I’m a little bit disappointed with the Seattle Seahawks. You see… I was getting jazzed for yet another 7-9, 8-8, or 9-7 record … the Seattle Seahawks franchise holding the NFL record for such records. It’s sort of like this: The Chicago Cubs fan secretly wants the Cubs to continue losing, and in their heart of hearts a few years ago were glad when Steve Bartman interfered with what would have been a key out in what would have thrown them into the World Series. To have it otherwise would be to destroy the identity. I believe a Seattle Seahawks fan needs their team to finish with a deadeningly average record… which basically entails that the team loses such big games as they managed to win a week ago.

In case you don’t remember, or didn’t care to begin with: the Seahawks snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Their offense struggled for 59 minutes of the game. Bill Purcells was content to allow his team to run down the clock on toward a 10 to 3 victory… for basically the entire freaking game. A statement of defiance: “We’re not even going to give you the dignity of losing in a blowout!” And then… the final minute… like a Sphynx rising from the ashes, touchdown, kick-off, Interception, field goal, Victory. The crowd at Seattle’s fabled Generic Corporate Conglomerate Stadium goes wild!

How do I console myself after something like that? With the knowledge that this team has been through this before. And before. And before. Check out this malarky!:

During the offseason, Seahawks running back Shaun Alexander, an unsigned “franchise” player who considered holding out of training camp, kept taking strange calls from his teammates. He was intrigued.

“It’s tough to articulate,” quarterback Matt Hasselbeck said of the different feeling about this edition of the Seahawks. “It’s a feeling that things are just different than they’ve been here in the past. I know a lot of us have always taken pride in being a Seahawk, and taken pride in doing our jobs. We’re probably a little bit closer as a team, closer as a group.

Examine the Seahawks’s games this season — the manner they lost in their two losses and the way they nearly gave away that game against Atlanta (in a “there’s something similar about this team” feel) and I wonder how this “new feeling” that the team felt managed to hide itself until either their victory against the Rams or their victory againt Dallas — Hence, these statements come across a bold-faced lie and just another attempt to sell tickets.

In fact, go back in time a year to just before the team’s melt down to the Rams — which threw the team back toward a 9 and 7 season… go back to the first Holmgren-run season where the team started 8-2, before stumbling to another brilliant 9-7 season… go back to the Warren Moon era, two seasons, the second where they stampeded their way to a 3-0 record with blow-out victories… (and the first season featuring a game where I very distinctly recall an exciting victory over the Oakland Raiders where they won despite a whole mass of things going wrong for the team as being called “a game the old Seahawks would have lost” — which is to say, exactly the same thing said about that last victory over the Dallas Cowboys.) Incidentally, the team went 8-8 both seasons.

I am convinced you will get the same article template and player-speechlet for every one of those seasons at various games… sometimes with a caveat that “this just feels different from those faux-success fits and starts they had in the past.) I wish I had the fortitude to dredge such articles up, but you will just have to trust me that they exist.

Therein lies my solace and assurance that the Seahawks will manage to muddle their way to a 7-9, 8-8, or 9-7 season. 10-6, if you must… even though that blows the whole “single digit middling” psychology.
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So the New Orleans Saints are going to be moving to Oklahoma City or Los Angeles (or Oklahoma City on the way to Los Angeles)? Sure, there are assurances that they’re not moving… but such was the case for the Cleveland Browns, (even though they got a “Cleveland Browns” franchise back — and even a claim to the rich history of mediocrity that the Cleveland Browns have — they lost a franchise for a handful of years as the team moved to Baltimore.) That’s just great! I like how a Hurricane can just blow your city’s football franchise away! (Oh, and supposing this goes down: chalk up another great “Sports Illustrated Cover Curse” moment.)

Given the history of such things (ie: G Gordon Liddy and Oliver North), I expect Scooter Libby will be given his own radio talk show after everything sorts out. Actually, I suspect that’s the whole reason to be involved in these things — it’s a jumping off point for a different job within the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy”.

ENTITY ONE: Conclusion; if it goes to Trial, and if no adjustment in the Times of Events happens, he will probably be convicted on all counts but like in the Old Mafia Days, if he keeps his mouth shut he will come out of it a rich man. He could get Two to Five years on all counts but would never go into the third year of serving his sentence, or so I think. What is not so clear is what this whole thing is leading up to. Even I can see several directions Mr Fitzgerald could go, but whether he will take it any further or not is open to his own personal integrity, how he views the Investigative Task assigned him, and to the Politics as Usual procedural method of doing things in Washington.

ENTITY TWO: `…if he keeps his mouth shut…’, `…old mafia days…’ I think you are assuming a degree of integrity that is not to be found in the current adminstration or republican leadership. Inconvenient people disapearing and their bodies getting buried in secret locations (aka Hoffa) is also an old mafia tradition. And a big part of the reason he is in this jam is because he could not keep his mouth shut in the first place.

