i guess the theme for the day is sports. not really sure why, just thought i should throw out an opinion on sports.

cuz of the big news, baseball is the first to come to mind.

baseball
yes, a-rod is going to the yankees. should we really be all that surprised? it's just ridiculous though if you look at the yank's probable starting lineup for this season. i can't remember a season in any sport where i can't imagine that team not winning the championship.

i am a baseball fan, i follow it during the regular season more than the average guy, but from like march till august i'm not really that into it. but usually i'm into it enough so that i know who's gonna make the playoffs and such. playoff baseball is actually really thrilling in my opinion, division series, LCS, and world series. the format's good enough, i don't think they should fuck with it at all cuz it works out pretty well the way it is.

sure, i think the yankees have way too high of a payroll and it makes it so much harder for other teams to win consistently, but i'm not so opposed to it that i can't enjoy the sport at all. it's just that as cool as the yankees are, i'm usually rooting against them just to prove a point.

basketball
i'm a relatively new basketball fan, within about the last 2-3 years. alayna's pretty into it so that helps me get into it some. since like the mid-90's i've always watched the finals, but not much more than that. nowadays i still don't take in a helluva lot of regular season basketball, but since the mavs are pretty good these days i'll watch them when they're on, same for the spurs. i understand the game better these days, and i watch enough to have favorite players and teams.

unfortunately a lot of things really kinda plague the nba these days. obviously the kobe case and all the other criminal cases of players. the west is considerably better than the east in my opinion, and almost always more fun to watch. at any given point in the season, i'd put money on the lakers, spurs, mavericks or kings to win it all. too much emphasis is placed on the damn lakers, and that obviously gets old pretty quick. this year i don't think they'll win it all, and i'll be glad when they don't (except maybe if the goddamn kings win). i'd just prefer if next season payton and malone piss off and do something else, shaq stays, kobe signs with somebody else (maybe the clippers or nuggets), hopefully leaving bill walton's son to run the team, haha. i don't even hafta mention how bill walton can singlehandedly ruin a televised game.

like the rest of sports, nba is most worth watching at playoffs time. it's not nearly as competitive as playoff baseball or hockey to me, but still entertaining. and btw, am i the only one that kinda wants kobe to be guilty? i mean if he didn't do it, fine, move on, but if he did, it'd really be great to just see a supposedly nice guy get completely nailed. he'd kick ass in the prison basketball pickup games for years to come, and it'd be the biggest sports story in years.

football
ever since prolly about 1992 when the cowboys won super bowl XXVII, i've been a pretty big football fan. it's america's sport, and i don't have any problem with that. an hourlong highlights segment at the end of a sunday is always thoroughly enjoyable. sometimes moreso than other sports, a 70-yard bomb or a huge pick can be extremely exciting and makes the entire game worth watching. i'm more of an nfl fan than an ncaa guy, but both leagues are fun to watch for somewhat different reasons.

lately though football's leaving a bad taste in my mouth, especially the nfl. the ncaa's got their own problems with the BCS system, but the nfl has been worse lately. the super bowl in general, the "boob" incident, a decent decline in quality of play, play stoppage, huge fines, ridiculous celebrations, tv rights, etc... they're just all adding up to make the nfl look like a bunch of assholes.

football in general, at least to me, has a horrible format. i understand why they do it, but playing all the league's games on one day (with the exception of monday night football) is just sorta shaky. on any given sunday, there's like 14 or so games going on, mostly all at the same time, and you have to rely on the highlights to get any kinda feel for how the game went. since the nfl is such a whore, i'm surprised they haven't adopted some system where at least some team played a game every night of the week.

as stupid as it sounds, i think the XFL had it right by showing games on saturdays. i know the entire country would revolt if we took football away from sunday, but doesn't saturday just make more sense? if you're going to insist on having all the games on one day, why not pick a day where we don't have to do shit the next day? plus you could even have some games start at like 9pm or something, for some good late night football watching parties. the games-all-in-one-day system is what ruins playoff football to me, not to mention it's a single-elimination format. to me, a 7 game series alternating home sites is way more compelling than 1 60-minute game, which is why i say of the 4 top sports, football comes in last when it comes to the playoffs. even the super bowl itself, it's more of a big party and holiday-type event than an actual football game. sure it's fun, but is it *really* a championship game?

