Something for Thursday

Thank you for the music, Mary Travers.

Darker sides of "fandom"

The other night, on Monday Night Football, the Buffalo Bills very nearly beat the hated New England Patriots. They were leading, and were in very good shape with a little over two minutes left: New England had just scored to pull to being down 24-19, when they kicked off. Bills cornerback and kickoff returner Leodis McKelvin fielded the kick in the end zone, and then he decided to attempt a run back. He got out about twenty-five yards or so before the New England players arrived around him and began tackling him. Rather than just fall down, McKelvin attempted to push for more yardage, and so doing, ended up fumbling. New England recovered, scored, and won 25-24. Ouch.

So naturally, McKelvin ended up being "the goat". It's not dead certain that the Bills would have held on for the win had he gone down, but their chances would have been superb; all they would really have needed to do is pick up a single first down and kill the clock. Much of the postgame discussion focused on McKelvin: whether he should have attempted to run the kick back at all, the obviousness that he should never have striven for more yardage once the tacklers converged upon him; Dick Jauron's odd defense of McKelvin the next day on the basis that he's a really good kick returner and you never know when he's going to break one. (This on a kick where the Patriots might well have been kicking onside, forcing the Bills to deploy their "hands" team instead of their kickoff blockers.)

Most people are now of the "Sucks, but it's over and Tampa's in town on Sunday." However, a couple of teenagers decided last night to vandalize McKelvin's front lawn. So now the discussion is no longer even about the fumble but about this act of misdirected "fanhood". The topic of discussion on the sports-talk show I like to listen to on the way home from work was, What does this say about us? About Buffalo Bills fans? About Buffalo? About football fans in general?

I'm not sure it has to say anything about any of those things, right now. Police in Hamburg, NY -- the Buffalo suburb where McKelvin lives -- apparently, as of this writing, have two teenagers in custody who have confessed to the vandalism. And as misguided-fan incidents go, this is pretty weak tea, easily corrected with some lawn care products and tools. Of course, that's not the point: it's still a very ugly incident that puts on display yet again the fact that too many sports fans in this country take their teams and their allegiances way too seriously. In point of fact, it's not even this country: it's all over the world. As bad as our fans can get at times, nobody's ever heard of people getting trampled at a baseball riot. But that's probably small consolation to taxpayers and business owners each year in the cities whose teams win the World Series, or the NBA championship, or the Super Bowl.

I've never been one to engage in "Things were better back in the day" rhetoric. I usually find that, upon deeper inspection, things "back in the day" tended to suck a lot as well, and that people pining for things back then usually turn out to have simply not been aware of how things sucked "back in the day". But I do wonder if sports fandom is getting qualitatively worse with regard to things like this. On opening day of the 1987 season, Boston Red Sox fans gave Bill Buckner an ovation. I don't remember how too many goats were treated, save one: after Super Bowl XXV, in 1991, a giant rally was held for the Buffalo Bills in downtown Buffalo. At that rally, Scott Norwood, who had missed what would have been the game-winning kick at the end of the game, received a massive ovation. Back then, a guy whose missed kick cost his team the Super Bowl championship got an outpouring of love and support. Eighteen years later, a cornerback whose fumble cost his team a regular season game got his lawn vandalized.

Of course, the situations are different, and the emotions in sports are so often defined by the situations. McKelvin's fumble came in a regular season game against an opponent that is universally loathed in this town, for various reasons. (Mostly because they're loathsome!) It also comes after a recent history that has seen huge amounts of futility, of mediocrity, of disaster at critical times, of injury, of just plain loss. But that doesn't excuse anything, obviously; and neither does it lessen the point. Instead, it clarifies it: why are so many sports fans so angry these days? Win or lose?

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Before leaving for your desert island, pick one: Abbey Road, or Sgt. Pepper's?

To the vomitorium!

One thought on last night's Bills game, in which they led 24-13 with five minutes left and lost 25-24: they have a very young team, especially on the offensive line, so this was the kind of game that might hurt to lose but make you feel that they might have a bright future -- if not for the fact that they also have a very mediocre coaching staff. So it ends up feeling like just another day at the office at Lose-a-lot Lane.

Patrick

Farewell.

Sentential Links #184

Linkage. Politics first:

:: But as someone who happened to be in New York City eight years ago today, the implicit premise of the 9-12 Project—that those who aren't on Beck's side must have somehow "forgotten" 9/11 and its aftermath—ticks me off royally and personally.

I was at home in Brooklyn, holding my six-week-old baby on the couch, when I saw the second plane crash into the World Trade Center on TV. I watched the smoking pit of the ruins from the roof of my apartment building as bits of memo paper and ash drifted on the winds to my neighborhood. I was there on 9/11, and 9/12, and 9/13. You'll excuse me if I don't feel warm nostalgia for the lingering smell of burnt airplane fuel, and metal, and bodies.

:: But are “frivolous lawsuits” the real cause of high health care costs? The short answer is no. (Well, color me shocked.)

:: We learned today that right-wing activists don't like government spending (except when Bush and Republican lawmakers spent freely), don't like the size of government (except when Bush and Republican lawmakers increased the size of government), don't like deficits and debt (except when Bush and Republican lawmakers added trillions to the nation's tab), and don't like czars (except when Bush used dozens of them to implement his agenda).

(And another by Mr. Benen:)

:: Second, the Republican Party still believes Bush's policies -- the ones that failed on a historic level and created messes we're still struggling to clean up -- were right. If given the opportunity, they'd like to implement them again. GOP lawmakers endorsed these failures as they occurred, and don't regret their positions in the slightest. They're proud to have supported misguided policies that didn't work, and insist that voters should reward them for failing -- and help them bring back the very policies that produced disastrous results.