So…say he gets convicted and tossed in the lockup about this time next year. Six months after that, he starts work on his tell-all book, which hits the presses in, say two years time (fall 2007). Once word gets to the wrong (?) ears he is working on such a project, just what do you think his life expectency will be?

ENTITY ONE: However, all that talking does not necessarily carry over into his writing some kind of expose. To people like him who have lived all their lives in the shadow of some elected official, it naturally follows in his trade that he has written very little over the years, actually, it would have been very stupid of him to have often put his name to the printed page. Once on paper, words will take on a completely different power than they will when only spoken; they become EVIDENCE [see Indictment for examples].

Spoken, his words may only have had an insinuating connotation, but once the Grand Jury and the Prosecutor got down to laying them out in linear form, they took on a more sinister format; evidence of Obstruction, of Perjury, of Criminal Conduct in laying bare to the world a Matter Of Secrecy. It goes back to something you called attention to before, everything he did worked well over the years, worked well right up to the time he got caught. The first rule of the game is still, Don’t Get Caught. Now the Conspiracy Buffs can begin Blogging on WHO IT WAS WHO DECIDED TO start up and to push all the talk that led up to his fall from grace, if that is the proper term to use.

The “Fall from Grace” equation. Who the hell is operating this government? Consider that all the information and all that is being spurred out by the media right now was known by the media this entire time (How many media figures were rounded in for testimony?) (Think about it for a moment… Bush Administration was propped up for whatever use, and is disgarded when it’s time to move in a slightly different direction. (Or this may be the case where “You don’t mess with the CIA” — the CIA strikes back when a presidential administration strikes at it, occasionally assassinating presidents… Plamegate being, at the heart of the matter, the attempt to discredit the CIA’s paltry assessment of Saddam Hussein’s weapons ability, and replace it with a loaded assessment.)

Actually I ponder the meaning of the end of Ronald Reagan’s term, and how this spells the difference between Reagan and Bush. I hear that he “cleared house” after the Iran – Contra Scandal blew up. Now who did he “clear house” of? That curious foreign policy species roughly identified as the “Neo-Con”… (though it overlaps with other foreign policy species.) So when Reagan realized that Gorbachev was a man who could be worked with, and thus we could wind down the Cold War, he did so against the advice of the most hawkish (and thrown down a few pegs) part of his foreign policy group. Bush’s administration is pretty much entirely made up of neo-cons and fellow travellers, so nothing doing there.

On or about July 10 or July 11, 2003, LIBBY spoke to a senior official in the White House (“Official A”) who advised LIBBY of a conversation Official A had earlier that week with columnist Robert Novak in which Wilson’s wife was discussed as a CIA employee involved in Wilson’s trip. LIBBY was advised by Official A that Novak would be writing a story about Wilson’s wife.

I have it on good authority that Patrick Fitzgerald originally toyed with a different psuedonym for the character of “Official A”. In fact, here’s a piece of the first draft:

On or about July 10 or July 11, 2003, LIBBY spoke to a senior official in the White House (ARL OVE) who advised LIBBY of a conversation Official A had earlier that week with columnist Robert Novak in which Wilson’s wife was discussed as a CIA employee involved in Wilson’s trip. LIBBY was advised by Official A that Novak would be writing a story about Wilson’s wife.

It’s a good thing he didn’t go with “Arl Ove”, because that’s the one bit of speech impediment I could never get rid of: when I say a vowel construction with “R” without the benefit of a constanent before it, it’s incomprehensible to people.

Anyway… Arl Ove.

The election analysis fround in the Tri-Cities Herald after the 1996 election victory of Doc Hastings over Rick Locke for Congress:

It was a well-matched and yet curious campaign. The last two elections in the 4th Congressional District were decided by margins almost as slim, and the closeness of the score showed the 4th is truly a “swing district” that can favor either side.

When looking over Doc Hastings for a college class I had once, (I pretended to be Doc Hastings for a term), I found a quote from Rick Locke, as he looked into running in 1998, and shifting through the poll numbers. To paraphrase from memory (he had connections to the Tri-Cities, though didn’t live there): “I don’t know what the Democrats did to these people, but it must have been bad.”

To explain the difference between the cycles of 1992-1998 (when a Democrat did reasonably well) and 1998 onward (where if you look at the map for political meaning you simply gaze over this district, shrug, and mark it a deep red shape… and thus Gordon Allen Pross can become your party’s nominee) is the job of anyone in that district who gives a damned. The district fairly obviously represents the stratification and entrenchment of one-party domination in most American Congressional Districts. (Fun fact: the British House of Lords has more turn-over than the American House of Representatives has had in the last half dozen elections.) You have one chance to dislodge a Representative, unless scandal breaks out, and that is after his/her first term. An entropy hits after that, and s/he’s there until s/he decides to retire… at which point, if you can find someone who fits the district and get lucky (1992 was a bad year for Washington State Republicans) … more power to you.

