The heck with it. After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
NFL scores are up because of Texas high school football. 579 words down.
(“Whichever university wins the BCS title will have played 14 game, which itself seem too many — increasing injury risk, distracting from coursework. In Texas this season, 24 high schools played 16 football games. That’s too much of a good thing.” Gee, Gregg, what’s the right number of games to play in a high school or college season?)
Aledo High may have “kept trying to score”, but if they did, it was with their second and third string players, as they pulled the first string 21 plays into the game. Also, Aledo agreed to use a running clock when the game got too far out of hand.
How do we know this?
From TMQ’s Twitter feed, that’s how.
(Edited to add: Gee, looks like we’re not the only people who have issues with this part of TMQ’s column.)
Also, year-round football is bad for kids, especially African-American boys, m’kay?
Sweet: Carolina, Arizona. Sour: Cleveland. Mixed: New England – Baltimore, Cincinnati – Minnesota.
Except, Gregg, that “meaningless” game also featured a hugely popular NFL quarterback who was on the verge of setting NFL season records. Do you think that maybe, just maybe, that might have been a factor in the network’s decision?
Happy happy joy joy. TMQ gets all cosmic and stuff around this time of year.
Well, for starters, it’d mean that homo sapiens is awesome, thank you very much.
Either life was created by a higher being; or began here spontaneously; or came to Earth from somewhere else. If the first, we must wait until such time as the higher being may deign to tell us what happened. If the third, then one day we may find the extraterrestrial wellspring.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm.
A University of Washington football coach is in trouble because it is alleged that he helped a potential recruit to GET AN EDUCATION.
Look, we hold no brief for the NCAA. But. If you click through to the linked article, what the coach actually is accused of doing is paying for “tutoring and online classes for a recruit”. We can think of some pretty good reasons why the NCAA might not be fond of that idea. (“Here’s a sack of $50s, Mr. Online Class Administrator. Make sure my boy here gets straight A’s. He’s got a bright future here at Enormous State University.”)
Chicken-(salad) kicking: Miami. (“Genetically Engineered Surimi” is still nonsense, Gregg.) Chicago.
More cosmic thought: “… the European Space Agency just launched a probe that will precision-map the locations of the billion or so stars nearest the sun. If the probe succeeds, it will improve dramatically knowledge of the patterns in stellar movement, which may reveal how galaxies evolve — and whether there’s something powerful but unseen tugging on ours.” Yes, but how is that going to help with asteroid defense?
Would you like to graph academic versus athletic spending? Would you like to know what you should do on fourth down? Would you like to swing on a star? Carry moonbeams home in a jar? Sorry, can’t help with those.
It’s not “artisanal porridge“, it’s Krusty brand imitation gruel artisanal porridge.
The owls item was not what it seemed. But thanks for admitting that it had nothing to do with owls, but rather with stopping logging of old-growth forests.
” The old growth of Europe has been gone for centuries. What remains in the United States should be saved, whatever the legal mechanism.”
So raise some money, like the Nature Conservatory does, and buy your own damn old growth forest.
Chiefs. Colts. Chortling. Credit to TMQ: No Ordinary Men
Wisconsin-Whitewater 52, Mount Union 14. More of TMQ’s Auto-Text. Seriously, does this man not have an editor at ESPN?
But two books on the same topic released around the same time with the same title — ye gods.
Yeah, you know, we kind of thought there was at least an informal working arrangement among publishers so that kind of thing doesn’t happen. Maybe they are all running scared of anti-trust suits these days?
Denver. (Did you know Trader Joe’s sells tapenade? Maybe you did. But Trader Joe’s is new to us.)
If the football gods chortling lasts for more than four hours, seek immediate medical attention. The Falcons are bad. Once again, people will pay money to see good games, won’t pay money to see bad games, and TMQ thinks this is a profound observation.
Gratuitous Dallas trolling. The reverse was a reverse, not a double reverse. TMQ picks up on the dinosaur item we noted last week: “Next they’ll say Thomas the Tank engine is on the take!” We’ve been subjected to a lot of Thomas, and we have to say: he’s always struck us as being a little too goody-goody. We wouldn’t be shocked at all if it turned out that Thomas was as crooked as a Chicago politician.
“…the Steelers got the football gods on their side by this manly-man decision.” Guess the football gods don’t care much about serial sexual abuse of women.
If you have $450 to spend on a candle, even a “flagship candle,” you should be ashamed of yourself for not giving the money away.
True confession; we felt this way ourselves. Then we clicked the link. Yes, it is a $450 candle. But: it is a huge $450 candle, with an estimated burn time of 250 hours. That’s about $1.80 an hour. Is $1.80 an hour too much for someone to pay for their enjoyment?
Creep. Should reviews be double-blind? Actually, TMQ makes a fair amount of sense here. But we can imagine the chaos the first time a play is reviewed, the review official overturns the call for a completely different reason than the coach threw the challenge flag for, and the resulting call goes in a direction the coach never intended.
Something something Dallas Cowboys/”Lone Survivor”. The Raiders are dumb.
That’s a wrap for this week, folks. Tune in next week when, if we’re lucky, the Houston Texans will have wrapped up the first round draft choice.