So, our long national nightmare drags on. The Patriots are still undefeated. The Giants did manage to play surprisingly well. I have never had much faith in either Tom Coughlin or Eli Manning, so I went into the bar to watch last night's game without a lot of hope. And the Giants played just well enough to get me excited, only to pull the rug out from under me when they eventually collapsed.

There are some encouraging signs. Tom Brady set the single season passing TD record. Randy Moss set the single season receiving TD record. The Patriots set the single season scoring record. And they became the first team to go through a sixteen game regular season without losing. And in all of that I can still find some positive aspects.

First, the last two QBs who set the single season passing TD record did so in seasons which did not culminate in championships. Then there's the fact that Jerry Rice set the single season record for TD receptions in a season in which the 49ers didn't win the Super Bowl. And the last two teams that set the single season scoring record (the 1983 Redskins and the 1998 Vikings) failed to win the Super Bowl. Not only that but the suffered embarrassing losses (the Raiders blew the Redskins out in the Super Bowl and mighty Minnesota lost to a terrible Atlanta team at home in OT in the NFC Championship Game).

It is true that this season for the Patriots has been utterly without precedent, from the head coach being mired in the most inexplicable scandal since Watergate (why, by the way, did Nixon even bother breaking into the DNC offices? He went on to win 49 states, were his preliminary polling numbers that out of whack?) to the 16-0 finish. But only one team has finished a regular season undefeated and gone on to win it all since the days of the Decatur Staleys and a ten team league. That was the 1972 Dolphins. There were two Bears teams in the late 30s and early 40s era that went undefeated but lost the NFL Championship Game.

I guess it depends on perspective. One can see history and karma being full square behind this Patriots team, or one can see history and karma setting a massive ambush for this mob of cocky nitwits. And based on the crowd at the bar last night, I get the sense that very few people deserve a comeuppance more than Pats fans. I actually overheard a guy at the bar refer to Mangini as "Mangina." And he seemed to be one of the more enlightened and articulate Pats fans in the place.

Far more vexing at the moment was the crime against aesthetic sensibilities perpetrated by the Dallas Cowboys this afternoon in the nation's capital. What the hell happened there? Did Jerry Jones forget the shipment of Diet Pepsi Max? Did he finally grab the headset from Jason Garrett and take the helm? I know the weather was frightful, but with the way they played you'd think that none of the Cowboys had ever seen rain before in their lives.

Having said that, I am not too nervous about their chances to advance to the Super Bowl. After all, most of the same people who are hyping the dangers of facing the Redskins in the playoffs were sitting there around Thanksgiving time telling us exactly how dangerous the Minnesota Vikings would be in the playoffs. Funny how that ended up working out these last few weeks.

I suppose it is unfair to dismiss the Vikings at this point. After all, they do still have the potential to surprise a few teams this postseason. I imagine they just might be able to rush onto the field in Seattle or Pittsburgh as though it were Wrestlemania. Or they could really impress the other guests at whatever resorts they will visit while the teams that actually made the playoffs are busing playing this January.

I would like to see the Redskins win next week. Even before I earned the ire of a few losers who root for the Seahawks, I didn't much care for the team. I just didn't like the way the team and the fans reacted to the bad calls in the Super Bowl two seasons ago. It's not as though they would have been so interested in the pure technical art of officiating a professional football game had the calls gone in their favor. Plus Matt Hasselbeck is a bald whiner and a proud product of Boston College.

I just don't see it happening. Todd Collins has been a great story so far and they have the sympathetic angle covered because of the tragic death of Sean Taylor. But that sort of thing only takes a team so far in the playoffs. I remember back in 1991 when Mike Utley was paralyzed playing for the Lions and his thumb up gesture as he was carted from the field galvanized the team for its stretch run. They made it all the way to the NFC title game, but it all came to a crashing halt against the Redskins under the first Gibbs administration.

Incidentally, that was also the year that the Falcons latched on to the MC Hammer song To Legit to Quit. Of course, like so many of my digressions, this has no real point. But they rode the momentum of that dreadful song and the pointless human interest story it generated for nearly two months. Fortunately, they rode the momentum right into the divisional round in old RFK Stadium and the Redskins crushed them 56-17. I really don't know why I bring that up, except that it is on my mind right now, and (at least to me) moderately amusing.