Beyond that… I suspect part of the problem is found from a small nugget I saw in a summary of the 2002 debate between Craig Mason and Doc Hastings. A caller (or person in the audience, I don’t know how the debate was set up) actually asked Craig Mason, “Are you an atheist?” That may be a bit uniqute a situation — Craig Mason was (is?) simply a well-meaning Community College Professor… and therein we see the anti-elitist and anti-intellectual bias of some people.

Do I dare chime in with a profile of Jay Inslee, Rick Locke, Gordon Allen Pross, Jim Davis, Craig Mason, and Sandy Matheson?

(Jim Davis photo can not be found. )

1992, 1994: JAY INSLEE. 51%, 48%.

1996: lost 52% to 48%. 1998: Gordon Allen Pross: 25% against Doc’s 69%.

2000: Jim Davis, 37% against Doc’s 61%. : mine this.

2002: Craig Mason, 33%.

2004: Sandy Matheson 37%.

They’re building landing strips for gay Martians. I swear to God!

Two celebrities have come out of the closet in the past few days. Firstly, Sheryl Swoopes of the WNBA:

She says she does not expect to lose her lucrative endorsement deals with Nike and other companies. Indeed, one of the reasons Swoopes has come out is that she has signed an endorsement deal with Olivia Cruises and Resorts, the nation’s most prominent lesbian-centered business. Out athletes Martina Navratilova and Rosie Jones are already Olivia spokeswomen.

Sterotypes can be true sometimes, and I will note precisely why she signed an endorsement deal with the “nation’s most prominent lesbian-centered business” before anyone knew she was gay: the WNBA has a large Lesbian fan base. Some franchises embrace that fact (Los Angeles); some fight against it (Utah). And then there’s the suggestion that comes from this:

Most of the players around the league already know I’m gay, and I do feel like there’s a sisterhood among lesbian players. We know we’re not going to get the support from a lot of other people. But the talk about the WNBA being full of lesbians is not true. I mean, there are as many straight women in the league as there are gay.

The WNBA has a lot of lesbian players in it. An open secret, probably even in Utah. Probably akin to that kind of stupid comedy routine I hear on the “All Comedy Radio” station, where a comedianne responds to the news that “High school students who play sports are far less likely to get pregnant” with a “DUH! They’re all Lesbians!” (Nay, though.) (Actually, come to think of it, I have never known a WNBA fan who was not a lesbian… but then again, I’ve only met a couple of bonafide WNBA fans. No… wait. Uh, never mind. I don’t really want to discuss the freaking WNBA!)

I like this statement:

I didn’t always know I was gay. I honestly didn’t. Do I think I was born this way? No. And that’s probably confusing to some, because I know a lot of people believe that you are.

Precisely because the debate about “nurture versus nature” always annoys me… it suggests a total gutting of free will from a complicated equation, and it suggests a genetic defect.

George Takei, who as helmsman Sulu steered the Starship Enterprise through three television seasons and six movies, has come out as a homosexual in the current issue of Frontiers, a biweekly Los Angeles magazine covering the gay and lesbian community.

Takei told The Associated Press on Thursday that his new onstage role as psychologist Martin Dysart in “Equus,” helped inspire him to publicly discuss his sexuality.

Actually what I want to know is: why is “Sulu”, not a Vulcan, giving the Vulcan hand gesture?

The current social and political climate also motivated Takei’s disclosure, he said.

“The world has changed from when I was a young teen feeling ashamed for being gay,” he said. “The issue of gay marriage is now a political issue. That would have been unthinkable when I was young.”

Current social and political slimate? One step forward, one step back. Wasn’t that last election supposedly churned over by a backlash against homosexuality in middle America? (if you look at the soil around any large U.S. city with a big underground homosexual population – Des Moines, Iowa, perfect example. Look at the soil around Des Moines, Stuart. You can’t build on it, you can’t grow anything in it. The government says it’s due to poor farming. But I know what’s really going on, Stuart. I know it’s the queers.) But, nay… he’s right. Time is running against James Dobson… who, eventually, will just be stuck with Kent Hovind hawking mental images of cavemen riding Dinosaurs.

Some political article or other redid the Barry Goldwater quote for the purpose of explaining why Democrats may want to say “aye” on Harriet Miers. Mediocrity in pursuit of moderation is no vice; competence in pursuit of extremism is no virtue. Thus, Miers is out of the way, and Bush puzzles over how to get the second coming of Attila the Hun onto the court. (Which, I guess, is what he wants to get his base. What he wants personally is just someone who will watch his back on the court.)

