I love professional American football, but a number of new trends this year have been disturbing my calm since the season started. Now that the regular season is winding down, here are some suggestions on how to improve for next season:

• The four-man comments before the game, at halftime and after the game is a formula that mostly works, but there is no need whatsoever to fly them all to the game and setup the desk on the field. The only purpose this seems to serve is to make it harder to hear anything anyone is saying, and force the hosts to wail like Olympic swimming commentators.
• To Bryant Gumbel: learn what the phrase “take over on downs” means before uttering it again. Ask your brother.
• To Dick Vermeil: please refrain from lending your image to any company for promotional purposes ever again. Also, have some of the beefier members of your team hunt down and kill everyone responsible for your beer commercials.
• Chris Collinsworth wins for suggesting he get work with Court TV as it is the “only way to cover the Browns”.
• To the NFL: since you have set up your broadcast rules to force me to watch nothing but the New York Jets, the least you could do is force the CBS network to broadcast the game in hi-def. Buy the cameras if you have to.
• To CBS Sports: high definition is no longer optional. Catch up.
• An occasional Thursday game is fun. Every week is overkill.
• Stop giving a shit about Terrell Owens.
• To advertisers: When you repeat the same commercial over and over, it makes me actively hate both you and your products. Stop it.
• To Chevrolet: When you insist on running the same honky-intensive commercial over and over and over containing the phrase “this is our philosophy”, you might not want to put a picture under it depicting someone from a homophobic organization that illegally uses federal funds.
• To the NFL network: Give up on the idea of the NFL network. Unless you are intentionally trying to destroy the NFL, in which case: soldier on.
• Light beer in sweaty green bottles is not my girlfriend and, even if it was, I’m pretty sure I would want it to be neither “hot” nor “a freak like you”. I don’t know what either of those mean.

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Having long lamented the shocking lack of DVD availablity of the animated Tick series, I’m pleased to say the wait is over. It’s almost as if the DVD has been waiting in the asylum…

Thanks to JL for pointing this out to me.

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After the 50th time listening to Paul Maguire tell me that he is going to tell me something right before telling me something, I thought I should come up with a Sunday Night Football drinking game. As with so much on the net, it’s been done.

I’d also add a rule that you must sip anytime Berman uses a “cute” nickname for a player. Also, drink anytime the camera focuses on a cheerleader. Chug if she isn’t a blonde caucasian.

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I’m certainly not the only one to notice that a good portion of the media has been having a tough time using the word “Muslim” lately. It used to be that you’d hear the media use the phrase “Islamic fundamentalist”, but this seems like it has given way to the unqualified “terrorist” or the even more abstract “terrorism”, where only the act of, say, a car bombing is important, not the fact that it might have some sort of religious motivation.

I suppose the reason for this is that much of the media wants to avoid looking like they are tarnishing an entire faith it calling attention to a “bad element’s” connection to it. I can understand, and even sympathize, with this desire. After all, in its more peaceful forms, Islam is no dumber or dangerous than any other religion. I think, however, that the media are going about it all wrong and have a suggestion to help them out, first made four years ago in a drunken rant I wrote a few days prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. At the time, the suggestion was made as a strategy the government should adopt. I’m now thinking that I had the right idea but the wrong target back then.

The idea is fairly simple. Media outlets should start calling any Islamic fundamentalist terrorist group what it is: a cult. This instantly separates these groups from the types of Muslims the media is anxious to avoid offending. Plus, a “cult” is a physical group with a finite number of members and, therefore, is significantly easier to defeat than an abstract concept like “terrorism”.

I encourage everyone reading this to start using the c-word in reference to these fanatics.

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Imagine the local network news casters are telling you that a storm is coming. This might require imagining yourself as someone who still watches the local news, which may be a stretch, but bear with me. Can you picture your local news people? The male anchor with good teeth and hair and the hot, yet professional, woman of indeterminate ethnicity joke with each other, then put on their “grim face” as they talk about the “Storm of the Century”. Custom made graphics woosh in each time they cut to another story about it. The Wacky Weatherman gesticulates wildly in front of a superimposed map, showing a spiral storm cloud off the coast. Reporters out in the street stand in the rain and warn of heavy winds and describe the storm as the coming apocalypse. The news offers a brief snippet of the governor calling the storm “the real deal” and that “as of right now”, your area “is definitely the target for this hurricane” and suggests you might want to think about going to higher ground, and take “small quantities of food for three to four days”. The local news shows shots of people leaving and interviews of people staying. They assure you that they’ll be there covering it all, so stay tuned.

Do you leave?

