Merry Christmas to all.

Merry Christmas to all but I have to tell you it's a lot more merry, and exhausting, when one has a three-year old. We had a super hero Christmas, super hero sheets, toys, adventures, and trailers to upcoming movies. Jackie P is definitely down for Thor next summer, let the record reflect that the first word which my son can spell and "read" on sight is THOR.

Exhausting again, but the most fun I have had for the holidays in a long time. We adopted a child for Christmas buying them a slate of toys and we rolled over the Kiva money to new budding entrepreneurs. We went crazy on the boy and spent very modestly on ourselves. My parents got my a gift card to Wal-mart and I was delighted to get about 20 MP3 that I could update my music collections and download to my computer.

So many things for which to be thankful

World Wide Wednesday

Go somewhere exotic this Thanksgiving.

http://www.indiarail.co.uk/index.htm

Five greatest basketball players of all time?

The ever entertaining Charles Barkley had this to say about the top five of all time. Let the record reflect that Charles was a pretty damn good player, and an entertaining analyst in his own right, and he freely admits on national television that fans basically know nothing. So I give him credit for that and the courage to say that.

And for the record as an idiot fan myself I do not have Kobe in the top five players of all time. Basketball is deceptively funny in comparing players. To the casual observer they all seem to be doing the same thing, catch, pass, shoot, what else is there really? But to compare a center to a point guard, or even a point guard to a shooting guard does a horrible injustice to both. A nice starting point might be who did comparatively better at their position during their era than any one else in history.

1. Michael Jordan-In a game that's all about points he scored more per game than any one in history. Jordan also won six titles and arguably left to on the table while trying to hit a curve ball.

2. Wilt Chamberlain-Second all time to Michael in points per game he played in an era where they were harder to come by (at least for everyone else). Wilt also averaged 22.9 rebounds per game (first all time). A big man's job is to grab rebounds and score points, and there you have it.

3. Magic Johnson-god love you Larry, but Magic was better. The best per game assist man was also a quality rebounder and scorer. Incredibly versatile Magic was also the undeniable leader of one of the greatest dynasties in basketball history.

4. Oscar Robertson-Blah, blah, blah averaged a triple double over an entire season blah, blah, blah.

5. Kareem Abdul-Jabar-Not quite Wilt, but along with Bill Russell easily the best three big men in history.

6-10. Not as easy to sort out but I feel like John Stockton as a pure passer needs to be included here, Bill Russell as a big man, Larry Bird for outside prowess and leader of a great team, Jerry West top five in steals and points per game and I gotta' tell you I am saving a spot here for LeBron. The trouble with Kobe is that he is basically a pure scorer so it's hard to argue he is in the top five players of all-time when he is 11th all-time in points per game behind both Dwayne Wade and LeBron.

On infrequent blogulations

Can a photo album serve as one's primary news source? Are you tired of looking at a map of the world as a background? Should I get my sports news from anyone other than ESPN or Yahoo? Does anyone other than me care?

I have used the best of the web directory (just Google "Best of the Web") to locate a couple of neat new toys. I am actually going to see how informed I can be using 10x10 as a news source and I am interested in how well informed Yard Barker is on sports.

Fishing Retrospective

Fifty days fishing, 29 fish caught, one three-pounder, one broken fishing pole, and one purchased kayak. All and all a pretty enjoyable first fishing season. It has been a refreshing experience because everything is so new to me. Learning to tie knots, then learning to tie better knots as the first ones broke. Trying new spots and styles, a slow retrieve versus fast, etc. Needless to say I am probably hooked for life, and quite frankly I really don't mind that I am not all that good at the sport. It's tranquil and fishing gives me a chance to unwind mentally from all of the other challenges that life presents.

Vacation

The only disheartening thing about vacation is that I sometimes end up spending half of it worried that it's almost over. It isn't even that I don't like my job, I have worked very hard to get to the seat I have, unfortunately, all things being equal work is still work and I kind of enjoy not working. I guess that's why they call it vacation.

Fall Foliage in New Hampshire

Thousand Word Thursday from this website http://rajeshprabhu.net/blog/?p=144

Fox News?

