The US handed power back to the Iraqi's today, two days before the scheduled deadline. I'm sure that people are going to say that this was a political move, but politics or not, given the situation in Iraq, I believe that the best way to get some sort of stability in the country is to hand over power as soon as possible and to start letting the Iraqis run their own country. However, it's not going to change anything, and cound get worse, if it appears to the Iraqi people that their new government is just a US puppet government, so the US needs to back off and let the new government really run the show.
Here begins what I hope to make an occassional feature on my blog--brief commentary on events that almost nobody would have thought possible if it had been suggested prior to it happening. I'm inaugurating this feature in honor of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays 12th straight victory, something which no sane person would have predicted a month and a half ago.
Really, who would have thought that while nobody was paying much attention, the Devil Rays, the horrible joke of a team that is the Devil Rays, quietly went about becoming the hottest team in baseball. In the process, they've won not just easy games, they've won the sort of game that, in the past, they would have rolled over and given up on. The question is, what exactly caused this sudden turn around? Some of the credit has to go to Tino Martinez's influence in the locker room starting to pay off--he's one of the few players on the team who actually knows how to do something other than lose, and players have referred to him in the media as their Dave Andreychuk. Speaking of Dave Andreychuk, one has to wonder if the fact that a bunch of Rays players jumped on the Lightning bandwagon and spent the last two months watching the Lightning on their championship run, if maybe some of that rubbed off on them and they realized how to be winners. It probably didn't hurt that in the days after the Cup Finals ended, the media kept saying that it's the Devil Rays' turn to be the Tampa Bay team to pull the worst-to-first routine. In any case, while the Rays' winning streak can't continue forever, they aren't thinking and acting like the same team that they were when the season started, and I'm starting to think they have a chance to do something.
In another who woulda thunk it, I never would have expected a player from the Buccaneers, Tampa Bay's only team that's been respectable for any length of time, say that the Buccaneers needed to look to the Lightning for an example of how to play as a team. If someone would have told me three years ago that, in 2004, a Buc was going to say that they needed to be more like the Bolts, I would have suggested the person seek psychiactric help.
And finally, who would have thought, back in the '80s, that a former Soviet leader would be on hand in Texas to watch a former American president jump out of an airplane to celebrate his 80th birthday?
Ok, I'm swearing off of all fast food forever. Just saw the documentary Super Size Me, and it grossed me out to the extent that I'm never eating at McDonalds again. Ever.
Super Size Me, which won the award for best director at Sundance, chronicles the filmmaker's experiment in what would happen if he ate nothing but McDonalds' food for a month. The results shocked even his own doctors. Before he began, he went to several doctors, all of whom gave him a clean bill of health, and who told him that they thought that the worst that could happen on a month of McD's was elevated triglcerides. Instead, he ended up with a liver that was in the same shape as someone who spent a month binge drinking and carrying around an extra 25 pounds of fat.
Admittedly, most people don't eat at McDonalds for all three meals day in and day out, and yes, the film was designed to make the viewer want to stop eating so much fast food, but it's still pretty gross what a steady diet of fast food will do to a person.
Seeing as the Detroit Pistons won the NBA championships.
Basketball isn't really my sport, but it was a pretty entertaining game, particularly since the Lakers lost. I must say that I don't exactly feel sorry that Carl Malone and Gary Payton still haven't gotten a ring, because I don't have much respect for players who jump ship to a powerhouse team just so they can get a championship, especially when it's contrasted with a guy like Dave Andreychuk on the Lightning who turned down the offer to be traded to contender three years ago when the team was a joke and stuck with the team and ended up leading them to a championship.
I'll write up a fuller reflection on the game tomorrow, but for now, just let me say that after standing on the plaza outside the St. Pete Times Forum with the thousands of other fans who couldn't get tickets but who just wanted to be there for the game (I don't know just how many people there were, I heard estimates ranging from 10 to 20 thousand people, enough that they had to stop letting people in), and watching the game projected on the adjacent parking garage, squeezed into the plaza like sardines, all I have to say is that if there was doubt about the Tampa Bay area being a real hockey town, it should be gone now. No, we don't have the Red Mile--Tampa doesn't have the sort of downtown that Calgary has. And no, Tampa doesn't have the sort of rioting that other cities have when they win championships or the sort of public nudity that Calgary fans have displayed earlier in the playoffs, but that's because Tampa has a police force that actually knows how to handle crowd control. What we did have was nearly as many fans outside the building as there were inside, and still more who had to be content with finding a sports bar to watch the game because they couldn't fit any more people into the space they had on the plaza, and a building with an official capacity of 19,758 that they somehow managed to squeeze 22,710 people into, and that with an entire section of seats lost to the extra press boxes.
It was so cool to celebrate winning the Cup with so many thousands of people. When the clock hit zero and the game was over, people threw their beer all over the place in celebration and we ended up getting quite drenched, not that we cared because we were too busy jumping up and down and screaming.
It seems that there are now three things that are certain in life, death, taxes, and J-Lo collecting husbands. The only real question is how long her marriage to Mark Anthony is going to last. My vote is 3 months, no more than 6. The only person who may be nuttier than J-Lo when it comes to marriage is Anna Kournikova, who seems to prefer that her marriages be kept secret until after the divorce (actually, probably the only reason that she ever married Sergi Fedorov was because at the time they were together, without a marriage license, she was jail bait in most states, and I doubt Detroit would have been very happy if their high price star had landed in jail because of her).
Ok, that's enough celebrity gossip for a few months.
Phew, I don't know if I can stand the stress, I thought I was going to hyperventilate or puke or something watching game 6 of the Cup finals. But, the Lightning won and we are still alive for another day. I've said it once, I'll say it again, the Super Bowl, the World Series, the NBA Finals, have nothing on the Stanley Cup Finals.
(in preview of coming attractions, I'll have a memorial to Ronald Reagan coming soon)