Tuesday Morning GM

A couple of changes to Three And Out, my Yahoo Fantasy Football team. Dropped Domanick Davis and Ashley Lelie (did I really draft a guy named Ashley?) and picked up Lee Suggs and Darius Watts. Sports Illustrated's Peter King, a.k.a. the Monday Morning Quarterback, sees these two as breakout players after a couple weeks, so I'll keep them on the bench and see what develops. My team now looks like this:

QB M. Vick (Atl - QB)
WR T. Owens (Phi - WR)
WR P. Price (Atl - WR)
WR I. Bruce (StL - WR)
RB B. Westbrook (Phi - RB)
RB W. McGahee (Buf - RB)
TE B. Williams (NO - TE)
K J. Kasay (Car - K)
DEF Baltimore (Bal - DEF)
BN Minnesota (Min - DEF)
BN S. Janikowski (Oak - K)
BN D. Watts (Den - WR)
BN L. Suggs (Cle - RB)
BN R. McMichael (Mia - TE)
BN J. Plummer (Den - QB)

I'm starting to worry about Vick and McGahee. If Vick starts slow, I'll have no problem putting in Plummer, but good RBs are hard to find.

Rowan Downstream?

Five days until the start of Division 3 football and, according to d3football.com, things aren't looking up for my Rowan Profs:

There have been off years in Glassboro before, so we’ll give them this year to prove K.C. Keeler didn’t take the Profs’ magic with him to Delaware. But with Montclair State (eight starters back on each side of the ball) looming in their own conference, being dominant is a tall order.

One thing you can always say about Rowan – they’ll play anyone. With No. 16 Christopher Newport, No. 22 Brockport State and Division IIs Southern Connecticut and Virginia State making up the non-NJAC schedule, if they make the playoffs, they’ll be properly tested.

Montclair State? Montclair State? Ugh. Hopefully when we play Montclair on the last day of the season the outcome will still matter. At least we'll have a bye week the week before we play Montclair. Oh no, wait, we play William Paterson the week before Montclair. Same thing.

Count on "The Accidental Blogist" to be your ultimate source for Division 3 New Jersey Athletic Conference football news. Be sure to get your fix of Division 3 New Jersey Athletic Conference football at "The Accidental Blogist." Nobody covers Division 3 New Jersey Athletic Conference football like "The Accidental Blogist."

Except maybe d3football.com.

Estate Planting

I just finished book number 44 in my pursuit to read 52 books this year, Blessings by Anna Quindlen. After a slow start, I was very impressed by this book. From the reviews and description on the book jacket, I was afraid that this would be Anne Tyler Lite. While I like her writing very much, this book was much deeper than what I have read by Tyler, if not as intimately written as Tyler's books. Like Richard Russo's Empire Falls (one of my all-time favorites) the book deals with a wealthy matriarch living in a large estate. But unlike that book, which held the old lady up as an enigma, Blessings gets into her mind by having her help her groundskeeper raise an infant left on his garage/apartment doorstep (the baby was obviously left there to be taken care of the rich owner of the estate). The most interesting parts of the book are the flashbacks into her own life that explain what forced her out of Manhattan debutante life and into lifelong exile at her family's country estate. At time the book reminded me of Ian McEwan's Atonement, but never actually reaches the heights of that book.

Since none of the books I wanted to read next were ready for me at the library, I picked up Sandra Cisneros' Caramelo. It's either the story of a Mexican family traveling cross-county, or it's about the Cleveland Cav's rookie forward.

Navel Records

Pictures documenting my two-year-old's belly button "scar reduction":
Before 


After 

Breaking the Law, Breaking the Law

It's bad enough that the Bush/Halliburton team is using the Iraqi Soccer Team in their ads against the players wishes, it turns out that they are actual breaking U.S. law. According to a Sports Illustrated article:

An act of Congress, last revised in 1999, grants the USOC exclusive rights to such terms as "Olympic," derivatives such as "Olympiad" and the five interlocking rings. It also specifically says the organization "shall be nonpolitical and may not promote the candidacy of an individual seeking public office."

Do we really want a blatant copyright criminal, a law-breaker, as our Commander-In-Chief?!? What's next, four years of our president re-transmitting baseball games without the express permission of Major League Baseball? I hope we never have to answer that question.

The Book I Read.

Book number 43 in my quest to read 52 books this year was The Hazards of Good Breeding by Jessica Shattuck. Just like with my beer review, I'm not the best book reviewer, but I know what I like. This was a very good book in a long string of good books I have recently read that were set in New England. It's very similar to Nancy Clark's The Hills at Home. Both have a New England family with it's blue-blood life becoming less and less relevant in the present day. And both have the family being documented by a young man who gets a little too close to the subject. The Hills at Home, however, made me feel as if I was in the house with the Hills, where Hazards felt like I was watching a documentary of the family. Plus, where Hazards was occasionally funny, The Hills was often laugh-out-loud funny. The Hazards of Good Breeding was a very good book, very well written, but came too soon after reading The Hills at Home to make me forget that excellent book.

