Are my eyes really blue?

El Foldo. We had them dead to rights for three quarters and blew it. Can’t hold a lead, can’t run out the clock. That’s 3 losses that should be wins.

Well that was a barren source of amusement. Longshore just can’t hit a damn thing in the fourth quarter. Mad love to Forsett and the Hawk, who have carried this offense, but Cal had better win the last two or there’ll be hell to pay with the Old Blues. Even if they did wear the Joe Roth – Chuck Muncie uniforms.

We missed two field goals and an extra point – and there’s your tie, and instead of a desperate 4th-down pass to the end zone, we’re lining up another field goal for the win.

If it’s going to happen, it’s going to have to come from UT or Wake.

Horrible, horrible, horrible loss for Alabama. But I cannot help but be thrilled for Sylvester Croom, one of Bear’s boys, somebody who I thought should have gotten the Alabama job over Mike Shula. Now he’s beaten the Tide two years straight. He beat Auburn this year. He’s turned around a program that was consistently the worst in the SEC.

I just hope he’s willing to pick up the phone once Saban leaves.

So here’s all you really need to know about the writer’s strike. Everything else is just local color – the spectacle of Tina Fey and John Oliver on a picket line at Rockefeller Center, Jay Leno delivering donuts or Jon Stewart allegedly paying every single production worker himself while the Daily Show is on ice, the giant inflatable rat essential to any New York work stoppage – but this is the nut graf, as it were:

The media companies and the writers did a deal two decades ago for home video sales. Writers get, I believe, .3% on home video sales. This was in 1984 – before the rise and fall of VHS, before Blockbuster, before DVD and the ability to sell somebody every season of an entire series, before iTunes and Blu-Ray and NetFlix – and it hasn’t changed since. Twenty years on, the writers want to reconsider this – and more importantly, they want to settle the issue of digital media now so that they won’t get overtaken by technology again.

The studios, by contrast, like the home sales residual right where it is – and they want to pay nothing for digital media while they “study the issue” for three years. Yep. While ABC is streaming Ugly Betty – with commercials! – on its website, while NBC and Fox are launching Hulu to compete with YouTube, while the head of NBC-Universal is decrying Apple for not letting them charge more for shows (even after the US version of The Office was basically saved in the cradle by iTunes sales), while every episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is made available on Comedy Central’s website – with !-ing commercials! – while all this is going on, the studios are claiming that there is no revenue model for these distrubution methods, that they’re not making any money, and they need a few years to see what the market looks like before deciding how many pennies to throw the people who wrote the material in the first place.

The Jews have a word for this: chutzpah. For those of you who don’t speak old-school Yiddish, it basically means “the caliber of unmitigated gall that leads a man who’s killed his parents to beg the court for mercy because he’s an orphan.”

Look, there is no great Solomonic compromise here. There’s no splitting this baby. Either digital media is a salable commodity, or it’s not. If it is, then the creators of that intellectual property are entitled to some portion of compensation for that sale, because a 30-minute show with commercials is the same whether it’s on your laptop or on a broadcast network – the totals may be different, but there’s revenue, and a percentage model should work just the same for both.

But if digital media is NOT a salable commodity – if all those episodes on NBC.com are “promotional” and all those downloads are just meant to attract viewers to the show – well, shit. Somebody needs to tell Steve Jobs, for starters, because Apple sold three million videos in the first seven weeks on the iTunes Music Store and that money didn’t just fall out of the sky.

But more importantly, if digital media is not a salable commodity requiring compensation, then every single word you’ve ever heard from the studios about piracy or fair use is a dirty, filthy lie.

If it’s worth something, the studios are ripping off the writers. If it’s not, they’re ripping off you and me. Either way, at this point, the villain of the piece should be crystal clear.

What the studios want is basically what baseball owners wanted in 1994, or what hockey owners want – well, all the time: a legally-mandated deal to freeze the current model in amber, ensuring themselves a revenue stream in perpetuity irrespective of their own misjudgments, foibles and outright stupidity. Anything that doesn’t end with them wallowing naked in a pile of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck is wrong, immoral, illegal, and A Threat To Our American Way Of Life. This is why people who use their TiVo to skip through commercials are “thieves.” This is why Jeff Zucker thinks Apple “destroyed the music business.”

And if you want an insider view that hits it much better than I can here, read John Rogers’s take at Kung Fu Monkey: Why Strike II. And try to forgive him for being involved in that Transformers shitstorm. Meanwhile, raise a glass for the geeks on the picket line – at least they’re rising up and demanding not to be screwed. What are you prepared to do?

So there I was, all by myself in Berkeley for the first time, for a Cal game. I guess I am well and truly assimilated now, enough that I’m with the rest of the crowd (and an ugly crowd it was): Tedford has lost his way.

