Are my eyes really blue?

Fourteen years it’s taken…but today, the Vanderbilt Commodores are ranked #21 in the AP poll.

I’m going to go get very, very, very drunk now.

Four wins, no losses.

Two conference wins, no losses.

One win over a ranked foe, no losses.

Outscored opponents 51-10 in the second half.

To cap it all off, not one, not two, but FIVE AP-ranked teams lost, and five more that didn’t have a loss already.

And we were the first team “also receiving votes” last week.

If the Vanderbilt Commodores aren’t ranked in the Top 25 when the new poll ships on Monday, they should cancel the whole thing for the rest of the year. Because right now? Any time, any place, any team…WE WILL FEAR NO EVIL.

DYNAMITE GO VU!!!

War in Iraq. Recession at home. Me in a funk. It can only be…1991.

Continue reading “Flashback, part 4 of n”

A nice low-end MacBook Air from everybody. Yup. Uh-huh.
Look, I’m not insensitive to the notion that it would be really bad for everybody if these things went belly-up. Nor do I want to see all the janitors, secretaries, help desk donkeys, etc etc. shoved onto the street. I get that.
What I don’t get is how, through all this, there are absolutely no consequences for the people who got us into this mess. You know, the innovators of NINJA loans (No Income, No Job, No Assets). The people who lent money knowing full well they were lending to bad risks. I don’t want to EVER hear this put on “irresponsible borrowers” – if you’ve got a thousand bucks, and you decide to lend it to your drunken cousin Slick who’s never held a job and who’s been in rehab three times for crack addiction and who got the neighbor’s sow pregnant – is it Slick’s fault for taking the money, or your fault for being a FUCKING MORON??
And the Whiffle Life goes on. Dear God, in my next life, please make me a Republican so I too can be immune from the consequences of my actions.

Martin Sullivan. $47 million severance from AIG in July, after two quarters of record losses.
Read the whole thing.
The worst six months in the company’s history is worth $47M…and an office and secretary until the end of the year. Now being paid for out of YOUR tax dollars.
Words fail me. Anything I post would probably be taken as incitement to a felony so I better shut up now.

Consider that number, $283. Not a bad little chunk of change. Three months of a really good DirecTV package. A new 16 GB iPod Touch, with your friend’s employee discount. Ten rounds apiece at the 4Ps with three of your pals, tax and tip included. Cross-country airplane flight. Swank new American-made leather jacket from US Wings. (Maybe on sale. Those things have gone up.)

And you’re about to spend $283 – you and every other person in this country – so that AIG can get off the hook.

That’s $85 billion. That’s more than Warren Buffett has. That’s enough money to buy the entire NFL, all 32 teams, and start cleaning house.

Back to the old “moral hazard” again. Bear Sterns. IndyMac. Fannie and Freddie. Now AIG is the latest corpse to get stood upright and paraded around on this month’s version of Weekend At Bernanke’s. Almost makes you want to ask who the hell Lehman pissed off that they didn’t get the complimentary reach-around.

When you have a market where everything is a game of musical chairs, but nobody ever takes a chair away, that’s not capitalism, that’s not conservatism, that’s fucking socialist. And the free pass is being handed out courtesy of the same people who went apoplectic at the suggestion that credit card interest should be capped somewhere around 30%, because it would undermine personal responsibility.

However, if you exist above the Whiffle Line, you’re far too important to ever bear the consequences of your actions. So stand by to have an iPod plucked from your wallet so that a bunch of gold-plated weasels can keep putting their name on Man U’s shirts. The very least they could do is round up their executive team, march them out at halftime of the Super Bowl, randomly select one or two, and let five lucky taxpayers go to work on ’em with steel-toes and a ball bat.

Not likely, obviously. They’re far too rich and important for silly shit like accountability.

…I don’t know who had a worse weekend: the Pac-10 (four teams lost to Mountain West opponents; one week away from formally being renamed the Pac-One) or the Big Ten (beaten soundly about the head and face even before their flagship team shat the bed again). At least now we have a tiebreaker in place when it’s time to decide who’s going to lose to the SEC champion this year.

Yes, it’s troubling that Georgia seems to have had more trouble with South Cackalacky than Vandy had…but it’s not outside the realm of possibility that the Lame Gamecocks are better than their record indicates, that Georgia is actually pretty good, and that *gasp* Vandy may actually be pretty good. If you look at the AP poll, who’s the first team “also receiving votes”?

Gulp.

Better beat Ole Miss.

