BillSaysThis

Sorry, but I just am not a Marty Schottenheimer fan. Sure he goes to the playoffs often enough but has he even gone to the Super Bowl? No my friends, he has not. But

San Diego hired him anyway. No mention on how the player control dispute that appeared to hold up the deal was resolved. I agree with Kamla (author of the linked article) that the Chargers are unlikely to reach the eight win mark in 2002. And not surprisingly, Norv Turner ankled the OC job rather than work with the man who replaced him in D.C. Turner’s best bet is to go work as OC for buddy Dave Wanstadt at Miami and see if he can work a miracle on Jay Fiedler.

Once again a team goes for a comfortable retread instead of elevating an innovative, possibly minority assistant. Of the eight major coaching openings I tracked, with Tampa Bay still open, three assistants got hired, two college coaches moved, and Dungy traded up to what could be a new powerhouse in Indy if he can duplicate Lovie Smith’s defensive makeover. Rumor, which may or may not resemble reality, has Al Davis just waiting for Tampa Bay to fill it’s opening so he can dump disgruntled Jon Gruden with nowhere to go but home to play with his Chucky dolls. If he does, the other half of the rumor is that Denny Green will put down his fishing rod away. Let’s see.

The last two years have been a disaster for tech company stocks, I don’t need to tell you that. Through all of this, though, IBM stock held up fairly well and remained between $110 and $125 until the last couple of weeks when the stock went on a deep slide from $125 to $103 today. Why the sudden change? Miracleworker Lou Gerstner is retiring after nine years at the top in place of IBM lifer Sam Palmisano. The big change at IBM during Gerstner’s tenure is the move to push services revenue instead of hardware and software. I’m a little surprised at the stock price movement since Palmisano has been a leader of this change, his ascension was widely expected even if the timing was not, and IBM is largely producing what Wall Street expects. Oh well, just goes to show you can’t predict the market.

Moondog says his number one–number one!—overrated artist is Bruce Springsteen. Moondog has a pretty cool website called The Rock ‘n’ Roll Vault, with lots of neat information and lists. But anyone can see that, with a couple of exceptions, one can switch his “favorite artists” list for the “overrated” one and have a much more accurate picture. I suppose it’s all about taste, very subjective and personal, but how you say Jackson Browne and Manfred Mann are among your favorites and not love Springsteen? I was surfing through his site, expecting to see Springsteen at any moment and when I didn’t, used the site search to look him up. I found only two interesting mentions: the overrated list and a review of a book called Flowers in the Dustbin. The latter mention of Springsteen? “The remaining pages of Flowers in the Dustbin discuss Bruce Springsteen, punk rock and of course the loss of Elvis, none of which would have been missed.”

As a longtime Oz fan, I noticed that PBS was showing a modern take on Shakespeare’s Othello starring Eamonn Walker and thought I might watch it. Very interesting, Walker plays John Othello, a police commissioner in present day London who has the misfortune to be jumped up over his friend and mentor Ben Jago (Iago). Jago, played here by Christopher Eccleston, goes a little mad and plots his revenge. The dialogue–script is by Andrew Davies (Bridget Jones’ Diary, Emma, personal fave House of Cards)–is modern but echoes the original nicely. Walker and Eccleston, along with Keeley Hawes playing Othello’s wife, are all strong. Check out the PBS website linked to the title if you want some background and good reference material on this production and the original. Recommended.

One of my good friends, Roxanne Rosales, married her fiance Thomas Sutter recently and they forwarded this picture from the party:

Just want to send them my love and best wishes for a long and happy marriage with lots of little ones. My only advice: never go to sleep angry with each other. Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Sutter!!

[Via garret] Perhaps this is going to be a recurring topic for me, though I can tell you it sure gets my goat. Recently, the New Mexico State Police conducted a DWI sobriety checkpoint in Santa Fe. While in operation the police stopped six drunk driving suspects and 17 “undocumented immigrants.” As the

Santa Fe New Mexican reports, the local immigrants rights groups are up in arms. Ooh, that’s not fair, they said. Cops can’t stop people at sobriety checkpoints AND see if they are in the ountry legally! One Undersheriff quoted in the article declared, “A sobriety checkpoint is for sobriety. We wouldn’t ask that. We shouldn’t ask it. We have enough to do with criminals without bothering people who are here just to try to make a better life.”

I say: Are these people in the country legally? Did the police violate some international treaty or convention by checking their documentation? Did the people of this country tell the federal government to repeal the laws regarding legal immigration? The answer to all is no. We don’t owe people in other countries the right to come here and break our laws, not even simply the ones regarding immigration. If people who are here legally want to change the laws, go for it. Otherwise, don’t complain when illegal immigrants have to leave.

