Big Ten Championship Mini-Rant

Ah, the madness of being a Michigan State Spartan fan.  Is this not the opportunity we've been waiting for for so, so long: a chance to play our way into the Granddaddy of them all, The Rose Bowl (presented by some company)?  It's supposed to be.  But it feels like we're getting screwed all over again.  What a hose job.  Last year before the advent of the B1G title game, the Spartans, tied for the league title, lost a popularity contest/ tie-breaker to other co-champs, Ohio State and Wisconsin, and were relegated to a non-BCS bowl... which I cannot recall.  Now in the first year of divisional play, the team has played its way against all the toughest teams (save for Penn State) to become the only seven-win team in the conference.  Now, to move on, the Spartans will need to re-defeat early favorite, Wisconsin.  Win and you're in.  Lose and you're in... The Outback Bowl?  I say win and let's get in.  I'm not going to cry if we lose and I encourage all Spartan fans to shut their yaps if that happens.  Although all Spartan fans will know with a wink and a nod that we're getting screwed, just like usual.

Adding possible insult to potential injury is the rumor that if State loses, UofM would be jettisoned into an at-large BCS berth.  I guess we'll see if that happens but right now, UofM is 16th in the BCS rankings... and apparently you must be at least 15th or 14th to be eligible.  But I ask, how can they move up from there?  If State loses, won't that diminish their computer rankings?  Since a State loss would be the only relevant activity to UofM's BCS ranking, wouldn't it have to go down due to the fact that A)State beat UofM (28 to 14, just sayin') and B)Two of UofM's signature wins were against teams that beat State (Notre Dame and Nebraska).  I don't see it happening but I just want to be on the record as saying that would be a truck-load of crap.

Shocktoberfest

Every October I do a horror movie marathon.  I like to call it Shocktoberfest.  I watch old ones, new ones, Italian ones, American ones, creature films, effect films, zombies, werewolves, aliens, serial killers, vampires, tortureporn, slashers, mashers, creepers, stalkers, maulers, crawlers and ghosties. Here's the lineup from this year's celebration:

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Genre: Zombies

George Romero's all-time classic follows a group of strangers that seek refuge in a Pennsylvania farmhouse as a mysterious phenomenon wakens the dead across the country.  Highlights include the stark opening in a hillside cemetery with a lone zombie wandering in the background and the pioneering use of source footage as law enforcement agents combat the zombies.

1408 (2008)

Genre: Haunted House (or hotel room in this case)

Hack haunted hotel writer, Mike Enslin (John Cusack) meets his match in the Dolphin Hotel's room 1408.  Highlights include a slick setup (haunted hotels aren't real, they're not real, OK maybe they're real) and when Mike consults his emergency map to discover there is indeed no way out.

The House of the Devil (2009)

Genre: Devil Worshiping Freaks

The credits say 2009 but everything else says this movie was made in the late seventies.  Everything is perfect in this ode to low-budget horror movies of yore.  The period detail and slow pace lull you in and then the film goes right off a cliff and lands somewhere you never thought could exist at the bottom of a cliff.  Highlights include two totally unexpected gunshots to the head and the opening credits. Yep.

Make-Out with Violence (2008)

Genre: Arthouse Zombies

False advertising on this one.  The plot is about two brothers whose prom queen crush vanishes and is presumed dead and then is rediscovered not dead but not exactly alive either.  The making of doc was far more interesting as a quarrelsome Tennessee art-collective struggles to make the film over several years.

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974)

Genre: British Zombies

Great start as two British mods get stranded at a country estate. The Netflix disc was scratched and I didn't finish it. Sigh.

An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Genre: Werewolves (in London)

John Landis' horror-comedy standard.  Two Americans backpack across England when they are accosted by a man-beast. One is murdered, the other wounded.  For some reason, the wounded guy does not return home until the next full moon despite his friends death. Things end badly.  Highlights include the penultimate creature effects of the era and a dreamed attack by Nazi mutants.

Deathdream (1974)
Genre: Zombie Vietnam War Vets

Directed by Bob (A Christmas Story) Clark. Andy's family receives news that Andy has been killed in Vietnam.  So when Andy shows up on the doorstep at home, they assume a mistake has obviously been made.  Something is not quite right with Andy though.  He stays up late rocking his chair, strangles dogs and oh yeah, his flesh is rotting and falling off.  Andy tries to conceal that last fact for as long as possible until getting set up on a date with his handsy sometimes-fling.  Highlights include the opening credits where we watch Andy get killed in slow-motion and the ending where Andy lies in a grave trying to cover himself with dirt.   

Dead and Buried (1981)
Genre: Zombies on the East Coast  

Dan Farentino (aka Dan, the dad from Wonder Years) investigates a rash of murders in a sleepy fishing town while his mortician-buddy takes way too much pride in his job.  Highlights include a host of early-eighties whats-their-names? and a Sixth Sense-esque twist ending. 

