All posts by Machine Trooper

Holding Their Own II by Joe Nobody

I’m a TEOTWAWKI/post-apocalyptic fiction fan going way back, to when I first saw The Road Warrior.  For many years, it seems like there hasn’t been a lot in the genre that’s well-written, unless you want zombies.

I’m working on such a novel myself right now, and wanted to keep my mindset grounded in the genre. So I’ve been listening to a lot of late ’60s rock (it works for me), and have tried a few TEOTWAWKI series on Netflix (all of which became overbearingly stupid after a few episodes).

I had some extra Audible.com credits this month, so I went shopping for a recorded book. And, being stung too many times by both tradpub and indie authors, I perused the reviews before taking a chance. I’ve been at this long enough that I usually know which reviews to ignore and which to pay attention to, and author “Joe Nobody” seemed to have a lot going for him. Also, his blurbs were competently written. (You might be surprised how many authors expect you to take a chance on their books after posting poorly written descriptions.) This is why I started the Holding Their Own series with the second novel–opinions were just about unanimous that the narrator for #1 was too awful to endure for hours.

So in this one, subtitled The Independents, the SHTF already, and folks are surviving as best they can.

The hero’s name is Bishop. Not sure whether that’s a first or last name, but it doesn’t really matter. He and his wife have a small ranch hidden in a canyon in Texas, surviving and minding their own business. The story kicks off when a former military/intelligence colleague of Bishop’s crash lands in a small plane after buzzing the hidden ranch.

“The Colonel” is seriously injured in the crash, and a whole bunch of other stuff is triggered as well. The plot involves a Colombian drug lord , a kidnapped girl, a treasure in gold, and a frustrated doctor without the right tools and materials to help his patients…just to name a few.

The adventure factor made this the most fun I’ve had in the genre since reading The Last Ranger and Doomsday Warrior series as a young man, though there are no radioactive mutants or B-movie villains in this one.

Where the author shines is in his characters. Bishop is smart and skilled. Not invincible, but he doesn’t cause me to groan like so many heroes in the genre, either. He faces some pretty intimidating odds at different points, and enjoys good luck for sure, but his triumph is entirely plausible as written. What’s more, I actually liked the character of his wife in this book. Most female protagonists in the genre are written in a way that causes me to roll my eyes and skip ahead. But this one is the kind of woman you’d want to have in such a situation.

Well, frankly she’d be a prime catch for any man in the western world these days, but especially in a frontierish survival scenario.

Mr. Nobody has made me a return customer with this book.

The Book Biz, Blogging, and Amazon Reviews

Seems like there are thousands of bloggers in the manosphere, and most of them either have books published, or will have soon. So a lot of you probably understand the significance of the much-coveted Amazon review.

My first book was published in 2010 and I did pretty much everything wrong. (I became a blogger not long afterwards kind of by accident.) If there was a mistake to be made as an author, I made it. An opportunity to be missed? I missed it—for the first three years of my writing career. Long story short: One truth I found out the hard way was that an indie author’s career lives or dies by Amazon.

The more essential I realized Amazon was, the more of a presence I tried to maintain there.  That, and my old blog, were the reasons I became a prolific Amazon reviewer for a while.

I still get more review requests than I can ever hope to fulfill, so this post can also serve as a disclaimer. My methods may be peculiar or even bizarre; sometimes perhaps inconsistent as well. But nobody’s paying me for this, so I make the rules. At least I have a modicum of ethics, unlike many reviewers out there.

First off, my reviews are honest. I may cut authors slack (see below) with Amazon’s star rating, but I don’t make stuff up or try to BS anybody.  If the book flat-out sucks, I usually don’t even review it. If a review was requested and the book sucks, I contact the author to tell them. If they still insist on a review, I write one and let people know it sucks. I make an effort to be constructive, but you can’t polish a turd.

My schedule is very tight and I have an impossibly-gigantic To Be Read pile. Because of that, I use audiobooks whenever possible. I have an Audible.com subscription and I get my money’s worth from it. If you have an Audible version of your book, that increases its chances of getting read/reviewed 10X, all other factors being equal. It’s a real sacrifice to stop what I’m doing, halt my productivity and read a book. But I can listen to a book while getting other stuff done.