What really concerns me about the Redskins going forward is their defensive backfield. This is a trifle indelicate, considering I've already mentioned that their Pro Bowl caliber safety was murdered in the not too distant past. But I just don't see them being able to contain the Seahawks vastly overrated group of wide receivers. Stopping the Cowboys today, with TO on the sidelines and an understrength Terry Glenn trying to get some game action prior to the playoffs in a driving rain storm is one thing. Holding down Bobby Engram and Nate Burleson in front of the even more massively overrated 12th Man is a whole different story.

I will, I think, be posting more about the playoff matchups as we get closer to game time next weekend. I also have to collect my thoughts tomorrow to see if I can find a way to talk myself into a plausible scenario which ends in Illinois beating USC in their first bowl game since 2001. It's definitely doable, but I have to consider the ramifications of the SIRSN jinx, which has claimed more victims in the last 18 months than the SI jinx has in its lifetime, I think.

So, Christmas is finally over. And it couldn't come soon enough. I must say, I got everything I wanted. Mostly because I didn't really want anything. But there is nothing like a nice simple ambition like that if you don't want to be disappointed.

There are two stories I think need comment, or at least I feel like commenting on, since nobody (at least I hope) really needs to know what I think about anything. First, is a nice positive story that hasn't gotten nearly the attention it deserves. As a frame of reference for how little attention it has gotten, the event took place in 2004 and I just heard about it this afternoon.

In the email I received, was a story. According to it, Denzel Washington was touring a US Army medical facility providing long term critical care to servicemen and women injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. When he was shown the Fisher Houses, in which family members of the wounded men and women can live to stay close to their loved ones, Washington reportedly asked how much a facility like that cost to build. When he received his answer, he took out his checkbook on the spot and wrote a check to cover the cost of construction.

The story, like so many received in so many emails, seemed to good to be true. So I did some checking up on it. And there are some embellishments in it, but it is, in the main, truer than most. Washington did not produce his checkbook on the spot, and the amount of his donation is not known, but he did provide a substantial donation to the charity that constructs Fisher Houses.

It is still refreshing to read about a celebrity actually doing something beyond vaguely criticizing the current administration and trying to forcefeed their political views (if their opinions can be called that fairly). None of us really do enough to support America's military and their dependents at home, myself included. I realize that a lot of us want to do more, but are touching capital for expenses like rent, food and utilities ourselves.

More praise should be heaped on Denzel Washington for his outstanding generosity. Perhaps, as a result, more wealthy Americans could be influenced to follow suit. Far better for them to do the right thing for the wrong reasons than to do nothing at all. No one wants to see Americans killed or wounded, but protesting the war and criticizing the President. Even electing a candidate who will push for a quick withdrawl from Iraq or Afghanistan will only accomplish so much. Even if no more troops are hurt, what will happen to those who have already been maimed? If recent American history tells us anything, it's that the American people will try to forget this as soon as possible.

But this is getting a little too serious for this blog, and dangerously close to the political. There are other, more responsible individuals who ought to be taking care of these matters so I can waste my time and yours ripping Dan Shaughnessy for one of his more pointless columns. Today, the CHB tells us that he's betting this is Jim Rice's year for induction into the MLB Hall of Fame.

Although I don't know why I should have expected anything different from a writer and thinker of his caliber, I'm still a bit surprised that so much ink was spilled on an argument that defeats itself. Or would, if Red Sox Nation were capable of rationally analyzing a situation like this. The real reason, according to the CHB, that Rice ought to be in the Hall of Fame is that he was the most feared hitter in Major League Baseball from 1975-1986.

I have made my views on that subject quite clear. I cannot understand how Jim Rice with his 382 career home runs in a much smaller stadium, hitting in a deeper lineup, playing in the American League can be considered to have been the most feared hitter in baseball when a third baseman for the Phillies hit 548 career home runs between 1976 and 1988. It just doesn't work for me. But let's leave my opinion on that subject aside for a moment.

The argument that Jim Rice was the most feared hitter in baseball from 1975-1986 should have no merit in a Hall of Fame discussion. It is totally, completely and utterly subjective. We are 20 years removed from the era in question, relying on the memory of baseball people and writers who, let's face it, aren't exactly a murder's row in the American intellectual scene, at least not since guys like Grantland Rice and Ring Lardner passed.

And the notion that the Mitchell Report has paved the way for Rice to go to Cooperstown is laughable. If Rice's 382 home runs prior to the steroid era are worthy of induction, then how do we exclude Dale Murphy, Harold Baines and Andre Dawson from consideration for Cooperstown, but roll out the red carpet for Jim Ed? They all hit more home runs. They (with the possible exception of Baines in a few years) played for teams that were worse than any Red Sox team in the Rice era.

