I'm a connoisseur of leisurely things.
Theories, Predictions, Opinions, & Other Nonsense
One of my friend’s from college told me that his mother once worked in inner-city Philadelphia as a teacher, and she had a kid in the class named “Shithead”, but it was pronounced “Shih-theed”. Likely story I suppose, until at my day job one day, a customer was named “Wayne Dwopp”. No joke.
I stumbled upon The Drunk Kansan website a few nights ago, and I found a link to the below video at Youtube. I used to watch The Love Connection all the time, and I never remember this episode.
So I can’t help but comment on Don Imus’s recent media trouble, when during his show, he referenced a girls basketball team as “nappy headed hoes”. Listen, I’m not a fan of Don Imus. I really don’t care for the guy’s show, or his sense of humor. I find his voice hard to listen to. That being said, his show is about controversy, and about comedy. If he’s going to get in trouble for saying what he said – in jest – then I will have to firmly disagree. I don’t believe he should be suspended, much less fired.
I don’t even think what he said was racist. The underlying meaning was not racist. At least I don’t think so. And most importantly, no one should have to apologize to Al Sharpton. Don Imus actually went as far as calling Sharpton “sir”. Give me a break.
People in this country are becoming more and more offended by the things other people say. I don’t get in an uproar and call for Sharpton’s job every time he says something ridiculous. For example, Sharpton once said:
1991: A Hasidic Jewish driver in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section accidentally kills Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black child, and antisemitic riots erupt. Sharpton races to pour gasoline on the fire. At Gavin’s funeral he rails against the “diamond merchants” — code for Jews — with “the blood of innocent babies” on their hands. He mobilizes hundreds of demonstrators to march through the Jewish neighborhood, chanting, “No justice, no peace.” A rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, is surrounded by a mob shouting “Kill the Jews!” and stabbed to death.
work citied
On top of all that, Sharpton has inspired racial riots against ‘crackers’ and jews.
I’m not offended by any of what Sharpton has to say, but no one – no one – should have to apologize to him like he is some prosecuting attorney.
Did you hear this one? David Copperfield (the magician) gets robbed in Florida, and he does a magic trick so the would-be robbers think that Copperfield has nothing in his pockets. The reality is that Copperfield has a cellphone, and some other important info. I’m not kidding, really. Check out the link below. How funny is that?
David Copperfield Tricks Robbers
Edit: April 4, 2007 – Dead link to article, changed to working link.
I’m thrilled! The Dish Network reached a carrier agreement with Sportsnet NY, home of the NY Mets, only days after my last blog post. I was getting a little discouraged since they remained the only national provider that did not reach an agreement with SportsNet NY. I had written to the CEO (“ceo@thedishnetwork.com”) asking for them to pickup this station, so when it was announced the other day that they did reach an agreement, I did something that I hope many people did — email “ceo@thedishnetwork.com” to say thank you. And, I got a personal reply.
Thank you Dish!
Mr. *********,
I appreciate the email and the kind words toward DISH. I hope you enjoyed last night’s game and the many that will follow. I hope the Mets have a great season!
Sincerely,
David Laslo
Executive Office of DISH Network
CEO Escalations
David.laslo@echostar.com
—–Original Message—–
From: Jeff
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 11:34 PM
To: CEO
Subject: Thank You for Adding Sportsnet NY-DavidAs an 18 month subscriber of The Dish Network that e-mailed you “begging you” to negotiate an agreement with Sportsnet NY – the home of the NY Mets – I want to specifically thank you for the recent news of this channel being added. I had been recently worried that you would not pickup this channel. It was a pleasant suprise coming home from the bar where I went to watch the game to come home and see the press release that a deal was struck between Dish and Sportsnet NY.
Thank you so much for adding this station. If the channel was not added, I would have had to switch to DirecTV, and based upon my friend’s review of it (he has it because his family loves the Yankees and DirecTV carries YES!), he doesn’t recommened DirecTV to anyone that doesn’t need it. It honestly would have pained me to switch from Dish because we love it so much. My mom *loves* Dish – she’s big into the DVR and recording programs.
