I don't care if you do think it's effective - only a sick person, removed from the reality, would be "proud" of torture http://bit.ly/aincKU3 hours ago
I declared it over prematurely a few weeks ago, but in the end I was right anyway. This post-Super Bowl = no playoffs pattern is a pretty bizarre one, but this is officially the third time the Steelers have pulled it off. (See also 2006 and 1980.)
The team felt out of Pittsburgh-style balance a lot this year – poor running performance in many games, and even stranger, poor defense. (Aaron Smith’s and Troy Polamalu’s injuries clearly played into that, but can’t explain all of the defense’s frequent fourth-quarter collapses.)
I’ll wait to see how things look in the off-season, but they have a lot of aging players these days, and that makes me nervous for 2010. Regardless, Pittsburgh sports don’t get much better than 2009, and now’s the time of year to become a full-time hockey fan again.
While slight, there’s still a shot for the playoffs. It’s pretty pathetic that the Super Bowl champs are one of those “Denver has to lose, then New York has to lose, and maybe Houston or Baltimore … and THEN we might get in” teams, yet that’s where we are. A dude can hope.
I’m obviously pulling for the Steelers next weekend, but shoutout to Miami’s two (!) Woodland Hills H.S. grads in the lineup — Jason Taylor and Lou Polite.
Big ups to my favorite NFL player from back in the day, Rod Woodson, who was inducted yesterday into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. (Which is, as Tom Landry used to inexplicably say in the commercials, in “Canton, Ho-i-oh”.)
When I was 10 or so, I used to mail off baseball/football/hockey cards and player photos now and then in hopes that one would come back with an autograph. I have to wonder if kids still do this, but I hope so, because it’s a lot more successful than standing outside the players’ entryway in a giant cluster and waiting for someone to walk by. I sent a team photo of the 1989 Steelers to Rod, and lucky me, a few weeks later it showed back up at my house signed “Rod Woodson #26″. It was tacked to my wall for many years, so in my mind, Rod Woodson has always been a chill dude. That was true even though the nachos at Woodson’s All-Star Grille were nothing to write home about — I’d say he was more cut out for interceptions than the restaurateur life.
In America, this could work to an extent, because News Corp.’s two big properties here are the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, both outlets with a dedicated (read: rabid) readership that turns there for a specific take on things that really speak to them. But outside the U.S. and for most of the company, I think this is a really bad idea: I don’t see anybody paying to access Sky News online, or junk tabloids like The Sun or New York Post (American, but more reminiscent of a British or Australian News Corp. publication).
I don’t think the blanket approach is a good way to go, and this type of drastic change should have been evaluated on a per-publication basis. (Maybe it was and they went with this anyway, but that would be puzzling.) TIME.com tried this when I was there, and it was a big failure — TIME is going for such a wide volume of readers that they don’t create a really targeted, “I need my fix” demand, and Sky News isn’t exactly media crack, either. Even the NY Times couldn’t pull this off with their opinion section, and that’s at least at the heroin-level of punditry.
I read an opinion piece in the Washington Post criticizing the Obama-as-Joker poster, in which the author argues that the poster is playing on racial fears and says that this poster isn’t as effective as the “Hope” one from the election.
That seems wrong on two counts. First, even the article itself takes a way long rhetorical path before it can make a connection between the Joker and racial fear. The Joker has always been a white guy, except on the ’60s Batman TV show, when you could possibly say he was sorta-Latino thanks to Cesar Romero. This article just doesn’t convince me that there’s anything about the Joker that links to blackness at all — if you want to break this Joker dude down racially, Heath Ledger clearly depicted him as a source of random violence, a.k.a. terrorism, and I’d say there’s a defined ethnic group that has a clear monopoly on being considered terrorists. Also, the Joker is a sociopathic serial murderer, and “weird middle-aged white guy” is the depiction that immediately springs to mind with that term.
Second, the Joker poster is totally blunt, but that’s not really ineffective: the great bulk of people are going to think, “Joker bad and socialism bad, so Obama bad”. I’m already seeing it as online avatars, so clearly it’s blunt enough to work on some level. You could get into the fact that probably 70% of people who dislike socialism have any knowledge of the topic besides negative word association, but the point is the poster ties the president pretty effectively to two things Americans dislike. Fair or not, it’s effective, and it’s not racist.
The Chicago Tribune launched a redesign today. I’m struck first off how much the top navigation looks like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette site. (Check out the two local-newspages, which for the Trib is the one I read the most.) But they did do a good job of cleaning it up a bit, particularly the headlines toward the bottom of the local-news page that used to get lost with no context, a.k.a. subhead, and the fact that the flyout links under the top navigation bar seem to be pretty flexible for spotlighting new stuff.
My pick for Michael Vick’s ultimate destination: the Oakland Raiders. Here’s why:
My iPod started acting ill today, and now I’m in the middle of restoring the factory settings. Since I have to completely re-upload all of my music, photo and backed-up files, I got some time to write. First, the news:
• At first today, it really annoyed me that the entire media-swilling world spent the day rending its garments and pulling out its hair over Michael Jackson. (It’s 10 p.m. here, and the funeral is still the top story on CNN.com.) But then I thought, “Parts of the U.S. have been doing this for more than 30 years for Elvis, so this is really nothing new,” and I felt better about our modern era — or worse about past eras, I can’t decide.
• I’ve been asking people for a percentage: how many people watching Michael Jackson’s funeral know who Robert McNamara is, and they have to understand that he was far more historically important than MJ. The common response is less than 1 percent, but I would think it’s actually up around 4 percent. Call me an optimist.
In fairness to that other 96 percent, I did call him “George McNamara” at lunch today. But to burnish my own history-nerd credentials with an even bigger bit of nerdness, I was also thinking of McGeorge Bundy at the time.
If policy now tilts too far toward deficit cutting, some argue, that would treat job creation as an option the nation somehow cannot afford, in contrast to “must haves” like tax cuts for wealthy Americans and unpopular foreign military entanglements.
True, but you also can’t ignore the fact that those tax cuts and unpopular entanglements were put in place, and now they are indeed making the job creation that much more financially difficult. I fall reluctantly in line with the spending advocates — I don’t think now is the time to pay down the deficit, because government spending at the moment really is a big portion of the money flowing into the economy. But if things do turn around, raise my taxes. It sucks, but it’s better than betting our economic livelihood on the whim of the Chinese government.
And on to frivolous stuff:
• I’m sorry to see the Penguins lose Rob Scuderi to the L.A. Kings, but they were right not to pay what the Kings paid. The dude is good, but not $13.6 million good.
• I got a Lollapalooza ticket for Sunday, August 9, hombres. Jane’s Addiction original lineup? I am hella there.
• This past Friday I went to see The Hangover. Verdict: four phats. Definitely some gross humor; definitely a weird Zach Galifinakis; and most likely worth seeing. (Though don’t take your parents.)
Even stranger, the movie featured both Heather Graham and Mike Tyson in prominent roles. Why is this strange? Those two were both guests at a 2004 arts-benefit party at the Guggenheim in NYC attended by yours truly, who by all rights should not have been there in the first place. (I’m pretty sure this Heather Graham photo is from that very night.) Mike Tyson is somehow even scarier when he wears fur, and I even made eye contact with Ms. Graham — or as I have no right to call her, Heather — for a full second.
The moral here? I really should have been offered at least a cameo appearance as the third part of that party trifecta, Hollywood.
