Are my eyes really blue?

This has been a shit-tastic year and no fooling. Not 1998 bad obviously, or 1986, but pretty damn close. I will be thrilled to see the back of it, though I'm not sanguine about 2008 being any better.

The trip went well, I suppose, although Paris was stressful. I think if we ever manage to get out that way again, the new priorities are Ireland and either Austria or southern Germany, and I don't think it would take much to get my German back up to tourist-sufficient. The amazing thing this time is that we spent parts of six days in London, and while it made for a nice turnaround, I think we've hit a point where we either need to move to London or start spending quality time on other destinations. Not that we've exhausted its potential or anything, but there are high-priority spots elsewhere that are more important to see than our third tier of London sights.

It didn't help that we got sick. I blame the walking tour of York in a slow drizzle and freezing temps, though I would certainly go back. In fact, York and Bath are both places I could go hang out for a while, just to relax and get my head together. Paris I'd like to see again, but only with an ironclad guarantee of Metro service and at least one pass through the phrasebook before leaving. I really think the next trip will be Dublin, Salzburg, the Black Forest, and whatever else of Ireland I can get in. But after totaling the spreadsheet on trip expenses, I think it will be a long time before we can get out of the country again, unless it's driving to Canada or something.

I'm FREEZING, by the way. I guess it's time to turn on the heater. I also need a haircut something awful, and something awful is pretty much what I can expect my hair to look like. Going down to the 2/2 was probably an error, but I don't know if I could still get by with 4/2 or even 3/2 anymore. I suppose I should look a some of the pics and see which looked more viable, but for now I think it'd better be a hat.

I was thoroughly displeased with Vandy losing to UT and Wake, and Bama falling to Auburn for the sixth straight year. But at least these were predictable losses to better teams, and while disheartening, they were hardly unexpected.

What happened tonight in Palo Alto should have been unexpected, but after the events of the last two months, it could hardly be anything of the sort. Indeed, the trend line pointed the way bright and clear: five losses in six games, a turnover margin of -11, an average of 5.3 points in the second half per game. Nobody should have expected anything but an ignominious collapse from the Golden Bears, let alone the 14 points Vegas was giving.

And yet.

Stanford's defense was regarded as poor-to-feeble, ranked last in the league against the run. The obvious course of action was to pound the ball on the ground - but Justin Forsett's second-half carries were measurable in single digits. With DeSean Jackson out, and Longshore still not up to competition standard, the obvious move was to eat up clock on the ground - but Cal threw, and threw ineffectively, against a Cardinal defense that blithely set up and blitzed the QB to oblivion, unconcerned with the chance that the blitz might leave them open to draw runs and short screens - because Cal didn't call any.

If I were the athletic director of the University of California, my orders would be this: the coaching staff, to a man, will stand all night tonight in the lobby of the student center, right outside the bookstore, staring at the empty trophy case that, for the last five years, contained the Stanford Axe. And once the sun comes up, they can go home and start planning for next year. No bowl bid will be accepted; there's no point wasting time on some horseshit nothing bowl for a 6-6 team. There are bigger improvements that need to be made.

The mark of a great coach is the ability to adapt and perform. Once upon a time, Cal made halftime adjustments as well as anybody in football. This year, the best thing the football team has done at the half is get off the field to make way for the band.

During the game I twittered that if Jeff Tedford had any honor, he would return his salary for this season and resign. I don't expect it to happen, obviously. But through the first five games of the year, Cal was 5-0 and ranked #2 in the country. Today, they are a .500 ballclub which just completed the biggest collapse in recent college football history.

For a coach, the order of priority goes like this: win national title, play for national championship, win conference title, play in BCS bowl, play in New Year's day bowl, play in bowl game, post winning record, and above all beat the arch-rival. Jeff Tedford in 2007 has failed on every point. An explanation ought to be forthcoming. For now, the British have the correct phrasing: as the head football coach at the University of California, as of December 1, Jeff Tedford is no longer fit for purpose.

Without too much fluff, my annual look at what the big bowls would look like if 1990 rules were still in effect.

