Dept. of Creepying Moronism, FedEx Division

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You can’t ship made-up things, apparently:

The FedEx guy then grabs cans of nitrogen (N2) and neon (Ne), with their store-advertised “purity” of 78.084 percent and 0.0018 percent respectively (which was our way of being clever about selling cans of normal air, since that’s their percentage in the atmosphere — which, of course, was our way of making more money for 826 Seattle by selling products that cost almost nothing to produce). Here’s what the atmospheric gas cans look like on the shelf:

FedEx guy: Nope. You can’t ship these either.

Me: But… they’re empty! It’s just air. And… nitrogen? It’s, like, almost 80% of the atmosphere. There’s nothing dangerous about nitrogen, even if it were pure.

FedEx guy: They look too much like bomb-making materials.

Me [going into dumbfounded mode]: Bomb… Neon? What? Is there anything here I can legally ship? How about this bottle of tap water?

I hand him a bottle of Certainty (tagline, “For when it’s preferable to think you know more”), which looks like this: [pic elided]

FedEx guy: Nope. It still looks too suspicious, too much like bomb-making materials.

Me: But it’s “Certainty.” That’s not even a thing. I just made that up. [That’s not strictly true. It’s a scientific term/idea, and we sell it alongside bottles of “Uncertainty.” But it’s like having a bottle labeled “Friendship.”]

FedEx guy: It’s just too suspicious.

[long pause]

Me [going into post-9/11, TSA-style super-dumbfounded mode]: So what you’re saying is you can’t ship any sort of containers, even if they’re empty? You know that we originally ordered these empty cans and jars from a company, and they shipped them to us.

FedEx guy: They must have used a different vendor [“vendor”? I can’t remember, some word like that, like a “service”].

Which I imagine he said because he couldn’t bring himself to say, “It’s the words that are on the containers that are dangerous” — even after I had opened them all and demonstrated the utter harmlessness/emptiness of the containers themselves.

(Via BB.)

Our kind of chef

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David Chang of Momofuku Noodle Bar in NYC takes no shit from the veggie hordes:

Back before Momofuku Noodle Bar was a certified hit, before it won widespread critical acclaim, before there was a rabble of foodies parked outside its door every night at 5:30 sharp, clamoring to get in, Chang remembers receiving a phone call. “It was a lady who said she was a vegetarian,” he says, “and that she got something to go, and there was broth on the side, and she drank it.”

“I said, ‘We don’t have any vegetarian broths,’ and she said, ‘Well, you should, and anyway, somebody said it was,’ and I said, ‘Well, that must have been a miscommunication.'”

“You can’t do this to the vegetarians!” the lady bellowed, before threatening to sue Chang and put Momofuku Noodle Bar out of business.

“I got so pissed off,” says Chang.

So pissed off, in fact, that the very next day, in a public-relations gambit that would give Danny Meyer night sweats, Chang and his co-chef, Joaquin Baca, removed every vegetarian dish from the menu (back then there were still a few) except the ginger-scallion noodles. (Emph. added.)

“We added pork to just about everything else,” says Chang, giggling like a schoolgirl.

“We said, ‘Fuck it, let’s just cook what we want.‘””

Word.

How to tell if you’re a big ol’ dork

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While on a business trip, you buy (a) the WoW expansion and (b) a new mouse to play it with, as you left your travel mouse at home and find playing games with the trackpad on your laptop unsatisfying.

Amusingly, in the utterly anonymous shopping center where our hotel is, there’s an EB Games. EB was sold out, unless you’d thought to pre-order the expansion at this particular podunk pissant hole-in-the-wall shop. However, around the corner there is an Apple store.

The Apple store had a shelf full. Blizzard has, for most of its history, shipped Mac and PC versions of their games on the same day, and on the same media. We expect many folks have left the EB shop disappointed with no idea they could get their jollies just 100 yards away.

Freebie or honeypot?

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We post this from gate B-62A at IAH in Houston, where an open wireless access point called “co_crew_wireless” allowed us in, presumably a Continental network. We reckon either they know it’s open and don’t care, or don’t know it’s open and intend for it to be a corporate network only, or it’s someone’s attempt to sniff traffic and such for nefarious purposes.

If the latter, good luck, buddy. We do everything over SSH anyway.

Mainstream Media Picks Up Law Firm Boycott Story

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The good news: the Pentagon is explicitly disavowing the statements made by Charles Stimson.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Brian Maka, said Stimson was not speaking for the Bush administration.