So what did I do to deserve an appearance on Fox news? In the last year I have appeared on Fox News (once) more often than I have watched it. Apparently, amid the latest hullabaloo over whether Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton are destined to switch seats for the 2012 election the network showed an old clip from Biden's speech in Nashua when I introduced him. I show up at screen right at about 1:02 and cough. If your curious about my thoughts on Hillary I clap a little too softly on Biden's comments that she's qualified and laugh a little too loudly at the notion that the one-term celebrity senator is more qualified than Biden. I wonder if I can sue for using my image without permission? If Joe Biden reads this blog he would know, as a former constitutional law professor.

On edit: I am aware it is not World Wide Wednesday, I just thought that the Fox News thing was too funny to wait three days.

Day 17 on No Cable Island

So we have made it to day 17 of no cable without any real signs of mental breakdown. We did sign up for the Netflix 1-at-a-time unlimited plan with unlimited online viewing ($9.95 per month). This gives us a decent stream of online TV and movie content and we still appreciate a savings of $110 per month. I still miss my sports a little but I am adjusting to the concept of listening to games on streaming radio and watching GameCast style content online. All in all we are watching less TV as there is a lot less to loss but we are spending more time together as a family and being a little more selective in what we watch. I for one was someone who put the TV on by default and next thing you know six hours of my life is gone.

As an aside I have basically been sick for two weeks so going to bed a little earlier sans TV has probably helped a little. Right now I am typing this obviously but I am listening to Air Force football free online and I have Yahoo's GameChannel on so I can check up on the stats.

Things I missed while fiddling with my Netflix

So the trouble with NASCAR isn't that the sport is unexciting. The trouble is that the the excitement is spread out over three days of pageantry and buildup followed by four to six hours of somewhat redundant racing. For the love of god, shorten the races. I know the advertisers pay the bills but would you rather pay for six hours worth of ads on an event no one watches or three hours worth of ads with a nice consistent Nielson rating. As a matter of fact here's three tips to improve your sport;

shorten the races, I swear I've turned off races after five hours, who watches anything for five hours.

single elimination chase (12 in the first race, 11 in the second, etc. down to three drives in the chase for the final race),and finally

work on your scheduling in two ways: start all of the races at two times (Saturday night at 8 or Sunday afternoon at 3). Everyone in the English speaking world knows when NFL games are on. The second way that you can fix your scheduling is to dust off the wipers and rain tires, I'll bet the ratings were just fine for that race in Montreal a couple of years back. Racing at 70 instead of 170 is still racing. Does anyone ever watch the race on Monday afternoon?

But whatever you do make sure you let guys keep doing idiotic stuff like this, it's funny and it's ratings gold.

Reasons to fish

Reasons to fish, you know, other than catching fish, which I rarely actually do.

Who needs cable?

So chalk up one point for who needs cable with the website Hulu.com. All the content you crave? No, but a lot of content and free.

In the heat of college football season and no TV!

So we didn't really ask the boy but my wife and I agreed to give up cable. We had a package that included about 6 million channels, our house phone, and digital internet through our local cable company. Very luxurious, hi-def, VS Sports, Speed Channel, our bill was also about $175 per month. When recently looking for ways to save many we came up with the radical (and possibly communist) idea of getting rid of cable. While I am slightly concerned that by eliminating cable I will miss the opportunity to see the latest products to purchase and I will be letting down the economy by eliminating the house phone and cable we will save about $120 per month ($1,440 per year).

So the gentlemen came on Wednesday and removed the box and frankly I didn't really miss TV until Saturday. I am a huge college football fan. I improvised but it isn't quite the same. Both Yahoo and ESPN have game center type features where you can find live scoring and updates (I am sure there are many others as well) and with a little effort there are many free radio stations available on the internet. I discovered googling team name, football, radio was pretty effective. I tried several different teams and was able to get a free live radio feed on all. Nebraska made me sign up for something (also free but tedious) but again I googled "Nebraska football radio" and spent about ten minutes signing up and I was in. I also discovered that Nebraska has an all online MBA program, but calculus is a prerequisite. Seriously, where are all these business people using calculus? I must be really low on the food chain because the subject is never even mentioned at my level. I am actually more intrigued with this which I also found last night.

