This was an eventful weekend. There were frauds packed on frauds packed on even bigger frauds. The LA Dodgers and the Boston Red Sox set an attendance record for a baseball game. This naturally disproves Hank Steinbrenner's contention that America is more of a Yankee nation than a Red Sox Nation. Which brings us to the first fraud of the evening.

The notion that this game means anything in any respect is absolutely goofy. From Kareem Abdul Jabbar throwing out a pitch (and throwing like a girl to boot), this was a festival of frauds. Of course they set an attendance record, they played in a bigger venue and one customized to fit as many people in as possible. The left field wall was barely 200 feet from home plate. How much more ridiculous could the farce have gotten?

The fact that over 115,000 people turned out to watch this game means very little. It certainly doesn't prove that more Americans root for the Red Sox than any other team out there. After all, had teams like the Yankees or Cubs been invited to a circus like this, could we have seen a similarly large crowd? I bet either of those teams could have helped the Dodgers set this record. To say nothing of the Giants, the Dodgers' archrival.

And to make a claim that America is overrun with Red Sox fans from this weekend's exhibitions, one would have to assume that there were more Red Sox fans than Dodger fans in attendance. From this Eric Neel piece on ESPN's Page 2, that doesn't ring true. But Red Sox Nation has always had a knack for spinning stories from nothing and making themselves look bigger and better than they really are.

And then there was the Bill James appearance on 60 Minutes. I find it hard to believe that any person who thinks that Chase Utley is the most underrated baseball player in the league and who would take David Wright if they could build a team around one guy is a baseball genius.

To start with, Chase Utley could cure the common cold in his spare time and still not manage to be underrated. I think it must be a Federal statute that commands ESPN to include him in as many highlights as they do. God knows it can't be his overall performance or his contributions to the Phillies winning ways, what with the fact that the Phils have yet to win anything with Utley. Or maybe it was his star turn as the heart and soul of the American entry in the World Baseball Classic.

And as for David Wright, he strikes me as a papier mache version of A Rod. He'll put up good numbers in a given season, but I'd rather depend on any other Met to get a big hit at a big moment. And if he's the long term future of baseball, then it's going to be a tough time for MLB going forward.

As an anonymous comment complained the other day, the Red Sox season is now two days old and I haven't mentioned the Red Sox in Sedition in Red Sox Nation yet. I don't really know what to say about the Sox vs. As games played in Japan, except that it was a total and complete fraud.

There is no reason why two teams should be 1-1 right now when no other team has played a game. There is no reason why teams should start the regular season and then come back to play more exhibition games. It's a shamelessly exploitative money grab, and it's beat.

If flying halfway around the world to play games in Japan were in any way, shape or form legitimate, MLB wouldn't have twisted the schedules the way they did. They might have tried something like this at the All Star break, since the All Star game has been a total fraud for years now, even though it decides home field for the World Series. But it's just another way for MLB to turn a profit off one of its two marquee teams (sorry, Dodgers and Cubs but you aren't in the same league with the Yankees and Red Sox, the pun is purely accidental and somewhat regrettable).

That said, it isn't the biggest fraud in sports at the moment. Far bigger is an ESPN panel ranking the top ten wide receivers of all time placing Randy Moss at number two. So what if he set a ton of records this season. He had plenty of time to rest up for that performance when he mailed in every single snap of his years in Oakland. That alone ought to disqualify him from the top ten.

Admittedly, I have a certain bias here, and it's a very big bias, but there is no way Moss should be ranked ahead of Terrell Owens. Moss has made a living of shining brightly in regular season nationally televised games. He has not, however, made a point of playing big in playoff games. TO, to his credit, has done exactly that.

Consider the fact that legend tells us Jason Sehorn shut Moss down in an NFC championship game because Moss was out of sorts after stadium security wouldn't allow his kids on the sideline. TO shook off an abysmal afternoon where he'd dropped four passes to make the best catch any one not named Lynn Swann ever made in a playoff game (sorry, David Tyree, even though that catch put a big smile on my face) when he caught the winning TD in triple coverage in the end zone against the Packers back in 1999.

And have we reached a decision on whether or not Moss could have caught that third down pass against the Giants this season had he but jumped? I think so, but I am biased against the player and the team. Bill Simmons thinks so, but he's kind of a whimp and has never slid into second base in his life (plus, rumor has it he bailed early on at least one world series game in 2004). Set that against the fact that TO signed a liability waiver, returned from a broken leg in six weeks, played with a pin in his shin, caught nine passes for over 100 yards against the Patriots back in Harrison's HGH days.

Check out this YouTube comparison and make your own decision.



I just wish the Moss section had included the moment from 2003 when the Vikings entered the final game in Soldier Field controlling their own destiny for the final NFC playoff berth. In the final moments, with the Vikings needing a TD to win and advance against the lowly Bears, Moss ran a fade pattern against then unknown Bears CB Charles Tillman. Tillman took the ball right from Moss' hands and the Vikings lost. Show me a 49ers, Eagles or Cowboys game that ended with TO in that situation.

So what if TO was less than pleasant to Jeff Garcia and Donovan McNabb. So what if we'll never know if he had a drug interaction problem or tried to kill himself in that media circus from 2007. So what if he has problems interacting with people in a normal, adult fashion from time to time. Throughout his career, TO has played with a level of toughness that has outweighed his personal inconsistencies and should command more respect than the media and too many fans have been willing to give.

That said, I found this piece on Bob Hayes' omission from the top ten wide receivers of all time interesting. I would suggest to the writer that there is ample evidence that zone defenses existed in the NFL prior to Hayes' debut (the Giants umbrella defense of the 1950s comes to mind, for one), but Hayes definitely changed the game with his speed. I think he deserved to be on the list ahead of Paul Warfield and Steve Largent.

I also think Art Monk should have made the list ahead of Largent, considering both were possession receivers and Monk beats Largent's career numbers and in single season performance as well. Plus, Largent and Monk pretty much came from the same era. I think the fact that Charley Taylor played in the 60s and 70s got him on the list, and then only on numbers. He was a rich man's Bobby Mitchell.

I don't really have anything to say against Don Hutson at number 3, how can one possibly evaluate a guy from the era before Unitas, when the only QBs I can name are guys like Baugh, Luckman, Van Brocklin, Waterfield, Graham and Connerly and none of them played with Hutson as far as I remember.

I don't think Raymond Berry should have made the top ten, but that's personal animosity from the time when he was coaching the Patriots. But he probably should have been in there ahead of Marvin Harrison. Unless you're putting together a list of people who have decided to maintain facial hair styles from adult entertainment features of two decades ago, there's no top ten list that should have Marvin Harrison on it. The only difference between him and Bill Brooks is the fact that Brooks played with bad QBs and Harrison plays with Manning.

As for Cris Carter, he's another lucky product of a pass-happy era. If a guy like Webster Slaughter had been 6 years younger, he'd have been able to produce numbers like Carter did. Perhaps Carter made the list because of the mortification Chris Berman must have felt when he learned that the Buddy Ryan "All he does is catch touchdowns" quote Boomer beat to death was really code for "I'm releasing him because I can't deal with his coked out narcissism any more."

I guess if I were making a top ten list of NFL wideouts, I'd grudgingly start with Jerry Rice because I always hated him. I'd put TO number two because he's my favorite athlete playing right now and he's a mean, nasty, cantankerous person, which is always a good thing when you hit and take hits for a living. I'd leave Hutson at number three, because I can't disprove his belonging there.

I wouldn't keep Irvin at number 4. He's another guy I always hated, and I thought he was a bit overrated because he was so charismatic and his teams were so talented. I guess I'd put Ray Berry there because of the numbers he put up, the contributions he made to those great Colts teams and because he played in a run-dominated era. And even though the Colts were an exception under Weeb Ewbank, they still had John Mackey who might be the best TE ever and Lenny Moore who was one of the best pass catching backs of all time.

I'd put Art Monk at number 5 because he was very quietly the best possession receiver of all time, light years ahead of guys like Largent. He was, after all, a huge part of the Joe Gibbs teams that won three titles with three different QBs. He caught over 900 passes on teams that are best known for the Hogs and power running games.

And before you get mad at me for ranking him ahead of Moss, think about this. If I told you that Charles Mann and Dave Butz played WR on those Redskins' team with him, could you disprove that off the top of your head? They were d-linemen on the Redskins. Guys like Downtown Charlie Brown, Gary Clark and Ricky Sanders played opposite Monk, not exactly John Taylor to his Jerry Rice. Monk definitely deserves to be in the Hall of Fame and should have made it a long time ago.

I'd put Moss at number six because he's incredibly talented but all but invisible in playoff games. I'd put Hayes at number seven because the ESPN piece convinced me and Landry was a guy whose offenses spread the ball around. I'd put Lynn Swann at number eight, even though his stats weren't there. No one was better in big games and no one had that artistic quality to his catches. I'd throw Charlie Taylor in at number nine for sheer weight of production in a running era. And put Irvin ten.

I would have posted sooner, but I have found myself once more in mourning for a tournament bracket sheet that died before its time. It doesn't happen every year (the catastrophic early collapse always happens, just not the reason why this particular year fell apart), but every now and then I talk myself into picking Georgetown to go deep.

