Painful Monday in Steelers Nation, Part II

From my post last week:

So after pissing away another game they had no business losing, the defending champs are on the ropes at 2-4. Should we lose to the lowly Raiders this week, our season would essentially be over before Halloween. They still look like a mostly good team, so I don't expect that to happen. But after six games, I also don't know what to expect.

So after pissing away another game they had no business losing, the defending champs have slumped over the ropes at 2-5. We lost to the lowly Raiders this week, essentially ending our season before Halloween. They still look like a mostly good team, so I can't explain what's happening.

The whole thing is pretty unreal. In all five of their losses, they either had a fourth quarter lead or at least had the ball in the fourth quarter with a chance to tie or take the lead. And in three of the five losses, they pretty much dominated in terms of yardage and simply coughed the ball up too many times. To best illustrate how insane it has been, consider this: in a 32 team league, their defense is ranked 6th and their offense 10th. Yet they still find new and exciting ways to lose week after week. This week, Ben Roethlisberger managed to "complete" four passes to Raiders players... only one less than the Raiders' quarterback who finished the game with a pathetic five completions.

Religious Extremism of the American variety

While I am not exactly in tune with the underlying anti-religion thrust of Richard Dawkins' recent essay, Why There Almost Certainly is No God, I do absolutely love his take on today's sad state of political affairs excerpted by BoingBoing earlier this week.

And in case you haven't seen what Dawkins is talking about first hand, I offer you Jack Van Impe. Van Impe is a televangelist / apocalypse-pusher that appears late at night in a lot of TV markets. When I happen to see him on TV, I'm always transfixed by his no-holds-barred, insane, "The End is Nigh" style. The Jack Van Impe Wikipedia page does a pretty good job of summarizing the show.

Jack Van Impe Presents is filmed at the Jack Van Impe Ministries World Outreach Center, located in Rochester Hills, Michigan. His wife Rexella Van Impe (born 1931) co-hosts the telecast with him. On a typical show, Rexella begins by reading a recent news headline. Van Impe then applies his memorization of Bible verses to interpret the news story from his apocalyptic point-of-view to indicate that the Rapture, Armageddon, and the Second Coming will soon occur.

I guess what really disturbs me the most about people like this is not even their message, but their methods. I'm just not a very big fan of people that try to get their point across by first appealing to their audience's sense of fear -- though I will grant that Jack and Rexella Van Impe aren't quite as sickening in this way as some.

I happened to catch this past week's Jack Van Impe Presents the other night and they were both in excellent form. If you've never seen these folks, I suggest taking a look just so you know exactly what rational America is facing. Here is a link to the most recent show. I flipped through it and have come up with approximate timing pointers for some of the "best" stuff:

- 0:50-2:10 - pretending to be regular people by pretending to be sports fans

- 3:00-3:50 - just a completely bizarre sequence where Jack ends up kissing his wife and then proclaims "She's so sweet I just got a dose of sugar diabetes!"

- 6:30-8:00 - the first let's-scare-the-crap-out-of-viewers segment of the show (including lines such as "We probably are living in the most dangerous time in all of history" and "I'm afraid we are headed for some real terrible times")

- 9:45-10:15 - Jack's usual warning that the Rapture will happen quite soon

- 15:40-17:45 - Jack explains how the Bible actually talks about North Korea and their nuclear program being a sign of the biblical Armageddon that will take place in the Middle East (this insane discussion includes a Bible-based prediction of a coming Russian invasion of Israel and numerous supposed references to nuclear weapons in the Bible)

- 25:50-26:40 - they hawk their $25 After Armageddon DVD while continuing to try to scare viewers one last time

I'm suddenly a lot less upset about the Penguins losing the 2004 draft lottery to the Capitals

Sure, Alexander Ovechkin is a fantastic goal scorer. But the #2 pick from 2004 isn't looking too shabby either:


Evgeni Malkin destroying two pretty good defensive players and a Hall of Fame-bound goalie last night in Pittsburgh

I just feel bad for Jordan Staal. The kid has now scored 4 goals in his first 8 games as a pro and has looked great on the ice, but he's still being totally overshadowed by Malkin's 4 goals in his first 4 games and the general awesomeness of Sidney Crosby (i.e. check out his three line pass that set up the goal on the video above).

