Weekend Sports Roundup

Let's take a look at what I cared about from sporting events this past weekend:

Arsenal beat Fulham 1-0, which was probably the right score there. Fulham is a good, but not great, football club, and showed last year that you underestimate them at your own peril. Without stellar goalkeeping Arsenal could have easily lost this match.

Robin Van Persie acknowledged that he likes to embellish his reaction to fouls. In other news, water is wet.

The baseball Cardinals clinched their division, thus assuring their appearance in the playoffs. This is good news, of course, but the team still has its problems, and I don't think they will make it to the world series. I pick the Dodgers for that honor.

Iowa put the smackdown on Penn State on Saturday, with what was one of the most brutal defensive beatdowns I have ever seen. Seriously, that 4th quarter showing by the Iowa defense was amazing. If you use just the points the defense scored they would have almost won the game by themselves. Four turnovers by Penn State in the 4th alone; just brutal. Unless you are a Hawkeye fan, of course.

The Detroit Lions, God love 'em, won a football game. For real! Against the Washington Redskins. As someone who lived in the D.C. area for over five years, I can state with authority that Redskins football is not just a game in that area, it is a full-blown cult. There will be blood, people, the cult members will demand a sacrifice for this one.

And, to top it all off, the Blues are in Sweden, getting ready to open the NHL season. Just a few more days, and I have hockey again!

Even Fortune Cookies Can be Wrong

"You cheerful outlook is one of your assets."

Pei Wei Asian Diner, Overland Park, Kansas

wallpaper fun

This season, one of the things I am doing to show my support of Arsenal football is putting wallpapers of their games on my work computer. Every time they win a game, the team creates a wallpaper from some point in the game. Sometimes, admittedly, these a pretty lame. Other times, however, they are unintentionally hilarious. For example, the wallpaper for the Champions League win against Standard Liege has a Liege player looking at Eduardo with a rather forlorn expression on his face. The best so far, though, is from the 4-0 thumping of Wigan Athletic. The Wigan player to the left of Vermaelen in the picture has this total "How did I get stuck on a team with these losers?" look to it that it makes me laugh every time I look at it. Good times. It would be pretty cool if the St. Louis Blues did something like this.

(Late) Weekend Update

News and notes from the weekend that was:
* On Friday I did not, in fact, have the dental appointment that I was supposed to have in order to fix my broken tooth. The dentist's assistant was "sick." Considering that this happened on a beautiful Friday, I'm going to be officially suspicious of this.
* Later on Friday, I met up with my friend George and went to the Touhill Performing Arts Center at UMSL to see Big Bad Voodoo Daddy in concert. Not totally my thing, but it was a good concert. it was odd to be listening to swing dance music in a concert hall, though.
* Saturday was a lazy day, where intentionally not much happened, except for the fact that I got absolutely hammered by nasal allergy problems. I'm not sure what hit me, but it was pretty bad. Because of this, when I got together with Art, Dawn, and Roy to play games that evening I was definitely not with my full mental faculties.
* Sunday was actually pretty productive. The allergy problems kept me from church (when you can't breathe well, it is hard to focus on the sermon), but I was able to do some general cleaning and picking up around the house, which was needed.
* I am now back in the Kansas City area, maybe for the last week, and maybe not; I might be here Mon-Wed next week, as well. We'll have to see how this week goes.

Half-Price Books

Yesterday I took advantage of my project in KC to actually make it to a Half-Price Books for the first time in my life. If you haven't been to one, it is a used bookstore writ large. It was actually pretty cool, though they had a pretty bad drek:awesome ratio in the sci-fi section. I didn't find what I was looking for (I was looking for some of the old Martian books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but no luck), but I did find some essentially brand new Osprey military history books for $6 a pop, which is well over 50% off the standard price, as well as an omnibus edition of a sci-fi trilogy by Elizabeth Moon. I haven't loved all of her stuff, but her Paksennarion stories still rank among my favorite stories of all time, so I figure it won't hurt to give some of her other work a shot.

Night Out With the Girls

Since I'm still staying in Overland Park until my project finishes, I took advantage of the proximity to family today and had dinner with two of my cousins, Diana and Kristi. Even though the KC area is just 4 hours away from me I almost never get over here, so it was good to catch up with them. We went to a Thai restaurant that was literally across the street from Kristi's apartment, and the food was great. We all seem to have settled in our ways a bit, as it is all the same stuff we talk about the few times I see either of them (usually Christmas), but it was a good time anyways.

St. Louis Ruins Everything

So I've been watching Hockey: A People's History off-and-on ever since I got it in early July. Episode 6 contained a real treat for me. After spending at least 20 minutes describing how awesome it was back in the "original six" days for Toronto and Montreal to meet in the Stanley Cup finals seemingly about every other year, at the end of the episode they mention the NHL's expansion in the late '60s, and how every one of those teams was American, and how the Leafs and Canadiens have never met in the finals since. While the anouncer is being all depressed-sounding describing this, all of the images are of the St. Louis Blues. They have old TV footage of the players, the fans, even the old Barn (aka, the St. Louis Arena). While there were five other teams that joined at the same time, all of the video footage is from St. Louis. Someone up in Toronto (where the CBC is headquartered) must really hate St. Louis to use only their video footage to describe how Americans ruined everything. It made me laugh out loud.

Time Warp

I was driving on Manchester Boulevard today, around 2PM, listening to 89.1FM, the Lindenwood University station, when they put the song Goldie's Last Day on the air. Man, I hadn't heard that song in ages. It's probably been at least five years since I listened to that album. Crazy.

The Revenge of the Fortune Cookie

You will enjoy doing something different this coming weekend.

China Wok, Des Peres, MO

I'm Broken

So I had an interesting experience this week. While biting down on a gumdrop, I had half of a crown fall out. Well, not really a crown, but a large porcelain filling that is supposed to last forever. Almost half of it just cracked right out. None of the actual tooth material on that tooth was damaged, just part of the porcelain separated and came out. I was able to get the dentist and have it checked out yesterday, and it looks like what is left is sturdy, and it isn't causing me much pain (just some cold sensitivity since the nerve doesn't have much covering anymore, so it's not being treated as an emergency. This means I get to go two weeks missingn part of a tooth before I get it fixed. Joyous.