I don't know why I do. I hate Georgetown, and odds are, if you know people who went to Georgetown as I do, you probably hate Georgetown too. Georgetown is dick central. Of the 30 or so people I know who've attended Georgetown, I can think of 3 who aren't total dicks. That's certainly not a large enough sample from which to make a reasonable assessment, but then I'm not necessarily a fair guy.

All signs pointed to Georgetown losing early in this tournament. We all know the cliche that March Madness is dominated by great guard play. Georgetown featured the closest thing to an NBA ready big man available to any of the field of 65, but they didn't have an answer for Davidson's quickness and shooting. So now I look like even more of a moron than usual, but I can live with that.

I did want to see what happened when Roy Hibbert got to play against Brian Butch and the Insane Clone Posse that makes up the Wisconsin front line. I know the entire state of Wisconsin is made up of 5 family trees, but these guys look enough alike that I wouldn't be surprised if they came off an assembly line.

On one level, Hibbert should have demolished the Badgers, based on talent alone. However, in the Coach K era in college basketball, sometimes pure talent is more of a liability than an asset. Far more important is the ability to swallow one's pride and sense of morality and hack, slash, hold and flop in the face of superior talent. And that is Bo Ryan's mission statement as a basketball coach. So Wisconsin would likely have won, especially considering they have vastly more experience than Georgetown (Brian Butch alone has been in college for 7 seasons now, after all).

Having my bracket come apart so spectacularly almost took away most of the joy I felt (and (I'm sure shared with all right-thinking Americans) when Duke lost to West Virginia. Almost, but not quite. Seeing Duke bow out this early in a tournament is always good, but it gives me hope that there might be a chance that teams who flop and whine might be losing their advantage with the officials. That said, I am still terrified by the prospect of another San Antonio vs. Detroit matchup in the NBA Finals. But time will tell there...

In other matters, actor Richard Widmark passed away on Monday. And all I have to say about that is who knew he was still alive? I am a big fan of old movies, and I like my fair share of Westerns. But I was never a big fan of Richard Widmark. I suppose I ought to be more sensitive, now that he's dead, but I am an imperfect person.

I also feel compelled to bring this story to your attention, if you haven't seen it yet. A Mississippi man "accidentally" shot his wife while trying to use a .22 pistol to put a hole in his wall during a satellite TV installation. Prosecutors are considering charging him with manslaughter.

Not for a minute is this manslaughter. Granted it's Mississippi and not civilization, but they ought to throw the book at this guy for everything and anything under the sun. I am not a big advocate for gun control, but I do believe in moron control. Only a total jackass would use a gun in a DIY job. So I'm thinking the guy shot his wife deliberately and came up with this ridiculous story under the Sam Spade principle that a sensible story would have gotten him arrested in the first place.

In a sad news item, somebody stole and torched Shawne Merriman's $180,000 Mercedes this week. Isn't that just awful? What's the world coming to when a fine, upstanding young man like that can't trust the rest of the world to respect his possessions? To add insult to injury, the perpetrators stole his wheels (literally) and left it on milk crates before they burned it.

I have to say it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. I may have mentioned in this space a time or two that Merriman is a fraud. After having read his official bio on his official website, I think it's time we upgraded Shawne Merriman to archfraud status. I guess one can't expect full disclosure from his own website, but it might have been refreshing to see some mention of Merriman's suspension for performance enhancing drugs not too long ago amid the description of how he became one of the NFL's most dominant (excpet in playoff games) defenders.

All too often, when I mention a story, it's to focus on the negative aspects. But today, I have to praise the courageous leaders of the great state of Maine. No longer can merchants in Maine sell novelty cigarette lighters. This is win-win for the people. First, children can no longer be tempted to play with the lighters and start accidental fires. Second, youngsters will no longer be tempted to smoke to look cool.

Shame on all 49 remaining states who rely on parents and other adults to take responsibility for the objects with which their spawn come in contact. Shame on the leaders of the other 49 states for assuming that their citizens might just be mature and responsible enough to handle decisions like this on their own. And shame on the rest of the nation for being slightly more mature and responsible enough not to be led around by the hand like our neighbors, the Mainiacs.

I know you don't need me to connect you with the news, and it is slightly hypocritical for me to provide this service when I try to avoid news on TV, radio and in the newspaper because it's too damn depressing, but I have two more minor items you may not have noticed. One is sad, the other is ultracreepy.

Al Copeland, the founder of Popeye's Chicken, passed away. This is sad, unless you are a total d-bag and you don't eat fried chicken. Popeye's is much better than KFC, and our world is a little poorer today, losing the man who brought Louisiana spiced fried chicken to the rest of the nation.

And the creepy story...LG is manufacturing a cell phone that feels like human skin. I find that to be beat on a number of levels. First, at this point cell phones can do much more than they should, with the capacity to send texts, photos, videos and play MP3s.

Maybe I'm hopelessly old fashioned, but all I need my phone to do is dial. I hate that I have a cell phone, and if it weren't cheaper than a land line and on very rare occasions useful, I'd throw the damn thing in a river or off the back of some tool's head as though I were a Red Sox fan and it were a slice of pizza.

This story also gives me the heebie-jeebies because it seems to send a message that we are so starved for actual human contact that we might want a phone that feels like a person. Either that or we're trying to get in touch with our inner Dr. Frankenstein. It's not good. In fact, it's quite gross.

About two weeks ago, I posted in this space to ridicule the Philadelphia Eagles for their terrible decisions this offseason. I couldn't conceive of a world in which a team could slap the franchise tag on LJ Smith and throw a mountain of cash at a cornerback who considers it beneath his exalted dignity to tackle. And then I took a quick look at the Oakland Raiders offseason transactions. Good thing I'm not a Raiders' fan.

According to John Clayton, Al Davis got the money to back his insane spending spree from selling non-voting shares in the Raiders. I wonder if the people who sprung for those shares are suffering from buyers remorse right now.

I think, and it's just me talking at this point, that when the dust settles, the trade and ludicrous contract extension that brought DeAngelo Hall to Oakland (at least until his next sideline hissy fit) will go down as the worst of these moves. Lest we forget, even as Clayton compared Hall to Lester Hayes and Mike Haynes, that this is the same man who whined to the league office that TO spat in his face (after TO torched him for two TDs in the game) and neglected to man up and throw down with TO.

It doesn't exactly sound like much of a pathway to the old Raiders mystique, is it? I can't say for sure what Hayes or Haynes may have done had a WR who torched them for two TDs compounded the injury with the insult of spitting in their face. But something tells me that their reaction might have been a bit stronger than crying to the League Office. I'm guessing guys like that just might have taken it upon themselves to kick the offender's ass. But maybe that's the difference between an NFL Hall of Famer and an overpriced fraud.

As you are all aware, the NCAA tournament is underway, and has been for a round and a half at this point. And all I can say is that I am very depressed. I tune into games desperately seeking the greatest broadcaster of all time and find that he isn't allowed to broadcast every game.

And don't give me any static about one man being unable to broadcast multiple games concurrently. Based on what I read from Bill Simmons and his legion of minions, Gus Johnson can eat lightning and crap thunder. So he surely can broadcast three different college basketball games in three different cities in three different time zones and fix the plot holes and inconsistencies in Shakespeare all at the same time.

I guess it's fair to say, at this point, that I am somewhat less than impressed by the cult of Gus Johnson. I've watched football and basketball games he's called for a few years now, and I just don't see what makes him so special. In fact, if I had to do some sort of blind test, a sort of Pepsi challenge for sports announcers, I don't know that I could tell the difference between Johnson and Kevin Harlan or Kenny Albert or mediocre broadcaster X.

This year's first round slate marked the longest span of time in which my sweet sixteen survived intact in at least five years. Generally, I lose at least one (and often a Final Four team) in the first set of games on the first day of the tournament. It's just a natural result of picking games based on personal animosities as opposed to logic and/or reason. But it can be embarrassing.

This year's casualty was UConn. And they played a very entertaining and nerve-racking game before falling in OT to the UCSD Torreros. The other teams I had picked to win in the first round who fell short were Winthrop (after watching Tom Tuttle from Tacoma fold in Communist indoctrination in Volunteers, I will never pick Washington State, plus they gave us Drew Bledsoe and Ryan Leaf), St Mary's, Arizona and Kent State. I didn't have any of those teams going anywhere, so it wasn't that bad a day and a half any way. For the moment, I am tied for first in the SIRSN challenge, with slightly better odds of winning than any of my competitors.

And as an aside and at the risk of making the same joke as 10 million other people, I should have seen this UConn loss coming. The UCSD Torreros were throwing Jim Jones' grandson at them, after all. It got me wondering as I watched the game, how many times do you think some friend's parent offered that kid Kool Aid without realizing that it was a trifle indelicate in his youth?

The Western Kentucky game was considerably more enjoyable for me, since I called that one correctly. Or more precisely, I guessed right. But this isn't the day for detailed game breakdowns. God knows, there will be at least 20,000 of them floating around the internet by this time. And there weren't any incidents that I feel compelled to complain about at length in the games.

