UConn James

As I understand it, the NFLPA rules doesn't allow contracts to be reduced in these offseason deals by any more than 10 percent, I think even if the player changes positions. There's not too much left on MW's contract, so I would guess he plays it out and based on how he does at LG, signs a more sensible contract next time or is cut free (which I highly doubt happens). For the cap, is this good, is this bad? It just is. Look, we're not paying our QB $18M/year like some other teams --- there's a bigtime savings there. Teague is going to be gone. It's unclear what's going to happen to Moulds.... Peters isn't in a position to renegotiate for a couple of seasons, if he turns into a solid starter at RT at all (knock on wood). Other players aren't necessarily going to look at the LG and say, "Wah wah. He makes more money than I do!" (If BRUUUUUCE were still here, tho....). TD holds the checkbook and whatever he's willing to part with, they can either take or leave. That simple. Say what you want about him evaluating personnel, but I don't have a problem with TD's management of the cap and fiscal matters. He does what needs to be done there, and it's largely out of his control to set prices; and he juggles the balls pretty well, considering.

The tail-section survivors continue their trek toward the beach, and Sawyer's wound becomes "life-threatening." This is a Shannon-centric episode with flashbacks to where she is... hold on b/c you're going to be shocked... a manipulative B word. And, per the ads for this ep, someone's going to buy the farm. They really, really need to shock us with something tonight. I'm talking an Arzt-exploding kind of shock. This season has been too sedate and building up to something that doesn't feel like it's ever going to arrive. But... a few eps down the line, we will find out exactly what Kate's original crime was. Who's bringing the coconuts to the LOST party tonight? And no inflatable anythings; there's too much rancor going on with all that.

Chrebet on the ground, blinking his eyes over and over.... shivers down my spine to see how tough and balls to the wall that guy is and he still puts himself up there catches everything sent his way, especially on 3rd down. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a football player. I hope he does the sensible thing now and retires gracefully.

[Jeff Foxworthy voice] We just.. can't.. have... nice THINGS!! [/Jeff Foxworthy voice] Say what you want about his politics (they don't really affect us much as it's more internal) but J.M. Le Pen has just picked up a LOT of votes, and maybe enough to get a plurality, considering he's gotten ~20% before.... People don't like having their sh-- burned.

Maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing to piss off the vets. Exactly what have they shown to merit the team sacrificing its future for their desire (probably not the right word b/c they have no desire) to "win now"? I honestly don't see how anyone can say that there's a big difference b/w Holcomb and JP, except that Losman doesn't have a limp arm and fart dust, by NFL terms. Moulds can get bent when the season's done, and looking at what the QB situation is here he probably doesn't want to waste his time staying.

No, I didn't mean it like that. It was meant to be understood as the Republican candidate is "Bill K. Public" and the Democratic candidate is "Bill K. Public." The Republicans nominated Democrats. Going down the ballot, they are all the same, such that you think you have double vision. Every candidate only needs 1 vote to be elected. Again I ask, why bother this year?

No lie, the Republican and Democrat nominees in my town are exactly the same. So why bother? Just confirms some suspicions I've had for a long time....

Like how you used the floating frame and left some clear space. I've seen some where the picture is extended right to the edge and it looks bad. There, the see-through complements the picture of the Tesla thingy. Claw's frame is a wavy alternative to the straight-ness of the machinery parts. I know people who would argue for going with a straight frame, but it came out all right. Is the matte board showing up redder and darker than it is? The frame and matte for Grove.... To me, the large blob of black contrasts too much with the lightness of the photo. Are they all going to be shown next to each other? In that case, I would have gone with a gold or silver frame to shake things up, but black is all right (but it would benefit from a lighter matte). After graduation, I had to make my own frame b/c I had two diplomas (one from PBK) I needed/wanted to put into one frame. Took a nice 16x20 polished silver frame (20" being the vertical) and used the guillatine to cut out two diploma slots and a pinstripe that ran down either side to make the matte areas even at ~1 inch, rather than have a 2 1/2" section on the sides, 1" at the top and 1" b/w diplomas. Filled the pinstripe with the back of.... get this from the poor college student.... the dull side of some aluminum foil (it exactly matched the silver frame tho). A $2.50 matte and a $20 frame sure beat paying $125 for the U's 'official' crapola.

If I were a GM and the least bit interested in signing him, the contract would have a clause that he wear a 6-inch piece of duct tape over his mouth at ALL times 24/7 except during plays. Someone takes a time out, get that tape back on! I don't care what his numbers are. TO is a POS.

That actually is a nuance in how they calculate it. If it were going by the same way it's done here, the number would be pretty comparable ~6-7 percent. But it is concentrated in the outskirts.... The snobbery is mostly in the big cities. Like everywhere else, you get out into the smaller towns and the people are generally very nice.

I travel through there every few months on the way further into Maine. Usually, it's at about 3 a.m. and it's low tide and if it's summer especially, it smells something fierce. I guess you can get used to it tho. It is a nice, just-big-enough city. As far as the events in France, they'll be dealt with, but I am a little surprised things got that out of hand. The police over there really can be mean bastids. They're probably a little reluctant to go all-out on the rioters b/c of the comparisons it would draw to '68 and to avoid that muck being raised again. They've got problems with the economy and race there, and often they intersect; France isn't alone with this problem by far. My high school French teacher was there in '68, doing grad school and living in the banlieus b/c he didn't have much money.... Cops just beat people; they say a couple thousand people drowned in the Seine after being thrown in by them -- no official numbers on that. So, he went out one night b/c he just decided he had to get out of there. A cop started toward him with a billy club, he said "Suis American" (which was like saying, "Touch me and you're going to have the entire U.S. Embassy crammed up your ---.") and the guy still didn't back off very fast. But yes. Most people there, just like most people everywhere in the world, are just trying to get through the day and earn enough currency to feed and house their families. From reading the PPP board, you'd swear that everyone who lives outside of U.S. borders spends their entire life shopping for the best prices on AK-47s and practicing their MUWAHAHAHAHAHAs.

