Mine own Ode to James Bond; a timeless poetic tale for the Ages of appreciating awesomeness.

Oh James Bond, you and your movies have been so great to me over the years. Let us sit and sip great Ale and think of the ways the lovable rascal of the title 007 has impressed us and me and thee over 24 movies. The list appeareth here now; 1. Underground Lairs. 2. Gruesome and inventive ways to kill henchmen/messengers/anyone that upsets the bad guy. 3. Piranhas in a pool. 4. Jet packs. 5. Mind blowing one-liners. 6. One punch knockouts. 7. SPECTRE. 8. Number 1 stroking his cat behind the barrier and coolly frying number 4. 9. Hijacked nuclear bombs(always a great plot device.) 10. How Q really hates that James wrecks all the gadgets he gives him. 11. All the gadgets he gives James, especially the 1964 Aston Martin DB5 with headlight machine guns, smoke, oil slick, and the handy, dandy, what no spy can live without ejection seat. 12. Golf with Goldfinger. 13 Being bad-ass and fighting Dr. No to the death over a tank of watery radioactive stuff. 14. Underwater scuba wars. 15. Running across the heads of crocodiles. 16 using a crocodile submarine. 17. Fighting Jaws. 18. Fighting Oddjob inside Fort Knox. 19. Dressing up as a clown and diffusing a nuclear bomb. 20. Being so smooth and classy and awesome. 21. Always knowing that he's going to defeat the big bad guy. 22. Always defeating the big bad guy and blowing up his underwater/inside a volcano/on an island bad guy lair.

These reasons herein the preceding list be yet a small smidgen of ways which the rouge bandit of England James Bond entertains us and expresses his righteousness.

My favorite Bond movies all stick to the clean and simple maxim of storytelling that can be summed up like this. Bond gets mission from M, Bond goes to location for mission, Bond fights people and meets ladies on his way to accomplishing the mission, The End. This highlights one thing Alfred Hitchcock always did and always preached about movie making, that you should give the audience most of the information regarding the story up front so they 1. know what is going on and why. And 2. can use all their wondering for wondering how the good guy will win out in the end(that is if it's that kind of movie.) The Bond franchise does this well by M. briefing Bond on who he will be trying to apprehend/follow/investigate, where he will be going to do so, ans who will help him once he gets there. Plot points plainly laid out. Mysteries erased. I mean James Bond isn't in the Mystery genre anyway right?

This past weekend I saw the new James Bond film called SPECTRE(which stands for Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion). And I must say that I didn't read too many reviews and online opinions this time so I was going in pretty fresh. That said, I will now resort to the tried and trued method of writing criticism and list the movies strengths first.

First, it had a great hand to hand fight between Bond and David Bautista on the train. Oh yeah, Spoilers!!! Daniel Craig as always was phenomenal, athletic, and smart. The super sneaky and dangerous vibe around the SPECTRE funeral and meeting were spot on and sweet, especially how David Bautista killed that guy basically for his job interview. This adds to the mythos of the Bond novels and the organization of SPECTRE as being based on Ian Fleming's dealings with the Illuminati during World War 2 when he served in the Royal Navy and which gave him all his ideas for the James Bond novels, which I find much more plausible a scenario than he was just having second thoughts about getting married and wanted to scratch his international spy, playboy, hero itch somehow.

But I digress, on with the high points of the film. The opening sequence was fast paced, action packed, really cool(I know my descriptions can be so specific sometimes ;)), and it wasn't fifteen minutes long like the one in Casino Royale. And while we are on the subject of Casino Royale for a second I must say that Shaun Connery would never go on a Parkour chase through a construction site and chase someone up a crane, just saying.

And now on to the part where this gets hard for there are flaws which I would like to point out, but in a nice way of course,  and no feelings are going to get trampled on. That's basically because I know neither Daniel Craig nor Sam Mendes will ever read this article.

