...in other words... Meme Jan 30th

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

-- Henry David Thoreau

This one has actually gotten me to think a bit. Mainly, about the word "tolerable" and what it means in the context of the quote. Does Thoreau mean a tolerant society? Did he ever imagine a world with such religious, racial, sexual, and political intolerance? In some respects our world is certainly more open to these issues, but the opposition to them is more vocal, more fierce. Perhaps a "tolerable world" is a peaceful world. I don't know. It does make you think though.

Jason Garrett Coach's The Boys

Everyone, around Dallas, seems to be pretty excited about the hire of Jason Garrett as at least the new offensive coordinator, and possibly the new head coach. I feel that I am the only one around here who doesn't see it as such a coup. Before I continue, I do like the idea of having him coaching the Cowboys a better proposition than some of the other people rumored to be coming here for the head coaching job (Wade Phillips, Norv Turner, etc.)

BUT, his only coaching experience so far is as the quarterbacks coach in Miami. Let me, repeat that, the quarterbacks coach in Miami. The quarterbacks who somehow were worse this year than they were last year.

The 2 headed monster of Gus Frerotte (the very definition of "journeyman quarterback") and Sage Rosenfels combined for 22TDs and 16 INTs in 2005, and threw for almost 3,500 yds. While also leading the Dolphins to a record of 9-7

The big free agency signing of Culpepper as well as the addition of Joey Harrington (with some Cleo Lemon thrown in) had these numbers:
3577 yds, 16 TD, 19 INTs. With a dismal record of 6-10 (and how many fools picked them to make the Super Bowl?) Not exactly Dan Marino numbers, hell they are barely Jay Fiedler number.

And lest I forget, lets compare the all important stat of QB Rating (which most of us don't understand anyways)
2006: 71.2
2005: 76.7
Which sucks for both years, but it was 5 points worse in 2006.

Like I said, Garrett could be an awesome coach, but lets just hold off on the coronation for a little while, OK?

All-Star Hockey Game

A couple of days ago the local sports station (The Ticket), had a little competition: "North America vs. The World" in which they asked 4 different players a variety of questions. One Finn, One Russian, One Canadian, and One American. I found some of the stats from the questionnaire interesting.
All four of the correctly answered the question that was approximately, "Who is the richest woman in the world, worth $1.5 billion?" The answer is of course Oprah Winfrey. They all know who she is. That blew my mind, and gave me a good chuckle.
Only one or two of them knew that Abraham Lincoln is on the $5 bill.
The other question that troubled me was that only one of them knew that Benito Mussolini was, "the ruler of Italy who joined Hitler."
All four of them knew that the U.S. President lives in the White House. Conversely, I have no idea where the PM of Canada or the President of Russian lives.
Heck, three of them knew that JFK was killed in Dallas.
Finally, only the American got any of the measurement questions right (how many yards on a football field, and how many quarts in a gallon) , as the other 3 are only familiar with the metric system.
I did feel bad for the Russian guy though, as he struggled a bit with the language barrier, and he apologized a few times for not knowing more of the answers.

Another Saturday Night

Have you ever had one of those night were it seems nothing can go right?No matter what you think of, it just doesn't work out? Last night was definitely one of those nights. My friend, Steve, and his cousin drove up to Dallas this weekend to visit some relatives, and hang out with another friend (Sam), and me.

It started out innocently enough, with Sam calling me, and saying "Hey lets all go out to dinner together." Sure why, not? We decided to make the safe choice, and to Chili's. As I am driving to the restaurant, Sam calls me again. They don't want to go to Chili's, now they want to go to Bennigan's (like there is that big a difference). The rest of dinner goes off without a hitch.

Now it is time to decide what to do after dinner. No one wants to go to a bar, or club. I have an idea, "Let's go bowling!" Everyone is agreeable to that. We get to the bowling alley. It doesn't look that crowded from the parking lot, but once we get inside, holy crap! It is a 2(!) hour wait to get a lane! 2 freaking hours! When the hell did bowling become the thing to do on a Saturday night? And these people are dressed up to. They aren't just there in jeans and t-shirts. They're dressed in pretty nice clothes. Blew my mind.

Ok, so bowling is out. Now there is something in the back of my brain that tells me we aren't doing crap tonight. I don't know what it is, but I know. Now we decide we are going to go to Dave and Buster's close to my house in Frisco to play some pool. There were 2 other locations we could have gone to, but I flat out told the other's that I wanted to go to that one in case we couldn't do anything, and it would just be a few minutes from my house. Does anyone think we go to play pool? Of course not. We get there, and we only see 3 pool tables there. WTF!? We ask the waitress what is going on. Well there was private party going on,a nd they converted the other pool tables in to regular tables for the party. We couldn't play until after 11PM. It wasn't even 10 yet. Well ain't that shitty.
We can still pull something out of this night, can't we? Dave and Buster's is in a mall, there is a movie theater here with 24 screens. Surely, there is something we can watch there. We go up the escalator check out what is showing. There is not one thing listed on the marquee that I,or the others, are interested in seeing. At least not for the night price of $8.50. Oh, I'm sorry the price of the ticket is $9.00, I just looked it up. As a last gasp, out of desperation, Steve wants to go to Barnes & Noble to look around. The guys say, "Sure!" Now as far as I know, none of these guys read regularly. We are in there for maybe 90 seconds, and Steve says, "Well this isn't as much fun as I thought, let's go." I don't know what kind of "fun" he was expecting a book store, but whatever it was he didn't find. So, that's it. We called it a night.

I went home, and thought of the perfect for us to do...


Special thanks to Omar Omar for the picture used