Back in the day I used to read for the pure joy of it, and the escape it offered. Without audiobooks, that phase of my life is long gone. I’ve served my time when it comes to Quixotic thankless jobs helping other authors succeed, so I am less and less inclined to spend precious time needed for my own career to read/review scads of other authors’ books. If you get your foot in my door at all, most likely you’ll have a long wait on your hands (again, unless you’ve got an audio version).

Next, I usually give preference to indie authors. As an indie, I know what an uphill struggle it is and I empathize. So I push indies toward the front of the queue and also cut them more slack on Amazon (I have no star-rating scheme on the blog so just say what I think and leave it at that).

There are exceptions: As a result of my reviewing, I’ve made friends with tradpubbed authors whose books I love. Because they are friends, I sometimes shuffle them to the front, too.

Also, I’ve stopped mucking about with books outside my genre umbrella. Unless I owe you a favor, I’m probably not going to read your book if it’s not men’s adventure (be it science fiction, fantasy, war, western, TEOTWAWKI or whatever flavor of men’s fiction). I occasionally review non-fiction and classics, but solely at my discretion. I have author friends, and sometimes stretch beyond my preference to help them out, but don’t count on it. If you see me review a romance or horror novel, it’s safe to assume that’s what I’m doing.

I’ve gotten picky in other ways, too. In the past, I read/reviewed indie books written from the typical leftist/feminist/America-hating perspective. (Some of the better ones I even gave four or five-star reviews on Amazon. )That’s history. You pinkos already have the deck stacked in your favor, and don’t need additional help from me. Apolitical work is great, but my patience for leftard, globalist…and even neocon…stuff has been worn completely through. I get enough of that crap everywhere else and I’m definitely not gonna expose myself to more when I have a choice. Same goes for “gay” pandering and the obligatory pixie ninjas and other “strong female characters.”

The buck stops here.

And if you sucker-punch me with any of that…one strike and you’re probably out. A while back I was working my way through a series written by some fellow pulp writers. I got sucker-punched a third of the way through one book with some establishment-approved homophile bupkus and stopped reading right there. Never finished the book; never will; and may never try another one from that series. I definitely won’t read that author again. This kind of thing has become a deal-breaker.

As you can surely tell from this post, I tend to be long-winded. Most of my reviews were lengthy—more like scholastic book reports than typical Amazon feedback. (Actually, you’re lucky to get more than a sentence or two from the average Amazon reviewer.) I have begun making an effort at brevity. Don’t feel cheated or spurned if I only give you a paragraph—that’s probably my new standard, for everybody.

It used to be Goodreads was an afterthought for me. I’m in the process of making it my default venue. It’s probably the closest to social networking I will get, anymore. In fact, unless requested by the author, it’s possible I won’t even bother to duplicate Goodreads reviews on Amazon. If you’re on Goodreads, hit me up. I could use some book recommendations from non-SJW/feminista/homophiles.

Finally, there’s an issue that really chaps my fourth point: Amazon’s helpful/non-helpful votes for reviews.

There are a whole bunch of worthless reviews on Amazon. These include:

  • Reviews by people who have obviously never read the book.
  • Reviews by people who have only skimmed the book, or not finished it.
  • One or two-sentence drive-bys that give an “it sucks” opinion without any clue as to why the book allegedly sucks.
  • Hatchet jobs by leftards out to sabotage non-leftard authors based on their beliefs, not on whether the book was good or bad.
  • Combinations of two or more of the above.
  • The positive equivalent of any of the above examples of negative reviews.

“Reviews” like those are deserving of a “not helpful” vote. However, what I’ve noticed is that people vote “helpful” or “not helpful” based on whether the reviewer personally liked or didn’t like the book.

I sacrifice valuable time to write thoughtful reviews. Whether I liked the book or disliked it, I take pains to be constructive in my critiques. I use examples and give reasons for what I say, which makes it possible for the reader to intuit whether they would agree or disagree with my opinions. (Some negative reviews I’ve read have convinced me to buy a book.) I’ve never written the equivalent of “It rocks! Buy it!” or “It sucks! Next!” without explanation. And yet it’s pretty much guaranteed I will get “not helpful” votes any time I give an overall negative report.

