Yesanditcounts! (Part Deux)

The other day I linked Matthew Yglesias's attack on the NCAA Tournament, and solicited responses to it, since I just don't have a dog in the fight. (Or maybe I do, but my dog's one of those yippy Pomeranian things that no one in their right mind admits owning.) The Indestructible Mr. Jones responded on his own blog; and so too did Jason Zengerle of TNR. Zengerle seems to leave less spittle on his monitor than Mr. Jones, but they seem to be coming from roughly the same place.

The Conscience of the King VP

In the course of a grab-bag post, John Scalzi says that he doesn't see the big deal with the recently revealed list of requirements placed on hotels at which Vice President Cheney stays. And it probably isn't, except for two things that I hold to be extremely revealing about the character of our Vice President and the type of being he is.

First, the list does not specify the availability of a portable defibrilator.

Second, the list specifies that the TVs shall be pre-tuned to FOX News.

Now, it's not surprising at all that Cheney would watch FOX News. His choice of channels doesn't interest me. What does interest me is the insistence that the TVs already be set to that channel when he walks into the room.

This means that Cheney's immediate impulse, upon entering a hotel room and flopping down on the bed or into the chair, is not to grab the remote and start flipping.

These two pieces of evidence convince me that Vice President Cheney is, in fact, not a human being at all. He has no heart, and he has no hint of the male compulsion to channel-flip when presented with a new TV and an unknown set of available channels.

The lack of a defibrilator, for a guy who has been reported as having "heart trouble" in the past, implies that he has no heart trouble at all. This makes me suspect that his previous hospitalizations for "heart trouble" were, in fact, treatments to maintain the appearance of his syntho-skin, in order to maintain his appearance as a human being as this nefarious being infiltrates our planet.

And I'll bet his "undisclosed location" isn't even on our planet's surface.

It's all becoming clear, now.

Still clinging to that one last delusion....

I've found the whole Washington Post conservative blogger thing just plain strange in so many ways, and now that it's over in surreal fashion, I just have to note the last graf of Michelle Malkin's post in which she decides that the guy had to go:

The bottom line is: I know it when I see it. And, painfully, Domenech's detractors, are right. He should own up to it and step down. Then, the Left should cease its sick gloating and leave him and his family alone.

Well, I suppose she's right -- it would certainly be unseemly for the Left to do any gloating over this. Domenech is gone, and that should be that. His name should never be sullied by the left again.

And having established that, I'm sure that the Right will never ever mention Dan Rather's name again.

Where's the funny?

Right now one of Buffalo's local stations is playing the series finale of Seinfeld, and I'm once again struck by the vast difference between the potential hilarity of the episode's concept and actual hilarity, or lack thereof, of the actual episode as filmed. There was, perhaps, legendary comedy gold to be mined from the legions of memorable characters from the show's years coming back to gain some bit of revenge for the various ways in which they were wronged. Too bad the producers failed to actually mine any of it. Weird.

The Boys are hitting the Big Time!

Wow -- over at BFLOBlog, the guys have been picked up by Fark one day (for this post, and then they have a guest post by one of the sports-talk hosts in Buffalo. (Howard Simon's OK, but I like Schopp and the Bulldog more.)

They also have a post detailing some poor behavior on the part of ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd. I can't stand Cowherd's show, personally; he has a very grating voice and he tends to pound his fairly pedestrian sports insights (or, in sports-talk radio parlance, "takes") into the ground with lots and lots and lots and lots of repetition. The guy generally strikes me on the radio as a jerk, so I can't say as I find this totally surprising.

Shamelessness on Display

I just don't have much to say today, so I'll just swipe a bit of the Government's bandwidth and show off a nifty bit of astronomy:

Info here.

I will look at you stoppingly!

Via Alex Ross I see this collection of utterances offered during orchestra rehearsals by Finnish conductor Lief Segerstam. Here are a few samples:

More grease in the pianissimo.

