Greatest two point conversion ever.

Sorry to keep stressing the fun factor, but we all need it with the country and the world going completely to hell day by day.

Many, many close games, overtimes, and dazzling plays. We’ll begin with the important games.

Harvard played frequent Nemesis Holy Cross, who insisted on remaining tied with the Crimson, touchdown for touchdown, throughout the regulation 60 minutes. So they started playing overtime. Unfortunately, the Harvard field goal kicker, Thurston Howell IV, was back in Cambridge nursing a painful gouty toe, so their strategy had to be touchdowns, one of which they scored in each of the three overtime periods. Holy Cross did the same for two of the three. It wasn’t enough. Must have been kind of thrilling to watch. (Side note. Penn-Dartmouth played out exactly the same way. No one has field goal kickers anymore?)

Rutgers played the SMU Mustangs and twice opened up three touchdown leads. But head coach Kyle Flood, like Greg Schiano before him, is smarter than the average bear. When you have a three touchdown lead in the middle of the third quarter, what you do is sit on that lead, no matter what. Run the ball, run the ball, and when it’s third and long, run the ball. When the other team scores, you stick to your guns and run the ball. Why SMU managed to tie the game in the closing seconds of regulation with the greatest two-point conversion in the history of college football: two yards gained on a desperation 40 yard pass to a truly gifted wide receiver. After that it was just a repeat of the Harvard-Holy Cross game. Touchdown, touchdown, touchdown, touchdown, field goal, touchdown. The Rutgers Scarlet Knights overcame their abysmal coaching to win in the end. It was too nerve wracking to watch except on the ESPN zipper.

Ohio State played Northwestern. The Wildcats were inspired. My wife loved their new helmets. Me not so much. I have nothing against Northwestern but Michael Wilbon, although I resented having to stay up way past my bedtime for the Buckeyes to rally late in the fourth quarter for a win that was way closer than the final score. A great football game. I agree with what the Wildcat coach said after the game. “Those guys getting on the bus back to Columbus know they were in a fight tonight with my guys.”

In less important games, Georgia squeaked by a valiant Tennessee team in overtime, when a too ardent running back trying to push the ball past the goal line fumbled it into the end zone for a touchback. Georgia field goal. Game over.

Indiana beat Penn State for the first time EVER. Doesn’t seem possible such a record could still exist. Well, it doesn’t any longer.

Notre Dame, wearing the cheapest, tartiest uniforms in their once dignified history, defeated the team that annihilated USC last week. They didn’t even need overtime to do it. Hmmmmph. Credit where credit is due. But the bright green shoes and the helmets with mirror shamrocks got to go.

And Navy and The Air Force defied Obama by playing a game, thanks to a special dispensation granted by the SecDef. I think Navy won.

All I’m saying is that in the constant hunt for distractions, college football is still a winning proposition. People actually trying, risking life and limb for something as intangible as victory. If you think about it, it’s kind of inspiring.

btw, if you’ve been daunted by all the “danger” talk about football, this is required reading. I’ll give you one teaser paragraph, but by all means read it all. Should adjust your perspective.

One thousand times more Americans die from swimming than from football hits. Last year, skateboarding collisions killed 15 times as many Americans as football collisions did. About twelve times as many people die annually from crashes on the ski slopes than die from crashes on the gridiron. If you’re wearing a Riddell or Schutt helmet when you die, the Drudge Report surely will highlight your passing. If you’re not wearing a helmet in a fatal riding or skiing crash, Matt Drudge probably won’t notice. The war on football is as much a clash between perception and reality as anything else.

I dunno. Sometimes you just roll with it and laugh.

It’s a two-episode miniseries called Cat8. I love it for so many reasons. I heartily recommend it to all our readers.

First, are Matthew Modine and Ed Begley Junior the same person? What do you think?

Green boy.

So incredibly earnest. And quietly sanctimonious.

Sandy haired, weak, soft-headed, prematurely wrinkled, and ultimately dim, they’re both poster boys for green phantasms and ill begotten leftist causes.

What’s so funny about this three hours of nonsense. The premise is absurd. The plot is absurd. The characters are absurd. And it’s all just perfect entertainment.

