Deprived Boston sports fan

A few things to ramble on before I go into fantasy football week 3...

Rants: Don't worry, I won't rant about work this time, I promise. Apparently, the Hanshin Tigers have won and clinched their 2nd division title in 3 years and everyone was going nuts out in the streets of Osaka. A few things irk me though...

1. Everyone cares only about the division title, yet nobody even cares about the playoffs! Why?! This drives me crazy! Regular season records mean everything in this current system. That's just plain wrong! The 2nd best team in the division couldn't close the gap fast enough and now they're complete losers. Oh, the agony! This system just completely murders the thrilling aspect of professional sports! What if one team just has a complete vice-grip on the entire division, like the Cardinals in MLB? I mean, the 2nd best team in their division is behind by like, what, 9.5 games or something? Seriously, if regular season records really mean THAT much to teams, why don't more teams play with complete urgency in every game? Even if all the teams and players try to play with complete urgency in every game, it's impossible to keep up that level of intensity for such a long time. Try imagining Jack Bauer keeping up that level of intensity for 4 straight days...that's what it would be like. Sheesh, if fans are already celebrating like their team won the championship, shouldn't they be celebrating BECAUSE of a championship victory?! In the words of the immortal Jim Mora: "P-Playoffs?! What do you mean playoffs?! We're just trying to win one game!!!"

2. I miss football. TERRIBLY! Here's the flipside to the coin of a baseball season. 17 regular season games, 4 postseason games. Crazy antics of T.O. and Moss, great quotes from Chad Johnson, shaky QBs like Chad Pennington and Kurt Warner, snake-bitten teams like the Jets who lose BOTH their starting QB and backup QB to injuries! Shaky coaching like the Mikes (Holmgren, Shanahan, Tice, hall of famer Martz). Throw all of them in the mix and you've got guys who are so intense, that they scare you when you watch them on tv (watch Ray Lewis sometime, trust me!), hillarious stuff from prima-donna WRs, quotes from Chad Johnson firing up the other team so much that they're looking for blood in the next game, shaky QBs and coaches adding suspense to every game. Add in the final touch of playoff football, where every game is do or die, and it equals to just about the best product of entertainment! Unfortunately, I live in Japan, where the most popular sports are baseball and soccer. Dammit, I miss football!

Rave: Although I do miss football, I was able to catch a little bit of the Broncos - Chiefs game on satellite tv here. The only downsides were that they showed it at 12:20am and that it's pre-recorded. The great thing is, pre-recorded actually means that they cut out ALL the commercials! So now, everytime the coaches call a timeout or when halftime begins, 2 seconds later the next play will start! It's excellent! Like having TIVO without the TIVO, if that makes sense. Furthermore, Al Michaels and John Madden were calling the game! I'm switching to cable, hopefully soon!

Ok, on to week 3:

I won my first game of the season and it felt really good. I still can't believe how it happened though, as Drew (not Brees!) has been absolutely carrying my team this season! Here's my starting lineup:

Drew Bledsoe-QB, McGahee-RB, Barlow-RB (Lewis had a bye week, so I had to grab an extra RB), WRs - Stallworth, Steve Smith, Rod Smith, Gonzales-TE, Chicago D

Well, Bledsoe threw for 363 yards and 2 TDs, and ran for a TD, which basically makes him the co-mvp of my team so far. Steve Smith was just a monster, 3 TDs! Unfortunately, Stallworth didn't even get one catch, though that's mostly Aaron Brooks' fault! Rod Smith was pretty solid though. McGahee was very good. I still couldn't believe that the Bills lost with him rushing for over a 100 yards in the game, but I'm glad he had the numbers. Barlow was mediocre. Not terrible, just mediocre. I probably should have read up on the Broncos/Chiefs rivalry, because the Broncos still own the Chiefs at home and Gonzales didn't get as many catches as he should've gotten, no thanks to Green! Chicago was torn up by the Bengals unfortunately. Still, this was my highest scoring total in one game so far and it was enough to win week 3. Since Dallas is playing against Oakland's non-existent defense, I'm starting Bledsoe again. Stay tuned...

Almost forgot: McNabb needs surgery after getting banged up. He's also on the cover of Madden 2006. The curse is strong with this one...

Ok, it's been a while since I've last written about how the league is doing. Again, due to spam attacks, I'm officially using this blog only from now on. Anyways, just some random thoughts about week 1 and week 2.