I’ve been reading www.satelliteguys.us and www.dbstalk.com daily for the last 2 months, awaiting news of Dish adding this channel. I was very encouraged by the uplink to ch 438 at the end of March, described by posters at those websites.
Thank you again for adding this. I’m sure many people (including myself) e-mailed to add this channel, and I hope that just as many say “thank you” for adding it. We Mets fans here in NY really appreciate it, and it does mean a lot.
Jeff
NY.
Springtime is a great time of year. The change back to daylight savings, warmer weather, driving with the windows down, and baseball. Baseball is by far my favorite sport. It’s my favorite sport both to watch, play and listen to. The NY Mets have been my baseball team since about 1981. Through the horrible early 1980s, the 1986 Word Series, the late 1980s fade-out, the horrible 1990s, and the rebirth in the last few years of a promising team. However, as of typing this, I can’t watch them.
Once upon a time in the 1990s, the NY Mets were broadcast on WWOR (Channel 9). It was an OTA station (over the air). If you didn’t have cable TV, it wasn’t a problem. Fiddle with your rabbit ears on the TV, and you could watch the Mets. In the eatly 1990s, both the Mets and Yankees moved off of WWOR and WPIX respectively, and moved to their own regional sports networks (RSNs) with the Mets splitting time between WPIX and MSG and the Yankees going to their own YES! network.
When the Yankees started YES! in the early naughts, Cablevision – the cable operator in this territory – refused to pickup the YES! network. They didn’t carry the station for a year, and Cablevision customers who were also Yankees fans were forced to go to DirecTV, as DirecTV carried and still does carry the YES! network.
On March 16th, 2005 the NY Mets started their own RSN called Sportsnet NY. Soon after this date, Verizon was the first TV provider to get a carrier agreement with Sportsnet NY. That’s just fucking great, because hardly anyone is eligible for FiosTV yet in NY. (Verizon has rolled out Fios Internet to some communities including mine since Feb 2005, but their Fios TV will be held up by political redtape in each municipality.) Cablevision signed Sportsnet NY a few days later, learning their lesson when they failed to sign YES! in a timely mannor. On opening day, too late to see the first game, DirecTV came to an agreement with Sportsnet NY, and the first broadcast on DirecTV will be tomorrow, Wednesday 4/5/06.
I have the Dish Network, and I’ve been extremely happy with it for the 17 months I’ve had it. However, they don’t carry the YES! network and they don’t at the current time carry Sportsnet NY. They say they are in deep discussion with Sportsnet NY, but that’s just saying that neither side has agreed to relinquish any of their outrageously high demands at the current time.
So, here in lies the problem. I live on Long Island, 15 miles away from Shea Stadium, but due to the fact I have The Dish Network, I will be unable to watch the large majority (+130) of NY Mets games unless Echostar (Dish) comes to a carriage agreement with Sportsnet NY.
If they do not, I move to DirecTV. And I’d hate to do that because we like Dish here, and my friend does not like DirecTV. He hates Cablevision, but members of his family are Yankee fans, so for him, it’s Cablevision, DirecTV or nothing. 🙂
How I long for the days when I could tune the rabbit ears to a fuzzy channel 9 and watch the Mets whenever I wanted.
Actor Don Knotts died Friday, Feb 24th in Los Angeles. A truly irreplaceable comic, Knotts made people laugh all his life. Granted, I caught him near the end of his career rather than at the beginning, as I was a huge Three’s Company fan from the day that show started until the day it ended. Knotts played Ralph Furley, the charismatic landlord for Jack (John Ritter), Chrissy (Suzanne Somers), and Janet (Joyce DeWitt).
It’s a tad frightening to see famous people go, even if their old. Three’s Company was a show I watched regularly throughout the 1980s, and even on re-runs years later. Heck, I own the DVDs to the show, and it’s as funny now as it was then. Sadly, with John Ritter dying unexpectedly in 2003, and now Don Knotts, two comedic geniouses are gone, but in better places.
For more information on Don Knotts, please see his entry at the IMDB (Internet Movie Database).
