AC/DC and Your Eyes

How about this to make you feel old as hell. Today in the UK, liking AC/DC is so uncool that it can get your ass kicked and your eyes poked out. See this article for more.



They can try to take my eyes. I refuse to denounce my love for AC/DC. Highway to Hell(seen above) was the first full album I bought. ER...Well actually, my Mom bought it for me at the record store in downtown Tiffin, Ohio. My second album was Kiss Dynasty. In hindsight, I wish I had asked Mom for another AC/DC album or somehow been wise enough as a third grader to know that KISS Alive would have been the wiser purchase. Hindsight...

No Complaints

I want more than anything to add a rant to the blog this evening. Unfortunately, my porch swing, seen here:



Along with the steamy Appalachian fog that I am sitting here staring at has relaxed me to the point of really having no complaints:



That's terrible when you feel wrong because you feel so right.

Trying

Check out these 4 funny pics that Ingrid took of Fabiola on her belly trying to be mobile:

http://www.keeseys.com/trying/

People who frequent Casa Cantina...

In the ongoing trainwreck of a defense for his drinking and driving offense, Ohio University coach Frank Solich has chosen the ludicrous defense that his drink was spiked with the date rape drug GHB. You can reference some of my past comments on Frank Solich here and yet another rant here.

As if his laughable defense is not joke enough, Solich's lawyer, Samuel Shamansky of Columbus had the following to say in court recently about the bar that served him the drinks according to this article in the Athens News:

According to Shamansky, "we know what the people who frequent (Casa Cantina) are like." Asked by The NEWS what that meant, the attorney replied "people that use alcohol and drugs."

Just for the record, this is my family's favorite local establishment for dinner. It's a wonderful place for kids and adults and is frequented by a diverse collection of upstanding local professionals. Still, as if Solich hasn't had a hard enough time in Athens, he lets his attack dog lawyer go after one of our oldest standing community establishments. Where do these clowns get their PR people?

The following letter to the editor ran in today's Athens News and pretty much says it all.

Bonehead me

Attention all web site administrators:

Never pull the bonehead move that I pulled. By greasing myself and posting that list of keyword searches from my web stats on my blog the other day, I effectively got all searches on each and every one of those terms buried in the 2 major search engines results that were sending me the traffic in the first place. It's kinda like the little boy who's gets so excited about going to the amusement park that he pees himself and ruins the whole thing...er...maybe it's not quite like that.

Dedicating Resources to Dolts

I had a brief conversation this weekend about the student athlete grades at Ohio State University. Apparently the overall average ACT score of an Ohio State athlete is somewhere around 6 points lower than that of ACT scores from other comparable schools. Can this be true?!! That is huge on a test with only something like 40 possible points. There also would seem to be entire administrative positions in the university dedicated to supporting and aiding in student athlete academic performance.

What a waste of resources and why bother? The number of student athletes is such a miniscule percentage of the student body at a university the size of Ohio State why not let the athletes do what they do, which is play ball. If they don’t have aspirations to be scholars, why must we waste resources to force them into being “scholarly athletes.”

When you really think about it, athletics provide wonderful internship style experience for a huge number of students in many different specializations around campus from sport management, physical therapy, journalism, broadcasting etc… Given this, an idiotic athlete, just by playing on the team, has already provided a wonderful service for other scholars regardless of their own academic performance. Here we are dedicating resources to the academic development a small number of dolts who have no aspiration of obtaining higher levels of knowledge. Let them do what they do, play sports. When they are done, they can either play pro ball, semi – pro, or get their application filled out for McDonalds.

City Without Scumbags

I am aware that I have previously commented on how much I cannot stand cities that lack "grit" as they consequently also tend to lack any personality whatsoever. I feel that I need to make an addendum to this statement. I am officially excluding Madison Wisconsin from my list of homogenized and boring American Cities. I just returned from my third trip to Madison. My first trip was in 1998 on tour in my former life as a musician and the last couple trips were for conferences.

Along with an excellent selection of diverse restaurants that will put most other smaller Midwestern cities to shame, Madison also boast an excellent farmer's market around their capital building on Saturday mornings. While this gastronomic strength is notable, the most pleasant feature of Madison Wisconsin is the people.

Allow me to give an example of just how impressive of a culture they have in this Midwestern island of sanity. I left my conference one evening to walk through the capital area on my route back to my hotel. Sitting around the capital building are thousands of Madisonites on blankets, drinking beer and wine, eating dinner and talking while they enjoy the featured music. Notable was the presence of alcohol and lack of hang up over people drinking it in public. Even more notable was to see thousands of Americans gathered around a downtown capital building drinking in a public environment completely void of out-of-control, poorly behaved scumbags, jerk-offs, loud-mouthed steakheads, hillbillies, clown-suited gangster wanna-be's or any other of a long list of undesirable assholes who, when given booze, ruin a good time for individuals and families in most other regions of this county.

To add yet one more notable, when the party was over they all picked up after themselves. Madison is shockingly clean and as I mentioned earlier lacks the grit of many American downtown areas. This is one city without "grit" however that has a lot to be proud of. Anyone hiring in Madison? Contact me via email, I'd like to talk.