First flaw. 1. They pulled a Star Trek: Into Darkness. Yes, that's right they did it, even after all the feedback on how lame it is. For those of you who don't know, pulling a Star Trek: Into Darkness will now forever be known as giving a film's bad guy a generic name only to flip on the audience once deep into the film and have said character reveal that he is actually the most dastardly villain of the franchise but was just using another name. This presents the problem of being meaningless to anyone who hasn't seen the movies with said bad guy in them for such a reveal to have any affect. Oh, and every press release, magazine interview, and actor and director interview must contain the smoke screen of "Oh, no he's not Kahn, he's just a guy named John Harrison." And I kid you not that I read a magazine article in EMPIRE none the less where Mr. Mendes states, "Oh, don't say the B word. Of course, he's not Bloefeld. He's Franz Oberhauser and that's all guys. Nothing to see here. And NO WAY will we disappoint fans by pulling a Star Trek Into Darkness."

Well folks he did and yes Christoph Waltz's character is revealed to be Ernst Stavro Bloefeld about two thirds of the way through. He being the leader of SPECTRE with their octopus symbol rings. Another fun fact, the NSA recently launched a satellite where the side of it has a painting of an octopus above the Earth and spelling out "Nothing is beyond our reach." Bet you didn't know that eh?

Okay, on with the review! With that said the only other big criticism I have is that the plot was just too confusing and I really never knew what was happening and why. For instance Bond drives to Austria but we don't know why. We only know he's looking for someone and then when he meets her he says he's looking for something else and we have no idea where or what it is only that some dying character spoke the important word twenty minutes before. At one point he walks into a cabin in a snowy forest. We don't know why. We don't know what he's looking for. I didn't know where the movie was going. It's hard to enjoy a movie if all my feeling of mystery is being tied up in the thought of "What in the heck is going on here and why is he doing this?"

And unfortunately the latter thought was repeated much more throughout the movie. It must be how Sam Mendes likes to construct a story. I remember I loved Jarhead and that had no plot, no mission, just characters existing in a landscape and reacting to what's happening to them. And that film was brilliant. I feel the simpler and more straightforward plot development fits movies like Bond better. But that's just my opinion.

With that said, Mr. Mendes did a great job with what he was trying to accomplish and the script he had. This movie already has many fans and has made lots of money. It is a unique addition to the James Bond cannon which has gone all the way from Goldfinger to Octopussy to Golden Eye and now to SPECTRE. Despite my criticism I do look forward to seeing the last installment of James Bond from Mr. Craig and whoever they get to fill the directorial role left by the departure of Mr. Mendes. Thank you for reading. That is all.

Sayonara
Jake

Post on The Martian, otherwise known as MATT DAMON!

So, I finally saw Matt Damon trapped on Mars and I must say that the above meme really got my excitement flowing to see it and was a thorough warm up to the main event.

If you don't understand the above meme, watch the movie Team America World Police, or watch this clip from the movie https://youtu.be/gnPWJOJYVKc

I went with some good friends to an Issaquah theater and there planted my butt and waited for the sciency stuff to get going.

And boy did the sciency stuff really science up the story. Filled with science, a true science buff will love this movie as there are lots of references to math and astrophysics that I didn't understand but must accept as truth for this story to make sense. You can't base a movie upon being hard Science Fiction and have half-assed science right? Right? This isn't Star Trek where you can say a futuristic sciency sounding word and fill a plot hole with it. NO! This is hard core science here, real life stuff, stuff that can and will happen at any moment and you must be ready. AT. ALL. TIMES. Thus extending the recent trend of movies trying to be realistic, yes that is a real trend my friends.

Okay, so I get what they were trying to accomplish here and I come out up front and admit that I didn't read the book not even the first chapter. But I did hold a copy of someone's in the Home Depot lunch room and pretended to read the last sentence on the last page and told everyone the famous last sentence was "And then he pooped his pants." And here is where the book and the movie began to not live up to my expectations.

