Kink

Just thought this was a cool picture...

Thank You

I never had to walk a mile in her shoes. No one ever thought two tired feet and a $14 fine could change the world. But in 1955, they did just that. Her refusal to give up her seat on a bus after a hard day's work inspired a movement that marked one of the largest and most successful challenges of segregation in U.S. history.

Her determiniation never to be humiliated again like she was the fateful day in October 1955 sewed the seeds of the Civil Rights movement that ultimately ended segregation and began to give blacks a rightful place in America.

Rosa Parks died Monday in her Detriot home at age 92. We should all stop to think about how lucky we are as a result of her civil disobedience. Most of us wouldn't have done what she did. Because of her, we won't have to. Thank you, Mrs. Parks.

Whats this? - LG

Ha Haaaa! whooooo! (imagine the nature boy rick flair) whooooo! Yeah
son! Let me celebrate a minute, world series coming to my city. Texas
has never hosted a world series. The rangers started in '61, the colt
45's (the astro's name before the astrodome) in '62. Astros! Roger
Clemens (hook em), petite, oswalt, backe, biggi-oooo, berkman, willie
t, burke, wham-bam thank you lamb, i can name them all. This team was
15 games below .500. Only the '15 braves were worse and still made the
playoffs ... then won the world series. Do you know how happy i am to
see this team in the series? i must have watched all of over 75 games
and most of more than 120 games this year. I saw the 3 games that
dropped us to 15 below and the two after where we won a few. I'm not
bragging here because obviously i sat around a lot, but to stick with
something like that and come out on top is unbelieveable. The Stros
are holding two absolute locks for the Hall, one more thats as good as
gold, and a number of other guys well on their way. This is my citay.
Welcome to my citay! if you could only see the jig i was dancing as
the team danced busch into just a memory. This is how you beat your
demons. This is how you break out and end 43 years of dead-ends. You
go out and beat your rival. You go out and turn the tables. If you
watched the games this week you saw the cardinals, not the astro's, in
fear, the cardinals making the errors, the cardinals sweating in the
batters box. Beating the cardinals for an astro's fan is like drilling
oklahoma for us horns. Nailing the cardinals in game six of the NLCS,
winning the last two and 4 of the last 5 in busch to close it down is
beyond words. "Yeah remember how much fun we had in Busch? that
stadium was great" Ha Haaa! Suckas! We closed that place down! Only
two teams have played their last home game ever in a stadium where they
lost the deciding game of a series. Welcome to the club, ye 'red
fowl'!

Now! Bring on the black sox, i mean white sox. The last time the
white sox made the series, the black sox threw the series. Mafia pay
offs. The white sox organization has been punished, cursed by their
foul play and dispicable actions. Since then, they've made the series
twice, back in 1959 when they lost and in 2005. Here's to the
resurrection of demons past for the boys of the south side. May your
misery continue. May the south side franchise rot in the annals of
lore. No man alive should remember a time the white sox were champs.
Players have thrown games before or shed points (devils) but these guys
threw away the gold. Many have played long careers and never had a
chance to play the series. Many have made it, some more than others,
and have walked away empty handed again and again. You play the game
to be the best. You bust your ass to win the big one. To blow series
was a crime against every man that has ever tossed a ball to himself in
the backyard pretending to be in the bottom of the 9th, staring at
Nolan Ryan, full count, two outs with the bases juiced and you're down
3. I happen to be one of those men. Go Stro's!

'and the earth becomes my throne'

The Greatest Game

I am lucky to have been alive during the past 16 years in sports history. In the collegiate footballing arena, I've witnessed four of the greatest teams in history, the Oklahoma Sooners of recent years, the USC Trojans of this year, and the Miami Hurricanes and Florida State Seminoles of the 1990s. In pro football, I saw the great 49er teams with Young, Montana, and Rice. I saw the Broncos with John Elway, the Browns with Bernie Kosar and Ernest Byner, and others. In the early 90s, I watched the Fab Five matriculate at Michigan, the Grant Hill and Bobby Hurley show at Duke, Larry Johnson, Stacey Augmon and the basketball juggernaut known as the 1989 UNLV Runnin' Rebels...

As a corollary, I've seen some of the greatest games these teams and others have played, such as Virginia Tech-Florida State in 1999, 2001 Oklahoma-Texas, 1993 Michigan-North Carolina in the Final Four, the 2000 subway series World Series, the 2000 Rams-Titans super bowl, and, more recently, USC-Notre Dame of 2005 and and 2005 NLCS, which the Astros won, but I'll let Logan discuss that...

