Originally appeared 12/4/05

The dreaded Glog

First question that is to be asked is what is a glog? Well, it is a game blog, used usually by sportsline when covering events, they will have a blogger on site to give you minute by minute perspective of the game from a bloggers point of view. Since this is the last week of fantasy football in one of my leagues, I figured I might offer a partial glog into today's action.

Argonauts (me) 6-5-1 vs Fighting Torgos (that's the opposition) 6-6

Whoever wins will get one of the 6 playoffs spots, the loser will need help in order to qualify. Also at stake is the fact that I lead in total points scored, so scoring some points to protect my lead would seem to be a good idea. My opponent has Ladanian Tomlinson, who is probably the best runningback in football right now, while I have Carson Palmer who is playing like one of the best quarterbacks in the league, though nobody, inculding me, expected this at the beginning of the year.

While the game goes on, I may prattle about different stuff, just to fill time, as I have been known to do from time to time.

For instance, I have been thinking alot about things that I just don't get. You know what I am talking about, things other people do, or talk about and you just don't understand the fascination.

Example perhaps? I don't get how Julia Roberts gets acting roles. I have yet to see a movie where I look at the screen and say that was a great performance. To be honest, it is so bad that if she is in the movie now, I won't go see it at all. Mind you, she isn't the only one, I won't see Ben Stiller either. Never found him to be funny to be perfectly honest.

Glog Alert

Argonauts 3 Fighting Torgos 1 Marvin Harrison has chipped in this week, he has 36 yards receiving already, which is good, because I benched Kevin Jones in favor of Harrison.

Back to things I don't get

Lower back tattoos - Why would you get a tattoo for a part of the body you can't even see, unless you contort yourself in some god awful manner? If it's for the guy who is doing you from behind, while I appreciate the effort and it does give me something to look at, if it ain't moving and you didn't leave me crayons to color stuff in while I am there, just leave the tv on instead. That at least has moving pictures.

Glog Alert

Argonauts 10 Fighting Torgos 3 Marvin Harrison again, this time with the touchdown. I figure if I can get to 80 points, I will wrap up first there, which should be worth about 200 dollars, and we are well on are way at this point.

Back to things I don't get, sponsored by ADM, Supermarket to the World (kudos to anyone who got that reference)

I would say I don't get the hatred of WalMart, but I have covered that issue in a previous blog (see it pays to keep up) so I won't rehash it here.

Madonna has to be added to the list. I will give her credit, she manages to repackage herself just frequently enough so that no one notices that she has an epidemic lack of talent. I would be more worried about her non skills being contagious than the bird flu. After all, imagine a world of Madonnas, we would all be worn out talentless hacks just waiting for the next fad to come along so we can claim it for ourselves to show how hip we are. Kabbalah, please!

Of course no list of things I don't get would be complete without the dreaded "Attack on Christmas" controversy that seems to be all of the rage these days. The claim that Christmas is under attack by liberals is preposterous. As an agnostic, I don't care what it is called, you can call the day Wing Nite for all I care, the holiday gets my family under one roof for one day out of the year, and if I have to worship at the shrine of the fat guy in the red suit for it to happen, so be it. It isn't exactly torture. Come to think of it, maybe they should call it Wing Nite instead, having some hot wings and beer with the family would seem to be a nice excuse to get off of work. But really, nobody is taking Christmas away, and those stupid complaints about people saying Happy Holidays as opposed to Merry Christmas, well duh, there is usually more than one holiday involved, with the whole Christmas commercialization starting right around Thanksgiving and finishing up after New Year's. If the religious folks are so worried about Christmas, here's an idea, take down your tree and take back all of your gifts, go to church on Dec 25th, come home, bake your savior a fucking birthday cake and leave me the hell alone.

Glog Alert

Argonauts 24 Fighting Torgos 7 Carson Palmer throws a touchdown pass, much to the chagrin of all of the Steeler fans, but much to my financial benefit.

Glog Alert

Argonauts 26 Fighting Torgos 18 Braylon Edwards scores cutting into my lead, which is not a good thing. Would be my luck to lose because a guys scores for only the second time this year.

Interesting reading so far isn't it? I figure by this point I have tuned out all of the non football fans and pissed off the religious folk something fierce. Good thing nobody reads this.

Glog Alert

Argonauts 33 Fighting Torgos 18 Carson Palmer again with the TD pass, though if he would hit Chad Johnson with a couple of these throws it would be even better.

Sorry, I have been a little distracted here, after all it is Sunday, which means since it ends with day, I must be at work. Right now I am recording next week's Big Band Jump. I already did The Lutheran Hour and 3 of my 4 commercial feeds that need recorded and I am still here for another 6 hrs or so. Hopefully I will be getting at least one more high school football game to broadcast this year. The state championship games are this weekend, and we have the potential of carrying two of the 4 games, most likely we will just carry one, but I am hoping for two. I could use the extra 100 to be honest. After all, Wing Nite is coming!!!!!

