After years of lackluster commentating on Monday Night Football, ESPN has giddily hired an all new 2022 crew, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman (stolen from Fox Sports for something in the neighborhood of $100 million), thereby ensuring another year of lackluster commentating.

The labor of calling a football broadcast is divided into two roles: the play-by-play announcer who tells the fans who weren't looking what just happened on the field, and the color commentator who explains why what just happened was a good/bad thing. Good crews inform you about what you might not have noticed and teach you about football. Really good crews get you excited to see more. Then there's the Buck-Aikman combo.

Competent play-by-play announcing is an art, and each sport is a different discipline. I'll give Joe Buck credit for being far above average at calling baseball games, but after years and years of trying, he comes across as disinterested and generally ignorant of the football games he calls. If the announcer doesn't care about the game, why should anyone listen?

As for the other side of the booth, I might have been the only person in the world who didn't enjoy John Madden's broadcasts because he reduced his commentary to idiot-level "BAM"s and "YAK"s to reach the average television-watching moron, but Aikman appears to have the actual vocabulary of the average television-watching moron. As a teacher, he's more a substitute than tenured professor; he's proven completely unable to elevate the game. At least he's really grumpy.

So did ESPN buy themselves a good crew or a great crew? The Buck-Aikman combo certainly has me excited... to see what's on a different channel.

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From the Bee's Inhumanity to Man Department:

After Leo Madden is found not guilt of murder, someone kills the lead witness in the trial. It doesn't take the World's Greatest Detective to guess that Madden might be involved (even though Madden was acquitted of the crime and need not worry about being tried for it a second time), so the Red Bee is on the case.

Hit Comics #15, September 1941

And what bloody case it is! Michael, the trained bee, kills the first suspect with a beaker of sulphuric acid. The Red Bee kills another by electrocution, then cleans out a room of mobsters with a gas explosion.

At the end of the issue, the only men left standing are Madden and one former gang member who can pin him to the original witness' murder. The DA calls for a new trial. Wait, isn't that where this issue started? The Red Bee's job is never done!

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An update to some previous blog entries:

First things first. On my last post, I covered the Scripps Howard celebrity Super Bowl poll. And now that the game is over (damn you, Saints!), it should be pointed out that the celeb who picked closest was Joe Mantegna, who predicted Saints, 28-17. Outperforming a majority of the celebs were video game simulations run by newfangled Madden 10 and classic Tecmo Super Bowl, both of which had forecast a Saints win. So keep in mind that the next time you need to turn to someone to advice, you'd be better off talking to a computer screen than your average celebrity.

On December 17, 2008, I mentioned that New York was planning to tax soda consumption. It failed to pass. According to the Houston Chronicle, a similar fate has just quietly befallen a federal measure with the same intent. Sure, raising taxes on an item to increase revenue and decrease health risks sounds good, but who really wants to pay an extra 15 cents per can of soda when they could instead pay higher income taxes? No one I know, that's for sure.

And speaking of predictions, last week I noted two separate incidents of single-vehicle accidents on the same stretch of road. Now another mysterious accident claimed the life of a third person, who was found mauled in the middle of that road. Police have no clues about the third death in three weeks on Newnan Crossing Bypass, but are guessing hit-and-run at 4AM in the morning. You heard it here first, people. Grab your .30-30s, the Great Deer Uprising of 2010 continues.

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If Madden NFL 10 is college calculus, Batman: Arkham Asylum is kindergarten finger painting.

To be fair, I've only played the demo. But to complete the demo, I only needed one button on my controller. Apparently anyone can be Batman, so long as they have an "X" button. This is the sort of behavior that I would expect from a Superman game. (Really, if you could shoot laser beams from your eyes, would it really matter if you had any other powers?) Run, punch. Sneak, punch. Drop from the ceiling, punch. While I'm not really expecting a solve-it-yourself Agatha Christie mystery in a video game, I would've like to have seen the World's Greatest Detective featured in something other than an upgraded River City Ransom.

Maybe I could forgive even this if I thought the game looked good. But a Batman wearing plate armor, Joker wearing makeup, Harley Quinn dressed as a circus slut, and a Jim Gordon who has been moonlighting as a body builder are hardly my idea of good design. (It's better than the designs in last year's hideous Mortal Kombat vs. The DC Universe, but then everyone involved with that game should have been subjected to Johnny Cage's Ball Breaker.) And Batman has pupils. Why, oh why, does arcade Batman have pupils? It's not like he's looking at anything.