60 degrees and overcast. Perfect. That marine layer just does amazing things in the morning – far from being gloomy or grim, having that thick gray ceiling at 8 AM is a comfort. No garish sunlight, no glare punching you right in the face, no unpleasant heating up first thing in the morning.

Fog is also what apparently drifts through the brains of assorted football officials. Setting aside the preposterous non-call of a safety that Cal forced on the Twerps just before the first half, Ed Hochuli’s brain-lock in Denver suggests that the NFL has the same unnatural love for Mike Shannahan that the media once had for John McCain (though that shows signs of fraying when some bobblehead bimbo on Fox in the morning is ripping into the campaign manager). Amazingly, the play’s a fumble, because the ball moved backwards…but it’s *not* a turnover? I got nothing but love for Jay Cutler, pride of the Commodores, but isn’t it enough that nobody ever calls the cut block above 4500 feet?

Meanwhile, yes, I have a new iPhone. I didn’t want a new iPhone, but mine had an esoteric failure: something went wrong with the dock connector above and beyond the traditional “it’s got lint in it” problem. It charged just fine, it would sync with no problem, but it kept thinking something was plugging into that dock connector, thus activating the screen and occasionally even warning that an unsupported peripheral was being plugged in. As a result, you could take the phone off the charger and barely touch it, and seven and a half hours later, it would show that it had been used for seven hours. That’s bad arithmetic.

As it turns out, once out of warranty, the fix is a refurb unit for $199 with only a 90-day warranty. At that point, you may as well have the new one. And as it turns out, I got to keep a foundation account…so my monthly bill only goes up by about $12-15 total. At that point, it’s worth it to have the new one with a full warranty (and 3G and GPS besides, which I guess I will be happy enough to use). The big trick now is the battery life…I think my old iPhone may have had this problem well before I noticed, so I’m curious to see whether I get more than a day out of the new one (especially with the new firmware, which I strongly recommend to everyone).

Oh yes – my brother-in-law has the old iPhone now. He has no fear of cracking cases and firing up soldering irons, so if he can make it work, it’s his. Meanwhile, I have bought a nice silicone-grip case for my new iPhone…with a cover for the dock port.

…I don’t remember the NFL being so solicitous when the Chargers got chased by a fire, or when the Saints got run out by Katrina. So stop screwing around and move the Texans-Ravens game. Ideally, move it off the edge of a cliff, but then, I’d have been just as happy for those two to play during the hurricane…

Disasterbation, n. The act of supporting Cal football.

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, it worked like all hell, and as a result, Cal shat the bed in the Eastern time zone again. The fact that the team only flew into Maryland on Friday didn’t help either – despite their attempt to “acclimate” to EDT while still in Berkeley, there’s really no way you can stay in California and simulate DC-caliber heat and humidity.

At some point, someone is going to have to drill into Jeff Tedford’s head that he has to be flexible in how he does things, and that decisions made in August are not binding on an entire season. It cost Cal the Holiday Bowl in 2004, it cost them an over-.500 season in 2007, and it probably cost them the first half today.

However, Vanderbilt put together a nice little 38-21 game. After trading score for score in the first half, the ‘Dores slammed on Rice in the second half with a 17-0 performance to cap their third win of the season. Vandy gets most of their work done on the ground, with Jared Hawkins pounding up the middle and Chris Nickson a surprisingly effective runner from the QB spot who also completes the necessary passes. Put that together with a defense that tends to slam the door after halftime, and it’s hard not to see some serious possibilities ahead for this team – opponents like Duke or Kentucky can certainly be had and there’s no reason to think Ole Miss or Wake are by any means unbeatable. Hold tight, don’t drop winnable games, don’t do anything stupid, and maybe…?

Not a great day for the Pac-10 – UMN beating Arizona and BYU over UCLA by 59 isn’t going to help the “Pac-1” talk – but a worse day for the Big Ten, with Wisconsin down in Fresno grasping for the only major intersectional win of the day for the conference. Cal notwithstanding, I’m still not prepared to take the “Almost College Conference” tag off until I see something impressive, and losing to Little Middle isn’t the sort of thing that can be overcome with one win.

And you just know that you’re going to see that clip of Jahvid Best’s unfortunate intestinal reversal all over YouTube, Deadspin, and EDSBS for the rest of the year, if not the rest of his career. I’m sure he would tell you that was a lot better going down than it was coming up.

ETA: Here’s how obvious the problem was: even the Junks, mostly Maryland alums and all Maryland supporters, basically said that Tedford screwed the team by not flying in until the night before, and that a 3000 mile flight is no joke. When the guys who just gave you a preposterous upset are sympathetic to your plight, you know your coach F’d up.