Geeks all over the Net have been adopting David Allen‘s Getting Things Done productivity methodology; perhaps the most famous is Merlin Mann and his 43Folders site. Chief Heathen is an imperfect devotee, sort of.
Comes now a counterpoint, based on a far simpler worldview: Writing Shit Down.
If by “works” you mean “produces the first uptick in teen births in 15 years,” I mean.
We’ve been enjoying The Big Bang Theory for two main reasons: one, it features a Houstonian and alum of our favorite local (and sadly defunct) theater company; and two, it’s doing a fine job with actual geek humor and personality types.
What we didn’t realize is that the names of the main characters — Sheldon and Leonard — are a tribute to a film and television producer, director, writer, and actor who, among other things, played Nick the bartender in It’s A Wonderful Life.
Jonathan Coulton is a musical god. For example: “Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write god damned login page himself.”
In finding Code Monkey, we also encountered “Skullcrusher Mountain,” which includes this lyrical brilliance:
I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don’t like it
What’s with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don’t like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?
Yes.
Remember that moron on The View who said she wasn’t sure if the earth was round or flat, and was absolutely certain there’s no truth in evolution? Her name’s Sherri Shepherd, and it turns out she’s even dumber than that. Quoth she, yesterday, despite polite attempts by her cohosts to explain what “B.C.” means: “I don’t think anything predated Christians.”
On December 5, 1933, Prohibition ended when Utah became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment.
We have fruitcake.
Dell’s released a special edition World of Warcraft gaming laptop for a cool $4450.
Now’s probably a good time to point out that I’ve been having a great time in Azeroth since it launched 3 years ago on bone-stock Apple laptops that go for half that: first a then-aged Titanium G4 Powerbook, then, starting 2 years ago, an Aluminum G4, and since August on a Macbook Pro. Sure, a hot-shit laptop is often a lovely thing if you’re playing brand-new very high-end games — but World of Warcraft was released in November of 2004. Machines costing $1,000 will play it fine.
Still, I’m sure Dell is giving you something very, very special for that extra two large. Or something. But the fancy extra hardware will really get you no better WoW experience; buying one of these machines more or less brands the user as clueless dork.
Good luck with that.
Despite the National Intelligence Estimate stating pretty clearly that Iran doesn’t have a nuke program, Bush pretty much still wants to invade. What IS it about these creeps and invasions?
Daily Coyote chronicles the growth of a coyote pup rescued as a tiny orphan by a Wyoming woman.
Radney’s on the case, again, but here’s the fun part: Michigan thinks it can force anyone under the age of 21 to submit to a breathalyzer at any time, i.e. when they’re not driving. And they’re aggressive about it. The ACLU is suing.
A second plaintiff, Ashley Berden was 18 years old when she attended a party at a friend’s house to celebrate her graduation from Swan Valley High School. After she left the party, Thomas Township police officers arrived and found her purse which she had forgotten. They then came to Berden’s house at 4:00 a.m., woke up her family and demanded that she take a breath test. The police did not have a warrant but they informed her that would be violating the law if she refused the test. The test registered a .00% blood-alcohol level, indicating that Berden had not been drinking.
Texas joins Kansas, et. al., as another state hostile to science; Christine Castillo Comer was forced to resign as the Texas Education Agency’s director of science for failing to be neutral on the issue of evolution.
It goes like this:
Ms. Comer, 56, of Austin, is out of a job, after forwarding an e-mail message on a talk about evolution and creationism — “a subject on which the agency must remain neutral,” according to a dismissal letter last month that accused her of various instances of “misconduct and insubordination” and of siding against creationism and the doctrine that life is the product of “intelligent design.”
…
Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the state’s education agency in Austin, said Ms. Comer “resigned. She wasn’t fired.”
“Our job,” Ms. Ratcliffe added, “is to enact laws and regulations that are passed by the Legislature or the State Board of Education and not to inject personal opinions and beliefs.”
