So, we started off the week watching the Saints play the dirtiest game they could possibly muster against the Vikings. Literally, Gregg Williams admitted that his game plan was to have his guys ignore penalties and try to injure a 40 year old future Hall of Famer. I’d say that’s going to come back to haunt them in the future. Instead of playing a clean game against an evenly matched team and showing some semblance of sportsmanship, Gregg Williams and Sean Payton decided it was better to crap all over the notion of sportsmanship. So what if New Orleans had a disaster and hadn’t been to a Super Bowl…cheap shots and home refs won that game for them. A lot of those Vikings turnovers, which most admit lost the game for them, came as a result of cheap shots, and on one of them, even the league admitted that the refs screwed up the call. If I were Brad Childress, I’d be scheming for that game against the Saints next year right now. And if I won that game, I would tell my team to ignore any Saints player looking for a handshake, because they don’t deserve shit.
Then we got introduced to one of the biggest head scratchers I’ve ever seen in the tech world. I now know why Apple decided not to release it at CES a couple weeks ago…because it really isn’t anything different (and probably more expensive) than most of the tablets demoed off there. It literally is the offspring of an April Fool’s joke I thought was hilarious last year, and an SNL joke about electronic women’s “hygienic items”. If these iPads came with substantially more memory and a fully multitouch MacOSX interface, I think they would be worthy tablets. But all they did was take an iPhone and make it bigger, then change the UI around slightly. I’ll reserve judgment on the processor, but it sounds like a wimp. And this thing is supposed to add multimedia playback to a typical Kindle type book reader…but it’s really only an iPhone with a bigger screen. I think…I’ll pass on that. The ideas I’ve seen so far for the iPad just sound like they’re trying to make an expensive device do something that a 100 dollar device could do just as well.
Then there was the State of the Union speech, and the even better conference with the Republican Party on the political front. The State of the Union speech was really the sort of speech that I think a lot of people wanted the President to make last October…but it still should be effective, if nothing else, as a campaign advertisement. After all, you can’t go home to your district and say you’re trying to pass tax cuts and be bipartisan, then sit on your hands when the President tells everyone that he’s cut taxes for 95% of the working families out there. But that wasn’t all…that conference with the Republicans proved, once and for all, that the right wing talking point that “Obama uses teleprompters” is a load of shit. And possibly, comes from subconscious stereotypes. The people pushing that talking point have all made blatantly racist comments in the past and have gotten in trouble for it. Glenn Beck lost a whole lot of Fox advertisers, Rush Limbaugh lost his “dream job” as a sports color man. Even Frank Luntz, the guy who’s job it is to craft right wing talking points, run them by focus groups, then push them out to right wing media types and various pols, admitted that Obama mopped the floor with the Republicans. Obama didn’t have a teleprompter, he didn’t have any knowledge what questions were going to come across the bow. He just nailed them all right to the wall. He came across as the mature, stable one in the room calling out a classroom of children who have cried wolf one too many times, and now they can’t do anything other than cry wolf.
Lastly, it’s time again to hunt for a new place to live. I found out from crunching the numbers that I’m roughly 300 bucks short of making mortgage payments + average monthly budget if I were to buy this house. Not coincidentally, that 300 bucks is roughly 80% of what I’m paying for getting a new vehicle. So, that woman in that SUV who didn’t know how to park properly who totaled my old car probably cost me my home as well. Let that be a lesson to everyone driving large vehicles…you can’t use your rear view mirror for parking. You have to use the side mirrors. You are lifted so far off the ground that you can’t see what’s behind you, especially if you’re backing up on a hill. Anyway, I found a place, I think, that should work. It’s a little small, but it’ll be fine. It’s really just a one bedroom with a really nice office type space, but it’s listed as a two bedroom for some odd reason. But the location is excellent, right by the MAX, and the view is tremendous.
And tomorrow, we do the Shiba meetup. So, looks like things are on the upswing. Plus it’s my little sisters’ birthdays.