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Regular readers here may know that I’m a big Miami Dolphins fan, they of the NFL.
This is the second season of their new coach, the much-lauded and uber-successful college football coach Nick Saban. Last season, the Dolphins ended strong, and all indications pointed to the belief that Miami’s players had bought into Coach Saban’s coaching philosophy. That, coupled with the common belief that a coach only starts “owning” his team in his second year onward, and with a few good moves in the offseason, the Dolphins should be able to make the playoffs this year. That was the belief.
One of those good moves seemed to be the acquisition of a new (to them) quarterback, in the name of Duante Culpepper. Two years ago, he was a star qb, a hang-your-franchise-on-my-shoulders kind of guy. Last year, his performance fell off a bit, then he got a very significant knee injury and missed the final half the season. He recouped his knee remarkably well in the off-season, enough so that Miami decided to trade for him. I was happy about this trade, because the Dolphins, for about half a decade at least, were in desperate need of a star quarterback. I (as did many others) expected Duante to return to some semblance of his star form after being fully recuperated. Hopefully, he’d return a month or so into this season, and play wonderfully. Joey Harrington, an underachieving but potentially quality qb who last played in hapless Detroit was also acquired. The question about Joey is this: are his poor statistics more a reflection on his abilities, or on the woeful team he played for? I always thought he was better than he was allowed to be, and when “we” got him, I was happy thinking he’d most likely competently start this season, until Duante was ready. That was the belief.
Then, over the early summer, Duante’s injury progress had improved to the point where he was now expected to start the season. A very fast knee recuperation. All was well with Miami. Preseason has the team not playing so well, but Duante is playing well enough. Yeah, he’s still rusty, but that’ll rub off quickly. Harrington, too, was playing pretty well.
All was so well with Miami that at least two prominent sports magazines declared the Dolphins to be SuperBowl favoured team from the AFC. While I never bought into that hype, I was quietly expecting the Dolphins to make it into the playoffs, and depending on how things stood then, who knows how far they’d go.
Well, six games into the 16 game season and Miami are a pathetic 1-5. They are a terrible team of underachieving, poorly coached, poorly motivated sports individuals. While the defense has shown itself capable, the offense stinks. Turns out Culpepper wasn’t ready to come back this soon, and needs to get more rehab. He proved to be slow, indecisive and rather immobile. After four awful games (even the one game they won was not a good win), in which he got sacked far too often, he got benched so, says coach, he can rehab himself back to the point where he has his spark back.
Enter Harrington for the past two games, and while the offense does look crisper, there are still far too many things going wrong in this offense for it to win anything.
The reality of the situation is that the Dolphins really suck this year, and I’m glad now that I didn’t splurge on NFL Sunday Ticket this season. It is highly improbable, bordering on impossible, that they’ll make the playoffs now. Honestly, I’m hoping they’re able to turn it around enough so they win half their remaining games. That would leave them at 7-9. A small smidgen of my brain still holds out hope that they magically turn on the “team” switch, and enough things will change that they turn it around and become a force to be reckoned with. But that ain’t gonna happen.
Anyway, it’s not fun being a Dolphins fan so far this year.

Technorati Tags: Miami Dolphins, NFL, sports, Duante Culpepper, Joey Harrington, Nick Saban

tchotchke: a trinket; a knick-knack
My parents went to Israel and all they brought me back was this t-shirt, and this tchotchke.
or
One of my favourite television spin-offs was Joanie Loves Tchotchke.

tchotchke: a trinket; a knick-knack

My parents went to Israel and all they brought me back was this t-shirt, and this tchotchke.

or

One of my favourite television spin-offs was Joanie Loves Tchotchke.

Ah, The Breeders. Yum.