Sleepy Hollow (1999)

Genre: Headless Horseghosts

It was time to revisit this one after only having seen it once.  Johnny Depp plays Johnny Depp in a Tim Burton movie and Christopher Walken snarls his way through as the Horsemen.  Highlights include a slew of beheadings and  a tree where all the resultant stray heads are stored like acorns.

Rosemary's Baby (1968)

Genre: Devil Worshiping Freaks

Say what you want about Roman Polanski but the guy makes great movies. It's your basic guy and girl move into apartment, girl gets raped by the devil story.  This movie alone could serve as source material for a season of Mad Men.  It's glorious. The building (filmed in NYC apartment building, The Dakota), the apartment, the music, the clothes, Mia farrow (I mean, cmon) and the mounting sense of dread and entrapment as Rosemary's Baby comes to term.  Yikes. Highlights include some crude but unsettling camera effects and Mia Farrow (that's Mrs. Sinatra to you).

When a Stranger Calls (1979)

Genre: Lunatic on the Loose

You know the ghost story where the prank calls turn out to be coming from inside the house.  That's this movie, they either started it or stole it. Whatever.  Most of this movie is a manhunt for a deranged killer book-ended by the Is He In the House? gimmick.  Highlights include the portrayal of the bad guy as so crazy that he's sometimes murderous instead of vice versa and the dead-pan delivery of the frantic dad asking the babysitter to "Please check the children."

The Week in Fails: Two Days Later

Saturday, I posted this blog about a few unfortunate stories from the past week. With recent developments, I thought I should do a follow-up showcasing the huge clout of RJ5K. Never has so much been done with so few clicks. Look at these results:

Fail #1: Netflix

Netflix announced on its blog today that Qwikster is no more. The short national nightmare is over. Let the business school case studies begin. Can you ever justify a business decision, other than a price increase, that costs you customers?

The Qwikster fiasco shows us again how democratic business has become in the internet-age. How long would New Coke have lasted up against Twitter?

Fail #2: Major League Baseball

After Saturday night's double rain delay of the Tigers-Rangers ALCS game that went until almost 1:30am, amid continuing rainstorms on Sunday MLB moved that night's game to Monday afternoon. And it's on network station, FOX transmitted in beautiful (and free) HD. Daytime playoff baseball is glorious.

Fail #3: Steve Jobs' Pancreas

Two out of three ain't bad.

Still too soon.

The Week in Fails

Fail #1: Netflix

Actually, Netflix' real fail was a couple weeks ago when Reed Hastings sent out his infamous email to Netflix subscribers. If you haven't heard, the email apologized for the handling of an earlier price-boost and then went on to announce the partitioning of Netflix' streaming and DVD-by-mail service.  The separation of the two businesses isn't a bad idea nor is it unexpected given that it is no secret that Amazon has been courting Netflix' streaming service wishing to make a bigger play in the content delivery market.  It's just that the handling of the whole thing was completely "ham-handed" to steal somebody else's perfect adjective.

Cool name... if it were 2002.

But Netflix' fail for this week came on Wednesday night.  As I logged in trying to update my DVD queue with a few horror selections for my annual Shocktoberfest movie marathon, I was greeted with a shortened queue of about 30 movies all with the play-now option next to them.  This all seemed pretty peculiar given that the last time I checked, I had about 250 movies in my queue and besides that, I had dropped my streaming service back when Netflix announced the price-hike.  Confused, I tried to access my account info but was met with an error-page.  I then jumped over to qwikster.com thinking maybe the transition had already happened but no, it still wasn't up.

Meanwhile, back on the main Netflix site, I managed to get this screen-grab of my suggestions page:

Hi, Tom.

If you're too lazy to click the picture for the larger view, let me just tell you... all of the suggested movies have an "Unavailable" button underneath the selection where it would usually say "Add to Queue" or "Play Now". So it appears I somehow caught Netflix with its pants down running some sort of transitional test for the upcoming Qwikster/Netflix divorce. Whatever the case, I wasn't too happy to not have access to my DVD queue for the night and it is clear that the streaming business is going to be seriously lacking in selections, as if we didn't know that already.

Fail #2: Major League Baseball

MLB just had its most exciting divisional series round ever.  All four series were decided by one-run games, three of the four series went to the deciding fifth game with one going into extra innings and another featuring a marquis pitching match-up in a 1-0 game.  Problem is, nobody saw the games.  OK, not nobody but not that many either; especially if you live in the EST without cable or a dish.  The games were on pay-station, TBS and each of the eight nights had one game starting after 8pm.  I personally saw only two innings of the entire Tigers-Yankees series which had six of its five start times in "prime-time".

wah-wah

Obvioulsy, MLB is going to put their games where and when it makes the most financial sense and if that's on TBS, well alright.  But playoff games generally take a lot longer with more commercials and more pitching changes which means that an 8:37pm first pitch probably won' be over until well after 11pm at which time most working stiffs will have thrown in the towel.  It would be interesting to see how many are tuned in at the start vs. the end of these late games.  Why not start the games at 7pm Eastern?  Even Albert Pujols was complaining about the start times and the Yankee-centric scheduling.  Although his complaints were more about being relegated to late-afternoon games with unfavorable sunlight and shadows.  But still, how about a little love for those of us who have to wake up early to make a few bucks that we then want to hold on to instead of handing over to the dish/cable oligopoly.  Just sayin.

