Saturday, January 13, 2007

CONCERT HALLS! (RAAAAAAH!)

I have no idea why I said that. Anyway, tonight the Eagles find themselves in the awkward position of having to break the hearts of the beleaguered citizenry of a hurricane-ravaged city. I was afraid the national media would play up the "Saints are America's team, Eagles are terrorist-loving villains!" angle but thankfully they have avoided that. Indeed, people have been respectful toward the Birds, and opinion seems to be evenly mixed about who's going to actually win this thing. Speaking as one random Eagles fan, my heart absolutely aches for the great city of New Orleans; I recall the images of flooding and devastation with horror; the stories I have heard about the refugees in the Superdome haunt me. Should the Eagles unfortunately lose tonight, I got the Saints' back. Having said that, it's just a game - a game I rather energetically hope the Birds find a way to win.

No "Dumb Things Bill Simmons Said" this week. His column yesterday was fairly reasonable and occasionally amusing. He predicts a big Saints win, which is his right. He took one minor dig at Andy Reid, but no harm done. He kind of arrogantly picks the Pats over the Chargers based on the somewhat specious reasoning that Belichick and Brady have a better playoff record than Schottenheimer and Rivers. He takes yet more shots at Peyton Manning, using the typically inane argument that he's "never won anything", conveniently ignoring the fact that he's just one player playing in a team sport where it's next to impossible to win games singlehandedly and has never been on teams quite good enough to go much farther (which should now be referred to as the "Abreu argument"). He takes lots of shots at various coaches, insinuating that he could coach much better than all of them, basing this argument on the fact that he's learned everything there is to know about football from playing "Madden" nonstop for the past twenty years. He keeps making up increasingly ridiculous "rules" to base his gambling picks on, then complains that "the league makes no sense" when they don't work. Actually, I guess he did say lots of dumb things this week.

It occurs to me now (and I haven't formulated this entirely) that Sports Guy's problem is that he assumes that all sports are the same, and keeps trying to apply the same dumb "rules" and "corollaries" to all of them. He's a big NBA fan, so he grew up watching Bird and Magic and Kareem and Jordan dominate games and win championships more or less by themselves (yes, I know that they all had very good teams behind them, so I guess I'm sort of reaching here). And I agree that it's possible in basketball - I just spent the last ten and a half years watching AI, so I know that if a guy scores 45 points one night, and his teammates get out of the way and don't do anything egregiously stupid, they're probably going to win. But with a few isolated exceptions, football and baseball just aren't like that - Peyton can score all the touchdowns he wants, but if his team's defense blows, all he can do is stand on the sidelines and watch them blow, and there's really not a damn thing he can do about it, and it's annoying that bitter, jealous, Boston-loving losers are then allowed to rant about how horrible he is and how he "can't win in January". (Similarly, Abreu was nothing short of spectacular while he was here, but he was usually surrounded by morons who could neither hit nor pitch, so he unfairly became a scapegoat for the team's failure. I've already covered Abreu in this space, so I'll say no more.) Point being, for all his obvious intelligence and talent, Simmons can be a very dumb man. Have I mentioned that he thinks Jimmy Kimmel is funny, and in fact used to write for his show? Make of that what you will.

On the subject of AI, we just lost him and C-Webb in the span of what, three weeks? Strange times. Webber was never embraced here, and in fact it appears he can no longer run or shoot, so he, for better or worse, won't be missed all that much. It's unfortunate, because I remember being really excited when we got him - it was a bold, gutsy trade, and the team really did look pretty good for a short while there - they lost in the playoffs to a clearly superior Pistons team, but they played hard and it was kind of a fun series. After that, things just fell apart. You know what, I think I’d rather cover this in a future post, so I’ll just leave you with the following thought: It suddenly occurs to me that Iverson might be my favorite Philadelphia athlete of all time.

GO EAGLES!!!

