Thursday, April 30, 2009

Going Back To New Orleans

When the clock strikes midnight Central time, I'll be back in the Big Sleazy cracking a cold one at Molly's At The Market!


Molly's - where, depending on the time of day/night, the crowd can range from this:


To this:


Our long national nightmare of me not going to Jazzfest and returning with a comical picture diary is over. Thanks to some commission work from MCSmackdown, I'll be frolicking at the Fairgrounds and queasy in the Quarter once again. Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Saturday, April 18, 2009

The Super Depressing NBA Playoffs Preview

Alright. It's just basketball. "Super Depressing" is relative. But I'm still wearing green shoelaces in my Stan Smiths to celebrate last year's championship. So I'm sticking with "Super Depressing". We'll have to use a different adverb for things that are really really super depressing. "Superer Depressing"?

Wednesday night, I was thinking about this post and how I was going to break down the Finals against the Lakers. I was hoping that it wasn't going to be a repeat of the 1987 title defense. I was confident of a 5 game beatdown of the Chicago No Defenses, an impressive 6 game series win over the Orlando Paper Tigers, and a hard fought series-for-the-ages 6 game squeaker over the Cleveland LeBrons.

Thursday morning: KG's out for the playoffs. Fuck.


Eastern Conference Preview

1 Cavs v 8 De Troit Bas Ket Ball - Cavs in a sweep. Detroit wasn't going to do anything this year with Chauncey Billups. They'll do less without him. I've always been an Iverson fan and have never been a Pistons fan. It's over for both.

2 C's v 7 Bulls - C's in 5. I don't want to hear it. Chicago is not going to score at will against the Celtics' playoff D. KG or no KG. They'll gut out one win.

3 Paper Tigers v Six Sixers
- O in 5. Dwight Howard's a force. Several other Orlando players can shoot three pointers. Philly is scrappy and has traces of talent here and there. The last three sentences will be completely irrelevant after Orlando wins this series.

4 Atlanta Hacks v 5 Miami Dwayne Wade
- I love this series. I joke about the Hawks being hacks. They're chock full of grit, talent, and heart. Nothing but respect for these guys. Dwayne Wade is a monster talent playing at the peak of monsternosity. He'll win 3 but home court advantage gets the ATL the WIN. Sorry, NBA fans. No Wade v Lebron.


Eastern Conference Semifinals

1 Cavs v 4 Hawks - I watched a great Hawks-Cavs game this year in which the birds got jobbed by the refs on a LeBron go-ahead basket in the final seconds... and then jobbed by a Joe Johnson last second miss. That's your preview. Add in Cleveland's home court start and 3 games worth of rest, and the Cavs will sweep the Hawks.

2 The World Champion Boston Celtics v 3 The Orlando Magic Kingdom Make Believe Contenders
- KG's absence will hurt them in this series, but I'm still not buying what Orlando's selling. Don't be fooled by power rankings or those meaningless last 2 wins by Orlando in the season series. The Celtics are better. But without KG, this might go 7. I'll say 7.

Eastern Conference Finals

Fuck.
This sucks. The Cavs really needed to get a karmic adjustment for their regular season hubrisistic celebrations during their victory over the Celtics last week. A healthy KG would have been enough - barely. But now, I just don't see it. I think the C's will make a series out of it, but the Cavs' rest and their home court advantage will likely be enough. And LeBron, which I think is French for The Candy. He's good. Cleveland in 7.

Western Conference Preview

Ah, who fucking cares. Lakers are going to win. They'll beat the Jazz in Round 1, they'll beat Portland or Houston in Round 2, and they'll beat Denver, New Orleans, San Antonio, or Dallas in the Conference Finals. Those other series should be entertaining, but the Lakers will be playing the Cavs in the Finals.


The NBA Finals

I think it's going to be the Cavs. I wouldn't bet a lot on it, but that's my call. The Lakers are great, but LeBron, home court advantage, and that Eastern Conference defense are a little bit greater. Cleveland in 6.

But who cares.








UPDATE

Damn it. He's pulling me back in. I was out and he's pulling me back in. 1% chance that he's coming back ...

Monday, April 06, 2009

Opening Day 2009

I'm still working on that promised documentary recommendations post, but Opening Day dictates that I leapfrog it with a tip of the cap to the return of baseball. Here's a Yankees video primer from our buddies at NoMaas.org:


Opening Day 2009 from nomaas on Vimeo.

I'm warming up with a nice scoreless Mets-Reds game right now. The first pitch of the Yankees season gets chucked in a little less than 2 hours. The Bronx Bombers had a healthy offseason of purging dead weight and signing big money power players. I'm looking forward to checking out the Big Two - and I mean Big - this afternoon when CC Sabathia throws his first pitch and Mark Teixeira takes his first swing as Yankees. Let's go Yanks! Let's go blue skies in Baltimore!

Thursday, April 02, 2009

@VTKountry - State of The Blogging

Looks like it's been nearly two months since I've written a legitimate blog post - one that wasn't a self- promoting repost from Obe Lincoln or a cop-out video post. No wonder my numbers are dwindling. That or maybe the blogosphere is just slipping into obsolescence with the rise of microblogging. I've done the twitter. I do the twitter. But I'm still not really grasping what it is that people love about it. Which is fine. I don't really "get" acrylics either. Why wouldn't you just use oils. But, whatever. Different strokes for different folks. Microblogging probably doesn't really appeal to me because I'm a rambler at heart and 140 characters is just not long enough for me. I understand how sometimes things require only brief mention and not a full blog post. For instance, today I was flipping through this month's Esquire magazine, which I get courtesy of my father's yearly Christmas subscription gift, and I noticed that a full page ad for viagra was opposite an article entitled "The Golden Age of American Meat". Kinda funny. A chuckle. A giggle. Maybe worthy of a brief mention to my efriends, but at 247 characters, it's nearly double the maximum character limit of a twitter tweet. Yet, it also might not be worthy of a whole blog post. If this were a three times daily blog it might fit, but for a 6.5 posts per month blog, it's less fitting. I think microblogging makes sense when it's part of a larger whole, like the facebook status update, or if it's a tool for people to get updates about the progress of a wildfire or something; but twitter on its own - for random webtainment or webformation - just doesn't do much for me. Or maybe I just need to get a cellphone and experience it that way. Maybe it's a side phenomenon of the texting world from which I've abstained. For now, it's back to old-school blogging for me. And it's about time for rusty old VTK. What'll it be, VTKountry? Sports? Politics? A mid-season LOST review? A frank discussion about how much Jimmy Fallon's new show sucks? How about some documentary recommendations? Alright, I'll be back in a bit with some doc recs. Stand by for my next bleet...


[UPDATE: I just microblogged about this blog about microblogging. But you already knew that. You've always known it. Eternal recurrence of the same?]