First off it is super hard to have satisfying character development when the main character has almost no other human interaction. He is always by himself, talking to himself, or recording cool video blogs of his progress in trying to make stuff he needs to survive, food, energy, water. There is humor in the movie, boy did they ever try to put humor here and in many places it is sciency humor that only super sciency people will get, which I am not so that is why I found the humor to be really lacking in places. I don't know, just not my type of jokes I guess. Science guys that work in science labs will probably love it or anyone who is really literal and left brained. Is left brained the literal sciency one? I am so the other type of brained that I can't even remember what the sciency one is, but whatever it is, it's the opposite of me. The most relate-able humor was Matt Damon swearing or falling down.

If this movie were to be remade I would request lots more explosions and stuff going wrong for Matt Damon and maybe an evil alien or bad guy astronaut on Mars trying to kill him or steal his freeze dried teriyaki chicken and them having space fights and making space weapons out of the scant materials they have left and then Matt Damon finishing him off and laying down the final scene stealing one liner, something like "This planet is mine." or "Get off my planet." or "Your epidermis is showing."

But overall, Ridley Scott did a good job considering it is super hard to make something with this type of tone and with basically the main character being all alone the entire movie and trying to adapt it from a book which makes it even more super hard. So, 2.5 stars out of 4 for the Martian even considering the theater broke down at the climax and we had to wait 30 minutes for them to fix the projector which they did.

I leave you with an interesting fact that I found from another meme I saw on imgur.com that states; "Between Saving Private Ryan, Interstellar, and now The Martian, America has spent a lot of time and money trying to save Matt Damon." Thank you, thank you very much.

Alright, Sayonara. I'm out.
jake

Mini post of just maybe a little significance, okay we'll see how it ends up ;)

Just an update wonderful people out there who maybe didn't want to read this blog but then thought well maybe since he hasn't posted in a while and then were like, well I don't have that much time, but sometimes his posts are funny and interesting in weird ways, so okay what the hay I'll read it and now here you are!

Great, now what I've been up to: 1. Going to school to finish the prerequisites for the Ultrasound program at Bellevue College. Now this isn't really complicated, it just involves about 80 million little steps that have to be done in perfect order so its mainly a test of patience, planning, and organization than anything. Just getting to the point where I could begin volunteering at the UW hospital to satisfy the volunteering requirement took about two months. Good thing I started early! My final quarter is this quarter and after that I send in my application, the application period is between Jan 1 2016 and Feb something 2016 so throw salt or something else over your shoulder for me. Thanks!

Anywho on to #2 the ongoing, unending, ever inspiring and sometimes maddening saga of trying to finish my book The Song of Jonas part 1 and publish it in some form that people can read dog gone it. So, 1 was finished and I started sending out submissions to Agents and in the mean time started part 2. So part 2 was going really good and am now about 90% done on first draft of it and since all agents I sent part 1 to were like "ummmmm we don't know, this sounds kind of weird and since its not accompanied by a perfect platform like a website, blog, or youtube account with already 1 million hits then we aren't interested, sorry," I decided to go back and make part 1 shorter. And I'm in the process of doing that or in other words "making it more like part 2, but also different."

In the mean time since traditional publishing is shying away from weird Young Adult novels that are too long, just like mine I have been thinking about self publishing on Smashwords and Amazon which is pretty cool in some ways and kind of a pain in more obvious ways such as no physical book being available in a real life bookstore. But oh, well maybe e-publishing will be easy and fun, or hard work and a little fun, or who knows.

So, that's my short update, nothing earth shattering here. Stay updated this fall for reviews from yours truly on the new Bond or as I like to say Borne in a Tux, and the Martian, or Saving Astronaut Matt Damon, and Star Wars part who the heck cares, which will have lots of lense flare galore and the usual J.J. Abrams staples that mean it will be pretty predictable, but hopefully good, fingers are crossing at least four times and it hurts.