A sloppy 17-3 win over South Dakota State ensued. In making our decision I really thought about it and half the time I don't really watch the games anyway, I mostly listen and half pay attention anyway. For $120 a month I'll improvise.

Five movies where you got more than you paid for.

So after dogging Tom Cruise for the movie Legend it got me reading and ultimately I was thinking about the film Born on the Fourth of July. Which leads me to this week’s Motion Picture Monday. Sometimes you really do get more than you paid for.

Born on the Fourth of July. The gut wrenching autobiographical tale of Ron Kovic tears at your heart on several levels, perhaps more so for veterans who understand that not all conflict is overseas.

The Perfect Storm. Really, how much acting did you expect from a movie starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, an actor whose biggest claim to fame is not something I’ll explain here (you can look it up)? This movie got the most out of everyone involved and tells the mesmerizing yet deeply personal story of commercial fishing in New England.

Rocky. Nominated for ten Academy Awards and winner for Best Picture, 1976 call it a dumb sports movie if you want to. Rocky is a quintessential tale of determination and perseverance, if you ever feel like an underdog watch this film.

Good Will Hunting. I’m partial to New England, I am amazed by people who can do complex math, and I have a soft spot in my heart for janitors who accomplish something (it’s a long story but the two people who read this will understand).

The Great Outdoors. I could make a list of fifty great comedies that came from the 80’s. Is it me or were movies funnier then? John Candy, Dan Akroyd and irreverent raccoons are a combination I could watch a thousand times, where’s a sequel when you need one?

Family Friday

So not a lot of posts lately but I have four days left of school so I keep thinking in theory I will have more free time then. In a "circle of life" sort of way the boy also started preschool last week. He seems to be doing quite well with it, I got him playing some pre-school games in early August to ease the trepidation and that seemed to help a little. On the down side he seems to have developed a completely random stuttering problem in the last two weeks and my wife and I can't completely decide if it's an act or some sort of bizarre developmental snag, bear in mind he spoke perfectly clearly two weeks ago?

We have also developed our first legitimate mutual interest, sorry Little Einsteins, it was always an act for me. The boy and I both really get a kick out of comic books, so last night we read digital comic books online for a couple of hours. He's really starting to turn into quite an entertaining little boy.

Gotta love Tecmo Bowl highlights

On Leaving Iraq

Sticking with a bad idea may be a great way to demonstrate perseverance however it does not ultimately make the bad idea a good idea. Seven year, hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands permanently affected, and the last American combat troops have finally left Iraq (not necessarily the two gentlemen at left, but I suppose it's possible).

You can argue the "making America safer" argument until you are blue in the face. Frankly the other seven reasons for invading Iraq were essentially lies or misguided at best so I guess you have to go with that one. Iraq was always the wrong war. There was never a valid reason to be there and if Obama accomplishes nothing in the next two years and you hate everything he has done in the last two years he has earned another vote from me.

For some of us, many of us these days, war is not an abstract concept that you debate over drinks, or read about on the news. War is Specialist Anderson nearly losing an arm and being medivac'ed out of theater in the middle of the night. War is the fiery Lieutenant Stovall simply not showing up in your office any more after he was killed by a roadside bomb. War is pointing a weapon at teenagers not knowing if their kids or terrorists. War is the thousands of soldiers who had to come home and work through their problems with the help of professionals and loving families and worse the thousands of soldiers who came home with problems but don't have loving families or access to professional help. There may have been a time for war, but it is most definitely time for peace.

He'll always be little to me

Rrrrrrrrr!!

Family-friendly fun, free, pirates, hours of online entertainment...how could you go wrong? Addictive, somewhat mindless, major waste of time, and possible detrimental to you marriage...you know for starters. Then of course there is the stigma of admitting to playing video games when you are a grown adult in a management position.

I could never really get into the MMO scene (that is massive multi-player online). Frankly, I'm not that social in real life I don't have a lot of interest in being social in the land of make-believe. I will admit to having (and yes using) a PlayStation 2. When I get a little downtime, every six months or so, I do still like to pop in a sports game and run it up on the Yankees or Ohio State. There are just some teams I will always love to hate. Anyway, for World Wide Wednesday I thought I would provide a link to Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean which offers a free mode and a naturally more elaborate pay for play mode. And for the record, in my video game world USC never goes on sanctions.

