Here’s a suggestion to help Albert Haynesworth settle down - attend the ballet: This afternoon, Tennessee Titans’ Albert Haynesworth said he was going to seek counseling for behavior management after stomping on the un-helmeted head of an opponent during last Sunday’s game against the Dallas Cowboys. I think the 6′6″, 320 lbs. defensive tackle might want to use his record-long five-week NFL suspension to also enjoy the arts scene in Nashville. Maybe something a little more laid back than the violence of football. Perhaps a a night at the Nashville ballet for tomorrow night’s premiere of Lizzie Borden.

I am in no way suggesting there are not many, many people in the world who have serious problems controlling their anger and who need serious mental health treatment. But the thought of a 6′6″ 320 lbs. NFL defensive tackle seeking anger management counseling for displaying insanity during a game is weird. Granted, I’m sure he needs treatment. And, if we were talking about his bouts with road rage or something done off-the-field, I would be praising the move. However, the “behavior” that he’s seeking management counseling for was done in the context of an NFL football game. He gets paid millions to be as mean and angry as possible — to take his rage and push it right up to the edge of insanity. As for “management” of that rage, his coach, Jeff Fisher, gets paid millions to manage Haynesworth’s “behavior” into something that wins games. Haynesworth seeking counseling for having uncontrollable anger during an NFL game is worthy of a movie called Anger Management II. Perhaps a reality show on ESPN or, better yet, Comedy Central, could be produced during the Albert make-over.

Rather than write anymore on this topic, let me just point to a piece by Chicago Tribune writer Rick Morrissey the other day.

Quote:

“Look, these are not well-balanced people. These are violent people. That, in part, is what makes them good football players. And it’s why we tune in, buy tickets, plan Super Bowl parties.”

I’ll stop there. If I keep it up, I’ll be listing all the war and killing metaphors evoked during a typical Titans game and then I’ll get even more steamed. Thank goodness I have this blog to help me control my anger.

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Director of rexblog hackery Patrick Ragsdale and I (along with some elves I will thank publicly later) have been experimenting with creating a version of the rexblog running on an in-house server using WordPress. We have several sites running on WordPress and I’ve begun to covet some features on this blog that we can run on those other sites. I am going to save a long “how-we-did-it” post for later, but one of the challenges I gave to Patrick was to migrate the entire six year archive of the blog to one server — not just to replicate a shell of the blog that I could pick up at some date, with the archive saved in the old format. I didn’t want to have “the old blog” and “the new blog” — but want everything in one database running on one platform. Also, I wanted all the incoming links to those old posts to work. (We think they will, but won’t know for certain unless and until we actually flip the DNS switch to the new site.)

We’re currently running that version at the URL wp.rexblog.com. We are starting out by making it look as close to this version of the site as possible. A new look may follow. If it works (and we won’t know for certain until we play with the DNS server in a couple of weeks), I’ll post a full explanation of how we did it — and give a couple of shout-outs to the kind folks who helped us out with their insight and, in one case, some major hands-on grease-monkeying.

Note: For those reading this via RSS, there is no need to adjust anything if you are subscribing to the feedburner version of the feed. If any permanent changes are made, your feed will continue to work.

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Non-spoiler Lost review: As I often watch TV shows at shifted times, I know that last night’s season premiere of Lost may be sitting on your DVR (or, if you’re not at work, you can watch it on ABC.com) so I won’t give away anything. Unlike my disappointment in this season (so far) of Boston Legal, one of the only other shows I actually listen to for the writing, the first episode of Lost was firing on all cylinders. The show’s creators are doing something I can’t recall in a previous episodic drama (which, I’ll admit, I have limited exposure to the past 25 years of prime-time drama): they are constantly re-telling — and re-casting — the same story from different points-of-view. I’m still hooked.

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