Nick sent me an email this morning that there’s new Woodger in the world, a bun now out of the oven.
So congratulations on the birth of Maddison. 7 lbs 15 oz isn’t a petite baby either. It’s just the way you want them!
A couple older relatives and friends of mine recently got burned by a spam/malware/phishing issue that traces back to desktopdate d0t net. Does anybody have any experience/knowledge of this?
I’ve found this but at least one of the people involved claims to have not clicked on the email, but still had many invites issued on their behalf to the contents of their address book.
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.
As the intermittent availability of the blog has shown, dactyl doesn’t have the chops to be a web server with a significant load. It wasn’t a problem when it was just us… but when the web spiders (particularly fucking Bing) started hitting, it just didn’t have the power to run multiple sql queries to serve up the pages.
So, how to fix it? Well, it’s a situation of “dactyl is dead, long live dactyl!” dactyl.dartmouth.edu might not be able to handle things, but dactyl.whitman.edu can. I changed some files on the old dactyl to send all the blog traffic over to the new machine. The full archives are on the new machine, everyone’s user accounts, everything so it should work.
I’m leaving personal web pages and everything at dactyl.dartmouth.edu.
Basically, everything should just work now and if you type something that’s on the new server, it will automatically take you there.
Now we just need to work on getting some new blood into the system.
And cooking in my little apartment hasn’t been a huge priority, mainly because I’m spending 14 hours a day in my office. However, Kirsten and Sarah were here for the weekend and we discovered something very odd…
My stove has retarded knobs. Or at least the person who designed them was somehow wrong in the head. I would naively expect knobs to be labeled something like “1, 2, 3, 4, etc” (going up to 11 of course) or “low, medium, high”. Something with some logic.
The knobs on my stove go “low, first, second, third, high”.
I’m going to go home now and make some ramen. I’m thinking that I’ll do it in second.
We have previously addressed this item, when one comes across hotness in either an unexpected, unanticipated or unconventional situation, or instead when traditional hotness is encountered in an atypical wrapping.
It is in this second category that I submit the item below:
Everybody expects cheerleaders to be hot, or rather is at least not surprised when cheerleaders turn out to be hot (but don’t forget the importance of community service) – and disappointed when that hotness is not lived up to. But what is extra-, or should we say, sneaky-hot, is when you put a hot cheerleader in 1960’s throwback outfits. They didn’t quite make up for the awfulness of the Broncos uniforms – see below – but it was a good effort.
In a weekend with a bunch of crazy/dramatic sporting events, there have been a lot of heroes and conversely, a lot of goats.
Here’s one of the goats. For the money shot, fast forward to ~1:20 or so.
