http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_drank

Nobody ever survives the purple drank.  I thought it would be more purple and less pink.  May have mixed the cough syrup incorrectly.  Mom, I’m just clownin’ around.

Are oysters recession proof? Bud Light and scented candles are still demanded. Thanks for hosting, Cupps.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/worklife/01/08/jumping.ship/index.html

Upon visiting Plinky.com, you’ll notice there’s nothing there.  If you go to any of the Plinky blogs listed, there’s nothing of substance there either.   So, I wonder what Jason is talking about when he says…

“You don’t find that in a small company.  At my new company, Plinky, we sometimes dream things up in the morning and by the afternoon have it live on the Web. That never happens at a big company.”

Weird.  Also, not to be overly critical because I love start-ups, but I probably wouldn’t accept an interview request from CNN (!) about jumping ship until my new company’s site added some sort of value besides an email sign-up.  Just a thought.

Update (1/22): Plinky.com is live.  After @aubs showed some love on Twitter, I gave Plinky a whirl.  The registration was easy yet stupidly quirky.   The service – unless it drastically evolves – offers little (to no) value.  Hey, whoever funded Plinky.com, I’ve got some oceanfront property to sell you in Idaho.  Jason, will Google hire you back?

For the first time ever (I think), I agree with Paul Krugman. Hey now!

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/the-trouble-with-sanjay-gupta/

As seen in the video below, Sanjay Gupta is a boner – especially at the 8:28 mark.

If you get through the 38 second mark – go ahead and fast forward – you’ll probably be stuck watching the whole thing.  Awesome.

Digg, thank you.

During last night’s episode of insomnia, I wrapped up reading Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book titled Outliers. Reading a book is annoying but book reviews are even worse. That said, I’ll steer clear of offering a comprehensive review since Time Magazine and the NY Times have already published good enough synopses. In short, Gladwell’s previous books (The Tipping Point and Blink) were entertaining reads and the same can be said for Outliers.

How I rank Malcolm Gladwell’s books to date…

1) Outliers

2) Blink

3) The Tipping Point

In Outliers, Gladwell proposes a theory that seems to make sense. You can only master something if you dedicate at least 10,000 hours towards it. Yes, a firm number of 10,000 hours was established. He goes into a plethora of examples from Canadian Hockey Players born January through March to Bill Joy to Bill Gates to Mozart to The Beatles. It got me to thinking, have I put 10,000+ hours towards anything?

I can only think of a few things – Gambling, Sales, and Current Events…

I’ve gambled enough to learn the house always wins. I wish somebody would have told me that a while ago. Ha!

I’ve worked in sales since I was 15 – first at my dad’s mattress stores as a youngster and currently I’m still somehow in sales almost 15 years later. Snooze fest! Nobody wants to hear about my sales experience.

This leads me to current events. I awkwardly “studied” current events – first as a kid watching the local and national nightly news seemingly every night including weekends. Can you imagine all the crap commercials I sat through? At one point, I went so far as to write the local sports anchor (Don Shane) at WXYZ-TV in Detroit. He responded with a handwritten (remember those days?!?) postcard inviting me to give him a call at a specific time on a certain date.

At my “assigned” time slot, Don and I chatted for what seemed like hours (probably 15 minutes) before he had to wrap up the sports programming for the 5 pm newscast. The conversation was awesome! Amongst other things discussed, he suggested that I read the newspaper on a daily basis and consider attending Syracuse or Missouri to study journalism. At age 13, I had no idea what he was talking about though I still recall his recommendations to this day. Don capped off the conversation by offering me a tour of the studio. Unfortunately, Southfield, MI was too far of a drive (45 miles – ha!) for me to hitch a ride with anyone in my fam. So, as my passion for current events developed rapidly, I never got a chance to take that studio tour though I did manage to start reading/saving a ton of newspapers.

