soapbox

I had one of my wisdom teeth pulled out almost exactly a year ago. To figure out where exactly the roots of the tooth were going, they did a panoramic x-ray (which showed that it was a simple tooth to extract) and the surgeon said “did you know that you have a huge cavity in your other top wisdom tooth?” In my visits to the dentist over the summer, she confirmed that I was going to have to get that tooth out too, but since it wasn’t hurting and since the removal would hurt, I put things off. (Also, she wants me to get the remaning three wisdom teeth taken out all at once and that requires more recovery time and my bottom ones are doing just fine.)

So, I could have gotten things taken care of last year, but selling the house and moving too precidence. I could have done it over the summer, but I was watching Sarah full time and just didn’t feel like it. I could have gotten it done a couple weeks ago during “October break”, but I had better things to be doing.

Now though, it’s kind of hurting. Well, more than just “kind of”. My mouth hurts! And, of course, now I can’t get an appointment. The surgeon I was referred to does all of his extractions on Fridays, which would work with my schedule. However, he has to do a consult with you first and he only does that on Mondays and Wednesdays when I’ll be out of town. The semester is rapidly coming to a close though and I don’t want to miss any classes because we need to get through all the material for the semester. Of course, if I’m crying and rolling on the ground in a week or two, I’m not sure how effective of a teacher I’ll be.

Now I’m thinking that I should maybe find a doctor here in Walla Walla. Make an appointment for early Thursday afternoon. Get the tooth extracted, give myself 2 hours to clot, and then hop on the plane home. That, however, strikes me as being somewhat insane.

I’ve never stood in a line for so long before in my life. I haven’t been to concerts with lines for tickets that were that long. When the Star Wars and the Matrix sequels came out, I had friends who wanted to stand in line and got tickets for me.

But today I stood in line for 6 hours, behind about 5,000 other people, to get a shot. It’s a very anticlimactic thing too. Jab, squeeze, done. 6 hours of waiting for a 2 second thing.

The good news though is that in another week or so once the immunity fully develops, my students can sneeze on me all they want and I don’t have to worry about getting Sarah sick. Kirsten can let coworkers sneeze on her. Sarah can let other kids sneeze on her. Gabriella can let other au pairs sneeze on her. So basically if H1N1 turns into a really big thing, we’ll be amazingly happy we stood in line for six hours. If it fizzles out, it’ll be the worst use of a weekend ever.

(Of course, one of the best ways to help it fizzle out is to get vaccinated, so get the shots once you have the chance. That might not be until December, but get it in December then.)

I try to avoid saturating the blog with too many sports-related posts, but honestly dactyl is probably more desperate than Steve Phillips these days, so oh well.

So, on to item #1, Brett Favre. I’m not even going to discuss his million-iteration retire/unretire cycle or the tediousness thereof, I’m just going to say that I’m really glad to not have been a Green Bay fan and that I’m not currently a VIkings fan. Favre is a gunslinger, a Jake Plummer who won a Super Bowl, the kind of guy who can win a game with a great play one game and throw 4 stupid INTs the next game – oh wait, he’s done that several times. This past game against the Steelers falls into the latter category, where just a couple plays after Adrian Peterson destroyed Steelers DB William Gay and illustrated who should have the ball with the game on the line, Favre gave the game away with a dumb scramble/fumble. Live by the Favre, die by the Favre, but it just irritates me when Saint Brett’s faults are ignored/explained away…

Which brings us to the second- and third-most overrated QBs in the NFL, Eli Manning and Ben Roethlisberger, you decide the order. Ben is really really talented but does stupid shit just often enough for him to lose my respect, and Eli just sucks, but they fluked into good teams that played into their individual strengths. The football aspect of this is that the Giants will actually be much better off if the NFC championship game is AT New Orleans, so that Eli doesn’t have to deal with NY winter weather – Brees has the arm to deal with windy/bad weather, and playing in the Superdome will actually work to even the playing field.

Item #4: I fully recognize that any time a team becomes a “dynasty”, a lot of people start to dislike them. Easy to root for the underdog, but once you become the favorite, then you’re irritating/arrogant/etc. And as such, it isn’t surprising to me that a lot of people don’t like the Patriots and thus when they destroyed Tennessee a couple weeks ago (58-0, ouch) there was much self-righteous pontificating and blowharding, decrying the running up of the score and the return to the bad sportsmanship of ‘07. Now, I’m not going to defend the general concept of running up the score, or the intent of Belichek and Brady to humiliate their opponents, but from a strictly football angle, those arguments miss one key element… the Patriots’ defense really really sucks. It was weak in ‘06, really bad in ‘07, and with injuries and trading Seymour, it’s not great this year. And this is what every critique of “running up the score” ignores, that the point of scoring 50 points a game is to (a) keep your own defense off the field as much as possible and (b) to prevent the opposing offense from gaining their rhythm. Additionally, if you can influence the playcalling of the other team into taking more risks (so as to be able to keep up) then you gain an additional advantage, especially if the other team’s roster isn’t designed for a quick-strike/high-scoring pace.

Anyway, that’s no defense for the Pats, I admit that WonderBoy and SuperCoach can be grating, but from purely football grounds, I totally get where they’re coming from. Up until the Titans game, Brady had looked pretty rusty/downright sucky, and so it also made sense for him to get in some more “practice”.

Is it hypocritical to trash Favre, Roethlisberger, and Eli Manning while praising Brady? probably, but that’s the prerogative of being a sports fan right? Objectivity is for PBS/NPR.

