Sunday, December 6, 2009

Kansas - All Access

C.J. Henry is impressive with about 1:30 left in this video. If his knee ever heals up, I think he has a real chance to help us out.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Jayhawk Football

Thank goodness basketball season is here. After a terribly disappointing loss at home to Nebraska, I find myself motivated to blog. I plan on composing my thoughts this evening and leaving a detailed post tomorrow. Speaking of tomorrow, Alicia, my sisters, and I are going to see Wicked with my mom in Kansas City. It should be a great show!

Thursday, September 3, 2009

HS Football Player Saves School Children

This is a pretty remarkable story


Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Obama TOLD us this was coming

Glenn Beck had an incredibly well written and spoken monologue this morning on his radio program. I have posted the transcript below, and you can listen to the audio here.

GLENN: Well, give me 20 minutes. President Obama's going on vacation next month. You know that, right? He's great. I mean, he deserves it. He's worked hard these last six months. He has worked hard transforming our country. He's been paying people's mortgages, putting gas in their automobiles.

VOICE: Because I never thought this day would ever happen. I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know, if I help him, he's going to help me.

GLENN: I've personally never seen President Obama, you know, gas anybody up at a Shell station, you know, but I don't get to New Jersey that often. I mean, maybe that's where he's pumping everybody's gas these days. I don't know. How does that woman feel today? She was in last October she said that. How is she feeling now, as she continues to write her own checks for her own mortgage or maybe lose her home and still fill up her own tank, or run out of gas? I wonder if she is disappointed by Barack Obama yet or if she's excited for the change that is still coming. We're now hearing from more and more people who are disappointed because they didn't understand the change. I wonder how did you miss that? The latest poll shows that a growing number of Americans strongly disapprove of his performance. It's now in double digits over those who strongly approve. To many Americans Barack Obama was a moderate and now all of a sudden he's governing for the left. Hello? Are you kidding me? Barack Obama could not have been any more clear about who he was and what he planned to do if he was elected, but everyone refused to listen and many Americans still are. He told us every step of the way up to and including his community organizer plans for America. He even told the American people that ACORN would help shape his agenda.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: But let me even say before I even get inaugurated. During the transition we're going to be calling all of you in to help us shape the agenda. We're going to be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda for the next presidency of the United States of America.

GLENN: He mentioned that he wanted to build an AmeriCorps type volunteer organization that would be just as strong and well funded as the U.S. military.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.

GLENN: A civilian force. I guess we just shrug that off as the peace corps, a Greenpeace. Although, how strong and powerful and well funded do you have to be to plant trees or throw buckets of water on beached whales? Do you need a tank to spray them down? Maybe they'll save sperm whales now with their new peace corps aircraft carriers. And by the way, your kids aren't really going to have a choice because they are making community service now super sexy. Oh, yeah, public service? First we're tying them into student loans. But the good news is their student loans will now be erased, picked up entirely by the taxpayer, if your children just serve as a government bureaucrat for ten years. But even more good news. Soon your kids won't have to worry about making tough decisions like should I serve in a government approved organized group like ACORN or AmeriCorps? They don't have to worry about that because Rahm Emanuel is there. The choice will have already been made for your children because it's good for the collective.

VOICE: The idea of universal citizens service, you have to participate.

EMANUEL: Citizenship is not an entitlement program. It comes with responsibilities. Everybody somewhere between the ages of 18 and 25 will serve three months of basic training in a kind of civil defense. That universal sense of service, somewhere between ages 18 and 25 will give Americans once again a sense of what they are to be American and their contribution to a country and a common experience. And you look at World War II. That was a draft. This is not a draft. It's a universal service. It is not an accident that we started our big march towards civil rights and expanding post World War II because the country came through and experienced together.

VOICE: So is this compulsory then?

EMANUEL: Well, you have to in a sense that it's required of everybody.

GLENN: It's required. It's not a draft. It's required. It's not a draft. It's universal service. It's required. It's not socialism. It's social justice. Does the book "1984" come to mind to anybody? Obama's taxation policies haven't been exactly timid but then I guess we should have known that.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: It's not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance at success, too. I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.

