The Mets Collapse

I suspect the silver lining is that if you move quickly enough -- you can get some champagne for next to nothing. More on the collapse in due course.

Democratic Rock

In the mid 1980s, a buddy told me that the term "rock" -- as in music -- was as pliable as the term "democratic." He cited the Peoples Democratic Republic of Korea as an example. But for me, "rock" still has some meaning.

Unfortunately for the folks over at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the term "rock" is as pliable as ever.

I never cared for those music award shows because they rewarded sales rather than music performance. Furthermore they were just stupid. Who in their right mind would consider Jethro Tull a heavy metal band and reward them as the best of a particular year? Only the clueless.

So when the Hall nominates Madonna, one gets the feeling that they are as clueless as ever. (Don't even get me started on Donna Summer, the queen of disco.) Madonna was big in her day (late 80s - early 90s) -- and she can probably draw a sizable crowd today -- but to consider her as a rock performer is like telling North Koreans that that they should be happy living in a democracy.

What I'd Like To See...

...instead of these bogus "debates", why don't we have both the Democratic and Republican candidates -- three from each party -- sit around a table and discuss the issues of the day? Something akin to the Charlie Rose show format. Because right now these debates seem to be more about the moderator than the putative candidates. Moreover, we don't need audience participation other than to watch and learn at home.

...football players handing the ball to the referee after scoring and then running nonchalantly to the sideline and defensive players helping the quarterback up after he's sacked. The silly antics we now see distract from the game.

...what's the fuss about HD radio? They advertise that I'll get more stations for free. If the content is more of the same -- talk radio or music stations with playlists as tight as a gnat's butt -- then I'll endure the pablum that I get for free with an ordinary radio.

...no longer paying for the cable I don't watch. I don't watch Lifetime, the Animal Planet, CSPAN-3, or Spike. (I'd add MSNBC to the list but there's something alluring about the weekend anchor, Alex Witt) so why am I paying to have those channels? It's 2007 for crying out loud, we can make this happen, can't we? (Remember the old saying, "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we (add your own thought here)..."

...a fall week free of college football. Shouldn't all these guys get a break to study for exams and for everyone else to do something else rather than sit around a TV during the most glorious season of the year? Geez, now ESPN is showing high school football.

...to find out what the Israelis bombed in Syria earlier this month

...Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy together in a comedy. These guys are hilarious yet they've been more concerned about the paycheck than the script (with the odd exception.) These guys aren't getting younger and sadly, and perhaps I'm the only one, but Ben Stiller doesn't tweak my funny bone.

... a modern day Len Deighton. He wrote terrific spy novels from the the 1960-80s, but nobody comes close today. In an era where the operative phrase is the global war on terror, you'd think we'd get some good literature as a by product

Counting One's Chicks Before...

Wisdom from Michael Wilbon, as of 18 September:

"The Redskins, after dealing the Philadelphia Eagles a serious setback Monday night, are two games better than the New Orleans Saints, who many people picked to go to the Super Bowl, a game better than the Chicago Bears who won the NFC last season, two games better than the laughably pathetic New York Giants."

"The craziest thing, of course, would be to look ahead, but it's difficult not to when the division's new doormat, the Giants, are coming to Washington on Sunday."

After two games, the DC denizens were preparing for the Super Bowl. Alas two games does not a season make. Given the Redskin's second half collapse against the doormat Giants, this may become a laughably pathetic season for the team from Landover.

Belicheat's Ripples

I will be upfront with my animosity for Notre Dame football. Maybe it is the fact that they have been able to secure a national TV contract for the past several years with a substandard product. Maybe it is the annual invite to a Bowl Game – one of the better ones – with a mediocre team. (Maybe it is learning that despite the nickname, they were not Irish after all.)

Anyway, I am a happy camper that the team is 0-3 and is likely to be 0-4 when the sun sets on South Bend tonight.

However, here is where it gets interesting. Their coach, Charlie Weis, was formerly the offensive coordinator of the New England Patriots. In their press release when he was signed on to be the coach, he was described as “highly regarded.” Well if you steal the signals of the other team’s defense, it wouldn’t take much to be highly regarded – would it? Bill Belicheck may have been the cheating mastermind – but Weis was certainly a beneficiary of their ill-gotten luck.

