Are my eyes really blue?

…it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Don’t forget, the use of primaries as the method of picking a candidate nationally is less than 50 years old, and the Iowa caucus system only dates to 1972. In all that time, only one non-incumbent has finished first in Iowa and gone on to the White House – George W. Bush in 2000, and don’t forget, he had three times as much money raised by caucus night as any candidate in history. In 1980, Iowa went for Bush over Reagan; in 1988, they picked Pat Robertson and Dick Gephardt. Seriously.
Here’s the thing: the Iowa caucuses were never meant to be dispositive. They were meant to be the first cut that winnows the field to 5 or 6 (or maybe fewer) via the 15% “viability” rule. New Hampshire would take a whack a while later, purging some more, and by the time you hit the South, you’d probably be down to 3 candidates battling like hell.
If you need somebody to blame, blame the Democrats. In 1988, they concocted a system of Iowa in January, New Hampshire in February (during the Olympics no less) and Super Tuesday in March, meant to find a winning candidate who wasn’t too far left and crown him well before the onset of a prolonged death march like the Mondale-Hart fiasco of 1984. What they got was Jesse Jackson, who ended up with 7 million primary votes to the nominee’s 9 million (Mike Dukakis, as if you cared). So they kept compressing the schedule over and over with hopes of simultaneously getting a centrist candidate and not burning through all the money before the general election – and then Clinton got in in 1992, was the incumbent in 1996, and had a designated successor in 2000, so much good it did them.
Anyway, because of the continued compression of the primary season, we now find ourself in a situation where the game could be over in 4 weeks. Iowa and New Hampshire will be done before we even have a football champion, and the Gold Medal Double-Double MegaUltraDeathStar Tuesday voting on February 5 should settle the deal just in time to give us a NINE MONTH GENERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN.
This is no way to pick a President, folks. And I’ll tell you something else – the only thing worse than having this done by February 5 would be NOT having it done by February 5; if one party is still picking between 3 or more candidates by then, they’re in for a world of pain.

Tough break for Hawaii, who has a fine program and does some nice things – they just got booked way way WAY above their weight class. Really, this was Georgia’s only option. If you lose, disaster – and if you win, you were supposed to. All you can do is pour it on and try to destroy your opponent. It’s not fair, it’s not right, but the way the system is constituted, it’s all you’ve got. Once we have a playoff and take human selectors out of the system, we can afford things like sportsmanship again. And after Arkansas and Florida took a dump today (Heisman curse? Anyone?), Georgia pretty much has to put it down HARD for the SEC. And even so, they have some kid at QB who apparently has his age on his jersey…

Meanwhile, the audio is shot on this broadcast, the announcers are godawful, the production values are mediocre at best – FOX doesn’t show a lick of college football until January 1. That they have all the BCS games but one is one more proof of the blight that is the BCS. Either have a playoff or blow it all up and go back to a truly mythical national championship, which I think would make everyone happier.

OBTW – the SEC put 4 teams on TV today. If the Pac-10 is sincerely happy with their bowl contracts, then their commissioner should be staked out on a fire ant mound.

HAPPY NEW YEAR. 2008 – this had better be good.

Hope your 2008 is as good as my 2007 was godawful. Better days coming, if I have anything to say about it.

Okay – maybe Joe Gibbs doesn’t know how to coach anymore. I can’t say for sure one way or the other. But he knows how to lead this team – and it looks like they had to completely crash out and hit rock bottom before they could start climbing back up. Since the brain-cramp against Buffalo that lost the game, the Redskins have not trailed. Today, Dallas went 0-11 on 3rd down and combined for one yard rushing. Read that last sentence again. ONE YARD.

Todd Collins is running this team better than any QB has since the Brad Johnson season in 1999. Guy sits as a backup for a decade and then, flip of a switch, rattles off four wins. Well done young old man. The defense has, amazingly, managed to gel even without Sean Taylor (RIP 21) and has put the wood to most everyone they’ve played in December (don’t forget, Buffalo did everything with field goals). And don’t look now, but at 9-7. the Redskins are off to the land of rain for a playoff game.

So…four years into The Return, Joe Gibbs has delivered two playoff appearances – and made the Dallas games competitive every year. During the years in the wilderness, you could write off the Cowboys as two losses almost every season. Playoffs every other year and beating the Pokes – you know, you could do a lot worse.

Maybe they had to have this whole tragedy to really come together as a team. Maybe you have to struggle through that kind of adversity to really become family. I don’t know, but this is manifestly not the same team that kept blowing 4th quarter leads in October and November. Something has changed – and if it carries over to 2008, watch out.

Meanwhile…

…I got another bloody cellphone. It’s not what you think – this was a Christmas present from my father-in-law, and although he never heard of it before my wife put a bug in his ear about it, he has since gone and ordered one of his own.

