I'm out

It just occurred to me that I really don't like either of these teams, and I don't want to watch either one win. It's like watching a Cowboys-Colts Super Bowl, except it's not legitimized by playoffs. I hate the BCS.

Sportsmanship: Oklahoma doesn't has it

Right before FOX went to commercial after Percy Harvin got hurt, you could hear the crowd reacting to the replay. One of the Oklahoma tacklers tugged on his feet and ankles as he got up after the play. Given that he already had a gimpy ankle, I wonder what ever the defender could have been thinking when he did that. Maybe it was the same sort of thing Bob Stoops thinks about when he keeps Sam Bradford in the fourth quarter of 50-point blowout so he can rack up Heisman stats.

Roommates

Did they really just say that two Oklahoma defensive tackles are roommates? I can't imagine two roughly 300-pound guys sharing a college dorm room. (I'm assuming that Oklahoma football players have to live in the same dorms as everyone else, which doesn't seem totally certain. Not that it would necessarily be wrong if they didn't. Yeah that was a triple negative. What are you gonna do about it?)

... and blocking

The announcers were falling over themselves praising Tebow for that first down run in the third quarter, and it was a good run. But he almost surely would have been tackled short of the line if he hadn't gotten a very effective block from the receiver, who spun around and blocked a safety (it appeared) across the 20 while Tebow was on his way to the same spot. It's so easy and natural to give all the glory (and blame) to the quarterback, and skill position players generally, but you would expect the broadcast announcers to bring a higher level of sophistication.

What is G?

Now I really want to know. Offhand, Michael Jordan, Mia Hamm, Lisa Leslie, Tiger Woods, in one commercial. Sounds like a Nike all-star team.

Roy Williams strikes again

Roy Williams (the overrated one on the Cowboys ... no, that doesn't work ... you understand) was a Sooner. The guy who just savaged Chris Rainey with a horse-collar tackle, even if not technically, is a Sooner. Coincidence? I think not. There's a reason those tackles are illegal. The receiver is going forward with all his might, but the defender is pulling him down with all his weight from behind, and it's so easy for the defender to fall on an outstretched leg with a ton of weight on it. Roy Williams tends to break people's legs, but Rainey looked like he suffered something more like a torn groin muscle. Bo Jackson dislocated his hip, I believe, on what amounted to a horse-collar, and it prematurely ended the career of one of the most promising athletes in recent NFL memory. They really need to liberalize the definition of that foul so they can call it more.

Update: According to the FOX sideline reporter, it's a sprained right ankle. I wouldn't be surprised, based on the tackle and the degree of pain Rainey appeared to be in, if his leg was broken just like Terrell Owens' was when the Roy Williams was first put into effect.

Tebow the prospect, part II

The Sooners' second (!) interception came on a great zone blitz where both tackles retreated after a half-second of trying to rush, linebackers came from the outside, and Tebow was trying to complete a crossing pattern across the middle. It was a really good call by Oklahoma because the zone blitz defending the short middle is a fantastic call against a short pass over the middle. They got lucky that was evidently the play call, but Tebow should have recognized the zone blitz and at least throw the ball away, and ideally throw it into the wider zones vacated by the blitzing linebackers.

Enhanced TV

It just occurred to me that a silver lining of my not yet having a Tivo-type system is that I could watch the extra simultaneous coverage of the game online. I wonder if networks are paying for all those extra cameras and the bandwidth to try to discourage Tivo use in these big ticket TV events. Advertisers have to hate Tivo since people don't really watch commercials when they have it. I can't help giving the network props for trying to solve technological and business challenges by providing additional value to their customers.

(Boo)mer Sooner

The OU Band needs more songs. It seems like every first down they play Boomer Sooner (I assume is the name of the fight sond), in addition to obviously playing it after touchdowns. Every time I watch an Oklahoma game I get that song stuck in my head for days.

Nice touchdown drive though. It's probably a good idea to try to run at the fast-twitch Florida defense. Between that and the unusual (even if it's not that fast) offensive tempo, Florida's defense did look a little out of sorts by the end.

Tebow the prospect

Two plays in a row Tim Tebow appeared to totally fail to recognize a blitz and adjust his protection. First he took a huge shot as he threw the ball, then he managed to scramble ahead for a yard. Nobody will remember it because on the next play he threw a pass for the first touchdown of the game, but that kind of apparent inability to read the defense at the line of scrimmage is a big black mark on his resume as an NFL quarterback.

Buy American

Gotta love those Hemi truck ads. A toolbox that can drive through explosions. Buy our truck! I'm so glad I got to invest some of my (tax) money in this company.

Live-blogging the BCS Championship Game

I've just decided to start live blogging the Championship game because, hey, sounds fun.

My blasphemous solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Nothing gets people moving like a firm, fast deadline. All the Israeli and Palestinian leadership seems to be able to do is negotiate temporary cease fires and launch recriminations at one another. The problem is probably ultimately insoluble because both sides have unshakable God-promised claims to the same territory, and no one will convince either side that the other is right.

So if they can't reach a compromise based on good faith, maybe they need something else to motivate them. I think an extremely powerful, nuclear country like the U.S. should, ahem, encourage the two sides who seem to have a vested interest in the Promised Land to come to some kind of agreement about how to share it. Kids and parents all know the concept: if you two can't share, nobody gets it. We should threaten to nuke Jerusalem.

We want to minimize the atrocity involved in this, naturally, so we need to make the ground rules abundantly clear.

