Awright, Denizens – time to crank it up for real.
The Perfect Football Weekend™ launches in grand style for what they call “Week 0” in Texas “hah skrewl” (a little Rush lingo, there) football parlance – basically Week 1.
No, don’t ask me why they do it that way.  I don’t know.
Anyway, if it’s “Week 0”, it must be Azle for my Arlington Heights Yellow Jackets.  Heights opened last season with the Hornets, winning 24-21.  (And, they closed with them, as well, losing 8-19 – but we won’t talk about that, will we? (sigh))  Give me Heights and four.
The Cowboys are at home against the Minnehaha ViQueens as I write this, and the over/under is five lap dances.
Also tonight, the University of Buffalo Bulls are at home vs. Temple in Turner Gill’s coaching debut.  Vegas has Buffalo -6½, so we’ll see.
Saturday, Pat Sullivan and the University of Alabama at Birmingham become the sacrificial lamb at Norman as they take on the Oklahoma Sooners.  We trust that the Sooners won’t lay an Opening Day egg again this year.  I’ll take the Sooners; you can have 21.
Sunday, the TCU Horned Frogs set out to prove that last year wasn’t a fluke when they travel to Waco to play the Baylor Bears.  Baylor coach Guy Morriss (a TCU alum) has already fired the first shots, saying about TCU coach Gary Patterson:
“Walk past him, and the hair on the back of my neck stands up.”
“When he’s around, my skin crawls.”
“He likes to hear himself talk. And he talks a lot.”
Gee, Guy.  I mean, just because Patterson’s done something you’ve  never done…*cough*beatIowaStateandOU*cough*…
Still, Baylor’s at home, and Vegas has them as a touchdown favorite over the Frogs.  I’m hoping it might be closer, but:  1) TCU doesn’t play ex-SWC opponents well, and 2) the last time TCU won 11 games in a season, they followed up with a clunker at 5-6.
Needless to say, I’d not watch this one, dreading what I think’s gonna happen…except I have a ticket to the game, courtesy of the Sibling Unit™, so my happy ass will be down there with the rest of the Frog faithful.
We’re back Sunday evening (probably from a pizza place in Waco) for the recap.
It’s a damned good thing I wasn’t here today.
I’d’ve been thrown in jail, and the toe-tag manufacturers would have had their supplies depleted.
Terrell who?
at Carolina 19, Miami 10
at Philadelphia 16, Pittsburgh 7
at Dallas 17, San Transexual Fairy Whiners 7
at Denver 17, Houston 14
at Cincinnati 48, Green Bay 17
Philadelphia proved they have a better backup quarterback than Pittsburgh.  He should be – he was only the Whiners’ starting QB two years ago.
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Carolina’s defense made Daunte Culpepper’s life a living hell Friday night.  I’d say they’re ready for the season.
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Denver beat Houston.  So what else is new? (yawn)
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Conventional wisdom holds that Dallas has one of the worst, if not the  worst, offensive lines in the league.
Screw that.  This clump of pork meat in Green Bay is gonna have Brett Favre wishing desperately he hadn’t come back this year.  I’m here to tell you that that line is gonna get Favre killed.
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Speaking of the Cowboys, yet another nice effort from the defense, and another sharp performance by the first-team offensive unit.  Bledsoe’s looking good, which makes you wonder how good they can be if/when “The Player” comes back.
Parcells is complaining that his defensive unit isn’t getting enough work.  Two schools of thought on this:  1) if this keeps up, conditioning will be a problem, especially early when games are played in hot conditions, and 2) they keep performing like this, and the offense keeps churning out 2:1 ball control, and they won’t need it; the less the defense is on the field, the less the opposing offense can score.
Whichever, it’s gratifying to see this team playing so well.  Maybe it’s the level of competition – N’awlins & San Transexual won’t exactly set the world on fire this year – but they did this to Seattle too, and that gives cause for hope.  Get this team together, healthy and on the same page, and there’s no telling what could be.
The PFW cranks up for real Thursday.  The Cowboys have one exhibition game left, but they start playing for keeps in “hah skrewl” (a little Rush lingo, there) and college.  There’s even a mini-roadtrip planned – more on that later.
Strap in.  This year’s gonna be fun!
Well, look at it this way:  He got a nice plane ride, champagne & caviar out of it.  All at taxpayer expense, don’tcha know?
