Great Days of Sports

One thing that's great about sports: you never know, at the beginning of any game, whether you're about to see a mundane, run-of-the-mill contest, or a few hours that will go down in history. Who goes to a baseball game expecting a no-hitter? No one, but it sure must be cool to have "been there" yesterday to see a kid with the last name Buchholz throw one for the Red Sox. Last January I almost went to bed, but decided to stay up for the entirety of the Boise State - Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl spectacular. I'm glad I did. Certainly, no one expected much out of the Appalachian State - Michigan game Saturday afternoon. If you somehow haven't heard, here:

Each year high-powered college football teams start their season by paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to probable cream-puffs to come to their stadium and get killed (see Oklahoma 79, North Texas 10). Appalachian State was to be Michigan's victim Saturday, but instead U-M paid $400,000 to be the loser in one of the greatest upsets of all time, 34-32, when App State blocked a potential game-winning field goal on the last play, only seconds after they made a field goal to take the lead. We were busy watching Notre Dame get embarrassed by Georgia Tech, so we didn't see it, but then You Tube came roaring to the cause:

First, highlights from the last few minutes of the game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_LnLiv99Ys

Reaction from an Appalachian State family at the game. The kid's face is priceless.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDFxzAp1Lf8

Following the game, some students and fans from App State back in Boone, N.C. went to the empty football stadium, climbed a fence, tore down the goal posts, carried them to the chancellor's house, and laid them in his driveway. College football is awesome:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-1MOFOYolw&NR=1

Rivalries what they are, many fans from other schools took joy in watching U-M go down. Here's the scene among a group of Ohio State and Penn State fans during the last few significant plays of the game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOBjdka9uEw

Next week my Irish, who looked pathetic against Georgia Tech, get to go to Ann Arbor to play a certainly ticked off Michigan team. I'm not expecting much.

Here's one more that has nothing to do with the U-M game. It's the greatest football game prank I've ever heard of. The visiting crowd was told that they would spell out "Go Darby" all together. They didn't. Go look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtuLwWJGnn4

Mas Beisbol

While the Tigers continue their freefall out of the playoffs (leaving me to root for the Mariners to keep the Yankees out) other things happen:

Wednesday night the Rangers pummeled, mauled, destroyed, clobbered, etc the Orioles, 30-3. The Orioles were actually winning 3-0 after three innings, and then gave up 30 unanswered runs (16 of them in the 8th and 9th innings). It's really the worst loss of all time - teams scored more runs in the late 1800s, but baseball then is not like baseball now. In honor of the game, ESPN presented the Top 100 Beatdowns of All Time, complete with links to YouTube clips and game summaries. I especially liked watching Mike Tyson take 90 seconds to defeat Michael Spinks. First Tyson knocks Spinks down, and right after the announcer mentions that Spinks had never been knocked down in his entire career, Tyson just wallops him and finishes the fight. Oh, and you've never seen Secretariat win the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths? That's there too. It goes beyond single games and also encompasses movies, books, entire competitions and individual moments. Yay for sports!

Baseball

If you haven't heard, Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron's career home run record a few days ago. It's mostly disappointing to me, with all the controversy surrounding it (steroids and such). It's very different from 1998, when Mark McGwire broke Roger Maris' single season record. That was exciting and I was paying close attention to it, and I even have home runs 60, 61 and 62 on videotape yet. Looking back, everyone was pretty blind to the steroid thing then and we were enjoying the comeback of baseball after the 1994 strike. This year, I made no effort to watch Barry Bonds, although I'll admit that part of the reason why is that we don't have ESPN.

Meanwhile, the Tigers are quickly going down the toilet, although they're still in it. If the season ended today, they'd be out of the playoffs. Meanwhile, the yucky, disgusting Yankees have surged back and would just barely miss the playoffs today. They're only 5 games back of Boston and percentage points behind Seattle for the wildcard spot. All my dreams of a Yankeeless postseason may be dashed. Sigh. No team is all that great this year, actually - based on today's records, no team will win 100 games.

