Tony Siragusa’s advice to Plaxico Burress: If you feel the need to pack heat when visiting a club, you probably shouldn’t be visitiing that club with or without your weapon. Yeah. Maybe. But that’s the Advanced Course, “Goose.”

Common Sense 101 would dictate that if you can’t even draw your weapon and unload it without shooting yourself then not only should you not be carrying a weapon, ever, you also should not visit clubs, drink alcohol, attempt to walk and chew gum at the same time, talk to the media, run a crossing pattern against the Baltimore Ravens … I could go on and on.

Actually I guess I should be fair. By firing a round into your own leg you have, technically, begun to unload the weapon. It just doesn’t strike me as a viable unloading solution over the long haul.

The talk has already started. On the pre-game shows and during dead spots in the middle of games the topic is heating up. Why aren’t there more black head coaches in football? Why do black head coaches get all the bad teams? This issue has been re-kindled by the likelihood that a number of black head coaches will be unemployed by the time the Super Bowl is played.

In the college ranks Washington has already announced that Ty Willingham is out at the end of the season, and yesterday Sylvester Croom resigned as head coach at Mississippi State. And among the pros, Romeo Crennel (Cleveland), Herm Edwards (KC) and Marvin Lewis (Cincinnati) are all in the process of adding another uninspiring season to their resumes and have been on the hot seat for a while.

Mike Singletary is kind of a wild card in this discussion. (more…)

Somewhere in Gainesville today, Tim Tebow is watching the games he Tivo’d yesterday and drooling. Florida’s agenda is now clear. Alabama next Saturday in the SEC Championship and then Texas or Oklahoma in the National Championship. It no longer appears as if either contest will be much of a challenge for the white hot Gators.

Don’t be deceived by the Alabama – Auburn score. Auburn was awful. More than half of Alabama’s points were set up by three Auburn fumbles.

The Tide in a nutshell: they are undefeated and not a whisper of Heisman talk for QB John Parker Wilson. Alabama relies on strong defense and a solid running game. All well and fine until you run into a team like, say … Florida. The strongest defense isn’t going to stop the Gators and if Tebow puts a couple quick scores on the Tide, it will take more than a running game to bail them out.

Last night Wilson was a woeful 8 for 16 on passing attempts. (more…)

Bill Snyder is packing up his walker and heading back to Manhattan, KS to once again coach the K State Wildcats. Look for him to re-introduce his patented “soft schedule” offense that put State on the map during his first run. Right now folks are throwing around anecdotes of Snyder’s success. The thing is, he didn’t achieve that success by building K State UP, he did it by building K State’s schedule DOWN.

Anyone can look like a genius if they simply take some middling college team, remove a couple of BCS schools from their schedule and insert a couple of Div II schools. Of course the media is just as much to blame. As long as a team can remain undefeated, it doesn’t matter if they are playing PS 157 week in and week out. The media doesn’t begin to look at strength of schedule until you’ve taken that first loss. Case in point: Texas Tech. They were everyone’s darling prior to last Saturday night. Now all of a sudden qualifiers abound up and down the Red Raiders schedule. Win #x is discounted because of that, Texas won the second half of their game, etc.

The fact that the US Senate still hangs in the balance seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. With 2 races still to be decided, Republicans need to prevail in one of them, not a given at this point, to prevent the Democrats from reaching 60 seats and unfettered control of the chamber.

It seems like events early on election night gave everyone the impression that the Republicans would dodge a bullet and keep the Dems from getting to 60. McConnell won here in Kentucky which was seen as one of the keys. And Chambliss in Georgia was hanging above the 50% + 1 vote needed to avoid a runoff. Minnesota was looking close but slightly favoring Coleman. And it looked like Stevens would prevail in Alaska despite his 11th hour legal woes.

Well, Stevens lost. Chambliss is facing a runoff. And it seems as if there are plenty of folks in Minnesota driving around with crates full of Franken ballots in their trunks. Apparently we won’t have found the last of them until Franken is declared the winner.

Seriously, the recount in Minnesota seems to be breaking for Coleman. However it really does appear that Franken’s camp will try anything and everything from fraud to lawsuits to steal that election. Franken is making Al Gore look like a regular diplomat by comparison. Powerline is keeping tabs on this race. (more…)

Last week US auto-makers struck out in Congress. Since then I’ve read that GM is considering selling off one of its corporate jets, and now they’ve fired Tiger Woods!

Now I certainly agree that every little bit helps. And that’s what we have so far – a couple of little bits.

GM has 80,000 hourly workers who cost the company roughly $30 per hour more than Toyota’s labor costs them. That means that between now and when I head home tonight GM will waste on excessive labor expense more than the $7million that they had been paying each year for Woods’ endorsement contract.

And, by the way auto worker, yes you do earn $70+ per hour even if you don’t deposit that whole amount in the bank every week. There are your wages and then there is all that money that you don’t have to spend on benefits and retirement. (more…)

Penn and Teller expose the causists with their petition to ban Di-Hydrogen Monoxide.

High marks for entertainment, but negligible for level of difficulty. Duping the left is just not a challenge anymore. How else do you explain Al Gore?

Thanks to Drama 2.0 for pointing this one out.

So far season 5 of The Office has been awesome! They are really doing a great job of mixing it up and keeping things fresh. I am wonderfully surprised on many fronts.

The first has nothing to do with the show’s content. What is wrong with NBC? By now we would normally have had several preemptions for reruns or to roll out some lame new show like Kath and Kim. Instead they have been going strong every week. Hope this doesn’t mean that we are in for a more sporadic than normal spring.

Jim and Pam: I was muy apprehensive about those two getting together as shows have traditionally had a hard time sustaining their success after giving in on the “will they or won’t they?” story line. There were times last season when my suspicions seemed to be confirmed. (more…)

Gotta hand it to Google. They got searchwiki up and out to the masses in a hurry. So far I’m liking it.

Also, as I read about this new feature on the web, the most oft-heard complaint / concern seems to be: “What is google going to do with all that information?”

I guess I’m weary of this one having thought that by now it would have sorted itself out. It is no secret that Google clearly stockpiles a lot of information about its users and their habits. If that concerned me terribly then I would already be very careful not to use g-anything. In the broader sense I guess I would have to be not using the internet at all.

But as I’m not googling for kiddie porn or instructions on how to build a dirty nuke, I’m pretty comfortable with the risk / reward equation. There are certain things I would never put anywhere on the web in any way, shape or form. The rest … I’m just done worrying about it.

A few weeks ago I looked at how the three QB’s linked by Brett Favre’s un-retirement were faring at the NFL’s halway point. No sooner had I posted that then Favre went on a tear logging two impressiver performances in driving his Jets into the thick of the race for the AFC’s #2 spot, and Rodgers struggled at Minnesota before righting the ship last week. So I figured I had better revisit this one briefly.

I stand by my ultimate conclusion that the Jets have mortgaged their future and doubled down on the present with Favre, while the Packers have done a great job of laying the foundation for their future while minimizing the current damage by going ahead with their transition to Rodgers. I am however re-thinking my speculation that the Packers wouldn’t be significantly better off with Favre this year. (more…)