Week 1:

The Chargers suck at offense so far this year, which means that they've killed my no. 1 QB. Normally, I'd wait and see if the QB can pull himself together and be more patient with the guy, but since he had his career year last year and stunk it up for a couple of seasons before last year, I decided to give him a quick hook. Meanwhile, Leftwich looked good (though I wasn't sure if he was ready to take the mantle of starting QB just yet) and Drew Bledsoe either a.) discovered the fountain of youth and took a big gulp from it; b.) signed a pact with Satan along the lines with Kurt Warner when he was 3 time MVP as well as Tiger Woods when he was tearing up the PGA and terrorizing poor Phil; or c.) proved to everyone that Buffalo really wasn't a good fit for him anymore and that Parcells is really Belichick in disguise. I'm willing to bet on b, though it probably really was the O-line in Buffalo that killed him before. For RBs, McGahee did pretty well for week 1, that was a relief, though Lewis still seems like he hasn't been able to hit his stride yet, although with Kyle Boller as the QB, what's gonna prevent defenses from stacking the line against Baltimore? Anything? Can I pull a Nancy Kerrigan on this and have a dude nail Boller's kneecap with a lead pipe? Sigh...wishful thinking... Anyways, week one seemed ok. I lost the matchup, but it was somewhat close...

Week 2:

Wow, Tampa Bay defense really killed McGahee this week. None of my RBs did well and guess what? NONE of my starters scored ANY TDs!!! The agony! On top of that, Leftwich got creamed in the game against the artist formerly known as the Colts' D. Brees stunk it up again as Marty Schottenheimer (sp?) seems to have forgoten that he still has Tomlinson. KC is doing extremely well with that 1-2 punch combo of Holmes and Johnson, which means that Gonzales isn't needed anymore to score TDs, thus killing my team yet again. The positives for this week? After watching the Bears lose 6-3, I decided to drop my Carolina D in favor for the Bears D. What happens? The Bears single-handedly rallied my team into a deadlocked heated battle against the team I was matched up against. Bears won 38 - 6, on account of their defense doing the scoring! Unbelieveable! I thought I had a good shot of pulling out the win in this matchup...until I noticed that Favre rebounded from his off-game with a vengence, thus destroying my team in the process. One more thing to add, DREW BLEDSOE did it again! He once again became the one QB I should have started this week by torching the Redskins! So, for week 3, I'm pushing that big flashing red button with the "Don't push this button!" sign on it. I'm starting Drew for week 3 and bracing myself for anything.

My friend has recently started to teach Chinese lessons privately to students. She, like most of us foreigners in Japan, signed up to a teaching match-making service website which provides potential students who want to study any language with connections to teachers who want to make some extra money on the side. Seems like a good thing to do right? After all, we all could use an extra 30 bucks per hour doing easy work. The only problem is, there are some real wackos out there who get confused by the word "teacher" with "potential girlfriend/boyfriend". My friend is a attractive young Chinese lady and she has had the unfortunate experience of teaching a trial lesson to a guy who's objective is "You are the reason why I want to learn Chinese". Translation: the guy's really just looking for a date. Probability of being a stalker at this point...5-10% So my friend asks me for advice on this situation. Since the guy isn't really serious about learning Chinese in the first place, I told her that she should just drop him before it gets any weirder. She did just that, except that the guy has been emailing her, a lot. Probability of being a stalker at this point...25-40% I wasn't sure how often the guy had been emailing her, but it was enough to creep my friend out. Anyways, she emails me last night and tells me that the guy wants to apologize to her in person and is in the immediate area of her work. She's legitimately scared at this point.
Stalker probability...50-75%. I go to my friend's area, since I was close by anyway, and decided to walk her back to the station. We meet up, had a drink in a bar, and her phone was buzzing every 2 minutes. Yep, it was that dude.
Stalker probability...75%+ Needless to say, I was able to catch the last train home, had a nice talk with my gf, confirmed that my friend got home safely, and went to bed at 1:15am. Of course, I had to wake up 6am this morning to get to school and teach, but heck, it's the long weekend now!

For once, I'm actually not going to take any shots on poor old SD... Nope, this time the onus is all on me, no excuses...

My high school is preparing for the annual cultural festival, and as a result, classes have been reduced to 40 mins per class rather than the usual 50. Should be a good situation right? Well, that's what I thought, except that I underestimated the lack of focus that the students would have. As a result, one of the classes actually loved the current lesson plan that I created, even though it was reputed to be the WORST class group in the entire school. Nevertheless, that class actually enjoyed it and students (astonishingly!!!) requested more of those kinds of lessons. Of course I was psyched at that point because I finally got that class motivated to actively participate. That's the ONLY class that would actually get anything out of that lesson though, and so the past few classes after that have been borderline disasterous. I take responsibility for that, because it was my lack of preparation that created these results. The only problem is, I'm starting to feel like a burnt out pitcher who's pitched too many innings. I'm losing my stuff, edge, and worst of all, intensity. I do readily admit that teaching is not my career choice and that I'm not all that good at it either. But, I feel like I should do my best to at least motivate and encourage these teens to become prepared adults. It's just that recently, I'm really feeling worn out by the fusion of business and education. The whole concept is inherently flawed as our best efforts in education will occasionally be undercutted by the business aspect. Like I told my buddy Herman before, it's really the frustration of the business that we're in. Still, I hold myself fully accountable for straddling the fence between caring and not-caring. Anyways, to quote Steve Spurrier: I'm close to "losing my give a damn." But, I'm going to get it back, hopefully soon.

