People not interested in the upcoming Super Bowl can skip this, unless they're actually interested in reading my immortal prose (what? I repeat, what?) concerning the upcoming Super Bowl.
Two things are rather obvious at this point:
1) Outside of his little football world, Tom Brady is a woo-promoting jackass;
2) That's still no reason to go after his daughter in public, though, like one radio host did.
That being said, I'm under the impression that if anyone's going to upset The Belicheck Machine That Ate The AFC it might be Philly. The Eagles are every bit as capable of making life tough for opponents as the Pats are, and the fact that they mercilessly pounded the Vikings 38-7 in a game where the Vikes were favored by Vegas is proof of that. Even so, the Pats have more experience. And they have a quarterback who's incredibly skilled and pulling off last-minute wins even if he is a quack medicine-promoting idiot off the field.
So Pats by 2.
However...
I have shit luck picking Super Bowl winners since I started doing it again in 2006. Last year was a rare exception (Pittsburgh beating Arizona in 2008 was the other one, and I didn't even cover my own spread that time), but considering my lack of luck picking winners in - which years were they, now? - 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 you can at least rest assured that just because I was right about the Pats in 2016 I might not be this year considering my Monopoly money-worthless 2-9 record.
So, Pats haters? Don't give up hope.
Yet.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Dave "Sherlock" Freer, Super Detective
The entire issue of Dave Freer's apparent obsession with the idea that Camestros Felapton is Toby Meadows (another hint that pseudonyms are practically mandatory when dealing with certain types of people online) has been written about more adroitly elsewhere (by Camestros himself, namely here, here and here, and Jim C. Hines, among others), the one thing that caused this to devolve from a almost comical wild goose chase to something repulsive and ugly is the borderline libelous statement that Freer makes (which is quoted in the Hines post) that Foz and Toby Meadows are involved in a relationship "reminiscent... of the situation between MZB and Breen" (i.e.,convicted pedophile Walter Breen and his wife Marion Zimmer Bradley, who was also accused of sexual abuse by her children and several others after her death). This was nothing but a crude, downright despicable personal attack on Meadows and her husband that was made because Freer is apparently so vewy, vewy angwy that he has no problem coming off as Elmer Fudd incarnate in human flesh in terms of emotional self-control.
This would all seem exceptionally pathetic, except that he accused two people he doesn't know personally of being in a relationship that promotes pedophilia. Without a single bit of proof to back that assertion up, of course. And all because one of them had the audacity to disagree with something he wrote. Apparently, Freer thinks that's so much of a crime that it's worth using the rhetorical equivalent of a tactical nuclear warhead to kill a fly. Foz Meadows has responded to this drivel herself, but here's a point I'd like to make:
If anyone can come off as the perfect combination of a paranoid conspiracy theorist and a sadistic turd with a truly fetid imagination, it's someone who turns to defamatory personal attacks when he has no proof for the former but plenty of proof as to the latter. And this, by the way, is over something as trivial and pointless as who the pseudonymous author of a blog devoted to science fiction really is.
If anyone can come up with an example of something as inane as this they've seen online recently, please post it in the comments. I need a cheap laugh. I'm certainly not getting one writing about this.
This would all seem exceptionally pathetic, except that he accused two people he doesn't know personally of being in a relationship that promotes pedophilia. Without a single bit of proof to back that assertion up, of course. And all because one of them had the audacity to disagree with something he wrote. Apparently, Freer thinks that's so much of a crime that it's worth using the rhetorical equivalent of a tactical nuclear warhead to kill a fly. Foz Meadows has responded to this drivel herself, but here's a point I'd like to make:
If anyone can come off as the perfect combination of a paranoid conspiracy theorist and a sadistic turd with a truly fetid imagination, it's someone who turns to defamatory personal attacks when he has no proof for the former but plenty of proof as to the latter. And this, by the way, is over something as trivial and pointless as who the pseudonymous author of a blog devoted to science fiction really is.
If anyone can come up with an example of something as inane as this they've seen online recently, please post it in the comments. I need a cheap laugh. I'm certainly not getting one writing about this.
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Mark E Smith, 1957-2018
Damn it, it's almost as if someone is trying to destroy the soundtrack of my formative years piece by piece.
Luckily, they won't succeed.
Luckily, they won't succeed.
Nassar Gets Dropped Hard
I wasn't expecting anything other than this, really, but the man remained an utterly grating asshole throughout the trial and especially in the wake of the victims' collective impact statements:
But before delivering her sentence, Aquilina read aloud a letter Nassar wrote to the court recently in which he defended his medical care, said he was "manipulated" into pleading guilty, and accused the women of lying.
"I was a good doctor because my treatments worked, and those patients that are now speaking out are the same ones that praised and came back over and over," Nassar wrote. "The media convinced them that everything I did was wrong and bad. They feel I broke their trust. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."
The letter "tells me you still don't get it," Aquilina said, tossing the letter dismissively.
"I wouldn't send my dogs to you, sir," she added.
I would, however, send dogs at him. Attack dogs do need their practice, after all.
He needn't worry too much, though. There are some things even dogs won't eat.
In other news - and in contrast to what the not particularly bright Joel Ferguson had to say on the subject earlier - MSU President Lou Anna Simon did indeed resign from her job.