Ms. Comer disputed that characterization in a series of interviews, her first extensive comments. She acknowledged forwarding to a local online community an e-mail message from the National Center for Science Education, a pro-evolution group, about a talk in Austin on Nov. 2 by Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University, a co-author of “Inside Creationism’s Trojan Horse” and an expert witness in the landmark 2005 case that ruled against the teaching of intelligent design in the Dover, Pa., schools.
“I don’t see how I took a position by F.Y.I.-ing on a lecture like I F.Y.I. on global warming or stem-cell research,” Ms. Comer said. “I send around all kinds of stuff, and I’m not accused of endorsing it.” But she said that as a career science educator, “I’m for good science,” and that when it came to teaching evolution, “I don’t think it’s any stretch of the imagination where I stand.”
Ms. Comer said state education officials seemed uneasy lately over the required evolution curriculum. It had always been part of her job to answer letter-writers inquiring about evolution instruction, she said, and she always replied that the State Board of Education supported the teaching of evolution in Texas schools.
But several months ago, in response to an inquiry letter, Ms. Comer said she was instructed to strike her usual statement about the board’s support for teaching evolution and to quote instead the exact language of the high school biology standards as formulated for the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills test.
…
Ms. Comer said that barely an hour after forwarding the e-mail message about Dr. Forrest’s talk, she was called in and informed that Lizzette Reynolds, deputy commissioner for statewide policy and programs, had seen a copy and complained, calling it “an offense that calls for termination.” Ms. Comer said she had no idea how Ms. Reynolds, a former federal education official who served as an adviser to George W. Bush when he was governor of Texas, had seen the message so quickly, and remembered thinking, “What is this, the thought police or what?”
If we do not act as a nation and keep these nutbird fundies out of educational policy now and forever, then we are well and truly fucked. To a first approximation, anyone insisting that dogma has a place in the schoolhouse is more interested in indoctrination than education. It is paramount that people grow up with actual critical thinking skills, but if we let the relgious types run education, that’ll be the first thing out the window.
More: Arkansas, is, of course much worse off, and surging GOP candidate Mike Huckabee is right there with them, defending creationism and the dumbing-down of American science education.
If you gave birth to a kid on the day Thriller was released, that kid would now be old enough to drink, vote, and rent a car. Somehow, I’ve managed to live my life without ever owning a copy of the best-selling album of all time. I like it that way.
The entire run of Rolling Stone is now available on DVD. It might be worth it for the HST archives alone.
Our government is busily asserting in British court that they have the right to kidnap British citizens in the U.K. if they are suspected of crimes in the U.S. Extradition is unnecessary.
Presumably, the British authorities will take a dim view of this, and remind the Americans that kidnapping is crime in Britain.
I continue to be shocked at the absurd statements this Administration seems wholly willing to promulgate. We as a nation would obviously not accept this line from someone else; it’s utterly contrary to the rule of law, and our support of such might-makes-right positions make it harder for us to “spread democracy” elsewhere. There’s just no way this is a good idea.
At the end of a weekend crazy enough to cap the craziest season in recent memory, we find a total reordering of the BCS. Here we go.
The first big shock was huge: Big East power West Virginia somehow managed to choke and choke hard, falling to unranked Pitt and thereby becoming the 6th second-ranked team this year to fall, and the 5th to an unranked team. Ouch. Say buh-bye to the title hunt, boys. On the other hand, they did give Pitt its first road win in 14 months. Pitt, for their part, improve to 5 and 7.
Unshocking in the extreme was overrated Mizzou finding itself unable to match Oklahoma. OU dominated the Missouri Tigers even more convincingly than in their regular season matchup back in October; the final score was 38 to 17, and OU claimed its second Big XII title in a row (amusingly, they’ll face the former #2 in the Fiesta Bowl).
With both #1 and #2 off the list, then, where does the BCS go? Well, wonder no more, little buddies, for the answer is known: the title game will feature LSU vs. Ohio State.
