We apologize for the lateness of this post. We are dealing with some personal issues that put us a little behind this afternoon.
Let’s just go ahead and jump into this week’s TMQ. Before we get started, though, we’d like to note something that strikes us as unusual: there is no mention of Jovan Belcher or Saturday’s events in this week’s column. We don’t think TMQ is the type of person who would say “Everyone else has said it better, so there’s no point in my saying it”, so his silence strikes us as unusual.
After the jump…
Hey, Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin III, and Russell Wilson are all doing pretty well. You can now skip the first 825 words of this week’s column; however, TMQ’s discussion of Wilson was interesting to us, as we were not previously familiar with his story.
Wilson was said to be “too short” at 5-11 to play quarterback in the NFL. North Carolina State told Wilson to hit the road so it could start a 6-6 quarterback. The guy who made that canny decision was fired a few days ago, but that’s another matter.
History may repeat itself in Denver. Schiano is still a jerk.
Sweet: St. Louis – San Francisco, New England – Miami, Steelers – Ravens. Sour: New Orleans – Atlanta. Mixed: Houston – Tennessee.
Hey, can we kick “Revolution” around some more? We sure can! Most of these points have been made before and elsewhere (some by TMQ) so we’ll summarize quickly: death by sword is not bloodless, death by arrow is not instant, where do these nice clean clothes and shoes come from, how does a guy who walks 20 miles a day stay fat, and why do the good guys keep dropping guns?
In “Revolution,” guns and bullets are said to be super valuable, since it’s impossible to make more.
We wanted to focus a moment on this. Obviously, firearms were made in a United States without electricity. And not just the sort of firearms you associate with the Revolutionary War; the first Colt Single Action Army revolver was produced in 1873, while practical use of electricity as a motive force really began in 1886 and took time to spread. There’s no technical or practical reason why today’s firearms could not be turned out by hand; without some motive force, it might take longer, but water power or a steam engine can drive a lathe or the other simple machines you’d need.
As for “bullets” (by which we assume the common metallic cartridge case), that predates electricity as well. There’s nothing in the limited amount of machining (making brass cases, casting lead bullets, and forming primers) that can’t be done by simple machines. Nor is there anything in the chemistry of modern smokeless gunpowder or primers that requires electric power; the production of these things is basic simple chemistry.
This, by the way, is one of many reasons gun control is doomed to failure. But we digress. Back to TMQ and “Revolution”: militia leaders are stupid, TMQ can believe that someone would invent a device to suck up electricity and target it at Red China, but he can’t buy that nobody would make the connection when electricity stops, why don’t non-elecrical devices work, and, (of course) everything above the level of a houseplant should be dead and the Earth should be a black hole.
Looking over this list, one thing that leaps out at us that TMQ doesn’t list as a fatal flaw is this: the entire premise of the series seems to be that after The Big Nasty, Americans are just going to lie back and passively accept the way things are until a plucky band of adventurers change that. We say “horse pucky”. The knowledge of how to rebuild a pre-electrical civilization is not lost; it is well documented in books (physical ones, the kind that don’t need electricity). It might take some time to do this – it might even take longer than 15 years – but it can be done, and you’d see signs of it happening way before 15 years are up. That is, if people had the motivation. Call us “American exceptionalists” but we believe that our citizens have the motivation. (We also strongly suspect that folks in, say, China, wouldn’t be passive either.)
We suspect the answer to this complaint is “but then there wouldn’t be a show”. To which we say: if you have to invoke The Hamlet Problem to explain your logic holes, it may be time for an agonizing reappraisal.
Chicken-<salad> kicks: Denver (and Schiano is still a weasel, which we think is an insult to the Mustelidae family).
How about that titanic offensive struggle in the Jets-Arizona game? “Both starting quarterbacks in this contest ended up with lower ratings than the 39.6 an NFL quarterback gets if he simply hurls every pass into the ground.”
Is Andrew Luck that good, or are the Lions that bad? Or wait: maybe somebody plans to job hunt after the season.
“Things in Philadelphia have gone from bad to embarrassing.” That happens when you make a dog-killer your quarterback.
Who, among all the non-quarterback college football players, should win the Heisman? TMQ has suggestions: Finney, Wagner, Warmack, T’eo.
Is the power rush making a comeback? You can get a job “editing a blog about Facebook“? Interesting.
“How Government Is Like a Cell Phone“. Because it constantly annoys you? Because in many cases, it serves as a leash on your freedom? Because (if you have AT&T as your cellphone service) it doesn’t work? Because the reception is poor?
Except that this is being subsidized by the taxpayers of the future. Sort of like how cell phone carriers subsidize phones, huh, Gregg?
A moment of silence for Jason Hanson, please.
TMQ wants the Katniss Barbie
Buffalo. Fun with fake kicks. We can’t share the gloating over Georgia.
“After this, NBA stars shouldn’t want a day off. Coaches and fans might realize someone who makes one-tenth as much can do nearly as well.” Hmmm. Didn’t we say something like this last week about NFL players?
Jeez, there’s a website for everything. Dave Doeren is also a weasel. What ever happened to TMQ’s promise to retire Christmas creep?
Sensors. Blitzes. Illinois State 38, Appalachian State 37. Eastern Washington 29, Wagner 19.
And that’s all for this week, folks. Tune in next week, when TMQ calls for sensible longbow control.