Quotulatiousness

October 4, 2014

Vikings struggles in perspective

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:45

The thrashing the Vikings absorbed from the Green Bay Packers on Thursday night had a lot of fans upset and angry, and rightly so: the team played a terrible game while Green Bay played very well. As I said in a post-game comment, “the news that Bridgewater would be inactive came as a knell of doom for any hopes we had for the eventual outcome.” Christian Ponder played badly, but so did almost everyone else in purple that night. You can make a (poor) case that Bridgewater being out would lower the morale of the offense, but it shouldn’t have made much of a difference to the defence or special teams players, yet almost everyone seemed to have “checked out” as Brian Robison put it in an interview.

Bo Mitchell wants to help put Thursday’s game into perspective:

Zimmer and Turner crafted their offseason game plan for the offense on basis of their best player (Peterson) being in the backfield. Turner said repeatedly that he planned to get him more involved in the passing game, get him in space, maybe line him up out wide on occasion, etc. Everything worked great in Week 1. Heck, the threat of Peterson was enough. Cordarrelle Patterson was the primary beneficiary. Vikings fans were riding high following the dismantling of the Rams.

Then the other shoe(s) dropped and scrambling to make adjustments ensued.

In Week 2, with a new game plan in place, new running backs in place and a controversy/distraction overshadowing the organization, the Vikings lost in lopsided fashion to the Patriots thanks in no small part to turnovers and a blocked field goal that was returned for a touchdown. You can never plan for such things as losing your star player in such an awful, embarrassing, scandalous (pick your adjective) way. The master plan was compromised significantly after one week. So they made adjustments and moved on like all coaches must.

[…]

Week 4 brought a brief return of giddiness to Vikings fans as they leveled the Falcons behind rookie quarterback Teddy Bridgewater, whom they seemingly had to get ready in a hurry. The good thing was that Bridgewater had been splitting a lot of first team reps in practice with Cassel and played a lot in preseason so there was already a sense of chemistry in place when he had to take the reins. The coaching staff had prepared for this scenario and it showed.

What they hadn’t really prepared for was losing Bridgewater to an injury as well. Christian Ponder was pressed into emergency duty at the end of the Falcons game and then asked to get ready for the Packers four days later — after he really hadn’t spent any significant time at all working in Norv Turner’s offense. Judd Zulgad of 1500ESPN and several others in the media pointed out that this would be a problem. Ponder barely played in the preseason outside of a few third and fourth quarters with second and third stringers.

So the Vikings were on their third quarterback in three games — their third quarterback in 12 days. If they wanted to use an excuse, I’d give them that one regardless of who that third quarterback was.

Ponder just wasn’t ready. Where have I heard that before? Seriously, few backup NFL quarterbacks would have been significantly better in this scenario with so little prep. This doesn’t excuse the horrible lack of accuracy, the indecisiveness and the rest of the Ponder-isms. It was a train wreck waiting to happen.

Looking back, you can only make so many adjustments so quickly. Zimmer, Turner and the rest of the coaching staff kept the team treading water for four weeks, but they drowned in the Green Bay rain on Thursday night after the adjustments fell short and time ran out.

The Vikings at 2-3 have been victims of really odd circumstances. This isn’t an excuse. It’s a fact, though I really hesitate to use the word “victim.” I don’t even want to call it bad luck. Maybe it’s just fair to say: no team could comfortably survive such a strange amalgam of issues in such a short amount of time. Every team deals with injuries and teams have to find a way to overcome the losses of players like Fusco, Greenway and Rudolph. “Next man up” is the mantra league-wide. But look around the NFL and let me know if you see another first-year head coach directing a team without its best player that has used three quarterbacks already. This is weird stuff. Then again, Vikings fans have grown used to weirdness. It comes with the territory.

The “Herod Clause” to get free Wi-Fi

Filed under: Britain, Business, Humour, Law, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:48

I missed this earlier in the week (and it smells “hoax-y”, but it’s too good to check):

A handful of Londoners in some of the capital’s busiest districts unwittingly agreed to give up their eldest child, during an experiment exploring the dangers of public Wi-Fi use.

The experiment, which was backed by European law enforcement agency Europol, involved a group of security researchers setting up a Wi-Fi hotspot in June.

When people connected to the hotspot, the terms and conditions they were asked to sign up to included a “Herod clause” promising free Wi-Fi but only if “the recipient agreed to assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity”. Six people signed up.

F-Secure, the security firm that sponsored the experiment, has confirmed that it won’t be enforcing the clause.

“We have yet to enforce our rights under the terms and conditions but, as this is an experiment, we will be returning the children to their parents,” wrote the Finnish company in its report.

