Monday, December 06, 2004
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM! Sorry the Fins couldn't pull it off for you.
Also.
Forward down the field,
A charging team that will not yield!
When the Blue and Silver wave,
Stand and cheer the brave!
Rah! Rah! Rah!
Go hard, win the game!
With honor you will keep your fame!
Down the field and gain
A Lions Victory!
GO LIONS!
Also.
But I'll get to this in a second.
See, I put birthday greetings to my mother over the Lions victory song. Now that, that is true filial love.
This was a bizarre weekend, both in Life and in Sports. I suppose it can best be broken down by days. This'll still be a long entry. I know half of you will rejoice and half of you will curse at this news, but sorry. If it helps, most of the football stuff will be on Sunday (duh) and there will be baseball stuff at the very end.
Friday:
Class in the afternoon, natch. I'm relatively certain I fell asleep partway through, because my notes start off sharp and crisp, sort of trail off the page and then suddenly regain their former comprehensible state. Oh well. It was the sexual organs lecture, and we'd already covered a lot of it in lab, so I probably didn't miss anything that I can't get out of the book. Marsupials have a bipartite reproductive system, which affords the males in my class something approaching endless joy. Is there an age where they're supposed to suddenly become mature, or is that something that just doesn't happen?
I spent the rest of the afternoon spraypainting a strip plug black. I had to take it outside, since I didn't have any particular desire to asphyxiate myself, but this ended up being an unfortunate thing. A note for all those who may wish to try this at some point: when you're hunched on the sidewalk, alternately blowing on your hands and manically shaking a can of spraypaint, protectively looming over a wet black strip plug lying in a muddle of ripped-up Michigan Dailys, you should be prepared to experience the full range of Odd Looks. This includes the Oh My God I'll Bet That's an Art Student Scum of the Earth! Scum of the Earth! sneer, the Is That Girl Insane?/Don't Make Eye Contact, Don't Make Eye Contact glance, and the OMiGawd I Would Never Do That It Would Totally Get All Over My Northface Jacket contemptuous sniff.
That night I went on a rampage of maddened wildness with Heather. It was utter debauchery. Totally uncalled-for. The sort of stuff that makes parents hide away their small children and makes old people write bitter letters to their local newspapers. The kind of depravity that only college campuses can properly foster.
We crashed a poetry reading at the Union.
What can I say? I'm wasting my college career.
Saturday:
I think I slept for most of Saturday afternoon. I then woke up, wrote a paper, read a book (Neuromancer, very psychadelic. Not as good as Snow Crash by a long shot, but it's sort of a landmark in the technopsychosexualscifi genre, so I read it), and finally got an idea for my art lecture final. That's the light pollution thing. Obviously I knew it was going to be on light pollution, but we're supposed to have a kind of 'narrative' or a 'point' to the whole thing. Being of a biological turn of mind, I scrawled up some nocturnal Ann Arbor residents in my usual inky style and superimposed them over the light pollution photos I'd taken.
This technically sort of skirts around the whole point of the class, which is the interaction of technology and society, but hopefully no one will notice that.
I spent Saturday night watching college football. Hawaii beat MSU, as I said in the previous, somewhat incoherent post. It was glorious. Now Hawaii, there's a football team I can't understand. They're killer at home, their quarterback has the most passing yards of any college football quarterback ever (he broke Ty Detmer's record earlier this season). And yet, they have a 7-5 overall record, because they suck on the road. Suck, as in, they lost 69-3 to Boise State and 70-14 to Fresno State. But they never scored less than 28 points at home, and won all but one of their home games.
Just weird. Anyways, good season for Timmy Chang, and he gets to play in that ridiculous Hawaii Bowl, but he'll suck if he gets drafted. If you break down that badly, that consistently on the road, there's almost no way you can succeed at the next level.
For the record, I have no idea why I care. I mean, Hawaii? What the hell, people? When I start having to demand explanations from my own brain, that's when you know those spraypaint fumes weren't as well-ventilated as you thought.
Sunday:
--Notes from the Lions game--
Oh man Joey's growing a scruff, I die of teh hot!
3-and-out, 3-and-out to start the game, someone kill me now.
"Navarre certainly not the most mobile quarterback."
Neither QB making good decisions, Joey one interception, Navarre four.
Kevin Jones nice runs. Seriously.
Is either team a real running or passing team? Seems like we all suck at everything.
Field goals instead of TDs, not again.
Dre Bly, giving us all a reason to live!
Thom Brenneman, in shocked voice, "You look at the 4th quarter numbers on Joey Harrington, they're pretty good!"
So it wasn't pretty, it wasn't stylish, it was at home against a rookie quarterback starting his first game, but by gosh it was a Lions Victory! Joey completed 15 of 27 passes for 196 yards, and if that seems low it's because running back Kevin Jones finally had the breakout game we've been waiting for and had 26 carries for, eerily enough, 196 yards. This included a 74-yard run that was the longest for a Lion since Barry Sanders' 80-yard touchdown in 1997 (obviously this doesn't include kick-off and punt returns, or Eddie Drummond would have that distinction). Could we be looking at the next Barry Sanders here? It's too early to tell, but a shot of good offense feels awfully good right now.
Jason Hanson scored 14 points all by his lonesome, putting up 4 field goals and two extra points. Ridiculous. There's no way we should have ended some of those drives in field goals. He also put a painful-looking tackle on Bryant Johnson of the Cards, who was in the process of returning a kickoff for 47 yards. Hanson later said, "That wasn't a tackle. That one hurt... I can't tell if he's going to go out of bounds, or going to cut. Option three is, blow up the kicker. I held on." Yes you did. Thank Cats.
