So last week when the Pro Bowl rosters were announced, I texted my Mom and youngest sister (aka Lizard) to do a post mortem. Several Panthers are either primary or alternate selections...far fewer than I would like, of course, but I'm a little biased. (It can't help but escape my notice that, once again, the teams with the greatest national exposure get the most players selected, regardless of performance. HELLO, Washington Redskins, I'm talking to you.)
Anyway, the Panthers left tackle Jordan Gross is a primary selection for the NFC. I voted for Gross and Travelle Wharton not because they're Panthers, but because they anchor an offensive line that's vastly improved as a unit this year. Mom and Lizard, however, disagreed, citing Gross' numerous false start penalties. I argued that false starts are just part of being an offensive lineman*...but I wondered - Is Gross really worse at counting than his counterparts in the rest of the NFL?
Lucky for me, Doug Farrar (a contributor to FootballOutsiders.com, the best Web site in the history of the Internet) looked at this just a few weeks ago. It turns out that, while the Panthers lead the league in false starts, the biggest individual offender is tight end Dante Rosario. Gross is tied with rookie right tackle Jeff Otah at four calls each, the same as the Chicago Bears' Josh Beekman. All are behind the Cowboys' Flozell Adams (six) and the Colts' Ryan Diem (five).
If memory serves, the Panthers ditched the zone blocking schemes they used last year, and now frequently bring up everybody but the ball boy to help clear the way for DeAngelo Williams and Jonathon Stewart. For every big running play, there's a kick-ass block from fullback Brad Hoover or tight end Jeff King or prodigal wide receiver Muhsin Muhammed. (At least two of Williams' TDs against the Giants last night are good examples of King blocks. I probably missed more, but I tend to watch King because I'm madly in love with him.)
Interestingly, earlier this season center Ryan Kalil took the blame for the penalties, saying he had trouble with the snaps. May or may not be true, but it's something to think about other than the reasoning that the guy who gets called is always the one who messed up.
*This is completely different from when I bitch about Chris Gamble, and someone inevitably points out that getting burned is just part of playing in the secondary, because I have an irrational dislike for Chris Gamble.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Fires, space heaters and other things that shouldn't be
Let me tell you a story that's mildly funny now that I'm past it. I moved into my first apartment in the late summer of 2004. In all the first-time grown-up stuff like signing up for cable and utility service, I only ran into one problem. The woman who'd lived in my apartment before me had developed Alzheimer's, and so her family had taken on power of attorney, which in this case included closing out her accounts. Most services were fine with this, except for one - Piedmont Natural Gas, which insisted (with the bureaucratic certainty that only a company with a monopoly can truly summon) that the person whose name was on the account had to be the one to close it - never mind that that person didn't have the mental capacity to do so, let alone the legal authority.
I moved in at the beginning of August, and by the time the gas company figured out what "power of attorney" meant, it was November, and it was cold. I called to make an appointment to have my heat turned on, only to be told there might be as long as a two-to-three week wait now that demand had increased along with the cold weather. I had a series of very unpleasant nights swaddled in every blanket I owned - I was also getting over strep throat at the time, FWIW. And one night, unable to sleep because I was so cold, I bit the bullet.
My stove was electric. I was raised by a former fire marshal and arson investigator, so believe me, I was perfectly aware of how stupid I was about to be - but I felt like I didn't have any other choice. I set the oven to its lowest temperature, opened the door and curled up on the kitchen floor. I slept pretty well, considering.
For me, this was a short period of inconvenience that I knew would pass. But for many people, that "danger vs. hypothermia" battle is one they fight every day through the winter.
On Thursday night here in Winston-Salem, a four-year-old girl died in a house fire that authorities believe started with a space heater. It's the city's third fire fatality in as many weeks, and the second related to space heaters - the day before Thanksgiving, a woman died when a space heater caught her bedspread on fire. A space heater caused another house fire in Greensboro this week, in which a woman and her two granddaughters were injured. Now, these families aren't stupid, and they're not lazy. They just weighed the options and decided that the risk was worth it.