Three years ago, I wrote that the legend of Jeff Tedford was dead, left in a sodden heap on the turf at Qualcomm Stadium because he refused to adjust to the reality of his personnel situation. With three of the top four receivers injured and unable to play, Tedford insisted on sticking to the air game, despite the presence of J.J. Arrington and Marshawn Lynch in the backfield, and Cal paid. Badly. In some ways, the team has never really recovered from that loss, although last year’s Holiday Bowl went a long way. Nevertheless, the fact remains: Tedford tends to stick with his vision irrespective of circumstances.

Now Cal has a quarterback controversy. The kids in the stands, and their older predecessors in QQ, are literally screaming for the same Kevin Lynch whose brain-dead scramble lost the Oregon State game three weeks ago. But Tedford is sticking by Nate Longshore, who missed all of said OSU game with an injury apparently sustained in the waning moments in Eugene two weeks earlier. Longshore is plainly not the quarterback he was. Never mobile before, he is positively sedentary now, and there’s something missing off his passing touch. And the fact of the matter is plain: he’s not going to get any better. If he had an injury that, two weeks later, was enough to hold him out of an entire game, then he is not going to have an opportunity to heal and get it together until the off-season. Which means that for purposes of 2007, Nate Longshore is as good as he’s going to be for the rest of the season, and that’s not that good.

This is not to throw Longshore under the bus. He seems to be a fine gentleman and played effectively through the first five games of the season, so it’s not like the talent isn’t there. But Longshore at something well under 100% may well not be as effective as Kevin Riley, and let’s face it: the time to find out is not against USC, or when the Axe is on the line. A game against Washington State, near the basement of the Pac-10, was the best remaining chance to see what Riley can do, and now we’re just going to have to wonder with the Trojans coming to town next week.

The bigger concern is the play-calling. On multiple occasions in the past month, Cal has had 1st and goal inside the 5 and come away empty – largely because they only have two plays at the goal line: Justin Forsett straight up the middle and a desperate throw to the corner to DeSean Jackson. Cal’s offensive line is not horrible – they’re better than the defensive front, which is seemingly incapable of pressuring a quarterback on a consistent basis – but they’re not the sort of line that can just blow people off the line and let a back bull ahead for 3 or 4 years. Nobody’s going to mistake the Golden Bears for the early-80s Hogs in Washington. Nevertheless, Tedford is committed to running between the tackles.

Now, this is not in and of itself a bad idea. In theory, the pass should be setting up the run, with 3 receivers stretching the defense and giving a broken field to the runner. But it’s not happening – Cal isn’t passing often enough, or effectively enough when they do, to force linebackers into coverage. Quite the reverse – teams are stacking an extra safety in the box and stifling the run. With extra coverage on Jackson, this has basically led to Lavelle Hawkins becoming the big-money receiver, and #7 has basically carried the team for the last month on offense. Well done to the Hawk, but this is supposed to be more than a one-man show.

Three years ago, Cal had creativity and verve on offense. Every so often, Aaron Rodgers would just tee up and throw the ball fifty yards down the field, where Chase Lyman had left some hapless DB gasping for air. And usually, it was a free six points. It’s not like the talent’s not there now; DeSean Jackson is a Heisman contender and freshman Jahvid Best is so electric that he can’t go in the whirlpool without shocking himself. But I haven’t seen one long vertical deep ball all year. Long plays because “Tha 1” did his shake-and-bake and rattled off 40 yards after the catch, sure, but no bombs-away air raid-type throws. And the thing that bugs me most of all is this: you have speed and talent on the field, but the passes aren’t there: why wouldn’t you do something else to get your playmakers involved in the offense? They have a student-body-right play where everybody is pulling right except Best, who gets the ball on a blind flip to the left, and he tends to get about fifty yards every time they run it – but they haven’t run it in weeks. This week, they ran Best on an end-around sort of thing, and since he’s already at full speed when he gets the ball it’s just a chase scene once he decides to turn. Why not do more of that? Why isn’t Jackson on a reverse? Is there anybody who can throw a halfback pass on the roster? (If Forsett could do that, turn another one of those off-tackle dives into a deep throw to a receiver a la Ernest Byner to Gary Clark back in the day, I guarantee you’d probably get a touchdown for your trouble.) And one more thing – I didn’t want to say anything, I didn’t know if the rules are different out West or what – but the tight end is ELIGIBLE. He can catch a pass. Maybe Cal’s tight end has hands of iron, I don’t know, but that’s a whole ‘nother body who can make a short reception to keep a drive alive. Hell, Alabama went to the Sugar Bowl in 1989 because Lamonde Russell was always there in the flat.

