UConn James

Offensive play-calling was in critical times. 3rd and short, 4th and 2 and we go for low-% long balls?!? What the frick was that? The few times we did run a screen or slant, it worked. One screen to Freddie went for what I believe was the second-longest play of the day. Also, a slant to Stevie for a 1st. The Jets CBs are very good, but allowing them to intimidate us into not even attempt to run what we do best is suicide. Fitz went long several times instead and we punted lots. How about that dump-off to Chandler that went for 10+? Chandler blocked his man, stepped out in the flat, followed his QB, caught a wobbler, duped the LB and S. Yeah, Gailey doesn't use TEs in his offenses.... Maybe he would more often if he had some that were worth a stevestojan. Chandler's emerged, but it would've been nice to get a Miller or Boss.... Those are plays to big targets that keep drives alive and win games. Defenses are gonna be toasted, as we've seen all year. WRs can just about mangle CBs and not get a flag, but if a CB so much as breathes on a WR.... I've said it all year, and it's abundantly clear by now that the league and the refs are just fine with the castration of defenses. And so, if you don't respond / keep pace with the other team's offense, you're screwed. (And besides that, the offense didn't do the D any favors by keeping them on the field for 40 minutes.)

I never thought I'd be saying this, but.... Damn!

Yeah, but after that, he's got two months to run us in the ground.... Well, deeper than he has. If he loses, I fully expect to see an Executive Order for gun registration in the lame duck period. If he wins, I fully expect him to railroad some kind of registration through. If this is the stuff he's pulled when he faces re-election, imagine once he doesn't have anything left to lose.

Romney: How I'll Tackle Spending, Debt I would put Romney's fiscal record against anyone. And what, pray tell, is this bullet point in the article...? But in Dave in Nor Fu-- and connor Land, Romney is pro-choice and will raise taxes. Ask them, they'll tell you.

A company came thru here about 5-6 years ago, contracted by CL&P to cut branches. We had to sign a waiver allowing them to cut trees that are on our property. We signed it. They came by. They cut any part that physically touched the lines, to a length just so it didn't touch the lines. Not an inch more. Now, that may have been a management decision to decrease the amount of material crews had to deal with/time on the clock. But it may well have been a worker decision to get paid then and a bit of job security when it grows back w/in two months. CT's problem is that they only do this every ten years, maybe. We need to either clear a LOT of trees and be aggressive about it, or bite the bullet one time, bury the !@#$ing lines and not have these perennial costs and frequent major outages. The total cost of these storms is astronomical when you add up all the macrocosm costs --- food spoilage, lost productivity from businesses unable to operate, inefficient use of gasoline in generators, people dying (eight so far) & hospitalized (I believe I saw a count in the 500s) from CO poisoning because they tried to heat with gas grills, etc.... You know, it may be a dumb--- thing to do when you read about it, but when temps are in the low 20s at night, people get desperate. I read those stories and thank God for our wood stove and woodlot & generator. Now, whose responsibility is a matter of dispute which gets out of hand when more than one or two people discuss it. And so, we've had a long time of passing the buck and a lot of indecision.

Per the Courant today, the current administration says they will not be enforcing that law/fines during the clean-up of Alfred. So companies that have the same equipment as "licensed arborists" will be allowed to prune back broken branches and those that pose a risk to power lines. In reality, all that law did was create another class of micro-specialization where the performers have come to charge a premium because of their relative scarcity. Contractors need a state license to cut a branch, if they're not cutting the whole tree down. I think we're going to look into renting one of those scissor-jack lifts to get some of the dead branches and one that have gotten too close to the house (and my teevee antennas!!) b/c while a contractor needs a license, a homeowner can do what s/he wants. I couldn't say it any better than that the laws promote procrastination/inaction on things that need to get done to help ensure power lines stay up. But the thing is, I really can't find any way to argue against this article linked below from a geologist who's saying that with a scientifically-proven stronger storms AND more rapid tree growth with increased levels of CO2 / longer growing seasons, burying power lines is going to be necessary to prevent these kind of outages from being more and more frequent. In the past two months, two weeks of this state's economic productivity has been lost. Even out of 52 weeks, that's significant. Two out 8 --- it's unacceptable to not begin addressing the problem. Robert Thorson: Had Enough? Bury The Power Lines

Happens a lot. People retire/"step back"... and they go breasts-up a short time later. Granted, at his age, it was a little more probable than most retirees. No surgery is "minor" at 92. RIP, Mr. Rooney.

Is that the one group Obama hasn't blamed his administration's failures on? Wait until Obama needs a fall group for Project Gunwalker. They're close enough to the border....

