Weekend Update

I guess that my first thought this weekend is to not piss off the Zionists.

I don't know if it matters if Syria and Iran are pulling the strings in Lebanon. At some point, we just may see The Promised Land extending north into Lebanon, east into Syria, and further east into Iran. And they may not give it back this time. Which may not be all that bad. Maybe the Jews can make things run a little more smoothly out there.

I'm starting to wonder if genocide is really all that bad. I mean, it looks like Israel is saying, well, Lebanon, if you can't control your own house, then it's an unfortunate consequence that we'll have to bomb some of the friendlies, as well as the bad guys. And can you really blame the Jews? You gotta take care of yours before you worry about others, right? Maybe? Let's assume that Hezbollah has a "no surrender" policy. If you continue the logic onto the end, if the Lebanese don't actively separate themselves from Hezbollah, then you're going to get Lebanese genocide. I don't know if it would be "intentional" like the stuff you see in Rwanda, but it would be interesting.

Actually, I'm sort of curious to see an escalation. I know that it'll send gas prices higher, but it may be worth it for the show. I'm kind of curious to see this whole thing play out. Will all the Arabs band together? Or will there be a Shiite/Sunni falling out? Will it matter, with the Jews and their superior technology and willingness to use it? Where will the Israeli borders be in a year? And what sort of cool CNN videos will we get? Will the U.S. get involved? Could be interesting to watch.

Transitioning into baseball, the Reds are still hanging in there, 1.5 games up on the Dodgers in the wild card race, and 4 games back of the Cards in the NL Central. They just made a trade that has been skewered on ESPN.com's Page 2, and a few other outlets. But, I think that the trade gives us a better chance at the post-season this year, and a better chance to win in the playoffs. We needed more pitchers, and now our bullpen actually looks solid. Closer in the back end. And 3 reliable arms in Coffey, Weathers, and Majewski, plus a young guy with talent in Bray. The gamble has to be that our offense is good enough without Kearns and Lopez, and that we improve our defense and bullpen enough to make a difference. If we make the playoffs, I think that it's worth it (Kearns gets expensive after this year, as does Lopez, I think).

Does anyone really care about a horse with a bum leg?

Anyway, probably no posts until August. Need to churn out my summer paper. Doesn't have to be great. Just can't have it suck. I guess that I'm sort of shooting for a B-. I know. I'm inspirational. Of course, I may find something interesting enough to post on. And I'm not really big on working, so you never know.

But, summer plans do continue. I'll be up in Chicago for the 2nd through the 4th (and hopefully 5th and 6th). I've got a conference that Wednesday and Thursday, and hopefully goofing off with some of the old troops that weekend. After that, I figure that there'll be a trip back to SC to see the folks. I think that at some point, I'll put up another poll question regarding where I'm going to stop off to cause trouble on the drive home. I'm debating between Lexington, Knoxville, Nashville, or maybe something completely different. We'll see.

-Chairman

New Tech

Yep. I'm finally caught up with 1998 blog technology. To the right, I've added a poll. Periodically, I'll be adding some random questions for which I'm curious to see your thoughts. Should be a fun addition to the Board Room.

Here's to not working for real (again).

-Chairman

Doing it in the Field

So I just got off the phone with my advisor. I'm convinced that this guy is like the best advisor, ever. Not only do I not have any of the horror stories that you hear about (or see at times), but the guy is just upbeat about things, even when I botch things.

So yesterday, I found out from my advisor that I had screwed up my latest draft of a manuscript that we're working on. Basically, we were using "track changes" in Word, and I hadn't been accepting changes when I was working on parts. Basically, we never talked about it, so I figured that as I made adjustments, that he'd accept the changes. It never occured to me that since I was a co-author, that I also had the authority (and responsibility) to accept his changes, as well. So, I hadn't been doing that, and I got myself confused with our revisions. Basically, I ended up working on an old draft, which made him duplicate some work. I flew through the stages, going from depression, to acceptance, to anger very quickly, but my advisor was just so upbeat about it. He just said, "Here's the latest version. Incorporate what you put into the previous version, and we'll get it taken care of."

