Category: Uncategorized

L – St. Louis Rams over San Francisco 49ers
L – Carolina Panthers over New Orleans Saints
W – Cincinnati Bengals over Cleveland Browns
W – New England Patriots over Oakland Raiders
W – Pittsburgh Steelers over Tennessee Titans
L – Denver Broncos over Miami Dolphins
L – San Diego Chargers over Dallas Cowboys
W – New York Giants over Arizona Cardinals
W – Buffalo Bills over Houston Texans
L – New York Jets over Kansas City Chiefs
L – Minnesota Vikings over Tampa Bay Buccaneers
W – Jacksonville Jaguars over Seattle Seahawks
W – Washington Redskins over Chicago Bears
L – Green Bay Packers over Detroit Lions
W – Indianapolis Colts over Baltimore Ravens
Philadelphia Eagles over Atlanta Falcons

Week One is always tough, since there’s so many unknowns. These are mostly Chokechain’s picks; we usually leave the first two weeks up to him since he does more offseason research than me and the other eight guys in the league combined. The three games that make me the most nervous are Philly, Indy and the Jets, the first two cases because I don’t like to rely on hot offenses playing excellent defenses early in the season. The New England game showed how even the best-prepared teams can be a little rusty in the early going. The Chiefs, meanwhile, are a bit of a mystery these days, but I suspect Chokechain is probably right and that the Jets solid DEF will slow Priest, Green and Gonzalez enough to win.

By the way, I’m moderately annoyed by all the sanctimonious emoting from the sportswriters about how we are all Saints fans and how bad they feel about picking against them and so forth. Well, I’m not and I don’t. This is the NFL Sunday Ticket, not the Weather Channel, and we are ready for some football.

UPDATE – How you like that Tennessee run defense now, Nate? And how about my boy Willie Parker? As for Mewelde, he was sitting on the bench, as he will until Tice wakes up and decides to start him.

The New York Times finds its own silver lining:

Local police officers began confiscating weapons from civilians in preparation for a forced evacuation of the last holdouts still living here, as President Bush steeled the nation for the grisly scenes of recovering the dead that will unfold in coming days…. Mr. Compass, the police superintendent, said that after a week of near anarchy in the city, no civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns, or other firearms of any kind. “Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons,” he said.

That order apparently does not apply to the hundreds of security guards whom businesses and some wealthy individuals have hired to protect their property. The guards, who are civilians working for private security firms like Blackwater, are openly carrying M-16s and other assault rifles.

Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards but that the police had no plans to make them give up their weapons.

It seems the Constitution is cancellable by water. I’m not sure which surprises me less, the fact that the corporations and well-connected get to ignore the “law” or the glee with which the New York Times announced the gun seizures.

Will someone please kick Michelle Tafoya in the teeth? I understand the NFL thinks it has to try appealing more to women, but why in the name of Cthulhu’s tentacles is she talking about jewelry OVER THE PLAY while there’s still four minutes left in a two-score game?

If I want to watch television about rings and things, I’ll watch QVC. There are few things I loathe as much as the “sideline reporter”, so I’m not at all happy that their so-called reports are now being given priority over the game itself.

One bright light: I had a feeling the game might go as it did, so I sat both Jerry Porter and Lamont Jordan. Both of them actually looked pretty good, especially since Porter is coming back from a hamstring injury, but you have to assume that you’re just not going to score much on Belicheck’s defense. See Peyton Manning for details….

David Brooks offers a prescription for rebuilding New Orleans in the New York Times:

If we just put up new buildings and allow the same people to move back into their old neighborhoods, then urban New Orleans will become just as rundown and dysfunctional as before.

That’s why the second rule of rebuilding should be: Culturally Integrate. Culturally Integrate. Culturally Integrate. The only chance we have to break the cycle of poverty is to integrate people who lack middle-class skills into neighborhoods with people who possess these skills and who insist on certain standards of behavior.

Can anyone spot the flaw in this argument? (Hint: it’s the same flaw that caused busing to fail.) You see, functioning middle-class families don’t like being used as the tools to fix the struggling lower-classes, to say nothing of the completely dysfunctional middle class.

White people don’t move out of a neighborhood because they fear the nice, middle-class black couple who just moved in or because they are unregenerate racists who don’t want to set eyes on a darkie from their front lawn, they move out because they know that less desirable elements are likely to begin knocking around the neighborhood in a relatively short period of time.

If the government imposes Mr. Brooks’ cultural integration solution, the first thing you’ll see is a rash of For Sale signs as the white middle class and the black middle class will race each other to escape the meltdown.

