Terminated

January 21, 2008


So it is the Giants and the Patriots in the Super Bowl. Oh, great-another 2 weeks of New York/Boston hype.


I cannot remember a previous NFL season in which so many big favorites-Cowboys, Packers and Colts-dropped out of the playoffs early. It was relatively obvious that the conference championship games were going to be New England-Indianapolis and Dallas-Green Bay. I don’t think you can reasonably argue that there were better teams in either conference than those two.


And yet…2 out of 4 missed the conference title games, and the Packers fell in the conference title game. Hard to figure, but that’s why they play the games.


So can the Giants beat the Patriots? Sure, maybe. Like any team this season, they would need to play nearly perfect ball, and have the Patriots make some mistakes. They can rush the passer, and they have some good cover guys. On offense, they have those big monster backs who are so good at chewing up clock, but I don’t think that will be so much of a factor in the warm weather. Spagnuolo and Coughlin are good coaches, for sure, and they should be able to keep it close, but I think, in the end, the Patriots will be able to force some 3rd and 11s, and Manning won’t be able to pull them out of it every time, and New England will win.


I just finished the third book of the Neil Stephenson 8 book series about medieval history and science. (It is 8 paperbacks that were split into three hardcovers. I bought the first three as individual books, then picked up the last 5 in hardcover at a discount bookseller.) The books I have finished are the first 3, which are included in a hardback version called “Quicksilver”. Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon” was a fantastic read, filled with history, and math, and science, and adventure-great, great, stuff. Everybody who I know who has read it is in high tech, so we can call it “geek lit”, for lack of a better word.


The Quicksilver books, so far, are pretty decent. The parts involving Isaac Newton and Friedrich Liebniz are excellent, but some of the other parts drag a bit for me. But I plan to soldier on. I’m enjoying it enough that I don’t want to turn back now.


I’m also reading book three of the Golden Compass trilogy, which has proven to be excellent, another military history of the Revolutionary War, which may be my third or fourth, the first of a two part life of Napoleon, a book on Stonewall Jackson, and Janna Levin’s “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines”. At the moment.


My Windows laptop just quit. It was so old, it was running Me, which is, I think, 2 versions ago. It will turn on, but it won’t sign on to the Internet. I was trying to clean it up by deleting some old files and coax a little more speed out of it, and I managed to delete something critical. I fussed with it, but I couldn’t get it to come back to life. Time to sign on to Dell.com and get another one. Goody.


Reason Number 9,411 why the Iraq War was a bad idea: Farmers in Diallyah Province have started growing opium because they could not make enough money to feed their families growing fruits and vegetables. That’s what the world needs, more opium.


The Terminator show is on again tonight. I am really getting hooked on it.