I mean, I was pissed off at myself, but during our conversation, my advisor put a lot of things in perspective for me. It doesn't really feel like you're doing a whole lot day-to-day (really, because I'm not, I think), but if you take a step back, it looks a lot nicer. At the start of the summer, we were 80% ready to go with a single journal submission. Currently, halfway through summer, we are 98% with the previous journal submission, about 80% with the latest one, plus we had presented our work at a good conference. This makes for a pretty productive summer, even though it feels like I haven't really done anything (which, I really haven't).

So, today, I get a call when I'm off at Panera getting some work in. He had just gotten off the phone with a gal from the Extension office. Basically, we were planning on introducing some new educational materials into their EFNEP curriculum, and then test the results of their old materials compared to our new materials. Somehow, this didn't work out well last fall, so we didn't end up getting the data that we wanted. So, we were going to set this up for this summer. But while we were reviewing their materials, we had noticed that there was a pretty big change in their materials from when we had first talked to them. Basically, they ended up incorporating a lot of our philosophies and suggestions into their materials. So, we can't really do what we were planning, since they had sort of stolen our punchline. But, really, as you take a step back, it just means that they took our advice, and just ran with it. Which is pretty awesome, really. This means that the work that I've been doing has been put into play at a statewide level by a program that probably serves 10,000 - 20,000 people at a given time. And what's nice is that we can just make our data look like a longitudinal study, where we compare the results from 2 years ago (when they were using old materials) to this coming year (which will use new materials that is modeled after what we had proposed). Same result, different way of telling the story. And more importantly, it gets our recent research actually out into the real world.

So, it's nice. It seems that this stuff that I do makes a difference, even if it's just a little bit at a time.

To close, I have an opinion question to throw out there. I think that the last two phone numbers that I've added to my phone are from vegetarians. Check that. Two of the last three. How long do you guys think that I could hang out with a vegetarian chick? Certain things I don't put up with. Like cats. But I've never really known any vegetarians, so I don't know what to think.

-Chairman

Interestingly Random Thoughts

So, while I was watching some World Cup soccer, I was listening to former player, turned broadcaster John Harkes do some color commentary. And all I could think was that, "Geez, this dude sounds like Mary Carillo." Of course, Mary Carillo is actually a good announcer for tennis and knows what she's doing. John Harkes sounded like a blithering idiot out there. But the tone and pitch of his voice sounded like Mary Carillo's. I'm not sure if it's more that John Harkes sounds like a girl, or Mary Carillo sounds like a dude, but either way, it definitely amused me for a while. More so than the actual soccer did, anyway.

Mary Carillo and John Harkes. One of them likes touching guys, and the other is a tennis announcer.
One of them looks how a man should look, and the other plays soccer.

And speaking of the World Cup, you know that there'll always be something interesting brewing when Germany and Italy get together. I don't know how much I like the chances of the French holding off the Axis without the help of the Brits and the Yanks, though. All I know is this - you'd have to be crazy to kidnap a Jewish soldier. I'm not really a pro-Jewish guy, but I love their efficiency. Let's just say that if we had the resolve of Israel, Iraq would have been taken care of in 2 months, with anyone who needed to be killed, killed. But you have to hand it to the Palestinians. Digging a 300 foot tunnel, under the fence, and then raiding army barracks? You couldn't write a better plot. But enough of the world. More about us.

But it'll be a strange 4th of July. Your sports viewing options will be watching a WWII re-enactment at the World Cup, watching a bunch of foreigners at Wimbeldon, or baseball. Ordinarily, one of the best story lines at Wimbeldon is the American playing on the 4th of July, often with the eyes of the nation on him/her. This is one of the best advertisements for tennis here in the U.S. Unfortunately, no Americans are left to watch. I think that unless Blake and Roddick figure out how to beat Nadal and Federer pretty darn quick, American men's tennis may be looking for a place next to soccer and hockey in the sports graveyard.

As far as baseball goes, I'm glad to see my Reds hanging in the NL Central race. Still only a game back of the floundering Cards, despite not playing great baseball. Plus, we're still running the wild card race. It would be quite an achievement for this club to make the playoffs with a young infield, no real masher at first base, and a suspect (but improving) pitching staff. This is shaping up to be an interesting July, August, and (hopefully) September and October.