"We are more concerned now with the economy the way it is, if people can't afford to buy oil heat or pay their gas bill, then the alternatives would be to use some type of portable heater," said Norman Mitchell, the city's deputy fire marshal to the Winston-Salem Journal.
It wasn't fire that killed and wounded these people and destroyed their property. It was poverty. The family of the girl killed Thursday had their heat turned off last winter by my friends at Piedmont Natural Gas when they couldn't pay a $700 bill. That's the cost of a f*cking widescreen TV at Wal-Mart. And now a child is dead.
So what can we do? How do we fix this? We could outlaw dangerous space heaters...but that would leave some poor families without heat entirely. We could push for more regulations governing fire-retardant blankets and drapes, but that's still only a band-aid - it doesn't get at the real problem. Poverty is the macro-level issue here. I'm concerned with something more immediate.
Only something like 20 percent of homes in the U.S. use natural gas, but even the cost of propane and electric heat are tied to the price of oil - which has dropped to a three-year low. Yet the Department of Energy predicts that natural gas prices here in the Southeast will rise between one and two percent this winter. I would like to know why that is. (And don't tell me it's because it's going to be a colder winter. I can fill up my Saturn for half what it cost in June.) I would like for Piedmont Natural Gas - the state-designated provider for my area - to explain to me why a child died over $700. Then I would like my state legislators to tell me what they're doing to ensure that this utility - which I have no choice but to use - isn't gouging the sh*t out of us.
By the way, the other state-protected utility, Duke Energy, has a program called "Share the Warmth," where customers can donate money to a fund that provides heat for poor families. Piedmont Natural Gas has no such program to my knowledge. (And, in case I haven't mentioned, their customer service is sh*t.)
I'm mad as hell, and part of that is a natural desire to look for somebody to blame. A lot of people will blame the family who brought a space heater inside and left it unattended. Some will just throw up their hands at the unavoidable tragedy of it all. Me - once, just once, I want someone other than the grieving relatives to lose sleep.
I moved in at the beginning of August, and by the time the gas company figured out what "power of attorney" meant, it was November, and it was cold. I called to make an appointment to have my heat turned on, only to be told there might be as long as a two-to-three week wait now that demand had increased along with the cold weather. I had a series of very unpleasant nights swaddled in every blanket I owned - I was also getting over strep throat at the time, FWIW. And one night, unable to sleep because I was so cold, I bit the bullet.
My stove was electric. I was raised by a former fire marshal and arson investigator, so believe me, I was perfectly aware of how stupid I was about to be - but I felt like I didn't have any other choice. I set the oven to its lowest temperature, opened the door and curled up on the kitchen floor. I slept pretty well, considering.
For me, this was a short period of inconvenience that I knew would pass. But for many people, that "danger vs. hypothermia" battle is one they fight every day through the winter.
On Thursday night here in Winston-Salem, a four-year-old girl died in a house fire that authorities believe started with a space heater. It's the city's third fire fatality in as many weeks, and the second related to space heaters - the day before Thanksgiving, a woman died when a space heater caught her bedspread on fire. A space heater caused another house fire in Greensboro this week, in which a woman and her two granddaughters were injured. Now, these families aren't stupid, and they're not lazy. They just weighed the options and decided that the risk was worth it.
"We are more concerned now with the economy the way it is, if people can't afford to buy oil heat or pay their gas bill, then the alternatives would be to use some type of portable heater," said Norman Mitchell, the city's deputy fire marshal to the Winston-Salem Journal.
It wasn't fire that killed and wounded these people and destroyed their property. It was poverty. The family of the girl killed Thursday had their heat turned off last winter by my friends at Piedmont Natural Gas when they couldn't pay a $700 bill. That's the cost of a f*cking widescreen TV at Wal-Mart. And now a child is dead.
