No time for a real post so here are a few bullet points:

• Jason Campbell:
  Obviously, we should have had this guy in earlier. Why is it that these decisions seem so obvious to most fans and sportswriters, yet escape the coaches who can actually implement them? I think it comes down to ego. Gibbs had bet his reputation on rehabilitating the franchise, with Brunell as his QB–replacing him meant admitting he screwed up one of the most important decisions the head coach has to make. Which leads me to my next point…
• Duckett:
  It’s great that Ladell Betts ran for over a hundred yards. But I thought we had finally learned our lesson here. Seven rushing attempts backing up our backup running back is not great. I’ll take the win and shut up, but this team has a terrible habit of keeping the best players on the bench for no clear reason. Might be time to change that.
• Redskins in general:
  It sure is too bad that we have no chance whatsoever of making the playoffs. It’s very sad, because the NFC East is a shambles this year. A merely competent season would have probably won us the division. I won’t bother mentioning it again, though–all we can do from here on out is try to improve for next year (and maybe keep the Giants out of the playoffs).
• Mike Vick:
  Enormous dickhead. Can someone explain to me why an NFL team would insist on sticking with a perennial loser with a bad attitude and herpes? He is a total coach killer.
• Junior Seau:
  The Boston Globe is reporting that Seau “appeared to break his arm” in yesterday’s game. That’s sort of like saying that the Hindenburg appeared to catch fire in 1937. His arm broke. In half. It looked like he had an extra elbow. It was Theisman-esque, and they’ll never air it again. I have DVR and I couldn’t bear to rewind and watch it again. Man, was that ever ugly.

Well not trivia exactly, but another riddle found on the internet:

Kottke posted a riddle he found at 3 Quarks Daily:

You are given two ropes and a lighter. This is the only equipment you can use. You are told that each of the two ropes has the following property: if you light one end of the rope, it will take exactly one hour to burn all the way to the other end. But it doesn’t have to burn at a uniform rate. In other words, half the rope may burn in the first five minutes, and then the other half would take 55 minutes. The rate at which the two ropes burn is not necessarily the same, so the second rope will also take an hour to burn from one end to the other, but may do it at some varying rate, which is not necessarily the same as the one for the first rope. Now you are asked to measure a period of 45 minutes. How will you do it?

Well guys, I’ve only spent a couple of minutes on this one but I certainly haven’t managed to figure it out yet. I mean, I have no idea. 3 Quarks Daily is going to post the answer to this (and 13 other riddles that were posted with it, most of which I think I know the answer to) sometime next week, but I can’t wait that long. What’s the answer?

Obviously, somebody may put the answer in the comments below, so be judicious in looking if you want to try to figure it out on your own.

O.J. Simpson Book, TV Special Canceled
NEW YORK — After a firestorm of criticism, News. Corp. said Monday that it has canceled the O.J. Simpson book and television special “If I Did It.”

It’s rare that, mere days after a daring (well, okay, not so daring–it seemed like a foregone conclusion before it happened) prediction, I get to say that I called it.

“I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,” said Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. chairman. “We are sorry for any pain that his has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.”

A dozen Fox affiliates had already said they would not air the two-part sweeps month special, planned for next week before the Nov. 30 publication of the book by ReganBooks. The publishing house is a HarperCollins imprint owned–like the Fox network–by News Corp.

Justice has been served. A little. I mean, he’s still a free man and everything… but it’s still nice to see that global megaoutrage is still powerful enough to get horrifying television off the airwaves. Next: Carlos Mencia.

“If everyone lived at the lifestyle of Americans,” says Jim McMillan, who works on alternative energy for the Department of Energy, “we’d need five planets.”

That quote is from Joel Achenbach’s pretty scary cover story in this weekend’s Washington Post Magazine, which basically suggests that it’s about time we start listening to Al Gore. It chronicles life at Earthaven, a semi-commune near Asheville in western North Carolina. If you happened to catch last week’s My Name is Earl you pretty much know what you need to know about this place. But not really; they generate their own electricity and use phones and computers, and they’re not all knee-jerk idealist hippies. They just think it’s time to start walking the walk where environmental responsibility is concerned. All that being said, though, they sort of remind me of the Others on Lost. And it seems like despite their good intentions they aren’t the self-contained, self-reliant, self-sustaining village they would like to be. At least not yet.

