mtadkins

More NFL. Sadly, my beloved Dolphins lost a heartbreaker to the Texans on Sunday. Luckily, I knew one highlight that was coming in advance:

Here’s SI’s Peter King from last week’s column:

With the Wildcat in Miami, necessity was the mother of invention.
The Dolphins had practiced the play but hadn’t used it in the first two
debacles of the season. Flying home from Arizona following a 31-10
loss, Sparano called quarterbacks coach David Lee to the front of the plane to talk. Seems Lee had used the formation last year as the play-caller at Arkansas, with Darren McFadden taking direct snaps in the backfield and Felix Jones
on the field. “For us,” Sparano said, “it was all about getting two of
our best players on the field, Ronnie Brown and Ricky Williams. This
was a way to do it. After the Arizona game, I was looking for answers
offensively, and we decided to give this a try.”

The best
thing for Miami is how adept Brown is at taking snaps and using
play-fakes and even throwing the ball. What could be next? My guess is
something involving a lateral throwback to Chad Pennington on the right flank, followed by a Pennington pass. As Sparano said, stay tuned.

Well, then…let’s see what happened…

Bush broke more laws on some single days than some of his predecessors
did in their entire terms in office. January 31, 2003, stands out in my mind. That
was when Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the White House
and proposed possible ways to provoke Saddam Hussein into an attack, which
included the painting of US airplanes with United Nations colors and trying to
get them shot at. Bush also proposed assassinating Hussein. He also promised
Blair that he would try to get the United Nations to legalize the coming invasion,
the same day the National Security Agency (NSA) launched a campaign to bug
the phones and emails of key members of the U.N. Security Council.

What’s more depressing…that awful  things were done…or that we all know that they were, but just shrug our shoulders, ask to “move on” and try to forget? When Bush is gone, I suspect he will be allowed to be respected in a manner that does not befit the damage he has done. He will not reap what he has sown, but rather will join the board of Halliburton ( as Cheney’s VP) and get a nice fat pension.

Read about the alternative: “The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush “, available for free download [pdf] or as a bound volume. Written by a Congressman, no less, and a fine addition to any library…

Writer Gregg Easterbrook brings the overlooked details of college & NFL football to our attention every Tuesday, but usually there’s a fair amount of non-sports commentary sprinkled in as well. Recently he’s been pointing out some of the misconceptions of the financial “crisis”:

What is going on is a financial panic, not an economic collapse.
Financial panics are no fun, especially for anyone who needs to cash
out an asset right now for retirement, college and so on. But financial
panics occur cyclically and are not necessarily devastating. The most
recent financial panic was 1987, when the stock market fell 23 percent
in a single day. Pundits and politicians instantly began talking about
another Depression, about the “end of Wall Street.” The 1987 panic had
zero lasting economic consequences — no recession began, and in less
than two years, stocks had recouped all losses. (See John Gordon’s
excellent 2004 book on the history of financial panics, “An Empire of
Wealth.”) Perhaps a recession will be triggered by the current
financial panic, but it may not necessarily be severe.

And there’s also some reassuring words from (gulp) Ronald Reagan:

We’ve also fallen into panic because we pay way too much
attention to stock prices. Ronald Reagan said, “Never confuse the stock
market with the economy.” Almost everyone is now making exactly that
mistake. The stock market is not a barometer of the economy; it is a
barometer of what people think stocks are worth. These are entirely
separate things. What people think stocks are worth now depends on
their guess about what stocks will be worth in the future, which is
unknowable. You can only guess, and thus optimism feeds optimism while
pessimism feeds pessimism.

You can read the full article (which also dwells on how awful the Patriots have become) here.

In honor of PORTAL: Prelude, an unofficial fan-made (mod) ‘prelude’ to the original game, being released to the inter-tubes last week…I whiled away my downloadin’ time by trawling for some Portal-themed goodies, and found 2 heart-warmers:

First, here’s a typography version of the final song by Trickster:

Portal – Still Alive typography from Trickster on Vimeo.

…then we have this feet-off-the-floor awesome version of ‘Still Alive’ done in freakin’ Mario Paint Composer. Damn.

[thanks to Wonderland for the discovery]

Boing Boing has a post today regarding a stellar vizualization of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights done by Seth Brau. Well worth a watch, and even better is the high quality version at www.humanrightsactioncenter.org.

It was a forming moment for me, looking back, when I discovered that there was such a thing as a universal declaration, and that was essentially an international law….that most governments (including my own) ignore when it suits them. Shortly thereafter, Noam Chomsky might have noticed a sharp spike in book sales 😉