So what can we do? How do we fix this? We could outlaw dangerous space heaters...but that would leave some poor families without heat entirely. We could push for more regulations governing fire-retardant blankets and drapes, but that's still only a band-aid - it doesn't get at the real problem. Poverty is the macro-level issue here. I'm concerned with something more immediate.
Only something like 20 percent of homes in the U.S. use natural gas, but even the cost of propane and electric heat are tied to the price of oil - which has dropped to a three-year low. Yet the Department of Energy predicts that natural gas prices here in the Southeast will rise between one and two percent this winter. I would like to know why that is. (And don't tell me it's because it's going to be a colder winter. I can fill up my Saturn for half what it cost in June.) I would like for Piedmont Natural Gas - the state-designated provider for my area - to explain to me why a child died over $700. Then I would like my state legislators to tell me what they're doing to ensure that this utility - which I have no choice but to use - isn't gouging the sh*t out of us.
By the way, the other state-protected utility, Duke Energy, has a program called "Share the Warmth," where customers can donate money to a fund that provides heat for poor families. Piedmont Natural Gas has no such program to my knowledge. (And, in case I haven't mentioned, their customer service is sh*t.)
I'm mad as hell, and part of that is a natural desire to look for somebody to blame. A lot of people will blame the family who brought a space heater inside and left it unattended. Some will just throw up their hands at the unavoidable tragedy of it all. Me - once, just once, I want someone other than the grieving relatives to lose sleep.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
A grammar lesson for area baseball fans
Winston-Salem's minor league baseball team announced its new name/mascot today. The team formerly known as the Warthogs (and the Spirits before that) will now be......The Dash. (One of my co-workers just asked me, "As in 'Mrs.'?")
Personally, I was always partial to the Spirits - not just because that was what they were called when I was a kid and I don't like change - because I just liked the carefree, soaring sound of it. But my college's mascot is also the Spirits, and I can tell you from experience that it's extremely difficult to represent graphically. Most abstract team names - the Browns, the Cardinal, etc. - either ditch the mascot or go with something else altogether - like the Carolina Tarheels, whose mascot is a giant psychotic-looking bovine.
And I hated "The Warthogs." I'm a firm believer that a team name should be unique to the area where it plays. Generic is bad, and the only thing connecting "Warthogs" to "Winston-Salem" was a bit of bush-league alliteration. This is why the "Jazz" belong in New Orleans, the "Ravens" in Baltimore, the "Hornets" in Charlotte and the "Packers" and "Steelers" in Wisconsin and Pittsburgh, respectively. Isn't a sports team supposed to represent local pride? How can it do that when its name sounds like it came out of a Random Nasty Animal Name Generator?
Which brings me to "The Dash." Again, I have no problem with abstract team names, but they can be awkward until people get used to them (like the Tarheels and their not-at-all-native-to-NC mascot with which NO ONE but me seems to have an issue...). Whoever came up with "The Dash" probably thought he/she was doing exactly what I mentioned above - choosing a team name inexorably tied to Winston-Salem. Here's my problem: that thing between "Winston" and "Salem" IS NOT A DASH. It is A FRACKING HYPHEN.
And yes, I'm upset about this. I'm a writer; it's part of my job to get pissy when people screw with the English language. Especially peeve-inducing is the fact that the dash and hyphen are two of my favorite punctuation marks. (Yes, I have favorite punctuation marks. Shut up.) Hyphens connect words that belong together only temporarily, finding a clear linguistic intent in random strings of words - "a good looking man" and a "good-looking man" are two different things (unless of course the hot guy also has really good vision). A dash is a semi-colon with an attitude - I love dashes so much that part of my editing process is making sure I take half of them out. (See how I just did that? Aaaaah, it makes me happier than Ben & Jerry's.)
So I'm officially reserving judgment on "The Dash." As long as people don't start referring to hyphens as dashes and citing the local baseball team as evidence, I'll stay neutral.