“Our legal advisor Mark Deem points out that — while terms and conditions are legally binding — it is contrary to public policy to sell children in return for free services, so the clause would not be enforceable in a court of law.”

Ultimately, the research, organised by the Cyber Security Research Institute, sought to highlight public unawareness of serious security issues concomitant with Wi-Fi usage.

Kids, don’t try this at home

Filed under: Britain, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:55

Published on 2 Oct 2014

#TheRidge is the brand new film from Danny Macaskill… For the first time in one of his films Danny climbs aboard a mountain bike and returns to his native home of the Isle of Skye in Scotland to take on a death-defying ride along the notorious Cuillin Ridgeline.

H/T to Roger Henry who said “Here’s some more of that insane bike-rider from Scotland […] I kept expecting to hear someone say ‘He’s fallen in the water’.”

Venerable Carl Gustav gets a major upgrade

Filed under: Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Nicholas de Larrinaga reports for Janes 360 on the latest version of my favourite recoilless rifle:

Saab debuted a new variant of its Carl Gustaf 84 mm shoulder-fired recoilless rifle, the M4, during a series of demonstration firings at the Bofors Test Center at Karlskoga, Sweden, on 24 September.

The latest version of the nearly 70-year-old weapon system has been designed to offer significant weight savings over its predecessors, as well as improvements to other aspects of the system.

The M4 weighs 6.7 kg, some 3 kg lighter than the earlier Carl Gustaf M3 and half the weight of the 14.2 kg M2 version still in service with many nations. This has been achieved by constructing the recoilless rifle’s barrel out of titanium, saving 1.1 kg (compared to the M3’s steel barrel), building its outer casing our of carbon fibre (saving 0.8 kg), and by redesigning the weapon’s venturi to save a further 0.9 kg. The redesign has also served to decrease the size of the Carl Gustaf, bringing the M4’s total length down to under 1,000 mm.

Saab Dynamics Carl Gustaf M4 84 mm recoilless rifle (Saab)

Saab Dynamics Carl Gustaf M4 84 mm recoilless rifle (Saab)

There are currently 11 different ammunition types available for the Carl Gustaf weapon system, providing considerable operational flexibility. Programmable ‘smart’ ammunition types for use with the M4 are expected to be the next to reach the market. Saab officials also disclosed they are working on a new concept of ammunition for the Carl Gustaf: and ‘Ultra-Light Missile’ that would feature lock-on before launch guidance, feature several attack modes, and have a range of 1,500-2,000 m – approximately doubling the range of the existing Carl Gustaf ammunition types.

QotD: Sea travel and food

Filed under: Food, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Another fellow I knew went for a week’s voyage round the coast, and, before they started, the steward came to him to ask whether he would pay for each meal as he had it, or arrange beforehand for the whole series.

The steward recommended the latter course, as it would come so much cheaper. He said they would do him for the whole week at two pounds five. He said for breakfast there would be fish, followed by a grill. Lunch was at one, and consisted of four courses. Dinner at six — soup, fish, entree, joint, poultry, salad, sweets, cheese, and dessert. And a light meat supper at ten.

My friend thought he would close on the two-pound-five job (he is a hearty eater), and did so.

Lunch came just as they were off Sheerness. He didn’t feel so hungry as he thought he should, and so contented himself with a bit of boiled beef, and some strawberries and cream. He pondered a good deal during the afternoon, and at one time it seemed to him that he had been eating nothing but boiled beef for weeks, and at other times it seemed that he must have been living on strawberries and cream for years.

Neither the beef nor the strawberries and cream seemed happy, either — seemed discontented like.

At six, they came and told him dinner was ready. The announcement aroused no enthusiasm within him, but he felt that there was some of that two-pound-five to be worked off, and he held on to ropes and things and went down. A pleasant odour of onions and hot ham, mingled with fried fish and greens, greeted him at the bottom of the ladder; and then the steward came up with an oily smile, and said:

“What can I get you, sir?”

“Get me out of this,” was the feeble reply.

And they ran him up quick, and propped him up, over to leeward, and left him.

For the next four days he lived a simple and blameless life on thin captain’s biscuits (I mean that the biscuits were thin, not the captain) and soda-water; but, towards Saturday, he got uppish, and went in for weak tea and dry toast, and on Monday he was gorging himself on chicken broth. He left the ship on Tuesday, and as it steamed away from the landing-stage he gazed after it regretfully.

“There she goes,” he said, “there she goes, with two pounds’ worth of food on board that belongs to me, and that I haven’t had.”

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog), 1889.

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