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| Taylor Swift at the game in Madison Square Garden - Dustin Satloff/Getty Images |
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| Wilson Duke Football |
This was a fun project. Passing a pile of discarded household items in my neighborhood, I spied a deflated football. I don't know anything about football really, but I recognized the Wilson Duke as a good quality ball, so I picked it up.
Was surprised to find a rebuild kit online for about $10, from a small biz out of Alabama who are obsessed with footballs -- new bladder, lacing, and lacing tool.
Then studied videos about how to re-lace. Fun project, no crawling on my hands and knees, wrenching my back or busting my fingers.
Inspecting it I see the ball is stamped with a big "K." Research indicates that this is an NFL "K" ball, used in NFL games for kicking plays (kickoffs, punts, extra points). The "15-4" on the right side indicates this is from week 15 of the season, K-ball #4 for that game. I can't, however, ascertain what season or what team. Maybe a sports shop can help me.
For now I have a nice football for my mantle.
PS: all Wilson Dukes still made by hand in Ada Ohio, tiny town near Lima, northwest of Columbus, and home to Ohio Northern University -- I knew a guy who went to law school there.
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| Wilson Football Repair Kit |
My wife is also a sports fan, though she is not nearly as much of a fanatic as Busted's is.
We watched the game, or most of it anyway. It's gotten to be that it's almost as important as Christmas or the Fourth of July. I still kind of wiped out from my excursion into Oxy land, so I was content to just sit there and watch it flow by. We watched the broadcast version, for free, using an antennae. All those fancy services fell on their face when the big day arrived. I would say bad things about them but it's not worth the effort, and what would it gain me?
Most of the game involved kicking - punts and field goals. It wasn't until the second half that anyone started making any touchdowns. Many of the Patriot's quarterback's passes seemed off the mark - sometimes too long, sometimes not accurate.
I caught a few minutes of the halftime show. It looked they imported a small forest onto the infield. Bad Bunny was singing in Spanish, and the tune was meh. Did nothing for me. I went and got something to eat.
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| Chauncey Billups. (Blake Benard) |
It sounded a little off to me. Near as I can tell all these games were private, they weren't held in any licensed venues, like a casino, which makes me wonder why they are any of the FBI's business in the first place. Further, it strikes me that someone who is playing poker with people he doesn't know is a mark looking to get fleeced.
Then I picked up a copy of Willamette Week in a coffee shop down in South Waterfront this morning, and found this story:
The federal case against Chauncey Billups look flimsy to criminal lawyers.
Wherein I found this little tidbit:
"They are playing in an illegal poker game," the [New York criminal defense] lawyer, also a former Federal prosecutor, said. "There's a certain Caveat Emptor that comes with that."
All in all it sounds a like a big power play. The Feds want to bust some Mafia big shots, but the only thing they've got is this gambling scam. Well, remember how they got Al Capone - Income Tax evasion. So that might what they are doing here. Chauncy apparently had little to no actual involvement with this scam, but he ranks highest on the celebrity scale, so they put his name front and center in all their announcements to the media.
P. S. Previous post that mentions Chauncy.
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| Iowa Hawkeyes Football Game |
We heard that a guy we know was a fan of the Seattle Mariners baseball team and they were in the playoffs, so we started watching them. They beat the Detroit Tigers in a series of five games in the ALCS (American League Championship Series), and then lost to the Toronto Blue Jays in the ALDS (American League Division Series). So then we watched the Blue Jays play the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series. The Dodgers won the series last night in the eleventh inning of game seven.
Mostly it was just baseball: pitches, balls, strikes, hits and runs, but there were a surprising number of oddball incidents like,
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| Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups during the teams first game on Wednesday. AP |
In the middle of the story about all the criminals and their criminal activity, there is this description that sounds like something out of a Mission: Impossible movie:
According to the FBI, the alleged fraud included self-shuffling machines that had "been secretly altered in order to read the cards on the deck, predict which player on the table had the best poker hand, and relay the information to an offsite operator," said Nocella, adding "The offsite operator sent the information via cell phone back to a co-conspirator at the table and that person at the table was known as the 'quarterback.' The 'quarterback' then signaled secretly the information he had received to others at the table and together they used that information in order to win their games and to cheat the victims."
The scheme also allegedly used poker chip tray analyzers, special contact lenses or glasses that can read pre-marked cards, and an X-ray table that can read face down cards on the table.
I guess all those Netflix shows about murder investigations that end up pointing to corruption at the highest levels of society are actually true stories, they've just changed the names to protect the guilty.
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| Charles Schwab Field Omaha Why are there four different fonts in this sign? |
We've been watching Oregon State in the playoffs. First we had three games against Florida State in the Super Regionals in Corvallis. They won two out of three, so they moved on to the Men's College World Series in Omaha. They won their first game there against Louisville, but the next game was against Coastal Carolina University who were on 55 game winning streak. How do you even do that? Oregon lost this one. I expect there will be another game soon.
