What’s up, Special Ed?!
We fucked up. We really try to get at least one post up on this blog every month during the off-season, and we know that doing four super-sized posts for MARCH MADNESS does not excuse us from writing anything in April.
Our bad, you guys.
But, as the true scholars will have surely noticed, DefendYourMoves.com has not been idle this past month. We replaced the old STAR WARS tab up on the top of the page with the new MISS CLEO page. That page will be home to all our CLEO videos and our on-going FANTASY TAROT CARD project.
Bet you guys thought we were fuckin around when we said we were making a tarot deck last month but we were NOT!!!!!
Of course our custom 2021 fantasy football tarot deck can’t be finalized until training camps open and the trade rumors quiet down. Once the dust settles for the 2021 season we’ll start rolling out the deck in a series of posts on this here weblog. As of today we have 76 of the 78 cards displayed at defendyourmoves.com/miss-cleo but that page is gonna be a living document, we’ve been chipping away at it since early march so we’ve already had to make a few personnel changes during free agency and the draft:
... much more to come later this summer.
IT'S A NEW DAY!!!
There was one major piece of NFL news this past month which is tangentially related to our tarot project - and we’re not talking about the SEVENTEEN game season - THERE’S NEW JERSEY NUMBER RULES!!!!!!
“The expanded [rules] will allow running backs, tight ends, fullbacks, H-backs and wide receivers to wear numbers 1-49 and 80-89; defensive backs can choose from 1-49; linebackers 1-59 and 90-99; offensive linemen 50-79; and defensive linemen 50-79 and 90-99. QBs, kickers and punters will remain in 1-19.”
Our own Buffalo Bills have already signed their first two single digit receivers: Emmanuel Sanders, taking over the old-fast-guy role from Smokey Brown will wear #1; and the stunningly named rookie Olaijah Griffin, son of rap superstar Warren G, will wear #2.
The funniest part about this is that Mitch Trubisky was already on the team and he was gonna be #8. It looks like when they changed the number rules he just went ahead and demoted himself to double digits, and we applaud him. That’s a team player right there. He knows that a 2021 Super Bowl contender can’t let those single digits go to waste on the sidelines. Way to go, Mitchell!
We never thought we’d see receivers with single digit numbers in the NFL so this is a qualified miracle in our book. This jersey number reorganization is the most socially conscious thing the NFL has done since they reinstated touchdown dancing. As labor advocates, this is huge for us - cool jersey numbers will go a long way toward NFL wideouts’ goal of making half as much money as NBA role-players. But more importantly, DYM is among the internet’s thought leaders on the subject of NFL jersey number aesthetics. Almost three years ago we wrote the definitive positional jersey number coolness rankings - a document that has become a touchpoint reference for bloggers, fans, and (hopefully) young NFL players.
We are very much looking forward to re-writing these rankings, but we’re going to have to see them in action to properly ascertain how cool the new numbers really look.
For now, we know QBs and kicking specialists will keep the same options they had, so we probably won’t change those ranks much. Except that we’re most likely going to move 17 up the list a bit since we’ve been seeing so much heptadecaphobia creeping in around the league this off-season.
Off the top of our head here’s where we'd rank the new jersey number options for skill position players:
1
7
2
3
5
8
9
6
4
10
11
12
17
19
13
14
15
16
18
23
21
22
25
27
Our 2018 rankings had 12 as the best available number for WRs because it denotes an alpha status usually reserved for the field-general QB. But for 2021 there’s so much hype around single-digit numbers that we feel like for RBs, LBs and DBs changing numbers this year the rule is gonna be “the lower the number the better.” Therefore number 1 is now #1, followed by all other single digits in order of typographic complexity, beginning with the prime numbers. Then when we get into the double digits we’re ranking 10 as the tenth best, and 11 as the eleventh best overall number for WRs, RBs, DBs, and LBs. Then 12, then 17, then 19 (the last prime under 20), then the rest of the teens. Then we’re thinking 24, 26 and anything over 27 is still gonna be ugly.
FILONI DID IT AGAIN!!!
Dave Filoni is making a case for himself as the #1 all-time best Star Wars writer. We’re starting to think we like his take on The Galaxy even more than George Lucas’s. We’re talking about a spin-off of a retread of series from a decade and a half ago but it was perhaps the most visually stunning Star Wars animation ever and they managed to introduce a new character that REALLY made us think. And that’s amazing, because we like to think we know everything about Star Wars that’s important to know, but now we’ve got QUESTIONS!!!
Of course The Mandalorian was thought provoking in its own right, but for us the Mando-Grogu relationship mostly made us reflect on our own life and the journey of parenthood - but this new clone Omega made us really ask ourselves some big-time Star Warsy questions, ya know?
AND she’s got a New Zealand accent!!!! It’s the best.
So the question is - Omega seems to have been the Kaminoan’s attempt to manufacture a Jedi. What ability/feature did they try to amplify to get to that?
At first we thought it was a heightened emotional intelligence, so like she’s super empathetic and stoic. But then she has that Anakin-esque facility with machines too... We saw a theory that she has a sort-of photographic memory and impossibly high IQ, so like she can learn to do something just by watching, and without really thinking about it. But that still leaves a very big psychological/philosophical question - one we hope isn’t too big for a Star Wars cartoon - What is intuition?
Elsewhere, as you would expect, the episode is jam-packed with call backs to the old Star Wars movies, like when Tech tells Echo that he’s “more machine now than man” and Saw Guerrera tells Hunter he may “die, along with the past”. We’re fuckin stupid for that shit. We just eat it up.
Our DYM EXCLUSIVE easter egg for this episode is that the Bad Batch’s ship bears a striking resemblance to the Imperial shuttles used by Vader and The Emperor, but ALSO to the “saber dart” that Jango Fett shot Zam Wessel with in Episode II.
And just like Dax said, “it’s the funny little markings on the side that give it away”:
In a deleted scene from the original Bad Batch arc from Clone Wars Season 7, Anakin sees a World War II-style pinup of his secret wife Padme painted on the ship’s hull.
