Thursday, September 25, 2003

There Is Only One Way In my referrer links page today, there is this gem: Someone has searched on Google for the text: "Ways to give yourself a blowjob" Look, I really can only think of one way to do that, and you either can or can't do it.  Google can't help you.  And unfortunately, neither can Pipeline.     2:11:55 PM    Say what?[]

Will the real Donovan McNabb please step up? The Seer Sees: Week 4 of the NFL This is a trouble week, the kind of week that should only see hardcore gamblers and lunatics laying down wagers on more than a couple games.  Why?  Injuries and road favorites.  Injuries come in three flavors in the NFL.  Flavor One is when you know a guy is out, and you know enough about his backup to know whether he is good or bad.  You can deal with a Flavor One injury, because what you need as a wagerer is certainty, or at least a close approximation of the illusion of certainty. Flavor Two injuries are where you know a guy is going to be out, but you don't know a damn thing about how his replacement is going to play, or how the rest of the injured player's team is going to adjust their scheme.  There's uncertainty there.  Uncertainty bad. Flavor Three injuries are the worst, though.  We'll call it the Edgerrin James Flavor this week, because James is, as of today, 50-50 this weekend.  What the Hell?  Now you don't know whether to evaluate the Colts with or without James, and you don't know if Dominick Rhodes, his backup, is going to play, either.  Of course, it's no coincidence that the Saints don't know, either.  The Seer only has to pick the games; the Saints have to come up with a gameplan without knowning who they'll play against. The list of injuries this week is a long one, but that's just par for the course as the NFL wears on.  Still, in a week where Daunte Culpepper, Randy Moss, Clinton Portis, Marshall Faulk, Edge James, the entire Patriots defense, David Boston and a few others are likely to be reduced or removed from game action this week, it makes for a tougher slate to pick against. And then there are the road favorites.  More or less, line dogma says that being the home team is worth 3 points.  So if you have two teams that are a pick 'em at a neutral site, the team that is home is going to be a 3 point favorite.  But the reality is, winning on the road ain't easy in the NFL, and covering spreads sometimes just doesn't happen the way it should.  You know more or less that at least two road favorites aren't going to cover.  Last week, for example...Well, now that I look at it, only one road favorite failed to cover last week, and that was the Packers.  God, that means all the road favorites are due to tank this week! Well, the reality is that I haven't come up with a hard and fast rule on road favorites, and I'm not so into this that I'm going to go out and do research beyond what my own picks and head and gut tell me, because I fear that would be crossing a line of enthusiasm and perceived knowlege that might actually lead me to want to try to persuade Jane to let me lay money down on these games, and that's no good for anybody at all.  At least until I start hitting my 58% goal.  Then she'll be begging me to put the money down. And now that I look at the lines, I notice that there aren't even that many road favorites this week.  I got that notion from a panicked Packers fan who was talking incoherently to me on the phone at 2:00 AM about the heat in Arizona during the Cardinals game, and then something about road games and the Lambeau Leap and bratwursts being better than cheddarwursts, and I don't even remember all of what this poor shellshocked chap had to say.  It turns out he was wrong, dead wrong, about the number of scary road favorites this week, though he turned out to be a sage voice of reason on the shortcomings of the cheddarwurst.  Let's jump right in, shall we? Week 4 Patriots @ Redskins, Redskins by 1.5 The Patriots are a troubling lot.  Their Week 1 massacre at the hands of the Bills is still working to keep their lines skewed, and now they have lost Roosevelt Colvin and run-stopping DT Ted (State of) Washington, as well as a couple of key LB's.  Injuries are really hurting that D.  But Bill Belichick is a master of preparation, and you have to think that he might have some tricks up his sleeve for Rookie QB Patrick R.  The Skins are due for a slight stop to their momentum. The Seer Sees: Patriots beat the spread Chiefs @ Ravens, Chiefs by 3 Well, this is a scary road favorite.  