Not only that, but I’ve gotten “not helpful” votes on positive reviews because I didn’t rate the book in question five stars!

What a bunch of bovine assclowns.

One more thing along these lines: So far I’ve avoided responding to negative reviews of my own books. But if you’re foolish enough to mouth off a stupid comment about one of my reviews, you will likely have your ignorance thrown back in your face.

UPDATE: Forget  what I said about Goodreads. It is an SJW-converged playground; I have taken my toys and left the sandbox.

UPDATE 2.0: I have now, on occasion, begun responding to negative reviews of my books. Not always, because some readers are honest and honestly just didn’t like something. Others, however…well, we’re in a culture war, and I’ve decided to shoot back.

 

Marvel Comics’ Insanity


Maybe you’ve heard that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing expecting different results.

But enough about American voters. I’m talking about the comic book industry.

I was a comic aficionado before it was cool. Had quite a collection and spent money on comics regularly. But as the writing became increasingly stupid and the left-wing, feminist, homophile prejudices became more blatant, my interest dwindled until I quit buying them.

Evidently, I’m not the only one. The industry has really hit the skids in the last few decades. Were it not for movie adaptations, comics would be a strictly counterculture pastime for basement-dwelling neckbeards.

Much like the Democrat Party (and their RINO enablers), comic book companies’ “solution” to an economic debacle is to amplify the very same policies that caused the devastation.

So DC decides the original (Golden Age/Earth 2/whatever) Green Lantern should be a homosexual. Marvel decides Thor should be a woman. And surely there’s even more of this crap going on with other characters, but I lack the stomach to get up-to-date on the cesspool comics industry.

Either the creatively bankrupt propagandists at Marvel read our original post about Thor’s sex change, or they’ve heard other people raising the same issues. And just as you’d expect of a self-righteous fanatic, their response was to ignore reason and simply double-down on their own lunacy. You can feel their mangina pride slithering from the dialog in this panel:

comicpanel

Explanation #2 from our original post is worth quoting again:

Nobody at Marvel is educated enough to realize that the pantheons of mythology are brimming with goddesses they could build another super-character out of.

Marxists (cultural and otherwise) have always preferred hijacking the success of hard-working men, rather than coming up with their own ideas, putting in their own sweat, and building their own track record. This pathology, for feminists, is not even limited to reality–it extends even into the comic universe.

Thoughts on American Sniper

I finally watched it, and some questions have been answered. One of those questions is, “Why are the critics frothing at the mouth over their hatred of this movie?” I can answer that simply with two facts in the context of the film:

  1. Americans are the good guys.
  2. Jihadists are depicted waging jihad as they do in real life.

Any idiot in the cultural elite knows that Americans are the bad guys and Christianity and free market capitalism are what make the Middle East a hellhole of slavery, institutionalized torture/murder and bloody feudal wars. So that little mystery is cleared up.

I know very little about Chris Kyle. I never heard of him until shortly before his death. I still don’t know the truth regarding some controversy surrounding him, and haven’t researched it. Initially I heard the guy who killed him did it intentionally. Later I heard it was an accident. I also heard that he kicked Jesse Ventura’s 4th-point in a bar fight, after which Ventura pressed charges for assault. Later I heard that Kyle lied about the whole thing, and what Ventura sued him for was slander.

The movie doesn’t take sides on those matters, or even bring them up. Nor does the film take a position on whether the Iraq War/occupation was justified (though Kyle, as portrayed in the movie, does obviously believe it’s a just war).

It was wise of the director to avoid preaching from either side of the pulpit about the War on Terror. I’m sure I would have been offended either way.

The movie is about  a guy who believes in what he’s doing, and I can judge it on that.

I was once a lot like Chris Kyle. I loved my country, and volunteered to fight for her, assuming that wherever I was deployed and whoever I fought would be determined by somebody of a higher paygrade who took their oath of office as seriously as I took mine.

Since then, I’ve adopted the opinion that very few foreign entanglements in American history were justified. And for over a century none of them have been about safeguarding our freedom or benefiting the American people in any way.