Looks like someone's scared stevestojanless of facing Romney, so you just make stevestojan up. 1) His feelings on the abortion issue have changed over the course of time. He admits that. He never liked abortion, just that it should be rare and safe because of some occurrences with personal acquaintances who died from unsafe procedures. Now, you can call that flip-flopping. You know, so be it. I think a person should be able to have his opinion on an issue change without being castigated for it. It means he's human. While he admits that Roe is the current law of the land, that doesn't mean there's no fine tuning to be done. He's promised to appoint judges in the Roberts/Alito mold. For me, personally, abortion isn't in the top 20 of issues on who I support for president, but there it is. 2) GOP "Hate toward other religions"? you, Dave. Seriously. you. 3) "Not anti-anti gay" --- Romney supports a federal gay marriage ban. He was against gay marriage and threatened to veto it in Massachusetts. What more is a president supposed to do in this area? Again, this doesn't break the top 50 most important issues. 4) I've detailed the farce of Romney being tagged for Obamacare before, and yet you keep coming back with this crap. The supermajority Democrat Mass. legislature was going to pass universal health care bill with or without him and the few Republicans. Romney made some inputs to make the bill more fiscally sound. Mass. also has seriously different demographics than the rest of the country that made it possible. Romney said then and now that the Mass. model cannot work for the entire country and that each state should do what is right for their state, along with some limited federal legislation allowing health care plan competition across state lines, tort reform that would lower malpractice rates that get passed onto patients, and that costs must be cut as a first step toward affordable coverage. Romney has said that the first act of his presidency will be to issue Obamacare waivers to all 50 states, and then work to repeal and replace it. Again, I've detailed all of this to great degree before, and yet you keep coming back with the same schtick. 4)Romney erased a $3B deficit in Mass. without raising taxes. Actually, he created a surplus. Which he didn't spend. Yes, these are indeed the actions of a tax-and-spend liberal.... You want a liberal? Our illustrious Democrat Gov. Dan Malloy here in CT faced a similar deficit --- $3.5B. He jacked up taxes on "the rich," increased spending by $1.5B over two years, and then silently increased withholding taxes by ~$3,000 per year on people who make more than $50K.This state has borrowed up to the hilt and he's spending even more now. We are so screwed it's not even funny. Dave, you're another Arnold Schwarzenegger. Fake muscles, all bluster, and you're a !@#$ing clown. Just go to the kitchen, grab a knife and slit your wrists. You know you want to. Make sure the knife is sharp! And Dave, don't go across the wrists; go parallel to the veins!

And generator fumes. Have been seeing lingering wisps in our area. Apparently it's the high pressure system that's generally keeping the air pushed down, rather than venting into the atmosphere. Still out here. A town crew (actually, they're a loaner crew from a town midway to the coast) came through today --- the first time they've raised flag, five days after the storm ) chipping up the branches that fell in the road and that people here moved out of the flow of traffic (myself included with a ~30-foot oak branch that fell in the neighbor's yard and jutted into the road). They say that 60% of my town has had power restored, but my guesstimate is it'll probably be late Saturday or early Sunday before we get it back. We are literally at the very end of the line. Supposed to be in the 20s again tomorrow night and the next.

You know, I don't think there's many people who'd argue that the boy didn't want it and in that sense, "victim" is off a little. But to say there won't be life consequences for the kid and others like him is ignorant. It creates unhealthy attitudes about sex. With every story like this, it breaks down a little further the ability / role of authority figures in our society in the boy's esteem and in the esteem of the public at large. However much you may deride the broad term, it creates emotional troubles. And probably the most important note: people who are sexually abused --- including circumstances like this --- are something like 5 times more likely to become sexual abusers themselves later in life. The cycle needs to stop. Going lenient because it's an older woman with a younger boy because we as men think back and would've liked to have screwed Ms. Templeton in the janitor's closet is a displacement of time/space. It is not your 40-year-old brain that's in that 14-year-old's head. Abuse messes people up, even when that abuse feels good.

Why do that when you can make a fresh start here. You know, like the Mickey/dik smub/.../elegantelliot/Steely/conner persona that continually haunts this board. And when he becomes a laughingstock, disappears then reappears under a new name... but without a new schtick.

Ouch! Our roof is 2x6s 12" on center. The contractor at the time (my uncle, in the '70s, who was also a stickler building inspector) said you could drive a truck across it. That was really nice to have last winter when there was like 4' of snow up there at one point. I doubt it'd survive one of our oaks falling on it, tho. And they're LARGE oaks. Were supposed to have a takedown guy we know get the most suspect one that has a V-notch and a cavity back in the spring, but it didn't materialize. Going to have to get on that as the weather gets more and more whacky.