The only decent offensive team the Ravens have played is the Steelers, and the Chiefs are a far sight better than that team, as they proved in Week 2.  Priest Holmes is out to show the Ravens that they may have made a mistake in not keeping him around, when they chose to go with Jamal Lewis instead.  Two great backs, but only one great offense.  The Seer is very wary of this game, but one of these teams seems to be a lot better than the other... The Seer Sees: Chiefs cover Eagles @ Bills, Bills by 3 I think this is the critical game of the week.  It's a tough one to pick.  McNabb and co. have looked clueless in their first two weeks, and I have to think the two weeks off may have been as much of a detriment as a benefit.  Still, McNabb is better than he has shown, and the Seer expects Philly to come out with some simple formations to get his confidence back.  The Bills were just brutalized by Ricky Williams last Sunday night, but the Eagles don't have that kind of RB.  The Eagles are missing some key people in the secondary, though, and Bledsoe and co. are itching to get back on the field after sitting on the sidelines most of last week. The Seer Sees: Bills cover Titans @ Steelers, Steelers by 3 Another tough one.  These are always great games.  The Titans came up big against the Saints last week, but laid an egg against Indy the week before.  Tough to know which team will show up.  Still, the Seer expects this to be a very close game,  Closer than 3, though? The Seer Sees: Titans beat the spread Bengals @ Browns, Browns by 5.5 In a week of tough picks, this one looks like a breather.  The Bengals are an improving lot, and the Seer can only guess that people are heartened by the Browns' last drive against the 49ers last week, and figure that will carry over.  The Browns should be better than they are, but the Bengals are getting better.  5.5 seems big against a Browns team that has struggled to put up points all season long. The Seer Sees: Bengals beat the spread 49ers @ Vikings, off the board This game isn't even on the board, because of all the injuries.  Since the Seer is a slave to the board, we won't pick this game, either.  Gut feeling?  The Seer doesn't think the Vikings go 4-0. Falcons @ Panthers, Panthers by 6 This just in: The Panthers are for real.  They have a bad-ass defensive line and a workhorse RB in Stephen Davis, and a smart defensive-minded coach in John Fox.  Fox's offense is a bit too vanilla for my tastes, but when you have mediocre QB's and a stud RB, that's probably smart.  The Falcons are sinking fast, with only a victory over green Dallas to crow about.  The Redskins loss at home, after being up 17-0, was a killer.  QB Doug Johnson is immobile, and the Panthers' D may further immobilize him. The Seer Sees: Panthers cover Cardinals @ Rams, Rams by 10.5 Hmm.  OK.  So the Cardinals did win a game last week.  Maybe they aren't quite as bad as everyone thought.  The Rams?  Well, Marshall Faulk is gone, and there is talk that they might go conservative this week and run the ball.  Who knows?  It's a big spread.  Sometimes, when a team finally breaks through and wins a game, they gain a sense of purpose that can fuel overall improvement.  Then again, sometimes teams only win one game a year.  The Rams haven't shown the Seer enough to think that a 10.5 point spread is automatic, and Jeff Blake is getting major yards through the air. The Seer Sees: Cardinals beat the spread Jaguars @ Texans, Jaguars by 3 How bad are the Jags, when they are only favored by 3 against the Texans?  Of course, one of these teams is winless, and it ain't the Texans.  The Houston crowd will be loud, though, and the Seer has a hunch this will be a close game. The Seer Sees: Texans beat the spread Chargers @ Raiders, Raiders by 6.5 The Chargers have been an abomination this season, and now they have injury problems on the O-line, and a possible team-ordered suspension against the over-inflated David Boston.  The Raiders, on the other hand, look soooo old.  The passing game isn't working like it used to, as the receivers can't get seperation, and the defenses have adjusted to the short passing attack.  There is talk from Raider camp that they might revamp the offense and go with more of a pounding, running attack.  We'll see.  I think the Raiders bounce back big-time this week, as they rally behind returned Super Bowl AWOL psychotic freak Barrett Robbins.  