Category Archives: sports

Olympic basketball

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Once again a quick look through regular blogs and the news didn’t give me much hope for a rant today, yet, I did happen to scrape up something that is not related to current political conditions. As luck would have it, that little gem seemed to be buried under a lot of internet news, not that I visit any international sites so perhaps it was a pretty prominent feature there. Hell, for all I know even FOX news did a feature on the U.S. Men’s Olympic Basketball team dropping the ball, so to speak, on a tradition.

I did mention, after the first U.S. loss in the competition, that I would like to see them lose a bit more. The only reason that I wanted to see that was to prove that collegiate athletes are much better for this type of competition than professional athletes. Every other country is exhibiting something called ‘Team Play’. That is a concept that is pretty much lost on most of your NBA players. Sure, back in the early ’90’s Michael Jordan and the original ‘Dream Team’ was kicking ass all over the world. I don’t recall all of the players that were on the team, but that was in the era where the Stockton/Malone type pick-and-roll was used quite religiously. Not to mention the fact that they were simply out to prove that the term ‘professional’ was appropriate when they were described as such.

The losers players that went to the Olympics this year (please, no angry mails about calling them losers. By defenition, if you lose more games than you win you are a loser), never exhibited anything approaching team play. Beyond that, they have blamed everything from the referees to the ‘weird Olympic court’ for their failures. Dear Random Fluctuations of Time and Space, man, snap out of it! The ‘All about me’ attitude of the top-notch NBA players has made it so that they can not come together as a team, not even once every four years, to show the dominance of the U.S. Basketball team. The humorous ‘but’ about that statement is that a lot of players in the NBA defend their home country now, and seem to do it fabulously. That is, the U.S. is putting up guys who (combined) make more annually than the Gross National Product of a lot of countries, yet they lose to teams that are basically playing for a place to stay while they play. If that nation has a player in the NBA, the player will represent his country, and hand the U.S. their ASS. Funny how a superstar on a team of unheard of people can bring them together, and elevate team play, while five superstars can’t seem to pull their heads out of their collective ass long enough to try to represent their own contry.

Now to the quotes that really made me start to bitch about this tonight. I am not going to link any of them since I have seen them all on multiple news sites.

US coach Larry Brown ripped referees for forcing US center Tim Duncan, a San Antonio teammate of Ginobili, to the bench early for fouling out.
“I’m proud of my team. They played hard under some difficult circumstances. It’s difficult when Duncan is on the bench every game,” Brown said. “I’ve never seen him foul out in 19 minutes in our league.”

Mmm. Hmm. In our league they also allow players to carry the ball for three steps after the last dribble without calling it travelling. They allow Shaquille O’Neal to use his ass as a bulldozer, to push two or three guys out of his way to get to the hoop, which is the only way he can score, and that is not charging. If you have a memorable name, you can get away with murder in the NBA and will rarely be called for fouls. The fact that they call the fouls in the Olympics can only bolster my position on thinking that it is far more suited for collegiate athletes.

“It hurts,” US center Amare Stoudamire said. “Everyone knows we have the youngest team here. We’re going to come back for that gold medal. You can count on it.”

I am not sure if they are, by average, the youngest team there. What I can say is that, hands down, they are the most arrogant team there. Arrogance does not equate to success though, as evidenced by the current U.S. team. Also, if you want to talk about extremes of the Olympic Basketball teams, the U.S. team makes more money than probably the rest of the teams put together (not counting the NBA players who play for their home countries, for pride, you see).

That might not be possible after their golden flop, but the US team was set up for failure when a dozen top stars rejected Olympic overtures. Iverson had a message for them – get yourselves into USA uniforms for the 2008 Bejing Games.

Okay, so I am supposed to feel sorry for our team because some of the athletes chose not to attend? I’m sorry, that is not going to happen. How many guys that you played ball with in High School are in the NBA? The Colleges select the top 5 percent of athletes that make it through high school. The NBA then takes the top 2 percent (or so) of athletes that make it through college. Haven’t we weeded out a bit of the riff-raff by that point? The NBA even sends a lot of guys packing every year since they don’t perform well. I bet any random team from any random college could also take out our Olympic team.

“We need to understand that even if we’re not fighting for the gold medal, we still represent our country and fight like it was a gold medal game,” Iverson said. “It’s important to make the people back home proud of us.”