the thing i like about the nfl is some of the players. sure, you have to put up with assholes like warren sapp and keyshawn johnson, but you have some awesome players like mike vick, terrell owens and ricky williams. i really like the guys with a little bit of attitude and some decent personality. to me, vick is better than favre only because he's more fun to watch, not cuz he's actually a better player. i think more than the other major sports, football is about entertainment. so if it's about entertainment, then entertain me. some of these young guys 3 years out of college are the best at that, and that's really what makes competitive nfl games good for me.

hockey
hockey is my sport. doesn't matter how much better financially the other sports are, hockey is my favorite sport, no matter what. to me, hockey combines the toughness of football with the finesse of the nba perfectly. unfortunately, hockey just isn't appreciated in the states nearly as much as it should be. it's pretty ridiculous how looked over the sport gets across the country. somewhat surprisingly, dallas has really developed a strong fanbase for the stars, people have really become diehards, including myself. not really sure how it happened, but unless people just don't follow hockey for no good reason at all, the nhl did a few things along the way that prolly hurt its chances...

• somehow, tight defense became king. hell, even dallas contributed to this. teams like dallas and new jersey were really defensive-minded, and won all their games either 2-0 or 2-1. pretty damn simple, less goals = less interest. even i felt this one. i see too many games with less than 5 total goals and i lose interest pretty quick.
  
• goalies got better. remember seeing clips from like the 80's when gretzky could breathe on the puck and it'd go in? i bet if he started playing today he'd only have 1/3 of the goals he scored in his days. with better equipment and training, goalies stop twice as much as they used to, which is forcing the other players to try harder (and so far, fail) to score.
  
• too many goddamn teams. hey, don't get me wrong, i like league expansion and moving teams from humdrum markets to more exciting areas (minnesota to dallas in '93), but 30 teams is just too much for this league. i've heard if there's a lockout and they come back in a few years, they just might come back with 16 teams. this wouldn't be the worst thing ever. i'd like to see about 24 teams the most, that'd be a good amount to me. but nowadays there's just too many areas with semi-dead hockey teams that could easily be eliminated. places like pittsburgh and washington don't do much for the league anymore, and even some of the newer teams in columbus and carolina don't seem to stir up much emotion. i'm not sure how it should be decided, but sure, go ahead, slash the 5 or 10 or 14 teams from the league, we'll try it out for a while. my only requirement is ya keep the fuckin stars. :)
  
• it gets shafted on tv. yeah, the nhl just has some problems as soon as it's put on tv, mostly just due to the deals it made with networks for the rights. ESPN/ABC sports obviously have deals with certain teams, so they get a lot more face-time than other teams. like on ESPN, waaaay too many damn games of the bruins, red wings and flyers. sure, those are great teams right now, but in like 10 games on ESPN you're like to have the flyers in half of them. it just gets old. i'm not a fan of the flyers. i'm a fan of the stars, that's why i'd wanna watch all their games. ESPN usually has semi-decent coverage of the games, good analysis and features, but i don't like the whole saturday afternoon games ABC does. sure it's kinda festive, but i wonder how many people are actually sitting down at 2pm on a saturday wanting to watch hockey, especially two teams they don't know much about. ESPN was on the right track delegating thursday nights every week as hockey night, but uh... why thursday? the one day of the week that i have a whole slew of other things i'd like to watch.
  
• too many pointless games. i've heard they'll prolly cut the 82 game schedule down closer to 70 to speed things along. it'd be a good idea. especially when you have too many ties to begin with, you gotta eliminate all the pointless games played out between non-rivals somehow. i mean sure, trim 12 games off of the avs' schedule if it means they won't play florida at all this year, but a higher percentage of their games are played against vicious rival detroit.
  

i love the nhl, but i'm afraid there's a big possibility they might not be back next year, which is just awful. hopefully they can work things out, but if not, we might not have a major league in this country for half a decade, which would be so damn wrong for us hockey fans.