I didn't particularly understand the connection between Rice potentially making the cut for the Hall of Fame and the posthumous award being given to the late Larry Whiteside. Larry Whiteside wrote about a lot of sports stories in his career. Simply because he covered baseball in the town in which Rice played doesn't mean an immortal hand or eye has framed this fearful symmetry (with apologies to William Blake).

The real story is that the Jim Rice for Cooperstown movement is little more than a bullying effort by a small-minded pressure group. Red Sox Nation has decided that Jim Rice acquired merits in retirement that other players worked an entire career to earn. And if Rice is voted into Cooperstown it will be because Red Sox Nation had the muscle to accomplish what ought to have been impossible.

Somehow, Red Sox Nation managed to shift gears from loveable (at least in their own twisted world view) losers to despicable bullies in the blink of an eye. Cubs fans haven't been able to guilt (I realize that the Oxford English Dictionary might not include guilt as a verb, but then how many limeys have seen This Old Cub) enough voters into taking Ron Santo into the Hall of Fame. And I hope Red Sox Nation won't be able to bully Rice into Cooperstown, either.

In other news, tomorrow is the 28th of December. It's a day of limited significance. Unless, of course, your a BC fan and you get to watch your team face the Michigan State Spartans in the Peaches and Herb Memorial "Reunited and It Feels So Good" Bowl. Now, there are some who might attribute this hostility as the carping of a disappointed Notre Dame fan.

Trust me, it's not. I know BC fans can't grasp my position with their feble little minds. But it's better to go 3-9 than it is to win the Who Gives A Damn bowl for the 9th year in a row. Yeah, ND hasn't won a bowl since Newt Gingrich was whispering about a fevered dream called the Contract With America. But it's better to lose the Orange, the Fiesta, the Sugar and even the Gator Bowls than it is to win a game that's going to be trounced in the ratings by the Days of Our Lives. And maybe one day, when BC makes it close enough to the big time to play on December 30th, or even, God willing, New Years Eve, BC fans might start to grasp my point.

I know I really ought to post more frequently, but I'm feeling very depressed. The damn Patriots keep winning. I was eliminated from the loser's bracket in my FFL playoffs by a cat who looks like the stunt double for BlackAdder. Plus, I really hate the holidays.

So many things about Christmas really bother me. First, there's the dreadful weather that we've been having lately. One day, I might understand why 88% of New Englanders can't drive in the snow. For the love of God, we live in a region that's almost assured of two to three storms of over ten inches in the course of a given winter, even in spite of Al Gore and his global warming.

Then there's shopping. I hate going to stores. I hate picking things out for people, especially when I'm not entirely sure what they like. I mean, it can't be my fault that I am self-involved and cheap, right? Above all, though, I hate shopping because it always involves two of my least favorite things - waiting in line and dealing with people.

But what really bothers me most at this time of year might seem like a small thing. I have no truck with atheists who celebrate Christmas. That drives me right up the wall. What kind of person celebrates the birth of somebody else's Messiah? It's bad enough that Christians participate in the materialistic sham that really hasn't honored Christ the way He ought to be honored since Charles Dickens was roaming the Earth writing on repentant misanthropic misers. But to have people who don't believe in Jesus celebrating His birthday (even though we don't really know exactly what date he was born) is just one more of the things that make this time of year fall short of expectations.

But this isn't a blog about general societal decay. Or at least it's not supposed to be. Another reason for my extended silence (this time) is that I've been terrified into silence by a group of Seattle Seahawks fans who stumbled across my evaluation of Matt Hasselbeck and didn't find it to their taste. I must admit that I didn't harbor great expectations with regard to the intelligence of Seahawks fandom. But somehow they managed to fall short of those low standards.

I particularly enjoyed the comments accusing me of being just another Patriots fan. Even leaving aside for a moment my long track record of anti-Pats posts, the particular item in question that stirred up this tempest in a tea cup started off with words to the effect that sometimes I wished I were ignorant enough to be a Pats fan. Then again, if Seattle folk were bright enough to pick up on irony and sarcasm, then they probably wouldn't live in Seattle and rip off traditions from middle of the road colleges like Texas A&M.

I guess this means that the city of Seattle and perhaps even the state of Washington are now closed to me. So you have to forgive me for grieving in silence for so long. My sources inform me that the state of Washington is full of a horrid mixture of hippie tools in Birkenstock and backwoods survivalist libertarians. With a grouping like that, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that I'd need a passport to get there from Logan. At least they can get angry with me to distract them after the Hawks exit the playoffs in the wildcard round.

