UConn James

If the Bills win a SB, it will be 99 percent attributable to the players, multiple levels of coaches and the current GM. They are the ones who coordinate everything done that year. I'll give TD the 1 percent just b/c he provided a pretty good example of how not to run the organization. As an analogy (which are dangerous on this board, don't you know): Joe Blow is building a stone wall, is 1/3 completed and it's about ready to keel over b/c he uses the wrong techniques of fitting stone. He gets fired by the homeowner. If I take that wall down but reuse the stones in different combinations and create a masterpiece that's entered in Better Homes and Gardens, does Joe Blow deserve any credit?

I think it may have something to do with the Penguins possibly moving and we're on the short list. Perhaps people want to show that Hartford can still drum up some support for the NHL. I've been rooting for Edmonton since the Sabres lost..

Yup. Mangold would've been pushing Teague out by the middle of the season anyway. This just speeded up that process.

Last season Lindell showed what he can do once he got over a shoulder injury that threw off his technique and got an excellent LS. 83% including 3/3 from 50+. His KOs also improved by almost 2 yards per kick. Edinger was 14/23 from over 30 yards away for Minn. So, the question is, did you follow the team at all last year or are you carrying talking points over from last offseason? Or are you arguing for exploding the entire team, even the center of a top STs unit, b/c we changed GMs and said kicker used to kick for our new coach? I would advise you to read my first sig line and take it to heart.

Bush to create largest marine sanctuary After some very unflattering articles in Field&Stream a couple of years ago about the admin's policies (both in terms of conservation and environmental) in some of the larger continental national parks, it's a great thing that was announced today. Didn't have to be done, and certainly not on such a scale... but now there is some promise in protecting a good many endangered species there. Good job for all involved on making this happen.

I don't think Crayola® offers this color yet....

If we blow up each other here on earth, do we really deserve to go to another planet and f--- that place up too? And, so 40 people can watch the Earth either explode in a fireball or go dark, then interbreed into beings that resemble Mr. Hawking?

Three words --- Weekend at Bernie's.

.... And why not get a job at the carnival?

This is exactly the mentality that's had Lieberman re-elected how many times? I mean, watch his latest ads now that he's facing someone in the primary. The man basically comes out and says, 'I know I don't represent the views of the majority of the voters of Connecticut, but vote for me anyway!' Any rational person might think it's a stupid strategy, but hey, it's worked.

The macrocosm view of 'Which party would you like to see win' means next to nothing.

This is all --- repeat ALL --- posturing and drama for the upcoming contract (re)negotiations. And you know what? I hate drama. Especially one that's directed by Drew Rosenass. Show up or not, the Buffalo Bills are more than Willis McGahee. Maybe he'll find that out someday.

Back in the '60s in East Hartford, there was a problem that a lot of people's cats were disappearing. (Well, some people see that as a problem ). So, one day, this kid my father knew.... his mother was cleaning up his room and found a drawer with wads of money in it, and bear in mind this was back in the day when a nickel went a long way. Turns out, he would shoot cats with his BB gun and sell them to a Chinese restaurant in the area. Yes, people, stereotypes don't always come from thin air.

There are a LOT of kids playing it these days. Who knows if they'll stick with it or move to other sports, but the numbers have gone up dramatically. I took my 6-y.o. nephew to some of his games last month when bro & s-i-l were at drill weekend. He scored 6 goals in one game. Granted they're playing the cluster offense.... He got in trouble for trash-talking the other team. After one of his break-aways, he walked up to a kid on the other team (the Yellow Tigers) and said, "Who's the tiger NOW?!?!?"

She's much better looking than that picture, especially her hair not in a part. Personality and class is what makes her a true 10, tho.

Do we have to sing "Shiny, Happy People Holding Hands" 24/7 too? Or can I just hum?

I'm reminded of that quote, "No one is ever as stupid as the person who owned your house before you." Every time I look down my crawl space, I shake my head and say WTF?!?!

