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I seem to have fallen off the Elliott Smith bandwagon lately, so pack up all those Bon Iver CDs and Cure tapes, it’s time for something a little more poppy.

Why am I so happy?  I have no idea.  Probably not from the doctor telling me that my blood pressure, if left untreated, will “kill you by the time you’re 45.”  On the plus side though, my foot x-rays came back negative.  So, according to the doctor, it’s just ligamentitis, which is a word so made up that even google can’t find anything on it.  Whatever though, no broken bones, and 20mg of Lisinopril to start my life-prolonging experiment.

But anyway, back to the music.  Being utterly void of the ability or desire to discover new good poppy music after being disgusted by the hipster fawning that tends to follow bands like Los Campesinos I decided to revert back to some old favorites.

Here are a couple songs from some bands I like a lot

Reel Big Fish – The Set Up
From the best cd released in 1998 you’ve never heard of

Saves the Day – At Your Funeral
You’d be amazed how few Saves the Day videos are on YouTube

So yeah, there you go.

He’s completely mesmerized.

Kind of an abbreviated week’s worth of stuff this time.  I’ve been pretty busy with school work and stuff so I missed out on a bunch of the interesting news I’m sure.

I’m spreading myself around a lot know so that after all of the semester long projects I have (4) and just general class work, I’m also putting in 14 hours of Graduate Research Assistant work a week, 10 hours of work with a local startup company a week where I get to work on formulating marketing plans and developing their revenue strategy, and now I’m the Vice President of Graduate Student’s in Management, which is basically MBA student government.  So yeah, I’m kinda packed.

Seattle Takes Over For Atlanta as Most Wired City (Forbes)
Wow, I had no idea Atlanta was the most wired city in America until seeing that it was 2nd.  I was actually pretty surprised and excited to be 2nd.

Hacking Road Signs (Gizmodo)
Yes, this is certainly very illegal and could also be very dangerous.  But really, how scared would you be if you saw this sign while driving down the road.

I’d probably just turn around if it wasn’t for the Zombie Survival Guide I read.

The Moment (CNN)
This is a panorama of photos taken during President Barack Obama’s inauguration.  The actual service is called Photosynth and it’s ridiculously cool.  Basically what it does is take you picture, figure out how it matches up to the pictures other people took, and make a 3d environment out of it that you can explore.  Just spend a few minutes clicking around.

The View From Above (Venture Beat)
This post from Venture Beat shows 4 aerial images taken during the inauguration by the same satellite that does the maps for Google Maps.  It’s pretty awe inspiring seeing the mass of people that showed up last Tuesday.

I don’t know how prevalent this is in other cities (from what I’ve seen/heard it’s not very) but there are a lot of trivia competitions at restaurants around Atlanta.  It’s not like what you used to see at bars with the keypads and the screen asking questions.  Instead  a guy reads out questions, plays a song, and then you have the length of that song to write down the answer and turn it in with a certain amount of wagered points.  At the end of the competition there’s a Final Jeopardy style question, and then winners get house-cash at the restaurant.

Recently someone took that idea and made the obvious leap to making the trivia about the songs that were being played during the question answering time.  It’s surprisingly difficult to go through a round of songs from the 70′s trying to name artist and title, and also rather gratifying when you’re the only group there who knows Kid ‘n Play – Rolling with Kid ‘n Play before the chorus hits.

So, if you live somewhere that doesn’t have stuff like this, there’s you million dollar idea.  Team Trivia makes a killing at it.

About a week and a half ago I did something to my left foot.  If I had to make a guess I would say that it had something to do with my running the week before that.  You see, I set myself a goal of running 1000 miles in 2009 more as an exercise in sticking with it than achieving some impressive number, but apparently I did something wrong.  If I had to guess I’d say that I pulled a handful of the tendons or ligaments or whatever’s down around there because I know I’ve done that before and it hurt a lot.  I guess there’s also a small chance that I broke one of the small bones, but I have no idea.

So, anyway, I stayed off it for about a week and that seemed to help as it started to get better.  At least, until I decided to play an intramural basketball game last night.

