Happy day

A smug SOB coach is out. Too bad they had to pay him anything.

Not that I like college football, but anyone that compares Minnesota to USC is a frigtard.

24 years...

...is a long time to wait for a World Series victory.

It wasn't the prettiest series, full of errors--not Pujols homers as we would have hoped, but we'll take it. Watching from Minnesota is not easy, since people up here have moved on the millisecond that the Twins got eliminated. But we enjoyed every second of it.

Go Cards!

ESPN announcers

Watching the Cards-Padres game--Question of the day:
Can Joe Morgan announce a game without:
a) mentioning the Negro league, Jackie Robinson, or how great Barry Bonds is?
b) mentioning the Reds teams he was a part of?
c) generally sounding pompous as all heck?

Answers: No, no, and NO.

I want to stick a baseball in this guy's mouth and choke him on it.

Political signs

Saw a couple political signs in my neighborhood. Got me to thinking a little about the latest fun our "distinguished" colleagues in Washington D.C.

IM-ing anyone aside from your wife/husband/significant other about taking off pants? BAD.

Trying to cover up that you knew about this with an underage person? BAD.

Potentially leveraging this all to try to grab power? BAD.

So everyone is BAD. I am pretty tired of listening to the politicos. Everyone wants to make the world in their image, and all of them want to use my money to do it. This is both parties here--and most interest groups. I'm not being partisan, since both parties have been equally replusive as late. How about a new political party called "leave me the crap alone!"

I doubt anyone would run (I have better things to do), but it would make for some catchy signs.

Better news: the new Evanescence album is wonderful. Best $9.00 I have spent in a long, long time. But when will Balligomingo give me a new album?

bad day

• still tired from business trip
• dog has ruptured anal glands...that's one trip to the vet
• now have to watch dog like a hawk to ensure she doesn't mess her butt up
  
• wife is still fighting off cold
• allergies are not happy
  
• traffic was bad around town
• bike ride was into wind for 20 of my 27 miles
• tried to install some software on the Mac and botched up OSX...had to reinstall OSX
  

Still 3 hours left before bed...what else?

Hey, at least it is a new blog post. Shut up.

Odds and ends

A few little things to pass the time:

• Great software for the pocket PC and Windows: ListPro. I now use it daily at work and home. The fact that it has a desktop version means a lot to me since writing everything using a stylus stinks. I like how OmniOutliner looks on the Mac more, but the lack of applicability to my work life excludes it for me.
• My wife and I are both discovering the joys of bluetooth. She's enthralled by the Jabra BT150 wireless headset paired to her RAZR, me to my Jabra BT250v and W600i. Even though both have speaker phones, cell phone speakers are just not good enough to drive with (unfortunately). Both phones, incidentally, are wonderful. So much better than the crap we had from Sprint.
  
• While I am on the subject of cell phones: $6.99 for Tetris? What the heck Cingular? Can't I just use the version we played on our 286 Packard Bell PC?
• Sometimes gMail's ad-serving in their Sponsored Link is funny. Go to your Spam folder to clean out your "enlargement" crapola, and you will likely see a link to a recipe for SPAM.

Soon to come--a review of our Roomba. It's on its way.

Uugh.

Well, there is another awards show I won't be watching. As we all know, the Academy Awards are the big movie award show. In my view, they have two major faults:
(1) they are behind on the awards. Exhibit 1: Renee Zellweger should have won best actress for "Chicago," but instead got it the next year for whatever that hillbilly piece of crap was. I thought I had a readily available second example, but I don't, so there.
(2) they pick crappy movies to win. Here, I have some evidence. "Shakespeare in Love" over "Saving Private Ryan" (1998). "American Beauty" over "The Sixth Sense" (1999). Others depend on your feel, but you can go down the list. The most gregarious example would be that "Star Wars" never won, but I digress. However, it just hasn't been crappy movies, it has been:
(3) they pick the trendy, politically inclined favorite. First there is the obvious example of Michael Moore, who is just, pardon my French, and a$$hole. Then a couple of years ago they decided to give awards to minorities to "make up" for a perceived historical slighting. How else can you explain Denzel Washington's best actor award for "Training Day." All he was was an angry, homicidal guy. By this measure, Arnold should have 6 or 7 Oscars, Sly Stallone another 4 or 5, and someone like Chuck Norris enough to fill a small garage.

Now they are touting this new movie "Brokeback" that is about two gay Wyoming cowboys. Of course it will win, some people already like the idea of "sticking it to the red states." And it has just won the first critical award on the way to the Academys.

I guess it is alright though, since no one watches the awards anyhow. Especially without Chris Rock hosting.

And for reference, the movies I have seen this year in the theatre are:
"Shopgirl," "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," "The WeatherMan," "Hitch," "The Wedding Date," and "Star Wars Episode III." I plan to add "The Family Stone" and "King Kong."
Out of the "seen" movies, the award for best goes to Harry Potter.

Hello again

As fall finally rolls into Minnesota, I again find time for things like blogging since my cycling is seriously curtailed. Not so much because of the cold, but because of the rain. Given that the tires have a contact area with the road of about a dime (or likely less), the idea of sliding all over the road does not really appeal to me.

Anyways, I had the chance to somehow stumble onto a website for my brother's high school class. They graduated in 1995, one year after I did. Because of this it was very strange/interesting to read through some of the stuff on there. Initially, my interest was of the basic "where are they now?" type thing. I haven't seen some of them for 11 years, so trying to ascertain who was who, or reading what they are doing now was pretty strange. That interest passed pretty quickly, but left me somewhat thinking of where I have been since then. Mostly school, I guess.

The bigger thing I noticed is that my class has nothing like this. Where '95 was like some bigger family, or at least a bunch of chummy-type people, my '94 class was the height of catiness and class warfare. Although I went to college with a bunch of them (thank goodness for good state-school scholarships) I have not talked with them for 8-9 years. We have no website. And I don't know if I could care less. My recollections of high school only compose homework, debates, and general feelings of unhappiness. Such is life.

Still, interesting analogy. Generation X (me) vs. baby-boomlet (them). Leave me the crap alone vs. let's go for coffee and chat.

Second thought, I'd like some coffee after all. Thanks.