Winless Watch (boys): A Very Special "Cannelton Wins!" Edition

First things first:

OK, OK. I didn't end up doing an Indiana high school football Winless Watch. To me, it's just not as compelling, and with only a 9-game schedule plus the tournament, there ended up being 18 winless teams at the end of the season. Too many for my purposes!

If I had to pick a WW Team of the Year for football, it'd probably be the Edinburgh Lancers. Edinburgh went 0-10 on the season, being shut out 6 times and losing by an average score of 52-6. They held only one school – Indiana Deaf – to under 40 points, and had a three-game stretch in the middle of the season in which they were outscored 156-0.

This year, unfortunately, wasn't an aberration for Edinburgh. If there were a word that was the opposite of "dynasty" that connoted "a long era of losing," it would fit the Lancers to a T. Out of the 100 games they've played since 1997, they've won 5. (Wait, it gets better – or worse: One of those wins was actually a loss on the field, but forfeited to the Lancers later.)

And take this for what it's worth: In 1993, the Lancers gave up the first touchdown scored by a girl in an Indiana high school football game. Hey, I'm just saying.

Also take this for what it's worth: It's completely unrelated to Edinburgh, Indiana, but in trying to find more about the school's sordid football history, I ran across EdinburghSucks.com. Unfortunately, it's about Edinburgh's namesake city in Scotland. Too bad, too. (Oh, chin up, lad! You can buy a T-shirt stating same. Or a thong.)

Ultimately, though, this column isn't about football and the boys who play it poorly. It's about basketball and the teams who play it poorly.

Speaking of which, for Cannelton, a funny thing happened on the way to "defending" their Winless Watch Boys Team of the Year crown – they won! Congratulations to the Bulldogs for snapping their 34-game winless skid on Friday night against New Harmony, 58-50.

The season's not been terribly kind to the Bulldogs, but it still pales in comparison to last year's average defeat margin of over 50 points per game. Signs of improvement are everywhere, though, if you look solely at margin of defeat. The 'Dogs have reduced their margins of defeat as much as 50-75% in several games this year - from 61 last year against Restoration Christian to 15 this year; from 74 last year against Washington Catholic to 38 this year, and from 56 last year against Wood Memorial to 29 this year.

Yeah, OK. The numbers are still frightful in places, but they're better. Point is, the Bulldogs are improved to the point where they've played their way off the Winless Watch list. Again, congratulations!

It bears mentioning here that last year's other two winless teams, Howe Military and Cowan, have won two and three games this season, respectively. Congratulations to them also!

So, who is poised to inherit Cannelton's crown as Boys Team of the Year? Any discussion must start with new IHSAA school Tindley, in Indianapolis. Taking their forfeit defeat out of the equation, the 0-13 Tigers have lost:

* 11 games by more than 30 points
* 10 games by more than 40
* 9 games by more than 50
* 6 games by more than 60
* 4 games by more than 70
* 3 games by more than 80
* 1 game by 100 points (a 117-17 defeat by Indianapolis Washington)

And in games played on the floor, they're giving up 86.4 points per game and scoring only 25.2 – an average margin of over 61 points per game. Ye gods.

Yet it's still conceivable that they won't be included on this list at the end of the season; a February 1 return engagement against something called "Terre Haute Falcons" is a winnable game – the Falcons edged Tindley by a 68-62 score on December 16.

If the Tindleys chalk up a W against the Terre Haute Falcons, their futility should still be rewarded: Tindley can split a special award with Seton Catholic, who isn't officially on this list by virtue of two wins over non-affiliated Christian schools, but still have lost 3 games by more than 90 points so far (a 121-20 defeat against Monroe Central being the nadir. It's also worth nothing that – again! – Indianapolis Washington handed the Cardinals one of those other 90-plus defeats – 123-30 on December 28.

(I would be shocked and dismayed if Indianapolis Washington received one of the IHSAA's sportsmanship awards, with a 93-point win and a 100-point win on its ledger this year, and I will raise holy hell about it in this space if it comes to pass. Mark my words.

(Although, on the bright side, those two wins – by an average of 96 points! - pushed Washington's average margin of victory this season to a meager 6.4 points per outing. So that's kinda funny.)