We'll see what happens. And there's only three weeks until Notre Dame plays Georgia Tech!

The End of HP

Hewlett Packard? No, Harry Potter. We've finished the Deathly Hallows, and sadly that's the end of it all (apparently, at least). I've got all sorts of thought and opinions to express, but I'm not even going to start here, except for this one (highlight to read):

Albus Severus Potter is a really awful name.

We'll probably never see a book series with that kind of popularity again. Now that the Star Wars movies and the Harry Potter books are over with, I can't think of any upcoming movie or book release that I would attend at midnight, especially while there are young children to take care of.

Anyway, now that all seven books are out, here how I rank them, as my favorites:

1. Prisoner of Azkaban
2. Half-Blood Prince
3. Sorceror's Stone
4. Deathly Hallows
5. Order of the Phoenix
6. Goblet of Fire
7. Chamber of Secrets

And . . . . . . discuss.

Pixar and Potter

I'm a sucker for Top Ten or Top 40 lists. I'm not addicted, but I'm definitely interested. I've watched parts of stupid things like "Top 40 Heavy Metal Moments" on VH1. Not because I sought out to do so, but because I was flipping channels and found it.

Anyhow, after seeing Ratatouille on the 4th of July, I've now seen all eight Pixar films. What follows is how I rank them, from most to least favorite, based on only one viewing of Ratatouille. Note that I'm not saying which movie is best - there's a big difference a "Top Ten Movies of All Time" list and a "My Favorite Movies List." Here goes:

1. The Incredibles
2. Cars
3. Toy Story 2
4. Finding Nemo
5. Ratatouille
6. Toy Story
7. Monsters, Inc.
8. A Bug's Life
   

Discuss.

And have you ever considered the sheer number of celebrities that have contributed their voices to these movies? I almost started making a list and then realized how long it would be.

Finally: in less than 90 minutes it will be July 21st, and I will be heading to the store that is a center of all-things literary: Meijer. I'll return some pop cans, get some groceries, and pick up a copy of Harry Potter 7, and try to resist reading any before I go to bed. I'll probably fail.

Firefox is Fabulous

Lately, our computer was running sloooowww........aaaaas......mooolassssssessss. We weren't very diligent about virus protection and such things, so I fixed that and cleared out some spyware that was haunting our machine. That didn't make much difference. I contemplated getting more memory. Then, I also installed the Mozilla Firefox web browser, as I've been encouraged to do from various sources in the past. Today was the first day where we've run Firefox exclusively (no Internet Explorer at all), and it's like the problem had never even existed. I'm so happy with it, and it's been a little boost to the mundanity (?) of life, especially since I'm "teaching" an online course right now and it's been driving me bonkers to count the seconds of my life wasting away as I watch the computer sit in a stupor after every mouse click, even to load up stupid things like pages of text. Anyhow, I hope this improved performance continues.

Of course, I remember, my freshman year at Calvin, in 1998, on the dorm computers in the basement, following a discombobulated series of links to grainy images of various things from Star Wars. It took 5 minutes to go through the whole thing and load the pictures, but we thought it was awesome.

And the One shall become Two

I'll apologize now: I'm Sorry.

Since no anti-blog proliferation treaty has been signed yet, I'm taking this opportunity to create another blog. The one you're reading now, which is mikedekker.blogspot.com, will be my own personal blog, where I can rant and rave about sports, movies, beer, math, or whatever.

Meanwhile, all the happenings of Mike, Lisa, Annika, Abby and Jake will be moving to a different blog, which is located here:

handfulofdekkers.blogspot.com

So, if you just want to hear about what's going on in our family, you can stick with that one. The two blogs will always be linked to each other, so they'll be easy to find, but you'll have to adjust bookmarks and such a little bit, if that's something you do. Sorry.

Anyhow, you can venture over there now if you like, as the first family update will be appearing shortly. Cheers!