ROSE BOWL: OHIO STATE vs USC. The traditional matchup actually provides a pretty good test for the putative #1 team.
ORANGE BOWL: OKLAHOMA vs WEST VIRGINIA. A great matchup that keeps the old Big-8 flavor in Miami.
SUGAR BOWL: LSU vs HAWAII. I had to make this match for agricultural reasons.
COTTON BOWL: KANSAS vs ARIZONA STATE. Not much to say about this one.
FIESTA BOWL: VIRGINIA TECH vs GEORGIA. This is a barnburner waiting to happen.

Random? Maybe. Solves anything? Probably not. Any more illogical and arbitrary than the BCS? Not in the slightest.

As always, look me in the eye and tell me college football is better off with the BCS than it was 15 years ago.

...but as the crapocolypse comes to a close, I have to add one more thought: it's time to put Joe Gibbs in a home. Seriously. Even Terri Schiavo would have known not to call that second timeout. I don't know what the answer is going forward - we've tried the incumbent (Turner), the cagey vet (Schottenheimer), the college whiz (Spurrier) and the legend, and it's all fallen apart. Maybe there's some hot assistant out there who's supposed to be an offensive genius (who's running the Patriot's O?) or maybe Gregg Williams is like Belichek - a highly compenent assistant who does a lot better in his second opportunity. But any way you slice it, the fact of the matter is that the Redskins have gotten as good as they will ever get under Gibbs 2.0. There's still a long way to slide, and for the good of the organization, it's time to pull the feeding tube.

If you'd told me Jason Campbell would go out hurt, Todd Collins would play out the rest of the way, and the Skins would roll up all of 31 yards on the ground, I would have stuck my head in a chipper-shredder. And yet, Washington wins 24-16. The point was made that you can't really blame the team for anything on Sunday, as they were just too emotionally ravaged to be responsible for anything. Maybe. It's great that they could win tonight, but it makes those five games where they led at the half and broke down in the 4th quarter all the more irritating.

Despite everything, when it comes to the Redskins, it's like Brokeback Mountain. "Joe Gibbs, I wish I knew how to quit you."

Meanwhile, I have to get cracking on my wish list for Christmas. There's not really very much I want or need that can be had for money - and to be honest, 90% of the stuff I want that can be had for money is stuff I really don't need and shouldn't get. (Another mobile phone, anyone? Water bottle? Pair of shades? At least I don't want any more Doc Martens...) What I'd REALLY like is a consignment of very hard drugs to knock out this lingering sinus thing. It's been two weeks, almost.

Well, football is done. Maybe I should consider looking for dinner beyond the last five pizza rolls...

...that I was flogging Huckabee a year ago as the breakout candidate. I know I told people, but I wish I had something in writing. Better yet, I wish I had a betting slip from Paddy Power or William Hill or Ladbrokes with £20 on it and $BIGNUMBER:1 as the odds. As it is, I said back in September that I'd been saying to keep an eye on the Huck for nine months, back when he was polling around 6% in Iowa.

But I digress.

Mitt Romney is an idiot. Even setting aside the fact that the largest Protestant denomination in the country officially considers him a cult follower (that's not just talk, that's Southern Baptist doctrine, and I have the papers from the Watchman Foundation to prove it) - how on earth did he ever think he could be more attractive to the evangelical vote than an ACTUAL SOUTHERN BAPTIST PREACHER?

If Romney wanted to have a prayer (HA HA SEE WHAT I DID THERE), he should have taken a page out of the Gary Hart playbook and run as a technocratic non-ideological managerial-competence type, pointing to the SLC Olympics and his time in Massachusetts as proof that he could change the tone in Washington and be a capable administrator. Sure, maybe you have a rough time getting through the primary, but McCain's habit of bucking the faithful was working just fine in 2000 until he hit the Rove dirty tricks machine in South Carolina. This year, by the time they get to SC, it might be too late if one guy has already taken Iowa and NH.

Instead, Romney went for the Bush offense: say what they want to hear and try to look inevitable. Since NH was considered an easy get because of his proximity, Iowa became the ballgame, and he dumped an absolutely scatalogically-obscene amount of money into the Hawkeye state. And now, with a month to go, Huckabee's polling in the high 30s and Romney's got half that. In other words, Momentum Mitt is sitting on 2-7 and Huckabee's just flopped a straight.

Looking at the GOP field right now, I don't see how any of them can possibly win the nomination. Of course, I feel the same way about the Ds at the moment. The 2008 Presidency season is going to make the 2007 college football season look like a Swiss watch.