But hindsight is 20/20. My motives were pure, even though my idealism was misguided and loyalty misplaced. The only way I would wear the uniform again now would be for purely mercenary motives (which is why most people do it anyway, and who the recruiting marketers try to attract). I would join a different branch and choose a cushy MOS that translates well to a civilian career, do my time, and get out to take advantage of the G.I. Bill.

The military is not the place for patriotic Americans. Hasn’t been for a while. In fact, those few anomalies who do love their country are being actively purged, starting at the top.

Chris Kyle was naive in his time just like I was in mine.  This story is about his life the way he saw it (and how others remember it, I guess). Don’t judge the movie on what it’s not trying to be.

There was another movie about a sniper over a decade ago, called Enemy at the Gates. It took place on the Eastern Front during WWII, where there was no “good” side or just cause. It told a similar story, concentrating on the character discharging his duty. As such, it was a good film. So is this one. Clint Eastwood is a great director and was the right one for this project.

Solidarity Is For Women Only

The myth of a patriarchy is ridiculous for a few reasons. One is, of the two legitimate genders in existence, it is only the females who feel and act on a solidarity to their own sex. In fact, Team Womyn is the only sex ANYONE shows allegiance to.  Even today, men are compelled to compete against other men exclusively, and habitually act against their own self-interest, and that of men collectively. They are oblivious to the organized opposition to their very manhood,

I don’t like video selfies that much, but this clip is really worth a watch–especially starting around 5:40 or so. If you skip what’s before that, I’ll summarize something she shared:

Several men approached Girl Writes What privately to thank her for speaking out, but when she organized a conference specifically addressing the discrimination men suffer, nobody showed up.

And isn’t that just like us?

When Survivor was all the rage, I never watched it. I had cable with all the bells and whistles at the time but just didn’t watch a lot of TV–especially reality shows. But I caught the first episode of one season while a guest at a friend’s house. From what I could tell, the format of that season was guys vs. gals. The first competition was a timed obstacle course, and the men were winning decisively until some dork lost his balance on an obstacle, fell off repeatedly, and added enough time to the cumulative score that the women were able to pull ahead and win.

If your goal is to win a given competition, then it only makes sense to vote the weak links of your team off the island, right? The loser with no balance should have been first on the chopping block.

Instead, individuals on the men’s side conspired to vote one of their strongest members off the island, and they kept the clown (who I heard caused them to lose subsequent events). The females, however, voted in a way that was best for Team Womyn.

Whatever the rules are in Survivor that might justify the men’s actions, it is nonetheless illustrative of western culture in general.

There is organized effort to assign all the responsibilities in our society to men, and all the benefits/privileges to women. Men can be abused, cheated, conned, even killed, but it’s always women who are recognized as the victim (whether or not a man has the audacity to fight back).

Because vagina.

You’d have to be blind as well as ignorant not to be aware of this.

Yet, while nearly all females have an ingrained loyalty to other women collectively, men continue to throw each other under the bus (often for some psychological expectation of personal gain, perhaps?). At least 75% of the male population are white knights who think the situation should be made worse, not better. And this is just as bad on the right as on the left.

I’m very grateful to Girl Writes What for saying what few have the courage to say (her other videos have good info, too). I know nothing about her personally besides what she shares in the clips I’ve seen (and yes, she would probably look better with long hair…now snap your superficial self back to the subject and focus), but I really feel her pain about going through the trouble of setting up that conference only to have nobody show.

It kinda’ reminds me of one of the windmills I’ve tipped at.

I stopped visiting bookstores after the early ’90s when all the men’s fiction disappeared.

Chick-lit and romance dominate the literary world. Even when you find a book which appears dude-friendly on the cover and blurb, the author will sucker-punch you sooner or later with the obligatory feminist-pandering message and “strong female character.” When the book business went online, the pattern remained the same. And as if the gender bias wasn’t bad enough in mainstream, ostensibly neutral outlets, there are bazillions of groups, blogs, publishers and stores which cater exclusively to women. There was no masculine counterpart.

I got tired of drowning in the estrogen, and decided to make a difference.

My quixotic undertaking involved sparking a revival of pulp fiction and men’s adventure in several genres. Those were the last entertainment mediums that catered to masculine sensibilities, so I considered them the perfect kind of vehicle for taking back a small chunk of the literary world from entitled feministas and their white knight enablers. I imagined that whispered phrase from Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.”

