goodaymate
January 21st, 2012 § 0
January 20th, 2012 § 0
I’m learning that no matter how bad a movie is throughout, if you stick with it and it somehow ends up with a happy ending its not so bad; so long as the happy ending ties everything together to make you appreciate the 100 minutes of seemingly irrational torture. but thats life, isn’t it?
Im sold, mr tebow. Win or lose
January 13th, 2012 § 0
Every week, Tebow picks out someone who is suffering, or who is dying, or who is injured. He flies these people and their families to the Broncos game, rents them a car, puts them up in a nice hotel, buys them dinner (usually at a Dave & Buster’s), gets them and their families pregame passes, visits with them just before kickoff (!), gets them 30-yard-line tickets down low, visits with them after the game (sometimes for an hour), has them walk him to his car, and sends them off with a basket of gifts. Home or road, win or lose, hero or goat.
i love this game.
December 15th, 2011 § 0
here we go again. another year of fantasy basketball, as if fantasy football didn’t take enough of my time.
Point Guards
for most of my leagues, i drafted guards early and often. there are a lot of bigs that rack up boards and blocks in the later rounds so i figured this year is as good as any to take the late round risk for the big guys. with the first 2 rounds of my drafts i went with at least 1 point guard, grabbing my yearly usual pick on Rondo (2). I got lucky with Deron (2) in 2 leagues and John Wall (1) is a point guard i wanted in all 3 leagues, but who didn’t? Jameer Nelson (3) is the only player i got in all 3 late in each draft, but with Gilbert Arenas gone i feel good about his 6 assists and 1.5+ 3s a game. I was able to grab Devin Harris late, which was sort of a surprise to me. Chauncey Billups (1) is a guy i seem to have wasted a perfectly good 5th round pick in which i could have grabbed Bynum, but sharing the backcourt with CP3, MoWill and Bledsoe makes me a skeptic unless someone, or two moves. Udrih (1) and Conley (1) are guys i hope i can get decent assists with. Udrih is a longshot since he left a sacramento team he played well with to a bucks team with a young point guard already in place. oh and Ricy Rubio (1), you know, just in case.
Guards
Manu Ginobili (2) is a guy I need to stay healthy. He’s a great multi category stuffer and produces great when healthy. Kevin martin (1) i would have liked in more leagues due to his frequent free throw shooting at high percentage and his crazy amount of 3s that he throws up. Wade (1), i got in the same league is the only other elite guard i drafted, you really can’t go wrong with him. so that leaves most of my other teams rely on point guards and bigs to take me to the playoffs. Joe Johnson (1) is someone i did not want to draft, but Crawford leaving town may free up some looks for the overpriced guard (his ability to lineup at forward was a plus).
Forwards
LeBron James (1), Rudy Gay (1) + Nowitzki (1) and Granger (1) hold down my forward positions in all leagues. Outside of those guys, i drafted a bunch of bigs that block and rebound. Cousins (2), DeAndre Jordan (2) and & Varejao (2) were my sleeper picks for the year but fell short of locking them up for all leagues. Boozer (1) is someone i would have drafted in more leagues since i think he’ll have a bounce back year, but not any sooner than he went in the drafts.
Centers
Bynum (2) was an easy pick where i drafted him as he gets a good amount of blocks, as does Bogut (2). McGee (1) might be the blocking leader again so it was a plus to grab him. Hibbert (1) I’m hoping for a more consistent year after posting a healthy average last year with the Pacers, he should do more of the same. Darko (1), Okafor (1) and Haywood (1) are guys that’ll stay on my roster all year long since they aren’t good enough to trade but too productive to drop due to their blocking ability.
here we goes nothing =X
picky pick
November 29th, 2011 § 0
with the NFL season nearing its end and the playoff picture taking shape, i can’t help but reminisce what could have been. at 5-6 the bucs’ are all but mathematically eliminated from playoff contention. at this point its not so crazy an idea to throw the rest of the games and try to grab a high draft pick. no, there won’t be any luck for well, Luck. but theres still a chance for Matt Barkley who some compare to Luck and others even claiming to be a better pro prospect (they’re smoking something). either way if the bucs continue to play the way they do, and Freeman plays as frantic and indecisive as he has, we might as well throw the rest of the games. had we done this 2 seasons ago, as many bucs fans were hoping, we could have actually landed that big man-lion on the left. Now there’s been a lot of talk about defensive tackle ndamukong suh being a dirty player and how he should be banned for longer to make sure he learns his lesson. i say let him play. football is a dirty sport, and on the dirtiest position, you want someone tough. not like the guy on the right, who the bucs picked up 1 pick after Suh because they decided to win meaningless games at the end of the ’09 regular season. i mean look at the guy, Suh looks like he could eat McCoy for breakfast and these guys play the same position! ahh… if only.
air ball
November 21st, 2011 § 0
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i used to adore this man. his every word seemed to be timeless, his moves on the court were original. everything about michael was likable. sure he was cocky, but who didn’t like it? it was fun, entertaining, and it made the world fall in love with basketball. but oh how far away 1998 was. from his less than charming hof speech to his puzzling opposition to a fair cba. our beloved mj is falling from grace faster than his highlight reels can make us forget the michael on the right. i didn’t want ever to be another greater, but now im on the wagon for searching for the goat. because i hope its not you.
