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Sopranos Finale

the_sopranos_iso.jpgWell, it happened last night. The Sopranos ended it’s epic HBO run to the delight and derision of its many fans. Of course, today the internet is alive with thousands of opinions, so I figured I might as well add my voice to the cacophony.

We were invited to a friends house to have a little Italian grub and watch the big show. I whipped up the now semi-famous ziti to take over there (it was a hit). I was a bit nervous to watch the show in a crowd, since usually when those sorts of things happen there are some in attendance who would rather talk through the whole show, and you become the asshole for trying to hear the show. Luckily, everyone just watched and was quiet, so that was great.

On to the show.

Continue reading “Sopranos Finale”

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Paging Dr. Spaceman

I want to use this space to implore any of you who might still be reading this to watch a new show.  I think it has taken over as one of the funniest sitcoms to come around in years.  If you miss Seinfeld, you might like this show.  It is different, but equally as funny.

The show is “30 Rock” on NBC.

I can’t even describe how funny this show is.  It is very well written (much like Seinfeld), and the characters are tremendous.

The premise of the show is behind the scenes of an SNL type sketch comedy show.  One thing that is great about it, is that they are using “NBC” as NBC.  Usually when you have a TV show about a TV show, they use some made up network (like in Studio 60) so they don’t step on any toes.  But here, they are able to crack jokes about current NBC shows, jokes about GE owning the network, etc etc.  It really adds something to the show.  You might not notice at first, but it is refreshing when they make reference to something you already know about NBC.

The series began as the show within the show gets a new boss (Alec Baldwin) who brings in an insane movie actor (Tracy Morgan) to be the new star.  The characters are so snappy and funny that the situations they get in are absolutely hilarious.

For example, in one episode, Tracy forgets to take his med (which apparently keep him somewhat sane).  They are trying to get the name of his doctor from him, but he keeps babbling about “Doctor Spaceman”.  Naturally, they throw up their hands and figure he is too far gone to help them.  But, once they find one of his empty perscription bottles, his doctor, is in fact, “Dr. Spaceman”.  Of course, it is pronounced Dr.  “spah-CHEM-in”.

There are lots of little things like that in every episode.

But, the very best part of this entire show is Alec Baldwin.  I know a lot of you out there (I’m looking at you Mom) don’t like him at all, but he is absolutely pitch-perfect in this show.  I can’t even describe just how funny he really is as network boss Jack Donaghy. Here are some vids instead.

Basically, what I’m saying is give this show a shot.  I laugh out loud multiple times an episode.  Seriously.  To top it off, NBC finally got smart and is running their 4 funniest shows back to back to back to back.  Scrubs, My Name is Earl, The Office and 30 Rock.  That is some quality entertainment on Thursday nights.  Almost like the days of Seinfeld or Cheers.  Besides, if you don’t like it, I’ll give you your money back.  But seeing as its a free show on a free network and you’re paying nothing to read this blog…

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October 30th!?

I’m watching NFL football last Sunday.  Still 2 days away from Halloween, mind you.  I’m only half paying attention when the commercial break happens.

A commercial from Garmin, a company that makes GPS navigational tools, came on.  Now this, as I said, was October 30th.  This was the first Christmas commercial of the year.  I think I threw up in my mouth a little bit.  Now, it would be one thing if it was just a Christmas visual… that is bad enough… but this freakin’ commercial took it to the next level.

THEY HAD CHRISTMAS MUSIC PLAYING

Not only that, but they did one of the most annoying things in modern advertising, they re-wrote the lyrics to a known song to sell their crap.  When you are watching football in October, before Halloween even happens, and you hear ‘Carol of the Bells’ with lyrics about navigation, it is very jarring.  I’m lucky I didn’t have anything handy to throw at the television, because I most certainly would have.  I just sat there dumbfounded.  And angry.

I can tell you this… from this point on, I FLAT OUT REFUSE TO PURCHASE ANYTHING FROM THIS COMPANY EVER.  Not that I was in the market for a GPS unit, but goddammit, if I ever am, you can bet I will NOT buy anything from them.  As a consumer, that is the only weapon I have.  And if you piss me off, you had better believe you will not get me back.

Garmin, I hope you burn in hell.  There, I said it.  And if any of you out there are fed up by companies doing the same thing, boycott their products.  It’s the only way they’ll learn.

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Urge to kill… rising

So, right now is probaby not exactly the time for me to be complaining about not getting MORE football on TV, but dammit, I’m going to do it anyway.

Here is the background. Boise State is playing this weekend at the University of Wyoming. Being a member of the Mountain West Conference, they have the brodcast rights. Well, in their infinite brilliance, that conference has signed their TV rights over to ‘cooter’s fancy backyard college football television channel’ that is available in about 7 homes nationwide.

