Sunday notes

I know some of you out there have wondered where my Sunday messages have been.  Well, I have some pretty stiff criteria on what to post on this subject.  First, It needs to be based on something I had to learn.  Second, it has to be something that I am taking to heart.  Third it has to have the proper period of digestion.  Lately, I have either struggled to have myself in the right mind-set, or haven't been led by something compelling enough, or haven't been compelled enough.  Today, I heard a strong, compelling pair of sermons- but digestion is still working on them.  In other words, if I am to give you the lesson I learn, two things must happen- I must learn, and I must be able to tellit in a beneficial way.  On the bright side, you all aren't paying me for insight, so no one's getting short-changed.

This morning, I read an excellent blog post on Surviving Boys about what it means to be an independant voter.  I'd like to make two observations before you check it out, though.  First, though Juli and I sometimes disagree on the candidates' "level of morality", we are pretty much in agreement on everything else, and I thought she did an excellent job on this piece.  Second, I guess I hadn't really given much thought to the "levels" of being an independant voter.  For example, with rare occasions of exception (many of which I came to regret), I have generally voted Republican.  But being independant for me has always meant that, while voting one way, I had the freedom to vote the other on occasion without the broccoli gods smiting me for "betraying the party line".  I believe that the other end of the spectrum for me are those who claim independant status because of an axe they wish to grind, whether they are a minority party adherant (say a communist, libertarian, or neo-nazi) who claim independance to deride all parties, or the system, or what have you.  Juli clearly shows what it means to be an honest-to-gosh independant- one who does her own thinking, weighs what is said on her experience of what has been done, and votes her conscience.  Okay, no go read her post, I promise you won't be missing anything.

Okay, in the meantime I thought I would bring up that the battle between myself and KC over who picks college football the best goes on. This week, he picked 46 winners to my 43 to win his first week out of four.  So far this year, I've picked 206 winners for a 74.37%, and he has 203 for a 73.29 %.

In other news, as we speak I am keeping one eye on the text summary of the ongoing game between Lokomotiv and Dinamo Riga.  Friday was out last game and we managed to snap a two game losing streak with a 4-2 win over Moscow Spartak.  They took the early 1-0 lead in front of 9,000 screaming Yaroslavlians, but Alexei Kalyuzhny tied it with under 15 ticks to go in the first period, his 3rd of the season.  We went on to score 4 straight times, all but one of them in scrambles out front like the first one.  Mikelis Redlihis got #2 6 1/2 minutes into the second; Yegor Yakolev, a member of last years' VHL team, got his first at the game's halfway point; and Yegor Averin tallied his 3rd on a breakaway 4 minutes into the final stanza.  Spartak got a goal late in the third, but came no closer.

Todays game has been a tight affair, and as I write is just now going to OT tied at 1-1.  Andris Dzerins scored at the halfway point to put the Lithuanian visitors on top, but Stefan Kronwall bagged his third at the 7:04 mark of the third to tie things up.  Despite a seven-shot advantage in the third, that's all we got.

While we're waiting for OT to get going, here's a new pick of Mr. Woody Pecker.

Geez, I used to be neat and entertaining; now, I'm just halftime entertainment.  What an upside-down world!

I guess while we're waiting I could mention that NHL star Alex Ovechkin scored his first goal of the year with Dynamo Moscow in a 3-1 loss to SKA St. Petersburg.  Another NHLer, Ilya Kovalchuk had an assist for SKA in the win.  Also, I see Martin Thornberg, a Swede in his second season with Torpedo after 12 years with HV71 in Sweden's elitserien, scored three times in a 10:04 stretch of the second in the ongoing game between Torpedo and Spartak. Wow!  In the meantime, the 5 minite OT is finished with no scoring, so we go to the shoot-out.  Our first two shooters are stopped, so are theirs.  Jamie Johnson, a Canuck who spent last year with Grand Rapids of the AHL, scored for Riga on their third try; Niklas Hagman ties it back up with a score for us. Our goalie, Vitaly Kolesnik, stops their fourth shooter.  And then Emil Galimov, one of last year's stars, beats Maris Jucers for the Lokomotiv win!  It's only the second game he's gotten into, and he was hot late, with two of our four OT shots to go with his game-ender.  That puts us at 3 regulation wins, two shootout wins, and 2 losses.  Next up is Tuesday against Donbass, who just got a score from would-be Philly Fyler Ruslan Fedetenko to beat Spartak in a shootout.

Monday morning, you sure look fine..

And last night’s title bout- 5 inches of snow vs a severe thunderstorm at 2:20 AM with somewhere between .33 and .89 inches of rain-



-and it’s thunderstorm by decision!