Okay, Sayonara, later.
Jake

A general post on movies

My post on why I like movies and movies that I like and why, no joking allowed.

1. I love movies that represent a hyper reality that looks and sounds fresh and interesting and unique and that you don't see everyday ever, at all. This is important because setting in a story can be used to really affect the mood of the atmosphere or the world if you will. Is it a dystopia? A sword and sandal movie set in ancient Greece? An alien invasion movie? Yes, please! I'll take three of each!

2. Movies that use practical affects or CGI sparingly and blend it in with everything. The wonderful thing about practical affects is that they are real. Real in a sense that a model or a miniature has density in three dimensions and can be picked up, moved, pushed, put into water, or blown up and it looks like something physical is really happening. Don't let the argument that a "oh, well a man in a rubber mask isn't real" fool you. You are supposed to suspend your disbelief that the rubber mask is indeed rubber, we're all past that by now. What the movie is supposed to do is make the scene work and look good so that you feel like a part of the story and can emotionally relate to the main character and what is happening to them. CGI has its places, but it is all too often taken for granted that "oh, well now with CGI we can create anything we want!" and the result is a ship or a character or a building that doesn't work, not because it actually isn't real, but because it doesn't look like anything that could possibly physically exist in three dimensions. This happens way too much and highlights why the special affects on the original Star Wars are still amazing and why that movie is still so beloved and why the prequels were so widely panned.

3. Good story. As a trained writer one of the first things my omnipotent writing teachers taught me when I was struggling away in that little nursery with all the other neophyte writers was that a good story trumps everything and in fiction that includes the elements of plot, character, and setting if we're talking the most basic elements. But what is happening now in movie theaters across the globe? The prequel disease is spreading and screen writers aren't learning the lessons that my omnipotent writing instructors taught us. Among other things one of the most important rules was that back-story is always more important to the writer than the reader. Meaning that the writer always loves back-story and loves writing it a million times more that a reader enjoys reading it. Why? Because it is just lists of details and doesn't add to the drama, danger, suspense, and conflict that a true story demands. And that is why, ladies and gentlemen, that prequels in all and any form will always fall flat in the conflict and suspense department. I know some people like the new Planet of the Apes movies and that is fine, but I can't bring myself to see them for that reason alone, that they are just back-story or else they would have been made with Charlton Heston.

4. TRUTH. One thing that my omnipresent writing instructors taught us was that good fiction has as much element of truth in it as possible. Yes, that sounds conflicting but it makes sense from the basic sense that everyday events taken to dangerous extremes are basically the garden of fiction writers. Case in point #1 Ian Fleming wrote his James Bond series based upon his experiences in Naval Intelligence and NOT in any way as some last gasp grasp at an imaginary spy/playboy lifestyle which is the truly lame current theory. Commander Fleming's stories were based on his experiences, that very powerful secret groups are behind many global events and they manipulate governments and cause lots and lots of problems. Now you can disagree with me that's okay and yes, I do read lots of conspiracy literature, but hey its not in the fiction section is it? And if you doubt any of it then go check it out. A true skeptic doubts and then verifies for him or herself and doesn't remain in willful ignorance. But then people have free will and so may choose the latter option if they really want it.

5. Because I grew up in the Golden Age of action movies and still live three blocks from the best movie store ON THE PLANET. Yes, that store is Scarecrow Video and by golly they have everything and by everything I actually mean there isn't anything that they don't have. They have so much it could almost never be watched and there is no way to actually describe the wide range of things they have. If you want movies from the Philippines, they've got 'em. Vietnam? Got 'em. Movies based on video games? Got 'em. Spy movies or Westerns or Kung Fu movies? PLeeeeaaassseee...... They have so many your eyes will start to bleed when you see it.