Stimson’s comments “do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the thinking of its leadership,” Maka told The Associated Press on Saturday.

Stimson’s “shameful and irresponsible” remarks deserve condemnation, said Neal Sonnett, a Miami lawyer and president of the American Judicature Society, a nonpartisan group of judges, lawyers and others.

Sonnett said in a statement that Stimson had made a “blatant attempt to intimidate lawyers and their firms who are rendering important public service in upholding the rule of law and our democratic ideals.”

Stimson on Thursday told Federal News Radio, a local commercial station that covers the government, that he found it “shocking” that lawyers at many of the nation’s top law firms represent detainees.

Stimson listed the names of more than a dozen major firms he suggested should be boycotted.

“And I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms,” Stimson said.

Asked who might be paying the law firms to represent Guantanamo detainees, Stimson hinted at wrongdoing.

“It’s not clear, is it? Some will maintain that they’re doing it out of the goodness of their heart — that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are,” he said. “Others are receiving monies from who knows where and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”

What a reprehensible jackass. But he gets worse:

Stimson also described Guantanamo as “certainly, probably the most transparent and open location in the world” because of visits from more than 2,000 journalists since it opened five years ago. However, journalists are not allowed to talk to detainees on those visits, their photos are censored and their access to the base has at times been shut off entirely.

He discounted international outrage over the detention center as “small little protests around the world” that were “drummed up by Amnesty International” and inflated in importance by liberal news media outlets.

Uh, right. Our own court system disagrees, bub:

FBI agents have documented more than two dozen incidents of possible mistreatment at Guantanamo. In one, a detainee’s head was wrapped in duct tape because he chanted the Quran; in a second, a detainee pulled out his hair after hours in a sweltering room.

In a December court ruling, a federal judge in Washington decried the plight of “some of the unfortunate petitioners who have been detained for many years in the terrible conditions at Guantanamo Bay.”

The judge criticized a system in which dozens have been held without charges and cut off from the world for lack of English or knowledge about the law, leaving them no choice but to turn to a fellow prisoner with outside connections for legal help.

Since the detention center opened, the U.S. military has transferred or released about 380 detainees. Some 395 remain in the prison.

Bush to Seniors: Drop Dead

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The newly Democratically-controlled House righted a serious wrong in the much ballyhooed Medicare drug plan this week by reversing a clause explicitly preventing Medicare from negotiated with drug companies for the best price.

Yes, that’s right: the GOP bill forbid negotiation. Gee, corporate handouts, anyone?

It gets better. Under the new bill, Medicare will be required to negotiated for the best price. And, of course, Bush has threatened to veto it if it makes it to his desk. Nice one, George.

The Democratic majority may not, in and of itself, be big enough to override a veto, but it’ll only take a few defections to create such a supermajority. And even if that isn’t possible, Bush will make it abundantly clear where he and his party stand on these matters, in front of God and everybody.

Best. Lit Gag. EVAR.

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Or, why the New Yorker remains the coolest magazine in the known world. From EmDashes:

Q. Is it true that at some point in the seventies, Goings On About Town used the listings for The Fantasticks to serialize James Joyce’s Ulysses?

Jon writes: Yes. The New Yorker began serializing Ulysses in the November 3, 1968 listing for The Fantasticks […]. That issue quoted the copyright information from the third printing of the novel (London, Egoist Press). The book’s opening words — “Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed” — appeared in the Dec. 21, 1968, issue. The serialization lasted almost three years, ending in November of 1971, and encompassed the entirety of the book’s first chapter. By the end, Ulysses had spread to the listings for other long-running musicals such as Hello, Dolly!, and Fiddler on the Roof. For about six months prior to serializing Joyce’s novel, the magazine had filled the Fantasticks listing with geometry (“The sum of the squares of the two other sides”), grammar (“‘I’ before ‘e,’ but not after ‘c'”), instructions for doing your taxes (“If payments [line 21] are less than tax [line 16], enter Balance Due”), and other nonsense.

In 1970, New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford explained to Time magazine that he began the serialization of Ulysses because he got bored writing the same straight capsule reviews week after week. Asked about reader response to the serialization, Botsford observed, “Many are delighted they can identify the excerpts, but others think we are trying to communicate with the Russian herring fleet in code.”

It’s true; thanks to the Complete New Yorker, we have a screenshot from the 12/21/68 issue:

Stately plumb Buck Mulligan

Click thru for the original 2-page spread; there’s a lovely surprise on the 2nd page.

