sigma7 | Simply Horrible

Thank you! :)

That was great.

I'm sorry, I'm still saying "F***! F***! F***! ...." after yesterday's abortion of a game. By the time I got home last night, I was ready to call in a tactical nuclear strike to Oakland and go to bed.

Halftime of Chefs-Oakland was first time I yelled in frustration yesterday, but I promise you it wasn't the last. I expected better from Todd Haley, but honestly, I expected better from anyone who'd ever played half a season of Madden before. It's Hermtastic.

That said, I still don't know that he did a worse job than Bring Me the Skull of Norv Turner. Any other team in the league I might forgive you for going for the easy points, but these are the Ravens, and few teams are as synonymous with defense as the Baltimore bunch, and with good reason. When you have the weapons you have on offense -- Rivers, Sproles, Gates, Jackson, et al. -- and your defense is missing key components, I don't think you settle for the field goal every time inside the ten, and certainly not inside five minutes.

But then there's that roughing-the-passer penalty on the Chefs that essentially lost them the game -- where JaMarcus "NyQuil" Russell hadn't been touched by a single Chief and had two fall on him while he was prone. Unless there a subparagraph of the rule book protecting down QBs I'm not aware of (and knowing the competition committee, that's always possible), that was just a bad call; the play was still going. It was a cheap call in a bad game with a few brilliant moments -- Dwayne Bowe's catch was one of them, though.

And I'd forgotten you'd gotten to go to yesterday's game -- I admit, when I saw "vs. Oak" on the schedule, that meant an automatic "W" to me. It never occurred to me that...well, you know. I'm glad you got to go to the new 'Head, but full of sorrow that you got the game that you did.

Edited 2009-09-21 22:27 (UTC)

This year, or at least this half of this year, I'm willing to write Todd Haley a pass. He knew they screwed up, and he knew how. From what I've seen from the guy, I'm going to guess it won't happen again, and the guy is learning the head coaching ropes. Herm, on the other hand, was an "experienced" head coach when he joined the team. He should have already known better.

Other than the halftime bungling, I really liked the playcalling. Particularly that first 4th down call and the subsequent onside kick. Cassell could have been better, but he was already better than Russell (7 of 24), and other than the picks, he looked pretty solid there. He didn't get rattled, he could move in the pocket, he didn't mind running and taking the hit to get the first down. The guy's not a wuss, which is more than I can say for Brodie Croyle.

I forgot the onside kick -- if whoever'd had the ball kicked right the hell to him hadn't gone all skillet-mitts that second, it'd been a whole new ball-game. And Cassell had one play I remember where he moved out of the pocket directly toward a blitzer like he was the whale falling toward the ground in Hitchhiker's Guide to the point I was beginning to think he had LT's smoked visor snapped in or something, and he still would've been better than JaMarcus "Muscle Relaxant" Russell (Jesus, 7/24 and it was worse than that). LJ decided to play a few downs, apparently keeping some in the tank for a free-agency showing later in the season, I guess -- he can still go either way, but it's up to him to decide to show the hell up.

Still a lot of potential. They shouldn't be 1-1, much less 0-2, but them's the breaks.

And we have a monster non-con draw this year. Cripes, the NFC East back-to-back (the tour starts this weekend in Philly) and the Steelers, but luckily we finish out the season with the not-so-killer-B's: Broncos, Bills, Browns, Bengals, and Broncos again. It's definitely a trial-by-fire season for Haley and Cassell.

Maurice Leggett had the ball on that onside, but was apparently the first victim of the new push-out rules, or that's what it looked like from the upper deck.

This is the first time I've seen Dr. Horrible. So...basically it's the story of a Dr. Clayton Forrester wannabe?

If he grows up to be Dr. Clayton Forrester, I wouldn't be surprised, actually.

The whole thing's still online for free (well, commercials) and it's on DVD, and even at 42 minutes, it's worth it. The third act takes a torpedo amidships and I think the premise falls apart terribly, though the conclusion tries valiantly to tie it all together. At worst it's uneven. There are certainly worse ways to spend an hour on the Internet.

And as hideous as the "sing-along blog" concept is, it plays out much better than you'd imagine.

Heh. A friend just described it to me as "It's two great episodes and one Joss Whedon "F*** YOU, VIEWER!" episode."

I've noticed this is a trend with Whedon projects; he just doesn't know how to finish. The last season of Buffy was way off in left field compared to the rest. The last season of Angel was better (thanks be to Spike), but still not good, and the finale was awkward. Even Serenity was subpar compared to the rest of Firefly. And, lest we forget, his involvement with "Roseanne."

I think Whedon's projects lend themselves better to long-term serial-form projects than to finite series. Once he sees the end zone, he starts strutting, and there's always going to be a Don Beebe right behind him. Buffy died after "Tabula Rasa" (or, more accurately, when Joss got sucked into Firefly), Angel's last season was a maudlin morass with moments, and Serenity definitely had the air of breaking a few toys on the way out of the room (and then there's Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men, in which he gets to ice one of the characters most inspirational to his collective mythos). I think it's a philosophical and narrative point of disconnect that I'll always have with him in that while it's always hammered into writers to "kill your darlings," death is not always automatically dramatic, and the manner and timing in which you do it is not arbitrary. Deaths in the tail end of Buffy and Serenity were especially unresolved, to which he'd say not necessarily uncorrectly that that's the nature of death, but that's not the best nature of fiction. In this I think there needs to be that level of artifice and symmetry and suitability or else we're disturbed and disquieted and not in a good way.

A couple of notes: I'm not counting the comics of the TV series because they've gone from interesting hypotheticals to extended train wrecks the longer they're allowed to continue, and I've never seen more than an episode (if that) a time of Roseanne, but I understand something of the charlie-foxtrot it became in its later years; I'm not sure who gets the blame in that regard, but I'm willing to saddle that on her and not him, if only because I'm willing to believe a second-generation TV writer has less clout than a one-named TV diva.

I wonder if he's actively trying to represent his avowed existentialist philosophy (which he admits to doing in Objects in Space) or if he's just petty and spiteful and wants to piss people off for the troubles he's had keeping his series on the air. I'm glad I'm not the only one to think Anya and Wash's deaths were pretty much pointless in terms of the story.

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