So, needless to say, nary a customer in the entire state of Idaho, apart from a few cow towns that are so pathetic that regular cable & satellite companies ignore them, are going to receive the game.

First off, let me say, that nobody in their right mind is taking a road trip to Laramie Wyoming. Not exactly the excitement capital of the world.

Now, I’m no marketing genius. I realize that ESPN is the 800 lb. gorilla who can dictate terms to the conferences and perahps you don’t want to play by their rules. But you’re really going to hitch your wagon to the TV equivalent of 3 legged horse with spina bifida? Is that really how you want your league portrayed? When millions upon millions are tuning into ESPN GameDay every Saturday, you really want your product shown on some channel which when not playing your games is showing the local farm report? You’re the Mountain West for christ sake. We’re not talking SEC here. The Big 10 can start their own cable channel. Mountain West, you are a road apple in college football, just like the WAC, MAC, and C-USA (although, at least we’re not the Sun Belt).

Even worse, the local NBC affiliate who has the Boise State broadcast rights has offered to rebroadcast the game locally. Free of charge. WITH their commercials intact. Asked 3 separate times, in fact. Their answer has always been ‘No’. Ok, now I can even see their logic with this move, to a point. They are thinking, that if we refuse, then enough people will call their cable/satellite providers and demand our product! It’s perfect! Well, not really. Boise is not exactly New York City. The actual number of people calling to request this new channel of their provider will mean exactly squat to these companies. Especially when compared to the amount of effort it takes for them to add a new channel.

Face it. You people suck. Your channel sucks. Your TV deal sucks. Your league sucks. Your suck sucks. You rotten pig-headed bastards are keeping me from seeing an away football game for the first time in 10 years. Last time I checked, this was 2006. How the game can’t be on here is beyond me. I totally feel a Clark Griswold level of blow up coming (“hallelujah, where’s the tylenol“). Nearing ‘homicidal rampage’ areas of disturbance.

I’m so pissed, I can’t even think straight. We can go from one week being in High Definition on ESPN with over 1,000,000 people watching to some channel where 6 guys on a tractor could watch, but won’t because, like everyone else, they will be watching ESPN.

AAAARRRRRGGGHHHHH!

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Overdose

I didn’t think it was possible, but I pulled it off. I think I have actually overdosed on football. Many times I have tried, yet could never reach that saturation point where you just couldn’t take in any more information but this weekend was the clincher. Here’s how it happened.

It all began Thursday evening. As I left work at 3:30 to head down to the Boise State v. Oregon State game on the blue. Granted, I wasn’t technically watching football the entire time, but it is part of the process, so I’m including it. So, from my arrival on campus about 4pm (for a 5:30 kick off) until the game ended at 9:30, it was 5.5 hours of some of the most fun I’ve had in a while. Boise State looked terrific. Ian Johnson was unbelievable. So great was the game, I made the mistake of starting to watch my recording of the game once I got home. I had planned on watching just the first quarter before going to bed, but that didn’t last. So, 3 and a half hours later, I watched the entire game again. That puts me at 9 hours of football, and it wasn’t even Friday yet.

Friday was strangely football free. I had other plans so I didn’t see any of Pittsburgh v. Cincinnatti. If Thrusday was the appetizer, then Friday was the palate-cleansing sorbet before the hearty meal of Saturday and Sunday. A football free day in the middle here might just have saved my sanity.

I awoke early Saturday morning and flipped on ESPN College GameDay before I even put my feet onto the floor. The first games started at 10am local. After an hour of GameDay I was set. I parked on the couch and flipped around between Rutgers killing Illinois, and Va Tech v. NC in high def. As an aside, I can’t wait until that point in the future where EVERY sporting event is in Hi Def. There is nothing worse than wanting to watch a game that is being broadcast in hi def, but you don’t receieve the channel (CableOne & ESPN2HD, I’m looking at you). I simply want every single sporting event, specifically football, in hi def. I will take nothing less. Is that too much to ask?

Anyway, the early games were simply a warmup for the real games to follow. Notre Dame v. Penn State was a huge matchp that I had been looking forward to. Plus, at the same time we had the battle of the Palouse in Idaho v. Wazzu. After last weekend, I thought Idaho might keep this one interesting. Well, they didn’t. In fact, they looked WAY worse than they did last week. Perhaps their heads got a little big after almost beating MSU. Plus, Notre Dame blew out Penn State. I rode through those 2 games going with the ‘picture in picture’ feature on the tube to watch both at the same time. Neither game was close, but I enjoyed each one immensely since I love ND and… uh… Idaho… um… not so much.

