Week 13: More Suck

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Up front, let’s get this off our chest: We pulled for those fucking coonasses all year because we thought they had a chance at the title, which would put the BCS crown in the SEC for two years running, and this is how they thank us — two triple-OT losses against candyass (for the SEC) opponents. It’s just as well; we figure this is LSU’s last shot for a while, since it’s a better than even bet that Miles will move north to take over for Lloyd Carr at Michigan. We’re still bitter that we delayed some holiday travel just to watch those fuckers squander another game that never should have been competitive, and with it their title hopes.

LSU’s loss put the rest of the BCS into a bit of a mess: see below.

Then, of course, there was the Iron Bowl on Saturday night. We’re not doing math this time, either. Frankly, we were still so disgusted after last week’s bullshit that we didn’t even watch; instead, we opted for a Star Trek rerun, since it turns out Mrs Heathen has never seen the episode that introduced Khan and laid the groundwork for the second movie. Sue us. We missed nothing. (We did, however, come across this funny picture. Enjoy.)

Fortunately, there were two better games to watch.

Back on Friday, the 104th Egg Bowl between Mississippi State and Ole Miss played out predictably for three and a half quarters, with plenty of hapless crappy play on both sides of the ball. By seven minutes into the 4th, Ole Miss was up 14 to zip, and it looked like another heartbreak for the Bulldogs.

Then they woke up. Sly Croom’s had a good year so far, and it got better on Friday. In the last 7 minutes of the game, his squad hauled in 17 unanswered points to shock the preppie weasels from Oxford and cement his hold on his job — and, maybe, qualify for a bowl. Ole Miss coach Orgeron wasn’t so lucky, and has been given his walking papers after only three seasons. Better luck in I-AA, Coach O.

After the Coonass Conflagration, we switched over to the Hawaii – Boise State contest, about which we could scarcely be happier. As has been previously noted by us and others, the Warriors have the weakest schedule in the BCS — but not for lack of trying. Nobody wants any part of their potentially explosive offense. USC and Michigan both said no outright; Michigan State scheduled them, but then took a $250K buyout option to bump them off their slate. Boise, though, we know might be real — they did manage to bag Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl last year, after all, even if their only “quality” win this year was against never-ranked Southern Miss. As it turns out, Hawaii is at least as real as Boise; the final score was 39 to 27, and it wasn’t that close. Hawaii stays perfect (11-0), and will face Washington (4-8, but they did give USC a scare in September) next week. If they win out, it’ll be awful hard to make a case for excluding them from a big-money bowl; the win over Boise makes them WAC champs already. (See below.)

Now let’s talk about rankings. LSU is obviously out; you can’t lose two and play in the show. Before this week, the rest of the top five was Kansas, West Virginia, Missouri, and Ohio State. Kansas and Mizzou played this week, too, and as predicted Kansas’ win streak stopped with a quickness. West Virginia spanked UConn, but that wasn’t enough to keep Mizzou from leapfrogging, improbably, into the top spot. The BCS folks see the new world order as:

  1. Mizzou (11-1)
  2. West Virginia (10-1)
  3. Ohio State (11-1)
  4. Georgia (10-2)
  5. Kansas (11-1)

LSU clocks in at 7, behind Virginia Tech. Mizzou still has to play #9 Oklahoma for the Big XII championship, and few think they’ll survive that game. West Virginia still has unranked Pittsburgh (4-7) to play, so the Heathen bet for the Least Exciting Championship Game Ever is West Virginia and Ohio State. Hawaii — the only undefeated team in the nation — clocks in at 12; if they stay that high, they get a real bowl. Cross your fingers for the Warriors.

(Astute fans will note an anomaly above: the SEC championship game will not feature the highest ranked SEC team. It’s LSU and the same Tennessee squad that both Florida and Alabama humiliated earlier in the season.)

Finally, some odds and ends.

First, in the “predictable” column, Florida beat FSU again, thanks in no small part to the heroics of Tim Tebow. The frontrunner for the Heisman now has 51 total touchdowns this year, and is the only player in NCAA history to get more than 20 TDs in both rushing and passing. If he wins in New York, he’ll be the first underclassman to do so. If FSU doesn’t shape up, we wonder how long the Seminole Faithful will keep genuflecting to St Bowden.

Second, in the “somewhat surprising” department: Notre Dame managed to win again to extend their streak to, well, two. They end the year at 3 and 9. Who wants to bet on how well they’ll do next year?

Clearly they’ve impressed SOMEBODY, but for the life of us we can’t figure out why

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A while back we noticed the 43Folders story about a brief flirtation with the previous “hot” e-book device, Sony’s Reader. More open than previous options, the Reader could accept PDFs and other files for reading, but the compromises this forced turned the whole experience into a joke, and the reviewer returned the device as a result.