Ran into a couple of weird takes on baseball. I stopped in a bookstore in northwest Portland the other day, picked up a book and read a couple pages, see if it's going to grab me. We've got a kid going to play in a baseball game with his dad. The old man is a bit of a baseball fanatic, the kid not so much. If you ever watch baseball you may know that the scoreboard often shows Runs, Hits and Errors. The kid doesn't like errors. He points out that no other sports have 'errors', or at least they don't count them. Doesn't like being told he made an error, or something. Baffles me why anyone would be bothered by this. Of course, when I played baseball as a kid, everything I did was probably an error, but nobody bothered counting. Still don't really know what counts as an error, but then my old man wasn't a baseball fanatic.
Then while my wife and I are watching the Oregon State game, it comes out that she doesn't like playing baseball because she doesn't like being called 'out'. People are just funny.
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| Fernando Valenzuela |
I mentioned the other day that the Yankees and Dodgers hadn't met in the Fall Classic since 1981. That year the Yankees won the first two games before a twenty-year-old rookie phenom from Mexico pitched a W in a complete game, turning the series around.The Dodgers won four in a row and the Series, the pitcher won the NL Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young, the first and only time a player has taken both awards in the same season.That pitcher, Fernando Valenzuela, has left the building.
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| Most Valuable Professional Sports Teams |
Unlike my wife, I am not a big sports fan. I can watch a bit of professional basketball and college football, because that's what she watches, but if the competition isn't close I soon lose interest. I find the ads during football games more interesting, probably because we're starting a new season with a new bunch of ads. I do not understand the attraction. Well, I sort of do, we are basically pack hunting animals and sports are a civilized way of channeling those instincts into something harmless but entertaining. There have been occasions when I have gotten swept up in the excitement, but there haven't been many and they don't last long.
Somebody told me about a friend of a friend, a blue collar worker, spent $21,000 for Super Bowl tickets one year. I cannot fathom making such a purchase. 70,000 seats at $8K a piece is half a billion dollars, and that's only for one game. What an empire.
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| Gladys Roy and Ivan Unger play tennis on the wing of a biplane in flight, 1925 |
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| Kenya's Peres Jepchirchir celebrates winning the women's race in the Boston Marathon, in Boston, the United States on April 18, 2022 [Faith Ninivaggi/Reuters] |
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| Colby Covington vs Jorge MasVidal |
There was a big MMA - Mixed Martial Arts - event at the T-Mobile arena in Las Vegas last night. One of the two main contenders - Jorge Masvidal - father is from Cuba. Osmany is from Cuba and is a big fight fan so naturally we have to watch the fight. It was PPV - Pay Per View - and very expensive compared to most other forms of televised entertainment - $100. $70 was for an annual "membership" and $30 was for this event. I guess I can understand that. They undoubtedly train as much as any other professional athletes, but I imagine they only fight a few times a year. Basketball and baseball players may play 100 games a year. And like all sporting events, only the obsessed are going to want to watch a rerun, so the promoters need to raise as much moola as they can at the time. Not much to be made in residuals.
One of fighters announced that he was donating half of his prize money, $45,000 to a children's charity, which means the prize for that fight was $90,000, and it wasn't the main event.
There were half a dozen or so fights on the card including one fight between two women. We missed that one because we didn't find out about the $100 price until showtime and then we got involved in a discussion of whether we should go to a sports bar to watch it. In the end, we decided to pay the fee. Of course, now we have to navigate the new, modern, convenient way of gaining access to the event. We needed like six pieces of information, some of which was for accounts we didn't know we had. We got there eventually, but we missed the girls.
There were like five fights in ascending weight classes. The first fight consisted of 3 rounds. The heavier classes had five rounds. Each round was five minutes, so some of these fights went on for 30 minutes. One fight ended early when one fighter got a choke hold on the other.
This is Mixed Martial Arts, so fights can involve boxing, kicking and wrestling. I enjoy watching the fight when both fighters are both standing up and trying to strike the other, but often one will tackle the other and then it turns into a wrestling match and that is very tension inducing. Not much action, but you tell they are both struggling mightily. Some of these wrestling matches turn very ugly, where the guy on top is beating the guy on the bottom. One fight was almost called because the guy was so badly beaten. But he got up for the next round and landed a big punch that came close to knocking the beater out. One time one fighter knocked the other down with a punch but did not tackle him. Apparently he wasn't a fan of wrestling either.
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| Alexa Bliss 100 piece jigsaw puzzle |
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| Sha'Carri Richardson, Olympic class sprinter |