Well he’s in the third year of a six year deal. Obviously, the players he recruited haven’t worked out and ND certainly is not a premier team.

Furthermore, it’s a pretty sad comment, when the radio coverage of ND football on Westwood One begins with highlights from last year’s team. (Ouch.)

Others have speculated that this cheating scandal is just the tip of an iceberg. If so, there’s a chunk of it floating in Indiana.

The Other 1 % Doctrine

Steven Levitt beat me to the punch on Diet Coke's odd advertising campaign which identifies the product as 99% water and 100% taste. (His take is that given the price of bottled water, the 1% of flavoring, isn't that much of a mark up. My apologies if I got it wrong.)

Anyway, I saw the ad at a bus stop in a large metropolitan city. (Curiously, at their website, other ads, but not the one in question, are on display.) The ad had me scratching my head -- something akin to the meaningless "Mustang Two, Boredom Zero" ads of the 1970s for the restyled Mustangs. This is when I think that Madison Avenue has lost its touch.

Back in the 1980s, Coke re-formulated the product and created the ill-fated New Coke. That was a reaction to poor sales and the product apparently tested well with focus groups. New Coke was an unmitigated disaster and was pulled off the shelves shortly after rolling out. In hindsight, they realized that they had a distribution problem, not a taste problem. In short, there's a history of poor strategic thinking down in Atlanta.

Although bottled water is a big business, water - when it's not packaged -- can still be acquired for free.

I don't care much for soda. But if I was going to pay for soda (or 1% flavoring) why not purchase something cheaper? (They all taste the same for the most part, don't they?) So why advertise the fact that the consumer is paying for 1% of the product.

This may not rival New Coke for stupidity. But it's close. Like 1%.

Saturday Shorts

The Patriot Facts.
Some --on sports talk radio mostly -- have suggested that the Patriot's unauthorized use of a camera to steal the defensive signals of the Jets last week is no big deal. Perhaps. (I think it was a big deal because is indicates that you're willing to cheat -- and that speaks to one's integrity.) However, the fine imposed by the NFL wasn't enough to punish the sheer arrogance of Coach Bill Belichick in thinking he was above the law. Next: Expect Belichick to continue issuing non-apologies as some disgruntled fan with a J.D. degree would likely sue the NFL for fraud. The NFL has deep pockets.

NY Times Poor Business.
According to this report, the NY Times offered MoveOn a discount on their ill-advised "General Betray Us" advertisement. (Of course only NYT readers saw the ad; it's exposure was exponentially increased when other media made the ad an issue.) However, is there a link between poor business decisions such as this and the junk status of its bonds. Next: Expect the public editor to roll up and play dead on this.

29 SEP UPDATE: I blew the call on this one.

Job Fair.
I was at a job fair in northern Virginia this week. This was a pretty huge event. Guess who had the longest lines to garner a couple of minutes with a job representative. How about the CIA and the DIA? Interesting.

TZM - DOA?
I saw about five minutes of the new TZM program and that was more than enough. If you go to a restaurant to eat and then leave to go home -- where is the responsibility to sign autographs for the fans as you make your way to the car? Who's the bigger jerk -- the autograph seeker or the celebrity? Thirty minutes of that -- for five times a day? I don't think so.

Republican Candidates.
I like most of them. I don't love any of them. None are ringing my bell or prompting me to put a check in the mail. However, they do make for interesting cabinet selections. Rudy Giuliani as the Attorney General; John McCain for Defense; Mike Huckabee for Housing and Urban Development; Mitt Romney as Treasury Secretary; Duncan Hunter for Homeland Security; Ron Paul for Health and Human Services (he is an MD after all); and Fred Thompson for vice president as long as he will be more an Agnew than a Cheney.

Payne Full Viewing

I saw something truly horrific on TV yesterday and I'm not talking about Britney Spears' embarrassing "comeback" bid -- although the still photographs suggest that it wasn't too easy on the eye. (BTW, Brit, when you're the subject of ridicule -- it's over.)

No, I watching the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. In a change of pace, he interviewed four backbench Congressional representatives rather than the usual suspects. One of them was Donald Payne, a Democrat from New Jersey, who appears to be incapable of an original or intelligent thought regarding the situation in Iraq. To wit:

JIM LEHRER: Congressman Payne, you want a different kind, a larger, a quicker withdrawal than what General Petraeus is suggesting?