I thought that the Pats were very lucky that Cleo Lemon apparently gets a bonus for each sack he takes. He must, what with the way he refused to consider throwing the ball away at any point in the course of the game. With the defense forcing four Patriot turnovers, there were plays that a remotely competent QB could have made. It might not have been anywhere near enough to win the game, but perhaps Miami could have challenged the Pats a bit more than they did.

I thought the game of the week was the Minnesota-Washington matchup tonight. For the last few weeks, I've been force fed a line of nonsense about the Vikings being a scary team come playoff time. Perhaps if they had fared better against Green Bay and Dallas earlier this year I might have been more likely to swallow it. There's no way I'm buying that after the Redskins dismantled them.

With Adrian Peterson, the Vikings do have the makings of an explosive running game. I know that seems a strange way of expressing that idea, what with the fact that he's only a rookie and he broke the single game rushing yardage record against a Bears defense that hasn't completely eroded yet. But he wasn't terribly effective before he was hurt against the Packers a few weeks ago, and the Redskins did a decent job against him tonight.

And it's true that Minnesota can stop the run, at least according to the stats. Only three teams have rushed for over 100 yards in a game against Minnesota this season - Green Bay, Dallas and now Washington. Unfortunately for the Vikings, that list consists of at least 1/3 of playoff bound teams in their conference and maybe 1/2 of them (if Washington can beat Dallas next week).

This loss is particularly bad for the Vikings because unlike Dallas or Green Bay, Washington isn't particularly good. While Romo and Favre are without question light years ahead of their "peers" in the conference, the Redskins started a guy who is 36 years old and ten years removed from his last NFL start. The Redskins can do a lot of things on the football field, unfortunately they don't really do any one thing tremendously well.

So now Minnesota is fading away in the playoff race. They aren't out of it, but they do need Dallas to beat Washington on the road. And unless Wade Phillips is dumber than a bag of hammers, Romo won't play a lot (if he plays at all) and Owens should be out. That leaves the immortal Brad Johnson starting in his old stomping grounds. Seems like a safe bet that Washington will be the final playoff team this season, doesn't it?

Since the title of this blog would indicate that it should be baseball themed, I have a baseball story to pass on to you. I imagine you must have seen it by now, but I feel I ought to complain anyway. Sam Zell, billionaire and the second biggest moron to own a professional team (behind the Benefactor), intends to divest himself of the Tribune Company's crown jewel (the Cubs). Along the way, Mr. Zell is considering selling the naming rights to Wrigley Field.

Can you believe that? Wrigley Field ought to be sacrosanct, but not in any kind of blasphemous sense. I am always running down the current owners of the Boston Red Sox for finding new ways to exploit the ignorance and gullibility of their fan base as they extort Red Sox Nation. But to their credit (even though I feel bile rising into my mouth as I write this), at least they haven't pimped out the naming rights to Fenway Park. What a world.

For those of you who braved my insulting rhetoric about atheists (and agnostics, I suppose) and the Seattle Seahawks, I would like to wish all of you a Merry Christmas, even though I probably won't have one myself. I may post tomorrow, if anything grabs my attention. But if I don't, you have my holiday wishes. And a warning. Don't be stupid, don't drink and drive. And I'd like to wish all of the American military personnel and our nation's veterans a Merry Christmas, and God willing a safe one too.

I had intended to post about the inconveniences of holiday travel and a bit on the Celtics-Pistons game this evening. And then I checked email and looked at some of today's headlines. From that brief venture, I have come away with the conviction that Curt Schilling does indeed intend to seek elective office after he retires from professional sports. And thankfully, according to what ought to be the first law of democracy in practice, whatever benighted muckers elect him to represent them will get exactly what they deserve.

Schilling was recently quoted calling on Roger Clemens to give back the Cy Youngs he won since 1997 if Roger cannot clear his name in the wake of the Mitchell Commission report. I don't know if they taught Curt this one little point in any of the courses he's taken on the way to becoming the self-proclaimed voice of truth, justice and the American way, but a person is held to be innocent until proven guilty under due process of the law.

This isn't an American concept. This concept predates the founding of the United States by over 570 years. It predates the first permanent European settlement in North America by some 370 years. It comes from the Magna Carta, which (to put it in terms the average Red Sox fan can understand) is basically the OG of documents establishing the legal tradition for the English speaking world.

I will admit that I have been otherwise occupied over the last several days. Apparently, I must I have missed the proclamation which handed over ultimate authority over matters of common and constitutional law to a cat who looks like Humpty Dumpty and is one trip to the DL away from being a has-been.

