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While I don’t consider myself a HUGE football fan, I’m at least tangentially interested enough to follow the local Seattle Seahawks from week to week, and I’ll usually watch the playoffs and the Super Bowl. I don’t stay glued to the set all day Sunday, but I’ll play the hell out of a football videogame. I’m that kind of fan.
One of the interesting things about the game is, because of the one-game-a-week nature of the season, if a team does well enough over the course of the year, the last game or two becomes completely and totally meaningless, and you don’t get to see any of the big stars play because they’re being rested for games that matter more. Such is how it’s playing out for the Seahawks this year, who by virtue of a 13-2 record have won their division and are guaranteed to have home-field advantage throughout the NFC playoffs. As a result, sometime in the fourth quarter of the game against the Colts last week, when it was pretty obvious we were going to win, all of the first-string players were pulled out and the benchwarmers got to mop up in garbage time.
The point of all of this backstory? Well, one of the big stories of the Seahawks this season has been running back Shawn Alexander chasing the record for most touchdowns in a season, which was set by Priest Holmes of the Kansas City Chiefs in 2003. Holmes found the end zone 27 times that year. And up to that exact moment in the game, Alexander had 26.
So the ‘Hawks recover a fumble and the scrubs drive all the way down the field to the Colts’ 1-yard line. And Alexander, who has been sitting on the sidelines for this entire drive drinking Gatorade, gets a slap on the butt and is sent into the game to run the ball in for Record-Tying Touchdown #27, at which point he returns to the bench and picks up his Gatorade again.
And this Sunday, in a COMPLETELY meaningless game against Green Bay, a game that Alexander will likely otherwise not even play in, I’m guessing that if the same situation comes up, he’ll be sent out to run the ball Yet Another Yard to break the record, and everyone will celebrate him like it’s some vast achievement.
So let’s recap this: Someone ELSE does the work for 99 yards, and then this guy gets put in to move the ball three feet? _I_ could move the ball three feet.
What good is keeping track of this record if it’s so easily hacked like this? Why not keep some guy on the bench whose LONE JOB it is to run the ball in every time they are on the 1-yard line?
Football specializes everything else; every team has a guy whose only job it is to snap the ball to the punter. No other time, just when it needs to be snapped a long way ‘cuz the punter stands back some. Why not this? I would be more than happy to be the Seahawks’ designated Three Feet Guy, and for a whole damn lot less than most of these guys pull down.
Sorry, folks, it’s another hockey post. But stay with me.
Longtime readers of this site know of my utter hatred of that no-good sack-of-crap Ed Belfour, the goaltender of the Toronto Maple Leafs. But I happen to think he’s a perfect fit for that team, as I pretty much have hated them long before that scum-sucking waste-of-flesh turd-magnet signed on to play for them.
If you don’t follow the hockey like I follow the hockey, it can be summed up very easily: The Leafs are the hockey equivalent of the New York Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys. (And, let me tell you, I had to make a concerted effort not to type “Cowpies” there, as that is how I refer to the team in any other instance.) The team’s management and fans completely believe that it is their birthright to win the championship every year, and any other outcome is clearly the result of some kind of horrible and unjust bias against them.
Not that “it would be nice if they won”. Not “if they put in the hard work and team cohesion necessary to win”. Their BIRTHRIGHT. They’d have the Cup off at the engravers before Opening Night if they could get away with it.
Anyhow, long story short, I hate the Leafs and revel in the schadenfreude whenever they lose. But I’m getting off the track a little.
Last night, I’m flipping around the games on Centre Ice. Everybody is playing, so there were 15 games going on throughout the evening. And the league’s P.R. people have come to the amazing conclusion that it might be nice to offer up a nod to the fans that didn’t tell the league to go screw after denying us the last season over the labor dispute. So along the blue lines of every ice surface, it reads in large letters:
Thank You Fans!
Nice sentiment. Except in Toronto, where it read:
Thank You Leafs Fans!
Which is TOTALLY appropriate, considering it’s the Leafs. “Yeah, screw you fans of other teams who might be watching, we just want to thank OUR fans, ‘cuz they’re the only ones who mean anything.”
I’m pleased to announce that the Leafs lost last night, and Ed Belfour will go down in the record books as the loser of the first shootout in NHL history. Good. Bastards.