How’d we get here? LSU comes in the back door, by claiming the SEC title in their win over Tennessee on Saturday. Ohio State — in their capacity as the the old #3 — is an obvious choice to promote to the big game; they’re 11-1, and the 1 was a shocker against Illinois. LSU, though, requires some explanation. The prior rankings went Mizzou, West Virginia, OSU, Georgia, Kansas, Virginia Tech, LSU. The #1 and #2 losses outlined above clearly disqualify those teams, and OSU is in the show already, which brings us to the matter of Georgia. The 10-2 Bulldogs were for some reason ranked higher than LSU or Tennessee, but they’re manifestly not the SEC champs (they lost to Tennessee, who then lost the SEC title game to LSU), so they get kicked to the curb. (We agree that you can’t expect to play for the brass ring if you don’t win your division.) Kansas is, well, Kansas; they played candyasses all year, and the BCS voters know it. VaTech may be the ACC champs after beating BC on Saturday, but they’ve got just as many losses as LSU, and one of those was a cajun-style 48 to 7 ass-whippin’ from LSU back in September. Which brings us right back to Baton Rouge. (The fact that it took 6 OTs for LSU to lose twice didn’t hurt them.)
What a mess. It would’ve made more sense if the rankings past #2 last week made any sense; the calculus required above makes it clear that Nos. 3 through whatever were pretty much random, because when it came time to pick a new top pair, the BCS realized that their old #4, #5, and #6 needed to be skipped for the top game to make sense, and that means the whole list is a clusterfuck. Frankly, we hope there are many, many more years like this so that everyone sees that the only fair thing is for the NCAA to have a Division I tournament for football just like they do for the lower divisions and just like they do for basketball. There are plenty of plans out there they could adopt, and — quite frankly, and pardon my french — fuck the bowl sponsors. This whole this-bowl and that-bowl proliferation is absurd, and needs to be exposed for the fraud it is.
Finally, there’s one more lovely thing afoot. Very late last night, Colt Brennan and his Hawai’i Warriors managed to rally from 21 points back to win against Washington, 35 to 28, thereby staying perfect and making it impossible for any just system to keep them out of a BCS bowl. (Brennan was 42 of 50, including 6 for 6 in his final 76-yard drive; Hawai’i’s final 28 points were unanswered by the Huskies, who did not score in the second half.) They got their wish: they’ll meet Georgia in the Sugar Bowl. We don’t expect Georgia to have much trouble with the Warriors, but we’ll be rooting against our conference anyway. Hawai’i has tried to play big teams for a while now, to show folks they’re for real, and they’ve been frustrated because quite frankly nobody wants any part of their offense. USC flat out refused to schedule them. They deserve a shot at a good team and a good bowl, and I’m looking forward to watching it. Where can I get a Hawai’i jersey?
We’ve updated the Heathen Macbook Pro to 3 gigabytes of RAM, which means that we never, ever go to swaptown anymore, even with a gigabyte instance of VMWare running.
Yummy. Highly recommended.
Thanksgiving 2007, documented on Flickr. Enjoy.
Techdirt points out the most interesting thing about Viacom’s decision to offer South Park online for free: What many have by now forgotten is that South Park began life as a viral video passed around on the Internet.
Here is our copy, preserved from back when its size actually was a problem (50MB Quicktime), around 1997. We first saw it a bit earlier, on videotape, via a friend of ours who was working at LucasArts at the time; we put this around New Year’s ’95-96 or ’96-97 (no earlier; the short was created for Christmas 1995).
Evel Knievel is dead.
As previously noted, Bower was a positive bargain in the world of Division I-A coaches. This bit from the hometown rag notes that the trustees will have to step up the money to entice anyone to take over the somewhat backwater program; the ugly truth is that most offensive/defensive coordinators in the SEC make more than Bower got as head coach.
Pope Benedict, in a new encyclical released on Friday, said atheism was responsible for some of the “greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice” in history.
We’re gonna have to call bullshit on that, Pope Ratz.
This is exactly how some guy stole a truckload of Guinness.
