WWE

Undisputed vs Countdown to Lockdown

March 30, 2011 – 10:58 am

Wow, it’s been awhile. Sorry faithful fans.

Well, it’s Wrestlemania season and I have been in full on professional wrestling mode for the past few weeks. It’s been great as the WWE’s writing has been a lot better than the past couple of year’s Wrestlemanias (check out this awesome burn I did on Bret Hart on twitter) and I just seem to like the matches they’ve set up better than last years. Of course, just watching the shows on TV isn’t enough for me when I get into full on wrestling mode. Sometimes I tweet during Raw. I’ve also been listening to a few podcasts. Former WWE Writer Dave Lagana’s I Want Wrestling, which either convinces me to apply or completely discourages me from ever wanting to be a WWE writer on a weekly basis, and Colt Cabana’s Art of Wrestling which is the best. It reminds me of early Adam Carolla when he would just talk to a person for an hour and hear their story of how they got there. Some of the crazy stories you hear plus Colt’s sense of humor plus the way the conversations are always open and honest make for an amazing podcast that I will continue to listen to even after Wrestlemania season is over.

And of course, I’ve caught up on the good wrestling books from the past year. Chris Jericho’s Undisputed and Mick Foley’s Countdown to Lockdown to be specific. read more »

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Seahawks

Seahawks at Bears, Soldier Field, January 16 2011

January 17, 2011 – 4:56 pm

bears-seattleLauren and I took in the Bears/Seahawks playoff game at Soldier Field on Sunday. I’ve had a good couple of weeks and am currently caught up on bills so I thought it would be worth it to spend the money and get tickets based on the logic that if the Seahawks had won I’d never forgive myself for not being there. The game didn’t turn out how I wanted to, but I am still glad I went. As much as it sucked to watch the Seahawks lose and have a bunch of assholes celebrating around me (note: they were not assholes because they were Bears fans, they were assholes because they were assholes) I still love the Seahawks and will always be there for a playoff game if I can make it.

I’ve been called a “fair weather fan” a couple of times because, I don’t know, people didn’t hear me talk about the Seahawks before last weekend, I guess. It’s kind of stupid. I could have easily gone on for hours about how I’m unsure of the Pete Carroll signing and how I love Matt Hasselbeck, but thought we’d be better off giving Whitehurst starts when it looked like we weren’t going to make the playoffs and how Russell Okung is amazing and how I don’t know what they should do in the draft or when they’ll be contenders again, but I didn’t because most people don’t want to talk about a rebuilding team on the other side of the country when their favorite team has a winning record and is in the playoffs. The St. Louis game and the Saints game may have reawakened the “I love the Seahawks and want to watch them every minute of the day” within in me, but it was always there. There was no way I was missing that game.

The weather wasn’t as bad as you would have expected it to be. Sure, it was 20 degrees and it snowed, but there wasn’t really any wind and we dressed appropriately. Lauren was a good sport about the whole thing considering it was 20 degrees and she doesn’t even like football. She tried to support me, even when I was ready to leave in the first quarter, and didn’t complain about the cold at all. It was a real good time.

As for the game itself it’s pretty safe to say the Bears won fair and square. Maybe it was the cold or the west coast team going east (and the game starting at 10 am their time) or maybe it was just a 7-9 team showing why they were 7-9, but the Seahawks just didn’t have it. Numerous dropped passes (many that would have been first downs), the inability to stop the run and establish the run are what did them in. People can talk all day about the Bears defense (2 sacks, 0 turnovers, quiet day from Peppers) and Jay Cutler (4 total TDs), but what won the game was the difference in the running game. Period. The scoreboard says what it says, but the two teams were a lot more evenly matched than that and the Packers are going to kill them.

The thing that killed me about the game was when the Bears were up 7-0 in the first quarter and had the ball at the 3 yard line when Jay Cutler threw it right to Jordan Babineaux, who dropped it. If he catches that it’s a 100 yard TD run the other way to make the game 7-7 or at worst 7-0 Seahawks ball. Instead the Bears scored and the rest was history. That play was the game and why I wanted to leave in the first quarter. The game was over.

It sucked watching that and I wish I wasn’t there for it, but I’m also glad I was able to go and would go a hundred times again if I had the chance. Even though this one hurt and the one I went to before hurt even more (the Hasselbeck “We want the ball and we’re gonna score” game), but I don’t really care. I love the Seahawks.

And the Brewers are going to win the World Series.

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NFL

Football. Who knew?

December 20, 2010 – 10:34 pm

sp.uofb_58U0185.tb.jpgI’ve never been the biggest football fan. I have never disliked it, although at times I’ve found it to be rather boring, but I’ve never liked it as much as the rest of of the world. If I had to rank my favorite sports it would probably go something like this:

1. Baseball
2. Basketball






3. Football
4. Pro Wrestling
5. Hockey

And that’s being generous.

Somehow this year that all changed and now there is no big space between two and three. I really like football. I think it had something to do with the combination of gambling and fantasy football, but that’s probably only half the story because I’ve been doing that for years and what I’ve really grown to love is college football. I love that anything can happen, that every conference game means something, how everyone plays differently and, perhaps most surprisingly, that it will all be different next year and the year after that.