Forget Paris
November 8th, 2011 § 0
fantasy football 2011
September 1st, 2011 § 0
here we are again. another year of fantasy football. when you turn america’s toughest game into america’s geekiest. with that said, i have 4 teams lol.
QB: Tony Romo, Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady and Matthew Stafford.. what? i think stafford is going to have a breakout season. he’s got a rocket arm and can make all the throws. not to mention he’s got megaton to throw it to. i think romo has a big year. he’s healthy again and needs to make up for last year.. at least i hope.
RB: Lesean Mccoy, MJD, Charles, Gore, McFadden, AP… i have McCoy in 3 of my 4 leagues. he’s my this year’s jamaal charles. but at a much higher price. he catches so many passes and runs with a healthy 5 yard average. MJD and Gore are risks since they are highly used, injury prone backs. but in PPR leagues they’re gold. cedric benson i was able to nab in 2 leagues for a low low price.
WR: Brandon Marshall, Welker, VJax, Britt and Antonio Brown… i never invest much on wide receivers, but maybe i should. I’m hoping Marshall and Welker continue their pass catching ways and both break 100 receptions this year. i tried to get Britt but only managed to come away with him twice. he’s gonna have a big year, not in jail. Antonio Brown is the early season sleeper favorite, i really need him to pan out.
TE: Witten, Gates and Cooley… i wanted to make up for the lack of WR power with a good TE. unfortunately i came up short in the auction league only managing to draft cooley, who is a good PPR tight end, but injury and QB issues worry me.
Equalizer
August 21st, 2011 § 0
Delta airlines in san Francisco airport is trying something new. When arriving at the security check they ask you one question.
“What time is your flight?”
If your flight leaves within 1 hour, you get to bypass the long line and straight into a late people line that gets processed at about 1/10th of the time.
If you happen to be one of the more responsible people and arrive the security checkpoint from 1-2 hours before your flight, well Delta has a nice treat for you: an hour long line in the security check line, along with your fellow passengers who couldn’t afford to miss their flight.
Now im not making it hard to seem the bias to getting to the airport on time is the best way to go. But let me just say that 2 weeks ago I was at this same exact airport in the same exact line arriving 50 minutes before my departure time. Getting the ‘equalizer’ treatment I was able to make my flight.
I must say that it was a very nice convenience to be able to make my flight after almost assuredly feeling like I was screwed. But sitting here in the hour long line feeling like it would have been the same to just wait a little while longer to leave for the airport to get some extra shuteye would have been better.
I guess the point of this blog is.. Exactly what type of behavior is delta promoting by this (social) experiment? Should I wait next time to avoid waiting in lines? What benefit is there in arriving early to the airport, if arriving an hour early will result in the same thing with less standing around? I guess we’ll have to see whether or not they’re continuing the trend of promoting bad behavior.
time
August 7th, 2011 § 0
I’m finding that the older you become, the more valuable time becomes in your life.
5 Catholic Teachings that Make Sense to Atheists
July 25th, 2011 § 0
another reblog.. this one is interesting.
BY JENNIFER FULWILER
Last week I gave a talk about atheism, and in the Q&A afterward there were a lot of questions about how to share our faith with atheists. I emphasized that the most important thing is simply to pray and work on becoming a saint yourself, so that you can show people Christ rather than just talking about him, but people with atheist friends, family members and coworkers wanted to know more. In the case where you’re chatting with a nonbeliever who is open to hearing your perspective and specifically asks for information about what you believe, how should you proceed?
Obviously there’s no one right answer, but I thought I’d list out some Catholic beliefs that might be good places to start. Though atheists typically see all belief in the supernatural as unreasonable, some doctrines, like the ones below, strike them as less crazy than others. (As I was not able to conduct a worldwide survey of every person who self-identifies as a nonbeliever, I am basing this on personal experience as well as conversations with atheists I know.)
1. Purgatory
Growing up as both an atheist and a nerd in a particularly status-conscious section of the Bible Belt, I was occasionally on the receiving end of unkindness from Christians. When these same people also announced that they were going directly to heaven when they died because they’d accepted Jesus, it didn’t make any sense to me. I knew enough to know that heaven was supposed to be a place of perfect love and peace, so it seemed illogical to say that people could act like jerks until their dying breaths and then walk right on through the pearly gates. On the other hand, being a jerk sometimes isn’t the worst thing in the world, and it also didn’t make sense to say that a loving God would have people spend an eternity in hell for a few slip-ups. When I heard about the concept of Purgatory when I was exploring religion years later, it made sense to me because it explained how heaven can be a place of perfect love, and God can still be merciful to people who had some work to do in that department when they died.
