vthokies4life

Hey now. EVERY VT fan has pissed on themselves while jumping to Sandman. No? Just me?

I punch my steering wheel every time I see those damned quotations. Is it vandalizing if you're correcting a punctuation error?

I'm not a Cardinals fan, but I like this particular Cardinals team if that makes sense. They seem to be a bunch of good guys, so I think I'm pulling for them this postseason. Also, as far as a fan base goes, there isn't really a better one in the MLB than St. Louis. The fans in St. Louis are loyal and smart about their baseball, which also makes it enjoyable to follow.

Nothing new. He's been know for being pretty incendiary and has voiced his hate for the Cardinals in the past. Also his antics on the field can get pretty tiresome. Just the classic "emotions on his sleeve" guy. Also, Grienke just called Chris Carpenter for having a "phony attitude". http://espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs/2011/story/_/id/7077878/2011-nlcs-milwaukee-brewers-zack-greinke-calls-st-louis-cardinals-chris-carpenter

I think it would be a good idea to start a thread that will take us through the World Series. My first question: What do you make of the Brewers? And do you feel strongly either way about Nyjer Morgan?

I love the idea of relegation and promotion. The big schools would be like the biggest teams in European football; they would get the players but that doesn't necessarily mean they would stay at the top of their conference year after year. Look at Texas last year. If there was relegation, with a 5-7 record there would been some Texas anuses tight as a snare drum. But again, this would never happen.

"This person"?! That's MARK THE SHARK Titus! Founder of Club Trillion!! Definitely look it up. How he got to writing for Grantland is a fun story. Now to actually reading what he wrote...

Very possible if the VT's offense can't sustain drives. I think 13 points will win this game. VT - 13 Miami - 10

Ha! Yeah, close enough to get the point across. It's still not this: "i thnk u sux how bout that boi wat r u sum type of techer" - Damascus Education

I guess "faith" sounds better than "probably won't have a job in 6 months"...

Nodding my head sadly...

We don't have any other options.

In all fairness, he did say "...is commonly quoted as saying" instead of "...said". That at least lets us know that he did the same google search I did. Still though, it's funny how these "quotes" take on a life of their own. I didn't mean for that article to be a thread killer though. He makes a good point by saying that people are all just pointing fingers and not addressing any problems we currently face, and therein lies the greatest problem. It's definitely a fair point.

Gotta love the Deprecating Fan. 1.) Logan Thomas played QB all his life. He's a converted QB-to-TE-back-to-QB. 2.) Wilson has 516 yards already on 87 carries. This O-Line is strong and experienced. 3.) Thomas is coming around in his ability to read blitzes and defenses. I think he'll be fine against a secondary that starts 3 freshmen. 4.) That's a pretty strong "if" you bring up and I never acknowledge speculation such as this... but "if" we start dropping players, we're pretty deep this year on D. So not only are you making ridiculous conclusions based on hypotheticals, you're also simply wrong. You may be right. We may get blown out because our coaches don't have the transcendent foresight and play calling abilities that you have, but at least have the decency to base an ounce of your claims on fact.

