f2f2s |

2 days into the journey, I’m about to go to sleep at a Holiday Inn Express in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Here are some tidbits from the trip so far.

- Cities that seem to have more and better radio station choices than Atlanta include: Birmingham, Memphis, Oklahoma City, and Amarillo (wtf?)
- Arkansas is the worst state
- Oklahoma might be the most politically incorrect state ever.  Exhibit A: “Like California, but not as fruity” billboard for a winery.  Exhibit B: Howe Nissan with a giant Indian doing the standard “Howe” hello sign.
- Oklahoma, well at least Sallisaw, smells like cereal
- There is no reason for any human being to live in North Texas.  It also looks like Africa.
- New Mexico east of Albuquerque is surprisingly devoid of desert.
- James Patterson books on tape suck.

That’s all for now.  If I can figure out how to get pictures from my phone I’ll try to post some of the scenary.

Yeah, I know I write a lot about soccer and a lot of people don’t care about it, but I’m really into it lately.

Last night was the opening of the first Superliga, which is a competition between 4 MLS teams and 4 Mexican Football League, widely considered the best non-European league, teams.  The winner gets $1,000,000 and the right to call the other country either dirty Mexicans or pig-headed American fascists.  This year the eight teams were invited to participate, however the plan is to have the top 4 teams from each league qualify for the tournament every year from now on.

Group A
Chivas de Guadalajara
LA Galaxy
FC Dallas
Pachuca

Group B
DC United
Houston Dynamo
Club America
Morelia

Last night featured FC Dallas against CD Guadalajara (Chivas) and the Becktastic LA Galaxy against Champions Cup and Copa Sudamericana champions and 22nd ranked club in the world Pachuca.   The games were AMAZING even if I did have to watch them on a Spanish language broadcast on Telefutura.  (For the record, mlsnet.com is showing the games with English commentary but blurry 20 inch picture is not worth being able to understand play-by-play).

FC Dallas 1 – 1 Chivas

The first game kicked off at 9pm EST.  FC Dallas really seemed to control the early part of the game.  Juan Toja was a menace all over the field and new acquisition Ricardinho absolutely proved he was worth the money.  Dallas finally broke through early in the second half on a magnificent chip by Arturo Alvarez.  Beautifully executed play start to finish.

Chivas got the tying goal just 10 minutes later on a horrible no-call handball.  Awful, awful job by the ref missing a play where the player basically reached out with his hand and fisted the ball down to correct for his terrible first touch.  No way he keeps possession and gets a shot off without that bush league move.

Things got interesting in the 72nd minute.  Assclown Chivas captain Hector Reynoso elbowed Drew Moor in the nose as he was running past him.  Of course Moor, being kind of a baby himself, got up and pushed Reynoso in the face.  Bad idea jeans.  A scuffle broke out between about a dozen players, Moor was shown the red and Dallas had to hold on with 10 men to earn a point in the game.

LA Galaxy 2 – 1 Pachuca

Now this was a great game and a very surprising result.  It should be noted that Beckham had nothing to do with this game outside of looking good in his box seats.  Very flowing back and forth action, great saves by both keepers, and Pachuca player Christian Gimenez…Jesus.  That dude’s got a cannon for a leg.  He was crushing shots from all over the field and they always seemed to be on target.

Joe Cannon and Abel Xavier have finally showed in the last 2 games why LA was willing to trade and pay so much money for them, respectively.  Pachuca had 23 shots, 12 corner kicks, and 4 or 5 great free kick opportunities from just outside the box and still only managed one goal.  Tremendous job by the LA defense.

Landon Donovan, on the other hand, seemed to un-pussify himself and notched the first assist of the game and then the game winning goal only 3 minutes after Pachuca had scored to tie it up.

This game featured a fight too!  I told you Mexican and US soccer players hate each other.  Nobody got a red card in this one, but this time at least the teams had enough heart that about 17 of the 22 players on the field got into the action (it was before a corner kick and only the Pachuca defenders/goalie and LA forward didn’t make it down it seemed).

So, now MLS teams have 4 points to MFL’s 1.  Hopefully MLS can keep this up, get some respect, win some money, and keep on improving.

I haven’t been updating much lately because, well, I haven’t known what I can stretch into a full post.  Instead, I’ll just rattle off a few things.

- This seems like a good job for my upcoming move to LA.

- God help me, but I’m ready for the Joey Harrington era.

- GT football’s over/under for wins is 7?  Really?  I’d like the over please.

- Running in Atlanta in July sucks no matter what time you try to schedule it.  It’s like running through a cloud of heat.