2. The Communion of Saints
The idea of deceased friends and family members being aware of what goes on here on earth is nearly universal. When I studied anthropology in college, I found it fascinating that so many cultures that were separated by time and geography had this same idea about the afterlife—it seemed like we’re wired to believe this. So when I was in the process of converting to Catholicism, I didn’t struggle with this doctrine at all—it struck me as an articulation of a spiritual truth known to the human heart from time immemorial.
3. Veneration of Mary
This may not be the case for atheists who had a Protestant upbringing, but most of the atheist-to-Catholic converts I know who had no religious background didn’t struggle with the Church’s emphasis on Mary—and many say that it always kind of made sense to them. To me, overlooking Mary was an example of intellectual inconsistency within Christianity: If you believe that there is a great Creator who, in his unfathomable power, brought forth the universe out of nothing…and you believe that he chose his own mom…why on earth would you not freak out about this woman? How unbelievably special would she have to be to be fit for God himself to call her “Mommy”? So when I heard that Catholics place a huge emphasis on the Mother of God, my reaction was basically to shrug and say, “Yeah. Of course.”
4. Salvation for Non-Catholics and Non-Christians
Another thing that always struck me as intellectually inconsistent about Christianity was the idea that people who hadn’t heard about Jesus through no fault of their own would spend eternity in hell, or that God would bar people from heaven who sincerely sought him but worshiped the “wrong” way. It didn’t see how people could believe this and also believe that their God was good and loving, since the punishment of innocents is inherently unloving. It struck me as fair and consistent when I came across this in the Catholic Catechism:
Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience – those too may achieve eternal salvation.
5. Apostolic Authority
One of the biggest atheist pet peeves I encounter—and one that I shared when I was an atheist—is the way much of modern Christianity interprets the Bible. It was baffling to see Christians go back and forth about how to interpret some section of the Bible, each person convinced that his own interpretation was the correct one, despite the fact that there were as many other different interpretations as there were people in the group. It fed into the stereotype that religion is a tool that people use to manipulate others when I’d see Christians come up with their own personal spin on what the Bible said, then tell everyone else that they had to conform that that view. Years later, when I was beginning to explore Christianity, I almost gave up on the religion altogether because I couldn’t even figure out what its doctrines were. I couldn’t fathom which church I should go to when there were thousands of different denominations, each claiming to be based on the Bible. Then someone told me that Jesus founded a Church that he guides to this day, and that this one God-guided Church has final authority on matters of doctrine. Finally, I saw a system that made sense.
—-
I hope this list offers some good conversation starters, though don’t expect that talking about these teachings will convert anyone on the spot. Conversion is a long process that must involve an openness of heart in addition to intellectual understanding—and much more than our nonbelieving friends and family members need our explanations, they need our prayers.
The Three Temptations of Facebook
May 16th, 2011 § 0
i’ve been in a reblogging mood as of late. so with that, enjoy this interesting read.
BY JENNIFER FULWILER
A while back I did a computer fast where I shut down my computer and put it away completely for an entire week. No email. No web surfing. No Facebook, Twitter or blogging. I didn’t even use my mobile phone for anything other than making actual phone calls. It ended up being an even more illuminating experience than I could have imagined. Not only did my little experiment reveal some stark truths about how I use my time in a typical day, but it showed me just how much my interactions with the online world had impacted my spiritual life, as well.
Naturally, the minute my fast was over I ran back to my computer like I was Richard Gere inthe final scene of An Officer and a Gentleman, and these days I’m pretty much back to living as if my laptop were a bodily appendage. But I have remembered some of the lessons I learned during my week of living like it was 1995, and they’ve helped me keep my relationship with Facebook, Twitter and other social media in check. I find that if I can watch out for the following pitfalls, I can (usually) maintain a healthy relationship to the online world:
The Top Three Spiritual Pitfalls of Facebook, Twitter and Other Social Media:
1. Overvaluing your own opinions
In what would end up being one of the most ridiculous moments of my computer fast—perhaps of my entire life—I happened to see a commercial I didn’t like on television, and instinctively reached for my computer to update my social media sites with some pithy commentary about it. When I remembered that that wasn’t an option, I grabbed a pen and paper and jotted down my thoughts to share when I was back online. I think it was at that moment, when I looked down and saw that I had deemed the message “UltraShine shampoo makes women look like Dee Snider” so worthy as to be captured and proclaimed to the world, that I realized that my involvement with social media just might have made me start to overvalue my own opinion.
