The Angst-O-Meter: Day 4

by

(From Ctrl+Alt+Del. Click for full-sized incriminating evidence.)

I know I said I was done with the Angst-O-Meter until after the election, but circumstances have intervened and I have to comment on today’s strip, despite the mountain of other stuff on my plate.

So it seems that if, when Shannon was first introduced, you had Ethan leaning on her as an escape from Lilah, well… you were half right. Ethan wasn’t having any of it, but Lilah was sure going to think he was.

This strip, in a way, is really a summary of the past month or so of strips, with a couple of peeks into Lilah’s actual situation and some looks at Lucas’ attempts to patch things up with Kate. As that relationship appears to be on the mend, if slowly, it’s possible the main reason for that subplot may be the last panel of this strip.

Ethan really has been focusing almost singlemindedly on his contest with Christian, and looking back on previous strips, it’s partly his fault. How far has his relationship with Lilah deteriorated that he’s not telling her about his day-to-day life, his day-to-day struggles? Even after Christian reassures him he’s not looking for Lilah, Ethan acts like a paranoid maniac with someone he knows is sensitive right now, leaving him unable to talk about his situation with someone who might be a more useful font for ideas than Shannon turns out to be, which leads to a phone conversation that inadvertently backs up Christian’s story about a cheating Ethan.

There are two reasons I’m not setting the Angst-O-Meter to 100%: Lucas still appears to be on the mend with Kate and the strip is still nominally having punchlines each day. But this strip about a week ago is the last strip that can be said to have a real punchline, and I can just see Ethan going on a woe-is-me diatribe within a couple of strips. And don’t forget Buckley’s ominous warning, back during the miscarriage, that “I know who moves out and when”. He assured people there wouldn’t be too much in the way of woe-is-me diatribes, but it’s sure looking like that’s only because he’s too busy adding more angst-worthy stuff to the fire.

So up goes the Angst-O-Meter to 92% and I could easily justify setting it higher. And I’m pretty darn close to the end of my rope with Ctrl+Alt+Del – it’s pretty much train-wreck fascination at this point.

Sports Watcher for the Weekend of 10/18-19

by

All times PDT.

Saturday
9:30-1 PM: College football, #23 Vanderbilt @ Georgia (Raycom Sports, available free online from Yahoo Sports). When you think about it, the SEC’s new deal isn’t much different from their old one. They even have Arkansas-Kentucky on ESPNU this week. Except their syndicator is ESPN Plus now, so it’s not even available to everyone online. So they’re still screwing themselves out of a good third place game getting national exposure. Maybe ESPNU will become less of the ACC Network, I don’t know.

12:30-3 PM: College football, Kansas @ Oklahoma (ABC, not available in most markets). I’d say the Big 12 gets screwed by never getting reverse mirrored on ESPN with the Big 10 game when the craptastic ACC does, but it does have Texas-Missou in primetime going to the whole country.

Alternately: 12:30-3 PM: College Football, Ohio State @ Michigan State (ABC or ESPN). I just realized that somehow, the Week 7 rankings aren’t on the web site as I thought. Either they got dropped from the backups in Freehostia’s ongoing transfer, or I just forgot them. Sure enough, Sandsday is missing a strip now so it’s the former. You might have wanted to make your last backup after shutting off the file manager, guys – unless you still have backups and you’re sadistically torturing me with the old copy because it’s fresh or something. (Man, how ill-timed is this whole voting sequence, with the cold last weekend and the backing-up this weekend?)

5-8:30 PM: MLB Baseball, Red Sox @ Rays (TBS). Well after that comeback I might actually watch and pay attention to this game. A damn shame it’s not on broadcast.

9-12 AM: Ultimate Fighting Championship, UFC 89 (SpikeTV). Same on both coasts. I don’t think anyone other than diehards cares about the main event match.

Sunday
10-3 PM: NASCAR Sprint Cup Racing, TUMS QuikPak 500 (ABC). I’ve dropped a lot of NASCAR Chase for the Cup races, haven’t I?

5:15-8:30 PM: NFL Football, Broncos @ Patriots (NBC). Hey, remember when the Patriots had a half-decent quarterback for a couple of years?

Wait, WHAT? The MLS edition!

by

Take a look at the “About Major League Soccer” list at the end of the article: MLS is expanding to Philadelphia and no one told me? They’re quadrilateraling and no one told me?!? (The WNBA really needs to get on the ball here!)

