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(If Em were around, he'd no doubt gloat at my son's choice of ball club.)
Just watched the Twins blow it against the Chisox and get swept for the first time since forever. Who the hell gets swept in a series? Cripes.
This season just sucks for me. Of the three of "my" teams, the Reds and the Nats are both plumbing the depths of their respective divisions, while the Twinkies are in second place, but below .500 and with wobbly pitching. Yeah, they come from behind a lot, but they also blow it a lot, as they did just now.
I get e-mail alerts whenever a game ends of any of those three teams, and I swear it's like I never see a win. Frequently all three lose.
The Reds also apparently got destroyed by the Marlins (whose stadium was once again pratically empty -- wtf?). Nine to two. Ouch.
Cripes. I finally get baseball on TV last year and have had nothing but misery to watch. *sigh*
Based on the video below, one can see that the main difference between men and women is that women read books and are smart, but still basically hopeless when it counts, while men are an even mix of fearless courage, determination, rudimentary intelligence and outright insanity.
And you know what, it's absolutely true!
(I'm still waiting on that global comet-caused disaster in 1994, and I want that damned Sunsword. Though maybe Thundarr really was on Jupiter.)
The other thing the video proves: New York never changes much.
Stefan Raab, one of Germany's leading comedy TV hosts, tries to teach Kylie Minogue how to speak the Cologne dialect of German, which is called "Kölsch".
I stumbled across this video on YouTube, and it's a good illustration of something I was talking about earlier -- how local dialects of German are nearly unintelligible to speakers of other dialects. I can just barely understand what he's saying in Kölsch, and even then it's only because I can make a good guess as to what he's talking about. Not only is the pronunciation different, but so is the spelling and many cases even the words are different. (Raab, like all TV presenters, speaks plain vanilla High German on TV, but also speaks his local dialect.)
I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”
The funny (not ha-ha funny but why-why funny) thing is that recently iTunes began offering free Sesame Street clips for download. I was delighted by this and downloaded some...and was annoyed and flabbergasted at how utterly lobotomized the clips were. They were singularly unfunny, unentertaining, blatantly paranoid about offending anyone.
Jim Henson must be spinning in his grave.
I can see it now. Parents buying Sesame Street: Old School and showing it to their kids should be locked up for child abuse. (Count me in. I'm a-gonna "abuse" my kids that way, sho' nuff.)
The other thought that occurred to me: Al-Qaeda doesn't need to terrorize us. We're doing a fine job ourselves.
...
Addendum BoE showed me this in our local (German) paper. When I read the article I assumed it was another story that had been distorted or misrepresented or perhaps even a bad joke (it happens sometimes in reports about America and other places). But I went on Google and found out that the article didn't even come close to the bitter, sad reality.
First off, I gotta wonder what the hell the Cowboys have for a center. Sweet Lord, three blown snaps in one half?! The Cowboys are insanely lucky none were recovered by the Redskins (though of course one turned into an INT).
That missed FG in the first half really hurt the 'Skins, especially to come up with nothing after that great drive. Sigh.
Jason Campbell is turning into a really solid QB. I have high expectations of him in the next few seasons, and think he may make those three draft picks he cost be worth it. Yes, he's been fumbling a lot -- but I think that boils down to the amount of pressure he's been under with that weak offensive line, along with his relative youth. Both can be corrected, and learning to deal with pressure is just the seasoning he needs.
But still, his inexperience shows, like the intentional grounding call he had, but especially like that blunder that effectively killed the game for the 'Skins by throwing a sloppy pass under pressure right into the gut of a Dallas defender. He had some room to run and could have gained a good four or five yards if he'd have just run with it, rather than throwing the ball into heavy traffic like that. Even so, he led what looked like a magnificent rally, marching down the field and giving the Dallas secondary fits. If he keeps this up, he's gonna be a hell of a quarterback.
Given the odds going in, the 'Skins were damned lucky to be in the game at all at the half, though, let alone be ahead 10-7. Unfortunately, the Cowboys are known for going berzerko-crazy in the second half, while the Redskins are known for wilting. And indeed, that's more or less what happened, though surprisingly it was the Redskins D that failed, not the offense. Even then, their secondary is what killed them, not their defensive line -- the latter managed to bottle up the run pretty well, while the former got burned repeatedly by Owens. Bleah.
