mycatharsis.com

You knew it had to happen sometime, but as the years passed, you almost wondered. Brett Favre has finally retired. I was just starting my second year in college when he became the Packers quarterback. It’s just incredible to think that, at 35, he’s been the Packers qb for nearly half my life! I remember watching him complete his first pass, to himself, and wondering if that foretold anything about what kind of qb he’d be. In a way it was a fitting start to a qb known for his ability to improvise.

Most incredible, the last qb to start a game for the Packers (Don Majkowski) was drafted in 1987 and led his team to a win in the 1984 Peach Bowl!

By far my best memories would have to be gathering with friends in Watson Hall or South Hall at UW-Stevens Point and listening to the ruckus that would emanate down the entire hall, not just in our rooms, when he threw a touchdown or, almost as commonly, a huge interception. Win or loss, you knew you’d hear some hooting and hollering. The Packers were just starting to put it together behind Favre, and watching this team get closer and closer to the promised land was exciting, to say the least.

The Packers have been good or decent for such a long time now that it’s easy to forget just how bad they were before Favre, Ron Wolf, and Mike Holmgren came to town. Doing some quick math, I found the Packers record to be 161-95 during his time, and 97-143 for the same number of years before his arrival!

But the best memories for me will be that of watching his games with friends and the excitement and the camaraderie that went with those college years! The fact that he was still around and slinging the ball in an NFC Championship game a decade later is just another tribute to his greatness.

Favre being Favre, I think there’s at least a decent chance we haven’t seen the last of him in uniform. Either way, an era has passed today, but the memories it created, laughing and drinking with college buddies, watching him at work, are what will remain with me forever.

this has to set a record for my longest dry spell blogging since I started four years ago. any number of reasons for it, inspiraitional, personal, professional, it has been a very stressful few months. I moved this blog to godaddy a few months back, though, so it’s up and will be for another year at least. I know I want to continue this blog, but not sure in what form. I may even write my own blog software as a way of keeping sharp on php/mysql. in the meantime, Merry CHRISTmas everyone and here’s my first shot at learning flash …

(woops, it messes up my layout)

The site is finally back up, moved it from Liquidweb to GoDaddy. Pretty much only due to cost, $15 a month vs $4. The long term future of my site is still in flux, though. Not really sure what I want to do with this site, only that I’ve sorta grown bored or burned out the way I had been doing things, and feel like it may be time to try something new.

yikes, almost 20 days between posts. I’m still here but I’ve definitely hit a bad case of writers block. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately studying digital photography, something that has always interested me but until now had not quite grabbed ahold of me as a hobby.

I’ll be adding more posts here soon, I’m hopeful this block won’t last more than another week or so. Different kinds of posts too, it seems that I had devolved into nothing but political rants over the last year or so, I am definitely looking at ways to add some variety and better writing to my site…

Currently #2 overall on Google Video, with a name like “girl caught cheating”, I spose that probably shouldn’t be a surprise. Pretty funny, although I guess it shouldn’t be. the way that guy turns around and goes right back into the bathroom, plus the girlfriends innocent look when denying anyone is there, is priceless!

Certainly not for you if you’re looking for realism, but otherwise Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976) is really a very good movie, funny and entertaining, with music that sets more of a 90s action movie feel than something from the 70s. Not to give too much away, but the inspiration for a “Street Fighter” video game character is in this movie and provides some scenes that made me laugh out loud when I first saw it, I definitely wasn’t expecting it. I can’t find any mention of this anywhere via google, but my favorite line in the movie has to be “Take the two winners away!!” Spoken by the tournament master after two fighters manage to kill each other in battle.

I found my long-since abandoned Google Reader account for my gmail account. It now includes a pretty cool feature to star certain articles and display them on your blog, as you can see in the “What I’m Reading” box on the right. I’ve tried a few RSS readers, but I just haven’t embraced them as much as I have other so-called Web 2.0 technologies, like Flickr, Wikipedia, Box.net and others. But Google does have a fairly nice reader, and it might be useful, especially as far as this blog is concerned. I might just start using an RSS aggregator, finally.