auto racing
not really sure if i should call this a sport, but it kinda is. i'll just come right out and say it -- nascar fuckin blows. i'm a big racing fan, but i still think nascar just sucks. it's southern, rednecky, not exciting, and silly. it's just not for me at all. i'm not even totally sure why we bother with serious racing in this country, we really fuck it up compared to europe and F1 style. formula one racing overseas is fantastic, it's exciting and extremely competitive, with way more road courses than oval tracks. CART and IRL over here are usually pretty good, but financially troubled. they should prolly just merge and get it over with. and as much of a racing purist as i am, i still love a good non-injury/fatality wreck, man.

i think that's why i don't have proper time for other things, like dvd's, anime and video games, cuz i'm such a sports fanatic in general. in any playoff season i'm pretty much all over it as much as i can be, and that tends to take up a lot of my time. makes me miss playing sports tho. within the next couple years there's a good chance i could start training for hockey again and join a league. my current kick is racquetball (getting better every month, might play tournaments and such in the near future) but i'd love to get back to roller hockey sometime soon.

thus ends my big sports opinion for no reason post.

cheers,
justin

welcome.

nasty fuckin week here in cs. just rainy and dreary, sorta sucks that valentine's and my birthday fall in prolly the ugliest month of the year. i remember as a kid always wanting to have my birthday in the summer so i could have some pool party or something.

scrubs 3x12 was pretty good tonight, for this season at least. overall it was a pretty funny ep, but i've got a couple complaints about it. what's with NBC's stupid bullshit fetish with fuckin with programming times? they do it several nights of the week, and they've already got the DVR community pissed off about it. you can see the problem with it: if a time-shifted NBC show starts at 7:59 instead of 8pm on the dot, any recording you have going from 7-8 is gonna conflict with that 7:59 start time. so it makes you either cancel the previous recording or manually record the NBC show partially, which kinda defeats the entire purpose of a DVR. it may seem like a really small deal to some, but that's the kinda thing that causes people (read: me) to lose loyalties to a network. NBC has started to sink the last couple years anyway, and i'm happy every time they lose a show of theirs where i wanna watch the channel even less. [i'll get back to scrubs in a sec...]

NBC just seems like they're getting more and more similar to fox, which is not a good thing in my book. you might have noticed for the first time in 20+ years, they've put something other than a sitcom on thursday nights, the apprentice. now i've never had any interest in the apprentice, so i can't bash it at all, nor do i really care whether anybody likes it or not. i think them putting it on thursday nights (not to mention wednesday) just shows they're really running low on new comedic scripted material these days. hell, maybe it's better they just rebroadcast the apprentice like they're doing thus far, cuz i wasn't watching anything from 7:30 to 9pm (except if scrubs was on) anyway. sure, tell me i live in the past, put do you remember NBC "must see TV" thursdays of the mid-90's? the lineup was friends-single guy-seinfeld-[several mostly horrible shows like suddenly susan, caroline in the city, veronica's closet, etc]-ER, and you were almost always guaranteed to have an hour and a half of good comedy followed by a good compelling hour of drama. nowadays i really only list ER as still being kinda watchable, although i won't cry when they wrap things up within a couple years (which admittedly, is prolly drawing it out too much anyway).

as painful as it is today (who am i kidding?) i'm ready for friends to end. they've made the right decision to end it after a round-number 10 full seasons on the air. it's been just a notch above horrible for a good 3 seasons now, and any comparisons to seinfeld are largely unfounded since seinfeld bowed out early enough to really go out on top. sure, friends still has phenomenal ratings, but it's definitely had a significant portion of its viewers lose interest over time. i still give the show credit, they've had a little less than 250 episodes, which really is a lot for such a generic subject. i'm not sure if it's really ever completely jumped the shark but i can sorta tell why i don't really like it very much anymore. it's easy to see. with any comedic medium, do the standard litmus test: see if it makes you laugh. friends has a hard time doing that anymore, at least for me. most of the time i realize i'm watching it (almost always with alayna) mostly because we feel obligated to see the show out to its proper end. but all the guest starts, cliffhangers, super-sized episodes, etc... c'mon, just cut the crap already. standard desperate attempts to keep the show going past its prime i say. sure, i'll occasionally miss seeing it in on the primetime schedule, but i can't really say i'll miss it as much as my personal favorite, seinfeld. believe me, you'll still get thoroughly beaten over the head with it in syndication.