The upcoming Watchmen film has a blog that includes some stills of the lot that look PERFECT as well as casting information.
I’m nearly certain they’re going to fuck this up, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still hope for the best.
(Via MakingLight.)
Lookie here what the archive page says today:
At 4:37pm on 29 November 2000, I decided to take the plunge and convert a longstanding mailing list then called ‘Some Arrant Knaves I Know’ into the blogolicious splendor you see before you today. Now, seven years and 5,225 posts later, I’m still here, scarred but smarter, as they say. Seven years is a decidedly biblical length of time, and reaching the milestone puts me in a reflective mood. (Of course, the original home of Heathen, NoGators.com, is slightly older, and was itself a migration of a site originally hosted at Houston ISP Neosoft since 1995.)
Bizarre differences, then and now
In 2000:
Bizarre constants, then and now
Things we noticed perusing the first couple months
I’m still having fun with this peculiar public hobby. You’re apparently still reading. I reckon there’s no reason to stop now. Happy birthday to Heathen, and Happy Holidays.
Via Frank, enjoy the tale of the St. Sixtus monks and the best beer in the world.
This long Wired profile of Universal head Doug Morris makes two enormous points:
Wal-Mart became the go-to retailer in nonurban America a long time ago via sheer ubiquity combined with loss-leader prices, but Apple’s done one better: they win with the trifecta of (a) lower prices than Wal-Mart; (b) near instant delivery without leaving the house; and (c) being literally only a click away on most computers. (Plus, Apple’s not run by or beholden to puritan fundies who blanch at racy lyrics.)
Morris and his cronies still don’t get it, though. They’ve branched out to Amazon, sure, but they’re hoping to roll out the Total Music store soon, with some sort of DRM plus all-you-can-eat subscription model. Rick Rubin at Columbia wants to do the same thing, but it, too, will require some kind of lock-up to work like they want it. That’s not what consumers want, clearly.
Total Music is designed to unify Apple’s competitors in what amounts to a coordinated attack on the iPod. The details are far from finalized, but in Morris’ conception a Total Music subscription would come pre-installed on devices like the Zune, the Sony PlayStation, or a mobile phone. Universal is well aware of the difficulty of convincing consumers to pay for music subscriptions, so Morris wants the devicemakers to pony up the cash themselves, either by shelling out for a six-month introductory offer or by assuming the cost forever. This would be money well spent, Morris argues, because it would help the Microsofts of the world eat into the iPod’s market share. He has already hammered out preliminary agreements with Warner and Sony BMG and has met with executives at Microsoft and several wireless carriers. If Morris is able to make Total Music a reality, he will once again have succeeded in bending the industry to his will — in this case, by using the combined catalogs of the major labels to help establish a true competitor to the iPod. After all, why buy an iPod if a Zune will give you songs for free?
Unfortunately, Total Music will almost certainly require some form of DRM, which in the end will perpetuate the interoperability problem. Morris likely doesn’t care. He is more committed to Total Music — or any other plan that allows protection — than he is to a future where music can truly be played across any platform, at any time. “Our strategy is to have the people who create great music be paid properly,” he says. “We need to protect the music. I know that.”
The music’s fine, Morris. Bands are already breaking on their own, without major label help, by looking to the net for distribution and booking. It’s middleman companies like Universal that need protection, and we’re betting consumers aren’t dumb enough to play along.
Additional commentary at BoingBoing and TechDirt, the latter of which has a bit of fun with one of Morris’ analogies:
Morris is so clueless that he chooses the worst possible analogy to explain his position. Lots of entertainment industry execs have thrown up their hands and ignorantly stated that “you can’t make money from free.” That’s wrong, of course, but Morris takes it one step further up the ridiculous scale, with the following example: “If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go. That’s what happened to the record business.” Hmm… and what is coming out of your faucet in your kitchen? That’s right… water. And how much are people willing to pay for water? That’s right, billions. In fact, it’s a larger market than (oops) recorded music. Can someone please explain how Morris keeps his job?