Anyway – I'm off-topic. At this point last season there were still around 10 winless teams left in the state. Even heading into January of this season (according to an unpublished draft of Winless Watch I put together), there were 16 0-fors remaining. But teams like Attica, Whiting, Medora and North Knox, among others, notched their first wins this month, and there are only three left this season. We've already talked about Tindley, the only winless Class A squad left. The other two are Indianapolis Scecina and North Newton (both 2A teams).

3. Indianapolis Scecina has a relatively weak schedule to finish out the season; as of this writing, their opponents' combined record is 28-60. Plus, with three losses by 5 points or less already, the Crusaders have come close, and will manage to get over the hump on the last weekend of their season on February 20-21 (a Murderer's Row weekend against 1-12 Covenant Christian and 2-9 International).

2. North Newton's remaining schedule is against opponents with a combined 47-46 record. Yes, undefeated Tri-County remains, but so does 2-win Lake Station, which represents the Spartan's last best chance at breaking into the win column this season. The remainder of the schedule, dotted with average 6-7 and 7-8 teams, should be just tough enough for the Spartans to fall short.

1. Tindley … poor Tindley. Maybe they shouldn't even be on this list – there are two game scores that have yet to be reported to John Harrell, against an Australian team and Thea Bowman from up near Chicago, and really, it's possible that they won. Anyway, the remainder of their games are against private, non-IHSAA-affiliates (whose records aren't available at this time), with the exception of 11-4 Yorktown and 5-10 Monrovia. It doesn't really matter, though; they're going to go through some growing pains as a first-year school, but they'll eventually make it work there.

(Special thanks, as always, to the inestimable John Harrell, whose Indiana High School Basketball site is priceless to me when putting together Winless Watch. The man should go into the Hall of Fame someday for his tireless work on compiling current and recent Indiana HS hoops info.)

This ... is ... not Jeopardy!

Took the Jeopardy online contestant quiz tonight. I feel dumber than a bag of hammers. See, here's the thing: I know a lot of trivia, but I don't have a lot of knowledge, if that makes any sense.

Hopefully they'll overlook my blatant ignorance of things that require knowledge and randomly select me for an audition.

I'll let them lead me on again.

The finest example of sports-related hubris that I've been exposed to personally came in December 2005, when the Indianapolis Colts were steamrolling to a 14-win season and were a mortal lock to reach the Super Bowl for the first time since their move to Indiana.

I was in Anderson, northeast of Indianapolis, en route to my graduation ceremony in Marion. Our small two-vehicle caravan had stopped off for a bathroom break and some munchies. While in the convenience store, I saw in the rack with the road atlases and other paper goods some Colts car window decals for sale.

These decals were special. They didn't just have the Colts helmet or logo on them, with an admonition for the Colts to "go." Instead, they pictured the helmet in front of the logo for Super Bowl XL.

"Uh-oh," I thought. "Pride goeth before a fall and all that."

I didn't like it at all. (The Colts were, at the time, still undefeated.) And I couldn't believe that such a product would have been created, given the team's historically spotty record in Indianapolis, as well as recent playoff history.

As hindsight tells us, the odds-on favorites to reach the Super Bowl instead fell to Pittsburgh in the divisional round of the playoffs - ultimately, you have to play the games. Nick Harper got stabbed in the leg, which surely hindered his ability to run back that interception of Ben Roethlisberger. The otherwise accurate-to-within-one-thousandth-of-a-second Mike Vanderjagt shanked a field goal attempt that was so wide right they still haven't recovered the ball yet.

And the Colts went home with their collective tails between their legs. Again.

I won't delve into today's dynamic; if you don't know the storyline of the Colts-Patriots AFC Championship Game today, then you've either not been paying attention or simply don't like football. Suffice it to say that I don't know that I'm prepared for the Colts to break my heart again ... but I'll give them the opportunity anyway.

There's a feeling across the country, once you get out of the Northeast, that the Colts really, really, really, reeeeeeeally need to win today's game to spare the country another Patriots Super Bowl appearance. That the Patriots have become as hated as the New York Yankees in baseball, or Duke in college basketball.