quite obviously, i don't agree with NBC's decision to create the friends spin-off, joey. i know, frasier was a spin-off of cheers, and both were great shows, but i don't have a good feeling about this one. i just think it has big potential to be thoroughly shat upon, like the american version of coupling. it'll be on at 7pm thursdays just like friends, so they're pretty much assuming everybody will just transition right into it. i'll give it a shot, but i just cannot see myself wanting any more to do with new content from the friends "world." i'll have all my own copies of all ten seasons of friends, maybe even on dvd, but c'mon, just go away already.

admittedly, i seem to be the kinda guy that if a show has been on for a while and i didn't catch it at first, i'll never watch it. as far as NBC, semi-long-running shows like ed (which is about to end), west wing and third watch, i just never watched 'em, so i don't watch 'em these days. so with mainstays like friends and frasier ending this season, it'll be interesting (at first) to see if NBC just plugs those holes with more reality type crap.

so i guess in my book, as far as next season, the only things NBC seems to have going for it will be scrubs, ER and las vegas. the law & order original series is still pretty rock solid, but c'mon, 14 seasons? believe me, there's a lot of recycling going on there. and don't get me started on all the spin-off series from that show either. but las vegas man. surprisingly, that show has actually been really good. yeah, they do the crazy camera transition shit too often and all, but overall the show's pretty entertaining and seems to have a decent enough following online so far. it's got the all-too-obvious something-for-everyone appeal, josh duhamel for the ladies, and plenty of eye candy like molly sims, nikki cox and vanessa marcil for the guys. it's got enough action and clever enough dialog to be entertaining for the most part. not sure how much longevity it's actually got, but it's nice to see that not every new idea a network comes out with immediately gets canned.

that brings me back to scrubs. i missed scrubs first season, and i've still only seen about 1/3 of the episodes from that season. somehow i caught the first episode of the second season (upon its shift to thursday nights at the time) and was almost immediately hooked. there's been a somewhat noticeable dropoff from the second to the third season, but overall it's still good enough to tivo and mostly enjoy. just like anything else, they're kinda running out of storylines. hell, look at ER in its 10th season, there's only so much you can do with a hospital and a bunch of doctors running around, whether comedy or drama. so they're filling the lack of plots with a slew of guest stars mostly, and it kinda starts to make scrubs look bad. admittedly, tara reid has to try pretty hard to make anything look bad, but the fact that she was one of many guest stars just makes the entire concept lose its luster. since almost the entire production team came over from spin city, with michael j fox on tonight now basically the entire former cast of that show has at one point guested on scrubs.

scrubs' first season should definitely be out on DVD by now. friends has like 6 seasons out now, it's time to start whippin out those fuckin tv dvd's quicker now.

i think lately i'm making a big effort to somehow broaden my tastes, at least in terms of media. i've tried to get away from a bunch of sitcoms or beaten-to-death reality shows and look for other shit to entertain myself. within the last few months i've run across these decent alternatives:

• most of the adult swim shows on cartoon network: i never really realized before that cartoon network bothered showing anything for people other than children, but adult swim is suprisingly cool, and the ratings have been sky-high for it. i tivo cowboy bebop every night, since the entire series is only 26 episodes long and hoang and rick have suggested it's somewhat essential anime viewing. overall it's pretty good, just that i get a little lazy in watching all of them, so i'm slowly making my way through them, bout halfway through now, with 6 episodes sitting on the tivo now. from what i can tell, witch hunter robin will replace bebop when it's through this month, and that looks pretty interesting as well. i'm still sorta feeling my way through the other adult swim shows, like aqua teen hungerforce, sealab 2021, the brak show and space ghost coast to coast. i've only watched a few of each and can't tell yet if they're my cup'o'tea. plus, since i never watched it on fox, i learned that family guy was a surprisingly great show, not to mention the ratings from cartoon network alone have influenced fox to most likely pick it up again for new shows prolly early 2005. but the best on adult swim that i'd never even heard of before has gotta be home movies. about 90% of the episodes so far have gotten me lol'ing, so that's saying a lot. if you need something to watch on sunday nights, turn off mtv and their bullshit road rules / real world challenges or whatever and catch this one.
  