Another thing I love doing is watching the ‘crawl’ at the bottom of the screen of scores from around the country. There are always some surprising nuggets in there. Such as San Jose State beating Stanford (I always root for WAC teams vs. other conferences) or even funnier is Colorado losing to Colorado State. Oooo… Coach Hawk. You have some SERIOUS work to do there. Oh for two. Colorado has scored a total of 20 points this season. Worse than that, they have a TOTAL of 363 total yards in 2 games. Mind you, this was at home against a 1-AA team and at a neutral site against a middle of the road Mountain West arch rival. When he was here, we would regularaly roll up 20 points in less than a quarter. It might take an entire half to get to 363 yards. For the record, Ian Johnson alone had 261 total yards and 30 points vs. Oregon State. Any second thoughts there, Hawk?

Following the Notre Dame and Idaho thrashings, it was another flip fest until the big game came around, Ohio State at Texas. Although, a quick dinner trip to Red Robin was thrown in there, there were still multiple TVs showing OSU/TX and LSU/Arizona, so other than the 10 minute drive, I was still mainlining football.

The day didn’t end until Fresno ran out of chances vs. Oregon at about 11:30pm local. If you’re counting, that is 13.5 straight hours of football. Running total of 22.5 hours of football with Opening Sunday of NFL still to come.

The Sunday plan was for George and I to hit somewhere to watch multiple games. We chose Busters, a local sports bar. We arrived just after the first games kickoffs at 11am. We proceded to eat finger steaks and watch 8 games at once. Our heads were on a swivel, always catching events on all the separate games. It’s a skill. Finger steaks, 2 pitchers of beer, countless cokes, a plate of ulitmate nachos, twelve games and 6 hours later, we retired back to my apartment. What did we do? You guessed it, turned on Sunday Night Football and spent the next 3.5 hours watching Giants v. Colts. For the day, thats another 9.5 hours and a grand total of 32 total hours of football. I think I’ve developed a football shaped brain tumor.

However, I’M NOT FINISHED! What is the perfect dessert to such a weekend football meal? That’s right… TWO Monday Night Football games. Might as well finish it off with another 7 or so hours of football. If anyone out there knows of a good doctor to surgically remove the couch from my ass, send them my way. For those of you needing help with the math, that would be damn near 40 hours of football in 5 days, or a full 1 of every 3 hours was spent watching football. even worse, if you remove time spent sleeping, I spent 45% of my last 5 days watching football. And, 3 of those are work days, so if you were to remove those 24 hours from the mix, I actually spent THREE FULL DAYS doing nothing but watching games. I think I might need to seek professional help. I can totally feel my brain turning to a tapioca like consistency and dripping from my ears.
Not to mention, I won my fantasy game as well (unless Lamont Jordan goes off for 30+ points tonight… ain’t gonna happen).

Some of you might be wondering (like one in my office asked), yes, I am single, with no kids, living in an apartment. aka. zero prior commitments of any type. I suppose there are some advantages. I wonder how many of you guys out there would give their right arms to live that weekend. However, I might be willing to concede that that might have been a little too much, even for me. I think the only way I could have ingested more football was if I could have some how jacked a satellite signal directly into my cerebral cortex.

If it came in High Def, I might just concider it.

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Champions

In the past 2 nights we have had 2 sport champions crowned. The Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup on Monday and Tuesday, the Miami Heat won the NBA championship. Really, I had very little invested in either series. Having not seen NHL hockey since 2004 and being at best a lukewarm fan of the NBA, I wasn’t real intrigued. I did, however, tune into the games from time to time, simply because they were broadcast in high def. I’m telling you, sports is what high def does best. There is no question. If you have yet to view such an event in HD, do not wait any longer. The picture is so good that even regular season baseball games are interesting.

Really, the only real good thing about these two sports ending the seasons means that we are that much closer to the real sports season… Football. Now, without the seemingly never ending NBA coverage to waste time with (and the cursory glance they gave to the NHL), SportsCenter can get back to their day jobs of covering the hell out of the NFL. Training camps open in roughly a month. Soon, they will begin breaking down every team, one per day, and analyze every aspect of the off season moves and the upcoming season. College players start practice a little after that and we start to talk about who is favored in the big rivalries… Michigan/Ohio State… Alabama/Auburn… The worlds largest outdoor cocktail party… the red river shootout… the civil war… Just typing it makes me excited.

This is also when Madden 2007 and NCAA Football 2007 video games are released. Anymore, the day Madden is released should be a holiday, simply because there are many many guys out there who will think of nothing but their upcoming virtual seasons for the entire day. I predict more than a few ‘sick’ days will be used that day.

