Day: January 25, 2001

The Detroit Lions just hired yet a new coach. How they did it illustrates why I have never been able to stomach rooting for the team.

First, the existing head coach Bobby Ross quit. Couldn’t blame him — the problem with the Lions, who have never come close to playing in a Super Bowl, are with the organization and are bigger than any particular set of players or coaches.

Second, they replaced Ross with Gary Moeller. Moeller was a former University of Michigan football coach fired from that job after he got in a mini brawl at a restaurant after having too much to drink. I thought Moeller was a horrible choice, but not surprising.

What was surprising is after a couple of wins, they gave him a three year contract. The reasonable thing would have been to put out some vague, “we’re going to evaluate our coaching situation at the end of the season.” But no, the owner had to go and give him a three year contract.

And then promptly fire him at the end of the season to replace him with Marty Mornhinweg. Mornhinweg is the choice of the new Lions president Matt Millen.

Millen knows football, and if the Ford family will just let him do his job he can probably turn the franchise around. On the other hand if the Lions keep insist on making stupid decisions, like they did with Moeller’s three year contract, it’ll be another 40 years before they find themselves seriously competing for a championship.

Speaking of “O Brother,” that was my reaction after watching “Fargo.” For years people I knew with pretty good taste in movies kept telling me I had to see “Fargo.” It was hilarious, cutting edge they said, and certainly there is a pretty rabid set of fans on the Internet and elsewhere.

So I finally watched the film the other day and I’m still trying to figure out what the big deal was. The film was a pretty straightforward police procedural movie. Not a bad police procedural film, but not spectacular either.

I certainly didn’t see anything in two viewings of the film to explain how on Earth it received an Oscar nomination, unless that was a pretty thin year for films.

The Washington Post reports that country music stations won’t play anything from the soundtrack of the Coen brothers’ new film, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” This despite the fact that the soundtrack is the number 2 country album in the country at the moment.

Why won’t they play it? Because almost all country radio stations stink. There is a lot of really good country music being put out these days, but almost none of it gets played on country radio. Country stations have become even more narrow than pop stations, and if a song doesn’t fit an extremely narrow format it simply isn’t going to get played.

Apparently the liner notes to the “O Brother” soundtrack include a swipe at contemporary country music saying that Nashville, “expropriated that term [country music] to describe watered-down pop/rock with greeting-card lyrics.”

Not everything played on country stations fits that bill, but way too much of it does (as evidenced by the popularity on such stations of country singers covering boy band hits — yuck!) Lucky for me, the digital cable here includes a progressive/alternative country feed so I’m not stuck listening to the pop country stations.

Slashdot has a hilarious story about DirecTV cleverly retaliating against hackers who were stealing the DirecTV. Using the automatic update feature of their system, they were able to literally destroy the hacked cards people were using and for a kicker rewrote the first 8 bytes of the now useless cards to read “GAME OVER.”