Weekend Wrap

I could have done a "Weekend Rap" but not sure how good it would be. I'm white.

Italy won the World Cup on some goal kicks. I love soccer, but it's hard to watch matches that continue to end 1-1 or 1-0. I enjoy good defense, but in soccer - a "good" match will have the winning team with only 4 shots on goal. That's not as much fun to watch. At least in a 1-0 hockey game, there still will be 25-30 shots on goal with some incredible saves by the goalie. The other thing that bothers me about watching the World Cup is watching all of the flopping that was done by the players. It's worse than watching the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA - anytime a player would get touched, he'd fall down and start holding his shin trying to get a foul call. Soccer could take a lesson from hockey in that regard.

1 Billion people were estimated to watch the World Cup Final yesterday from around the world. That's pretty amazing when you think of it. 1 in 6 people world wide were watching the match. I would estimate 1 in 100 people in the US were watching it - just won't take off here in the states, even if we are able to send a team that might actually win the tournament (or score a goal... something that proved very difficult for this year's team).

Wimbledon is finished for another year. Federor (*yawn*) won again over Nadal. Federor reminds me of Ivan Lendl who dominated tennis from 1984-1990 and was one of the most boring players of all time. Federor might be good, but he lacks the charisma that people want to watch. Nadal has that charisma but was not much of a challenge yesterday. It was nice to get to see the Bryan brothers win the Men's Doubles Championship. It was nice to get to see the entire match with them playing - usually doubles gets the shaft for TV coverage.

I'm also reading that Pirates of the Caribbean broke records at the box office this weekend. While I am not trying to take anything away from what is probably a really good movie - not sure why breaking the records is a good thing. It usually just means that ticket prices continue to rise ($8 here in Rochester now), not that more people are going to see the movie. They should hold those records as to how many people saw the movie, something to really compare with. I have two free movie passes to go see Cars that expire Sunday so I'll add that to my list of things to do this week.

I'm on a mission with my new flower garden: Keep all animals and unwanted things out of there. There is evidence of some bugs eating the leaves on my flowers so I bought some bug/flower spray yesterday. But then I can tell that something has been eating my flowers before they bloom. I had three roses that were ready to open up this weekend and then I noticed on Saturday that they disappeared. Like they were popped off. I am pretty sure it was a deer as nothing else is tall enough to get that high plus I know we have deer in the area. So I bought this "deer repellent" stuff. I thought about sitting out there all night with a gun, but figured that might not be 100% legal. We'll see if the repellent stuff works. Plus I've seen a mouse running around on my patio and on the neighbor's patio - so I have some mouse traps out there now. I know, all this work just for some flowers that I could buy at Hy-Vee for $10. I'm cheap like that.

Song of the Day - Thanks to Wyatt for sharing the new Paris Hilton song with me for the weekend. Stars Are Blind is her single that is released on iTunes if you're really desperate for it. I personally think it's bad and reminds me of UB40's Red Red Wine which was an ok song back in the 80s. The first time you hear Paris's new song, you'll laugh and think "boy does this suck".... it does suck, almost as bad as her acting. Must be nice to be rich and buy your way into a movie or onto a CD.

Book of the Day - I finished Dan Brown's Digital Fortress this weekend. That's the first of his novels (no Robert Langdon in it) and it was just the same style as his other ones. After reading all 4 novels by him, you get used to his style of jumping around and trying to throw you for a loop. So when the plot unfolds unexpectedly, I really didn't react the same as I did when reading Angels and Daemons the first time when the Camerlengo discovers... nevermind. Digital Fortress was cool because it dealt with computer encryption and the thought of computer nodes being used to create a supercomputer (we call this "Bluegene" around IBM) - but this was written back in 1998. Also dealt with the NSA (unknown to the public in 1998) and it's secret spying on the citizens of the US... sound familiar?

Webpage of the Day After an extended break (rumor has it that the father passed away of the two brothers that are the creators and brains behind Homestar and StrongBad) all the characters are back. New StrongBad email is the Webpage of the Day, but there is also a Welcome Back cartoon that is pretty funny as well. NO WHAMMIES!! Looks like StrongBad got a new iMac (complete with plastic bar of soap):)