Dave’s Football Blog

I know this whole mainstream media v. bloggers topic has been beaten to death in the last couple of days since Buzz Bissinger’s rant. Even Techdirt has chimed in, with Mike Masnick saying basically the same thing I did — MSM people don’t understand the Internet, nor do they want to. (And yes, Brian, he gives ol’ Bob Costas some stick, too.)

Still, this thought has been stuck in my head for the last day or two, and it’s time I got it out. It involves one of my favorite sports TV shows — ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption.

Here’s the thing: PTI co-host Michael Wilbon is afraid of sports bloggers.

“The notion of blogging scares the hell out of me… There’s no accountability….stuff isn’t edited. It just goes out there as gospel. What it is is opinion.”

Yes, that’s exactly what a worthwhile sports blog is. It’s one person or a group of people giving their opinions on the day’s sports stories. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s thought-provoking. The good blogs, though, remain consistently entertaining and/or informative.

So how is PTI any different?
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I have yet to see the obscenity-laced tirade that Fright Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger spewed at Deadspin chief Will Leitch last night on HBO’s Costas Now, so I’m probably ill-equipped to respond to it. Tons of sports blogs have chimed in already with intelligent responses to that rant, including the target of all that vitriol himself — who, in all honestly, reacted far better to this attack than I would have. Here are a few more worthwhile responses:

• Awful Announcing
• Every Day Should Be Saturday
• FanHouse
• Fire Joe Morgan
• The Run of Play
• Techdirt

The more I read about Bissinger’s tirade, though, the more one thing seems to pop up in my mind — he sounds an awful lot like music industry executives, doesn’t he?

About six months ago, Wired ran this profile of Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music. Morris is 68 years old and has a documented history of calling iPods “repositories for stolen music.” He also served up this gem:

All the sharing of the music, right? Is it correct that people share their music, fill up these devices with music they haven’t paid for? If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go. That’s what happened to the record business.

There’s one underlying and unspoken thought that connects Morris and his peers with Bissinger and his colleagues, and it’s the same thought that rattles around the heads of corporate executives across America: We don’t understand the Internet. We don’t know how to react to these changes. We prefer for things to stay as they were.

Those RIAA labels grew up in a world where they controlled the distribution, and that monopoly ensured they made all the money and had full control over the flow of music. Likewise, the newspaper and magazine columnists used to have a monopoly over opinion in sports. They could control the flow of information and shape that opinion among the people.

That doesn’t exist anymore. Any band can create a Myspace page and start selling their music right there. Any sports fan with half a brain (or less) can create a blog and start typing. The barriers to publishing have deteriorated. All it takes is cheap web space and a worthwhile product, and individuals becomes just as easy to access as the biggest media monoliths. A few of those individuals will become well-liked and well-respected, because they produce interesting and/or entertaining material. Sure, there will be dick jokes. People like dick jokes, or they wouldn’t tell them.

This frightens guys like Morris and Bissinger. They used to have final say over what was interesting and worthwhile, and thanks to this Internet thing, they don’t anymore. What makes this tragic is that they refuse to accept this fundamental change. They would rather paint their new competition as the great Satan and lure the huddled masses back to their old harbors.

Sorry, guys. The huddled masses all have blogs and Myspace pages now. We don’t want to be mere consumers anymore. We want to be creators, too. But hey, you guys are more than welcome to come join the party. It’ll be going on for a while.

UPDATE: Here’s the video.

So the audio on my laptop went apeshit again over the weekend. Last time, it was a result of iTunes overrunning Windows for no reason. This time, I think it was SlingPlayer, which means my brilliant plan for taking my laptop into the kitchen to watch recorded shows on my DVR has gone terribly wrong.

Of course, this became an excuse to spend some of my FanHouse money. I ran out to Best Buy last night to get a relatively cheap new laptop. The new plan is to use the new laptop as my every-day PC while my old laptop will handle more specialized tasks. (And before anyone asks, no, I did not get a frigging Mac. Blogging for AOL doesn’t pay me nearly enough to afford a Macbook that isn’t built like a Frito.)

Anyway, this new plan would work better if the new laptop didn’t annoy the hell out of me. Between Windows Vista and the sheer amount of crapware loaded on to this thing, I can barely get through half a minute without some pop-up window asking either for permission to run a program or telling me something “helpful” about my new PC. You want to be helpful, computer? How about you shut the hell up for 2 minutes and let me do what I’m trying to do here?

I’ve already looked around the web for a few tips and tricks, but if any of you fellow football fanatics out there would like to share your own tips on making Vista behave itself, feel free to post a comment. A lot of my headaches will probably be solved when I get rid of all that crapware — even if it did make the laptop so cheap in the first place — but I’m sure there’s something here that I won’t see.

By the way, is it just me, or does Schalke 04 really look like they couldn’t kick a rock into the ocean right now?

Hey, who’s that dork with the big cell phone standing next to Stuart Scott?

(Spotted on With Leather. Photos published by Don Chavez. My half-assed story about this particular party is here. Why it showed up on With Leather today remains a mystery to me.)

