So how bad is it? Bad. Very Bad.

The Eagles lost again last night, giving them a 4-5 record and effectively ending their season. There is virtually no hope of the playoffs now. McNabb is banged up again. The team’s weaknesses are obvious to everyone and easily exploited. Worse: They no longer have a championship swagger, the confidence that winning teams use to get the close ones.

How bad is it? The Eagles aren’t just 4-5, they’re 0-3 in their division. Before this season the Eagles were 22-4 in the NFC East over the last four years. Read that again 22-4. Those days are long gone. It isn’t clear that the Eagles will finish this season with even one victory in their division.

And don’t go buying the argument that this is just parity with the rest of the NFC East catching up. Yes, the Redskins, Giants, and Cowboys are each slightly improved, but none of them is as good as their records suggest and I’ll be very surprised if any of them is good enough to win even a single playoff game. It’s a mediocre division and the Eagles are locked, gimp-style, in a box in the basement.

How bad is it? Over the last few years Philadelphia was Cover City. Before this season, over the last four years the Eagles were an amazing 44-29 against the point spread–that’s money in the bank. This year they’re 2-7.

Mind you, the point spread isn’t just about betting. It’s a measure of a team’s dx/dt, their slope: The spread is a good indication of whether a team is under or over-achieving. Forget their absolute record: The Eagles used to be an over-achieving team; now they’re not.

How bad is it? McNabb should go in for surgery–now. There’s no sense in keeping him on the field for meaningless games and risking more serious injury. Westbrook should be kept to a minimum of carries and the coaching staff should find out if Lamar Gordon is good enough to get 15-20 carries a game.

It’s bad in Philadelphia right now. But we won’t know how bad until next season. We know that Andy Reid can manage a reclaimation project; we know that he can manage a winner. Now we have to wait and see if he can manage a rebuilding year.

Galley Friend B.W. sends this link to one of the all-time greatest interviews ever: Darryl Dawkins. Samples:

Q: You’ve claimed to come from Planet Lovetron but actually grew up in Orlando. When did you realize the discrepancy?

A: I realized the discrepancy when I was about 18 years old. When I figured out I had more funk than most people from Orlando. I had too much funk to be tied down to one hometown so I went off to Lovetron. . . .

Q: You named your dunks: Your Mama, In Your Face Disgrace, Cover Yo Damn Head, Earthquake Breaker, Left-Handed Spine Chiller Supreme and more. How did you come up with this name: Turbo Sexophonic Delight?

A: It was just a swivel of the hips. You had to swivel the hips so fast that you coulda kicked in the turbo on a new car. And for the sexophonic part, you had to do a little hump — a little boogie while you’re going in there. You know, seeing Parliament without their funk is like seeing Darryl Dawkins without his dunk. I had to have it, man.

In anticipation of the trash-talking I’ve got coming my way from Cowboy Superfan Jenny, I decided to go looking for her former partner, my Blog Crush Brendon Donnelly. I couldn’t find him, but I did find a link to his old, old, old site, which had this very excellent list of the top 10 movie trailers of all time. Best line:

#7 Heat–Would probably be higher if not for the fawning voice over, some guy talkin about Pacino and De Niro like they’re gonna shield him from the rapture. Not that they aren’t brilliant here, they are. And god almighty is this thing beautiful. Film can be art, this proves it. Michael Mann could be Terrence Malick if he were boring and in love with exposition. He even kept the cast out of make-up to keep the look real. Great score by Moby and a glimpse of the best gun fight ever put on film.

That’s right. I do what I do best. I take scores.

(Note: The trailer list is safe for work, but the site’s main page probably isn’t. You remember how Brendon was about his girlfriend, M.M.)

If anyone knows Donnelly’s whereabouts, I’d like to hear about it.

Most of the time I can tolerate the use of artists’ songs on television commercials. (They gotta make a living somehow.) And sometimes I recognize the melody only from the promo and not from the original: My wife recently pointed out to me the line “Cheese, glorious cheese,” is actually “Food, glorious food” from Oliver! In turn I’ve pointed out to her the drums and guitar riffs used by Cadillac come from Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll.”

