FilteringCraig

I wouldn’t join the military. Not that I don’t respect the job they do, but I am kind of an ass. I don’t do that well with authority. I think too much about stuff, and pose questions pretty much whenever possible in most every phase of my existence. I don’t find this stuff to be that original, and I am sure lots and lots of people have said all this stuff before.That being said, I have had no problems engaging in the military process in the video game world. I started off as a Private and have been working my way up through Gunnery Sgt on my way to General in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for my computer.

I don’t get addicted to games as much as I used to, but this is the exception to the rule. This game is amazing.You are a soldier on the ground and you join an online battlefield with other soldiers at varying points in their military career. You have missions ranging from planting explosives in enemy territory to just out and out killing the other team. As you advance in your career by earning points from objectives and kills, you achieve more abilities and have greater access to weapons.I am telling you, it is intense.

The beauty of the game is how they are able to achieve that intensity. They don’t tell you what is coming next. They don’t tell you the weapons that are coming if you achieve the next level. You just keep your head down trying to achieve it so you can see what is in the next secret box. They have found a way to turn me into a soldier and keep trying to earn the next weapon and/or ability. They turned me into a good little soldier to the point that I have fought the temptation to even search out the information on the web.

Anyway, it won’t last forever. I will play through for a while and I will earn my way up the ranks for a while. Then I will go back to the same old life that I have known for so long. In the meantime, Jen is wondering what has happened to her husband, who used to watch movies with her at least 4 or 5 nights a week. He has momentarily disappeared into a world of weapons, ranks, bullets and battles.If you have the capability to play Call of Duty 4, you should give it a go, unless you have real aspirations to do other things in life. Then, you should stay away.

Jen and I are officially considering moving. We have begun final preparations of our house to put it on the market. This included a trip into the basement to clean it out a bit more. On top of some shelves, I thought were just some old blinds. What I didn’t know was that there was a scary old poster, which just blew me away. I had no idea that such a poster ever existed, and now I am slightly freaked out that something like this could be in my home for over two years since Jen and I moved in and I would have no idea about it.

It is called “The Naked Truth” and you can see it after the jump. It is not safe for work. It is not safe for kids, at least without some proper explanation that it might be some kind of a statement or something. I am not sure what statement it makes except to say, “we found these old ladies who were willing to pose naked together.”

Enter at your own risk.

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After a Cavs’ loss to the Washington Wizards DeShawn Stevenson said of LeBron James, “He’s overrated.  And you can say I said that.”  Apparently he and LeBron had been jawing on the court since the opening tip of the game.  The Cavs had a chance to win, but LeBron missed a game-winning three pointer and the Cavs lost by two… in Washington… on the second night of a back to back after playing the previous night in New Jersey… After embarrassing Washington by beating them with a starting five of LeBron James, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Devin Brown, Damon Jones and Eric Snow in Cleveland after the big trade.   I guess I might be salty too if my team couldn’t beat a team made up of also-rans and NBDL’ers the way the Cavs were on the night that they embarrassed the Wizards in Cleveland.

But I guess that would lead one to understand just how LeBron James isn’t overrated in any way shape or form.  And certainly such criticisms ring hollow when they come spewing out of the mouth of a player like DeShawn Stevenson who never lived up to the hype like the target of his criticism.

Just like LeBron, Stevenson skipped out on college to enter the NBA.  Unlike LeBron, Stevenson couldn’t get his career going between his off-the-court problems including charges of statutory rape for an incident allegedly involving a 14-year-old girl when he was 20, and his splintered ass from not being able to find his way off of an NBA bench, he is probably quite jealous of The King.  Maybe it was the sweep that LeBron and company hung on the Wizards in last year’s playoffs?

Either way, despite the victory that the Wizards put up on the Cavs the other night, it is safe to say that DeShawn Stevenson is still LeBron’s bitch.  And by the way, whenever someone says any variation of, “And you can quote me on that” after their quote, they even know they are full of shit.

The number 1 QB recruit in the nation from Jeannette, PA has chosen The Ohio State University.  I am cautiously optimistic about this.  Just because a guy was amazing in high school doesn’t mean he will be amazing on the next level.  But for now, fans can dream of Ohio State being set at QB for the near future.  That’s not to say that Pryor will be the starter this year over Todd Boeckman, but it seems to me that he should be given every opportunity to compete for the position.  Boeckman had a nice season, but he isn’t anywhere near the top QB in the nation or probably even the Big Ten.