Meanwhile, LaDainian Tomlinson is the new Corey Dillon in the NFL, a waste of a premier running back on a terrible team. The Seer Sees: Raiders cover Cowboys @ Jets, Jets by 3 ESPN's John Clayton, the Seer's favorite NFL reporter because he's such a poindexter that we imagine him getting stuffed into lockers all across the league, had a great line about this game, saying that Cowboys coach Bill Parcells might win more games in the Meadowlands this year than the Jets do.  The Seer can't help but feel for the Jets, who have fallen from the glory days of early NFL upset darlings and 80's era dance bad to having their wagon so completely abandoned after Chad Pennington's injury.  "But what about this game?", you say with $500 big ones burning a hole in the breast pocket of your smoking jacket.  The Cowboys aren't pretty.  But they are getting better.  Parcells wins again. The Seer Sees: Cowboys beat the spread Lions @ Broncos, Broncos by 13 Geez, that's a big spread.  The Seer has seen the Lions play.  The Seer has seen the Broncos play. The Seer Sees: Broncos cover Colts @ Saints, Colts by 1.5 Ah, now this is the scary road favorite.  Scary because of Edge James and Dominick Rhodes' playing statuses.  Scary because the Saints are an enigma, but seem to be a slightly better enigma at home.  If the Saints would just run the ball with Deuce McAllister, things will be just fine.  Can you do that for the Seer? The Seer Sees: Saints beat the spread Monday Night Packers @ Bears, Packers by 4 Yeah, like a new $500 million, uglified Soldier Field can come down and play the offensive line for the Bears.  Loss to the Cardinals or not, this line is a joke.  It's Brett Favre, it's Monday Night, and it's against the Bears.  Easy, easy money.  The Seer is emptying his bank account as this goes to press. The Seer Sees: Packers cover There you have it.  The Seer sees this week with the clarity of a mariner caught off the Newfoundland coast in the midst of a dense and persistent fog.  This is a Tough Week.  Only the Packers and Panthers picks seem trustworthy.  Some weeks you make your breaks.  Some weeks you just go broke.  The Seer has a bad feeling about this one. 12:43:38 PM    Say what?[]

Fussy I was what they call a "fussy eater".  Still am, in a lot of ways.  I was a complete pain in the ass.  The list of foods that I wouldn't eat or even allow near my food was long and without rhyme or reason.  Ketchup?  Yes.  Tomatos?  Not in a million years.  I would claim an allergy to mustard if it found its way onto my burger.  I once refused to drink my milk, after someone took a drink of it who had just eaten a pickle.  The milk tasted and reeked of pickles after that, and I stand by that story to this day. Mealtimes were always a trial for my mom, as she tried to cook meals that met my strict dietary regimen.  But she was a good mother, and so while she wouldn't let me go hungry, and did prepare things I liked, she also would try to get me to eat other things.  Things like cooked carrots, or some other infernal culinary abomination.  My parents used all the strategies they could think of.  "It's good for you." "You'll like it." "You won't get dessert if you don't eat it." "You can't leave the table till you eat it." None of this worked.  I didn't care if it was good for me.  I knew I wouldn't like it, and I had the hair-trigger gag reflex to prove it.  I didn't care about dessert.  And above all, I could wait them out.  You see, waiting wasn't a strong suit for a family that was pounding Pepsi like it was oxygen.  None of us could sit still for more than a couple hours anyway, and seeing as I was an only child, I was used to sitting in a chair and daydreaming.  I can't think of a single time I couldn't just wait them out.  I can only think of a few times that I actually had to eat something I didn't want to eat.  I did, on a couple of occasions, have to get creative about making my food disappear.  Sometimes food found it's way behind a chair in the corner, while my parents weren't looking.  Weeks later, while playing in my room, I would hear my mom say things like "How did these carrots get back here?"  Hey!  That was my cue to go play outside. Bad parenting?  Hardly.  When a kid chooses to be stubborn, as I did, what can you really do?  You can't force-feed a child--The kid surely isn't going to grow to like the food in question, and then they'll resent you for physical force that comes with the territory.  At some point, if you're kid really decides they are going to be a fussy eater, they're going to be a fussy eater unless you can figure out a way to make them break.  