So right it hurts

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Wil Wheaton points out what John Rogers figured out:

They search for the best way to describe a President who engages in military policy opposed by his Joint Chiefs and contradicted by his own brand-new counterinsurgency policy, who doesn’t seem to understand the difference between goals and strategy, recycles last year’s “Plan for Victory” with more troops, and is apparently hell-bent on starting a war with Iran … a man incapable of calculating risk versus reward, or even understanding that hope is not a plan …

The geeks have it cold. The rest of you just won’t get it, but —

George Bush is Leeroy Jenkins, baby.

More More iPhone Backlash

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We’re still pissed off about this. Deal with it.

First, Jobs on the iPhone:

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

Actually, Steve, that’s all bullshit, and in fact a small telephone/computing device is exactly what I and others want. And the whole “it won’t work if you put software on it” thing is a damned lie; I don’t recall Treo or Windows Mobile people having this problem.

Mark Pilgrim has more, as does Open the Future; the latter suggests that regardless of how wrongheaded this is, Jobs may be digging in his heels on the “no outside software” point. The Steve isn’t known for backing up when he’s been wrong, so we’re pretty sure this means the iPhone will remain a crippled, useless thing instead of what it could have been.

Great job, Steve. Fuck you.

More iPhone Backlash

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Geek productivity-porn site 43Folders weighs in on the suckitude of the closed platform:

Yes I’d understand, but I’d feel like Apple was abandoning an opportunity to make this more than a phone, and more that an iPod, and even — let’s be frank about the elephant in the room — much more than a Palm or a Pocket PC. There’s the potential here for some serious George Jetson shit and it would be a pity not to capitalize on that as early as possible.

Exactly. The problem is: every Treo or Windows Mobile device can already do orders of magnitude more things than the iPhone precisely because they’re open platforms.

The last great hope for smartphone geeks was the Sidekick, which T-Mobile foolishly insisted on controlling completely. Like, there was no way to download your own apps, and T-Mobile could delete anything they liked from the phone at any time, over the cell network. It wasn’t and isn’t really yours with that kind of power imbalance. As a consequence, instead of the technorati carrying them, idiots like Paris Hilton carry them.

Apple and Cingular don’t seem to be fucking up quite that much — the iPhone will sync with your desktop, not remote servers, for example — but they’re close. Openness is paramount. It’s Freedom 0. Without it, the iPhone is useless to a significant and influential demographic.

Well, hell: as it turns out, the iPhone sucks.

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Gizmodo is reporting, and we have heard elsewhere as well, that the new Apple iPhone will be a closed system — i.e., like an iPod, not like a proper handheld smart device.

By contrast, all Treos and Windows Mobile machines have the ability to add programs from third party developers. Their usefulness is limited only by developer ingenuity and the phone’s owner. Apple, by contrast, has apparently chosen the opposite plan, where only they can decide what can run on the iPhone.

If this is true — and at this point is seems very much so — Steve was being very disingenuous when he said this thing “runs OS X.”

Laura Lemay put it this way, over on The Well:

From the further info coming out it doesn’t run Mac OSX — it runs something that looks like OSX but is actually a locked down, proprietary system similar to that of the iPod.

When us geeks hear “it runs OSX” we think we’re hearing “It’s unix, we can write apps for it and get a bash prompt.” But when Steve says “it runs OSX” he’s saying “it looks like OSX and has the same icons and interface whizzies you expect from OSX.”

Exactly.

It’s still a very nice phone, if it lives up to the hype, but $500 for a closed machine is more than Heathen will consider no matter who pays the bill. In fact, it’s overpriced by a factor of 5. There’s no chance at all of us adopting such a phone, Apple shiny-ness or no, for more than $100 if we’re limited to what Steve thinks is useful. No thanks, Apple. We’ll take another Treo and wait for someone else to do this properly.

Geraldo is apparently worried people might have forgotten that he’s a douchebag

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So now he’s threatening to beat up Keith Olbermann. This is just fantastic:

Apparently Geraldo was visiting with 104.1 FM’s Monsters just before Christmas, when they asked him about the time he made international headline for disclosing too much information about troops in Iraq. Geraldo claimed the incident was blown out of proportion, largely by NBC — and specifically Olbermann. Geraldo then began mumbling semi-audible names, seemingly meant to describe Olbermann: “midget … punk … slimeball.”

But then, with the Monsters helpful prodding, Geraldo went a step further, leaving no doubt about what he was saying. He called Olbermann a coward — specifically a “[female part of the anatomy] who wouldn’t walk across the street against the red light.”