Wacka spouting off that I'm "a liberal" just like CTM is a Nazi, and KRC is a Communist. What else is new? The Providence media (especially Alison Bologna on Ch. 10! ) has done a good job covering the story. I dunno. But I do think it would be appropriate for every pol to just stop using the phrase "African-American" in an off-the-cuff manner b/c past performance shows it's like asking for trouble. Yes, he was arrested in a neighborhood whose population is close to 100% black, but why did he go out of the way to add race into the mix? The context here is that he doesn't want special treatment. In the Trent Lott case, he made similar usage, yet the (inadvertant, in the middle of chatting up an outgoing Senator at a party; I gave him a pass) context made it out to some people like he supported continuation of segregation back in the day. He paid a political price. Kennedy might too; the most recent polls have that 46% support his return to Congress, 47% say he should step down, 7% undecided, in a state he's won convincingly a few times. He claims that 10 out of the 12 police said they couldn't smell alcohol on him. Is that similar to how 4 out of 5 dentists recommend Trident®?

Or, you could take that out of quotes, b/c those are not the words he said. The real quote is Kennedy saying he should be treated exactly like someone from that neighborhood would be were they in the same circumstance, which is a rather standard response. (I'm not arguing here whether he is.) Tantamount to quoting the president as saying, "I sent 2,000 of our kids to be murdered in Iraq b/c of our SNAFU, but I'm not sorry!" after those speeches last year. Take liberties, break out the thesaurus for a few words, and you've got fantastic headlines to sell at the newsstand, yeah? The NYDN is a rag, pure and simple; if you want to promote better discussion, use a better source.

Yeah, I was going to say 10 p.m. too. That seems to be a reasonable middle ground. 'Course, I'm usually outta there when the mosquitos start showing up in hoards.

Maybe this is a topic for the Consumer Forum...? I'm looking for a dehumdifier my ownself, as our dinosaur sh--box would get about 4 drops in a weekend. Got a Kenmore humidifier at Sears for this past winter that worked great, but the reverse process is a different animal. Anyone know a good model? As for the worst product.... Hmm. That would be the Canon S400 printer I bought back in 2001 for ~$70. It worked all right for about a month when I was printing something most every day and then when it stopped getting frequent use, the black cartridge wouldn't print. Tried everything in the maintainence stuff, even a new cartridge and still nothing. It's now collecting dust in the attic. I've also heard bad stuff about the Maytag washing machines that supposedly use less water (b/c there's water that always stays inside a shell in the machine).... Long story short, sludge/mold/bacteria builds up in there. The sh-- of it is, Maytag alledgedly knew about this before they put it on the market.

Ladies and gentlemen, IIRC, this selfsame source also steadfastly refuted a story in early '97 that the Hartford Whalers were moving to Raleigh, N.C.