But the Redskins D looked surprisingly good overall, considering how banged up it is. And amazingly enough, the Redskins' offensive line didn't do too badly, all things considered. Maybe things are finally looking up again for the team -- but it's a shame they couldn't come up with a win after that effort.
A real heartbreaker of a game overall. Were it not for that late INT thrown by Campbell deep in Cowboys territory, the Redskins probably would have won it. The look of utter disappointment and frustration on Joe Gibbs' face after the INT just said it all: Somehow the Redskins have immense potential, but keep coming up short.
The Confessor was weirdly prescient, getting himself dressed earlier after coming home from shopping with BoE...putting on his Ohio State sweatsuit that his Buckeye grandma gave him some months back, but until now he always refused to put it on. But today he proceeded to go to the closet, pick it out and get dressed.
Maybe he heard me talking to Grandma about the game during our recent video chat, and took it to heart more than I realized...
Anyway, I now also direct your attention to the schedule the next day, 10 pm (or 22:00 as they put it).
Hot diggity-double-damn.
Hail to the Redskins, hail victory, braves on the warpath, fight for old DC!
There is a brouhaha over here about a well-known German TV presenter, Eva Herman, who for some time has been pushing her ideas about how women shouldn't do careers, should stay at home and just be good mommies. It began, oddly enough, about the time she had her baby; then she began praising breastfeeding on TV, and gradually she started a sort of mommy crusade, culminating in a controversial book, The Eve Principle ("Das Eva-Prinzip"), where she called men who didn't provide for their wives "wimps" and laid out her belief that it is a waste of time for women to pursue a career (pretty rich coming from a wealthy career woman who is still working after becoming a mother).
In other words, she is having a mid-life crisis and is doing it very publicly.
The crowning glory, though, was her recent assertion that the Nazis had a good family policy. (To quote: "...much was of course bad, such as Adolf Hitler, but some things were also very good. For example the high esteem of mothers. This was gotten rid of by the 1968 generation, and that's why we now have our social mess.")
When her employers demanded an explanation, she offered a half-hearted apology (or non-apology -- more like an attempt to explain it) which only served to tick people off even worse, and her state TV network, NDR, promptly sacked her. And sure enough, neo-Nazi parties such as the NPD are claiming her as an icon.
Yesterday's edition of our local paper has an editorial that is suitably acid (quick and dirty translation by yours truly):
Please stop babbling!
People say a lot about women. For example, they like to say that women talk too much. There was even a scientific study recently that took up the question and recorded the flow of speech of men and women with a stopwatch. Without scientific aid, a prominent TV presenter has offered proof that not just men, but women too should sometimes rather remain silent. Eva Herman could have saved herself -- and her public audience -- a lot of trouble.
But she didn't do that and impudently blabbed on about what was supposedly "good" about the Nazi dictatorship. It resulted in her dismissal by the public TV networks. Rightly, in spite of her proffered apology. For a little basic knowledge would have sufficed to expose the reality behind Hitler's praise of the family for what it was: a façade, hypocritical and part of an inhuman racial ideology that removed the rights of families and destroyed them. Even in the rearing of children, parents were mistrusted: Jungvolk (German Youth), Hitler Youth and Bund deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) were there to twist them to the will of the Party. Ms. Herman's problem is not so much her sloppy handling of the blackest chapter of Germany's history, but rather -- see above -- her loquaciousness and her strident crusade for home and hearth. Both paid off well until now. In talk shows, in which endless babbling and shallow provocation are of the essence, she made a name for herself as the jokester and big mouth. With books about God-willed gender roles, she became a leading woman for all those who dreamed about returning to a time when women would clear out the dirt without complaint and wouldn't compete with men for jobs.
What went wrong, Ms. Herman? A PR gag turned into a campaign; the campaign turned into a mission. For applause is addicting. That it came increasingly from the far right was -- apparently -- unimportant to the author and antifeminist Herman. For every provocation -- that's the rule in the media circus -- wears out. She had to lay it on again to secure her own success. And keep on babbling -- preferably that which Joe Sixpack also says. That the 1968 generation is to blame for everything. That not all was bad "back then"...until the gaffe that didn't even get the point across.