Matthew Modine is a scientist who wanted to deter global warming. He invented a technology that tapped into the power of the sun. But the evil Bush-era Republicans weaponized it. Of course. He tried to destroy his research, but all he destroyed was his own career. Irony One.

The president, who is obviously Bush, and the Secretary of Defense, who is obviously Cheney, push ahead with a premature test of the weaponized technology which obviously pisses the sun off big time. Irony Two.

Typical SyFy soap opera follows. Modine saves the entire earth and its inhabitants not once but twice. With the Cheney character gunning for him the whole time, beating him in a Guantanamo situation even though he’s the only one who might have a clue how to save the earth, and sending special forces against him with kill orders throughout, even when it’s clear that earth itself is about to break apart (cat8). The movie is a leftist political masturbation orgy. Irony 3.

Oh. The Bush stand-in dies humiliatingly. The Vice President is mysteriously Hillary like. What you expect is that she will know immediately who the villain is. But she doesn’t. It takes her to the final five minutes of Episode 2. Oh shucks. Irony 4.

No, I’m not going to do a matching game. I’m just going to talk sense. The whole purpose of the script is to bash Bush and Cheney. But being ill educated idiots, actors like Modine don’t realize that the premise is more damaging than the target. Hubris is believing we can deal with earth factors we don’t fully understand without creating unintended consequences. The movie is 100 percent about unintended consequences.

Evidence increasingly suggests that the sun is a huge part of the climate effects we think we see. Did somebody sneak that idea in, past the physics geniuses of folks like Matthew Modine?

The only president we’ve had who would have punished Americans for just being Americans is Obama. The idea that the whole planet imploding wouldn’t change the equation recalls nothing so much as the current administration’s desire to punish ordinary citizens for nothing but wanting to visit the nation’s heritage sites. America is dying. Obama is sitting for a portrait and playing more golf.

I know. Nobody wants to blame Obama for anything. Cipher. Geek on the golf course. Intellectual. Right. Tiny little creep of a vicious halfwit who thought he was something he clearly isn’t. And a world of morons who are determined to sustain him in his fantasy.

IRS audit to come.

He’s happy. Are you?

Chopping birds to pieces in the name of Gaia.

How Do Wind Turbines Kill Birds?

Wind energy is frequently touted as a clean, green source of energy that can reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

But like all sources of energy, wind power comes at a cost — one that’s too often borne by eagles, hawks, falcons, owls and other birds.

Wind turbines kill more than 573,000 birds each year in the United States, according to The Associated Press, including federally protected species like bald eagles and golden eagles.

Environmentalists don’t care about anything but killing off people. Maybe Matt Damon should make a movie about that. He can ride to the rescue in his Toyota Prius. Or blow up in it. I don’t care which.

Sorry about that. Had an incident today with a right lane bandit in a Prius. They’re still in a hurry, mind. They just assume they have the right of way. Because they’re, you know, liberal.

As for me, right lane bandits are the same old cowardly scum they’ve always been. Too yellow to speed in the open, too stupid to understand how they put other people in danger by racing in the slow lane. In short, Democrats.

Windmills are a blight. They’re ugly and inefficient. They kill thousands, hundreds of thousands, of the most beautiful creatures on earth. Green? I don’t think so. Black is the color of Greenpeace and PETA. Death is their signpost.

This pic is really kind of perfect. The totalitarian cage they want all of us to live in.

Yeah. Let’s all be cows owned by the state.

We have to be older. And wiser. Even removed, to the extent necessary.

It’s sad. A whole new photoshoot for Mylie Cyrus. A girl spiraling down the drain. They do that. We should never help. The mandate is not to be tempted by children. Which they mostly are until they’re 25 or so.

It’s easy to distract men. We’re so distractable. But we have to remember that we have a moral responsibility. Regardless of where our minds and fantasies go unbidden, we have an obligation to be good.

Why I commend this essay to all men. I won’t mention the Brizoni word, but it applies. Read.

And think.

Women are so much more enticing than girls.

Take a cue from the master.

The Narrative now is two pronged. “Evil Republicans” on the left. “Stupid Republicans” on the right.

The actual story that’s being covered only in passing is the monumental screw-up that is ObamaCare. Remember that, no matter how fervid the rhetoric becomes.

