Tag: ek Holiday

Faithful readers already know what I think about Turn Left.

In the Roman form of chariot racing, teams represented different groups of financial backers and sometimes competed for the services of particularly skilled drivers. These teams became the focus of intense support among spectators, and occasional disturbances broke out between followers of different factions. The conflicts sometimes became politicized, as the sport began to transcend the races themselves and started to affect society overall.

Those who have worn the crown should never survive its loss.  Purple makes a fine winding sheet.

It’s hard to blame the technology, the cars and tracks can hardly be safer than they are.  It’s high speed bumper cars and the rules that create an environment where you can take out 12 of them at a time; and though 33 were injured, some critically, nobody died… yet.

To me the sport’s biggest sin is that it’s boring.  BORING!

Yup, that’s right, more boring than having Vettel dive into the front and drive off into the distance with Mark Webber in tow.

And that’s because nothing matters until the last 5 laps except for the accidents.

You know, like the whole track falling apart.

So let’s talk instead about Danica Patrick’s love life.

Patrick Was Leading Way Even Before Winning Pole

By VIV BERNSTEIN, The New York Times

Published: February 18, 2013

On the first day that drivers arrived at Daytona International Speedway for Speedweeks, the Daytona 500 and the celebrated start of Nascar’s 2013 Sprint Cup season, the story making headlines was Danica Patrick’s romantic relationship with the driver Ricky Stenhouse, Jr.

…

Her relationship with Stenhouse, an up-and-coming driver who will also be a rookie in the Sprint Cup this season, has only served to intensify the interest in everything she does on and off the track.

…

“I don’t mind answering questions about the other stuff,” she added. “But I get that it’s not about racing. It’s nice to change the tone of the questions because of what’s going on, on the track. That is a really good sign, and I like that.”

Either way, it’s all good for Nascar. Patrick made the rounds of many of the major television talk shows Monday morning, giving the sport some much needed publicity. Nascar has had a drop in attendance and television ratings in recent years. The marketing game plan is to focus on drivers, and nobody does a better job of self-marketing than the 30-year-old Patrick.

“Driver star power is something we’re going to bang on from a marketing perspective in ’13 and in ’14, ’15, ’16,” said Steve Phelps, Nascar’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer. “It will all be about the drivers.

…

“Listen, she is a marketing phenomenon,” Phelps said. “I think putting her on the biggest stage that we have, the Sprint Cup, and have her run a full season, will only help her.”

He asked rhetorically: “Do I believe that she needs to win in order to continue that momentum that she has seen so far? I don’t. Would it add to it? Would it kind of plus-up the whole thing? I do.”

To be continued, as Patrick moves through the week and heads to the pole Sunday, with 500 miles in front of her and the remaining skeptics in the rear.

ek, are you implying that we’re living in the decadent final days of empire with bread and circuses to placate the proletariat?

Ahem, let me clear my throat.

WE ARE LIVING IN THE DECADENT FINAL DAYS OF EMPIRE WITH BREAD AND CIRCUSES TO PLACATE THE PROLETARIAT!!!

Enjoy the race, I’ll be back for the last 5 laps to see how things turned out.

Tonight’s event is the last of 2 days of judging and includes 3 Group Finals and Best in Show.

Last night’s results-

• Hound– American Foxhound Ch Kiarry’s Pandora’s Box
• Toy– Affenpinscher GCH Banana Joe V Tani Kazari
• Non-Sporting– Bichon Frises GCH Vogelflight’s Honor To Pillowtalk
• Herding– Old English Sheepdog Ch Haystac’s Dream Catcher

It is broadcast live on USA starting at 8 pm with a repeat at 8 am.

Some links-

• Official
• Wikipedia

One of two new breeds this year, the (Jack) Russell Terrier, makes it’s debut tonight in the Terrier Group.

The Group Finals tonight are-

Paden doesn’t seem to care about anything, except he does. You just can never tell what it’s going to be. Let me tell you about your friend Paden. A long time ago, me, Paden, Tyree, and a couple of other fellas did a lot of riding together. On business, and business was pretty good. We moved around a lot, the way you have to in that line of work. Somewhere along the way, we picked up this dog. One of us took to feeding it, so it followed us everywhere. Well, one day we’re leaving this little Missouri town, in kind of a hurry with a bunch of the locals hot on our tail. Somehow this dog got tied up with Tyree’s horse. Tyree went flyin’. Well, Tyree was pretty mad when he got up, and, being Tyree, he shot the dog. Didn’t kill him, though. The next thing you know, Paden’s down off his horse, and he’s holdin’ this dog, sayin’ we should go on without him. I thought he was kidding, except he wasn’t. Tyree was ready to plug ’em both – all this with the posse ridin’ down on us. I thought we were pals after all that riding we did together. All of a sudden he’s worried about some mutt. Well, we did like he asked. We left him, and he went to jail for a dog. You want to hear the funny part? Paden didn’t even like that damn dog.