Thus begins the time of year when I start to get a little giddy. I start researching for our fantasy football draft (not that it ever helps for I will end up injuring half my team anyway). I look at the weekend schedules of which college games will be on ABC or ESPN or FoxSports (always knowing that Notre Dame will be on NBC) and plan accordingly.

Mainly, it begins the season of the only team on the planet that I live and die by. Boise State Bronco Football. I will expound on this more in a future post, but growing up in geographically isolated Boise Idaho (seriously…look at a map) you don’t have any major pro teams close to devote yourself to. You’ve got one game in town, and growing up like I did, you learn to love it. At the time of this post, the season opener is 71 days, 9 hours, 2 minutes and 38 seconds away. Of course, this season will be a little different for me as the massive tailgate party of past years I will no longer be a part of. Just another thing I lost in the divorce. Those six or seven days were always in my top 10 favorite days all year. I’ll truly miss them. At least I’ll still be at the games, which is the main focus.

But, it’s still the greatest time of year. And its only 2 short months away. Bring it on.

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World Cup… Game On

World Cup has started. I sat down and actually watched my first ‘match’ (see… I even know the lingo) on Saturday. I gotta say, soccer in High Def is very nice to watch. Then, I flipped to regular def and the game looked like I was watching it though a mud puddle. Man, I cannot wait for more High Def programming.

Anyway, I was watching Sweden vs. Trinidad & Tobago. I have to admit that I enjoyed it. However, I did have 2 major problems with ABC’s coverage of the game. Technically, they did a good job. Lots of cameras, good replays, high def (like I mentioned) but they really screwed the pooch in two places.

First, one of the teams involved in this game was Sweden. Half of the stadium was completely decked out in yellow and blue (Swedish flag colors). Unfortunately, ABC did not spend the stoppages in play showing us audience shots of 6 foot blonde Swedish goddesses cheering on their team. This is unconscionable. Isn’t that the whole reason the rest of the world watches Sweden do anything? If Sweden has an advantage in any department, its gotta be in 6 foot blonde goddesses. How you cannot spare the camera time and give the fans at home a little taste of what its like at the World Cup, is just irresponsible.

My second major problem came with the announcing team. Now, they knew the game. They could describe what was happening and explain why certain things were going on. That’s all well and good. But, to me, you absolutely cannot have 2 American guys covering soccer on TV. How they could not have brought in some guy with an Irish, Scottish, or English accent for at least one of the positions in the broadcast team is just plain wrong. I watch soccer once every 4 years. Nobody gives a damn about the MLS (Major League Soccer in the US). If I see any soccer on TV, 100% of the time, the announcing team comes from a country that actually cares about soccer. It just doesn’t sound right coming from someone without an accent. I mean, would you expect there to NOT be someone with a southern accent on a NASCAR broadcast crew? Absolutely not. Hell, I would have settled for the guy from Univision who shouts “GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!”. At least there would be some international flavor.

I guess that entire post is a prime example of an American and soccer. The only complaints are hot blonde chicks and foreign guys.

Oh yeah… I think the game ended in tie or something. I wasn’t paying attention.

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Enough Already

Ok, I am officially sick to freakin death of The Da Vinci Code. For the past week every informational/learning channel out there has been showing more and more and MORE of these shows relating to it. Be it ‘Mysteries from the Bible’ or ‘Beyond the Da Vinci Code’ or ‘Inside the Knights Templar’. Enough. Yes, we got it. You’re trying to cash in on the movie’s release. But now that the weekend is over, can we please get back to a variety of subjects? Please? I swear, they really ramped it up this weekend and it was all Da Vinci all the time.

I have seen Da Vinci related shows on every one of the following channels: Discovery, The Learning Channel, The History Channel, A&E, History International, Science Channel, National Geographic Channel… even the freakin TRAVEL Channel has had crap on it. The only holdouts were the channels that couldn’t really pull it off, Military Channel, HGTV, Food Network, Discovery Health, ESPN(s). Thank god for those channels. If I see one more Da Vinci thing, I’m going to hurt somebody.

Yes, this does have me hot under the collar. I’m in a fragile state right now and simple things can set me off. This is one of those things. At least you can pretty much always find a Law & Order or spinoffs on 24 hours a day.

The real frustrating part was that The Da Vinci Code wasn’t even that good of a book. It was a near duplication of his earlier and far superior Angels & Demons. I highly recommend that one. However, if you’ve read Da Vinci first, you’re going to think A&D is ripping it off. Its not. For some good old Da Vinci Code bashing…