And speaking of monumental, here’s the master demonstrating which part of your person should be aimed toward the television news.

Monumental is one word. Gigantic, glorious, and heroic are three more. You choose your own favorite.

Yeah. Everything’s shut down. Except everything but the national parks. Maybe, maybe we can scrape through this. Why I’ve prepared a musical interlude to facilitate the healing process.

We need soothing. We need comfort. Abatement of passion. I can provide that.

And we need to get our rhythm back. It’s not as hard as it seems.

All right. Maybe this isn’t going as well as I’d hoped. Maybe some actual emotion is still called for.

Okay, screw it. It’s still and always has been balls to the wall time. The Interlude ends with this.

Everybody ready to go back to work? Thought so.

He’s getting no federal funding. Shut down.

10:00 AM. I have to tell you. The shutdown is hitting us hard here. The Keurig is only making half a cup of coffee. The pictures on my iPhone are only three quarter size. Google is finding 30 percent fewer links. Only two of the three ESPN channels are broadcasting. We’re getting OWN fine but the Lifetime Movie Network is reduced to showing Audie Murphy westerns. The mail lady delivered only the junk mail, not the fan mail I generally get. The broccoli potato soup Raebert gets mixed in with his kibble ran out yesterday, and when I look in the fridge for the bowl it hasn’t been refilled. We’re at our wit’s end here.

I’ll try to post live updates through the day, but I warn you some of the keys on my plug-in keyboard are not funded and not working…

Wish us luck. And feel free to share your own shutdown travails.

10:20 AM. It’s getting worse, even snowballing. Our unfunded housecats are shut down.

Well, two of the four anyway. Elliott is an Obama bundler, so he’s fine. And Cassie’s a leader in the Occupy the Garage movement, so she hasn’t even noticed. Actually, she might even be in jail by now.

And apparently my Ohio State cap is not funded, because look at all the dust. Shocking.

Tell me again, why do we pay all those taxes?

Most alarmingly, the child gate we use to keep Raebert in, or something else out (I’m not 100 percent sure), is usually six inches higher so the older cats can go underneath. But you can see that it has now been lowered by some 20 percent, which compounds the cat shutdown effect, I’m almost 70 percent sure. See?

Even Raebert’s elephant is trapped.

Hand wringing. What are we to do?

11:20 AM. Worse and worse. It’s looking pretty likely that the blonde women of Fox News are showing 18 percent less leg today. Who knew thighs were federally subsidized? Damn. Airwolf is on, but it’s Season 2, Episode 1, and the plot is about terrorizing a pickup truck in the parking lot of a Texas bar. Really?! The unearthly howl is gone too. Airwolf is just beeping, like a low fuel warning. Those federal credit cards not working at the gas pumps? Double damn.

12:00 PM. Even my wife’s computer is sleeping so hard it’s actually snoring.

It’s usually more discreet, pretending YOU screwed up somehow.

Another thing. I have a full serving of Chicken Parm from Pat’s Pizza in the fridge downstairs. (They make really good Chicken Parm btw.) By this time normally it would be hot and plated and ready for my delectation. Where is it? Where is it!!! I say give Harry Reid what he’s asking for. I can’t abide any more of this personal torture.

Besides, we’ve had a casualty. Absolutely shutdown related. In our own household. Raebert’s elephant, who would usually go downstairs UNDER the child gate, tried to go over it instead.

I thought he was doing okay. Huffing a bit, but okay.

Then he fell.

Dead. Very sad.

I blame them all. Obama, Harry Reid, and the remorseless Republicans too. Then there’s this:

Turns out his pillow wasn’t funded. Talk about suffering. Lost his elephant and now this.

Who knows what horrors the rest of this benighted day will bring?

1:30 PM. So I’m not pretending to be Mister Righteous here. When the newsreaders of Fox stopped showing their legs and boobs and stuff owing to the Shutdown, I went looking elsewhere. Where do left wing ladies strut their stuff? At the Emmys!

But the Shutdown has already closed off that avenue as well. Look at this censored picture of the probably (but who knows?) lovely boobs of Zosia Mamet from the progressive HBO series “Girls.”

Look, government. We can handle pictures of young naked boobs, or gauze covered boobs, or any kind of boobs that aren’t wiped completely off the map. Get off our lawn, whyn’tcha?

