Whipped Cream Difficulties

There are no undefeated teams left in the NFL this season. The Kansas City Chiefs lost on Sunday.

We all know what that means, right?

Or do we?

After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

When a call (or a no-call) on the last play decides the game, officials want to be sure they can get out of the parking lot. That means the call (or no-call) will go the home team’s way.

Doesn’t this reflect a rather cynical view of NFL fans? A view that says fans will get so upset if a call doesn’t go their way, they will engage in acts of violence or vandalism against the officials?

Doesn’t this also reflect a rather cynical view of NFL security? A view that says officials are afraid to make the right call because they can’t count on being protected after the game?

Anyway, Easterbrook thinks defensive holding should have been called on the final play in the New England-Carolina game. We have no opinion on this, as we didn’t watch the game. (We didn’t watch any games this weekend. We spent much of Sunday sleeping. Is it just us, or does half of the United States currently have a cold?)

There have of course been cases where zebras ruled against the home crowd in the final seconds, and every official knows what happens — the crowd goes bonkers, as it did at the 2001 Cleveland Browns rain-of-beer-bottles game.

So TMQ has to reach back twelve years for an example of “the crowd” going “bonkers”?

Officials have come to view Hail Mary situations as let the boys decide the outcome. That was part of the psychology in the final Carolina-New England ruling. The main part was Parking Lot Theory.

Hey, why do we need officials at all? Let the boys decide the outcome.

In other news, the Panthers are on the map, the Patriots are angry, and Atlanta and San Francisco both stink. The Saints have bravado (also, their defense has vastly improved).

Sweet: Bengals special teams. Sour: Kansas City (mostly, chicken-(salad) kicking). Mixed: Buffalo-Jets, Pittsburgh-Detroit. No mention of the 1972 Miami Dolphins yet.

TMQ has issues with the conviction of New York psychic Sylvia Mitchell.

But since the lack of actual psychics is widely known, aren’t the marks as much to blame? Bernard Madoff claimed he was investing in legitimate enterprises; that was fraud. Mitchell told her marks she could see the spirit world. That’s not fraud, it is performance art.

This seems uncomfortably close to “it is morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep their money“. If TMQ wants to take the latter as a governing philosophy, we can certainly see that, but it seems inconsistent with other expressed TMQ views.

Also, the article TMQ links is frustratingly vague in specifics on what Ms. Mitchell actually did. “Performance art”, we’d suggest, might cover the $10 palm reading. But here’s a better NYT article about Ms. Mitchell’s crimes.

Ms. Mitchell told the woman that this attachment-to-money problem could be addressed by the woman giving her $27,000 to “learn to let go.” It was just an exercise, Ms. Mitchell told the woman, promising to return the money at any time, the police said. The client paid with a check but awoke the next day and realized that her “judgment had been clouded,” she told detectives. When she asked for the money back, Ms. Mitchell said it was no longer “available,” the police said.

Something about scamming $28,000 (the woman had already paid $1,000 to be told she needed to give Ms. Mitchell the $27,000) out of a vulnerable woman makes our gorge rise. But let’s hear TMQ out:

Suppose the theory of the Mitchell conviction is correct — that accepting fees for promises of supernatural interaction constitutes grand larceny. Wouldn’t every church, mosque and synagogue be subject to a police raid?

Does TMQ’s church promise supernatural interaction?

Your columnist is a churchgoer who pays an annual pledge, doing so of my own free will. The minister says that attending church and making donations is good for my soul. Maybe he’s right. I choose of my own free will to believe he is. Or maybe all clergy are con artists. Should they go to prison for accepting money in return for vague intimations about an unverifiable spiritual plane? That’s why Mitchell is going to prison.

Ms. Mitchell is going to prison because she scammed money from vulnerable people. “She also spent over $9,000 on clothes one day after taking the woman’s credit card.” Does TMQ really not see the difference here? We’d be willing to concede that, especially with certain “prosperity gospel” preachers, the lines may get a little blurred. But we don’t recall Jim and Tammy Bakker, even at their worst, using other people’s credit cards to buy clothes for themselves.

The football gods keep chortling. Hey, how about that Royal Navy?

Paul Meka of Buffalo, N.Y., notes that in total, the Royal Navy has 79 commissioned ships, two vessels for each admiral. Yoni Appelbaum of Cambridge, Mass., compared this to the United States Navy, which has 331 admirals for 285 ships in commission, a worse H.M.S. Pinafore ratio than under the Union Jack.

Ford gets a carrier. FDR gets a destroyer.

Jimmy Carter, who beat Ford at the polls, has his name on only an attack submarine. (Carter is the sole president to have served aboard a submarine, but elected presidents should outrank appointed presidents.)

“Only an attack submarine” seems highly dismissive to us. Here’s the USS Jimmy Carter. (In addition to being the only president to serve on submarines, Carter was one of Rickover’s boys, so naming a Seawolf class boat after him has a certain special significance.)

