Did you know that you can find much of the 90s British sitcom “Chef!” (it was all over PBS for a while) on YouTube?
What does that have to do with TMQ? We’ll find out in this week’s TMQ after the jump…
But are the Chiefs for real?
Oh, wait. He said “Chiefs”, not “Chefs”. Never mind. (The answer, by the way, is “No”, and 459 words down.)
More teams than TMQ expected have been gaining 500, 600, and 700 yards on offense and losing. “…the Broncos are 7-1, have outscored opponents by 125 points, and if the season ended today, would be a wild-card team.” And if our mother had wheels, she’d be a wagon, Gregg. The NFL has adapted to Chip Kelly’s blur offense. Or maybe the Eagles just aren’t that good.
Sweet: Oakland, New England. “Genetically Engineered Surimi” is still a nonsense term. Sour: Cleveland. Mixed: Dallas – Detroit.
It isn’t that we think there’s nothing to laugh at in the NSA scandals. Actually, we find the parody t-shirts amusing. What we don’t find amusing is TMQ’s attempt at humor. Geeez, even They Might Be Giants are more amusing than Easterbrook, and that’s from 2006.
Do NFL owners care more about avoiding liability than protecting players’ brains?
We’ll just mention again that while “no helmet can prevent concussions, but some provide better protection than others”, the “better protection” appears to be around a 2.6% reduction in concussions, according to the most recent study we’ve seen.
Nothing should frighten moviegoers more than remake after remake.
“Remake after remake” wouldn’t scare us, Gregg, if they were remaking movies that we not that great the first time around. Yes, the “Carrie” remake was pointless, as are many other remakes, but that doesn’t invalidate the concept.
But: Holy crap! How did TMQ find this? “This” (for those of you not clicking through) being the complete 1988 Stratford production of “Carrie: The Muscial” on YouTube. Apparently, the 2012 revival has been uploaded in chunks, too. This earns TMQ one free pass, which he may redeem with WCD for any item of his choice except the GD 1972 Dolphins.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Paramount is now calling “World War Z” a “horror film,” because that definition makes it the highest-grossing movie in a genre.
And possibly because zombies are a classic horror trope? Was “Night of the Living Dead” marketed as “horror” or “SF”? And there’s a long tradition of blended “horror”/”SF” movies, such as the original “Alien”.
Why don’t they block? Tickets for good games on StubHub sell for more than face value; tickets for bad games on StubHub sell for less than the cost of postage. Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Bird, bird, bird, bird’s the word.
And led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people from malaria. But who’s counting?
Something about Seattle – St. Louis.
Duke (football) doesn’t suck. Bad blitzing: Minnesota.
TMQ revisits the gerrymandering theme from a few columns back:
We need to think about this some more, but off the top of our pointy little head, this seems more practical than TMQ’s previous proposal for computer generated districts.
The Eagles’ crowd steadily booed Michael Vick…
Eagles fans also once booed Santa Claus, Gregg. But, yes, these are two crappy teams.
Overall, NCAA athletes in the latest study graduated at an 82 percent rate, better than the caps-in-the-air rate for public university students as a whole. This overall number includes the revenue sports of football and men’s basketball, plus everything else: lacrosse, soccer, Nordic skiing, mixed rifle. In big-college football, the Football Bowl Subdivision graduation rate hit 71 percent overall — 84 percent for white players, 64 percent for African-American.
“mixed rifle”? We’re guessing that’s “mixed gender” and not mixed in the sense of multiple rifles. Though we can see where having to move from an AR to a .22LR benchrest gun could be interesting. This makes us think a bit more: collegiate three-gun matches. We sense a great need.
- Dismissing Schiano mid-season serves as an effective repudiation of him and his coaching style. We’d like to think that being dismissed mid-season might make it tougher for him to get another coaching job.
- Also, reports are that Schiano has pretty much lost the confidence of the entire team. If they fire him now, the team might pull together and win a couple of games, perhaps putting them out of contention for the first round draft choice next year. Come to think of it, maybe TMQ has a point…
Maybe once Schiano is cashiered, he and Bobby Petrino can run coaching clinics.
Hey, this seems unfair. Bobby Petrino made a mess of his personal life, and he did some things as an employee at Arkansas that were sleezy (if not actually illegal), but we never heard anybody say that he was as bad a sport as Schiano.
Do a little dance, make a little love, get first downs tonight. Misdirection: good.
Many readers have complained that the Nobel Prize for economics is not adequately covered by ESPN.
Yes. We ourselves have been nearly deafened by the cries of our friends, family, and cow-orkers: “Dear WCD: why doesn’t Gregg Easterbrook write more about the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel?”
(Say what you will about our circle; at least they recognize that the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is not an actual Nobel Prize.)
But that’s okay, because TMQ’s topic this week is none other than Paul Krugman, prominent doomsayer. For more information on Paul Krugman, the Library of Congress recommends reading SmarterTimes.com.
The Maroon Zone. Not to be confused with the T Zone.
“Just give the ball to Octavias!” Or if not him, perhaps Augustus. Or Claudius.
Yes, TMQ did predict on Twitter that the Lions would gain 500+ yards and lose. Yes, he was wrong. No, it isn’t worth making a federal case out of it.
Noted: playoff teams are generally better than regular season opponents, which may explain P. Manning’s struggles in the post-season. At least, that’s a theory. We’re not sure we buy it – even taking that into account, we’d expect P. to have a better post-season record – but it is a theory.
Chicken-(salad) kicking: Jacksonville.
The 500 Club. The 600 Club.
Reader Craig McMichael notes that in juco action, in a road game at College of the Redwoods, Mendocino College gained 1,041 yards on offense, scored 10 touchdowns, did not punt, and lost.
“Did not punt” and lost? We’re surprised Easterbrook’s head didn’t explode.
More chicken-(salad) kicking: UCLA. “Concord University 9, Charleston of West Virginia 3 in double overtime.” Wow. That must have been a riveting game. Was it televised? (Not that it would have mattered, as WCD was in the country away from television sets.)
Concord University teaches “non-verbal communication.”
Why the scare quotes, Gregg? Do you believe there’s something illegitimate about the concept of non-verbal communication?
And that’s a wrap for this week. Tune in next week for the countdown to TMQ’s 1972 Miami Dolphins auto-text. And if we’re lucky, maybe he can find the complete “Moose Murders” on YouTube as well.