Indianapolis is now on the clock in two ways. Sure, there’s the countdown to April’s NFL Draft. And now, with the conference championship games out of the way, the final countdown for the Super Bowl is on. In two weeks, a city where you can’t buy alcohol on Sundays1 will host America’s biggest single-day sporting event. Anyway, a couple of great games on Sunday. Perhaps not artistic masterpieces, but tremendously entertaining.
The hypocrisy that permeates big-money college sports takes your breath away. College football and men’s basketball have become such huge commercial enterprises that together they generate more than $6 billion in annual revenue, more than the National Basketball Association…And what does the labor force that makes it possible for coaches to earn millions, and causes marketers to spend billions, get? Nothing. The workers are supposed to be content with a scholarship that does not even cover the full cost of attending college.
First off, the Saints-49ers game last Saturday was fantastic if you were just an unaffiliated person watching. I imagine it was fun for San Francisco fans, too. The terrific early performance by the ‘Niners’ D. The inevitable Saints comeback. And the frenetic final four minutes. Great, great stuff. The Colts are making progress. First, the Polians were shown the door and Ryan Grigson was brought in to remake the franchise. Yesterday, Grigson fired coach Jim Caldwell.
Perhaps no one has noticed, but I have yet to write anything lengthy about KU basketball this season. There are a couple reasons for that - which I’ll get into in another post at some point - but the bottom line is I have a different relationship with the team and with college basketball in general this year. In fact, Monday’s game against Baylor was the first game I watched from start-to-finish all season.
We lost a dear friend yesterday. C.’s fish, Spike, passed on to the great fishbowl in the sky. It was not unexpected, as he hadn’t been right for months. That didn’t make the loss any easier for her. He had always been an odd fish, but since the fall he spent most of his time curled up on the bottom of his bowl. While his brother Sparkle would swim around and eat his food as soon as we put it in his bowl, Spike just sat in the rocks.
So, I ’m kind of late on this, since the BCS title game was Monday and all, but I might as well get it off my chest. I think the BCS is a gigantic scam. Now hold on. Before you go clicking somewhere else, thinking to yourself, “Of course it’s a scam. You’re just now seeing that?” allow me to clarify. I’m a long-time BCS hater. I remember one night in late 2003, while traveling for business, I couldn’t sleep because I was so wound up mentally drafting an anti-BCS post.
Finally, the holidays are over. M. is back in school today, which means we get to work our way back into our normal routine. She reminded me last night that I utterly failed at the one thing I wanted to accomplish with her over the break: master tying her shoes. Oh well, she’s waited this long. It won’t kill her to put it off another month. She can read a 150 page book in a night, but she can’t tie her own shoes.
The Lawrence Journal-World just completed their reader-driven contest to determine the best KU basketball player of the last decade. Weird timing, yes, since apparently everything that happened in the spring of 2000 gets pushed back to the 90s. But fun anyway. Some thoughts. It was interesting looking at their brackets - they went position-by-position - and realizing how unique KU’s pool of talent over that period was. Until a year ago, no one had left after a single season in Lawrence.
Over the weekend, word leaked that MLB was considering a plan that would dramatically reshape the game. One team would move from the National to American league, leaving two, 15 team leagues. Then, all divisions would be scrapped and the teams in each league would compete for five post-season slots. I think this is horrible news, and not for the reasons you would expect. I think it’s horrible because it’s a great idea, yet most insiders feel it has little chance of actually being adopted.
Six wins in four weeks. 1 Four of those wins came in their final at bat. It appears the Royals may indeed suck this year. You can feel the enthusiasm waning as frustrated fans mutter “Same old Royals.” Danny Duffy can’t throw strikes. Joakim Soria looked lost (but may have been found). Alcides Escobar can’t hit and Ned Yost refuses to pinch hit for him late in games. Outfielders let fly balls drop.
Can’t complain. That’s my simple, two word summation of our week in Hilton Head. I know you expect much more than that from me, though. I will do my best no to disappoint. Our home was gorgeous. S. spent many, many hours researching the options and looking for something that would hold a significant chunk of our family and be a nice place to stay. She found the perfect place. We stayed in the Forest Beach area, which is on the ocean-side of the island.
By the time you read this, we should be several hours from home in the Family Truckster - a.k.a. Swagger Wagon a.k.a. Daddy’s Blue Van - heading south. We will pass near Cincinnati, go through Lexington and Knoxville, then turn east towards Asheville. We will spend Friday night visiting with friends there and then continue southeast Saturday until we can continue no further. Our final destination is Hilton Head, South Carolina, where we will be spending a week with the kids, three aunts, one cousin, and two grandparents.
A long-winded, semi-diary of last night’s storms in Indiana. Crazy week. If I’m not mistaken, the bulk of my regular readers have heard tornado sirens and taken cover at some point in the past 72 hours. Hopefully all of you made it through this insane weather safe and sound. Last night was our turn to get Mother Nature’s hammer. To make it even more fun, S. was working, so it was just me and the girls.
Piggy-backing a bit on my post about cloud-based music systems last week, my baseball post for this week will focus on the changing broadcast technology of the game. I first became a baseball fan in 1978. But I really went head-over-heels for the game in 1980, when we moved to Kansas City. Suddenly I could listen to every single Royals game. Every week or so a couple road games were on TV.
I’ve wanted to believe Lance Armstrong for a long time. I know I’m not the only one. Each time there was a new allegation claiming Lance had, in fact, benefited from various banned substances and procedures during his Tour de France reign, I held the company line: He had been tested over and over and over again through his career and never been caught. He operated under as intense a microscope as any athlete in modern times, with seemingly the entire European cycling community focused on nailing him for doing something wrong, and was never caught.