However, there are a few things with which I had a problem in the last day and a half that I am sure will piss me off to no end before this tournament ends. Considering the fact that they are a division of Toyota and they presumably appeal to the higher end consumer demographics, I think the good people at Lexus owed us a little better or at least more imaginative ad campaign than this pathetic where did all the hs go drivel.

But the real villain of this tournament to this point has to be Coke. Maybe I am the only person who feels this way, but I hate the Coke Zero ads. The fake efforts to get a lawyer to sue Coke Zero on behalf of Coke for taste infringement were funny for all of about 13 seconds when they first came out a couple of years ago. Alas, even then the ads went on for 30 seconds, or at least 17 seconds too long.

Coke Zero doesn't taste like Coke. It tastes sort of like coke that has been distilled through a rag soaked in Windex. And don't ask me how I know what Windex tastes like, my childhood contained a series of ill-advised experiments which I am, in hindsight, lucky to have survived. The fact remains that these commercials weren't terribly imaginative to start with and have been on for far too long. And they play them fourteen times an hour it seems.

There is one more thing I need to complain about. Despite what Pat Forde would have us believe, I will not be rooting for Bruce Pearl and Tennessee this season. Or ever. Forde wrote a nice puff piece about the trials and tribulations Pearl experienced after he ratted out the University of Illinois for recruiting improprieties while he was an assistant at the University of Iowa. For that noble and self-sacrificing act, Pearl was blacklisted and relegated to Division II until he made such a success of himself his vast awesomeness could no longer be overlooked.

Truly it is a heartwarming story, until one recalls (as Forde admits) that Pearl taped conversations with the recruit in question to obtain the evidence to rat out Illinois. Despite the fact that I am myself a product of a Jesuit school, I do not find that the end justifies the means. One cannot really portray oneself as a martyr and a crusader for that which is right if one has stooped to questionably ethical means to do so. So it's not just that natty pale orange blazer that makes Bruce Pearl look ridiculous as he stands on the moral high ground, it's what he did to get there.

And if you need more convincing that Bruce Pearl is, in fact, a douche, don't forget that he went to BC, a notorious haven for douches from all walks of life. And he's a close friend of Bo Ryan, a noted douche in his own right, and the coach of the University of Wisconsin Badgers in Madison, Wisconsin, which is douche central in the Midwest.

So, the NCAA tournament is again upon us. I'm sorry that I haven't been posting much lately, but I haven't really had all that much to say. I'm staying away from commenting on the Celtics because my comments on the Red Sox throughout last season looked fairly ridiculous when October's travesty finally played itself out. And I just haven't really been all that motivated to watch a lot of college basketball these days.

One of the problems, I suppose, when it comes right down to it is that I hate Duke and I hate North Carolina. I just don't want to see either team do well. Nor do I want to see announcers grovelling at the feet of the coaches and players associated with either team. And unfortunately, while one can never escape the latter (especially where Duke is concerned), there was far too much of the former for my taste this season.

And then at the end of last week, Illinois launched an improbable, history making run in the Big Ten tournament. Too bad they fell short, but it was still a great story. And you can tell it was a great story, based merely on the reaction of the Chicago media's one man answer to the bubonic plague, Jay Mariotti.

I realize I spend a scandalous amount of time in a blog devoted (ostensibly, any way) to the Boston sports landscape shredding a columnist from Chicago. But if ever there were a person who deserves it, it's Mariotti. And since not every one has the time to read fine sites like Jay the Joke and Boise Wants Jay, there's always room in this space to let Chicagoans know that a few people on the East Coast feel sorry for what they have to endure.

I've been thinking this for a long time, but I am now just about convinced that Jay Mariotti is the biggest douche in the continental United States. It seems improbable that a moderately trained chimpanzee could spend a decade or so covering sports and manage after all that time to fail to understand why we watch sports. And yet Mariotti has not developed the faintest inkling of the curious appeal that a team like this season's Illini can have over even the most cynical, relentlessly negative, unpleasant people in America (i.e. me).

Illinois had, up until this month began, been one of the big disappointments in college basketball. They could do a few things effectively enough to hang in most of the games they lost, but they didn't do enough of those things well enough to win, or even be a particularly watchable team. And all of that changed this week, at least except the bit about being particularly watchable.

Although, as an aside, I should introduce this anecdote. I have a friend who did a semester abroad at St. Andrews in Scotland, mostly for the academics, naturally, but he managed to get in a round or two of golf. He came back with a term he picked up from the natives to describe what we might call a wormburner. In Scotland, some people call it a Sally Gunnels shot, after some female track star in the distant past. The rationale, as they put it: "She's not pretty but she sure can run."

Leaving aside for a moment that which is Scottish and very likely sexist, that was this season's Illini in the Big Ten tournament. In the words of Victor Frankenstein, it wasn't supposed to be this way, it was supposed to be a thing of beauty. But for three and a half games over the course of four days, Illinois reminded us that we look to sports as the last remaining area where David has a shot against Goliath.

In every other aspect of our lives, some one some where is probably micturating upon you in some sense and expecting you to believe that it's raining. It may be your boss. It may be Uncle. It may be the guy who lives three doors down from you and brings his dog to drop a deuce in your wife's flowers while you're just trying to get some damn sleep. Who knows. But odds are some one in life is making your life more difficult than it really ought to be and you probably can't do all that much about it.

And go figure it had to be Wisconsin who stopped Illinois. If ever there were a team custom tailored to play the modern American Goliath, it's Duke. But Wisconsin's a close second. In fact, I hate the Badgers and Bo Ryan second only to Duke in the NCAA landscape today. And for a lot of the same reasons. Wisconsin players flop shamelessly and whine incessantly.

If they wore blue and white instead of red and white, all Wisconsin would need to play Duke's mini-me is a Coach who looked enough like a certain German dictator to make me think there might have been something more than meets the eye behind the plot of the classic Gregory Peck film The Boys From Brazil. Too bad they have to settle for a cheese ball who looks like a frustrated, failing lounge singer, right down to the lame wardrobe and giant bald spot.

Not so in sports. Every once in a while, there's a team like Illinois that, despite all signs to the contrary, manages to pull off an inspiring run like this weekend's trip through Indianapolis. And when that improbable run occurs, there's going to be some douche like Mariotti out there to try to ruin that for the rest of us. He's the guy who's going to sit through the sub-prime meltdown, the Bear Sterns China Syndrome and the damn recession that's falling down around our ears right now and rip to shreds the few bright spots that might give us a reason to smile for 15 minutes. Even I won't do that/

I guess the lesson here is that if you find yourself on the other side of what the guy I go to for my Red Sox info blithely refers to as "the douche trade" and I'm not standing there with you, you must really be king douche. So once more, congratulations, Jay.

In other matters, I have decided to revive last year's failed experiment. If you want to enter the Sedition in Red Sox Nation bracket challenge and prove that you can pick college basketball games better than a bitter dude whose motivations stem from bizarre, yet deep-seeded, personal antagonisms against coaches he's never met on campuses he's never visited in towns he can't spell, have at it.

Go to this link, and sign up: http://sirsn.mayhem.sportsline.com/e
The group password is s3dition

And I promise to cheat only if I lose.

The other day, some one sent me a link to Simmons' What If NBA column. I figured I'd pass it on to you, since it was suprisingly good, good enough that I feel I have to give the devil his due. Not only was it good, but it was astonishingly funny. I'm not sure if he's incorporated some new jokes or recycling ones that he beat to death so long ago that I forgot all about them, but it's definitely worth a read.

It's time for another tools of note segment. This evening, we celebrate the toolness of an ecoterrorism cell. It seems too perfect, but this cell operates in the Seattle area. For some reason, every time Seattle is mentioned in this space, the post is highlighting something stupid, creepy, pointless or all three. I guess I ought not be surprised, just look at the losers who wrote in to whine to Sports Guy that some douche is stealing the Sonics.

This ecoterrorist group, the Earth Liberation Front or ELF, allegedly set fire to a row of unoccupied luxury model homes called the Street of Dreams in a Seattle suburb. These fires caused over $7 million worth of damage to the properties. The apparent motivation for the act was the claim by the developers that these luxurious homes were ecofriendly.

Now, I am always willing to condemn hypocrisy (except, of course, my own). And I imagine I am like most people in that regard. But isn't it just a little bit hypocritical to burn down homes that claim to be ecofriendly? It can't be all that ecofriendly to release whatever chemical byproducts of the arson were into the atmosphere, right?

This is one of the things that bothers me about the environmental movement. No matter what the lunatic fringe does, the rest of us are expected to act as though their excrement didn't have an unpleasant odor. And any invasion of a theoretically pristine area in the name of ecofriendly activity is perfectly acceptable.

I remember watching an Animal Planet documentary about polar bears and penguins, contrasting the two polar extremes as they deal with climate change. In the background of one of the penguin segments, I could see as clear as day some vast tracked monstrosity that the film crew used to cart their equipment around the ice shelf. I couldn't help but wonder what the carbon footprint from that behemoth was. And I couldn't help but think that whatever benefit the documentary might bring to the front lines of the war on climate change might be undone by the impact those vehicles and whatever conveyance conveyed them to the poles unleash on the pristine, vulnerable polar ecosystem.

