Fred At Home in Tennessee

Fred is really hitting his stride now on the campaign trail. This is a long, but outstanding speech outlining many of his positions. I see him there in Tennessee and a feel my ridge-runner ancestors just jabbing me to do more to support him.

Magee Renovation

West Excavation, originally uploaded by WG Finley.

The construction committee took a tour of the Magee Middle School site today. Things are going along well. It’s an old building so of course we’ve run into a few surprises here and there but overall things are in good shape.

Head on over to Flickr to check out the full set.

Trade Grossman In

I’m sick of Rex Grossman, I’m sorry, really sick now. If you read my Super Bowl blog post you already know I’m not a big fan. But I’ve really had it now. Here’s why.

Every campaign in the NFL should be predicated on winning the Super Bowl, at least when you have a defense like the Bears do. The Bears defense is so good, Hester is so incredible, they keep them in every single game regardless of the opponent. In the past two weeks the Bears D has shut down two of the best running backs in the league. Shut them down! So how do we reward that defense? We trot the bumbling, stumbling, fumbling Rex Grossman out there.

All the Bears need is a quarterback who is serviceable, who can move the offense a bit, not do anything spectacular and make a few plays. The Bears have two of those type of quarterbacks on the bench right now. Let me put it this way, if the Bears were a person when it comes to Grossman they would be the aging, balding, middle-aged guy that insists he needs to buy a roadster to somehow compensate for his follicular issues. Sure, roadsters are fun but they have many issues (only two seats, leaking roofs, cold in the winter, propensity to be annihilated in collisions, etc). So the Bears make the same stupid decision, the insane decision when you look at it, to throw the guy who has the potential for brilliance out on the field. What they are doing though is ignoring the plethora of times he hurts this team with his shoddy play.

More or less the Bears are trotting the BMW Z4 out there when all they need is a Honda Accord. Sure, the Accord isn’t the most flashy car, it won’t blow anyone’s doors off but it does its job and delivers you comfortably to your destination with a minimum of trouble. That’s what the Bears need right now, a quarterback that does his job and doesn’t hurt the Bears if they expect to drive back to the Super Bowl.

The Bears lost a game they could have won with a decent quarterback in San Diego. They were a few fortunate calls away from being in real trouble this week at home against a rebuilding Kansas City team. In fact, but for the outstanding play of the defense saving Grossman’s bacon again and again as well as the contributions of the human highlight reel, Devin Hester, they should have lost that game. That’s just plain scary. When you’re depending on your defense to beat the Kansas City Chiefs at Soldier Field then you are in a world of hurt. Lovie, please, wake up.

The Net – Simply Amazing

The Internet may be the single most incredible invention ever. Sure, this may not be huge news but what happened to me yesterday is pretty much proof of it.

For a long while I had avoided social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook. I thought they were silly, the pages (mostly tainted by MySpace) were ugly and poorly laid out. To me it was just silly. But then a friend invited me on MySpace and I found a bunch of friends I have not seen in a long while. Then another friend, one who has trouble not typing in all caps even, gets me over on Facebook and I am completely hooked now.

Here’s a rundown of what has happened to me in the past year or so because of these sites and the net. Keep in mind, this is someone who’s been on the full blown net since 1993 when you had to use things like “Trumpet Winsock” and things to connect and then load your browser, yada yada. Before that I was on Prodigy and I was on AOL way way way back when it first started. So this is nothing new, this is just something incredible now.

1. I found one friend I haven’t seen in about 12 years yet lived back in her old neighborhood and we’ve been out socializing numerous times since.
2. I found another friend I haven’t seen since junior year of high school who has a daughter and lives up in Antioch now but still had no idea where she was or what she was up to (or why the heck she didn’t finish at RLHS even!)
3. I went to the wedding of one of my great friends from high school who lives not far away but I had not heard from in a long time. At that wedding were many friends from high school including the guitarist in my high school rock band who I had not seen since my son (now 10) was an infant in a car carrier. At said wedding I saw another friend who just out of coincidence is a mutual friend of the bride and groom and I had not seen her in about 10 years or so either — she looked great, had a great husband and looked far happier than when I had last seen her.
4. I found the first true love of my life from my senior year in high school who I had not seen, talked to, had any idea where she was in 17 years. She’s incredibly successful, still incredibly beautiful and is leading an incredible life. We’ve had several phone conversations and text each other a few times a week to stay in touch.
5. Finally, the coup de grace from yesterday – I found the second love of my life from college who I have not seen or heard from other than some brief online contact a few years ago, I last saw her 14 years ago. She’s got two kids now and living in Seoul, South Korea of all places. Thanks to the magic of the internet I was singing an online performance last night and she got to listen to the whole thing.

We are flooded every day with the things that are wrong with the internet and that is certainly the case. Any tool, any powerful idea, can be used by those with less than ideal goals. But how it has enriched my life in the past few months has been nothing short of amazing. Thank you Al Gore!

Here Comes Fred!

I’ll let him speak for himself!