Northbound

I cooked the turkey last night (in the smoker, and it came out beautiful, oh, you should see it) and the stuffing is ready to pop in the oven (cornbread, with sausage and sage and it’s going to kick all ass) and the Lions game isn’t on yet, so I settled in to read a bit of the NYT online:

First rattle out of the box is a (very interesting) op-ed by a guy with a book to sell, explaining how a junior-level Spanish conquistador wiped out a peaceful settlement of French Huguenots who (according to the tale) celebrated the first Thanksgiving on the East Coast (the article doesn’t say if it was before or after the one in Santa Fe, which I am far too lazy to look up.)  I read the whole thing, saying to myself, I did not know that.  And then, at the end, the ritual backhanded swipe at our President, bless his heart:

Our history is littered with bleak tableaus that show what happens when righteous certitude is mixed with fearful ignorance.

Setting aside the disclaimer (anyone versed in NYT-speak knows he’s talking about Iraq), I have been listening to this tripe for eight years and I fully expect to have to listen to it for the next sixty.  Is it possible, for just one day, to give George W. Bush a tiny break here and be thankful?  Thankful that he liberated Afghanistan (which is more than James Buchanan or Franklin Pierce or Herbert Hoover — bless their little black hearts — ever did on their best days)?  Thankful that he signed the Medicare prescription-drug bill that makes sure that seniors have the medications they need?  Thankful that he ended a horrible tyranny in Iraq?  Thankful that he built up our homeland security to the point where domestic terror threats (like the one against Penn Station) are few and far between, and that we haven’t been attacked since 9/11?  Thankful that he brought dignity and honor back to a White House in need of it?  (Expect the next President to campaign to bring dignity and honor back to a State Department that will likely be in sore need of it.)

You can take this and write it out in letters twelve foot high on the mountain of your choosing:  If George W. Bush had been a liberal Democrat, and had taken the same actions that he took in office, he would be remembered in the media and by historians today as one of the shining heroes of our country.

No.  We can’t be thankful for any of it.  We have to take little weasely code-worded swipes at GWB even when we’re talking about the actions of some idiot Spaniard almost five hundred years ago, because that’s just how we roll at the NYT.  Blast.

I wasn’t going to write any of this, but then I read this about Thanksgiving management:

Dr. Friedman offers a script to use if someone, say, wants to bring a dish of canned sweet potatoes and marshmallows to a Thanksgiving meal made from all local ingredients: “You ask them: ‘How do you see this fitting into the larger locavore initiative? I personally love that dish, but let me show you what the larger set of issues are, and why we chose to serve local food.’ ”

Then, he said, brainstorm some solutions that don’t involve marshmallows.

You know something?  If you’re the kind of person that turns down a thoughtful, heartfelt side dish just because it has marshmallows from the grocery store on top of it, because you want to be a “locavore” for Thanksgiving (which does not one thing for the “environment” and just allows you to show off your supposed social awareness and enlightenment to set you apart from the common lot), then it doesn’t matter.  If you’re going to act like that, I don’t care what you say about my President (for the next couple of months, no matter what Tom Friedman thinks), or what you think about me.   You have your Thanksgiving and I’ll have mine and you can take your larger set of issues and put them right up the place where the giblets come out of.  More marshmallows for me, anyway.

For the rest of you, a happy Thanksgiving (and a special shout-out to an Air Force helicopter unit in Afghanistan that is getting no cranberry sauce today or anything like it).  GO COWBOYS.

T.R. Sullivan:

The Rangers, in this decade alone, have signed five free agent pitchers to contracts of three or more: Kenny Rogers, Darren Oliver, Chan Ho Park, Vicente Padilla and Kevin Millwood. The Rangers traded for Padilla but he had declared free agency when the Rangers signed him to a three-year, $33.75 million contract. They signed Rogers to a three-year contract in 2000.

So anyway, the total investment in those five pitchers was approximately $205 million.

