Tag: ek Holiday

In addition to exercising my roman numeral skillz this off beat event has become more and more popular the longer I’ve blogged it.

Call it the ek bump.

Here is a link to past Bissell Kitty Halftime shows and if that Aw factor is not enough- live kitten cam.

They now have an embeddable puppy cam too-

And, this page of Puppy Bowl whores and highlights which may (or may not) run a live feed.  Or you can try the Animal Planet main page.

And, to prove how scandalously mainstream I’ve become-

• Washington Post
• The New York Times
• USA Today

TheMomCat’s live feed link.

How appropriate.

It’s the Mind

How appropriate.

It’s the Mind

Ned?  Ned Ryerson?!

You like boats, but not the ocean. You go to a lake in summer with your family up in the mountains. There’s a long wooden dock and a boathouse with boards missing from the roof, and a place you used to crawl underneath to be alone. You’re a sucker for French poetry and rhinestones. You’re very generous. You’re kind to strangers and children, and when you stand in the snow you look like an angel.

How are you doing this?

I told you. I wake up every day, right here, right in Punxsutawney, and it’s always February 2nd, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

The American Conference Championship is an entirely different ball of wax.  Here you don’t have two teams that are mostly unremarkably objectionable, no better or worse than most, instead you have two positively hateful ones and the question is which evil is lesser?

Fundamentally the Carrion Crows and the Patsies are guilty of the same offense, robbing their host communities to fund huge empty white elephant eyesores that are basically unusable except for 8 days a year to the tune of hundreds of millions.

In the one case the thief, Art Modell, was not quite as successful as Robert Kraft and lost everything except his team contracts and The Bank ($314 million) and in fairness Kraft was able to raise the $420 million for Gillette privately, though it is not in any sense funded by his personal fortune any more than all those architectural monstrosities with Trump plastered on them.

And, if you like rooting for winners, the Ravens don’t even have a suspicion of victory today.  Unless Brady and about half the other Patsie players are suddenly stuck by mysterious illness and injury this is about as close to a sure thing as you get in Throwball.

Nope, as we head into the break week before the Super Bowl the question will be if the creaky old Patsies can stave off the new kids on the block ‘9ers and whether you should even be watching Throwball at all.

The Falcons are an expansion team of no particular note.  There’s really no good reason to hate them except the team colors (red and black in case you’re interested) and Michael Vick.  They’ve been historically somewhat ineffective in post-season play relative to their overall winning percentage.

The ‘9ers on the other hand are a storied program tracing their origin back to the All-American Football Conference.  Their ascendancy in the ’80s was roughly co-terminant with the despised ‘boys, but their fans were nowhere near as loud, obnoxious, and arrogant.

Now there are those pointing to the investigation of Michael Crabtree for sexual assault as a reason to favor the Falcons, but I don’t see it.  For one thing they didn’t fly him to the Georgia Dome to ride the pine.  A late breaking development is a second witness that supports his version of events.

In any case this particular edition of the ‘9ers is not a one dimensional team dependent on him or even Colin Kaepernick for that matter.  What they have this year that they lacked last is a solid offensive line that can protect anyone they put in the pocket and open lanes for their rushing game.  It’s not impossible that they’ll lose, it’s just hard to see how.

ek?  How can you possibly root for the Texans?

Well, on the merits they’re a pure expansion team that simply took the biggest market available after the Oilers bolted.  And of course I’ll never forget how the Patsies took Hartford for a ride so they could screw over Foxboro.

That said there’s no reason they shouldn’t crush the Texans like a bug, the Patsies are the surest things this weekend.

But I’ve been 100% wrong so far.

A battle of expansion teams the Seahawks extended a 5 game winning streak last week beating the noxious Native Americans and handing D.C. a well deserved defeat.

A word about that.  I hope and wish Robert Griffin has a swift, speedy, and complete recovery, but the likelihood is that it will be long and painful and as with Broadway Joe Namath his game will never be the same.  Why did Mike Shanahan and the rest of the organization including their preening team physician, trainers, and offensive coordinator so badly blow this call?

Stephen Strasburg.

