Random Friday Thoughts

- Getting glass in your foot really hurts. If at all possible avoid doing so, because trust me, you will be mega-gimpy for a few days until you have to see a surgeon to get it pulled out.

- Will the Gamecocks rebound and beat Troy University on Saturday after the thumping they received from Bama last weekend? Does anyone besides myself care?

- Rita is bearing down on Texas and will hit it hard. New Orleans is flooding again as I type this. Our gas prices will be affected by another huge hurricane. Is someone upstairs trying to tell us something?? I'm just asking....

- I have determined that Natural Lite Ice in a can is horrible. It's like drinking water with alcohol added to fool you into liking it. Oh I just bought it to grill beer can chicken with, I'm still a beer snob.

- After winning two presidential elections, people still call our President an idiot. Doesn't say much towards his competition or the people that say that about him in the first place. It has to take SOMETHING in the brain department to accomplish something like becoming the chief executive and Commander in Chief in a constitutional republic.

- My fantasy football team won laast weekend. YAY! Wonder if I'll make it two in a row? I'm playing my buddy Renato's wife, and she's been talking smack. You go girl (but not this weekend)!

- Best wishes and godspeed to my good friend Renato who has shipped to Iraq to serve our country. We will miss him horribly, but are extremely proud of what he is going to accomplish with his and his family's sacrifice. I plan on attending his welcome home party next year and toasting with a nice cold one. He is a man of true honor and duty, and for that we are all thankful.

- Dang, what does one guy gotta do to get some comments on his Blog? Advertise free beer?

- Good friend of mine yesterday at lunch told me when I asked him if he read my blog that he doesn't like to read them because its usually just a bunch of ranting about stuff. I don't do that do I??? *coy look*

Fuzzy Death...

Turn your Hamster into a Fighting Machine!

*chuckle*

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/543178.html

P-Dogg's Zymurgy Tip of the day..

Just in case you've ever wanted to make a high gravity beer, here's a tip for you. Get a reaaaal strong yeast or one that you can add to the bottle after primary fermentation. My batch #7 is a Belgian Style Abbey Ale with about a 10% Alcohol content. It has been almost three months since I bottled it, and I have no carbonation whatsoever. I asked the friendly neighborhood beer maker store owner guy about it and he told me that the amount of alcohol in the beer ends up slowing the yeast activity and therefore the remaining yeast in the bottles are having a hard time creating the carbon dioxide needed for proper carbonation. He recommended adding a few granules of dry yeast to each bottle and then re-capping them.

I did that Saturday evening, and I sure hope I didn't put too much in each bottle and they become bottle bombs.

Moral of the story: I'm probably not going to make another high gravity beer anytime soon. They're expensive, take too long to make, and you have to wait forever for them to carbonate and be drinkable. I'll stick with the regular gravity beers, thank you very much. I can buy myself a finely crafted Belgian Ale at the liquor store when the need hits me.

Halloween is coming

I found this link while GIS-ing for 'Special Ed'.

Someone is having a big Halloween party and they offer a humorous list of costume ideas. Check it out - maybe a slow download because of the background music and number of pictures...but worth the wait.

oh my favorite?? Fat Kid.

Heres a good laugh....

Check this out, the 'world' is demanding that the U.N. take charge in the War on Terror. haha.

OK. four years ago, the terrorists hit us, the U.S. HARD. We got a clue. We hit 'em back, and we hit 'em HARD. The rest of the world whined and moaned "Bush's rush to War!" and "unchecked American Power!" and other nonsense. Terrorism is now (and has been for decades) spreading all over the world and they realize that they need to stop it. Unfortunately, the U.N. is not the way to go about it, and that has been made clear many times over. Anti-Americanism still taints this war and they will not help the U.S. and its allies fight it, even if it means thousands of their own innocent people dying. The reasons for not helping the U.S. abound, and they're all lame socialist excuses. This is serious and most of us know it.

However, the U.N. is not serious. It has not been for many decades, and it is even worse now. Any effort towards getting help from the U.N. versus dismantling it, is wasted effort. Unfortunately, terror will strike these countries while they plead with the U.N. for help, and they won't get any. For that I feel truly sorry for those people.

