Another Old Article

This one actually did run in the WSN, but heavily edited and minus the bit about Brandon Jacobs. I like my verison better...

The Top 5 Characters in the NFL:

The NFL is full of lunatics. Year in year out, we’re bombarded enough scandal, intrigue and mystery and sex to make us think we’ve wandered into an Elmore Leonard novel, lest we forget that pro football is rarely about actual football-playing. Here are the men who keep the season as close to a three-ring circus as possible. God bless you all.

Ray Lewis, LB – Baltimore Ravens
---Maybe it’s just me, but that interview Lewis gave after the New England game was the most terrifying thing I’ve seen on TV all year. Without exaggeration, he looked like he was about to stab everyone in that locker room when discussing the penalty calls on his fellow defensemen. He gave off every crazy signal in the book short of spouting Ezekiel 25:17. If he had barged into Tom Brady’s press conference and beaten him to a pulp, I doubt anyone would have been remotely surprised.


Ice in his veins, malice in his heart: Ray “the Hitman” Lewis.





Rex Ryan, Head Coach – NY Jets
---First off: Dude. Put. The Twinkie. DOWN. That said, it’s hard not to love the guy who barged into the Meadowlands like he owned the place, talked smack right out of the gate and then put a team together that could back it up. Mark Sanchez has a tendency to play hot potato with the football, and that Saints loss was an overall failure on Gang Green’s part. But you’ve got to admire that fake punt call against Miami. That stuff is only supposed to happen in “Madden.” It takes a special kind of coach to actually try it out on national television.

Brett Favre, QB – Minnesota Vikings
---No. 4 has been a hot topic in the NFL for the last few years now; this year it’s for jumping ship to his archrivals of 16 years. Obviously, this isn’t the first time this has happened in sports. But after Favre unceremoniously dispatched the Packers, he unwittingly turned himself into one of the league’s most polarizing players. Even at 40, Favre will have success with the Vikings and he could damn well reach the Super Bowl with them. But unless Green Bay gets in an F-You game where Favre gets thumped at Lambeau, the Cheeseheads will never be able to forgive him and Favre may well be left without a home city when he finally does hang up his pads. Forget interesting, this story is becoming more of a Greek tragedy with every passing week.

TIE: Jerry Jones/Al Davis, Owners – Dallas Cowboys/Oakland Raiders
---These two are like the Batman and Joker of NFL owners: always in constant competition for who’s the bigger eccentric. It’s still too close to call. I’m pretty sure Jerry “What Recession?” Jones only has the better public image because he channels his crazy through the piles and piles of money he accumulates and not outlandish personnel machinations, which is why Dallas ended up with Cowboys Stadium and not a bizarre, eleventh-hour trade for Richard Seymour. Davis, meanwhile, is becoming more and more like Citizen Kane every day; he lords over his empire even as it crumbles around him, his “Just Win Baby” motto is no longer applicable or even appropriate given Oakland’s sorry state. Plus, his quarterback is an ungodly mess and his head coach beats up his own staff. Somebody stop him!

Brandon Jacobs, RB – NY Giants
---He should have more yards than he does, but that’s only because he prefers to slam into defenders like Optimus Prime instead of skirting them with quick cuts. The Jacobs Way is an entertaining but predictable game plan, and it’s admittedly worked better in the past than it is right now. But still, it’s been a while since a runningback seemed to base his play solely on “number of 300-pounders I’ve knocked into next week with a full-body charge.” Even big boy Albert Haynesworth looked like George of the Jungle hitting the tree when Jacobs cracked him in week 1. Now that's football, baby.

AFI review

I wrote this review of AFI's new album last month for NYU's paper, but it never ran. Thankfully, we have blogs just for this sort of thing!

AFI: "Crash Love" 3 1/2 stars out of 5

Breaking the emo mold is not an easy task, but AFI often come the closest to pulling it off. Their music is consistently tight, frontman Davey Havok can actually sing, and occasionally they break out a thumping lead single (“Miss Murder”) that threatens to break the genre wide open with heavy synths, roof-shaking hooks, doom-metal guitar riffs and legion-of-millions chants. Their new album “Crash Love” doesn’t really capitalize on the bold strokes of ‘06’s “Decemberunderground,” but it’s a solid record nonethless. The musicianship is still impressive, and Havok’s pipes are in fine form, but AFI seem to backpedal a bit, into a more generic form of punk, which is to say they don’t move forward thematically. The guys hem and haw just fine on tracks like the single “Medicate,” but the subject matter is all too familiar: my girlfriend dumped me, life sucks, yada yada yada. It’s a universal sentiment, so even emo naysayers will indentify with songs like “Darling, I Want to Destroy You” and “I Am Trying Very Hard to Be Here.” But for a band that flirted with broader topics like suicide and the afterlife its last time around, there should have been more here to love. If there’s anything that lifts AFI up here, it’s the glimpses of flair and style they allow themselves: the layered chorus of “Beautiful Thieves” adds a churchlike feel, and the poppy “Veronica Sawyer Smokes” has a radio-friendly quality thanks to its easy-on-the-ears background and a catchy hook. Those flashes show AFI aren’t in danger of going stale anytime soon, but they should still heed that classic broken-heart advice: move on, dudes.