This post is already getting long so, to make a long story shorter: after a couple years investing a whole lot of time and effort to bring back male space into the literary world, almost nobody showed up. And they kept not showing up. I stayed at it, and there were modest inroads made. Other authors and publishers thought a pulp revival was a good idea, so there were glimmers of hope.

What pimp-slapped me back to reality was, one of the guys I networked with brought some soccer mom into a mutual project, who immediately began beating her drum to feminize pulp, have homosexual pulp heroes,  social justice messages and so forth. In other words, to make pulp fiction exactly like everything else.

Shortly after that, it became evident that the guys I networked with to revive pulp didn’t share my Quixotic motives. They echoed the sentiments of the homophile soccer mom.

I had no allies.

It wasn’t the only time I bowed out of a creative undertaking because I  refused to conform. Other than working with cover artists, I’m not sure I’ll ever try to collaborate again.

I didn’t get it when I watched that episode  of Survivor, but now I do: for women, “the battle of the sexes” is a team sport; and they do and say whatever they think will benefit their team. For the male of the species, it’s every man for himself.

Lessons in Masculinity From an Unlikely Source

Bill is right, I have to admit: as horrible this series was as a whole, the early episodes (in black & white) were not that bad, as TV science fiction goes.

My sophomore year in high school, this show was on the air when I got home on weekdays. My family never had cable, so choices were limited. I watched it most of the time simply because there was nothing else to do.

There was an upperclassman I changed next to in the locker room that year. He obviously watched the show a lot. His favorite character was Dr. Smith, and he hated Don West.

On the surface this seemed idiosyncratic because the guy was a loud, egotistical blowhard whose behavior bordered on bullying. In other words, what most people would assume to be alpha male traits.

Looking back, though, I realize the “alpha traits” were just part of the guy’s defense mechanism. It was a facade he put on, probably because he’d been victimized by the sort of males he was imitating by the time I met him. Peel the facade away, and he is pretty representative of males of my generation (and later ones). It makes perfect sense why he would choose Zachary Smith as a role model.

Thanks Bill Whittle, for your analysis.

Guide to Social Justice Newspeak

This is long overdue, and might turn out to be only Part 1.

You may have noticed that language is evolving, and words used by certain people don’t have the same meaning they do in the dictionary. Similar to individual rights vis-a-vis government regulation, what was perfectly acceptable yesterday might be forbidden today. So bookmark this post and keep it handy for reference.

 

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION – A policy to encourage compliance with the Civil Rights Act, which says employment decisions shall not be made based on race or sex. Wait…um, nevermind…

AFRICA – A utopian paradise where slavery and prejudice don’t exist and never have.  You can be sure any evidence to the contrary is the fault of a greedy, oppressive American.

AMERICA – A dark, sinister entity that invented racism, slavery, greed grimlibertyand poverty. It is still such an oppressive blight on the planet that millions from around the world take whatever action necessary, legal or illegal, to get within its borders and join their voices to those already shouting down its villainy. The final solution to the American problem is to transform this reprehensible nation into something more like the utopias all those millions of immigrants are so desperate to escape from.

“CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE” – Effective safe words to use when a fascist (see definition below) is oppressing you with inappropriate facts.

COMMUNISM – A trigger word (referring to an imaginary boogeyman invented by right-wingers) used by the enemies of progress, who try to make others believe that a system of government proposed by Karl Marx has been instituted in other nations, and failed miserably despite being subsidized via foreign aid and other handouts from U.S. taxpayers for half a century.

CONSERVATIVE – Anyone to the right of Rachel Maddow.

CONSPIRACY – A doublethinkparanoid fantasy fabricated out of whole cloth by the vast right-wing conspiracy, used to justify their hateful, reactionary opinions.  We enlightened leaders should meet privately and decide what to do with dangerous individuals who entertain such notions. IT DOESN’T EXIST, understand? Exceptions include The JFK assassination, Tailhook, and the Patriarchy.

FACTS – clusters of data which are only relevant if/when they support an SJW position. They are invalid when they fail to support a current SJW argument, even when previously cited to support another SJW argument.

starwarsracismFASCIST – Someone who not only destroys an SJW argument (see “racist”), but does so via rigid, inappropriate use of facts.