FOR A PLACE DEDICATED TO BEING SUSTAINABLE, Earthaven has a fundamental problem: It’s not. Not even close. No one pretends otherwise. There’s not enough money, not enough labor.

“There’s just not enough people here,” longtime member Sue Stone says.

You can’t buy a sandwich at Earthaven. You can’t even buy a loaf of bread. You can buy a dozen organic eggs from a little farm in the center of the village, but no orange juice. There’s a trading post that doubles as an Internet cafe, but it doesn’t have enough of a customer base to carry much merchandise. For a quarter you can buy a cigarette, but you have to roll it yourself.

A dentist would be nice. Greg Geis has a cracked tooth. “I haven’t had my eyes checked for nine years,” he told me.

And it goes on like that.

At any rate, the piece touches on a bunch of different issues related to energy use and conservation and I thought it was interesting. Maybe you will too.

He did an online chat about it today.

And as a sidenote, Catherine already posted on this but I want to add my own two cents: Japan’s annual dolphin hunt is an appalling and brutal anachronism. How can we tolerate such utter cruelty and sadism toward creatures of such intelligence? I’m not against eating meat or the industries that requires, but there are good ways to do it and bad ways to do it. It seems pretty clear that slowly and painfully slaughtering a self-aware mammal and then (maybe) using the meat as fertilizer and pet food is fundamentally inhumane. I really hope this practice is stopped soon.

The Redskins still can’t play defense, but Duckett averaged over five yards per carry and Campbell was good. This means, of course, that I’ll have to start next season with high expectations yet again, and almost certainly have my hopes dashed by week seven again… but I can live with that. Just please, please, please, leave Brunell on the bench forever. It’s sort of liberating to not have to worry about winning or losing (since we’re completely toast, playoffs-wise) and just get to think about whether we’re getting better in the big picture. Maybe Clinton Portis will have enough time to actually be healthy before next season starts, and our receivers will learn to make catches, and our offensive and defensive lines will learn to block, and our cornerbacks will learn to cover receivers, and, and, and Joe Gibbs can ride into the stadium astride a glistering unicorn!

Jay-Z’s new album, Kingdom Come, comes out tomorrow. The first single, “Show Me What You Got,” produced by often-namechecked Just Blaze, is pretty terrible. But the title track, also produced by Just Blaze, is pretty awesome. You can viscerally feel Danger Mouse’s influence on hip-hop production, and it is a good thing. Word on the street (i.e. Amazon’s editorial review) is that the last half of the album is a lot more experimental–collaborations with various people, including Coldplay’s detestable Chris Martin–and I’m a bit apprehensive about that. But we’ll see. I may write more about this album if I listen to the whole thing and determine that it is excellent or awful. You can interpret radio silence as a tepid review.

Tomorrow afternoon I fly to Denver, Colorado, to spend Thanksgiving with my family. I get back to Boston on Sunday.

Finally, NFL head coaches can wear suits on the sidelines again. NFL regulates sideline apparel, and head coaches have heretofore been required to wear official Reebok gear (from a limited selection of polo shirts and other casual garb). Apparently, San Francisco coach Mike Nolan has been in talks with Reebok about an acceptable compromise (maybe he should have spent the time trying to make his team better, but that’s another story)–apparently they worked something out, because he and Jacksonville coach Jack Del Rio will both be wearing coats and ties this Sunday. The NFL is incredibly picky about rules enforcing conformity/uniformity, so any time they give in, even slightly, to individuality, it’s a big deal.

My dear friend over at Supine Fever just wrote about a pretty nearly universal experience she’s had with UPS (link here):

I ordered something off of ebay, and it was due to arrive last Friday. The UPS guy only delivers to my area during the “After 5pm” timeslot, and I was at work Friday night, so I got home to a yellow slip saying they’d be back at the same time Monday.