Now that Golden Age comment, let me explain. I grew up in the eighties and during that time such an amazing amount of classic action movies came out that studios are still, to this day, 35 years later trying to duplicate that creativity and movie magic and they haven't come close. Case in point, studios are still making Terminator movies, Predator movies, Alien movies, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars. They remade Total Recall, Robocop, the Karate Kid, and are planning to remake Kick Boxer and Ghostbusters! Now if they try to remake Caddyshack I think I won't be able to handle that. So if you find out that I'm in jail, you'll know exactly why. Still need more proof that the 80's were the best, okay I take that dare; Conan the Barbarian-remade. Gremlins-classic. Goonies-untouchable. Blazing Saddles-modern scripture, and yes it was made in the 70's. Tim Burton's Batman, Pee Wee's big adventure, Top Gun(rumored Top Gun 2 has fallen apart) all were incredible.

Now can CGI be used well? I'm glad you asked. For yes it can and the likes of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well as G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra proved that. Yes, I liked the first G.I. Joe movie, but I'm allowed to.

Well, my hands hurt from all that intense typing, but you get my point. Disagree? Why not leave a comment? What's up next? Well, I think I'll see Whiplash and maybe Exotic Marigold Hotel 2: Bedpan Apocalypse(That's actually the real title, yes...)

So until next time, Sayonara and keep watching movies and keep reading books!
jake

New Awesome book I read recently, I mean like really recently

Hey everyone, here's a blog topic I've been thinking about posting for a while, it's on a pair of totally sweet books I read by the same author. There's a lot to say about them, and I obviously can't say everything. So in order to give a thorough overview this will probably be a two or three part blog posting.

The first book is Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Lives Between Lives, by Michael Newton, Ph.D. Dr. Newton compiled the cases for this book and a second over years and years of notes from patient hypnosis sessions over his career probing and fitting the pieces together.

His technique is simple, anyone can do it! No, not really... He put patients under hypnosis and took them to the super-conscious level of their soul and then regressed them through previous lives to their most recent life and then through the death experience and into the astral/Afterlife realms. Now the amount of information he covers is so staggering please forgive me for rambling and chasing tangents. He covers what happens when people become ghosts. He states that souls can sometimes remain near their body or their loved ones to send them healing energy and thought to help them cope with their passing. Some souls just want to see what happens with their body or are upset with their method of passing and have trouble moving on. In almost all circumstances he says that a soul feels a magnetic pull from far off and that they easily agree to join it and eventually follow it into the astral world (let's just call it that from now on).

From there his subjects usually meet their spirit guide who is a wise human like being that they identify as having been their teacher through many, many, many afterlife periods. The teachers and their methods of teaching are almost as diverse as the personalities of people and it is important to point out that the teachers are never tyrannical, judging, or negative. Speeding up a bit, the teachers always take the souls to meet their soul group usually in a type of building, sometimes in a field, but always in a room where they are free to share their recent life experiences on earth. At this point he points out the dynamics of a soul's own soul group which has many dynamics but basically includes a person's closest family and friends incarnating in different ways and personal relationships over their lifetimes. There is so much that he covers regarding soul groups and dynamics that I might just devote a single post to that, we'll see. Needless to say there is also the topic of soul evolution and the levels he encountered. Every soul he interviewed stated that they are in the process of evolving towards the Source, or god and that eventually they will be free from incarnations on earth.

From the initial soul group meeting a soul might break off to review events from their most recent life, sometimes in a giant library setting by viewing holographic 'life books' as people refer to them. Souls are also accompanied by their guide to a meeting with Elders who are understood t o be ancient high-level teachers that set up a type of board meeting or 'afterlife interview' to help the soul honestly introspect on the important events of their previous life. These Elders interview the person usually in a round chamber while from above them a great beam of love and peace emanates from what the souls simply call 'the source' and not usually god, but definitely a loving type of energy that permeates everything and the Elders and their guides especially.

