Two things about yesterday’s football post:

:: In comments, a reader asks why I think NFL referee Ed Hochuli is biased against the Bills. Actually, I don’t really think that; Hochuli’s is the only name I could think of when writing that post, and I didn’t feel like Googling some other ref. I was joking about how Bills fans tend to get really incensed about bad calls against the Bills; however, having only really been around Bills fans, I can’t say if the same phenomenon exists among all NFL fandoms.

But I do think that the NFL refs should be full-time, and they should be very rigorously trained. There are enough bad calls on a frequent enough basis that the officiating needs some upgrading.

:: I griped a bit about the Football Outsiders website, whose editorial stance seems to be to say nothing about JP Losman unless it’s negative. Today’s a good case in point. From today’s Audibles at the Line column, here’s the total of what the FO.com folks have to say about yesterday’s Bills-Dolphins game:

Doug Farrar: Well, you have J.P. Losman and his weekly 90-yard bomb to Lee Evans. His first half against Miami: Five completions, 105 yards. Passes of 37, 33 and 28 yards to Evans and Robert Royal.

Michael David Smith: Jason Taylor is looking great as usual. Is that guy ever going to get old?

That’s it. That’s all they say about that game. Nothing about the progress of a Bills offense that is producing consistent scoring drives. Nothing about the Bills’ defense throwing its first shutout in over two years. And for that matter, they leave something out in that summation of Losman’s first half: Five completions, out of only eight attempts. It’s not like he went 5 of 19 in the first half; he went 5 of 8, and finished the game with a very respectable line of 13 completions, 19 attempts, 200 yards, 3 TDs, and zero INTs.

It seems that if Losman has a good game, the FO.com folks will either (a) completely ignore it, or (b) mention it in a way that makes it sound like he mainly sucked and just got lucky on a handful of plays.

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I haven’t done a blog quiz thing in a while, and this one’s tailored specifically to musicians — although non-musicians can participate too, simply by omitting the specifically musicianly questions. I found it via Tosy and Cosh, who in turn got it from Terry Teachout, who in turn links this as the embarkation point for this quiz.

GIVE US AN EXAMPLE OR TWO OF AN ESPECIALLY GOOD OR INTERESTING:

1. Movie score. The Lord of the Rings (Shore), The Sea Hawk (Korngold), Star Wars (Williams)

2. TV theme. Magnum, PI (how great was the team of Post/Carpenter at TV themes in the 1980s!); Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (still my favorite of the Trek themes); The West Wing (nifty “patriotic” sound; ends on an unresolved chord)

3. Melody. The idee fixe from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique; “On the Street Where You Live” by Lerner and Loewe, from My Fair Lady; “Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral” from Lohengrin (this will be the entry music if I ever get married again).

4. Harmonic language. “Irish Tune from County Derry”, set by Percy Grainger. In fact, all of Grainger; he had an amazing way of voicing chords so you rarely notice just how dissonant they are.

5. Rhythmic feel. Elmer Bernstein’s score to The Magnificent Seven. The last movement of Scheherazade. “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash.

6. Hip-hop track. I don’t know anything about hip hop.

7. Classical piece. Geez, how many! I don’t often mention the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto here. Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead. Berlioz’s wonderful oratorio L’enfance du Christ. (If you only know Berlioz as the master of orchestral bombast, check this work out.)

8. Smash hit. Hmmmm…I usually tune smash hits right out of my consciousness after I get sick of them. The theme song to “Friends”, I guess.

9. Jazz album. I used to pretend to be a jazz afficionado, but I eventually gave that up. Still, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis should be in every record collection.

10. Non-American folkloric group. Altan; the Battlefield Band.

11. Book on music. The Joy of Music by Leonard Bernstein; Evenings with the Orchestra by Hector Berlioz.

BONUS QUESTIONS: (I’m just presenting them here, but not answering them, because they don’t really apply.)

A) Name an surprising album (or albums) you loved when you were developing as a musician: something that really informs your sound but that we would never guess in a million years.

B) Name a practitioner (or a few) who play your instrument that you think is underrated.

C) Name a rock or pop album that you wish had been a smash commercial hit (but wasn’t, not really).

D) Name a favorite drummer, and an album to hear why you love that drummer.

So there you go.

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In comments to this post, Roger points out that I haven’t talked much about the Buffalo Bills lately, even as they’ve been playing quite a bit better compared to their first month of this season (when they were mildly OK), or the second month (when they descended into the Pits of Suckitude). I still enjoy football, and I still root for the Bills with all the lustiness my lungs can summon, but I figure that since the team’s problems are pretty much the same as they’ve been for the previous four years I’ve faithfully blogged the Bills, why keep repeating myself?

But to sum up anyway, I’m encouraged by JP Losman’s play over the last five or six games. After a couple of horrible outings (against the Bears, who are very good, and the Lions, who are very not) in which Losman played about as badly as an NFL quarterback can play without getting benched, he’s shown a lot of maturity in addressing his weaknesses, in leading the team on the field, in making good decisions with greater frequency and consistency. I can’t look at Losman and definitively state that he could be the guy to eventually bring this team a championship, but I don’t for one second think that he’s guaranteed to be crappy either. For me, Losman’s earned the reins in 2007. He’s learned, he’s grown, he’s rebounded from some very bad games, he’s executed a couple of successful comebacks (and narrowly missed on a couple of others).