• a limited number of decency on spiketv: don't get me wrong, overall spiketv is a stupid idea. i know women have their lifetime and oxygen channels, but this "first network for men" crap is a bit too much. seems more like they have maybe 6 hours of good programming per week and then a bunch of filler crap on for the other times. so far i've caught onto MXC and the john henson project. i managed to turn lauren and laura onto MXC, so if they like it, why wouldn't anybody?! watch an episode, then send an IM to suckdahornywater and tell him how you love those crazy charlies. hoang and i really missed john henson from when he quit talk soup several years ago and he FINALLY turns up again on his own show on spike. i think we've had like 4 episodes now, and the show is only marginally good, but it's just nice to see skunkboy back on tv so i don't mind tuning in for each episode. basically the parts where he's sitting at the desk commenting on something (just like the old days, eh?) are the really worthwhile parts, with the other segments just being bad ripoffs of the man show. also they show old CSI episodes on friday nights, which is cool, but once a week is a fuckin joke. not to mention the entire seasons of CSI on dvd are way too fuckin expensive so far.
  
• semi-scholarly shows: i'm referring to anything i tivo on the travel channel, the history channel, or TLC now and then. oddly enough sometimes it can be more entertaining to watch 45 minutes worth of semi-educational tv rather than bad sitcoms. if you look through like the next week's worth of schedule for each of those networks, you can usually find a handful of decent shows on each that pique your interest. definitely a nice change from the usual idiotbox entertainment.
  
• sports-related shit: playmakers was actually an awesome series, and let's all send a collective fuck you to the NFL for pressuring ESPN to cancel it. they should have been able to have a 2nd season, but the NFL shit all over it, just like they do everything else lately. i tivo PTI everyday, and most of the time it's great to keep you up to date on current sports news and opinions. even alayna watches it and enjoys it when she can. sportscenter isn't quite as good as it used to be, but still well-produced and entertaining to watch. now and then you can also find a decent "beyond the glory" episode on fox sports, the much-inferior sports network.
  

that's the great thing about tivo, y'know? if i've got enough other good stuff recorded and ready to play, if i feel like watching tv for the night, who says i have to watch primetime major-network shit?

but i guess i shoved enough opinion down your throat for tonight, huh? kudos if you even got this far ;)

cheers,
justin

hello friends,

alayna pretty much summed up our weekend, but i can add a few comments of my own i guess.

as alayna said, it was overall pretty fun but i think maybe 10% actually went as planned in some sense. we just plain got to san antonio at completely the wrong time. just happened to come in on 1604 into SA (thinking there might be some traffic) when some shithead decides to jump across the median and kill a couple of his passengers and hold up westbound traffic for 2 hours. once we got there it was cool and the riverwalk was decent, only problem was we weren't really on the river very much. we got there, took 10 minutes to decide where to eat (which was fine) but we pretty much just ate and left. but i guess brant had already celebrated his birthday and there wasn't really much of a festive environment left. in hindsight laynie and i really prolly should have taken my car downtown separate (and we prolly would have if we hadn't sat in traffic for so long) and hang out longer on the river. it sorta sucked even more cuz for some reason all the local theaters stopped showing "miracle" at like 10:30 and we couldn't make it there by then, so we didn't get to see the movie we wanted to at all.

saturday we were only able to hang around SA a little longer and had to hit the road back to CS. the drive to houston turned out ridiculously easy and after a short adventurous trip we decided to eat right next to the improv. never heard of red robin but it was real good. if you ever hit it up i'd recommend the clucks n fries with buffalo style sauce along with a TNT on the side. not quite as potent as wings n more's aggie punch, but i felt the headphucking after just one for sure.

after we stood in the ridiculously long conga-style line to get seated at the improv, as alayna said, we sorta felt like heterosexuality was apparently passe. i've always liked margaret cho but i never knew she had such a gay following. we're still not sure whether she's gay, straight or both, but she sure as hell as a lot of equal rights and gay pride fans. alayna and i are pretty in the middle about gay issues at all, meaning we're not against them and we don't really give that much of a shit about what laws they pass against them. but HOLY SHIT all we had was gay equality and shit forced down our throats all night. combined with cho's apparent drunken stupor and fake latinaesque street-style delivery (something i've never heard from her at all) she came across as more trying to make a statement instead of trying to make me laugh. i actually ended up counting and i think i laughed out loud only twice, and laynie did only a little more than that. she wasn't awful, but she had her soapbox out almost the entire time and i wasn't surprised seeing a few people leave early, something i've never seen at a comedy show. it was fun to get out of CS and do anything, but i wouldn't recommend anybody cutting their teeth on standup to go see her. it's possible she used up all her funny juice back in the 90's cuz that's when she was hilarious in my opinion, even on her short-lived ABC series all-american girl.