Three from Matthew Yglesias:

:: Still it did strike me as noteworthy that your basic tea party crowd isn’t the sort of crowd in which a Confederate flag is unwelcome. I feel like if you’d tried to bring this to a health care rally, folks would have gotten upset. But the tea parties, like a lot of big time conservative events, are a very racism friendly environment.

:: Probably the weirdest thing about the Glenn Beck / Tea Party nexus to me is that it tends to rely so heavily on libertarian rhetoric and fear of incipient authoritarianism. These kind of sentiments would be a lot easier to take seriously if not for the fact that we didn’t see these people marching out in the streets when George W. Bush used the threat of terrorism to justify secret, illegal warrantless surveillance, detention without trial, torture, etc. Indeed, the very same people who spend Monday, Wednesday, and Friday complaining that Barack Obama’s “czars” are a threat to liberty not only weren’t worried about czars in the Bush years, they spend Tuesday and Thursday worrying that Obama’s not doing enough to ensure that intelligence operatives can break the law with impunity.

:: It still rankles—a lot—that Osama bin Laden is still out there. When the attacks happened, and in the days and weeks that followed, lots of notions flew through my mind, most of them wild and fanciful or flat-out insane. But it genuinely never occurred to me to that the main architect of the attacks would still be at large eight years later.

:: I think that seven years ago we all collectively went, to borrow one of my mother's more colorful expressions, out of our rabbit-assed minds.

Non-Politics:

:: Being a Beatles fan is a curse as much as a blessing.

:: Daniel Snyder Is a Dwarf Dung-beetle. (That's the post title, but it's pretty indicative. The way NFL teams extort their fans is nauseating.)

:: For several days after I walked with a swagger. Yes, I was still a virgin and no, that wasn’t about to change anytime soon – but I was different, changed. I had become a man. I had seen a French movie.

:: I’ll be honest: I don’t know what the future of NASA is right now. Worse? NASA doesn’t know either.

All for this week.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oddities abound!

:: I have The Daughter to thank for this. I've no idea how she developed such a warped sense of humor.



:: I can't imagine what the thought process was behind such a thing, other than to see if it could be done, but someone wrote a novel in which a word, once used, is never repeated. (PDF document.)

:: Unfortunately placed advertisements. Heh. Several of these cracked me up.

That's all. Embrace the weirdness!

Monty Haul 9-09

This weekend saw my local library's quarterly Used Book Sale, and as always, I was there when the doors opened to rush in and grab my fair share of the booky goodness. While this iteration was spectacularly unsuccessful from the standpoint of bolstering my SF collection -- I didn't see a single SF volume at all amidst the offerings, whether it was something I wanted or not, and I can almost always count on at least seeing a few Star Wars or Star Trek novels floating about -- I did grab some nice items, as pictured below.



Going from the top down: Tennyson is, as longtime readers will know, my favorite poet, and thus, when it comes to the library book sale, I have a weakness for grabbing volumes of his poetry. I was especially glad to see this, however, since it's been a very long time since I read Idylls of the King and was thrilled to see a copy here. Yes, I already own a copy, but that's not the point! (And anyway, my other copy is kind of neat in its own regard, printing the text on the right side of the open page only, with the left given to explanatory footnotes. Obviously it's a "teaching" edition.)

Next down we have a travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux. I've never read any Theroux, but I've heard lots of good things about him, and I have grown to love good travel narrative writing a lot over the last few years, so I was glad to pick this up.

Then, The Wisdom of Kahlil Gibran. I've read some Gibran of late, and I'm keenly interested in pursuing his work. I'm not sure what in this volume I already own -- probably most of it -- but that's not bothersome to me at all.

Below that is Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini. I know that Sabatini was quite popular in his day, and, like most such authors, has fallen out of fashion nowadays, but I've always been interested to see what he's like, and of course, I love a good pirate tale, so we'll see. Who knows when I'll get to this one, of course, but there it is. The book sale is always a good source for copies of very old books, the bestsellers of yore; it's not uncommon for me to thumb through a very old book titled "Best Loved Poems" or something like that and realize that I don't recognize any of the names of the poets contained within. I always find myself hoping that these books find homes.

Next is something called The Parables of Peanuts. It looks like some kind of theology or moral philosophy book, using Peanuts as its inspiration. To be honest, I grabbed this on a whim.

On the bottom is Shakespeare's England, which I picked up to help in a future project of mine -- to learn more about the Bard and his world. (I'll have more to say about this project in time.)

The most interesting book I found today, though, was that thick one second from the bottom of the stack.



It is a collection of the works of George Gordon, Lord Byron, and it cost me all of one dollar. I adore very old books, and I gravitate toward them often at the library sales. Some, I admit, I purchase with the intent of listing them on eBay, but in most cases I've kept them for my own collection. Not only do old books on the shelves look cool, but there's a unique tactile sensation, I think, in actually reading a very old book.

This one is in relatively decent condition, with the most wear and tear being present on its spine:



The binding is in decent shape, though, and the pages are all bright and have lost none of their contrast. But as I started thumbing through the book, I discovered that it's not just a literary time capsule of sorts, but also a very small window into a couple of lives. Here is what I found immediately upon opening the front cover:



The book plate on the endpaper indicates the this volume belonged to a James Resetarits, who indicates in his tiny script on the flyleaf that he lived in Buffalo ("Bflo") in 1975. (I've never seen that name before, ever.)

