Football Odds and Ends

• Spent all day obsessing over not obsessing over ISU @ Nebraska, but it wasn't so bad. They racked up 415 yards and only lost by 2.5 TDs. Stop laughing; it's usually more like 6 TDs when they're in Lincoln.
• Also pleased the BigXII North aren't the pushovers the media painted them as at the beginning of the year; two big wins over teams from the South. Go State!
• Bret Favre needs to get a TD today so I can stop hearing about it. I don't remember Peyton Manning getting this much coverage when he broke a Marino TD record in 2004. But I was living in Kurt Warner's hometown that year; there wasn't much coverage of any QB not named Kurt. And Peyton had the bad fortune of making the TD on the day Reggie White died, and even that headline got deprecated for reports on the tsunami.
  
• I've always liked Kelly Holcomb. Nice to see him starting again.
  

Whitefish Dunes SP

My brother stood me up this weekend to go to a gay rodeo in Sioux City (don't ask, I don't know either), so I took a day trip up to Door County. Overall, I wasn't as impressed by "ZOMG! DOOR COUNTY!" as the propaganda said I should be; Sturgeon Bay seemed like a more expensive, more annoying Michigan City (note to self, schedule trip to Indiana). More rocks. More boutique crap. Less normal working people. A little too smug for my liking. Maybe if I'd had time to go further north...

OTOH, it was very beautiful. It's a good thing I don't have money, because I'd probably have given in to the impulse to buy a llama farm in Manitowoc County or a B&B in Algoma just to be out in the rocks and trees every day.

More photos here.

So much for baseball.

I knew it was going to be bad when I walked in and they handed me a white towel to throw in.

The game itself wouldn't have been so bad, but the people I was attending with don't actually like baseball, they just go to drink heavily and act like assholes (I almost said "act like infants" but the actual infants in our section were very well-behaved). They spent the last two innings smacking each other with beer-soaked towels and screaming obscenities at each other. It's weird; they're fine at bars and parties, and the tailgate was great, but once they get inside the ballpark they turn into complete wastes of carbon.

Also could have done without the row of high school girls behind us who made noises like gilts getting their first visit with a boar when JJ Hardy was up and spent the rest of the time giving each other graphic descriptions of everything they've done with their boyfriends, other boys, and occasionally other girls. Alone and in groups. Holy crap, high school girls do things I had never heard of until sometime after I graduated from kollij. They also left behind several dozen airplane bottles of flavored vodkas when they decamped just before the towel-smacking.

I feel really old.


On the plus side, Bratwurst finally won, and I brought home $55 from the sausage race pool. I don't normally profane the sacred sausage ritual by betting on it, but I let them talk me into it for the last game. Heh!

Bob isn't even his real name.

Best itty-bitty safety in the league.

I'm always weirded out when I realize I'm taller than some professional football players.

Can't live with 'em, can't eat 'em.

I wasn't going to be one of THOSE people, but this is too good to keep to myself. Meet my faithless animal companion, FUZZ. Apparently the asiago-basil foccacia I was going to have for dinner was not to his liking.

I saw this headline

2 Patriot Act provisions ruled unlawful

And I thought "YES! I can buy Sudafed without having to wait for the pharmacist to be in, showing ID, and having my purchase tracked by the stupid government like I'm sort of criminal!"

But no, it's just about a judge in Portland deciding agents of the U.S. shouldn't be listening in on terrorists overseas.


*mutter* 80% of the meth in the U.S. comes from Mexico, and people (in Iowa, at least) with meth labs have their friends steal pseudoephedrine from storerooms or order it from distributors using falsified credentials, so CLEARLY the bipartisan solution to "looking tough on meth" was to tack a bill punishing Heather and her sinuses onto a defense bill. I mean, really. It's so obvious, I can't believe people can still find meth to buy.

I could use a new ride...

Now I'm more upset than usual about being too ugly to get married. I want a house and an SUV, not to mention all that tax-free life-insurance money...

OK, that was sarcasm, but this isn't: The thing that's pissing me off about this murderer's enablers and fans--the Oprah-fication of America--is that they end up tarring all women with the same brush. Women are psychologically fragile! Women are emotional and wholly incapable of logical thought and rational actions! Women can't be held responsible for their actions--they have UTERUSES (uteri?) and that makes them incapable of self-control. Etc. Speak only for yourselves, brain-dead bimbos--some of us are better than that.