so overall the weekend didn't exactly go as great as we wanted it to, but luckily we still had a pretty good time. can't be too bad of a time when you have a TNT, coors light draft and long island tea within a couple hours, right? plus there's something to be said for the comfort you feel when within 2 minutes of walking into your possible-future-in-laws' house, your possible-future-father-in-law hands you a shiner bock.

plus we found out alayna's killer combo is showing cleavage and sippin a cosmopolitan.

this should be a more academic week, but goddamn i'm lazy. smells like i'll be putting everything off till the last second and skippin out on some sleep. hey, it's only appropriate in my last semester, right?

any tivo readers out there, watch out for getting a season pass for MXC on spike. i mean that show's funny and all, but shit too often i've got like 6 episodes racked up on the hard drive. lately i've been grabbin [some hdtv] bittorrent rips of tv shows, like 24, alias and CSI. my plan might be to grab some episodes of those now just to see if i like 'em, since i hadn't watched some of those much at all. might be worth it to go rent the first seasons of shows like 24 and alias to maybe catch up on things and have another show that i follow every week. not that i'd abandon ER or anything, but lately it's been kinda lackluster and it's looking more and more like it's suiting up to jump the shark. also with friends and survivor still on opposite each other if i want both i've gotta find a solution for that.

same-o same-o, juggling academics, entertainment and massive organization. ;)

cheers,
justin

thanks for coming on back now.

random thoughts:

--finally cut the damn muff. it had been roughly 5 months, last september since i had had it cut. i had it left a little longer at the beginning of the semester and had intended to go back every 3-4 weeks to leave it about that length and instead decided to let it go a little longer for a month or so, turns out each month i just kept saying that. the length it had gotten to, i'm not really sure if i'd say it's that long for going so long without getting a trim, but it was definitely the longest i've ever had my hair. but, it was an experiment and it was fun to try something different. i definitely won't miss the pain of severely tangled hair in the shower and having trouble fitting into hats.

--the highlight of the semester might have come already yesterday. of course it's gonna happen in racquetball. it was at the end of class so me and another guy were playing like any other day, and this guy (tall, must have been at least 6'3" i'd say) just happen to step right in front of my return shot right off the back wall. so imagine this scenario if you will:

• tall guy returns it off the front wall
  
• bounces on the floor once
  
• hits back wall
  
• justin returns ball straight off back wall
  
• tall guy moves toward middle of court for return
  
• high speed ball strikes tall guy right in the back of the head
  

heh, it was half funny half sad to see this big tough guy take that ball so damn hard and just lay on the court with his arm over his eyes saying "alright man i gotta go anyway..." i think it's the highlight of my semester mostly just cuz it made him quit right away, HAHA. i'm not sure how i'll see him the rest of the semester without cracking up immediately.

--i agree that zachry 102 is the worst classroom on the entire texas a&m campus. not sure what the seating capacity is, but it's about 7 times as much as it really should hold. i can't concentrate on learning engineering ethics cuz the whole time i'm thinking "hey y'know if all of a sudden my stomach starts to kill me, what the fuck route do i take to get outta here?"

--taking notes longer than about 15 minutes has become increasingly difficult for me. if this happened to me when i was in 3rd grade, they'd say i had ADD and give me some dope to fuck me up. but seriously tho, nowadays in class after i've taken notes for a few minutes i just spend the rest of my time looking at other people in the class or writing a bunch of to-do lists and such in the margins.

--and on a final note for today, that ben & jerry's flavor makin' whoopie whatever is insanely good. it's not even a good good, it's a bad good. you just sit and think "nothing should taste like this" as you're eating it. i think i felt the same way i had a chocolate shake from shakes and wings from wings n more.

au revoir,
justin