Thumbing through the book, I discovered a common feature of very old books: multiple flyleafs. (The flyleaf is the blank page one finds immediately inside the front cover, opposite the endpaper. Older books have more than one flyleaf.) On the final flyleaf (five of them), I found this inscription:



To Dr. James Keech,

In appreciation for
your inspiration and
confidence.

May we each find
our own perfect stream.

Regards

James & Karen Resetarits
1976

So it seems that Mr. Resetarits owned this book for at least a year before he inscribed it and gifted it to Dr. Keech, whomever that may have been. (More on that a little later on, though.)

Books with gift inscriptions show up frequently at library book sales. I don't know how actual book collectors feel about this, but it never bothers me -- I always enjoy the indication that at some point in a book's life, the book was considered enough to be judged worthy of being a gift for someone special to someone else. I see this a lot in the children's books I pick up for The Daughter, and I always think there's something a bit wistful about those -- not unlike the sad nostalgia of, say, the second Toy Story movie, where toys are tossed aside by kids when they outgrow them. The same may apply to books.

But with cases like this, another possibility exists: that what I'm finding at the library sale is the detritus of a life that has since ended. Was this a prized volume in Dr. Keech's home library until his passing? I don't know. (I don't even know if Dr. Keech did pass yet.)

Continuing, I found this wonderful frontispiece:



Again, in books of this era, it's common to find a small piece of tissue paper bound into the book between the frontispiece and the title page, which is the case here. Turning that tissue paper past, covering the portrait of Lord Byron, I find the first of two title pages:



Of all the historical forms of illustration, I think the engraving is my favorite. I wish we'd see more of this these days.

And then, turning the page again, the second title page:



The age of the book is now apparent, isn't it? It's been a very long time since the style was to include a period at the end of each phrase on a title page. Note the use of the "Olde English" font on the phrase "The Suppressed Poems", and note especially the date at the bottom of the page, indicating the book's year of printing: 1866.

This volume is 143 years old. And I got it for a dollar.

For amusement, here is a brief taste of the "Sketch of His Life", as written by a J. W. Lake:

It was reserved for the present age to produce one distinguished example of the Muse having descended upon a bard of a wounded spirit, and lent her lyre to tell afflictions of no ordinary description; afflictions originating probably in that singular combination of feeling with imagination which has been called the poetical temperament, and which has often saddened the days of those on whom it has conferred. If ever a man was entitled to lay claim to that character in all its strength and all its weakness, with its unbounded range of enjoyment, and its exquisite sensibility of pleasure and of pain, that man was Lord Byron. Nor does it require much time, or a deep acquaintance with human nature, to discover why these extraordinary powers should in so many cases have contributed more to the wretchedness than to the happiness of their possessor.

Phew! The "life sketch" goes on thus, in very tiny print, for another thirty-four pages. I imagine that many an owner of this particular volume, back in the 1800s, skipped right past Mr. Lake in favor of Mr. Byron.

The rest of the book is a fairly typical example of an exhaustive collection of an author's work from the nineteenth century: it is very densely printed, with occasional engravings of art scattered throughout on thick plate-paper. But the story of this book doesn't end there, for tucked into the back cover, I found this:



This is the program for an "Honors Convocation" for Kappa Delta Pi, held in the Upton Hall Auditorium. (Upton Hall turns out to be part of the campus of Buffalo State College.) This convocation was held on April 30, 1976 (right about the time I was in the home stretch of Kindergarten). Tucked inside this program is a typewritten list of what I assume to be Kappa Delta Pi members who were in attendance at that convocation. Each student (listed on the left) is paired with a guest (listed on the right). At the bottom of the second page of this list (it's four pages, stapled together), I found this:



So, I can only surmise that Dr. Keech was the guest of Mr. Resetarits at this Honors Convocation, and that this book was presented to Dr. Keech on that occasion. There's nothing especially remarkable about this -- a gift from a student to a valued teacher, I suppose -- but the long winding road this book has taken impresses me greatly, as does the fact that owing to the presence of that program in the back cover, never removed even when the book was unshelved and boxed up for its trip to the library, I can trace one of those steps on that path.

I've written of this kind of thing before, and this fascination with finding things in old books has manifested itself in my fiction writing as well ("Elizabeth and Andrew"). Here's another fine example.

Something for Thursday

One of my favorite bands. Here's Blackmore's Night, with "Under a Violet Moon".

Ten geek demerits for me....

A few days ago, Steven Den Beste posted a quickie item:

40 years ago, FRP was born. And because of that, a lot of babies weren't.

This puzzled me. See, in my job as a maintenance man, I have to work with FRP on occasion, occasionally mounting FRP panels to the backs of fixtures at The Store or even attaching FRP panels to walls. I thought this post over, unable to figure out why the advent of FRP paneling, especially in food-service environments, might lead to a reduction in certain birth rates.

And then I clicked through SDB's link, and realized that he wasn't referring to Fiber-reinforced Plastic. He was referring to Fantasy Role Playing. I think my geek cred may be slipping a bit.

Twenty-five cents (part 6)

Wow...I forgot about this series for four months. Whoops! Anyway, time to finish up the whole thing with the last batch of quarters.

Idaho

I think I have to be nice here, since my in-laws all live in Idaho, but I don't care for this quarter. It's design-by-committee again: the head of an eagle, a state outline, and the motto. Bonus points for the Latin, though.

Idaho's quarter: $0.12

Nevada

Here's another quarter where multiple design elements manage to work together. I'd have made the main image clearer, though, by ditching the flowers vining up the sides; the running horses in front of the mountains are fine by themselves.

Nevada's quarter: $0.19

Washington

This one's nice, combining a couple of design elements that are themed together. A salmon leaping from the water on its way to spawn, and one of the peaks of Washington's coastal mountains. I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a specific mountain – Rainier, maybe? This quarter is nicely done.

