Johnny Coli

Well La-Dee-Da. Does your pinky stick out when you sip it, Mr Fancy Pants.

Pabst Blue Ribbon. Sometimes Labatts Blue if I'm feeling saucy.

Wow. I used to bowl at the Conesus Lanes while I was briefly...ahem...enrolled at SUNY Geneseo. That was back in '85. I wonder if that joint is still around. We were in the rec league. You would bowl your frame, then run out to the car in your socks and pound beers until it was your turn to bowl again, then you would run back inside. I lasted one semester at that school, but stuck around for two years.

Wendy O Williams of the Plasmatics was born in Rochester. That has nothing to do with anything in this thread, but it's a nice bit of trivia.

I love the draft in franchise mode. Are we talking about drafting from a pool of players from the start of season 1, or playing the Bills team as is and drafting in subsequent seasons? I do the latter. I play it out to 20+ seasons, but I don’t play every game (unless it’s the Pats or Miami, then I like to give a beat-down). I love doing all the off-season stuff myself, and I do a lot in the training camp to get some player’s progression’s up there. I’ll typically sim 5 or 6 games in a row to see how the team is doing, but if they are really tanking and might miss the playoffs, I’ll play them for a few games. This is also crucial for getting their ratings up there, because if you only sim, they never (well, rarely) get up to icon status. You need a good mix of veterans. I found that out the hard way. If you start getting trade-happy to load up on draft picks by trading away your vets, team morale goes into the toilet. Watch the veteran’s progressions closely, and if they lose a step for two years in a row, trade them while you can. Don’t get fooled by their off-season progression, though. Believe-it-or-not, a lot of them come into camp in poor shape, and you’ll see their ratings drop a few points. Don’t panic and cut them or trade them. By the end of preseason their ratings are back up. I’ve done pretty well with cap management, and really try to get a couple key free-agent vets in key positions. O-line vets are a must, and I’m pretty aggressive in free agency for that position. A good way to get your back-ups a progression boost is to put them in the second half of blowouts. Say your RB is getting long in the tooth, and you know he’s not gonna be at the high level he’s at for too much longer. If he’s an icon, you can trade him for a ton of picks at the end of the season. But you need to get his backup some touches. Get him into the second half of some games mid-season, then make him your starter for the last 4 games of the season and go to a more run-oriented offense…watch his progression soar. I really have no problem with the draft. I’ve seen a lot of trading between the AI teams during the actual draft. If you want to trade, don’t give up if you get turned down a few times. There are 31 other teams, and they each have 7 or more picks. That’s a lot of possible trade scenarios. I go team-by-team, and see what I can get for some of my vets. You’d be surprised what you can do and get before the draft in trades. I scout like mad for the later round picks. Low-round picks are awesome for kick returners, special teams guys. I pick a lot of “projects” as well. A lot of stud CBs are gone after the first round, but you can get a mid-level WR with good hands and leaping ability and make him an all-pro CB/safety. I do this with linemen, too. Need tackle depth, draft Cs and Gs and just groom them into tackles, or whatever. Wanna know who my 99 rated FB was for a few seasons? A converted Tim Euhus. I agree, the create-a-fan thing is useless. I also wish you could take your franchise team and bring it to the next year’s Madden. One thing I would change is maybe putting in a Hall of Fame for franchise mode, for those of us that play it out for 20+ seasons. I liked my franchise QB so much last year I contemplated getting a customized Bills jersey with his name on it. John Sedberry was the best QB to ever play the game.

That's two hours THEY owe YOU, brother. You make up for that lost time, and you make up for it this week. Are you lucky enough to have any video games on your cell phone? I have bowling. Let me tell you, time flys by when you are on the quest for a 300 game. They can track internet usage, but they can't track your cell.

Oh my God. My man, you have an even bigger incentive to do nothing, because you're always on the clock. Avoiding work is a full-time job for unfortunate souls such as yourself. Ok, I think everyone should take a minute (or 30 minutes) out of their day tomorrow to think about others out there like this poor bastard...others out there who have to deal with the twilight zone of getting to go home, BUT STILL BEING AT WORK. Jesus. I'm going to "time manage" my ass off in honor of our brother Fezmid, tomorrow.

