Dowbrigade

Watching
the undefeated and league leading New England Revolution play
their arch-enemy New York Metro Stars. The scene on the field in New
York is brilliant sunshine and the fans are all in T-shirts and shorts,
whereas when we look out the window here in Boston it is dark and dreary,
cold and nearly night-time.
Supposedly the game is live, but it is hard to believe, and incongruities
like this are what make us doubt the reality of a lot of what they are
showing us on
TV
these days.

Meanwhile, as part of the plot to popularize the world’s number one
sport among the athletic barbarians here in the homeland, the network
announcers keep presenting, with attractive animated graphics, newly invented
statistical categories like "passes for possession" and "passes behind
the defense".

They are obviously trying to pander to a perceived American predilection
for numbers, statistics, objective measurement of performance. It won’t
work. Soccer is too fluid, too subjective, too creative to be reduced
to statistics. In Europe and South America sports writers and pundits give
grades to each player after every game, B+ or C- for this guy or that,
but this is a subjective analysis as well.

American networks who want to help soccer catch on would be better advised
to use their technological wizardry to better capture the magic on the
field; more camera angles, super-slo-mo so we can actually see the footwork
and body control necessary for those incredible moves, movable cameras
suspended over the field like FOX NFL broadcasts to capture the dynamic
sweep of
a wave
of attackers racing downfield or a perfectly timed offside trap.

Forget the numbers and graphics.  Show us the game, just better.

postscript: Revs
2 – Metro Stars 2; Revs still undefeated.

So here is the Friday the 13th edition of the Get
Fuzzy cartoon which
has sparked so much controversy, dominated local sports radio, and sparked
a lawsuit by
Boston sportscaster Bob Lobel against the Boston cartoonist Darby Conley.

Conley is, obviously, a Red Sox fan, and his strips frequently reference
the team, players, and the nemesis NYY. The controversial strip has been
pulled from several papers, and in the Boston Globe Lobel’s name was
replaced by the pronoun "him". In addition, pursuant to the lawsuit,
the strip has been removed from the Get Fuzzy archives, but your ever-alert
correspondent managed to find a copy of the banned artwork.

Since Get Fuzzy is only carried in a handful of papers, you might need
a scorecard to keep the players straight.  Here they are:

This
is Rob Wilco. He is a kind of nerdy, ironic loser, who works in
an ad agency and whose social life seems to consist of talking to, and
dealing with the problems of, his "pets" Bucky and Satchel.

This
is Bucky Kat. He is egotistical, carnivorous, sarcastic, dismissive
of both Satchel and Rob, and locked in a mortal feud with the ferret
next door.

This is Satchel,
he is good-hearted, dumb, literal, who tries to be man’s – and Kat’s – best
friend but usually ends up the but of jokes he doesn’t get.

Now, it may seem that Conley has something against Bob Lobel,
(he wouldn’t be the first or only one), the preeminent TV
sports reporter and commentator in Boston for over 10 years, but any
local sports fan with a TV has noticed something weird about Lobel’s
diction
lately. He has definitely been slightly slurring his words, and looking goofy-happy, not as much
as Joe Namath on the sidelines last fall, but leaning in the same general
direction.

However, there are MANY things, temporary, permanent, ingested, organic
or emotional, which can cause the drop in muscle and tissue tension the
human ear hears as a slur. Believe us, not only are we a professional
in the
phonetics
and pronunciation of the English language, but have over the years acquired
a long and deep first-hand familiarity with many of the conditions causing
slurring.

Drawing on this vast body of knowledge, we can categorically state that
Bob Lobel has NOT been under the influence of alcohol during his recent
TV appearances.

If we had to hazard a guess, we would go for a balanced combination
of oxy-contin, a relatively unknown blood pressure medication called Lisinopril,
and a commercially available horse tranquilizer marketed as Ketaset, but
known among aficionados as "vitamin K".

This makes sense, as Lobel recently returned from covering the Kentucky
Derby, but don’t quote us on that.  And please don’t sue us….

article from the Boston Globe

I tend to age my bourbon in my ample gullet. However, if you wish
to spend $29.95 on a massive magnet that realigns the individual molecules
of your finest port, whiskey, or brandy, be our guest.

Through the magic of the spheres, the Shooter Buddy will make any drink
less bubbly and more better. Using the age-old vintner’s technique of powering
heavy electrical fields near vintage bottles, the Shooter Buddy realigns
"delicate magnetic alignment of the liquid particles." We prefer to use
ours while wearing our aluminum foil beanie and mind control prevention
pants.

Just what we need – an aging accelerator!

from Gizmodo

product page