Whipped Cream Difficulties

You know that comment we made yesterday, about “Start writing or stop talking about it” being pretty good writing advice?

This week’s TMQ after the jump…

The Dallas Cowboys are bad. 668 words down.

“Genetically Engineered Surimi” is still a nonsense term. Your “Authentic Games” Super Bowl matchup is now New Orleans and Denver, “despite both losing in Week 15”. Why? “The losses came to teams that don’t count as Authentic, though what does count as an Authentic victory varies weekly depending on the performance of other teams — kind of like high-school playoff bonus points.” Huh?

SI Curse. Cowboys December Curse. “Who would have expected Houston and Washington, playoff teams last season, both to tank?” We would. Houston teams will always break your heart.

Sweet: San Francisco. (Hey, how about the Flip 90?)

Sour: Cincinnati. Mixed: Miami – New England.

Can we participate in TMQ’s double-blind taste test? It isn’t that we think we can tell Johnnie Walker Blue Label from Red Label; we just would like the chance to sample $200 a bottle whisky.

Are the Stadium Gods the same as the Football Gods?

Bailing out an arrogant, poorly managed company violated every rule of market economics. Yet five years later, the country is better off.

Nnnnnng! Nnnnnnnnng!

Washington went for the two point conversion and lost. But that was the right call. Tennessee went for the tie and lost in overtime. That was the wrong call. “So both teams in the last-second-deuce-to-win situation lost the game. At least Washington used the bold strategy.”

Cars are good. No, really.

Detroit’s rebound traces to American manufacturers finally learning to match imports for quality. The Ford Fusion is now a hot seller in all-important California, home of trends in automotive taste. A milestone was reached when the new Chevy Impala became the first American sedan in 20 years to get the Consumer Reports top rating. Cars such as the Fusion and Impala are roomy, fuel-efficient, packed with electronics and safety features, and most important, well-built. Low manufacturing quality caused the Detroit decline: high quality is leading the rebound.

One of our friends has owned two recent model Ford Fusion hybrids, and we have to admit; we like those cars. They wouldn’t be first on our list of “cars to buy after our winning lottery ticket is drawn”, but if we happened to win one in a contest, we’d be very happy driving it.

Lexus and Chrysler now offer eight-speed automatic transmissions; the 2014 Jeep Cherokee will have nine-speed automatics; General Motors and Ford recently announced a joint venture for 10-speed automatic transmissions. Cars with as many speeds as bicycles!

How about cars with more speeds than bicycles? (Hint for TMQ: look up “fixie” sometime.)

(We used to ride a three-speed bicycle. Which was the same number of forward gears our dad’s used Ford F100 pickup had. There is nothing new under the sun.)

(The Audi A4 catalog devotes a page to insulting American lager as “cheap” and “mass-produced” compared to German beer.)

Depends on the specific lager and producer, to be sure, but TMQ might want to look up the Reinheistgebot.

Wretched excess continues in the horsepower department. The latest 7-series BMW series boasts a zero-to-60 time of 4.3 seconds; the company’s ads say, “Get pinned to your seat.” What possible function is served by such power, except road-rage driving? The ads don’t mention 15-mpg fuel consumption or 9.7 tons of greenhouse gases annually. (A BMW television ad shows a 3-series simply traveling down a road; tiny type says, “Professional driver do not attempt.” You can’t drive your car down a road?) The new Cadillac CTS-V has 556 horsepower, gets 14 mpg and emits 10.2 tons of greenhouse gas annually. Versions of that engine can be found in several General Motors cars — a too-potent motor developed partly at taxpayer expense, even as Congress mandated higher fuel-economy standards for future cars.

So the country is better off for bailing out General Motors, even though some portion of that money went into developing engines that TMQ thinks are “too potent”? Uh-huh. (And we know we keep asking this question, but: really, who appointed TMQ to the position of “moral scold”?)

By the way, TMQ’s “Hurray for Cars!” item runs 1,322 words out of a total of 8,162 words in this week’s column. And that’s not the only car item; there’s more to come.

With each successive season, there seems more evidence Shanahan was just the guy who was standing there when Elway realized his potential, and otherwise is a mediocre coach.

TMQ hopes that for his own sake, [Art] Briles [Baylor head coach – DB] stays put. A college town, adoring kids, high pay — why come to Washington to have knives thrust into your back?

Indeed. Three words: UT head coach.

These developments mean China and India have pulled within a half-century of American space technology — the United States soft-landed a probe on the moon in 1966 and placed a satellite into orbit around Mars in 1971. Other nations should feel free to spend their money seeking space prestige.

And instead we should spend our money on asteroid defense. Mmmmmmhmmmmm.

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. TMQ’s item on car colors runs another 340 words.

(“Cadillac’s sports-car models offer painted brake calipers — $595 for your choice of red or yellow.” That’s about $150 per caliper, which does not strike us as unreasonable. If we were going to buy a Cadillac sports car, we’d give serious thought to springing for the painted brake calipers; yes, they have no practical purpose, but there’s nothing wrong with aesthetics.)

Did San Diego figure out the secret to beating Denver? (Probably not, no matter what TMQ says.) Who among us wouldn’t like a desktop model of the Titanic? (But $1,995 is a bit high. Heck, $315 is a bit high.)

More on TMQ’s manual transmission Acura TSX. Is he writing this off his taxes as a business expense? (And another 412 words.)

The TSX has so-so exterior styling but the interior looks great and is comfortable, the interior of a vehicle mattering more than the exterior.