Most normal boys growing up start collecting baseball cards and/or comic books. I had baseball cards and newspapers. It was weird. I can’t really remember studying in high school or college – I’m shamefully not joking – but up until a few years ago there weren’t too many days that I missed the nightly news or failed to read at least one newspaper. This said, I’m confident that I have put 10,000 hours towards this strange obsession.

Yada, yada – So, I guess I’m a current events expert…whatever the f_ck that means?!? As far as I know, I still have the aforementioned bin of newspapers sitting somewhere at my parents’ crib. My pride & joy (side note: great beer…check link) from the bin is the TWA flight 800 blowing up story from the Ann Arbor News. Why? To this day, I remember the article’s contents way too clearly. Here’s a link to the story though it’s not from the Ann Arbor News…

http://archive.deseretnews.com/archive/502329/TOO-EARLY-TO-TELL-IF-ITS-A-BOMB.html

Anything stick out? How about this passage?

With a water temperature of 65 degrees and an air temperature of 73, officials estimated that survival would not be possible much beyond noon Thursday.

One of the first private boats at the crash site came upon a macabre sight: a yellow TWA life jacket floating on the water.

“It was inflated and it was buckled,” said Jimmy Vaccaro, who hooked the empty jacket into the boat. “These things don’t light and inflate by themselves – you have to pull on it or blow through the tube.”

At age 17, I was mesmerized by the fact that the newspaper even mentioned a remote possibility that anyone could have survived the crash. This made no sense to me as the plane was climbing to 16,000+ feet. I was even more amazed that an inflated and buckled life jacket was found. At least one passenger knew the plane was going down so it had to have been a bomb in the cabin or fire on board that caused the disaster, right?

As determined by the NTSB, I guess faulty wiring in a fuel line brought the plane abruptly back to earth without any passengers having knowledge that their fate was sealed…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800

Interviews with potential witnesses to the TWA 800 crash were conducted by the FBI; the NTSB was asked not to interview or re-interview witnesses because multiple interviews could lead to difficulties in any potential future criminal prosecution. No verbatim records of the witness interviews were produced; instead the agents who conducted the interviews wrote summaries of the interviews which they then submitted. Witnesses were not asked to review or correct the documents. After the FBI closed their active criminal investigation, the summaries were handed over to the NTSB (with personal information of the witnesses redacted), who then formed a witness group to review these documents.

Is it weird that the NTSB wasn’t allowed to interview eyewitnesses after the FBI had completed their investigation? You’d think both parties should interview eyewitnesses but who am I to judge?

No, I’m not calling out a TWA flight 800 conspiracy. Rather, I’m shocked that I can remember newspaper article like I just pulled it from the bin yesterday and – unrelated – the NTSB still hasn’t presented a convincing case for the cause of TWA flight 800’s failure. I wonder what the cause of Richard Reid’s plane crash would have been if he wasn’t incompetent?

So, what does the above rambling “make” me? An amateur blogger with a software sales job and no desire to gamble. Woot!

I found this sign on top of a Chicago Sun-Times newspaper rack to be really humorous.

I hope they were joking.  If not, the sign unintentionally made me laugh really hard.  There was nothing in the lobby to monitor the newspaper rack.  Why did they have to bring the driver into this?  Thefts will be prosecuted – huh?  If you get caught stealing a newspaper, you should get life since a) nobody steals a newspaper and b) I would think newspapers are the easiest thing EVER to steal.

By the way – since nobody reads newspapers anymore outside of the WSJ and NY Times, shouldn’t the Sun-Times be giving away newspapers for free to increase circulation and thus provide more value to their advertisers?  I’d probably pick up the Sun-Times once or twice a week if I didn’t have to keep change in my pocket.  Just a thought…

I’m not a huge fan of the op-ed pages but this entry is really good…

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/opinion/30herbert.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

I could have pulled a quote every other paragraph but the entire article is worthwhile reading…

“When Mr. Bush officially takes his leave in three weeks (in reality, he checked out long ago), most Americans will be content to sigh good riddance. I disagree. I don’t think he should be allowed to slip quietly out of town. There should be a great hue and cry — a loud, collective angry howl, demonstrations with signs and bullhorns and fiery speeches — over the damage he’s done to this country.”