Okay, I guess I lost you at HELLO. Any collegiate team that we could have sent to the Olympics would have brought home the Gold. The lackluster play of a bunch of superstars has tarnished the name of the USA in international play. The U.S. would be better served if you just drove your Porsche to watch the game, played by players who actually give a damn about wins and losses, and, more importantly, about the success of the USA in international competition. I do understand that you need some time off, but come on man, I work 306 days a year…full time…That is working, throwing around boxes that weigh around 80 pounds each. I do it six days a week without a break, save my one-week annual vacation. I can’t even try to feel sorry for you.

The first collection of NBA talent since 1992 not to claim Olympic gold, the Americans fired a dismal 42 percent from the field, closing a US dynasty that produced 12 gold medals and a 109-2 record before Athens.

So that is what you have destroyed. Not only your personal reputation, but the reputation of the USA for the last fifty years. I hope you guys are all sitting pretty, in your million dollar houses, when you realize that you could not beat a college team from Argentina.

Fucking Losers Good game.

Olympic basketball; My friend George

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Well the good news is that I saw George in the store today buying a bottle of Port wine. He was pretty drunk when I saw him, which is good since alcohol may be a depressant, but that seems to be the only way to deal with pain. I will cite my neck injury as proof of this; The ibuprofin didn’t really help, the muscle relaxers didn’t really help, the alcohol made it possible to sleep. That is not to say that the pain killers don’t work, just that they may not work in the same way. It is a known fact that alcohol pretty much numbs your brain, whether the pain killers can do that as effectively is probably based on the person and not some formula. I will say that when I was taking the Flexoril (muscle relaxant) it did make the pain subside, yet, if I actually moved the pain would come back. With alcohol it works acrosss the board. Maybe your head is on fire, you don’t care, you can’t feel it, good stuff, liquor, maybe they should use it more often for medicinal purposes. I know I do, and on a daily basis.

• So I have not been paying any attention to the Olympics this year. You may ask yourself why, but likely you don’t care that I am not following them, since you are not following them either. I must admit, though, that I found it pretty humorous that our basketball team got their ass handed to them. Not unexpected, mind you, just humorous. The USA may have some of the best athletes in the world, but when you think about it they are only the best athletes because the conditions allow it. Why is it that the runners from Kenya seem to win every marathon ever? They spend all of their lives running from damn near everything you can think of. They have certainly earned their place as the fastest nation on the planet. I am sure that they do toil and train to get better, but I am equally as sure that if you were to grab a random guy in Kenya, and a random guy in New York, and make them race 26 miles, the guy from Kenya would certainly win. The guy from New York might not even finish, what with his heart exploding about six miles in…

That was a bit off topic, but still, people who happen to live in the USA always get a hand up when it comes to athletic competitions. Well, I suppose it is possible that the jocks that can’t put a noun and a verb together could possibly make it through an average high school English course, but once they are in college (on scholarship) they are getting a lot of preferential treatment. Free passes on exams and the such, just based on the millions of dollars that a college can make on a T.V. deal if they put a good team on the floor. The colleges do sometimes expose the little leaches, usually when the media gets wind of what’s going on, then the NCAA will go ahead and place sanctions against the team for a couple of years. No one really believes that the corruption is going away, but we take the sanctions as an act to show that cheating is not tolerated…However misguided…

The net result of all of the preferential treatment is that we get some more athletes through college and onto professional sporting fields. The fact that they can not read or write seems to take a backseat to the fact that they CAN run, jump, throw, or just be really big for the sake of being big. Hell, ask probably half of the professional athletes in the USA to define a ‘metaphor’ and they would say that they don’t know what a ‘meta’ is for.

This is the crap These are the people that we send to represent our country in the Olympic games, a bunch of whining babies that were the star of the team back when they were playing high school sports in Alaska, then got babied through college since they were the “next big thing”. Then they end up on profesional teams (now I am talking about basketball exclusively) where they are treated in a different way than the rest of the guys who are on the same ‘team’.

You end up with a ton of over-paid, un-educated fools that think they are better than Jesus. Sure the dunk might look great on a poster, but there has to be someone there to pass you the ball to make the dunk. Since the Olympic team we send over now is comprised of a bunch of guys that already think they are better than Jesus, they never really pass. The U.S. basketball team got their ass handed to them, the most likely reason for that is ego. The U.S. has a team that is made up of a bunch of people expecting the other guys to wipe their ass after they shit. The rest of the world is using teams that play as a ‘TEAM’, and they will hand the U.S. its ass over and over again until the U.S. team realizes that it is not a dunk show, it is a game, the team with the most points when time runs out will be the winner. The U.S. guys need to start asking themselves whether they want to be the winner, or the team with the best ‘poster dunk’.