Frankly, the problem being solved here eludes us, given how portable, cheap, scalable, and fault-tolerant actual books are. Most people don’t want or need to carry more than a book or two (professionals with large and dynamic reference libraries are, of course, a different case). Still, companies continue to invest in the idea. Amazon is the next big player with their brand-new Kindle, which apparently sold out almost immediately. Frankly, it’s no more attractive to us than the Sony despite its admittedly groundbreaking qualities. It is not, for example, tethered to a computer at all; instead, it’s got a wireless modem that connects directly to Amazon and the Internet. However, it fails on some of the same points as the Sony, plus adds some nickle-and-diming bullshit that’s frankly below Amazon — for example, the Kindle wants the user to pay a subscription fee to read web sites on the it that are free on the public Internet, for example, and while it’ll take Word files and other personal documents via email, Amazon will charge you a dime for every one you send over. And of course, the Amazon’s ebooks are loaded with DRM, which means that it ultimately works for Amazon, not you, despite its $400 price tag. As Gruber points out:

Kindle actually is what ignorant critics have claimed regarding the iPod: a device designed to lock you in to a single provider of both hardware and digital content. You can easily and happily use an iPod without ever buying anything from the iTunes Store; without Amazon’s DRM-protected content, a Kindle is the world’s worst handheld computer.

What happens if Amazon decides this market doesn’t work, and bails? Ask people with “PlaysForSure” music bought from Microsoft. (Hint: you get screwed.) Gruber continues:

the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion. That’s no way to build a library.

Gadgets are cool. We like gadgets. We admit that if someone could create a real “book iPod,” we’d be interested — but that’s not likely to happen for several reasons, most notably the inability to get previously purchased content onto the Kindle. It’s simple to rip old CDs to MP3 and put ’em on your iPod; try that with a book and the Kindle. Amazon could have come closest to this idea by adopting the idea mentioned quite a bit in reviews: allow Kindle customers to download free e-books for anything they buy from Amazon as well as for any book they’ve ever bought from Amazon. That is, of course, untenable because of the paranoia of Big Content, so instead we get another DRM nightmare.

At the end of the day, as potentially promising as the idea of a portable high-capacity wireless device with a built-in bookstore is, the Kindle is ultimately a disappointment — but an avoidable one. Amazon already sells music without DRM; why not books? Without open content, we’d have a drastically different opinion. Either the things you buy work for you, or they work for someone else. Our iPod works or us. Kindle works for Amazon. We hope it fails as-is, regardless of how much the biz press may think otherwise. We’ll close with this bit from BoingBoing:

Here’s the biggest mystery of the Internetiverse for me today: why is it that Amazon, the most customer-focused, user-friendly company in the world of physical goods, always makes a complete balls-up hash out of digital delivery of goods? You’d think that they’d be the smartest people around when it comes to using the Internet to sell you stuff you want, but as soon as that stuff is digital, they go from customer-driven angels to grabby, EULA-toting horrors. Why does the Web make Amazon go crazy?

We wonder, too.

Upset Nation: Week 12

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We told you Oregon weren’t that good, and we were right; the Ducks dropped another game, this time to unranked Arizona on Thursday night, who still have a losing season even after knocking off the No. 2 team and ruining the Ducks’ shot at a title game.

What’s even weirder is who may have a shot: Kansas. The lone undefeated team in the contiguous 48 (Hawaii’s been robbed; we’d love to see them play a quality program) is now ranked at 2 in both AP and BCS, but has yet to play a real team. Truth will out next week, as they have to face #4 Missouri. If they win there, they’ll have to beat either Texas (9-2; 13 BCS & AP) or Oklahoma (9-2; 10 BCS & AP) in the Big 12 game to play for the title. Given their soft schedule, it’s amazing they’re ranked as they are; we don’t expect them to survive this gauntlet.

That means the real #2 is West Virginia, Missouri, or the Buckeyes, one of which will play LSU if the Tigers make it past the next two games. They had no trouble with Ole Miss on Saturday, but they have tough pavement ahead. Their final regular season game is Friday, against spoiler wannabe Arkansas (7-5, unranked and coachless). Assuming a win there, they’ll face either Tennessee (8-3; 18 BCS/19 AP) or Georgia (9-2; 7 BCS/6 AP) in the SEC title game. They’ve got to win both to play in the Show, and on paper they should. However, the SEC remains tough, and Miles’ squad had trouble with lesser squads from Alabama and Kentucky already this year.

