http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16508177/

Seems like just the other day…

LAKE PLACID, N.Y. – As Marie Goff drove up the muddy access road to the top of the bobsled track at Mount Van Hoevenberg on Saturday, the thermometer on the dashboard caught her eye.

“Unbelievable, 51 degrees,” said Goff, a driver for the Olympic Regional Development Authority. “Thank goodness it stopped raining and thank goodness the track is refrigerated.”

The balmy winter, which has sap running, tree buds sprouting and dogs shedding their winter coats, has been unlike any other in Goff’s memory, and she’s 83.

The National Weather Service reported record or near-record temperatures across the region Saturday after a long warm spell.

Albany International Airport hit 71 degrees, according to the National Weather Service. The temperature at Boston’s Logan International Airport was 69 degrees at about 2:30 p.m. In New Jersey, records set in 1950 were broken in Newark, Trenton and Atlantic City. And in New York City’s Central Park, the thermometer hit 72, tying January’s all-time high. The city, and much of the region, has seen no snow this winter.

“I can remember a thaw at Christmas many times, but not for the length of time we’ve had this year,” said Goff, who was ferrying passengers at the Chevrolet Geoff Bodine Bobsled Challenge, a competition on ice by racecar drivers.

Riding shotgun on the Brown Line train…

• The Hurricane Katrina Room, which is still under construction.
• The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you won’t be able to remember anything.
• The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don’t even have to show up.
• The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don’t let you in.
• The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don’t let you out.
• The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room, which no one has been able to find.
• The National Debt Room, which is huge and has no ceiling.
• The Tax Cut Room, with entry only to the wealthy.
• The Economy Room, which is in the toilet.
• The Iraq War Room. (After you complete your first visit, they make you to go back for a second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth visit.)
• The Dick Cheney Room, in the famous undisclosed location, complete with shotgun gallery.
• The Environmental Conservation Room, still empty.
• The Supreme Gift Shop, where you can buy an election.
• The Airport Men’s Room, where you can meet some of your favorite Republican Senators.
• The Decider Room, complete with dart board, magic 8-ball, Ouija board, dice, coins, and straws.

• ‘The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country.’
• ‘If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.’
• ‘Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.’
• ‘No senior citizen should ever have to choose between prescription drugs and medicine.’
• ‘I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy – but that could change.’
• ‘One word sums up probably the responsibility of any governor, and that one word is ‘to be prepared’.
• ‘Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.’
• ‘I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.’
• ‘The future will be better tomorrow.’
• ‘We’re going to have the best educated American people in the world.’
• ‘One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.’ (during an education photo-op)
• ‘Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it.’
• ‘We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.’
• ‘I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made.’…George W. Bush to Sam Donaldson

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!