Put it this way: even if Losman is right now as good as he’s ever going to be (which is possible, I grant, since I’m unable to predict the future), he’s still not in the top three of the problems the team’s management will need to address this coming offseason.

Much press was made about a month ago when the Bills’ coaches decided to shuffle the offensive line, stacking things so their best players are at least all on one side of center (the left side, actually), so at least theoretically they could rely on that side to get things done. That’s worked fairly well as sacks have gone down, rushing yardage has gone up, and Losman’s had time to look at the field and find open receivers (Lee Evans, more often than not). But I don’t want to oversell the line right now: it’s become “adequate”. There’s some encouraging stuff going on there, but I still believe that offensive line has to be a major priority this offseason, either in the draft or free agency (preferably, both).

Defensively, the team seems to give up lots of yards but make enough big plays to stay alive in games. That kind of defensive philosophy can make games fun to watch, but rarely will you win with a “bend but don’t break” approach to defense. (I’ve always believed that Walt Corey’s “bend but don’t break” D was the prime culprit in the Bills losing four Super Bowls in a row.) They’ve got to get tougher at the line of scrimmage, preferably with some kind of big guy who can stuff the run in the middle and let those speedy ends do their thing.

What of Nate Clements, the soon-to-be free agent cornerback who’s almost certain to leave this year? I’m fine with him going. He’s a very good player and he’ll be tough to replace, but I’ve always found him inconsistent and very much of a “Me!” type of guy. And besides, if the Bills can make the defensive line significantly better going into next year, that will somewhat accomodate the departure of the team’s best CB.

As for all the bad vibes in the air right now about the increasing suspicion in these parts that the NFL is pricing itself out of cities like Buffalo, I’m just not in the mood to write about that right now, except to note that my optimism about this region is as high as usual, and that maybe if we can just figure it out in the short term, in a decade or so this region will again be rich enough that we won’t have to worry so damned much about the future Toronto Bills.

I do think they should tarp over some of the seats at Ralph Wilson Stadium for next year, however. It makes no sense to me that, to take one example, Gilette Stadium (home of the New England Stupid Patriots) seats 68,000 people in service to a metro area (Boston, MA) of over 4,000,000 people, while Ralph Wilson Stadium has over 72,000 seats in service to a metro area of just over 1,000,000 people. (Over two million, actually, if Rochester, NY is included — but still, we have more seats for far fewer people. Makes no sense.) I’m not one to get into handwringing over the fact that the Bills have failed to sell out their last three home games; fatigue over this team’s mediocre results was bound to set in sooner or later, and the Bills occasionally had trouble selling out during the Super Bowl years (that famed Wild Card game in 1993, for example, when the Bills overcame that 35-3 deficit, was blacked out locally). The atmosphere at the Stadium has a fairly raucous reputation right now, the NHL Sabres are incredibly hot right now, and there was that wild storm in October that hit a lot of people squarely in their wallets. I don’t think the recent spate of blacked-out games is something from which we can draw conclusions about this franchise’s viability.

But hey, the Bills clobbered the Dolphins today. Hooray!

And I wasn’t going to link this, but then five or six people e-mailed me the thing, so there it is. If life were a German opera, Tom Brady would be in the part of the story where the Devil comes back to exact the horrible price for the magic bullets he’s just bought.

Finally, since I’m in the midst of a big football post, I may as well bitch a bit about the Football Outsiders site. The degree to which these guys are anti-JP Losman is really irritating. Each week, they have a column where they cover nearly every game — except, in a few recent weeks, they’ve either made absolutely no mention of Losman at all in games in which he’s played well (like the Jacksonville game), or not even mentioned the game in the first place (they managed to utterly ignore the Houston game, the San Diego game, and more). No real point here, but it sometimes seems that they feel they have to find a way to not saying anything good at all about Losman. Yes, I’m sure the reasons they didn’t cover several of those games are perfectly prosaic in nature, having to do with the fact that nobody can watch every game and so on, but we Buffalo sports fans are a paranoid bunch, given to hypothesizing conspiracy theories whenever things don’t go our way.

(Don’t get me started about Ed Hochuli, the NFL’s most anti-Buffalo official. Harumph!)

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Via Sean, I see that Ken Jennings is a heathen pig who must be banished to the fifty-ninth circle of Hell for daring to commit this transgression. O the Humanity!!

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Just popping in here to say that I haven’t fallen silent for any nefarious reason this week; I’ve just been very busy at work and at home with Christmas prep and whatnot. I hope to return to my still-sporadic-but-not-this-sporadic posting schedule sometime this weekend. I’ve got lots of posting ideas churning in my head as it is (including my thoughts on Casino Royale).

Keep on trekkin’!

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What if A Charlie Brown Christmas had actually been an episode of Scrubs? Find out here.

(God bless MeFi!)

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Overheard at Borders yesterday, from the lips of one of two guys who were looking for a specific book in the Romance section, presumably for the girlfriend or wife:

“Ooooooh, dude! They’re arranged by the name of the author, not the title!”

That guy’s education constitutes money well spent, I’d say.

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