 

Fail #3: Steve Jobs' Pancreas

Too soon?  Yeah, too soon.  But I would like to give my personal Tip-of-the-Cap/ Wag-of-the-Finger to Mr. Jobs.  He was a true visionary and a pretty good businessman to boot.  You don't need me to tell you how Jobs' and Apple's products have routinely altered the arc of technology.  They do make cool stuff.  However, Apple would also have its customers believe that there was no such thing as cool stuff before Apple came around (at least since Jobs second tenure with the company).  And that corporate attitude seems to echo if not result from Jobs' demeanor within the company.  Apple treats its customers like idiots in the inflexibility and proprietary nature of their products.  That arrogance is one of the reasons I have always resisted their products; certainly not the higher price tags.  I suppose I prefer a more democratic product that might take an extra minute to figure out. But still, Steve Jobs, no denying you're the man.

Go Green! Go Black. Go... Gold?

 My initial reaction to Nike's Pro Combat uni designs for MSU was disbelief.  Not outrage per se but just, really?  Gold helmets? Somebody with the university signed off on that? (Turns out the players actually asked for a new design and then gave them a final thumbs up.)

The Fighting Spartans?

However, I wanted to wait a couple days before taking a side on this very bold design.  And my side is against. Sorry, they're ugly. The black on green is awful.  Throw in the alien looking gold and it's a mess.  I find the gloves perplexing too given that a player could easily be penalized for making that gesture in a game.  I do like the helmet but more as a novelty.  It looks like something you would give to a coach or booster to put on their mantle.

Looks like dogshit. And not the good kind.

But there is more beyond the radical design, that kind of pisses me off on this subject. A year or so ago, Nike and the University quietly unveiled a new design for the Spartan helmet logo.  The backlash was pretty quick and pretty fierce and as a result the new design quietly went away.  Then before the season, the uniform design that the football team wore last year (and still wears mostly unchanged) was unveiled featuring mostly innocuous changes to the pant and helmet stripes and logo/ number font.  But sneakily a new bronze accent color was added (really it was brown).  It was largely shrugged off though because it wasn't very visible nor did it have that big an effect on the overall appearance.  But now, the accent color that nobody asked for has been transformed into metallic gold and thrust upon the team and its fans as if it were always a part of the school's tradition. And with the ever present (and frankly, lazy) black no less.  Nike has effectively pulled an end around in its quest to Nikify MSU.

Why couldn't Nike create something like this? 

This.

I found this design while doing a little research for this post. I absolutely love it. It pains me a little that they were designed by a UM guy (aka TheZuba.com). But you have to give him credit for a great design and for repping Michigan, as in "the state of".  Heck, I'll even admit that his designs for the wolverine helmet look pretty cool.

Note the wolverine head watermark on the right helmet.

For a little more commentary on ALL of the Nike Pro Combat designs, check out Uni Watch blog's take on ESPN.com.

All the pics of the new Michigan State unis

So I couldn't find a good source that showed all the views of the new Michigan State "Nike Pro Combat" uniforms that will be worn during the game against Michigan so I decided to compile them all here. A special shout goes out to the internet for making it possible. I may comment later but for now here they are...

Save the Post Office?

Yahoo! News and The Daily Ticker are reporting that the U.S. Post Office faces an $11 billion (with a B) shortfall this year and may be forced to close up the shop without more cash or drastic restructuring.

Won't happen. But that is a heck of a way to get our collective attention. I support the post office as much as I can. I still mail a fair amount of my bills out of sheer stubbornness. When I have an item to ship for Swap.com, eBay or Amazon, I choose the P.O. over UPS or FedEx. Come to think of it, I just canceled my Netflix streaming service in favor of their by-mail only service.

But after hearing the news about how much cash the USPS is losing, I ask myself whether my choice is a good one or not. Am I right to place value in patriotically supporting this service despite the shortcomings of its long-term operations? Or am I merely helping to prop up their sales and string them along just a little bit longer? Don't get me wrong, if UPS or FedEx were measurably cheaper or more convenient, I'd take my business to them but they're not so I still enjoy my occasional runs to the P.O.

With the bailout word getting thrown around one thing seems obvious to me: That if this isn't quashed it could get turned into an election issue. Whether some sort of bailout happens or if the USPS fails (again, it won't), all fingers will point at the current presidential administration despite the fact that strictly-speaking the USPS isn't even a governmental agency nor do its problems have anything to do with any recent presidential or legislative action.