If I had had that thought 10 years ago, it most likely would have disappeared as quickly as it had come, like the hundreds of other inane opinions I form about random things in a day. But now I’d developed a habit of making sure that no opinion, no matter how ill-thought-out, inappropriate or pointless, went unannounced. In fact, I’d almost come to think of it as a duty, as if I had to form opinions about every single thing that crossed my path so that I could bless my social media friends with my commentary. Needless to say, it did nothing to help my already-epic struggles with the sin of pride to be stuck in the habit of thinking THIS IS IMPORTANT every time I had even the most fleeting thoughts.
2. Overvaluing other people’s opinions
There was a distinct silence in my life during my week offline, and I only realized later that it was the silence of not being exposed to other people’s feedback all the time. Don’t get me wrong: I love my online interactions with people, and even largely credit my conversion to Catholicism to discussions I had on blogs and social media. Getting other folks’ input via the internet is often a great thing. But it’s important to get a break from it sometimes too. The ding of the iPhone announcing a new email, the responses to our Facebook status updates, the @replies on Twitter, the direct messages, comments on our blogs, comments on our photo uploads, etc. all combine to form a near-constant hum of feedback—and, at least in my experience, it can be addictive.
During my fast I took a nice picture of a sunset over my back yard, and it felt weird to just look at it and enjoy it for myself. Normally I would have uploaded it, emailed it, tweeted it, and waited for the responses to come rolling in. The moment made me realize that, because of my over-involvement with social media, the opinions of internet comboxes had become my default source for validation and approval. I’d all but stopped listening for the voice of God in the little moments of daily life, forgetting that his “still, small voice” doesn’t communicate by direct message.
3. Getting into a “slot machine” mentality
Probably the biggest lesson I learned in my experiment was about the “slot machine effect” of social media. During my fast, I regularly felt the urge to jump up and see what was new online—and each time I was looking for a payoff. Every so often, we all come across virtual jackpots on the internet: an unbelievably hilarious Youtube video, a life-changing blog post, a huge bit of news announced on Facebook, a critical tip discovered on Twitter, an email with juicy info from a friend, and so on. Each time I felt the urge to mindlessly drift over to my computer, it was the same urge that slot machine addicts must feel when they pull that lever: I was seeking the jackpot.
This, for me, is the most potentially addictive aspect of social media. With all the great stuff that’s out there online, I know that it’s only a matter of time until I come across the next payoff … and it’s that knowledge that leads me into real time wasting territory. I end up floating over to try my luck in front of the glowing screen instead of engaging in the duties of my vocation, hanging out with my family, praying, etc.—activities which, like most things in real life, don’t offer a quick and easy jackpot.
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There are a lot of warnings out there about the various dangers of social media use, and if you read enough of them it can start to feel like we’re all doomed if we don’t immediately burn our routers and communicate by smoke signals alone. I’m sure there are plenty of other valid concerns out there, but I’ve found that doing nothing more than keeping an eye on these three most common pitfalls is often enough to maintain a healthy balance between real life and the lure of the online world.
wisdom.
May 4th, 2011 § 0
bjp2 in regards to third secret of fatima…
THE QUESTION: “Holy Father, what has become of the 3rd Secret of Fatima? According to Our Lady’s instructions, wasn’t it supposed to be revealed in 1960? And what will happen in the Church?”
‘THE HOLY FATHER’S RESPONSE: “Because of the seriousness of its contents, in order not to encourage the world wide power of Communism to carry out certain coups, my Prederessors in the Chair of Peter have diplomatically preferred to withhold its publication. ”On the other hand, it should be sufficient for all Christians to know this much: if there is a message in which it is said that the oceans will flood entire sections of the earth; that, from one moment to the other, millions of people will perish…there is no longer any point in really wanting to publish this secret message. ”Many want to know merely out of curiosity, or because of their taste for sensationalism, but they forget that ‘to know’ implies for them a responsibility. It is dangerous to want to satisfy one’s curiosity only, if one is convinced that we can do nothing aganst a catastrophe that has been predicted.” At this point, the Holy Father took hold of his Rosary and said: “Here is the remedy against the evil! Pray, pray and ask for nothing else. Put everything in the hands of the Mother of God!” Then he went on to say: “We must be prepared to undergo great trials in the not-to-distant future; trials that will require us to be ready to give up even our lives, and a total gift of self to Christ and for Christ. Through your prayers and mine, it is possible to alleviate this tribulation, but it is no longer possible to avert it, because it is only in this way that the Church can be effectively renewed. How many times, indeed, has the renewal of the Church been effected in blood? This time, again, it will not be otherwise. “We must be strong, we must prepare ourselves, we must entrust ourselves to Christ and to His holy Mother, and we must be attentive, very attentive, to the prayer of the Rosary. “
Amen.
tumblrze
speechless? i know how you feel, yahoo sports. me too.
