The inventor of Ramen Noodles is dead, at the age of 96.

I haven’t eaten Ramen in a while, but I do still like it, and I keep them on hand for when I get an actual bit of craving for them. (Seriously. I like to butter up a piece of rye crisp and dip it into the Ramen broth. That’s good eatin’!) The Wife refuses to have any part of Ramen, having decided that she’s long past the stage of her life when she needs to eat anything that comes eight for a buck, but I loved them when I was a kid, many years before I got to the stage of Friday night internal dialogues like this: “Hmmm, I’ve got ten bucks. If I spend two bucks on Ramen, I can eat all next week, and still buy four beers at the bar as long as I drink Old Style!”.

So anyway, here’s to Momofuku Ando. Long may your noodles boil for three minutes in water before being flavored with the mysterious contents of that little foil packet!

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I have to admit to being somewhat conflicted about the whole Nick Saban fiasco with the Miami Dolphins. I don’t see this as a Steve Spurrier kind of thing, because it quickly became clear that Spurrier had no idea whatsoever how the NFL game works; he became just another entry in the ever-lengthening list of people at whom Dan Snyder has thrown money under the mistaken belief that throwing money at people creates winning teams. Objectively, Saban screwed the Dolphins royally, and that’s a bad thing. But as a Bills fan, we hate the Dolphins, so I guess I’m supposed to be glad that their organization is now a complete mess. But then, the Bills-Dolphins rivalry hasn’t been anything to write about over the last few years, because all that time, either one or the other has been bad. It just hasn’t been the same since the Bills and Dolphins were splitting the regular season series en route to meeting in the playoffs back in the Jim Kelly versus Dan Marino days.

But Gregg Easterbrook feels no such ambivalence. Here’s the entirety of what he has to say in today’s TMQ column about Saban:

Saban Points Part 1: TMQ’s law of job-hopping coaches holds: When you hire a coach who’s only in it for himself, you get a coach who’s only in it for himself. Of all schools, Alabama should know this. In 2002, the Tide hired Mike Price away from Washington State, even as Washington State was preparing for a bowl game. That is, Alabama hired the kind of person who would walk out on his previous commitments. We all remember the fiasco that followed. Now Alabama has signed Nick Saban away from Miami, Saban walking out on his Miami commitments just two years after arriving, and just two weeks after publicly vowing he would not leave. Hall of Famer Don Shula called Saban a “liar” and a “quitter,” and that was sugarcoating it! Saban walked out on LSU, then walked out on the Dolphins – once again the Tide places the mantle of Bear Bryant upon the kind of person who does not honor his commitments. What would the Bear, a man of honor, think to know the University of Alabama now hires the kind of people who break promises? TMQ predicts another Alabama fiasco. Potential Alabama recruits, bear in mind: If Saban repeatedly lied at Miami, what makes you think he will hesitate to lie to you? At least in hiring a coach who doesn’t keep his word, Alabama gets someone who is a perfect fit for its program.

Saban Points Part 2: Little Nicky – Saban is short – sure came up little in the slimy way he hauled out of Miami. The fact that he left was not a problem in contract terms. His contract allowed him to return to college coaching; this was a provision Marine Mammals owner Wayne Huizenga offered Saban two years ago in order to help entice him to walk out on LSU. So Huizenga knew he was getting the kind of guy who walks out, and in doing so Saban was only exercising a contractual right. It’s the way Saban walked out that makes him a sleaze.

Saban repeatedly lied about interest in the Alabama job even as his agent was negotiating with the school. And sorry Jason Taylor, “everybody does it” does not justify such deceit. Coaches in big-deal sports are paid huge sums of money in a world of poverty and want, and one rationalization for their pay is that they are supposed to set good examples for the young. What kind of example did Saban set by repeatedly lying in public? At the news conferences where he lied, Saban belittled reporters who tried to call him out. As former Dolphins coach Jimmy Johnson noted, only people of low character belittle those who earn substantially less than they do. Little Nicky has a longstanding reputation of being nasty to secretaries, office assistants and others beneath his station – he’s the coaching equivalent of the Meryl Streep character in “The Devil Wears Prada.” And Saban was classless with his assistants. He used a speakerphone call to tell the assistant coaches he was walking out on them, lacking the courtesy, or the guts, to look them in their eyes. (Alternatively, maybe Saban feared telling his assistants in person and seeing their expressions of delight.) He informed his players he was walking out on them via e-mail. Something to think about, potential Alabama recruits – if Nick Saban decides it serves his purposes to screw you, he won’t even have the manliness to say it to your face. But check your e-mail!

