On Saturday morning, I awoke to a ruckus outside my apartment window. Looked down and saw 20 belligerent, presumably intoxicated Santas stumbling into the uptown 6 subway station. Turns out they were in town for SantaCon 2005! (image via Productshop.)

-Elsewhere this weekend: Let's Go Bowling played the Starline. If you missed it, this guy took video of the show (via Vimeo, a Flickr-esque site for posting clips.)

-I'm going to lay off the Bulldogs for one post and give Pat Hill a brief respite. Instead, here's a fascinating New York Times magazine profile of Texas Tech Coach Mike Leach, who's raising eyebrows for his unique offenses, which spread out the linemen and allow his quarterbacks to set passing records. (Prior to Texas Tech, Leach did some hard time at my alma mater, Cal Poly, among other small football programs.) A couple tidbits:

The offensive linemen positioned themselves between three and six feet apart -- on extreme occasions, the five linemen stretched a good 15 yards across the field. At times it was difficult to tell the linemen from the receivers. Strictly speaking, they were not a line at all, just a row of dots. ''The offensive line splits -- you look at them, and you're just shocked,'' Schwartz said. ''It scares people to see splits that are that wide.''

''He makes them nervous,'' Leach's agent, Gary O'Hagan, says. ''They don't like coaching against him; they'd rather coach against another version of themselves. It's not that they don't like him. But privately they haven't accepted him. … They dismiss him out of hand. And you know why? Because he's not doing things because that's the way they've always been done. It's like he's been given this chessboard, and all the pieces but none of the rules, and he's trying to figure out where all the chess pieces should go. From scratch!