The Sports Guy’s football picks this week are pretty entertaining for three reasons:
1) A great anecdote about Milton Berle’s natural gifts:
I thought of a new gambling theory after last week’s Denver-Oakland game when the Broncos sat on a 13-3 lead for the entire second half: The Milton Berle Theory. In case you didn’t know, Berle was famous in Hollywood circles for being more endowed than anyone else. Basically, he was the Dirk Diggler of Hollywood. (Note: There’s a hysterical anecdote in the SNL book “Live From New York” about this. Highest of high comedy.) Anyway, the famous story about Berle (maybe an urban legend, maybe not) was that somebody challenged him to a “who’s bigger?” contest once, and Berle soundly defeated the guy, then bragged to someone else in the room, “I only pulled out enough to win.” I’ve heard this story 20 different ways but that’s always how it ends.
What does this have to do with gambling? In the age of perpetual putridity, I feel like we’re seeing these games now where double-digit favorites play bad teams straight up, let them hang around for four quarters, then prevail in an unsatisfying, closer-than-we-thought win that leaves their fans wondering what the hell just happened. Well, why does this happen? Because they only pulled out enough to win.
2) An entertaining rant by his wife, who’s beating him this season in NFL picks:
I’ve seen “Devil Wears Prada” four times already: twice in the movies, then on both ends of a cross-country flight last week. Bill couldn’t understand why I would watch it four times so I tried to explain it to him. They don’t make enough movies where there’s a young girl who has no style and can’t fit in, and then, as the movie goes along, she realizes you need to look the part to get ahead. So she finds somebody non-threatening who’s willing to help her understand how to dress and act, and the whole time, everyone’s wearing great clothes, looking great and going to high-society events. And by the end, she’s cooler and more stylish than anyone in the movie. Pretty Woman worked the same way: Julia Roberts was a hooker with no style, then she found a billionaire boyfriend and a new wardrobe and everything turned out fine. I’m glad she fell in love and it was a nice story, but I really liked her clothes more than anything, especially the brown dress she wore in the polo scene.
Bill joked that, if that’s what I liked about these movies, then they should just keep remaking “Prada” in different environments. Like if, instead of a fashion magazine, they tried a high-class gossip magazine, or a black fashion magazine, or a teen fashion magazine, or they could get out of the magazine industry and use an ad agency or a daytime TV show. It could be the same premise every time — a young girl gets a job in a hectic workplace and has no style, people are mean to her and, eventually, she fits in and succeeds at her job even though she has an evil boss. Then she gets a promotion, falls in love and gets her revenge on everyone who thought she was worthless and didn’t have any style. I thought this was a neat idea until Bill said he was kidding. But why is that a bad idea? Bill has something like 50 favorite sports movies and they’re all the same movie — somebody’s an underdog, nobody believes in them, then they win the big game in the end. That’s every sports movie. So how is that different than making my fashion movie premise 50 different ways? I think Bill is a hypocrite.
3) A link to a good article by Chris Rose of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, defending the decision to get the Superdome opened in time for this season:
The arguments posited in [anti-Superdome letters sent to] USA Today seem to suggest that there be no compartmentalization of funding for recovery. In other words, that repairing the Dome prevents homes being rebuilt in the 9th Ward. Or that patching potholes on Bourbon Street is keeping hospitals from opening. Or that reopening the Aquarium of the Americas — or doing anything with federal dollars that rebuilds our economic engines rather than homes — keeps people homeless.
That said, this week’s Sunday NFL slate is so bad that I’m willing to take the day off and go up to the big outlet mall so Amy can do some shopping.
It’s up in the Harriman Park area, so I’m hoping we can go off and take some pictures of the fall color, too. Unfortunately, we got hit with Day-After-Tomorrow-style wind yesterday, so a lot of the leaves may be gone by now.