Sunday Morning Thoughts

Cleaning out the Mental In-Box while awaiting the Steelers kick-off....

• After soundly thrashing South Florida last week, Pitt fans were giddy in the seeming arrival, finally, of Todd Graham's high octane offense last week. So what happened at Rutgers, which Bill Hillgrove continually tells is is in Piscataway, New Jersey, sure came as as a shock yesterday. What a stinker of a performance that was.


• Graham was quick to place the blame squarely on himself and his staff. Guess he learned his lesson after he blamed the players and took no blame after the Iowa and Notre Dame losses. As someone suggested, while Graham may be the highest paid employee at Pitt, he still has a boss, and that that boss obviously told Graham to knock it off with the it's-not-my-fault stuff.


• Which makes me wonder about Dana Holgerson's bosses at WVU. Holgerson's reaming of the WVU fans for not showing up at game against Bowling Green two weeks ago had to have Oliver Luck wondering about this guy, who has been a loose cannon of sorts ever since he arrived at Morgantown.


• Which leads me to another prediction: If Holgerson achieves any type of success at WVU, and if WVU finds itself an odd man out as colleges keep playing the conference reshuffling game, he will leave Morgantown as soon as some BCS school comes calling with a job offer. I say he's gone from WVU by 2014.


• To anyone who says that baseball games are slow, boring, and take too long to play, I will point out that the Pitt-Rutgers football game yesterday took 3 hours and 40 minutes in real time to play. Even Hillgrove and Pat Bostick on the radio broadcast were saying how excruciating it was. The first half, in which 9 total points were scored, took and hour and forty-five minutes to play.


• The 17-10 score of last week's Steelers loss to Houston is not indicative, if you ask me, of how badly they were beaten in that game. Today the 2-2 Steelers take on the 3-1 Tennessee Titans at Heinz Field. Is it an overstatement to say that how this game goes could well determine the direction of the rest of the season for the Steelers?


• A friend of mine made the statement this week that if nothing else, Steelers losses make the sports radio talk shows a whole lot more entertaining.


• And that phenomenon is not unique to Pittsburgh. The Atlantic Highlands, NJ correspondent to The Grandstander reports that callers to New York stations are demanding that the Yankees ditch Curtis Granderson (the presumptive MVP in the American League) because "he strikes out too much." Good thing there wasn't sports talk radio back when Babe Ruth was striking out a lot for the Yankees back in the 1920's and '30.


• Watch but Don't Bet Department: The Steelers win over the Titans at home today, but it won't be easy.


• Those MLB Division Series sure were great theater, weren't they? Hope the two LCS can live up to them.


• To Absent Friends: Al Davis, who WAS the Oakland Raiders died yesterday. While he was certainly not a likable guy to the teams that opposed him, his place in football history cannot be disputed. The NFL-AFL merger was going to happen eventually, but it happened a lot sooner when Davis became commissioner of the AFL, and established NFL bigdomes realized that they had no stomach for a street fight led by Davis. And has football in Pittsburgh ever been so intense as it was when the Steelers and Raiders met so often and with so much on the line in the 1970's? Davis was as big a part of that as anyone involved. You wonder what will happen to the Raiders now that Davis will no longer be there.

LCS Predictions

After some scintillating Division Series, wherein the each of the three game fives (games five?) was better that the one which preceded it, I am ready to make my predictions for the League Championship Series. For those who don't remember, and who probably don't much care anyway, I went 2-2 in the four LDS, hitting on the Brewers and Rangers, and missing on the Yankees and Phillies.

ALCS

Not sure why I am not sold on the Rangers. After all, they ARE the defending AL champs. Maybe it is just the fact that as an AL team who plays most of their games well past my bed time, I am just not that familiar with them. Also, I look at the Tigers and see a team that seemed to get better as the season went along, and then beat the team with baseball's best record in the Division Series. So I'll go with the Tigers to take down the AL gonfalon.

And speaking of the Tigers, I love seeing Lloyd McClendon in their dugout. Yeah, the Pirates weren't any good while he managed them, but I liked the guy, liked the passion he brought to the job. Plus, he made regular use of the word "flummoxed." How can you not like him?

NLCS

Logic tells you to go with the hot hand, and that is the Cardinals, who stormed through September to win the wild card spot, and who then beat the Phillies in the LDS by beating Cliff Lee, Roy Oswalt, and Roy Halladay. Logic also makes you see that the Brewers were the team that outdistanced those same Cardinals over 162 games in the NL Central. Prince Fielder will no doubt be leaving Milwaukee after this season, so this may be the Brewers last shot at taking it all. That degree of urgency will get them past the Cardinals and into the Fall Classic.

As always, watch, but don't bet.

Book Review: "Sex On the Moon"

OK, the book is not as salacious as the title would suggest, and the subtitle fills you in: "The Amazing Story of the Most Audacious Heist in History." It's author is Ben Mezrich who has written "Bringing down the House" which was a terrific book about a group of MIT students who formed a black jack team to "bring down the house" at various casinos, but ran into some nasty trouble in Las Vegas. It ws made into a good movie called "21" that starred Kevin Spacey. His more recent book was "The Accidental Billionaires" about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, which was made into the really good movie, "The Social Network."

"Sex On the Moon" is about a brilliant young student (you sensing a theme here among Mezrich's topics?) named Thad Roberts who secures a three year internship with NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. He wants to be an astronaut, and he just might have done so, but.... There's always a "but" in stories like this, right? Somewhere along the way, Roberts gets the idea of stealing actual moon rocks from NASA's labs. Moon rocks may well be the most valuable substance on earth considering that there only about 800 pounds of them brought back by the Apollo astronauts, and it's not likely that any more will be arriving on earth in the foreseeable future, if ever.

