(Sir Charles) Barkley

Well, we ended up with a puppy this weekend. He is a lab mix, and was born on June 16th. We found him when we went to the franklin county animal shelter. A gentleman had brought in two pups on that day, and was going to give them to the shelter since he could not afford to take care of them and their mother. He did not want to give them up, but had to. So we couldn't resist taking one in.

Lori named him Barkley. I gave him his full "royal" name of Sir Charles Barkley. Here are some pictures of him:

Batman at 9 months

Batman turned 9 months old on the 25th of August. Here are some photos from that day:

MoveOn.org and North Korea agree

That Bush is like Hitler.

You can still find that Hitler ad on MoveOn site someplace I bet...unless they cleaned up the hole after Drudge reported on it a month or so ago.

Wow MoveOn, you've gotta love it when the North Koreans agree with you!

If I was really playing politics, I'd claim there was an obvious link between MoveOn and the North Koreans.

The Media Fund's Outsourcing Ohio Ad vs. Google

Sounds like that AVP movie doesn't it?

The Media Fund is currently running an ad in Ohio featuring Ohio residents talking about the loss of their white collar jobs to outsourcing. They are all Cleveland area residents, supposedly.

Let's ignore the fact that the ad completely bastardizes the idea of outsourcing and the proper solution to it...making America a more difficult place to do business in will only speed up outsourcing in that whole businesses will move to other countries.

Let's ignore that for a moment and concentrate on the ad...more specifically the people.

My first question was, are these people real, or is the ad like the sleazy lawyer ads that run in every city in the country? You know the ones in black and white, "OOOOOH, them? We're gonna settle?"...where they just change the name of the law firm depending on the market you're in. Kinda like the Trunk Monkey ads that Byers Auto used in Columbus.

So I thought, what would Google tell me? I began to search for these people, and found some entertaining results.

Namely, it seems that they probably do really exist...and that one of them may not have been smart enough at least use a different town. This has nothing to do with my position on the ad. I'm waiting for a dumb GOP based ad to do the same sort of thing so I can search again on those people, to see if they're "real" or memorex.

Enjoy these links:

Louis Russo, Cleveland - Macedonia is practically Cleveland, so this might not be him.
Edward Lucas, Mayfield Heights - Again, there's no Mayfield Heights listing, so it might not be him, but two Cleveland addresses link up pretty close to Mayfield.
Sherease Ranking, Maple Heights - Well here's the worst...two listings in Maple Heights for a Rankin. Even if it's not her, I'm betting someone's related somehow.

Whistling Straights Finally Showed Up

So it took until day 4 of the PGA Championship, but the course everyone was saying was the most difficult course finally showed up.

It was a flat out puppy dog the first day, and didn't get too much tougher for the 2nd and 3rd day. But today, it showed up for the leaders, which is why there is a 3 hole playoff starting now. Not at -12 where Vijay Singh started the day at, but at -8. Vijay Singh shot a 76 and Justin Lenoard shot a 75 to tie with Chris DiMarco who blistered a 71 to get to -8. DiMarco's 71 was amazing considering the conditions.

A total of 14 players managed to go under par, and they all shot up several places as the majority of the field looked at +1 or worse. Paul McGinley shot a 69 and moved from the 30s to 6th.

Those that teed off early had the advantage of better conditions, but the wind that hit the players in the afternoon looked like the type of thing that we were expecting to see from the hype that the course got. I am happy to see it actually show up...even if it was at the very end.

Quakes sold to Club America

So fresh off of the heels of the Chivas ownership setting up an MLS expansion team in LA, it seems that their big rivals are planning to purchase San Jose and move them to Houston or San Antonio.

And my question is...why is anyone surprised?

The Quakes haven't been able to draw flies in their current situation, and apparently can't make headway in pulling in a sizeable fan base. All this when you have a championship team, and you have one of the two "faces" of American soccer in Landon Donovan playing for you.

Now, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that this is a difficult market to play in. Everyone knows the stadium is not a good place to watch soccer, and from my limited knowledge of the area, to folks in the northern bay area and San Francisco, San Jose might as well be on another planet.

I know that they have loyal fans, I know that they've sought a place to play up in the San Francisco area. But as with everything, it comes down to money. And if the Bay area people can come up with a stadium, there's a good chance that AEG will be back in town with an expansion team. It's a market they clearly want to be in as a league. But if they can't make money, then it's not a good place to be in.