P.S. Great quote from my buddy Greg, huge Packers fan. “[Favre] has AP and gives the game away. He is who we think he is. Roethlisberger is him [Favre] 2.0, just as annoying, will be worshipped by home fans despised by others. one difference is that favre is actually pretty smart”

P.P.S. Tomlinson is DONE. Unlike last year where SD didn’t give him as many opportunities as he was used to, and tried to rest his legs by giving Sproles more work, the past couple games Norv has given LT multiple goal-line cracks, only to see the Visored One get stuffed. If you play fantasy fb and can get 80 cents on the dollar, sell! That said, do I blame SDs struggles on LT? no – blame Norv Turner. This is an amazingly talented team hamstrung by coaching that is sub-par both motivationally and strategically. And yes, Andy Reid deserves firing just as much as does Norv. Philly fans, I defy you to convince me otherwise.

This past week was full of awkward moments caused by those stupid little ear-bud-y things that dumb people put in their ears because they are too cool (or too lazy) to hold their phone up to their head, and instead walk around talking to themselves. “Oooh, look at me, I’m busy and important, I need to have a phone in my ear every damn second just in case I need to do some more bootlicking.”

First, I was twice greeted by someone in the bathroom stall next to me, and somewhat surprisedly I give some kind of “whats up” in return, only to get a “dude, I’m on the phone” response. Seriously, who takes phone calls while taking a dump?

Then, leaving work on Friday, I saw some guy that I might have seen in passing a couple times previously and gave him a little head-nod in greeting, and his (apparent) response was “take care.” Now, that’s pretty weird, I think, so I’m left hoping that he was actually on the phone – I couldn’t see his right ear – and the “take care” was for his phone buddy, not me. Of course, I responded to his “take care” with “have a good weekend”, so either way, very awkward.

F*$@ing Bluetooth. Technology sucks.

So, this has been kicking around in the ‘drafts’ section for almost a month now, but it’s been a busy month and the item at hand is still worth a post.  Namely, Boseman, MT coming up with the genius policy of asking prospective employees to “please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages, or memberships on any Internet based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube, MySpace, etc”… and also requiring the listing of the corresponding username and password information! wow.

According to city attorney Greg Sullivan, the city has “positions ranging from fire and police, which require people of high integrity for those positions, all the way down to the lifeguards and the folks that work in city hall here. So we do those types of investigations to make sure the people that we hire have the highest moral character and are a good fit for the City.”

Note that after just a couple days after the story was leaked to local TV, the city backed off the policy, but it’s quite clear that they really had no clue what they were actually asking for… only three lines were provided for data entry, nevermind the privacy issues, etc. But, “moral character” is important stuff, so why not.

This evening we had a prime example of why soccer in the US is struggling to gain/keep/improve its standing in the American sports scene. The MLS “game of the week” was hosted by ESPN2, not a top-end network but pretty much ubiquitous in cable/satellite packages. The game was even moved from 8pm PST to 7:30, perhaps in an attempt to be more family friendly (90 minutes of game time with ~20-30 for halftime) to the national TV audience… but it’s not a national audience if it’s starting at 10:30pm Eastern, so oh well.

But, through bad luck and perhaps poor contingency planning on the ESPN programming department, the previous time slot on ESPN2 was devoted to the Arkansas-Virginia College World Series (baseball) game. Neither one a powerhouse, but when a horrible call from behind the plate (Orel Hershieser was beside himself) in the bottom of the 9th inning sent the game into extras, the network was stuck. So, nobody except for the 73 people who paid for the MLS satellite special package got to see a very entertaining first half between DC United and the Seattle Sounders, a team that sold out for the entire season in something like the first month that tickets were available.

So in a sport mocked for boring, low-scoring games, a 2-1 halftime score was promising, except that nobody got to watch it on TV. Finally, the stupid baseball* game was done and ESPN2 switched over to the feed from Seattle just in time to see a brilliant third goal for the home team. Good stuff, right? just what the network and the home crowd wanted. Then, even better for the producers, DC United scored against the run of play to narrow the gap and set up and exciting finish.

And it WAS a good finish, if you are a fan of open-play soccer with aggression overcoming smart play: Seattle continued to attack even though it was a up a goal, frequently getting caught with too many man up the field, and narrowly dodging an equalizing goal even as it was clearly the better side. Then with 5 minutes to go, the visiting side finally scored the seemingly/cynically inevitable tying goal, setting up a very frantic last 10 (5 minutes of stoppage time) minutes of soccer.

But here’s the other reason why soccer gets slammed – no overtime. A great game, 6 goals, plenty of end-to-end action, but then after a seemingly arbitrary number (90 + x) of minutes the ref blows the whistle and that’s it, game over. 1 point for each in the standings, no overtime, no shootout, no winner. Seattle played entertaining but stupid soccer and wasted two points, DC got lucky and had enough skill to earn a valuable away point, good for them… but many fans, at home and on TV, were probably left with a sour taste in their mouths. All in all, a very ironical and perfectly-titled “MLS Game of the Week.”

* don’t get me wrong, I love baseball. And I love the drama of the double-elimination tourney, I liked watching the “upset” championships of Fresno State and Oregon State in the past couple years, but the sub-pro level of play and the ugly “clank” of metal bats just doesn’t do it for me. I’m sure I’ll get sucked in again this year, but for #&$%’s sake, ESPN was busy reshowing a taped NFL Live on the mothership channel… are we not saturated with Brett Fahv-ruh stories? Do we need to know exactly when/where T.O. picked his new apartment in Buffalo? don’t you think they could have done some switching around? Seriously, bleh.