1. Set a specific deadline for all interested parties to conclude negotiations (or, perhaps more likely, hostilities) over what to do with the disputed territory. Several months would probably be advisable, but experts in diplomacy would be best suited to advise on the exact length. Long enough for the stakeholders to get their heads around the problem and actually get a solution, but not so long that our capability to follow through on the nuclear deadline would be compromised (more on that below).


2. Set a second specific deadline -- the time that the area will be razed by nuclear hellfire. The purpose behind this is to allow all the residents of the area to be affected to leave. I think it would be incumbent upon us to facilitate their safe removal, because as noted, we want to minimize the atrocity involved. We aren't trying to kill anyone. Or more to the point, we aren't trying to scare Israel and Palestine by threating to kill anyone. We're trying to scare them by threatening to destroy their holy places because they can't behave like adults and share them civilly.
   
   I would think a matter of weeks or months after the negotiation deadline passes would be necessary. It's a thorny issue, because the vast majority would refuse or fail to investigate their options for relocation before the negotiation deadline had passed, so it needs to be long enough for the entire process to occur in an appropriately civilized manner. On the other hand, the longer the delay the more likely it is the negotiating leaders would fail to take the negotiation deadline seriously, which would jeopardize the people and put tremendous pressure on the commitment of the U.S. to delay the nuclear strike. And again, if negotiations continue after the negotiating deadline passes, it will severely hamper the relocation efforts.
   


3. We can expect some opposition from some corners of the globe. That will put strain on both our resolve and our tactical abilities. This incentive won't work if the nuclear threat is not credible. (It needn't be nuclear, so long as it achieves the specific mission objectives of destroying the holy land as it is known and fought for, but nothing gets the attention of the international community like "nuclear.") If we let the negotiating parties believe that the U.S. is not serious, the odds of actually driving an accord (no Honda pun intended) plummet. The best way to ensure U.S. resolve against foreign opposition would be to craft the deadline parameters in such a way that the U.S. cannot reasonably be blamed for Israel and Palestine's failure to negotiate according to them.
   
   There is also the problem of people trying to physically stop us, rather than just convince us not to go through with it. I'm pretty sure the military has anticipated that that would happen for as long as they have had nuclear weapons to deploy. That is why we have nuclear submarines. The biggest concern may be that we will need to have our nuclear subs in the water before we make the announcement in order to keep them from being spotted leaving San Diego or Chesapeake bay on satellite and followed that way. I don't know how long a nuclear sub can remain underwater, although I it's a long time, but that's something we will have to consider when setting up the deadlines in the first place.

Perhaps the political will does not yet exist for this kind of drastic action. But it's been 60 years since Israel was created, and there has been little peace there since. The area has been fought over in the name of God since at least the Crusades a thousand years ago. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, perhaps mankind simply is not perfect enough to occupy the holy places in Jerusalem.

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

"An obliging stranger, under pretence of compactly folding up my bank-notes for security's sake, abstracts the notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine, when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes!"

Great Expectations spends a lot of time masterfully illustrating both how hard and how easy it is to do what is right by showing how easy it is to do what is wrong and how obvious it is that it's wrong.

The Dark Knight vs. Iron Man

Having seen about a half-dozen movies in the theater this year, I'm obviously qualified to critique the Wall Street Journal's year-end film criticism. Joe Morgenstern put Iron Man on his 2008 top-10 list, and left The Dark Knight off. It's not so much that I want to split hairs on which of the two is a better movie. Both were excellent, although both clunked similarly to the endings with villain characters (Jeff Bridges' bad-guy Iron Man, and the post-face burning Harvey Dent) who just sort of went crazy without any further explanation.

What made me think about Dark Knight while reading the Iron Man review was Morgernstern's comment that the former "expands the notion of a mainstream summer action adventure," mostly with the depth and intelligence of the story. I thought Dark Knight did so much more for the expansion of, specifically, the comic book movie. Think about how many little stories there were in sequence in the movie. Just off the top of my head, six months after seeing the movie:

• The Joker is robbing banks to get in with the Gotham mafia community.
• Batman goes and roughs up the Chinese mafia impresario.
• The Joker kidnaps and sets fire to Maggie Gyllenhaal and Harvey Dent.
• The Joker threatens to and then does blow up a hospital to spook people.
  
• The Joker sets bombs on two ferries and tries to get the passengers to blow each other up.
• Harvey Dent/Two-Face kidnaps Inspector Gordon's family and Batman has to save them.

And there are others that I left out because I couldn't remember just how they went, including the big car chase and the Joker getting himself arrested and Batman interrogating him. The film is like a half-dozen episodes of a TV show, woven together not by the usual story arc of good triumphing over evil, but by Batman's impossible struggle and ultimate repudiation of the attempt to be a perfect superhero. In that regard, it represents a step forward both stylistically and thematically.

It's hard to argue that Iron Man really took either of those steps. The plot is much more linear, following the invention of the Iron Man character and the transformation of Tony Stark into a good guy, and his fight with Jeff Bridges that culminates with an actual Iron Man on Iron Man brawl. In other words, it basically follows the script of a big budget comic book movie, albeit improved with everything Marvel has learned from its mostly successful X-Men and Spider-Man ventures, and the less successful older Batman movies. It's true that it's better written, better acted, and better effected than what we're used to, but that just means it's the same thing done better. The Dark Knight actually did it differently, and did it very well. Which is the better movie is a more subjective question, but Dark Knight is the one that really expanded the genre.