* Pie beer is back at Tied House. It's incredibly tasty stuff. I have almost gotten through a jug in two days.

* The Trader Joe's chocolate caramels with sea salt are much more gulp-able than the Recchutti variety. Cheaper too. My poor taste will out eventually.

* Looks like Tony Anthony is leaving the Geoff Show to take a command position at Virgin Radio. Good for him and well done, although it will be like losing a co-worker. I've been listening to the show, live or in podcast form, since it started in its current incarnation - in fact, the Symposium and the Junkies are some of my best pals, or so it seems.

* I need to find something to buy to be my Christmas present from my mother and Cousin Pa. The fact of the matter is that there's not really that much out there that I want - certainly nothing I need, by a long shot. I'm trying to fight the phone glee and not get another cell phone - I am sorely tempted to get the unlocked Motorola MOTOFONE F3, which for my money is the most innovative phone in the world right now and a slick $40 plus shipping - but am I really ever going to use it routinely unless my iPhone goes tits-up? No I am not. And I sure can't use it abroad; one of the cheapening points of the F3 is that it eschews any but domestic bands in its home market. So what's the point of getting it other than as a cutesy demo and a waste of time?

* It occurs to me that I really do miss T-Mobile. I made the switch about this time in 2003 and stuck with them for a year; the only reason I eventually dumped them was because they didn't have the greatest coverage around my in-laws' house and I really needed two-band coverage between my apartment and my workplace. Now, when I don't have ANY coverage at work to speak of, it really doesn't seem to matter much who my carrier is, and although i dearly love my iPhone, I would also dearly love to get rid of AT&T, which is not the real AT&T anymore - it's at&t, which is SBC on steroids and just the sort of Baby Bell swine that made me hate Verizon so much back East.

* Being in the UK and seeing four competing mobile operators (plus the virtual ones like Virgin Mobile, which is my UK number) really makes me sick of how things are set up in this country. By not settling on a standard, we got a market split between two different technologies, with a dual-band carrier on each side and a single-band PCS operator as the "competition." And with two different technical standards, hardware is tied to the provider. Just imagine what the US cellular market would be like if you could get your phone completely separate from the service provider - which you sort of can with T-Mobile, less so with at&t, but not at all with Verizon or Sprint.

* Life on Mars starts Series 2 on BBC America tonight. NO SPOILERS! Other than "It were dark! We all make mistakes!" "BAAAAAA!! BAAAAA!!"

* OK, that's 500 words, I can knock off now, right?

Down by 7 with less than 2 minutes to play at DePaul - and Vandy comes back to win on the road and be the nation's first team to 10 wins.

CHEW TOBACCO, CHEW TOBACCO, SPIT SPIT SPIT
IF YOU AIN'T A COMMODORE, YOU AIN'T....

...you know =)

* With no more college football, I've been forced to turn to Villa - Sunderland. Which I think already happened - this must be tape-delay, although I suppose they could have kicked off at 7 PM. If it were live I think they would be pitching the fact prominently.

* It's good to know that I can count on Vanderbilt basketball to at least do SOMETHING right every year. Even when they miss the postseason altogether, you can still count on a winning season and at least two big home upsets, usually in conference. Last year, with the 5 straight wins over top-25 teams capped by beating #1 Florida? Magic. Getting to the Sweet 16 didn't hurt either.

* It sounds like T-Mobile may be blocking Twitter. It could be a technical problem, I suppose, but if they really are blocking it...well, that's insane. I mean, you're getting a dime every time somebody sends or receives, why in the hell would you WANT to block it? Sadly, this is just a whiff of what you can expect once network neutrality is thrown out.

* It's legit cold out here. That's remarkable. I could actually wear my Celtic scarf on a regular basis this past week (and actually did, up in the city last Saturday). Now I just have to find a pub to wear it into. Unfortunately, the (WARNING: MAY CONTAIN PUB-LIKE SUBSTANCE) down the road doesn't show enough of the soccer to really be a good pub option, but maybe once conference basketball cranks up I'll be more amenable to strolling down there.

* What Mountain View needs is a downtown coffeehouse with actual couches and things. Actually, if you could take the old Xando at Ballston and plop it down in the 100 block of Castro Street, you'd be set. Coffee drinks, lunch snacks, full bar, comfy chairs. Now if you wanted to take the 4C's from Court House and drop them in the same spot, I wouldn't say no to that either.

