sullim4

Definitely appliances. We just updated the kitchen to all stainless steel. Out of the four major appliances, two of them had quality issues right out of the gate. My oven's door handle snapped off on one side because they used a plastic fastener to connect the oven door to the handle/trim instead of a metal one. In my refrigerator's case, one of the screws that secured the decorative door hinge caps was shipped in a stripped state and an SOB to take out. The warranty repair shop had to order a whole new hinge. For all of the cost cutting that they've been doing on appliances, it amazes me that the prices are so much higher than they were even just 10 years ago.

I live east of Seattle. If you think the saturation of Starbucks in your area is bad, then I suggest coming up here. I know of numerous strip malls in the Bellevue/Redmond/Kirkland area that have three separate Starbucks locations. The city that I live in doesn't even have a post office, but we do have 3 Starbucks plus a couple grocery store Starbucks. I really don't understand it because Seattle has some excellent roasters. My favorite is Caffe D'Arte, though the most popular around here is probably Caffe Vita. If you are looking for "real" Seattle espresso/coffee then my suggestion would be to grab a bag from one of those two roasters.

Apparently the brass in NYC isn't happy with the coaching hires of the past few weeks... http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/8858003/nfl-looking-adjust-rooney-rule-ensure-diversity

Doug Marrone talks tough, Will winning come in three years? Not if Fitz stays here. Russ is a genius hiring a no nonsense coach to sell tickets. Ralph is cheap, no more! A simple substitute though... Russ is cheap works too!

Where has your owner gone off to? He is missed in these parts. How are Carl and the Googlebot doing?

Are you suggesting that Russ Brandon has as much impact on winning and losing as the janitor? Come on man. He's the CEO of the damn team. While he doesn't have the same degree of impact as a coach or GM, he certainly needs to be held accountable when the team loses. I think Smithers wants the best for the team but is he the best man for the job? With no playoffs since 1999 everything should be on the table.

Why do you always run backwards?

I really don't think anyone is asking fans to be behaved the same way they would at church. No one cares about what language people use. No one wants to ban alcohol outright. I just want to go to a game and not have to worry about my car getting damaged from an unattended tailgate fire. I want to be able to go to a game and not have to put up with !@#$s that pick fights because they are smashed beyond belief, not just simply drunk. I want to be able to go to a game and not have to watch someone piss all over an opposing team's car. This is not too much to ask. I am not asking for a setting that's kid-appropriate - dive bar-type behavior is fine with me. None of the above would be even close to tolerated at the local watering hole by my house - you'd be thrown out right away and asked not to return. I don't see why an NFL game somehow excuses it and I don't understand at all why Orchard Park and Erie County haven't demanded that something be done about it.

I'm sorry, but no, it is not as bad at other stadiums as it is at RWS. Seattle isn't nearly as bad. Green Bay isn't bad at all. Every time I have been to the Meadowlands (pre-MetLife), it hasn't been nearly as bad as RWS. Are there obnoxious fans at those stadiums? Absolutely. But there aren't cars parked in a mish-mash fashion with fires going right next to vehicle gas tanks. There aren't completely wasted drunks throwing footballs at other people's cars. There aren't near the number of fights that go on in any of those other stadiums as compared to Buffalo. The only NFL stadium that I have seen public urination at is RWS and I have been to a fair number of games in other stadiums, always wearing Bills colors. I have been repeatedly been treated worse by my own fanbase than those of opposing teams. This is all completely preventable if the front office cared enough to hire rent-a-cops to aggressively patrol the lots and refer offending parties to the Erie County Police for arrest. Fine these bastards thousands of dollars and force them to work hundreds of hours of community service. Buffalo's fan base deserves better. Buffalonians are the nicest people you'll meet. But dammit, they do nothing to control the jerks in their midst.

I thought the number was excessive as well, but I unsubscribed. I didn't sue the team.

I 100% agree with this and I was thinking the same thing. I was also upset when they decided to kick the first field goal when we were down 21-14. I think that was a 4th and 2 situation, and given how utterly miserable their defense was and how the game was shaping up to be a shoot out, going for it seemed like the right thing to do.

Definitely not true anymore. The Mariners have fostered a lot of ill will in Seattle - they oppose the new arena deal that would bring the NHL and the SuperSonics back, because they fear the competition it would bring for the public's entertainment dollars. Ownership refuses to invest any money in the team, ticket prices are sky high, and attendance is pathetic. You can walk up the day of the game and get your choice of any section in the ballpark - even when they are playing the Yankees or Red Sox. The Seahawks have taken over the town since their Super Bowl appearance. In fact I would argue that UW football is higher on the totem pole than Mariners baseball at this point. That being said, I don't think Seattle is a great sports town - they have a core group of supporters but enthusiasm doesn't spread much further than that. In Buffalo, odds are good that a random guy on the street will be able to identify who Ryan Fitzpatrick is. Here, it's more probable that a random person will think Matt Hasselbeck is the current quarterback of the Seahawks instead of Russell Wilson.

WOW...

For the record: - The back judge (#84) involved in the play is Derrick Rhone-Dunn. He is a former Big 12 official who was FIRED due to performance reasons. Interesting that the NFL thinks that a D-I official that flamed out is qualified to call an NFL game. - The side judge (#26) involved in the play is Lance Easley. He is a junior college official from California - not even D-III NCAA. He ruled TD. - Gerry Austin (the former referee in the ESPN booth) was 100% correct. The R should have gotten those two guys together to figure out what happened. The madness must end.