So far, the chain of evidence against Clemens seems to include a former trainer who is, himself, under federal indictment and the admission of Andy Pettitte that he used HGH on two occasions. Now, I'm not a legal scholar, but it seems to me that extrapolating any illicit use of banned performance enhancing substances on Clemens' part must then rely on hearsay and conjecture. If I'm not mistaken, it can be devilishly tricky to build a case in a court of law on hearsay and conjecture, what with the fact that that sort of evidence is (at least de jure) in admissible in a court of law in this country.

Provided, of course, that the rule of law still rules in this country, there is no way a responsible court can punish Clemens. If no responsible court can punish Clemens, then there is no reason on the face of God's green earth to take the Cy Youngs back from Clemens outside of the fact that Curt Schilling has opened his mouth and spoken with the voice of God.

If Curt Schilling had an IQ sufficient to chart on any sort of reasonable test, perhaps he'd have realized by now that he does more damage to his image each time he flaps his gums on this sort of thing. Something tells me that John McCain might not be to thrilled that one of his foremost celebrity supporters just can't stop being a total douche for the benefit of the media. Perhaps Schilling should do us all a favor and abandon public life in favor of playing more Everquest.

Hell, he's already half a LARPer at this point. He might as well go all out and dress like an Orc and run around with the world's biggest tools and argue over who hit whom with what in some sort of hideous live action version of Dungeons and Dragons. The only reason I'm not demanding that he do so instantly is that it would make the CHB a very happy man, and that's not good for America.

I also find myself once again defending Terrell Owens. I think it's a good thing that TO suggested that Jessica Simpson give Texas Stadium a wide berth for the time being. Now I might be a very cynical person and a terrible human being, but I have the nasty suspicion that Jessica Simpson just might be in this budding relationship with Tony Romo to see and be seen more than out of any altruistic romantic motivations. But that's just me.

Consider this: what has Jessica Simpson done lately? Ostensibly, she is a singer and an actress. The only problem - she hasn't been in a film or released an album in a while. Of course, I could very well be wrong there. I didn't see Dukes of Hazzard or Employee of the Month, so I haven't been following her film career. I also pay very little attention to the ways and means of contemporary pop music, so she could have released 50 albums in the last year, for all I know.

What I do know is this: sooner or later, some kind observer usually finds his or her way clear to tell me when some momentous development in the entertainment industry breaks. Lately (as in since about 2004) none of these bulletins that have reached me under my rock have involved Jessica Simpson. Preening in a pink #9 jersey in a luxury box in Texas Stadium seems to be the only way she can get herself in the media, short of downing bottle after bottle of pills or turning herself into a train wreck.

As for the other side of this sordid little problem, there are those who can say that Tony Romo ought to be above this sort of distraction. It shouldn't matter how many of his celebrity girlfriends are in the stands at any given moment. But I say this, Tony Romo has really only been a celebrity for about 13 months now. It's still something he's trying to learn to live with.

Sure, Tom Brady didn't have the same type of problem with the confluence of his personal and professional life. But, at the same time, he wasn't as big as star as fast as Tony Romo has been. Dallas is still America's Team, and the Patriots didn't really get that kind of media exposure until they were well on their way to a second Super Bowl title. Plus Brady played at Michigan, as opposed to Eastern Illinois University.

Furthermore, Romo might not be a regular Alfred Einstein, but he is somewhat brighter than Brady. Where Tom Brady has barely enough grey matter to master the playbook and game plans of the Patriots, Romo is just bright enough to let the media distract him. And it's not exactly as though TO forbade her to enter the grounds of Texas Stadium. He just pointed out that she could be a distraction and wished that she wouldn't come to the games.

If any other player on any other team in the league had said this, it would have been a mildly amusing flap that would have died down within about 12 minutes. However, TO dared to be relatively quiet and blend in with his teammates as much as he possibly can this season. And for that, the media had to punish him. After all, TO's job isn't to excel on the football field, nor is it even to catch passes for the Cowboys. Rather, TO's solemn duty is to provide countless path of least resistance stories to the legion of media drones who don't want to break a sweat when they cover the NFL. And if that means mountains must be made of molehills, then mountains shall be made.

Consider this piece, suggesting that TO is responsible for the Cowboys' problems. First of all, how many teams would trade problems with the Cowboys any day? They are 12-2. They may have identical records with the Green Bay Packers, but they beat the Packers soundly, not three weeks ago. They have the inside track for home field throughout the NFC playoffs until someone takes it away from them. And yet they must be on the verge of collapse, at least until the media needs yet another new angle this season.

