Where ya been?

I get this question all the time..."hey, I love your blog it's so great but why don't you write it more often." My reply is always a sheepish, "aw shucks."

Then I wake up.

It's OK, no one really cares. I suppose they would if: a) they were well-written; and b) had focus and a point; and c) I was a celebrity, or close to one.

Insert the song, I promise I'll sing along: "la la la, whatever...la, la la, doesn't matter....."

Life gets in the way. I work part-time, coach two hockey teams, drive a kid to marching band practices and competitions, somehow raise all 4 of them. I see 'em off to school every morning and am usually there waiting when they get home every evening. In the space between I try to work or exercise or clean or run errands. Last week I completed over 10 hours of online hockey coach training. This was as fun as watching paint dry. Come to think of it, I have to put some paint up in my basement. And wash some clothes. Oh, and here come the holidays.

Jeee-zus. I think I sound like I need an apron. Take my word for it, though, I wouldn't look good in one.

Toss in the occassional men's league hockey games at 10:45 pm, for good measure. I might as well complain about everything, yes? Depending upon which relative you're talking to, I either do too much or not enough. Either way, I'm screwing up. Well, some things never change.

Leaves. I've been raking up lots and lots of leaves. My job will be ramping up later this week and I've been racing to get as much yard work done as I can before that happens (how Horatio Alger is that? I'm working hard for the reward of ....working more hard). I'm complaining, I know, but I admit that the work beats sitting around watching game shows.

Come by and chop down your own Xmas tree, I'll be around to take your cash....isn't that what the holiday's about?

NFL Logjams, Liars, and Hell to Pay

My segues will suck today, per usual. But hell, I watched Antonio Pierce on Sportscenter this morning attempting to segue out of the Penn State story and into the week's NFL action and he looked very uncomfortable doing it.

At least you can't see me squirm.

Now's about the time that an NFL season gets really interesting. The season's half-way over and you can see the playoff seedings begin to gel while also knowing that there is still a lot of football left for those current frontrunners to fall off. There could be a Dark Horse that bursts into the playoff party and ruins your team's fun.....it's the possibilities that make things fun.

Any question about Green Bay? At 8-0 they're sitting pretty atop the NFC North with the 6-2 Lions nipping (somewhat) at their heels. Who's gonna beat them? Probably not Detroit. Other than Detroit, the NY Giants are the only other team on the schedule that could give the Packers trouble.

Those Giants are sitting atop the NFC East at 6-2, two games up on the Cowboys and (most likely) the Eagles. Yesterday's win against my Pats was pretty big, but I'm thinking that Philly will continue to rise out of their early season malaise and take the division. Forget about Dallas, too self-destructive. The Redskins? Grossman is no soothsayer or Oracle, G'night guys.

They keep telling us that the NFC South is a good division, and maybe the Saints and Falcons are good teams - we have the remaining season to discern that. Tampa's 2010 season was a surprise and this 2011 season has got to be a disappointment, they aren't making the playoffs this year. Carolina's QB is the goods, but forget this year. Go with New Orleans to take the division.

The NFC West is a joke, at 7-1 the easy money's on San Francisco. No other team comes close, at 2-6 Seattle and Arizona aren't picking up 5 games on the 49ers.

Alternatively, the AFC has some real logjams, and obviously all of the teams involved aren't making it to January.

In the AFC East there's the Jets, Patriots, and Bills are knotted at 5-3 with the Pats-Jets game next weekend looming large. The Patriots cannot defend against a high-school squad. The Jets? They're pretty good on D and have the talent to field a good offensive team yet somehow don't. I think Buffalo's a bit of a fluke, their early season success won't continue into January. I'm afraid that the Jets are gonna take this division.

Similarly, the AFC North is the home of badass football, with Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Cincy all sitting at 6-2. The upcoming schedule will sort things out, and no one knows if Cincy's for real. I hear that their defense is good, and see on highlight shows that Andy Dalton is the kids the Redskins should've drafted this year, but ya gotta be skeptical about those Bengals. I'd love to pick the Ravens but they've laid a few eggs (pun intended) the past few weeks. The Steelers are the best choice out of the 3 teams knotted up, but Baltimore's fully capable of de-throning the reigning AFC champs.