Use parabolic crescendi. . . they are more animalic.

We will enter in the right times, so the shortening is to the left.

I have to be the bumper to take all these colleagueual comments to the playing trumpets.

Don't make it sound as brutal as my left hand, please.

You are still mouldering (to the percussion).

We still have a pleep.

I can only imagine the plight of those poor musicians. I'm reminded of anecdotes about film director Michael Curtiz, who once directed his stagehands to "Bring on the empty horses!", and said, upon accepting a Best Director Oscar after losing out a number of times before: "Always a bridesmaid, never a mother."

(And I can't help but think that there's a great pickup line in "I will look at you stoppingly".)

Yesanditcounts!

The other day I posted about how I don't like the NCAA Tournament because I'm not much of a basketball fan. Now, I've been reading Matthew Yglesias for ages, so I know he is a basketball fan, so I was a bit surprised to read that he doesn't much like the NCAA Tournament either.

If April is the cruelest month then March is the most frustrating. My favorite sport -- basketball -- is still in full swing but, at the same time, mercilessly pushed out of public view in favor of the NCAA Tournament. College ball is, simply put, basketball played badly, and America's obsession with that game's absurd method of determining a national champion is the true madness.

Now, I just don't have the chops to really judge Matthew's argument here, but something faintly smells about it -- maybe it's my vague sense that the NBA does not, actually, represent "the game as it's meant to be played", especially if the disastrous Team USA performance in the 2004 Summer Olymics can be held as an indication of the current style of NBA play. But as I note, that's just a vague sense of mine, and I may well be full of crap.

So, basketball fans, let me know if and how Matthew's argument fails.

Fun things you can do with sovereignty

Here in Buffalo, our experience with the sovereign status of Indian Reservations mostly involves casinos and the tax-free sale of gasoline and cigarettes. But it seems that, in another state, an Indian leader is thinking outside the box a bit with regard to what else can be done within sovereign Reservation borders.

Such as, oh, opening a Planned Parenthood in South Dakota.

Talk about creative thinking!

Hints of Another Life

Trey the Rambling Taoist links a blog that I had to read, The Useless Tree, as soon as I read Trey's post about it: another blogger is mourning the passing of his disabled son. Reading the archives at Useless Tree (as well as some linked writings at other publications over there), I saw so many familiar things: the fear and grief inherent in a child's severe disabilities, and the unavoidable striving to find peace even in a world where one's entire life revolves around those disabilities.

I never heard of Aidan until I read of his death. The differences are there, of course; they always are. Aidan lived to be 14 years, as opposed to 15 months; Aidan's family had a chance to prepare for his passing, inasmuch as anyone's passing can ever be prepared for. But that could have been our life, and our life could have been theirs.

I never knew you, Aidan, until you died -- but farewell, nonetheless.

Sentential Links #42

Here we go with this week's clicky goodness:

:: I say no records, no Hall for steroid-using players.

:: Guess what? Macaulay Culkin has named his, um, well, you know... (Oh, for the love of God! That kid is so messed up.)

:: The way I see it, critics can play a useful cultural role, but composers should ignore what they say, even when it's positive. (Why limit that to composers? I'd include just about every artist, personally.)

:: The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability always to indicate the right TEMPO. (OK, it's not a quote from a blog post, but from a written selection that was in turn quoted within a blog post. But the words are Wagner's, after all. If I had a time machine, I'd use it to hear Wagner and Berlioz conduct.)

:: As the raindrop scatters the sun's light into a rainbow, so your love scatters joy into my life. (What a nice custom this guy has! It's explained here. Lynn is always linking this guy, but somehow I never checked him out until a week ago.)

:: A mysterious communication arrived via my agent. (Man, this is surreal. But when did merely linking a site become something that could be legally challenged? Did I miss something? Am I tempting fate by linking the site? Oh no!)