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Saturday, January 06, 2007

Dumb things Bill Simmons said, 1/5/07

I don’t want this to turn into an “awesome blog” where, leech-like, I cherry-pick bad journalism and make fun of it. But, Fire Joe Morgan does it so well, I literally can’t resist, especially when it involves Bill Simmons. I’ve been reading the “Sports Guy” pretty consistently for five or six years now, and there’s no writer more fascinating or enigmatic. He definitely knows his sports, but he’s a loathsome Boston fan. He’s well read and has an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, but tends to write long treatises on reality TV and other asinine garbage that no sane human could ever watch. He writes from a fan’s perspective, but often breaks sports down to rather cold, soulless patterns and “rules” that suck all the fun out of it. He’s never failed to illicit a reaction from me – I’ve gone back and forth between being a loyal reader to openly despising him (his blatant, unapologetic hatred of Peyton Manning in recent months was particularly obnoxious and really irritated me, and I don’t even like Peyton Manning). His column yesterday was no different; some things were funny, some things were insightful, some observations were dead on – and some things really annoyed me, and for no particularly good reason, I will now make fun of them.

Look, I know Owens is crazy, and I know Parcells has become a full-fledged liability as a head coach. But the Cowboys are loaded on both sides of the ball, they can play on the road, and they're the healthiest team heading into the playoffs. You're telling me they can't get it together for three hours and beat a clearly inferior team?

Yes, I am. The Cowboys are terrible and they’re going to lose. Don’t you watch football? Earlier in your own column, you say this:

Of the newer NFL stadiums, only Seattle's seems to provide a real home-field advantage

Which is true. Are you telling me that Seattle’s fans won’t rattle the inexperienced and highly overrated Romo, the thoroughly insane Owens, and most of all Parcells, who openly appears like he’s given up and ready to retire? The Seahawks aren’t all that good either, but they’ll lose next week in Chicago, so no harm done.

It's been fun to see the Jets fans come out of a decade-long hibernation/depression to unleash taunting "you're going down!" e-mails and phone calls to Patriots fans like myself…
[in reference to the Patriots’ win over the Titans last week] It was an awesome performance. For the first time all season, they looked like the physical, nasty, ball-breaking, smashmouth team that won 21 straight and 31 of 33 during the '03 and '04 seasons. I can't imagine that team losing at home, in January, in a do-or-die game, to an opponent that can't run the ball or stop the run. It's not happening.

This is the sort of stuff that makes me hope the Jets win 100-0, and Brady throws 20 interceptions and gets sacked 30 times. In fact, I hope the Jets get that 100-0 lead in the first half, and just spend the second half doing that rarely-seen thing where you’re allowed to directly kick the ball back to the kicking team on kickoffs, and they just sack Brady three times on each Patriots possession, over and over again, and CBS shows lurid closeups of crying Patriots fans. Good lord, I hate Boston teams.

BET starts running Season 1 of "The Wire" on Wednesday. You're out of excuses.

Look, I’m sure “The Wire” is a great show – many people whose opinions I respect have told me so. But I can’t stand it when diehard fans of a thing – a show, a band, a movie, whatever – get all high and mighty about that thing and belittle people who aren’t as into it as them. I tend to reject such things out of hand. There’s only one thing sadder than a man whose life revolves around watching TV – a man whose life revolves around watching TV and he’s a dick about it.

We know the Eagles finished the season strong and would be a Super Bowl sleeper if there wasn't an entire city of fans expecting the worst from them at all times.