But once in a while, I witness a game so remarkable that it puts the great games of the past to shame. This post, my friends, is my account of the greatest game I have ever witnessed; the greatest game I have been a part of.

The setting was glorious. Austin, Texas. Early autumn. A cool, brisk 68 degrees. National television with Brad Nessler, Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit in the booth. Texas in its beaufitul burnt orange. Vince Young leading a virtually unstoppable offensive attack that makes defensive coordinators weep. The unlucky victim for this game...?

...the Brown University Bears. That's right, Brown. Ivy League. No athletic scholarships. 150-pound linebackers. Midget wide receivers. The double-wing, option-run offense...Aaron Harris, Derrick Johnson, Michael Huff, and Cedric Griffin must have been licking their chops.

Yes, young grasshoppers, I am talking about a video game I played on my PlayStation 2 today. As Brad Nessler welcomed me to another presentation of NCAA 2005 college football brought to me by EA Sports, I could feel that this game would be special. I felt confident. My fingers were nimble, my cushion was comfortable, the A/C was on, a large, cold, glass of grape juice (as opposed to grape drink, which is comprised of sugar, water, and of course, purple) lay next to me. I was ready.

A strange feeling of anger came over me as I prepared to play the game. I didn't just want to beat the Bears, I wanted to maul the Bears. So I quit the game and changed the quarter lengths from 4 minutes to a full 15 minutes. Yes! I get to fuck with Brown for a full 60 minutes. No commercials, just offense. Pure, unadulterated, relentless, offense.

After Brad Nessler re-welcomed me to another presentation of NCAA 2005 college football brought to me by EA Sports, I settled in for what would be the greatest 2 hours of my gaming career. What ensued would become the most glorious, passionate ass-whooping ever administered by one college football team to another on the field. I wanted to run up the score on these fuckers. How dare they step into my stadium and challenge me to a game! I don't care if I did select them as an opponent.

I had one thing in mind - offense. I audibled my receivers to fly patterns (translation: go deep) every play. I ran hail mary's for the hell of it. I went for 2 point conversions after every touchdown. I kicked onside after each touchdown. My defense was impeccable. I threw downfield every play...

The Bears never had a chance. I took a chainsaw to the once-vaunted Brown defense. It was a massacre on the field. The evidence is below.

Key offensive stats:

-Vince Young: 66/99 for 2266 yards (~ 1.3 miles) and 45 touchdowns, 2 sacks and 1 INT
-As a team: 59 first downs, 2296 total yards of offense, 53/61 on 2-point conversions, 61 touchdowns scored (all of these new single-game NCAA records)
-Selvin Young: 49 punts for 606 yards and 9 touchdowns

Key defensive stats:

-As a Team: forced 13 turnovers, including 9 interceptions (5 returned for TD's), 7 sacks, and a combined 6/72 on 3rd and 4th down, held Brown to 319 yards of total offense

In the end, EA sports stopped taking score when it got to be 255-0 (3 minutes into the 3rd quarter). The stats kept rolling, and I took score by hand. When it was all said and done, the Texas Longhorns defeated the Brown University Bears 479-0, in what will go down in the annals of history as the greatest performance ever by an athletic club.

After the game, I watched the Astros win the National League pennant. Logan, you have to write about the Astros.

Was I Ready? - LG

Finally, five years of cotton depression has turned. Oh the glory of
beating Oklahoma! Chris knows this, but he has a knock in the nuts
coming. I told him before he left. I told him in a text as Rod Wright
ran 70 yrds for a touchdown. I told him as I welcomed him back to
houston while the astros clinched the division series. He's getting a
knock in the nuts. Now, before the aggies and nay-sayers say anything.
I know we were suppose to beat OU this year, but hear this ags. One
day, you will know how it feels to break a 5 game or longer streak to
your archrival. Until then...ah, silence.

As for me I had the distinct pleasure of standing as a groom's men in
my friend Wiliiam's wedding. Hands down the best man of my generation,
Will was the one I took to stacie's with me as I gathered my goods.
I've known him since i started playing soccer (the first sport a kid
has the attention span to play). He's the one I 'rebelled' with when I
strew trash accross an exes lawn. He's the one that showed up first to
my bedside in the hospital. Remember your best friend through high
school? He was it. All that and I had never seen him as happy as I saw
him the past few weeks. It begs me to ask the question: was i ready?
.... tough call.