I also remember ridiculing the tool who swam in the North Pole waters to point out the adverse effect human actions have had on our planet. I mocked him for calling himself an explorer (as though he were out there identifying terra incognita in the age of GPS and satellite mapping) and for using whatever means he used to get to the North Pole to point out that the climate is changing. And a reader pointed out that there are many different ways to grease one's body so that one can endure swimming in extreme cold conditions.

And I remember an old article from Gregg Easterbrook (Tuesday Morning Quarterback) where he mocked an environmental group who bestowed an award on two individuals who took a helicopter to monitor what residents who owned beachfront property in the Pacific Northwest were doing with their land. TMQB pointed out that helicopters are incredibly inefficient fuel guzzling machines, so whatever benefit might have come from the aerial reconnaissance probably vanished from the carbon emissions of the vehicle used.

And then there's old friend Al Gore, winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his global warming bandwagon. Meanwhile, while he jetsets all over the world to remind us that we use to much in the way of fossil fuels, he has three big mansions cranking the climate control apparatus as though it were good for the planet. And his socially maladjusted tool of a son is popping adderol and driving his hybrid as though he were coming down the back stretch on the last lap of the Indy 500.

And after all this, it's people like me who don't own cars, who leave the thermostat at 65 in the winter and keep the AC off in the summer, who recycle what can be recycled and don't throw away any more than they have to who have to change their lifestyles because they are responsible for global warming. What a world.

I guess it had to happen sooner or later, but I still wasn't ready for Brett Favre to retire. Obviously, no one plays in the NFL forever, and quarterbacks take a fair amount of punishment over the course of a season. But seeing Brett Favre go is like losing something I could always rely on.

I am 28, I remember a lot of NFL games before Favre broke into the league. So it's not like losing part of my childhood or my youth. It's just that Favre was the last of the great old style of NFL quarterback. Now we have the two Mannings, Brady and the rest who are sort of manufactured, prepackaged automatons on and off the field. Their play is pretty much the same, their sound bites are pretty much the same. They just aren't that interesting.

Sure Peyton Manning is in every third commercial for every fifth product and we get the rundown on all of Tom Brady's sordid off-field dalliances, but that doesn't make them stand out from the herd of celebrities that stalk the media landscape these days. And I think an NFL quarterback should stand out. Like Namath having the guts to rock pantyhose in that creepy ad campaign or sport a man fur on the sidelines. Or like Don Meredith (even though he was already retired and broadcasting at the time) who introduced MNF fans to a game in Denver saying: "Welcome to the Mile High City, and folks that's about how I feel right now."

Yeah, Favre had a recurring problem with the huge interception at the exact wrong time, but at least he had daring. A guy has to do a lot for his team just to get them into a position where he can kill them with a bad throw. And while Favre did make his share of mistakes, he did it with style. So now he leaves the NFL with Manning, Brady and their peers who talk like Junior Simple but cut a nice figure in a fancy suit. And I think we're all just a little bit the worse off for it.

Speaking of the NFL, I am enjoying the offseason moves for the Philadelphia Eagles. As one of TO's biggest fans, I still enjoy seeing the Eagles in the process of imploding. When all is said and done after this season, it will be the signing of Asante Samuel that draws the most attention, whether it works or fails. But as ludicrous as it was to give him a six year, $55 million contract, it isn't the worst decision the Eagles could have made, or did make for that matter.

That dubious honor has to go to the Eagles' front office brain trust who decided to slap the franchise tag on tight end LJ Smith. In case you don't know, the franchise tag forces the team to offer the player a one year deal equivalent to the average of the top three salaries at his position. So that means if you're franchising a guy, you probably ought to be damn sure that he is one of the three best players in his category in the league today.

There is no way LJ Smith is a top three tight end in the NFL. Perhaps he is as talented as draft gurus and Eagles execs have claimed, but I think if that were the case he'd have proved it by now. Hell, even Kellen Winslow II has had a breakout season, and he's been in the league half as long and missed almost two entire seasons to boot.

Out of curiosity, can you even tell me that LJ Smith is a top three tight end in the NFC East? Would you rank him ahead of Jason Witten, Chris Cooley and Jeremy Shockey? I don't think I would. And that's not even beginning to compare him to guys like Ben Watson or the likes of Gates and Gonzales.

Now, it may be that the Eagles franchised him in the hopes of trading him, but who the hell would give up anything of significance for LJ Smith, let alone two first round picks? I think if I were an NFL GM, I'd demand a late second day pick included in a package for LJ Smith where I had to send nothing back in return, or maybe a used kicking tee and worn out down and distance markers.

There are at times, other concerns when it comes to franchising or not franchising a player than simple statistical production. But is LJ Smith so important to the Eagles (who didn't even make the playoffs last season) that the entire football landscape in the City of Brotherly Love that the whole thing would collapse if he left town? This just might take the cake for dumbest decision made in the NFL this offseason, at least until the Eagles draft in April.

In other matters, Mountain Dew has come out with a new marketing campaign. It is called Green Label Art, and they are selling their product in limited edition aluminum bottles featuring six distinct designs from six of America's edgiest up and coming artists. I bet you James McNeil Whistler is shaking in his boots in the afterlife, fearing that his place at the pinnacle of artistic achievement in American history is about to come to an end.

When I saw this campaign, it reminded me of a scene from the classic film "The Third Man." The character played by Orson Wells delivers a famous line:

"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly."

If one were to modernize that quote to describe America today, I suppose one could say that we've had 220 years with a few ups and downs, but with unprecedented security, peace and prosperity and we produced six tools who adorned a soda that is little more than citrus flavored rat poison with six "works of art" that make a sane man want to weep for the future. I shudder to think that there will come a time when a person who owns unopened bottles with these images on them will make a fortune on eBay. What a world.

I think Jerry Garcia said it best when he said...

This has been a pretty good weekend in the wide world at large. The Patriots limp into free agency coming off one of the most spectacular Super Bowl chokes of all time. To be fair, they did resign Teddy Bruschi who will only get better in his next twelve seasons with the team. That said, both Asante Samuel and Randall Gay left town.

Obviously, the Eagles overpaid for Asante Samuel. The scope of this contract was so ludicrous that it defies description. Six years and $55 million for a guy who doesn't like to tackle and got 25% of his career interceptions from Rex Grossman (exaggeration) is a bit steep. That said, I think TO will call a press conference tomorrow to announce he's going to retire before he has to face Samuel twice next season.

I don't think any one is thinking Randall Gay is a future Hall of Famer, barring some sort of minor miracle. But that leaves the Patriots entering next season with a huge target on their backs from Spygate, from this season's blowouts, from choking away the Super Bowl and from the last seven years of douchery. And they're going to war with Ellis Hobbs, Brandon Merriweather and spare parts. I must say, I like the way that looks on paper. Short of teaching Matt Light how to play tackle, I can't see the Patriots coming vaguely close to the level of success they almost enjoyed this season going forward.

In other matters, I get a chance to do something I never anticipated doing in this space - complimenting a member of the Rolling Stones. I do like the Stones, but I was less than thrilled with their recent album entitled Neocons. Regardless of my personal feelings for neocons, I think it advisable for musicians and celebreties to stay out of politics, especially when they aren't Americans. And I regret the days of General Andrew Jackson, when an Englishman with funny notions on how Americans ought to be doing things would find himself limping back to London, are long gone.

That said, I liked the fact that Keith Richards took a shot at Led Zeppelin, saying that he wasn't even aware they had a reunion. Obviously, since these old rockstars are all buddies, I'm betting he was joking. But that said, what was the big deal about their reunion. I'm sure there are other bands that are more overrated, but there can't be many and I can't think of one at the moment.

If American middle school and high school school dance administrators had had to courage to get together and say enough Stairway to Heaven, then the great unwashed wouldn't nuture the soft spot for this band that they harbor at the moment. Perhaps they were the Godfathers of Heavy Metal, good for them. Let's face it. For the most part, heavy metal sucks. The root of their appeal rests in the memories of people who hear Stairway and recall slow dancing awkwardly with their pizza-faced first love and hoping to steal a kiss before the wood panelled station wagon came to whisk them away. I don't see how people can look back at things like that fondly, but then again people are morons and ought to be locked up for the good of society.

And let's not forget that they made a Lord of the Rings reference in Ramble On, which wasn't a good song to begin with and got worse. When they dropped Gollum and Mordor in, that was kind of risky, since the beat Peter Jackson movies hadn't been made and LOTR was not to be referred to in open conversation unless you were a LARPer. And maybe it takes a certain courage to admit that Gollum stole your woman. But it's still beat. To be fair, though, I do like You Don't Have To Go and a couple of their other songs, but I could do without Led Zeppelin.

So good work Keith. And good work telling kids to stay off drugs. Has there ever been a more shining example of do as I say, not as I do in action? Denis Leary was all over him for making similar cracks 15 years ago. But he had a point. Keith Richards did so many drugs he just might still be high, for the love of God.