Here, somebody made you a snowman, Alisa!  He seems to have had a rough night…


The view from Scrappy’s Landing.  It was weird to listen to the ice cracking from the melting, the current, and stuff dropping from the trees.

Now there are three ways we use to cross the feeder to get on the greenway trail- the bridges at the Plex; our little crossing at the stream; and the wooden bridge down from the landing.  The little crossing was full enough of water that I had to find a dryer place to jump across, but the wooden bridge (which can float away in times of flood) was pretty secure.

The view from the wooden footbridge.

It would have taken probably 3 times the snow to melt to put that one in trouble.

Meanwhile, they continue to work on the bridge over the St. Joe in order to put in the path beneath it that will link the greenway to Shoaff Park…


Hopefully they’ll have it done before the erosion at the river bend knocks out the trail.

Two days ago, the 9 AM temp was 10.5.  Today it was 47.  Welcome to Indiana.

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Some other notes- in nosing around the hockey world, I saw that Austria’s EBHL had finished the regular season and went on to stage 2- where the top 6 teams do a round robin to determine playoff seeding, and the bottom five do likewise, with two teams getting the last two playoff spots and the last one getting relegated.  Black Wings Linz won the season title, and my VSV Villacher team is in the “other five”.  I’ll deal with this a bit more when I do my next hockey update.

Also, I brought up the other day the Israeli league, which I don’t regularly follow as the quality of club hockey at McMillan Ice Arena here in Ft. Wayne is better.  But I brought it up because they used to have the one team that might be worse than AHL’s China Dragon.  That team used to be Bat-Yam 2; Now it is in the city of Holon, where they are known as (I can’t make this stuff up) the Jet Turtles.
They are the ones who got beat 19-0 on opening day.  That game was apparently 5-0 after 2 periods, but then they put in their backup goalie (one Yoav {Knuckles} Friedman, who apparently tried out once for Ontario of the ECHL, with predictable results)   and he managed to give up 14.  One commenter on International Hockey Forums mentioned that there was a video available, but it mainly focused on the goaltender.  To which another commenter rightly noted that when he gives up 14 goals in a 20-minute period, there’s not a whole lot of opportunity to look elsewhere.  Holon has gone on to lose their next 2 games 12-0 and 13-0, and even China Dragon has played a couple of relatively close games.

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Finally, a note about JoePa.  I thought about doing a full blown tribute here, but talked myself out of it.  Not because of that pervert Sandusky, but because of the tales of his dictatorial rule over the university that have come out since.  Mind you, you can’t touch as many lives for the positive as he did without having something good within you.  But apparently you had to be a member of the football “family” to rate that treatment.  So, as is true for all of us, in between those who want to put him up for sainthood and those who wish he’d lived long enough to do jail time, the truth lies.  I still am uncomfortable about how the university treated him at the end; but what you sow, that shall you also reap.  And before you know it, the crop’s all in.  Something to think about before your combine gets fired up.

Memorial Day for Jim Tressell.

Anyone who knows me knows that today's announcement of Jim Tressel's resignation at Ohio State is a cause for celebration.  That said, I would like to sidestep gloating for irony.  What makes a man like Tressel wait until Memorial Day to do something he should have done a long time ago, if not at least two weeks ago?  Is he suggesting subtly that he has died for the cause, a martyr to a system out of control?

That would be accurate in a sense, if a laugh.

The system he lost his job protecting is the same one Pete Carroll was smart enough to jump off of just before the torpedo hit at USC.  It is a system of money and the power derived thereof- that same system that made OSU prez Gene Smith look down his nose at Boise State and Utah, et al.  We are richer than you, more powerful than you.  That not only makes us better, but  more deserving.

This is a system founded on TV contracts, bolstered by the monstrosity that is the BCS (who is not only besmirching the teams but the bowls themselves- look at the punishment and near expulsion that they handed the Fiesta Bowl for participating in a system THEY encourage), and built around the elite of the college football world- the Texases, Alabamas, USCs and Ohio States.

I found it amusing moments ago to read in a Texas alumni site called the Burnt Orange Review where the writer excoriates Tressel for not resigning earlier, for the constant stream of lies and disavowals that led him to today's action.  He also goes on to blast ESPN for constantly feeding us investigative lollipops instead of tracking down evildoers like Tressel and OSU.  I wonder how he would feel if ESPN woke up from the disingenuous lethargy he describes and turned their sights on the Longhorns.  For the reason I found the article amusing is that it is his own Longhorns that manipulated the PAC-10 into taking Colorado off his hands, got Nebraska to agree to a self-imposed exile from the Big-12, all in the name of coercing the powers that be into giving U of T football a network of their very own.  This was all very legal, and all very much a part of that same system.  I'd like to know how many "Buckeye discount" type arrangements are going on in Austin.  The university slogan "What happens here changes the world"  is a good ad for their institution.. It is also a symbol of the arrogance these programs operate with- an arrogance shared by Ohio State.

