Drinking whiskey clear!
The Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Baltimore Ravens by a score of 13-9 this afternoon, thus winning the AFC North championship and securing a first-round bye in the playoffs. The Steelers defense looked great as always, but their offense is making the few hairs I have left turn grey:
Yes, complain about that call all you want… I don’t care! My team is 11-3 and sitting pretty!
I hate NASCAR. To me, driving a car is not a “sport”, whether it be NASCAR or Formula 1. Sure, many consider it an “entertaining pastime”… but a “sport”? No, not hardly.
But the fact is, I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, the birthplace of NASCAR and home to hundreds of companies that support the sport. Oh, and the future NASCAR Hall of Fame, too. NASCAR is huge here. In fact, the sports reporting on our local TV news usually goes Carolina Panthers > NASCAR > NCAA basketball > NCAA football > Charlotte Bobcats > Charlotte Checkers (and, if there’s time left in the broadcast) > Carolina Hurricanes. So whether I like it or not, I hear a lot about NASCAR. And what I’m hearing lately isn’t good.
You probably know that the Big Three automakers are in a world of trouble. You might not have followed through on that thought: the Big Three are huge supporters of NASCAR, to the tune of millions of dollars a year. As much as the automakers would like to keep their NASCAR sponsorships, they are at the point where it simply might not be feasible to keep pouring millions into the sport. And any government bailout of the industry might actually make things worse for NASCAR, since the government might question why they should give taxpayer money to NASCAR by way of the Big Three. After all, several Big Three executives recently appeared before Congress, and were given tounge lashings for using private jets to get there. What do you think Congress’ reaction would be to find out that the automakers gave $20 million of that supposed bailout money to NASCAR?
Just last night there was a bit on the local news about how Petty Enterprises cannot find a sponsor and thus might go under or be forced to merge with another team. Again, I’m not a NASCAR fan, but I know who Richard Petty is, and if he can’t get a deal, you have to wonder about the stability of the sport in general. And then there’s this bit where NASCAR president Mike Helton literally begs fans to support the “sport’s” sponsors.
What happened to NASCAR? My grandfather was big into NASCAR starting in the late 80s, so I heard about it all the time from him. It seemed for a while in the mid 90s that NASCAR would eclipse the NHL or MLB as one of the “Big Three” sports. And now the wheels are falling off (punny!). What the hell happened?
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
– C. S. Lewis
It’s Friday! Woo-hoo! That means the weekend is upon us… better yet, that means only two days until football comes back! Rejoice and kick back with these random images!
First, we have Gemma Atkinson! Pardon me while I wipe the drool off my keyboard:
Hey, does anyone remember this “video game” from the late 70s or early 80s:
I saw a picture of the game online, and it brought back a flood of memories. I had that game, and I used to play it for hours. I love pointless nostalgia!
Here’s a picture of Jenna Fischer looking cute as a button on the set of The Office:
And lastly… because it never gets old, here’s one more pic from the Cowboys\Steelers game last Sunday, at the point of the Steelers’ victory:
Monster Cable Products is a company which makes a brand of cables called Monster Cable. You’ve probably seen their products at big box retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City. Hell, you’ve probably gotten the hard-sell about them from a Best Buy salesman. And no wonder – the cables are a quality product, but are outrageously overpriced for what they are. The big box retailers make an obscene amount of profit from them, and thus will resort to scare tactics to sell them: “Oh yeah, those Sony HDTVs will explode on you if you don’t use a Monster brand cable!”
I personally hate Monster cables, and it’s not just because they have the nerve to sell a $2 cable for $150. No, I hate Monster because the company will seemingly sue anyone that uses the word “Monster” in their name. I could understand the legal action if a company was in the cable or electronics accessory business, but Monster Cable has threatened legal action against anyone with Monster in their name, such as:
Monster Garage (a car show on the Discovery Channel)
Monster Energy Drink
Snow Monsters (a children’s skiing group)
MonsterVintage (a small used clothing store)
Monsters, Inc., a Disney animated film
“Monsters of the Midway”, a nickname of the Chicago Bears that dates to the 1940s.
The “Monster seats” at Boston’s Fenway Park
Monster.com, an employment website
Monster Mini Golf
Look, I understand how trademarks work. You have to defend their use, or else you’d lose the rights to that trademark. That’s why the legal departments at Xerox and Kimberley-Clark send letters to DJs and TV reporters reminding them to use the terms “photocopy” and “tissue” instead of “Xerox” or “Kleenex”. But Monster is a company gone mad. And now you can do something about it! This post at Consumerist.com has contact links for Monster’s CEO where you can tell him to stop wasting his time (and taxpayer money in the court system) by ending Monster’s ridiculous trademark campaign!
