the tindog coffeehouse

With so much focus on the various BCS predictions, it’s easy to forget there’s a football game on Thanksgiving night. But of course it’s not just any game, it’s Texas vs. Texas A&M.

Now, you’re probably wondering, so what? The 10-1 Horns are No. 2 in the nation, and the Aggies are 4-7.  Heck, A&M (“the floormats of the Big 12″) even lost to Baylor this year! A blowout is all but guaranteed.

Or is it?

Aggie fans will be quick to point out that Texas has lost to A&M the past two consecutive years, and I’m betting they’d like to make it three.

Oh, who are we kidding? A&M doesn’t have the same caliber team it’s had the past few years, and Texas is playing at least as well as it did in 2005. The Horns will win this one and win big: 41-0, according to NCAA Football ’09 for the Wii.

But with almost nothing to gain from the victory, why is it still such an important game?

Because it’s Texas vs. A&M.

OU might be UT’s biggest threat, but A&M is still their biggest rival. After all, it’s the Aggies who are mentioned every time the Longhorns sing their fight song:

Texas Fight, Texas Fight,
And it’s goodbye to A&M.

So have another round of turkey, dressing, and burnt orange pumpkin pie, and let’s all be thankful for another Texas Longhorn victory.

Hook ‘Em, Horns!

Real Score: 49-9. Wow! A pretty close prediction (closer than I expected) and the largest margin of victory for Texas over A&M in 110 years! With the exception of a missed field goal, it was a picture-perfect game. Unfortunately, it probably won’t be enough to stay ahead of OU in the polls, but the Horns have done everything they could possibly do. If they make it to the Fiesta Bowl, I will be satisfied. More thoughts about the flawed BCS system and Big 12 tie-breaker method later. But for now, just appreciate an 11-1 season that far exceeded all expectations.

A couple of interesting posts from über-blog Boing Boing on the economy:

First, a sobering look at the cost of the recent government bailouts, which have exceeded $4.6 trillion if the Citigroup bailout is included. (Original blog post here.)

Crunching the inflation adjusted numbers, we find the bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

I’m sure there’s a lot of debate over these numbers, but at least you begin to get an idea about how much money is at stake here.

Second, Dale Dougherty has a long (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) list of why CNN has a hard time reporting on the flailing economy:

1 ) It’s not a hurricane so Anderson Cooper of CNN is unable to position himself in the middle of the storm for optimal drama. In other words, TV anchors can’t get wet and windblown, while viewers worry about their safety. The state of the economy is a disaster but not a natural disaster. Nobody’s leaving the studio for this one. There’s no place to go. …

8 ) “Why can’t this be happening to Russia or China? If it was only happening there, and not here, we would know how to cover it.” CNN would send Christiane Amanpour there. “Live from…”. We don’t have visuals like people knocking down walls, rushing into the streets or standing in lines. The Fall of the Berlin Wall is the Fall of Communism, the fall of Saddam’s statue — now these are stories of new freedoms. In America today, we have a big fall without a distinctive symbol, without a video loop, without an exotic locale. …

10 ) Lastly, the TV media is no better off than we are at understanding this complex crisis. On a gut level, viewers know what the story is, that it’s about them, their future and their children’s future. They have specific questions that are difficult to answer (see the Suze Orman blog on CNN where it is promised that she’ll answer these many, many questions; she doesn’t, of course.) and they have general worries (should I panic?) that are hard to resolve. While we try to absorb as much information as possible, we keep having the same conversation over and over:
Q. What’s going on?
A. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell.

Well, rooting for Tech against OU did absolutely nothing. I can’t say I’m surprised. Tech only plays well at home.

So here’s where we stand: Texas moved up to No. 2 in the BCS while OU is No. 3 by a razor-thin margin, with Tech dropping to No. 7. Texas has to beat A&M, period. That shouldn’t be hard this year since the Aggies are 4-7 for the year. And Tech will almost certainly beat Baylor. That leaves the OU-OSU game as the wildcard.