I’ve always been a person that prefers the pros to college. College (and minor league) baseball is boring. College basketball is only good during the tournament. College wrestling doesn’t even feature any tables or chairs. For my entire life I’ve felt the same way about college football, but now I realize that is just not true. I’d put up the Boise State-Virginia Tech game, the Arizona-ASU game or the Alabama-Auburn game from this season against any NFL game this season. Anything can happen. The Arizona-ASU game was decided by a blocked extra point in overtime(!) no less.

This isn’t to say I don’t like the NFL too because I’ve enjoyed this season more than any since the Seahawks went to the Super Bowl. Which is saying something because the Seahawks are freakin’ horrible this year. Completely unwatchable unless they’re playing a fellow NFC West team.

As I said gambling and fantasy have helped this out a lot, but I think what’s really made football work for me this year is that I have finally figured out how to watch it. I have a habit of taking my sports (like my everything else) far too seriously. I think this is a byproduct of being a baseball fan where you are taught that every number in every game is supposed to mean something. Sometimes with baseball it’s more about history than what is actually happening in the moment. A good example of this would be the famous homerun chase of 1998. In a lot of ways it was more about the fact that a long time record was being broken than it was about two guys breaking that record. Even now it’s more about how those two guys tarnished that record than it is about anything else.

Anyways, this thinking goes against everything that makes football work. Everything that happens in football is really important, right now. Tomorrow it might seem trivial that something meant so much yesterday, but right in that moment it meant everything. Only in football could your season be considered a letdown in three games. With such a short season every game could literally mean the end of your season, the end of your hopes for the postseason. Everything matters and then it doesn’t.

In a lot of ways football is a lot like the TV show LOST. When LOST was on I could not wait til the next episode to find stuff out and I always had tons of questions about what was going on in my head, but when it was over that was it. I don’t get nostalgic for it like I do with Buffy or Veronica Mars because LOST was the greatest show on TV in that moment. If you haven’t seen it yet you should watch it because it is really good and while you are watching it will be amazing to you, but when it’s gone it’s gone. You can never recapture that sense of wonder you had when everything was new and fresh because you will never have those questions again once you have their answers. That’s football and now that I know that I’ll love it forever.

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Internet

Apparently my writing for this site is not that good

July 16, 2010 – 12:00 pm

Someone linked me to this site called “I Write Like” which analyzes your writing and tells you who you write like. I took a couple of posts from Miller Park Drunk and plugged them in there and it said that I wrote like J.D. Salinger. That’s acceptable. He only writes about adolescents, I write like a 13 year old on that site. Makes sense. I think he’s pretty good, I’ll take it.

Then I took a post from here and it said that I wrote like… I don’t even want to admit this really. It was the last post I did on here, the one about being friends and moving and all of that. I put that post in there and it said that I wrote like Stephenie Meyer. The same Stephenie Meyer who wrote the Twilight series. Seriously.

This couldn’t be right, I thought. Something is clearly wrong here. So I took the next oldest post that I wrote and it said that I wrote like… Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code.

Maybe it’s time that I step it up a notch with these blog posts.

(Or that site is complete garbage.)

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personal

We become such worse friends as we get older

June 29, 2010 – 9:25 pm

I cleaned my room today. I don’t really like cleaning my room. Now don’t get me wrong I love having a clean room. Having a clean room is something that is important to me. It’s just that whenever I clean my room I inevitably find something that reminds me of someone, some place, some thing that I didn’t really want to think about. Today is no exception. Today, I found this picture:

vin-john

This photo reminds me of a lot of things. It reminds me of the time I thought it was a good idea to shave a line in my left eyebrow because I thought it looked cool (like Spike). It reminds me of Muska, my crazy ass dog with a mole on his nose that we named after skater Chad Muska during my brief “I think I want to start skateboarding” phase. Was he tied up in the backyard here? Was he in the house getting into something, chewing up something? Was he doing that crazy howl he used to do that drove the old neighbors crazy? Maybe he was playing in the yard with Shannon, my big (like 250 pounds) black friend from Philadelphia who defied stereotypes by spending way too much time playing video games. Was he at the house? Was he on his way over? It was probably a Saturday. We’re probably grilling out. Our neighbors seemed cool. It reminds me of Tacoma and this house we lived in. There was so much fun we had there, but when I look at this picture mostly it just reminds me of the photographer and the guy cutting my hair.

Katy, my girlfriend from high school, the first person I ever loved who quit school because she didn’t want to lose me and came to live in Alabama and then went back to school because I came with her. I liked her a lot. She was the perfect person for me at that point in my life. I really screwed up that relationship.

Then there’s John, her best friend from college who became my best friend when I moved there. He was probably one of the nicest guys I’ve ever known in my life. He was so easy going and always willing to help a friend. We had a lot of fun and we were friends from the first day I arrived. He was a really great guy. It’s really no wonder she started dating him after me. I would have done the same thing. read more »

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