This game was an embarassment for the NFL: 24 penalties, 215 yards 13 first downs on penalties Hochuli and Walt "Just give it to 'em" Colmean might not be perfect but there were so many incorrect and phantom penalties in that game that even my girlfriend that barely watches football was amazed. For sure, highly entertaining to see what happened at the end but this just serves to piss NE* off even more and gives them extra motivation to kick ass next week. Not exactly what I want to see as a Bills fan.

What a game by the offensive line. Spiller gets the game ball but the OL's play was responsible for a good chunk of his yardage today. Spiller was running like FJ because there were so many holes to choose from. I was generally very happy with the D, but there were two plays where KC caught them off guard, they weren't set, and they got burned. A team like the Patriots* will exploit this more frequently than the Chiefs did. I thought the secondary was OK but there seemed to be a lot of plays where there were 3 or 4 of our players in the vicinity of a pass, and it was caught with little fight coming from any of them. Gilmore and Aaron Williams seemed to get picked on a lot. Fitz looked absolutely awful today. Many of his throws were way off target and they would have been picks if he was facing a better defense (say, like the Jets). There was no improvement at all from last week and that's going to need to change if this team wants to make the playoffs. They will be better than 6-10 merely because their schedule is weaker than last year, but if they want to improve, Fitz needs to do A LOT better than this. I agree with an earlier post re: SJ. He looked like he was out of the game at times with his body language and was generally a non-factor... but that could just be due to Fitz's subpar play.

If the Jets win, you can expect a headline about them. If they don't, you can bet your life they will be covering the US Open mens final instead.

BUF @ NYJ: Marv Albert/Rich Gannon KC @ BUF: Spero Dedes/Steve Beuerlein BUF @ CLE: Spero Dedes/Steve Beuerlein NE @ BUF: Greg Gumbel/Dan Dierdorf

Probably because to the human eye, which is programmed to take shortcuts, it looks similar to the much more common "Julius", where the consonant "l" is before the vowel "i". Not to mention the fact that "Jarius" is a lot easier to pronounce for most English speakers than "Jairus" since "ai" sounds are usually towards the end of a word and followed by only one consonant (laid, pain, main, etc). "Kristen" vs "Kirsten" is similar, though in that case, Kristen is the far more common name.

I don't understand why there's even a debate about this... and I just got back from a weekend of wine/beer tasting so I'm not exacty a prohibitionist. The experience at RWS is out of control, mainly because of men in the 19-25 age range that have been drinking like fish since 6am. I have no problem with someone having a beer at the game but these folks have been drinking like crazy and aren't exactly shining examples of why we should lower the drinking age. They were the same group of idiots smoking outside their high school while they were under 18. I honestly think it's sad that alcohol plays such a large part in the culture of our fanbase as well as others around the NFL. To be clear - I don't advocate banning alcohol in the lots, but I do think that enforcing underage laws for those under 21 and cracking down on those in their 20s that can drink legally but do so to excess greatly enhances the experience for those who simply want to have one or two beers and enjoy the game. Bottom line - if an underage person's judgment while sober is so impaired that they decide to drink in public yards away from police cars, what does that say about their judgment while drunk?

You left out Crayonz, who seems to have turned 4 today!

I had flashbacks watching this video - I saw it happen to others on the bus and it happened to me 20 years ago. It hurt a lot and to this day I can identify with that woman. This starts 100% with the parents. Kids learn by imitating their parents - it's very likely that this video is simply a microcosm of how their parents treat other people. Some of it is peer pressure as well. They'll see Johnny ganging up on someone, so they'll feel the need to pile on, even though they'd never do it on their own. Punishing these kids won't change anything, even though that's what needs to be done. This has been going on for ages, it's just more visible now because people are beginning to realize that bullying is a real problem. Unfortunately, it's a problem that can't be solved until society makes a dramatic shift towards alienating this kind of behavior. Perhaps this video is the first step in doing that - for people that were never picked on as kids, it might be the first time they're seeing this as adults and realizing that it needs to stop. It begins with them setting an example of how to properly behave in front of their children.

A paid subscription model for online newspapers isn't going to work. There are still plenty of other sources of news on the web that offer content for free - local TV/radio stations being the primary source. For sports you have so many blogs (PFT, rotoworld, nfl.com, etc) that will never charge for news articles. These folks are used to giving away their content for "free" in return for advertising and the web is simply another vehicle for that. Frankly the print model is where most papers are bleeding money. It costs a lot of money to contract out to a printing company, run a network of drivers who deliver your papers, and handle customer service. The price of a print subscription in no way makes up for the actual costs that are incurred. This is a case of an industry refusing adapt to a clear technological shift - a la Sony with the walkman and mp3 players/digital music. The Seattle P-I, while I do not agree with their political bent, has been largely successful in transferring to online-only. Hearst hasn't shut them down after 3 years of running with this model (and rumor has it that they haven't been losing any money) so something must be going right.

At least we lost to an NFC West team. Needless to say, given that they are playing at Arizona the next week, I hope the Bills lose again. In Crayonz we trust .

There is a lot of training that goes into becoming an official. To get to the NFL, you've typically been a Division IA NCAA official for a minimum of 5 years, officiated several seasons at multiple lower NCAA levels, and done a significant amount of work at the high school level to start. You're typically looking at 15 years of officiating at lower levels before the NFL even becomes slighly interested in you. They have to study film of their work on a weekly basis (just like the players do), study for and take arcane rules tests every week, and train for annual fitness tests. You get graded every week by the office in NY, and if you aren't cutting it, you're fired. You might not think that officials get fired, but honestly, how many of you know whether or not Hochuli's side judge from last year is still with the league? Steve Wilson (U29) was one of the more notable firings recently. Pay 'em. They deserve the cash for the amount of crap they have to take.