If you’re a left-wing dictator, and you want Nobel Peace Laureate Jimmy Carter to hug you and make apologies for you and tell the world how misunderstood you are, well, that’s (historically) a (breathtakingly) easy thing to do.  If you want him to criticize you, though, well, pulling his visa seems to do the trick.

Note that the article also says that Jimmy Carter and his self-appointed Elders are still in favor of pouring millions of aid dollars into the Zimbabwean rat-hole, just as though none of the hurtful misunderstanding about the visas never happened.  Lesson:  left-wing dictators can be too awful to get praise from Jimmy Carter, but nothing can ever shut off the foreign-aid spigot.

I have a piece published in McSweeney’s today.  Read it!  Read it now!  You know you have to.

Note that this piece (despite its excellence) is primarily a means to an end – there will be query letters now that note that I’ve been published in McSweeney’s.  That’s right.  Eggers, Chabon, Edmonds.  Murderer’s row over there.

The Cowboys play the San Francisco 49ers this week, so in the spirit of rivalry – if not the spirit of total intense hatritude - I am turning this post over to reign of error, who is (saints defend us) an Obama supporter, a Bay Area partisan, and — well — as you will read, someone who is totally and completely misguided in every way.  (You can read my post over at his blog now – and you can look at the rest of it, too, especially his deeply irrational opinions about Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.)

Because Curtis got around to his post first, I’m going to try and make this ‘apples to apples’ now and use his admittedly bizarre categories for assessing the lifetime value of each franchise. As for this weekend, I have some friends who think the 49ers could win – the Cowboys have looked terrible and eked out a win last week. I’m not quite that optimistic, though I’d love to be wrong on Sunday.

But, as Curtis asked, which franchise is better? Let’s break it down.

Ownership: The DeBartolos did get kicked out of the league but while they were there they created an environment that made players from around the league want to move to the city by the Bay. Sure, they stretched some laws here and there, but most importantly, Eddie D was the best kind of owner – he threw money around and stayed out of the way. Jerry Jones not only thinks he is the coach, but he meddles almost as much as George Steinbrenner did back in the day. Jerry Jones had a Hall of Fame coach in Jimmy Johnson, and decided he was smart enough that he could not only win without him, he could win with Barry Switzer.  Because I’m an understanding man, I’m going to call this one a tie. ADVANTAGE: PUSH

Stadium:  Honestly, who cares? Texas Stadium is obviously not so great or the Cowboys wouldn’t be moving out next year. And Candlestick Park is actually an amazing place for a football game. (It sucked for baseball because of the cold, but you expect that in football.) Plus, the Beatles played their last concert there. ADVANTAGE: NINERS

Iconic Coaches: I’m willing to give both Tom Landry and Jimmy Johnson their credit as HoF coaches, and when we are talking ‘icon’ certainly Landry is part of that discussion. But I had to grin when I saw this category from Curtis, because Bill Walsh is not only one of the greatest coaches (and gave up the opportunity for more dollars to go back to Stanford and work with college students), but his influence is greater than anyone else in terms of coaching. Not convinced? Check out this link to see his coaching ‘tree’:   Who are the best coaches in football today? Jeff Fisher, Mike Tomlin, Mike Shanahan, Tony Dungy, Andy Reid, Jon Gruden…seriously, can I stop now? This is a no-brainer, slam-dunk win for my boys. ADVANTAGE: NINERS

Iconic Quarterbacks: Joe Montana is the greatest quarterback of all-time. Troy Aikman is not. Not exactly sure what his announcing has to do with anything, but Cool Joe was, and remains, the industry standard. (And Steve Young wasn’t too shabby either.) ADVANTAGE: NINERS

Super Bowls:  Frankly, I would have thought this would have been a push, since they each won five rings. But if we want to talk about Super Bowls, isn’t it worth noting that the 49ers never lost a Super Bowl that they got to? 5-0, baby. The Cowboys made it to eight Super Bowls – which is impressive – but choked in three of them. I wouldn’t have mentioned this, but Curtis brought it up. So … ADVANTAGE: NINERS

Organizational Class: Curtis is right when he talks about how awful it was to have Terrell Owens act like a ninny in Irving, dancing on the Cowboys star, etc. But … where does Owens play these days? Oh, that’s right – in Dallas! Add in the history of ‘the white house,’ where all sorts of illegal activity was ignored and/or condoned by the organization for such folks as Michael Irvin and Deion Sanders, and it’s hard to make a claim that the Cowboys have even a lick of class. ADVANTAGE: NINERS.