:: At this point, Dems need to proclaim as loudly and as often as possible that they've got the far stronger hand going into 2006. President Bush is a deeply unpopular president who's hitting record lows in the polls; he's widely seen as incompetent and a failure; he's lost the ability to corral Republicans in Congress, who are running from him as though their lives counted on it; and, perhaps most important, less than half of Americans approve of President Bush's handling of terrorism -- the very thing pundits somehow can't stop describing as his "strong suit." (Exactly! In the words of John Stewart: "Talking points. They're true, because they're said a lot.")

:: What all these violent aggressive conquests by the rep-resentatives of missionary religions do demonstrate is that there are no major world religions devoted entirely to peace, and no major world religions devoted entirely to war. There are only changing motives. (Exactly. The whole problem with the "Religion of peace" meme, when applied to any religion, is that it omits the religion from the people who practice it. Violent people beget violent religions.)

:: What a wonderful concept. Most times when people hurt or disappoint us, we treat them with with judgment and alienation. What if we were to accept that we all make mistakes, we all fail miserably and often, during this human condition. What if we were to make this paradigm shift to respond with Love, compassion, and understanding instead of with anger, judgment and rejection?

:: I will tell you my opinion. Be aware of some facts first. (Good post providing a real-life example of how a skeptical bit of inquiry works.)

:: To put it in its simplest terms, for me, reincarnation is nothing more than the act of human compost. From what I've observed in my lifetime, all matter eventually dies and breaks down into its most fundamental elements. These elements come together to form new matter.

And at last, two I found recently that may, in one way, be kindred spirits:

:: There has been some discussion recently about the value of overalls in society but nowhere has the overall truth been mentioned - overalls bring happiness.

:: However, the potential utility of these amazing pants quickly overwhelmed the comic intent and I spent a good deal of the party imagining myself wearing them while performing chores around the house. On Sunday, I turned that reverie into reality and donned these penultimate pantaloons.

Carry that flame forward!

...and more sentential goodness next Monday.

A brief basketball thought

I read a bit in the paper today about the goings-on at the NCAA Tournament, and I have to admit: that Tournament probably yields more great sports stories, per event, than any other major sporting event outside of the Olympic Games. So I guess my difficulty with the Tournament, as in my inability to get that excited about it, lies in my lack of excitement about basketball in general as a sport.

First, I was an utterly crappy basketball player. I learned when I was in college that I had very little depth perception to speak of, in terms of judging distances, which goes a long way towards explaining why I've never been good at sports that involved throwing things specific distances (as in, shooting a basketball). Sucking at a sport in a participatory way doesn't help much when it comes time to partake of that sport in a spectator way.

Second, I realized another problem I have with basketball as a spectator sport when I saw the movie White Men Can't Jump: it's a gorgeous sport when watched in slow-motion, but not so much at real speed. And for all the talk about how it's a thrilling and fast-paced game, that doesn't hold up, really: a basketball game takes two to two-and-a-half hours to watch, and the last minute or so of gameplay is almost always interminable as the trailing team starts fouling left and right in hopes of snatching the rebound or something. Of course, the same phenomenon doesn't bother me as much in football; but then, football is a "one play at a time" sport, so gameplay is constantly starting and stopping.

Anyway, those are just my opinions on basketball. I'm always a bit jealous of all the people who get excited by the NCAA Tournament, and I wish I'd lived in Syracuse just a week longer so I could have seen what it was like to be in a town that had just won it all.

Ah, my poor deluded little blog brother....

The Indestructible Mr. Jones tagged me today with Four Things, which is a quiz of which, believe it or not, I have completed a version before. Here are the answers I gave then:

Four jobs you've had in your life: Technical services assistant in a university library; pizza restaurant shift manager; pharmaceutical telesales; grocery store maintenance guy.