Don’t mean to be cranky. But now it appears that the Keurig is wrapped in a half dozen yards of police tape. Well, it doesn’t say police. It says FBI.

Speaking of the FBI, here’s something odd. Heard a few motorcycle crashes today. No ambulances though. Shutdown, right? When I went out they were still writhing around in the fields. Too far away to hear what they were yelling. But I did notice this on the road.

They’ve got money for this but not EMTs? I’ve lost patience, I tell you. Somebody should pick that up.

I thought government was supposed to take care of us.

2:40 PM. So now we’re approaching three o’clock in the afternoon. When will this ordeal ever end? One of my computer speakers fell over. There’s no one to pick it up. Raebert’s elephant is now a zombie, stalking cats…

Who will save Mickey?

…and even Raebert himself…

Who would be terrified if he ever noticed.

Beside the point. Things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be. If they’re going to shut down the things government controls or has a fat finger in, why do we still have all these lewd unfunny sitcoms? Why does the network news still feature blow dried nancy boys of both sexes? Why, if the government really cares about us, does life go on always, exactly, as if there’s no one looking after us but us?

Unless things are exactly the way they’re supposed to be. Tough. Annoying. Difficult. Constant challenge.

Government shutdown? Only a handful of people will ever notice. Mainly people doing business with the government. But they’re used to that by now too. A few days or weeks of hardship. Overcome in the past and in the future too.

As for the rest of us, it’s a giant steaming stinky pile of nothing. Let the pollsters do their worst. Nobody will remember. And Raebert is still The Man.

My elephant is healed. Except for the ears I chewed off. All is well.

And (as Samuel Pepys used to say) so to bed.

Yeah, I saw that concert. Closest I came to my own dream band, The Shuteye Train. Doesn’t matter I’m old enough to know better. But it’s Lake who should know better than to dangle a documentary over my head I don’t know how to see. Curses.

Mick’s a great grandfather. I’m on the verge. Changes your stage style.

I never believed anyone. Do you believe that?

Just an ordinary old man.

Now, finally, I realize I’m a decrepit old jerk with a really cool backstory. Shammadamma.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL. Mephistopheles leaned back in his chair with a sigh.

“It’s been a good run,” he said.

“But all good things have to come to an end, right?” replied Mick.

“Yes. But sometimes one wishes one could make an exception for special circumstances.”

“But one can’t make an exception. You DID sign the contract, did you not?”

“That I did, Sir Mick.”

So Mick collected the soul of Mephistopheles and returned to his concert tour.

Shidooby.

I half expect to see Clinton and Stacy from ‘What Not to Wear’ pursuing the protesters down the runway… “Don’t show off what you don’t have!”

I have one objective today. To make people laugh. My Global Warming piece failed. You’re all too serious, knotted up, falling to earth without a ripcord… Wrong way to do it, friends. You got to reeeelaaaax.

Try this:

A Liverpool model said she “punched” two Femen protesters who broke onto the catwalk at Paris fashion week and grabbed her arm.

Hollie-May Saker was modelling for designer Nina Ricci in the French capital when protesters from the radical feminist group ran on stage, with the words “model, don’t go to brothel” painted across their torsos.

When one of the two women grabbed Ms Saker’s hand, she can be seen pulling her hand away in response, before both members of the Ukrainian group were dragged away by a security guard who quickly rushed onto the stage.

Anfield resident Ms Saker continued to walk around the catwalk even as the protesters were being pulled off stage.

Speaking to the Liverpool Echo, Ms Saker said: “I punched her – I didn’t mean to but she grabbed my arm and I just wanted to get her off me.

“I was the 19th girl out of the catwalk and I could hear screaming behind me.

“As she grabbed by arm she lifted my skirt exposing me – I pulled my arm back with such force that I landed a punch square on her nose.”

It’s a fun story, guaranteed to be more interesting than what Boehner said to Reid on their landline phones.

Don’t you love the way they put “punched” in quotes. Models can’t punch. Just like high fashion models don’t actually have breasts, any more than they have flesh on their thighs or hips. Perfect. So protesters of models are actually like anti-models and they don’t have any of those things either. Not to mention the brain thing. Which I won’t.