You will recall that Davey Johnson took no end of heat over his decision to bench Strasburg in the playoffs rather than risk permanent injury to their star stopper in what would have been an ultimately futile pursuit of a pennant anyway.  Indeed I expect the Monday Morning Quarterbacking to resume the instant Pitchers and Catchers report and while I will call this masturbatory manifestation of instant gratification “D.C. Disease” most fans are not immune.

The Versailles Villagers, that passel of perpetually wrong pundits and politicians who suck up and kick down confident in their non-existent knowledge of subjects they know nothing about and have no interest in really except as psychic proof of their pompous predestined prepotency over us mere peons and an affirmation of their inherent superiority and hard work instead of inbreeding and nepotism, insist they are entitled and every last one of them is a rabid fan of that team with the racist name where they can get season tickets or a seat in the owners box or sideline and no one else can.

God ordained them in the womb and that divine silver spoon is a true refection of their merit and treasure in heaven and not a distorted fun house mirror.  If they were supposed to be sinners they’d have poor parents and according to His will their struggles would not be blessed with success.  But they are successful and thus His plan is made manifest in this world as well as the next, forget that eye of the needle stuff- if Jesus was so holy why wasn’t he rich?

Thus endeth today’s lesson on hubris and hypocrisy.

Back on the field if the Seahawks were not on a roll you might be tempted to believe that the Falcons had a shot what with home field advantage and all, but their defense is very ordinary especially against the run and they have no ground game of their own to speak of.  Additionally Matt Ryan has never ever won a single playoff game (0 – 3).

But if you insist on another reason to hate the Falcons they are the team that drafted Michael Vick, noted Dog Murderer.

91 – 21.

No, that’s not the score of last week’s Packers/Vikings game, it’s the number of fans ejected and arrested, far ahead of their average performance of 18.4 and 5.5 a game.

The Packers looked better than average on the field also, dominating most of the game except for a late 4th Quarter score in a 24 – 10 victory.

Aaron Rogers is not the only Packer getting healthier just in time for the post season so their contest against the ‘9ers could be more interesting than people expect, though in fairness the ‘9ers are a mere 2.5 point favorite and that because of home field advantage.

As opposed to the AFC, the NFC is a tough pick, almost any team could win.

The ‘9ers can’t count on a 30 – 22 romp like they got in Week 1 and their defense is playing injured.  Justin Smith’s triceps is definitely questionable and they are much less effective without him.  Quarterback Colin Kaepernick is a mid-season replacement so who knows, though his scrambling style is something the Packers have had trouble dealing with in other teams.  Both kickers have the potential to suck but the ‘9ers signed Billy Cundiff during their bye week so they have a replacement even though the still slumping Akers will start.

The ‘9ers are not a bad team, there’s nothing much to hate about them and I’m going to be disappointed to miss this game.

But I hope the Packers win.  What about

The Packers are the only non-profit, community-owned major league professional sports team in the United States.

are we not understanding?

The AFC is shaping up as a Ponies/Patsies showdown if teams play to form.

Last week the Ravens dispatched the Bolts kinda decisively, 24 – 9 in what is more accurately described as an offensive rather than defensive struggle.  Flacco and the Ravens finally put something together while Luck wasn’t able to.

A big deal will be made about the last match-up between Payton Manning and Ray Lewis with Lewis retiring after the season, but the game is more likely to turn on the Ravens offense or lack thereof.  The Ravens changed offensive coordinators just last month because they were so ineffective.

Payton Manning is Payton Manning, not Tebow, and the Broncos are likely to make this a very tough game for Lewis because they don’t suck and can put up a score or two.  On the other hand it bespeaks a kind of institutional idiocy that they hired him in the first place so there is hope for the Carrion Crows.

Still, the Ponies won 34 – 17 in their match-up 4 weeks ago, in part because running back Ray Rice has fumble fingers and didn’t get many calls, and they have one of the best records against the pass in the league.

I’m missing both games today for a holiday party with some of the people I know through my other life as a community organizer.  As always it’s up to you to make your own fun though I’ve tried to encourage a couple of folks to stop by.