The View From Wisconsin
Just a random set of rants from a Sports Fan from Wisconsin.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Beckham, Bowls and Botched Tech Launches
Let the jokes about the "iFUBARphone" commence...
- Watch out Hollywood, here comes Becks and Posh. David Beckham signs with the L.A. Galaxy of MLS for a gazillion bucks. No one notices that he won't be playing until August (which is halfway through the MLS season). Everyone in London town seems to think he's washed up. People in Tinsletown are more interested in his wife. This has all the makings of either a really silly soap opera - or a really bad reality TV series. Which I wouldn't be surprised if someone tried to pitch that concept somewhere along the line to the couple. "Luvya babe, let's do lunch."
- I read a recent article by Dan Wetzel over at Yahoo sports that lays the blame for a lack of a true college football playoff on the hands of the Big Ten and Pacific Ten Conferences. Their reticence to give up the Rose Bowl as their cash cow is supposedly the reason why we don't have anything more than the one-versus-two BCS Championship Game in Division I-A football. Well, there's a way of getting around that: make it where the Rose Bowl is the Pac-10 vs. Big 10 champion, and the winner takes on the victors of a post-season playoff with the remaining conferences. I've even done some of the figuring, and it could be done by having the first round include the conference championship games in existing leagues with such games. This way, the other semifinal could be played at the BCS Championship site (like the Fiesta was), and the winner goes to the Championship game the next year. With all of the conference champions involved, it'd actually come off as legitimizing it as an NCAA playoff. And the Rose Bowl people would still be happy - even if the SEC and company wouldn't be thrilled that the winner of that game essentially gets a bye to the semifinals.
- Unless Steve Jobs has information that Cisco intended to use the iPhone name for their VoIP service intentionally to block Apple from using it, I'd say that the Apple iPhone is iDead in the iWater. However, the iJokes are going to be in iFull-swing for months on end.
- Dieting alert: I've actually dropped six waist sizes in pants. Unfortunately, my inseam size hasn't grown, so I'm still rolling the pants. But I'm on the right side of 200 lbs, which is something.
- There's been some list-making of favorite webcomics around the net as of late, so I'll put my top five out there for argument's sake:
- Wapsi Square. My fave by a long shot. Paul Taylor does a great job of fleshing out characters and making you give a damn about their lives.
- Sheldon. Just a fantastically drawn strip. I almost imagine that if Charles Schultz had lived in California all his life and came along about 50 years later, this is the strip he would have drawn. Has the right amount of geek references, the right amount of just funny "life" stuff... and Arthur is just the cutest thing. I'm waiting for the stuffed version to come out. Strangely enough, it's because of Dave Kellett's strip that I was turned on to the other strips in my top five - but that's another story.
- Starslip Crisis. Kristofer Straub's "anti-Star Trek" story is the right amount of SciFi and weirdness. If Star Trek was Wagon Train to the Stars, then SSC is F-Troop to the Stars. Though there's a bit of a hard edge to it at times, Kris doesn't take the future as seriously as others do. (Actually, he doesn't take the future seriously at all - take a look at Time Friends.)
- PvP Online. Okay, I admit it - I like this strip. And no, it's not because I'm some gamer geek that spends hours on end playing WoW. I actually like it because it's funny, it speaks to my generation (which does consist of gaming geeks), and the characters are realistic (okay, maybe not the troll or the cat), funny and have faults. It's kinda like a goofy version of Seinfeld. And I mean that in the best of ways, Mr. Kurtz, I really do.
- Evil Inc. Brad Guigar's premise was simple: Evil's better if you do it legally. What's funnier is when a company founded by a supervillan for supervillans gets sold in a corporate takeover... to a group of superheroes!
Copyright © 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, Joseph Houk. All rights reserved.