It’s been a good last few days. In that time, I have been offered a new job, which I have accepted, picked up Burnout Revenge for my PS2, baked a kickass batch of chocolate chip cookies that my Tuesday Night Game Gang enjoyed greatly…
…and tonight, the puck drops. Go Sharks!
EDIT: If you’re interested in following the exploits of the Sharks this season, and you run something like Outlook and/or have a Palm or PocketPC, my VCalendar schedule for the team is available in the Downloads section.
Today, our long multinational nightmare is at an end. Commissioner Gary “Walking Asshat” Bettman announced that the National Hockey League owners have ratified the collective bargaining agreement that they basically sodomized out of the players last week, it’s all official, and the 2005-2006 NHL season is a go.
They held the Draft Lottery today, and one of Pittsburgh’s three ping-pong balls came out of the hopper first, so they get Sidney Crosby. I find a certain irony in the fact that the 30 NHL general managers spent the morning playing with their balls, something the REST OF US have been doing for the last year while the league and its players failed to get this ironed out.
They also announced several rule changes that will allegedly make the game more exciting: touch-up offsides is coming back, they have moved the goals back two feet and the blue lines two feet closer to the middle, they’ve eliminated the center red line for the purposes of determining if a two-line pass has taken place, a team that commits icing will not be permitted to change lines during the play stoppage, and goaltenders now will only be able to handle the puck behind the net in a designated trapezoidal area, and will be required to do so wearing smaller pads than the mattresses they wear now.
In addition, they promised us they will be cracking down on hooking, holding, and obstruction penalties, but they say that every year and it usually lasts about a month before the referees start to ignore them again. I expect this year to be no different.
The biggest change, however, is that there will be no more tie games during the regular season. The shootout has been adopted by the NHL.
Many have suggested that resolving a game with a shootout is like settling an basketball game with a game of H-O-R-S-E. Many would be right.
One of the great things about hockey was that it recognized that some nights, two teams are simply just as good (or just as bad), and that nothing was decided at the end of sixty-five minutes. And so each team gets a point (two points in the standings are awarded to a game’s winner) and we go on our way. Well, no more. The “gotta have a winner!” conditioning of the average American idiot sports fan has prevailed, and the dumbing down of the planet continues.
In the last week or so, the rumor that was buzzing around that the shootout would only take place after a five minute four-on-four overtime, followed by a three-minute three-on-three overtime. I could have lived with that. I’ve been advocating for OT to be extended to ten minutes for as long as I’ve been watching hockey, anyhow, and that seemed an acceptable compromise, especially with the amount of ice that would have been opened up during that three-a-side period. The chances of someone scoring in OT and avoiding the shootout would have been pretty high.
But that’s not the best part: Not only is the shooting happening immediately after the already-too-short five minute overtime, but instead of five participants per side taking part, like in, I don’t know, EVERY OTHER SHOOTOUT IN THE WORLD, there will only be three shooters per side. ‘Cuz, you know, that extra couple minutes the other four guys would have taken might be the difference between landing a TV deal and not. The NHL can’t even get a freakin’ shootout right.
So if a regular shootout is like playing H-O-R-S-E, the Shootout Lite is like playing H-O-R. Which, ironically enough, is exactly how I feel about Gary Bettman right now.
Yesterday was the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in Detroit. Like most sports fans, I normally find most All-Star Games to be horrendously dull affairs, as they are exhibitions where the players spend three hours patting each other on the ass and playing at 50% so as not to get injured. However, baseball has impressed me just a little in the last couple years by making it worth something: the league that wins the All-Star Game is awarded home field advantage in the World Series. A small prize, sure, and a gimmick, but it at least makes me a little interested in the result.
I didn’t watch the broadcast on Fox. Why? Tim McCarver. I like Joe Buck fine…in fact I think he’s one of the brightest young broadcasters in the business. But Tim McCarver is a blithering idiot, and as a former sports broadcaster it hurts my head to watch him receive a paycheck for his moronic commentary.
So, it was the high esteem in which I hold Joe Buck that made me sad to see this. Apparently, during the game, some fan unfurled a mysterious banner over a Corvette ad in the outfield, designed to look like an ad for a website. The broadcast team covered it extensively, discussing among themselves what the banner might all be about, as if it were a large-scale version of the “John 3:16” stunt.
Except they KNEW what it was all about, because the whole thing was a stunt by Chevrolet, and Fox was completely in on it.