Win-win in my opinion, but that's of little consolation to Nassar's victims.
But before delivering her sentence, Aquilina read aloud a letter Nassar wrote to the court recently in which he defended his medical care, said he was "manipulated" into pleading guilty, and accused the women of lying.
"I was a good doctor because my treatments worked, and those patients that are now speaking out are the same ones that praised and came back over and over," Nassar wrote. "The media convinced them that everything I did was wrong and bad. They feel I broke their trust. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."
The letter "tells me you still don't get it," Aquilina said, tossing the letter dismissively.
"I wouldn't send my dogs to you, sir," she added.
I would, however, send dogs at him. Attack dogs do need their practice, after all.
He needn't worry too much, though. There are some things even dogs won't eat.
In other news - and in contrast to what the not particularly bright Joel Ferguson had to say on the subject earlier - MSU President Lou Anna Simon did indeed resign from her job.
Win-win in my opinion, but that's of little consolation to Nassar's victims.
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
In Memoriam: Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929-2017
From the New York Times:
Ms. Le Guin’s fictions range from young-adult adventures to wry philosophical fables. They combine compelling stories, rigorous narrative logic and a lean but lyrical style to draw readers into what she called the “inner lands” of the imagination. Such writing, she believed, could be a moral force.
“If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly,” she told The Guardian in an interview in 2005. “Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.”
The writer’s “pleasant duty,” she said, is to ply the reader’s imagination with “the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.”
Ms. Le Guin’s fictions range from young-adult adventures to wry philosophical fables. They combine compelling stories, rigorous narrative logic and a lean but lyrical style to draw readers into what she called the “inner lands” of the imagination. Such writing, she believed, could be a moral force.
“If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly,” she told The Guardian in an interview in 2005. “Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.”
The writer’s “pleasant duty,” she said, is to ply the reader’s imagination with “the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.”
And this is what we call a special kind of Stupid...
From Deadspin, which has been covering the hell out of the Larry Nassar case and continues to turn over many large turds of muck concerning the issue:
In an interview on local radio show Staudt on Sports, Michigan State board of trustees member Joel Ferguson reinforced the university board’s stance that the majority of board members still support university president Lou Anna Simon, saying, “there’s so many more things going on at the university than just this Nassar thing.”
After brushing off the largest sexual assault scandal in American sports history, Ferguson maintained the stunning pace of arrogance by claiming that not only should Simon keep her job, but that nobody on the school’s senior leadership should be held accountable for the roles they played in abetting Larry Nassar’s years of sexual abuse. Calling Nassar a “pervert,” Ferguson posited the former Michigan State employee was “on an island by himself”—a statement that is categorically false, as Nassar was subject to annual reviews by superiors as both a team doctor within the Michigan State athletic department and as an associate professor who taught students within the university’s Division of Sports Medicine and College of Osteopathic Medicine. These same superiors were the ones made aware of numerous complaints against Nassar dating back as far as 1997 and who, at one point, allowed him to continue seeing patients one-on-one in the midst of an internal investigation.
Well, that was lovely, wasn't it?
It's all okay as long as it's in the name of college sports and raising money for the mighty university, right? I can't wait until one of these privileged mopes (and that's precisely what Ferguson is, CEO credentials and all) ends up having to defend a dean or a university president for not acting against a coach or a player who's either a serial killer or an outright child murderer.
I'm sure that'll come off as being a beautiful moment for all of us as well.
In an interview on local radio show Staudt on Sports, Michigan State board of trustees member Joel Ferguson reinforced the university board’s stance that the majority of board members still support university president Lou Anna Simon, saying, “there’s so many more things going on at the university than just this Nassar thing.”
After brushing off the largest sexual assault scandal in American sports history, Ferguson maintained the stunning pace of arrogance by claiming that not only should Simon keep her job, but that nobody on the school’s senior leadership should be held accountable for the roles they played in abetting Larry Nassar’s years of sexual abuse. Calling Nassar a “pervert,” Ferguson posited the former Michigan State employee was “on an island by himself”—a statement that is categorically false, as Nassar was subject to annual reviews by superiors as both a team doctor within the Michigan State athletic department and as an associate professor who taught students within the university’s Division of Sports Medicine and College of Osteopathic Medicine. These same superiors were the ones made aware of numerous complaints against Nassar dating back as far as 1997 and who, at one point, allowed him to continue seeing patients one-on-one in the midst of an internal investigation.
Well, that was lovely, wasn't it?
It's all okay as long as it's in the name of college sports and raising money for the mighty university, right? I can't wait until one of these privileged mopes (and that's precisely what Ferguson is, CEO credentials and all) ends up having to defend a dean or a university president for not acting against a coach or a player who's either a serial killer or an outright child murderer.
I'm sure that'll come off as being a beautiful moment for all of us as well.
Thursday, January 4, 2018
At least the U. of Arizona did the right thing, for once
...unlike either Penn State or Baylor, who seemed utterly incapable of getting rid of some of their baggage.
Ah, Rich Rodriguez. We hardly knew ye, apparently, and it's too bad that we eventually did.
Ah, Rich Rodriguez. We hardly knew ye, apparently, and it's too bad that we eventually did.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)