He then said he was ready to fight him, saying: “I would make a pizza out of him.”

Oh, and before leaving the topic, Geraldo offered an example of a TV talker who’s a “real man” … that would apparently be Montel Williams.

No word yet on whether Olbermann even knows Geraldo called him out. (Maybe we’ll see.)

UPDATE 1/9: Yes, Olbermann does know now. On his MSNBC show last night, he cited this blog and then recounted the story. He said the “midget” remark confused him, claiming: “I’m about 7 inches taller than he is.” And after describing Geraldo’s desire to fight him, he said: “Geraldo, you should not give me a hard time. I can still remember when you were a big deal … back when I was a kid.”

Ohio State Who?

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Tonight Florida showed their selection for the title game against supposed No. 1 Ohio State was earned, and in the process made pretty clear what paper tigers the Buckeyes were. We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, as at this moment the score has just gone 41-14 on a short punch by Tim Tebow, but with that kind of margin we’re reasonably sure that Ohio State can’t manufacture a win when they’ve been limited to a single offensive touchdown all night.

The final stats on this game will make it clear that it wasn’t as close as the score, even. LSU’s performance in the Sugar Bowl wasn’t this dominant, at least not over the whole game. Florida sacked Ohio State’s Heisman winning QB over and over, once very nearly forcing a safety. The Gator defense was unstoppable, giving up only 7 points and holding the Buckeyes to a pitiful 82 offensive yards. 41 points and 369 total yards tells the tale of the Florida offense, for which Ohio State had no answer at all. (Meyer could have easily tacked another 7, or at least 3, onto the total had he been bloody-minded; we like that he did not.)

Now, for the record:

  • Alabama (UR) — Independence, vs. Oklahoma St (UR) — LOST
  • Arkansas (12/13/12)– Capitol One, vs. Wisc (6/5/7) — LOST
  • Auburn (10/10/9)– Cotton, vs. Nebraska (22/22/23) — WON
  • Florida (2)– BCS Championship, vs. Ohio State (1) — WON
  • Georgia (UR)– Chik-Fil-A, vs. VaTech (14/14/13) — WON
  • Kentucky (UR) — Gaylord Hotels Music City, vs. Clemson (UR) — WON
  • LSU (4) — Sugar, vs. ND (11) — WON
  • SC (UR) — AutoZone Liberty, vs. Houston (UR) — WON
  • Tenn (17) — Outback, vs. Penn State (UR) — LOST

So, 6 and 3 for the SEC, or one worse than Heathen predicted. Congrats to the Gators, our new national champs, and to the other five bowl-winning teams who made it clear once again that the SEC is the toughest conference in college football.

Update: The rankings are in, and Florida’s championship is official. However, Ohio State managed to hold on to the No. 2 spot — ahead of LSU, which strikes us as iffy at best. We’re pretty sure the Tigers would eat the Buckeyes alive, too.

ESPN also came up with another little fact worth remembering: Ohio State may be all that in the Big 10, but they’re 0 and 8 against the SEC in bowls. In major BCS bowls this year, the SEC is 2-0, with dominating margins (amusingly, 41-14 in both). In major BCS bowls this year, the Big 10 is … 0-2.

We couldn’t agree more

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ESPN’s Mark Schlabach: “Notre Dame shows it doesn’t belong in BCS bowls“

Against LSU, Notre Dame once again proved it doesn’t deserve to play in BCS bowl games, which have become its birthright because of the school’s national stature and ability to draw high TV ratings.

And by shutting out the Fighting Irish in the second half and erupting for 577 yards of offense in the game, the Tigers again proved Notre Dame is no longer capable of beating teams like LSU. Or Ohio State, Michigan and Southern California, which also handed the Fighting Irish lopsided losses in the past 12 months.

We Now Live In A Police State

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You thought we were done being pissed off now that the Democrats control Congress and we’ve got football? Think again.

John Gilmore has been pursuing a case against the Feds over the right to fly domestically without identification; it’s been amply demonstrated by folks like Bruce Schneier that the ID requirement has no security implications (and in fact exists to solve an airline business problem, not a security issue; n.b. that it’s now impossible to sell airline tickets to another person) — every one of the 9/11 hijackers, for example, had valid ID. Part of Gilmore’s case is a desire to force the government to disclose the law in question, something they won’t do because they claim the law is classified.

Think on that for a minute. We now have classified, secret laws that are not available for our review, nor are they available when they’re legally challenged, as in this case.