Tai Streets (Michigan grad) had his first touchdown with the Lions. Teddy Lehman and James Hall (Michigan grad) had their first career interceptions. Dre Bly, awesome little Dre Bly, had two interceptions. Two! For a Lion? My god, that's as good as 50.
Dre Bly, we love you, but please secure the ball when you are running with it.
On a moderately related note, I just trotted over to the Cards site to see if they had any better game photos than the Lions site has (they do not), and found this article. Apparently Pat Tillman was killed by his own platoon. Truly grotendous.
I then watched the highly-touted Eagles/Packers game. I don't really want to get into it, it was horribly disappointing. Favre ended up looking his age, plus 10. McNabb had yet another one of those plays that I watch with my mouth hanging open in shock. This time he had Cullen Jenkins literally wrapped around his ankle. McNabb hopped up a few steps, calmly looking for a receiver, dragging the rabid defensemen along. He then put his wrong leg forward, lofted the ball, and completed the pass. It was unreal. I'm starting to expect these sorts of plays from him, though, that's the scary bit.
Meredith has some good things to say about the game if you're looking for more insightful input/a markedly more interesting read.
As I madly rendered a 3-dimensional tiger for digital class, under the panicked and apparently mistaken impression that it was due this morning (*twitch* *twitch*), I sort of watched the Steelers/Jaguars game. It was interesting hearing about Roethlisbergerererer and Leftwich before the game. Apparently they're good friends, since they were both MAC quarterbacks at the same time-- The Burger for the awkwardly-named Miami of Ohio, Brainy Byron for Marshall. They had dinner together the night before the game, and Roethlisbergergereer had to pay because Marshall had beaten Miami (OH) when they played each other earlier in the college football season.
Sadly, this did not translate into professional victory. To give the Jags credit, they fully lived up to their Cardiac nickname, and the game was lost because their kicker barely (barely!) missed a 60-some-odd yard field goal in the final seconds. It was a battle that they fought well, but not well enough. Which brings us back to that drawing up by the top of this entry.
Pats fans-- how're we doing? Nervous yet? Sure, we put the proverbial smack down on Cleveland this week, winning by the gaudy margin of 42-15 and cleanly blowing all my nice theories about the Pats doing just what it took to win right out of the water. Sure, we've proven that we can play ball with cornerbacks we picked up off the floor of the Government Center subway stop. Sure, we've shown that we're a Team-with-a-capital-T and that this will carry you far in the NFL.
But what happens if, god and Bill Belichik forbid, someone indispensible gets hurt? Corey Dillon? We already saw what happens when he's out of the game (send your minds back to that dark, dismal time known as The Loss...if, that is, you can stand to face the madness). What if Brady gets hurt?
And what about those pesky pretenders to the throne, those who would challenge our red-silver-and-blue supremacy? What scares you more, NASCAR-addicted Colts fans or by-all-accounts-completely-insane Steelers fans? Infinite Audible Man or The Burger? Marvin 'I can't think of anything funny' Harrison or Plexiglass Burress? Horseshoes or that inexplicable tri-star thing?
I worry, I do. The Steelers are way too close for comfort (and with that ugly tie-breaking advantage over the Pats), and the Colts are putting up points like they're Louisville.
Urgh.
Anyways, baseball! I assume pretty much everyone and their small hairless dog has heard about this by now, but just in case you and your canine companion don't follow the news, feast your eyes on the recent tale of Anna Benson, wife of Mets pitcher Kris Benson. To put it bluntly, she has threatened to sleep with everyone on his team, including staff, if she ever catches him cheating on her. This may be something that would have been better left private, but you have to give her credit for recognizing a potential situation and, uh, diffusing it. Sort of. Who am I kidding, the whole thing's hilarious.
Jason Varitek wants to stay in Boston. Please let it be so. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I want 'Tek back on this team. I don't want him tied up for a long contract, but the market for catchers is so thin this offseason that if we don't get him, we're going to be in a tight spot.
The Yankees dumped Kenny Lofton onto the Phillies. Making room for Beltran? Who knows. They've still got Bernie 'Guitarman' Williams in center, but I guess he's movable. Beltran's good, but are even the Yankees willing to pay the ridiculous money Boras is asking for? Especially if they can't somehow void Giambi's contract and are still paying out cash to Slappy McBluelips and Jeter. Hmm.
Tomorrow is the last day for clubs to offer free arbitration to their players. Friday the winter meetings start.
Say it with me, kids. "I will not hyperventilate while watching Sportscenter during this time. I will not take my laptop to classes that do not necessitate the use of a laptop so that I can check news sites obsessively. I will not second-guess Theo, because he is older and smarter and prettier than me."
To close, a conversation I had with Trevor on Sunday night. You have to understand that Trevor does a lot of extra labwork and seemingly has an immense propensity for injuring himself or somehow causing his labmates to get injured when using scalpels. For some reason I am the emergency callgirl in these situations. It's already happened twice this year, once during a football game and once during the middle of the day, when I ended up taking a shocked and blood-soaked biology major to the hospital with him. He's a junior, I have no idea why he calls the wee sophomore whenever he does these things.
[phone rings]
Me: Hello?
Trevor: Hey! What's up?
Me: Nothing, watching the game, rendering this frelling tiger. You?
Trevor: Ah. Nothing. Just, uh, wanted to call. And see how you were doing.
Me: Ha, OK. So long as you're not doing a lab makeup again and managed to somehow get one of the kids in your lab group injured! Ha ha!
Trevor: .....
Me: .......
Me: You didn't.
Ladies and gentlemen, he had.
4:40 PM
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