And it's WOMEN perpetrating this bullshit--the exact same bullshit beliefs that were used for centuries to keep women from voting, owning property, working outside the home (except for spinsters who were allowed to teach and poor women who had no choices but domestic work, factory work, or prostitution), having their own checking accounts, etc. All those things were debunked in the early 20th century, ladies--do you MIND?

I'm pretty sure sometime before I was born there was a feminism that said women were individuals, just like men, and should be allowed to own stuff and use their talents as they see fit, just like men, but didn't consider men an enemy to be fought and killed (probably 19th century feminism), and didn't consider the uterus to be a source of excuses for personal failings. At some point, I absorbed this attitude from my aunt, my dad, and their family (my mother's still upset I didn't major in elementary ed...just living in a dorm full of el ed majors dropped my IQ 15 points...).

Let's go back to THAT.

I will now annoy Milwaukee natives

by saying that a bronze statue of The Fonz downtown would rock!

I like the di Suervo, too.




What are ya gonna do, send me back to Iowa? :P

Blah

In the multi-cultural sensitive tolerant political correct doublespeak world, there are three classes of people you can still laugh at with impunity:

a) fat people
b) conservatives
c) women with some non-traditional success who aren't lesbian separatists.

(I've got nothing against the lesbian separatists--if that's the life you want then Godspeed--I'm just tired of people assuming that's the life I want.)

I've never complained about any man's paycheck. It's always been the opposite: they find out what I do for a living, and they can't get away fast enough. Maybe if I had looked more like Cameron Diaz than Bea Arthur when I was in college, someone might have wanted to be with me without fretting about earning potential, but the sad truth is that most men with the same level of education and professional experience as I have can afford (and seem to prefer) to date attractive young women, so I have to work with what is available to me.

And what is available falls into two categories. One group rates "providing for wife and family" very highly and considers it a masculine trait; the other group just wants someone to be their mommy and give them an allowance while they sit around on the Internet or watching TV all day. Sadly for me, I find the latter group unattractive, so I'm stuck with the first group, which finds me unattractive because I can afford my own groceries and install my own electronics.

So I don't get to have the life I want. It's my fault; I never should have gone to college.

But I'm getting really, really tired of providing the rest of society with someone to laugh at and look down on and feel smug about.

Trust but verify

Michelle Malkin has a Photo of the Day featuring a woman in a nun's habit being searched by a TSA agent wearing a hijab.

It's a revolting image (causing revulsion, not staging an uprising), but I need to know more about the participants.

a) There have been "peace activists" (yes, those are sneer quotes) who have falsely claimed to be priests and nuns to get extra media attention to their demonstrations. Some of them really did belong to a cult group, but not an order recognized by Rome; some had left the Church in the 60s. At this angle and distance, it's hard to know if this is a woman who has taken vows or a Code Pinko in her costume from The Sound of Music. I assume an actual nun would understand our need to double-check, since she took up the habit to set her apart from the rest of the world.

b) Need to know more about the "passer-by" who took the photo, as well as the person who posted it to the Internet (they appear to not be the same person). I don't put it past any multi-culti sensitive "tolerant!!" moron to stage and/or distribute the photo with the intention of bashing "reich-wingers and Rethuglicans" for our reaction to it.

c) The lighting is really shitty. I couldn't tell it was a hijab; I thought it was a Black woman with straightened hair. It does kind of look like she's wearing a skirt instead of standard-issue pants, though. Which brings me to

d) Thank God I never have to go to Detroit for anything ever. Because I absolutely refuse to be searched by anyone who is not wearing the standard uniform, especially if they're wearing some sort of hood.

It's a joke, people!!

When I say it doesn't matter if you lose every game of the season as long as you beat Iowa, I don't really mean it. *sniff*

Fortunately, my little brother is coming to town next week so I will miss the radio broadcast of the Nebraska game.

Speaking of Ahmadinejad...

I'm vaguely pleased to see there are some students at Columbia who aren't sheeple. I don't think you'd see a group like that at any Big Ten university.

I knew there was a reason I liked Fred.

Here's two.

First, at the NRA convention:

"It's never seemed to me to be coincidental that the places that have the highest crime rates tend to be the places that have the most restrictions on gun ownership in America."

You know, I never felt like I needed a gun for self-defense until I moved to Milwaukee, where of course I can't legally carry one. I got panhandled on the way in to work today, which rolls off fairly easily, but then on the way out of work there was another fight in the liquor store parking lot, and I really don't want to get carjacked for someone's get-away.