Long story short: the kids are doing the best they can with what they have. But if Cal has aspirations beyond the Deez Nutz bowl, it’s time for Tedford to get his testicles back out of the blind trust and start playing gunslinger football again. And it’s time to get the kids involved, because think about it: the skill positions on offense right now are a senior running back, a senior tight end, two senior receivers, and DeSean Jackson, who will probably be playing on Sundays next year. Two starting defensive backs are also seniors – and the defensive secondary has been the most reliable part of the defense all season. And on a roster of 111 players, 48 are freshmen. If the youngsters don’t start getting reps now – and lots of them – next year’s team will have to change from Golden Bears to Chartreuse Bears, because there’s so much green in there I’m afraid they might spoil in warmer weather.

In September, you could say that the future is now. Three losses later, next year has to be taken seriously again. If Tedford’s going to turn things around, there’s not a day to lose.

So Vandy went down to the Swamp and got that ass tapped, 49-22. That was probably the least winnable of the remaining games. Florida has points of vulnerability, but they are not as pronounced as those of Kentucky or Tennessee – and even though everybody knows where the holes are on those teams, we may not be capable of exploiting them. And how’s this for a dagger: even if we get the 6th win, it may not be enough: a 6-6 team can only go to a bowl if every 7-5 team has a bid. This is not as unfair as it looks; the 12th game in the SEC is a non-conference game, and if we were 5-6 coming into the last game, that’s not bowl eligible under the old rules. Nevertheless, it would suck to break the 5 win ceiling for the first time in a quarter-century and be unable to cash in on it.

Meanwhile, the wife is gone to Texas for a few days. I have never been more tempted to play the Southern Baptist card and say “Wife, I forbid you to go to Texas.” However, I’ve been in preliminary RCIA classes for a couple of months now, so I may not be allowed to play the Southern Baptist card any more. Hell, I may never have been allowed – I was characterized as a Zen Baptist from the age of 17 or so, and got married by a Benedictine priest from an Old Catholic order, and I only set foot in a Baptist church once a year for Decoration Day…so whatever. I’m left alone in the house for four days. Somebody may need to come around Tuesday morning and pack my lungs in gauze. (I got a lot of cigars to get through.)

Come ON Bama…

So I was conscious of it being an earthquake immediately…sitting in a metal folding chair at St. Joe’s school. I could feel the earth going up and down, although I didn’t get to see the ground ripple or anything. I figured it was either big or close – turns out neither, but enough of each that it made for an interesting experience. I wouldn’t file it under pant-soiling terror or anything. Maybe if more stuff had been falling down.

Thing is, other people were losing their minds, and I think rightly so – if you’re in the wrong aisle of the grocery store, and suddenly get attacked by a slew of canned goods, that’s kind of trifling. It’s the whole “unexpected could happen anytime” thing about the earthquake that makes them nature’s suicide bombers – you at least get some warning with tornadoes, or fire, or hurricanes. Not much, certainly, and much good it may do you, but at least you get a fighting chance. Earthquake just flips the switch, and pow, fall down go boom. The only thing left is whether you just get shook up or whether a building falls on you.

Between the quake in the north and the fires down south, California is really living up to the promise of becoming the #1 action state in the country. What would you expect when the governor is an Austrian robot from the future?

One of the only worthwhile things at my godforsaken undergrad institution was Chapel at Six, every Monday night. To this day it remains the model for what I look for in a church experience. They also ran a “service learning” program with the motto “College IS the real world – it’s just not the WHOLE world.” They were the only people there with any sense of perspective. But I digress…what if that’s overshooting the mark? What if in fact, high school is the real world? And it’s not the whole world – but the whole world IS high school?

Think about it. What is modern America – the politics, the culture, the attitude – but the nerds vs the jocks writ large? The punk kids versus the rednecks? The art and band nerds against the bitch gang in the girls’ bathroom? Everything unbelievably superficial, nothing but scorn for sincerity, and the real problems of life completely overlooked? And here’s the thing – high school comes with a built in time limit. Survive through the end of the 12th grade and roll out. But if real life has become high school, when do we get to graduate?

I think sometimes that maybe I really do need profound psychological help. It would explain a lot – like my profound distaste for contemporary high school movies, my abiding love for Heathers, my tendency to still identify with the just-slightly-weird-enough kids, my obsessive interest in gifted education for somebody who doesn’t even have children…The fact that I can still see the patterns of the old days two decades on may be proof of advanced psychosis…or maybe I’m just brilliant. But if I’m so bloody brilliant, why can’t I find a way to get the hell out of school?

(Or at least stop thinking so fondly of Heathers? You sure couldn’t get that film made today…)

Vanderbilt beats Miami (Ohio). That makes five wins. Bowl eligibility requires six.

One more river to cross.

Unfortunately, the names of those rivers are Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee and Wake Forest. However, based on the way things have gone this year, you have to think that any of those can be had. And hell, if you finish the season on a 4-game losing streak, you didn’t deserve a bowl bid anyway. All I ask is please, no frickin’ Music City Bowl. Nothing worse than going to a bowl in your own hometown.