Back to things I don't get. Next on the list is the 2000 stolen election. Hate to break it to you folks, but it wasn't stolen at all, at least not by the conservative Supreme Court, as has been claimed ad infinitum every time Bush screws up (which is too frequently for my tastes). Everyone points to the 5-4 ruling made by the Supreme Court in the case Bush v. Gore stating that all of the conservative justices sided with Bush, thereby handing him the election. The problem is, well, it didn't happen like that. Turns out the court voted 7-2, not 5-4. Mind you, there was a 5-4 vote, but that was regarding how to remedy the case, not the actual merits on the case itself. The case falls on a little thing called the Equal Protection Clause, which basically means that everyone should be treated the same under the law. When the Florida state Supreme Court ruled that all of the undervotes should be counted, they violated this procedure. An undervote is a ballot that doesn't have a vote for president marked on it. The Florida court ruled that those ballots could be reexamined (recounted if you will) to determine the intent of the voter, such as a punch ballot that has an indentation, but is not actually punched out. In theory the machine would have read this as no vote, even if the voter intended to vote for one of the candidates. The problem with this, is that under the Equal Protection Clause, you can't specifically pick certain people to have their ballots reexamined. After all, what if the machine made an error and counted some ballots as overvotes (voting for more than one candidate), even if that wasn't the case? What if somebody made a mistake and started to punch out one candidate, but really wanted to vote for the other, so stopped and punched the appropriate hole, but leaving enough of a mark on both that the machine just tossed the ballot? Is not that voter's intent equally protected? The Florida Supreme Court failed to address any of these concerns in their ruling, let alone the differing standard for determine intent by the local election officials, standards that changed literally as the counting and recounting was going on. How can you determine intent if two different election's officials examining the same ballot, but using two different standards, can come to different conclusions? The US Supreme Court ruled that for these reasons, the Florida ruling had to be tossed. Now the 5-4 ruling is a different matter, that being a decision on what to do since the Florida Court in essence didn't do it's job. The court opted to go by the standing deadline in Florida for when counting votes had to stop, and therby ended the election.

Enough history already, time for a Glog Alert

Argonauts 44 Fighting Torgos 32 Carson Palmer gets his third TD, Braylon Edwards his second. This is going to be a nerve wracking day.

The last entry into things I don't get leads directly into the next. I don't get how people can be sheep. Far too often people are literally led around by the nose, rather than looking at the facts and determining for themselves what is actually taking place. Usually you can do this simply by reviewing the original source material. Prime example, such neat places as Findlaw.com have the actual justices opinions in Bush V. Gore posted, all it requires is reading. Maybe it is laziness, or kool aid drinking, I don't know, but far too many people would rather guess what happened or have someone else tell them instead of looking for themself and making up their own mind. Certainly there are people that I will read because I usually agree with them and like to see what their mind is focused on these days, but I make it a point to read people that I don't agree with as well. Mark Morford with the San Francisco Chronicle is one such person, I don't agree with him all that much, but I will read him just to see how his segment of the population may be thinking. At the end of the day though, neither the people I agree with or disagree with make up my mind, I do that all on my own from examining a variety of sources.

Glog Alert

Argonauts 44 Fighting Torgos 33 His defense has accounted 15 points already. That is normally a good day for a defensive unit, but he still has a half to go with most of them. I only have one guy in the early games on defense (Shelton Quarles) and his 6 points is nice, but the other two defenders will have to play well at this rate.

Typical radio lunch again today, a Cup O Noodles and cheese doodles, thus proving that I could eat the next Dr Suess book. Screw the green eggs and ham, I've got noodles and doodles here.

Back to the things I don't get, this segment brought to you by Texaco. Trust your car to the man with the star.

I don't get how people let the results of the local sports teams ruin their mood for the next odd number of days. I like sports as much as the next person, but my life doesn't collapse if the home team doesn't win. There are far more important things for me to worry about that I don't need to add anxiety to it because someone didn't hit a homerun, score a TD or get a game winning goal for the home team. I assume people would be saying, well what about your glog then? Isn't that the same? The difference is while I write about it and it would be nice to win, if I don't it's not the end of the world. If I don't win money, one of my friends will and for 14 weeks or so, we get to trash talk each other in a playful manner that befits people who haven't grown up yet, of which I am one.

Speaking of which

Glog Alert

Argonuats 52 Fighting Torgos 42 This may turn out to be as entertaining as the Steelers Bengals game that is on tv right now (Bengals 31 Steelers 24).

Just abouit time for my next cigarette break. I like Sundays where I get to work at my own pace, this seems to be one of them. I am getting stuff done, watching football, blogging and eating. And if I look out the window, it looks like Wing Nite, what with everything covered in just about a half inch of snow. Not enough to slow anything down, but enough to create that whole Wing Nite season feel.

Glog Alert

Argonauts 54 Fighting Torgos 45 He is up to 19 points out of his defense, which is a very good day and Tomlinson doesn't play until the late games. He has 3 players left after the 1pm games, I have 4, but no one with the pedigree of Tomlinson.

Hopefully all of you pogo folk managed to get all 5 badges done this week. For those who aren't members, it was a marathon week, which meant you could select 3 personal challenges as opposed to the normal 1. They do this from time to time to let the newer members get caught up on challenges they may have missed. Since I am a newer member by most standards, I still have plenty of challeges from 2003 and 2004 that I can work on. I got all 5 of mine done, though the stellar sweeper badge sucked the big one. Stellar sweeper is pretty much the same as minesweeper with a few added features to make it more pogo-ish. Getting 100 perfect games took some time. I was finishing games in about 2-3 minutes, but that is still between 2 - 3 hours work on a game that I admit I never play on my computer because it sucks.

Okay one more glog alert, then I have to go work the football game.

Glog Alert

Argonauts 55 Fighting Torgos 48 Told you this would be a close game.

Okay, it hi ho and off to work I go. If I don't see you before then, have a good Wing Nite!!!!.