So, Congress finally got around to asking the Justice Department to look into whether or not Roger Clemens committed perjury. It seemed fairly obvious that this was going to be the end result of that he said-he said fest into which the hearings of two weeks ago degenerated in short order. The only surprise was the delay between the hearings and the request.

Personally, I think it had something to do with the fact that Congress was desperately searching for some other charge to file against Clemens. Alas, interrupting a legendary orator like Henry Waxman in the midst of a contralto harangue full of sound and fury but signifying nothing is merely a violation of Robert's Rules for Order. Even though Robert's Rules are the tools which do little more than protect the elected officials from the electorate, an ordinary citizen can't be punished for breaching them.

This case should be fairly interesting in so far as what the result will be. But I am sure that the process by which said result will be obtained won't be tremendously interesting. Yes, no side in this sad little mess has any reasonable claim to credibility. But I don't think I'll be flying to my set to see if Andy Pettitte's story on his own HGH usage habits changes for the third time since his name was included in the Mitchell Report. I would like to see whether the NYPD service record for Brian McNamee sees the light of day any time soon, but I'm not big on hoping for miracles.

Of far greater importance and interest to me at the moment is a nugget in Peter King's Monday NFL column this week. Generally, I avoid Peter King like the plague because he's a New Jersey d-bag and one of the less than shining lights of NBC's dismal NFL Sunday Night studio show. But the guy I go to for my Red Sox info told me that there was an interesting little tidbit about the Dom Capers hire.

I am unhappy with myself for missing the Capers hire on the tickers when it was announced. To me, this is a great sign. It's a panic move on the part of the Patriots. It looks superficially like an insurance policy, a possibility which Peter King is quick to dismiss, in case Belichick should be forced to step down or face suspension for his role in the ongoing signal taping soap opera.

On that level, it would make some sense, since the Patriots had no one on staff with head coaching experience and McDaniel would have caused the knuckle-dragging troglodytes who root for the Patriots to mutiny had he inherited this team. Dean Pees may or may not have potential, it's hard to say as the presence of Belichick overshadows any fair understanding of what he's brought to the table as defensive coordinator. And who knows when this situation will resolve itself?

One thing is sure, it didn't make very much sense for the Patriots to enter the official NFL league year 2008 (starting with free agency and the draft process) without a viable candidate in house. Even if Capers isn't on any one's short list for a quick fix or permanent replacement, his presence means they won't have to make a panic move should Belichick have to leave town for a while.

The reason I like this move is that it shows the Patriots organization is scared at some level. Whether they are afraid of the end result of Arlen Specter's half-assed witch hunt or afraid that it's "Katy bar the door" time for the dynasty is another matter. Hiring a defensive assistant with experience with another branch of the 3-4 tree to serve under a less experienced defensive coordinator cannot bode well for the current coordinator's confidence.

The defense isn't getting any younger in the front seven. Assante Samuel is out the door, and some Pats fans aren't too upset considering he didn't intercept Eli Manning when he could have salted the game away. But that leaves you with fearsome shutdown corners in Ellis Hobbs and Randall Gay (who might be leaving town himself). Yes, in the piece I mentioned, Peter King proved with the case of the 49ers this past season that cornerbacks aren't a great investment compared to a solid pass rush.

When you think that Richard Seymour has quietly become the Manny Ramirez of the Pats defense and that Vrabel is getting older and much more likely to submit a season like he did in 2006 than another like he did in 2007, things all of a sudden look a little bleak in Foxboro. Of course, Adalius Thomas is still around and maybe he can get his statistical production mojo back if the Pats are forced to use him more like the Ravens did.

In another Pater King related comment, I want to address another column he wrote recently, predicting that Matt Ryan will be a better pro than JaMarcus Russell. I find that particularly amusing. One of the rationales for King's claim is that Ryan played and produced his impressive stats with a supporting cast that will not play pro football while Russell played with some of the best players in the nation and several future stars. That is a weighty argument.

However, doesn't it produce it's own weighty counterargument? Even if Matt Ryan played with players that won't make it to the NFL, should he not be expected to play at a high level any way, given the nature of his competition? For the last few years, as much as I hate to admit it, the SEC has been, top to bottom, the best and most competitive conference in college football. The ACC has been in a down cycle.

And on top of that, while both teams play cupcakes in the nonconference schedule, LSU plays Championship Subdivion powers and BC plays teams from the notoriously weak Northeast. And let's not forget, Russell torched an ND team in the Sugar Bowl that managed to send several players on to the NFL (Ndukwe and Landri among them). Matt Ryan struggled to lead BC to a win over a very depleted ND team this year, even though he threw outlet passes to his tailback that reminded people of a very old Joe Montana (the one in those terrible NFL Network diner ads, not even the one who played for the Chiefs).

If I were to give you ten things I think, items one through eight right now would be that Peter King is a d-bag. Item nine would be that anyone who actively reads Peter King to gain insight into the seamy underworld of the coffee nerd should be disenfranchised. And last but not least, item ten would be: "I hoped you enjoyed the dynasty, Pats fans" because it's over.

Here's some Roy Orbison music to help cushion the blow.


The song is called The Comedians. I particularly like the line: "It's always something cruel that laughter drowns." In this instance, the cruel thing will be the decline and fall of the Patriot empire and the laughter drowning it will come from me and the overwhelming majority of NFL fans who have grown tired of the Pats and their fans.

And in one last note, we need to join forces with Sports Guy Nation in a new crusade. Bill Simmons is launching a mock-campaign to replace the GM of the Milwaukee Bucks. I'm not taking the side of the trade that says a guy has to come from an NBA background to run an NBA team. I'm taking the side of the trade that this loudmouth who has never slid into second base in his natural life (not including that rich, full life he leads in his own mind a la Walter Mitty) ought to put his money where his mouth is just one time before he dies.

As a bonus, here's a tools of note feature. I inadvertently typed in Roger's Rules instead of Robert's Rules when I googled the parliamentary procedure portion of what I wanted to talk about tonight. I guess I had Clemens on the brain and I was still chuckling from the Simmons piece. But I happened to stumble across this goldmine of sayings that are too obvious and banal to be considered cliches.

This fellow, Roger J. Wendell, has a website defending 3.8 billion years of organic evolution. And on this website, Roger J. Wendell has his own quaint rules for order. After reading them, it's just too easy to make fun of him. So all I have to say about them is this: if he's the last line of defense for 3.8 billion years of organic evolution, then 3.8 billion years of organic evolution is in for a world of pain.

Bill Simmons just might be the greatest basketball mind in the world today. I doubt it, but I am obliged, as a Catholic, to believe in miracles. But here's the thing, let's say a team were to give him a shot, since he boasts that he has at least some of the answers to fix each and every team in the league at the moment. What happens when he picks up the phone or approaches a GM from another team at league meetings? Are they really going to forget his arrogant columns? Are they going to be impressed by his soprano twittering? Are they going to be intimidated by J Bug and D Bag and Joe House and the rest of his insane clown posse? I doubt it, and I hope I get to see him fail.

I'm sorry I haven't posted in so long. With the football season over, and a moderate interest in basketball until the NCAA tournament starts, what was there for me to say? Yeah, the Patriots videotaping scandal has shown surprising staying power (or maybe not so surprising since it gets elected officials headlines while forcing them to take no risks to their future career prospects whatsoever), but I've already said all that I have to say about that, for the most part.

I know NBA teams are scoring more, and sinking ships in the league are offering big name players to potential contenders at bargain basement prices. But I still can't get fired up to watch too much basketball until the playoffs start. No matter how intriguing some teams are starting to look, that doesn't change the fact that there are 8-10 teams more than the market can support.

While there are enough basketball players to fill the league's rosters in the sense that they can all put enough warm bodies on the court, there are far too many guys who have no business in an NBA arena unless they paid the price of admission or sold beer at a concession stand for my taste. There was a time when a player with so little talent and so few discernible skills in the basketball industry like Brian Scalabrine wouldn't be cashing checks from an NBA team. I'm old enough to remember and miss that time and young enough to be depressed when I do remember it.

I do want to talk a little about the big NBA trades that have come down lately. It gives me a chance to do something that I almost never do, and that is compliment Bill Simmons. I guess I'd file it under the "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then" theorem, but Simmons was dead right on Jason Kidd going to the Mavericks being much more likely to blow up than pan out in the short run or the long run. Simmons nailed every one of Kidd's flaws as a basketball player, and how specifically his competitiveness won't overshadow his inability to fit in on an already flawed basketball team.

That said, I am thrilled that Mark Cuban did this. First, it brings together three people in the NBA that I hate more than anyone, even Ainge, in Cuban, Kidd and Dirk. And it puts the three of them on a ship that will almost certainly sink. As Simmons said, Kidd can't shoot and he's too old to consistently drive to the basket. The players who should benefit from an upgraded point guard position were already shooting very well before Kidd came to town. And best of all, Kidd makes $20 million a year at his age, granted the deal ends after next year, but that's a lot of money to pay for a product that just may be past its expiration date. Good night and good luck to any hopes of a Mavericks' title run in the immediate future.

