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I drove out to La Conner again to visit Jake on Saturday. Did you ever notice that Saturday has a turd in it? I digress. Jake, the ever Windows-loyal gamer, has a file server that runs CentOS Linux, which had some issues he needed help solving. He bought a new 250 GB perpendicular recording hard disk that he couldn’t get formatted. I repartitioned it to use the entire drive, then created an ext3 file system on it. That was easy. He also wanted to reconfigure Samba to restrict the kids from accessing the pr0n collection via the network shares. The easiest and most transparent fix was to move the pr0n to one drive/partition, then make it private so only the adult accounts can access it. While I was there, I also disabled the X server from loading automatically, and fixed an access denied error on the drift file for ntpd. Easy work, really. I had to Google the samba stuff, since I don’t really use it… but it was pretty easy. While I was there, I snapped this photo in Jake’s computer room, which is littered with computer cables and wallpapered with Iron Maiden posters. It was like hackin’ on a laptop in a geek’s titty bar… only there was no booze, or titties.
It was not a pretty win, but the Seahawks beat the St. Louis Rams with a 54-yard Josh Brown field goal to win the game 30-28. As they racked up penalty after penalty and let the Rams take a 14 point lead early, I couldn’t help but think about curses.
The Sports Illustrated cover jinx is a famous and fairly well-known curse, but there’s also an alleged Madden curse, where the NFL player featured on the cover of EA Sports‘ Madden NFL video game has a crap year following the release of the game. It happened to Mashall Faulk in 2002, and Michael Vick was injured in 2003. Donovan McNabb was injured with a sports hernia in 2005, and Shaun Alexander broke a non-weight-bearing bone in his foot in 2006.
While watching the ‘Hawks game, a Campbell's Chunky Soup commercial was run, and noticed that they used some old imagery in the Matt Hasselbeck version of the ad. Early in the commercial, it looks like Hasselbeck is tackled by current “Stealers” players; #98 Casey Hampton and #51 James Farrior.
After some cheesy, emasculating scene with his Mommy feeding him lunch in the locker room and giving him a Mommy hug, Hasselbeck is confronted in a stadium tunnel by a Stealers defensive line, that “hits really, really hard,” (poor baby). The Steelers players’ numbers are 63, 75, 78, 68, 47, and 59, and the image of these players is more faded and “shittier” than the rest of the soup commercial. The angle changes, and the names of some of these players are seen on the backs of their jerseys; Greene, White, and Greenwood. Matching the seen numbers and names, they match up to some big Steel Curtain names of the 1970s: #63 Ernie Holmes, #75 Mean Joe Greene, #78 Dwight White, #68 L. C. Greenwood, #47 Mel Blount, and #59 Jack Ham. Way to jump on a bandwagon, Campbell’s. Maybe they used the 1970′s Steel Curtain because the current Stealers’ defensive line sucks without the help of referees. (Nothing like beating a dead horse, eh?) Nevertheless, Hasselbeck should be ashamed.
I got to thinking, though… maybe a Campbell’s Soup endorsement is also an curse. The aforementioned Donovan McNabb and his parents starred in soup commercials, and the Eagles lost Super Bowl XXXIX, McNabb was injured in 2005, and the Terrell Owens circus pitched a tent in Philly in 2005. Now the Stealers and Matt Hasselbeck are starring in soup commercials. Ben Roethlisberger suffered a motocycle accident in the spring. And, while the Stealers are beating the Kansas City Chiefs as I type this, they’re off to a rocky 1-3 start. Hasselbeck’s QB rating is currently 83.4 (his second lowest since 2001), and the Seahawks are struggling to barely win games. Of course, when I googled “campbell's chunky soup curse,” I found it's not an original thought. I suck. Always a day late and a dollar short.
There was something else I was going to talk about, but as usual, I forgot the topic. Sumbitch! I should lay off the crack pipe. If I think of it, I’ll write it down and post another update soon.