Men, according to Herman, are unfortunately sometimes wimps. Nonsense. The men at NDR certainly aren't. They fired their employee. Now Ms. Herman can live the life that she proclaims -- a life for the family, without a career. Wanna bet she doesn't make it? (Gabi Stief)
JtS posted a funny video in my previous blog entry about Luxembourgers from the German TV comedy show Switch. I was poking around on YouTube and came across this gem from the early days of the Iraq war:
Transcript, for those who don't speak German:
ANCHOR The signs are gathering that a military attack on Iraq by the Americans is imminent. Live in Baghdad, our correspondent Torsten Schaub. Torsten, what is the situation?
REPORTER Yes, Peter, a few minutes ago everything here turned green, and the experts agree that whenever it turns green, things go boom. The UN negotiators have tried to the last to mediate a mixture of grey-brown and beige, but Saddam Hussein was not ready for any compromises.
ANCHOR Are those white streaks flying around in the sky again, Torsten?
REPORTER No, this time not yet, instead a little red light on CNN's camera, that must mean that at any moment [BOOM] ah! there it goes! yes! a wonderful light show, ohhhhhh, pretty!
(cue scrub)
ANCHOR RTL Current Special, Bombs on Baghdad: It's going boom in Iraq, and we're there live, with our correspondent Torsten Schaub. I'll go to him live now in Baghdad.
VOICEOVER (with rockets flying everywhere) Four to nil for America. (BOOM) Five-nil, America! (BOOM) Eleven to nil, America! (BOOM) Twelve-nil, America! (BOOM) Thirteen to nil, America, Thirteen to, oh, no, fourteen to nil...
Yeppers, Ethelred finally went out and got the set-top box for digital cable on Saturday (set me back EUR 120, but oh well), and went to the cable company today to get the SIM card for it today. I only ordered the English-language channels (scroll down to the UK flag), and among them is NASN, North American Sports Network.
And this means...
BASEBALL!
The funny thing is that I mentioned this to the Confessor, who really has no way of knowing what baseball is, except for a couple pictures from some of his books (such as Go, Dog, Go!, where in one picture the dogs are playing baseball) and of course the Nationals and Twins ballcaps he and I both have. I also have an autographed ball that I got once when I was in the hospital (some Twins players came by for a visit). But other than that, he really can't have a clue what baseball is.*
Yet he's been apeshit about wanting to see baseball on TV, even more than me. All evening as I was setting up the set-top box and re-cabling everything (which is pretty complicated, given all the stuff we have), he was excitedly going on about baseball.
Unfortunately, the SIM card still hasn't been activated by the cable company, so no baseball as of yet. *sigh*
Meanwhile, when he's older, there is a small baseball club in Hannover, the Hannover Regents...but unfortunately they play at noon on Sundays, which means skipping church. *sigh*
But hey, after years of missing it, I will finally be able to watch baseball on TV! w00t!
* - He does know football, because I have Madden 2003 and Madden 07 on the PS2 and play them sometimes. He also has a kid-sized Rhein Fire football.
'Round these parts, free terrestrial digital broadcasting (DVB-T) has been available for some time. Because Hannover is host of CeBIT, it was one of the first regions to get it (one of the nice things about Hannover -- it's not a big city, but thanks to CeBIT we get a lot of the geek bells and whistles like ISDN or DSL early on). However, at first the channels on offer were a bit meager, and in particular the two English channels offered through the regular 32-channel analog cable package (BBC World and CNN International) aren't available through DVB-T. So even though it's free (aside from the aerial and set-top box, which cost from about 50 Euros on up to 150 Euros, or more if you want PVR-type functions) I put off getting it for some time.
Digital cable has also been available for some years, and within the last couple of years, they started offering a small package of English channels, including a few that I would like to have -- NASN (a sports channel that has NFL, NCAA, MLB and other American sports live), National Geographic, BBC Prime, BBC World and some others. Unfortunately at first they would only offer it in conjunction with a full package, which I didn't want.
Well, recently I saw that they unbundled the English package, so now I can get it for EUR 14 a month. We now pay EUR 19/mo for the analog cable. So if we got a DVB-T box, then got digital cable and the English package, and cancelled the analog contract, we'd have many more channels overall, much more English channels, and save five Euros a month.
Schweet. :-)
So I went on eBay and got a good Sony DVB-T receiver. I almost thought I was going to get lucky and get it for a Euro, but some scumbag swooped in at the last minute and started bidding, so I ended up paying a bit over 70 Euros...but new it's worth about 150, so I figure it's still a good deal.