Now, some quick hits:

Lloyd Carr Out at Michigan
It wasn’t the AppState game, or the Ohio State game; apparently he told the AD office he’d be retiring earlier in the season, and it seems reasonable. Mich has already had their Bear in Schelmwhateverthefuck, but following Carr won’t be particularly easy, either, unless they dislodge Les Miles and thereby piss off Tiger Nation.
FireNickSaban.com
Are you fucking kidding me? UL-Monroe? At HOME? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, NickyLou? We’re not even doing the math this time around; we’re too disgusted. The Tide drop to 6 and 5 after losing 2 straight, and face Auburn this week; Monroe improves to 5 and 6.
Aw, they got another win!
The Irish managed to quash also 1-9 Duke on Saturday to improve to 2 and 9 and bag its first home win of the season. In November. Say what you want, but you can’t take that away from them.

Mmm, taste the tolerance!

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This is what happens when you explain what “Interfaith” means to a bunch of dumbass fundies:

Austin Area Interreligious Ministries, the city’s largest interfaith organization, announced Thursday that its annual Thanksgiving celebration Sunday had to be moved because Hyde Park Baptist Church objected to non-Christians worshipping on its property.

The group learned Wednesday that the rental space at the church-owned Quarries property in North Austin was no longer available because Hyde Park leaders had discovered that non-Christians, Muslims in particular, would be practicing their faith there. The event, now in its 23rd year, invites Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Bahais and others to worship together.

Things About Which You Must Be Shitting Us

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A DVD set of the first couple seasons of Sesame Street has a disclaimer on it: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

I [NYT writer Virginia Heffernan] asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.

Language is teh funneh

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Elyse Sewell has some amusing pirate Arrested Development DVDs:

In Hong Kong, I bought a pirated box set of Arrested Development. You can watch it with Chinese or English subtitles.

Imagine you’re a poor sap working at the pirate DVD factory writing the Chinese subtitles for this show. There’s no Chinese alphabet, only ideograms, so when you have to subtitle a word like “Michael,” or “Lindsay,” or “Buster,” or “Warden Gentles,” the only thing you can do is pick out a couple of ideograms whose pronunciation roughly approximates the sound of the name.

So, you might pick the character “mai” and the character “ko.” It wouldn’t matter what the ideograms meant in Chinese as long as they sounded pretty much like “Michael” when read aloud.

Fine.

But this is a pirated DVD — whoever made it didn’t have access to the faithful English subtitles that would accompany a legitimate Arrested Development DVD. So they had to write their own at the pirate factory. And for some reason, they didn’t make the English subtitles using the audio from the show. They back-translated the Chinese subtitles.

Madcap hilarity via screencap ensues. Click through for giggles.

The night sky has followed you your whole life

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It’s followed all of us, essentially without change, since the first time man looked upwards at night and wondered what the multitude of pinprick lights in the darkness were.

Go take a closer look; this short web tutorial will show you how to find your way around the night sky in 10 minutes ore less, and as such is the coolest link you’ll see today. Very, very well done. Those of you with kids may want to bookmark this for later stargazing with amazed young’uns.

Monkeybusiness

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From Warren Ellis: This Happened On Your Planet:

Pony is an orangutan from a prostitute village in Borneo. We found her chained to a wall, lying on a mattress. She had been shaved all over her body. If a man walked near her, she would turn herself around, present herself, and start gyrating and going through the motions. She was being used as a sex slave. She was probably about six or seven years old when we rescued her, but she had been held captive by a madam for a long time. The madam refused to give up the animal because everyone loved Pony and she was a big part of their income.

Pony was eventually liberated, but it required a large armed force because, apparently, people liked fucking a monkey.

Also, note the casual usage of the phrase “prostitute village.”

WaPo Has Zero Balls

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Their music critic got a political spam from the amazingly-still-active Marion Barry camp, and responded:

Must we hear about it every time this Crack Addict attempts to rehabilitate himself with some new — and typically half-witted — political grandstanding? I’d be grateful if you would take me off your mailing list. I cannot think of anything the useless Marion Barry could do that would interest me in the slightest, up to and including overdose. Sincerely, Tim Page.

The Barry camp showed what can only be described as balls the size of Texas in ratting him out to the WaPo and demanding he be fired. The paper has placed Page on leave and forced an apology from him.

However, there is this bit from the end of the WaPo piece:

Barry served a six-month prison sentence after being videotaped smoking crack cocaine during an FBI sting in 1990. […]

Page won the Pulitzer for his music criticism in 1997, two years after joining The Post.

What fucktards.

Dept. of Grossly Unfair Expectations

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Understanding as we do the nature of computing, and having as we do a 20+ year history with said devices, we are occasionally briefly astounded that, say, the our thumbdrive has more storage capacity than all the computers we owned prior to 1999 combined.