Next, Ahmadinejad (I think that's spelled right; I'm really not joking when I say I used all my name brainspace on "Vinatieri"):

Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson said Thursday that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should not be allowed into the country, much less at the World Trade Center site, when he travels to New York next week to address the United Nations.

"I know there would be ramifications in the United Nations" if the U.S. refused to let Mr. Ahmadinejad into the country, Mr. Thompson said during a brief news conference at Dallas Love Field. "I would deny this character a visa. What's he going to do, visit there to get pointers for his own activities? I wouldn't let him in the country."

I wouldn't either, U.N. or no U.N. Actually, I think it's well past time to move the U.N. headquarters to a country that all the delegates don't hate. How about Zimbabwe or Saudi Arabia or Cuba? Everyone loves Mugabe and executing non-Muslims who get lost near Mecca!

(My apologies to whoever had the "U.S. out of U.N." sign up along U.S. 65 near Bondurant, oh, 2000-2001ish...at the time, I didn't understand why you felt so strongly about it that you put up a sign on your backyard fence, but now I do.)

It's always our fault, especially when it's not.

Canada is suffering from an invasion of poor Mexicans who call themselves "economic refugees" so they can collect various forms of welfare.

Canada blames...the U.S.

the suspected source of the problem -- a recently begun crackdown on illegal immigrants in economically struggling regions of the U.S. South.

Maybe if Canada doesn't want so many foreign freeloaders, they should stop giving away so much free stuff to foreign freeloaders. Or they could call up Felipe Calderon and tell him if wants to claim Mexico doesn't stop at the borders, he can come on up to Windsor and take care of his own damn people, since he can't be bothered to do it south of the Rio Grande.

Either way, the problem is NOT the U.S. half-assedly regulating its borders.

Attention cat people

I heartily recommend Two Lumps.

Today's comic is extra-great.

Signs of the Apocolypse

I got a Canadian nickel today, and it's worth 5 cents.

The Detroit Lions are undefeated after playing more than one game, the Brewers are in a pennant race, and the Canadian dollar is worth a dollar. Who are those four guys on horseback out in the parking lot?

I shouldn't even be joking about this with all the Iranian arms and soldiers turning up in Iraq lately and Ahmadinejad on his way to New York. Sigh.

A little football...

I know that between Texas and Tennessee I should really hate Vince Young, but I'm starting to respect the lad. About that Donovan McNabb race thing...

"Black or white quarterbacks, we all go through something because that's the life of a quarterback," Vince Young said Wednesday after Titans practice. "You've got to be able to handle all the pressure. You've got to be able to handle the losses. You've got to be able to handle the media. If you can't handle it, you've got to get off that position and go play something else."

Young is the third black quarterback to start for the Titans franchise. The team won a bidding war to sign Warren Moon to a contract in 1984, drafted Steve McNair with the third pick overall in 1995 and selected Young in the same place in 2006.

Young said he respects every quarterback in the NFL and that everyone is entitled to his opinion.

"That's not my fight to fight. Right now over here the Tennessee Titans, we're trying to go to the playoffs. I can't worry about all the other stuff going on," Young said.

It might help that Young plays for a team that hasn't lost a Super Bowl with him at the helm in a city that isn't known for the hostility of its fans, but I'm pretty sure all those people wearing Brian Westbrook jerseys aren't booing McNabb because he's black.

Hey, American feminists?

Where the fuck are you??

Female circumcision focus of ferocious debate in Egypt

Girls are dying, men refuse to "give up control over women," and you morons are still bitching about George Bush.

I hate writing about my art

It always makes me feel like a fraud. I don't do "profound statements about society/gender/politics/blah blah blah." But I can't write the truth--"I just kinda threw some fabric together because I liked the colors"--because that's not serious.

I don't want to write a dissertation in Gender Studies, Revisionist History, or Malignant Narcissism; I just want to put my name up next to the quilt. But I have to write a statement. And it has to be serious. And in the 21st century, all serious art is moonbat identity politics.

Drives me nuts.

You don't say....

Interesting stuff about Fred Thompson and polls from Jim Geraghty. My favorite part:

Rasmussen also noted, “We just did a poll last night that showed 58 percent of voters saying everything that has been going on with the campaign so far has been generally annoying and a waste of time.”

Can I get a "No shit, Sherlock?"