My first NFL post

I used to play football once upon a time, but since NYU has no team, I've channeled all my repressed energy into the NFL. I'm trying to get into sports writing a little more, so here's my first shot at an NFL post. I'll start with my own team: the New York Giants.

My boys just lost their second straight, which is what tends to happen when you fall asleep on the field in the 3rd quarter against a Super Bowl team from the previous year. Goodness gracious. I can see losing to the Saints, who will be in the Super Bowl barring an act of God or a hit on Drew Brees (my realistic pick for the Super Bowl right now is Saints/Colts). That team is unquestionably legit and is as close to the '07 Patriots as we're going to get this season. But the Cardinals? Certainly beatable, although nobody expected a cakewalk. This was a statement game for New York and they came out swinging early. But after a lethargic 3rd quarter it took the Giants too long to get their mojo back and the rust cost them two turnovers: one on Ahmad Bradshaw's fumble and the last on Eli Manning's pick in the final minutes, both of which came during important, and up till then, textbook, drives. Big Blue has the Eagles next week, a game that has me nervous to no end. On the one hand, Philly did just drop one to Oakland. But on the other hand, the Eagles knocked off the Giants in the playoffs last year, AND they hate the Giants to begin with, AND the NFC East is in kind of a tailspin right now, so the teams in it are going to be scrambling against each other to determine who's top dog. I'll never give up on my G-Men, but they've got more questions than answers at this point; they've got some tough games coming up that will show their true colors. This is still a playoff team, but they coasted for too long on gimme games and they need to get used to earning their wins again. I see a good, not great finish and a likely shot at the wild card spot and conference title, provided the next few games go well.

In other NFL news, Brett Favre finally got knocked off his 6-0 pedestal by the Steelers, who I had pegged as too inconsistent to slow down the stampeeding Vikings. Shows what I know. Favre goes to Lambeau next week to play Green Bay, a game even people who hate football might tune in to watch. Peyton Manning and the Colts devoured St. Louis 46-6, but Peyton did NOT throw his 6th consecutive 300-yarder, which analysts and talking heads are pegging as an act of mercy. But...the Rams still lost by 40, so I'm not sure if they'd exactly agree right now.

The Bengals destroyed the Bears in Cedric Benson's revenge game, and the Cowboys dominated Atlanta in Tony Romo's vindication game. The Patriots also murdered the Bucs in London, which is just what happens when Bill Belichick loses to his division rivals and former underling within 3 weeks: he hits the kill switch hard.

Speaking of which, Denver has a bye and the Jets beat up on Oakland, who finally switched quarterbacks to minimal effect (kudos to JaMarcus Russell for keeping his hat on and not sitting on the bench. If nothing else, he is certainly a professional with a lot of heart - it takes a lot of heart to get thumped on live TV and in the press week after week and still show up for more beatings). Mark Sanchez needed a pick-me-up game, and I'm sure the win feels good for a New York team that just dropped 3 in a row, but as any Giants fan can tell you, crushing the Raiders does little to prepare you for competitive games.

West Village Post from Journalism Class

If you ever decide to take a walking tour of the West Village, good luck actually getting to the end of the thing. The neighborhood is so vibrant, interesting and enticing that, for unlucky college students like myself who have to follow a route instead of taking a guided tour (hey, my schedule is horrible and I’m strapped for money; sometimes you just gotta do it yourself), it’s incredibly easy to get lost in the restaurants, bakeries and local shops amid all the landmarks and famous hot spots.

The tour can be tough to follow for other reasons besides the distractions, too: the West Village is “off the grid” of Manhattan, which means that the streets don’t run vertically/horizontally like everywhere else, and a good chunk of them aren’t numbered. The area is much more suburban but also more old-fashioned, which probably contributes as to why it’s so expensive. It all looks very pretty and I wanted to live there immediately, but due to the unusual layout I was lost within minutes and spent at least a half-hour trying to find Charles Street. I was all of thirty feet away from it, which probably says more about my cartography skills/general sense of direction than the West Village, but still.

But once you find your way around and get the hang of the neighborhood, there’s all kinds of amazing spots around here for tourists and college kids alike, the tour I went on made stops out of Thomas Paine’s old apartment (59 Grove St., blink and you’ll miss the door), the Friends apartment (you can see it from the corner of Bleecker and Grove), and Magnolia Bakery (immortalized by Sex and the City and “Lazy Sunday”). Just make sure you stay focused and don’t spend a half hour you don’t have browsing a vinyl store for old albums. Not that I did that or anything. I’m just saying.

Here Goes Nothing...

OK, so apparently I'm a blogger now. I avoided it as long as I could, but the blogosphere has finally caught up with me thanks to a requirement from my journalism class. But I'm thinking positive: compelled by the fear of a bad grade in journalism, my desire for a job (hire me, please), and my propensity to share way too much about myself, I'm thinking this could be a good thing after all.