Back in the Groove

Happy New Year to everyone.
Any News Year's resolutions for you?
I do make them every year although they are more goal oriented.
Last year I did not reach my goals though and it was a bit distressing. My particular issue was that I set a particular financial goal but didn't even focus on all of the moving parts that would ultimately have made it possible to reach it.

So this year the overall goal is the same but the focus is taking care of the details.
There are a lot of things into which I get my hands and if you pass through my world at all you will hear about a lot of things, some old and some new. Please just keep in mind that anything that I do all has a final purpose. It might look like I am crazy and scattered but I just have an ultimate goal and will do whatever it takes to get there and reach it, that is legal and doesn't hurt anyone.

Some people will do whatever it takes to succeed including illegal, immoral and unethical things to get there. It can sometimes be frustrating watching those people in action and then to see the damage that all of those actions causes. But I do think that, in the end, they get what they deserve.

Take, for example, the recent MLB Hall of Fame selections, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Johns Smoltz and Craig Biggio.

Craig Biggio

John Smoltz

Randy Johnson

Pedro Martinez

These four guys had great success during the steroid era of baseball.
Now, on the surface, one might wonder how the heck Craig Biggio's star shined so brightly beyond the fact that he amassed over 3000 hits, usually one of those numbers that people reach that end of earning such a selection.
Other offensive players during his time included Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, Mark McGwire and Juan Gonzalez. All had much better numbers and/or exciting careers, but all have been linked to steroid use and cheating at succeeding.
For the pitchers, the other three had to face one of the most successful pitchers of the era in Roger Clemens, a 7-time Cy Young award winner who won over 300 games and had over 4000 strikeouts; again, normally a 100% lock for HoF induction. BUT...he cheated too. So...NO SOUP FOR YOU CLEMENS...and Bonds, and Sosa, and McGwire and Palmeiro.

I was watching pieces of Cocaine Cowboys the other day and took particular note to a building boom in Miami in the 80's; most of it financed by blood money. Most of those connected to it either in jail or dead or cracked out in some alley somewhere.

So while the lure of financial success can be great and, I admit it is for me because I simply don't want to work anymore; I just want to retire in peace and travel like most everyone else I know does, I will never resort to cheating, in any way, to get there.

I had to watch the Golden Globes last night and since I had to I made the best of it. One of the shows I watch and recommend is The Affair on Showtime. Don't laugh, it's awesome, and it won a GG for best show in one of the categories and best actress in Ruth Wilson, who gets naked a lot in the show.

Another show I recommend is on Cinemax called Banshee. It's in its third season now and there is much hotness, nakedness, and blood on there with some good plot twists to keep it exciting.

 Of course, its that time of the year for The Bachelor, the best sit-com on TV next to The Big Bang Theory. It's a game show for me where I show off a very useless talent picking out the final four winners after watching the very first show with amazing success. For those interested this year will feature Whitney, Kaitlyn, Jade and Becca as the Final Four. Whitney will be the winner. Yes...Whitney with the horrible voice.

Kaitlyn

Whitney

Jade

Becca

That's it. I know, its been about 9 months since I posed in here. There will be more this year; its part of my focus.

Done

Insanity

Misao Okawa, a Japanese woman, just celebrated her 116^th birthday. She credits her old age to eating a lot of sushi and getting proper amounts of sleep. 

Many people would consider Misao blessed with such longevity. These pictures are exactly why living to 116 is simultaneously a curse. I’m having a hard time getting dates now at 52. I can’t imagine the horror of trying to get one 54 years from now, unless some Fountain of Youth miracle makes its way into our lives. 

Who would want to have sex with her except someone who is 130 or 140? And is it even remotely possible, if someone that old was around, that Misao would want to give it up to a 130 year old and whatever he might look like?

Since the Tonight Show has changed hands and Jay Leno has been booted out in favor of Jimmy Fallon, I have clicked back and forth between the four or five late-night shows in the last couple of weeks. (Fallon, Letterman, Kimmel, O’Brien, and even Arsenio Hall.)

Why anyone gave Arsenio Hall a show again is beyond me. He sucked in his old one but I guess all around he is a nice guy.

Jimmy Kimmel was the least funny of the duo that rose to some cult fame as co-host of The Man Show. Adam Corolla is much funnier and should have gotten that slot. But the Kimmel show is still decent.

Conan O’Brien had the Tonight Show for a while and I always liked him and still do.

The clear mystery now is David Letterman. Man, it’s time for him to get put out to pasture. He looks horrible, hasn’t been funny or relevant for at least ten years, and his audience is forced into laughing at jokes he still thinks he is delivering with the vigor and effectiveness of his younger days.

I would rather see Misao Okawa do his monologue every night now. Then the show would make much more sense. 