Five movies where you didn’t get what you paid for

When movie price are like $47 per ticket you expect to be entertained. Action movies ought to blow up every damned thing in Los Angeles (or New York, whatever) comedies should make you laugh until you pee your pants. In that light I give you five movies that really didn’t give you what you wanted.

Simon Birch. If your movie poster even mentions Jim Carrey then your movie ought to at least be a little funny. I used to go to the movies a lot when I was stationed in Virginia and the movie poster said Jim Carrey, and we wanted a comedy. Little did we know that this depressing melodrama centered on a dwarf 12 year-old whose family and pastor hate him and then he drowns. Seriously.

Legend. Even the biggest stars have duds. Legend starring Tom Cruise as Jack o’ the Green and, here’s a hint, Tim Curry wasn’t even a good movie when I was 9 years old. From Wikipedia, “the Lord of Darkness (Tim Curry) instructs his goblin servant Blix (Alice Playten) to locate the two unicorns that roam in the nearby forest and remove their horns. If the unicorns die and their horns are removed, the Lord of Darkness can ensure that dawn never again breaks, and sunshine never returns.” What?

The Adventures of Pluto Nash. I hate to pile on Eddie Murphy but this movie generally appears on everyone’s list of the worst financial failures ever, possibly because it was one of the worst movies ever. The fact that it was expensive only makes it suck more.

The Singing Detective. So obscure I actually stumbled across it by accident, this movie starred and was produced by Mel Gibson, who by 2003 was a fairly bankable star. But when your protagonist is “suffering from the skin disease psoriasis and a crippling arthritis” (thank you Wiki) you may be headed for trouble even with Katie Holmes, Robert Downey Jr., and Adrien Brody. While spending just $8 million to make this movie is fairly impressive, it becomes a lot less impressive when your film grosses $337,000.

Gigli. This movie had an established big budget star, and a Hollywood sex symbol. With Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, how could you go wrong, so very, very, very wrong? On Rotten Tomatoes.com 152 of 162 people rated it negatively.

Top Ten Running Backs of All-Time, says me.

So any top ten lists are going to inherently include the bias of the author. As it relates to running backs are you a power guy, or a speed guy? Short burst of brilliance or do you reward longevity? Where do you put guys like Jim Thorpe or Bo Jackson who helped define their era but don’t measure up statistically? In short there are a lot of different ways in which one could go. So I cheated. In a top five list you essentially end up arguing which statistical measure is the most important. In a top ten there is a little more room for deviation from the standard stats.

Yards per game and yards per carry can support your argument for Jim Brown while total yards and touchdowns lend credence to Emmitt Smith. Popular sentiment to the contrary Barry Sanders is third when you look at a broad cross section of rushing statistics, which of course, is where Sanders’ fans jump in with how terrible his team was. So here's my completely unbiased list.

10 Adrian Peterson. Ah potential, every few years some young stud comes in with the potential to rewrite the record book, feed the hungry, and solve the problem of repeatable cold fusion. A glimpse to the future, Peterson is simply the latest, in fairness he is currently fourth all-time in yards per carry and he does have as many rushing titles as Walter Payton (1).

9 Bo Jackson. Perhaps the most talented athlete ever, Bo Jackson is a perfect example of why Mr. Peterson is unlikely to end up at number one. Of a hundred guys who could be in the top ten something usually goes wrong with 90 of them. Amazingly talented in two sports Bo never quite reached his potential when some idiot on the Bengals basically ended two hall of fame careers.

8 Marion Motley. If Peterson is wink to the future, Motley is a nod to the past. Called the Jackie Robinson of football, Motley was also a damned fine running back. One rushing title and the all-time top yards per carry among running backs solidify Motley’s place in history.

7 LaDanian Tomlinson. Easy to lose in the shuffle Tomlinson is second all-time in touchdowns, and also appears in the top eight all-time in yards and yards per game measures of both longevity and talent.

