Sentential Links #49

Linkage, linkage, lots and lots o' linkage. Click and enjoy:

:: The local Furniture Graveyard, however, never lacks for corpses, rudely ejected from someone's flat, somewhere here abouts, at some ungodly hour. (This person found me today and left a comment.)

:: For the final chapter, Savage makes a trip to New York City just a few weeks after 9/11 to see if he can get all seven sins accomplished in one weekend while contributing to the (underground) economy per President Bush’s wishes. (Ditto. I love it when random people end up here!)

:: But what if home is the storm? (Yet another new visitor from this week. It was a good week.)

:: Contrary to a popular American stereotype, most Australians do NOT wear hats decorated with crocodile teeth or sell Subarus. That was just a phase Paul Hogan went through before he found Goth.

:: I again implore you to visit the Oregon coast. It's groovy. (Groovy it is. I want to go back there, quite badly.)

:: This bohemian, gypsy artist......

the woman of rather.... ahem....

alternative dress code

(for 42 years).........

.........now owns...........


.......... slacks. (Say it ain't so! Don't fall into the clutches of the Docker-clad! Nothing good can come of it!)

:: The funny thing about Doug Flutie, who announced his retirement today, is that nobody in the NFL could ever quite figure out how to use him. (I'm not sure I agree with that -- the Bills figured him out pretty well, toward the end, but that was pretty much the end of his effectiveness. For all the "You'll be sorry!" chanting that occurred when Flutie was pushed out, his 2001 Chargers only went 5-11, compared with the Bills' 3-13; and a major factor wasn't just that the Bills had to find out if Johnson was the guy -- which they did have to do -- but also John Butler's earlier, bizarre decision to give both guys big contracts. By the time Butler's tenure ended, the Bills couldn't afford to have so much salary tied up with one QB. Flutie was tough and tenacious, but he was small, and, even in his second year as the Bills' starter, he couldn't muscle the ball to the outside on the deep routes, so his production dropped dramatically. I'd also note that Homerun Throwback might have happened no matter who was the starter, and Rob Johnson did everything he had to do to win that game. I'm still somewhat surprised, seven years later, that the fiery Rob Johnson of the Homerun Throwback game, who late in the game completed a crucial pass despite losing his shoe in the course of taking the snap, turned out to not be the real Rob Johnson, who never seemed to give a shit about playing football again.

I also don't have a problem with Flutie in the Hall of Fame, except that Canton tends to completely ignore leagues other than the NFL. Jim Kelly's passing statistics vault him into a very high echelon if his USFL days are factored in -- but they're not.)

:: Over the last month, I've been fortunate to receive links from four big bloggers, and I thought it might be interesting to analyze the traffic that resulted from each link. (This is an interesting read about not just how links help blogs increase traffic, but also how different kinds of links affect traffic. Not that I would know, seeing as how I haven't been "lanched" in a while. I'm just sayin'.)

:: The media's adulation of McCain is genuinely stupefying. The straight talker does some garden variety political pandering by agreeing to speak at Falwell's university, but somehow that doesn't affect his straight talking reputation. He gives a bland, uncontroversial speech so as not to offend anyone, and that somehow adds to his straight talking reputation. No matter what he says, he's a straight talker. It's a miracle!

:: My position is based on the fact that I love music. I want to learn as much about music as I can, which means that I have to be open to learning new things. (That's my position, too. I divide music into two categories: "Good" music and "Bad" music, and that's it. It's just too facile to say that classical music is inherently superior to all other forms of musical expression, because what does that really mean, anyway? Sure, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is a towering masterpiece of human art, but I have to concede the possibility that Abbey Road is, too; and besides, we can compare specific cases until the moon falls out of the heavens, but what would be the point? We're talking genres here, and it seems clear to me that "Stairway to Heaven" will be beloved for a far, far longer time than, say, any of Franz Berwald's symphonies.)

That's it for this time. Tune in next week for more.