Play Poker Online at Full Tilt Poker Learn, Chat, and Play with the Pros at the fastest growing Online Poker Room.
Get the best $600 full tilt bonus for Full Tilt Poker when you sign up on the biggest online poker room accepting players from the US, FullTiltPoker.com.
If NASCAR wants to attract the more casual fan, it has to give them a sense of drama, and the way to do that is to compact the action, not have it drawn out over four hours and 500 miles.
Everybody wants things shorter and faster…gotta go go go get going. This Bonkowski guy should just have his wife Tivo the race while he’s out doing whatever the hell is so damn important, if he’s all worried about how long they are. How he can’t see drama in the 500-milers is a mystery. Maybe it’s a casual sense of drama, kinda ginned up and frothy, that’s missing. That’s it — NASCAR needs to be more like American Idol, or Pick A Briefcase, Stupid.
Piss on the casual fan, anyway. Does the race scene need ‘em?
Authorities on Friday confirmed that the deadly toxin ricin was found in a motel room most recently occupied by a man who has been in critical condition with breathing problems at a hospital for more than two weeks.
Las Vegas police said there was no apparent link to terrorist activity, and no indication of any spread of the deadly substance beyond the several vials of powder found in a plastic bag in the man’s room on Thursday. But what the ricin was doing there remained a mystery.
Nothing to see here, move along, chop-chop. Just a guy with a few vials of ricin. Got it all under control. Hit Las Vegas? Why would anyone think of terrorizing the sleepy town of Las Vegas? Nobody ever goes there anyway.
You’ll note that, in the story, there is a studious effort to avoid any - ANY - kind of identification of the sick guy with several vials of ricin in a plastic bag in a cheap-ass motel room. Muy mysterioso.
In an industry-defining move, Sprint (NYSE:S) today announced it will launch a domestic unlimited pricing plan that gives customers unlimited voice, data, text, e-mail, Web-surfing, Sprint TV(SM), Sprint Music, GPS Navigation, Direct Connect(R) and Group Connect(R) for $99.99 a month. The new pricing plan is available to existing and new customers beginning tomorrow.
I was just checking Verizon for different plans that revolve around that all-you-can-eat idea, and the same thing over there is another $50 ($40 if you don’t use a smart-phone and are willing to wander through Verizon’s dumb and numbing web apps.) Now, though, I just might have to change.
Unless I can talk Verizon down. I really do like their network most of the time. Almost all of the time.
Amen, brother, amen. I purely hate to see Omar gone. I was just thinking, when Omar walked into that store, that if Omar didn’t make it out of this season alive, it would be at the deadly hand of some shorty trying to make his bones, and he would never see it coming. Then, kaboom! It was kind of weird for me there for a couple of seconds.
I’ve got a strange relationship with The Wire. I watched it mostly off and occasionally on over the years, but I never really got into the whole thing. Too tangled up, too many plot lines, too many characters, the same problem with any five-year long serial for a newbie. But Pete was insistent, so I downloaded all the first four seasons, and watched them over the course of four weeks. It is, unquestionably, brilliant. I do, unquestionably, feel sorry for the dude who writes it. I have to wonder if there is even a single ray of happiness that has penetrated his soul. But like Cormac McCarthy, another world-renowned nihilist, I think the answer is Yes, and Simon’s just showing off. But my only point is, Damn that’s some dark shit. I think I would recommend that you take a little time to soak up all five seasons at a reasonable pace after this one’s over.
And I’m not sure that I’ll ever watch it again, but if I do, it’ll be from start to finish. It really is that well-done and deserves that level of attention.
Jebus, the utter garbage that shows up in my inbox:
Speaking of the candidates, we expect a flurry of Twitter updates
during tonight’s debate between Clinton and Obama — both of whom
have Twitter accounts.
Like either of those megalomaniacs don’t have an intern typing crap in for them.
This is one of those things that happen to a society that is quite a long way from that Heirarchy of Needs deal…these fooking fools think fookiing morons need to be informed that Celebrities Feel Pain, Also. Too bad there’s no way to measure how many morons actually might actually feel informed by this…development. Cute girl in the pic tho:
Like some dude said today or yesterday, the cops are here to document and solve crimes. When they can, they will, indeed, prevent them. There ain’t enough, though, to prevent them all, and we really don’t want enough. Or I don’t.
…mainly because they inevitably over-reach. Today, I drove to Victoria, TX for a day-long meeting. When I left home at 7:30 am, all the way down the gas prices were 2.99 per gallon for your basic unleaded. On the way back, at 4pm, the gas prices were 3.09 for your basic unleaded.
Now, what could have possibly happened in that intervening 8 hours? Terrorist attack? Death of a major global leader? Steve Jobs announced his retirement from Apple? Well, sorry but pretty much nothing happened. Just someone saying the gas prices might should go up.
I like to think that I’m sensitive to market movements and how they work (dang, am I sensitive these days), but there is simply no way in hell that some jackass Harvard professor gets quoted in the International Herald Tribune and a franchisee in Smiley, TX gets the long pole out to change the price on the tall sign. You can read all the chicken entrails you want in the producer price level, of all goods all across America, going up 1%, and there’s no way in hell that the Smiley Valero gets 3% more per gallon of unleaded the same damn day.
No, that’s what’s called “softening up the dummies” for the big jump come Spring Break. Don’t like it? Tell the little darlings you’re staying home and playing Monopoly this year.* Me, I gotta drive to draw a wage, and you do, too, probably. What you don’t have to do is drive across the state because the kids are off school for a week. Give ‘em a book. Better yet, give ‘em a library card.