Four movies you could watch over and over: Star Wars (all six -- cheating a bit there); The Lord of the Rings (all of it -- still cheating); Casablanca; Dial M for Murder

Four places you've lived: Buffalo, NY; Syracuse, NY; Portland, OR; LaCrosse, WI.

Four TV shows you love to watch: Of shows still airing, House; Scrubs; CSI; Nova. Of shows no longer airing, Once and Again; Seinfeld; Millennium; Star Trek: TOS.

Four places you've been on vacation: Pittsburgh, PA; Orlando, FL; Cape Cod, MA; Coeur d'Alene, ID.

Four websites you visit daily: Most of the websites I frequent daily now are blogs, but the non-blogs I visit daily are FSM, AICN, Bright Weavings, and Flickr.

Four of your favorite foods: Sausage; Chocolate; Ice Cream; Pizza.

Four places you'd rather be: I dunno -- I love it right here. For visits, I'd like to have a week in Chicago, Vancouver, Toronto, and Great Britain.

Mr. Jones's version of the quiz has a few extra question, so here are my answers to those:

Four things that really irritate me:

1. Classical music lovers who look down on other forms or genres or music
2. People who insist that they are bored by classical music (For some reason, it really bugs me when film music fans make this claim, because film music is, for the most part, a subgenre of classical music.)
3. People who assume that a negative view of something is an "objective" view of something (i.e., "Well, you can like The Phantom Menace, but looking at the movie objectively, it's crap."
4. I'm really starting to get pissed off at the national Democratic Party.

Four names I would never, ever name a child:

1. Dakota
2. Alfred
3. Brooke
4. Brittany

Four names I would consider naming a child, though I shouldn't:

1. Maximus
2. Diarmuid
3. Aragorn
4. Takeo (Fine names all, but each would mark me as a supreme weirdo in one way or another)

No tagging, although I retroactively tag Mr. Jones for every friggin' quiz I've ever done in this space. Heh! Indeed!

Quizzes ahoy....

Terry Teachout posts a quiz, and as always, I am powerless to resist its siren call. (I omit the three last questions, which are indicative of the quiz's origins in e-mail.)

What time did you get up this morning? Let's just say, "Too damned early", because one of the cats seems to have OCD when it comes to scratching in the litter box.

Diamonds or pearls? I like the way diamonds look, but I'm told that the diamond business is so evil that Halliburton won't even try to enter the market. I tend to really like sapphires, emeralds, and amethysts.

What was the last film you saw at the cinema? We took The Daughter to Nanny McPhee. Good movie, and always refreshing to see a Brit family film that recognizes that children are often shits.

What is your favorite TV show? Scrubs.

What did you have for breakfast? An almond granola bar and three cups of coffee.

What is your middle name? Just the initial 'C'. And if you think it odd to only have a middle initial, go look up what the 'S' stands for in "Harry S Truman". If I have one thing in common with President Truman, I'm happy.

What is your favorite cuisine? An entire cuisine? Chinese, I suppose -- I hold Buffalo's lack of a true dim sum house as a tragedy right up there with the fact that we once demolished a Frank Lloyd Wright office building. (Although for cuisine, "Buffalo Bar Cuisine" is right up there.)

What food do you dislike? Broccoli, which is what Darth Vader and Ernst Stavro Blofeld would be if they were vegetables. God could have prevented the entire "Forbidden Fruit" thing in the Garden of Eden if he'd just designated broccoli as the fruit of knowledge:

"Verily I say," sayeth the Lord, "thou shalt not eat the broccoli of knowledge!"

"And verily we shall not," sayeth Adam, "for it smells and likely tastes of dung."

What is your favorite potato chip? Zapp's Creole Onion and Sour Cream. (I adore salt and vinegar chips, but they make my saliva glands kick into overdrive. Seriously, I fountain saliva after I eat those. I can only eat them when I'm alone, as a consequence.)