I'm getting kind of tired of prefacing each of my increasingly rare posts with an apology. But it gets kind of old after a while, sitting here in front of the computer trying to invent reasons why a given team has a chance to beat the Patriots. And should I indulge in speculation on what team will give up which prospects and position players to get Johann Santana away from Minnesota? It's just not all that interesting to me at the moment.

I suppose I could take a sort of grim satisfaction from the fact that the Patriots have become everything which they were not supposed to be two years or so ago when every talking head and his brother insisted on holding them up as the model of virtue and excellence in professional sports. But even that gets old after a while.

I must confess, I was disappointed to see the way the Patriots reacted to Anthony Smith's "guarantee." It was disgusting to see Tom Brady go out of his way to get in his face after the first TD pass. Brady is, regrettably, a Hall of Fame quarterback on a record setting pace. Anthony Smith is a second year nobody whom the media exploited to generate more interest in a non-story.

There was a time when Brady was supposed to be a paragon of how to succeed with class and dignity. There is very little that smacks of class and dignity in going out of your way to put down a guy who barely even ran his mouth. Could you see Joe Montana or Terry Bradshaw doing that? Hell, Bradshaw never seemed to go out of his way to talk trash to Hollywood Henderson, who said considerably more insulting things about Bradshaw than any one has ever said about Brady.

Now the Patriots are playing the Jets again. Thankfully the media has an easy angle courtesy of the whole taping signals scandal to justify hours of coverage devoted to a very mediocre game. Conventional wisdom tells us that the Jets have no chance to win this game. Unfortunately, I can see no reason to disagree everybody and his brother for a change.

In other news, George Mitchell has finally delivered his report on steroids in Major League Baseball after 20 months of what surely was a exhaustive and ethically conducted investigation. In a blaze of vindication for those who have dragged Roger Clemens' name through the mud on this issue for the last two years or so, his name is at the top of the list of high-profile players who are named.

If you had told me earlier that losing to an unknown despite running not only as an incumbent but the sitting Senate Majority Leader to boot would end up not being the most embarassing professional failure of George Mitchell's career, I wouldn't have believed it. And then he had to go and release this report.

If sources like discredited and terminated former Yankees strength and conditioning coach Brian McNamee are at all typical of the informers who are expected to provide the Mitchell Report with its substance, then I am willing to bet guys like Clemens, Tejada and Pettitte will have little to fear from these proceedings.

This report which tells us many things we already knew (like MLB dragged its collective feet on the steroids issue) amid its hearsay and innuendo about respected players and choice nuggets about players who have already been caught cheating like Giambi, will likely go down in the annals of justice with hard-hitting and epoch shaping events like the Red Scare, the Army-McCarthy hearings and the Salem Witch Trials.

Curiously, outside of Eric Gagne, no one of consequence from the Boston Red Sox was named in this document. Thankfully, and perhaps conveniently, Brendan Donnelly was not offered a contract today. Interesting....

Today marks the twenty seventh anniversary of the day Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon in New York City. For many people, this is a sad occasion. As a sign of what some take as his last gasp of cultural relevance, Howard Cosel interrupted the Monday Night Football telecast to tell the world that sad news. I was just over a year old at the time. And believe it or not, I care less about the life, the times and the tragic death of John Lennon now than I did then.

I have mentioned in this space that I hate the Beatles. So today, in honor of John Lennon's death, I am bringing back my personal favorite feature of this blog, the Random Thing I Hate. I hate the Beatles. I do not hate the Beatles more today than I do on any other day, but it's about time I blogged about it at length. I don't know that I can explain why I hate the Beatles. I just do.

I guess unlike a lot of people, I have no problem admitting that I react to music on a visceral, emotional level. There is very little rational or intellectual thought involved. I like what I like, and have little time for the rest. I can tell you some of the things I don't like about the Beatles, and maybe why I don't like those aspects but I don't think they will add up to a coherent explanation of my overall hatred of the Beatles.

The Beatles burst on the scene singing mushy, trite love songs about holding hands and loving till the end of time (a paraphrase and a Bowdlerization of a line from the film The Commitments). Then all of a sudden, they got into drugs and somehow became a force for positive change in the world. At least that's what I've been told. I don't necessarily buy it.

Then again, I'm the sort of guy that gets mad when I hear or see the History Channel ads for the new show they're running to explore the tumultuous year that was 1968to commemorate its 40th anniversary. According to the History Channel, 1968 was the most explosive year in American History. Somehow, I find that hard to believe when you think about things like the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Or the election of Abraham Lincoln and South Carolina forces shelling the Federal troops at Fort Sumter in 1860. But that's just me.