If OU wins, they’ll probably leapfrog UT in the BCS and will face Missouri for the Big 12 Championship. A win there would probably put them in the National Championship against the SEC Champion (either Alabama or Florida). Texas still ranks higher than Tech and would probably go to the Fiesta Bowl.

If OSU wins, Tech wins the Big 12 South tiebreaker and heads to Kansas City to play Mizzou for the Big 12 Championship. If the Red Raiders win there, they are guaranteed a BCS bowl, but it wouldn’t be the National Championship. Texas would move back up ahead of OU in the polls, and it’s very possible they could end up in the National Championship game.

So as long as the Horns beat A&M, they should be fine regardless of the outcome of the Bedlam game. But an OSU win would probably be more beneficial. Is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? I think it’s 50/50, but only because they’re playing in Stillwater, so the Cowboys will have the home field advantage.

Of course, all of this is ammunition for the anti-BCS crowd, and I kind of agree. How would it look for the Longhorns to be playing for a National Championship when they didn’t even win their own conference?

I’d like to find out.

Dr Pepper is giving away coupons on Sunday for a free soda because apparantly Guns N’ Roses has a new album out. Wait, what?!

Dr Pepper is making good on its promise of free soda now that the release of Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy is a reality.

The soft-drink maker said in March that it would give a free soda to everyone in America if the album dropped in 2008. Chinese Democracy, infamously delayed since recording began in 1994, goes on sale Sunday.

“We never thought this day would come,” Tony Jacobs, Dr Pepper’s vice president of marketing, said in a statement. “But now that it’s here, all we can say is: The Dr Pepper’s on us.”

Beginning Sunday at 12:01 a.m., coupons for a free 20-ounce soda will be available for 24 hours on Dr Pepper’s website. They’ll be honored until Feb. 28.

Well, alrighty then!

Update: Just in case you were wondering, no, I didn’t get my coupon for a free Dr Pepper. I actually went to the website a couple of times, but it was down both times. I guess it just couldn’t handle the onslaught of traffic. Probably for the best.

The BCS makes for strange bedfellows. Had the Texas Longhorns beaten Texas Tech on November 1st, they would still be the undisputed No. 1 team in the country, or possibly a very close 2nd. As it is, Burnt Orange Nation will spend the bye-week nervously watching what happens in Norman between No. 2 Tech and No. 5 OU.

Should OU win and then beat Oklahoma State on the 29th, there would be a three-way tie in the Big 12 South between OU, Tech, and Texas, with the winner decided by the BCS results. Consequently, there is a slight possibility Texas could come out on top (probably thanks to the BCS computers), and then a Big 12 victory over Missouri would then give them a very good shot at the National Championship.

On the other hand, in a three-way tie Texas could end up in third place in the Big 12 with an invitation to the Holiday Bowl. (Although apparently it is possible all three teams could end up in BCS bowls — if the rules are bent.)

It’s that latter scenario that has me rooting for the Red Raiders this week and for Alabama in the SEC Championship on December 6th. Bama and Tech are both undefeated and ranked first and second in the country, respectively. By beating OU, Tech not only locks in their spot in the Big 12 title game but also guarantees that a 2-loss OU team can’t leapfrog 1-loss Texas. Plus, the Horns’ single loss looks a lot less painful because it will have been to a top-rated undefeated team. Barring an embarrassing loss to Mizzou by Tech, the Horns are pretty much a lock for the Fiesta Bowl — a much better ending to the season than the Holiday Bowl.

So why root for the Crimson Tide? Because a lot of voters are anxious to move Florida up in the polls, and a stronger Florida (which is currently No. 4 in the BCS) is a direct threat to Texas (which is No. 3), regardless of how the Big 12 shakes out.

So, no, I won’t be rooting for OU tomorrow. Let Tech and Bama fight it out for the National Championship. It’s a lot safer for Texas than hoping for a mathematical miracle.