So that leaves us with models built like starving twelve year old boys being protested by Femen activists built like starving twelve year old boys, both endowed with the brains of sociopathic nine year olds (sorry, I lied), and there’s both nudity and violence!!!

Except that there isn’t. No breasts at all. No punches at all. Just an anorexic flail of arm.

Oh well. Think of it as part of my continuing training on the Obama foreign policy. Nothing done but nothing to look at anyway.

On the other hand, naked is naked. You do get to see the empress unclothed. If you choose to look away, that’s information too. Obama’s spent a lot of time on the runway. I’ve seen enough skinny pigeon chest for a lifetime. How about you?

Relax.

I LOVE it here in the Tropics.

The UN’s IPCC has updated its climate change report, and true blue environmentalists are responding with typical scientific rationalism:

A meteorologist who has covered weather for the Wall Street Journal tweeted that he has decided not to have children in order to leave a lighter carbon footprint, and is considering having a vasectomy.

He also vowed to stop flying after the world’s recent climate-change report made him cry.

Eric Holthaus was reacting to the findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which released a report on Friday that found it was ‘extremely likely’ that humans are causing warming trends seen in the last several decades.

On Friday the weatherman tweeted: ‘No children, happy to go extinct.’ Don’t let us stop you.

Calm down. Have a Piña Colada.

What’s the word for this kind of reaction? Groping for it, need some help here, maybe the help of an eminent MIT climatologist…?

Top MIT scientist: Newest UN climate report is ‘hilariously’ flawed

Not all scientists are panicking about global warming — one of them finds the alarmism “hilarious.”

A top climate scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lambasted a new report by the UN’s climate bureaucracy that blamed mankind as the main cause of global warming and whitewashed the fact that there has been a hiatus in warming for the last 15 years.

“I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence,” Dr. Richard Lindzen told Climate Depot, a global warming skeptic news site. “They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claimed it was 95 percent sure that global warming was mainly driven by human burning of fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases. The I.P.C.C. also glossed over the fact that the Earth has not warmed in the past 15 years, arguing that the heat was absorbed by the ocean.

“Their excuse for the absence of warming over the past 17 years is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean,” Lindzen added. “However, this is simply an admission that the models fail to simulate the exchanges of heat between the surface layers and the deeper oceans.”

“However, it is this heat transport that plays a major role in natural internal variability of climate, and the IPCC assertions that observed warming can be attributed to man depend crucially on their assertion that these models accurately simulate natural internal variability,” Lindzen continued. “Thus, they now, somewhat obscurely, admit that their crucial assumption was totally unjustified.”

I know nuthink!

Oddly enough, there seems to be another government scandal involved:

The Associated Press obtained documents that show the Obama administration and some European governments pressured UN climate scientists to downplay or even omit data that shows the world hasn’t warmed in over a decade.

“Germany called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted, saying a time span of 10-15 years was misleading in the context of climate change, which is measured over decades and centuries,” the AP report said. “The U.S. also urged the authors to include the ‘leading hypothesis’ that the reduction in warming is linked to more heat being transferred to the deep ocean.”

Global warming skeptics have exploited such data to show that the science behind manmade global warming is faulty and politically driven.

“[I]n attributing warming to man, they fail to point out that the warming has been small, and totally consistent with there being nothing to be alarmed about,” Lindzen said. “It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going.”

Amazing. And don’t forget hilarious.

Let’s Dance. But if you don’t mind, I’ll lead. You don’t have the stones for it.

The surreal aspect isn’t the fact of a whitewashed report. Or even the evidence of government conspiracy to commit fraud. It’s the ongoing hysteria of those who insist they are the devotees of real science in the face of so much evidence that their philosophically fallacious “consensus science” is demonstrably wrong. The poor little weatherman who wants to go extinct isn’t alone. CNN is a whole TV network that’s just as happy to ignore the iceberg which has already sunk their ship of fools:

All Friday morning, every hour on the hour, CNN has been broadcasting a fear-mongering segment about rising water levels in the city of Miami, Florida. The hysterical CNN reporter not only blames Global Warming but also any country that burns energy. You can watch the segment below, but what you won’t see are CNN anchors Carol Costello and Ashleigh Banfield fret over the fact that we are all doomed.