There's some division called the AFC South that used to include the Colts. Apparently the Houston Texans are sitting at 6-3 and most likely to win this division unless 4-4 Tennessee goes on a tear.

Nah. Texans.

What is it about the West? The NFC West is awful save for the 49ers and the AFC West is wildly inconsistent. KC, San Diego, and Oakland are 4-4 and Denver is 3-5 and maybe heating up. KC got clobbered by Miami yesterday - nope. San Diego seems to sleep through half of every game (too much beach time?). Oakland might be the best choice here, especially if Palmer gets comfy in the Bay Area.

It's one of those seasons where I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see a re-match of the Packers-Steelers Super Bowl. I can't imagine any other NFC team pushing the Pack out of the picture, unless it's Philadelphia. The AFC is the more interesting conference, it's not a stretch to see Pittsburgh, Baltimore, or the Jets making it to the Big Game.

We'll see.

_________________________

I was about 10 or 11 when I fell in love with football, all thanks to the Redskins being a good team and my grandfather's ardent support of them. I had it planned out. I was gonna play ball locally and in high school then play for Penn State and get drafted by the Skins. It was all figured out.

Well, except that I wasn't good at football.

The Penn State thing? I guess that came from them being pretty good at the time, I can't recall. The luster wore off and that was that.

This weekend, the luster wore off in Happy Valley and their sainted Coach Joe. Mike Wise at the Washington Post wrote a decent opinion piece about this story in today's paper. More interesting, and sad, was the actual Grand Jury indictment of Paterno, Penn State's AD, and pretty much everyone involved in the cover-up of the alleged child sexual abuse of D-coordinator Jerry Sandusky.

In law school, they teach you that "you can indict a ham sandwich." It means that a grand jury hears testimony that is not obstructed by the rules of evidence. There's no defense counsel present to object to anything. So, the allegations are just that....allegations.

Of course, common sense thinking will make the average person say "where there's smoke, there's fire." Usually, I can put on my lawyer hat and intellectualize a case.

......but when there's kids involved, I really can't.

The word is evil. That's the one that comes to mind when you read the Indictment of Mr. Sandusky. You give a person a little bit of power and some of those empowered people will abuse it. He was a respected part of the Happy Valley institution. I'm willing to be that there are encomiums that have been heaped upon his name during some of his teams stirring victories. And, oh by the way, he was so great with the kids.

No, perhaps, we know why.

Paterno and the AD are going to deny direct knowledge even though the indictment indicates that they had knowledge of.....something. I'll never understand how a man in Paterno's position could pass the information he'd been given "up the chain" of command and then believe in his heart that he'd done all he could.

This is so much worse than Ohio State or Miami - that was about money, greed. Whatever crimes were committed weren't anything like the alleged abuse of the young boys at Penn State. If any of this - if even a part- is true......the storied Penn State football program may (perhaps should) become a distant memory.

'cause there'd be hell to pay

Brrraaaaaaaiiiiinnnnns

"I feel so alo-one/

gonna end up a big ole pile of them bones"

Alice in Chains

As you can probably guess I had intended to write this closer to Halloween, but I was reading Colson Whitehead's pretty good Zone One, and because its subject matter was on point with this entry I wanted to finish it.

As I write this, cannibalistic zombie hordes are the metaphor du jour. AMC's excellent show based on the excellent comic-book The Walking Dead. The aforementioned literary effort titled Zone One. Cormac Macarthy's The Road (well, sort-of). Countless bad horror movies that imitate the really good ones (more on this in a moment). Videogames titled Left for Dead or Dead Rising. Zombie hordes are in cartoons from Spongebob to Calvin and Hobbes (ok, that was a long time ago). They're part of our spooky, fear-inducing zeitgeist, like Dracula and Frankenstein's monster - now engrained in our scary repertoire of silly costumes.

Let me back up. They scared the absolute sh*t out of me when I was a kid.