And everyone, just remember that the camera adds ten pounds to any inflatable Kate doll.

MM has 3 1/2 years left on his contract. How come Marvin Lewis can start Palmer. Nolan can start Smith. Del Rio went with Leftwich. Due respect, but the choice is not about job security. As long as Ralph is satisfied, it's okay. And Ralph isn't stupid --- he knows that it takes time to develop a starter. The coaching staff has to have the willpower to make a choice to start a young QB, and then (here's the key words, Coach) STICK WITH IT. It sounded like they were going to do this, but after four games, our coaches chose to cut and run to KH, who's shown that he can't direct the O to much more success than JP did. I don't care about a winning record as long as I can see that things are progressing whereby we'll be competitive and might be settled on the QB situation for the next several years.

In the salary-cap era, that's the thing. You can choose to build a Great defense or a Great offense but you usually won't ever have both (Pats were an abarition in that they got very lucky with things converging at the same time, and it's now correcting itself). You can also choose to go the route where you have a Good O and D, and hope that over 16 weeks, you catch the corresponding Great units on their bad days. In the SB run, the O was the primary mover while the D had a lot of stars, but you knew they were always the second banana. Under Wade and GW, the transition was made that this is a defense-first team. Wade made it work with just enough sparks on offense to have a real shot at winning; GW retooled the defense to his brand but while making a stronger unit there, the O was left with the crumbling remnants (esp. OL) that Bledsoe couldn't succeed in (tho he did try admirably). Now, we're left with a question. Do we rebuild/stockpile on O while letting the D slide back, and hope that their paths intersect at a point of high production? Do we retool the D to again make it Top 5 and make nominal improvements to the O?

They're "going to do an evaluation this week of every position"? Really? B/c TD says in every one of his "Ask the GM" thingies that they only do player evaluations at the end of the season. From the sounds of it, it's probably 60-40 that Holcomb is playing vs. KC, and if he still can't put up much better overall results, then it's curtains. With a dink-and-dunk QB, the stats don't matter --- they will usually have good comp/att numbers, and Ds will give them garbagetime-like yardage gains in order to stop them or force FGs. When the field gets shorter, defending the D'n'D gets easier b/c the DBs aren't covering nearly as much ground. What does matter is whether the QB controls the O smoothly, methodically and with results. KH hasn't done that first one very well (to some degree, Tom Clements has a lot to do with this, but by that same token, TCs' craptacular 'Who's Willis?' O when JP was in didn't help the rookie), and the last one, well... you know the answer in that Rian Lindell is the team MVP.

You know, a lot of the Pats' opponents this year have come away from their game thinking the same damn thing. There's a point where it stops being sheer happenstance and starts being a pattern. They simply bring their opponent down to their level, don't allow the score to get too much to overcome, and then Brady lights it up in the 4th and is the Second Coming of John Elway. I can't say this is a good strategy by Bellichick, but he's pulling out some wins with a bunch of 3rd and 4th stringers in his secondary and OL.

Puhonix, Those are pretty cool shots, and the $150 and $100 prices you said seem about right. If someone is interested, you can always strike a bargain, but don't sell yourself short --- takes a lot of time/money to produce these things and people sometimes have a tendency not to realize that. Agree with JC about black/white, but then there is the whole craze with that now and everyone's doing it.... I always wanted to take a photography class at the U, but never had the proper schedule (it was a 6-hour/week class for the same number of credits as a 3-hour/week class, too). In my area of study, photography was kind of a run-along. Have had a lot of times where I've wanted to have a camera with me to take a photo of something that was really beautiful (ie a startlingly red leaf on the top of a gray stone wall last week), but for the moment, I'm pound-wise and penny-poor for one of those new-fangled digital cameras. If you're interested, there was a display in the library a few years back where a woman used light-sensitive photopaper to take pictures of the inside of fruit/vegetables. I was taking a botany course at the time and they just blew my mind how they related to the stuff I was studying, and how beautiful they were. My absolute favorite is "Sugar Peas" These pictures were about 3 feet by 5 feet, so they were BIG, but I looked at the prices for them and about went . Don't know if this link is still active, but you can also try googling if it doesn't work or for more info on how she did them. I've also seen the first name as "Ann." Anne Parker --- Botanical Metamorphics

Nope. Helps him offset when his nose is that W.C. Fields-like shade of maroon. Hell, if I had as much coin as him, I'd go through life drunk too.

How many times did they cut to Bruschi's wife in the stands? I gave up long ago in hoping that announcers talk about things that matter.

I don't leave it to announcers to dictate what is a good hit; you can turn the sound off and watch the game and not get a migraine. The players are the ones who matter. This one learned from the best. Rodney Harrison reincarnate. He was trying to make a highlight reel for a WM career-ending injury.

Well, he is consistent in getting overpowered, then doing his matador impression on nearly every play. I'll give him that....

This is an excellent one for MM's "Ask the Coach" thingy. Unless they're screening out the questions with any criticism of TC. I don't remember one entry with MM being asked about his playcalling, and his tendency of forgetting to run the ball and instead going with the cute plays, especially at the goal line. I don't really like Joe Theisman, but he had one good observation last night. When RP ran the end-around, he said something to the tune of 'This is the type of play you run when you're desperate and you're out of ideas.'

It may have been the Captain Morgan, but was I seeing MW play at LT? If so, it wasn't that bad....

When MM stated why JP was being benched, it was basically that very reason. To which I furrowed my brow and asked, "So, Bob gets fired b/c Bill sucks at his job?"

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