UngsungBlog: A (Fantasy) Sports Blog

- Not long ago, I noticed the clock in my bathroom stopped ticking. I popped the AA battery out of the clock, and went searching for a new one. It turned out that I didn’t have a spare, so I just popped the battery back into the clock, and noticed it started ticking again. I put the clock back up on the wall, and thought nothing of it.

That was a month ago…the darn thing has worked since. The next time the clock should stop working, remind me to swap the “dead” battery with one from my TV remote control (we all know how long those things go without needing new batteries!).

- Not that I was doubting Amy, but the guy who screamed “NOOOOOOOOOOO!” when it was announced that Paris Hilton was going to have to serve her entire 45-day sentence has been identified as Jake Byrd, real name Anthony Barbieri, of Jimmy Kimmel Live fame.

- I hate poker. I really do. So why do I keep playing? Because I love losing an entire buy-in against the mother of all hands: the dreaded four-deuce.

- A 66-year-old in Iowa City, California, used a set of pocket knives to amputate his leg, in order to free himself from a felled tree. The man “had been cutting trees last Friday when one fell on him. After freeing himself, he cried out for help, and a neighbor passing through this sparsely populated area heard him.” The guy was pinned under the trees for eleven hours!

I remember a similar story, where a guy cut off his arm–pinned under a rock, IIRC–to escape as well. I don’t want to know how the guy pulled this off, but I don’t think I could ever amputate myself, no matter the situation. And how the heck did this guy chop off a limb with a pocket knife? I better get a chain saw, or a machete, or maybe one of those ginsu knives. All I know for sure is, If I had to choose between amputation to save my own life, or certain death, give me death!

- A man who was sentenced to ten years in prison for consensual oral sex he had with a 15-year-old when he was 17 was ordered to be released by a Georgia judge on Monday. The sentence handed down on Genarlow Wilson, which came with mandatory registration in the sex offender registry, was widely criticized by many for being unfit for the crime. Although the judge has requested that the sentence be reduced to aggravated child molestation–a misdemeanor–without having to register as a sex offender, the Georgia Attorney General has filed an appeal. The A.G. argues that “Georgia law does not give a judge authority to reduce or modify the sentence imposed by the trial court.”

I don’t want to hear any of the “rules are rules” arguments; the fact is, the guy had consensual sex, and he did not deserve ten years in prison. Mr A.G., I do hope you get the “expedited” ruling you asked for, and I hope the Georgia Supreme Court rules in favor of Mr. Wilson. Then I hope Mr. Wilson is able to get his life back on track, once he is released.

That’s all I’ve got for today.

by Peter
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Quick-hitters:

- I woke up this morning, and went outside to my patio, when I noticed a ton of bird poop all over the place! Apparently, a couple birds have now taken control of my patio, and marked their territory accordingly.

- Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is an awesome show. USA Networks has had an SVU marathon, starting from 11am this morning, and yes, I’ve seen every episode since then.

- I inserted a DVD-ROM into my DVD+RW today, and absolutely nothing happened. The drive wouldn’t read the disc, and it wouldn’t even eject it! I used a paper clip to manually eject the drive, and that didn’t work either! I tried restarting the computer, and the drive tray eventually ejected.

I found a small piece of Play-Doh stuck to the bottom of the disc, and the tray itself…

- So after two games of the NBA Finals, some people are already calling for “LeBroom” (as in sweep, heh), as the Spurs demolished the Cavs. I only caught a little bit of the game–thanks, SVU marathon–but when I first tuned in, it was something like Spurs 33, Cavs 17. I did catch the fourth quarter, up until Manu hit that killer four-point play to put the game on ice.

I’m not convinced that this series is over, though. Lebron spent a bunch of the first half on the bench, saddled with foul trouble, and the Spurs blew out the Cavs during that stretch. Would it be that far-fetched to see Duncan, Parker, Manu, or Bowen, to be saddled with foul trouble in Game 3?

(Of course, I’m not suggesting that the referees are going to go out of their way to fix Game 3 in the Cavs’ favor…)

That fourth quarter push by the Cavs against an obviously bored Spurs team has to be encouraging for the Eastern Conference champs, who now get the next three games at home. I’ll pick the Cavs to win Game 3, with Lebron having a huge game.

(Of course, I also picked the Cavs + 7 here in Game 2, and that obviously worked out well…)

- According to a poster at DSLReports.com, Time Warner is announcing a plan to start “packet shaping” on their Road Runner HSI service. Packet, or traffic, shaping, is defined (via Wikipedia) as “an attempt to control computer network traffic in order to optimize or guarantee performance, low latency, and/or bandwidth. Traffic shaping deals with concepts of classification, queue disciplines, enforcing policies, congestion management, quality of service (QoS), and fairness.”

In other words, we can slow down your internet connection whenever we damn well please! As for “peak hours,” what’s to stop TW from deciding that peak hours start at 12:01AM and end at 11:59PM?

In all seriousness, I can understand why TW would want to attempt this; by slowing down bandwidth hogs, they can ensure that non-hogs will get decent speeds during peak hours. Here’s the problem I have with the new policy:

“Packet shaping” technology has been implemented for newsgroup applications, regardless of the provider, and all peer-to-peer networks and certain other high bandwidth applications not necessarily limited to audio, video, and voice over IP telephony. Road Runner reserves the right to implement network management tools for other applications in the future.

What does that leave? Text-based sites and web mail? Will TW only allow online tic-tac-toe and pong? By the way, TW does sell their own VoIP service; will they be throttling that as well?

- Remember the substitute teacher that was accused of “expos[ing] seventh-graders to pornography on a classroom computer,” and was threatened with up to 40 years in jail? Apparently, new evidence “presented belatedly by the state that suggested jurors received erroneous information” has come about, and now a judge has overturned the conviction.

Hooray for justice! In fact, in this sue happy world of ours, where just about anyone can sue for “mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, defamation of character, etc.”, I would not mind if this woman countersued for damages. And if she does countersue, I hope she wins, or at least gets a fat settlement.

Until next time…

by Peter
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