Man, I realize it’s Fox, and this shouldn’t surprise me. But up in that booth we expect the guys calling the game to be journalists, and behave accordingly. They are to report on what is happening on the field of play, use whatever expertise they might have to provide insight on that, and, yeah, pimp sponsors and the network, but there should be no question when said pimpage is going on.
That said, with some regret, we award an Oreck Vacuums “You Just Suck” award to Joe Buck. Your dad would never have done that, Joe.
(Giving McCarver one along with him would be redundant, as a charter member of the Suck Hall Of Fame.)
Later this morning, 3:41 AM to be exact, marks my 34th successful circumvention of the sun. I’d like to take a moment to thank the planet for not killing me yet.
Today also marks the one-year anniversary of one of the greatest moments in San Jose Sharks history: the Game Six victory over the Colorado Avalanche which clinched the series and punched San Jose’s ticket to their first Conference Finals. (Yeah, they had their asses handed to them by Calgary, but we had no idea that was going to happen at the time. So we were pretty stoked.)
Tomorrow, there will be baseball, and the NBA playoffs. There will be no NHL hockey.
So if you’re the type to pour one out (and if you are, fer God’s sake, yer wasting perfectly good alcohol), do me a favor and pour one out for the demise of the NHL season, with hopes that the idjits in charge of negotioations give themselves a rectal craniectomy and get this impasse settled, so that next October we can once again enjoy the greatest game on the planet played at its highest level.
So you know, in the wake of dropping my keys down the elevator shaft, I never got around to making that post about the fine evening leading up to the incident.
A buddy of mine’s wife plays ice hockey on a team associated with the Seattle Women’s Hockey Club, and that night they were holding their Exhibition Games and Beer Garden Fundraiser. About a week before, they were contemplating how they could scare up an announcer for the event. Hello, over here. Eventually they got the bright idea to call me, I considered it for exactly 2.4 seconds, and accepted the gig.
Reason #62854 why hockey is the greatest game in the world: the public address announcer is actually mentioned in the NHL rulebook. He is required by rule. Of course, this rule is frequently broken on ponds and in small rinks across the country, but it was good to see the SWHC adhering to code. ;)
So the club President, who I also happen to know via having met her at the annual Tri-Birthday Celebration thrown in May for myself and two friends of mine with birthdays within a week of my own, gets in touch with me a week in advance, and actually has scripts for me. This was a level of preparation I was not used to, and was thrilled to see, as I was able to spend the week rewriting the information in my own voice while still getting across the information they wanted to disburse. Usually, this is something I’m furiously doing on game night via scribbles in the margins of the notes they give me, instead of editing it in nice big text on my laptop, which enabled it to double as a TelePrompTer. (Yeah, I have no idea why they capitalize the second T, but it’s a brand name, and I’d hate to see it go the way of Jell-O.)
Said laptop also tripled as the music system, as I loaded my entire MP3 collection to it, ripped a bunch of other songs I had on CD that I thought would fit well, and downloaded a few more. (Shhh. Don’t tell the MPAA. Or RIAA. Or AARP. Or AADA. Generally keep it quiet from anyone with a lot of ‘A’s in their name.) So, a trip to Radio Shack to get a couple little adapters I needed on Saturday, and it’s off to the game.
As expected, last-minute preparations were at a fever-pitch as I was trying to set up, which always makes me a little antsy, but with some help I got everything hooked into the sound system at the rink and my sound checks done. And when I went on the mic the first time, I have to admit I had a little bit of stage fright, as I was playing to a full rink, and wasn’t expecting to.
But it didn’t take long for me to get into the swing of things, and I don’t want to sound like I’m tooting my own horn here (even though I suppose I am), but it’s a crying shame there isn’t a full-time industry for public-address announcing, because DAMN am I good at it. Much as Gretzky’s office was directly behind the net, mine is behind that mic in the scoring box. And it’s fun and satisfying to do something you do well.
But the greatest part was meeting everyone. What a GREAT bunch of women, they couldn’t have been nicer, and they truly appreciated having someone there to make their games feel like a major event. And the feeling was mutual…I truly appreciated that they WANTED me there, and it totally pumped me up to hear how much they enjoyed it. You just don’t get genuine props like that a whole lot.
I’ve been told I’m welcome back anytime, and I may well take them up on that next chance I get!