Washington's quarter: $0.20

Oregon

Well...I don't know. The rendition of Crater Lake is very nice, but it seems to me that the obvious thing for Oregon would have been to depict Lewis and Clark reaching the Pacific at long last, making complete America's exploration of the continent. I have to rate this quarter, nice as it is, as a giant missed opportunity.

Oregon's quarter: $0.17

California

I like the idea here of depicting John Muir standing over Yosemite Valley; I just don't like the picture all that much. Maybe it's the giant bird flying over everything, but the sense of scale just seems way off to me on this picture, and scale can be done well even on a coin this size (see Nevada above). California has a near miss here.

California's quarter: $0.16

Alaska

According to the Mint's website, the final design for Alaska's quarter was selected by Governor Sarah Palin, so, if that's the case, maybe the job for her would be to be whoever it is who designs our currency. Hey, I may have my extremely negative opinion of Palin, but credit where due: this is a terrific quarter. What better depiction of Alaska than the rugged brute strength of a grizzly bear?

Alaska's quarter: $0.23

And finally:

Hawaii

Ooooh, they came close here, too. I love that they use the native Hawaiian tongue alongside the image of King Kamehameha; I just think the whole coin is thrown off balance by all the blank space needed to show the Islands themselves. They were on to something here, but they didn't quite get there.

Hawaii's quarter: $0.18

Wrapping up, I've greatly enjoyed the unfolding of the Statehood Quarter program over the last ten years. (Geez, has it been that long? yes, it has....) Seeing each new quarter, wondering why each design was chosen, and sifting through every handful of loose change given me have been fun pleasures. So, from this citizen, a big thanks to the US Mint for the Statehood Quarters!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

White meat or dark?

Jacks and sockets and lugnuts, oh my!

There's nothing like getting a phone call from The Wife at 11:30 pm, during which she informs me that she's stuck on the side of the road with a flat tire, sustained after driving over a piece of metal of some sort. Of course I had to drive out to her assistance, although I could have done without the particular location at which she finally had to pull over. She was on the side of Interstate 90 in Buffalo -- called locally "the Mainline 90", which indicates its general levels of traffic -- and of course, it was the front driver's side tire, which meant that I'd be just a few feet away from the passing traffic as I made my attempt to change the tire.

Sadly, my attempt was unsuccessful, owing to the fact that her vehicle -- a Dodge Caravan -- is nine years old, and thus the spare tire, mounted underneath the damned thing, was so rusted and corroded that it couldn't be removed. Which led to a tow truck. This annoyed me, because I was able to get the wheel off the van with no problem. I am very glad that I decided, some months ago, to buy a quality jack; this I purchased when I decided to start doing my own oil changes. I've never much liked the jacks that come with vehicles -- they always look slightly rickety to me. Not quite trustworthy. A little shifty, even. Better that I was able to use my new jack, which is rated for two tons and comes with jack stands and everything.

Of course, none of that mattered because of that damned spare. Now, twenty-three hours later as I write this, the van's fine and it has a new tire in the place of the damaged one. We plan to get a full-size spare (those "donut" tires are stupid) and just keep it in the back of the van, because why chance things? But, after waiting for tow trucks and waiting for them to winch the van onto the flatbed (making me wonder what ever happened to the two trucks that would just lift up your vehicle's front end and pull it on its back wheels), and getting the van to the tire place for us to call this morning, and then finally getting home, it was 1:30 in the morning. I staggered through today on about four hours of sleep, so naturally I'm still up and blogging.

No real point here, except that I'm a bit irritated that I wasn't able to get the tire-change job done. I hate when I can't get a job done!!!

Instead of running onto the field, they should all pile out of a clown car.

It's just about time for the NFL to kick off its 2009 season, so it's time for me to do a little football blogging. My plan this year is to put up this "predictions" post, and then I'll weigh in here and there during the regular season with various thoughts and such. I won't be doing weekly examinations of each game the Buffalo Bills play, because while I still enjoy the game, I'm just not nearly as enthusiastic about football as I once was. In fact, last season I actually stopped watching the Bills for the last three weeks of the year and only learned of the disastrous things they did in those games through print media and web video and stuff like that. If this season goes the way I think it very well could, I'll end up doing the same thing again. You reach a point where spending three hours every Sunday watching something you don't really enjoy watching starts to seem, on balance, a little stupid.

But anyway: what's the state of the NFL and what's the state of the Buffalo Bills?

Well, the Bills are a mess. Pure and simple. This season has the potential to be one of the biggest train wrecks in franchise history. They have a completely new offensive line, which (as of this writing) will be starting two rookies. They tried rolling out a new offensive scheme in the preseason, which performed so poorly in five preseason games that they fired their offensive coordinator just two days ago. Their quarterback is a once-promising young talent, a smart player with all the physical tools, who has been regressing since his debut two seasons ago. They are led by the same coaching staff that has piloted the team to a 7-9 finish three years in a row. They are managed by the same front office that has been stocking the team with lackluster talent for nearly a decade now. They are owned by the same pigheaded owner who seems to loathe being in the same room as someone strong-willed and intelligent, which is why his best general managers all get fired eventually.

I've come to see the worst day in Buffalo Bills history as the firing of Bill Polian, the guy who built the teams that went to the Super Bowl four years in a row. Polian went from the Bills to the Indianapolis Colts, a long-moribund franchise at the time. All Polian's done there is turn the Colts into a perennial powerhouse.