Did you ever read TV Guide? I've always read voraciously (if not finicky), and my parents used to buy it at the store every week. I'd grab it and look for late-night monster movies or cartoons (and little had changed since, I'm sorry to report). One day I blundered across an "article" by Stephen King about his choices for the scariest movies and he mentioned George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead." Better yet, he described the plot and what spooked him - the unending horde of zombies seeking out human victims on which to feed.

Zing! It hooked me. From, "ewwww that's gross" came the inevitable "wonder what it looks like?"

I found it on a late-night show sometime in the '80's and it was a spooky as advertised. I could be a light sleeper before but I spent several nights anxiously planning my escape from the zombies (I knew where my dad's gun was) and trying to be vigilant for the signs of cannibalistic doom (save the last bullet for yourself -I didn't wanna know what it felt like to be ripped apart or munched on while still alive.

The plan was, if I was awakened by the sounds of shambling death, to try and wake up my dad and mom - then get the guns. My dad was in the Guard, I was pretty sure he'd have no problem killing zombies. Of course I'd have to save my baby brother.

My middle brother? Well, if there was time.

Then the neighbors. My friends down the street. Maybe Father Bozell at the church (can't hurt to have God with you, or the closest-best thing). I was a good shot, and I already knew you had to hit 'em in the head from the movie.

Oh, and for good measure maybe I'd try and save one of the girls I liked in class. Then she'd like me instead of ignoring my existence - when I saved her from the zombie doom. Everyone would be impressed with my forethought and how good I was with a rifle and I'd be King of Whatever the Zombies Left Behind ......someday.

What the hell? It wasn't a terrible plan.

Wherever I'd stay overnight I'd check out my plan. When we stayed at my grandmother's place at the beach I was particularly concerned because we stayed on the second floor and there were too many avenues of access for hungry undead. But, on the other hand, we had boats close by and everyone knows zombies can't swim. Alas, however, there were no guns there that I knew of.

[OK, so my plan sucked]

What did I find so scary? I guess the Fall of Everything and the End of all Hope. Something like that. Or the gross idea of being someone's meal. Or, in my twisted 10 or 11 year old mind, maybe I wanted to show humanity how great my Apocalyptic survival skills would be. "Look coach, all you need to do is shoot 'em in the head!" I can be an idiot sometimes. An imaginative idiot, but an idiot nonetheless. [I'm only mentioning in passing my daydream to invent a time machine that would allow me to save Jesus from crucifixion by going back intime with a gun....Freud would've had a field day with that dream I'm sure]

But apparently (deities aside) I wasn't alone, given all of the mass-media that pertains to zombies - it must have captivated other minds than just mine. Back in the early '80's I only knew of George Romero's zombie flicks, Night and Dawn of the Dead (the shopping mall movie). His zombies were slow but relentless and his movies were tense but still had some humor to them. The knockoff movies weren't scary at all, like Return of the Living Dead and some similar-plotted movie where an Egyptian tomb is disturbed and zombie mummies run amok.

Poor Mr. Romero. He invented all this in 1968 with his low-budget flick in Pittsburgh. He lost the rights, somehow (lazy reporting on my part - go look it up yourself) and the movie ended up in the public domain - which is how I ended up seeing it on "Creature Feature" some late evening in 1981 or 1982. I think he's seen some cash since then, and most of the guys and gals who are cashing in on the zombie stuff tip their collective caps to the man - his movies started the whole thing.

The "conventional wisdom" passed down in these mediums suggest that humanity would be wiped off the planet's dry-erase board. When you think about it, though, the center cannot hold and things fall apart (begging your indulgence, Mr. Achebe - your book was tremendous). I nitpicked the zombie hordes, and thus return them to death from their un-death and removed the scare.

It's a completely implausible premise, here's why it's all bullsh%t:

Bugs, birds, dogs, and fungus: In almost all of the movies and books I've seen I never see bugs. Hold up, if there's a dead chipmunk in my front yard one morning it's teeming with scavengers by noon and in a few days mostly chewed up and removed. Crows and vultures are always swarming around the bodies of roadkill. As society breaks down packs of wild dogs would run feral - wouldn't they feast on zombie flesh? But wait, the afficianado says, perhaps the zombie's necrotic flesh is poisonous to animals and insect? I see no evidence of such in anything I've read or watched. The zombie is dead, scavengers would decimate the hordes. If not, then why not fungus? Fungus lives on all detritus - why not necrotic flesh?