I’m playing with a new Wordpress toy today that was passed on to me from The Postmen. So if things look weird here for the next day or two, that’s why.

I put up with a lot of unnecessary shit from my cell phone.

Last month I upgraded from my old Treo 650 — the phone I used to liveblog NFL games from sports bars three years ago — to a new Treo 755p. At least, it seemed like an upgrade. The 755p had more memory, built-in EVDO for faster Internet speeds, a headphone jack that worked and the ability to use high-capacity memory cards. I threw an 8MB microSDHC card in there and declared it my new MP3 player.

Of course, the last few days have made me wish I hadn’t sold that iPod on Craiglist so quickly. To put it mildly, the 755p is a big, fat buggy mess. It freezes at inopportune times and often requires 2 or 3 reboots a day. Connecting it to my PC results in an instant blue screen of death, so I have to use a backup tool on the phone itself to save my data in case things go terribly wrong — which has happened twice already. I’m getting just as good at hard resetting this Treo as I am with reinstalling Windows on my laptop.

Why do I put up with all this? Because in spite of all the bugs, the Treo does everything I want it to do and then some. I remain enamored with this whole idea of the “swiss army knife” gadget, the one device that does everything. The Treo is my cell phone, my calendar, my organizer, my on-the-go camera and word processor, my email-and-web-anywhere device, my road atlas (thank you, Google Maps), my MP3 player, and my portable video game console. If I had a Slingbox, I could watch live Champions League matches from anywhere.

The Treo does all these things — and it excels at absolutely none of them. When it works, though, it’s still pretty cool, because I can still do more with my Treo than I can with anything else. You can’t play Ms. Pac Man on an iPhone — only a 5G/6G iPod — while I have MAME on my Treo, so I’ve got Ms. Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, Galaga, Frogger, Donkey Kong, Hat Trick and obscure shit like Pepper II, Spectar and Q-Bert’s Qubes.

On top of that, I’ve got a console emulator on here that can play Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and Turbo Grafx-16 games. They can play hacked ROMs, too, so Roethlisberger-to-Ward in Tecmo Super Bowl is doable. (And kind of cool.) The 16-bit console emulators are buggy as hell and require a lot of soft resets to run properly, but that didn’t stop me from going out looking for ROMs to run on them.

In fact, in my search for Genesis ROMs, I found not only multiple versions of Madden and FIFA, but also this little gem:

Yes, EA Sports gave us Rugby World Cup 95 for the Genesis, and it looks exactly as you think an EA Sports-coded rugby game for a 16-bit console might look:

Of course, I don’t have the first clue how to control the damn thing — ROMs don’t come with instruction booklets — but if I ever have some time to kill, I’m going to figure it out. I think it might help me appreciate rugby union a little bit more, and if I’m lucky, it’ll only require one or two reboots to work properly.

Still, you can’t do that on your iPhone or Crackberry, can you? Typing on an iPhone sucks, and it won’t run 3rd party apps (yet) or work with a Bluetooth keyboard, among other things. So I’ll stick with my buggy-ass Treo, thanks.

What I really want to know is this — where are the Aussie Rules games for the old 16-bit consoles? Did they not make any AFL games until the Playstation came out?

Being A.) a sports blogger and b.) a guy, I feel somewhat compelled to mention here that the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue — that little piece of historical kitsch that became a giant marketing monster with tits — arrived on newsstands in America this week. Those lovable pervs at With Leather were much more focused on this “event” today, with separate posts for the athletes’ wives — what, no Premier League WAGs? — the NFL cheerleaders, Danica Patrick (pictured above) and, of course, the pros.

Of course, most folks who visit this site won’t be all that interested in this swimsuit issue. It doesn’t include the one woman that seems to lead everyone here…

We’re waiting, Pam. Don’t let Erin Andrews beat you to the punch.

By the way, has anyone else noticed that since I uploaded this video, Fox never shows any part of Pam Oliver below the shoulders? I apologize to all of you for that. Seriously.

I know this has pretty much nothing to do with football, but I imagine that most of you out there enjoy a good brew with whatever football game you choose to watch, so there you go…

As a few of you know, I’m something of a beer snob. I refuse to drink any sort of brew that offends my taste buds. Cheap American swill advertised during NFL games won’t cut it, and if you have a problem with that, well, it’s your problem.

So I stopped in my local Total Wine store for a variety six-pack. For whatever reason, I was in a dark beer mood and started sifting through stouts and porters for something interesting. That’s when I stumbled upon this:

That’s right — Entire Butt English Porter. It’s not just part of the butt. No. It’s the whole damn thing.

Who in their right mind would name their beer this? Did someone drink this and determine that the “ass-tertaste” warranted putting potential customers on notice? “This brew is all ass, people. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.” This must be the kind of beer that drunken frat boys would buy to haze the pledges — that is, if the drunken frat boys weren’t getting kegs at the Big Red instead.

Suffice to say, I had no interest in drinking this Entire Butt, but hey, if that’s your thing, knock yourself out. It might be just the right brew for that Seahawks-Panthers game this weekend, or that Derby County v. Middlesbrough match.