Well, it happened. They finally killed my fantasy season. Who knew Cedric Houston would have a better day rushing than Tatum Bell? I sure couldn't pencil that into the box score.
I managed to put together an Oakland Raider like 3-12 season this year in our big money fantasy league, which either goes to show that I know absolutely nothing about picking fantasy players and lineups, or that I had a bad season. I'd like to think it was the latter.
We had a good run Tom Brady, Willis McGahee, Kevin Jones, Tatum Bell, Braylon Edwards, Lee Evans, Hines Ward, Terry Glenn, Randy McMichael, Josh Hanson and the New England Patriots, but we'll have to wait til next year to make up for it.
From here on out looks like I'm going to have to concentrate on winning the Music Blogger Fantasy Basketball League, but I'll have to knock Bows + Arrows out of the top spot first.
Trainwreck - "Christmas Time Blues"
The Politics of Ebenezer Scrooge
HUMBUG | Miser or free-market player? The first copies of A Christmas Carol appeared 163 years ago today but Scrooge's true character remains a topic of debate even now
We all recognize Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol as a heart-warming story of the redemption of a mean, stingy, grasping, emotionally crippled gentleman into a generous, happy soul, but there is a crucial aspect to the tale that has received far less recognition:
What are the politics of Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim and the Yuletide ghosts? And are their adventures an advertisement for socialism, or free-market economics?
Dickens is certainly fair game for political scrutiny, given his reputation for attacking social ills in his fiction.
A novelist who is also a reformer can be a lightning rod, and Dickens played this role beginning with his second novel, Oliver Twist, which appeared in instalments from 1837 to 1838. The harsh conditions endured by the young orphan hero were a direct attack on the 1834 Poor Law, which decreed that the poor must go to workhouses — a fate slightly better than outright starvation.
That law, in turn, was based on the theories of T.R. Malthus, a Victorian clergyman who maintained that poverty was inevitable because population increased in a geometric ratio while subsistence increased only in an arithmetical ratio. If you were kind to paupers, this theory ran, you were only encouraging them to breed and produce more hungry mouths.
This widespread belief is behind Scrooge's snarling reference to workhouses and "the surplus population," when approached by two gentlemen soliciting charitable donations for the poor.
A Christmas Carol was a product of Dickens' discovery that you could link traditional sentiment about Christmas with the issue of poverty — a particularly live issue in the 1840s, a decade of economic distress in Britain. But where exactly does he stand on this issue?
Or, more importantly, where does his story stand? (Trust the story, not the teller, D. H. Lawrence used to warn us.) (READ MORE)
MUSIC
Featured Album: Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde
Released on May 16th, 1966, rock's first studio double LP by a major artist was, as Dylan declared in 1978, "the closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my head . . . that thin, that wild-mercury sound." There is no better description of the album's manic brilliance. After several false-start sessions in New York in the fall of 1965 and January 1966 with his killer road band the Hawks -- "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" was the only keeper -- Dylan blazed through the rest of Blonde on Blonde's fourteen tracks in two three-day runs at Columbia's Nashville studios in February and March 1966.
The pace of recording echoed the amphetamine velocity of Dylan's songwriting and touring schedule at the time. But the combined presence of trusted hands such as organist Al Kooper and Hawks guitarist Robbie Robertson with expert local sessionmen including drummer Kenneth Buttrey and pianist Hargus "Pig" Robbins created an almost contradictory magnificence: a tightly wound tension around Dylan's quicksilver language and incisive singing in barrelhouse surrealism such as "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35" and "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again." Amid the frenzy, Dylan delivered some of his finest, clearest songs of comfort and desire: the sidelong beauty "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," recorded in just one take, and "I Want You," the title of which Dylan almost used for the album. - Rolling Stone
Bob Dylan - "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35"
Bob Dylan - "Temporary like Achilles"
Bob Dylan - "I Want You"
Bob Dylan - "Visions of Johanna"