Author: Stagger Lee

Well, as always, the Redskins are what unites DC, and today they are united around one theme: Jim Zorn is dumber than a sack of hammered feces. When your special teams coach has to handle your clock management for you, when you’re running trick plays over and over inside the 5, when you’re playing the worst team in the NFL and never cross the goal line in five trips inside the red zone (and come away with only 3 field goals for your trouble), your playcalling is clearly for shit.

On the bright side, I won both my fantasy league games, largely because I had the fortune to get Drew Brees in one and the brains to draft Ronnie Brown in the other. You’d think nobody ever thought of a direct snap to a running back in the shotgun – it’s called the single wing, jackass, it was the basis of all football for the first two decades of the NFL – but the Monday Night Football team kept crowing about “Wildcat!” with all the exuberance of a teenage girl who just discovered the shower massager. As somebody who watched the Alabama Crimson Tide play the back end of the 1993 season with a slotback under center for most of the game (the immortal David Palmer, and no not the President), all I can say is that the NFL is like watching a bunch of 4 years olds play soccer – as soon as one discovers something, they all run after it in a pack like nobody’s ever done it before. Face it, people: your superior entertainment takes place on Saturdays, not Sundays.

* Not much to say about Bama, but their marquee win against Va Tech looks a lot better today than yesterday. (Although the biggest winner had to be LSU, whose out-of-conference win looks a HELL of a lot better now.

* Cal is not as good as they will be ranked tomorrow. They played a great first quarter and a great fourth quarter, but the middle 30 minutes are the sort of thing that make Old Blues hold their faces in their hands and moan about how Cal always snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. Riley needs to hunker down a little and the pass defense needs to learn to adapt to marquee receivers – and with Maryland’s loss to Little Middle, Cal now only has this game all year to hang its hat on. Going on the road again next week, to a suddenly wakeful Oregon, and then hosting USC at home – well, let’s just say we’ll know a LOT more about Cal in two weeks than we know now.

* Utah was ranked. BYU was ranked. Both lost to unranked teams. WHERE’S YOUR GOD NOW, MORMONS?

* Sigh. Vandy. I think the exact words you want are “Same,” “Old,” and “Vandy.” The regression to the mean is sudden and unwelcome, but even with the injuries and departures, there’s no excuse for only mustering 3 total points at home to likely the worst team in the SEC West. The Dores didn’t break 100 yards total offense – or manage a drive longer than 4 plays – until the 4th quarter , and despite pinning Mississippi State deep over and over in the first half, utterly failed to capitalize – the three points came following a Bulldog fumble on their own 5 that left Vandy with first and goal.

The truth hurts: Larry Smith is going to be a great quarterback someday, but today’s not the day. 12/32 passing, for a whopping 124 yards, will avail you nothing. Add true freshmen in the backfield – a backfield that amassed a whopping 33 yards rushing – and what you get is a Commodore squad that will struggle all year to build and sustain drives, which means the Vandy defense will be increasingly taxed all game long and lead to breakdowns in the 4th quarter…which, translated, equals “Same Old Vandy.”

Nothing to do now but wait for tomorrow…and if the Redskins shit the bed against the Rams, again, it’s going to be one hell of a long year for football.

The old man was a bit claustrophobic. He compared the MRI process to being shoved down a sewer pipe and having somebody bang on it with a wrench. Like father, like son – I wouldn’t normally call myself a claustrophobe, but that did it.

In fairness, I hadn’t really considered it. My only other MRI was an “open” one two years ago, and the place I picked (because it was close to work) was pitching “non-claustrophobic MRI” on their website. Then I was given earplugs, laid on a very narrow bench (which cause my shoulder to sag and exacerbated the pain which brought me there in the first place), had something plastic snapped over my face within millimeters of my nose, and then got slid waist-deep into the sewer pipe, the upper part of which was so close my eyes crossed trying to focus. And of course my head was braced in such a way as to be immovable, and my arms were pretty much stuck, and well, paralysis plus sensory deprivation plus no way to gauge the passage of a half hour equals HELLLLLLLLLLLL NO.

