New Year's Eve (plus one)

Being ill sucks.

Dagmar and I have both been ill since November. It's starting to get old. I still have pneumonia and my beloved bride is at this very moment at the doctor's office yet again. In a few more weeks I'm gonna start getting whiny about it...


Say It Ain't So!

I just heard that the Green Bay Packers have fired head coach and former general manager Mike Sherman, just months after he signed a two-year extension to his contract. The Packers have had a miserable season, winning just four games and losing twelve - mostly due to injuries to key offensive players (at one point they were starting a running back whose claim to fame to that point had been being a third-string running back in college, but he, too, was injured and replaced). Future hall-of-fame quarterback Brett Favre has been making rumblings about possible retirement for three years now, so it's possible that we'll see the Packers with a new coach and a new quarterback next season. Favre has been the starting quarterback for the Pack for some fifteen years and has turned into an institution.

It seems a shame to me when teams fire coaches so quickly. Sherman had a winning record at Green Bay. The Detroit Lions fired coach Steve Mariuchi several weeks ago, and the Houston Texans have fired their coach as well. Both Detroit and Houston have been steadily improving the past few years, in my opinion. It would have been nice to see the coaches have a little more time to develop their system and their players.


Silly Software...

I use "Blogger" to maintain this silly little hobby of mine. I'm a tad upset at the moment - it won't let me upload any photos. Grrrr... What really irks me is that the software is free, so I can't really complain when it doesn't work.


Have we REALLY lost all sensibilities?

Since I've been down with pneumonia for the past five weeks or so, I've had plenty of time to stare vacantly at the TV, and I don't much like what I see.

There are good, entertaining, educational shows aplenty, but they're buried in nonsensical fluff, gore and smut. I've enjoyed watching shows on the Science Channel, but like all channels owned by Discovery, they repeat every three hours. So, you get three good, quality, educational, well-produced shows a day. If there's nothing else on, you get to watch those three shows over and over and over again. (I amuse myself by pretending I can see what's behind the annoying logo in the lower right hand corner.)

Public Television is, of course, almost always worth watching. But there are times when they're showing Sesame Street and I've already seen all three shows on the Science Channel. Hmmm... Click to the History Channel. Same thing as the Science Channel - three pretty good shows repeating themselves all day, half hidden by that silly logo in the lower right hand corner. (I absolutely, positively HATE that particular trend. I know what channel I'm watching. I don't really need to have a quarter of the screen covered in logos to tell me what I'm looking at.)

I've watched a few college bowl games over the weekend. Whatever happened to the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl? Why do we have things like the Alamo Bowl and the Capital One Credit Card Bowl and the Outback Steak House Bowl? Why do they always have to have their logo on everything in sight? Again, I know what I'm watching, for gosh sakes. Does everything need to have a corporate sponsor? Doesn't it weaken and dilute the honor of being invited to a bowl game if almost every college team in the nation gets to play in some bowl or another? (I keep waiting to see the Tidy Cat Kitty Litter Bowl or the Preparation H Bowl.)