Like everyone else, I was shocked to log on and read that Paul (BiB, Ghost of BiB) chose to end his life. I am not a weeper by any means, yet I’m tearing up that someone I ‘virtually knew’ is gone. Like most, I only knew him as a fellow poster. His contributions to the PPP boards always held a certain weight b/c of his long experience in geo-politics. For anyone who wrote in metaphors and at great length about the theory of something, Paul would saunter in to write one sentence that hit right at the heart of things. I remember a couple of run-ins in PPP but in time I came to realize that he was right and it comforts me that despite what I may think about the politics of a person who lives in a white house, there are other people who sit behind desks that dream up ways to keep us safe and to try to keep the nations and groups of the world from tearing at each others’ throats. I said as much in one thread where someone else overreacted to some issue of the day, and he sent me a PM saying that it meant a lot to him when he helps someone Get It. I’m glad I had the chance to let him know that all was not for naught. And then there were the times when he held clinics on the Art of Smart-Ass. I’m sure even the “Evil B word Woman” will lament the loss of threads wryly asking what she was wearing. He sure could lighten up a thread. I always thought of him as this board’s Lt. Col. Frank Slade (Al Pacino in “Scent of a Woman”), and maybe that was a little prescient if you know what that movie is about…. I was aware that Paul had lost his wife a couple of years back and that he took it extremely hard, at times sinking into deep depression. He seemed to delve wholly into his work, TBD, and occupying himself with friends in the community, from here, and those he’d come to know around the world in the course of his travels. From the stories recounted here, he seemed like the kind of friend everyone deserves in real life. That he took the loss of his wife so hard is a testimony to how much he loved her. In the recent months, Paul had been talking a lot about moving to a different country (I think he mentioned Greece or the South of France), maybe because he was tiring of how sh--headed this country’s ethos has become, maybe because he desired to get away from the place that held so many happy memories that now came to haunt him. And yet, it didn’t seem that he actually wanted to --- or was --- going to go anywhere. Those posts now hark on him mulling Not Being Here Anymore in a bigger sense than Alexandria, VA. I have had some times myself in the past year where everything seems too much. How to start out in the world where despite my having done extremely well in college, I’ve been on interviews where the person points to my current job, self-employed in a construction niche, and says, ‘You should be doing something better than this’ and yet no one is giving me a chance. Kind of like people who surmise that a beautiful woman “must be somebody’s baby” as the song goes, but she laments that she’s not; she’s too beautiful. Last November featured a mini breakdown where I wasn’t asking whether I should, but how. I survived it by just plugging on and I’m still doing that a day at a time but there are times when those 3 a.m. thoughts would get a little scary if I shared them with anyone. I’m not going to say that my sadness at Paul’s death will keep me from doing something --- I can’t make that promise. I’m trying to get involved in things and get things done, helping out people in my life who need help and trying to avoid the… dullness… and the tide of an American conscience that seems to be circling the drain and a wider human ethos that first seeks death and destruction as the answer to a problem of dwindling resources and people who don’t think the same things as them. And yet, there are slivers of hope left like when I spend a weekend looking after my nephew while my brother and sister-in-law are at drill weekend or when I got checked out by my high school secret crush while I was mowing, who if possible is even more beautiful and special now. And there’s the knowledge that I don’t know if I’d be able to go through with an active death. I think it’s more like what Jeff Buckley says in his song “Grace.” “I’m not afraid to go. But it goes so slow.” I worked a job once doing an outbuilding foundation with a guy who’s a psychology professor and as we took shelter under his porch from pouring rain, another guy who was working with us was talking about a distanced cousin of his who hanged himself. A 40-ish farmer who had no wife, worked himself raw every day for not much money, was going into foreclosure and it just got to be too much for him and he saw no avenue for change (people talk about that as if it’s something so easy to do; to uproot your life and “start anew” and somehow ignore the baggage). We talked about whether there is such a thing as rational suicide. As is the case with that farmer, I think there is. Paul, it seems, reached that tipping point. May he find his peace and be reunited with his love in what dreams may come.

Not quite. The Sabres would have to be up 4-0 heading into the third, whereupon the refs would start calling penalties: a 4-minute major on Briere for having his skatelace untied, 2 minutes for Drury for being too desirable to the female demographic, 10 minutes on Campbell for having knocked the sh-- out of Umberger back in the Philly series, 4 minutes on Fitzpatrick b/c his last name is the end of the last word of a famous gay joke, 10 minutes on J.P. Dumont for speaking in French on the ice. The refs would then have to get special dispensation from Bettman to have all of these players to serve their penalties simultaneously, curtailing the NHL Rulebook... and just for the hell of it, Bettman would have to decide that each penalty deserved Major Game Misconducts and the coaches and skaters would all have to go to the locker room for the duration of the game. Which would leave Ryan Miller all alone in net. Miller would then have to make 45 magical saves, letting just 3 get by him until :02 left. At this point, Rod Brind'Amour would have to skate up to the net, whack Miller alongside the facemask, step on the goalie stick and big trapper while Hedican puts one top shelf that really only hit the post and went in halfway, yet on the upstairs replay the goal is upheld. That is what it would take to equal Wide Right.

If so, then from the interviews I've seen, so is Gen. Pace. The fact that he used the common weasel words like 'looks' or 'seems', etc doesn't do much when you're talking about murdering 3-year-olds. And it's pretty sad that some people here will go to the mat defending soldiers who would do something like this and when the media reports something that happened, blame them for inciting riots. These Marines just gave credibility to the terrorists in the eyes of those of whom we're trying to win the hearts and minds. I say this with my brother currently deployed in Afghanistan.