Go where it's hotter : in the unlikely event that zombie flesh repelled all other living things on Planet Earth that currently eat dead tissues, the warmer the weather the faster the decay. This is inarguable, flesh decays faster in warmer climates. OK, perhaps the two zombies roaming in the Arctic wastelands would "live" a very long time....anything South of the Mason-Dixon is probably going to decay itself to bones within a year....two years max. And those folks in the tropics? The plague's over by tourist season.

We aren't that stupid: every movie I've seen or book I've read maintains that Man is inhuman towards his fellow Man -that we can't solve something like the fictional zombie plague because we can't come together and work as a united front. It's a cynic's weltanschuung, that I completely reject as a matter of practical application of logic. It's not hard to imagine that some people would be awful to each other, but I think it's more likely that- when faced with a common enemy - people would come together to collectively attempt to fend off the fictional extinction event. And, I'm betting on the human race in any stupid zombie apocalypse. We survived the Black Death. We survived the Spanish flu. Hell, we have government entities using zombies as some kind of disaster-preparedness plan (really? taxpayer funded?).

We'll be fine. Just remember my plan, a gun and a pretty girl. After that, it's clear sailing.

I'd be dead in a day, I know.

Things I don't "get"

Ah, the perils of false advertising. No, this isn't gonna be a blog entry about the lovely ladies I've never had the chance to "get" (a long list) as compared to the list of lovely ladies I've "gotten" (a very, very short list).

Nope, just the musings of a newly-minted old fart. Think of it being read to you in the curmudgeony voice of TV's Andy Rooney.

Metallica's collaboration with Lou Reed, Lulu: I don't get it. Why bands do this is beyond me. I'm no expert on the creative process but when a band's been around as long as Metallica has it's obviously released some gold and some poop. Metallica caught lightning in the proverbial bottle with two fantastic records, Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets....then Cliff Burton died and they've been uneven since then - going so far as to try and "reclaim" their former sound on 2008's not-so-bad Death Magnetic. Some of their post-Justice stuff has been great and some, not so much. I've only previewed the songs on Lulu and am figuring on saving my cash, it's Metallica playing with a spoken-word artist. Lou Reed's done some great stuff with Velvet Underground and as a solo artist, Heroin is still on my playlist as is the less-great Dirty Boulevard, but from what I hear on Lulu he sounds old and angry. Maybe I'm wrong, and the entirety of the album is better than the 30-second clips I'm hearing.....decide for yourself, but I don't understand the "point" of the recording.

Collaborations are nothing new, Jagger worked with the Beatles, etc. At some point in their career some members of Metallica weren't satisfied with just being Metallica (as Keith Richards writes in his book Life, "what's so wrong with just being Mick F-ing Jagger?") and have tried to wear many different hats. Maybe it's part of the aging process, or they were bored with crunching out The Almighty Riffs that they were so good at.

Or maybe they just lost their mojo......

There's no shortage of alternatives if you like metal, though, and the best of the current lot is Mastodon's The Hunter. I'm an avowed Mastodon fan and have been to see a few of their shows (they're playing the 9:30 club in DC in November.....) and they've taken Metallica's baton and run with it. I won't bother naming every song in a pedantic track-by-track review but I will say that the album (with one glaring exception that's weird and sounds completely out of place) will not disappoint. If you like metal, that is. Even if you don't, it's a good example of what's out there in rock music that's worth listening to.

I don't get my neighborhood's high-schoolers. Time was, you got to be 15 or 16 and trick-or-treating wasn't an option. We had a legion of driving-age kids schlumping around our neighborhood begging for candy (well, maybe not a legion). Sure, I understand that there's free candy to be obtained but at some point don't we want these doofuses to get jobs?

Maybe this is old-guy bitterness but when I was 16 I'd had a job for a couple years. My wife did, too, and so did most (if not all) of my friends. I don't recall teenagers being so opposed to the idea of earning money. Kids today seem to only want to sit in front of their computers and consume. Where are my Geritol pills? I seem to have misplaced them. Those kids probably took them....stupid dummies.

