Thursday Night Football and the Olympics

I sit here watching the Galaxy play Chivas USA, and I smile as Donavan gets a good feed and sinks a goal. I've just started watching soccer, or as the world calls it football, this year and I really like it. The players seem to have a pride in their sport that you see when you watch college football (pigskin). I like the Galaxy but choose the Red Bull in a attempt to drum up some rivalry at work. I still don't have the rules down yet, like when a goally can touch the ball with his hands. Thats another story. Galaxy is storming the goal in the first 15 minutes. No manager, he got fired. No GM, he got fired. This is the best I've seen them play this year.

Sunday night I watched along with the rest of the world via tape delay the US Mens Relay 4 X 100 team tear France a new one. Shut them up and I love shutting cockiness down. Sometimes having self assurance is one thing but France or Bernard accepted the gold metal before the race. I will have to give France respect though. Being a dumb redneck that the only thing I know about swimming is chasing down water skis after being so drunk I couldn't ski, I and millions of Americans were insulted to hear Bernard's brash statement, but after hearing the announcers give France the goal before the race I had to humble myself. Then Jason Lezak just overtook Bernard. Anyway, sorry to go on about stuff that the world already knows. Alain Bernard redeemed himself later in the men's 100-meter freestyle. Lezak won the bronze.

NBC's Olympic coverage would get an 'A' if I lived back east, but since I live on the left coast, they get a 'D'. Since when does California not rate getting life coverage of the Olympics. NBC sucks for that alone. Network TV sucks in California anyway. If they had it together they would start their tape delayed 'Prime Time' at 7:00 instead of 8:00.

Time Warner got it together here in the desert by adding USA to their HD lineup. Olympic coverage is on up to 6 HD channels now. The Friday night opening ceremony was unreal. Who cares if the footprints were fake. I'm not a pro at picking out CG stuff like that, but anybody could tell that was fake. Fireworks are boring on TV anyway. The Millie Vanillie part sucked though. I guess China felt the world had to see a pretty little girl would be the only way Euro/Americans would watch and shafted a little bucktoothed girl from being on TV. Whoever made that decision should spend the rest of their working life manning a gun station in the freezing pacific someplace. That little girl could sing!

Enough rambling for tonight.

Afternote. The Galaxy came back in stoppage time and tied the game at 2-2. Beckham is awesome. It's not that he outplays everybody but it is that he does everything so effortlessly.

Megyn Kelly, Big Tobacco and Strange

I was just ready a blog I like, The War on Big Tobacco, where BT makes a comment about Megyn Kelly. I have no idea who this is, I'm not a news person. So I googled her. She's a Fox news talent that is a beauty queen. Probably anybody but me would already know that. I go to images to check her out, and use my PicLens for the pictures. There's a bunch of screencaps of her loaded on the wonderful world of the web and one of the screencaps has a title "Charges dropped against IL mom who left child in car for 3 min." How cruel of my mother. She did that to me once a week, if not more. Really, how is a kid supposed to learn about a car if he's not left alone at an A&P while his mom shopped for groceries. I learned that if you pressed lightly on the brakes and pushed the flashers in a little that the radio would come on. Probably didn't work on many cars other than a 69 Ford Galaxy 500 but it worked.

I live in the desert now and you can't do that, even if it's winter. And how could you lock a kid in the car with manual windows. Now it's all power windows. Life is strange. Life changes. Strange changes.

Nothing Can Be Said

Bernie Mac
born Bernard Jeffrey McCullough
10/5/57 ~ 8/9/08
IMDB
Wikipedia

Husband, Father and entertainer

Lewis Grizzard & Damn Yankees

I've discovered as of late that I'm not much of a writer. I can put words together, but it's as if my brain has a tongue of it's own, just begging to be tripped over. I have no imagination, yet I yearn to be a writer half that of Lewis Grizzard. Grizzard, in my opinion, was one of the greatest writers of wit and humor there ever was. I would like to compare him to Will Rogers. A southern Samuel Clemmens.

When Grizzard died, a piece of Americana died that can never be replaced. If Lewis were alive today, he would be read more than anyone. Period. Lewis died over 14 years ago of heart disease leaving behind a wife of less than 2 years (just guessing from memory) three ex-wifes, countless empty bottles of booze. I can't remember his drink of choice, but I don't think he was much of a beer drinker. He also left behind a true love of the south. He didn't care much for what the south was changing to, but he had a love of the old south. Not the "blacks in the back of the bus" south, but things like peanuts in coke bottles, southern cooking and Georgia football. Heck, just the glass coke bottles.

He wrote books like "Shoot Low Boys - They're Riding Shetland Ponies" & "Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself". My favorite title was "Don't Bend Over In the Garden, Granny - You Know Them Taters Got Eyes". I don't remember a whole lot about his works and I did refer to Wikipedia for reference. I do remember reading a handful of books when I lived in Northern California. The last book he wrote, you could tell that he was writing his last. You could feel it in his words. Here is a guy that was a golfer. He loved his bourbon. He loved his strippers. I think he thought it was joke that he could make a living writing and living the way he lived.

What he did was make me happy and sad at the same time. His writing made me homesick. Yet when I read his books I was home. He could put me back in a small room in Alabama, sitting at the feet of my father watching Porter Wagner and Dolly Parton. He would take me back to catching lightning bugs and putting them in jars. Anyway, I digress. I said I yearn to be half the writer Lewis Grizzard was. He had millions of readers, I have one. Me. I

If a Yankee is a northerner and a Rebel is a southerner. If a DAMN Yankee is a northerner living in the south then was Lewis Grizzard a damn Rebel?

Professional Landscapers, Womp Rats & the Goat Man

Spring has sprung, fall has fell. Summers here and it's hot as hell.

You'd think after 20+ years in the desert a person would be used to the heat. Wind comes in and it's like a forced air heater blowing in your face. Moods are never good. People in a hurry like there's no tomorrow. People tailgate when you're in the slow lane.

Then there's the lawnmower races. With a speed limit of 50 in one of the most expensive towns in the country, gardeners, no Professional Landscapers drive side by side at pit road speed at Bristol. Side by side they go. If there was a God, he would give us proton torpedoes just for days like this.

"I used to bullseye womp rats in my T16 back home. They're not much bigger than gas cap on that John Deere." Vigor Skywalker would proclaim.

"It's a trap!" proclaims General Ackbar from the backseat. God I hate backseat Generals!

Real life spits in my face as I get caught at a red light behind another trailer. I can't even turn right on red because the lawn mower handles are sticking out too far.

Now my mind wanders again, to when I was 6 in the south when the Goat Man would take his goats down the highway. Now that was a sight. An old wagon, pulled by goats, surrounded by a herd of goats, led by an old man that resembled Professor Dumbledore, (how the heck does the spell checker get Wimbledon from Dumbledore?) Maybe the Professional Landscapers should sell postcards. The Goat Man sold postcards. The light finally changes to green and with me being third in line, I barely make the light before it changes red. I don't wanna run this light, they've got the camera up, just waiting to send you a $300 ticket, probably better than any Christmas cards I get with the family picture.

After hitting the next red light, I figure that while idling in my ol jalopy has probably cost me over $1.00 in petro. I zip onto the next band leader street and 5 minutes later I pull into work. Naturally there's already 3 Professional Landscapers trucks in the lot, taking 9 of 11 parking spaces. Hey, Professional Landscapers need free ice just like the next guy.