Combine long exposures and light sources and you get painting with light. Cool.
Cracked’s list of the 9 most badass Bible verses includes Exodus 2:11-12, with commentary:
One day after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. Glancing this way and that, and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.
Sure, Moses was a great leader, an emancipator of his people and a prophet. Most people don’t know that he also was the Biblical equivalent of Splinter Cell’s Sam Fisher–a well-honed killing machine, able to slay from the shadows without pity or remorse. Martin Luther King may have had a dream, but Moses had a body count.
You can almost picture the scene: An Egyptian soldier is wailing on a hapless Hebrew when Moses, clothed in head-to- toe black, drops down from the ceiling. Moving with cat-like grace, he sneaks up behind the soldier and, taking his head in his hands, snaps the man’s neck with one savage twist. As the lifeless body slumps to the ground, Moses lights up a cigar. “Well,” he quips, “looks like someone bit off more than he could Jew.”
This Canadian PSA is the scariest and most awful such thing I’ve ever seen. I blame Rob.
BettyBeauty, color for “the hair down there.”
Ashcroft: “I’m willing to be waterboarded.”
Shaolin Monks Rule. A photographer got permission to go into and photograph the home monastery; there’s now a book. Check out the links in the Metafilter link, above.
Mississippi governor Haley Barbour reacted predictably to Trent Lott’s intended retirement, which is to say he said he’d ignore the law and have a special election next November to replace him, which would be great for the GOP and bad for the Dems.
However, state law actually says — and the Secretary of State agrees — that if Lott resigns in 2007, they have to have that special election within 90 days. It’s only if Lott resigns in 2008 that they get to wait until next November — and here’s the rub: if Lott waits until January 1, the lobbying rules he’s trying to avoid kick in, and he can’t lobby for 2 years. Of course, the Mississippi GOP wants it both ways, but that’s not how the law reads.
More at TPM.
Pat Forde over at ESPN has a bit up about the coaching carnage, and had this to say about USM and Jeff Bower:
Jeff Bower, Southern Mississippi
Record: 119-82-1 overall, 7-5 this season.
Shock value: Immediate Dash reaction was, “No freakin’ way.” This has to be the stupidest move of Coaching Carousel Season, no matter what else is to come. (OK, if USC boots Pete Carroll tomorrow, that might be worse.) All Bower has done is compile 14 straight winning seasons, and 15 out of 17, at a school that should never mistake itself for Alabama. Put it this way: Bower’s run is comparable to Fisher DeBerry’s at Air Force or Sonny Lubick’s at Colorado State; they named the field for Lubick at CSU and DeBerry got to hand-pick is his successor. Bower deserved similar respect.
Capital offense: Hell if The Dash knows.
Will he coach again: Absolutely, if he wants to.
How good is the job: It’ll be attractive to some hot young assistants or lower-level head coaches who want to pad their resume for a couple of years and then upgrade. Most established coaches will look at what the school did to Bower and steer clear.
Successor: Nobody who would be willing to put 17 years of sweat equity into the place, that’s for sure. They saw what happened to the last guy who did that.
Longtime Heathen and USM alum Ear O’Corn points us here, which makes the case that perhaps Bower had it coming for lackluster performance compared to the 90s. However, even the linked article notes
…the move is obviously a risky one, because the odds of USM getting another boss that meets the expectations of a conference championship every three years or so – or that even does what Bower did in guiding the program to eleven bowl games in twelve years – are dramatically lower than the odds of hiring a worn-out retread or generic coach who turns the program into Memphis or UAB, a mediocre team with a seven or eight-win ceiling and a two or three-win floor, and hardly any way to distinguish which result you may get from year-to-year. This describes most of Conference USA right now, and the only reason it hasn’t described Southern Miss as far as I can tell is that Jeff Bower, at the very least, has never allowed the bottom to fall out to such an embarrassing degree. So the Eagles can do much, much worse, and the odds may be that they will.