What is your favorite CD at the moment? I'm putting myself through a bit of forced rest from the "Complete Recordings" edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

What kind of car do you drive? A white Plymouth Acclaim with burgundy interior. Yes, this long-haired would-be hippie tools around town in a granny-mobile.

Favorite sandwich? Cappacola on a toasted bun or grilled sourdough.

What characteristics do you despise? Arrogance.

What are your favorite clothes? Wow, that's a tough question. I'll have to get back to you on this one. Hmmmmm....

If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would you go? I'd love to go to Britain, rent a car, and go on a literary and mythical tour to see things like Stonehenge, Glastonbury Tor, Tintagel, Tintern Abbey, Locksley Hall, Hadrian's Wall, the Highlands of Scotland, and so on.

What color is your bathroom? Whoa -- there's color in my bathroom?

Favorite brand of clothing? Dickies.

Where would you want to retire to? East Aurora, NY. (Currently this would entail a move of about eight miles.)

Favorite time of day? You know what? I like each time of day, for different reasons. I like morning coffee. I like lunch. I like dinner. I like early afternoon when I get home, I like the two hours spent in and around church on Sunday mornings, I like early evenings and late nights. I don't much care for the middle of the night, but even that's OK in small doses.

Where were you born? Pittsburgh, PA.

Favorite sport to watch? Football.

Coke or Pepsi? Pepsi -- but not fanatically so. I like Coke too. Heck, RC's damn good.

Are you a morning person or night owl? Both, which may explain why I'm so friggin' tired all the time.

Any new and exciting news you'd like to share with everyone? I considered myself a Republican when I was in fourth grade. I got better, though.

What did you want to be when you were little? An astronaut.

What is a favorite childhood memory? Endless debates with friends, between 1980 and 1983, whether Han Solo would survive carbon freezing and whether Darth Vader was really Luke's father.

What are the different jobs you have had in your life? Technical services assistant in a University library; cook and shift manager at a Pizza Hut; assistant manager of a family restaurant; stay-at-home father; pharmaceutical telesales; stay-at-home father again; attempted freelance writing (never got far, which was probably a function of my half-assed effort at such); maintenance at The Store.

Nicknames? Never really had nicknames. I've tried to get people to call me "Maximus" lately, but that hasn't much taken off.

Any piercings? No.

Eye color? Bluish hazel, or something like that.

Ever been to Africa? No. But I liked Disney World's simulacra thereof at Epcot and the Animal Kingdom.

Ever been toilet papering? Well, I've partaken of TP'ing a kid in his bunk at a summer camp. Does that count? I've never done the "cover an entire house and lawn and shrubs and trees with TP" thing, though. It always struck me as phenomenally wasteful.

Been in a car accident? Not yet. A few near misses and spin-outs on ice, but never a full-on crash.

Favorite day of the week? Well, I've come to detest Mondays. Thursdays are OK, because they've got that feeling about them like at the top of a big hill you've just crested on your bike and now the easy part is starting. Saturdays tend to be consumed with domesticalia -- laundry, food shopping, etc. -- but that's also when Thistle and Shamrock is on the radio at night. I like Sundays during the day, but Sunday evenings are kind of blah with the impending Monday. Wednesday is just kind of there. Fridays are overrated. I guess that leaves Tuesday, when American Idol and Scrubs are on and the crappy part of the week is (normally) over with.

Favorite restaurant? I mentioned a place in East Aurora called Charlie's Diner last week; only been there once, but I loved it. Ted's Hot Dogs, of course. (Headed there as soon as I finish this quiz, as a matter of fact.) There's a little roadside burgers and hot dogs joint near my home called Taffy's that's only open in the warmer months. Ordinary food, really, but when you're sitting outside watching the traffic and eating as the sun goes down, ordinary food becomes culinary miracle. For chain restaurants, I love Don Pablo's. For pizza, I like Pizza Plant and Just Pizza (full disclosure: I'm not afflicted with the "NYC crust is the only true pizza and everything else sucks!" disease).