The list of things wrong with the Buffalo Bills is pretty long, but for me, that's where they start: in the front office. This team just does not have a good football operation in place. Head Coach Dick Jauron is generally the public face of the team's recent ineptitude, so his is the name that is vilified the most every time this team goes out and stumbles all over the place, but to me, it's terribly galling to see that despite picking in the upper half of the draft every year for a decade, the Bills have still failed to find top-flight talent in most cases. Three years ago, people were saying that the Bills were two or three drafts away from being good. Now, after those two or three drafts, guess what? They're still two or three drafts away from being good.

Why the hell is this?

Well, it's a double-headed monster of a problem. The Bills don't scout talent terribly well, and they don't make picks intelligently, either. One prime example is their recent obsession with drafting numerous defensive backs each and every year. The thought is, apparently, that in a league where there are so many good receivers, "you can't have too many defensive backs". Well, along the lines of that old canard stating that "Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting different results", the Bills get ripped apart by teams with good passing games each and every year, no matter how many talented DB's they have. Maybe they should try something else – like, say, addressing the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball.

They've made some half-hearted efforts at this over the years, but never enough. This year they finally realized that the offensive linemen at whom they threw large amounts of money three years ago weren't getting the job done, so they drafted two guards high in the draft (one in each of the first two rounds). While I was happy they finally made linemen a priority (the good teams are always drafting linemen and developing them), they should have been doing this three years ago, when they were actually rebuilding. Instead, they decided to do things like trade up to get John McCargo, a defensive lineman whose play on the field has been spotty enough that the Bills actually tried to trade him away last year. Or they picked safety Donte Whitner with the eighth overall pick, a choice everyone at the time thought to be a stretch – nobody had Whitner going before the middle-first round at the earliest, and nobody had McCargo going in the first round at all, so the Bills could have traded down in the first round and possibly added another second round pick, and still picked Whitner and McCargo if those were the guys they really wanted.

(Of course, they shouldn't have taken Whitner at all – they should have taken DT Haloti Ngata, who has become a rock in the middle of the line for the Baltimore Ravens. But at the time, the Bills were fascinated by the notion of a defensive line consisting of small but fast guys, where Ngata is a giant behemoth. That's why they passed on him and went with Whitner instead. But after two seasons of seeing their small-and-fast defensive line ripped apart by good running teams, the Bills had to trade last year for Marcus Stroud, a big guy for the middle of their line. Oops. And even if safety had been a logical place to go in that draft, Whitner has never in my mind justified his being taken that high. To my way of thinking, if you're taking a safety with the eighth overall pick, you'd better be getting Bob Sanders, or Ed Reed, or Troy Polamalu. Whitner isn't close to being mentioned in the same breath as those guys.)

Of course, the Bills didn't want to come out and admit three years ago that they needed to do some serious rebuilding by starting with the basic building blocks. There's another constant problem here: the belief, always prevalent in the team brass, that they're just a few good players away from contending.

The Bills' approach to rebuilding has never been to once-and-for-all address the team's fundamental needs and then build from there; instead, each season they look at one of two things and then draft according to those. They either (a) replace the biggest free agent who just left, or (b) address whatever the most glaring problem from the most recent 7-9 season might have been. That's why they do things like draft Marshawn Lynch in the first round right after dumping Willis McGahee, or pick Leodis McKelvin right after Nate Clements is sent packing. And this approach goes back to the Tom Donahoe era, when the team's management decided that they were sufficiently talented to use their first-round pick in 2003 as a "luxury" pick, taking a running back (McGahee) who was coming off a wicked injury and who thus would have to spend a year not playing. But that was the way Donahoe approached things: get the replacement for the next big free agent before they leave. (The McGahee pick made keeping Travis Henry irrelevant; a year later, the Lee Evans pick made Eric Moulds eventually "expendable". Smart? Well...not really. The Bills were never talented enough to be able to take such a luxurious approach to the draft.)

On the other hand, the Bills have tended to use the draft as their only real way of addressing major team problems. Last year's team had a horrible pass rush, so this year, they drafted Aaron Maybin, a collegiate pass-rush specialist. As a rookie, Maybin is unlikely to turn in amazing pass-rush numbers, but there it is. Last year's glaring problem was the lack of height in the receiving corps, so they drafted James Hardy and pronounced the receiving corps "rebuilt". Never mind that receivers notoriously take two to three years to develop into quality players, and that receivers who excel as rookies are rare.

And then, in a category by itself, we have the teams' long-to-the-point-of-Quixotic quest for Jim Kelly's successor as the next great Bills quarterback. Trent Edwards may be the most promising prospect the team has had since Kelly retired, but the Bills have misfired a whole bunch of times on finding the next QB, using three first-round draft picks on quarterbacks over the last ten years. They traded a first-rounder to Jacksonville to get Rob Johnson in 1998 (thus getting themselves out of a draft round that saw guys like Vonnie Holiday, Alan Faneca, Randy Moss, and Fred Taylor taken). They sent New England their 2003 first-rounder to get Drew Bledsoe (they got a pick back with another trade later on, getting Willis McGahee from a round that saw Troy Polamalu join the Steelers). They sent their 2005 first-rounder to Dallas so they could get JP Losman in 2004 (thus sparing themselves the opportunity of taking DeMarcus Ware, Shawne Merriman, or Aaron Rogers). And if you want to, you can even go farther back to 1995, when they used a second-rounder on Todd Collins. (But then, Collins is still in the league.)

What does all this have to do with 2009? Simply, the Bills have been misfiring and/or grabbing at straws for ten years now, when it comes to picking talent. Now, they're not the Lions or the Rams of recent years, picking outright bad players, but they've either missed entirely or they've picked small guys who play hard but simply aren't playmakers in the NFL. The roster simply does not have the talent to compete with the best teams in the AFC. I think that's the ultimately frustrating thing about watching the Buffalo Bills this decade: the continual sense that they're not that far off. Not really. They have decent players who would be even better if they could just find some real stud playmakers. But they never do.