The only reason that I even mentioned the U.S. basketball at the Olympics was because I saw a quote, from Allen Iverson, of all people, that said;

“They play the game the way it’s supposed to be played,” Iverson said. “It’s not about athletics. That’s the game the way Karl Malone and John Stockton play it. It’s good for kids to see how the game is supposed to be played.”

Okay, so even Iverson understands that they need to play as a team. Why didn’t he mention that prior to the game? My best guess is that it would have required him to pull his head out of his ass. Playing the game in the Olympics is not the same as playing it at home; You have to guard everybody, as these are the best five guys that a nation can put on the floor. Every other nation’s team seems to understand that, yet, our athletes think it is going to be a highlight reel. The USA “Dream Team” has won every overall competition since they started to allow professional athletes, don’t you think that is some sort of hype that everyone has on their blackboard?

I really hope that we fall short of the medal in the basketball competition, I hope that only because it will make the athletes try a bit harder next time around. Sure it may be something to write in your diary when you kick the ass of the highest played player in the world, but how do you feel when you lose to a team that doesn’t get paid at all, and therefore plays for thd love of the game? When you can kick the ass of a team that plays for heart., not money., You will be about equal to where I was in grade school, where our team could take all comers. No one ever made a poster out of it, none of us went on to the NBA, but I will guarantee you that we played better, as a team, than the hacks players that we sent to Athens this year.

Kobe lawsuit

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I am going to start off with the thick of it, if I get to any random thoughts I might post them below. Time will tell.

The news item in question today is Bryant Accuser Sues, Seeks Monetary Damages

I spent a hell of a long time going through my old posts looking for my mention of this case (which is all my fault, since my archives are about four months out of date.) and I did find it. I must say that it kind of tickled my little, tickly parts when I found that it was saying basically the same thing that I thought it had said. I will quote just one paragraph on this update, if you want to see the whole thing I wrote (which was all about Richard Simmons getting sued for slapping a burly Harley salesman), you can read it Here.

The part from this particular rant that I wanted you to see is the following paragraph, indented for ease of view;

The sad truth is that so many of the cases involving celebrities are utter bull-shit that it is hard to pick through them and find the one in a hundred that is real. Take the trial of Kobe Bryant for instance. Did he have sex with that girl, yes. Was it consentual sex? There are only two people in the entire world that know the truth. I personally believe that it was consentual when it happened, then the girl realized that if it was not consentual she would be able to file a civil suit against him and get a boat- load of money. I feel a little bit more strongly about this case (though I am not actively following it) than I do about others because the woman in question turned in the panties that she had been wearing that night, and they had sperm from three separate persons in them. I am not sure if that was allowed to be entered into evidence in the case, also I guess it would be possible to rape a slut, but that really seems to take away from the credibility when she is screaming rape.

That almost seems prophetic, considering this line in the news today that;

The case took a serious turn against the prosecution when the judge in the criminal case ruled last month that the woman’s sexual history just before and hours after she said Bryant raped her could be presented at the trial. The defense’s theory is that she had consensual sex just hours after she said Bryant raped her, which could explain injuries the prosecution said she sustained. The woman has denied the defense claim.

Well, I have only known one woman that was raped ( I mean actually raped, not like a “date-rape”, which is just a bad a crime, but often never spoken of ). The woman, that I personally knew, who was raped didn’t run out and have consensual sex with the next half-a-dozen guys that she saw. Instead, she cried into my arms for a good six hours afterwards, that was when her friends and myself persuaded her to go to the police. There might be a woman out there who is gonna go fuck anything that moves after she has been raped, but that is going to be a tough position to defend.

The girl in this case is going to have to fight a really uphill battle both in the criminal and civil courts. She is going to have to explain how she has the semen from 3 different men in her underwear. Now, I am certainly not a pundit when it comes to court proceedings, but when you have to sift through your own panties to find DNA from the guy that raped you I think your case is pretty feeble. How did the other semen get there? Was it consensual sex with everyone except Kobe? Why did she have sex with a couple of other guys on the way to the police to report rape?

Don’t get me wrong, if he raped her he should be prosecuted. The thing is that the accuser can’t even keep her story straight about the rape, while the accused knows just how it went down.

The most damning piece of evidence in the whole story is this:

Usually, crime victims wait until the end of a criminal trial before suing in civil court, unless the statute of limitations is running out. “That’s not the case here,” attorney and former Denver prosecutor Craig Silverman said.
The civil lawsuit could be used by the defense to buttress an argument that she was only interested in getting money from the multimillionaire basketball player.

That is totally what happened. If you want to sue someone for rape you should keep it in your pants for a day or two on either side of the accusation.