Favorite flower? Roses and African violets.

Favorite ice cream? Coffee Haagen-Dasz, for which I and some friends once embarked on a college road trip to find. (I'm not making that up.) I only indulge in this stuff once or twice a year now. But I adore ice cream.

Favorite fast food restaurant? The afore-mentioned Taffy's. I've also developed an appreciation for Wendy's and Arby's.

Which store would you choose to max out your credit card? I haven't been there in years, so I don't know if their classical selection is still as good, but Toronto's Sam the Record Man. Or Borders.

Bedtime? Between 11:00 and 12:00.

Last person(s) you went to dinner with? The Wife and daughter.

What are you listening to right now? The Daughter is playing a CD of Disney love songs in her room.

What is your favorite color? Purple.

How many tattoos do you have? Zero. I don't get the tattoo thing.

That's it. No tagging involved, so if anyone's inclined, there it is.

Putting away the rosin

I'm noting an interesting juxtaposition today. This fall, the Buffalo Bills will kick off their tenth season since quarterback Jim Kelly retired, after himself playing eleven years. Except for a handful of seasons when Doug Flutie was in town, the Bills have mostly been a disappointment since the 1996 campaign ended: Todd Collins, Alex Van Pelt, Doug Flutie, Rob Johnson, Drew Bledsoe, J.P. Losman, and Kelly Holcomb have all come through here, and the Bills are still looking for Kelly's successor. (Losman and Holcomb are still here; their respective juries are still out.)

Contrast that with another local institution, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. This year, the orchestra's concertmaster (the quarterback of the orchestra, if you will), Charles Haupt, is stepping down. He's been in that chair for 37 years -- more than three times as long as Jim Kelly was under center for the Bills, longer than I've been alive, and certainly longer than I've lived in this city. And yet, the BPO will go on. Will the BPO go through a period of doldrums after Haupt lays down his bow for the final time, like the Bills did when Kelly took off his cleats? Probably not. I love sports, but the fact is that art is a lot more durable than sports.

Haupt isn't actually retiring from the violin, I should note -- just his position with the BPO. He's still going to be an active musician. Mary Kunz Goldman has a nice profile of Haupt in today's Buffalo News:

"I happen to love music," he says. "I really feel good when I'm playing."

So good, in fact, that when it came to performing, he was never afraid. Well, hardly ever.

At 17, he played Lalo's "Symphonie Espagnol" with the New York Philharmonic.

"I was peeing my pants," he confesses. The orchestra's famous concertmaster, John Corigliano (the composer's father) tried to offer comfort. "Couragio," he told the young violinist. "I missed that," Haupt jokes, "because I didn't speak Italian."

On stage, though, everything came together. "My fingers just knew what to do," Haupt says.

They didn't shake? Haupt breaks into that attractive grin. "My fingers only shake when I'm stopped for a traffic ticket."

I would like to have read more about Haupt's views on the music -- favorite works, less favorite works, other thoughts on life -- orchestral, musical, and artistic life -- in a city whose artistic vibrance seems to always outstrip its wallet. It also strikes me as odd that the News didn't assign this piece to Herman Trotter, the News's emeritus classical music critic. But Goldman's article is a nice one.

Aside from solo violin passages in orchestral works (he did the solo in the second movement of Brahms's Symphony No.1 particular justice one year), I never heard Haupt play by himself. Still, he was an omnipresent figure at just about every BPO concert I've ever been to, and reading the news of his impending departure reminds me that I've got to start going to BPO concerts again. It's been far too long.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Boy Howdy, did I need a laugh this morning -- and Eric Conveys an Emotion provided. Look at the photos as a guy named Eric acts out an emotional response suggested by his site's visitors. Sure, there are the easy ones like "Happiness", "Anger", "Complacent" and "Shy", but the real hilarity starts when you start digging into the true depths of emotional angst: "Just realized you bought the wrong fabric softener", for instance, or my current favorite, "Staring at your hands the way people do in movies when they've just killed their first person".

