Boom or Bust

A few weeks after my first fantasy football draft (of three this season), I have been pondering the quality of my players and fate of my team. One thing I noticed in looking at my team compared to others in the league is that I tend to draft younger players who have upside or a chance for a breakout season, rather than crafty old veterans. A few examples of this on my roster are Running Backs J.J. Arrington and Mewelde Moore, Wide Receivers Larry Fitzgerald and Lee Evans, and Byron Leftwich at backup QB. These guys are going to make or break my roster. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

The good thing about being in multiple fantasy football leagues (besides it being really fun) is that you can go back and look at how you drafted previously and note any players you may have reached or guys you may have missed out on. I'm pretty confident heading into my next two drafts. The first one was full of hardcore NFL fans who study up and for the most part, know their stuff. The next two are definitely more winnable leagues with about half of the owners being more casual fans. Those leagues are always fun, but I definitely prefer the challenge of trying to win in a league of guys on your level of football knowledge (or higher, of course).

The job search continues. I think I've been a little stressed out about it lately and it's completely unnecessary. I could've easily landed a job a long time ago but I'm only pursing opportunities I really want and it's going to take some time because of that. I still search online on the daily, but I've realized I just need to chill out more and something will hit. My internship is over in less than two weeks and it will be a relief to go back to strictly part-time hours after working 55 a week between my internship and job all summer. I might plan a vacation...nothing major though. It'll definitely be continental U.S., maybe some place where I have a friend to visit (New York, Jackson Hole, Sacramento). As long as it's a place that offers some new and refreshing surroundings. We'll see how much money I have to play with.

My brother left for school last weekend. All this talk of friends and siblings going back to college almost makes me miss it. Thing is, I'll pretty much have the same lifestyle minus the classes and homework in two weeks.

With my brother heading back to school I'm now driving his car for the timebeing. It's ugly. Driving a 1988 Pontiac 6000 is even more inspiration for finding a job soon. At least it's got a nice CD player.

Speaking of CD's, I have to get out and pick up that new Kanye West album. The few tracks I've heard have been stellar and I've read nothing but glowing reviews including 5 stars in Rolling Stone and a 9.5 on Pitchfork (I didn't even know those guys ever gave ratings like that to acts that people have heard of). Look for me next weekend rollin' around in that hot 6000 bumpin' some Kayne. I might be at the State Fair too.

CURRENT LISTENING: Kanye West - "Touch The Sky"
LAST MOVIE SEEN: Red Eye

Chardonnay + Peanuts

This is what the girlfriend and I had while watching Kung-Fu Hustle last night. Definitely not a conventional combination but it turned out to be "pretty dece" as one of my friends would put it. I'll still take an ice-cold beer with my peanuts in a second though. That said, I don't think I'm the type of guy who can ever be a wine conisseur. It's enough for me to get into the different styles and flavors of micro and import beer offerings that I don't think I have a place for wine. Whine doesn't go too well with my love for football either...

Oh yeah, back to the movie. Kung-Fu Hustle was incredibly entertaining. It had the right mix of zany comedy, unique characters, a well-written plot, and of course, crazy special effects-enhanced kung-fu fight scenes. Definitely a two thumbs up.

I'm going to see Big Boi (of Outkast) at First Ave tonight. Not counting Atmosphere, this will be only the fourth hip-hop show I've been to. Would be nice to catch the full duo but I'm sure seeing one half of the Stankonia emcees will still be highly entertaining.

On the music tip, I recently signed up for this service called LastFM. You download this plug-in for iTunes and it tracks the music you listen to and creates charts of the artists and songs you listen to most as well as your most recently played tracks. The whole point of it is, it connects you to other listeners based on your played results and gives you the opportunity to see what other bands people with a similar taste are listening to. It's a pretty cool tool. I haven't listened to enough stuff to create any "neighbors" (people who listen to similar music) yet, but for someone who loves checking out new bands I think this will be pretty awesome service/community tool to use.

Starting Sunday I'll be in Fargo for a few days working for Red Bull. I haven't ever been there and while I don't presume that it will be a very exciting place, I always enjoy visits to new and unfamiliar territory. If anyone knows any quirky, tourist-y things that we should stop and check out or has good bar recommendations (hey, we don't work all day) please post them in the comments.