If they can replace him with a guy who has the potential to be the best QB in the nation, then they should go ahead and do it.  I would at least expect Pryor to have some formations and situations where he gets to be a meaningful part of Ohio State’s offense this season.

So, how beautiful was the call girl that Eliot Spitzer ruined his career over? Well, she is a looker, that’s for sure. I wonder if he could go back in time if this pretty face was worth it.

Ashley Dupre, an aspiring (and bad) singer was “Kristen.” This was taken before her Myspace page disappeared. You can sample her (bad) music at AmieStreet by clicking here. As for Ashley, it is too bad that she got caught up in such a high profile case, but I guess those are the breaks when you can make thousands of dollars for hooking up with dudes for cash.How long until she gets the offer from Hugh Hefner to pose in Playboy? I am betting that he has people working on it already.

Somewhere along the line with Enron and Worldcom, the world stopped trusting big companies. It became a situation where a few bad apples really did spoil the bunch, to quote a trite phrase. What we are finding out is that not all companies are truly nefarious juggernauts, intent on bilking investors out of money and creating high stock prices on little more than vapor. The problem is, with Enron, Worldcom and others so fresh in the public’s mind, it opened the door for someone like Eliot Spitzer to smash and bash his way to political fortune on a popular sentiment, even if it was based on the same vapor that built stock prices for Worldcom.

Eliot Spitzer was wrong more often than he was right. For every bad person he took down with his reign of terror as Attorney General for the state of New York, there were more good people who paid dear prices and had no reasonable way to stay out of his path. I don’t want to get into all of the details of all the people that Spitzer smashed unfairly. Those stories are all over the place this week. But know this. Spitzer’s tactics were very similar to those of the RIAA who have been going around the country suing college students and file sharers with the intent of never giving them a day in court. It is a terrorizing campaign seeking to coerce people into settlements and statements admitting wrong-doing.

And while Spitzer’s political career won’t end because of those types of tactics, these tactics probably helped create enough enemies in the world where Spitzer couldn’t get away with something like ordering prostitutes in his personal life. It is really an unrelated situation to why people really hate Eliot Spitzer, but as the other old saying goes; “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

Also, I have been reading up on a lot of this business about Spitzer, and the one article that I found most fascinating was about the media and how they became complicit in Spitzer’s reign because he leaked info to them all the time. The key quotes from Kimberley A. Strassel’s article in the WSJ are the paragraphs below.

Mr. Spitzer’s main offense as a prosecutor is that he violated the basic rules of fairness and due process: Innocent until proven guilty; the right to your day in court. The Spitzer method was to target public companies and officials, leak allegations and out-of-context emails to a compliant press, watch the stock price fall, threaten a corporate indictment (a death sentence), and then move in for a quick settlement kill. There was rarely a trial, fair or unfair, involved.

On the substance, his court record speaks for itself. Most of Mr. Spitzer’s high-profile charges have gone up in smoke. A New York state judge threw out his case against tax firm H&R Block. He lost his prosecution against Bank of America broker Ted Sihpol (whom Mr. Spitzer threatened to arrest in front of his child and pregnant wife). Mr. Spitzer was stopped by a federal judge from prying confidential information out of mortgage companies. Another New York judge blocked the heart of his suit against Mr. Grasso. Mr. Greenberg continues to fight his civil charges. The press was foursquare behind Mr. Spitzer in all these cases, and in a better world they’d share some of his humiliation.

Update, Spitzer has now resigned. The rumors were that he was waiting to resign so that he could use it as a bargaining chip to keep from being prosecuted. Listen to the disingenuous jackass as he stands next to his wife. This is abuse to be sure.

This is what hockey is all about. Without fights and debauchery, hockey is just like soccer. Check out one of the greatest fights in hockey history.

The Worst Fight In Hockey History - Watch more free videos

Wait, What?

Death Cab for Cutie have been working on their follow-up to “Plans” for a while now. The release date is fast approaching, but if you just can’t wait to hear what the album is all about, a scouring of YouTube leads to some samples from Ben Gibbard’s solo tour this year.

Here are the samples that I found.