GLENN: Oh, it's good. When we spread the wealth around, it's good for everyone. But that wasn't Marxist. No, no, no. That's not Marxist. That was just a good rule of thumb, sort of a social justice safety tip. Is it possible he learned that ideology very early on from his mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, an avowed communist? And from his favorite professors in college of whom he spoke in his new book, Dreams of My Father.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance pullets who smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night in the dorms we discussed neocolonialism, Frantz Fanon, Eurocentrism and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet, we set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting Bourgeois society's stifling constraints.

GLENN: Oh, but Glenn, you can't hold him to that. He was in his early 20s at the time. Even though he said he carefully selected his Marxist professors. Okay, can we hold him to something he said on an Illinois public radio station in 2001 when he was a state legislator?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers and the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted. And Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you. But it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn't shifted, and one of the, I think the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that.

GLENN: We went through the courts and so we lost focus on the community organizing on the ground, which is the way you bring about redistributive wealth. The Constitution didn't break free from those founding constraints. It's a document mostly of negative liberties. What a powerful endorsement of the most perfect political document in the history of the world. Thank you, Barack Obama sorry. Thank you, Mr. President of the United States. Unfortunately it also didn't bring about that redistributive change that we and when I say "We," I mean Karl Marx wanted so badly. Here was his response to a caller to that same public radio show.

VOICE: With Karen. Good morning, Karen, you are on Chicago public radio.

CALLER: Hi. The gentleman made the point that the Warren court wasn't terribly radical. My question is with economic changes. My question, is it too late for that kind of reparative work economically and is that the appropriate place for reparative economic work to take place.

VOICE: You mean the court?

CALLER: The courts, or would it be legislation at this point.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know, maybe I'm showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor but, you know, I'm not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn't structured that way.

GLENN: He needs to change the structure of the institution. Remember, his last phrase was "Community organizing." Now, you might be thinking, okay, Mr. Fatty Fat Fatso, witch white guy, you are just concerned about a piece of your big fat pile of your Brinks truck cash being taken from you and heaven forbid given to, shhh, a person of color. Really? Do only the rich have electricity in this country? I mean, I know they do in Zimbabwe or where George Onyango Obama lives in his hut in Kenya. But most of us don't live in those conditions. I'm just, I'm thinking out loud here that most, if not all, low income wage earners in this country have things like lights, TVs, radios, air conditionings. And they just might be affected by something else: Obama clearly spelled out during the campaign.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even, you know, regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I'm capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money; they will pass that money on to consumers.

GLENN: Obama was kind enough to alert us to the fact that some of our rights may be curtailed because we don't want to offend our close personal Euro trash friends and their tender sensibilities with our lifestyle. God forbid we do that.

MICHELLE OBAMA: Barack, as Oprah said, is one of the most brilliant men you will meet in our lifetime.

GLENN: Here's what he said about driving our SUVs. Cut 74, 074.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We can't drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times whether we're living in a desert or we're living in the tundra and then just expect that every other country's going to say, "Okay."

GLENN: Let me tell you something. My studio is set right now at 65 degrees. I don't care what the Frenchy frogs think about it. Why are liberals always so concerned about the French and what the French are going to France is a rat hole. They are setting cars on fire. They are kidnapping their bosses and threatening to blow up automobile plants if they don't get raises. Why would we care about a country that is out of control, filled with beret wearing, wine swilling surrender monkeys? I'll put this thermometer in this studio at 38 below zero if I want to. It's my damn thermometer. If I want to hang frozen sides of beef in here, I'll do it. I'll park an idling Cadillac Escalade in the studio if I want, with the heaters running at full blast just to stay warm in the 38 below zero studio conditions that I've created with my ridiculously low thermostat temperature while I eat frozen pudding and jelly doughnuts! And I'll be fine... or will I? You see, I can't do that because if I eat too many jelly doughnuts, then I would be bad for the collective health, and the new healthcare system would punish me. If I left my Escalade running, that would be bad for the collective. It would be bad for global health. And it's illegal in New York to let your car idle now unless you're the mayor. Plus, don't forget, GM, Government Motors. They are not even going to be making the Escalade anymore, cars that are supposedly unfriendly to the environment. No, no, we'll soon all be driving the 1 1/2 passenger squirrel powered Yugo. But let's not forget Michelle told us things were going to change. We were hoping for this change. And once we change, we'll never, ever be allowed to go back to our lives before Obama.

MICHELLE OBAMA: And Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism, that you put down your division, that you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones, that you push yourselves to be better and that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual.