REP. DONALD PAYNE: Definitely. The American people want it, too. That's why they elected a majority of Democrats in the House and the Senate in the past election.

You see, the problem was that General Petraeus did not get us into this war. Had he been in charge, perhaps there would have been a different outcome. We were to find weapons of mass destruction. Then it was said, "Well, it's regime change." Now it's that we have to fight al-Qaida, and there were none of them there in Iraq before. They're in Iraq so we don't have to fight them in the United States.

So we see a continual change of why we had the preemptive strike in the first place. And I still even hear, as much as I respect my friend, Representative Wilson, when we get the stretch about 9/11 being perpetrated on us by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. That is wrong, and we continue to try to say that that's what happened.

To these ears, it seemed like a replay of 2004 Presidential election talking points. Putting aside the fact that he failed to answer the question, it appears that Mr. Payne was coached on some of the well-worn (and somewhat dubious) Democratic talking points if for no other reason than to change the focus from General Petraseus' presentation. I'm sure Mr. Payne does wonders for his constituents, but they didn't elect a foreign policy heavyweight.

To his credit, Mr. Lehrer, gently nudged Mr. Payne to respond to his question for a quicker pullout than that proposed by the administration due to the geo-strategic rationale of that's what the American people want.

Mr. Payne's fellow Democrat, Lynn Woolsey from California, didn't seem to be any more enlightened when she noted:

REP. LYNN WOOLSEY: Well, my reaction to both of them is that they're talking about, "Stay the course." And we've heard these stories over and over. And Congressman Payne said the different reasons why we're there, the different missions.

You cannot win an occupation. This is what we're doing: We're occupying a foreign country. We need to give that country back to the Iraqis, give them back their sovereignty, give them back their oil rights, help them in a non-militaristic way later.

But in the meantime, we don't just pull our troops out. We plan and work with them and make sure they come home safely and in an orderly fashion, because that's what the people of this country want.

Listening to her, one gets the idea that "occupation" is a bad word like "neo-conservative" and should be used in describing America's role in Iraq. Trust me, if this was truly an occupation, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Of note, though is their repetition of what the American people want -- conveniently failing to mention what would happen if troops were to precipitously depart from Iraq.

On second thought, it seems that Britney Spears wasn't the only who made a fool of herself yesterday.

K-Mart Follies

So there I'm at a K-Mart. It doesn't matter where as they're all the same. It's lunch time. There's a long line and the cashier does a price check in the back of the cavernous store. (The cashier was a young woman; the customer requiring the price check was a young man -- I think they were checking something other than prices.) The customer next in line goes berserk -- well sort of. He finds the manager to complain but it appears that the manager is recovering from some sort of back surgery as he was missing a spine. After a few minutes, the cashier returns and keeps muttering, "I'm going home; I don't need this." (When folks mutter that -- they're hurting for cash and need the job like they need air and water.) The upset customer is still complaining as he walks out the store. I make my purchase and realize that unless they're giving stuff away, it will be a long, long time before K-Mart gets any of my business.

News flash: Rock stars more likely to die prematurely

The above headline was found in a recent Reuters report. And pity the poor British taxpayer who had to pay for that study -- obviously one conducted by those who never had a rock record in their collection -- otherwise they wouldn't have bothered studying the .

So what now? Guidance counselors to require that prospective rock stars sign a waiver before hitting the garage for their first session?

Here's where it gets silly. They based their sample on 1064 recording artists -- from 1956 to 2005. Nowhere in the article is it mentioned as to who made that list -- and who didn't. It would be nice to know. Take that as a sample for a particular population and you can prove just about anything -- or in this case, that 100 rockers of this group died prematurely. That comes up to the newsworthy stat that rockers are 2 to 3 times more likely to die than the population at large.

Of course, Tim Castle, the reporter has to gussy up the report by identifying some folks who died in their 50s such as Johnny Ramone. (Of course, Ramone died of prostrate cancer, so it's hard to make the connection with that disease and the rocking life style -- so it's conveniently omitted.)

Castle, shows his liberal leanings by quoting a the study's author who suggested that "impoverished" American ex-pop stars may not have any health insurance. (Hence the premature deaths.) It would have been appreciated, if they would bother to name just one.

Perhaps, in the future, these folks could do something meaningful -- like come up with a cure to cancer.