I don't care about any of that. And I don't hate the Patriots - I appreciate a good dynasty, which is becoming more and more rare this days thanks to across-the-board "parity" in most sports. I guess it'd be one thing if the Patriots played dirty or just outspent all of their opponents on their way to three Super Bowl wins in five years. But they don't; they're a class act, and they've got the best coach in football and probably the most clutch quarterback this side of Joe Montana. It's just Indianapolis' plain bad luck that the Patriots' rise coincided with the Colts' hitting their stride as one of football's most exciting teams. And I don't begrudge New England that at all.

But I would appreciate having a rooting interest in the Super Bowl for once. Go Colts.

And #3001 was the greatest blog ever written. Pity.

The page counter you see on the right sidebar at the top has a link to the top 3000 blogs that use that particular counter (out of over 24,000). (Hey - Bramble Tamble is in there, in the mid-2800s!)

Here's a look at some of the blogs that are scraping the bottom of the top 3000 as of right now. Check them out if any of them strike your fancy.

3000. Running With Sticks - A blog focused mostly on knitting with some other thoughts tossed in.

2999. Circuitous Thoughts - A woman in Adelaide writes this blog. She "swears inventively," she says, which is refreshing - a lot of swearing anymore is really pretty gratuitous and superfluous. She writes in parentheticals a lot, even more than I do. Seems pretty clever also. Pluses: the Spinal Tap quotes at the bottom of the right sidebar. Minuses: Posts only about once a month, but at least when she does, she writes a lot. So that's only, like, a half-a-minus.

2998. Puntos de Fuga - In Spanish or Portuguese. Strange picture under the third post (date is "lunes, enero 08, 2007").

2997. Gazete Servisi - I have no idea what the hell this is. Appears to be a list of newspapers in Europe and other far-off locales. Not being versed in ... well, whatever that language is ... I couldn't tell you for sure.

2996. Word Play - Teenager. Hasn't blogged since September. Key quotes include "I don't understand vandalism," "I'm experiencing my first hurricane .... (t)he thunder is so loud!" and "Southern life revolves around pigs." Seriously, today's teenagers seem a little more wise (and wise to the world) than when I was that age. Or maybe I was just very, very, very naive then. (I'd bet on the latter - I remember how shocked I was at our senior party when one of my classmates pulled out a cigarette and started smoking.)

Anyway, check these blogs out (or don't - I really don't have a stake in it) before they fall off the list into oblivion. At least the ones in English. And that one with the picture.

"I'm for free speech, as long as you agree with me!" - H. Cullen

Back in July or so, I wrote that global warming denial was essentially being treated the same as Holocaust denial, and that global warming skeptics were being written out of the discussion.

While feedback from that piece was neither swift nor existent, I bring it up again thanks to some comments from Heidi Cullen, the Weather Channel's resident global-warming alarmist. (You can catch Dr. Cullen's "The Climate Code" on the Weather Channel on Sunday afternoons or sometime in the middle of the night - it's Nielsen gold!) Anyway, she said on December 21:

If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval.

To Dr. Cullen's credit, however, there is a link in the blog's sidebar to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works blog that blasts her comments. Pretty convincingly, too, if you ask me, and good for her for linking it regardless.

But this business of drumming out of the AMS a meteorologist who doesn't march in lockstep with the rest of the Chicken Little crowd is a bit alarming, and even a little bit irresponsible.

Here's a little quandary for you. A conundrum, if you will.

My employer, who shall remain nameless, requires that in conjunction with an employee's annual performance evaluation, the employee shall also take online ethics and timecharging training. All well and good, right?

Here's the rub. When I go to mark my time for the day, I can charge no more than one hour to the "overhead" charge number. Nevermind that each training takes about 30-45 minutes to complete.

Which means that I'll likely have to lie about the time spent on my ethics training.

Think about that.

I can't even wrap my mind around this.

Let it be known, here in the Year of Our Lord 2007, that I have never, ever looked longingly at my dog and said, "..... yeah. I gotta get me some of that."

And you haven't either. Because if you're a reader of this blog, chances are you're not a deviant, and chances are that your mind - like mine - doesn't have the capability to make that connection on its own.

I mean, my God. She's just a puppy.

Clicks and kicks on 66.

"Cars" is an amazing movie.

While I was fairly lukewarm on the racing subplot of the film (though the animation was phenomenal), I was overwhelmed by the Route 66/Radiator Springs portion of the film. And I'm a big fan of any film that my son will actually sit through from beginning to end. As for me, I swear I got something in my eye a couple of times, especially during the "flashback" portion of Radiator Springs' heyday and subsequent downturn after I-40 was built nearby, especially with the James Taylor song accompanying the scene.