I never broke. And while I would sit there, oppressed by sour kraut or asparagus or beets or whatever other gawdawful thing was on my plate, I would think to myself, "Never!"  Never would I force my child to sit through this sad charade when I was a parent.  Never would I be a harpy parent with the pointing fingers and the rolling of the eyes and the predictions of the stunted growth and the being ostracized during lunchtime and the failing to get into culinary school.  "I will not treat my child that way!" But plans go awry. Last night, we had rice for dinner, with a side of broccoli.  The rice was fried in chicken broth, with roasted garlic and pinenuts in it.  Linus likes rice and broccoli, so he's already way, way ahead of where I was.  He is not what you could really call a "fussy eater".  He's pretty average.  But he has his moments, and last night was one. He took a look at the rice, and he promptly declared that he didn't like it.  He didn't like the brown things in it.  We explained that it was garlic, and that he eats garlic all the time.  No dice. He was defiant.  We used our trump card, the only card we usually need--"You won't get any dessert if you don't eat your rice."  (I once lobbied for us to have more pudding for dessert so I could cry out "How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?", Pink Floyd-style, which would then also allow me to declare, LL Cool J-style, that "pudding is delicious", but so far no dice on that one.) Linus asked what we would have for dessert, and I explained that we would be having delicious blueberry-vanilla ice cream shakes (a lie), or that he could possibly just have a bowl of ice cream with chocolate syrup on it.  That usually causes him to belly up to the chow line, but tonight his answer was different: "I don't want dessert." He said it with an air of smug satisfaction, the way someone might say "check mate", or "But I haven't been drinking, officer", or "Too bad about the Packers".  He knew he had won that round. Jane then initiated guerilla warfare.  She took his rice, and patiently scraped out the pine nuts and roasted garlic so that only pure, brown rice was on his spoon.  This seemed to placate him somewhat, but he still resisted.  And yet, for some reason I do not know, perhaps because he has been bred with Jane's patience gene or whatever, Linus is not as stubborn as I was, which is a Good Thing.  He took the bite of the rice.  And then Jane prepared another bite for him, and he took that.  And he liked it, though he knew that he could not show this.  He ate four bites, then five.  And then Jane and I crossed a line I swore I would never cross when I was a child.  I made eye contact with Jane, and we looked down at the bowl of Linus's rice as she was preparing another bite.  I motioned, ever so slightly, down at the bowl.  I spoke under my breath, the words not even intelligible.  They didn't have to be.  She knew what I was trying to say.  She slipped a piece of garlic and pinenut into the rice, then covered it with more rice.  Yes!  We were going to trick him!  We watched him open his mouth to eat this loaded bite of rice, like Claude Raines watched Ingrid Bergman in Notorious as she slowly drank her poisoned tea. He ate it!  And he liked it.  And she kept loading up bites for him. And this is the part I felt bad about: It was so damn funny.  Jane and I were smiling back and forth at each other at how we were tricking our trusting son.  I so badly wanted to leap from my chair and point and yell, "HA!  You fool!  We have deceived you!  Look at this rice!  You are eating the garlic and pinenuts and you don't even know it.  And you like it!" I am sure that my parents pulled this kind of stunt on me.  I am sure they must have smiled back and forth among themselves as I ate some thing, some horrible thing that was hidden in a friendly food, a kind of dinnertime Trojan Horse.  But if I had ever, ever, perceived this trickery, or the fact that they were laughing at me the way we laughed at Linus last night, I can't tell you how furious I would have been.  It would have set their cause back years.  I still might not be eating rice, carrots or broccoli. And so we had to keep it under wraps last night.  We had to be careful.  No need to rub it in.  Just be happy for another healthy meal consumed, another taste gradually acquired. And the best part?  We never even had the ice cream last night!  Sucker. 11:14:28 AM    Say what?[]

© Copyright 2003 Doug Hennessee. Last update: 9/30/2003; 11:51:56 AM.