Once again I pray and hope for every single American Soldier that is fighting terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and elsewhere that we are not aware of. I also pray and hope for the British, Australian, Polish, Iraqi, Israeli, Czech, Japanese, and other troops that are there fighting along side us. You know, the other countries that are fighting in this 'unilateral' war.

They have a clue. and so does the U.S.

I pray it's not too late for the rest of 'em.

The Gamecocks Reprezent

Using my best gangsta rap voice, the Fighting Gamecocks went to Athens last weekend to reprezent! Follow up to my last blog entry about the Atlanta area media and national media thinking that USC had no shot at winning last Saturday's game, I am happy to say that even though we lost to those ugly Dawgs, it wouldn't have been so had our kicker made a PAT and a FG that he missed. It was REAL close.

Ah well, a loss is a loss, but the Gamecocks looked really good against the #9 team in the country and I think we're going to have a good season after all. Next year UGA better be prepared, because we ain't losin to them again for a while.

Oh and by the way, the media sure has been quiet about how great UGA is this week. Wonder why....hmmmm.... *grin*

Football Gripe

I just got back from making my lunch in the breakroom in my office, and every day there is a copy of the local newspaper in there to read. I, being a red blooded American male, of course read the sports section. This weekend is the big matchup between my Beloved South Carolina Gamecocks, and the Georgia Bulldogs. Of course the Dawgs are the local favorite seeing as how I live in Georgia and all, but every year it's the same old thing with the local media, and it drives me crazy when the proof just isn't there. Let me take an example and try to explain to you what I'm talking about:

"Lou Holtz, former football coach and still 10 percent humanoid, with the rest meat-byproducts, recently predicted South Carolina would upset Georgia.

I find this amusing, though not because Holtz doesn’t even have his own Friday column, and therefore his projections aren’t considered as scientific absolutes, like, say, the theory of relativity and Weekend Predictions. Rather, this is funny because in his 174 years of coaching, Holtz never once predicted a victory for his own team, even when he knew he was coming off a really good illegal offseason."

And more:

Spurrier is not with Florida.

With South Carolina, is he.

With gout, he might as well be.

The Dogs are favored by 18 points over South Carolina. If the line goes any higher, the SEC mandates they play at least one series blindfolded.

- Jeff Schultz, Atlanta Journal Constitution editorial

I hear the local talk radio hosts chuckle when someone mentions that SC has some talent on their team. They joke about Lou Holtz' NCAA Violations. They talk about how this UGA victory will be a 'hollow' one over Spurrier. The 'Mayhem in the AM' guys this morning had Lou Holtz on the show interviewing him and after they were done they commented 'Lou seems to actually believe that USC can upset Georgia!' followed by much laughter. This is repeated ad nauseam in print and TV and radio 'analyses'.

Granted, last week UGA dismantled a Boise State team that went undefeated last season, and USC didn't look its sharpest against UCF. But this is the same USC program that was beating UGA 16-0 at halftime last year. The year before UGA whomped us. The year before that, UGA escaped with a Pollack fumble/interception thing in the end zone and won by a field goal. It's been a close game, year in and year out.

I guess my biggest beef is that even though we beat Georgia, and recently barely lost to them, the media still laughs as though USC aint got an ice cube's chance. The funny thing about this is, most of the actual UGA fans I know, give USC some props for past battles well fought and some even have a bit of fear about Spurrier taking the reins there. So where's the disconnect between the media and the fans?

That's cool (pun intended), I personally don't think we will pull this one off, but damn, I will laugh soooo hard if we beat UGA, AGAIN. And I look forward to reading the post mortems containing lines like 'how could such a superior team lose to a bunch of untalented hacks from South Carolina?' (I've seen it before...)

Ben gets a Blog

My Bro-In-Law Ben just made his presence felt in the blog-o-sphere. If you think I tend to lean conservative on political issues, you ain't seen nuthin' until you've talked to Ben. He's Patriot to the core, and sick and tired of the leftist pansies in this country.