(And if you ask me, his punishment for this child-porn case they’re nailing him for now should be 48 hours in general – say, at Rahway in Joisey.
With bonus points if he makes it past the first six.)
UPDATE:  And be sure not to miss His Ragingness’ take on the whole thing.  Worth your time.
Oh, well, that ties it.  Katherine Harris cannot possibly  be qualified to hold public office.
She came out in favor of a morality-based government.
U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris told a religious journal that separation of church and state is “a lie” and God and the nation’s founding fathers did not intend the country be “a nation of secular laws.”
The Florida Republican candidate for U.S. Senate also said that if Christians are not elected, politicians will “legislate sin,” including abortion and gay marriage.
That would be the next step, ’tis true.  They’ve been forcing it upon us through the auspices of judicial fiat for some 35 years now.
The SpatulaGoddess alerts us to this blurb she found on StrangeCosmos.  It’s below the fold should you not wish to click the link.
Scientists, if you ask me – and I know you didn’t, but humor me, mkay? – are the type of folks that you just love to hate.  They always think they know more than you do simply because they’ve dissected more frogs than you or made a liquid change color in a test tube.
And granted – perhaps they do  have a better chance of passing an SAT than do you or I.  But then they have to get really  pissy about it and flaunt it.  Makes you just wanna shove a pocket protector up their asses, y’know?
But now here comes a group of “scientists” – and really, who appointed these elitist snots, anyway? – saying that we may no longer consider the planet Pluto to be a planet.
Pluto, beloved by some as a cosmic underdog but scorned by astronomers who considered it too dinky and distant, was unceremoniously stripped of its status as a planet Thursday.
“Dinky and distant”?  That’ll come as a real shock to Eminiar VII and Vendikar.
The International Astronomical Union, dramatically reversing course just a week after floating the idea of reaffirming Pluto’s planethood and adding three new planets to Earth’s neighborhood, downgraded the ninth rock from the sun in historic new galactic guidelines.
Translation:  “Pluto just isn’t sexy  enough for us.  Mentioning Pluto to Tyra Banks is a real date killer.  Not that we’d ever know what that was like.  A date, we mean.”
Pluto, a planet since 1930, got the boot because it didn’t meet the new rules, which say a planet not only must orbit the sun and be large enough to assume a nearly round shape, but must “clear the neighborhood around its orbit.” That disqualifies Pluto, whose oblong orbit overlaps Neptune’s, downsizing the solar system to eight planets from the traditional nine.
[…]
Pluto and objects like it will be known as “dwarf planets,” which raised some thorny questions about semantics: If a raincoat is still a coat, and a cell phone is still a phone, why isn’t a dwarf planet still a planet?
I’m throwing the bullshit flag on this one:  Fucking around with the universe, trying to play God again,  98 million mile penalty, loss of down.  You people are the same types that are trying to BS us about men coming from apes, and I’m still  not buying that one.
Our solar system has at least nine planets, maybe more.  That’s what I was taught, that’s what I’ll continue to believe.  As for you “scientists”…I’d sooner vote to drop you asshats from the list of people not considered total boobs.
Sheesh.
When Widdle Terri Owens put a pen to a Cowboys contract, local wags here started a pool on just when he’d start acting like the asshole he is.
Some postulated that he’d wait until the bonuses kicked in during the contract’s second year, as has been his pattern whereever he’s gone.  Other, more cynical pundits didn’t think it’d take that long, noting that Bill Parcells is a harder-assed coach than either Andy “Fat Ass” Reid or Stevie “How about a nice round of Kum Ba Yah?” Mariucci, Widdle Terri’s previous two bosses.
At issue, as it has been for weeks now, is when, if ever, Owens will quit using his hamstring tweak as an excuse not to practice. He has ruled himself out for Saturday night’s preseason game with San Francisco at Texas Stadium, the third Cowboys’ preseason game he’s skipped, and hinted strongly that he might not make another appearance in a Dallas uniform before the season opener in Jacksonville Sept. 10.
That news prompted a quick response from Parcells when he addressed the media Wednesday.
“I wouldn’t put a player out there if I haven’t seen him practice,” Big Bill deadpanned.