Saban Points Part 3: Little Nicky follows Steve Spurrier as big-deal college coaches who came to the NFL expecting championships and praise, and soon retreated to the college ranks. One thing going on here is that it’s much harder to win at the NFL level than at the football-factory level. Football-factory colleges have such incredible recruiting advantages that they often take the field with two or three times as much talent as the opponent, and it’s easy to look like a genius coach if your guys are far more talented. In the NFL, the talent contrast between a division winner and the division’s last-place team is surprisingly small. Football-factory schedules are rigged with cupcakes, insuring even an orangutan could coach a big-deal college team to several annual wins. In the NFL there are losing teams but no cupcake teams; San Diego had to work hard to beat the Oakland Raiders, this year’s worst NFL team. At the football-factory level, coaches are treated like little gods, while press coverage is adulatory; at the NFL level, coaches are under constant criticism, and the media knives are always out. One reason football-factory college coaches seem like little gods is that their advantages in recruiting and cupcake opponents allow them to have several 30-point victories every season, whereas in the NFL, even the best coaches are relieved to beat the Raiders by a touchdown. Runaway victory margins in college help coaches seem like geniuses, while the close margins of most NFL games mean even winning coaches face criticism.

You can’t blame Saban and Spurrier for wanting to retreat from a life of criticism to a life on being treated like little gods. The very morning last week that Saban decided to walk out on Miami, he boarded a private jet for Alabama, where he was received by a worshipful throng as if he were Dwight Eisenhower returning from the defeat of Germany. Saban simply left his Miami problems behind, not even bothering to say goodbye to the assistants and players who depended on him. If you’re a little god, you go where the worshippers are.

Ouch.

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I don’t think of myself as any kind of Luddite — I’m writing this post on a brand-spanking new computer, and we’re mulling over upgrading at last from dial-up to DSL in the near future — but I look at things like the new iPhone and watch people run away from me, to escape the waves of “Meh” that are cascading from my body.

:: I don’t feel any pressing need for an iPod. If I won one, I’d use it. But I have no intention of buying one anytime in the foreseeable future.

:: I don’t own a cell phone. I wouldn’t mind getting one, but again, this is an expense I don’t feel has risen to the level of necessity. I’m fairly staunch in my belief that a tiny percentage of cell-phone conversations are necessary at the time they’re happening, and I don’t think people look any more drone-like than when they’re gazing intently at their cell-phones as they send text messages.

:: The iPhone has a two-megapixel digital phone built in. I just bought a 5-megapixel camera for $89. What’s the deal here? How often in life are we really presented with sudden moments when we need a camera?

:: This gizmo browses the Web, providing full content. I’m forever mystified that people scramble to be able to watch video and look at webpages on a screen that’s smaller than an index card.

I just don’t see what the big deal about this is. So Steve Jobs has put a lot of different gizmos into one gizmo. Is that all there is? Maybe my experiences with doing maintenance and repair work are jading me on the idea of all-in-one gadgets, but it’s always been my experience that a tool designed for one task is better for that task than some funky multi-tool that’s designed for lots of tasks.

Anyhow, iPhone, iPod, iTunes…I’ll take an iPass.

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So for no other reason than nothing else was on, I watched the first episode of You’re the One That I Want on NBC the other night. For those who might have missed this, it’s another American Idol clone, with the twist here being that there will be two winners, a man and a woman, who will then go on to play Danny and Sandy in an upcoming Broadway production of Grease.

My verdict? Unless you’re slavishly in love with Grease, I recommend eschewing this Idol-clone in favor of the genuine article, which returns next week.

You’re the One… has all the usual trappings of Idol. People who can sing audition amongst people who can’t in front of a three-judge panel that includes, as do all such reality-teevee shows these days, a blunt male from England. In fact, we should have a word for such, don’t you think? Here it is: BluntBrit. So hopeful contestants come out and sing, and if they’re good, BluntBrit praises them; if not, BluntBrit castigates them. Bluntly.

And since the object of the show is to cast Grease, a show whose songs are all 50s-style pop tunes, that’s all the auditioners sing. With Idol, you hear lots of different stuff from the contestants, but here, not so much.