What is it with this movie Brokeback Mountain? I mean, what’s the big deal? So, the guys are gay. How is this movie different than any other love story. Granted, I probably won’t go see this movie while it’s out in the theatre, but I’ll probably make it a Netflix rent when it comes out on DVD. This being said, why the big fuss? Because it’s two gay guys in a love story rather than a man and a woman? Don’t we all have something better to do then to make a big production out of love between a couple? Whether it be a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, or a man and man, what is the big deal?
While this movie may be good and indeed well acted, directed, and produced, I fear that too much attention is being made to the general issue of sexuality. I think the media response to this movie exemplifies our cultural issues with sexuality and homosexuality, similarly to how other movies show our issues with racism and violence.
Anywho, that’s my rant. For those with a comedic bone in them, check out the links below related to Brokeback Mountain, or “Bareback Mounting” as I like to call it.
Broke Mac Mountain
Broke Back To The Future
BrokeBack Top Gun
Seattle Seahawks vs. Pittsburgh Steelers.
2/5/2006
Detroit, Michigan.
I didn’t really have a whole heck of a lot of time this year to actually watch the game. Actually, I hardly watched any football the whole year. I caught about 15 mins of a game back in the beginning of January. It’s not that I dislike football, it’s just I’d rather play Xbox, or do something else. At any rate, I make an effort to watch the Superbowl every year, but this year I had a lot of work to do around here that was time sensitive (like clean underwear for work on Monday AM), so in lieu of going out or to a friend’s house to watch it, I just watched it here at my place as I tended to other things.
And boy, am I glad I did.
Between a horrible first quarter, atrocious refereeing, some poor play calling, and a less than stellar Rolling Stones performance, I’m glad I wasn’t paying all that much attention to the game like I normally would have. That being said, I also missed out on a lot of the cool commercials, which is one reason I watch the game to begin with. Not to worry though, here are some links that offer all of the commercials for viewing in case you missed them:
A few days ago, I had the great pleasure of seeing (for the first time) Billy Joel perfom live. He played at Madison Square Garden in NYC, close to his home town. It was, by far, one of the most amazing musical experiences of my life. He played for about 3 hours, playing most songs I knew (and I’m not even a hardcore fan). His performance was so well refined, so crisp, and so awesome that words can almost not describe it.
He played to a sold-out crowd, and just added a 12th show in NYC at the end of February.
There is one thing that I’d like to mention — this was the first concert I’ve been to in a long time where the crowd was mostly older than myself. At one point during the concert, a younger fan – around my age – stood up and started to grove to the music a little. Shortly after he did that, a woman fan – about 50 years old – asked him to sit down. And he did. I looked at that, as I sort of saw the whole thing happen. I was reading facial expressions; the kid couldn’t believe he was asked to sit down, and the woman looked like she couldn’t believe that he couldn’t believe that he was asked to sit down. None the less, he reluctantly sat down and about 15 minutes later, he stood right the hell up again. That was pretty awesome too. 🙂
Oh, and the audience practically sung “Piano Man” for Billy. That was kinda cool, too.
I like these guys. Not exactly sure why, but I think all the brass instruments and some classical roots might have a factor in it. The lead singer (Ian Anderson) is a bit whacky, but he seems really into the music. Until I did a search on these guys recently, I wasn’t sure what songs they created (that I might have heard). Of couse, this was followed by me saying “oh, they sing that? That too?”. You know how that goes. 🙂
Talk about being 45 years late to the party. 🙂 Below are three movie clips, one of which is from 1970, and thus it’s 2006 right now, that puts me like I said, about 45 years late to the party. 🙂
I’m debating whether or not this guy is – or was – on drugs. What do you think?
I’m going to say that he might have been on drugs for the making of this video – may be a just-lower-than-lethal brew of coke, acid and shrooms. However, in concert, I don’t think it’s possible for a human being to be that heavily medicated and be that good at playing all sorts of various instruments.
Here are the three video clips. Note: These are stored locally here, so please do not link to my website and use my bandwith. Instead, (on an x86 machine – thats a machine that runs Windows for all you non-geeks) right-click, “save as” to your own machine. Thanks!
Aqualung
Witches
Thick as a Brick
For more information on Jethro Tull, visit the Official Jethro Tull Website, and the Unofficial Jethro Tull website might be a good visit as well.