Can they do better? Yes – briefly. A young hire that pays off in quick success is certainly possible, and will be great for the program in the short term, before he’s poached for big bucks by a bigger school on his way up the ladder. Mid-majors all want to make the splash hire, the Urban Meyer, Bobby Petrino, Steve Kragthorpe, Dennis Franchione, Dirk Koetter, Dan Hawkins who will take the program back into the polls, but the reality is that those coaches will move up quickly or, if they stay – like Bower or his nearest longtime parallels, Pat Hill at Fresno State and simultaneously-deposed Sonny Lubick at Colorado State – they will eventually succumb to the limitations of the location and drift back to the pack, and that coach will eventually stagnate and be forced out. See not only Bower and Lubick, but LaVell Edwards and Fisher DeBerry before them. Hill’s time will come. Chris Peterson will be paid lavishly soon to leave Boise State; ditto Bronco Mendenhall at BYU, or else his program will eventually move to the middle, too, as it did for Edwards. There are no exceptions to this.
I prefer Southern go the supernova route, hire a young, innovative guy and hope he pays spectacular dividends before moving on. At least we’d have those three or four great seasons and get a glimpse at the moon before descending back to Earth. Because in the long run, Southern Miss is just Southern Miss, and I don’t know that anyone can do a better job with that over an extended period of time than Jeff Bower.
Emphasis added.
Via Frank, we get this excellent idea from Yahoo! Sports writer Dan Wetzel. Go. Read.
In 2000, I bought my townhouse. It, like most homes, came with a kitchen sink, which in turn came with a faucet.
At some point in my first year of ownership, the faucet developed a terminal leak (it was, unaccountably, a cheapie — sitting not 3 feet from a Bosch dishwasher, mind you), and I had it replaced with a fancy one from American Standard called a ClearTap. My new faucet was sort of stealthily fancy, actually; it looked normal to the unattentive eye, and behaved normally in the up-and-left or up-and-right modes common to single-handle faucets. However, if the operator pushed the lever to the right, laterally, with no upward force, it dispensed filtered water from a dedicated additional port — which, at the time, obviated the need for me to continue to do business with Ozarka, who had already acquired all the other water companies in Houston. Neato. Sold.
Well, at some point this faucet started leaking. I know this because, at some point, we developed some minor water stains in the ceiling on the floor below. I could never catch it in the act, and so thought (erroneously) it was something else. That changed last week, when we found the ClearTap filter housing steadily drip-drip-dripping water. Uh-oh.
I called a plumber (who does not, for the record, sell faucets). He poked, prodded, and investigated my now-aging faucet and pronounced its condition financially terminal. In addition to the ClearTap filter area leak, the sprayer also dribbles, and some friction mount parts in the main pivot are also failing. It’s theoretically fixable, but plumber rates are such that simple replacement will be cheaper.
Since (a) the filters for the thing are about $20 and (b) I tend to buy them in bulk, I’ve got about $100 worth in the pantry, so I went online looking for a replacement ClearTap, and found them nowhere. Ooops. I checked the AmStd site, and still no joy, so I called them to find out the scoop.
AmStd’s story — via the very nice Nancy — on this is that they dropped the product because they sold poorly (there are easier ways to get filtered water now, apparently), not because they leak. Then, without warning, the conversation got kind of odd:
Nancy: So, can I have your address and phone number?
Me: Um, why? Are you coming to fix it?
Nancy: (laughs) No, so we can send you another conventional faucet. We’ll also need a digital picture of the one you have so we can match it.
Me: Hang on now, what’s the cost?
Nancy: Oh, nothing.
Me: (speechless)
Yep. 6 or 7 years into its life — which, according to the plumber at least, is an acceptable life span; the cheapie that came with the 1997-era house only lasted 3 or 4 years — and well past whatever warranty it had, American Standard is replacing it, and doing so without me actually asking them to (I suppose this may be their way of compensating me for the $100 in filters I’m about to eat, but Nancy didn’t mention a connection). Wacky.