As it damned well should be.  This isn’t a game of 11-on-10-and-here’s-one-guy-out-here-doing-his-own-thing.  This is a team sport – you play as a team, and you damned well practice  as a team, too.
But in this test of two very strong wills, t.o. (I refuse to even capitalize his initials) isn’t flinching.
“If he wants to see something,” Owens said of Parcells, “he has 10 years of film he can go back and look on.”
Yeah, you dumb shit.  He has 10 years of you running routes in that limp-wristed, pansy-assed, two-yard-dump-and-run-away West Coast Offense.
Last I checked, we didn’t run the WCO here. (Granted, I’m not sure what the Hell™ we do  run – but we tried the WCO once, and figured out a way to fuck it up.  Then again, it was  Bruce Coslet coordinating it…but I digress.)
The routes aren’t the same, the blocking schemes aren’t the same, the blitz-pickup-packages aren’t the same…need I go on?
What happens, Widdle Terri, the first time a play calls for you to run an out route, and you fall back into your pansy-assed WCO habits and run a crossing route?  Hmmm?
Now get your ugly ass back out on the field, and be damned  glad I’m not the coach, or you’d have a lot more to worry about than your hammy – courtesy of the meanest, baddest-assed lineman I had.
Let’s get to this week’s games.  Miami’s Dolphins will tackle the Panthers in Carolina tonight on Fox; Pittsburgh & Philadelphia stage their annual cross-state preseason rivalry in the City of Brotherly Shove tomorrow night on ESPN; Houston travels to Denver to play the Broncos Sunday night on the NFL Network, and it’ll be Favre vs. Palmer as Green Bay goes to Cincinnati Monday night.
Saturday night, the Cowboys are at home against the San Transexual Fairy Whiners, which is a good time to give a shout-out to all the guys over at the 49er Haters Society (formerly at www.49erhaters.com)…except they seem to not exist anymore.
Pity.
Anyway, with a year under his belt, Alex Smith should pose a stronger test for the Cowboy defense than what they’ve seen the last two weeks.  It’ll be interesting to see.
We’re back Tuesday for something resembling a recap.  It’s your turn now to ramble on incoherently about your teams, so get busy.
So much for Tony Romo’s bid to become the Cowboys’ starting quarterback.
at New York Football Giants 17, Kansas City 0
at Chicago 24, San Diego 3
at New England 30, Arizona 3
Seattle 30, at Indianapolis 17
Dallas 30, New Orleans 7
Not much to tell concerning the other three games.  KC looked like they wished the preseason was over with already in losing to the Giants.  Phillip Rivers received his official “welcome to the NFL, rookie” papers at the hands of “da Bears”; New England did likewise to Matt Leinart in the Pats’ thrashing of the Cards.  Indy tried to make a game of it with the Seahawks, but Shawn King simply isn’t Peyton Manning.
Neither is Tony Romo, but he’s still a damned sight better than Drew Bledsoe.  However, Bledsoe looked extremely sharp in dissecting the Saints, who still have a ton of work to do under new coach Sean Payton.
Romo looked good, too, tossing a 48-yard pass-catch-run to Miles Austin.  But he tried to do too much on one play when the protection broke down, and lost the ensuing fumble.  N’awlins scored five plays later, which pretty much ensured Romo would be holding a clipboard again this season.
The defense looked every bit as good as they did last week in throttling the Saints’ offense.  This is likely the Cowboys’ best defense since the JJohnson days, and it’ll be exciting to see how many quarterbacks shit their pants at having to face it (he said with fingers definitely  crossed).
The PFW returns in a couple days.
I don’t have time to write about diddly squat these days (well, except for PFWs ), which is why I depend on the Denizens to keep me hip-deep in Grab-bag™ stuff.
LC, IB & Denizen Lady Heather, to this end, is responsible for tonight’s gem:
Denizens, I’d love to pontificate at length about how piss-poor of a judge Anna Diggs Taylor is, or how her half-baked decision that a sitting Commander-in-Chief has to be hand-held by a FISA court in order to prosecute a war – a FISA court, I might add, that can’t get out of the way of its own ass half the time.  I’d love to tell you about how this bitch is a Peanuthead appointee, and about how it’s yet more proof that nothing good came out of that half-assed excuse-for-a-Presidency except its end.
Happily, Patterico’s already beaten me to it – here, here, and with further mocking of the crock o’ shit decision here and here.