6 Eric Dickerson. Caught between the likes of OJ and Payton who shown brightest before and Emmitt and Barry who came after Dickerson is often left off of top five lists. Dickerson is fifth in yards per game, sixth in yards, and he won four rushing titles in his prime. If you are going to haggle over “the best,” rushing titles demonstrate that you were at least the best during you prime.

5 Walter Payton. Payton is the only back above Dickerson on my list who didn’t win at least four rushing titles (1). A workhorse who mostly played on mediocre teams, Payton is fourth all-time in touchdowns and second in career yards.

4 OJ Simpson. Forget all of the ridiculous drama for a second, OK are you ready…Orenthal James Simpson was a really, really good running back. Perhaps the greatest five-year stretch in NFL history from 1972 through 1976 OJ won an MVP award, was a five time first team all-pro, five time pro bowler, ran for an eye popping 7,699 yards, won four rushing titles, and averaged 5.1 yards every time he ran the ball. OK and he’s a lunatic alleged murderer.

3 Barry Sanders. I say he’s third, write your own damned list and put him at number one. Sanders finished his career second in yards per game and third in yards. Sanders also finished in the top 10 in touchdowns and won four rushing titles running head to head against Emmitt Smith.

2 Emmitt Smith. See above. Every football fan of my generation will debate who was better but the more you look at the numbers of these two the less impressive the numbers of anyone else tend to look. Smith is first all-time in yards, touchdowns, and won four rushing titles. Then why not number one?

1 Jim Brown. Here is where you need to put career statistics aside. Jim Brown played just nine seasons, won eight rushing titles, and never missed a game. Interestingly enough if you project Brown’s 104.3 yards per game over eleven 16-game NFL seasons you would 18,356 yards, one more than Emmitt Smith.

Fishing

World Wide Wednesday

Perfectly normal valedictorian speech until about 1:15 in, then things get a little weird. Credit the young lady for four years of hard work but then you have to scratch your head a little when she lets a puppet give half her speech. God, I love YouTube.

Ten Great Animated Films

So I have been on a little hiatus from the blogulations. The boy, and work, and school can sometimes be a bit overwhelming and frankly the blog finishes a distant fifth to fishing in spite of my lack of fishing prowess (but more on that tomorrow). We are actually all sitting together watching Snow White so I thought for Motion Picture Monday it might be nice to make a list of ten must see (not to be mistaken with top 10) animated films.

1. Remember this one? Cool World featured Kim Basinger and Brad Pitt as some sort of detective in an animated nonsensical world.

2. Snow White was the movie that proved that animation could work in movies. That wacky Walt Disney had to prove it could be done.

3. See also Cool World but Who Framed Roger Rabbit beat the Brad Pitt entry to the punch by four years in the leggy cartoon, animated mayhem, live action, detective drama.

4. Want depressing cartoons? The Secret of NIMH is a real downer about rats subjected to chemical testing, and there’s a sick kid (well mouse kid) and a cinder block house that’s sinking, or something like that.

5. Pinocchio is one of my all-time favorites. Deep, meaningful, without being to preachy and just spooky enough that you can still let your three year-old watch it.

6. Sticking with the Disney theme (hell they invented the genre) Sleeping Beauty is kind of a standard princess fairy tale with one key exception. Maleficent is hands down one of the best villains in cinematic history (animated or otherwise).

7. A generation of boys (including me) grew up waiting for Transformers and GI Joe the movie, not the cheesy big budget remakes but the 80’s cartoon. I’ll give the nod to GI Joe.

8. A beautiful off-beat love story if it had starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and been set in Paris it would have won best picture. Unfortunately Wall-E starred two robots, was set in space and had the misfortune of being animated so it got screwed.

9. Stop-action animation is still animation and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is one of the best. Emblematic of a half dozen great movies you looked forward to every year Rudolph was always my favorite.

10. The photo-negative of Pinocchio, who only wants to be a real boy, is Peter Pan whose entire motivation is to live in a fantasy world and never grow up. Constantly being redone the Disney one is still the best. On the other side of the coin this is one of Disney’s most textbook stereotypical movies with caricatures of Native Americans, disempowered and denigrated women, and frankly it doesn’t do a whole lot for pirates and house pets either.