In recent weeks both Amazon and Google have launched cloud music services. Persistent rumors have it that Apple will follow suit sometime soon. Throw in a wide-range of independent streaming services and we may be on the verge of the next digital music revolution: the age of cloud storage, high speed broadband access, and the ability to stream our music wherever we want it. I’ve been a loyal iTunes user for almost seven years.
We are in the midst of some crazy times in our house. S. was away at a work conference for a couple days. She now works eight straight days. I have a couple work assignments coming up, and really could be working almost every night if S. was not. C. finishes school this week, M. next week. Next Friday we’re off to South Carolina for a week. Oh, and C. turned five yesterday.
Did I jump off the Bond Bandwagon? Nope. Between watching the Royals most nights and keeping up with my Thursday shows, it’s been tough to watch movies lately. My slight reluctance to tackle the next Bond movie didn’t help. I remember hearing, when I was a kid, that some people thought George Lazenby was the best Bond ever. Back then, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was rarely, if ever, shown on TV.
You would think I learned my lesson already. I was unreasonably excited about Josh Selby’s arrival at KU last fall, and downright giddy the day he debuted against USC. That didn’t work out so well, after the first five games or so. Four years ago, I was pumped for Alex Gordon’s arrival in Kansas City. That excitement quickly disappeared and did not return until this season, when Gordon seems to have finally figured things out.
In case you missed my recent ramblings about my training schedule, I ran 13.1 miles Saturday. It went pretty darn well, all things considered. First, the important thing. Not only did I finish but I did so in 2:21. So I was slow, but that was expected. I was pleased to break 2:30, although it was another sobering reminder of my age. When I ran a half-marathon 11 years ago with a sore hamstring in pouring rain in hilly Kansas City, I got in in 2:05.
We all have our sports weak spots. There are those who think Pete Rose did nothing wrong. Giants fans embraced Barry Bonds when the rest of the baseball world shunned him. I guess there are a few people out there who think Roger Clemens isn’t lying. And then there’s Manny Ramirez. I’ve written many times over the years about my love for Manny. Through all of his bizarre behavior, I stuck with him because he was such a joy to watch in the batter’s box.
I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting a new blog, not to replace this one but rather in addition to it to give me an outlet for all my technology geekery. If that happens, I’ll let you all know. I wrote something this morning that would have fit such a blog perfectly. But, in the absence of it, below I shall share with you my thoughts on the latest “scandal” to plague the fine Americans at Apple, Inc.
I once made the grandiose assertion that the Beastie Boys saved my life. The context was, in our preparations to see the B-Boys live in 1998, several of us were sharing our favorite Beasties memories. My claim that they saved my life stemmed from the year my family spent in San Leandro, CA. Our arrival in the Bay Area over the holidays of 1986 coincided with the explosion of the Beasties' Licensed to Ill.
A few notes from our Easter celebration. M., who it should be noted is getting smarter by the minute, had an interesting observation last week. She suggested that the Easter Bunny exists simply so Easter is exciting for kids. She’s received a healthy dose of why Easter is significant, going to a Catholic school and all, but apparently she was unimpressed. She said she knows all about how Jesus died and they put him behind the rock then he came back to life and moved the rock.
So there I was, sitting on my couch, watching Luke Hochevar mow down Cleveland batter after Cleveland batter1 Wednesday night and, for a few moments, I thought history was unfolding on my TV. The first 15 batters Hochevar faced failed to reach base. He was commanding every pitch beautifully. He and Matt Treanor seemed to have a solid plan of attack. Even when a Cleveland batter made contact, the ball flew directly to a Royals fielder.
Time for two more Bond movies. Thunderball, 1965 Four years, four Bond movies. While there was a sense of extravaganza to the first three Bond movies, Thunderball feels like the moment the series became a massive event. Sprawling, audacious plots by the bad guys. Large deployments of troops by both sides. And massive climactic battles. In this case, it all works. Almost. What kills Thunderball is not the cheese factor, which again creeps upward.
Let’s get this out of the way right up front: expectations for athletes are never fair. Especially for kids who were high school stars and who move on to elite college programs. All these kids do is play a game they have some natural talent for very well and suddenly outsiders are ranking them against other kids their age, experts are touting them as the missing piece to teams that are already loaded with talent, and fans expect players who may not have to shave more than once a month to step in and play like Kobe or LeBron.
I’ve been kicking around a minor change to the blog for a couple weeks. I’m still not 100% happy with how it looks right now, but I’m going to go with it for the time being. Basically, Reader’s Notebook posts are disappearing. I will still be listing the books I read, but instead of doing a monthly listing, I will be posting each book individually on a new Reading page. You can either hit that link to see the first entry, or click on the Reading link up at the top of the page.
Winters are hard for me. I think that’s probably the case for most stay-at-home parents. You run out of things to do to entertain the kids. They get sick of being stuck inside around each other, and you, constantly. The longer the winter stretches, the more tension builds. I’ll admit that each year, when we get to late February/early March, I’m pretty much ready for them to leave for a month or so and let me recharge.
If the Internet is good at anything, it’s connecting people with similar, obscure interests.1 If there’s something that interests you even in the slightest, chances are you can find a community of people who are crazy about the subject. Blogs, Flickr groups, newsgroups, podcasts. Thirty minutes of searching on Google can produce enough research material to keep you busy for weeks. Example: people love to show off their desks. Either they’re sharing the computer hardware they own, 2 showing off their interior design chops, or perhaps are writers and just want to share how their carefully crafted writing space looks.