Simmons made an interesting point that Portland would have been a better fit, but Kidd nixed that deal. Apparently he had his heart set on going to the Mavs. Personally, I can't help but wonder if there might be some small motivation for Kidd coming out of the Toni Braxton fiasco, which ruined the chemistry of the young Mavs teams of the mid 1990s after Kidd and Jim Jackson fell out over their interest in the R and B singer.

I also found it interesting that Simmons dared to ask hard questions about whether this Garnett move might not come back to haunt the Celtics from a competitive stand point down the road. I am actually looking forward to that unfolding, considering the fact that I still hate Ainge and wish this team no success. If they don't win this year, all the players will be a year older. More than that, the issues that can arise on a team with three superstars trying to share shots won't be as easy to work around. If people put the team first for a year and it doesn't get it done, particularly if they lose to a one man team like Detroit or Cleveland, it's not going to work like this again.

As Simmons said, and we all know, the simple, pure economic decision was to go for Garnett. Even without the win differential, it got people excited and interested in the Celtics for the first time in 6 years. It sold a lot of tickets and jerseys and other assorted memorabilia. And something tells me, that even if this team comes apart at the seams in the playoffs and never gets close to bringing the 17th banner to Banner 17, those tools won't lose much sleep over it. Not so long as they make money.

So much for the thought that Mark Cuban is a brilliant business man. I wonder how the people who were desperate for Cuban to acquire the Cubs have taken this. I notice Jay Mariotti hasn't had the time to devote an entire column on this story. I'm not surprised, what with the fact that he had to tell us Tiger Woods had overtaken Michael Jordan. Aside from the horrendously half-assed stab at some sort of poetry to start the piece, the worst aspect had to be comparing a golfer and a basketball player.

Consider the fact that Tiger Woods goes ballistic if a fan dares snap a photo of him while he's in his back swing. Then set against that image a picture of Jordan trying to drive to the hoop against the Bad Boys era Pistons or the Pat Riley Knicks whose hacking habits did what just might be irreparable damage to basketball as a sport. At the end of the day, it's got to take a bit more than a few ads for Amex and Buick for a guy who excelled at a hobby to pass by a guy who took a shameful amount of contact in a non-contact sport.

As for college basketball, I'm really not all that hard up for something to watch that I can force myself to sit down and watch a game featuring two teams that I really could care less about battle it out in conference play. The only thing I feel strongly about in the entire college basketball landscape is that I hate Duke. I just hope that the upcoming NCAA tournament provides some earth-shatteringly interesting story lines, otherwise college basketball might be dead to me forever.

Since I was so miserable and depressing yesterday, I thought I'd share something that I like with the three of you who read this blog. Even though I've been a huge Elvis fan for as long as I can remember, there are still some songs out there that I've never heard. Recently, I happened to check out the five disc box set Walk A Mile In My Shoes, The Essential 70s Masters.

A lot of people who claim to be Elvis fans are down on this period in his career. I, for my part, think that he recorded some of his most mature music in this period. These songs might not have climbed the charts the way his more renowned material of the 50s and 60s did, but that's really not his fault. I think people get too hung up on the jump suits, the concert act and the odd behavior he exhibited during the seventies and don't approach the music with an open mind.

I said all that to say this, I think I may have a new favorite Elvis song. It's called Twenty Days and Twenty Nights. He recorded it in June of 1970, and it can be found on disc 3 of the Walk a Mile in My Shoes collection. I was just amazed at the courage it took for the writers to pen the song and a singer of Elvis' eminence to record it when it starts off to tell the story of a guy who ran out on his home and left his wife with a stack of unpaid bills.

Obviously, that's a rotten trick to pull on one's wife, and it doesn't take courage to do it, quite the opposite as a matter of fact. But it takes courage to come out and admit it in the first two lines of a song, when you consider that it's going to alienate the entire listening audience. And I think that, more than anything, is why I really like the music at the end of Elvis's career more than I like a lot of his big hits.

Elvis in the Seventies had the guts to record songs that might not win over a big audience. He was even willing to record songs that caused him a lot of pain, but he didn't wear it on his sleeve the way emo tools do. He was willing to dig deep to find the part of the song that spoke to a part of himself and didn't really give a damn whether people bought it, got it, liked it or cared as long as it mattered to him. And I admire that.

Here's a pretty good version of the song Twenty Days and Twenty Nights available on YouTube. Check it out:



It almost makes up for the local library owning four hardbound copies of the Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, but nary a copy of Trainspotting. I found that out because the authors are next to one another alphabetically, and I've been trying to read the books that movies I've really liked are based on of late. I highly recommend both the book and the movie version of The Commitments, in case you care. And don't worry, I have neither read nor watched any version of the damn Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, thank God.

It's been a while since I've had a Festivus post, by which I mean since I've aired several grievances without benefit of a common theme. But so much has been going on lately that I want to say a little bit about. For instance, I find myself amused by the memory of the voice of Boston sports, even though he lives in LA.

Bill Simmons in yet another mailbag column answered a reader from NY who wrote in to ask:

Can you clarify something for us New Yorkers? The cocky attitude that New England fans carried about the perfect Patriots was suddenly turned into classy responses of "you beat us fair and square," with very few comments like "I hope New York burns in hell." I expected more of the latter. Was your "classiness" just a facade, and have Boston fans exposed themselves as thin once things go south? Or is this more of an Eddie Murphy in "Trading Places" thing where you are a KARATE MAN and get bruised on the inside and don't show your weaknesses? What gives?

Simmons' response reads:

You have to remember, Patriots fans were constantly bristling during the 2001, 2003 and 2004 seasons when opposing players and fans played the "they had no business winning that game," and "maybe they were the winning team, but they weren't the best team" cards. Hence, the "nobody respects us!" angle that was pushed ad nauseum by Patriots players and fans alike. As crazy as this sounds, we believed that 60-minute football games should be used to determine who had the best team, not what "could" have happened or what "should" have happened. (Sorry, everyone from Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Indy.) So when the Giants outplayed the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, we admitted as much -- we've seen good defense and good coaching topple too many "talented" teams to call that game a fluke.

Also, it's easy to forget this after what happened from 2002 to 2007, but Boston fans are REALLY good at losing heart-wrenching games. We've had tons of practice. It was like Madonna dropping the British accent and the classy mom routine and turning into a slut again. You fall right back into it.

I find that tremendously funny. It seems to me that the Patriots were a seven point favorite when they played Carolina. It also seems to me that the only reason the Panthers managed to play their way to the point where the mighty Pats needed a Vinatieri field goal to win the game was an absolutely awful second half performance by Tom Brady. Even though it is very nearly a Federal offense to question Tom on any aspect of his performance, I still remember him turning the ball over a few times when it could have killed that team.

And then there is the game against the Eagles. The Patriots were also seven point favorites in that game. And they squeaked by on another Vinatieri field goal in part because Donovan McNabb couldn't keep his lunch down for the two minute drill at the end of the game. But as for no one expecting the Pats to win that game, I seem to remember the team had a 19 game win streak stretching from 2003-2004. I don't think they were sneaking up on teams at any point in that run.

But far be it for me to suggest that a man can't remember things in his own fashion in what still passes for a free country. Some Boston fans reacted with a stunning display of class because the epic upset in Arizona was so shocking, it even stopped the instinct to bully that resides at the core of the average Boston fan. And the facility to remember things in a way that never really happened is also one of the key attributes of the citizens of Red Sox and Patriots Nation.

Let's not forget that Red Sox fans have made a life of claiming their fathers, grandfathers and ancestors of remoter degrees were loyal, devoted Red Sox fans to the death. And yet the stadium was less than one-third full when Ted Williams played his final game. And I'm sure 2/3 of that generation of Red Sox fans would gladly have shivved the Splendid Splinter with a sharpened toothbrush to steal his medals and the fillings from his teeth.

I also want to talk a little about the tragedy at Northern Illinois this week. This is another symptom of a fundamental problem with our society. And it's not the fact that guns can be purchased in stores. It's a much deeper problem. After all, guns have been available to Americans since the first settlers landed here from Europe. Twenty years ago, just as many guns were available to just as many people and there wasn't even a waiting period or a Brady Bill.

But this isn't a defense of the gun lobby. It wouldn't bother me terribly if the nation made guns illegal. What I do fear, however, is the knee jerk reaction and a government that overreacts to specific events without addressing their underlying causes. This cat went into an auditorium and killed five people because he was a d-bag with serious emotional problems. So why don't we address the system that creates d-bags with serious emotional problems?

For the last 20 years, some geniuses decided that we had to tell every child that he or she or it is special. Every one who participated in any activity had to be given an award whether they earned it or not. The idea behind this is that self-esteem, self-respect, self-worth or whatever you call it can be instilled, inculcated or imposed from on high. That's not the case, it has to be earned. It's a painful process, and one filled with risks with very little reward. But unless a person experiences it, they have nothing.

No one ever seemed to ask a very simple question - what happens to these kids who never had to develop their own sense of self worth when they leave the relatively safe haven of elementary school and enter the real world? The real world, from middle school on is a harsh place. The real world doesn't give a damn how special you think you are or have been told you are. The real world is an awful, heartless, cold place. And we ought to raise and educate children that can deal with it.