That’s all kinds of fucked up. And yet, the Supremes have decided not to hear the case, rejecting the appeal without comment and letting stand the lower court’s opinion that Gilmore’s right’s aren’t abridged by being forced to show ID. The question of secret law has been effectively shoveled under the rug until the next challenge, but that doesn’t help us today.

More at Slashdot and BoingBoing.

Signs of the Apocalypse, Musical Edition

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Overheard…

NEW YORK (Billboard) – Kelly Clarkson’s next album will boast some punk rock flavor.

The inaugural “American Idol” champ secured the services of bassist Mike Watt, who co-founded ’70s punk band Minutemen, ’80s combo fIREHOSE, and is now working with Iggy Pop and the reunited Stooges.

“I ended up playing on six of the songs. I had no idea what it was going to be like, but it ended up being pretty interesting,” Watt said of the sessions for Clarkson’s third RCA studio album.

Watt said he was a bit skeptical about working on the project, since he knew hardly anything about “American Idol” or Clarkson herself.

“I heard that Kelly won some game show, but I was really impressed how she sang her ass off. It was intense. I’m really glad I had the experience — it was trippy and everyone gave me much respect.”

The album is being produced by David Kahne, who previously worked with the likes of Paul McCartney, Tony Bennett and Stevie Nicks.

“(Kahne) let me try all kinds of stuff like fuzz bass, fills and solos besides just making things fatter,” Watt said.

Watt also found an admirer in Clarkson guitarist/songwriter Jimmy Messer, who “was very enthusiastic and helped me much — he was a skater when he was younger and knew all about my music.”

The Stooges, meanwhile will release “The Weirdness,” March 20 via Virgin. Watt is expected to be on the road with the group in the spring.

Dept. of “ZOMG!!! Wifi Hotspots are Insecure!”

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(Otherwise known as the “um, duh” category for technical types, natch.)

David Pogue over at the NYTimes has an illustrative bit up today (well, Thursday) about just exactly how insecure traffic is at a public wifi hotspot. Your computer itself may be secure, but the data you send out is pretty much open for perusal by anyone who can get on the network.

While this isn’t news to at least some of you Heathen, we figure it’s a big enough topic that we may as well cover it here. Go read Pogue, or follow along with our summary.

The Intarwub — a series of tubes, of course — is basically insecure. Mail and web traffic move all over the world in completely unencrypted packets. This wasn’t that big of a deal in the years before wireless, since getting access to a network involved plugging in an actual cable; sure, the guy in the cube next to you could read your incoming mail, but he’s probably got better stuff to do, and (furthermore) probably isn’t a nefarious identity thief.

Well, enter Wifi. Now every self-respecting coffeeshop, sandwich place, pizza joint, etc., has a $99 Linksys and a DSL connection, the better to attract customers with. This is great and all, but there’s a downside. All that traffic that was moving over a physical wire is now in the air, unencrypted, and anyone with a smattering of technical know-how can sniff the network and get access to everything you send or receive.

No, really.

This is actually a HUGE deal for business travellers, since lots of biz hotels use wifi instead of wired connections in the rooms — meaning a bad guy could just check into room 105 and leave his laptop running all night, merrily capturing packets for later analysis.

Scary, huh?

Some of you are now wondering “But Mr Heathen! My bank/webmail/dominatrix/catfish purveyor/whatever web site says they’re secure!” This may be true! There’s hope! Web browsers have, since forever, had the ability to negotiate a completely encrypted connection to a given server. This is what that little lock icon means (Firefox goes one better by turning the address bar yellow when the connection is secure). This technology is called “SSL” (for “secure sockets layer”), and it’s pretty robust. A network-sniffing goon could still get at your network packets, but he’d get only gibberish if the traffic was encrypted (and while SSL is breakable, few will go to the trouble when there are plenty of plaintext packets to sniff).

Gmail and, we think, several other webmail providers have an option to encrypt your mail session with SSL. So do most banks as well as any online retailer worth a damn (though they probably won’t offer it until you get to the part where you put in identifying details or credit card info). Also, some kinds of email can be sent over SSL as a matter of course, which is an excellent idea for road warriors (ask your sysadmin).

So, there are a few important takeaways here:

  1. First, secure your home wifi. Use WPA encryption if you can, WEP if you can’t, and consider even applying a MAC filter. This “MAC” has nothing to do with Apple or cosmetics; every network device (wired or wireless) has a unique Media Access Control address; it’s a string of letters and numbers. All modern home routers have the ability to limit their service to a list of known-good MAC addresses (or, conversely, keep known-bad MACs off the network).