The Wall Street Journal has a great explanation of just why the Big Three American automakers are in so much trouble while Japanese, Korean, and German companies aren’t:

It wasn’t that American auto executives were always malicious and stupid while the Japanese were always enlightened and smart. Japanese car companies have made plenty of mistakes, most recently Toyota’s ill-timed move into full-sized pickup trucks and SUVs. But just as America didn’t understand the depth of ethnic and religious divisions in Iraq, Detroit failed to grasp — or at least to address — the fundamental nature of its Japanese competition. Japan’s car companies, and more recently the Germans and Koreans, gained a competitive advantage largely by forging an alliance with American workers.

Detroit, meanwhile, has remained mired in mutual mistrust with the United Auto Workers union. …

The debilitating management-union relationship largely remains, however. In 1998, after GM moved some equipment at factories in Flint against the UAW’s wishes, workers went on strike for 54 days, costing GM $3 billion. While such headline-making confrontations have become rare, small-scale impasses occur regularly.

Not terribly long ago, says a Ford manager who must remain unnamed, Ford dispatched a team of welding experts to a factory to explore efficiency moves. The plant’s union leaders, fearing layoffs might result, refused to meet with the team, and the effort came to naught. UAW leaders aren’t bad people; far from it. But when everything is a negotiation, many things don’t get done. (Just ask any parent.)

Instead of begging for $25 billion in bailout money, GM, Ford, and Chrysler need to fix the underlying problems. As Mitt Romney wrote a few days ago:

If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

The American automakers need to study Honda. Study Toyota. Study Hyundai. Engineer to the level they do. Approach the management-labor relationship the way they do. Approach manufacturing they way they do. Why, after 30+ years of getting run over by the Japanese, have they not figured that out?

As much as I try to fight it, I’ve realized I’m well on my way to becoming fully assimilated into the Google empire.

It started innocently enough — as it usually does — with an Internet search. Google.com, the ugly, bare search engine with the stupid name but great search results. I hated myself for using it at first but eventually got over it. Fine, it’s ugly, but it’s just a search engine so whatever.

But then it began to evolve into more. I started using Google Maps after Mapquest let me down once too often. Then I reluctantly began using Google Reader for my RSS feeds when Pluck discontinued its reader. Then at some point I installed the Google Toolbar in IE and later Firefox. And I found Google Earth to be a good tool when doing research for my novel.

All along the way, I justified my actions, insisting that I was simply choosing the right tools for the job, each one filling a specific need and nothing more. I was certainly no Google fanboy.

Then a few months ago I began using Google Calendar as a way to sync my calendars between my home and work computers. Again, it was a tool to fill a specific need. And the nice part was that I didn’t have to ever go to the website, just run the synchronization client and go to Outlook.

But there was still another need to fill, one that I had ignored for a long time, one that I had refused to acknowledge for fear of what it would mean. I had to open a Gmail account.

Web-based email, of course, is often times a spam magnet. A few years ago, the spam got so bad in my Hotmail account that I abandoned it for the safety of Yahoo. And ever since then, I’ve happily used my Yahoo email with very little spam.

So why the need for Gmail? First, because it’s faster. Yahoo is fine, but once you log in, you still have to click again to go to the Inbox. I don’t want to have to wait for it load and then still have to click something else to get to my mail. Second, because it’s more stable. For some reason, when I check my Yahoo mail on my Vista machine at home, it often renders Firefox unusable until I close it and reopen it. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s annoying. And third, because I’ve already moved to Google Calendar, and combining my web-based email, calendar, and contacts under one roof just makes sense.

Am I ashamed at my assimilation? A little. Of course, the new Gmail themes are a welcome peace offering. (I’ll admit, I’m a little partial to the Ninja theme.)

And hey, at least I’m not completely Googlized! At least, not yet.

Is reclusive North Korean president Kim Jong-Il still alive? Some say no. But the Photoshop experts at Worth1000 say otherwise.