Why does Roberts do this? Well, a lot of it involves his own insecurities, and, as you might expect, a woman was involved. He literally wanted to "give her the moon."

It's a pretty interesting tale, but I did not find it as compelling a read as "Bringing Down the House", and I confess that I did not read "Accidental Billionaires." I actually found myself feeling sorry for Roberts, a brilliant kid, but a social nerd, and not at all smart enough to see how stupid he was in considering, executing, and (trying to) complete his audacious caper.

Actually, if you just Google "Thad Roberts Moon Rocks" it will give you all you really need to know about the story. Then, you can wait until the movie comes out.

Movie Review: "A Bronx Tale"

Loyal Reader BigPoppy has long been recommending that I see the 1993 Robert DeNiro directed movie, "A Bronx Tale." Finally, it has come to pass that I have now seen this gem (thanks solely to the BigPoppy's loan of his personal DVD of the movie), and what a great movie!

The movie stars DeNiro as Lorenzo, a New York City bus driver, and Chaz Palminteri as Sonny, the neighborhood wiseguy who holds court over this one little neighborhood in the Bronx. It is told from the point of view of Lorenzo's son, Calogero, or "C". In 1960, nine year old Calogero witnesses a murder, doesn't properly identify the shooter, and is then taken under the wing of Sonny. What happens then is not what you might think. C does not fall into Sonny's way of life (as happened to Henry in "Goodfellas"), although he is surely tempted. The honest working guy Lorenzo battles to keep his son on the straight an narrow as he grows into a teenager (the movie jumps ahead in time to Calogero at age 17 in 1968).

It's a mob movie, it's a movie about family values, it's a coming of age movie, it's funny, and it's deadly serious. And it is based in fact: Palminteri wrote the screenplay for the movie based upon his own one act play, which was based on his own life growing up in the Bronx. Turns our that Chaz is a nickname for Calogero.

I don't honestly even remember this movie when it came out, and it is difficult to find today. I could not get it from the library, and I am told that you can't even get it on Netflix, so many thanks to BigPoppy for the loan of his DVD. It is worth keeping your eye out for this one if you've never seen it. It is well worth watching.

Oh and for fans of The Sopranos, the role of Lorenzo's wife is played by Kathleen Narducci who played Charmaine Bucco, and the 17 year old Calogero was played by Lillo Brancato (who, btw, looks enough like Robert DeNiro to actually be his son) who played Matthew Bevilaqua, who met an untimely end at the hands of Tony Soprano himself while sipping a diet soda, "the last thing you're ever going to taste." And it could have had an even stronger Sopranos connection. According to IMDB, there was to be a scene where Sonny's mob boss was to pay him a visit, and that don was to be played by Frank Vincent, aka Phil Leotardo, aka Billy Bats from "Goodfellas." It was eventually decided to leave that scene out of the movie.

Big Thumbs Up from The Grandstander for this one.

To Absent Friends - Steve Jobs

As I type up this blog on my home, laptop computer, listing to music on my iPod, music that I may have purchased from the iTunes store, after having already perused several out of town newspapers on my iPad2, let me be among the many to note the passing of Apple founder Steve Jobs. Actually, the previous sentence could make me come across as an insufferable bore (please hold your comments on this point), but it was really written to make the point of the impact that Mr. Jobs has had on the world and on almost everybody's everyday lives. Perhaps it isn't often that we recognize true genius in our midst, but that was certainly not the case with Steve Jobs.

He and his company, Apple, truly did change the world, and it was perhaps best summarized in the statement released by President Obama: "His ultimate tribute is the fact that most people may have learned of his passing on a device that he invented."

RIP Steve Jobs.

Quickie Premonition and Quickie Thoughts on Yesterday

Anxiously awaiting the Steelers-Texans kick off. Somehow, I do not have real good feeling for this one. Unless Rooney U. Plays a lot better that they did last week, I fear that the Texans will win this one.

Hope I'm wrong.

Hey, did anyone watch the Wisconsin and Nebraska game last night? Now THAT was what you would call High Octane Football.

And I happened to stumble upon the Navy and Air Force game and saw the last few minutes of regulation and the overtime. What a finish! No one much cares about a game between Navy and Air Force, but, trust me, if that one was between a couple of SEC biggies, it would be dubbed an Instant Classic, and the ESPN boys would be slobbering all over each other raving about it.

And On The High School Front...

First, a disclaimer. I don't follow high school sports with the exception of Central basketball and soccer, and North Allegheny girls' soccer for familial reasons. Oh, I'll check the scores to see how Central or NA is doing in football and hoops, but that's about it, so I claim no knowledge, expertise, and a very limited emotional attachment.

That said, I note today that Gateway High School defeated Norwin High School in football last night by a score of 85-0. That's right...EIGHTY-FIVE to ZERO.

Again, this is just a score in the newspaper. I don't know when, or even if, the Gateway coach cleared his bench and put the water boys in against Norwin, don't know if they were calling times out in the fourth quarter, don't know if they were still passing after they got up by, say, forty or so points, and I am sure that the Gateway coach will thoroughly justify this performance and tell everyone what a great win it was for his "program", and he will no doubt say something like "what was I supposed to tell my fifth string kids? Lie down out there?" But I'm sorry, there is no reason on this earth that a high school team should beat another high school team by a score of 85-0.

These are not the paid professionals of the NFL, nor the scholarship athletes of the NCAA, but high school kids. Many of them aren't old enough to drive a car yet. It's one thing to tell the Steelers to man up and play better when they get beat up by the Ravens in the season opener, but should those 14-15-16 year old kids from Norwin be held to the same standard? I hardly think so.

I guess this just makes me a bleeding heart, but I wonder how those coaches and kids from Norwin are feeling this morning.