On a tangential note, Fred pointed out this week: “The melding of the races just hasn’t worked and, if examined honestly, shows few signs of working. Fifty years after the Brown decision, blacks remain unassimilated. They appear to be unassimilable. This, after endless programs, after the nation has turned itself on its head trying to encourage, promote, force, or imagine assimilation…. Neither race shows much inclination to associate with the other. Left to themselves, they quickly segregate, in housing, on campus, in night clubs. Only heavy federal pressure produces an appearance of togetherheid.”

Nothing else has worked, so let’s just try the same thing, shall we? As usual, the “liberal” solution requires modifying intransigent human behavior at gunpoint. The truly sad thing about this is that Mr. Brooks is supposed to be the house conservative.

I can’t help but suspect that Jamie is somehow to blame for this:

TWO secretaries at one of Sydney’s top law firms have been sacked after a catty email exchange that was circulated around the city’s legal and financial district.
Allens Arthur Robinson has been rocked by the cyber brawl, which began over a missing ham sandwich and ended with one woman taunting the other for being unable to hold on to a boyfriend.

In a warning to everyone who uses email at work, Allens confirmed that Katrina Nugent and Melinda Bird had been sacked and other high-flyers were facing disciplinary action. The trouble began last Thursday morning, when Ms Nugent sent a group email to colleagues in the firm’s Sydney head office asking if anyone had stolen her lunch.

“Yesterday I put my lunch in the fridge on level 19 which included a packet of ham, some cheese slices and two slices of bread which was going to be for my lunch today,” Ms Nugent wrote.

“Overnight it has gone missing and as I have no spare money to buy another lunch today, I would appreciate being reimbursed for it.”

Melinda Bird fired back a terse e-mail pointing out that Ms Nugent had probably left her lunch on a different floor, and that’s when the fighting words started.

Ms Nugent taunted Ms Bird for being blonde. Ms Bird replied: “Being a brunette doesn’t mean you’re smart, though.”

Ms Nugent e-mailed her co-worker: “Let’s not get person [sic] Miss Can’t Keep A Boyfriend.”

The email exchange was then forwarded to colleagues at Allens who copied it to rival firms. Soon it was sweeping Sydney’s offices, drawing comments from employees of Westpac, Deloitte, Macquarie Bank and JP Morgan.

It never ceases to amaze me how people pay so little attention to email’s inherent lack of security. It’s bad enough that no one will use encryption technology, but to use your company’s server for stuff that will get you in trouble is just stupid. People, the chances are very good that your boss will eventually read your work emails… not on a daily basis, of course, but in the event any problems should arise, it’s the very first place they look.

Always assume that your worst enemy is reading everything you write. That’s the only sane way to approach email… and blogging, come to think of it.

The autumn soccer season has started and all the kids have moved up a year. Our team was unexpectedly successful these last two years, apparently too successful, as the local professional team stole another of our players and our own club has promoted no less than four of them up to the next level a year early.

That means I’ve lost all ten kids that made up our tournament team, plus two kids who weren’t good enough to make it, and out of 24 kids I’ve got more that have never kicked a ball (5) than have seen a tournament before (3). I have no idea how I’m going to instill in them the sort of discipline and diehard competitiveness their predecessors had, and to be honest, I don’t even know if that would be possible.

But it was great to see last year’s squad when they showed up for practice just as the little ones were leaving the field. The boys aren’t too cool to look pleased to see their old coach yet, and they were beaming as they informed me, en masse, that last Saturday they’d beaten our club’s onetime nemesis, Blue, for what is now the third year in a row. At this rate, they’re going to give those future professionals a serious inferiority complex.

It was strange, but I really didn’t want to leave the field and walk away while they were still playing out there. It seems time passes us all by in the end.

A reader responds to the Sports Guy:

More importantly, why do you care so much? You’ve whined about the WNBA something like 10 times this summer. Just quit it already. It’s not fun to read. I can only guess that you harp on this because you feel threatened, and I can’t guess as to why that is. Your sports dominate — football, baseball and basketball. Just let it be. Let the WNBA fans have their WNBA. I don’t watch it, but I don’t care that someone else does. Why do you care?

Simmons posted two pages of responses to his anti-WNBA column, and while the supportive emails are much more fun to read, I was struck by how familiar the critical emails sounded. Questioning motives is the last resort of the roundly defeated; “well, what do you care, anyhow?” has got to be one of the least effective responses to a facts-based analysis this side of Miss Pandagon’s threat to have unproductive sex with the men of America.