Did I mention that the 49ers won 10 or more games sixteen years in a row? That’s not only hard to do, it’s never been done by any other team. That they employed the greatest wide receiver of all time in Jerry Rice, the greatest quarterback of all time (Montana) and the greatest safety of all time in Ronnie Lott?

On merit alone, the 49ers should always outproduce the organizationally inferior Cowboys, but games are played on the field, and it’s hard to envision a scenario where the Niners walk all over the ‘Boys like they did the Rams last week. It could be close, and I’ll be crossing my fingers and hoping that good prevails over evil.

An ordinary, kind of boring NYT review of a documentary about a pointless Ivy League tie football game back in the sixties, enlivened by the following comment:

- tcod2

Not only is college football “picayune,” you see, but you’re a Nazi sympathizer if you enjoy it, and the Golden Age of America’s most honored and respected university was a 1969 riot that made Harvard Yard look like Berkeley.  It is ridiculous idiocy (presented with a thin patina of intelligence by someone who can’t spell “someone” correctly) like this that make me glad that I went to Baylor.  Not just glad, but proud.  SIC ‘EM BEARS.

The WaPo on a blow for liberty against the spam menace:

At roughly 4:30 p.m. Eastern time last Tuesday, the volume of junk e-mail arriving at inboxes around the world suddenly plummeted by at least 65 percent, an unprecedented drop caused by what is believed to be a single, simple act.

According to security experts, one Silicon Valley based computer firm was playing host to computers of various organizations that controlled the distribution of much of the world’s spam. Confronted with evidence tracing the spam activity back to the hosting firm, McColo Corp., Internet service providers pulled the plug, severing McColo’s online connections.

And this happened thanks (in part) to one intrepid crusader:

Matthew Prince, chief executive of Unspam Technologies and founder of Project Honey Pot, a collaborative effort that secretly gathers intelligence about the world’s largest spam networks, has tracked the spam harvesting bots hosted at McColo for more than two years.

Project Honey Pot’s free technology, which is deployed at more than 20,000 Web sites, tries to track these crawler bots by assigning a unique “spam trap” e-mail address to each participating site. The dummy addresses are designed to be difficult for humans to find but very easy for the bots to gather. The project’s software then records the Internet address of any visitor and the date and time of the visit. Because those addresses are never used to sign up for e-mail lists, the software can help investigators draw connections between harvesters and spammers if an address generated by a spam trap or “honey pot” later receives junk e-mail.

Prince said statistics from Project Honey Pot suggest that crawler bots hosted at McColo are responsible for more than 30 million spam messages sent to the project’s e-mail traps since June 2006.

“And our spam traps constitute a tiny fraction of the e-mail addresses in the world,” Prince said.

I am on record as favoring instant death for spammers, preferably through GPS laser-guided bombing.  But until we get that (hey!  it’s change you can believe in!) this will work.  Good on ya, Matthew Prince.

But I have a book review to write, and I’m writing it (with little built-in breaks to play Spider Solitare).  So there.  And later, there is Madden 09 to play.

I’ll have you know, I went to Famous Dave’s last night, and walked away hungry.  That’s how serious this is.  Just got a sandwich – brisket and sausage – and their lackluster mashed sweet potatoes, no appetizer, no dessert, no sweet tea.  The sacrifices I make, I tell you, you wouldn’t even believe.

Didn’t go to the gym Friday – I usually don’t – or Thursday, because I had to schlep all the way over to the State House in the driving rain, and I don’t have to go to the gym on days I have to schlep all the way over to the State House in the driving rain.