My first ’starred’ article on the Google Reader was this post on The Agitator, entitled American Gulag. Some of these numbers are nothing short of astounding. We’ve nearly doubled our inmate population in just 5 years! From 1.3 million in 2001 to 2.2 million today. The number of non-violent offenders incarcerated is more than the COMBINED populations of Wyoming and Alaska! I have asked myself in the past, how long before people sit up and take note? Will people eventually start pushing back against the recent trend for harsher and harsher penalties, including for all these non-violent offenses? For a couple reasons, I think it’s bound to happen sooner than later.

There’s a saying that a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested. Not sure I necessarily believe that, but I have to admit both Rush Limbaugh and Tom Delay have worked hard to prove my doubts about that statements veracity ill-founded. But I do believe that people will look at our justice system much more closely when it matters to them personally. It’s one thing when some ‘anonymous dirtball’ is arrested, but another thing entirely when that anonymous dirtball is your son or your sister, or yourself, etc. The more people that are incarcerated, the more people out there have a loved one who is incarcerated. The more people we incarcerate, the more closely our current system will be inspected. Or at least you would hope. At what point does this tip the scales? At what point do more people start demanding a common sense system of justice? It’s an interesting question, and will be interesting to see if the increasing experience even our law abiding citizens have with dealing with our justice system starts a renaissance of sorts and changes the way we look at our current policies of incarceration.

On a somewhat related tangent, have you seen the “click it or ticket” ads? Across the country, cops are cracking down, etc. Just how much money has the DOT spent on these ads? And how much money are police departments around the country raking in ticketing people for doing something that endangers no one but themselves? If those ads aren’t proof positive of our nanny state, I’d like to hear what is.

I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.0 after being lazy and sticking with 1.5 for the longest time. Surprised how smoothly the upgrade went, even my captcha plugin works! that is a definite surprise, guess I coded it better than I thought. oh, and changed the top graphic again. when I switched to a different season type themes, it started to bug me that I used a Colorado picture for a supposed Wisconsin based theme. Spose it’s no big deal, but I’m anal about stuff like that (that sentence should bump my hits some). But after going to Devil’s Lake in Baraboo last weekend, I have plenty of Wisconsin pictures to use, so that should no longer be a problem.

Of course, I am now contemplating a move to Colorado. So that mountain picture may make a reappearance soon.

Maureen Ryan asks a question I’ve been asking myself lately: “Why do I cheer so hard for Vic Mackey?” A crooked cop who killed another cop and has done plenty of other shady and less than legal things is not usually a hero to cheer for. Of course, the answer, I think at least, is that the story is never as easy as that. Part of the genius of this show is that there is no black and white, only varying shades of grey. At least with the main characters at least. There are real villains, such as ‘Doomsday’ on last weeks episode, with very few redeeming qualities, and it usually falls to Mackey and the Strike Team to deal with them.

Tonights episode especially should be interesting. Kenneth Johnson has done an amazing job the last two episodes in his role as Lemanski, the team member with a conscience who is now feeling a full court press from internal affairs. I like Forrest Whitaker so far as the Internal affairs officer. Slick, a little slimy, and apparently will go to any length to get Mackey, this show looks as good as ever so far, although some of the subplots are maybe not as interesting.

Some other reviews of the shield are available here and here.

For the first time since the late 90’s, I’ve decided to open a brokerage account and start trading stocks again. Hopefully I’ll have more success than my first time around, when I figured Netscape Communications was a great investment and decided to pass on Ebay at $18 a share, just before it shot up to literally 10 times that amount. Being the wonderful thing that it is, our minds never let us forget muck ups like that. One thing I realized this time around though, is that I don’t really understand why people buy stocks in the first place. Yes, I know about dividends and hoping the price rises. But why buy stock in a company that doesn’t pay dividends? Is it basically guessing and hoping that the price goes up sometime in the future? The Fool.com has this article from May 2000 that explained it in a way even i could understand. Now to find that next eBay, and hoping for a resurgence of ‘irrational exuberance’, hehe.