* For the first time ever, the three branches of the modern Republican party all have a candidate of their own, and each candidate is unacceptable to the other two branches. By the way, in 30 days we'll be done in both Iowa and New Hampshire. This is no bloody way to pick a President, and you can put that on a banner and fly it over FedEx Field on Sundays.

* It still doesn't feel like Christmas, but I put that down to having been out of the country at Thanksgiving and missing the kickoff.

* What a free kick for Villa in the 74th minute. I honestly think that if you brought Martin O'Neill to Vandy and put him in charge of the football, we'd be in a bowl game in two years. The man is a coaching ass.

...remember that in 1988, Pat Robertson won the Iowa GOP caucus.

However, there was about a month between Iowa and New Hampshire back then. Might not me time to shift gears then. Also remember that South Carolina was set up as a firewall by Lee Atwater in the late 80s and early 90s to forestall an insurgency-type candidate...and that South Carolina is exactly the sort of state that might gravitate to a Southern governor with a strong religious streak.

Iowa wasn't even on anyone's radar until Jimmy Carter won there in 1976. And yet, from this one aberrant event, everyone's built the caucus system into some sort of political Elector of Saxony. And now that everybody wants to matter, we're going to rush through this thing like beer through a frat-boy, be done by Valentine's Day, and then be stuck in general-election mode for the next NINE MONTHS.

This is no way to run a democracy, people. Most countries can blow through the WHOLE PROCESS in 60 days. May be time to take a look at the parliamentary system again (although APSA didn't go that far in 1950 and the only implementation of their plans was by Newt Gingrich in 1995, with...varying degrees of success).

EDIT TO ADD: According to Novak's column this morning, Huckabee was on the wrong side of the Southern Baptist revolution in 1980...which means he may not be able to count on the support of the various Baptist ayatollahs who run things in Nashville and Houston. Apparently the head of the SBC is a Fred Thompson man, which could just be a Tennessee thing...but this horse race isn't even close to over, and there's going to be a lot of glue made between here and the finish line.

...there's a small liberal-arts school, religious origin, high academics, successful in the lower levels of college athletics, joining the Big South and Division I - and it looks like a success.

Gee, where have we seen this before?

Here's a hint, you men of Presbyterian College: whatever you do, don't change school presidents. And if you do, find out first what is the new guy's personal vision for "his" program. And make sure you're in it.

You don't want to end up like [ALMA MATER REDACTED.]

As always, the lesson of Christmas back home is simple: keep yourself as far from the dealings of Southern women as possible. Otherwise it's going OK...although thank God for friends with bonus post-Christmas parties. I think I'm going to need to decompress.

Merry Christmas to all... And to Y'all a good night.

Home after a long trip home for Christmas. While it certainly had its moments, it's also unbelievably excellent to be in my own bed, in my own car, with adequate cellular coverage and pervasive Wi-Fi and decent coffee available most anywhere. The old homeland is improving, slightly and slowly, but I'm not sure it's worth waiting the extra 10 years for them to catch up to where I've lived in the last decade.

Two day workweek this week, with the extra day off for New Year's next week. factor in MLK coming up and I only have one five-day workweek out of four or five weeks. Which is a good thing, I think.

Trip left me with a lot to think about. Not necessarily in a good way, either. Suffice it to say: stay out of the drama of Southern women if you value your quality of life.

However, I have a whole blog post about one of my presents (yes, it's a phone, more on that later) but people who knew me back East will be amused at one of the gifts I got from my surrogate big sister: a t-shirt with a squirrel holding an enormous pair of acorns, captioned "Mine Are Bigger." Goes very well with the old motto T-shirt.

And now, the countdown begins...

...I got another bloody cellphone. It's not what you think - this was a Christmas present from my father-in-law, and although he never heard of it before my wife put a bug in his ear about it, he has since gone and ordered one of his own.

It's the MOTOFONE F3 from Motorola, and if anything, it is the total opposite of the iPhone. In terms of functionality, it's the perfect GSM phone...from 1996. It places calls, it receives calls, it does rudimentary text messaging (only stores the last 10 received, doesn't store sent ones, no predictive text of any kind, etc etc), it has an alarm, and you can pick from 7 pre-installed ringers. And that's IT. Okay, it also vibrates and has a simple phonebook and speakerphone mode, but that's all. No color display, no auto date and time, no animated wallpapers or Bluetooth or video camera or touchscreen or GPS or anything like that.