But there is a limit. A few years ago David Segal of the Washington Post lamented the use of the Turtles’ “Happy Together” in an Applebee’s commercial: “Imagine steak and shrimp, or shrimp and steak / Imagine both of these, on just one plate.”

Over the weekend this might have been topped. The ad was for the new cheese crumbles by Kraft. The song: 1991’s “Unbelievable” by EMF (which stood for what again?)

But instead of “unbelievable,” the Kraft voice sings, “They’re crumbelievable!” (Other lyrics run something like, “The thing. You crave. The big cheese taste will blow you away…”)

Eddie Guerrero is dead at the age of 38. Very sad.

It turns out that one of the bombers in last week’s attack in Jordan was a former terrorist detainee. Here’s the story on Sfah Mohammed Ali:

“He was detained locally at the division detention facility” but was released two weeks later because there was no “compelling evidence to continue to hold him” as a “threat to the security of Iraq,” the military said.

Hmmm. Maybe requiring our military to meet the full burden of U.S. law when it comes to detaining terrorists isn’t the best idea.

Sfah Mohammed Ali may be the terrorist Willie Horton, but it’s not like this is the first time this has happened. From the October 22, 2004 Washington Post:

At least 10 detainees released from the Guantanamo Bay prison after U.S. officials concluded they posed little threat have been recaptured or killed fighting U.S. or coalition forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to Pentagon officials.

One of the repatriated prisoners is still at large after taking leadership of a militant faction in Pakistan and aligning himself with al Qaeda, Pakistani officials said. In telephone calls to Pakistani reporters, he has bragged that he tricked his U.S. interrogators into believing he was someone else.

Another returned captive is an Afghan teenager who had spent two years at a special compound for young detainees at the military prison in Cuba, where he learned English, played sports and watched videos, informed sources said. U.S. officials believed they had persuaded him to abandon his life with the Taliban, but recently the young man, now 18, was recaptured with other Taliban fighters near Kandahar, Afghanistan, according to the sources, who asked for anonymity because they were discussing sensitive military information.

Shouldn’t something be done about this?

Amy Welborn has a good post about the media attacks on C.S. Lewis that are now underway in advance of the Narnia movies. If the The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is a hit, I suspect the attacks will increase. But already, they’re bizarre. Welborn points out this strange Times piece on Lewis, which claims:

Lewis was an old-fashioned Christian, and those who consider the church to be too interested in modernising see him as a hero of religious orthodoxy and conservative values. This would be harmless except for the fact that they have managed to morph the real Jack Lewis into “St Jack of Oxford”, a version of himself he would have had trouble recognising. The puritans of America (a breed Lewis always loathed) have even tried to eradicate all references to alcohol and tobacco in his writing.

Lewis loved a drink, he loved to smoke and he continued to enjoy his cigarettes when his doctors told him that they would hasten his death. For more than 40 years he smoked 60 a day between pipes. He actively disliked non-smokers and merrily mocked teetotallers.

And then there was sex. As a youth Lewis revelled in vivid and cruel fantasies. He also loved bawdy songs and ancient poetry bordering on the pornographic. As an adult he had sex with at least one woman. Nonetheless, the evangelists who collect his furniture and place it in glass cases — and the Lewis societies that work hard to project a fabricated image of the writer in England and elsewhere — have tried to remould him as a “perpetual virgin”. They believe that he died without ever having engaged in sexual intercourse and that therefore his late marriage to Joy Gresham was never consummated.

I’m not fully versed in the Christian culture, but I’ve never heard anyone claim Lewis as a proud prude.

A freebie for anyone wanting to point out how stupid this blog is. From the April 13, 2005 edition:

I’m Just Saying . . .
That it’s pretty obvious to me that the Eagles are going to go 16-0 this season. Go ahead, look at the schedule and tell me where you see a loss.
posted by Jonathan V. Last

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