I suppose, in part, my hate for the Beatles is tied to my lack of respect for the historical import of the 1960s. Outside of the effects of the Civil Rights Movement and equal pay for equal work, there is very, very, very little evidence that the world is a better place now than it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Everything that the hippies, the counter culture and the optimists of that era thought was subverting the Establishment is now a wholly owned and marketed subsidiary of the Establishment.

For instance, there is no way that anything that is legitimately controversial can get air time the way a show like All in the Family did in the early 1970s. But if it's controversial for the sake of creating meaningless controversy over whether or not one can say dirty words like Howard Stern, or arguing the same fringe aspects of major issues without tackling the issues themselves like the ten thousand talk shows on the ten thousand cable news networks, then it's a big hit.

There are certain companies that market themselves as the sort of ironic Fortune 500 companies. On the inside, but still trendy and current and subversive. Like Starbucks. Or Apple. And I hate that. It makes me sick to my stomach that people think they can buy a prepackaged, mass produced product and have it lend them an air of individuality and rebellion.

I'm not saying that this is the Beatles fault. What I am saying is that people point to the counter culture movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s as though it accomplished something, and the fact is that it did not. And whether I am overstating this case or not, I still believe that the Beatles are the most visible and esteemed icon of the counter culture of the late 1960s.

The Beatles came out with a lot of songs with hollow rhetoric about lonely old women and drugged out tools in skies with diamonds and living in yellow submarines. Perhaps they had some tangible accomplishments in there that I somehow missed. Are hungry people all over the world less hungry because the Beatles recorded Abby Road? Are the lonely people less lonely than they were before Elanor Rigby?

Perhaps the Beatles had a role in making Western society a less repressive, patriarchal, hierarchical endeavor than it was. Was that a good thing? Are the streets safer? Are we really freer, or more free or whatever grammatical impossibility best describes the logical impossibility contained therein. If we are more free as a society, it is in the nightmare scenario which prompted Orwell to include the line Freedom is Slavery in the credo of Oceana in 1984. People work longer hours for less and are, in general, less happy than they were in the old days. Maybe we were better off before the counter culture freed us from our social chains.

I am aware that it is not the responsibility of four tools from Liverpool with bad hairdos to solve all the world's problems. Nor is (or was since there are now 1/2 as many of them as there were in the beginning) it possible. But people seem to want to look back and perhaps tell themselves that the Beatles song Back in the USSR caused glasnost and detente and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. But at least people look at Elvis as a quasi-saintlike figure purely as a performer and not as some bellwether figure of a cultural sea change that maybe shouldn't have happened in the first place.

The best thing about the Beatles is that this band that revolutionized music and changed the world in the process was not taken down by drugs or repressive society or some cabal led by Richard Nixon and everybody's least favorite transvestite, J Edgar Hoover. No, the Beatles were taken down by a marginally talented Japanese American conceptual artist of no artistic distinction and an uggo to boot. It might be tragic if it weren't so damn funny.

As for their efforts as solo artists, I think the fact that the first hit any of them had was a dreadful song about pagan gods says a lot. However, George Harrison is only number two of the Beatles I hate. Primarily he's on the list for that song and for playing at his ex-wife's wedding to a dude who slept with her while she was still married to George. I have to tell you, even if my wife left me for Eric Clapton, it would take some sort of miracle for me to go to the wedding, let alone participate in it in any capacity.

Paul McCartney is third on the list, even though he's a giant tool and an outspoken advocate for vegetarian lifestyles. Of the post-Beatle music I think his work with Wings and as a solo artist is probably better than any of the others from an aesthetic standpoint. I like Band on the Run and Live and Let Die quite a bit. I am also inclined to sympathize with him as he is being taking to the cleaners by his estranged wife Heather Mills, who becomes more and more insane with each passing day. I'd hate him a lot less, however, had he not sold out and released his latest album on the Starbucks label.

Ring Starr isn't even on the list actually. I think between his looks and the fact that every one has shown him much less respect than any of the other Beatles for so long that he has reached critical mass in the tool category. So I don't hate him. I suppose it helps that I hate Octopus's Garden the least of all Beatles' songs (excluding covers). And his solo hit Photograph is far and away my favorite of any of their solo projects, even though Paul's body of work is better as a whole. I do realize that George Harrison helped write both songs mentioned above, but nobody's perfect.

