Month: April 2005

Jayme has a stalker. Not that I don’t like his chances, but….

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The NFL Draft, that is. Calm down, all you readers who are male and between the ages of 18 and whatever the upper age is!

Next week brings the most significant event in the National Football League in the offseason (the period between the Super Bowl and the opening of training camps). This event is, of course, the annual College Draft, when NFL teams pick their players of the future from the ranks of colleges throughout the US. For the football junkie, Draft Day is the main event of April (except for Easter, most of the time).

Anyway, here’s a good guide to what each team is looking for in this year’s Draft. The Buffalo Bills currently do not have a pick in the first round, having traded this year’s first-rounder to Dallas so they could grab quarterback-of-the-future J.P. Losman last year. I never had a problem with this: only a Super Bowl appearance, frankly, could have kept Drew Bledsoe around after last year, and I figured that if the Bills were going to get a QB of the future at some point, better to do it while Bledsoe was still around so the new guy could ride the bench and learn the NFL game a bit before getting the starting job. Of course, Losman would be better off if he hadn’t broken his leg in last year’s training camp, which kept him totally off the field until mid-season, but at least he’s been around a year. The Bills won’t be breaking in a complete rookie.

In my opinion, they have to draft for the offensive line this year. I’d like to see them take at least two OL’s by the time the fourth round is over. O-line is the one area that the Bills have not significantly upgraded in years (with the exception of drafting Mike Williams fourth overall four years ago, and he has yet to really live up to his potential, although he started showing real signs of doing just that last year). They need a shot of talent up there.

The Bills are also rumored to be still considering trading running back Travis Henry to Arizona for OL L.J. Shelton, thus filling a need for both teams, but Bills GM Tom Donahoe apparently still thinks he can get some kind of draft pick for Henry, an often-injury plagued back who lost his starting job a year ago to Willis McGahee. We’ll see. I don’t really see the Bills moving up in the Draft, unless they trade another future pick, which I would hate to see them do. Mortgaging the future is always dangerous.

Anyway, go Bills.

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Never have I been so glad to click through a headline on a news item and see that the story in question happened nowhere near my hometown:

Man Passes Driving Test on 272nd Attempt

Relax, folks. Unless you live in South Korea. And that’s just the written test. He hasn’t tried the road test yet!

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I sometimes worry that when I finally join the ranks of published writers, my work will (a) suck and (b) that, while in the process of sucking, my work will be read by Warren Ellis, who will then proceed to describe my work with a simile like this:

[Insert work here] is like ironing the farts out of a dozen pairs of old trousers, sucking them into a bottle and then trying to sell it as a new perfume. This is such an arse-burgling zombie horror of a thing that I don’t even want you to steal it.

What’s he actually talking about? Find out here.

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Darth Swank and family apparently made an unfortunate discover the other night: his oldest daughter’s pet goldfish died in a fishtank-related accident. (Really. It involved some kind of intake pipe or something.) His poor kid, who is five (the same age as The Daughter), was obviously quite traumatized by this. Losing a first pet is never easy.

We haven’t lost any pets since we had two cats die within four months of each other, two years ago, when The Daughter was just three, and she didn’t really know what was going on at the time. She did experience something of the sort a month or so ago, when she went to the Grandparents’ house to spend the night and learned that their oldest cat, a calico that managed to chug along for twenty years, had passed. That calico was a very friendly animal and had slept with The Daughter on her last couple of overnights to the Grandparents, so she was very sad to learn of the calico’s passing. But it wasn’t nearly as traumatic as if either of our own cats was to pass on.

It actually hasn’t been a very good few weeks for pets in Blogistan. David Trowbridge and Wil Wheaton both had to bid farewell to long-lived, and long-loved, cats. As well-written as both tributes are, I have no doubt whatsoever that both Dave and Wil would trade a thousand finely-honed blog posts for their cats back, in the prime of their lives.

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I’ll try to do this once in a while — link some good stuff by the Local Folk.

:: I hope things are OK with Jen, who has gone very minimalistic. (At least she has a white background now, though — the black one was really making me worry.)

:: Arkitrave confronts a minimalistic painting, and comes away baffled. I think I would too, judging by the picture.

:: Craig went walking about town, and has some pictures. He has some interesting thoughts on that necessary evil of urban settings: parking garages. I’m always reminded of Toronto, where many if not all of the parking garages not only feature retail at street level, but also don’t even look like parking garages. You don’t really encounter those giant, gray concrete tombs that suck the life out of a city block.

:: Balgar admires Andrea Dworkin. I, myself, don’t know the first thing about Andrea Dworkin except that she is now dead.

:: Mark is incredulous at the amount of sheer ineptitude on display by the Erie County Comptroller, with said incredulousness being intensified by the fact that had a few hundred votes changed hands, the Comptroller who seems to be professing ignorance of the budget process every time she’s in front of a microphone these days would now be representing us in Congress. (I wonder if, when she finally conceded defeat, if her thinking was along the lines of, “Dammit, now I’ll still be Comptroller when they find out what a bad one I’ve been.”)

:: “Fix Buffalo” documents a Buffalo building’s slow decay. Well, he’ll never lack for posting material in these parts….

:: Craig of Buffalog has an interesting post on the NRA logo. (Not that NRA, though. Which one? Click through.)

:: BuffaloPundit is still on his week-long hiatus, ten days after it began. Harumph.