Little League Baseball

The Sports Calendar in August

So as we close the book on July and say goodbye to France for another year we set our sights on August and one of my favorite events in amateur sports, the regional finals followed by the Little League World Series. The tournament is held annually in Williamsport, Pennsylvania and features 11 and 12 year-olds from around the world in one of the few sports that can truly claim a world champion.

Locally Portsmouth, NH trounced their way through their district tournament, dispatching Laconia along the way. After the districts they went on to win the state tournament to represent New Hampshire in the regional tournament to be held from August 6^th through the 16^th in Bristol, CT. Six of the sixteen tickets to the World Series have been punched (see chart below) and Portsmouth will fight to join the ranks of the world elite. Good competition, good times, and refreshingly, good attitudes rule the day.

Pool A		Pool B
Mid-Atlantic	TBD August 16	New England	TBD August 16
West	TBD August 15	Midwest	TBD August 14
Southeast	TBD August 13	Southwest	TBD August 12
Great Lakes	TBD August 14	Northwest	TBD August 15

Pool C		Pool D
Japan	Edogawa Minami LL	MEA	Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
Caribbean	Manati, Puerto Rico	Latin America	Chitre, Panama
Mexico	Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas	Canada	TBD August 14
Europe	Ramstein AB, Germany	Asia-Pacific	Kaohsiung, Chinese Taipei

Thousand Word Thursday

From National Geographic- Dapper black-and-white razorbills (at right) and bright-beaked puffins (at left and in air, at center) find a haven on the Shiant Islands, just a few miles southeast of Lewis, Scotland. Nearly 8,000 razorbills and more than 200,000 puffins are estimated to use these islands as their breeding grounds each year.

http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/puffin-shiant-islands/

World Wide Wednesday

Wait until PETA here's about this, Pam Anderson is gonna' be pissed...

Fish Stories

So I took the Manolin out twice over the weekend around town and caught zero fish and lost my anchor (don't ask). But I really did enjoy being out in the kayak. There is a water poker run on Squam Lake up in Ashland this weekend. I will probably go up freakishly early so I can fish for a while first. Prizes ironically include a new kayak donated by Dick's Sporting Goods in Concord.

So a customer at work named Chris gave me two rubber worms and a hook and showed me a little better way to rig my lures so I am excited to give that a try this weekend. One last note on fishing for the week I picked up some Berkley Gulp Worms, these are obviously worm shaped but with the odorous liquid that made the minnows so successful for me. So again I am excited for the weekend and it's only Tuesday.

The Kayak

So I have received the mythical pile of Army money for being held a really long time after my contract was supposed to end. As an added bonus the Army took out very little in taxes, most likely because I was in a war zone when I technically "earned" the money making it tax free. Most of the money is earmarked for repairs of one sort or another but Renee agreed that I could get a Kayak. So this is the Kayak that I got on clearance from the Piche's outlet in Belmont and this is basically the rod holder that I installed myself (the trade-off for saving a couple of hundred dollars not buying a fishing kayak).

I took her out this morning from about four a.m. until 7:30 and had a blast. Unfortunately I didn't catch any fish but fun nonetheless. Realizing that a boat without a name cannot possibly catch fish I quickly came home, did some nice errands with the family, bought a small anchor, and did I quick online search for the name I had in mind.

Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is one of the most poignant and timeless fishing tales in American literature. Set in Cuba, the old man, Santiago, hasn't caught a fish in over two months, has trouble remembering to eat, and wouldn't have the money to buy food if he could remember. He is essentially the archetype for the unlucky fisherman. Manolin is the young boy who helps to take care of the old man and brings good luck with the fish...and not a bad name for a little kayak. Just my opinion, but naming her Santiago would be like asking for trouble.

Family Friday

So no major news for our first Family Friday. The boy was very good both yesterday and today. Yesterday we went to the park for awhile and then we went fishing for about an hour. Jackie was very cooperative, he helped carry a few lures and helped me look for fish. Today we had to do some serious power shopping between 6 and 7:30 pm and again the boy was a very good sport. When we finished, as a reward for good behavior, I took the boy to Big Lots and let him pick out a few super hero friends to play with.