Did Tressel share that arrogance?  Well, he did give himself a 5-game suspension over the incident.  Why wait for actual authorities to rule on the case, right?  Except that what he probably regarded as less-than-full disclosure the rest of the world defines as lying.  So, in an attempt to secure his own opinion of his actions, perhaps, he hired two weeks ago the former chairman of the NCAA's Committee on Infractions, Gene Marsh, to be his lawyer.  Any body want to bet that Gene studied the case for two weeks and said, "You're dead, Jim." (Sorry, I've been watching Star Trek all day.)  And that that is why he has had a change of mind (the day he hired Marsh, CBSSports.com ran an article titled, "Jim Tressel won't be resigning").  Which would also be amusing except that CBSSports.com has been op-ed-ing itself out of relevancy for some time now.

The one bright light on the opinion horizon was ESPN college analyst and OSU alum Mark May, who I just got done watching as he said Tressel should have resigned "months ago" and that with the extent of the revelations coming out even as we speak, Gene Smith will likely be next.

Good.  Smith's arrogance, unlike Tressel's, is not a matter of debate.  I've a feeling that when it's all said and done, Smith will bow out to avoid criminal complicity, let alone NCAA sanctions.  But when the sun comes up the next day, Ohio State, Texas, USC will still be there.  The BCS, the TV sports networks will still be there.  And the system will install another disciple- likely a more subtle one than Gene Smith- and the system will go on.  Ohio State will still sneer at her weaker brethren, Texas will continue to manipulate things until it creates the Big 12 that earns them the maximum profit, and the NCAA under the wings of its wonderful head Miles (Yeah, I fired Bobby Knight) Brand will continue to ensure us that the education of the student-athlete is the #1 priority.

Saturday Junk update

Item #1: Woodbridge sent out another letter; this one gave us a description of perp and event. Male black (surprise!), 5'6" to 5'10" and thin, wearing black trench coat w/ white piping and baggy pants (surprise again!). Scum approaches woman as she unloads her van, smashes her head into driver's seat as he grabs for purse in passenger seat. she struggles and he hits her on the noggin with she believes a gun. The gun described a a black semi-automatic. May be wearing either a fur lined hood or a stocking cap. Hopefully with all the attention he's meriting, he'll either move on to other hunting grounds or slip up and get caught. I'd like to see him hiding in a trash dumpster Monday morning and get picked up by Serv-all. Beats having him get shot by FWPD and listening to his pastor and relation crying about what a good boy he was and how evil the cops are. Y'ever wonder why we have stereotypes? Because certain types of people do the same stupid $#!t over and over.

Item#2: When my LaCrosse technologies weather station died after a mere 6 months on the job (in good weather), I replaced it with a $10 temp and humidity station from Accu-rite / Chaney. This week it also went the way of all flesh. I e-mailed Chaney about the problem, not expecting much based on my experience with LaCrosse. I've already wrote how the LaCrosse answer to every problem was "change the batteries", that if you persisted, they told you to send the ENTIRE UNIT back to them, and for your bother they'd tack on a $50 fee just to look at the $100 unit. And, I wrote about how I wrote to LaCrosse, Wal-Mart (where it was purchased), and the Weather Channel (who sponsor it) and told all involved it was a POS and so was LaCrosse's customer service. TWC was obviously too uninvolved to reply, Wal-Mart as usual was too big to care, and LaCrosse replied as always, "change the batteries."

Flash forward to today. Chaney asked me one question and sent one reply. the question: when did you buy the unit. The reply: your new unit will be coming by FedEx in 7-10 days. Is there anyone out there from LaCrosse technologies? THIS IS WHAT CUSTOMER SERVICE IS ABOUT!!! Of course, after reading the reviews for my unit on Amazon.com, I'd guess if they had any real customer service, they'd be out o' bidness in a matter of weeks. They make a great unit in theory that does not function well in practice. It does not bear up well in any weather (an odd quality in a weather station) and changing the batteries is a lot like doing the hokey-pokey without the music. Congrats to Chaney Instruments for standing behind their stuff!

Item #3: Watching the East West shrine game. You Wisconsin fans, Tolzien blew chunks today. You're lucky he didn't play like this against TCU, you'd have bee humillerated.

Item #4: Indiana Workforce Development just sent Laurie and I each a form asking for info that they already have in our profiles and our weekly filings from last week. They needed to have this info that they already had within the next 7 days. And just to make their point that they REALLY need this info that they already had, they sent EACH of us TWO of the same letters with the same forms with the same date! To sum up, that's four letters sent out to collect info that they could have gotten in a few seconds of pushing keys. But, as long as they're doing it efficiently, I guess.