Sad: our printer has been busted for a few months now. 
Happy: We’re not printer snobs, so when we heard there was a Lexmark all-in-one printer/scanner/copier on sale at WalMart for $45, I ran out and bought it.  45 bucks!  That’s less than it’d cost to fix the old printer!!  Then I did some online research on it.  By most accounts, it does photos pretty well (something we don’t bother with) but, because it’s only a one-cartridge (tri-colour) deal, reports that it doesn’t print black text very well (looks faded and brownish) weren’t very encouraging to me.  Still, for $45 dollars, let’s give her a whirl, eh?
Sad: Try to install the printer drivers onto the computer and get a message saying that the cartridge that came with the printer isn’t the right one.  Also, the “all-in-one” software that enables ease of scanning doesn’t seem to be there.  So, I can’t print due to the erroneous cartridge message, scanning is a pain since it can only be done through Microsoft’s own laborious software program, and if I could print it would likely turn out brown and not very professional looking (which could be an issue at some point when we need a more professional looking print-job).  So, I resolve to return the printer and search for another one.
Happy: Tonight my wife calls and says a friend has a printer that she no longer uses and we can have it.  It’s an upgrade from our busted HP printer, so I’m looking forward to it coming home tonight.  When I see it in my wife’s arms, it looks very nice.
Sad: Something is dripping from it.  What could possibly be dripping from a printer?  Why, the answer is ink.  Black ink (at least it’s not brown) has dripped its way to the kitchen lineoleum to the living room hardwood floor to the “office” carpet.  To the task of cleaning.  First my wife does a quick dry-cleaning with a cloth to get rid of the liquidy drips, while I try and stop the actual dripping of the printer (it seems like the printer has had a leaking problem for some time.  The inside of it looks all sprayed-ee, and I’m guessing there’s a pool of ink that’s congregated on the bottom of the printer.  When my wife was carrying it in, it got turned sideways and started dripping).  There are curious new kittens in the house, and first priority is to try and alleviate the potential for black-ink paw prints all about the house.  Once the majority of the ink drops are dry-wiped, the cats become far too curious to be a non-nuisance, so she goes about the task of catching them.  One has a bit of ink on her paw, so she’s easy to track down, but no so easy to catch.  Finally, though, both get coralled into the bathroom, and, luckily, the cat paws didn’t do too much extra inking.  And so, the cats a-hidden, and the dripping now a-stopped, I go about the task of wet-wiping the quick-dried spots.  With Mr.Clean to help, the ink comes off the lineoleum and hardwood very easily.  Not so easy from the carpet.  It’s a crappy old carpet anyway, so we’re not too worried about it being a bit stained.
Trouble with ink and other stain-inducing liquids, though, is that they seem to never quite stop appearing.  Almost magically, they show up in places that were, moments ago, ink-free.  Also, cleaning ink off of floors and printers gets the ole hands pretty dirty, and cleaning them is not easy.  A few washings and rinsings with a pasty water-bleach-salt mixture, followed by a number of regular soap rubbings gets the hands looking at least presentable (tough to get it out from under the fingernails, though), but feeling rather raw and chemicalized.
Happy:  Finally, though, it seems all the damage has been cleaned.
Sad: Of course, such an event at such an hour in the evening causes frustrations to percolate to the surface a bit, and, while there were a few moments of voiced irritations…
Happy: overall, I think we got through the ordeal pretty well.
I don’t know if the printer is salvageable.

I’ve added another show to my “watch every week” repetoire – Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.  This does not necessarily mean that I love the show.  At the moment I’m undecided, but more about that later.
Here, by the way, is my current “watch every week” repetoire, broken down into days:

Monday:  Nothing really.  What am I missing?
Tuesday:  Nothing really. Again, is there anything on I should be watching?
Wednesday: Don’t think there’s anything here.  Should there be?
Thursday:  Watch Survivor.  Download The Office, and download Extras (watch them next day)
Friday:  Nada.
Saturday:  Now it will be Battlestar Galactica, that it’s back on.  Depending on anticipation, I may not be able to wait, and will download Friday night’s US airing.
Sunday: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.  Amazing Race. The Wire.

That’s it.  Not a lot of TV for me right now. If you think there’s a show I should be watching, let me know.

So, anyway, back to Studio 60.  Back in the days of Sports Night, I was an Aaron Sorkin fan.  I dug the fast-paced dialogue and witty, intelligent things the characters said.  I liked the way the show ran.  Bam, bam, bam.  For whatever reason, I didn’t bother following him to The West Wing.  Even though the segments of The West Wing I did see didn’t really thrill me too much, I thought I was maybe missing out on some great writing and acting.  So, this time, with his third show starting, I made an effort to be on board from the beginning.
I watched, and enjoyed, the first episode quite a bit.  Then, dammit, I read a Salon review of that episode.  It talked about how Sorkin’s style of writing, and the hyper-intensity of the characters/moments and of what they say, and the fast-paced style really fit well in a setting like the White House, and that made us care about those characters.  Will we, the reviewer asked, care as much when the characters display the same qualities, intensities and manic quippings all in service of a late-night comedy show.  In other words, we dig clever things that are said on the long fast walks down corridors as the President balances Middle East turmoil, pouting subordinates and whatever familial problems his wife is complaining about, but will we dig it as much when the outcome isn’t, perhaps, so important to us?  In other other words, fast-paced drama works in the White House, but can it work in a late-night comedy studio?
I don’t know if I buy the reviewer’s question, but being aware of it has made me more critical of the show than it perhaps deserve I be.  As long as the events are important to the characters, that’s all that should matter, right?  Yet, it does leave me thinking “ease up on the self-importance”.    I don’t want to be thinking that, though.