HATE – Worldviews and ideologies that are a hindrance to progress. The worst is one particular  religion which teaches “love your neighbor as you love yourself,” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

HATE CRIME – A crime which makes a victim out of someone from a Recognized Victim Class. A murder of a homosexual, for instance, is hateful; whereas other murders are not.

HATE SPEECH – Something written or spoken with terminology which is not current; like saying “illegal alien” instead of “undocumented worker” or “socialist” instead of “liberal.”

HOMOPHOBE – Anyone who doesn’t automatically add the clause: “not that there’s anything wrong with that” after a reference to homosexual behavior.

HOMOSEXUAL – An outdated term (which should probably be classified as a trigger) for those who use the body parts they were born with in ways they were never meant to be used. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

LEFT-WING – A trigger word used by fascist hatemongers for an ideology that doesn’t exist. (We know it doesn’t exist because the term is never used on TV.) It doesn’t even exist in Marxist countries, where genocidal tyrants are merely “Stalinist.”

trueleftrightLIBERAL – An enlightened person or policy which recognizes that individual rights  should be infringed upon; that government should dictate how the proletariat spends their money and uses their “property” (an outdated concept); and that all this should be enforced with Executive Orders, unwarranted searches, drone strikes and indefinite detention without trial or charges.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE – A prestigious award, all the more prestigious in recent times now that it’s awarded for such achievements as leading terrorist organizations and being born a certain skin color.

PATRIARCHY – A conspiracy by men to oppress women (by forcing them to pay for their own birth control, for instance) which arosieriveterccounts for every female failure, and male success, in history. Its height of power was in the Dark Ages of the 1950s when most children had both a dad and mom; men opened doors for women; and females were safe walking alone at night nearly anywhere in America.

PRIVILEGE – Something enjoyed exclusively by those who disagree with SJWs.

PROGRESSIVE – (See “liberal”) A person or policy which marches forward to hope and change by gradual increments. Kind of like how you boil a frog, comrade.leftistargumentcycle

RACISM – A state of mind which often goes undetected until the one guilty of it effectively dismantles an SJW argument.

RIGHT-WING – A broad-brush umbrella term, under which fits all the dastardly villains who have ever lived. Including guys like Stalin and Mao (if they truly are dastardly villains; if not, then they are still left-wing…er, progressive).

womenstudies

SEXISM – The narrow-minded insistence that there are differences between males and females.

SOCIALISM – A brilliant, equitable form of government which results in utopia. Not that anybody here believes in it, of course. We are “liberals,” not “socialists.”

SOCIAL JUSTICE – An enlightened mindset which helps one understand that every rape accusation by a womyn is true; that a fair, equal society can best be accomplished by institutionalized discrimination against white male heterosexuals (see “Affirmative Action”); and that any criticism of someone in a Recognized Victim Class is motivated by bigotry.

TRIGGER WORD – A clue that you’re dealing with an enemy to progress. Examples include words like “the Constitution,” “free market,” “liberty,” “founding fathers,” “individual rights,” “personal responsibility” and “republic.”

TRUTH – A trigger word which refers to invalid data (see “facts”) used to oppose progress. It can sometimes be invoked (with caution) by SJWs in its older definition: information which advances the progressive agenda.

50 Shades of Hoopla

What is so bleeding “hawt” about an S&M chick-lit novel, anyway? Haven’t those been around since Victorian times?

As authors (and aspiring full-time authors) here at VP, we take an interest when success stories are waved in our faces. Whiletemp3 getting work published is easier than it’s ever been; the writing racket is also tougher than ever before. Fewer and fewer people read; yet there’s more and more competition from other authors to capture the (mercurial) attention of that shrinking pool of readers. And those readers, by-and-large, don’t necessarily care that much about the quality of the material.

It’s worse than that when you’re a man, writing books for other men. Why? Because men have never been the avid readers women were (on average). Fewer still read fiction. Here are a few distractions contributing to this imbalance:

  • Work (even in this age of “equality,” men still put in more hours than women).
  • Movies (they’re everywhere, now–you don’t need to visit a theater).
  • Video/computer games (often they’re written better anyway).
  • The Internet.