This does not, however, make it ok that we curse and become frustrated with our current platform if it slows down even a little bit when doing all of the following:

  • Playing music over the stereo via wifi;
  • Running a virtualized Windows XP machine containing Outlook, IE, and PowerPoint;
  • Periodically checking email from 4 servers;
  • Periodically polling some 200+ rss feeds;
  • all while having an editor, a personal Wiki, a note/document repository app, Word, an outliner, and a dozen Firefox windows open.

SabanWatch Week 11: One Cloud and Lots of Silver Linings

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We’ll start with the bad news, which is that NickyLou and the Tide have now managed to drop two in a row to Sly Croom’s MSU Bulldogs, which is not going to sit well with the Crimson Nation back in Tuscaloosa. MSU dropped our Tide 17 to 12 in a sloppy, sloppy game that included an end-zone INT run back for a Bulldog TD. Yuck. The math doesn’t change much, but it’s still a loss. Nick Saban Point Per Million drops to 2.3125.

However, Saturday did bring us plenty of opportunities to get happy. Let’s start with the biggest news: formerly top-ranked Ohio State got upset by the unranked Illini. Whups! Buh-bye, No. 1 and BCS title bid! And guess who shows back up at the top of the list? LSU, who cruised to a big win over La-Tech as they enter the easier part of their slate.

What else? More comeuppance for paper tiger BC, who fell to unranked Maryland 42 to 35. Insert Nelson laugh here.

Oh, and it gets better: Notre Dame managed to fall to another service academy in their spectacular 41 to 24 loss to Air Force. The Irish still face Duke and Stanford, and could easily lose both. How much longer will Weis have a job? ESPN wonders the same thing:

The Irish, who were held to 58 yards rushing, had lost eight games in a season twice before, going 2-8 in 1956 and 1960.

It was also the school-record sixth straight home loss. Notre Dame could finish the season winless at home if it doesn’t beat Duke next week. The only other times that has happened were in 1887 (0-1), 1918 (0-0-1) and 1933 (0-3-1).

“As a team, we’re at that low point, basically the lowest of lows,” safety David Bruton said. “But we’ve got to keep plugging.”

The loss dropped Weis’ career record to 20-15. His predecessor, Tyrone Willingham, was fired after three seasons with a 21-15 record.

This week was also fun if you hate Steve Spurrier, as all right-thinking fans do: his Cocks couldn’t get over Urban Meyer’s Gators, who spanked their old coach 51 to 31; Florida QB Tebow rushed for 5 TDs and threw for 2 more.

Even better, Coach Fran lost, too. All in all, an acceptable Saturday even with the Bulldog win.

Anyway, BCS isn’t out yet, but AP is, and they have it: LSU, Oregon, Oklahoma, Kansas, and West Virginia. The Buckeyes drop to 7.

Update: BCS is now out, and varies slightly: LSU, Oregon, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and then West Virginia. OSU is 7 in both polls. Kansas is totally a paper tiger here; they’ve beaten basically nobody and have a schedule packed with powerhouses such as Central Michigan, SE Louisiana, Florida International, Baylor, etc. It’s starting to look like Tigers vs. Ducks or Sooners in the big game; time will tell.

Long things you should read

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Our affection for Fred Clark’s Slacktivist is well documented. Clark is a journalist, but also an evangelical Christian frankly dismayed by what’s become of his church. He’s made much sport of the Left Behind books in a series of posts described as “reading them so you don’t have to;” they are at once hilarious and depressing.

He’s in the midst of a new series of posts now worth a review if you find yourself confused by the vision of a church based on Christ’s compassion being so obsessed with contempt for homosexuals. Check out “The Gay-Hatin’ Gospel:”

  • Part 1: The Safe Target
  • Part 2: Inner Demons
  • Part 3: The Innocent Backlash
  • Part 4: The Exegetical Panic Defense, which includes this:
Part of the answer, I think, has little to do with homosexuals or homosexuality per se. It has to do, rather, with epistemology — with the need for certainty and the panicked hostility that surfaces when that certainty is threatened. “We see through a glass, darkly,” St. Paul said, warning against the temptation to chase the will-o’-the-wisp of certainty. But American evangelicalism is largely based on the idea that certainty is not only possible, but necessary. Mandatory, even. This certainty can be achieved thanks to the one-legged stool of the Evangelical Unilateral. That’s a made-up term, but it describes something real. It’s a play on the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” — an approach to theological thinking that relies on the four foundations of scripture, tradition/community, reason and experience. The evangelical approach to theological thinking is exactly like this Wesleyan method, except it doesn’t include tradition or community. Or reason. Or experience.
  • Part 5: It’s the politics, stupid
  • Part 6: In which critics who believe there really IS some sort of moral struggle happening are answered, and he illustrates how a longing for legislative enforcement of religious mores paints a picture of weak moral fiber

I’m sure he’s more to say on the subject, but read these. It’s illuminating.