Worst of all, You’re the One… is intercut with clips from the movie Grease, as one would expect. But despite them showing these clips in widescreen format, they still screw up the aspect ratio, so you get that “squashing” effect that afflicts widescreen movies when they’re just crammed into the TV frame.

You’re the One… stinks. Avoid at all costs.

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I didn’t discover this until just a few minutes ago, but Michael Berube has closed his blog. For some reason, he never became a regular read of mine, despite the fact that every time I read him, I loved what I read. Odd. Here he divulges the real reason he’s leaving Blogistan:

I’ve now taken the medium as far as it can go. I feel it’s too constrained, too limiting. My new project for 2007 will involve v-casting my enormous looming ghostly head directly into your living room so that I can harangue you and your loved ones at any hour of the day.

Well, good luck with that. There are so many ghostly heads bobbing about my living room that it’s getting crowded. And that’s to say nothing of the way the clouds often roll in, take the form of a giant lion head, and tell me that I am the one true King of Pride Rock. But anyway, bon voyage to Mr. Berube.

(And Berube’s comment above reminds me, for no good reason, of a funny quip I saw on this MeFi thread devoted to alternative keyboards like Dvorak:

I predict that in 800 years time when all humans live as .hum files running on virtual computers in postbiological cyberspace, our virtual keyboards will still use the QWERTY layout.

Hmmmm…if I’m just a .hum file, why can’t God just rewrite certain parts of the file? Like the time I….

(I know that the Latin title of this post makes no sense at all. Roll with it, people!)

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Via SFSignal: Mike Resnick has a post about why it’s no fun seeing sci-fi movies with him. Basically, he rants about a whole bunch of SF movies he didn’t care for, singling out various plot points. I haven’t seen a number of the movies he critiques, but he does take after Star Wars and ET, so I should respond to those.

:: Resnick on Star Wars:

First, has no one except me noticed that it’s not pro-democracy but pro-royalty? I mean, all this fighting to depose the Emperor isn’t done to give the man on the street (or the planet) a vote; it’s to put Princess Leia on the throne and let her rule the galaxy instead of him, which is an improvement only in matter of degree.

You know, it’s hard to take rants seriously when they start out like this. Where in any of Star Wars — heck, not just the first movie, but anywhere in Episodes IV, V and VI — is it implied that Princess Leia is going to rule the Galaxy once the Emperor is deposed? It seems to me that Resnick heard the word “Princess” and lept right to that conclusion. If he can’t pay attention to this tiny degree, why should anything else he says be taken seriously?

Doesn’t it bother anyone else that Adolf Hitler — excuse me; Darth Vader — the slaughterer of a couple of hundred million innocent men and women, becomes a Good Guy solely because he’s Luke’s father?

Well, no, he becomes a “Good Guy” because he does the right thing at the very end and kills the Emperor, not “solely because he’s Luke’s father”. Vader commits an act of redemption and turns away from the Dark Side of the Force.

Now, had he not died, you can probably bet the fledgling New Republic probably would have tried him and executed him, but that’s not the point. As far as The Force is concerned, Anakin/Vader does what’s right in the end. (There’s probably some kind of parallel that could be made to Christianity here, but I’ll leave that for another time.)

:: On ET:

If E.T. can fly/teleport, why doesn’t he do so at the beginning of the film, when he’s about to be left behind?

Well, let’s look at ET’s power of flight. It’s more of a telekenesis, obviously; he levitates other objects, so during the two “flying bicycle” sequences, it’s pretty clear that ET’s not flying in the Superman sense of the idea, but rather that he’s levitating the bikes. And note that he doesn’t exactly move them all that quickly, either; those bikes aren’t exactly moving at a good clip. So could ET have “flown” to catch up to a spaceship that was quickly achieving escape velocity from the Earth? Doesn’t seem so to me.

(And, again, where is it implied that ET can “teleport”? What is Resnick talking about here? Hell, one of the movie’s funnier exchanges turns on this point, when one of the guys on bikes at the end of the movie asks why ET can’t just “beam up” to his ship, and Elliot says, “This is reality, Greg.”)

What mother of teenaged children walks through a kitchen littered with empty beer cans and doesn’t notice them?

OK, I haven’t seen the movie in a long time, but my memory is that the floor isn’t littered with empty beer cans. In other words, ET didn’t down a case of beer. He had three, maybe four, if memory serves. Of course, that was enough to get him good and hammered, since he’s a lightweight and all, and anyway by this point he’s already kicked them into the corners of the kitchen. Couple that with the fact that the mother enters the house with her arms full of the dry-cleaning she’s just picked up, and there’s no problem here.