I wonder how many people in Louisiana and Mississippi looked at the dire warnings on the news and decided to stay because the local news always makes dire warnings about even insignificant weather. If this happened to even one person who got killed, it’s yet another indication (if you needed one) of the media’s collossal failure to fulfill their basic purpose. As John Stewart observes:

A free and independent press is essential to the health of a functioning democracy. It serves to inform the voting public on matters relevant to its well-being. Why they stopped doing that is a mystery.

I’m breaking my own rules by bitching about this without a solution to suggest, but I’m at a loss on how to fix this. Do we just stop watching until they shape up? I’ve been trying that for years and it doesn’t seem to be working. If anything, reducing the number of viewers used to thinking for themselves just makes it worse. Do we just beg them to stop? The blogosphere is starting to marginalize the press in some ways, but this is a mixed blessing, as most blogs check facts more loosely than television and most follow no editorial standard at all. Maybe the point of the blogosphere is really that of fact checker for mainstream media. It’s proving that it does that job really well. Will this turn the media back into something trustworthy? Was it ever trustworthy?

Looking back at how the press covered Katrina before it hit has been enlightening, and I recommend it. You can see a map showing predictions of flooding scenarios, for example. You can see the director of the National Hurricane Center describing the coming Katrina as “really scary” and “a worse-case scenario”. (I’d be curious to see how local TV covered that.) You can see New Orleans main newspaper’s June 2002 story about New Orleans washing away if hit by a big hurricane. You can see Bush follow three paragraphs about Katrina, in which he urges people to seek safe ground, with a dozen about Iraq. Hindsight is, of course, 20/20, but it’s good to see how the world looked before something bad happened, to see if you could recognize the signs of it if it happened again.

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I don’t really have a good story for this, but the title is so brilliant, I had to share it. It would be a great name for a book. Plus, it was overheard from a source I almost never watch: local news. Evidently there was a lot of rain north of Manhattan today.

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Several days after my previous brief mention of Nostradamus, NPR broadcast a story about Mahmoud Abbas. While listening to it, I was still in a prognostication frame of mind and put together some Nostradamus writing with Mr. Abbas.

I don’t put a lot of stock in Nostradamus, but one prediction that seemed to go beyond coincidence is the use of the name “Hister” in relation to a prophesy of a certain German dictator. Nostradamus didn’t use proper names that often, so it’s not like he threw a bunch of names into his quatrains and just happened to get lucky here. He did, however, use another proper name once, allegedly in reference to his “third antichrist”: Mabus.

When listening to the story, I realized it is not much of a leap from “Mahmoud Abbas” to “M. Abbas” to “Mabus”. Foolishly thinking I might be onto something, I googled for “Mahmoud Mabus” and, naturally, got a bunch of hits from Nostradamus fanatics who figured this out a long time ago.

Unfortunately, most of these brains seem to completely ignore what Nostradamus actually wrote. While I have a more or less pluralist view of different belief systems (all belief systems, including mine, are equally useless), it bugs me when people completely ignore the rules of whatever belief system they claim to follow. If you are someone who claims to run your life by following the Anasazi Oracle, that’s great, so long as you actually follow that oracle’s rules.

What Nostradamus wrote about Mabus was this (Century II, Quatrain 62)

Mabus puis tost alors mourra, viendra,
De gens & bestes vne horrible defaite:
Puuis tout à coup la vengeance on verra,
Cent, main, soif, faim, quand courra la comete.

…which means (as translated by John Hogue):

Mabus will soon die, then will come,
A horrible undoing of people and animals,
At once one will see vengeance,
One hundred powers, thirst, famine, when the comet will pass.

This seems to be a pretty clear prediction that someone named “Mabus” will get killed, then a bunch of bad things will happen immediately after. That’s it. For some reason, however, most of the Nostradamus “scholars” out there will go on at great length about how Mabus is the third antichrist and speculate about who he is, in spite of the fact that the above prophesy says nothing of the kind. It is just as likely that the third antichrist kills Mabus. You can’t tell from this prophesy.

An entire belief system seems to have deluded itself by completely ignoring the rules of the system in which they claim to believe (rules like “pay attention to what the prophet actually said”). There have even been TV shows based on the idea that Mabus is the antichrist when there seems to be no foundation for this idea within Nostradamus’ work.

I’m sure at least one Nostradamus fanatic will point out the error of my ways. (Someone will also no doubt point out that if you hold “Mabus” up to a mirror, you get a good approximation of “Saddam”.) I’d also love to hear from anyone who has references to what people before 1900 A.D. thought Mabus meant.

In any case, if Nostradamus is to be believed and if Mahmoud Abbas really is Mabus, sounds like his impending wacking will ignite quite the powder keg. I predict it will also ignite a wave of “we told you sos” from the Nostradamus faithful and at least one TV special, probably on Fox.

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