Well, it’s been 7 months. Might as well let you know what I’ve been up to.

• I grew a beard, then shaved it off, then grew it again, over and over and over again.
• I moved from my apartment in Cleveland Park to an apartment I’m sharing with my friend, Drew, in The Center of Cool DC (i.e., the 14th St. Corridor between Logan Circle and U St.).
• I obsessed over Foursquare and Twitter and Google Reader (and, related to these things, Fojol Brothers, ChurchKey, Google Wave, and Android). These obsessions have yet to wane, and indeed I have managed to infect many other people (but not enough!) with them.
• I went to Spain and ate all of that country’s pork and foie gras.
• I listened to the same music as ever–Daft Punk, Kanye West, Chromeo, Ratatat, the Old 97′s, Lily Allen, Lil Wayne, and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”–on a continuously rotating basis.
• I relished the most recent seasons of Lost and Mad Men, and have so far found the current season of Top Chef to be a very enjoyable return to form. Dollhouse was as good as it could possibly be, but that actually wasn’t very good at all–it was a fundamentally flawed show that richly deserves cancellation.
• The Redskins went 2-6 against the easiest first-half schedule in the history of the NFL, because the owner refuses to hire professionals to manage the team and let them make football decisions. But then they won one game, and now everyone loves them again!
• Obviously, I completely lost the habit of posting anything on my blog. This may be permanent, although I would like to get back to it (even though, as I may explain in a forthcoming blog post, Twitter + Google Reader have essentially replaced whatever meager benefits I used to get out of having a blog).

And… that’s all, folks. See you again in 2010!

Sorry if you’ve already seen this. I was delayed in posting it because I was watching the Redskins win an ugly one in Detroit. Go Skins.

It’s been a while since I posted anything substantive. Why start now? Instead, let’s talk about the Redskins for 1500 words or so.

First of all, let me just say that no matter how this season ends up, I am really enjoying the way this team plays under Jim Zorn. They dominate the line on offense, run right up the gut, and take their shots with deep passes and trick plays often enough to keep opposing defenses guessing. On the other side of the ball, they are playing confident, aggressive defense, making it very difficult for their opponents to put up points.

Here are some factors that I find to be very positive about the season so far:

• Clinton Portis (and the offensive line). Is Clinton Portis a new man? It’s hard to say. I think he’s been playing this well ever since Joe Gibbs arrived, but now he’s running behind an experienced, smart, enthusiastic (more on this below) offensive line, and his head coach is really calling on him to establish the parameters of the entire offense–run to set up the pass, run to set up the wacky gadget play, run to set up more damn running. From what little I understand about the NFL running back mindset, it seems like Portis is really responding to the confidence the team is showing in his abilities. It doesn’t hurt that his backups, Betts and Cartwright (and maybe, but probably not, Sean Alexander) beat the crap out of the other team when they get in the game. And he is great at picking up the blitz on passing plays. I love watching him lay out linebackers.

• Defense.What can I say? They’ve been pretty great. They came up huge in the Dallas and Philadelphia games, shutting down explosive offenses and really demoralizing those teams. The line is great against the run, and puts a decent amount of pressure on the quarterback

• ZORN. I wasn’t particularly happy to see Joe Gibbs go–he had a rough start, to say the least, but after a while his personnel and his game plans came around to something kind of like the Super-Bowl-winning teams he coached in my youth. Jim Zorn came in and did something very interesting: he didn’t mess with things too much. He took a hard-running, tough team, and stuck with its strengths. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t touch the defense, letting Blache take care of it. The results on that speak for themselves. And on offense, he’s interpolated his own playcalling preferences–quick passes aimed at creating yards-after-catch, and quirky gadget plays taking advantage of his personnel–with what the team has been doing well for a few years (running the ball down opponents’ throats). He hasn’t been perfect–his time management in the two-minute drill is still pretty questionable, for example–but for a guy in a head coaching position for the first time ever he’s done a great job.

Continue reading »

My internet friend Tracy wrote a post about Deadspin that kind of blew up. Here’s the lede:

The thing about sports is that it, well, tends to be an old-boys’ club. The sports world is full of sexist shit that pisses me off if I think about it too much (and, honestly, I’m not often prone to do that, because I don’t always want to be addressing Big Issues in the context of something I enjoy just for the hell of it, which I suppose is lazy of me). Commercials aired during sporting events or programs often are sexist. There are sexist athletes and sexist columnists, and I hate it all, but I try not to hold it against sports as a whole. That would be like being a Cubs fan, but hating the Cubs because of Cubs fans.

That said, there’s one place where the sports assholes come out in droves and it drives me batshit insane every freaking time I see it. It’s a land where you’ll see Asshole Stupidus in its natural environment, taking a gigantic dump on women and human decency.

It’s the land of the Deadspin commenters.

I was going to leave a comment there but figured I might as well put it here instead, since it’s important that many people in the world know how I feel about this issue.

I really enjoyed this interview between Dan “DC Sports Bog” Steinberg and Chris “Chris Cooley’s Official Blog” Cooley. It made me feel a bit bad for Fabini. Also, when Cooley mentioned that his blog gets ten or fifteen thousand hits a day, it made me feel a bit bad for myself.

If you don’t have time for the whole thing, you can just catch the highlights at this page.

I TOLD YOU. Poor Kobe. It just wasn’t his year. Not that Boston deserves another championship, but I am happy for all the Celtics who just won their first.

A little less than three years ago, I was in the last few months of a job that I knew I’d be leaving. I didn’t have a lot to do (it was quiet–the doldrums of summer–and since I was on my way out, I hadn’t been given much work), and I spent a fair amount of my time starting at my computer waiting for the day to be over. The result of that time was this post about Minesweeper on my livejournal.

Now that I’m a month and a half away from graduating, I find myself unmotivated. It’s not that I don’t have much to do (quite the contrary, actually–I have a ton of work to get done), but I’ve been spending a lot of time screwing around on my computer–keeping up with my RSS feeds, playing solitaire, and, germane to this post, getting reacquainted with my old friend, Minesweeper.

Which is all a long way of saying, rather than write anything new today, I think I’ll just recycle that post. Enjoy this look back at July of 2005, and forgive my younger self’s ornate, doofy prose!

I created a bracket group at ESPN.com. You are encouraged to join.

I don’t know how big the overlap is between internet dorks and NCAA dorks, but I’m sure there are a few others out there. Also, while I was out of town I may have missed someone else’s post doing the same thing. If so, who cares. Join my bracket, too.

Here is the info you need to play (cut and pasted from the email I didn’t bother to send):

This message is from Jake who is challenging you to play Men’s Tournament Challenge on ESPN.com.

This game gives you the chance to win $10,000 by predicting the winner of the most games in the 63 game men’s college basketball tournament. A correct selection in the first round counts as 10 points, and in each succesive [sic, ESPN's fairly dumb error that spell check should have caught] round the point values are doubled. You can create up to ten entries, and best of all, it’s FREE to play.

Get in the action now:
http://games.espn.go.com/tcmen/group?groupID=82612

Game Front:
http://games.espn.go.com/tcmen/frontpage

Group: jake’s house of bracket
Password: internet