Ok, at my other blog I wrote that Rosenhaus clients seem a bit shaky. Not character-wise, like T.O., but physically shaky. For example, T.O.'s been banged up with that groin injury, Edgerrin James has that reconstructed knee, and Javon Walker was banged up in the preseason. So what happens? Javon Walker is now out for the season with a torn ACL. Though I'm not quite ready to put Rosenhaus in the same light as the cursed EA's Madden cover jinx or the SI's cover jinx, or even the Peter King jinx (Danny Wuerful??? Wonder if Julius Jones is gonna last the season this time?) Still, it's worth mentioning that it's 1 for 3 clients now. If all of his clients are injured or have bad seasons, I'm definitely patenting this Rosenhaus curse and taking credit!

The weekend is finally here, and it's about damn time! Work was just brutal yesterday at the office. SD, TRULY living up to his given nickname starts out the day by giving me a "We...are...going to...have a...meeting...at...11." Since the stupid elementary curriculum project was supposed to be finished by the end of the day, I was actually looking forward to having that meeting and finish everything on time. Of course, little did I know that whenever SD says "meeting...at...11." it really means having a meeting at 11:50. Finally we have the meeting and I had every intention of editing and fixing everything that needed to be done. Of course, the meeting lasted for nearly an hour, in which he could have just as easily gotten his point across by saying something like: "please take a look at the changes I made and make your plan like this." Nope, he was going over every single nit-picking detail at a pace that made me feel like I was travelling through an Astral plane. By the time he finished, it was 12:35, which meant that I had to take 25 minute lunch break before I had to do some recording downstairs for a different department.

-Ok, let's imagine you are the manager. You have 1 project that ABSOLUTELY needs to get done by the end of the day. You have one guy assigned to do the project. That guy is dedicated to finishing the project at all costs. You have a bunch of other guys in the office that are doing what amounts to tedious busy work that doesn't need to get done right away. The last part is, another department needs the services of someone in our department for some voice recording. If I'm running the show, I'd give the guy my edited piece and have him work on it like a mad dog with NO DISTRACTIONS, at all costs. I'd have one of the newer guys go down to the other department to lend his vocals for recording. The rest of the guys, I'd have them share the load of editing the last pieces of the project that needs to be done by the end of the day.

-Here's what really happened. I get off to the latest possible start ever thanks to SD's incessant ramblings (I swear he does that because he likes to hear himself talk!) He assigns me to do the voice recording at 1pm (if they REALLY needed only my voice, do it some other f-ing time!!) when someone else could have easily done it because there were 3 guys with the "what should we do?" look on their faces. I get screwed over for lunch because of SD's rambling + 1pm recording session (when added together, it equals one cluster-fuck! There, my first cuss word on this blog, hopefully the last.) After editing and editing and editing, I look up and it's already 4:05pm. My shift ends at 4:30. As the quote of the day says below, "You can't stay over your shift." On top of that, he chops off the last activity of the lesson plan (which I admit, should have been chopped off), at 4:05!!! WTF!?! To make sure of this I said to him: "You want me to create a new activity, from scratch, in 25 minutes, and for it to be finalized?"

Anyway, that was a day from hell. Anymore days like that come up for me, I'm pulling a Larry Brown (job-speculating) with no remorse. I just don't want to put up with that shit ever again.

That concludes this tirade. Now I can get on with my weekend and enjoy it to the fullest. Happy weekend everyone!

"You...are...not...supposed to...stay...longer than...your...shift." - SD telling me that I can't work overtime, even though we needed to crank out a brand new activity in 25 minutes.

Damn I'm tired. I did the live draft online last night which ended at roughly around 1:45am. My team should be solid this year, hopefully. Unfortunately, I had to wake up less than 5 hours later to get to my high school and teach. Luckily, the adrenaline was kicking in and I was doing pretty well. In fact, even the students were motivated for once! Right in the middle of the lesson however, I almost stumbled as my vision started to blur and turn white for split-second. I recovered quickly and nobody seemed to notice, so it's all good.

Quick rant: Spam sucks! Seriously, does anyone really expect to buy useless crap like rubber bands online? WTF! If I could somehow setup a macro that would automatically reply to the spammers with the mother-of-all viruses that destroys their computers in fell swoop, that would make me a very happy bastard.

"No, no, no, it's stupid to do that! Don't give me that!" - new guy to SD as our collective jaws dropped.