It’s a moot point, perhaps. I gather Harriet Mier’s basic stand for the Theocrats of the nation by the realization that she attends a Dominionist break-away church. (And while I’m not supposed to judge people by the church they go to… her fellow church goers were all aflutter with a “put two and two together here, people. Look at the church she goes to!” (The opposite case is that she is so very impressionable that she might as easily fall under the spell of Justice Souter as Justice Scalia… Which isn’t giving her a whole heck of a lot of credit in the field of Mental Independence.)

I like how the breakdown of for and against was bi-partisan. Harry Ried suggested the name Miers to Bush. [And therein lies something horrific about this nomination and the next one: let the record show that, for good or bad, this nomination was the result of bi-partisan consultation, akin to Clinton getting recommendations from Senator Hatch — that fact which we heard over and over again before the Roberts nomination.) But, say, Patrick Leahy gave a “huh?” James Dobson had secret information that Miers was good. (And therein lies the real tragedy of Miers being cut loose: we will not be seeing the spectacle of James Dobson coming before the Senate Committee.) [additonal note: Why the frick is James Dobson a player of any sort in American politics?] Ann Coulter was against. Weirdly, no Senator explicitly came out opposed… even after she embarrassed herself by turning in an incomplete and at times baffling paper. (Which was a key part of what made this one of the more baffling political shows of the moment.)

“I loved you in Manhunter!”

That was something somebody in the (overflowing I must say) audience at Chris Elliott’s Powells reading shouted just as Elliott took his place behind the microphone. And… considering the tenor of much of the question-and-answer session, it’s pretty appropriate.

See… the Q and A had the ring to it of… people dredging up obscurities from Chris Elliott’s career for the sake of impressing upon everyone (most especially Chris Elliott himself) the depth of their fandom. (To the question of “Hot Dog Boy?”, the answer: “You work up an episode once a week, and sometimes you do things you regret.” Google ‘hot dog boy’ with “Chris Elliott” or “Get A Life” and you’ll get the subject to what that refers to.)

I can say this though: his story about writing a book report for Treasure Island, not having read the book and thus making stuff up as he went along… the teacher reading it to the class, and “it was killer material”… and the report gets an “F”, but hey! “It killed!”? Somewhere in the midst of the q and a, Elliott glibbly gave it away as false. But it’s a true story. How do I know? Because it’s included in the Late Night With David Letterman — the Book (in that odd section of original material.) [See now… I can out-obscuro even that couple who brought in a poster saying “Chris Elliott IS The Regulator” (where did that thing come from??)… or that one weird fellow who raised his hand one too many time to ask a question, to whom Elliott tongue-in-cheekly pulled something reminscent of a William Shatner.)

He had his line down pat for any question concerning what Biff Henderson or Larry Bud Melmon (or likely any other cast member of Letterman) is like. Sternly, he says: “Biff Henderson has been dead for ten years.” (And thus, the audience is discouraged from asking the question more than twice.)

“Where’s Spewey?” Probably in a backlot at Fox studios somewhere. “People think that we based Spewey on E.T. No… actually Adam Resnick and I once saw this terrible movie, um… MacDonald?” (someone in the audience “Mac and Me!” “Yes! Mac and Me… and that’s where we based Spewey off of. Gawd, that was an ugly alien!” Considering that Mac and Me is a rip-off of E.T., and considering that the Spewey episode includes that parody where Chris rides off over the cliff with Spewey (CRASH!)… I don’t see what this means.

The 20-something year old woman standing to my right was most ecstatic when Chris Elliott suggested that he (and I guess it was Adam Resnick) wanted to stage performances of “Zoo Animals on Wheels”. (Read it for yourself here… Want to see that actually performed right in front of your very eyes?)

Incidentally, mentions of the movie Cabin Boy was not the applause line you’d think it might be… this was definitely more of a “Get A Life” crowd.

In defense of only a couple questions being asked about the actual book, consider that there’s not much of an opportunity to have read it. The crowd was here to purchase the book and have Elliott autograph the it.
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The mother sitting diagonally in front of me… her 10 or 11 year old daughter sitting next to me (alongside her friend). The daughter had earlier noticed a book on Andy Warhol in the batch of books that are in our sight — she’s apparently doing a project on Andy Warhol for school, which I find curious. The Mom opens up the book to the photo of Chris Elliott, to see if she recognizes him. “OH! I know who he is… He was in…” (thinks hard to remember) “Snow Day!” Mom: “I knew there had to be a movie you’ve seen that had him in it.” Friend: “Oh! Also in… Scary Movie 2!” “He must be in a ton of movies!”
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Two more attendees of. (the Chris Elliott Reading and Signing.