I will, though, say this:  If this decision, either directly or indirectly, leads to another attack on the United States of America – certain folks had best run & find a damned  good hiding place.
And that’s all I’ll say about that.
In keeping with tradition, another Perfect Football Weekend™ kicks off – it being perfect simply because they’re playing.
But if I may divulge from f’ball for just a moment (I’m going to anyway, so deal with it (grin)), I would say that if the stRangers played like this more often, I wouldn’t be looking forward to preseason football so much.  Y’know?
Anyway, Kansas City travels to Joisey to play the New York Football Giants this evening, Chicago will host L.T. and the San Diego Chargers tomorrow night, New England hosts the Arizona Cardinals Saturday (NFL Network, so I doubt I’ll get to see any of it), Seattle’s at Indy Sunday evening, and the Cowboys travel to Shreveport Monday night to play the Saints and see if Reggie Bush is really all that and a bag of chips.
We’re back Tuesday with the recap.  Anyone have any preseason smack to talk?
I’m currently fixing a PC for a customer (the first of the year for the side business (groan)), so not much time to talk about anything.  I do  have an idea as to why the Israel-Hezzbollocks war turned out the way it did; hopefully I’ll have time to bang it out before the story becomes yesterday’s news.
In the meantime, we find out from Misha that our good friend Delftsman is back in the hospital.
The Realm™ extends its prayers, and the Denizens will, too.  Won’t you, Denizens? (glares somewhat)
Thatisall™.
Even if the Cowboys hadn’t  been playing, it would have been a Perfect Football Weekend™ – simply for the fact that anyone was playing at all.
at Atlanta 26, New England 23
Dallas 13, at Seattle 3
at Cincinnati 19, Washington 3
Oakland 16, at Minnesota 13
Adam Vinateri kicks for Indianapolis now, else this one would have gone into the books as a tie.
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Instead of settling for the field goal – and overtime – Minnesota went for the win at home and got picked off in the end zone on the last play of the game.  Memo to Tony Kornheiser:  Degree Solid anti-perspirant.
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I gotta get used to Sunday Night Football being on NBC this year.  Only caught the last 31 seconds of this one.
Clinton Portis hurt his shoulder and may miss the start of the regular season.  The guess from here is that he saw the Cowboy defense on Saturday night and had to hurry to think of an excuse not to face ’em.
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Speaking of the Cowboy defense…whoa.  In previous years, Doomsday had been good by being very fast.  The flip side of that was that they had to be small to accomplish that, which meant they got pushed around a lot.
That ain’t gonna happen this year.
The Cowboy 3-4 defense under Bill Parcells is not only going to be fast…it’s going to be big, as well.  This is potentially Parcells’ best defense since the Giant units that featured Lawrence Taylor.
When you have Demarcus Ware at right outside linebacker, and former defensive end Greg Ellis at left outside linebacker outplays him…you’ve got something.  You heard it here first – there’s going to be a pass rush in Dallas this year.  Bank on it.
Tony Romo played the entire game for Dallas, and no quarterback has done that in a preseason game since John Elway back in ’89 or so.
Whether it’s because they need to get a handle on what kind of player Romo can be (this is his contract year, and they’d like to know what they have in him)…or whether Parcells is just lining up his p’s and q’s in advance of naming him the starter, we don’t know.  One thing’s for sure – though the offensive line played adequately, Romo still had to do a little improv on the run; thankfully, he handled it well.
Much better than Bledsoe would have, in fact – which does tend to make the average Cowboy aficionado wonder a bit.
The preseason PFW will return Friday or so, once we figure out if Sean Payton intends on leaving Reggie Bush on the sidelines on 4th-and-2.
The Perfect Football Weekend™ returns for 2006 with new teams, new attitude and new optimism that I might experience a few more PFWs this year.
For those of you who are new here, this is how we roll:  A Perfect Football Weekend™ (PFW for short) is one where all the teams I follow – be they “hah skrewl” (a little Rush lingo, there), college or pro – win their games on a given weekend.
(For the record, no – I don’t give a shit about your teams.  Use the comments section of a PFW thread to talk your own smack.  Even you leftist fucks at the Church of the SubTarded are welcome here to talk f’ball, provided  you behave yourselves, and provided I haven’t banned your skanky asses previously.)