Alabama stomps, Auburn struggles

In one of the ugliest games of Tubberville's career Auburn won 3-2 over Mississippi State. They need to figure out an offense fast if they will compete with the SEC's big guys.

Alabama rolled all over Western Kentucy 41-7. A not unexpected win but the offensive production is good news. In recent years the offense has not put up points when they should and this year looks like they will. Almost the opposite of Auburn one would say.

Arsenal Destroys Blackburn

Since the horrific 1-0 loss to Fulham, Arsenal is 3-0 scoring 11 goals. Yesterday they made Blackburn look foolish with a 4-0 loss. With one loss they are comfortably in third one point behind Man U and Chelsea. It looks like Walcott has finally arrived as demonstrated in his English game and then further yesterday.

See The Daily Telegraph for the story.

Bad Reporting

This is a nice article about a neighborhood (of bars and restaurants)in DC that has an annual festival to get more people in. Fisher is the Post's community reporter/columnist. Unfortunately the article makes no sense. The bar owner has a beef with the organizer but it is never explained. It may have something to do with a bad investment deal that is described in great length, but is never related. I guess there will be some rework there.

The Corollary to This Must Be Non-Whites Keep Obama Close...

Whites lift McCain to slim lead over Obama in poll.

Sparkman High School Marching Band

From last Friday's game. Sparkman beat Decatur 23-22 in a thriller of a wet game.

Raiders Falling Apart Already

The San Francisco Chronicle asked Lane Kiffin about the lack of defensive pressure on Jake Cutler. His answer, I don't run it. Go see Rob Ryan and Al Davis. This is not an auspicious start to the season. See the blog post about this here.

Desperation is an Ugly Thing

My Car(s) are a guilty pleasure.

Right now I have two cars, both Mazdas. I have a 2002 Protege5 and a 2008.5 Mazdaspeed3. I have to say it is a 2008.5 as it is Metropolitan Gray, a color you can only get since January. The Protege5 is a drivers car, tight suspension lots of bottom end torque with nice handling with fat 16" tires and can go fast when needed. It has 140 hp from a 2.0 l straight four. The Mazdaspeed3 is an evolution of the P5. It has 263 hp and 270 ft-lb of torque at 3K RPM. It has even better suspension and tires then the P5. It is the fastest production front-wheel drive car in the world.

I feel guilty driving it as I can go 20-80 in about 3 seconds. Makes it easy to merge onto the highway I use to get to work. See the map below. It is amazing to go by a car doing 65 as if it was standing still. I thought the P5 was fun, but the Speed3 is so much more.

Electoral College

I have been going to this site, FiveThirtyEight.com for a while as I like things that talk about the election at the state level. The guy who runs it has been reliably pro-Obama for the last few months. He has worked hard the last week explaining the pro-McCain/Palin bounce as really nothing, and that Obama has nothing to worry about. Today, though, with a poll showing McCain surging to a 20 point lead in North Carolina he has gone completely the other way. Obama had originally planned a 50 state strategy like Gov Dean had planned, but is now focusing on certain key flip states. In fact he had just pulled resources from Georgia to move to North Carolina. The poll probably is an outlier but as the guy, Nate Silver, says "But even if it is a big outlier -- say Obama is really down 10 points rather than 20 -- and even if it's owing in part to the convention bounce -- say Obama rebounds to 5 points behind -- is there any way in hell that it's going to be a tipping point state?"

Politics can be fun!

Raiders

The offense was what I expected. The Raiders actually out rushed the Broncos, just couldn't score until the end. A little more time and things will come together. The defense though was horrible. I give Rod Ryan very little time. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if he is gone by the end of the week as Al Davis wanted to fire him during the off season.

Weird Story about N. Korea

A Japanese professor believes that Kim Il Jong has died and there is a body double posing for him. There has been a change in his appearance and habits. Why the North Koreans would do this instead of just picking a successor makes no sense to me, except maybe his sons are useless and the country cannot function without such a Dear Leader. See a report in the Times here for more.

Alabama and Auburn

Not surprisingly Alabama struggled a little against the Green Wave, or at leas the offense did. They won easily 20-6, but a letdown after last week was inevitable. They have Western Kentucky next week, not East thank God! So a 3-0 and top 10 rating seems inevitable with the way the season is going.

Auburn beat up on some no-name as well, so they are 2-0. They haven't really been tested yet and their offense is suspect until they pick a QB and stick with them.

Government Budgeting

Instapundit has a post here discussing how state and local government pension plans are underfunded. One of his readers make a point that these budgets are drawn up in an annual fashion, with no thinking about the long term. As someone who has worked with the Federal budget I cannot but agree. The US Government budgets on an annual basis with a two year projection and a five year plan. This means that every year the two and five year plan can be changed completely. It is always based on the needs of the moment. To make things worse, in DoD at least, we would move money around within the year to fix problems by robbing other programs of their funds.

I Think This Is Illegal, But For A Congressman Maybe Not

Turns out the Democrat head of the Congressional committee responsible for taxes failed to report income from a vacation property. See the New York Times here for more. I think he will probably get away with it. You and I, not so much.

Random iPhone Pictures

Things I have taken the last month with the iPhone.