* And you and your slow ass will not be in my way when I drive. I have become a horrible leadfoot as I age. I can’t stand not doing 80 or 90 when the freeway’s clear. I thought I’d be one of those right-lane geezers, but no, I’m Richard Petty at Daytona, and it’s kinda surprising. I think I think I’m running out of time.
Something about converting fundies to Democrats. I didn’t read it, just liked the book cover. I’m sure it’s more of the much bally-hooed “framing” chatter with a different name.
Whatever. I guess if you’re a fundamentalist Democrat and you feel the need to convert, then Yay!, you now have a certified-by-Salon guide. If you’re not a fundamentalist AND you’re a Democrat, you’ll probably get your nose poked in.
As Tom also says, “Even the Supreme Court can largely agree on what the Constitution means every once in awhile. Thank God and may He continue to bless This Here Republic.” Hear, hear, and let’s have more of that.
I’m trying to build a dual-boot server box for R&D. It happens to have an Intel DG33TL motherboard in it, thanks to a decision I made a few months ago. The Ubuntu 6.06 and 7.10 releases won’t do dick if you use the i386 release…the machine just sits there like a bump on a log So, I had to use an AMD64 release. That, in turn, does not support my partner’s server & client software. This means I have a nice purty tricked-out server sitting here, with a 300GB HDD partitioned all to hell and back, that’s only barely able to run Windows XP with a lot of hackish trickery. Thanks, Intel. It looks like I’ll have to run all that partner stuff on an ancient, slow-as-molasses Celeron laptop. Hopefully, though, I’ll be able to get a development environment up and running on it, though.
I’m also dorking around with embeddedLinux. That’s some fun stuff there, boys, let me tell you. Building images, flashing memory, editing with vi, downloading packages, running everything over a null modem cable using minicom. At some point, I will have to integrate a non-integrated set of software, and as a former mainframe systems programmer who did all of his work in System 370 assembler for heavy lifting or REXX for short-life fooling-around stuff, I just can’t wait to bang my head into the brick wall of C and object-oriented programming. I mean, I can read html & PHP, at least. C, and all of it’s derivatives, is like trying to read Russian. My eyes cross, and I get an intensely sharp pain in my brain. At least there are plenty of explanations online that I can read. Makes for a lot of sitting and concentrating, though, something I’ve lost the ability to do in the last 17 years.
All of this for a thin-as-a-hair Next Next Tiny Bidness scheme cooked up in two weeks of intense, um, refocusing. And it’s been raining in California all weekend, so there’s no racing going on, and I therefore have no chance to go vegetate and flush my buffers clear my mind in front of hot rods turning left.
For those of you reading this with no idea what the hell I’m talking about, this is the reason I need two pots of coffee, a pack of Marlboros and a sixer of cold beer just about every day. I don’t understand most of it, either.
Twenty-eight years ago? Yeesh. I vaguely recall getting up real early to watch this game, and the gold medal game. One of them, anyway. Tears in my eyes, too, at each one. Even as a salty young buck, that kind of thing was completely thrilling.
I highly recommend that dumb Kurt Russell movie, too. “…the rest of your fucking lives.” That’s a quote that’ll stick with you for a long time.
Yes, another No Country For Old Men post, borrowing heavily, nay, completely from Mike Whybark:
All three films share with No Country (as well as the majority of all the other films by the team) a deeply misanthropic view of the world, which endears them mightily to me. However, all three present a traditional resolution to their events even as the films clearly present a disturbing and amoral outcome of the plots they convey. In No Country, the assassin’s unexpected wreck fills the role of the moral resolution, even as it remains ambiguous. Tommy Lee Jones’ retiring sheriff sits at his table and recounts a dream of his father leading the way to the underworld over a mountain pass, and the string of killings remains unresolved by the lawman, who has come to feel that he cannot bring justice to a world he believes he cannot understand.
Of course, the sheriff’s loss of faith is tragic precisely because we are shown that he does grasp the task he faces, even as he fails to protect his charges. He just doesn’t realize that he sees the pieces to the puzzle even as he tells others about them. In particular, when he muses out loud, distractedly, about the cattle hammer, we can see that his mind has assembled the parts of a puzzle we know he’s been thinking about, yet he never proceeds to an ‘aha!’ moment.
That pins down, with words, a lot of what I feel about both the book and the movie, and are too dumb to type.
So, anyway, I hope it makes more Oscars than that There’s Gonna Be Some Blood movie, just so I can do a fanboy dance for old Cormac, even if none of you internet bastards get what I’m going on about.
Gordon had announced his switch from Ford to Dodge, along with a new partnership with Gillett Evernham Motorsports, five days earlier and inadvertently had used a Dodge Charger nose that had been submitted to NASCAR but had not yet been approved. Before qualifying for the Daytona 500 on Feb. 10, Gordon replaced the part with an approved Dodge Avenger nose.
“This was an innocent mistake made by someone not even on my team,” Gordon said in the statement. “They accidentally supplied us the new Dodge noses that NASCAR hasn’t yet approved because of what amounted to a clerical error. It was discovered during technical inspection and corrected before the race. It was not even close to being an intent to create some competitive advantage, and the mistake was not even made by my team.”
One of the enjoyable things about Sunday’s race was seeing Gordon finish in the Top Ten. It makes no sense to me that NASCAR would sock him and his team with this level of penalty, for what is essentially a paint job change, that never even made it onto the track and had zero effect on the outcome of either qualifying or the actual race itself. I don’t do conspiracy theories, but it really makes you wonder about NASCAR’s intentions here.