The Ice is Getting Thinner

Cath

Casino Blues

Ricky Davis would appear to be a good player in the NBA. He is capable of putting up between 15 and 20 points per game. He can add 3 to 5 rebounds per game. He can jump right out of the gym to deliver thunderous dunks and alley-oops. He is an all-around athletic player who seemingly would be a good addition to any team. Seemingly.

But the stats don’t add up. It seems that Ricky Davis is truly not a good addition to any team. The Ricky Davis Effect has pretty much doomed every team that he has been a part of in his NBA career. I won’t bore you with any details of anecdotal evidence, but it seems that this year, the Ricky Davis effect has taken form in Miami.

Last season, Miami had a record of 44-38, which was good enough for the fourth spot in the East heading into the playoffs. Ricky Davis was not on the team. This year, with Ricky, Miami is 11-51 so far. That is a winning percentage drop from 55% to 18%. I know what you are probably saying at this point. “How on earth could Ricky Davis be solely responsible for the downfall of the teams he plays on?” The simple answer is that I have no idea, but the statistics are too strong to ignore.

In Cleveland, in the 2003-04 campaign, Ricky Davis was traded on December 15th to the Boston Celtics. Upon his departure, the Cavaliers had a record of 6-19 for a dismal winning percentage of 24%. After his departure the Cavs went 29-28 for a winning percentage of 51%. That was LeBron James’ first year in the league. With Ricky Davis on the court, LeBron scored just over 17 points per game. When Ricky left, LeBron scored just over 22 points per game and the winning percentage speaks for itself.

Now, I know there are a lot of factors that go into a team game like NBA basketball and it seems problematic to try to link a lack of success to a single player. With these two small examples, I would agree. So, I have prepared a statistical analysis. On one hand, we have a team’s winning percentage. On the other hand we have Ricky Davis’ contributions to the team as measured by his per-game averages. I found Ricky Davis’ Points, Assists, Rebounds and Steals, converted them to per-game averages and added them up to measure Ricky’s contributions to the teams he is playing on. I split Ricky’s stats and the teams’ records in years 2003-04 (Cleveland / Boston) and 2005-06 (Boston / Minnesota) to be sure that I had The Ricky Effect tracked appropriately to account for trades during a given season.

(Click Here for the Larger Version)

 

As you can see, there is a relatively inverse relationship between Ricky Davis’ success and his team’s success. I don’t know if this means that Ricky Davis is a cancer to the clubs he is on. Maybe it means that if Ricky Davis is a “good” option to play a lot on your team, you don’t have enough options. Maybe it has to do with Ricky’s selfishness on the court. Whatever it is, I am quite sure the Ricky Davis effect should not be ignored.

So, if your team tries to bring in Ricky Davis during this or any off-season be wary. Try a letter writing campaign to your team’s front office. Email them a link to this article. Hell, tell them to ask John Lucas who was basically fired as a result of the Ricky Davis Effect.

And just for good measure, here is the Youtube Clip of Ricky Davis shooting at the wrong basket in an attempt to get himself a triple double against the Utah Jazz. Davis needed one more rebound and subsequently shot a basket off the rim at the wrong end of the court in a meaningless game where the Cavs were up by a lot already. DeShawn Stevenson fouled him hard for being a dick. Jerry Sloan might have ripped his spleen out with a spork if given the opportunity.

Ricky Davis attempts to get a triple double by knocking the ball off the rim at the wrong end of the court.

Word has it that I have avoided politics too much lately. Well, here you go.

You know the guy who is smarter than you are, who has no idea why you won’t acknowledge the fact that he is soooooooo much smarter than you? That is Jeremy Scahill. I just watched him derail an otherwise entertaining episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. He came in and just gave a combative, exasperated testimony in douche-baggery. The show was full of disagreements and good points, and interesting opinions until he showed up and became the cancer of the panel. The whole tone of the show changed and soon everyone was screaming at each other, except Adam Goldberg. Goldberg was witty, intelligent and most of all funny throughout, and tagged it with, “Uhhh they told me in my pre-interview that there wouldn’t be any yelling.”

Back to Jeremy Scahill… Dude, we get it. You are smarter than we are. Or at least you have more knowledge in this one area than we do. Now take your condescending, smug attitude and go away, you inconsequential, intolerable douche.