Random Observations

1. I have a perhaps irrational hatred of Jack in the Box commercials. First, I don't get the Sleepy Hollow-like "pitchman." Why the stupid spherical head with the crooked hat on a normal body? What could be the meaning of that? I don't like his eternal smugness either. I'm not an advertising expert, but I can't think smugness field tests very well among fast food customers. Even the way he constantly gestures out with his hands the same way every time no matter what he's saying annoys me. I'm not sure I've ever seen a Jack in the Box store, but I'm sure that if I did, I wouldn't eat there. Assholes. You know who wasn't smug? Dave Thomas.
2. Colt McCoy's interview after the game last night was damned impressive. Either he's going to win an Academy Award for acting in his second career or he was as honest as I've seen an athlete in an interview in a long time, and the context made it all the better. The guy's whole career basically built up to that one game, and he goes out on a fluke injury five plays in, then he watches his team look helpless only to mount an ultimately failed comeback? Amazing. At this point, there is still nothing more than a lot of speculation about what happened or especially why he wasn't able to return, so I won't comment on whatever sinister or conspiratorial events were taking place in the training room that required his father's presence (ok maybe I will, because you have to at least wonder if ol dad was summoned because he could have played through the injury but it would put him at a greater risk in the future; ie he would be hurting his chance at more money in the draft). That aside, McCoy managed to answer every question both honestly and with the necessary acknowledgments of the other team's superiority. He did this while pausing to choke back emotion, emotion that didn't get in the way of his responsibility in facing the questions. That's a man that is fit to lead. I always figured him to not quite have the goods for the NFL, but maybe he's got a sneaky Brees-type career in him after all.
The secondary comment I have on this is about the interview itself. I generally hate postgame or halftime interviews with any athletes (especially the literally breathless ones given to track athletes--ridiculous), but I guess I'll put up with hundreds of worthless ones if it might eventually lead to something like McCoy's. That actually added to the broadcast in a meaningful way.
3. I have a friend who won $150 on one bet on last night's game. I won $20 on the same bet. This, along with general overconfidence and delusional thinking, is why I always end up losing overall when gambling online.
4. Jon Heyman is a dickbag. Read this and tell me you don't agree. There is a similarly stupid article on SI's site from Dan Shaughnessy, but I'd rather bitch about Heyman. They both are purposefully ignorant writers who are way over on the wrong side of history, and curiosly proud of it. Arrogant, actually. But that's just the baseball Hall of Fame vote. What makes me pity Mr Heyman even more is that he is one of a handful of guys who, over the last couple months of baseball's offseason, has constantly put out articles and statements and twitters trying to scoop about which free agent is signing with which team. Basically, Heyman's status as a journalist is that he is one of this small group of guys who comes up with these scoops. I'm sure the job is tough--he has to make phone calls pretty much constantly and always keep up on the latest gossip (let's face it, that's all that it is), but it's also totally unecessary and irrelevant. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, there may have been an honest need for a guy to tirelessly monitor a group of contacts to stay informed, but in 2010 there is this thing called the internet which happens to have shrunken the news gathering timeline to zero. So what I'm saying is that scoops are a total relic of the past. The only thing that benefits from Jon Heyman being the first to report that Mike Cameron signed with the Red Sox is Jon Heyman's ego, because if he didn't report it, then someone else would have, usually within minutes. It's mid-December and you are a baseball fan. you learn that Mike Cameron has signed with the Red Sox. Really, what good is this information to you? What good is it to you right now? It's worthless. You could be lost at sea and only learn about the signing a month later and it would really make no difference. The whole enterprise of digging for scoops in the baseball offseason bothers the hell out of me, so when I see one of the posterboys of it write such haughty uninformed garbage as Heyman does in that article, it really gets me.