-Chairman

The End is Near

It's interesting to realize that you're actually getting older, but one thing that sucks is that you have to see the sports heroes of your youth get older, too. My initial bouts of this came when I saw Barry Larkin play his last couple seasons with the Reds. I had seen Eric Davis' career end prematurely, but that came from cancer and his reckless playing style in center field. So that didn't really get me. But watching Barry Larkin was when I figured that life was changing. I saw Larkin his a ground ball deep into hole, and I just assumed that he'd run it out like he always does. Instead, he was just thrown out. And that was when I realized that things would be different.

Earlier today Andre Agassi made his last appearance on Centre Court in at Wimbledon. He lost in straight sets to one of the best young players in the world, Rafael Nadal. A quick aside on Nadal - look at his arms. He's pretty built for a tennis player, but if you look at his left arm, is sort of scary how much bigger it is than his right arm.

Rafael Nadal, with a freakishly large left arm. We'll let you add your own punchline.

Back in the day, you'd see the same thing with Pete Sampras. It's sort of funny. But, back to the point.

American men's tennis was dominant, starting back in 1989, when Michael Chang came out of nowhere to win the French Open, taking down Ivan Lendl and Stefan Edberg, two of the top 5 players of that time. In 1990, Pete Sampras came through with the U.S. Open, and Jim Courier was actually the dominant player in the world from 1991 to 1993, taking down 2 French and 2 Aussie Opens, and was #1 for most of 1992 and 1993. And of course, during all this, Andre Agassi was probably wasting some of his potential, and actually was the last of the U.S. group to win a slam, taking down Wimbeldon in 1992. These guys combined for 27 major championships in their careers. It was an exciting time for American tennis.

I was playing some tennis during this time. I did some of the group lessons, tennis camps, club leagues, and the school team. I wasn't a great player - I was reasonably skilled and pretty strong, but was never fit enough to play to my talent. I could have been a decent player, but I wasn't willing to work to get into shape and make it happen.

Really, before that, my favorite players were Boris Becker. Big serve, followed it up with the big net game. But as the new generation of Americans came through the ranks of pro tennis, I tried to model my game after theirs. The Jim Courier inside-out forehand. The Pete Sampras one-handed backhand. I tried to recover and move like Michael Chang. My serve was still Boris Becker, though. But oddly enough, I never really like Agassi when I was a player. One of my favorite moments was at Wimbledon in 1996 when Sampras beat Becker, who passed the keys to Centre Court to Sampras. Of the Americans, I think that my favorite player was Jim Courier. I was the most in awe of Pete Sampras, and I admired Michael Chang the most. Really, I was pretty neutral towards Andre during this time, though I did enjoy his gold medal in the '96 Olympics. Really, I think that I was too similar to Andre in the sense that neither of us worked at it hard enough. And familiary breeds contempt.

I didn't appreciate Agassi until career caught a second wind in 1998-99, when he won 3 out of 4 slams, with the only thing preventing the "Andre Slam" being Pete Sampras winning Wimbledon. He came back to the sport as an older player, but was in the best shape of his life. And he played like he meant it.

And really, this is what made me come to respect, and even like Andre. He came back, when his talent wasn't what carried him. It was his fitness and his willingness to work. And for me, I think that I admire hard work more than I admire talent (though, I think that if I were to look at myself, I probably end up relying on talent more than I do on my work ethic). But while Andre was working on his fitness, so was I.

After I put on my freshman 15... well, okay, 30, I decided to do somehting about it. I started working out, playing more sports, and getting myself into better shape. And over the next couple years, I was actually pretty athletic. And I understood what it took to make yourself fit, if you aren't blessed with it naturally. And I appreciated Andre Agassi more. But, eventually, time catches up with everyone. Andre slowed down, and even though his fitness was solid, his reaction time and his reflexes were just a step slower. But I'm hoping to mimc Agassi's rise from the ashes in 1998. He came off injury in 1997, at the age of 27, and was in the best shape of his life. I've mentioned my journey back from my knee issues over the last 2 years or so. I turn 28 next month. So, for the first time, I really want to be like Andre.

I don't know where American tennis goes from here. We have a couple top 10 guys. But Andy Roddick has hit a bit of a career slump over the last couple years, and had the misfortune of running into Roger Federer at his finest. James Blake has some game, but I don't know if he has a big enough weapon to really take on Federer or Nadal. I don't think that anyone else out there right now has the potential to win a major. Of course, I can't remember the last time I played tennis. So maybe it's not as important anymore.

-Chairman