Despite all of this, it may still be the best Batman game ever. That's damning with weak praise, indeed.

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Madden NFL 10 loudly and proudly proclaims itself as the best NFL game on the market. But look a little closer and you'll realize that it is the only NFL game on the market. And it sucks.

If you haven't been playing Madden since 1989, don't bother picking up the controller unless your idea of a good time is sitting in rush hour traffic while the car next to you plays music you can't stand loud enough for you to hear over the sound of the horn blaring from the car behind you. Everything about the game is designed not for the football enthusiast but for the Madden-ophile, though the game would attempt to berate you into believing that the two terms are synonymous with its derogatory help text and insulting in-game commentary.

By "help text" I really mean "sarcastic text." Because while the instruction booklet includes an entire page devoted to button combinations for establishing a "Defensive Playmaker" without ever defining what exactly that is, its advice on how to complete a forward pass is limited to "Throw the Ball: X, A, B, Y, or LB." Needless to say, this "instruction" is surprisingly inadequate to the task of conveying the exact level of skill needed to get the ball to what would appear to be a wide open receiver but is in fact a masterfully created interception beacon for the CPU's defense.

Byzantine menus require hours of exploration to decipher. Franchise mode alone shows more non-football data about your team than you could glean in an entire week's worth of NFL Network coverage. Taking the time to navigate the dozens of unexplained play-calling options means that you hear only slightly more delay-of-game penalty whistles than in-game Snickers advertisements. (I'm not kidding: they're everywhere: Snickers heavily subsidized a game that still costs more than $60.) At any given time, there is more information on-screen than F-22 fighter pilots have in their 21st-century HUDs, which is kind of appropriate, as this "game" is more flight-simulator than sports recreation.

If you, like me, haven't at this point in life mastered Madden, the game insinuates, you don't know shit about football. Which is demonstrated in the game's only 2 levels of difficulty: Rookie, which is about as much like real football as a rousing game of Duck, Duck, Goose, and What-The-Fuck-Do-You-Think-You're-Doing-Noob? The learning curve is so steep that "imminent-failure cliff" is a better term to describe it.

So I guess if I don't know it by now, I never will. Oh, well. I just wanted to play an intuitive football game with my favorite teams and players. If Madden's too difficult for me, I guess I'll just go play... oh, that's right. Thank you, EA and NFL for your exclusive contracts. Nevermind.

I should note that the game isn't all bad. My favorite part of the game is the list of Hall of Famer players. Not that you can play them. It's just a list. Embedded in a video game. Taking up space. It's not even a complete list. Among those missing from the list of HoF members is none other thanJohn Madden, the man known for introducing the fun and excitement of the NFL to generations fo fans. And that really about sums this whole game up.

Welcome to Batman and Football Month, everybody!

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Last night, in the game between the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers, it was challenged whether there were too many men on the field for Chicago. After several minutes, referee Larry Nemmers came back to say that there weren't. Of course, by that time, John Madden had twice proven that there were 12 men visibly on the field, not 11. Why did it take the officials so long to count TO THE WRONG NUMBER?

Later, when packers coach Mike McCarthy challenged the spot of the ball on an apparent Bears' first down, after several minutes of staring at tape, Nemmers placed the ball about a foot backwards. This is not at all the full yard or more difference in the spot of the ball that the replay had shown. Though spotting the ball has always been a largely arbitrary action, why, when you have ample time to look at it, do you get it so wrong? To add insult to injury, the Packers lost a timeout over the "failed" challenge of the spot of the ball (because the re-spot following the replay review resulted in a first down anyway) despite the fact that the replay proved that the coach was correct in challenging and should not have resulted in a Bears first down.

Note, please, that when Nemmers placed the ball about a foot backwards, he was well aware that the Bears would still have the necessary yardage for a first down. He had just brought out the chains to measure the gain before the challenge. After moving the ball, he ordered the chains on the field and measured again. Since he had just measured, knowing full well the location of the first down marker, this second measurement was only for dramatic purposes as he revealed that the Bears still had a first down.

Two failed instant replay calls in favor of the Bears while playing a game in Green Bay? Unheard of!

After several years of provisional implementation, so-called "instant" replay was made a permanent part of the NFL game earlier this year. That's a travesty. It's one thing to get a call wrong on the field. Officials are human and prone to making mistakes. It's another thing altogether to stop a game and extend its length by minutes in order to get a call wrong while staring at a recording of a play. That's just inhumane and inexcusable.