This morning, while I was getting dressed for work, I flip on the TV, and there’s The Today Show on NBC, and Matt Lauer is introducing Jose Canseco, live and in person at the NBC News studios at 49th Street and Rockefeller Plaza.
For the non-sports fans, Jose was a baseball player who enjoyed some success in the late 80’s and early 90’s, most notably in 1988 for becoming the first player in baseball history to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in the same season, before losing in the World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers in five games. (As a former Dodger fan, I had to get that shot in. :)) Unfortuntately, those ubiquitous “personal demons” caught up with him, and the twilight days of his career were spent in relative obscurity, if not notoriety.
And now he’s written a book, which I refuse to plug by name (if you really wanna know, search Amazon, I’m sure it’ll pop right up), a tell-all where he not only admits to having taken steroids during the majority of his playing career (and if you’ve seen him, you can file that one directly under “N” for No Shit), but he also outs several other players, including Mark McGwire, Jason Giambi, and Bret Boone, as being regular steroid users themselves. And, of course, the media being what it is, this is causing some controversy, and Jose’s doing the talk show circuit to drum up some more sales.
No shock here. This is the same Canseco who ran a 900-number in his heyday where you could find out what he had for breakfast, who has sold off a great many of the momentos of his playing career, including MVP trophies, equipment, milestone baseballs, and stuff of that nature. Jose’s always been about the Benjamins.
Now, the great thing about writing a tell-all book is that you can pretty much make any accusations you want and the people being accused don’t get a floor to respond. So, of course, Lauer lays in with the questions. “How do you respond to their denials?” “Is it all about the money?” “Why are you selling your World Series ring?” (He was a member of the 2000 Yankees, I believe by trade. One at-bat in the Series itself. He struck out.)
(Oh, now, THIS is interesting. I was gonna link to the ring on Jose’s online store, but it’s no longer there, and at $40,000, I doubt it found a buyer. But you can get a game-worn autographed jersey from when he was with the White Sox (I don’t even remember him BEING with the White Sox) for the low low price of $745.95.)
Of course, Jose neatly dodges everything thrown at him, and, with some blather along the lines of “Something’s gonna happen in a month. I can’t talk about it, but you’re gonna wanna keep watching. ‘Cuz something’s gonna happen. That I can’t talk about. In a month. The something, that is.”, strongly hints that he’s gonna take a lie detector test to prove the veractiy of his claims…on Pay Per-View.
You see it coming, of course. In cooperation with our friends at Oreck Vaccuums, we proudly offer a “You Just Suck”…to Matt Lauer. For letting Jose get away with it.
If Matt really wanted to, he could have put the screws to Jose, but he didn’t. Every time Jose started dodging a question, Matt just took it, and moved along to the next question. Yeah, sometimes he pressed for an answer, but he never once called him out outright for not giving one. Big fat softballs, right across the plate. Might as well have been Larry King.
(And a second one should go to whoever booked Jose’s dumb ass on the show to start with. Because if you had done ANY research at all on the guy, you should have been able to tell that this was EXACTLY where the interview was gonna go.)
I hate it when a sports team names itself for a state instead of a city. The Golden State Warriors, the Colorado Avalanche, and the Utah Jazz, among others, are guilty of this. In the case of the Warriors, it’s for marketing: they don’t ACTUALLY play in San Francisco, but they want San Franciscans to support them. Hell, the stinkin’ New York football teams don’t even play in freakin’ New York!
Golden State, though. That one always chapped me. California is a big place with many major metropolitan areas. How DARE these guys claim to represent the entire state! ESPECIALLY with the Lakers down south winning championship rings?
The Avs play in Denver. Nothing wrong with Devner. It works for the Nuggets and the Broncos. Are the Avs and Rockies embarrassed to be in Denver? On the other hand, the New Jersey thing, I totally understand. :)
The California Angels always bugged me, too. California has FIVE baseball teams. Who are THEY to suggest they are the state’s official team? One of the few good things Disney did, when they bought the team and realized that most people knew where Anaheim was and associated it with a rather large amusement park holding of the same parent company, renamed the team to the Anaheim Angels. Amaheim. Great. That’s where you play, that’s the name of the stadium, you should be named for the city. Perfect.