-  I honest to God put together those MLS stats I talked about, but now they’re out of date so I have to do it again.  Also, it involves a lot of number crunching right now which I’m trying to automate with better database queries.  I will make a page for them soon though, promise.

-  Ratatouille is the highest ranked movie of 2007 on Rotten Tomatoes.  I wanted to see it to begin with, but now I pretty much have to.

- I want to learn how to cook Thai food.  Please show me good recipes.

Ok, so Blink never made it onto the front page of the site even though I read the thing.  That’s because I was able to hammer through it during the plane rides to and from Los Angeles, so I never really had the chance to update the page.  Also, A Year in the Merde is going slowly as I still can’t seem to get into fiction, even though it is entertaining.

I read Gladwell’s other book The Tipping Point a few months ago (coincidentally enough, on a plane to and from Mechanicsburg, PA) and  found it very interesting.  Blink is about the unconscious mind, and what we do that we don’t know we’re doing.  For instance, he talks about how many experts are able to immediately sense when something is “off” even though they can’t quite explain why.  Whether it’s an art scholar being able to identify a fraud, or a tennis coach knowing when someone is going to double fault.

He also goes on to talk about how that relates to racism.  How almost all of us are racist and sexist, at least in the immediate sense, and we can’t alter that fact no matter how hard we try.  It’s a very interesting and eye-openning discussion.

You can get both Blink and The Tipping Point for a total of $18.56 from Amazon right now.  If you haven’t read them I would definitely recommend picking them up.

And very expensive housing.  I think we found a place, the only bridge left to cross is the credit check.  Thankfully I don’t think that will be an issue considering we were about 3 weeks away from closing on a condo before this whole thing started.  Now we get to pay more per month to live in a 1 br/1 bath place instead of the 2 br/2 bath condo.  Oh well.

Back to the weather… allow me to compare.  Atlanta has highs around 90 for the next week with scattered or isolated thunderstorms 9 of the next 10 days.  Los Angeles has highs ranging from 75 to 80 for the next week with no clouds 6 of the next 9 days.

Truncated weather.com table for Westwood (90024):

Hmmm, yeah.  That’ll do.

First 10k in the books.

I ran with Ben and Mike, but we lost Mike at right around the 3 mile mark about halfway through Cardiac Hill when his calf cramped up pretty bad..  Ben and I finished in about 63 minutes, which I was happy with considering we started in group 8 so we had to deal with a lot of slow people and walkers, and I hadn’t kept up with my training since about mid-April.   Mike came in about 4 minutes later, so he actually recovered pretty well.

Overall I had a lot of fun and felt good for the entire race.  My shirt and shoes definitely got heavy from all the water so that hurt my time, but it felt a lot better being wet, heavy, and cool than it would’ve being dry and hot.  This was only the 2nd time I’ve ever run a 10k distance in any capacity, so I was happy with how everything went.  I never felt like I needed to stop or that I wouldn’t finish which is something I was worried about.  I’m not good at running when my mind starts to give up.

The whole event was run very well.  There was plenty of water all throughout the course despite some 50,000 people running, and everything was well marked.  Also, since it’s a relatively short race, there were great crowds almost the entire length of the course.  In fact, the only time I can remember not having people lining both sides of the street was on the bridge over the connector.

Jen came in (unofficially) at 44:46 (43:53 chip time) and placed 88th in the women’s open.  Her 10k PR was 38:54 and she was hoping to run 5 minutes off that, so she did pretty damn well.

I spent way too much time at work this past week doing basically nothing.  I have to wait until the very last person leaves because only I have a code for the alarm system, and that usually means finishing up work at about 4:30, and then sitting around until 6 before the last guy leaves.  Tomorrow we should be zoning off the warhouse though with different alarm systems so I can start leaving early again.  That will be very nice.

In other news, I am running the Peachtree on Wednesday.  Mike got us numbers in the 5 group, but we’ll probably go back to the 8s so we can run with Ben.  I use the term “run” loosely though because I have declined a lot from when I was running every day back in March.  It started with that whole hospital trip and then being out of commission for a week, and then compounded with me being lazy again.  Oh well, we’ll see how it goes.  Jen managed to get a seeded number in the 1B group, and will be running as Marcia Ammons so keep an eye out for her.  I have no idea what name I’m running under, but it won’t matter because there is no way we will be fast enough to finish with our times in the paper.

This weekend is the first trip out to LA to look at apartments.  We’ve been using westsiderentals a lot on the recommendations of other LA residents, and will be setting appointments to look at the apartments this week.  Hopefully everything goes well because this is pretty much a two day trip that will decide where we live for at least the next year.