Zach Off Sports: iPod dilemma

If you are a fan of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, you've probably read all three books, maybe more than once, and the Martians story compilation that fills in some of the gaps along with continuing parts of the story. When you're finished, there's nothing else to read and there never will be. That's how I felt about my old iPod. It's true that I could recycle music and change the actual content on the iPod, but I was always constrained by owning the "tiny" 4 GB version.

As an anniversary gift, my wife took me to Best Buy to get a new iPod. My old unit, beaten to death by constant use, only played audio on one speaker. Not that this fact deterred me in the least. Technology has come a long way since I got the first-generation Nano. I now have 8 GB to play with. I am currently uploading as much of my music collection as possible. We have nearly 29 GB of songs on the desktop, and a few dozen more on my laptop. While I still have a song limit, now I'm allowed to have a much deeper bench, so to speak.

Wow, that was two whole non-sports-related paragraphs. Enough of that nonsense.

Brian, one of my vice-commissioners in z34, stated today that I doth protest too much in calling Brett Favre a "mediocre" fantasy QB. While it's likely that out of Favre, Campbell, and Derek Anderson I will get one good performance, I have a poor chance of guessing who that will be. They're all in the low end of starters. While Favre is the seventh-highest scoring QB in the AUFL despite having a bye (none of the top six have), he scored 45 of his 104 total points in one week. He averages nearly 21 points a game, but in the weeks when he doesn't throw six touchdowns, it's down to 15. That puts him just ahead of Jason Campbell, and I guess that tells me who I'm starting this week. Thanks Brian. Your commentary allowed me to look closer into a difficult roster situation. If it weren't positivity week, I'd say something like "I'll never get those ten minutes back."

Zach's quick political corner: The most sobering thought regarding the presidential race is this. The people who really want John McCain to win are scared to the point of losing sleep that Barack Obama will win, and vice versa. Will either candidate be able to bring those folks off the ledge?

I liked last Thursday's discussion of Joe Biden on the NPR Fresh Air podcast. Both Biden and McCain seem to have withstood major scandals that would have ended most political careers. Biden had a plagiarism issue during a 1988 attempt to win the Democratic nomination for president. McCain was one of the Keating Five.

I believed in Missouri as the "scrappy underdog" until I saw that the ESPN fan vote gave Missouri a majority that Obama or McCain would love to have on November 4. More than 60% of the voters picked Missouri. Being number one isn't as cool as it used to be. Like AC/DC says, it's a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.