Monday, October 17, 2005
Gray skies in LA
And that's not a misprint. No, sir. Dark, rainy skies hang over Los Angeles today, and it's not even February. Temperatures are only rising to the mid 60s today - and it won't be sunny and in the 70s till mid-week. Ye Gods!
This can only mean one thing. A team from Chicago is going to the World Series, and the Gods, not knowing how to deal with something like this, have turned the world upside down. Crazy, crazy talk.
In all seriousness, congrats to the White Sox, finally breaking past that barrier of mediocrity and making it to the Big Show. Let's hope that you'll find some fans for the next series of 7.
All in all, I'm coming off a pretty good weekend. Got a chance to celebrate one buddy's birthday, and to hang out and get drinks with another. Then came yesterday, and that greatest of all modern inventions:
The Lazy Sunday.
That's right. For only about the third time in our married life, Our Woman in LA and I spent Sunday chilling out, taking naps, and not doing much else. The critical stuff (a conference call with her theatre company, her working the box office for her show's Sunday matinee, paying the bills) were knocked out early. That left watching classic movies on DVD (Steph has a crush on Orson Welles, so she's seeing CITIZEN KANE for the first time), reading the paper and the week's run of comic books, and rejuvenating the spirit a little.
A couple of other notes:
1) Besides the aforementioned White Sox, it was damn near as good a weekend in the world of sports as you can have. It's a rare, rare thing to log a perfect weekend - one in which all your teams win, unless you're one of those pathetic band-wagoners who starts liking teams the minute they begin to win.
For me, this was just about there. The mighty, mighty Longhorns dispatched Colorado and hated nemesis and all-around smug traitor Gary Barnett with ease, proving that there would be no letdown from the thrashing of Oklahoma. Ohio State beat Michigan State, and stayed in the running for the Big Ten championship. UCLA continued its unbeaten streak. For that matter, my alma mater's team, the sometime football powerhouse Northwestern U. Wildcats (official motto: we don't need defense, not ever) defeated the Purdue Boilermakers.
So yeah, NU and Ohio State could still win the Big Ten. Hell, as an NU grad, I'll take a trip to a bowl game. How about a bowl win in the Motor City Bowl or Gallery Furniture Bowl??
Sure, Michigan won, but at least they took down Penn State in a heartbreaker. Sure, USC won, but at least that game against Notre Dame was exciting as hell.
Oh, yeah, and the Bengals came back to win against the Titans. In Tennessee. The Bengals are 5-1. Crazy times.
2) If you're into the sports minutia, as I am, you might want to check out my buddy Rick Porter's new web blog at this site:
http://nbabillions.blogspot.com.
Over the course of the NBA season, Rick will be tracking scrub bball players who log a "billion" in the box score, meaning that they play one minute of a game and have no other stats (points, fouls, assists, you get the picture). Back in college, Rick had a wall of shame of sorts, where he hung Hoops basketball cards of as many scrub players as he could find. Now, in the new century, he's creating a new cyber-wall of NBA mediocrity.
Ought to be fun stuff.
This can only mean one thing. A team from Chicago is going to the World Series, and the Gods, not knowing how to deal with something like this, have turned the world upside down. Crazy, crazy talk.
In all seriousness, congrats to the White Sox, finally breaking past that barrier of mediocrity and making it to the Big Show. Let's hope that you'll find some fans for the next series of 7.
All in all, I'm coming off a pretty good weekend. Got a chance to celebrate one buddy's birthday, and to hang out and get drinks with another. Then came yesterday, and that greatest of all modern inventions:
The Lazy Sunday.
That's right. For only about the third time in our married life, Our Woman in LA and I spent Sunday chilling out, taking naps, and not doing much else. The critical stuff (a conference call with her theatre company, her working the box office for her show's Sunday matinee, paying the bills) were knocked out early. That left watching classic movies on DVD (Steph has a crush on Orson Welles, so she's seeing CITIZEN KANE for the first time), reading the paper and the week's run of comic books, and rejuvenating the spirit a little.
A couple of other notes:
1) Besides the aforementioned White Sox, it was damn near as good a weekend in the world of sports as you can have. It's a rare, rare thing to log a perfect weekend - one in which all your teams win, unless you're one of those pathetic band-wagoners who starts liking teams the minute they begin to win.
For me, this was just about there. The mighty, mighty Longhorns dispatched Colorado and hated nemesis and all-around smug traitor Gary Barnett with ease, proving that there would be no letdown from the thrashing of Oklahoma. Ohio State beat Michigan State, and stayed in the running for the Big Ten championship. UCLA continued its unbeaten streak. For that matter, my alma mater's team, the sometime football powerhouse Northwestern U. Wildcats (official motto: we don't need defense, not ever) defeated the Purdue Boilermakers.
So yeah, NU and Ohio State could still win the Big Ten. Hell, as an NU grad, I'll take a trip to a bowl game. How about a bowl win in the Motor City Bowl or Gallery Furniture Bowl??
Sure, Michigan won, but at least they took down Penn State in a heartbreaker. Sure, USC won, but at least that game against Notre Dame was exciting as hell.
Oh, yeah, and the Bengals came back to win against the Titans. In Tennessee. The Bengals are 5-1. Crazy times.
2) If you're into the sports minutia, as I am, you might want to check out my buddy Rick Porter's new web blog at this site:
http://nbabillions.blogspot.com.
Over the course of the NBA season, Rick will be tracking scrub bball players who log a "billion" in the box score, meaning that they play one minute of a game and have no other stats (points, fouls, assists, you get the picture). Back in college, Rick had a wall of shame of sorts, where he hung Hoops basketball cards of as many scrub players as he could find. Now, in the new century, he's creating a new cyber-wall of NBA mediocrity.
Ought to be fun stuff.