From NRO’s Corner:

NEW ORLEANS MAYOR NAGIN: The president looked at me. I think he was a little surprised. He said, “No, you guys stay here. We’re going to another section of the plane, and we’re going to make a decision.” He called me in that office after that. And he said, “Mr. Mayor, I offered two options to the governor.” I said — and I don’t remember exactly what. There were two options. I was ready to move today. The governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision.

S. O’BRIEN: You’re telling me the president told you the governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision?

NAGIN: Yes.

S. O’BRIEN: Regarding what? Bringing troops in?

NAGIN: Whatever they had discussed. As far as what the — I was abdicating a clear chain of command, so that we could get resources flowing in the right places.

S. O’BRIEN: And the governor said no.

NAGIN: She said that she needed 24 hours to make a decision. It would have been great if we could of left Air Force One, walked outside, and told the world that we had this all worked out. It didn’t happen, and more people died.

As I wrote before, it wasn’t merely Governor Blanco’s tears that were the issue, it was the complete absence of leadership capability they indicated.

Now this kid, on the other hand, would seem to have what it takes: “In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader. They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.”

From Instapundit:

Kaus writes, correctly, that “Anyone who knew anything about New Orleans would know that they wouldn’t get it together.” But that’s not a problem of federalism, really. And federalism compartmentalizes the problem — Louisiana may have done badly, but Alabama and Mississippi seem to be doing better. A hierarchical, unitary system opens the possibility of blowing it everywhere at once.

This is the great and inherent danger of centralization that so very few seem to grasp. In a decentralized system, a Hitler or a Mao or a Pol Pot can only affect so many people. Create a vast, centralized organization like the global governance people would like to do, and you’ve just created what will be transformed into the ultimate killing machinery in the hands of the wrong people.

That efficiency argument, ever so popular among would-be centralizers, cuts both ways, you see.

The naive fools of the world assert that the answer to this problem is simple, just make sure the wrong people don’t get their hands on the levers of power. They don’t seem troubled by the fact that this is a) not an original thought, and b) history shows that it happens all the time.

Mississippi, not New Orleans, took the direct hit from the hurricane. Imagine if instead of a federal system, we had a national system in place, and that someone like Louisiana Governor Blanco was in charge of it instead of George Bush. Because that is the general direction we appear to be headed in this post-911, government-worshipping equalitarian era.

From SI:

The 42-year-old receiver, a first-round draft pick out of tiny Mississippi Valley State in 1985, leaves the field with 38 NFL records, including the most career receptions (1,549), yards receiving (22,895) and touchdowns receiving (197)…. Revered by fans and his peers, Rice told the players he was retiring during a short meeting held after his public announcement. The Broncos gave him a standing ovation.

Being a die-hard fan of the Minnesota Vikings, who often ran into the 49ers in the first or second round of the NFC playoffs during their glory years, (and were usually run over), I hated Jerry Rice. But it was a hatred born of fear, of the certain knowledge that sometime during the game, probably on third-and-six when a defensive stop would swing the game in the Purple’s favor, Jerry Rice was going to cut across the middle on a slant and what would normally end in a five-yard gain and a punt would go for fifty yards and a first down instead. It was maddening!

Sure, we Vikings fans told ourselves that we had our great receivers too – John Gilliam, Ahmad Rashad, Sammy White and Anthony Carter – that Cris Carter with his superglue hands was every bit as good as Rice and that Randy Moss was one day going to eclipse both Rice’s legend and his records, but we didn’t believe that even as we were saying it.

It became a little easier to appreciate his greatness when Bill Walsh left San Francisco and the 49ers seemed to become a little more vulnerable. I was surprised at my own disappointment upon hearing that he’d been hurt playing against the Pack, and then when he broke his kneecap – while catching a touchdown, of course – during that MNF game that was his first game back from injury, it seemed like he’d be done. But Jerry Rice was as tough as he was talented, and he played well for years after that double whammy.

Unlike most stars who travel the free agent circuit in the last act of their careers, embarassing themselves and their fans by horrible performances in strange uniforms, Rice remained an effective player to the end. In his last year, he caught only two fewer touchdowns than high-priced free agent Plaxico Burress and would have caught more had the Seahawks considered starting him and Bobby Engram instead of two speedy wideouts who couldn’t hang onto the ball without having it stapled to their hands. He fought a good fight in Denver, and in the end, retired in the knowledge that he’d given Father Time his best shot.

Jerry Rice doesn’t need our sympathy. He has a great life ahead of him. Even so, it would be churlish for NFL fans, even those who have always cheered against him, to fail to note the last bow of a great one as he finally steps offstage.