Fielder, thank you.

Live blogging an expected blowout…

Update: Sparty looked really good tonight.  It’s the best MSU team I’ve seen since the 2000 team.  That’s saying a lot since the 2001 and 2005 teams made the Final Four.   Barring injuries, anything less than a Final Four or NCAA Championship would be a major disappointment.  Keep in mind that the Final Four is being hosted in Detroit this year.  Watch out!

Yeah, for some reason Barack Obama sounded off on the “NCAA Football Playoff System” topic during an interview on 60 minutes last month as our country was on the brink of falling apart.  It was weird.  I think he was trying to be funny.

Regardless, as every college football fan has discussed at one point in their life, there should undoubtedly be a NCAA football playoff.  Some people argue for 8 teams, 16 teams, or some sort of variation.

Here are my reasons for a 16 team playoff system…

1) Nobody cares about non-conference games.  Non-conference games suck.  Cut all 4 of them out of the schedule and start the season off with OVERLY worthwhile conference games.  Without being said, your team better be ready to play on week 1!

2) Nobody cares about bowl games (anymore) unless your team is playing in one.  For example, this year I slept through the Rose Bowl because it was a blowout, went shopping during the Cotton Bowl even though it was a close game because – ranking wise – it didn’t really matter what team won, and am blogging during the Sugar Bowl because I could care less about either Utah or Alabama and they can’t finish #1.

3) A 16 team playoff system would make the NCAA so much money it’s sick.  Just like March Madness, some network will drop some major $ on the exclusive tournament rights.   In fact, I’ll guess that a network would drop way more money than the networks dish out to cover the current BCS bowls.  Each of the 8 tournament games can keep their bowl games (and destinations?) in the event the NCAA wanted to keep corporate sponsors.  For example, the 1 vs. 16 match-up could be the Gaylord Hotels Bowl and/or the 2 vs. 15 match-up could be the Outback Bowl.  As the playoff boils down, the NCAA would still maintain their major bowls like the Rose, Fiesta, Sugar, Orange and keep their lame sponsors.

4) Every single year since its inception in 1998, it seems that the BCS system screws some team HARDCORE – sans rubber.  This year, USC, Utah, and Texas got screwed.

5) There isn’t a single football fan that likes the BCS system.

So, a 16 team postseason tournament.  This would make for 9 conference games, 1 bye, and NO non-conference games.  The top team from each of the 11 conferences and the top 5 other teams (as voted upon by a committee) would be invited to participate in the tournament.  I guarantee that such a playoff system would have almost every single college football fan tuning into each of the 15 games over 4 weeks.  RATINGS!

Unless I’m missing something, a NCAA football playoff system should be in place as early as next year.  As baffling as it was that my grandparents didn’t have running water growing up, I think my children and grandchildren will wonder why the NCAA screwed the pooch so horribly with the current BCS system.

Thoughts?

Update: Here’s something from last year that I seemingly copied and pasted sections from.  Ha!

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/news?slug=dw-playoff112707&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

1) Join at least one social networking site per month.  Radar.net is up next and then after I figure out how to jailbreak (wtf?) my iPhone “properly,” I’ll be on Qik.com.  Send some suggestions outside of facebook, myspace, linkedin, twitter, digg, etc.

2) Ban smoking.  Unoriginal yet horribly ineffective over the years.

3) Keep posting at least 1 blog entry per day unless I go on another honeymoon in an area where there are days upon days of no internet access or Tim Russert dies again.  Should he, take a one day break.

4) By the end of the year, find something other than technology, politics, and the economy to become fixated with.

Happy New Year…