Are my eyes really blue?

Disasterbation, n. the act of supporting Cal football. orig. Stagger Lee, Sept. 2008.

To quote directly:

In retrospect, it should have been obvious to a small child that this is the way to beat Cal this year: stack the box to stop the deadly Jahvid Best, overload on the pass rush, and force a quarterback in his first full season to make plays to receivers with a combined total of four catches and no starts when the season began.

Well, another year hasn’t improved things much. Oregon did just that, and at last check are up 39 on the Golden Bears. After losing to Boise State, everybody wrote off Oregon, and neglected to look up when they pounded Utah, and now the hayseed hippies of UC-Eugene are delivering the worst defeat of the Tedford era.

This is a team loss in every sense of the word. Offense: feckless. Defense: helpless. Special teams: anytime your superstar punter delivers a punt for five yards, you know how special teams are doing.

It’s time to ask the question: is Jeff Tedford capable of delivering a must-win game? Think about it: since 2002, when’s the last time Cal won a significant victory against a meaningful opponent? They had to miracle out wins in bowls against Virginia Tech and Air Force and Miami, they’ve still never won in Los Angeles under Tedford, the Texas Tech fiasco is known to all and sundry. The Oregon State loss in 2007 when a win would have sent Cal to #1 in the country. The Big Game that year when a win might have salvaged the biggest collapse since the walls of Jericho.*

Tedford’s big kills are: a triple-OT win at home against USC in 2003 and a Holiday Bowl disemboweling of Texas A&M. Other than that, the team has struggled against teams it should beat, frequently backed into wins against teams it should have blown off the field, and – reliably – lost every single consequential road game since 2002.

Jeff Tedford has hitherto gone unchallenged by a fan base of Old Blues who remember the age of Tom Holmoe and haven’t seen a Rose Bowl in fifty years and are just grateful to be televised and ranked. And if you are happy with 8 wins a year, occasional bouts of top-25 ranking, and a rock-solid home record, and can live with being a sub-500 team on the road and spitting the bit at the most pivotal moment, that might be enough. But the day is coming, and coming soon, when people start asking what it’s going to take for the Bears to finally break through.

* A collapse surpassed the next year by Vanderbilt, who lost to the likes of Mississippi State and Duke in the course of pissing away a 5-0 start.

New Wayfarer by Ray-Ban, model 2132, tortoise frame, lens 902/57 (brown polarized), 52/18mm. See, Sunglass Hut, they DID make a brown polarized New Wayfarer.

I lost my shades at the beach house last month. Fortunately, it turns out my sister-in-law found them. Which saved me an impulse purchase of another hundred-something bucks. Because I’ve basically come to realize that the Preds, the Oakleys, the little silver-blue things from back in ’02, all the other stuff – it breaks down in the face of the single most iconic form of eyewear on the planet. Besides, I can’t remember the last pair of sunglasses I kept successfully for three years – except I can and they were black Wayfarers that I got my first year at Vandy and hung onto in some form for a decade. Even after the eyepieces went wide from leaving them in the car one year at City Stages, and believe me, you can leave a car in the shade but in Alabama it’ll still get hotter than hell.

All this is just so I have a record of what I need to replace them with when things go awry. =)

“But Obama has made it even more explicit, regularly proclaiming his determination to rely on rational analysis, rather than narrow decisions, on everything from missile defense to Afghanistan — and all the big issues at home.”

And the problem here is….?

Memo to the Washington Post: if you don’t want to finish as the fish-wrapper division of Kaplan Test Prep, it’s way past time to put David Broder in a home.

So apparently tomorrow, we’re finally going to get MMS on the iPhone. Assuming you have a 3G or 3GS, that is. And of course, since it’s AT&T, there’s no telling how well it will work if at all.

This represents the rare-but-not-unheard-of phenomenon of Apple guessing wrong. A lot of things that they’ve done in the last 15 years or so were good guesses, mostly regarding legacy features that could be dumped (SCSI? ADB?) or premium products marketed brilliantly (“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”) or features that could be ditched without consequence (i.e. 2009 before releasing an iPod with FM radio).

But back in the days when the iPhone was under development, I am willing to bet that Himself made a bet: that given the opportunity, people would eschew sending postage-stamp-sized pictures for a quarter a pop when they could email a full-sized pic for free. And thus MMS support didn’t make it into the iPhone. Of course, since MMS is a data service, it’s possible to cram other things in there, and once video messaging became part of the package, MMS suddenly took off.

Which left Apple in a bad spot again, because at the time, the hottest camera in phones was a 2 MP camera that still took, at best, 176×144 video. And there’s no nice way to put it: that looks like shit. And as I said two years ago, the reason the iPhone doesn’t take video is because Himself won’t let it until there’s a way for it to take video that doesn’t look like ass.

It seems that day has come – iPhone and Nano alike now take 640×480 at 30 fps, which is equivalent to standard-resolution television or the low-end Flip camera. Which is good enough for Himself. Better late than never, but the two year delay is the price of the mentality that keeps Apple in a premium price niche (and keeps the stock bumping around 180).

And so we get to the final delay: AT&T. On the day that iPhone OS 3.0 went live, with MMS capability, 29 of Apple’s 30 carrier partners were live with MMS service. Guess which one wasn’t?

And this is because unlike SMS, which rides on the control channels for free, MMS is a data service. And as we have proven over and over and over and FUCKING OVER, AT&T’s network is not up to handling the data requirements of the installed base of iPhone users. Adding an additional data capacity to the phone will only increase the load on what is already a weary and wobbly network, especially in New York and San Francisco.

The iPhone has customer satisfaction ratings that most manufacturers would sacrifice their children for, but the number-one complaint of owners – by a huge margin – is the AT&T network. And rightly so.

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.