Thank God for the Interweb!

Nope. no good Samaritans here. Only us bad ones.

To the person who, in the roughly ten minutes that elapsed this afternoon between the time my daughter placed her sterling silver and blue sapphire ring on the counter of the bathroom in a local retail establishment while she washed her hands and the time when she realized that she'd left her ring there, found said ring and, rather than turning it into said retail establishment's service desk for safekeeping in the lost and found, instead elected to keep it: I hope you enjoy your ring muchly.

I also hope you contract some form of disease that makes further trips into restrooms both frequent and painful.

Love,
Me

(And no, this doesn't absolve my daughter of her responsibility for keeping track of her own belongings, a lesson which will now occupy the bulk of our interactions this weekend. But there's a way to be about stuff like this, folks. As a bit of moral calculus, "Finders Keepers" isn't of much use.)

(If it turns out that there was simply a lag time between the ring's finding and its arrival in the Lost and Found, I will redact this post. And no, I don't have any specific "shifty-eyed" character in mind here, as I wasn't watching people going into and out of the bathroom in the timeframe mentioned above.)

Other fun things you can do with quarters

Kevin Hosey has the beginnings of a good idea for Buffalo denizens who are frustrated by the "zero tolerance" Buffalo parking enforcement thing: if you're on the town and you spot a parking meter about to expire, pony up a quarter and buy the person parked there some more time. Imagine if we got everybody doing that! It would frustrate the police and make their pouty-lipped, "Not give us our raises, will you?" strategy backfire a bit, and it would be a great way for this city to live up to its oft-cited "City of Good Neighbors" self-image.

(Of course, it's easy for a suburban-dweller like me to propose things like this. But I'm with the city-folk in spirit!)

March Madness

Yup, it's the NCAA Tournament -- otherwise known as the Major Sporting Event most likely to put me to sleep. The closest I've ever come to really liking basketball was when I watched the NBA back in the early 90s, when Jordan was in his prime and when Clyde Drexler was doing great things in Portland. Now the NBA is boring, the college game has never interested me much, and so on. (It's odd to note, however, that Syracuse is the closest I've ever come to living in a town where a major sports championship was won. The Orange won the 2003 Tournament on the very day that we finished packing the moving truck and departed for Buffalo again.)

Luckily, this year in Buffalo the Sabres are actually doing OK. In fact, they're doing better than OK -- they've been playing so well, so consistently, for the entire NHL season, that they have to be conceded as being actually pretty damned good. Now, I'm no big hockey fan, either, although I enjoyed watching it on TV some years ago and probably would have become a bigger fan had I devoted more time to understanding the game. (Remember when FOX Sports would put that little dot above the puck on TV, and superimpose a streaky whooosh thing whenever a shot or aggressive pass took place? I liked that. The whooosh thing reminded me of the movie Tron, for some reason.)

So, now I've got the Sabres and next week's World Figure Skating Championships (remember, Worlds are held every year, and are the real culmination of the skating "season" -- the Winter Olympics exist as a special prestige event), as well as the Bills' free agent signing period and, if I get really bored, baseball's spring training (not terribly interesting for a Pirates fan).

I do look forward to the inevitable day, however, when a #16 seed in the NCAA tournament knocks off the #1 seed. Just as long as it's not Duke, since that would cause certain folks to shriek and rend their garments.

Die Nasty

Oh, lord -- there's another generation of Bushes waiting in the wings? Curse Bill and Hillary for only having one kid!

(Between that kid's smarmy grin -- imagine GWB's smirk dialed up to the proverbial eleven -- and Campbell Brown's "Oh you're just so cute as a button!" demeanor, that clip almost had me putting my fist through the glass of my monitor. Jee-bus. Link via MeFi, and I'm not the one who included 'douchebags' in the YouTube search, in case anyone wonders.)