Whipped Cream Difficulties

Before we start in on this week’s TMQ, we want to note a story from today’s New York Times that bothers us. We think it is appropriate to talk about here, as it deals with things TMQ has been hammering on as well. After the jump, we’ll get started…

Southbridge and Tantasqua are towns in Central Massachusetts. Both have Pee Wee football teams. The two teams played on September 15th.

On the first play of the game, two Tantasqua players were hit so hard that an EMT removed them from the game. On the sixth play of the game, another boy was removed. “An official with the Tantasqua team said the eyes of one of the boys were rolling back in his head.”

But the game, an obvious mismatch between teams from neighboring towns in central Massachusetts, went on, with Southbridge building a 28-0 lead in the first quarter. The game went on without the officials intervening. It went on despite the fact that the Braves, with three of their players already knocked out of the game, no longer had the required number of players to participate.

The final score, according to the NYT, was 52-0 and five head injuries.

Late last week, league officials suspended the coaches for both teams for the rest of the season. The referees who oversaw the game were barred from officiating any more contests in the Central Massachusetts Pop Warner league, and the presidents of both programs were put on probation.

It sounds like there were rules in place that should have prevented this; the mercy rule, Tantasqua not being able to field the required number of players, etc. So why didn’t it stop?

“We were trying to play a football game,” one parent of a Tantasqua player wrote in an e-mail. “Every kid who was out there wanted to play and not give up.”

We totally get this. We understand that you want to teach kids to stick things out and not give up when they get difficult.

But you’re the f–king parent. Even if the kids want to play, it is your job to say “No”. It is your job to explain to the kids, “We’re not quitting because the going is tough. We’re stopping this because continuing will put you in serious danger.” It isn’t a house fire, people, and your kids aren’t fireman; it is a Pee Wee football game, and the rest of their lives aren’t worth a win today.

And it isn’t all on the parents. It is your job, too, coaches. It is your job too, officials.

Lazo has coached in Southbridge for 18 years, and says he idolizes Vince Lombardi, the Hall of Fame pro coach who was once said to declare, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”

We’re not exactly students of the late Mr. Lombardi, but we have a pretty strong suspicion that he would not have put winning above the health and safety of players on either side of the ball. We’re sure that some of his players did play hurt, and that our understanding of sports medicine has advanced considerably from Lombardi’s day. But we believe with all our heart that if Lombardi was active today, and knew what we know now, he would do the right thing by players.

We don’t believe Vince Lombardi wanted ten-year-old boys to suffer head injuries.

Enough. On with the show.

This is what “Monday Night Football” would sound like if it used a presidential debate format

This is what TMQ sounds like when he’s trying to be funny and failing.

What’s wrong with the Lions? We’d suggest regression towards the mean, being the Detroit Lions, and, yeah, maybe Calvin Johnson and the Madden curse.

Yeah, yeah, James Bond, air shafts, yadda yadda all that other stuff TMQ harps on about. We just want to say that we approve of the included Ursula Andress photo.

Sweet: New Orleans – Tampa (odd that TMQ names the controversial game-ending play his sweet play of the week). Sour: Jacksonville – Oakland, New England – Jets.  Both: Washington – Giants.

Earthlike planets.

Of last week’s discovery, the Times quoted astronomer Sara Seager of MIT saying, “I feel like we should drop everything and send a probe there to study the new planet.” I feel like we should drop everything and find out what they’re smoking at MIT! At the speed of the fastest spacecraft, reaching Alpha Centauri would take about 20,000 years. Until such time as there may be a fundamental breakthrough in propulsion, objects even a few light years distant are unfathomably far away.

We’ll give TMQ the point as far as “fastest” currently built spacecraft. However, there’s been a lot of theoretical work done on spacecraft that would be suitable for an expedition to Alpha Centauri; we’d point TMQ in the direction of Bob Forward’s laser-assisted solar sails as one example. (Yes, nobody’s built giant lasers yet, either. But we have no objections to throwing money in that direction. We like giant lasers. Who doesn’t like giant lasers?)

(Seriously. Who doesn’t like giant lasers? Let us know in comments. Please leave your GPS coordinates as well for targeting marketing purposes.)

“TMQ’s law of money holds: Receiving a million dollars would be wonderful, receiving $100 million would ruin your life.” We’ll make you a bet, Gregg; give us $100 million dollars, and we bet it won’t ruin our life. We can set up terms on this; three independent observers evaluating every seven years, and if they determine our life has been ruined, we’ll give (what’s left of) the money back.

Chicken-<salad> kicking: Bengals, Browns.

We’re not clear on what TMQ’s complaint is with “reboots”. But we did want to single out “Rumor is that ‘Space: 1999,’ among the worst television shows of all time…” “Among the worst television shows of all time”? We admit we saw very little of “Space:1999”. But in a world where “Homeboys in Outer Space“, “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer“, and “Heil Honey I’m Home!” exist, calling “Space:1999” “among the worst television shows of all time” seems like hyperbole and a half.