I think I'll end his one here. One random thought: the NFL preseason is probably the longest 5 weeks of the year (at least since I stopped believing in Santa).

Peace.

CURRENT LISTENING: Days Away - God and Mars

I didn't know I was so popular

Apparently some idiot thought my blog was read widely enough to spam the comments section on the previous post with 3-pages worth of fake stock market sham. That has since been erased, but seriously, there can't be more than 20 people who read this on a given day. Save your junk for e-mail boxes....better yet, leave the world alone!

That's all I have for today. That, and the new Limbeck CD is a really fun album. Can't think of many bands that are better to listen to on the road or when drinkin' with a group of friends. Go get it.

Two days in a row

That's right, I did it.

Going to make this a pretty quick one. I wanted to follow up yesterday's post about Quite Frankly by commenting on how hilarious it was to see Stephen A. Smith and Leigh Steinberg call out Rosenhouse's method of operation as an agent. It's about time someone stepped up and stated the obvious publicly.

Today, local blog Slanderous Minneapolis posted their "first annual Slanderous City Awards" and some of them are quite amusing. Here are a couple of the highlights:

* Best Place to Drink Cheaply:
TIE: Liquor Lyle's and Grumpy's Northeast
Best Answer: Under bridge

* Best Place to Pick Up Very Drunk Girls:
Brothers
Best Answer: Wayzata High School

I'm out like a fat kid in dodgeball. Can't wait to sit on the couch and watch the Pack tonight. Yes, I know it's only preseason.

CURRENT LISTENING: Phoenix - Everything is Everything (acoustic) courtesy of Stereogum

Quite Frankly, I'm surprised

If you watch ESPN even occasionally I'm sure you're well aware of who Stephen A. Smith is. For a while, this guy was the most annoying person I had seen in sports broadcasting. He came onto Sportscenter and NBA broadcasts seemingly out of nowhere and made a lot of noise with his attitude and brash viewpoints and predictions. I wanted to turn the channel at times that this guy would be talking and a friend of mine who was even more annoyed by him went as far as to research what his actual sports credentials were. What he found was that the guy played Community College basketball for two years and averaged something like 17-points per. Not exactly expert material. Well as of a week ago, Stephen A. Smith has his own show called "Quite Frankly" weeknights on ESPN2. I can tell you right now that I was rolling my eyes the first time I saw a promo for it on ESPN. Out of curiosity I watched one of the first shows last week. Now this show is different from all of ESPN's other material -- it's a one hour talk show where Smith sits and gives an indepth interview with various figures of the sports world. After watching the first show, I gotta admit, I was a little intrigued. Smith interviewed Allen Iverson and he asked some good questions that got to the heart of things -- even bringing Iverson to tears over the subject of his relationship with Larry Brown. At the same time, the guy can pump up some of the athletes too much by caking on what he loves about them. Overall, it seems like it's going to be a show worth watching and I'm sure it will draw both praise and quite naturally, sighs of agony from those put off by Smith's personality. I have yet to watch another full episode but I've already TiVo'd tonight's feature that promises to be an intriguing one: Drew Rosenhouse. Oh yeah, for a little more info on Smith's rise to his pseudo-star status...he went from being a beat writer for Temple basketball in the Philadelphia Inquirer to sports columnist to a career with America's biggest Sports Network in 10 years. Not a bad climb.

I was a little aggravated yesterday...my pre-order of the Limbeck album (along with Demon Days by the Gorillaz) did not come . Damn towerrecords.com to hell. In the meantime, I've been listening to The National, Death Cab For Cutie, Days Away, and possibly the album I overlooked the most this year: Ryan Adams' Cold Roses.

Only four days until the long-awaited Fifth Quarter Fantasy Football league draft. You know the wheels are in full motion on the fantasy football think tank!

That's it for the moment. Cheers.

Random, random, random

Had a pretty fun weekend, but it went by too fast. They almost always do...