Awesome! Welcome, Brother! I love this topic. OK...first and foremost, it is not your fault that you hate your job. It is their fault. Once you get your mind wrapped around that concept it becomes a lot easier to "time manage". I prefer "time manage" over the more common term "slack" because the connotation of the word "slack" makes an assumption that you are doing something wrong, like "stealing", which I refer to as "not paying". Most people don't realize the effort and creativity that goes into time management. Take that fellow you work with that took the time to set up his laptop case to make it appear that he was there. Not only did he show a remarkable level of creativity, if he actually left the building he hit a 10 on the risk/reward scale. Upper management takes risks every day, and they get rewarded for taking those risks. His reward was getting paid for not doing a job he already hates. Also, by putting on the appearance of actually doing his job, he saved a lot of anguish on the part of his manager, who assumes everything is humming right along with the people he is in charge of beating down every day. By "appearing" to work, even though he was gleefully miles away, he did that manager a favor. There are a lot of people out there who will tell you that they absolutely love their jobs. I like to refer to those people as "liars." Anyway, good luck brother. Remember, every time you walk out that door at exactly 4:55PM, you walk out with your head held high knowing that for the next 16 hours no one can tell you what to do, and for the 8 hours before that you did only enough to not get fired.

The Replacements "Bastards of Young". The whole video is a shot of a stereo speaker, and then a foot kicks it over at the end. Good stuff. MTV ruined music.

It's too bad they don't have a way for you to transfer your franchise mode team over to the next year's game. After a decade, you're basically playing with guys you scouted, drafted, made into a dynasty. It would be cool to be able to advance them to the next game. Maybe you can, and I'm just an idiot.

So I jump ship in Hong Kong and make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas. A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I'm a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald... striking. So, I'm on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one---big hitter, the Lama---long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga... gunga, gunga-galunga. So we finish the eighteenth and he's gonna stiff me. And I say, "Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know." And he says, "Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consiousness." So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.

I thought it was a good post, and it made me do some research on him. As for some of these other lads, a lot of their stuff comes directly from Karl Rove's Anti-Liberal Emergency Response Kit. Mention Michael Moore, take a shot at Hillary, tell us we lost the election, and trot out the "soft on crime" angle.

Mr. Clutch is now Mr. Crutch. Ok, you didn't go the workman's comp route. That's cool. All is not lost, my man. If your place of employment doesn't have a wheelchair ramp, you can probably get paid to "work" from home until they install one. They'll have to hire a union contractor, so that should buy you a couple extra weeks.

Tonight is apple crisp night.

Go to work, then tell them you fell down the stairs. You'll get to spend the day in the ER reading the Sports page and back issues of People magazine on their dime. If you're lucky you'll get to hear two of the most beautiful words in the english language..."workman's comp." I envy you, brother.

Man, if I had a nickle for every time I got high on meth and slept with a dog....

Ask not for who the cowbell trolls, it trolls for thee.

Actually, going to the hearings or engaging these people in an organized debate would only lend some legitimacy to their "theories". As for Kansas, the deck is already stacked and any real scientific presence would be pointless.

I read your posts out loud now, and add "dude" to the end of each sentence. Instead of wanting to punch a hole in the wall, now they put a smile on my face.

Zip up your fly, Bill. You're exposing your agenda. ID is a back-door attempt to ram a Christian fundamentalist agenda into public schools under the guise of science. That's all.

Read the post aagin. I didn't say God is crap. What is crap, though, is explaining away a scientific black box as some divine mystery. To me, that is ignorant.

Not in the discipline of Science there isn't. ID is no more of a scientific theory than "magic" is. If people want to believe in ID, awesome. Belief in a higher power is fine. Whatever helps them get through life. But it is not science.

Iggy was a real American Idol. I'd like to see Bo Bice try and sing with people chucking eggs and bottles at him. We'd see who the real performers are then.

Good call. It's the only version I can stomach.

I was wondering when someone was going to get around to posting this. There was a Nature article on this that came out last week. Nature 434, 1062-1065 (28 April 2005) No one is saying the Theory of Evolution doesn't have holes in it. Most theories do. That's why they are "theories" and not "laws". But real science tries to fill those holes with testable hypotheses and experimentation, not just passing them off as the "divine hand of God" or some other crap.