On to the wedding (here comes the sap). Beautiful wedding. The bride's
maids were all dressed nice. The groom's men were pimped out. I must
say, I looked 'so fresh and so clean' that day. The brides and groom
were all dolled up, and in mind i had to think 'football, football,
baseball, footba.., base.., ...'. Everytime i stopped, my lip started
to curl and tears welled up in my eyes. The first wedding i'm in, and I
paid the least amount of attention to the proceedings. Hello! Two weeks
from the day, it was going to be me front and center.

So, was i ready? No. I wasn't ready to get married. After seeing
William and how happy he was, i wasn't ready. But would I have been?
who knows now, i'm not that worried about it. The point is this: i'm
not gettin married! We'll never know, and unlike the last time I asked
myself what might have been (here's that reference to a certain someone
you hugged at graduation only to hate again), I will never attempt to
see what might have been if i was, in fact, ready as I had once
believed.

Hey wally! remember that healthy pile behind bevo? Revielley does.

one for 'air will'... "I can't remember anything / Can't tell if this
is true or dream"

Dallas

I find myself more excited than normal to write this post. I know some of you loyal readers are craving for new material here and I am more than happy to oblige.

This past weekend I made the trip to Dallas, Texas for the annual Texas vs. Oklahoma football game. The 100th game in the rivalry was played this year. As is custom in my book for Friday night, I went to the Across The Street bar with my friend Eric. As usual, it was a great time. 1,000 Longhorn fans clad in burnt orange and $2 pitchers is my kind of atmosphere. However, the bar got cheap on us this year. Normally the pitchers are Dos Equis (yes, $2 Dos Equis pitchers), but Coors was on tap this time. No matter. I picked up the cover charge and Big Easy (one of my nicknames for Eric)..because he's big (approx 6'4") and easy, like I guess most guys are, bought us 2 pitchers and we were set for the night.

I realized early on that I can't drink as much as I could in college. Halfway through the pitcher, I was damn near full. Seriously, I actually got mad at myself for considering the possibility of wasting cheap beer. So, in typical crunch-time fashion, I sucked it up and finished the pitcher. I thought I was gonna explode. Later that night (since I don't break the seal), I would take the biggest piss of my life. Man, it brought tears to my eyes...and a little warm bath to some shrubs. Anyhow, the bar was great. As usual, I ran into people I know. I saw my friend Chris who I had not seen literally since my senior year. I also saw my friend Noteel, a girl I attended high school with. She's doing well. I had not seen her since my junior year of high school - a full 7 years ago.

We left around 11:30 to head back to Eric's parents house. His little brother, Adam, had a little league hockey game the next morning, which we attended and met up with his parents. The all of us trucked over to the Cotton Bowl for the game. The atmosphere was crazed. You could feel it in your bones that this day was special.

We had the better team, Oklahoma was rebuilding, and most important of all....

We had Vince.

Texas crushed Oklahoma 45-12 and tied the 1941 Texas team for the largest margin of victory for Texas over Oklahoma. The game was incredibly exciting and filled with big plays. Vince Young's 64-yard touchdown pass to Bill Pittman, Jamaal Charles's 80-yard touchdown run, Rodrique Wright's 67-yard fumble return for a touchdown resulting from Brian Robison's sack of OU quarterback Rhett Bomar. I loved every minute of it.

Whenever I attend Texas games, I always over-exert myself in the process of cheering for my team. I always lose my voice by halftime. I have a habit of jumping up and down on big plays. I do the "hook 'em horns" on 3rd and 4th downs. I'm always yelling something and giving my own insight on what's happening on the field to whomever I attend the game with. By the end of the game, I am really tired. But it's so fun. And this weekend, I was exhausted after the game. But, like the Ohio State game, we stayed late in the stadium to celebrate while the team was still on the field. It was truly a great day to be a Longhorn.

Saturday night I hung out with a couple of Eric's friends. Then on Sunday I hung out in Plano with his fam before flying back to Houston.

I really enjoyed the weekend. I wish I had a digital camera to commemorate the weekend. If Texas wins the national championship this year, the commemorative dvd is gonna be amazing. Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas Tech, A&M, Big 12 Championship, Rose Bowl and a ton of other highlights will make it a tough item to have.