Can Hub Arkush be more of a fucking whiny, bitchy douche? Mike Tice is the OC, but I guarantee he would be fired sooner than #6 would be traded. Hub tries so hard to be an anti-homer that it just nauseating.

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RFDC thinks I'm retarded.

All of the furor is over the one clip. I can use one clip to show Jay being a good teammate, talking with Webb and patting him on the helmet after the final TD. Also, what about the clip of Jay laughing with Tice -- later in the game.
The focus on the negative clip as opposed to the two positive clips seems to point out an effort to keep one storyline alive and dismiss other information that don't fit with that narrative.

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President of Blake Shetlon fan club

Is it really a storyline? Cutler is a douchebag. And everytime he does something to confirm that, it will be a topic. The unfortunate thing for Jay is that the bad seems to outweigh the good.

I deem "around 1:15P-ish or so" to be redundant.

Either "around 1:15," "1:15-ish," or "1:15 or so" will suffice.

Thank you.

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"I honestly don't see a good bet on the board here."

That doesn't fly either. They spent most of last Friday's show talking about the Webb bump. Now that he won a game, "Cutler is what he is" and none of this matters.

And I stand by my assertion that "digital vampires" is among the most hackneyed devices in the history of the written word.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

The press wants to talk about all the felonies I committed. What about all the times I wasn't committing felonies?

You don't get credit for not being a dickhead as an athlete. It's just built into the assumptions of what you are supposed to be.

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Fire Phil Emery

Digital vampires is a poor phrase but I've let plenty like that slip myself, usually while drink, because I think they are cute.

I think the whole quote is Midgetian (Ten Foot, not Tall), though.


His performance cashes the checks. Those checks are written by his behavior. So his behavior pays his checks.

Now the next phrase, I think (Curious is better at grammar than I am), modifies his performance, not his behavior. I get he's trying to prevent the dangling modifier, but strictly speaking, "caught" refers back to "checks" here the way it is written. I also think that's true with the last comma as well, which refers craving back to performance.

The whole thing is a fucking mess. He's an English major for Chrissakes. He's supposed to be the smart one. And he just struggles so much with it. I gave McNeil grief over his writing but his problem was too many cliches. Bernstein takes six cliches, sticks them into a blender, adds a few adverbs, and moves on to the next sentence.

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Fire Phil Emery

Allow me also to point out that his first five paragraphs have a total of five sentences combined. WHY DO SPORTS WRITERS DO THAT?

When I asked Ten Foot Midget why he writes like a sixth grader, he told me it's because he was writing about sports and not Chaucer, or something like that. Okay. Pretend you were writing about Chaucer for a moment. How would you get your point across then?

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Fire Phil Emery

Thanks for this. The whole construction was ridiculous, but when I tried to diagram it I just ended up giving myself a cluster headache, so "digital vampires" it was.

Ten Foot Midget thinks Fahrenheit fucking 451 is "one of the most important novels in the Western canon," so anything he thinks about the English language can be safely ignored.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

I think Dan can be a really good writer--he has written some really good stuff in the past--but sometimes he goes for one flourish (or four) too many, and that's how you get Digital Vampires. 813hh!

Personally, I would blame the CBSChicago format: it's not quite a column, yet it's not quite a blog, so you get the structural cliches of newspaper sportswriting (word count, one-sentence paragraphs) without necessarily maintaining the formality of the bona fide printed word (the breezy, editor-free voice that allows for tortured metaphors to go unchecked). Combine this with an imperative to Produce Content, and it's easy to see how the whole deal won't necessarily yield one's best work. The same could be said with message boarding, actually: I can be a grammar/usage dork, but I lapse in my own writing, because I'm usually just working stream-of-consciousness and trying to get my thoughts in before some PantherPisla post breaks the thread continuity. I wish I took the time to thoughtfully compose and revise all my >1-line posts, but I don't, and I probably won't. If I did, I'd just start a blog and stop wasting keystrokes on posts.

I joked once about how Dan was going to round up 10FM, Larry, and his myriad articulate-yet-Sox-loving emailers and curate a sports blog like Grantland (I called it Boersland), but seriously, that format would work better than what they have now, which apparently seems to be "email some hastily-typed verbosity to Adam Hoge twice a week and then move on with my day."

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Point well taken on the format, but I think we just agree to disagree on Dan as a writer. I can't remember any piece he's written that didn't strike me as turgid slop.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/08/01/ ... insulting/ This was a good one, though I will concede there's more than a bit of turgidity.

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/06/10/ ... -shocking/ Ibid.

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/05/16/ ... -up-vinny/ I liked this one quite a bit, though it's marred by a one-sentence conclusion, of course.

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None of those are bad, per se, but the problem is that his stylistic choices can be so pretentious even as his arguments are so banal (Penn State is bad! Racism is bad! Vinny Del Negro is bad!). It makes for a really difficult read. Makes me think you're right that he'd be better served by writing one or two longform pieces a month or a few breezy blog entries per day. Right now we're getting the worst of both worlds.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

In the interest of fairness, I should also point out that "turgid slop" is not much better than "digital vampires," as stylistic choices go.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

Well, originally, it was just a daily quick-hits sort of blog thing. "Hey, we're gonna talk about x, y, and z today, here's a funny link I found." Then he realized that being required to do this petty crap every day was really kind of a pain in the ass, especially if--speculating here--he wasn't getting paid for it, so he stopped blogging altogether for a while. Then after a few months, the blog came back with him as WSCR's "Senior Columnist," and thus began the twice-weekly colublogs. Speculating again, maybe he and/or his agent realized he had to MONETIZE EVERYTHING~!, and so he held out for a "legitimate" writing job. I don't think the current arrangement is serving anyone particularly well.

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http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/10/04/ ... al-debate/

Welp. Last time I defend his columns.

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Wow.


Bernstein is going to kill himself when Tebow becomes a Senator.

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You know me like that.

It's like a bad parody of a Beardown bad parody.

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Holy fucking fuck. If you put a gun to my head, I don't know that I could settle on one single "worst" thing about that column. The brutally hackneyed concept? The cheap Gruden jokes, two years later than the rest of us? The nonsensical false dichotomy between Cutler and Tebow? The fact that Bernstein is the only non-Bayless media personality who still considers Tebow relevant in any way? The shoehorned look-how-culturally-literate-I-am Peckinpah reference? Reading that column was the cognitive equivalent of drinking someone else's vomit.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

Gruden: Awright, now…anyway – America’s standing…

Cutler: genius.

Gruden: …with all the violence in Arab countries…

Cutler: genius.

Gruden: Team Bernstein.

Cutler:

Gruden:

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Clear off a place on the mantel for the Poster of the Year Award.

#Truth

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There's an award?

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You know me like that.

An inanimate carbon rod.

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How did you guys make it past the opening italicized paragraph? I read the premise and closed it out. That has to be one of the most pointless columns he has ever written.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

At least Dan's fictionalized Gruden made more cogent points and kept the debate on the rails better than Lehrer

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