(I don’t think that last one is Photoshopped.)

John C Abell at Wired’s Epicenter blog argues that companies receiving money from the government’s $700 billion bailout rescue plan should be free to use that money to pay for executive bonuses. To come to that conclusion, he looks at the public funding of Planned Parenthood in the 1980s:

In 1984 the Reagan administration denied family planning funds to any overseas group that offered counseling about abortion, and generally opposed public sex education for teens (which works) and supported abstinence education (which doesn’t).

It was willing, in other words, to make a bad investment in order to advance a principle.

The funding decision affected Planned Parenthood, which is under the umbrella of an overseas organization. They made an intriguing case for being able to spend as they saw fit while taking the money: we won’t spend your money on abortion education. We have other money; we’ll use that.

Abell’s argument is that just as Planned Parenthood should be able to use public funds to offer abortion counseling, financial companies should be able to use public funds to pay for executive bonuses because  “[e]xperts should manage the business. Amateurs with agendas should not.”

Never mind that the taxpayer-funded bailout rescue plan was never intended to pay for bonuses. The idea that the same executives who ran not just their own companies but the entire economy into the ground should be financially rewarded for their performance is ludicrous. At a time when a company like Citigroup is laying off an additional 53,000 employees to cut costs, I don’t think executive officers should be collecting massive bonuses, whether the money to pay for those bonuses is public or not.

Abell insists that companies still need to be able to compete for top talent, even in a bad economy. Fair enough. But how effective is a company if it can’t even pay for its own rank-and-file employees? It’s the chicken-and-egg conundrum: Which comes first, the superstar CEO or the high-performing company? If the CEO is the only employee left in the company, then I guess it doesn’t matter, does it?

As for the abortion counseling argument, Abell may think funding abstinence education is a “bad investment,” but since it’s the taxpayers’ money, the taxpayers should have a say in how it’s used. And I, for one, do not want my money going to pro-abortion organizations such as Planned Parenthood.

It’s official: Google has become omniscient. Not only does it know the answer to your question, it knows what question you’re going to ask in the first place.

For example, you pull up Google.com to find out why the sky is blue. As you type the question, the all-knowing search engine also suggests other questions you may be wondering, such as “why is a raven like a writing desk” and “why is my poop green”.

See, Google knows that’s what you’re really curious about!

More hilarious (or possibly disturbing) Google suggestion results here.

P.S. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” is a riddle from Alice in Wonderland. And if your poop is green, it could be because of a stomach virus or because of too much iron in your diet. You’re welcome.

OK, so the Texas Longhorns are going to Lawrence, Kansas, this week to face off against the Kansas Jayhawks, their last road game of the regular season. I’ll keep this brief since I know very little about KU, except that head coach Mark Mangino is the spitting image of Mr. Lunt from VeggieTales:

Hee-hee.

OK, I’ll try to be serious now. (Giggle-snort.) Yeah, so anyway, the Jayhawks have a great quarterback, Todd Reesing (an Austin native), who will probably be more of a challenge to the Texas defense than Baylor’s Robert Griffin. But Texas still has Colt McCoy and now-healthy Quan Cosby and Fozzy Whittaker. Plus, Kansas has a 6-4 record, so barring any major injuries or a complete breakdown of coverage, the Horns should win this one pretty solidly.

The Wii predicts a score of 44-0, Texas. I predict Mangino will break into song about cheeseburgers by the end of the third quarter.

(Sorry. I couldn’t resist.)

Real score: 35-7. Pretty close to the predicted score and a nice win for the Horns. Only one game left: a Thanksgiving-day roasting of Texas A&M. But before that, we’ll have to see how this week’s match between Texas Tech and OU turns out, as the outcome of that game has a big impact on which bowl Texas ends up in. More on that later in the week.

Christy’s been sick the past couple of days with a cold. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that flu activity in Texas, at least according to Google, is still considered “Minimal”. Apparently, we’re the only state in the country to claim that status. Yay, us!