There are very few people that I like less than John Lennon (obviously, monsters like Hitler, Stalin and Mao are in a whole other category). I have no time for songs like Imagine. Human nature has changed very little over the years. As the Billy Bob Thornton character in Bad Santa said before I censored it, wish in one hand then defecate in the other. Tell me which fills first.

I really want to know what John Lennon accomplished. Sure the Beatles songbook kept Michael Jackson in business in Neverland for a few years. But other than that, what? When John and Yoko famously took over the Mike Douglas show for a week and called random people to tell them they loved them, there was no tangible result. It was just a couple of oddballs, albeit famous oddballs acting oddly.

So John Lennon died twenty-seven years ago today. It's somewhat sad that a nut job shot him on the stairs of the Dakota apartment building. I just can't bring myself to consider it to have been any more tragic than the 34 or so other murders that surely happened on that day in New York City (God knows, it's like Detroit with a tourist industry there). The one thing that bothers me most about the Beatles is that their achievements outside the musical world are so massively overstated that it obscures the level to which their musical achievements are overrated.

It is a strange thing, for me, with my new found interest in Alice Cooper to rail at the Beatles this way. He's always talking about how big an influence they were on his early musical ventures. I just don't like the Beatles. I like them less with each passing day. And then again, Alice Cooper loves John Cougar Mellencamp, so there is clearly something wrong with him.

I also think the following bands are overrated: Aerosmith (massively, very nearly as big a blight on Boston as Red Sox Nation is), the Rolling Stones (although I do like their music a lot), Chicago (they suck), the Allman Brothers (whom I also like), Skynard (can't say too much about them, since I also fly a lot), Boston, KISS, Metallica and any number of others that I just don't have time to enumerate right now.

I apologize for my long silence. I've had a virus problem on my computer, and I'm only about 95% certain that I've solved it. That said, too much has gone on for me not to comment. But I'm still not convinced that I have it solved well enough to spend the time to do a proper post.

However, God is in His Heaven and all is right with the world. The Patriots are looking more and more beatable with each passing game. Fortunately, the only team on their schedule that has a realistic chance to beat them is the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Steelers are a Jekyll and Hyde sort of team. On a good day, they can beat any team going, with a solid offense and a confusing defense that is capable of beating any scheme going. And then there's the bad day when they can't beat a mediocre Arizona team or a horrid Jets team.

I'd love for the Pats to limp through the rest of the season unbeaten and then collapse in the divisional round. It's possible. Their defense has looked eminently mortal these last two weeks. Philly with an average at best second string QB and a line that let up ten million sacks to the Giants threw the ball all over the yard on them. Baltimore with a line that is a ghost of what it was ran the ball very well against the Patriots. True, the Pats came up big in the fourth quarter, but sooner or later they'll face a more complete team and it will cost them. But time will tell.

Even better, another BCS bowl season is upon us, and BC will not be joining the elite teams in the country. The Eagles went in to Saturday's game controlling their own destiny. If they beat Va Tech, all the conspiracy theory excuses that the boys at the Clover Club have advanced to explain year after year of mediocre, second tier bowls would have gone away. Get an automatic bid and no one can say your fans don't travel well or you don't generate enough ratings interest. But that wasn't in the cards for Matt Ryan and the boys.

I'm sure there are those people who might think that BC might have as much a right to a trip to the big time as another three loss team (Illinois) that is going. Of course, perhaps BC should have beaten a number one team on the road. Or maybe they could have played fewer 1-AA or Championship Subdivision teams. Or maybe they could have beaten average teams from Maryland and FSU. But they didn't.

Missouri has a legitimate complaint. Even though they lost to Oklahoma twice, they were still a better pick than Kansas. Kansas got the bid because they are a feel good story. They beat one ranked team, out of two they played all season. Illinois is also a feel good story, winning more games this season than they did in the previous four combined seasons. But they beat Wisconsin and Penn State when both teams were ranked (and PJ Hill was healthy for the Badgers), even though both games were in Champaign. And they beat OSU on the road.

It is true that Illinois did lose to Missouri in the first game of the year. That game came down to the final minute, when Illinois backup QB Eddie McGee threw an INT at the goal line. Missouri has a legitimate complaint that Kansas is going, but Illinois earned their bid. Plus people from Missouri should be used to disappointment, they come from Missouri.

As the big games get closer, I'll have more to say about them. I may even risk making a prediction or two, despite my abysmal track record there. I'm sorry I have to cut this short, but I have to start getting my Fantasy Football team ready for the playoffs. I'm worried that Dallas might rest Romo and Owens at a very inopportune time for me.