The souls can then go onto several types of activities that I won't get into right here, maybe another time. Souls stay in the astral world for different amounts of time and are not forced to return to earth but all know that they still need to return. If a soul is reluctant to return their guide encourages them and might use further discussion and forms of persuasion to see that they are stalling and almost every soul comes to the knowing that they must reincarnate if they are to progress and learn. When the soul accepts it is time to reincarnate they enjoy a second 'interview' with their guide and the council of Elders in order to plan their next life. The soul is given different options to choose from based on what they and their guide have discussed and what the Elders know is best for the soul due to their high level of wisdom and previous knowledge of that soul and their journey. When the choice to reincarnate is made the soul descends into the baby in the mother's womb and integrate with the mind of the child.

Okay, that's enough for now. This was a pretty long post and still I only scratched the surface of Dr. Newton's first book. Needless to say it was a fascinating and highly inspiring read and would recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. As a last note I must add that in many instances Dr. Newtons states that a soul's guide would often reject requests for certain knowledge that they deemed to intimate or not for Dr. Newton or the patient to know. This leads to what I feel is the important fact that he is only reporting on a limited portion of the astral world and an imperfect view of it as well. The important underlying truth here is that nobody has the whole ultimate truth especially regarding such a vast metaphysical topic as this and needs to keep an open yet discriminating mind. I believe that there is much much more remains to the astral worlds and beyond than what Dr. Newton describes in his two books which is not hard to accept if someone has done a thorough amount of research into different realms of spirituality and metaphysics.

And.... that is my final thought on the subject for now. If you still doubt that this book is awesome take note that it has 685 5 star reviews on Amazon. Boom!

Peace,
Sayonara
Jake

Two great science books to check out. THE ZERO BLOG!

Zero Blog

Hey, so there are two new books on science that I wanted to share, one I’ve already read, the other one I’m about half way through. Nonfiction is probably my favorite genre, ironically, since I like to write almost only epic YA with fantasy and scifi angles, tangents, and flavors. Not sure why, but there must be a reason somewhere. Not that I don’t like to read fiction, it’s just that I just don’t find that much fiction that I like reading, other than The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Lord of the Rings, and A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The classics are always great. Oh, those and Slaughterhouse Five, one of my all-time faves.

The first science book, well history of science really is called Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel. It traces the time period before, leading up to, and during the race to find the solution to calculating Longitude. This was very, very important for sailing of all kinds obviously and would release ships from needing to stick close to shore and just praying they were on course to the British Royal Navy pretty much dominating the seas for at least a hundred years.

The cool thing is it was almost all due to the hard work of one man named John Harrison an 18^th century clockmaker who worked over thirty years to perfect the chronometer a maritime clock about the size of a pocket watch. His previous attempts are on display in a museum somewhere in England. They started out looking huge and then got smaller and smaller. The trick to making it was that all clocks up until then had been pendulum clocks that got out of whack and off time when subjected to the swaying of a ship. Others had their oil and gear messed up due to changes in atmospheric changes like temperature, pressure, and humidity that resulted in loss or gain of time and in the worst situations total seizing up and ruin.

Without knowing their longitude sailors had to use dead reckoning which was basically guessing or using maritime ‘intuition’ to determine where their destination was or just hug the coastline or sail along a latitude and then take a straight shot from that known location. All of these methods led to extra long voyages, shortening of rations and a heightening threat of scurvy, or in the worst cases wreckage and loss of the entire vessel.

The chronometer basically allowed the sailors to keep the constant time of their home port. Then at noon when the sun was its highest the sailors compared this to the home port clock and the hour difference was calculated into distance difference and thus the sailor could determine their longitude and have a good idea of where they were and not crash into huge nasty, pointy rocks.

I suggest that if you don’t want to read the book, check out the Wikipedia page on it just to get a more in depth idea of exactly what it’s about. If you like science, engineering, and history this is a really interesting read.

