And so is TMQ. And so is TMQ Watch. The first column of the NFL season is always kind of strange; there’s a lot of short items, basketball coverage, and other things that throw us for a loop. We’re probably not going to hit every one of TMQ’s throwaway quips. And yes, we’re aware that TMQ did a couple of draft columns; we looked at those and frankly didn’t find anything noteworthy in them. One was his usual silly mock draft, the other was his draft analysis, and both contained the recommended US daily allowance of TMQ tropes.
Anyway, back to this week’s TMQ, after the jump…
“…football keeps speeding up”. 653 words down.
“Just what I asked for,” said nobody, ever.
When a LeBron James AAU-style everybody-look-at-me club faces a San Antonio let’s-help-each-other club in the Finals, team basketball is 11-5. There may be a legitimate question about which style the crowd prefers. As to which style is superior, the question is settled.
Ho, Ho, two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor spent $5.4 million on a primary run and won 28,898 votes — $187 per vote. Challenger David Brat spent $122,000 and drew 36,110 votes — $3 per vote.
President Clinton. Snowden’s movie deal. The CIA has a Twitter account. And a style guide.
You people have held me back long enough. I’m going to clown college! (After all, there’s a shortage.)
(That one was for Mike the Musicologist.)
The NCAA manipulates the Academic Progress Rate figures so they look good:
Everything is hunky-dory at Wisconsin men’s basketball, according to the APR metric. Pay no attention to the Badgers’ 44 percent graduation rate…
…According to the APR, everything’s hunky-dory at Division I champion Florida State, where the football graduation rate is 58 percent. The NCAA is silent about football academics at money-making programs — but the Alcorn State women’s volleyball team knew the NCAA’s wrath.
Here’s the APR for UT-Austin for 2012-2013. By the way, you’ll never guess what’s coming out in paperback soon
We quote this item in its entirety just for laughs:
We don’t have a lot to say about three and four star generals, so instead we’ll link to this bizarre story we found yesterday (by way of FARK).
“Revolution” is cancelled? Hurrah! And we’d just like to take this opportunity to remind folks that T.I. (of the “Blurred Lines” video with Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke) did time in federal prison for attempting to illegally purchase automatic weapons and suppressors.
After the NFL draft, only two of 32 teams graded as below average.
Man, those Samoans are a surly bunch.
We used to play “Macadamia Nut Tycoon” on our SE/30. (Not really. But that’d be a great IOS game.)
Worth the Wait: Forty-one years later, The Washington Post finally printed Doonesbury’s famous “guilty guilty guilty” strip about Watergate.
Speaking of being late, we can’t find the tweet now, but we did get a kick out of the suggestion that maybe it is time for Gary Trudeau to apologize to Dan Quayle. (More background here.)
“Eddies in the space-time continuum.” Or maybe not.
The Arena Football league is still in business?
The Wall Street Journal reported that the $23,900-per-night luxury suite at the Connaught Hotel in London is booked so far in advance that the hotel is building two more similarly priced suites.
TMQ’s head on that item? “But a Living Wage for McDonald’s Workers Would Be Way Too Costly”. Not sure we see the relationship between a fancy hotel in London and a living wage for McDonald’s workers. Are we missing something?
TMQ doesn’t like pink weapons. “There’s a great idea — teach young girls to emulate the worst thing about boys.” And what would that worst thing be, Greggles?
“A Belgian baker concocted a life-sized cookie version of Barack Obama.” TMQ’s headline? “At Least It Was Baked, Not Computer-Animated”. Much like the young Barack Obama himself. (Rimshot.) Thank you. We’ll be here all week. Tip the veal and remember to try your waitress.
Of the $135 billion in annual taxpayer subsidies to science, increasingly it looks like a fair chunk is spent on fraud. If the fraud were by Halliburton, pundits would be scandalized. Why is fraud by scientists any different?
Question not asked by TMQ: should we stop increasing “taxpayer subsidies to science” until the scientific community does more to address fraud? (And we were happy to see TMQ’s shout-out to Retraction Watch, which you may note is on our blogroll.)
Violence is both hyped on TV, and depicted as having no consequences: good guys get shot at close range and are completely healed minutes later.
First occurrence of this TMQ evergreen this season. Everyone take a drink of your Glen McKenna. (TMQ drinking game, anyone?) (We’re trying to imagine what the label on a bottle of Glen Kraken would look like. Our own favorite fictional tipple is, of course, Von Kruger’s, “the Scotch aged in Styrofoam kegs”.)
Yet research is lavished with subsidies while art sings for its supper, and the science lobby complains.
Are you trolling, Gregg?
Science produces cures but also weapons that kill; no one has ever been harmed by art, except perhaps by having to sit through an opera.
All billionaires’ donations to science cited in the article equate, combined, to 12 percent of the FY15 federal proposal. And the billionaire donations are one-time events; the federal budget is annual. I roughly estimate that over the past decade, taxpayers have spent $50 on research for every $1 donated by the super-rich. The super-rich are not saving science; average people are.
And how much have the “super-rich” given to art? TMQ conveniently doesn’t even try to estimate.
“American Ninja Warrior” is on the Esquire Network, in case you were wondering. (We were. We also wonder what it has to do with ninjas.)
CIA bad. More beefcake! More Canadian-made porn! (We understand the main difference between Canadian-made porn and ordinary porn is the exquisite politeness of the performers in the former.)
Speaking of “CIA bad”, shouldn’t we be concerned about the CIA (and NSA) snooping on the tooth-brushing records stored on our smartphones? Or on our Girl Scout cookie purchases?
At the NBA job of lowering expectations, the 76ers are Zen masters!
In case you were wondering what the stats were for the SI swimsuit issue, they are here.
Dear Greg: we would have been happy with a photo of the Andorran sweater. Those Lithuanian outfits look like an outtake from “Elf”.
And that’s all we’ve got this week, folks. Tune in next week for the AFC preview, plus tubular bells.