Now, I know it may seem like a bad idea to try and play a sport on a foot you’ve been hobbling around on for the past 10 days, but you have to understand that the first year MBA students are undefeated in every grad league contest so far this year.  We won the grad league for flag football in the fall and then a team made up of first and second years won the soccer at the of November.  I would like to point out that I was the goalie for that team and was the only goalie in any league to not give up a goal for the entire season.  Brick wall baby.

But back to the point at hand, this was our first game of the basketball season and we wanted to get off to a fast start despite missing three players due to an info session with Siemens Management Consulting.  So, here were 6 out of shape guys (waaaay more out of shape than any of us realized we came to find out) playing basketball together for the first time against a team from the Georgia Tech Taiwan Student Association (good luck reading that page).  They had new fancy jerseys in contrast to our menagerie of 6 different shades of green, actual plays, and, most importantly, 8 in shape players.

It went pretty much exactly how you would imagine with them screening, cutting and generally running circles around us on their end, and us playing physical grind-it-out basketball on our end.  We were down 45-39 with about 5 minutes when everyone collectively shut down.  With 90 seconds left the score was the same thanks to a bunch of turnovers (them) and about the same number of missed layups (us) when finally Brian hit a 3 pointer after going 0-4 previously.

That seemed to loosen everything up and we started to make a few layups while being forced into fouling them every time down the court to stop the clock.  There were just over 10 seconds left on the clock and we were down 48-47 when Tim, our shortest player but the one with more heart than anyone, got the ball and started driving to the basket.  Due to a mixture of complete exhaustion and trying to get myself open I can’t tell you exactly what happened next, but TSA ended up with the ball.

For some reason their guy tried to throw the ball down the court to a teammate rather than just take the foul and have free throws.  I took off from the top of the key and intercepted the ball at midcourt and we were able to use our last timeout.  With 3.8 seconds left we got the ball at midcourt and I was the inbounder.  Again, for some reason I can’t understand (they weren’t very basketball smart) TSA had all 5 guys outside of the 3 point line trying to defend the inbounds pass.  Tim cut back to the basket and I hit him perfectly in stride.  As Tim went up he got hacked and had two free throws with 0.3 seconds left.

Now, at this point all of the other 6pm games had finished, so between them and the people showing up early for their 7pm games we had a little bit of a crowd forming.  Tim steps up to the line and leaves the first free throw short for a pressure packed second free throw since if you lose one game in this league it’s almost impossible to go to the playoffs.  Two dribbles and the second shot goes up.  A collective groan flows from the crowd as the ball bounces of the right side of the rim.  Somehow, in what can accurately be described as the only exhibit of the basketball skill I once possessed, I get from the left block to the right side of the basket, get one hand on the ball, and tip it off the backboard and in for a 49-48 victory.

The next 5 minutes were pretty exciting as all of the players from our second year team rushed the court, I accidently bloodied a teammate’s nose by jumping into him, and TSA argued that there’s no time for a tip in with 0.3 seconds left.  It was the 4th game winning shot I’ve hit in my ~25 seasons of basketball and my favorite of them all just because of the celebration afterwards.

And now, to get back to the point of the title, here I sit barely able to walk.  My left foot managed to make it through the entire game but that was all it could take.  I have a doctor’s appointment for tomorrow at 4pm so hopefully I can get some medicine to make it stop hurting, because we have only 4 games left and I’m not missing them.

Gonna switch it up a little this time and post a few videos I saw this week instead of stories I read.  Now, I’ve seen that google reader isn’t always importing the embedded movie with the feed, so if you don’t see it, just click through because I promise they’re here.

1. Canadian Drunk Dad Commercial
In this epic piece of cinema a dad has had one scotch too many and can’t fix his kid’s General Lee toy car.  Now, forgetting about the question “What is some kid in Ontario doing with a Dukes of Hazzard toy?” we can still marvel at the wonderful drunk acting including “suuuuuure buddy” without ever openning his eyes,  his attempts to slam the car pieces together that even a trained gorilla would be embarrassed by, and the sudden unprovoked rage.  Thank you Canada, you’ve taught me so much.