Things just get worse, too. For thousands and thousands of years, the human being evolved into an animal that needs a community. And in the last 15 years, it's become easier, thanks to computers and social networking sites, to make friends in Berlin than it is to have friends in your hometown. I exchanged more words so far today with my college roommate over facebook than I did with my own roommate in my apartment. And people wonder why our society has so many inexplicable problems.

And since this latest tragedy is almost sure to bring Michael Moore out of hiding, I want to throw him in as a random thing I hate. I hate Michael Moore, not because I don't share his politics. God knows, I don't, but I have a lot of close personal friends whose politics I do not share. I hate him because he's a whining, carping fraud.

For instance, in his recent film about the state of health care in this country, Michael Moore spent how much money to whine about the fact that the Federal government doesn't spend enough money to provide universal health care to every American? It seems to me that he could have put that money to better effect paying for health insurance for needy families. Not only that, but he could have done more good and earned himself better PR with normal Americans (as opposed to people like me who would hate him anyway, or the people whose hearts and minds he's already won). But that's just me.

If time were not a moving thing
And I could make it stay
This hour of love we share
Would always be
There'd be no coming day
To shine a morning light
And make us realize our night is over

That's how the Elvis Presley version of It's Over starts. In case you're wondering, it is not a cover of the Roy Orbison classic which I included in my post celebrating the death of the Patriot dynasty in the Arizona desert. They just share a title. I included it in tonight's post because today's hearings ended as they began, with a whimper.

While they didn't go as well as I would have liked, they certainly did not go as poorly as McNamee apologists will claim. The only real damaging revelation came when Roger Clemens shocked me, and the rest of the world, by throwing his wife Debbie under the bus unceremoniously. It's hard to believe that a team trainer injected a player's wife with HGH for an SI shoot when he wasn't doing the same for the player.

I was livid when I heard that statement from Mrs. Clemens read into the record. I can't remember a time when a guy threw his wife under the bus to try to save himself. It was bold and shocking, like good modern art (to borrow a phrase from Joseph Heller, and if such a thing exists), but shameless, just the same. It makes it hard for me to defend him, but then, half the posts in this space seem to be devoted to defending the indefensible.

The guy I go to for my Red Sox info considered that to be a smoking gun when I spoke to him this afternoon. It does look bad, but all I can say is this - just because your wife runs your life doesn't mean Roger Clemens and his wife can't pursue independent courses of action vis-a-vis growth hormone. But it looks bad, nonetheless.

As for those who regard Andy Pettitte's testimony as ironclad proof of Clemens' dishonesty, I can't see it that way. Yes, Andy Pettitte is a born-again Christian. But when he admitted to using HGH way back in the aftermath of the Mitchell Report, Pettitte was adamant that he'd only used HGH for a very short time in 2002. Now, his deposition tells us that he also injected himself in 2004 with HGH he got from his father. I can't help but wonder where this story will lead us when Andy is done spilling the beans in bits and pieces.

I thought Roger looked convincing under the questioning. He stumbled a bit, and seemed to falter in places. But he looked like a regular guy under intense pressure in an unfamiliar setting. After all, had Clemens ever testified under oath, on camera before a Congressional committee before? Of course McNamee looked more polished, he's had plenty of experience with this sort of thing.

In the glut of after the fact coverage, I noticed that Congressman Watkins of Maryland got rave reviews for his hard-hitting cross examination of Clemens. Personally, I thought Congressman Burton of Indiana stole the show. And the rep from Connecticut, Congressman Shays, did a great deal of damage to McNamee's credibility when he forced McNamee to admit under oath that he was a drug dealer. It wasn't so much the admission, but the way McNamee failed to weasel out by saying that's your opinion a half dozen times.

McNamee, to me at any rate, looked like a small, devious, petty weasel in his good moments. In his bad moments, particularly under Burton's questioning, McNamee looked like a guy who has already admitted to having lied to police and investigators on a few occasions. I am most interested to find out exactly what is in McNamee's service record from his time in the NYPD.

I don't understand why the NYPD denied a Freedom of Information Act request to release the McNamee records. Knowing the mentality of big city police departments, it's clear they are protecting something embarrassing to some one. The question is to whom is it damaging? It's got to be covering a secret in his past because his father was one of their own or it's protecting superior officers who stand to lose their careers or pensions because they swept something under the rug.

What really ought to happen in the wake of this hearing, which was nothing more than a colossal waste of time, is really quite simple. Instead of perjury indictments, we ought to go back to the way the Pilgrims did it. Clemens, McNamee, all the Congressmen and women and every American who watched it ought to be put in the stocks and pelted with rancid produce. Except me, of course, I am far too valuable for that.

For the moment, I'm still on Clemens' side. I think this hearing did more to damage McNamee's credibility than it did to hurt Roger. I think the expanding revelations hurt Pettitte's capacity to hurt Clemens. I think the Debbie Clemens story is the last thing that remains that can kill Clemens on this issue. And I think that if Clemens had signed the prorated $18 million deal with the Red Sox in May, his name stays out of the Mitchell Report (Sen. Mitchell is on the Board of Directors of the Boston Red Sox)

I should have published this last night, but I just didn't feel like it. But I enjoyed watching this year's Pro Bowl more than I have in the past for some reason. I don't think it is a lingering positive feeling following the Patriots' epic collapse against the Giants. I think because there were more first time guys than usual, the game was played with more intensity than it has been lately.

Or maybe it was because Tom Brady and Randy Moss weren't there. My position on the two of them has been apparent from the earliest days of this blog's existence, so you are free to take it with a grain of salt. But I just can't help believing that even if he had to undergo some Lee Majors Six Million Dollar Man surgery on his high ankle sprain, Tom Brady would have been there to bask in the glow of 19-0. Or perhaps the shock of losing to the Giants overtaxed his fragile intellect so much he had to take a rest. Or maybe the thought of Matt Light facing off against Osi Umenyora one more time was more than he could bear.

As for Randy Moss, I remember mentioning once or twice that he had a history of coming up small in huge moments. For once, I have to include a reference to a Bill Simmons column that doesn't rip the author here. In last week's mailbag column, Simmons said this about Moss:
I don't know how it played on television, but in person, it was a breathtaking moment -- Brady buying himself time with a planned rollout, Moss sprinting down the sidelines flanked by two d-backs, and then Brady launching the ball 70 yards down field as every Giants fan in the building stopped breathing. The pass was right on target and Moss would have caught the football had he jumped for it ... which he didn't. I will always believe that. And by the way, it's taking all the will power in my sick body to refrain from a "If it were Week 6 and we were winning by 28, Moss would have caught the football" joke.

Yeah, Moss caught five balls for sixty two yards and a touchdown, which is nice. But at the end of the day he had a chance to make the play that saved the perfect season and for all his talent, all his athletic ability and all his demons that had come oh so close to being forgotten, Randy couldn't be bothered to go all out for that one moment. Damn shame that. So what if Assante Samuel could have iced the game by not dropping a sure INT. Aren't teammates supposed to bail one another out? We wouldn't have had Havlicheck steals it if we didn't have Russell making one of the worst inbounds passes of all time a second before.

The Patriots and the fans can point to the ankle injuries, but they can't answer that nagging doubt in my mind. Those two would have been in Hawaii had the Patriots won. Flagging the Pro Bowl is just one more of many instances in which these Patriots prove themselves to be classless and consummate sunshine soldiers.

As for my man, TO. I thought it was awesome when he came out and called himself the front runner for Pro Bowl MVP. In another instance of things I can't help but believe, I think that if any other receiver had caught two TD passes and I can't remember how many first downs to bring the NFC back from the brink of defeat, they might have managed to edge out Adrian Peterson. But that's just me. So I have no problem with any of TO's actions yesterday.

It was nice that Adrian Peterson rushed for the second most yards in the history of the Pro Bowl. Maybe if he'd been that intense down the stretch, Minnesota might have beaten out the Redskins for the final playoff spot in the NFC. Perhaps the Vikings should have been offering new Cadillacs for playoff incentive.

As for other peripheral matters... I'm just not sure Andre Tippett ought to be in the Hall of Fame. Yeah, he had 100 career sacks. So did Mark Gastineau. Yeah, those Patriot teams blew, but Gastineau's Jets weren't much better. What it comes down to, I think, is that the Patriots had (prior to this dynasty) next to nothing in the way of history and tradition, so Tippett got in to the Hall.

Now that the post Super Bowl euphoria is passing, it's time to get back to serious business. I didn't take the time to comment when the Red Sox added Sean Casey to the team in the not too distant past for three reasons. First, the NFL playoffs were much more important at the time. Second, I really don't know what to make of it. And third, I'm not too worried about what he can bring to the table.

Casey is, in theory, an interesting addition to the 2008 Red Sox lineup. He's a left handed bat, who can serve to spell Mike Lowell and Kevin Youkilis at stretches during the season. I am not anticipating that he would play third, but with him in the lineup it would free Youkilis to play third and Lowell to rest, or DH according to the whim of Francona.