GLENN: Of course, as soon as she said that, she was hidden on the campaign trail. We were promised that there would be change, transformation over and over and over again. When will America open their eyes to the promises of a fundamental transformation of America?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

GLENN: He said it as plain as it possibly could be said and people lived in denial. No one, almost no one, took him at his word. You want a president that you can take at his word. You want a president you can believe in. You want a president who will say what he means and means what he says. And yet when you get one, you think it's campaign rhetoric. You think he doesn't believe in taking wealth from one group and giving it to another. You think he doesn't mean that he's actually going to change or make useless the Constitution through community service groups. You think he actually means or doesn't mean that he's going to start an AmeriCorps where your children will be required to serve. You think he doesn't actually mean that you won't be able to go back to your life as you knew it. You think he doesn't actually mean that you're not going to be affording electricity. You think he doesn't actually mean that you can't have your thermostat at 72 because of what Europe thinks. It's time we take this politician at his word. People haven't been doing it for a while. My question is will you start to do it now?

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Test Synth

There is a new service that Microsoft is offering called Photosynth. This is just a test of my living room, but I plan on doing some serious synthing in the future.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Michael Jackson

Now, almost a week after his death, I may finally be able to write a post about Michael Jackson. It is bizarre to think that somebody with whom I have never had an interaction can become so close to my heart. And now that I read that out loud, it sounds bizarre too. But, the fact of the matter is that I have been an avid fan of Michael's since I knew what music was. One of the first, if not the first, cassettes I ever owned was his album Bad. As I grew up, I purchased the rest of his albums and began to enjoy his body of work. He created so many songs that I can associate with early childhood memories and late-night college parties. What he did for the music industry is astounding; many popular artists of today undoubtedly owe their careers to Michael Jackson. Music videos, as we know them, did not exist before he started creating them. He broke down race barriers, sponsered disease prevention and treatment in other countries, and supported our troops. He truly was a humanitarian. It is difficult to put into words what he and his career meant to this world. Think about it, when was the last time you saw this much international attention focused on the end of somebody's life? This was a man that desperately wanted to make a difference in people's lives. He was able to do that by reaching out to the world through his music. There are plenty of facts to support that statement. From his album sales, tour grossing records, and 20+ number one hits dating back to the Jackson 5. I recently watched a concert from his Dangerous Tour in 1992, and the reactions from his fans in attendance is remarkable. They put the boy-band fans to shame. Emotion pours out of these people, as they cannot wrap their minds around what they are witnessing. His shows were so ellaborate, and, from what I have read, his London tour was going to be no different. Throughout his life, talent oozed from his weird body. And, you almost expect him to be so weird because that much talent cannot possibly be contained in a normal person; that part of his brain was not unlike a sevant's. If this reads like random thoughts stitched together, that's because it is. I still am unable to accept the fact this Michael Jackson is gone, and this world was robbed of his unique talents and gifts. He will be sorely missed.

I encourage you to read up on Michael Jackson's life, and enjoy his music. From Motown, to Disco, to Funk, to Rock, there is something in his library for everybodhy.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

U.S. Open Continued

Consider this: Since 2000, Tiger has never ranked better than 54th in tour driving accuracy. Moreover, from 2001-2007, he was never in the top 100. Going into the Memorial, many questions were being asked about his accuracy off of the tee. During that tournament, Tiger hit 49/56 fairways, an impressive 87.5%. As you can see from the chart below, that would be the highest percentage among the most accurate drivers in the past decade. I know, it isn't an acceptable sample, but it is still impressive. If he can continue to drive the ball well and increase his YTD percentage to the low to mid 70's, who is going to beat this guy?





Couple these fun facts with his accomplishments, and it's pretty scary.

  • 2000 - 71.0% - U.S. Open, British Open, PGA - 6 other PGA wins
  • 2001 - 65.5% - Masters - 4 other PGA wins
  • 2002 - 67.5% - Masters, U.S. Open - 3 other PGA wins
  • 2003 - 62.7% - 5 PGA wins
  • 2004 - 56.1% - 1 PGA win
  • 2005 - 54.6% - Masters, British Open - 4 other PGA wins
  • 2006 - 60.7% - British Open, PGA - 6 other PGA wins
  • 2007 - 59.8% - PGA - 6 other PGA wins
  • 2008 - No Data - U.S. Open - 3 PGA wins
  • 2009 - 61.9% - 2 PGA wins