My two favorite Route 66-related sites on the Internet are:

Route 66 News - I actually stumbled across this site when trying to learn more about the "Cars" movie. Ron has a fairly comprehensive guide to the characters and places in the movie and the real-life folks and attractions on 66 that they are based upon here.

Route 66/Area 51 Tours - Details a father and son's trip along 66 from Chicago to L.A. (but it's not schmaltzy or anything). Plenty of photos and narratives about each state along the way. I'm drawn to this site because it was the first Route 66-related site I'd ever visited, and I revisit the site to read about that particular roadtrip about once a year.

Me? I'd love to see the Mother Road someday. I'm grateful for all of the folks who have discovered or rediscovered this link to our nation's motoring past and are working so hard to raise awareness of it as well as preserve it. As a road geek from way back, I like to discover the off-the-beaten-path roads that used to be the main thoroughfares from place to place before "progress" swooped in (old Indiana 37 between Bedford and Morgan-Monroe State Forest springs to mind). I wonder, with the eventual construction of I-69 through the southwest part of the state, whether towns like those on Indiana state roads 57 and 67, which the interstate will replace as the main Indy-to-Evansville route, will meet the same fate that Radiator Springs did.

Tigger pulls trigger, beats teen senseless.

The list of vastly overrated and unfunny cartoon characters, both in print and animation, is as long as my arm. Hell, it’s probably as long as that Chinese guy’s arm that saved a dolphin’s life a couple of weeks ago by reaching down into the dolphin’s stomach and pulling out the offending plastic inside it.

On the animation side, Tweety Bird is awful close to the top of list, followed by later incarnations of the Tasmanian Devil, most Disney characters (see my short treatise on Disney vs. Warner Bros. here), the Animaniacs, the Flintstones/Jetsons, Scooby-Doo and the bulk of the Hanna-Barbera oeuvre. (That just about covers everything, doesn’t it?)

Print cartoons that just aren’t funny include "Nancy."

I bring up comics and animation because of seeing a news item that warmed my heart immensely:

Tigger is a child beater.

Sure, “child” is a stretch, really – it was really a teenager with whom he got into a fistfight. And were there extenuating circumstances that caused the lovable tiger who bounces everythefrigginwhere to haul off and start punching that kid? It’s not clear.

Linked in the story that I linked to in the “child beater” paragraph above is a cavalcade of other stories about Tigger’s unfortunate behavior. It seems that “random acts of violence” can now be added to a list that includes “inappropriate groping,” among other things.

We can, however, determine from the mascot’s history that, whether you’re the Cincinnati Bengals or a largely useless Disney character, donning the orange and black leads you to wildly erratic behavior that often crosses the boundaries of the law, not to mention the boundaries of civil behavior.

Marriage: Endgame.

This conversation, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, happened.

Me: “It was the sweetest thing, honey. When I picked up Son from the daycare today, we were just about out the door, and he turned and looked at the two teenage girls who were helping out there, and he said, ‘Love you!’”

Wife: “Awwww. That’s so sweet. He’s such a little flirt!”

Me: “Oh, sure. You condone it with him. You don’t condone my flirting, though.”

Wife: “If you flirted with the babysitter, I’d kill you.”

Me: “Really?”

Wife: “Yes. Physically kill you.”

Me: “But … isn’t that what they’re there for?”

And then her cell phone lost its signal.

For all of you legal types out there who might read the above as a threat against my physical well-being, don't worry. It wasn't a threat. It was actually more of a promise. I'm cool with that.

(Oh, and the title of this post should be taken entirely in the spirit in which it was intended, with tongue firmly planted in cheek.)

1-2-3-45-6-7-8-910-11-12

Man, I love that song.

Kurt Cobain sang some years ago in "On A Plain":

The finest day that I ever had
Was when I learned to cry on command

This is not really the same thing. I mean, it is, kinda. But not really.

Boy, he's going to be a real bear when spring rolls around!

Get it? Bear? Because he's a ..... ahhhhhh, nevermind.

You got your laxative in my peanut butter! No, you got your peanut butter in my laxative!

Happy New Year, all.