Maybe Larry Nemmers, who has been an official in the NFL since 1985 and a referee since 1991 has just gotten so old that he can't see well anymore. But I suspect that it's more than that. Every year, the NFL delegates that their best (i.e. "fewest blown calls") officiating staff be on the field for the Super Bowl. Despite being a referee for 16 years, Nemmers has never been on the field at the end of January. By the way, before joining the NFL's part-time officiating staff, Nemmers was a high school principal in Elgin, Illinois, a suburb of -- guess where? -- Chicago! (The Chicago Bears, loser of last year's Super Bowl, came into the game with a 1-4 record, desperately needing a win to stay alive in the divisional rankings. They got it, thanks in no small part to you, Larry!)

Bah!

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After completely schooling me at NCAA Football 2006 on the PS2, my brother made the horrible mistake of trying to teach me to play his favorite card game, Cribbage. (Note, please, that my brother was playing the mighty Georgia Bulldogs, a team boasting two recent Heisman Trophy candidates and a National Championship, and he had given me the lowly Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, a team that couldn't find its ass with three hands and a sliderule. In the first quarter, I tried 4 passes: 3 went to receivers that I DID NOT throw to -- seriously, pressing triangle and watching the ball sail to the R1 or circle receiver gets really, really old very, very fast. Apparently the computer decided that my pressing the triangle button only constituted a suggestion -- and were not caught. The 4th pass was intercepted. I did not attempt another pass until the 4th quarter, when I went an entire drive calling ONLY Hail Marys, 4 of 5 of which were completed, resulting in my only touchdown of the game. In a fit of pique, I ran my linebacker into the offensive line before every future attempted play, preventing my brother from ever running a play again because the game was not programmed to prevent me from repeating the gambit as a real referee would do by ejecting players or ultimately declaring my team forfeit. So, to summarize, NCAA Football 2006, like all the Madden games on which its physics and rules are based, sucks balls.)

Now where was I? Oh, yes. The so-called "game" of Cribbage.

Cribbage, it should be noted, was apparently the invention of a seventeenth century poet named Sir John Suckling. After making up a shitload of completely inane and nonsensical rules, he reportedly passed marked decks out to the English nobility and traveled the country ripping them off for a small fortune. Though at first hearing, that anecdote may seem ridiculously implausible, once you realize that only a truly foolish individual would appreciate a completely random game such as Cribbage, you will recognize the likelihood of such a misadventure.

In case you can't tell, I think Cribbage sucks. But what else should I expect as the offspring of a poet named Suckling?

If you've never played Cribbage, I can sum it up thusly:

1. The Deal: The dealer deals everyone 6 cards and then everyone throws 2 of those 6 away.
2. The Play: Take turns turning over the 4 cards that you kept. Every time you turn over a card, yell out a number and then score yourself anywhere between 0 and 12 points.
3. The Show: Once you all have turned over all 4 of your cards, reveal how many ways you can combine the cards that you turned over plus the top card revealed from the remaining deck to total 15 points or just create some pattern that you find pleasing to your eye. Then give yourself anywhere between 0 and 29 points.
4. The Crib: Now the dealer gets to look at all the cards that were thrown away and repeat step 3.

I'd like to say that there is some sense to the game, but there simply isn't. A player is rewarded for reaching an odd-numbered 15 points or having pairs which can never add to an odd number. Triples are scored as multiple pairs but runs of cards are scored by the number of cards in a run, thereby rewarding a player holding a three-of-a-kind but comparatively punishing a player for having a much rarer Royal Flush. Playing a run is worth more points than having a run in your hand. You get a point for playing a card that prevents other people from playing, unless the added total of the cards played equals 31, in which case you get 2 points instead. Rhyme? Reason? No, not with Cribbage.

When my brother revealed a Jack of Clubs and with a chuckle said, "I get a point because this card is the same suit as the card that is on top of the deck," I was done playing.

There is a Star Trek episode titled "A Piece of the Action" in which Kirk tries to trick aliens who look and act like Al Capone's gang by luring them into a card game called Fizzbin. As one of my favorite episodes, I've seen Fizzbin played many, many times. Since Kirk's rules for Fizzbin change based on times of the day or days of the week, I always chuckled at the gullibility of the gangster trying to learn the game. Now the poor gangster seems that much more the sap to me; Fizzbin probably sounded like a likely game to him because he was probably a Cribbage player.

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