I guess I wouldn’t have been as affected if it hadn’t been for two things: one, the fact that they specifically billed it as “non-claustrophobic,” thus catching me out with the bait and switch (a MAJOR trigger for me), and two, the notion of sitting there for a half hour with nothing to hear but the ringing of my ears and nothing but a wall of plastic directly in my face and unable to move. I don’t recall how it went at the last place two years ago, but I seem to remember it was kind of brisk in the paper gown and I nevertheless started to drift off to sleep. And really, I’m OK with that, especially if it’s going to be two sessions to get neck and shoulder alike.

In summary: Palo Alto Imaging of Palo Alto, CA, is at best disingenuous in their salesmanship. At worst, they are liars, and they can eat a bag of dicks. Meanwhile, I will be enjoying a relaxing trip to Sunnyvale Imaging Center on Thursday. The moral of the story: always defer to the people with whom you have a pre-existing relationship, and – as always – don’t get cute.

So it looks like the People Against Marching were foiled again, and the District got hit with another waves of yokels out to stick it to the Man by taking it to the streets in numbers an order of magnitude (or more!) less than what they claimed. And oooooh, they have signs and omninous warnings of their power like “We Came Unarmed (This Time)!” OOOOOH OMG O NOZ FEAR!!!!!!!!

Right.

I would like to take a second to remind the mouth-breathing trailer-park proctologists of the Old Confederacy: your team lost. Your boy and your Congressional majority lost because your team shit the bed for eight years running. As a result, we are now engaged in a long hard slog to try to clean things up. Your boys had the run of things for quite some time, and the result was utter and comprehensive failure, from Afghanistan to deficits to Katrina to I don’t know what all. And right now, all I’m seeing from the opposition is the same dog-vomit of tax cuts, bigoted scaremongering, and fantasyland pig-ignorance that the GOP’s been running on for the better part of two decades, ever since George HW Bush and Lee Atwater decided all’s fair in politics. There’s not even a coherent theme there – except that there is, and for all the talk about government power and health care takeover and everything else, this is what it boils down to: we can’t stand the fact that we got beat, and by a Negro.

You know what? The hell with it. Let’s go. We all know you’ve wanted a rematch since 1865. Do it. Rise again. Get out all your M4geries and your cheap Norinco AK-knockoffs and your precious Kimbers and SIGs and let’s just do the goddamn thing. Obviously you’re not going to be happy until you have an actual shooting war and get to rise up against the horrible fascist socialist communist oppression of a government that’s about as radical as potato soup. So let’s quit pissing around. Stop jacking off to your Sarah Palin pictures, put down the jug of high-fructose corn syrup, and lock and load and find some fucking cover. Either we’ll pummel the shit out of you and go back to having the United States, or we’ll finally flush this country down the bowl and make Mike Judge’s movie come true. Either way I’m just tired of the bullshit, and it’ll be worth it just to stop the fucking yap-yap-yap from the radio and the TV and every half-wit with an AOL account, not to mention the constant hemming and hawwing and false-equivalence ass-kissing from the chickenshit whores of the DC press.

You want to “defeat totalitarianism”? You want to “take your country back”? Do it. Take your best shot. TRY IT IF YOU GOT THE SACK.

Otherwise, go back to your manufactured home, sit your ass down, turn on your NBC lineup and shut your fucking hole.

I would give two toes off one foot to have been on the line when Joe Wilson (Douche-SC) called the White House to apologize to the Prez…and found himself on the phone instead with Rahm Emmanuel.

Seriously, if they ever start a show called “Inside the Cusser’s Studio”…

There’s something they need to know at 1600 Penn – yes, the last guy was a disaster, the sort of guy who couldn’t find a slut in an Auburn dorm if you spotted him a bottle of tequila, and it’s no wonder he couldn’t nail Osama Bin Laden given that everything he did turned to shit.

But the thing they need to know is this: I don’t care.

The man behind the attacks is still out there, and he still needs to be dealt with. So President Obama…you’re now on the clock.