The second Book is called Zero; The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife. In this one the author traces the concepts of zero and infinity and details how they have been so closely interrelated and ultimately considered to be two sides of the same coin. The author traces its appearance in Babylonian mathematics, all the way through the ancient Greeks, the Egyptians, the Roman Empire, the dark Ages, then the Renaissance, and all the way up to Quantum Mechanics and possibly beyond(Like I said, I’m not quite finished yet.) I don’t quite understand all the fancy math ideas, especially once he gets to Calculus, but it was interesting once the same and it’s not hard to appreciate how it was such an important concept to early mathematicians that struggled with it and rejected it all the way up to those that embraced it and invented the irrational numbers and the different types of infinity and how to count them(whewww! That last part is a mind bender!).

Since it is basically tracking the history of science I think a really important thought experiment is to try to think of where we are getting science wrong now and think about where it is going and how. Think of one of Arthur C. Clarke’s maxims; “If an old scientist says something is impossible he is most probably wrong. If a younger scientist says something is possible it most likely is.” That wasn’t a perfect quote word for word, but you get the idea.

Well, anyway, those are two of some of the best books I’ve read recently and if you’ve got the time and desire I definitely recommend them as easy, quick reads.

Take care

Sayonara!

Jake

The Sports Blog, better known as the futbal/football blog

Hey everyone, so I've recently really gotten into this little sport called futbol or football. That's what it's called over almost 80% of the world that only the United States and Australia call Soccer. I think it's super awesome and will from now on refer to it as football since you actually play it by kicking a thing that looks ball shaped with your foot unlike American football where you mostly use your hands to pass, catch, run with something that looks like an egg. The Brits refer to American Football as armored wank ball which is just hilarious and in no way offensive. You shouldn't be offended American Football fans, it's entertaining to learn new things about other places and cultures and mix it up a bit right? Right;)

So, I slowly got into this sport of futbol by playing the video game Fifa which stands for the world governing body of football, or something to that affect. The game is super fun and I have progressed from getting waxed on a daily basis to being able to beat the computer every time. But what will happen when I face my old human opponents remains to be seen. The game allows any league team to play any other or any country squad. In the future I will use this to evaluate impossible scenarios such as; who is the better defender, scorer, Wayne Rooney playing for England national squad or Wayne Rooney playing for Manchester United?

 Now watching the game on television and following it online, or in print is another task in and of itself. Being by far above and beyond the most popular sport in the world there are just so many leagues and players to know and keep track of. I'm starting slow, but reading regularly. But if I start memorizing the previous leading scorers of the Czech Republic top league then I will need admission to a Shick Shadle like facility for Futbol Obsession Disorder, or FOD. And I'm sure such a thing exists within the London city limits.


Since I'm new to football I tend to use comparisons to other sports in trying to understand it. For example the excitement of scoring a goal in football and the impact on the game is equal to a single basketball player scoring a ten point basket. It isn't impossible to overcome a ten point deficit in basketball, but it puts you behind for sure. Losing by three to nill in football is a thrashing, similar to losing by thirty in basketball, not a pretty picture. This analogy works except when evaluating goals per game average; a football player averaging 1 goal or more per game is straight killing it, and is much more impressive than a basketball player averaging ten points a game, more like 25 or 30 points per game.

You can even compare players like Christiano Ronaldo is like a Lebron James type player, super powerful, fast and a scoring machine. And Messi can be a more prolific Allen Iverson, a mighty mouse that goes and goes and scores like a maniac, except that I'm sure Messi likes 'practice.'

Now in defense of armored wankball, I'm a fan, especially the Seahawks, and I've followed it all my life to some extent even though now I follow sports in general maybe a third as much as I used to. I still feel like I've entered a bizarro world or alternative Earth when I think that the Seahawks actually won the Superbowl.  And I really believe it will never stop shocking me, it was just an incredible experience. Can they do it again this year? Who knows? Let's find out. Go Hawks!!!
later
jake