2. Will Smith Inspires Children
This video features an old Will Smith speech from the Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards where he probably won the award for “Best Black Cowboy” in Wild Wild West.  I heard that Martin Lawrence tried to argue that it should’ve been “Best Black Actor in a Role That is Funny Because it Doesn’t Make Sense” so that Black Knight would’ve counted, but that got voted down unanimously by the people who drew Doug.  Anyway, he explains that the two things you need to do in your life are run and read.

3. The Matrix Cat Fight
No, this isn’t what you thought when you first read it.  It’s literally a cat (Neo) taking on an entire heard of identical puppies (Agent Smiths).

4. OMG Soccer Goal
Yoann Gourcuff.  I’d never heard of him, but he’s a 22 year old midfielder from France who people like a lot, like, to the point that people call him the New Zidane.  Probably because he makes absolutely ridiculous plays like this.

5. The Curious Case of Forrest Gump
This one comes from Funny of Die where apparently someone picked up that Forrest Gump and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button have some shockingly similar themes.

My basketball teams are not doing well lately.  The Hawks look lost on both ends of the floor, Mike Bibby and Joe Johnson are shooting terrible, and Al Horford is still out indefinitely.  As for the Yellow Jackets, I can’t even start to expand on what’s going wrong with the team right now, but if they win a single ACC game I’ll be impressed.  Instead, let me sum up my feelings with the following BINGO card I made up during the NC State game today.

Yeah, never good when that’s what your fans are doing.

The one bright side is that tomorrow I’ll be up in Athens for the UK/UGA game with my mom, sister and Nana.  Can’t wait to see a team I like win a game.

First a new band I found out about.  The Rural Alberta Advantage.  A very indie sound, but if that’s your gig you’ll like it.  And yes, Canadian Amy, they are from Canada.  Listen to some of their songs on Hype Machine.

Second, the retelling of Star Wars by someone who has never seen it. I got this from Fishrockit via Gizmodo.

11 days 10 nights

Vienna

Brno

Prague

If you’ve got any must see hot spots let me know.

This is killing me.  The Hawks should be in line to get a home-court series in the playoffs and Mike Woodson is going to blow it because he’s afraid to ever use his bench.  Up by 20, down by 20, it doesn’t matter to him.  Acie Law isn’t getting more than 10 minutes, neither is Solomon Jones.  Mo Evans seems to have been pushed aside too now as he only got 8 minutes in a short lineup against the Phoenix Suns.

We’re on a 4 game losing streak including some embarrassing games against Orlando and Philly and I’m about ready to give up the hope I had that I was wrong earlier about wanting Woody fired.  I’m not saying it’s Avery Johnson time, but I’m not saying it’s not Avery Johnson time.

That just doesn’t make sense, and 37 games into the season is why you’re seeing this team come out tired every game.  All of the starters are averaging over 35 minutes a game.  That’s ridiculous.  You have a very servicable bench to 10 players with Flip Murray, Mo Evans, Zaza, Acie and Solo.  There is no reason why you need to use a short 7 or 8 man roster through the regular season, it’ll kill the guys.

Short rosters are for the playoffs where you get some rest if you win early and every game truly is a must win.  It’s not for the regular season.  And, more importantly, when you get into situations like this when people are injured now the Acie’s and Solo’s aren’t ready for the speed and pressure of the game because they haven’t seen more than 300 minutes in the season.  I’m not asking for them to start, but you’ve got to give some people a breather.  Bibby’s too old for this and Joe’s been one of the leading minutes per game players for the last 6 years.  That wears on a guy.

So, Woody, I haven’t even touched on your complete inability to motivate this team, draw up a defense, or have a well run offense here.  All I want you to do is recognize you have a bench and use it accordingly.  Maybe that way we don’t have Randolph Morris playing down the stretch against Phoenix in a tie game.  Maybe.

Also, Jodie Meeks scored 54 tonight for a new UK school record.  Kid’s awesome.  I hope he goes off for 75 this Sunday when I’m up in Athens watching him.