Yeah... It's a nice sentiment but Tocqueville never said it. A quick google search came up with this article from The Weekly Standard: http://www.tocqueville.org/pitney.htm Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America is a beloved, canonical text; the urge to quote from it is understandably great. Politicians ever seek to demonstrate familiarity with it, from Bill Clinton to Pat Buchanan. One of their favorite quotes runs as follows: I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers - and it was not there . . . in her fertile fields and boundless forests and it was not there . . . in her rich mines and her vast world commerc - and it was not there . . . in her democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution - and it vas not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great. These lines are uplifting and poetic. They are also spurious. Nowhere do they appear in Democracy in America, or anywhere else in Tocqueville. The authenticity of the passage came into question when first-year government students at Claremont McKenna College received an assignment: Find a contemporary speech quoting Tocqueville, and determine how accurately the speaker used the quotation. A student soon uncovered a recent Senate floor speech that cited the "America is great" line. He scoured Democracy in America, but could not find the passage. The professor looked, too - and it was not there. Further research led to reference books that cautiously referred to the quotation as "unverified" and "attributed to de Tocqueville but not found in his works." These references, in turn, pointed to the apparent source: a 1941 book on religion and the American dream. The book quoted the last two lines of the passage as coming from Democracy in America but supplied no documentation. (The author may have mistaken his own notes for a verbatim quotation, a common problem in the days before photocopiers.) The full version of the quotation appeared 11 years later, in an Eisenhower campaign speech. Ike, however, attributed it not directly to Tocqueville but to "a wise philosopher [who] came to this country ...." One may conjecture that Eisenhower's speechwriter embellished the lines from the 1941 book and avoided a direct reference to Tocqueville as a way of covering himself. Speechwriters do such things from time to time. In his wonderful primer on politics, Playing to Win, Jeff Greenfield presented a model stump speech complete with a fake quotation from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. "If you are worried about being found out," Greenfield wrote, "change 'Heraclitus' to 'The Poet.'" (See page 117 of Greenfield, if you'd like to check.) Whatever its origin, the passage found its way into circulation. President Reagan used it in a 1982 speech, though his speechwriter hedged by attributing it to Eisenhower's quotation of Tocqueville. Two years later, Reagan declared that Tocqueville "is said to have observed that 'America is great because America is good.'" Thereafter, his speechwriters grew less careful, and several subsequent Reagan addresses quoted from the passage without any qualifications. At this point, it started showing up with greater frequency in political rhetoric. In 1987, Rep. William Dannemeyer quoted the passage's final line, adding that "America ceased to be good in 1971, when America's promise to pay ceased to be good." He was referring to President Nixon's decision to close the gold window. Apparently, Dannemeyer disapproved. The day after President Clinton's inauguration, Sen. Jesse Helms performed an ecumenical paraphrase on the line about churches: "As the remarkable French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1850s, the source of American virtue . . . will always be found in the churches and synagogues of America." In 1994, Bill Clinton tapped the passage to temper his "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no" speech in Boston. "I believe fundamentally in the common sense and the essential core goodness of the American people. Don't forget that Alexis de Tocqueville said a long time ago that America is great because America is good; and if America ever ceases to be good, she will no longer be great." And now, synthetic Tocqueville is appearing in the 1996 campaign. Pat Buchanan used the "America is great" line in the speech announcing his candidacy, and Phil Gramm invoked the flaming pulpits in his May address to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. It's a shame that politicians are using a knockoff product when the real thing is so fine. Democracy in America offers profound analyses of the roles of religion, morality, and voluntary action, though its insights are subtler than the purple prose of the counterfeit. Why does faux Tocqueville thrive? It took only a modest effort to expose the quotation as a phony, so how could it have circulated so widely for so long? We could make a nasty crack about politicians who cannot tell Alexis de Tocqueville from Maurice Chevalier, but that would be irrelevant since they seldom write their own material anyway. The lyrics of politics come from staffers, whose tight deadlines often keep them from checking original sources. When they need a quotation (or a statistic or an anecdote), they lift it from a speech or an article by somebody else. That somebody probably got it from another piece, whose author got it from . . . you get the picture. Bad information tends to linger and spread. Here is a personal brush. In 1992, I served on the staff of the Republican platform committee. We came across the "America is great" line in an old Reagan speech. Though we could not verify it, we still wanted to use it in the platform, so we attributed it to "an old adage." Of course, after decades of repetition, it has in fact become an old adage. It just isn't Tocqueville's.

Big, big game on Saturday. Thoughts?

Yeah, I care. These past couple of years have been a ton of fun. Better talent spread throughout the league than I have ever seen. Plus, NYC gets pretty fired up for basketball season, and it sucks that it won't happen this year.

As pissed as I am today, this is spot on. Good post, BigD.

First post of this thread. My oh my what foresight Lance had. And oh how I wished you were wrong when you posted this... But you weren't. And now?

I want to know two things: 1.) Why didn't it look like the Braves were trying tonight and 2.) why was the stadium half empty? Completely unacceptable.

Whoa! Reverse jinx! Take it back now, Observer! Take it back!!

Braves down 7-0, Cards down 5-0. How about the NL just skip the Wild Card this year? No one wants it apparently.

So do we know how many Roughing the Passer calls he gets compared to Brady and Brees? If we had those numbers, we could see if he was making a valid point.

Can I be your color commentator?

To quote the linguistically eloquent deuceswild, "boom goes the dynamite".