Ok, I'll Say It...

...they can pretend he never existed as much as they want to, but just as I feared, Manchester United have no way of replicating the impact of having Cristaino Ronaldo on the pitch.

It's early days in the season and the standings say that everything is fine. They managed to thump the Spurs while short handed and triumphed on derby day to overcome some spectacular defensive blunders, but what I've seen of the team thus far gives me reason to be concerned. Berbatov has nowhere near the selfless work rate requisite for a striker in the premiership. Sir Alex Ferguson's infatuation with the one dimensional and unrepentantly negative Park continues to mystify. The reliance on Scholes and Giggs, legends now in the twilight of their careers will be costly. The flatlining of Nani and the failure of Anderson to emerge as our version of Michael Essien or Javier Mascherano. Not to mention that Ben Foster evokes the very worst of Fabien Barthez.

But nothing worries me as much as the lackluster play of the midfield.

With CR in the lineup, we had a player that the opposition feared to the point where he would draw constant attention and disrupt the shape of the other team. With the versatility to play right or left, supporting or attacking midfield, or out and out striker, he could befuddle you and leave your defenders scrambling for position all afternoon long. His presence led to acres of space for the other midfield players to rove and dominate. No more. They lack the room to play, the creative spark and yes, the imperious arrogance that we've been accustomed to for the last few years.

Valencia's instincts always take him wide, he just doesn't seem to have the willingness or ability to cut inside looking for shots on goal. Owen is injury prone and it remains to be seen if he can be the impact player he once was. The gamble that these two in combination can replace the irreplaceable is one of the great challenges of SAF's career.

Never thought I'd miss the diving, whining, annoying, supremely skilled, spectacular bastard as much as this. But I do.

"He wasn't a ninja"

The words of Baltimore City police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi describing Johns Hopkins student John Pontolillo after the NJ native went medieval on the ass of career criminal Donald D. Rice. The comment was simultaneously an assessment of the lethal skills of the young man and a tacit acknowledgement that all's fair in love, war and the defense of private property.

Not so fast. The story has elicited responses that are dismayingly predictable.

On the one hand you have the law and order crowd who believe that frontier style vigilante justice rules the day. The kid was just preserving the security of himself and his possessions against the ravages of those too indigent, unambitious and unmotivated to work hard and obtain the material trappings of life in a legal manner. The deceased was a repeat offender on the streets only because of a revolving door legal system that fails to protect its citizens from an obvious menace to society. If Seth Bullock can't impose order then Al Swearengen surely will.

On the other side we have the bleeding heart liberals and the perpetrator's family. Even though he had a long criminal record, the guy didn't deserve to die in a pool of his own blood when all he was trying to do was flee the scene. He only went there to steal and he would never really have hurt anyone. When you find someone committing a crime, call the authorities and let the law sort everything out in a civilized manner. The cops / homeowner / businessman didn't have to kill him to stop him.

In a scene that plays out with alarming regularity, the family wails in grief before the cameras for the nightly news. The agony of an inner city mother bemoaning the loss of her progeny, gunned down by a would be victim is real. Her defense of the fallen relative as being merely a harmless hustler is a wrenching level of naivete given her constant contact with the ravages of street violence.

Should the swordsman end up escaping indictment for the events of that tragic day, there's more to fear from the fallout of this incident. Chances are that the family of the thief will drag the student into court seeking redress for the slaying. Look for the anguished invoking of all the elements that make the story so sadly American. Class, privilege, race, cultural influences, vigilantism, inequality, injustice. All will be laid bare as a sharp legal team scorches the earth in search of a payday.

Pinned against a shed on a late summer night, Donald D. Rice was not a saint, but John Pontolillo shouldn't exactly be elevated to the status of mythic urban hero either.

Sublime

Robert Carlyle is one of my favorite actors. Trainspotting, Ravenous, The Full Monty. He always brings a rouge sensibility to his roles.

In this ad directed by Jamie Rafn for Johnny Walker, the Scottish actor delivers a pretty amazing technical performance. And that's not to overlook the small army of crew and the logistical precision it must have taken to pull this off. A bold concept, some serious planning, lots of dogged implementation and 40 takes later, you've got a mini masterpiece on your hands.

Kudos to the cheeky flourish of doing a dolly-zoom (around minute 4:00), using a handheld camera on a rocky, uneven path and with a subject advancing towards the camera. Outstanding.

Come on lads and lasses, how about we lift a wee dram to this tour-de-force bit of movie magic?

Repulsive Redirects Repel: We're from Comcast and we're here to help you...