So, I want to like the show, but I am not really digging the Sorkinisms.  I really didn’t like last week’s fast-paced walking scene with Matthew Perry and Nate Corddry.  It was too manicured.  The dialogue is too precious. 
And that Amanda Peet network president is too precious, too.
Another thing I don’t like about the show:  As of yet, there hasn’t been any sketch or line from the pretend sketch show that I found to be particularly good.  Much of the humour is too collegiate, I think, to be found on a sketch comedy show.

Anyway, who am I?  I’ll still make it part of my repetoire, but I won’t be surprised if it eventually makes its way onto my “I’m on the computer and that show is about to start. Do I stop browsing the internet and go watch it?  Hmm, wonder what’s new on YouTube?” list.

We got our two new kittens today from the Humane Society.  The orange and white male is called Zoozle, and the calico female with the goatee is called Mafia.  Karyn is at work and hasn’t had any time to be with them at home.  Cameron and I are totally smitten by the kittens.
Zoozle is more of the adventurer so far, whereas Mafia has a more subdued personality.
They both have colds, which hopefully won’t bother them too much or too long.

Technorati Tags: kittens

Technorati Tags: kittens

Yesterday, I was riding out to the Ch’town Mall on the transit (Bus 1 for those keeping track).  A woman, a young lady, was sitting beside me.  She’s what I would stereotype as a non-fighting Tammy.  A hard-workin’ Tammy.  An Island girl from the lower end of the social spectrum, I’d guess.  I assumed she was on her way back home to her family after a hard day of work.  Anyway, at one point I noticed, on her hair, on a strand of hair (her hair was pulled back, but at the end of the day, more than a few strands were sticking out), was this tiny, tiny little bug.  Perhaps a little spider? It was crawling down her hair-strand to her head.
At that moment, I realised, I had options. I could tell her, or not tell her. I could help her out by pointing out that she had a bug in her hair.  This, I rationalised, could be potentially embarrassing for her, and for me (why was I looking at her hair?).  So, I decided not to tell her.  It was a pretty tiny little thing.  And who knows, maybe it was on its way back to its family too.

I used to work at MBS Radio.  I left the company primarily because I got tired of working for a company that didn’t seem to care one iota about the people who worked for it.  For the most part, I enjoyed working with the people I worked with.  But the company itself drove me (as it had countless others) away.
Anyway, I was made aware that the Charlottetown stations (CFCY and Magic93) are looking for a new producer, and that their online advertisement was rather, um, unique?
Here it is, in part:

PRODUCER

Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island

Some say that primates are a gene or two short from
being human … so we could actually hire a monkey as a producer, but we’re
looking for more than a button pusher … we want someone with that special touch,
a magical touch when it comes to producing commercials and station
imaging.  A producer
who understands the entire process of production from client expectations to
programming consistency.

“we could actually hire a monkey”.  Is this really supposed to entice a potential producer to come and work there?  Anyway, perhaps it’s just sour-grapes on my part, but this made me laugh.

At any rate, I see a potential sitcom for Bolo, the Monkey President.

Today a bunch of VIPs were handing out special literacy editions of the provincial paper.  In a front-page “Literacy: The Challenge” fact box, it states that “43 per cent, or 40,000 Islanders have reading skills so limited that they cannot deal with most printed materials such as newspapers or telephone books (source: Provincial Literacy Secretariat)”.
That has me wondering what percentage of Islanders have limited math skills too.  Because by my calculations (admittedly arrived at by using a calculator) 43 per cent of the population of Islanders (which, I believe, is around 137,000) equals almost 59,000.  That’s quite a difference in figures, Secretariat.  Perhaps you mean “43 per cent, or 40,000 Islanders who are of an age where they should have competent reading skills etc.”?

Another fact from the same fact box:  “Recent international tests place 15-year-olds in P.E.I. lower than other provinces in reading and writing.”  What kind of vague  information is this?  How much lower, and lower than how many other provinces?  By this statistic we could be third highest, since “other provinces” signifies at least two provinces rank higher.