  2. When you’re in Starbuck’s or whatever, be careful about how you read your mail and what you do online. Just reading the news? Don’t sweat it. Reading your email? Probably time to think about some countermeasures. Shopping or doing something sensitive for work? Go home, or get secure.

  3. If your email provider offers an encrypted method of getting email, USE IT.

  4. If you must do sensitive things on an open or near-open wireless connection, consider using any of the fine personal Virtual Private Networking tools mentioned in the comments to Pogue’s piece. We don’t use any of ’em, so we can’t tell you which one is better.

(What do we do? Something terribly geeky, but very effective. We use a technology called “SSH tunnels” to manage email and web browsing on the road, which sends all our traffic to our secure server in an encrypted “tunnel” before it goes out to the Internet at large. Sniff our coffeeshop packets all you want; we’re locked up tight. (This is sort of like a primitive VPN solution, but it’s quick and easy if you know what you’re doing, and even then nonsavvy can use it if a savvy type sets it up for them. (HDANCN?)))

NYT and Schneier on Airport Insecurity

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In this fantastic bit, they discuss airport security with expert Bruce Schneier:

Inherent in the obsession on liquids and gels, Mr. Schneier said, “is the notion that we can stop the bad guys by focusing on tactics, which is moronic. I pick a defense, you see my defense, and then you, the bad guy, decide what to do. That’s a game we can’t win.”

He added, “Screeners are so busy looking for liquids that they’ve missed decoy bombs in tests. We’ve defined success so weirdly. When T.S.A. takes away some frozen tomato sauce from grandmom because it might become a liquid, they think of it as a success. But that’s a failure. It’s a false alarm.”

(Local copy, since NYT rots links.)

“Hi, I’m from NBC scheduling, and I’m dumb as a box of hair!”

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So, as you have certainly noticed (some of you more verbally than others), Heathen enjoys the college football, especially bowl season. We’re by no means alone, obviously, given the ratings these games get; chief among them are the major BCS bowls: Fiesta, Rose, Orange, and Sugar, plus the championship game.

These games are also, for the most part, the biggest things on TV during bowl season, since most network programs are on holiday hiatus until early to mid January.

However, this year, there was a collision at Chez Heathen. We went upstairs yesterday to start watching the Sugar Bowl only to discover the Tivo already capturing, on another channel, one of the very small number of those network shows enjoyed in our household (Mrs. Heathen, natch). It wasn’t a repeat; it was the first new episode of this program in over a month, scheduled opposite the Sugar Bowl.

This struck us as really dumb, and we’re sure you agree. What makes it cross the line into absolute stupidity is this: the program in question is Friday Night Lights, a show about big-time Texas high school football. Just exactly WTF was NBC thinking?

(For the record, we’re gentlemen here at Heathen; we went to a bar for the first half.)

Hey, even Heathen are right sometimes

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As predicted, LSU just handed perennially-overrated Notre Dame their 9th consecutive bowl loss[1] in the Sugar Bowl. Final score: LSU 41, Notre Dame 14. LSU quarterback Jamarcus Russell outproduced the much ballyhooed ND golden boy Brady Quinn by better than 2 to 1 — and he’s a junior who could come back and lead the Tigers next year.

Revised bowl rundown, now with final AP/USAT/BCS rankings:

  • Alabama (UR) — Independence, vs. Oklahoma St (UR) — LOST
  • Arkansas (12/13/12)– Capitol One, vs. Wisc (6/5/7) — LOST
  • Auburn (10/10/9)– Cotton, vs. Nebraska (22/22/23) — WON
  • Florida (2)– BCS Championship, vs. Ohio State (1) — 1/8, 8pm
  • Georgia (UR)– Chik-Fil-A, vs. VaTech (14/14/13) — WON
  • Kentucky (UR) — Gaylord Hotels Music City, vs. Clemson (UR) — WON
  • LSU (4) — Sugar, vs. ND (11) — WON
  • SC (UR) — AutoZone Liberty, vs. Houston (UR) — WON
  • Tenn (17) — Outback, vs. Penn State (UR) — LOST

The SEC has played 8 of its 9 bowls, and taken 5 of them. Cross your fingers for the big show next week.

[1. The last time Notre Dame won a bowl, Heathen lived in Tuscaloosa, and most of you people had never heard of the Internet. It was the January 1994 Cotton Bowl, against A&M.]