So, I looked forward to my awesome new ebay It all weekend. Monday came, and I rushed home a few minutes early from my internship so that I could be home at 5pm on the dot, and sweet Mary mother of God, the yellow slip was on the door, saying they had come at 4:45. I was incensed. Incensed!

This is, without question, a total mess–the kind of customer service disaster that I think really hurts big businesses all the time (see also: cable companies, phone companies, cell phone companies, banks, etc). Why aren’t these corporations interested in doing the extra 5% of work it would require to make life better and easier for their customers? ESPECIALLY since doing so would make them stand up in stark contrast to their competition.

Anyway, my rant about big business in general put aside for the moment, I’ve got a pretty simple question specific to package delivery: why don’t these companies deliver on Saturdays? I don’t mean for an additional fee; I mean as a standard service for regular shipping. For the millions of people who work during the day on every weekday, the missed delivery experience is incredibly common and indescribably frustrating (although I’m trying). Even as a student with a relatively-flexible daily schedule, I’ve had many problems being home at the right time to receive packages, and over the summer when I was working a regular nine-to-five I ended up having to hoof it out to the FedEx Shipping Center after work just to get my package. Assuming that it’s not practical to simply add a day of delivery (although we know they have people working on Saturdays already, to deliver their Super Extra Priority Express packages), I propose that UPS simply adjust its schedule, bumping everything by one day: deliveries on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. No deliveries on Sunday or Monday. See what I just did there?

Now I know there are probably good reasons for the policy–it probably costs more to pay someone to work on weekends then on weekdays, the bulk of their packages are sent to and from businesses which are only open on weekdays, their infrastructure and flowcharts and brochures are all premised on weekday deliveries, etc. So let me offer an alternative plan that addresses one of those reasons and weakens the strength of another: why not have two types of regular shipping–commercial and noncommercial? Commercial packages are M-F; noncommercial are T-S (or M-S even!). Would this be more work for these companies, especially initially? Absolutely. Would I make sure that, whenever I had the choice, I would use the service that gives me the option of a Saturday delivery over the one that doesn’t? Absolutely. Would I pay an extra fifty cents or a dollar to know that I could schedule my package delivery for a day that I might be home? Absolutely.

There are at least a couple of smart people reading this. Tell me why I’m naive, stupid, misguided, or wrong for some reason I couldn’t possibly have known. Or, you know, forward this link to your great uncle Milton, VP at UPS.

O.J. to discuss killings of wife, friend in TV interview

“O.J. Simpson, in his own words, tells for the first time how he would have committed the murders if he were the one responsible for the crimes,” the network said in a statement. “In the two-part event, Simpson describes how he would have carried out the murders he has vehemently denied committing for over a decade.”

The interview will air days before Simpson’s new book, “If I Did It,” goes on sale Nov. 30. The book, published by Regan, “hypothetically describes how the murders would have been committed.”

In a video clip on the network’s Web site, an off-screen interviewer says to Simpson, “You wrote, ‘I have never seen so much blood in my life.’ ”

“I don’t think any two people could be murdered without everybody being covered in blood,” Simpson responds.

I guess he must really need the money. This is going to be a repugnant, undignified spectacle, and not in a fun way. The worst/best part about it is how the title of the book (“If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened”) fails to even clearly state that O.J. isn’t responsible for the killings–which is strange, since if I killed two people and lied about it for years (sometimes under oath), I wouldn’t suddenly have any qualms about lying in print. Why not just go with “If I Had Done It, Here’s How It Would Have Happened”? Well, I think we all know the answer, but it’s just too depressing to think about any more.

I hate to channel Aaron Sorkin, but is there no level of indecency so outrageous that even a television executive will draw the line? I know this is Fox we’re talking about here, but even so, this is pretty disgusting. I wonder if we have the makings of another civil case here.

At any rate, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Fox will never actually air this. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

More from the Washington Post.