Illegal Procedure

The Pro Football Talk website is pretty much a case study in how not to build a scalable web service. (Whereas, here at IP.com, we have no trouble catering to the demands of our 4–6 daily readers, including “canadian pharmacy teen sex orgy,” “casino gambling,” “hrb@l v*i*a*g*r!@,” and “GoogleBot”.) In general, PFT will just die with the old “MYSQL is TITSUP, LOLLERCOASTR” message that we know and love from underpowered WordPress sites everywhere. Today, though, it was different:

ZOMG FLORIO’s WEB GUY IS USING SOME CACHE SOFTWARE THAT MAKES IRONIC REFERENCE TO TEH AMIGA!!1! <3 <3 <3

You just bought yourself a week of reprieve, Deliverance boy. But if you write about politics again, all bets are off.

Here’s some embarrassing spin from Mike Florio, when confronted with reports that Tony Dungy is not expected to retire this year, contra Florio’s league sources:

So our report from a week ago was right in content, wr-wr-wr-wr-erroneous in timing. We apologize for the error.

Hey, by that standard, he was “right in content, wrong in timing” on the infamous “Terry Bradshaw is dead” rumor — after all, the human mortality rate is still right around 100%.

You fill in the caption. My suggestion: “but not as well as Favre has gotten to know the ‘other side’ of King, if you catch our drift.”

I’ve avoided the Emmitt Smith pile-on. I more or less like him as a player and a person, and I don’t think he’s any worse than Stephen A. Smith, Keith Olbermann, or Bill Maas as a broadcaster. (I’ll always take a well-meaning goofball over a high-decibel blowhard.)

However, tonight he uttered the following Little Carmine-worthy claim:

“This is the time of year when the cream of the crop rises to the top.”

Why is this awesome? It’s awesome because I’m not even sure whether or not it’s a mixed metaphor.

I have never even entertained the thought of wanting McNabb to leave Philadelphia. I don’t know anybody who wants this. I only know who Kevin Kolb is because you’ve shown him more than McNabb during the f*#king game. The only people who’ve discussed it are Mike Tirico, Tony Kornheiser, and expert Charles Barkley.

Oh wait, what am I saying? Of course! I really want the Eagles to ditch McNabb for a once and a future career backup! Thanks for reminding me!

Love,

Eagles Fan(s)

Apparently, oft-disgraced wideout David Boston, who was recently arrested for being asleep at the wheel of his car, peed a glass of GHB. (If that doesn’t mean anything to you, you can get some more information from drugged-out ravers here.) There’s no word yet on which dastardly frat boy is suspected of spiking Boston’s candy apple schnapps.

On a personal note, as a Vikings fan, I have to feel pretty good about the fact that Boston was once a top-ten pick; perhaps Troy Williamson is so terrible because he’s always hopped up on panty remover.

Vikings safety Darren Sharper is flat-out awesome in this tongue-in-cheek quote about Mankato, MN (pop. 32,427), where the Vikings hold their training camp:

Well it’s always a pleasure to come down to such a beautiful place like Mankato. You get to see the nice scenery, the farms. When we were driving here, you get to smell the nice aroma of manure when you hit about 20 miles from Mankato… We get to check out a lot of the nice spots they have here, the nicer restaurants. Red Lobster, which is always a fine place to eat… We definitely get some culture down here. It’s a nice place, we always enjoy coming down here.

[via KFAN, which reports this without detecting that Sharper is kidding]

According to Ben Maller, former Texans GM Charley Casserly believes that JaMarcus Russell has poor technique:

I think you’ve got technique issues, which you hope to straighten out. That leads to inaccuracy issues, mostly lower body mechanics. Scouts I talked to expressed some concern about his work habit and weight control. … I personally thought Leinart, Cutler, and Quinn were better prospects than Russell was.

Yes, Charley, but you also thought that Mario Williams was a better prospect than Reggie Bush or Vince Young.

No, whatever you were saying about Jabar Gaffney (who Gus claims is related to Boba Fett) doesn’t “beg the question.” It “raises the question,” if anything. Learn to speak fscking English, dawg. Update: Apparently Theismann doesn’t know how to beg the question either.

Ron Jaworski, as far as I can tell, is trying to get a gig as a judge on some to-be-released Bravo reality show about aspiring candy designers. There is no other possible explanation for his ludicrous glasses. Furthermore, in a 2-hour span on Monday, he referred to both Trent Dilfer and Brad Johnson as “wily.” I must have missed the memo: when did “wily” start to mean “old, competent dude who has won at least one more Super Bowl than Peyton Manning?”

Michael Irvin is a disgrace to all other members of phylum Chordata. I don’t know why he slurs his speech so much when he launches on his unintelligible ramblings, but I suspect it has something to do with narcotics withdrawal or the side effects of a daily antiretroviral cocktail. Irvin is literally a tambourine and a thick slice of watermelon away from being a one-man minstrel show. There are two possible reasons why he is still employed: either Disney CEO Robert Iger is an incorrigible racist, or he is a goofy pervert who has a thing for watching Irvin continually give Eldorado the reacharound.

HDTV is cruel to most broadcasters. Steve Young looks like the reanimated corpse of Brigham Young without the 480i blur to smooth his zombie-like pallor. However, Suzy Kolber actually benefits from higher resolution: after seeing her in HDTV, I can tentatively claim that she actually has eyes, and not just strategically-applied patches of mascara as I had previously assumed.

Finally, Bill Maas has gotten a lot of justified criticism (see, e.g., this message board posting) for his commentary on this week’s Minnesota-Carolina game, including his insistence that the Metrodome crowd was asking for the refs to flag Fred Smoot for a late hit, his impromptu generation of a folksy ode to the name of DT Ross Kolodziej, and his insistence that it’s best to begin sudden-death overtime by giving your opponent the ball. It’s hard to use words like “nadir” when talking about a televised presentation that was clearly produced by the Apple Valley Junior High AV Club, but Mass was rather dismal. However, his primary fault as a broadcaster is not his less-than-clueful ramblings, but rather the foul, musty smell of his chin. That’s understandable, though, since it spends so much time adjacent to Julius Peppers‘ scrotum.