That said, he's not tremedously young anymore. Casey won't be a character problem, since he's been very well liked by teammates, fans and the media everywhere he's played. But he's slow, even by the standards of these Red Sox who are (with the exception of Ellsbury and others) a particularly slow team, both mentally and physically. Also, I don't see him getting enough at bats to make a big impact on the team's fortunes. But who knows who might get hurt.

In other news, Brian McNamee took the stand in Congress today. His battle with Roger Clemens has taken an interesting turn. And one must wonder how it will impact the more important battle being waged between myself and theKobraKommander for the hearts and minds of my readers. This is, indeed, a strange turn.

Brian McNamee turned evidence including syringes, gauze pads and vials over to the IRS Special Investigator allegedly providing the substance behind the earlier accusation that he had injected Roger Clemens with steroids, HGH and everything but the kitchen sink. At first blush, this looks very bad for Clemens, who testified in his own deposition on Tuesday that he had never taken performance enhancing substances.

If Clemens is proved to have perjured himself, it is, ironically, the only way he can fairly and legally be punished for what he is alleged to have done in the Mitchell Report. As baseball had no comprehensive policy banning performance enhancing substances prior to 2004, all of the allegations against Clemens would be moot otherwise, since one cannont be punished under a law written ex post facto.

As a defender of Clemens from the first appearance of the Mitchell Report, I am not tremendously worried about the material that has been handed over to the government investigators. This comment provided by the doping expert ESPN consulted for their story eases my mind somewhat:

Doping expert Don Catlin said steroids could still be detected in a sample that old.

"But if you don't find it, it doesn't mean it wasn't there before," said Catlin, who added there are sure to be chain of custody issues.

He said HGH would be much less stable.

Any reasonably competent lawyer should be able to get around that, provided that there is anything around which to get in this story. Granted, there isn't a great deal of detail in Catlin's comment, but it doesn't seem strong enough to damn Clemens, either. Time, however, will tell.

I am still in shock that the Patriots who managed to survive so many negative stories and stave off a few big upsets in the making this season haven't found a way to reverse the outcome of Super Bowl XLII. I am also in shock that I managed to walk the tightrope between implying that the Giants could actually win the game without harnessing the awesome power of this blog's jinx.

I can't remember the last time I actually called something before hand and had it come to pass. It may never have happened, I just don't feel like going back and looking through my posts to find it, on the off chance that I was ever right. I get the feeling that I was right in picking Dallas to beat Indianapolis in Dallas last year the week before Thanksgiving. And I think I picked the Bears to win against Seattle and New Orleans last year in the playoffs. But since then, it's been a bad, bad, bad run.

Unfortunately, I think that the NFL will be forced to find a way to have this game replayed until the Patriots can find a way to win. If not, then so many of our most respected sports journalists will continue to look even more foolish than they ordinarily do. For instance, Bill Simmons compared these Giants to the 1985 Pats. The podcast is still up on his site at ESPN, in case you don't believe me. If Roger Goodell and the league office allow this to stand, it might bring down the sports media as we know it.

Meanwhile, I got an email on Saturday from the guy I go to for my Red Sox info. He was out in Arizona for the game. And he had his picture taken with Jim McMahon. It seems very funny in retrospect, to have him out there with the QB whose team devastated, humiliated and set the Patriots back ten years with the savage beating the Bears inflicted that day. And all the while, Simmons is out there comparing the Pats opponent to the Pats of yesteryear. Although, I have to say Tom Coughlin is a lot like the evolutionary Ray Berry in the sense that he's kind of a tool.

This retrospect on what it felt like to see the undefeated Patriots fall apart in Arizona has to be my favorite Simmons column of all time now. One thing I'm not entirely sure of, as I talk about this loss with my friends who root for the Patriots, is whose fingerprints are on this spectacularly offensive offensive collapse. It's easy to blame McDaniel, but didn't Belichick promote him because he was an unknown and could serve as a strawman enabling Belichick to have even more control over the team? It seems like the arrogant game plan that seemed to be governed by the premise that all the Pats had to do was show up would bear this out, but then I might just be blinded by my hatred for Belichick.

It wouldn't be a normal day for Sedition in Red Sox Nation if Jay Mariotti hadn't found his own way to taint what should otherwise be as nearly perfect as a moment can be in sports fandom. The notion that the Patriots should be further punished for the report that came out of Saturday's Boston Herald claiming that the Pats cheated by videotaping the Rams pregame walkthrough before the 2002 Super Bowl is absurd. If they did cheat, it was dirty, shameless and beat. But it's also fairly unprofessional to punish a team now for what they did six years ago.

Professional sports aren't the real world. In a sense, it's not that different from punishing baseball players who took performance enhancers that were banned by other sports but not banned by baseball at the time the players took them. The NFL came down hard on the Patriots when they were caught red handed this year. If it happens again, they ought to come down harder on them. But if six years intervene between that incident and when the story came out, then it's St. Louis' tough luck. Maybe they should have had a guy make sure the stadium was empty if they didn't want people checking out their walkthrough.

The one good thing about this whole episode is that it reminded all of us that Arlen Specter is still alive and kicking in the US Senate. But as for this silly little story, I have a pretty solid record for disliking and ripping the Patriots, their coach and their owner. That said, I have no empathy or sympathy for Kurt Warner and the 2001 Rams. They had every chance to beat a team that was markedly inferior on paper. Knowing the Dick Vermeil/Mike Martz offense, I'm sure they had practiced other plays enough over the season that they could have made adjustments.

The real story is that those Rams didn't treat the game as seriously as they ought to have. They came in as a big favorite, having beaten the Pats on the road earlier in the year and playing in a dome against an outdoor team. They were the greatest show on turf and they failed to show up. It's not Roger Goodell's problem. Nor is it the problem of Congress. Taping other teams' signals isn't right, but neither is a retroactive investigation that really can't culminate in an appropriate or effective punishment.

In general, I try to avoid commenting on specific political candidates in this space, mostly because I realize that none of you give a damn what I think about a particular candidate. But I think we need to throw a tool of note award in Mitt Romney's direction. Romeny's campaign came out today and claimed that John McCain and Mike Huckabee made some sort of illicit "backroom" deal to deny Romney the delegates from W Va. To me, it seemed like more than a little sour grapes from Romney. Or perhaps a sense of frustration because he didn't think of it first, if in fact anything untoward was done.

In case you care, in the interest of equal time, Sedition in Red Sox Nation is forced into an anti-McCain stance because he is supported by Curt Schilling. Mike Huckabee is out because he reminds me of the Homer Stokes character from O Brother Where Art Thou. Fred Thompson is out because he was in Die Hard 2. And Rudy was out because he has a bad comb-over, although I defy anyone to show me a good comb-over, and he did a terrible cameo in Anger Management. Kind of funny, isn't it, the thought process through which we here approach the democratic process.

Eighteen and one. It looks even better spelled out. I didn't post last night because I had to do some serious celebrating. And I didn't post earlier today because I was suffering from a hangover. I was wondering, too, what quote I would use to lament the Patriots fall from glory at the finish line. Over the course of this season, I have been making frequent references to Gerald Ford's first speech to the American people after taking the oath of office, telling every one that the long national nightmare was over. Instead, I think we'll go with Jackie Gleason: "How sweet it is!"

I still don't like the Giants, and I don't think I ever will. But this was just an unbelievable moment. After all the records, all the attention, all the hype and all the disgustingly classless behavior on the part of the coach, the players and the fans, it's all come to nothing.

Brady has the regular season records that Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw didn't get. And now he's added one more mark that the two of them can never touch. He's no longer perfect in the Super Bowl. Sure, the offensive line let him down but Bradshaw took his fair share of hits and still managed to make the plays that had to be made. Montana took the field needing to drive his team 92 yards in the two minute offense down by four, and he did it. Brady just wasn't good enough yesterday.

I just can't say enough about Matt Light's performance. My friend from Maine called him the most overrated lineman in football. I don't think that's fair, I would only put him in the top five. I think Marcus McNeil from San Diego is more overrated, for example. But his performance conjured many happy memories of Max Lane being abused by Reggie White. Too bad Strahan was on the other side of the formation, otherwise the symmetry would have been perfect with the 92 jersey number and the shellshocked Pats o-lineman.

The best part, however, of this Super Bowl is that it presents tantalizing signs of not being the end of the beginning to steal a phrase from Churchill, but the beginning of the end. I know I've said this more than a few times to this point, but age has to catch up to these Patriots soon. Vrabel did come back in a big way this season, but he can't have much gas left in the tank at his age. Bruschi and Seau aren't getting any younger or quicker. Harrison might have to get back on the HGH.

Yeah, they have San Francisco's first round pick. But they aren't going to be in the same position as far as the salary cap economics are concerned. Moss is a free agent, and they have to answer some tough questions. He's coming off a great season, but without the contract year incentive to perform, will he be as hungry next year or will some of the character issues reappear? Stallworth is also a free agent, and will he be as eager to return to a team where he was overshadowed by Moss and Wes Welker?

That's all I can say right now, so I'll leave you with this video, letting Roy Orbison speak for me.