What the anti-science CNN is withholding from its audience, though, is the good news that there actually is no Global Warming. Global temperatures have not increased for fifteen years. Moreover, we have just learned that the Antarctic sea ice is at its highest level in 35 years.

What happened to my swimming pool?

I also heard a segment on NPR a week ago in which analysts in educated accents repeated the same weary crap about the threat of climate change, and I notice that the science propaganda channels are still rerunning their endless catalogue of (sometimes decade old) documentaries about this and that consequence of global warming which our fearless academics and technocrats are trying to save the planet from. Al Gore, Obama, and John Kerry are still sounding the alarm of the knowing elders about our carbon footprints, and I can only conclude that they kind of missed this evidence, which should be simple enough for even a dilettante elitist millionaire to understand:

A bitter wind blows off the Arctic Ocean but the mother polar bear and her two cubs standing just 50ft in front of me are in their element.

For more than an hour I watch from a boat just offshore, transfixed and oblivious to the below-freezing temperatures, as the four-month-old twins gambol across the snow.

For years polar bears have been the poster boys of global warming – routinely reported to be threatened with extinction due to melting ice-packs and rising sea temperatures.

Hope: Despite concerns about future extinction, polar bear populations appear to have stabilised.

Indeed, when they were put on the US Endangered Species list in 2008, they were the first to be registered solely because of the perceived threat of global warming.

One prominent scientist said their numbers would be reduced by 70 per cent by 2050 while global warming proponents – including Al Gore and Sir David Attenborough – used emotive imagery to highlight their ‘demise’.

Yet there is one small problem: many polar bear populations worldwide are now stable, if not increasing.

According to a report compiled this year on Canadian polar bear populations by academics at Lakehead University, Ontario, only one out of 13 areas showed declining numbers. In fact, in some areas numbers have steadily increased…

Those who insist the bear population is healthy are not popular.

Dr Susan Crockford, an evolutionary biologist and expert on polar bears, was criticised as a ‘climate change denier’ when she published a paper called Ten Good Reasons Not To Worry About Polar Bears earlier this year.

Population forecasting expert Dr J Scott Armstrong agrees: ‘The decision by the US Senate in 2008 to name the polar bear as an endangered species because of global warming was based on flawed information.

‘The fact is it is almost impossible to get an accurate figure for the number of polar bears – they do not stay in one territory.’

Where’s our food stamps? Do we really have to do a million-bear march on DC? Okay. On our way.

I’m thinking that in many ways this has become a silly topic. It’s never really been about science. It’s been about a weird combination of dumbshit New Age Gaia mythology, cynical leftist political ideology, and the old reliables, money and careers. It would be funny if it weren’t so pernicious and ultimately nihilist. That’s why we have this age old graphic.

That would be us on the right, and the left on the left.

But because it’s so absurd, so out and out ludicrous, it’s been a long time since I delved into the political muck of it. Here’s a piece worth reading and the best, most illustrative paragraph in it:

Religion has ritual. Global-warming alarmism has recycling and Earth Day celebrations. Some religions persecute heretics. Some global-warming alarmists identify “denialists” and liken them to Holocaust deniers. Religions build grand places of worship. Global-warming alarmists promote the construction of windmills and solar farms that uneconomically produce intermittent electricity. Global-warming alarmism even has indulgences like the ones Martin Luther protested. You can buy carbon offsets to gain forgiveness for travel on carbon-emitting private jet aircraft

Hence the hair shirts and self flagellation of the most devout. They’re so far into the faith aspect of their science that nothing — no fact, no absence of fact — has any power to change their conviction. Understandable with religion. But science is not religion. Consensus actually hasn’t any meaning as a word in science. But try telling that to the Gaia loons. What I’m guessing is that polar bears have a much hardier survival instinct than left wing “idealists.”

Something you want to say to me?

Or you can say it to me. I promise I won’t be listening either. Just call me Sir Real.

Uh, btw, weathermen of the TV news world — weather isn’t climate. No wonder the Weather Channel is confused. I remember South Jersey heat in summers 50 years ago that would make your hair curl, no white Christmases for a decade. We didn’t call it climate change. We called it what it was. Weather.