Greek Pirates, Peyton's Place, and the NCAA

Avast ye Greeks! Reuters has a bizarre way of looking at the Greek economic problem involving a kiddie pool, a pirate ship, and some rubber duckies. Certainly it oversimplifies everything about it but it's at least entertaining. I wish it had a bit more of a substantive discussion of what's going on because it doesn't address the proposals and interests of the parties as much as I'd like. I know very little about what's going on, but personally I feel like they're just trying to avoid the inevitable: a Greek default. Frankly I've been saying I'd probably rather they just go ahead and default already because I think that ship is going to sink either way, so why not save some cost and just get it over with already? Hopefully they prove me wrong.

Hitch did it best. Hitchcock really was a master at movie making and a very entertaining guy. Here's a list of quotes from Mental Floss. My favorite was "One of television's great contributions is that it brought murder back into the home, where it belongs." Very amusing list, just like his movies.

I miss 18. So Dave's Art Locker did me a favor by taking Peyton Manning's face and mashing it with every single NFL logo. Fabulous.

Saying goodbye is the hardest part. Great look at the pains and struggles of facing retirement as an NFL player. I still remember being in the locker room for our last high school football game and having our coaches mention how that was probably the end for pretty much all of us (especially me because I was terrible) and it was a somber, surreal feeling. I miss it every time I smell the fresh cut grass.

I really, really, really hate the NCAA. As an institution that is and I'll detail some of my thoughts about that in a second. But here's an interesting piece about a journalist declaring war on the NCAA and their retaliation in response. In all honesty I can't blame them for this retaliation, it seems like a wise and fair move based on what is going on. I know Jay Bilas feels like questioning this guy's motives isn't fair, but I do think that is a legitimate thing to bring up (although I doubt that's guiding what he's doing). It's an interesting battle and I'm curious how this all ends up since the NCAA has a lot of money and power, but it's also experienced a lot of ill will. That being said, those ratings still keep climbing so clearly it doesn't mean that much.

As far as my NCAA hatred, I could go on forever about it but here's some of my basic thoughts. The NCAA itself as an institution is a farce and it needs to seize power back. It is a centralized body that comes up with a lot of silly recruiting and other rules, but doesn't ever really bother to enforce them. Who cares about an organization that doesn't really have any real teeth? There needs to be greater scrutiny served by the NCAA upon schools.

Also, conferences as separate institutions need to be abolished. I understand what the functional purposes were as collegiate sports grew, not unlike the beginnings of many of the professional sports leagues. However, they've long outgrown their usefulness and there is too much power in the conferences and not enough of a sharing of the pot of money. I'm fine with keeping conferences for structural matchup purposes, but conference commissioners hold too much power and keep the NCAA sports from developing into what they could be.

As part of fixing conferences, officiating needs to be based in the NCAA. How silly of a farce is it that the NCAA has refs but they really all come through the separate conferences? You can't tell me that an SEC ref has a bias against even other major conference teams, much less mid-major or minor conference teams. How idiotic is it to incentivize refs to have a built in bias based on who their paycheck is really coming from?

Finally, abolish the BCS, but even the conference commissioners seem to realize that's one they can no longer resist.

Tweet of the day. Courtesy of Yahoo!'s Shutdown Corner NFL blog's Doug Farrar, an evaluation of the Jason Whitlock incident from over the weekend. Whitlock is an inflammatory idiot and this is a great witness of that.

Journal choice. I need a new journal for taking notes at Church. I always like to have something fun/goofy. I had a Harry Potter one at one point and most recently I had a Tootsie Pop journal with Mr. Owl. Well that one is filling up so I need to find a new one. I think I've narrowed it down to these two: a sock monkey riding a Vespa or a Mork and Mindy one. Sorry to you kids that aren't familiar with Mork from Ork. Figure the Nanoo Nanoo probably won't be as popular but I got a kick out of it. I'm also open to other suggestions, but I'm trying to keep price reasonably low, so let me know if you know of any other cool one's out there.