Greenland’s ice sheet is thickening!” is a common one, although it’s far from clear as to what this means and its implications for overall global warming), and displaying a surprising lack of knowledge about what he’s talking about (“Kyoto would only affect temperatures by a tenth of a degree!”, Stossel breathlessly writes, apparently not realizing that when talking about global temperatures, variations as small as tenths of degrees actually are significant; it’s not like one’s living room going from 72 degree to 72.1 degrees).
Of course, what’s really bugging Stossel isn’t warming at all; it’s all part of his libertarian ethos, as encapsulated in his last sentence: “And the politicians would have one less excuse to take control of our lives.” There’s what it all boils down to. Stossel doesn’t have a genuine clue about whether global warming or climate change constitute serious science or not; his problem is that if global warming is happening (and yes, the majority of climate scientists say that it is), then he also knows that it’s simply not a problem that the function of The Free Market will solve on its own. Let’s not be coy about this, OK? There is nothing in human history that suggests that in the absence of environmental regulation, the market response to pollution won’t be, as it has time and time again in the past, “Go ahead and piss in the pool; someone else will clean it up later.”
As always, when faced with a genuine example of a problem that free markets are exceedingly and undeniably unlikely to solve, the libertarian gambit is to simply argue that the problem doesn’t exist.