Outgoing Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has said the driver’s cell phone should been turned off when the car is in motion.

Ignoring, for the moment, the grammatical clumsiness of that sentence, we really want to see the technology that is capable of distinguishing between the driver’s and passenger’s cell phones.

Some 2014 car models go further, with devices that read a text message to the driver, then transcribe a response into a text to be sent as the car moves.

That technology is called “Siri”, Gregg, and it isn’t just on 2014 cars.

(Totally irrelevant and embarrassing side note: we have observed that Siri will not play “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer”, no matter how slowly we enunciate or how loudly we yell at it. Siri just comes back and tells us that there’s “a problem”. Is there a bug in Siri? Or did someone at Apple program it with good taste?)

So far as I could determine, government regulations do not ban automakers from offering ticket warnings by in-dash nav systems. Automakers appear to censor themselves on this point. Perhaps in-dash nav systems don’t warn of ticket cameras because automakers know the true purpose is revenue for government. Automakers don’t want to anger government by depriving it of cash to squander. If government got angry, it might impose road safety rules!

We’re not slamming TMQ here, but for a future edition of the column, Easterbrook might consider writing about smart phones versus car navigation systems. We haven’t shopped for a new car in ages, but our impression is that a car navigation system adds $1,000 to $1,500 to the price of a car, plus about $300 for updates. Why spend the money on that, when the $300 iPhone you have with you already can give you hands-free turn-by-turn directions from Apple Maps, Google Maps, or Waze, for free, no updates required? In addition, Waze will even warn you that there are police or cameras ahead.

(And here’s a possible answer to TMQ’s question about why in-dash nav systems don’t offer speed trap and camera warnings: “After four Democratic senators complained, the company that makes Blackberry smartphones said it will remove programs that notify motorists of upcoming police speed traps and red-light cameras.“)

(And this item was another 412 words.)

The football gods continue to chortle. TMQ still likes “Alpha House”, so don’t look for it to turn up in his “television shows are unrealistic” complaint department. Even stranger than the hovercar is that weird hat/coat combination the guy is wearing on the Popular Mechanics cover; it looks like something the protagonist would be wearing in Furious George and the Cross-Country Killing Spree.

Hey, speaking of unrealistic television shows, this week’s complaint is about “The Blacklist”. (655 words.)

If practically everybody is straight-A, that suggests getting into Harvard is really hard, but once there, the rest is falling-off-a-log.

It also suggests that being smart enough to get into Harvard does not make you smart enough to phone in a bomb threat correctly.

(Also, Gregg: “most frequently awarded” =/= “practically everybody”. If 24% of the Harvard student body got straight A’s, and 19% of the student body each got B, C, D, and F grades, “straight A’s” would still be most frequently awarded. We’re actually kind of surprised that we have to explain this to you.)

And if you’ll be my bodyguard, I’ll be your long lost pal watch:

…this report, by Murray Weiss of DNAinfoNewYork, that outgoing NYC police commissioner Ray Kelly will get a 10-person NYPD security detail after he leaves office. Cost to taxpayers: $1.5 million per year. Weiss writes, “The detail will include a lieutenant, three sergeants and six detectives to chauffeur and protect Kelly and his family around-the-clock in the Big Apple and even out of town… Kelly has made himself the face of fighting crime and terrorism in the Big Apple, and has argued he’s a target of threats, in need of continuing protection.”

More:

Kelly has been bragging relentlessly about declining crime rate in New York City. If crime is down, why does he need the largest security detail ever for a former commissioner? The reason is not what he claims, that’s for sure.

What goes unmentioned by TMQ, but what we’ll mention here, is that Kelly, his master Bloomberg, and other NYC officials have spent their careers denying law-abiding citizens who aren’t rich the ability to defend themselves, while cowering behind private armies of bodyguards and police officers. We wish TMQ would point out the rich/poor dichotomy here, as he’s done at other times, but we’re not holding our breath.

Rudy Gay. Chicken-(salad) kicking: Atlanta, Dallas, Washington, Duke.

A Tuesday Morning Quarterback immutable law proven wrong? In the offseason I will journey alone to a distant mountaintop to be admonished by the football gods.

Nnnnggh! Nnnngh!

When the Broncos notched a record 64-yard field goal on the final snap of the first half versus Tennessee, this supported TMQ’s contention that Minnesota should have attempted a 76-yard fair-catch field goal on the final snap of overtime versus Green Bay.

We quote this mostly because we’ve been meaning to say something nice about Matt Prater. We’ve also been meaning to say something nice about Tom Dempsey, too.

What Amen later learned is that bygone-era kickers like Dempsey, who was listed at 6 feet 2 inches and 255 pounds, did things on the field that are pretty much unheard-of today: they played other positions on offense and/or defense, as Dempsey did in high school and college, not to mention being vital components on special-teams units — unlike modern kickers, who usually get near a return man only if he manages to get past the 10 other guys on the coverage team, and that is only if the kickoff does not sail out of the end zone for a touchback.

The weasels of Arkansas State. The 500 Club. Lenoir-Rhyne 42, West Chester 14. More chicken-(salad) kicking: Mary Hardin-Baylor.

That’s a wrap. The promised review of The King of Sports is coming soon; writer’s block and the holidays are messing up our schedule, but we’ll have it for you as soon as we can pull it together.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 19th, 2013 at 9:27 am and is filed under Apple, Cars, Clippings, Cycling, Geek, Guns, Mixology, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.