Third Cain accuser emerges Welcome to being vetted, Herman. Did he expect that the two harassment settlements wouldn't come up or that saying they're false isn't making them go away? These things sometimes do settle out of court to save lawyer fees, but wow, if you have any inkling that you may one day run for public office this is the stevestojan that pops up and kills a campaign. If you're going to do this thing, if there's anything in your past that's in the public record or that people can come out with some kind of documentation about, you need to reveal it yourself at the outset to any and all. Saying early on that there were two settlements that the Restaurant Assoc. made and trying to explain that they were unfounded, but that the company settled to avoid having to pay legal bills multiple times what the settlement was (if that's an accurate or plausible argument) would have at least bought him a little straightforwardness points. Hoping it's not discovered isn't a strategy for dealing with this stuff. It's weird because in America, by and large, if you come right out and tell everyone that you like to screw tigers, they're OK with that. Sometimes, they revere it and you get a cult following. But get caught screwing tigers, and you're done. I don't know if he's even touchable as a VP choice now, if he ever was. Sexual misconduct, even the whiff of impropriety, isn't something a politician (at least a GOP pol) usually survives. And, let's face it... it's not something a black GOP candidate can survive. Frankly, if it is going to be Mitt, I'm a big fan of the job Susana Martinez is doing down in NM. Her record of lowering the unemployment rate by 2 points, cutting waste, going from a deficit to a surplus without raising taxes and fostering business growth/pushing to revise the state tax code highlight areas that Romney (believe it or not, all those who call him a RINO!) can point to as well... especially the bolded one as he took MA from $3B in the red to a $300M surplus while in office, also without raising taxes.

It's the oaks --- which I've seen sometimes hang onto their leaves into March! --- that got the worst of it here WRT weight stress. As an aside, there've been NO acorns in our yard this year under five oaks (that mostly held up, thankfully). I hope that's just a seed production cycle/anomaly (we've had unusually high yield years recently) doesn't portend anything about it being a particularly rough winter. Some people are quick to dismiss that trees are able to forecast these things, but these are living organisms that we still learning about and which have such intricate workings. Anyway, the squirrels here do not look very happy. Lots of pine branches too b/c it's weaker wood and generally doesn't grow as large.

Power's still out, but the generator's still going. Lost phone/Internet for most of today, but that's mostly a convenience thing.... We brought the neighbor a pair of oil-filled radiators that we had at a campground close by (she was able to get a generator via her family). And I got a kiss.... from her dog. That's Crooks, Looters & Plunderers. Meh.... Just throw it in the Charles!

AJ, you wanna apply for the race some season? I think "Internet Message Board Acquaintances" might make an interesting dynamic for the show. Have they ever had a pair that's never met IRL?

We've been w/o power since Saturday afternoon. With low temps that dipped to 26* the other night, we are one of the lucky ones. We heat with a wood stove ordinarily, so that's no biggie (despite some repairs that have to be made on the cap but the mason said it'll be OK until he gets here). Also have an old generator banging around that had to be coaxed into working but as I type, it's firing away outside my window. We invited my neighbor over that night it dipped to 26, as she just has oil/electric but she toughed it out in bed with her dog and a pile of blankets. No pictures forthcoming, but I will say she could pass for Stana Katic's sister (it's a good general rule not to dip the pen in neighborly ink. If it goes bad, the consequences can get downright tragic.) So, we're getting by a lot better than others and I do count my blessings / am glad we're prepared. Gotta handle it with a good dose of grace. Mustn't grumble! They're saying it may be as long as another week until it gets to the residential areas, especially here at the end of the line.

In addition to campaign donations to a certain party, and if Chef's link proves true, done on the backs of other peoples' money....

I don't know about this, but I did see hints of a no-confidence vote / collapse of his coalition gov't. They'd just hire someone to fight their war for them. Lord knows they've been doing that since the dawn of democracy.

No stevestojan.

What gets me is that teams are still trying to get away with flouting the rules. You have to notice everything. You have to pay your drivers or you're screwed. That was an * move by "That '70s Show"-Mom, first b/c it almost cost them the race and second that they stiffed a dude doing his job. You've gotta play it fast, but you've gotta play it clean. (Even the twins last week were playing it honorably. They asked for their two free rides... and they received them.) The father on that team definitely is a Grade A stevestojanbox. I'm growing OK with a number of the teams that are left.

Crazy scary. There is such little margin available, and so injured players have additional pressure to get back on the field. The league wants to appear like they give a stevestojan about concussions? They really need to increase the roster size by 2 or 3 players... and more if they eventually plan on switching two of the preseason games to regular season. I just don't get why practice squad players can't dress for games.

It's just appalling to me how a penalty that can result in such HUGE swaths of yardage is not at least reviewable.

That "OWS is Orwell's 'Animal Farm' without the farm" gets more correct with each passing day.