Blue Moon; the Cubs

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Well I had no intention of writing anything today. I decided that in the spirit of getting off my ass “once in a blue moon” I would go ahead and do it even though I really didn’t want to. Speaking of blue moons, I was googling a bit earlier to see if I could find some really great definition of the term; for instance, had I found that the first recorded occurance of what people called a “blue moon” happened to be the second full moon in a month, and there happened to be a catastrophic event (volcanic eruption for instance) that actually blocked the reflection so much that the moon appeared to be a subdued color, possibly blue, through volcanic ash, that would have been something that I could have really understood and expected. Unfortunately, if that information exists on the internet it is not in me to find it. There have been so many songs written with the words “blue moon” in them that a search results in only the top few items for the day followed by a ton of old song lyrics. I would probably take the time to sift through all of the riff-raff to try to find the ultimate answer were I not crutched by a 56k modem. Even at that, when most of the things that I am able to find regarding the “blue moon” are coming from sites like Slashdot, the self-proclaimed “News for Nerds” website, I suppose that I really shouldn’t find it surprising that the discussion over there is about how the blue moon is Not all that rare, considering that they do occur about once every three years, which is about the same as the frequency of sexual encounters for the people who post at Slashdot (autoeroticism and Real Dolls being excluded).

• I have been a pretty faithful Chicago Cubs fan for most of my life. It was not like I really wanted to be a Cubs fan, it was more like it was forced onto me. When I was growing up in Oregon we didn’t have a baseball team, what we did have was a WGN station on our local cable. Any baseball that I watched was always the Cubs against someone else, and the commentary was always leaning towards the Cubs. Hell, it was Harry Caray doing the play-by-play, if you don’t know what he sounded like, or his passion for the Cubs, you simply need to watch any Saturday Night Live show from the last two decades, he (Harry Caray) is likely the most impersonated person who ever lived, except, possibly ELVIS.

I grew up watching the Cubs, and I likely will die with a Cubs jersey in my closet. I do root fot the Diamondbacks now that I am in Arizona, but I don’t seem to have the same passion for the D’backs that I have always had for the Cubs. When Harry Caray died several years ago, I thought it was akin to Blasphome that they were going to have someone else sing the song in the seventh inning stretch. I know that we must move on when someone dies, but come on…That was what Harry Caray did so horribly that none of us will ever forget him. I just googled “ozzy take me out to the ballgame” and got a lot of results for it. You could hear his rendition of that song, even see the video, if you happened to be registered through some of the sites. Of course the registration turn-around time seems to take well over an hour and I don’t have it in me to sign up and then try to follow this train of thought on another day. If you do happen to get the audio of Ozzy singing the song just keep in mind that it is the most realistic cover of Harry’s singing ever. Neither of them seem to know the words, they both seem to be really drunk while singing, they get great crowd response. I think Ozzy really nailed it!

While still on the subject of the Cubs, I guess I should mention that they acquired Nomar Garciaparra today. I don’t really have a solid opinion on Nomar, mostly because he doesn’t play for the Cubs, wait, he does now. I know that the Boston faithful are pretty pissed off at the loss of him, that alone should make me think that he is going to be “the one” to turn the Cubs around…Yet, I can still remember the Cubs trading away all of their good players over the years in the hope to get better hitting, when the hitting was great the pitching sucked. It works vice-versa as well. The Cubs, evidently, haven’t put a really good team on the field since 1907, that is a damn long time. Will the addition of Nomar be enough to push them to the top? NO.

The five year plan for the Cubs, in my mind, runs as such: They currently have pretty solid pitching, but no hitting, so they get a gold-glover who can hit. They finish just out of the wildcard this year. Next year they bolster their hitting with another guy, maybe second base, and still finish just a bit behind. The next year they will trade one of their dominant pitchers for a quality guy to play third base. The following year they finish last in the division, one of the marquee pitchers is injured and gets traded, the aging in/outfield is pretty pissed that the team has all but given up on them, so they don’t really even try. No one really wants to play for the Cubs (the ‘lovable losers’) so they aren’t able to sign their draft picks for a couple of years. Then, in about 2007, they are going to have a few really good pitchers, they will nurse them for a year or two, you know, until they are really good, then they will trade them for aged, has-been position players. This will be the cycle for the next, well, eternity really, for my Cubs if someone doesn’t step in and say NO. Although I do hope that they prove me wrong, I have a bet going that the Cubs will be the first team to ever win the world series exactly 100 years after their last title…That is a bet that you can’t make in most western sports, and I want my damn dollar!

Randy Johnson; Weird search strings

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

There are only a couple of things that are on my mind today, so this will likely be a short one even by my standards. That being said I will get right to it.