It evened out in the end. They locked me up; the dog sprung me.

Tonight’s event is the first of 2 days of judging.  It is broadcast live on CNBC starting at 8 pm with a repeat at 11 pm immediately following and again at 8 am on USA.  Tomorrow’s Groups which will be folowed by Best In Show on USA at 8 pm with a repeat at 8 am Wednesday.

Some links-

• Official
• Wikipedia

The Group Finals tonight are-

Until about Monday this was a simple story- Art Modell and the Ravens == bad guys.  ‘9ers, storied franchise == good.

And the Ravens are.

It’s your typical tale of elite corporate greed with billionaires threatening to take away their yachts unless you build a new boat basin on the backs of the peons.

I even had a Les Mis clip to go with it.

Now the story is the homophobia of the ‘9ers–

San Francisco 49ers’ Ahmad Brooks, Isaac Sopoaga Deny Participating In ‘It Gets Better’ Gay Youth Video

Huffington Post

Posted: 01/31/2013 5:20 pm EST

“This is America and if someone wants to be gay, they can be gay,” Brooks told the publication. “But I didn’t make any video.” Later, after he was reportedly shown the video on an iPhone, the player clarified, “Oh, that. It was an anti-bullying video, not a gay [rights] video.”

In San Francisco?  I know gay people (men and women) who will kick your ass!

Happy to do it myself.

The fact is that there is no larger and deeper heap of bigotry than Throwball and yes, I am including Turn Left Racing.

Not to mention the Drain Bamage-

Transcript

Will someone hold my hair?

In addition to exercising my roman numeral skillz this off beat event has become more and more popular the longer I’ve blogged it.

Call it the ek bump.

Here is a link to past Bissel Kitty Halftime shows and if that Aw factor is not enough- live kitten cam.

They now have an embeddable puppy cam too-

And, this page of Puppy Bowl whores and highlights which may (or may not) run a live feed.  Or you can try the Animal Planet main page.

And, to prove how scandalously mainstream I’ve become-

• Washington Post
• The New York Times
• USA Today

TheMomCat’s live feed link.

How appropriate.

It’s the Mind

Ned?  Ned Ryerson?!

You like boats, but not the ocean. You go to a lake in summer with your family up in the mountains. There’s a long wooden dock and a boathouse with boards missing from the roof, and a place you used to crawl underneath to be alone. You’re a sucker for French poetry and rhinestones. You’re very generous. You’re kind to strangers and children, and when you stand in the snow you look like an angel.

How are you doing this?

I told you. I wake up every day, right here, right in Punxsutawney, and it’s always February 2nd, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

The American Conference Championship is an entirely different ball of wax.  Here you don’t have two teams that are mostly unremarkably objectionable, no better or worse than most, instead you have two positively hateful ones and the question is which evil is lesser?

Fundamentally the Carrion Crows and the Patsies are guilty of the same offense, robbing their host communities to fund huge empty white elephant eyesores that are basically unusable except for 8 days a year to the tune of hundreds of millions.

In the one case the thief, Art Modell, was not quite as successful as Robert Kraft and lost everything except his team contracts and The Bank ($314 million) and in fairness Kraft was able to raise the $420 million for Gillette privately, though it is not in any sense funded by his personal fortune any more than all those architectural monstrosities with Trump plastered on them.

And, if you like rooting for winners, the Ravens don’t even have a suspicion of victory today.  Unless Brady and about half the other Patsie players are suddenly stuck by mysterious illness and injury this is about as close to a sure thing as you get in Throwball.

Nope, as we head into the break week before the Super Bowl the question will be if the creaky old Patsies can stave off the new kids on the block ‘9ers and whether you should even be watching Throwball at all.

The Falcons are an expansion team of no particular note.  There’s really no good reason to hate them except the team colors (red and black in case you’re interested) and Michael Vick.  They’ve been historically somewhat ineffective in post-season play relative to their overall winning percentage.