Score another one for the corporate overlords who unilaterally dictate the terms of the minutiae of our daily existence.

Seems that Comcast, Verizon and apparently a host of other ISPs have decided to embark on an altruistic crusade to save us from the tyranny of misspelled urls. Incorrectly type in an address in your browser and get a bland message saying that the site doesn't exist? That's so 2003. Do the same thing as a Verizon or Comcast subscriber and up pops an ISP branded search page with some suggestions as to sites similar to the address for which you were looking. And by the way, you may also be interested in these "sponsored" results related to your search.

What's that you say? You weren't actually doing a search? You just mistyped something? Silly customer you are. We know what you REALLY want. Irrelevant suggestions with only the vaguest connection to your incorrectly entered address. Advertising for sites, products and services that bear not the slightest connection to what your clumsy, Cheetos encrusted fingers pounded out on the keyboard. Sure we might make some revenue by breaking the way the internet was designed to work, but who needs the pesky tenets of Net Neutrality anyway?

Bonus points to Verizon for making the procedure to opt out of this service suitably arcane enough that your average MIT grad might find it challenging. Further credit to the marketing arms of these benevolent giants for the wonderful terms "Domain Helper" (Comcast) and "Domain Assistance" (Verizon) used to describe this marvelous new service. The more friendly the misnomer, the more hostile the underlying intent. Welcome to the pantheon of linguistic flavored corporate savagery, you're worthy entrants to these hallowed halls.

Just Another Anti Texting-While-Driving Rant

Sat in traffic once with a lady in a red sports car behind me. I could see her with her phone in her left hand, a lit cigarette AND lipstick in the other hand, while simultaneously trying to shift gears. Didn't hear any reports otherwise so I'm hoping that she managed to get to her destination without maiming herself or some poor innocent Saul on the road to Damascus.

For as transformative a technology the ubiquitous cell phone has become, our good sense hasn't been anywhere near as pervasive. Sure there were people before who caused accidents while rummaging around in the glove compartment of fiddling with the radio, but more and more I see examples of reckless driving with folks who are too distracted by their voice or text conversations to pay attention to what's going on around them. Purely anecdotal perhaps, but I don't have the heft of a massive study of the effects of all of this behind me, so what do I know?

Maybe the sextant and astrolabe weren't as sophisticated as our very helpful GPS units, but ancient mariners weren't known to run aground while trying to break-up via text messages either. The cell phone companies haven't exactly worked hard to deter these practices. Perfunctory warnings about texting or calling while driving are geared towards protecting against lawsuits and are not the least bit interested in saving us from ourselves. I'll wait for an aggressive, industry sponsored public service campaign discouraging texting-while-driving with baited breath.

Put down the phone and keep both hands on the wheel. Or at least if you're intent on killing yourself, do it with cigarettes, booze and Twinkies in the comfort of your own home.

Clown Car Vaginas

Step Right Up, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you...The Duggars!

Far be it for anyone to criticize the procreation choices of others, but our loopy fascination with multiple birth families shouldn't be this mystifying.

After all, with Jon and Kate and Nadia Suleiman current media sensations, the modern incarnation of the Dionne Quints suggests that we have yet to move beyond the most primitive freak-show preoccupation. Multiple media appearances with fawning interviewers marveling over the smiling mother's blessed fertility, cheery optimism and breezy insistence that this was "God's will", project to the world a charming naïveté that belies the sinister selfishness behind the fierce spawning of cascading progeny. Every sperm is, after all, sacred.

Make no mistake about it, spewing out as many children as you can is an act of willful aggression. The usual arguments that providence (or public assistance) will provide, or that the parents can afford to do it, or that the world's insatiable appetite for information about them will be a never-ending source of income, may all in fact be true. The belligerence of these actions are however wreaked on those of us who observe the proud parents with head-shaking disbelief.

In a world marked by dwindling resources, economic uncertainty, environmental degradation, we can hardly afford to take seriously the biblical approbation to be fruitful and multiply. Yet that seems to be the draw of families with all those kids running around. How are we to seriously address issues such as poverty, inequality and teenage pregnancy when the media exults over the Duggars and the Gosselins? We profess to be appalled at teenage mothers and 30 year old grannies in the inner city or Appalachia but yet we exult over the actions of people who crank kids for shiny faced exhibition on the Today Show.

The carny element to the spectacle is undeniable. The Duggars may be alternatively charming or appalling depending on your point of view, but they are essentially a short step above the Elephant Man or the bearded lady in curiosity and relevance.