Spring Has Sprung...well at least down South

Ah yes, the warm gentleness of Spring, well at least in Florida its warm. Good 2B Alive.

Well that devious little smartypants daughter of mine, Gigi has apparently discovered how to turn off the sound on the computer. We let her on to use the Net and when I came back after she was finished, I found my sound no longer worked on my system. Luckily I have a PC hardware background and soon traced the problem to the sound card being "muted" in the Control Panel setup. Wonder how that happened? Hhmmmm. Well little Miss SmartyPants apparently didn't like my music coming thru the speakers (Classic 80s rock) and got mad at me. Or maybe it was me making her listen to Rick Dee's Disco Duck. Thought she'd like it at her age (one of those cutesy 70s songs) but guess not. And after I just bought her a new Hannah Montana shirt. That's gratitude for ya.
And yes, I was subjected to, well I'm not quite sure what those Britney Spears like sounds were coming from the speakers. To Gigi, its music.

But at the same time, I went to see her at her horse riding lesson (she begged me to come) and now I'm feeling that parental pride in helping to raise a little girl into a intelligent lovely young lady.

But she still busts my chops....and takes over the TV.

I was relaxing watching my new Battlestar Galactica, Season 3 DVD (definitely not kids fare) and out come the girls (they were supposed to be sleeping). Laci wanted to sit on the couch and watch a kids nighttime show (I think it was on the Public Broadcasting channel). So much for Battlestar Galactica that evening. Gigi immediately took over the remote control and put it on public TV for the kids show.

Our DVD collection is starting to sport a impressive collection of Dora the Explorer DVDs. Was it a few months ago, I'd never even heard of Dora the Explorer. Amazing. Now, thanks to Laci, Kyrsten and I have almost memorized the Dora theme songs. And of course Laci insists that we sit with her and watch as well.

And of course the Easter Turkey. What a "easter turkey"??? Yes indeed. Seems that Easter is now a turkey day as well. So I cooked a nice turkey for the family. It came out perfect, golden-brown, juicy and delicious. And I did it all myself, with a little help from the cooks at Publix (who pre-cook the turkeys, then wrap them in a cooking bag for you to finish heating them in).

Well, thats it for today. If I think of anything. I'll add it here.




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And now some older postings which I've had in MS Word docs but never got around to posting.

Well folks, I’m watching the Pro-Bowl as I write this and thought I’d reflect a little on the Super Bowl. Oh it was a great game to be sure, I really enjoyed it.

However the NFL has turned what was once the crown accomplishment of the game of football to a big corporate event / Hollywood celebrity party where real NFL fans are few & far between. Just look at the percentages of tickets the fans of the two SB teams get (I think around 15% for each team). The rest all go to rich corporate CEOs who don’t give a crap about the game, Hollywood celebs who don’t know the first thing about real competition, and ticket brokers who buy up whole blocks of tickets for face value and re-sell them for a huge markup (Why the NFL doesn’t crack down on this “scalping” is a mystery to me).

A lot of NFL fans won’t even watch the Super Bowl because its nothing more than a corporate spectacle with a game mixed in on the side. And I have to agree with them on that. But that is pretty much well known by now.

I think that two changes, minor ones at that, could help real NFL fandom take back the Super Bowl and make it again what it should be, about professional football and the two teams that actually made it.

One would be to increase the allotment of tickets to the fans of the two teams, say 35% to each team. Of course all those corporate clowns would scream bloody murder but it would go a long way toward making the Super Bowl about the two teams that are playing.

The other is to crack down on scalpers and strictly prohibit the resale for profit of any Super Bowl ticket. Lord knows they’re expensive enough without scalper markup.

McCain and the Republicans.

Well it looks like John McCain will be the Republican’s guy for the 2008 election. And now as a Reagan Republican, I’m faced with the choice in the voting booth of either holding my nose and voting for McCain, or registering a protest and not voting for McCain. Of course this would have the effect (if enough Republicans did this) of throwing the election to the tax-everyone-till-it-hurts likes of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

I haven’t decided yet on how I’ll end up voting but I’ve got till November to make up my mind.

UPDATE, March 2008: Well with all the negative hoopla now vexing both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (the Jeremiah Wright fiasco), John McCain has a real chance here to take the initiative and the coming election. Heck if the Republicans would simply get out there now and state what they're for (lower taxes, border security, immigration reform, etc), they might just win it all back in 2008. But as Sean Hannity has so observed, the Repubican party is simply too stupid to take the offensive.