Maddening

Madden '08 keeps growing on me. Not so much the fact that the PC version is just a redecorated '07 version with one or two tweaks -- I'm actually resigned to that fact nowadays -- but I finally got my Superstar player into the Hall of Fame. And scored 46 touchdowns in one season along the way. Rushing. As a quarterback. Moo hoo haa haa.

I did try the Franchise option with the intention of just moving a franchise, just to fulfill the ring-of-a-champion requirement, and found it more difficult than I would've expected. I guess it doesn't help when you try to move the Oakland Raiders. Las Vegas turned them down, as did Mexico City. (And by this point they'd managed two seasons of 3-13 records, which really didn't make them enticing.)

Strangest thing happened, though. San Diego made it to the Superb Owl, lost (well, that part isn't so strange), and then announced its intention to uproot and become...the Boston Wildcats. (The whaton whatcats?) The Wildcats actually won the Superb Owl that season, but more importantly, all of southern California was bereft of an NFL franchise, so I moved Oakland to LA -- which, let's be honest, everyone should've seen coming -- and promptly redubbed them the Los Angeles Bastards. At least nobody moved to Mexico City this time out.

I did, at one juncture, try to move an NFL team to Topeka. Needless to say: it didn't work.

Idaho: just a different flavor of hypocrite

Replacing Senator Larry Craig (R-estroom) is Lieutenant Governor Jim Risch, who had this nugget of wisdom to offer about New Orleans:

Here in Idaho, we couldn’t understand how people [in Louisiana] could sit around on the kerbs waiting for the federal government to come and do something. We had a dam break in 1976, but we didn’t whine about it. We got out our backhoes and we rebuilt the roads and replanted the fields and got on with our lives. That’s the culture here. Not waiting for the federal government to bring you drinking water. In Idaho there would have been entrepreneurs selling the drinking water.

Reality check:

Hundreds of millions of tax dollars went to build the dam, and $850 million in reparations went to 15,000 Idahoans who lost property when the dam burst (11 people died). Then, hundreds of millions in tax dollars went to fix all of those federally built irrigation systems for those hardy, self-sufficient Westerners who can't even supply their own water.

Sorry, Idaho, but this may not be an upgrade.