The book I'm reading now is Anna Quindlen's Blessings. I like Ms. Quindlen's oped column in the back of Newsweek, so I was curious to read fiction by her.

I also put holds on three more books at the Philadelphia Library today: Maile Meloy's Liars and Saints, Ira Sher's Gentlemen of Space, and Dennis Lehane's Mystic River. The wife and I have rented Mystic River but haven't watched it yet. If we time it right I'll read it right after watching it, which the opposite of my preferred order.

How not to Stecnil Stencil.

Seen at the Westwood Center, Tyson's Corner, VA:

And there was a whole row of them!

Ain't That a Kick?

According to a Sports Illustrated article, here's what George W. Bush thinks of the Iraqi Olympic Soccer team:

"The image of the Iraqi soccer team playing in this Olympics, it's fantastic, isn't it? It wouldn't have been free if the United States had not acted."

According to the same article, here's what the Iraqi Olympic Soccer team thinks of Bush:

"How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women? He has committed so many crimes."
"The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?"
"We don't wish for the presence of Americans in our country. We want them to go away."
"I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists? Everyone [in Fallujah] has been labeled a terrorist. These are all lies. Fallujah people are some of the best people in Iraq."

One player said if he were not playing soccer he would "for sure" be fighting as part of the resistance.

Great Advances in Technology

In the last two weeks, my seven-year-old son has bought two products that have been greatly improved over the originals. The first is the GameBoy Advance SP he wants to marry. The second is this:



That's right, scientist have finally created a self-inflating whoopee cushion! It's like a perpetual-motion laugh machine.

Hey baby... oh wait, you actually are a baby.

It's never too early to start thinking about Halloween Costumes.

Islas del fuego

Survivor 9 "Vanuatu - Islands of Fire" has posted contestant bios. My first-glance favorite: Sheep Farmer Dolly Neely, whose favorite magazines are National Rifleman, People, and Deer & Deer Hunting. No Joke.

His name is MacGyver...

I love DIY/Food Network/HGTV Sweepstakes. Every day I'm on at least one of those sites filling out an entry. The best part (since there's no chance of me winning) is dreaming of how I would spend the money once I sold that $1.1 Million Dream Home or driving around in that restored '62 Corvette. But I haven't had one single daydream about DIY Network's "Do it with Duct Tape" Sweepstakes. Grand Prize - $5000 in Duct Tape products. And still I signed up every day and made sure the contest was over before posting this (lest you sign up and become competition to my entry).

Hi Ho Neighbor!

Hello!

Beer Snobbery

Although I describe myself as a "beer snob", I am not a very good beer critic. I just know what I like. The Dogfish Head Shelter Pale Ale that's in my fridge now is very good. It was the first beer I got at Oaklyn Discount Liquors, which I would not have thought to go into until my brother recommended it. They have a good selection of craft brews, but I don't know if it's worth having to wait behind a woman buying a case of Molson Ice and a pack of rolling papers (apparently the latter being a last second "Ohh... almost forgot" kind of purchase).

What I really liked this summer has been the Smuttynose Old Brown Dog Ale and the Lancaster Milk Stout, both of which have gone really well with burgers and steaks. Both beers were purchased at Voorhees Discount Liquors, which has more microbrews and (from my experience) fewer potheads.

I'm still looking for someplace around Philly that sells Kennebunkport Brewing Company beers. They're the beers that turned me into a beer snob ten years ago.

Riding the Balloons in O.C.

Cool

Fantastic Planet of Football

My Yahoo Fantasy Football draft was Thursday night. I sorted out my pick order (bumping T.O. up) and put some guys on the "Do Not Pick" list (Emmitt, all of Dallas and NYG) and let the computer do the rest. After a couple clean up trades Friday morning (dropped Maddox for Plummer, picked up a second D), I'm pretty happy with my team. Of course, there's four weeks for these guys to get hurt before the season starts.

QB M. Vick (Atl - QB)
WR T. Owens (Phi - WR)
WR P. Price (Atl - WR)
WR I. Bruce (StL - WR)
RB B. Westbrook (Phi - RB)
RB W. McGahee (Buf - RB)
TE B. Williams (NO - TE)
K J. Kasay (Car - K)
DEF Baltimore (Bal - DEF)
BN Minnesota (Min - DEF)
BN S. Janikowski (Oak - K)
BN A. Lelie (Den - WR)
BN D. Davis (Hou - RB)
BN R. McMichael (Mia - TE)
BN J. Plummer (Den - QB)

I'll kept you posted.

I'm new here...

I kind of ended up with a blog when I wanted to comment on a post at Shollow Center. I registered at Blogger and -boom- "The Accidental Blogist" was born. Hopefully I'll post every single one of my opinions before I suffer blogger burnout.