So true. There’s more, including:
Just last week BCS administrators had to tweak their “system” for about the billionth time. The latest bandage was applied after it became apparent that the BCS might not have enough eligible at-large teams for its five games. Oops. The BCS works so well that the only undefeated team in the country, Hawaii, could finish the regular season 12-0 and still get squeezed out of a BCS bowl game. Meanwhile, two-loss Georgia, which didn’t even win its conference division or qualify for its league championship game, could conceivably play in a national title game. Huh?
Go read the whole thing.
ESPN’s Maisel has some good bits to say:
For years, Bower’s name received mention as a coaching candidate at programs with more resources than he has at Southern Mississippi. He stayed out of a sense of loyalty and family. He stayed, and now the school and its fans have left him.
Southern Mississippi begins a search for a coach who fits what it needs more than Bower does. It won’t happen. The Golden Eagles will find that out soon enough.
The rest of the SEC can keep on making fun of departing Arkansas coach Houston Nutt, as he’s been picked up by Ole Miss.
The Perry Bible Fellowship — which has nothing to do with the Bible, near as we can tell — is worth your time, particularly this one, this one, this one, and this one.
Dear Intarwub: We need this for the garden.
Kthxbi.
Southern Miss has apparently ousted head coach Jeff Bower after 17 seasons and a 119-81-1 record. Apparently, 14 consecutive winning seasons (7-5 this year, which is as good as Croom at MSU and better than Ole Miss), 9 bowl games in the last 10 years, and a trip to the Conference USA title game five times since 1996 isn’t enough for somebody. Hell, they’ve even got a bowl game this year.
USM has it hard; they’re perceived as a second tier program in the south because, at least in part, they’re not in the SEC. Consequently, many of the marquee high school players get picked up by the major programs in Oxford and Starkville and Baton Rouge. Even so, Bower — an alum — has had success there; it’s also a sure bet he’d stay forever due to his roots in the community.
From the Clarion-Ledger:
Bower was forced to resign during a meeting with USM athletic director Richard Giannini. Bower stormed out of the USM athletic department offices and went to his house. He could not be reached for comment.
[…]
The Golden Eagles (7-5) clinched a 14th consecutive winning season with a 16-10 victory over Arkansas State Saturday and received an invitation to the Papajohns.com Bowl in Birmingham. It will be the school’s ninth bowl trip in the last 10 years.
Although USM has the fifth-longest current streak of consecutive winning seasons among Division I-A teams, many USM fans have been critical of the program in the last several years.
Picked by league coaches as the preseason favorite to win Conference USA, the Golden Eagles finished fourth in the C-USA East with a 5-3 record. That included a home losses to previously winless Rice and to Memphis in a game that USM led by 12 with five minutes to play.
USM won four Conference USA championships under Bower, the last in 2003. The Golden Eagles won the C-USA East Division last year, but lost to Houston in the C-USA championship game. He was named the league’s coach of the decade in 2004 and was a three-time coach of the year (1997, ’99, ’03).
We predict a shitty season for the Golden Eagles next year, and for years to come. Folks are, predictably, annoyed.
(More bits: only 4 teams have longer streaks of winning seasons: Florida State (31), Michigan (23), Florida (20) and Virginia Tech (15) (cite). Bower’s tenure at USM is behind only 3 other coaches: Paterno, obviously, at 42 years; Bowden’s been at FSU for 32; and Virginia Tech’s Frank Beamer is at 21.)
(Even better: a recent news bit at CoachBower.com notes preseason ticket sales were at an all time high before the 2007 kickoff, and cited the ongoing success of Bower’s Eagles as the proximate reason. (Thanks, Frank.))
Terminus is a pleasantly weird short (8 minutes and change) about a man being stalked by a figure made of concrete who, apparently, only wants to dance.
No, seriously.
(Widely linked.)
Dennis got it goin’ on.
We are complete and unrepentant fanboys about few things, but Blade Runner is on the list, and there’s a really awesome 5-DVD reissue coming out for Christmas. You do the math.
