Are my eyes really blue?

* You are not hallucinating. That’s ESPN College Gameday, broadcasting this Saturday from VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY, home of the #19-ranked Commodores. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. Kiss your loved ones and get right with God, because the world as you know it is ending.

* Bama ranked #2 and generally regarded as a legit contender for the national championship? THIS is what Nick Saban was paid $8 million for, to wrench the Tide from humiliation to superpower in the span of 18 games. It’s not the sort of thing where one or two plays would have taken everything the other way and left them 2-3, or anything like that – they’re making sure that those one or two plays don’t have a chance to make a difference. And that is scary stuff.

* “Horny for Zorny” shirts are going to be popping up all over DC this week. The Skins have now beaten Dallas five times in the last seven tries – say what you like about Joe GIbbs 2.0, but he did something that nobody else managed during his absence: he made the Cowboys beatable again and turned the series from a thrashing into a rivalry again. Tony Romo is, quite frankly, pwned by the Burgundy and Gold defense; he’s 1-3 as a starter against Washington. At this point, I’m willing to bet that 3 teams from the NFC (B)East will go to the playoffs, and the fourth will have a better record than at least one other playoff team.

* That’s all the good stuff. Now for some really incendiary commentary about the Golden Bears, after the jump…

Continue reading “Football Wrapup”

So the “John McCain Wins The Debate!” ad pops up on the Wall Street Journal site this morning…before McCain’s actually committed to showing up.

If McCain loses this election, he can put it down to one thing: the fact that while Karl Rove was a poor man’s Lee Atwater, Steve Schmidt is a homeless man’s Karl Rove. I thought the showrunners at Team Hillary were incompetent, but right how I think Schmidt would screw up running a lemonade stand in the driveway.

From Gawker Media and our pals at Defamer:

Take-home text: “Hey Ryan – I’m sorry, b/c I’m covering for Lindsey’s usual asst., could you tell me, who’s Rosh Hashana and why would he/she affect Kristi’s meeting with KN and MC?”

Now, here’s the really troubling part: this person can vote.

I’ve frequently thought that the House of Representatives is the world’s biggest open-air special-needs class, and the GOP contingent a bunch of snake-handling mouth-breathers, but if this is true, it’s an inspired move. Sure, the government is on the hook if things go pear-shaped, but insuring bad debt for private companies who agree to take it on – and charging them for said insurance – is a hell of a lot less of a budget-buster than buying up all the bad debt outright and hoping against hope that it’s worth something someday. I mean, seriously. Put the profit potential of mortgage bonds in one hand and crap in the other and see which fills up first.

If this “toxic debt” is really something that will pay out for us in the end, then the private sector should be just as happy to make a profit on it, right? Especially with the government as the reinsurer of last resort? The best part is, it’s a simple plan along the lines of FDIC insurance and it leaves the heavy lifting on the industry that got its tit in a wringer to begin with. I think the watchword for anyone working on this deal should be “elegant in its simplicity.” These Rube Goldberg three-rail bank shot schemes are where shit comes unravelled.

And again, if I’m rank-and-file at Lehman, I’m climbing a bell tower with a high-powered rifle right about now…

…you can take it or leave it, but I’m starting to wonder if there’s something to it, and it’s this:

Anything that we were hung up about when we were 13 or 14 or 15 – our body issues, our social problems, our self-consciousness and fears and anxieties – anything from that 8th and 9th grade range just gets burned into the ROM and we’re stuck with it for the rest of our lives. No matter how brilliant or gorgeous or successful or lighting-our-hundreds-with-hundreds rich we get, at root, we’re still the fat kid, the nerd, the burnout, the reject, the freak, the flake, the basket case. And while all your adult hangups can eventually be cured with enough drugs and therapy and liquor, the stuff that was there originally is damn near impossible to overcome, because it happened when you started being an adult. Whatever you thought you were when the switch flipped, well, you’ve got yourself a duck.*

This dovetails nicely with the old line about how high school IS the real world, it’s just not the whole world…because anybody who thinks the real world isn’t like high school needs to get out in the real world some more.

Anyway, it’s a theory…

* old line about imprint theory: “if a duck hatches from its egg, and you’re the first thing it sees, you got yourself a duck.”

Michelle Cottle basically lays down the smack on behalf of those of us who know that we’re not the Chosen of God just because we grew up in East Butthole, Alabama.
And spares me writing basically the same thing all over again.

Quite frankly, the more companies there are out there producing the next generation of superphone, the better. Plus somebody needs to push the iPhone team…because the Blackberry and Windows Mobile aren’t gonna do it.
T-Mobile is in a bit of a weird spot, given that their 3G is in a band nobody else in the world uses (1700 Mhz? Really?) but at least you get to reuse your 850 Mhz antenna. Sort of. (Honestly, I think it would have been better all round if they’d just given us two harmonics to begin with for mobile phones, but then, Europe kicked our ass up and down on the mobile phone front, so that ship has sailed.) But for the first time since the Pearl, T-Mob has a really compelling product that moves the bar and legitimately brings the Internet to your pocket in a way that Blackberry never did and WM6 never could. And let’s not even get started on how Symbian never took off in this country…
So welcome to the fight. Your move, Apple.
ETA: After looking over the reports and liveblogs, it looks like they’re going right for the gut on all the stuff the iPhone didn’t ship with: physical keyboard, contexual menus, 3G out of the box, wide-open developer program, etc. So now we get to see what’s doin’. I suspect that there may be some battery life issues at first, unless they’ve crammed in a much larger battery or Android does something truly astonishing with power management. (Pulling hard for the latter.) The fact that the phone will only launch in markets where T-Mob has already rolled out 3G, though, points up exactly why Apple skipped 3G in the first iteration of the iPhone.

This may be the single best obituary of all time. I have my work cut out for me.

They really like us!

ETA: they must really like us…Vandy vs Auburn has been picked up for ESPN’s prime-time game, Saturday Oct 4.

No, no, no, a thousand times no.

“We ran the economy to the brink of oblivion, so let us have $700 BILLION to bail out the firms that did it…without applying any regulation, without any sort of corrective measures, without even allowing anyone to review or approve the process. Just give us a shitpile of cash and don’t worry about it, we’ll take care of things.”

Is there any reason – any reason AT ALL – not to expect them to make a hash of this? And don’t start with that bullshit about what Obama would do, or what Clinton (either) would do. The old theoretical equivalence game is not in play here. The responsible party is the one who has fucked us sideways, so they are the ones who have to demonstrate why handing them one bazillion dollars scot-free is not THE STUPIDEST FUCKING IDEA ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH.