Obscure lyrics…FTW!
Well, this was the last week of summer classes. I have one and a half finals on Monday and a half of a final on Tuesday. My Writing for Mass Media final is split over two days, which means it will suck.
You know how when teachers will tell you that they won’t try to trick you on a test? This class is the complete opposite. We had an obituary writing exercise the other day. We were told that an obituary was given to us by the family. So, you would assume that the family would know how to spell their own name, and knowing how long he worked at his job. Yet, they put these errors in there. Granted, we should catch them, and fix them, but lets think in reality here. People know how to spell their own names. I considered this to be bush league on the professor’s part.
This class has also basically affirmed that I don’t like print journalism. Basically, to write for a paper take away any and all personality and your set. I like to be able be conversational in my style. Its what I’m trained in. AP Style has so many little rules that you can’t be conversational. In an obitary, you can’t even say a person “passed away”. No, be the cold, impersonal “died”.
So, while I’ve slowly slipped into the abyss that is hating a class, I’ve rather enjoyed Graphic communication. Laying out pages is a lot of fun, and I knew what I was doing. The only thing that killed me was the two hour lectures. Oy. But, the class was enjoyable, and the professor talked about the tour de France. Everybody wins.
(Well, Floyd Landis kind of won. Maybe. Steroids have ruined sports. Even if his name is cleared, we will never see individual sports the same. Track, field, cycling, skiing, whatever. I don’t trust anything anymore, and it sickens me. Its not like I can just trust them, and tell myself that they’re clean, because simply put, thats being very naive. In what I want to do, the cynic in me has to come out. And that’s why sports is ruined for me now. Thanks Floyd. If you could have done stage 17 clean, it would have been amazing. I would have had hope for the future of clean athletes. But, you didn’t, and I don’t.)
In other news…I almost had a date, but there was some phone number confusion. And she’s moving to Nevada. So let’s look at the scoreboard.
Alan 0 Bad breaks in dating 237
Bad breaks is currently pitching a perfect game. Its 3-7 hitters are a combined 57 for 63 on the evening.
Things I’ve learned this week
~No matter how great the mountain on the side of the case looks, beer on the end of the refrigerator racks will taste bad. On a sidenote, if you like Hamm’s we’ve got some.
~Micheal Irvin in front of lawbooks for a stand-up is hilarious. Methinks that he’s been in his lawyers office so much, he just asked if he could do some work while he’s there.
~Canadians are awesome. Even if they’ve never seen cheese in a can or charcoal.
Movie reviews: lady in the Water
Simply put…one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. If you get off on having your intelligence insulted, I highly recommend seeing this movie as many times as you possibly can. The acting was subpar. The plt was meh. And the writing was straight out of Clifford the Big Red Dog gets Hit in the Face with a Crowbar. (Balantine Books, 2003) I rarely get mad at movie characters, because they can’t hear me, and they aren’t real. However, I rreally, really wanted to inform the characters in Lady in the Water that they are very, very dull, not witty at all, and quite possibly just showed up after additioning for the starring roll in the movie adaption of the book mentioned above.
I really can’t explain why I hated this movie without telling you what happened in the movie. So, my recomendation is wait until one of your friends gets really, really drunk. Then convince him/her that renting Lady in the Water will be good. You don’t spend money, and they chalk it up to being hammered.
You got to give it up for the new modern man,
Alan
(In baseball, there’s a term called building a picket fence. Thats getting one run in a few innings in a row. We’re doing that with comments. Let’s shoot for at least two in this one. Also, if you haven’t yet, read caffeinated sports.)
I’m not huge into sports, but I agree that steroids are ruining things. Will they eventually just bag drug tests completely and assume everyone has to take steroids?
I’ve also heard bad things about Lady in the Water. Your review puts such a bad face on the movie that I want to see the movie *more* just so I can see how bad it is. Heh.
I don’t think it will ever get to that point, because sports fans won’t stand for it. We still want testing, and probably to a small extent, we will want villains. People who are caught so we can yell and scream about how bad its gotten.
What is going to have to happen is strict testing at every level. I don”t know if its possible, but have mandatory testing in high school. You get caught once, you’re off the team. No questions asked. Have tests in college. Have tests on amateur circuits for cycling and track. Look, you can preach to kids all you want about how steroids are bad, but until they get kicked off a team for using them or see one of their friends go through it, the message isn’t loud enough.
The problem is, testing is expensive. If schools can’t afford to update history books that claim the Vietnam War is currently going well for the United States, then they aren’t going to spend the wad ‘o cash needed to test for preformance enhancers. I mean, look at Lake Stevens High. We probably had two hundred athletes in our school, maybe? Maybe more (I’m terrible at estimates). To periodically test them would cost millions. (You can’t just test once, because they stay clean until the test, then go back to using the steroids) And we weren’t even the biggest school in the county, so you can imagine how this would play out over in Marysville.