In this article, writer Elaine Ackerman writes up the age old plaint that complex software gets shipped with bugs still remaining. Well gee. Slow news day? Writing more politely, I sent the following letter:

Ms. Ackerman,

Your article is correct in saying that the immensely complex software programs like Windows XP are nearly impossible to test completely with current methods. However, software could be significantly better tomorrow, though still imperfect, if the executives of the publishing companies implemented and enforced good coding practices. The example of buffer overflows is a good example; if the programmers had checked the return

values prior to using them there would be no error. Since the pressure is on programmers to deliver too quickly and on managers to keep costs down, simple things like code reviews and mentoring don’t happen, much less more complex improvements such as the SEI processes implemented are just not going to happen. I was amused after finishing your article to note that while a corporate shill like the Gartner vice president was quoted, there was no working programmer interviewed.

Regards…

All kudos for the War on Terror aside, Dr. David A. Sprintzen of Long Island University has compiled a sad, sorry

list of accomplishments for the Bush Occupation. These type of decisions plus the likelihood that he’ll get a chance to nominate two or more justices to the Supreme Court are exactly why I opposed his election. With any luck, this year’s midterm elections will hold to form and the Democrats will pick up enough seats in the House to block too much damage.

Have you seen the commercials on TV or heard them on radio? Are you annoyed too? Well, I did a little Googling and here are some of the English language results. One version is a statistical computer program “for survival analysis with emphasis on Cox regression with various extensions, such as allowing easy introduction of communal (external) covariates, etc, etc.” Another is a set of paintings by Charles Burchfield. A third is from eServ Global, a solution family for the mobile telecommunications provider and Internet markets. Not to be left out is the Meaning of Life, which seems to be about believing in God and perfecting man through that belief. Or is this the meaning of life? Anyway, none of these seem to be the one behind the annoying commercials.

Some films just have a very distinctive sensibility and Brother is one of them. This movie is somewhat of a kind with The Last Seduction in that the lead character has no problem with hardass murder. Written, edited and directed by and starring Takeshi Kitano, Brother is the story of a Yakuza gang leader who is defeated in a gang war and forced to flee to America, where his younger brother already lives as a small time drug dealer. Kitano’s Aniki (Big Brother) takes over his brother’s gang and drives them to become a force in the LA underworld until they become too big and run into a force they can’t defeat by ruthless violence, the Mafia.

Perhaps the culture gap between me and Japan is just too wide, or that this is Kitano’s first attempt at a film largely in English, but overall the movie didn’t work for me. Plot gaps and inexplicable to me behavior occur throughout. The acting was good, especially Omar Epps as the gang member Big Brother bonds with, Susumu Terajima as Kitano’s faithful follower, and Masaya Kato as the rival LA Japanese ganglord Kitano teams up with. This is the kind of movie where characters commit hara-kiri onscreen over public insults and others just shoot their guns without warning and massacre the opposition. Your mileage may vary.

These Playmates and others will be swallowing bugs, jumping off bridges, and doing other amusing things in bikinis on a special Super Bowl halftime edition of the annoying and vile show Fear Factor.

In a largely sucessful attempt at being wacky, Rick Kamla talks to the spirits of some dear departed (Lombardi, Hendrix, Hartman, MLK…) in

Kamla Unfiltered: Altered State of the NFL to get some answers on the NFL. Read the whole thing but I like the coaching comments well down into the article as Kamla has ‘Phil Hartman’ get nasty on Tampa Bay and San Diego. Both teams are still headless.

In other news, John Fox was announced as the new coach of the Panthers yesterday. He immediately named former All-Pro linebacker Jack Del Rio, an All American at USC in his college days who won notice as linebackers coach the last few years at Baltimore, his defensive coordinator.

San Diego seemed headed for ex-Cleveland, Kansas City, and Washington head coach Marty Schottenheimer until he and GM John Butler bumped ugly over the issue of personnel control. Butler has it and Schottenheimer wants it. Marty can afford to be picky, somewhat, since the Redskins are on the hook for $2.5 million a year for the next three years less whatever another team pays him. But he’s getting older and one wonders how marketable he’ll be in 2003 if no job comes together this year.

16 years have passed since we saw Michael Corleone foiled in his attempt to protect his family and get out of “this thing of ours.” The years have been harsh to him, yet he is more powerful and feared than ever at the start of Godfather: Part III. The stakes have escalated as well; Michael’s push for legitimacy has him donating hundreds of millions of dollars to a corrupt Catholic Church in exchange for their golden share in one of the world’s largest real estate companies. But in this morality lesson, evil, no matter how well intentioned, cannot win in the end.

Critics have panned this last episode of the saga mercilessly since it was released in 1990 and I can’t say I disagree with them. Director Coppola, on his DVD commentary track, even seems to disown responsibility and claims studio interference. His casting of daughter Sofia as Corleone daughter Mary was surely his own mistake, even if it was made out of love. I noticed on IMDB that this was essentially her only substantial acting role, although she did write and direct the acclaimed Virgin Suicides in 1999.

Pacino is his usual brilliant self. Keaton is a non-entity onscreen although a recent Pacino biography claimed that the two were near marriage at the time in real life after being off and on lovers for decades. Andy Garcia is just a little too comic book-like as the bastard son of Sonny Corleone.