In this day and age in the NFL, a bad team can become a good team very quickly. The Miami Dolphins went from 1-15 in 2007 to 11-5 in 2008. The Baltimore Ravens seem to alternate good years with bad ones – 13-3 in 2006, 5-11 in 2007, 11-5 in 2008. The Packers were in the NFC title game two years ago, and after a rough year last year look ready to compete again. The Eagles had some rough years, but last year they rebounded to get to the NFC title game and this year they look really good. In a blog post today, Buffalo News columnist Jerry Sullivan provides this stat:

Since the Bills last appeared in the NFL playoffs, there have been 57 instances of teams making the postseason after missing the previous season. That means more than half of the 108 playoff spots in a nine-year stretch were occupied by teams that had missed the season before.

Last year, seven of the 12 playoff teams were differerent from the year before. That included the Dolphins, who went from one win to 11; Atlanta, which improved by seven games; and Baltimore, which went up by six. So clearly, there's a lot of playoff turnover from year to year, and teams can bounce back from poor seasons in a hurry. In light of the evidence, it's even more amazing that the Bills haven't made it nine years in a row.

And you don't even have to stop at mere playoff appearances. On a hunch, I looked through the last ten Super Bowls, and I discovered something interesting. Here are the matchups of each of those games, winners listed first:

1999: Rams*, Titans*
2000: Ravens*, Giants*
2001: Patriots*, Rams
2002: Buccaneers, Raiders
2003: Patriots, Panthers*
2004: Patriots, Eagles
2005: Steelers*, Seahawks
2006: Colts, Bears*
2007: Giants, Patriots
2008: Steelers*, Cardinals*

What do the asterisks mean? They indicate the teams participating in each Super Bowl that had posted a record of 8-8 or worse just two years before that Super Bowl appearance. It just doesn't have to be this way, and yet in Buffalo, it is. Ugh!

For me, the most illustrative franchise of this simple fact -- it doesn't have to be this way -- during the Bills' current era of futility has been the New York Giants. Let's compare how it's gone for these two teams since 2000, when the Bills started to sink after being good or great all through the 1990s.

2000

Bills: 8-8, fourth place.
Giants: 12-4, first place, NFC Champions.

2001

Bills: 3-13, fifth place.
Giants: 7-9, third place.

2002 (first season with four-team divisions in the NFL)

Bills: 8-8, fourth place.
Giants: 10-6, second place.

2003

Bills: 5-11, fourth place.
Giants: 4-12, fourth place.

2004

Bills: 9-7, third place.
Giants: 6-10, third place.

2005

Bills: 5-11, third place.
Giants: 11-5, first place.

2006

Bills: 7-9, third place.
Giants: 8-8, third place.

2007

Bills: 7-9, second place
Giants: 10-6, second place, playoff berth, Super Bowl champions

2008

Bills: 7-9, last place
Giants: 12-4, first place

So, in the span of the last nine seasons, the Giants started off better than the Bills, then they got worse than the Bills, and then they quickly rebuilt to get better than the Bills again – so much better that they got a Super Bowl trophy in the process.

My ultimate point is this: in today's NFL, being bad for more than, say, two or three years is a sign of either awful luck or total mismanagement. And if your run of badness runs to more than five years, then I think luck can be ruled out as well. Nine years of being mediocre at best with occasional drops into outright badness? That is pure mismanagement.

Obviously, then, I don't hold out much hope for 2009. Trent Edwards looked smart and confident when he first arrived on the scene, but just two years later he is looking tentative, unconfident, and downright fearful. The Bills constantly say things like "We have to take what the defense gives us", which is a totally frustrating thing to hear from offensive players – you'd never hear anybody from the Patriots' offense saying anything like that – and insist that they're confident, which is surely why their leading receiver is almost always the running back catching the quick dump-off pass. The offense will likely be awful, which will lead to lots of playing time for a defense with a bad pass-rush (Maybin's potential notwithstanding) and a very thin linebacking corps. There is serious potential for this year's Bills squad to be awful.

Ahhh...but what about Terrell Owens? Well, what about him? Full disclosure: I've always liked T.O., and I'm glad he's here. But he's not a miracle worker. He can't make his quarterback confident. He can't make the young offensive line better. And he can't play defense. This is not a team that was sufficiently talented at the outset to be made better by T.O.'s arrival. And for all the negative press given to T.O.'s locker room antics over the years, I frankly look forward to the injection of some kind of passion into the Bills' locker room. For years the Bills have come out after bad losses acting like the guy at the office who just had a day where the printer ran out of toner every time he tried to print. To be quite honest, I will find it refreshing if somebody in the Bills' locker room explodes if they're sitting at 2-6 halfway through the season.

All right, so it's time for some actual predictions. For the record, I am predicting that the Bills will finish 6-10 and in last place in the AFC East. If this happens, look for a complete overhaul of the organization next offseason. My nightmare scenario, though, is that they are able to put together a sufficiently positive season to convince owner Ralph Wilson that they need "continuity" and thus keep this front office and coaching staff around another year. A 9-7 finish would probably do it; or maybe an 8-8 year if they have lots of injuries. Hell, I can even see a fourth consecutive 7-9 finish resulting in Jauron-and-friends sticking around. How? Well, if the Bills start out bad – say, 0-4 or 1-5 – and then win enough over the rest of the year to "claw their way back" to 7-9? Or maybe if they have a stronger December than usual? Especially if the young O-line plays better late in the year? I can totally envision a number of scenarios under which the current management team and coach staff is retained, and many of those scenarios do, in fact, involve the team being mediocre and out of the playoffs yet again. Such is life. The team needs new management and new coaching, and the only way I see those things coming to pass is if the team is unquestionably bad this year. Ugh, indeed.