Bill Simmons, during his NFL preview column:

Chicago fans have been wondering why I dumped them and adopted the Packers as my NFC North team and Super Bowl pick du jour. It came down to one thing: I didn’t want to root for Jay Cutler. Has he had a likable moment yet? This year will be his coming-out party as the most despised player in football. Every time they show him on the sidelines, he looks like a pissed-off trust-fund kid who can’t believe the valet scratched his Escalade hybrid. And you know what? He makes the league more fun. I like rooting against him the same way I liked rooting against Rick Barry, Bill Laimbeer and the Iron Sheik. We need more Jay Cutlers in sports. Not everyone was meant to be liked.

You know what? I endorse this 100%. #6 needs to start wearing his sunglasses all the time, even on the sideline of games. He needs to start calling himself “Hollywood Jay Cutler.” He needs to play up the whole Vanderbilt angle (despite being from Santa Claus, IN) and be the spoiled punk-ass rich brat who nevertheless has undeniable talent can throw the ball through a battleship. He needs, in short, to be a heel.

It would be the 80s WWF all over again. Come on, it’s the Chicago Bears, it’s going to be 80s anyway. He could be Jim McMahon turned up to 11 and sprinkled with glitter and cocaine. Seriously, if Jay Cutler goes down this road, I will pile all my Redskins S in a big heap and light it on fire and become a 100% Chicago Bears fan.

(And if he wants to throw to Earl Bennett every down, well, I have Easy Earl on my fantasy roster, so let’s go!)

You know, there really is something to be said for getting away from it all. I spent a long weekend down the coast earlier this summer, followed last week by a long road trip that included quality time out on the Oregon coast and in upstate Washington state – hell, about as upstate as you can get without a passport, and in fact, you have to have one anyway because you can’t get there on land without crossing borders. In short, I have spent a good amount of time in places with little enough Internet access and if anything less cell signal.

And honestly, that’s fine. I have been surrounded by fog, mist, cloud cover, marine layer, weather that basically looks at August and laughs and demands a jacket anyway. I have walked out on cold, cold, COLD beaches that have rocks as often as sand and where you would have to be insane to consider sunbathing. I have set up in the blogger’s pit at the beach house, looking out at the sun setting over the Pacific, and spent the whole time reading and writing rather than surfing and watching.

I was fine missing out on the email. I was fine missing out on the social networking, for the most part. I was certainly not sorry to skip the RSS feeds, and the steady stream of bullshit made worse by a Net-enabled world. I actually read text from a book (albeit on an iPhone, often as not) and got through a whole bunch of socially unredeeming but generally amusing stuff. (I would bet real money that “Harry Turtledove” is a series of shell scripts connected to emacs, but I finished the Timeline-161 series anyway.)

I know I’ve said before that I can get by for a week with only the iPhone. I could have gotten by for 10 days with only the iPhone if not for my fantasy football draft – as it is, if you set aside the draft and occasional blogwork, I only pulled on it two or three times the whole way. There’s still no acceptable way to use the iPhone for long-form text entry. But I could scale it down even more. Give me one of my basic phones for emergency contact and maybe the Twitter feeds of my friends (the promotional feeds I can skip), a good stout notebook and a couple of pens, all the Economists and New Yorkers I haven’t gotten through yet, and maybe half a dozen books, and I’m good to go for the long weekend. In a real pinch, give me the iPod shuffle with all the podcasts I’m behind on, and I’ll use that on the trip down or something.

There’s a lot of bullshit out there. Sometimes, instead of trying to reason with it (or add to it), the best thing to do is punt and go have some time for yourself to get your head together. And amazingly, I did the whole thing without pulling out one cigar. Don’t ask me to total up the coffee, though…

Van Jones had to go. Period, paragraph. The whys and wherefores of September 11, 2001 are pretty straightforward, and “asleep at the switch” does not equal “knew date, time and details and still punted.” Basically, if you subscribe to any shade of 9/11-Truther-ism, your place in the political world is out on the curb passing out mimeographed flyers.

Yes, it’s one little slip. I don’t care. So is being caught in an alley getting a Jeff Smoker from a sophomore coed. Either way, you’re out.

Obviously I don’t care if he called Republicans assholes. Let’s face it, being an asshole is one of the core values of being a Republican in the age of Beck, Hannity and Limbaugh. Being an asshole is as important to being a GOPer as being a chickenshit is to being in the TV news business.

Eat shit and die in a fire, you fucking retarded hillbilly.