He got a real kick out of his little men completely ignoring the pre-existing collection of 700 little men in order to spend quality time showing his new friends around. All in all a nice week. Renee and I also had some nice chats about different future plans which we are considering.

In him I see myself

So the point of Thousand word Thursday is to post a title, a picture, and a link or credit as needed without further explanation. As this is the first Thursday I thought a brief explanation was in order. Some pictures may be of historical significance, I am also partial to National Geographic and their images, and some days like today I may just choose a family photo.

Most people think that the boy looks a lot more like Renee than me which is, of course, true but I love this particular photo because he could be my twin when I was little and we lived on Guam for a while.

I Write Like

For our first installment of World Wide Wednesday I picked a simple little website which I came across "which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers." I write like is a very straight forward website where you copy a sample of your writing and simply paste it into a block, click on the analyze button at the bottom of the page, and presto your work has been compared to a famous and well respected author.

I played around with the website and copied a few different posts. The website is certainly good for one's self esteem because at best I was comically compared to James Joyce and at worst I was compared to Stephen King (who does OK in spite of what critics might suggest). Interestingly enough the website never responded by saying, "your writing is crap, did you ever wonder why your a blogger rather than an author?"

Fish Stories

Last week was a six day work week with two projects for school which is not really all that different from a lot of weeks but just a busy week in general. As it is I was only able to fish once, on Sunday morning, for about three hours. I went back to the Messer Street trestle. There was a nice temperature and an ever so light breeze. The downside with the breeze was that it made light ripples on the water reducing visibility.

I was able to hook another large bass in the three pound neighborhood. I was using a wounded shad pattern, mostly silver with flecks of red which I picked up at Wal-mart for a couple of bucks. I had been losing a lot of fish slipping off the back of my lures so I wanted to buy this particular style with a hook on the back. I tend to do a quick retrieve to avoid a lot of reeds and rocks looking for reaction strikes and I thought this style would help. So anyway, I hooked the bass and he fought well enough that I had to let the drag out a little. With the 20 lb. test line it was probably unnecessary but I'm still pretty new at this. Anyway he tugged hard and brought the line under the bridge. Somehow he was able to rip the lure off the line. Now a customer at the bank that I was telling this story looked at me dubiously at the suggestion that a 3 lb. bass could snap a 20 lb. line. But in reality once we talked about it I realized that I am not tying my lure on correctly and I need to learn a more secure knot. This knot will provide a tremendous amount of strength and doesn't look to complicated to master.

Five Great Military Movies

So my first installment of Motion Picture Monday will have to be a cheapy. I stalled on a weekend paper and as it is due today I had to finish writing it this evening. So just a short review of five great military movies in no particular order.

Gladiator- Let's get this out of the way right now, we weren't the first nation to go to war and we sure as hell won't be the last. I love the battles and Russell Crowe's stoic leadership, a soldier who has been there and understands. Favorite quote, "If you find yourself alone, riding in green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled.For you are in Elysium and you are already dead."

Empire of the Sun- Produced by Steven Spielberg this movie is probably the most elegant war movie ever coupled with a haunting soundtrack featuring a lip-syncing Christian Bale to the Welsh Lullaby Suo Gan. I also love the war imagery, war isn't all about bombs and tanks sometimes it's about riding around a living room on a bicycle and golf shoes that don't quite fit.

Stripes- If I could only watch one movie on a continuous loop until the end of time it would probably be Stripes. Bill Murray, Harold Ramos, and John Candy are like peanut butter, jelly, and powdered sugar.You should go pick it up in the $5 bin at Wal-mart and check out the deleted scenes. "Cuando, cuando, cuando cuuanddooo..."

Red Dawn- Laugh, I don't really care. I grew up at the height of the cold war and when I was a kid and had bad dreams it was of this. The Russians were scary and there was always that little chance no matter how slight that they might not love their children too. Granted I was like eight years old when this movie came out but this is another classic probably found in the $5 bin.

Das Boot- I know you're thinking, "Oh great he's probably got a black beret and will next tell us how much he loves Franz Kafka." But let me tell you, I have like a twelve minute attention span and I was riveted to the director's cut of this movie, which for the record is three and a half hours and entirely in German, seriously.