Baseball players are back in Spring Training and pre-season games have already begun. Even as big of a fan as I am of baseball, I just can’t seem to get into it. I know that there are personal reasons that have nothing to do with baseball that are the cause of it. That makes me pretty sad. But once the season starts and I can start playing Fantasy Baseball again, I’ll be more enthused. 

Speaking of Fantasy Baseball, the best baseball game out there is from Strat-O-Matic. I’ve been a fan of the SoM games since before I was ten years old and I sent $5 cash in an envelope to that company to make a purchase. They dutifully, and honestly, sent my board game to me and I had my face in that game for a lot of time. The computer version isn’t one that you might think it is. It’s not a graphically driven game. Its more for fans of stats of the game and baseball is the best game for sports stats lovers like me. They even have fantasy leagues with players all over the country, and world I guess too, that make use of players from seasons since the start of baseball. Fascinating stuff for those inclined to dig that sort of thing, like me.

Finally the weight that I gained over the course of the last 4 months of 2013 when I was in a short-term relationship is gone. The gym has been my friend the last couple of weeks along with the fact that I referee basketball games and had a chance to do a lot of running around doing that this season. 

Couldn't care less about the Oscars so that means I'm...

Done

Shut the Pie Hole

The Sochi Games are now over and, quite frankly, they were pretty dull for me. There was perhaps two break-out stars of the event for the USA, Mikaela Schiffrin, the 18-year old skier and TJ Oshie from the St. Louis Blues and the US Hockey team.

At least Schiffrin won a gold, but it wasn’t Oshie’s fault that his team didn’t win any particularly with his inspiring effort in the shootout against the Russians.

I suppose if we take some of the newer X-Games type events there was more to celebrate. We did sweep the podium in one event, but the French even did that in one of them too, so that took a bit of the excitement away from that. 

 

We stunk in speed skating, short track, figure skating, curling, hockey and basically anything that had ice involved with it. We couldn’t jump, run or shoot on skis either (Biathlon, Cross Country.)

But for some odd reason we found enough people to sit on, or in, a sled and go downhill pretty fast. Gee…what an athletic set of accomplishments there.

Our ski team did do rather well with Schiffrin and Ted Ligety taking home gold medals. In an event where competitors only get two chances to head down a hill for about a total of two minutes, that is quite notable.

But how did we end up in 4^th place overall in the medal count? I think, given the fact that we really only placed that high because of the newer events that were contested were included, this was an overall performance similar to the days when it was an upset any time one of our athletes took home a medal. Our team clearly took a step back this time around with the most disturbing performances coming at speed skating.

We didn’t even hit the podium ONE time in speed skating. Twelve events overall and not even one bronze. 

However, we weren’t the only nation with problems on the speed skating oval. The Netherlands brought in a team that dominated in a way never seen before. They took home 23 medals in that event with 8 golds of the 12 awarded. The next closest teams were Russian and Poland with three and only 4 other teams even picked up at least one medal. Even Canada only had 2 medals in that event. 

The Dutch had 7 medals total in 2010 and we had 4. 

So kudos to the Dutch for that performance. Now we need to send some spy drones over there to see what they did and figure out how to do that for our country in South Korea in 4 years.

How the hell, by the way, did South Korea, that well-known winter wonderland, get an Olympic Games winter bid? I still can’t figure out how Sochi did. It’s not even close to a place where anyone would think of to go for winter fun besides the fact that there are the Caucus Mountains in the background. 

Sochi is one of the warmest places in Russia.
Naturally a place for Winter Games

I watched a bit of the Costas interview with Nancy Kerrigan last night. Overall the subject didn’t interest me but during the parts that I watched I was impressed with Kerrigan’s take on the whole matter of how she was attacked 20 years ago by Tonya Harding’s boyfriend, Jeff Galooley, or whatever his name was.
Kerrigan was graceful, thoughtful and forgiving and much more so than anyone would have given her a right to have been. There was no lingering animosity or resentment and I thought it quite admirable. 

That Costas though…again this week he launched into a political rant about Russia and their past. I think that given the fact he opened up that can of worms he was in a no-win situation. He was vilified for not talking about the violent communist “past” (ahem, ahem) so he went ahead and did it.

But as I mentioned here earlier, he never should have started talking about politics at all. It’s a sports production where athletes from all over the world come to compete in games not debate politics.

Regardless of where someone stands on present or past-day Russia and Vladimir Putin, it was just RUDE to go into Russia and bash it. I don’t care if Putin hates gays or anything else of the sort; for two weeks that has to get put aside because the world was the guests in that country. 

That’s like getting invited to a holiday party and bad mouthing anything that your host has done in the past or is doing in the future; if you accept the invitation, you go and keep your pie hole shut and be as gracious of a guest as you can be in the circumstances. 

That’s it for now.