The Agony That Will Belong to the Aggies

Before I start this rant, let us establish a few statements first.

1. Every movement by a college to another conference in the last couple years is entirely motivated by football. This is because every Division I school that has a football team receives more revenue from said football team than any other sport.

2. Just because a school is moving to another conference, doesn't mean that school is any more or less important than it was before said move.

3. There are only about ten or so schools who really matter when it comes to football. I would say some of those are (in no particular order)Texas, Notre Dame, USC, Oklahoma, Ohio State, Penn State, Florida, and Michigan. (You may or may not agree with this entirely, but a part of it is true. Don't get hung up on this point too much.)

I set these points up so I can bash Texas A & M.

A Cinematic Top Ten... Er Seven: Christopher Nolan Edition

I have found in my cinematic travels through Middle Earth, Oz, and beyond that I thoroughly enjoy movies with ambiguity amongst the protagonists and antagonists. At times, this confusion bleeds into moral ambiguity. I prefer the former over the ladder, because discussions of morality get too intense and off the point. I like when traditional "bad" or "good" characters are not necessarily as they seem.

The example I most often use to illustrate this point is one of my top, if not favorite, characters in film history: Hannibal Lector. He is obviously a deplorable human being full of violence, cannibalism, and severe psychological problems. But in the Silence of the Lambs, he acts as a guide for the protagonist, though with heavy pseudo-sexual overtones that not only confuses Clarice Starling, but the audience as well. While he is disgusting and horrific, he is still an essential piece in finding and killing Buffalo Bill, a serial killer on the loose. Hence the protagonist/antagonist line blur.

Viva La Revolution!

Do you ever get the feeling that college football is like pre-Revolution France. Like your team is a peasant eating rotten fruits and vegetables like three star recruits, luke-warm fan bases, and coaches who use your college as a stepping stone rather than a destination? Do you picture Texas or Florida or Oklahoma as Louis XIV, hanging out at Versailles sitting on a golden toilet, sleeping on silk sheets, and playing catch with his pet peacocks? Do you pray and hope for an uprising, lead by the Jacobin-esque Boise State Broncos?

I know I do.

A Quick Analysis of the Harry Potter Movie Series

Currently, I am waiting around to go see the final installment of the Harry Potter movie franchise. I have always been of the opinion that the books are way better but the movies were always a nice way to relive the glory that was the books. And the movies become increasingly more important in the summer of 2007, when there were no more books to be read.

But I'm going to be brutally honest and say that, as far as movies go, the Harry Potter movies aren't all that good. Many may think this is blasphemy but lets look at a few points.

The Few, The Proud, The Lifers

They are the ones who stayed. They are those who have known one city, one fanbase, and one arena (usually) as home in their professional careers. In today's sports' world, full of greed, free agency, and egotistical athletes who insist on clashing with their coaches, GMs, or fellow players, constant movement from one franchise to the next is considered the norm rather than the exception. The exception now is staying with a team for one's entire career. In fact, it's a down-right rarity. So this post is dedicated to those players whether they fought to stay with their team or because circumstances allowed them to.

A Cinematic Top Ten: CROPCIMS Edition

Hopefully, this will be a continuing type of post which considers an interesting (sometimes unusual, sometimes pretty basic) top ten list concerning films, actor/actresses, directors, basically anything within the realm of cinema. I hope to mix it up so it's not always the same thing.

For the first rendition of this post series, I want to focus on an idea I came up with after hearing Baby Got Back while flipping through the radio. What the heck? That is what you are probably thinking right now. How does Baby Got Back relate to movies? Well, name one other song Sir-Mix-A-Lot has done. Waiting..... Still waiting.... Wait, you can't name another song he's done? Neither can I. Surprise, surprise. He's the epitome of the one-hit wonder in music. Now, this cinema theme relates to that. One hit wonder actors don't really exist because you can be really bad and still get jobs in Hollywood or an Indie film or on stage or anywhere really.

Hey I Made It, I'm the World's Greatest

All we ever do in sports is rank things. The best pitchers of the 1960s (#1 Bob Gibson), the best dynasties in college football (obviously the 1930s Golden Gophers), and the greatest sports moments in 1985 (who knows, I'm making this stuff up off the top of my head). We make top ten lists, we argue who belongs where, we use statistics to back up our amateur analysis, and we feel indignant when someone disagrees. The internet has only made it worse with idiot bloggers who think they know something about everything, making mundane posts about pointless topics and self-serving rankings of the most unimportant things.

The Dog Days of Summer

In the last few weeks in sports, we've crowned champions, drafted a Dunking Ninja, watched Roger Federer do something he's never done (and it wasn't good), and seen two leagues' negotiations progress with the kind of monotony only reserved for root canals. After the dust kicked up from Wimbledon's courts settles, we will be left with a seemingly barren sports landscape in the middle of the hot and humid summer. Of the four major professional sports in the US, only one dares to march through the hottest months of the year. The two best (in my opinion) golf tournaments of the year have already happened, the US men's soccer team will go into a long hibernation, and the last tennis major won't be played until Labor Day.

Wimbledon Fantasy Draft: Pre-Quarterfinal Results

Bold indicates player is still in tournament

John Men's


Djokovic (2) - Won through Round 4 - 4x16 = 64
Soderling (5) - Won through Round 2 - 2x16 = 32
Tsonga (12) - Won through Round 4 - 4x16 = 64
Monfils (9) - Won through Round 2 - 2x16 = 32
Mezler (11) - Won through Round 2 - 2x16 = 32
Gasquet (17) - Won through Round 3 - 3x16 + 16 (bonus for 17-32 seeded player advancing to 4th round) = 64
Dolgopolov (22) - No wins - (-16)
Isner - Won through Round 1 - 1x16 = 16

John's Men's total through the Fourth Round = 288

The Levels of Movies

If I asked you, out of the movies that you have seen in your lifetime, what percentage you would give at least a 6 on a 1-10 scale (of likability), what do you think that number would be? A really stuck up "movie connoisseur" kind of person might say 15%, an average person might think around 75%. Myself, well I try to limit the number of movies I watch that I think look bad from the beginning so I would say my number is around 63.5%. But that's just liking a movie, which isn't too hard to do. It doesn't necessarily imply you'll buy it on Blue-Ray, watch it over and over, and be the person every looks to to know the answer to every trivia question about Big (or whatever the movie may be).

What about if we upped the stakes and said it had to rate 6.75-8.25? Obviously the percentage would shrink significantly (for me around 25% but only because I filter the movies I watch vigorously). Let's say that at about a 6.75, a movie becomes a "good" movie. Not a "great" one like Apocalypse Now or an "ok" one like X-Men (original, haven't seen the new one yet), but a "good" one like Old School. We can already see that a 1-10 scale is probably over simplifying our movie assessment and designating a single number to a movie is foolish, uneducated, and down right insulting to everyone involved in that movie (unless we're talking about Faster, in which case it can be simplified to a number, 0).