Not recommended.

This is kind of like daydreaming, only you do it in the shower. And you kind of meander into it, not through any conscious choice or direction. One minute your happily going through the shower routine, wash the hands, wash the face, shampoo the hair…next thing you know you think you’re all done but you don’t remember if you lathered the soap up and down your body. I get lost thinking about some topic of the day or some fantasy woman or things I want/need/ought to do that day. Did I finish everything that was supposed to be washed? I just don’t know. Does this every happen to you?

I can’t find the webpage but yesterday I read a complaint by someone that there aren’t any great female villainous roles. Then I saw 1994’s Last Seduction on the schedule for HBO tonight and said to myself, “Self, don’t you remember that Linda Fiorentino plays an incredibly bad, amoral woman in that flick?” So I watched just to make sure. And sure enough, Self was right. Fiorentino plays a woman who just wants to live the good life in Manhattan and has a sexy enough body and devious enough mind to get Bill Pullman and Peter Berg to do what’s needed for her to get there. Drug deals, welshing on loan sharks, murder, nothing is going to stand in her way.

Excellent script by Steve Barancik, whose only other credited script is for the upcoming Samuel Jackson thriller “No Good Deed” also features a manipulative female lead (the also slender, small breasted, sexy Milla Jovovich). Good pacing and direction from John Dahl, he really gets performances from the leads as well as Bill Nunn and J.T. Walsh. Much better than anything Dahl’s done since, unfortunately. But this one is highly recommended.

Check it out! Ev has delivered a key feature for the new verison of Blogger, a new version of the BlogThis! bookmarklet. Not only does it support the title field but the edit window is now resizable and provides access to all the little tools of the main Blogger client. Love it!

While the actual coronation appears to be coming tomorrow, John Fox is in Charlotte today for final meetings before being named the Panthers new coach. This is a good choice for the team, Fox has done excellent work for the Giants as defensive coordinator since 1997. What I wonder is why they chose him over Ravens defensive coordinator Marvin Lewis. The two coaches have very similar backgrounds and ages and both are expected to make solid head coaches. ESPN should do a behind the scenes special one year with cameras at some of these interviews to let us know what goes on.

In other news, former Giants fullback Maurice Carthon (from the 1986 and ’90 Super Bowl teams) was named offensive coordinator of the Detroit Lions today, moving up from the running backs coaching slot. Hard to believe Carthon has been coaching for eight years already. The Lions also added former Vikings OC Sherm Lewis as a special assistant; after the season the Lions just had, can’t blame them for wanting as much brainpower as possible focused on that side of the ball. Don’t forget that Lion HC Marty Mornhinweg’s background is also on the go side.

Speaking of offensive, the Cowboys sure need help and rumors have them offering the OC job to former Bengals/Jets coach Bruce Coslet. Some guys just aren’t meant to be head coaches even though they really look the part, and Coslet is one of them. A great offensive mind but never really got all the pieces of the head job put together. Star player-wise, the ‘Boys have an aging but still juiced Emmit Smith and confusion at quarterback: Rookie Quincy Carter was named the starter and spent much of the year on the injury list, Anthony Wright seemed to fizzle after starting a few games, Ryan Leaf didn’t impress in his third stop and looks like the stop for a cup of coffee is over, and latest news is the team is offering Chad Hutchinson a multi-year contract with a $2 million signing bonus. Hutchinson was a big time college QB at Stanford but has spent the last four years as a pitcher in the St. Louis Cardinals minor league system and has been disabled twice in the past two years with elbow trouble.

Writing in the Slasdot thread The End of Cyber BS, wunderhorn1 posts an amazing update of the Gil Scott-Heron song poem, morphing the lyrics to catch the happenings of our time. Worth reading.

Can you imagine this 620 (that’s right, six hundred twenty) carat diamond called the Sefadu on your or your fiance/wife’s finger? It’s only the world’s largest, so by most any definition, you would win that game.

Ev’s mention of a dream today reminds me that I wanted to write up my own dream from my last sleep. Of course, several hours later, the details are beginning to slip away but.. I was in college, I think as a student again, and a group of 15 or 20 of us were taken hostage. Our keepers were quite brutal and harsh although I was fortunate (it was my dream, right?) to escape most of their anger. Towards the end, though, one of the bad men was focusing on a woman close to me, emotionally close, though not anyone I recognized from waking life, and I put myself in between them. The man spoke quite angrily to me, pushed a gun in my face and asked if I wanted to move. I didn’t. He slapped me in the face with the gun and the woman jumped to me.

All of a sudden there was chaos, I heard gun shots and screaming. A rescue attempt. I jumped at the man who was menacing us, landing my head square in his stomach and knocking the wind out of him. We were near a door and I grabbed the woman’s hand and we raced out. Didn’t stop running for about five minutes when I was about to keel over. Some police came over to us and then I woke up. Didn’t even stick around to find out how grateful the woman might have been.