There is no ship named the Bill Clinton — or perhaps, in naval naming convention, the William Jefferson Clinton — though Clinton was a popular two-term president whose policies helped cause an economic boom and the retreat of the remnants of the Soviet Union. (Capital ships sometimes are named for the living, including the Reagan and the Bush.)

Perhaps it is just a wee bit early for the USS William Jefferson Clinton. The Jimmy Carter was launched in 2004, 23 years after Carter left office. It has only been about 12 years since Clinton left office. (It was roughly 28 years between the end of Ford’s term and the laying of the keel for the USS Gerald R. Ford: the USS Ronald Reagan took twelve years from the end of his term to actual christening, which strikes us as awfully fast for naval shipbuilding. But we’re not experts.)

This week in unrealistic television shows: 772 words (out of 7,388 total, or just over 10% of his column) on “The Blacklist”.

In just the first few episodes, a dozen FBI agents are killed in several machine-gun battles in Washington, D.C.; an FBI helicopter is shot down with a missile; four U.S. Marshals are killed, including two killed in mere seconds by an unarmed bad guy in shackles; 100 people are killed with biological weapons in Washington’s subway system and in a federal courthouse; a cargo plane explodes above Washington and a commercial airliner is blown up at Reagan National Airport.

Daymn. And we’ve been missing this?

(We were listening to one of our favorite podcasts over the weekend, and they actually had some very nice things to say about “The Blacklist”. We might actually have to give it a try.)

(Oh, and about 35% of this item is actually imagined dialog involving a real estate agent “showing abandoned warehouses to a criminal mastermind”, which just adds additional evidence to our theory that Easterbrook thinks he’s more amusing than he actually is. But this did make us chuckle slightly: “Mastermind: Tanning beds, message chair and wet bar?” Mostly because it reminds us of “It’s got a bar, a really nice one“, which is way funnier than anything TMQ wrote.)

(That same podcast we were talking about earlier? A bigger bunch of comic and Whedon fans you’ll probably never hear from in your life. And they hate “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” Just a data point.)

The Falcons are 2-8. Tampa Bay is also 2-8. Houston is also 2-8, but TMQ doesn’t mention that.

Charles Youvella, a high school football player in Arizona, died last week from head injuries he received during a game. TMQ has some comments. Out of respect, we’re going to let TMQ’s comments stand alone.

Ordinary people using hotels in the Jacksonville will pay more so that a billionaire can have a new toy.

“in the Jacksonville”? Is that anything like “on the Twitter”? Or “check the Googles”?

(And not that we think this is a good idea, but hotel taxes generally screw the out-of-town visitors more than they do the locals.)

The Redskins stink, but it isn’t all Bobby Three Sticks’ fault. Duke (football) doesn’t suck.

Why did the state of Pennsylvania pay $82,000, not for bodyguards for the governor, or the lieutenant governor, but the lieutenant governor’s wife? Good question. And, though we hate to sound like “that guy”, we kind of wish TMQ had addressed Michael Bloomberg offering his current NYPD provided Praetorian Guard $100,000 a year to leave their jobs and work for him (while they collect their NYPD pensions). Why does Bloomberg need bodyguards? And isn’t it nice he can afford personal protection, after spending much of his career attempting to deny it to others?

We see the Gettysburg Address correction as a pretty transparent publicity stunt. Reader mail: college football fans can generally watch any game they want, while NFL fans have to watch what the league offers them (unless they have DirectTV with Sunday Ticket, which is another recurring TMQ trope).

How long until college teams start playing on Sunday afternoons, challenging the Big Brother broadcast policies of the NFL directly?

How about “never”, Gregg, given the deference that the NFL already shows to college football. Though total war between the NCAA and the NFL might be amusing to watch.

Something something Colts-Titans Stanford krumbles. “Why do judges impose sentences too long to serve?” Why does TMQ ask questions he knows the answer to?

Adventures in officiating: roughing the Brees (and why was the ball spotted where it was), what the frack was going on in Tennessee, more on “targeting” ejections (spoiler: this rule will probably be modified next season), and the safety dance.

Everything is Jeff Ireland’s fault. The 500 Club. The 600 Club. The 700 Club. Reinhardt 66, Campbellsville 48.

And that’s a wrap, folks. But wait! Isn’t there something missing? Yes, yes there is: no mention of the 1972 Miami Dolphins at all. Could TMQ have forgotten? Seems unlikely, since he did acknowledge that there were no undefeated teams. Could someone have told TMQ that item was wrong and he should stop using it? It would have had to have been someone with authority over TMQ. And we’d expect Easterbrook to say something about it. Unless that person told him not to. And could Oswald actually have fired three shots from a bolt-action Carcano Model 91/38 carbine in 5.6 seconds?

Wait. We’re getting our conspiracy theories crossed. See you next week.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 20th, 2013 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Clippings, Law, NFL, TMQ watch, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.