What it does have is, for starters, an e-paper screen. This looks like an old black-and-white calculator-style 12-segment LCD display. However, it remains static without power. This means that at any given time, it maintains what is "written" on it like a sheet of paper and only draws power to change what is displayed - meaning that if you pull the battery out without turning the phone off, whatever was on screen STAYS THERE until you put the battery back in. In short, unless the screen is changing what's displayed, it draws NO power. You can imagine what this does for battery life.

It also has TWO internal antennae, one at each end. This improves reception tremendously. Better reception means less power wasted trying to patch onto a signal or boosting the transmission power to compensate for a weaker signal - which, again, means better battery life.

No flip. No moving parts at all, really - the keypad is plastic with rubber accents, familiar to anyone who's ever used the old Sinclair ZX-80. Not a lot of space for dust or moisture to get in. Only the one port for the charger.

You've probably guessed by now - this phone is geared toward the developing world. No text ever appears on screen; the menus are a short series of icons, backed up by voice prompts that the phone speaks in one of three languages (determined at manufacture and based on point of sale; mine speaks in Spanish, Portugese or English and is thus suitable for almost anywhere in North or South America. A Canadian model would probably substitute French in there; the one sold in the south of Germany speaks German, Italian or English; one sold in India could speak Gujarti and Hindi, etc etc). In short: you don't even have to be able to read to use this phone.

As a side note, they've almost accidentally created the perfect phone for the elderly and technophobic - the display is clear and easy to read, the keys are plenty sizeable, and it tells you what you're doing every step of the way. Which gives them an interesting selling option in the developed world, but that's not the target here. The target is the kind of place where there's never been wireline infrastructure, where chances to plug in may be few and far between, where your typical RAZR would probably be ruined in a day and a half. It's the kind of phone that suddenly means ready access to market prices, or news from the next town over, or maybe quicker access to a doctor or police. And it goes for around $30, total - or whatever the equivalent is. (You can pick this thing up in London on a new pre-paid activation for NINE POUNDS.)

When Nokia sold their one-billionth phone, it wasn't some slick megapixeled 3G Series 60 iPod killer, it was a bog-simple Nokia 1100 somewhere in Nigeria. For Motorola, it's all well and good to sell the next re-hashed RAZR in America, but they're looking at a world where one of every two people has a mobile phone, and thinking, "How do we sell one to the other fellow?"

So I have one now. It's a backup phone, obviously. It's also a neat technology demonstration. But mostly, it's a memento mori for my high-tech career - the iPhone may change the face of the phone business in America, but an F3 is the sort of thing that could change the world - at ten cents on the dollar, at that. A new toy AND perspective - as Christmas presents go, that's not bad.

Okay - maybe Joe Gibbs doesn't know how to coach anymore. I can't say for sure one way or the other. But he knows how to lead this team - and it looks like they had to completely crash out and hit rock bottom before they could start climbing back up. Since the brain-cramp against Buffalo that lost the game, the Redskins have not trailed. Today, Dallas went 0-11 on 3rd down and combined for one yard rushing. Read that last sentence again. ONE YARD.

Todd Collins is running this team better than any QB has since the Brad Johnson season in 1999. Guy sits as a backup for a decade and then, flip of a switch, rattles off four wins. Well done young old man. The defense has, amazingly, managed to gel even without Sean Taylor (RIP 21) and has put the wood to most everyone they've played in December (don't forget, Buffalo did everything with field goals). And don't look now, but at 9-7. the Redskins are off to the land of rain for a playoff game.

So...four years into The Return, Joe Gibbs has delivered two playoff appearances - and made the Dallas games competitive every year. During the years in the wilderness, you could write off the Cowboys as two losses almost every season. Playoffs every other year and beating the Pokes - you know, you could do a lot worse.

Maybe they had to have this whole tragedy to really come together as a team. Maybe you have to struggle through that kind of adversity to really become family. I don't know, but this is manifestly not the same team that kept blowing 4th quarter leads in October and November. Something has changed - and if it carries over to 2008, watch out.

Meanwhile...

Hope your 2008 is as good as my 2007 was godawful. Better days coming, if I have anything to say about it.