With that said, I want to give him a hearty WELCOME! to the blogosphere, as if I'm such a haggard veteran of it. I am sure he'll be leading the pack of bloggers fact checking and bringing about the next "Rather-gate", or "memo-gate" as some folks call it.

You go, Ben (not Bin)!

College Football '05 Kickoff

Last night the Spurrier era finally began at South Carolina. I watched every minute of the game to analyze every move and play we ran. First off I gotta say we WON!!! and that's cause for celebration. However, we really didn't play well in the second half and it showed. The following are some notes about things I noticed about the 2005 version of the Fighting Gamecocks:

1)Blake Mitchell and the Spurrier offense looks good. I was totally surprised by how well he threw the ball and that our receivers made some great catches and some great blocks. This part of the game right now is our strong point.

2)Our Offensive line looks atrocious. Wow, 32 yards rushing the whole game? Against an 0-11 team? Blake spent some time getting hit hard too, we HAVE to get some boys who will open holes for our running backs, because it just ain't happenin' right now.

3)Our defense is small. All night our defense got pushed around by that 'vaunted' Central Florida offensive line. They were poppin' 5-7 yard runs almost at will on us, and when they didn't do that, they had two WRs that were eating our defensive backs alive. What the??? This was supposed to be our strong point coming into this season, and so far it looks like we're lining up 10 defensive backs and one 300 pound defensive lineman on the field. Boy I hope we improve because it could get ugly against a real offense (see UGA, UF, UT ad nauseam).

4)Spurrier is the Anti-Holtz. He runs plays that make sense and work. He plays like he wants to win, not to prove some point. He makes our QB look great by teaching him where to throw the ball and let the receivers make plays. He doesn't force something that isn't working, and he actually adjusts game plans to suit the situation. Gee imagine that. I am very happy he is at Carolina and brings a coaching scheme that I think will work and work well once we get some more talent around the ball.

At this point USC has a ways to go, first order of business it seems is to recruit some big uglies for the O and D lines. We were just getting whipped out there by a mid-conference team. The Offense will improve, I can just feel it and see it. Unfortunately the Gamecocks won't be able to outscore many folks until we stop them, and that leaves us with the Defense. We better get some size and talent there or its going to be a long year.

Next up, UGA and the Ugly Dawgs. They have yet to live up to their hype with a big game against Boise State tomorrow. We will see what happens there. I will say that if their Offensive line is as good as advertised, then the Gamecock defense will be eaten alive by their running attack. Coach Thompson, you'd better readjust!

*gulp* Georgia, here we come!!!

Katrina - Continued...

Wow. Read this article and you'll start to realize the cultural bias in this country against the South in general. It was an eye opener even for an adopted Southerner like me.

Enjoy.



courtesy of Neal Boortz's blog

Katrina

We were in Hickory this past weekend when we noticed on the news saturday night that Katrina had intensified and become a Cat 5 storm and was bearing down on Louisiana. I had always wondered what a Cat 5 storm would look like when it hit land, seeing as how I used to T.A. Meteorology and Climatology in Grad School. I had this inner desire - from the same place that people have the desire to see car wrecks - to see what sort of destruction a storm like this could bring.

I've seen it now, although not in person, and I am ashamed of ever thinking that it would be 'cool' to see what a Cat 5 storm could do.

This is beyond anything I could have imagined, and I fear it may get alot worse in New Orleans. Buildings may start to topple due to softening foundations. There is no law in the streets now, so it may even be necessary to have a Fallujah-style invasion of New Orleans by our military just to get it back. Gas lines are insane here in Georgia. Corpses float through flooded streets. Diease will soon set in. Thousands may die. The effects are seemingly endless.

And all this because of a very large hurricane - a natural event.

Who's to blame? No one. The lefties and Euroweenies are blaming President Bush for this, just showing their total lack of human hearts and minds in the process. Category 5 storms occur on this planet, they have in the past, they will in the future. It's not one man's fault and to think so is ignorant, and then to voice it? That's just the height of stupidity.

I pray and hope that things get better for the entire Mississippi and New Orleans Katrina impacted areas. I just hope that we as Americans learn some lessons out of this, and remember when someone brings up the possibility of an event like this being brought on by a terrorist. *shudder*