Well, apparently that’s not good enough for new owner Arte Moreno, who bought the team the year after they won their first World Series, in 2003. He feels the need to glom on to Southern California again, and has renamed the team to The Los Angeles Angels Of Anaheim. Gawd. What a pain in the ass. Bad enough when the Ducks did it, but that was Disney capitalizing on a movie. This makes no sense at all.
Arte’s not fooling anyone, and that’s a hell of a nice way to say thanks to a city that renovated their multiuse stadium into a beautiful baseball park just for the team that stayed.
I’m waiting to see what happens when The Loe Angeles Angels of Anaheim roll into D.C. to square off against The Washington Nationals, Formerly The Montreal Expos, at This Used To Be Halliburton Stadium Until The FTC Buried Their Dumb Asses, So Now We’re Named For A Nice Quiet Product Like Sprite Field.
We haven’t been here in a while, so lets clear out the junk drawer, shall we?
First, big props to the men back home:
| ArenaBowl XVIII |
| San Jose Sabercats |
69 |
| Arizona Rattlers |
62 |
| Sabercats win second ArenaBowl |
Best. Arena. Football. Game. Ever. I’ll leave it at that, because those of you who haven’t seen Arena Football live just wouldn’t understand. Seattle needs an AFL team something awful – but once again, it’ll never happen because the Key eats wang when configured for hockey, and that’s what you have to do to be able to fit the AFL field. (Configure for hockey, not eat wang, you perverts.) Special thanks to Barry Ackerley for that one, you polesmoker.
Okay, onward. The summer movie season seems to be in FULL effect, so I thought I’d comment on a few I’ve seen, and what I want to see:
Watched Dodgeball yesterday. About what I expected: group of loveable losers makes good with the help of a cute chick, but with enough of a sense of humor about itself to be worth the time invested. Rip Torn is always funny (hell, just saying his name is pretty damned funny), and the cameos in the last half hour, and the wrapup in the last 10 minutes (which would OTHERWISE be totally formulaic crap, unless you read what was printed on the treasure chest, which makes it all totally okay) is actually worth the fairly insipid buildup. (But not $8. See a matinee or rent the DVD.)
Today’s feature was the controversial Fahrenheit 9/11. Usually I can leave Michael Moore to his business, but I’ve heard enough conflicting opinions about this flick that I figured I should see it myself and make up my own mind. And my mind’s made up: I was right the first time. Not a thing here I didn’t already know: Moore spends the first half of the movie using preroll footage of Gee Dub to make him look like a ninny. Here’s a tip from someone who knows a little something about television: when you have footage of someone who doesn’t know the camera’s on him getting ready to go on camera, you can pretty much make ANYONE look like a ninny. If they had TV back then, I could get you B-roll of FDR that would make him look about as Presidential as Carrot Top. Of course, it helps that Gee Dub IS IN FACT a ninny, but, again, Moore could have done something other than take the easy road out and I would have respected him a little more.
He then goes on to show us that the war in Iraq was started for pretty much no good reason. Well, duh. Finally, he wraps up with a Michael Moore trademark: he follows politicians around with a microphone asking questions that no politician in his right mind would answer, and thinks this proves a point other than that politicians know better than to spend time on camera talking to Michael Moore, because he would twist a lunch recommendation around to make them look bad.
So, I left the movie with about the same feelings I had going into it: the President is an idiot, the war is stupid, and Michael Moore has become a lazy filmmaker. The only reason I can think they they would award this the Palme D’or is that it’s a French film festival and the movie makes Bush look stupid. Of COURSE they love it.
Upcoming: Spiderman 2 is a no-brainer. I thought the first one was pretty good, but the Green Goblin just isn’t strong enough in terms of personality to make a compelling filmatic bad guy out of. Alfred Molina as Doc Ock, on the other hand….GENIUS casting. Nicholsonesque, if I may say so.
Finally, and I know it’s not gonna have a thing to do with the actual story, but I wanna see I, Robot. But I’m gonna go into it expecting not a good sci-fi story, but tons of special effects, lots of cool future-lookin’ sets, and His Royal Freshness blowing shit up. So I should be okay.
And now I get to go downstairs and be trained on the proper procedure for issuing a new CD key. I don’t issue CD keys myself, since I don’t deal with customers directly anymore, but I figure it can’t hurt to brush up on procedure, so I don’t write something that throws the techs under the proverbial bus. So, until next time…
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