And when that happens, what then? It's not like we'll ever see Ralph Wilson open up his wallet and bring in, say, Bill Cowher or Marty Schottenheimer. Yes, I've joined the "The Bills are doomed" club. Sue me.

So, onto the rest of the league. Here's how I see the divisions turning out this year (with the proviso that in the past, I have never been more than fifty-percent right about these):

AFC

East: New England
North: Pittsburgh
South: Indianapolis
West: San Diego
Wildcards: Baltimore, Houston

NFC

East: Philadelphia
North: Green Bay
South: New Orleans
West: Arizona
Wildcards: NYGiants, Dallas

I'm almost certainly wrong here, of course. Every year somebody seemingly comes out of nowhere to win a division, which will probably happen again. But on paper, that's how I see the most likely result. And the Super Bowl?

Super Bowl XLIV:

Pittsburgh over Philadelphia

The Steelers' defense is still awesome, while their youngish offense is still improving; Ben Roethlisberger is just entering his prime, when he already has two Super Bowl wins under his belt. The AFC is always tough, but I think the Steelers' upside is better than most of the other AFC contenders. Tom Brady's health is going to be a concern in New England, I think; Indy's got a new coach and I think Peyton Manning's physical decline is about to begin. As for the Chargers, yeah, they have a great roster, but until Norv Turner is actually holding up the Lombardi Trophy as confetti swirls about his head, I won't believe he's a good playoff coach.

In the NFC, the Eagles look most balanced to me. I think Green Bay is up and coming, and the Saints can outscore most teams. I don't think Arizona is primed to repeat as NFC champs, but their division is pretty bad, so there they are.

Some final bullet points on my thoughts on the 2009 NFL season:

:: The Vikings will ultimately regret the Brett Favre maneuver, and it could very well be detrimental to the club for years to come.

:: The Browns will ultimately regret the hiring of Eric Mangini, who looks worse as a coach every year.

:: How many times do New England assistant coaches have to stumble badly as head coaches before everyone realizes that maybe they shouldn't hire New England assistant coaches to be their head coaches?

:: My nomination for NFL Moron of the Decade is Plaxico Burress.

:: It is my hope that every single NFL player devotes his efforts this year to honoring the single greatest exemplar of courage in the history of professional sport, Tedy Bruschi.

That's it. Let's kick it off!

Thrusters and Blasters and Spaceships, oh my!

Notes on a couple of space opera reads I've done lately:

:: I greatly enjoyed Andre Norton's Moon of Three Rings a few months back, so more recently I read another by her, The Zero Stone. Where Moon of Three Rings was more planetary romance than space opera, The Zero Stone actually is full-on space opera.

Murdoc Jern is a jeweler by trade, who has learned the ropes of the business from his father and is now traveling the galaxy with a business associate, trading in rare gems from many different worlds, when his associate is killed and Jern has to make his escape by taking refuge aboard another ship. Jern also possesses a ring whose stone is deeply powerful and deeply mysterious -- the "Zero Stone" of the title -- and it soon becomes clear that everyone is basically after him for the stone.

Eventually his only trusted companion is a brilliant psychic cat named Eet. (Well, he's an alien who is very cat-like, not an actual cat.) With Eet at his side, Jern must evade numerous villains and adversaries in order to win his freedom. I don't want to say more than that, because the story is fairly rollicking and wide-ranging, despite its mere 221 pages in the old edition that I own. The story takes us to odd worlds and shows us interesting aliens, all the while telling a fairly gripping tale about greed and peril and freedom.

I find reading older science fiction novels refreshing, in a way. The authors of the 1950s and 1960s had to take a "get in, tell the tale, get out" approach to storytelling, packing their galaxy-spanning notions along with interesting characters and drama into much shorter books than are the norm today. I love a florid and long epic as much as the next person, but there's often something just invigoratingly pleasant about reading a book that has an epic story in less than half the length of an almost-standard novel today.

(I've now discovered that The Zero Stone has a sequel called Uncharted Stars, which I just happen to already own. Huzzah!)

:: More modern, and thus more epic and thus longer, is In Conquest Born by CS Friedman. This is a big story told on a very large canvas. Two races, the Braxana and the Azeans, have been at war for a very long time as their respective empires have spread across the stars. Our focus is on one warrior from each culture: Zatar from the Braxana, and Anzha from the Azeans, who find themselves endlessly opposing each other, bringing the endless war to a deeper and more personal level. This book is as much character study as it is story, alternating between Zatar and Anzha as their respective lives become more and more intertwined as the book progresses.

While I liked In Conquest Born a great deal, I must confess that I wanted to like it more than I did. The characters are well-drawn and well-developed; they are complex, with motivations that aren't always easy to understand. The main problem I had with the book was that it often felt somewhat disjointed. There are times when the book doesn't feel so much like a novel as a collection of inter-related short stories and novellas about the same characters. Also, there are quite a few plot threads that never seem to go anywhere or get visited again. Those aren't deal-breaking quibbles, though; I greatly enjoyed In Conquest Born and recommend it.

This is the title of this post.

You know how lots of times, in movies and teevee shows, someone will read a letter? And we might get a very brief glimpse of the letter itself, but not even close to being enough to actually read the physical contents of the letter (which is a prop)? Well, enter the DVD freeze frame, from an episode of Leave It To Beaver. Hilarious!