:: Erin ate sushi, and then she had a job interview. Talk about packing lots of adventure into one week! (I like sushi, even though I haven’t had much of it and I’ve never been to an actual sushi bar.)

:: The Goober Queen points out a web-thingie where you can make your own Egyptian cartouche. Gotta try this later.

:: The Grey Bird, before. And the Grey Bird, after. Wow. Not a bad new look, even if I do disagree with the idea that long hair is mainly a thing for the young. (And if anyone’s wondering if I have any plans to follow suit: NO!)

:: Julia calls it the “Concert of the Year”. What is it? Go find out. I’m not sure I’d call it the concert of the year, but that does sound like a fun one.

:: A Slightly Mad Housewife recently started posting again.

:: Bill Altreuter went to hear Bob Dylan, and then takes the the Buffalo News‘s rock critic to task for panning the show. I’m not the biggest Dylan fan, but this sounds like another good show. (When it comes to live music, I’m really very inexperienced. I haven’t even been to hear the Buffalo Philharmonic in an absurdly long time.)

:: Prince Ali posts one of those heart-warming parables that show up in e-mail from time to time. I hadn’t seen this one before, though. (And I have to admit that the “demented writer” part of me got to the point where the gold box is noticed missing, and my imagination started going elsewhere….)

:: Jennifer has some thoughts about grocery stores, including the nail in my heart that she won’t shop at The Store because it’s too far from her house. Fair enough, I guess…but geez…that playroom makes it worth the eight-mile drive, wouldn’t it? And aren’t those eight miles just down Transit Road? Come on! Come over to the Good Side of the Force! At least we’re not owned by a Dutch conglomerate with accounting troubles! You know you want to! (We’re going to squash Martin’s like a bug, I tell you.)

That’s all for this week….

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I used to be a subscriber to TIME Magazine, but I let it lapse a couple of years ago when I couldn’t afford it anymore. I’ve occasionally considered resubscribing, since I generally liked it, but I should probably wait a bit. I don’t want to risk getting this issue in the mail. I try to avoid keeping noxious substances in my home, which is why I do not currently have any ammonia, hydrochloric acid, or photographs of Ann Coulter in the apartment. You can’t be too safe. Gotta think of the children.

And besides, I’m once again noting that the lunatics of the Right get to be on the cover of TIME, host nationally-syndicated radio shows, and hold posts like, say, Majority Leader of either house of the United States Congress, whereas the lunatics of the Left make the occasional documentary movie or hold such lofty posts as literature prof at some college in Colorado and only become household names when the “MSM” (itself the most laughable concept since phlogiston) obeys its corporate masters and starts parroting the talking points handed down from the RNC.

(Link via Craig of the North Coast, who owes me some money for the giant hole that TIME cover burned in my retinas.)

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If you pay any attention to baseball, or even cast a lazy eye on the sports part of the local newscast, you probably saw the footage of the latest “incident” involving a fan in the stands and a player, this time at Boston’s Fenway Park, when a fan reached for a ball that was in play while Yankees outfielder Gary Sheffield attempted to field it. (Video of the incident is available at the link.) The fan might have taken a swipe at Sheffield; Sheffield swung at the guy, and then returned to the business at hand of fielding the ball. The whole incident took less than ten seconds to unfold, and yet, it’s been the topic of just about every baseball discussion I’ve seen lately, which strikes me as odd, since the incident doesn’t strike me as that big a deal. It’s certainly nowhere near that ugly brawl that erupted at an NBA game last fall. This writer agrees.

What I actually found funniest about the whole thing was this: if you watch the video, look not at the fan scuffling with Sheffield, but the one standing a row back and to the left of the incident — this person is wearing a light brown jacket and a hooded sweatshirt. This guy’s reaction cracks me up: first he’s excited that a play is unfolding just inches away, then he visibly goes “WHOOAAA!” when he sees Sheffield swing at the player, and then he starts clapping in giddy glee that an obvious SportsCenter moment has just happened, again, inches away. I just know the guy sprinted home to fire up the VCR so he could tape himself and show it to his buddies. “Hey, Fred-o, watch ESPN tonight! I’m on it!”

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Nefarious Neddie winds up a post about how good Battlestar Galactica is (which I, being a rabbit-ears only TV viewer, cannot watch until it comes to DVD) with a shot at un-named people who like American Idol. I can only assume he’s taking a vague potshot at me, the little devil.

But so be it: I am an unrepentent American Idol fan, even if this season’s failue to see the increasingly nauseating Scott Savol survive from week to week. (That guy doesn’t even have the “incredibly nice guy” vibe that John Stevens had last year when he survived way longer than he should have — Scott Savol is just plain annoying, and his singing is Godawful.)

Never fear, though, dear Readers: I won’t be writing much about AI in this space. I’m confining my own debate-slash-bitching on all-things-Idol to this thread on the FSM boards. And I’m excited to learn that Michele of A Small Victory has a side-blog devoted to AI, Idol Tongues.

So, go, Bo Bice!

(Constantine’s OK, but I’m tired of that “let me smolder a bit while the camera lingers on me” thing he does.)

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Michelle has a post about something I’ve never heard of before, something which she says she likes a lot. It’s called a “Moleskine”. Having never heard of that before, I did a bit of research.

And wouldn’t you know it. Now I gotta have one myself. It will be mine — oh yes, it will be mine.

Sigh.

(Although I think that Michelle needs to ditch the mass-produced Uni-Ball pen and get herself a fountain pen. Fountain pens are wondrous objects.)

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