The ‘9ers on the other hand are a storied program tracing their origin back to the All-American Football Conference.  Their ascendancy in the ’80s was roughly co-terminant with the despised ‘boys, but their fans were nowhere near as loud, obnoxious, and arrogant.

Now there are those pointing to the investigation of Michael Crabtree for sexual assault as a reason to favor the Falcons, but I don’t see it.  For one thing they didn’t fly him to the Georgia Dome to ride the pine.  A late breaking development is a second witness that supports his version of events.

In any case this particular edition of the ‘9ers is not a one dimensional team dependent on him or even Colin Kaepernick for that matter.  What they have this year that they lacked last is a solid offensive line that can protect anyone they put in the pocket and open lanes for their rushing game.  It’s not impossible that they’ll lose, it’s just hard to see how.

ek?  How can you possibly root for the Texans?

Well, on the merits they’re a pure expansion team that simply took the biggest market available after the Oilers bolted.  And of course I’ll never forget how the Patsies took Hartford for a ride so they could screw over Foxboro.

That said there’s no reason they shouldn’t crush the Texans like a bug, the Patsies are the surest things this weekend.

But I’ve been 100% wrong so far.

A battle of expansion teams the Seahawks extended a 5 game winning streak last week beating the noxious Native Americans and handing D.C. a well deserved defeat.

A word about that.  I hope and wish Robert Griffin has a swift, speedy, and complete recovery, but the likelihood is that it will be long and painful and as with Broadway Joe Namath his game will never be the same.  Why did Mike Shanahan and the rest of the organization including their preening team physician, trainers, and offensive coordinator so badly blow this call?

Stephen Strasburg.

You will recall that Davey Johnson took no end of heat over his decision to bench Strasburg in the playoffs rather than risk permanent injury to their star stopper in what would have been an ultimately futile pursuit of a pennant anyway.  Indeed I expect the Monday Morning Quarterbacking to resume the instant Pitchers and Catchers report and while I will call this masturbatory manifestation of instant gratification “D.C. Disease” most fans are not immune.

The Versailles Villagers, that passel of perpetually wrong pundits and politicians who suck up and kick down confident in their non-existent knowledge of subjects they know nothing about and have no interest in really except as psychic proof of their pompous predestined prepotency over us mere peons and an affirmation of their inherent superiority and hard work instead of inbreeding and nepotism, insist they are entitled and every last one of them is a rabid fan of that team with the racist name where they can get season tickets or a seat in the owners box or sideline and no one else can.

God ordained them in the womb and that divine silver spoon is a true refection of their merit and treasure in heaven and not a distorted fun house mirror.  If they were supposed to be sinners they’d have poor parents and according to His will their struggles would not be blessed with success.  But they are successful and thus His plan is made manifest in this world as well as the next, forget that eye of the needle stuff- if Jesus was so holy why wasn’t he rich?

Thus endeth today’s lesson on hubris and hypocrisy.

Back on the field if the Seahawks were not on a roll you might be tempted to believe that the Falcons had a shot what with home field advantage and all, but their defense is very ordinary especially against the run and they have no ground game of their own to speak of.  Additionally Matt Ryan has never ever won a single playoff game (0 – 3).

But if you insist on another reason to hate the Falcons they are the team that drafted Michael Vick, noted Dog Murderer.

91 – 21.

No, that’s not the score of last week’s Packers/Vikings game, it’s the number of fans ejected and arrested, far ahead of their average performance of 18.4 and 5.5 a game.

The Packers looked better than average on the field also, dominating most of the game except for a late 4th Quarter score in a 24 – 10 victory.

Aaron Rogers is not the only Packer getting healthier just in time for the post season so their contest against the ‘9ers could be more interesting than people expect, though in fairness the ‘9ers are a mere 2.5 point favorite and that because of home field advantage.

As opposed to the AFC, the NFC is a tough pick, almost any team could win.

The ‘9ers can’t count on a 30 – 22 romp like they got in Week 1 and their defense is playing injured.  Justin Smith’s triceps is definitely questionable and they are much less effective without him.  Quarterback Colin Kaepernick is a mid-season replacement so who knows, though his scrambling style is something the Packers have had trouble dealing with in other teams.  Both kickers have the potential to suck but the ‘9ers signed Billy Cundiff during their bye week so they have a replacement even though the still slumping Akers will start.

The ‘9ers are not a bad team, there’s nothing much to hate about them and I’m going to be disappointed to miss this game.

But I hope the Packers win.  What about

The Packers are the only non-profit, community-owned major league professional sports team in the United States.

are we not understanding?