Whether or not the fans believe in the team is completely irrelevant to the team’s performance. Your insistance that it’s somehow relevant is dumb and embarrassing. If you lived here, you would know that we love our Birds to the depths of our being, and that we’re all pumped for this game, and if our own feelings have any effect (which I doubt) then if anything we’re only going to help the team. You only think otherwise because the national perception of Philly fans is… well, speaking of which, Simmons printed a letter about this very thing:

My buddy e-mailed me the other day with the defining quote of the current psyche of all Philly sports fans in regard to the Birds' upcoming playoff game: "If they lose to the Giants this week I will be so emotionally ravaged that I went ahead and bet $56 on the Giants to win straight up. Got +250 on that play to pay out $140, helping to ease the anticipated depression."-- Mike, Philadelphia

I can’t believe people like this represent me to the rest of the country. Philly is a fantastic city, and many sports fans here are perfectly intelligent, rational people, and not panicky gambling addicts, but the national media continues to promote this idea that we’re all rage-filled, self-loathing assholes. It’s kind of like if you were a citizen of a spectacular, beautiful country, rich in diversity and opportunity, and you were represented to the rest of the world by a nasty, arrogant, illiterate, blood-thirsty jackass. Just as a point of reference.

That said, it’s possible that this letter-writer is smarter than me, and knows that the way to get your letter printed by Simmons is to say the most ridiculous, sensationalistic thing you can think of. I should send a letter that tops this one, something like this:

Hey Sports Guy,
If the Eagles lose to the Giants I WILL KILL MYSELF. Seriously, at the end of the game, as the seconds tick off, I will clumsily hack my own throat open with a letter opener. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, all I do is sit in front of my TV, letter opener at the ready, dreading the game and longing for the sweet release of death. I hate myself, almost as much as I hate the Eagles.
Jeremy, Philadelphia

And then I should make some reference to “The Karate Kid” or “Road Rules” or tell some story about a trip to Vegas or a crazy ex-girlfriend or some other nonsense that will grab that Boston loser’s attention.

Nah, I’m just kidding, Simmons is cool. Enough of this silliness for one day, I got stuff to do.

GO EAGLES!!!

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Wednesday, January 03, 2007

You know why I never update this thing? Because a blog is basically a diary, and diaries are lame. I mean come on, diaries? What am I, that comic strip character "Luann"? I mean really, what am I, one of those American Girl dolls? Diaries, pfft.

Also, the way most blogs are written (i.e., badly) disturbs and angers me. People need to start learning how to write before I stab them in the face. So in that spirit, I propose the following list of "blog-speak" that was overused in 2006 and which I sincerely hope will be eradicated from our language forever in 2007. Wait a minute, doesn't Matt Groening do something with exactly the same premise at the end of every year? Eh, I don't feel like looking it up.

BLOG WORDS TO NEVER BE USED AGAIN
Blog
Blogging
Blogger
Bloggest
Bloggery
Bloggish
Blog-Speak
Most Blogginest
Mr. Blogsley
Blogosphere
Blogoverse
Blogoglobe
People’s Republic of Blogland
Blog Valley, USA
Bloggy, the Blogging Frog
Fucking
Awesome
Fucking Awesome
Fawesome
Gawesome
Blog-Awesome
Bl’gawesome
Rad
Rad-Awesome
Rad-Fawesome
Blog-Rad
R’dawesome
Awesome Blog
Blogradawesome
Aweblogsome
Radsome
Fucking Radsome
Google the content (of your rad, fawesome blog)
Blincoln Blog
Bloggity Bloo
Blog-rockin' (as in "Just another one of those blog-rockin’ beats!")
Bloghead (as in "Cube top, squared off, eight corners, 90-degree angles, flat top, stares straight ahead, stock parts, bloghead")
Awesy, the Awesome Frog (not to be confused with "Aussie, the Australian Frog", a short lived Disney Afternoon show from 1992)
Dude
Endy Chavez
Fendy Chavez-some
Dubya

So, for example, if you happen to be a "blogger" and write an entry that goes something like this...

Dude, this fucking awesome blogger told me about last night's Colbert, it sounded fucking rad! Dubya and Rummy are SO NOT FAWESOME.

...I will stab you. Not because of the politics, mind you, but because in an ideal world, bad writers would be stabbed. Doesn't that sound nice?

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