MLS already has 16 teams as of 2010 – the addition of Philly will re-balance the conferences at 8 apiece – and will add two more later, as will be announced either later this year or early next, which is insane. You might want to think about breaking them up into divisions within the conferences at this point, certainly once you hit 20.

So with Philly, Atlanta becomes the largest Nielsen market without an MLS team, and – ta da! – Atlanta is one of the teams on the short list of potential expansion candidates. (Montreal, Ottawa, and Vancouver are among the others? Is soccer THAT big in Canada?) Detroit is the largest 2000-definition metro area without an MLS team (followed by Atlanta) and is next on the list of Nielsen markets, but isn’t on the short list to get a team. Instead, it’s Miami (repeating a bad experience and leapfrogging fellow-Florida-bad-experiencer Tampa, along with Phoenix and the Twin Cities, on the Nielsen market list)… along with St. Louis and Portland, the #21 and #22 media markets respectively?!? It’s not even as small as -33 KC, Columbus and Salt Lake, but… they really are going for soccer markets, and I didn’t even think St. Louis was that big on soccer. Maybe they’ve seen Wizards viewership numbers.

St. Louis is #18 on the metro areas list but, in addition to all the ones above except Tampa, leapfrogs Cleveland (who pays attention to Columbus just like in hockey) and San Diego (weren’t they supposed to get Chivas USA at one point?), and Cleveland, Orlando, and Sacramento on the markets list (the latter two are stepbrothers to larger nearby markets everywhere except the NBA anyway – but then again, so is Portland). On the metro areas list Portland also leapfrogs Tampa and Pittsburgh (who’s right behind it on the markets list).

(Worth noting: Most of the cities on the list would also be in the Eastern Conference, necessitating Kansas City to move West. Portland and Vancouver are the only exceptions.)

I should probably comment on this before I forget again.

by

So I guess now we know how FSN is going to port its new graphics package to other sports.

Not shown: The logo bug in the corner. Does it, perhaps, as might be expected from other evidence, show the new name of the network, “FS Arizona”? No. From what I’ve seen on, say, FSN’s Final Score program and read on Wikipedia, it would read “FS Coyotes”… and would be displayed in Coyotes colors. That suggests a de-emphasis on regional identities in general (something FSN has waffled on in the past) and indeed, the potential for regional identities to be rendered superfluous.

We can presumably expect a similar bug for the NBA, but as the shot clock doesn’t “belong” to anybody, I don’t know where it would be displayed. Maybe it would only be shown when needed over the team with the ball? It would get kind of awkward if it kept shuttling back and forth on changes of possession… and I still have no clue how this box is going to work with baseball.

An addendum to my previous posts on global warming

by

To say the least, I have not been getting in as many posts on these topics I feel so strongly about as I would have liked. I think I started falling behind when I was stricken with a cold over the weekend, and subconsciously started using that as an excuse to goof off once I started losing the momentum. It doesn’t help that Blogger-in-draft is still buggy when it comes to pasting in information in IE7; I was working on a post offline, not backing up anything in any way, and found that it is still prone to coughing up on me. I’ve planned to put up the first part of that post on Sunday, but after starting last Sunday or Monday I haven’t started again AT ALL…S Ethejw,hvwgfmjklcxvk

I HAD intended to spend enough time on global warming and mass transit that it would sort of bleed in to a return to more political posts. Given the amount of work I’m about to start on, that’s looking unlikely. I’m going to start again tonight, this time using Word as the basis of the post in question, and I have no idea how that will go. Things might start looking a bit iffy on other fronts – I haven’t started putting together the next College Football Schedule, and won’t start until tomorrow at the soonest.

But I do want to make a clarification for anyone who’s seen my rundown of global warming-fixing options and my conclusion that there’s only one or two approaches that will green up our transportation paradigm other than mass transit investment. I didn’t mention offshore drilling for what should be obvious reasons. Of course I have heard that it won’t do a lick to lower gas prices appreciably, but also, my emphasis was on global warming. That’s also why I’m skeptical of T. Boone Pickens’ natural gas crusade and why I was always skeptical of the biofuels craze and why I’m still skeptical about hydrogen.

I think, when we talk about alternative fuels for our cars, we tend to mix up two different goals: solving global warming, and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. With the latter, any alternative fuel will do. Any one you want. You want biofuels? No problem. You want hydrogen? No problem. It doesn’t matter what we pick as long as it stops us from contributing to, as Pickens keeps ramming down our throats, “the largest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind”. But for global warming, we can’t settle for less. We need to make sure we curb emissions, not just oil use.