Personally, I was always partial to the Spirits - not just because that was what they were called when I was a kid and I don't like change - because I just liked the carefree, soaring sound of it. But my college's mascot is also the Spirits, and I can tell you from experience that it's extremely difficult to represent graphically. Most abstract team names - the Browns, the Cardinal, etc. - either ditch the mascot or go with something else altogether - like the Carolina Tarheels, whose mascot is a giant psychotic-looking bovine.
And I hated "The Warthogs." I'm a firm believer that a team name should be unique to the area where it plays. Generic is bad, and the only thing connecting "Warthogs" to "Winston-Salem" was a bit of bush-league alliteration. This is why the "Jazz" belong in New Orleans, the "Ravens" in Baltimore, the "Hornets" in Charlotte and the "Packers" and "Steelers" in Wisconsin and Pittsburgh, respectively. Isn't a sports team supposed to represent local pride? How can it do that when its name sounds like it came out of a Random Nasty Animal Name Generator?
Which brings me to "The Dash." Again, I have no problem with abstract team names, but they can be awkward until people get used to them (like the Tarheels and their not-at-all-native-to-NC mascot with which NO ONE but me seems to have an issue...). Whoever came up with "The Dash" probably thought he/she was doing exactly what I mentioned above - choosing a team name inexorably tied to Winston-Salem. Here's my problem: that thing between "Winston" and "Salem" IS NOT A DASH. It is A FRACKING HYPHEN.
And yes, I'm upset about this. I'm a writer; it's part of my job to get pissy when people screw with the English language. Especially peeve-inducing is the fact that the dash and hyphen are two of my favorite punctuation marks. (Yes, I have favorite punctuation marks. Shut up.) Hyphens connect words that belong together only temporarily, finding a clear linguistic intent in random strings of words - "a good looking man" and a "good-looking man" are two different things (unless of course the hot guy also has really good vision). A dash is a semi-colon with an attitude - I love dashes so much that part of my editing process is making sure I take half of them out. (See how I just did that? Aaaaah, it makes me happier than Ben & Jerry's.)
So I'm officially reserving judgment on "The Dash." As long as people don't start referring to hyphens as dashes and citing the local baseball team as evidence, I'll stay neutral.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Something nice about President Bush
In honor of World AIDS Day, let me do something I don't do very often - praise President George W. Bush. In his emphasis (maybe even over-emphasis) on the "war on terror," one of the things that gets lost is the fact that the Bush Administration has funded AIDS treatment around the world at a much higher level than this country did before he took office. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar) pays for 2 million people suffering from AIDS to have life-saving medicine, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. In an interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson, Bush named Pepfar as one of the accomplishments with which he's most proud.
Another proud accomplishment - though one that's not exactly fully "accomplished" - is the liberation of Afghanistan. First Lady Laura Bush went on "Meet the Press" Sunday to talk about life in Afghanistan, particularly for women and girls. I thought she did a great job, and she's obviously committed to this issue. I'm not sure why she hasn't been more vocal about it during her husband's term...But I'd dearly love to be a fly on the wall at Crawford or Camp David when she and George talk about how much better things in Afghanistan would be if he hadn't flitted off to Iraq, leaving the job unfinished.
Okay, sorry to get snarky. Today, just this once, I'm going to choose to leave aside the unmet potential of the Bush tenure, and focus on the people - millions of them - whose lives are actually better off thanks to President Bush.
Another proud accomplishment - though one that's not exactly fully "accomplished" - is the liberation of Afghanistan. First Lady Laura Bush went on "Meet the Press" Sunday to talk about life in Afghanistan, particularly for women and girls. I thought she did a great job, and she's obviously committed to this issue. I'm not sure why she hasn't been more vocal about it during her husband's term...But I'd dearly love to be a fly on the wall at Crawford or Camp David when she and George talk about how much better things in Afghanistan would be if he hadn't flitted off to Iraq, leaving the job unfinished.
Okay, sorry to get snarky. Today, just this once, I'm going to choose to leave aside the unmet potential of the Bush tenure, and focus on the people - millions of them - whose lives are actually better off thanks to President Bush.
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