When the New York Publishing Cartel abandoned male readers in the 1990s, the male population abandoned literature in a mass exodus.

temp1(Anybody remember how J.A. Konrath snuck by the NYPC gatekeepers to get published in the first place? The fact that he used the androgynous “J.A.” in lieu of a first name was no mistake. Neither was the “strong female character” orthodoxy.)

So when 50 Shades or some other literary fad comes along and makes big money, we pay attention, but generally don’t learn anything useful from it.

What this bestseller-turned-blockbuster(?) movie teaches us has more to do with the state of our culture than anything else. And I’m not even referring to the kinky sex fetishes. I’m referring to the fact that 50 Shades of Grey is just a hyped, edited work of fan fiction derived from the Twilight series.

 

 

 

 

Great Moments in Stupid Coaching

Wow. Just, wow.

What a wild finish to an epic see-saw battle where the outcome was always in doubt.

I have not been pleased with the NFL for a while now, and hadn’t watched a game for a few years.  The league’s agenda conformity of late has pretty much guaranteed I will never be a fan again. So normally I wouldn’t have watched the Superbowl. If it wasn’t for an invitation from friends this year, I probably wouldn’t have.

So because of my NFL boycott, I knew nothing about Seattle running back Marshawn Lynch. But based on what I saw last night, he runs a lot like how I described John Riggins and Natrone Means in my last post. He’s a bigger, stronger Bronko Nagurski.

Which brings us to the play that will be talked about for years to come, that Seattle’s offensive coordinator may never live down: You’ve got a back who can gain at least three yards a play regardless of how a defense is stacked against him. Certainly you just hammer the line with him until he punches it in, right? No, as it turns out you call a pass play and your talented young quarterback throws his only interception, a hockey-style brawl breaks out on the field, and the repeat championship is ripped from your grasp in the final seconds.

I submit that the pass play was not the most stupid play call ever. I don’t know what the most stupid of all time is; but I know which one takes the cake that I’ve seen.

You are head coach Denny Green. Your team has gone 15-1 in the regular season, easily marching to the NFC championship despite some horrible officiating in the playoffs. Your key defensive player, John Randle, is hurt and won’t be able to anchor the defense in the game, but you’ve kept that a secret. You’ve got homefield advantage and the crowd noise in the Metrodome is a potential extra player. Up to this point your boys have blown out everybody except your one (close) loss to the Buccaneers around mid-season. But your defense is especially porous in this game (you’ve lost five starters to injuries), and you’ve botched a few drives by throwing deep down the field incomplete instead of just getting first downs. Now you’re tied at 27-27 with 49 seconds left to play. It’s first down in the Red Zone and you’ve got the most prolific offense to ever play the game. The formidable weapons your red-hot quarterback has at his disposal are Chris Carter, Randy Moss, Jake Reed, a healthy Robert Smith in the backfield and an offensive line like the Great Wall of China. You can put the game away by a score–all your mistakes and the uncharacteristic flubs by your players will be forgotten. What do you do?

You have your QB kneel on the ball to end regulation. At least that’s what Green chose to do.

You could have put the game out of reach with a chip shot field goal in your last drive, with a kicker who has been perfect all season. That’s right–he has not missed a single FG or PAT all year. Guess when he decides to miss a kick? The other team’s kicker doesn’t miss in overtime, and they advance to the Superbowl.

That missed kick is the only thing people remember about the game, saving the coach from scrutiny when it should have never come down to the kick in the first place.

Back to Seattle-New England. So far as stupid calls go, I wouldn’t even put it in the top ten. In fact, it may not even be a stupid call. Had the right guy come down with the ball, it would be considered a stroke of genius. The same people bitching about the call now would be trash-talking about how the Patriots were punked by the potential threat of Lynch, giving up the pass while focusing on the run. Oh, how brilliant a strategy! Oh, how clever!

People will also probably forget that the only reason Seattle got to the red zone in the first place was the ridiculous bobbled bounce-off-the-knee reception. It even reminded the commentators of the helmet catch a few years ago that ruined New England’s perfect season. New England fans were sure that the jinx was still in effect.

But Lady Luck was a fickle, two-timing slut last night.