Sentential Links #183

The Labor Day edition. Say, anybody ever wonder why we don't have "Management Day"?

:: The kids with those books in their hands may look like they're reading but what's actually going on in their heads is that they're watching television or going to the movies. There are plenty of books that aren't meant to be read only skimmed in a way that allows readers to remind themselves of things they've seen on a screen of one size or another. The trick of these books isn't to stimulate imaginations, it's too trigger memories of the most familiar cinematic cliches. A lot of books supposedly aimed at adults are like this. Most mysteries and thrillers, for instance, even ones by the supposedly best writers. Michael Connelly writes excellent screenplays that he publishes in the form of novels. I think it would be better if the students were given a list to choose from, a junk-less list that was truly eclectic and took into account that most twelve and thirteen year olds are not like I was.

:: As a comic book, From Hell elevates the comic book medium. As a graphic novel, it diminishes the comic book medium, in the same way Margaret Atwood insisting A Handmaid’s Tale isn’t science fiction diminishes science fiction. Both situations encourage those who don’t know what a comic/sci-fi is to believe the comics/sci-fi they’re consuming is something else. They are given no incentive to seek out good comics or sci-fi, because they aren’t interested in comics and sci-fi. The fact that they just enjoyed those very things is immaterial to their future reading choices, because they don’t understand what they just read was the very thing they’re predisposed to believe they’ve no interest in reading.

:: So long as Disney keeps out of the creative content of Marvel Comics this should be nothing but good news, right?… right?

:: Again, ladies, take away the fact that he's a vampire. Now here's what you have in this entire conversation (paraphrasing): "I'm fascinated by you because you're so much different than everyone else. I worry about you when I'm gone because you're so clumsy and stupid that you can't take care of yourself. I need to watch you like you're a toddler because you can barely stand on your own, so I follow you around all the time. I'm a dangerous creature who you should be very, very frightened of, so I'm going to hang around with you as much as I can and force you to let me treat you like this is the Victorian Era. I could kill you, and in fact I really want to kill you, so much so that it makes me uncomfortable to be around you, but I also kind of like you and it amuses me to watch you pretend to be on my intellectual level. Here, put on my jacket." (SamuraiFrog continues to do yeoman duty in establishing why Twilight is so staggeringly awful.)

:: Did you have a good Mootday? We sure did. The traditional Mootday Breakfast of cold cereal and milk was enlivened this year with the addition of dried raspberries. And there was much rejoicing.

:: There’s been a lot of talk about Archie’s proposal to Veronica, and most people tend to fall on the pro-Betty side of the debate. And while we all know that pretty much everyone in Riverdale sucks, I think we should consider what it’s like to hang out with Veronica.

All for now. Tune in next week for more.

A Query for Tech-heads

(I'm going to be keeping this post at the top of the page through the rest of Sunday. Newer content will appear beneath it, later on.)

I posed this question on Facebook, and I thought I'd throw it up over here as well, since not everyone who reads me here is over there.

Basically, my laptop -- nearly two years old -- has worn out its battery. (No, not its welcome! Just its battery.) The battery still charges, but its full charge now lasts less than an hour, which means that it's time for me to investigate a new battery. All well and good.

Now, this machine is a Dell Inspiron, and the Battery Life meter makes the bold claim that I should only use Dell batteries and nothing else. And of course, Dell batteries are only available through Dell. But I've found some third-party batteries available out there, for quite a bit less money than the Dell ones, so I'm wondering: are there any actual consequences to using a third-party battery, or is it OK to do so? Such as, are Dell machines specifically set up to only charge Dell batteries, so if I get a different brand, is there a possibility that the thing doesn't charge?

Also, a respondent over there -- Sean, actually -- tells me that he believes usage of a battery while a laptop is plugged into the AC outlet tends to shorten a battery's lifespan, and my best bet is to get the new battery and then only use it for when I'm actually in need of battery power, and use the old one when I'm plugged into the wall. (In truth, I'm plugged in more than ninety percent of the time, anyway, when I use the laptop.) Is this the case? I figure if I get a new battery and get about three years out of it, by that time I'll be in the market for a new laptop anyway. (This machine is working just fine, with just a couple of hiccups that are so minor I barely notice them anymore.)

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oddities abound!

:: I think we can officially call the "Coming Up With New Stuff to Deep Fry" craze over, with the advent of deep-fried butter. What else is there besides deep-frying stuff that will literally kill you? Bring on the deep-fried arsenic!

:: If you've ever looked around Blogistan and thought to yourself, "Hmmmm, there needs to be a blog that does nothing but contrast the way foods look as prepared versus the way they look in the picture on the packaging", well, look no further! It's Food In Real Life. This is nothing new, obviously; I remember my intense feelings of disappointment the first time I got a Big Mac at McDonalds and noted that the burger I got wasn't the four-inch-tall behemoth pictured in the commercials.

:: Note to self: avoid Jericho, Arkansas. Hoo boy, what a mess they've got brewin' down there!

:: Want to see what a molecule looks like?

More next week!

No, I don't kill my pets.

For no real reason, here's one of my favorite scenes ever from The West Wing. This is when President Bartlet decided to hire the whip-smart Republican woman who came out of nowhere to make Sam look like an idiot on national teevee:



I loved this scene, and it points out one of the show's real flaws. Aaron Sorkin would create some wonderful characters and then underutilize them awfully. Ainsley Hayes was a terrific character who only appeared a handful of times after her introduction to the show. That was a shame -- as was the fact that the show always had her in scenes with Sam afterwards, when in fact her best chemistry was with Leo. Oh well. I still love this scene -- the repartee between Ainsley and Leo is just fantastic.