So now lets look at Club America getting involved.

There's been a lot of talk about people getting upset that Mexican based clubs are purchasing American clubs and essentially making them farm teams for their clubs. But I'll wait until I see it. At this point, these guys are investors in a single corporation who have asked to run a division in a city. And they need to play by whatever rules exist overall for the corporation. And with a grand total of four investors in MLS, I welcome a fifth and sixth. If anything, the owners meetings will be very entertaining considering that America and Chivas are like the Red Sox and Yankees.

And that will be something to look forward to.

Wolfgang is back, and I missed it...

I suppose it's something to do with getting married, getting older, and just not being able to do the rock show thing every weekend, but I just don't get to see too many rock shows anymore.

Those who really know me know that I love to see local original acts. I like to see them trying out real original stuff rather than the party covers you see at the party bars. I really enjoyed hitting Chelsea's when it was across from the White Castle in the Short North. It was a favorite hangout.

One of my favorite acts to catch was Wolfgang Parker. He and his band became very close to a guy (Steve), that I worked with while I was working at AEP. Steve became their webmaster, and I became a pseudo groupie because of it, hitting as many shows as I could, because I got to know the guys. It was a blast. Used to hit the shows, drink a lot, hang out, hit Tee-Jays for 3 am breakfest and crash until about noon.

Then, I started to date heavily, which limited my time to see Wolfgang and bands like Fenster. Soon I found that Wolfgang had ended up dissapearing as I think some of the musical tastes changed and didn't quite see the brilliance of where he was taking his punk/swing fusion based sound. It is really good to see him back, as the guy was supremely talented. I still hold out hope someday to see that "The Mice, the Demons, and the Piggies" would end up as an opening track for a film of some kind. Even if it's some little independant flick (actually that would probably be best).

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to search for him today while I was ripping CDs. And I found his new site, which is great! I hope that he will have some more shows coming up soon, because I clearly missed the May show. Had way too many clearly ugly things going on at the time, which wouldn't even have caused me to think to look for him.

Anyway, to Wolf...much luck, I hope to catch a show soon. And if you did try out for INXS, as one of your posters suggested, I would be extremely entertained. They're not just going to want someone with "talent" who's got potential. They're going to want someone who's talented, knows something about the business, can be controversial, and can perform. I think you've got all three for sure. If nothing else, it would increase your fanbase on a regional basis. But it all depends on what you want for your career. I mean, how long can INXS actually last after this? 5 years at the most? That's plenty of time for other projects.

Anyway, get that gig list updated so I can plan to make one sometime!

Rip it...Rip It Good

Shows you how far behind I am when I have just started to rip my CD collection my PC. Should only take me...months, or so it seems. So far it's taking 10-15 minutes a CD...perhaps I need to try the other CD-ROM in my PC for better speed. I figure I have a good 300 or so CDs to go through, so that would take a damn long time at 15 minutes CD.

Ah, that fixed it...the old DVD player is probably only a 16x, while the burner is a 52x

The Phallic Phillies Logo

Over at BigSoccer.com one of the Crew boardies was displaying a Phillies logo upside down in protest.

It was then that I offically was frightened at the phallic nature of the logo.

I now provide the proof so that you too may be phrightened! Enjoy...

The Village

I'm by no means a film critic. I generally miss the nuances and sublties of films in terms of symbolism.

So it is by no surprise that I am completely confused by the use of yellow in The Village. I don't think it's a spoiler by saying that. I just can't quite put my finger on the purpose of it. I have an idea about it, but it's so trite that I don't believe it can be correct.

As far as the film itself. I found it, dissapointing because I had 2 theroys on the "twist". One of which would have been cool, the other of which was about 60-70% correct. Not that the second one wasn't cool. It's just that I had the idea nailed, but I couldn't figure out the "real" secret that they beat over your head at the end of the movie.

They also left quite a few questions unanswered about the specifics of some of what actually occured, and that was dissapointing. Equally as unsatisfying was the lack of furthering of the story. What happens when more people understand the secret? What happens in 30-40 years? Those would have been much more intriguing than the actual events that cause the dominos to fall.

Hopefully there's nothing in here that spoils it more than the reviews I've since read at Yahoo Movies. They tend to tell a lot more...and bitch about the ending quite a bit more...than this commentary. To me, since I had the twist pretty much figured out, I guess I expected more from the film in terms of answering real social questions.