While we’re on the subject of the mother and the kitchen, what is a woman with an unexceptional day job doing living in an $900,000 house in one of the posher parts of the Los Angeles area?

I guess Resnick slept through the dialogue bits when it’s clearly established that this family is undergoing a divorce, and that the father has gone off to Mexico with a mistress? Clearly they have, until very recently, been a two-income family (and maybe still are; the script thankfully doesn’t go into the whole alimony/child support/who-gets-the-house-in-the-settlement thing), so it’s equally clear that the mother isn’t paying for that nice house on a single income. (Not that we’re ever told what, exactly, her job is — and how much would that house have been, anyway, back in 1981 when the movie was made?)

Why does E.T. die? (Answer: so he can come back to life.)

Why does E.T. un-die? (Still awaiting an answer, even a silly one, for this.)

OK, these go pretty much unanswered. But he’s an alien being on a planet that probably has all manner of pathogens unknown to him, he’s under a bit of stress, and his diet whilst roaming this planet consists of cola, beer, and Reese’s pieces.

Come to think of it, I’m now wondering why ET didn’t die sooner.

As for un-dying, well, the movie doesn’t address this much at all, but consider that ET himself can will a dying geranium back to life. So I’d surmise that his people are coming back to get him, and thus use whatever power they have to resuscitate him. Or something like that.

6. When E.T. finally calls home, the lights in the room don’t even flicker. I’m no scientist, but I’d have figured the power required would have shorted out the whole city.

He doesn’t “phone home” from inside. They go way out in the woods to do it, where they power the apparatus with a big flashlight battery. Who knows? And really, who cares?

I didn’t see a lot of the other movies Resnick rips on, so I can’t comment on those. Armageddon certainly does suck, I’ll give him that one, at least.

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It seems that over the last few days some kind of controversy has erupted in the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan. Basically, several local bloggers who often write about local issues of politics, economic development, and the like have been making weekly appearances on a local radio news program, until they were abruptly informed that they will no longer be invited on the show. No problem there, except for the fact that the guy who made this decision apparently told the bloggers one story and The Buffalo News another.

Basically it apparently all boils down to the fact that the bloggers in question tend to be critical of the other hosts on that particular radio station (who are, in my opinion, both idiots and completely uninteresting listens on the radio, which is why I stick with classical WNED FM and sportstalk WGR 550, but that’s neither here nor there), the station doesn’t want to give airtime to people who continually criticize their other talent, and then they were dumb enough to fib about it in print. Of course, this particular fib probably won’t hurt them much, since far fewer people are going to read about this in the blogs than will in the paper. It’s still pretty dumb — nobody’s going to really think twice about a radio station not allowing airtime to people who are harshly critical of their main talent (such as it is). So what this guy thought he was gaining by putting multiple stories out there is beyond me.

As far as all that goes, I would note that it sometimes seems as though in Buffalo the only blogs that attract any kind of attention at all are the ones stabled at WNYMedia.net. Now, a big part of that is obviously the size of their operation, coupled with the fact that many of those blogs make Buffalo-centric topics the main staple of their content (whereas this blog, for example, might as well be based in Walla Walla for all the Buffalo-blogging I do these days). But the fact is that the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan extends, in fact, beyond the borders of WNYMedia.net, a fact which I think is sometimes forgotten these days.

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It comes from Paul this week: a sign offering a strange kind of free ride. I sure hope they hand out protective gear to riders — and I wonder what kind of vehicle they use!

Also, via His Grace Duke William the Possible of Puddleston St Droop, I used a nifty widget to generate my own peculiar aristocratic title:

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Venerable Lord Jaquandor the Overdecorated of Witchampton Under Buzzard Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

(I used my pseudo-moniker because, well, it works better for stuff like this. “Sir Kelly” or “Lord Kelly” just don’t work as well as “Venerable Lord Jaquandor”, right?)

Finally, the query is posted over at PSoTD: What goofy thing are you going to do this year? Frankly, I’m not sure what goofy thing I should do this year. I’m open to suggestions. I think. Anyone?

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Happiness is going into Borders and, between the gift cards from Christmas and the various discounts one has accrued by participating in whatever their loyalty card program is called, plunking down $32.xx in cash for $79.xx in books.

(Actually, “happiness” is going into Borders and spending $79.xx on books. What’s described above is more a definition of “slap-happy glee”.)

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