And, if you do see Lady in the Water, go in with the Mystery Science Theater 3000 would dig this movie mindset, and you’ll find it hilarious.
What an awful attutude towards sports. If you plan to spend a good majority of your life dealing professionally with sports, you’d better be able to trust that some athletes are trustworthy and wouldn’t gain an unfair edge. Otherwise you’ll be a bitter sports cynic. Now I do agree that the level of cheating like this in sports is sickening, but cheating has had a long history in sports, and that means that unless drastic measures are taken, it will stay that way.
Regarding the spefic incedent which ruined it for you, this is rediculous! You don’t even know whether or not he has done anything illegal! You say, “If you could have done stage 17 clean, it would have been amazing. I would have had hope for the future of clean athletes. But, you didn’t, and I don’t.” What are you going to say if the test results were incorrect the first time? You would be a liar. I’m pretty sure that’s a bad reputation to have in your field.
After my little berating, I hope you still consider me your friend. I know you were going on a rant, and this causes people to say things they wouldn’t say otherwise. But you should know that in the media, things you say can follow you around for a long time, so you should say things that you actually mean, and you actually want people to hear.
I can assure you that what I said is exactly what I meant. And I would harbly be the first sports writer/radio personality to have this type of stance on steroids. Some athletes are clean, some are dirty. I didn’t say that everybody was dirty. But, in cycling and track there have been so many incidents ver the past few years that it takes a person living in Wonderland to assume that they’re all clean. Some of them are, some of them aren’t.
As for Landis, I personally think he cheated. He claims to have naturally high testosterone, but then why hasn’t he gotten caught before? How come the testers didn’t know this? And if you’ve listened to his interviews, he isn’t convincing at all. It seems as if he just came up with this.
By the way, a positive test for testosterone only shows up when the ratio between testosterone and epitestosterone is 4:1. 1:1 is normal. So, Landis has a natural ratio three times more than most people. Yet, he apperently didn’t tell anybody before his cycling career and this has never come up in a test before.
On top of that, in stage 16 of the race he lost eight minutes of time. He was exhausted. He went from the lead, to eleventh, eight minutes behind the leader. The next day, he beats everybody by seven and a half minutes to get back into striking distance.
Like all stage winners, he gets tested. It comes back positive.
Now tell me how after all of that you can still believe 100% that he’s clean. Sure, if the B test comes back negative, hooray for Floyd. We’ll throw him a parade and try our best to forget all of this. But, until that result comes back, I think we have to be a little cynical.
1. I never claimed that all athletes were clean.
2. You claimed that Floyd himself ruined sports for you. Perhaps he was the straw that broke the camel’s back. If you personally believe that he cheated, that’s fine. But blaming your entire hatred on 1 unconfirmed case of testosterone is poor form.
3. Drug testing, like any test, is not foolproof. A positive test for testosterone only shows up when the ratio between testosterone and epitesterone is 4:1…or if the test was a false positive. Although it is usually accurate, every now and again a false positive will show up. If you’ve ever seen the show House, you’d see how important it is to sometimes confirm testing with a second test (maybe a bad example, since they seem to use that in just about every episode). Please know that I’m not arguing that his test was a false positive. I’m just saying that it’s always a chance. We’ll just have to wait for the results of the second test to come back before we know for sure.
Anyway, I think the only fair stance is one of limbo. It’s not fair to speculate and place blame in one place or another until we know for sure what happened. If the second test comes back positive, then I think you have a fine stance. But until then, you’re just counting your chickens.
Its more of a the star that broke the camel’s back. I’m tired of hearing about positive tests, that always include the token, “I never did that!” response from athletes. Everyone from baseball players to cyclists that have been caught say the same thing, but decisions are raley reversed.
Of course there’s a chance that he gets a false/positive test. But, even Landis himself says ther will be a cloud of suspicion following him if that is the case.
For now, I don’t buy his excuse for his positive test and will wait for the results of the second one.
Alan, the one crucial piece of evidence your argument lacks is that testosterone is not a quick recovery drug. You have to take many cycles of it over an extended period of time for it to enhance your athletic performance. So, even if he did take it after the 16th stage it’s not likely that it helped him very much, if at all, in the 17th stage. Not to mention that there are natural explanations as to why his ratio was so high, including being under undue stress, and don’t you think if you just bombed the 16th stage you’d be a little stressed? I don’t know if he didn’t. It sucks if he did, but don’t villify him until we know the truth and the second test results come back.
I’m just saying its quite suspicious. THanks for the testosterone knowelgde.
BTW: Update time. A study of the testosterone found in Landis’ urine sample was found to be synthetic, not natural. Article over at ESPN.com I won’t villify him, but let’s just say I would be very surprised if the B sample came back negative.
“Alan, the one crucial piece of evidence your argument lacks is that testosterone is not a quick recovery drug. You have to take many cycles of it over an extended period of time for it to enhance your athletic performance.”
That’s what I had heard, but later sort of forgot the details of how the drug works over time, which is why I didn’t bring it up.