From the L.A. Times:
Bettie Page, the brunet pinup queen with a shoulder-length pageboy hairdo and kitschy bangs whose saucy photos helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, has died. She was 85.
Page, whose later life was marked by depression, violent mood swings and several years in a state mental institution, died Thursday night at Kindred Hospital in Los Angeles, where she had been on life support since suffering a heart attack Dec. 2, according to her agent, Mark Roesler.
It’s a sad day. đ
The “Cold War” was a state of undeclared war that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union from the end of World War II until the collapse of Russia’s Communist government in the early 1990s. Unlike a “hot” war, where two sides are actively shooting at each other, the “cold” war was all about readiness, posturing, and brinksmanship. If the Soviets came out with a new tank, the US would develop a missile that could pierce its armor. If the US came out with a submarine that was much quieter than its predecessors, the Soviet Union would develop better sonar for detecting it. If the Soviets sent $10 million worth of arms to a tribe in Africa, the US would send $20 million worth of arms to a competing tribe.
The Cold War was breathtakingly expensive and affected almost every country on earth. Although the US and Soviets never directly went to war, the Cold War did get awfully “warm” at times. In 1983, in fact, the world came to the very brink of a nuclear holocaust. Twice. And for that, you can blame Able Archer.
It all started with the 1980 US presidential election. President Carter (and Presidents Ford and Nixon before him) had pursued a policy of dĂ©tente – a relaxing of tensions – between the US and the Soviet Union. Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan actively rejected dĂ©tente. Reagan felt that the previous administrations – Carter’s, especially – had used dĂ©tente as an excuse to cut military spending. He felt that the United States could not negotiate with the Soviets with a weakened military. He called it “Peace Through Strength”, and it terrified the Soviets.
What did I tell you about the Steelers’ defense?
Thanks for knocking the smug off Tony Romo’s face, guys!
You Cowboy fans are priceless! Don’t ever change, OK?
Jan Kemp, a notorious figure in Georgia sports history, died this past Friday. She was 59.
Infamous among UGA football fans, Kemp was a University of Georgia professor who blew the whistle on the school’s preferential treatment of student athletes. Fired for refusing to pass athletes in her classes, People magazine hailed her as “a hero of the 80sâ for filing a lawsuit against the university in 1986 in order to get her job back.
The trial brought many of UGA’s unseemly practices to light, especially an infamous tape recording of remedial studies director Leroy Ervin saying that âI know for a fact that these kids would not be here if it were not for their utility to the institution⊠They are used as a kind of raw material in the production of some goods to be sold as whatever product, and they get nothing in returnâ.
Such revelations about a university producing functionally illiterate athletes led to the resignation of longtime university president Fred Davison. They also led to a million jokes from Georgia Tech fans, as well as a humorous “UGA Athletes’ Exam” that was chain-faxed thousands of times in the Atlanta area.
Reforms were immediately instituted at UGA and across the NCAA as a result of Kemp’s lawsuit – which she won. She was awarded $2.58 million, although this was later reduced to $1.1 million. Kemp, although a pariah that was often verbally assaulted by UGA football fans who blamed her for the program’s later difficulties, refused to leave her Athens home. Indeed, she lived there until around six months ago, when a combination of a broken hip and Alzheimerâs Disease forced her to move to a nursing home.
Q. What did the average UGA football player get on his SAT?
A. Drool
God bless, Jan!
This is a picture from the first quarter of the ACC Championship game in Tampa this past weekend:
Although the ACC’s official attendance number was 53,927, you can clearly see that the “real number” was far lower than that. The ACC officially acknowledged that BC and Virginia Tech sold less than 5,000 of their 20,000 allotted tickets… yet somehow they come up with 53,927… when “less than 20,000” would be more realistic. Word is that the game was such a snoozer that scalpers were actually giving tickets away outside the gates. And no, I don’t mean “giving them away” as in selling a 50-yard line seat for $10… I’m talking about actually giving them away, as in “here… no one wants these… you can have them for free!”
That’s friggin pathetic! The SEC Championship, held at the Georgia Dome this weekend, was like a bowl game unto itself. Meanwhile, fewer people show up for the ACC Championship than a regular season game at perennial football powerhouse University of Delaware.