I don't get NFL football right now (though I am forced to get the lackluster Redskins, who need several more years of building....not re-re-re-re-rebuilding). Why is passing the football so all-fired great as opposed to a balance between run and pass? Why does "scoring" have to be up? Why can't Theismann and Riggo just come back and bring with them the good old days?

Hmmm....this blog is taking a turn towards Nitwitville.......

Ok, what makes the spectacle of a team passing for 400 yards every game so great? It wasn't that long ago that running backs were as important to a team's fortunes as the quarterback. And the O-lines can't be that different....those guys still must prefer the easier practice of run-blocking than the far more difficult art of pass-blocking. The "new" rules that Indianapolis argued for in 2005 or 2006 (the 5-yard no-contact zone) have made old-fashioned bump and run coverages illegal. I'm no sports blogger, and Sports Illustrated broke this down far more eloquently and in-depth in their annual NFL Preview last August, but I think it kinda sucks. today's game would have no place for names like Walter Payton, Emmitt Smith, and Terrell Davis much less defensive players like Jack Tatum and Mike Haynes. You Redskin fans might recall the awful experience of Super Bowl 18 in 1984, where the LA Raiders played bump and run coverage that removed the Redskins short-yardage passing game....then they stuffed Riggo as well and Game Over. Nowadays with these rules the 1984 Redskins probably win that game, as would the 2001 Rams in their game against Tom Brady's Patriots.

Defense used to win championships, not it's almost a liability. Somehow, Baltimore and Pittsburgh have maintained excellent units in spite of the rules changes. Hey Shanahan....you watch tape on them?!

Speaking of Baltimore, I don't get purple. Ok, the Vikings are purple. So are the Lakers and the LA Kings. Why would Ravens be purple? And those stupid-looking numbers.....I don't get that either. Why does Joe Flacco look a little vacant to me? He's got this open-eyed stare that, when couple with his obvious mouth-breathing says...."duuuhhhh."

Of course, so does Eli Manning but Eli's got an excuse because he's Eli.

How about that snow over the weekend here in DC? Wild and wacky, huh? All of you climate-change apologists and "skeptics" (who must work for oil interests ,or are dangerously retarded) take note. Oh, hold up, it snowed on October 29, 1971 in DC (I have it on the word of my parents whom I met for the first time in a hospital that day). I don't"get" snow in October.

And I was out driving in it all day and I can tell you that DC-area drivers are the worst. There was a doofus hauling a boat over the 14th street bridge and he was driving too fast - thus his boat ended up blocking two of the three lanes. His doofus-ness made me late for my daughter's hockey game, ass. Of course, if you live here you know that some drive too fast in bad weather conditions and others drive like they're racing a terrestrial mollusk home......soooooooooooooooooooo slllllloooooowwwwwwlllllllyyy.

I "get" all of that, but I hate it.

Hey, why is it "cool" to decorate your house with dismembered limbs and gore on Halloween? I don't get that. Is it supposed to be scary or edgy? Or are you guys trying to slowly indoctrinate us to the idea of cannabalism being ok? Sorry, guys, I can't support the cannibal agenda.

Been watching "American Horror Story" and am starting to love it and its attendant weirdness. But I don't get why "Sons of Anarchy" is so universally loved. I watch the show but can readily admit that it's stupid as all hell. It's essentially a male-oriented soap opera. Every episode has these bikers simply wandering into the local hospital for a scene or two. Or there's the "home-based" scenes at their hangout clubhouse or in an actual home. And the dialogue's always something riveting like "we've got to deal with this shit." Whoah! How badass. The show really amounts to a bunch of grown men avoiding growing up by riding motorcycles and subverting law-enforcement at every turn. It's like an updated and slightly edgier "Dukes of Hazzard." Storylines are clearly being dragged out to keep the fish-like viewer hooked. You just know that someday, some friggin' day, Jax is gonna read those letters and make Clay pay for his sins.

It's stupid but it's a guilty pleasure, so I guess I get it.

I don't get lots of other things too, but I think I'll stop now. Excelsior!