• Being an Arizonan, I was just as excited about Randy Johnson’s perfect game as the next guy, even more so in a lot of cases I am sure. Since it was only the 17th perfect game in recorded history it is quite an accomplishment. The fact that Jonhson was able to do it at the age of 40 is mind-boggling. Understanding that he is a major league athlete, and as such will excercise as one, his body can not possibly be in the kind of shape it was ten or twenty years ago. He does deserve all the congratulations that he is getting. Not some two-bit guy like me to criticize it, but I pay for the opportunity to bitch, so bitch I shall.

There are a lot of factors that contribute to pitching a perfect game. First and foremost you need to be a top notch pitcher like, say, Randy Johnson. Second you have to have an umpire that is a bit lenient about the actual strike zone, as a pitch an inch too high/low or too far out/in side could ruin the whole thing. The third thing (in my mind) that has to happen is all on the pitcher, and that is that he has to keep it perfect for three or four innings; if he strikes out 8 over four innings and the other three are routine flyballs and maybe a grounder to first the rest of the guys are going to start to feel the energy. Once those three things have happened it is no longer just about the pitcher, unless he happens to strike out the last fifteen guys, which is unlikely. This is the point where a lot of perfect games become ‘no-hitters’.

Having watched only one perfect game, but seeing many ‘no-hitters’, or perfect until the ninth inning games, I have worked out a theory on how one could pitch the ‘perfect game’.

While a lot of people are rooting for the pitcher, a lot of people are also rooting against him; The perfect game would be lost if you were not a respected pitcher. No one, save the fans of the team, would want to see an unknown rookie throwing a perfect game, you need to have enough respect in the baseball community that the opposing fans are even on board with you achieving this feat.

This one doesn’t carry much weight considering the Current Standings, but you must be playing a team that is not really all that good to begin with. Johnson was facing a team that had 18 strike-outs against the Brewers (of all teams) a day or two before.

Now the aforementioned team energy needs to come into play. Can you imagine what it would feel like to be the guy who bobbled the ball at second that cost someone a perfect game? I can’t, but I also don’t make a ton of money, thus insuring that I will be in the public eye for all of my life. That is why it is up to the pitcher alone to keep it perfect for three or four innings, long enough for the rest of the guys on the team to get it in gear. Keep in mind that the rest of the guys on the team play 162 games a year while the pitcher plays every, what, fourth game? The guys on the field need to realize that it is happening so that they can wake up just long enough to make it happen. If you think that it is akin to blasphomy to say that, you haven’t seen a lot of ball games. Having attended a few of the games myself, I have seen that a lot of the players (outfielders in particular) sometimes seem to forget that they are playing the game at all. One of the players (for the Reds) that was in the outfield actually took off his shoe and was shaking it out while there was someone up to bat.

Now that we have very good pitching, respect from the fans (even opposing fans), and a really bad team to play against, there is still one more thing that needs to be factored in. That one thing is the guy on the other team that is an asshole for the sake of being an asshole. This is not really a concrete term that should be attached to the guy, but I am going to use it whenever possible. The scenario would go thusly:

The opposing pitcher has a perfect game going.

It is the ninth inning.

Your team is down by two runs.

There is no one on base.

There are already two outs.

You bunt to get on base.

I don’t think that the previous scenario has ever happened, but I bet that it will if it hasn’t.

The only thing that I am intending to say here is that it takes a lot more than a good pitcher to pitch a perfect game. All of the players on a team are involved in it. From the catcher that sends the calls to the pitcher, to the lowly outfielder (who is likely bored in a perfect game), the whole team must come together to help the pitcher achieve greatness. I bet that the pitcher knows this as well and likely will buy them all dinner and drinks after the game.

• The other thing that I wanted to mention is the weird strings that have resulted in people looking at my site through Google.

Two people clicked through on “drod roaches”, that one I can kind of understand since the drod website was (is?) still down, and I had mentioned them previously.

I had one click on “emachines 466is cpu upgrade”, of course when I googled that I am right near the top, but I shouldn’t be. I was bitching about my emachines antiquity, then talking about upgrading to a new system. I guess they do have to just go by what is on the page though, as opposed to what you were thinking/writing.

The third Google search really freaks me out. Someone searched for “tomorrow site:shadowtwin.com”. I am pretty sure that the word ‘tomorrow’ is going to be in a lot of my posts. Why would someone search for that particular word on this site? If I said, “tomorrow, goat porn”. Wouldn’t you search my site for goat porn? Or would you think that I had somehow forgotten to describe the goat porn as “goat porn”? I don’t know, that one just seemed a bit weird to me.