A pretty good top 10

America's Dumbest Congressmen

There are definitely a couple glaring omissions, but I do like the list. The story under #2 about Don Young and his National Endowment for the Arts comment was a particularly funny one which I had either forgotten or never heard before. And for the scorekeepers among you, seven of the ten Congressmen (including all of the top four) are Republicans.

Painful Monday in Steelers Nation

Insane football stat of the week:   In our last two games against Atlanta, Pittsburgh quarterbacks have connected on a combined 52 of 76 passes for an incredible 906 yards and NINE touchdowns... yet we failed to win either game.

So after pissing away another game they had no business losing, the defending champs are on the ropes at 2-4. Should we lose to the lowly Raiders this week, our season would essentially be over before Halloween. They still look like a mostly good team, so I don't expect that to happen. But after six games, I also don't know what to expect.

If these guys could just hang on to the football, they'd easily be 4-2 right now. But nothing's easy for the Steelers at this point. And there's certainly nothing easy for Roethlisberger. Almost killed in a bike accident in June. Emergency appendectomy days before the first game of the season. And now, with his season finally getting back on track, he gets [literally] knocked out of a game with an apparent concussion. What a rough five months for Ben!

And it's been a rough five game stretch for us fans. Probably the worst since at least 1998 when the team -- coming off a season in which they just barely missed winning the AFC championship -- inexplicably dropped their final five games after heading into the infamous Thanksgiving coin-flip game with a 7-4 record.

Why are the Democrats complaining about the RNC's new Osama bin Laden ad?

Instead of crying about it, they should have their advertising people cranking out an awesome response. If handled properly and quickly, they could blow this right back in the RNC's face. They should basically run the exact same ad in response, only slightly tweak it so that the message reminds voters that A) 9/11 happened on the Republicans' watch and B) after spending about half a trillion dollars and the lives of over 3,100 American soldiers in the "War on Terror," OSAMA IS STILL OUT THERE, Afghanistan and Iraq are still in chaos, and North Korea now has nukes.

Trying to scare the crap out of voters may have worked for the Republican party in 2002 and 2004, but I really think we are past that. Putting Osama bin Laden in an advertisement in the year 2006 should not benefit the Republican party... so long as the Democrats are willing to stand up and fight fire with fire. If people are scared, they should be reminded that they're only scared because of how things have gone during the past six years of total Republican control in Washington.

Catching up on reading / recommended reading

I have a nasty little problem when it comes to reading material. My problem is that I can never throw something away until it has been read. Whether it's a magazine or even something insignificant like the Outlook section of a Sunday Post, it stays in the pile until I get around to it. So sometimes there's a backlog of Sky & Telescopes, sometimes I wind up with a Washington Post sitting around until it turns yellow, sometimes it's the ABA Journals... and at the moment, I'm working my way through the last four National Geographics.

While reading the August NG, I was generally blown away by a piece in the Voices section. Bill McKibben's "A Deeper Shade of Green" is fantastic. He talks about what environmentalism and "being green" in the 21st century could and should entail. Specifically, he hits on carbon dioxide and global warming in a cultural way that I've never really seen before. The essay is certainly thought provoking. I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read it.

Some scattered thoughts for the weekend

- Tell your boss you are taking off Tuesday, November 7! Click here to volunteer some or all of your day to be a poll watcher. If you are a lawyer or law student, click here to volunteer for November 7 election protection work. I just signed up yesterday.