It’s the MOTOFONE F3 from Motorola, and if anything, it is the total opposite of the iPhone. In terms of functionality, it’s the perfect GSM phone…from 1996. It places calls, it receives calls, it does rudimentary text messaging (only stores the last 10 received, doesn’t store sent ones, no predictive text of any kind, etc etc), it has an alarm, and you can pick from 7 pre-installed ringers. And that’s IT. Okay, it also vibrates and has a simple phonebook and speakerphone mode, but that’s all. No color display, no auto date and time, no animated wallpapers or Bluetooth or video camera or touchscreen or GPS or anything like that.

What it does have is, for starters, an e-paper screen. This looks like an old black-and-white calculator-style 12-segment LCD display. However, it remains static without power. This means that at any given time, it maintains what is “written” on it like a sheet of paper and only draws power to change what is displayed – meaning that if you pull the battery out without turning the phone off, whatever was on screen STAYS THERE until you put the battery back in. In short, unless the screen is changing what’s displayed, it draws NO power. You can imagine what this does for battery life.

It also has TWO internal antennae, one at each end. This improves reception tremendously. Better reception means less power wasted trying to patch onto a signal or boosting the transmission power to compensate for a weaker signal – which, again, means better battery life.

No flip. No moving parts at all, really – the keypad is plastic with rubber accents, familiar to anyone who’s ever used the old Sinclair ZX-80. Not a lot of space for dust or moisture to get in. Only the one port for the charger.

You’ve probably guessed by now – this phone is geared toward the developing world. No text ever appears on screen; the menus are a short series of icons, backed up by voice prompts that the phone speaks in one of three languages (determined at manufacture and based on point of sale; mine speaks in Spanish, Portugese or English and is thus suitable for almost anywhere in North or South America. A Canadian model would probably substitute French in there; the one sold in the south of Germany speaks German, Italian or English; one sold in India could speak Gujarti and Hindi, etc etc). In short: you don’t even have to be able to read to use this phone.

As a side note, they’ve almost accidentally created the perfect phone for the elderly and technophobic – the display is clear and easy to read, the keys are plenty sizeable, and it tells you what you’re doing every step of the way. Which gives them an interesting selling option in the developed world, but that’s not the target here. The target is the kind of place where there’s never been wireline infrastructure, where chances to plug in may be few and far between, where your typical RAZR would probably be ruined in a day and a half. It’s the kind of phone that suddenly means ready access to market prices, or news from the next town over, or maybe quicker access to a doctor or police. And it goes for around $30, total – or whatever the equivalent is. (You can pick this thing up in London on a new pre-paid activation for NINE POUNDS.)

When Nokia sold their one-billionth phone, it wasn’t some slick megapixeled 3G Series 60 iPod killer, it was a bog-simple Nokia 1100 somewhere in Nigeria. For Motorola, it’s all well and good to sell the next re-hashed RAZR in America, but they’re looking at a world where one of every two people has a mobile phone, and thinking, “How do we sell one to the other fellow?”

So I have one now. It’s a backup phone, obviously. It’s also a neat technology demonstration. But mostly, it’s a memento mori for my high-tech career – the iPhone may change the face of the phone business in America, but an F3 is the sort of thing that could change the world – at ten cents on the dollar, at that. A new toy AND perspective – as Christmas presents go, that’s not bad.

Home after a long trip home for Christmas. While it certainly had its moments, it’s also unbelievably excellent to be in my own bed, in my own car, with adequate cellular coverage and pervasive Wi-Fi and decent coffee available most anywhere. The old homeland is improving, slightly and slowly, but I’m not sure it’s worth waiting the extra 10 years for them to catch up to where I’ve lived in the last decade.
Two day workweek this week, with the extra day off for New Year’s next week. factor in MLK coming up and I only have one five-day workweek out of four or five weeks. Which is a good thing, I think.
Trip left me with a lot to think about. Not necessarily in a good way, either. Suffice it to say: stay out of the drama of Southern women if you value your quality of life.
However, I have a whole blog post about one of my presents (yes, it’s a phone, more on that later) but people who knew me back East will be amused at one of the gifts I got from my surrogate big sister: a t-shirt with a squirrel holding an enormous pair of acorns, captioned “Mine Are Bigger.” Goes very well with the old motto T-shirt.
And now, the countdown begins…

Merry Christmas to all… And to Y’all a good night.

As always, the lesson of Christmas back home is simple: keep yourself as far from the dealings of Southern women as possible. Otherwise it’s going OK…although thank God for friends with bonus post-Christmas parties. I think I’m going to need to decompress.

…there’s a small liberal-arts school, religious origin, high academics, successful in the lower levels of college athletics, joining the Big South and Division I – and it looks like a success.
Gee, where have we seen this before?
Here’s a hint, you men of Presbyterian College: whatever you do, don’t change school presidents. And if you do, find out first what is the new guy’s personal vision for “his” program. And make sure you’re in it.
You don’t want to end up like [ALMA MATER REDACTED.]