TMQ is waiting for a big-budget reboot of “Airwolf”, or perhaps “Fireball XL5”.

Hey, we might pay money for a big-budget reboot of “Airwolf”. (Or, for that matter, a remake of “Blue Thunder”.) As for “Fireball XL5”, we think the market for Gerry Anderson reboots is non-existent after the failure of “Thunderbirds“.

Thanks to TMQ for reminding us about the firing of Eagles defensive coordinator Juan Castillo, which we missed when it occurred and failed to note after the fact. “…on the day of the dismissal, the Eagles defense had notably better stats than the Eagles’ offense.”

“Should newspapers and television stations accept advertising containing statements that are literally true but intended to deceive?”

1. Who gets to decide “intent to deceive”, Gregg?
2. How far do we go with this? Accepting or declining campaign ads, for example?
3. Do you really want to cut off the dying print media from any revenue source, no matter how sleezy?
4. “It’s morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money.”

This suggests both that campaign excess is propping up the economy and that serious campaign reform would be a disaster for television networks!

Hmmm. If campaign finance reform would be a disaster for the television networks, we may have to rethink our opposition to it. Tell you what; we’ll support reform, as long as NBC is the first network to die.

Yes, Gregg, “MSNBC declared that he fell ‘faster than the speed of light'”, but it was a thinko (which is sort of like a typo, except it represents more of a synaptic misfire than bad fingering of the keyboard). Don’t tell us you haven’t said something slightly stupid and regretted it.

“So do television chefs actually cook, or hire someone for that, too?” From what we’ve heard, Gregg: yes, many television chefs do have other people cooking for them. If it takes two hours to do a roast, and you only have 30 minutes to do a show, absolutely you’re going to have an assistant cook a final product to show off, while you go over the script and talk to the producer and schmooze with sponsors. Plus somebody’s got to prep your mise en place and preheat the oven and deal with the thousands of other fiddly little details. This isn’t public access television: this is serious business.

We have touched previously on the “Maid of the Mist” controversy. TMQ picked up on an editorial from the Niagara Falls Reporter that we missed that touches on this issue as well; basically, the Canadian lease holders will pay about 35% of their gross, estimated at $300 million over the thirty-year lease term. And on the New York side, the current leaseholders…

Glynn’s projections show that, in 2012, his boat tours grossed $7,335,168. He paid the state 4 percent or $293,407.
(Hornblower would pay $2,567,309, or almost 10 times as much. See what competitive bidding can do?)
But Glynn took in from the Observation Tower another $1,170,558 out of which he kept $877,918.
So you figure it out.
He paid the state as rent on his boats $293,407, but kept $877,918 from the elevator fees.
As a result, the state paid James Glynn $584,511 in 2012 to be their tenant. [Emphasis added – DB]

Refugio High School does not teach good sportsmanship. We’re not really inclined to argue with that, but this statement bothers us:

No one need worry about the feelings of Division I football players.

We get TMQ’s point; that college football players are adults, not kids, and need to learn to take criticism. But they’re still people, and they still deserve to be treated with respect. TMQ’s statement makes it sound like they’re as bad as Hitler or Jennifer Petkov. Certainly that wasn’t his intent, but it comes off badly.

There have been seven collisions between Western navy subs and other subs or ships in the last five years alone.

Reader mail: those were rocket launchers on the Batmobile, Gregg, the Slauson Cutoff, sports rules are arbitrary, racial gerrymandering is bad but partisan gerrymandering is A-OK, teacher ranks are growing faster than student population because of the growth of special education classes (and by the way, shouldn’t we be using the median for class sizes instead of the mean?), Mack Brown honors his commitments, “the term illegal immigrant is a dysphemism” (pull the other one, Jay Brubaker of Indianapolis), and the entire AFC East was in first and last place a week ago.

Buffalo stinks. And “Nothing’s going to change in Buffalo until the Bills have a gung-ho head coach and a young general manager, both of whom are looking to make their marks, rather than retirement-age time-server leadership looking to pick up a last paycheck.”

Kutztown 59, East Stroudsburg 33. Grand View 37, Siena Heights 25.

“Pulaski reached a 43-6 halftime lead.” Who did they play, Gregg? (Mills University Studies. You’re welcome.) We were going to suggest that Pulaski played another cupcake; actually, Mills is 5-3, and beat Little Rock Christian 34-0 in their previous game.

(We know we keep hammering the “Who did they play, Gregg?” theme. We just feel that it is fair, if TMQ wants to highlight Pulaski Academy, that he give us all the information. We don’t think it is too much to ask who the opposing team was, or even just a link to game coverage.)

Tune in next week, when we’ll watch some acids ferment.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Clippings, Firings, Food, Movies, Neuroscience, NFL, Safety, 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.