Nothing too exciting going on. Another pretty slow day at the internship but I've happened upon a lot of interesting and funny things on the web today so I'll spare you the usual run-down of my life and give you some fun stuff to check out:

- Jon Heder (of Napoleon Dynamite) is finally going to be in another movie. He'll be co-starring Billy Bob Thornton in School of Scoundrels, a remake of a 60s British comedy of the same name. Heder will portray a meter reader who enrolls in a confidence-building class to help him win over his dream girl. Thornton stars as a motivational speaker with whom he competes for the same girl. The big news...the movie is being directed by Todd Phillips (Old School, Road Trip). Sounds like it has all the right ingredients...

- Death Cab for Cutie's new album Plans has been leaked (surprise) on the internet and is already receiving raves from bloggers and e-zine elitists. Here's one gushing review of the album.

- Today I discovered a unique brand of entertainment that basically consists of movie shorts made through video game play, voiceovers and some quite clever writing and sponteneity. This new genre is called "machinima" -- "an ungainly term mixing 'machine' and 'cinema'" and thanks to a New York Times Magazine article I was able to kill some time watching the hilarious "Red vs. Blue," a series of mini-movies that spawned from some guys playing Halo 2 and doing voiceovers for the characters. It might sound lame at first but the dialogue (and the creation of characters through it) is quite funny and the plot consists of what might be the existential meaning of the game itself -- two teams of soldiers who are constantly at war but have no idea why. Check it out for yourself and then tell me if it's awesome or I'm just a dork.

- Finally, Limbeck's new album Let Me Come Home comes out tommorow. If haven't heard of Limbeck yet you must be new to this blog. The good part is, now you have an awesome band to check out. From the songs I've heard, the album should be amazing but I'll share some indepth thoughts after I've gone home, torn open the package, and given it a couple listens tommorow.

I'll leave you with a quote that seems to embody my life right now:

"If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." - Lewis Carroll

I hate cover letters

A cover letter is supposed to give a potential employer a brief overview of why you're interested in the position, their company, and why you'd be an ideal candidate. The catch is, most of this stuff is bull that people cake on in order to hopefully get in for an interview. Most cover letters end up having the same general format and overall message. You can try to infuse some personality into it, but that's difficult to do without getting to an informal level. Best of all, you have to try to impress them while keeping it as concise as possible. You might spend 2 hours researching a company, writing, and revising. Conversely, the HR person is going to spend about 30 seconds or less reading the letter. Since last spring I have probably written at least dozen of these. Kill me now.

Yesterday I was driving back to Minneapolis on 35W North from my parents' house. When you get down by Hwy 13 the highway road is on a slope and you have this great view of the Minneapolis skyline on the horizon. I love that.

One of my college friends who moved out to Omaha this summer for law school is coming back into town this weekend. Definitely looking forward to that. This guy is a staunch (and blindly loyal) Conservative who knows so much about law and history that he can can make you believe he's right in a political debate even when he's dead wrong. Somehow him and I became friends. Given our political positions, this seems highly unlikely to some people. Then we go out and party together and they soon understand.

I'm almost ready to give up on the Twins for the rest of the season. Since the All-Star break we've been on a downward spiral and with the injury to Hunter and lack of a trade made before the deadline, things look to be getting worse. Unless the hitting turns around our playoff hopes are over. It's a bummer too, because more than a Twins playoff berth I really wanted to see the Yankees NOT make the playoffs for once. Maybe that can still happen.

JWalk showed up to the veterans arrival day of Packer camp. I agree with his stance on being grossly underpaid so a cheesehead can only hope he matches or exceeds his level of play from last season and gets rewarded with a contract extension during the season. I'm getting insanely stoked for football season. I wasn't too optimistic about the Green Bay defense a few months ago but from what I've been reading in training camp reports (yes, work downtime) it sounds like Bates could be putting a much improved product on the field. I'm not going to hold my breath for a Super Bowl but it would be great if they could make the playoffs again and have an awesome season for Favre.

Before I go, I must note the hilarious spawn of two of the most popular features to ever hit the internet: HotorNot + Google Maps. Yes folks, you can now find hotties that live in your neighborhood on the internet.

Keep up the barrage of comments!

CURRENT LISTENING: anything by The Secret Machines