- We're more than a month into the NFL season and only a few games into the NHL season, yet shockingly, the Penguins have more wins than the Steelers (2 to 1, with a chance to make it 3 to 1 tomorrow night). The following pretty much says it all: Sidney Crosby has six points through three games while Ben Roethlisberger has zero touchdown passes and seven interceptions through the three games he's played in.

- Saw a guy on the metro yesterday morning with pointed ears.   Seriously.   So there's at least one Vulcan (or elf?) on the loose somewhere in DC.

- You don't have to wait until election day to volunteer. Be a good Democrat and volunteer with your local/state party headquarters and/or with a local Democratic Congressional campaign office. There's plenty to do between now and November 7.

- I still expect the Steelers to rebound from their 1-3 start to finish 10-6 and contend for a wildcard playoff spot. On the other hand, though the Penguins' 2-1 start is nice, I find it pretty troubling that they've been outshot by an average of 36-19 in those three games. I still can't see playoffs in their future unless their 5-on-5 offense wakes up and/or Evgeni Malkin turns out to be even more talented than most people expect once he returns from his injury.

- I've got a pretty crazy weekend plan up my sleeve:   Go to College Park for Midnight Madness tonight --> go to our nephew Conrad's second birthday party tomorrow afternoon in Silver Spring --> drive to the Penguins game in Pittsburgh tomorrow night --> go to the Steelers game in Pittsburgh Sunday afternoon --> drive home after the game.

You know it's football season when you employ linebacker tactics in every day life

Last night Mary and I were horsing around in the bathroom while brushing our teeth. She tried to block me from getting to the sink, so I leaned in to her a little and then rolled to my right, just like a linebacker using a spin move to get around an offensive lineman en route to the quarterback.

And yes, in case you're wondering, it worked.

I'm sure glad we invaded Iraq...

... because we wouldn't want a rogue state to attain nuclear capability

I love Pittsburgh

There's plenty to like about this story from today's Post-Gazette, but clearly, the best part was:

As a precaution, the governor [Jeb Bush] was ushered into a T-station supply closet and stayed there until the crowd left.

(thanks for the story, Art)

I think my ears are bleeding

There's a woman here at work that has the worst laugh ever. It makes you cringe when you hear it. I'd like to describe it in words, but I'm not sure if I can. It is not at all similar to either of the well-known bad laughs from Seinfeld or Friends. The best I can come up with is that it's like someone trying to do an evil, sinister laugh... but getting it all wrong.

Please woman, stop laughing!

Blue Nightmare

Just got back from club regionals late last night. Our team wound up finishing 9th in the Mid-Atlantic region for the season which was just slightly off from the team's season goal (top 8). We had a nice day, though, highlighted by a huge comeback win over a Philly team. They owned us most of the way, but after being down 12-7 late, we scored 9 of the last 11 points to win 16-14. And I got a layout D block at 15-14 to set up our winning possession. In general, I feel like I played really well for most of the day. Unfortunately, I missed most of the last game because of a banged up hip and a head-to-head collision that each combined with general late-day fatigue to leave me mostly useless on the sideline with a big headache.

But the head-to-head collision notwithstanding, the most frightening part of my day was certainly my early morning visit to the port-o-john. After many years of traveling to play ultimate in open fields in the middle of nowhere, I have quite a bit of experience when it comes to port-o-john matters. In fact, while looking in my car's rear view mirror, I once saw a unit fly off the back of a truck and nearly land on my college coach's car. But I was caught wholly unprepared for the startling event of yesterday morning.

A split second after I dropped off my business, I was horrified to feel a significant splash-back strike against my rear end. I could not believe it, yet deep down I knew what had happened:   The blue death from below had reached up and made significant contact with my ass. Eeeewwwwwwwwww!! Gross!

I have no idea why this happened. I thought it was a 100% standard, average, everyday crap. However, it apparently shot out at 100mph since I got a blue port-o-john splash of death. I tried to keep calm and thought about the situation. True, it was early morning and I was probably one of the first people to use the unit since it had been serviced/placed there.

But on the other hand... eewwwwww!!