I’ve only watched hockey on tv so I didn’t really know what to expect. First, this was the first time I had been in the Qwest Center. The Qwest Center is home to the NCAA Volleyball championships and the first round of the NCAA Basketball tournament, so it’s a pretty reputable place. The outside of the arena looks really good, I was very impressed with it. It’s far and away better then the other arenas that I’ve been in (The Devaney Center and Pershing Auditorium). Of course, it’s not saying much because those places are at least thirty years old and Qwest is about five years old, if that.

My roommate and I sat in the student section where the students were being obnoxiously supportive of the team by standing and ringing cowbells. They ring cowbells because the mascot is a maverick and apparently a maverick is a bull. This also happened to be “More Cowbell” night, so the jumbotron obnoxiously played the SNL sketch with Chris Walken where they have the Behind the Music of Blue Oyster Cult and the inexplicable cowbell track on the song “Don’t Fear the Reaper”. This has been so played out, it’s become stupid.

We were about seven rows behind the ice and I could barely see a thing. Between the students standing and two hot chicks being incredibly annoying and having hot asses, it was impossible to pay attention.

From what I know watching ESPN, Michigan State is supposed to have a really good hockey team, but they didn’t show it last night, getting the crap kicked out of them 7-1. Only seeing one game and it having such an extraordinary score, I can’t really tell if this makes UNO good or Michigan State bad. Looking up rankings, UNO is 19th out of about 60 teams where as MSU is about 30th, so it looks like the media believes UNO is better. One stat jumped out at me. UNO has given up the first goal in 8 of 11 games this season, and they just so happen to have eight wins versus two losses and a tie. This leads me to believe that they can play without a lead and still win games.

Overall, the game was just something to do. It was hard to get exciting for a game that I have no emotional investment in. It wasn’t a Husker game and it wasn’t football. Hockey just isn’t exciting without hard hits and a better vantage point to see them. Mostly, what I got out of the game was that I really need a girlfriend. I spent the entire game staring at hot chicks’ asses. There was one who was literally six feet tall. Oh my gosh. My tongue was on the floor with my jaw in my lap. HOT!!!!!!

In the end, eff hockey. It’s stupid. But, I’ll probably go again because of the hot chicks’ asses.

Image source: University of Nebraska at Omaha Athletic Department

Listen to Paul F. Tompkins on Daylight Savings Time (warning: this effs with your browser).

Happy fall back day everyone!

Taking a page out of Borat’s playbook, I introduce you to the smear campaign that the McCain-Palin camp has entrenched themselves in since the last presidential debate. Before the debate started that day, Obama was greeting several well-wishers and someone had a question for him. The man introduced himself as Joe, a hard-working plumber, who had some questions about Obama’s tax plan. No problem for a well-spoken Obama to handle.

Quoting from that same Chicago Tribune article:

John Bachtell, the Illinois organizer for Communist Party USA, sees attempts by Sen. John McCain’s campaign to label Obama a socialist as both offensive to socialists and a desperate ploy to tap into fears of voters who haven’t forgotten their Cold War rhetoric.

“Red baiting is really the last refuge of scoundrels,” Bachtell said. “It has nothing to do with the issues that are confronting the American people right now. It’s just a big diversion.”

Further along:

Bruce Carruthers, a sociology professor at Northwestern University: “Obama is like a center-liberal Democrat, and he is certainly not looking to overthrow capitalism. My goodness, he wouldn’t have the support of someone like The Wizard of Omaha, Warren Buffet, if he truly was going to overthrow capitalism.”

Of course, I don’t believe for a second that Obama is a socialist. Reading up on the pros and cons of spreading the wealth and concentrating it anywhere along the economic classes, I found an article that explains it. Most people will say that it’s bogus because it comes from very-left leaning Huffington Post, but it’s the only article that makes sense to me. In Robert McElvaine’s “‘Spreading the Wealth Around’: Just What Ailing Economy Needs“, he references history in explaining that concentrating the wealth in the higher tax bracket doesn’t work because quote: “An economy based on mass production requires mass consumption, and mass consumption is only possible when income is ’spread around.’”

Further along in Robert’s article:

Tax cuts for the highest income brackets and opposition to labor unions and to any government regulation of the market were the orders of the day under the Republican governments of the 1920s, as they have been under the Republican government of the 2000s.

Those policies accomplished the opposite of “spreading the wealth around.” By 1928, the richest 10 percent of Americans was taking in almost half of the nation’s income. The economy was kept going only by the extension of credit to middle-class buyers. When the credit bubble burst in 1929, the economy collapsed.

Very much the same thing has happened in the present decade. By 2005, income concentration had actually become somewhat greater than it had been just before the 1929 collapse. In 2005, the richest 1 percent of Americans took in 22 percent of the national income, while the top 10 percent made off with more than 48 percent.

Should anyone still be tempted to think that “spreading the wealth around” has been the problem, consider the following trends:

In 1964 the ratio of executive to employee compensation in the United States was 24:1. In 2005, it was 262:1.

Between 2000 and 2005, median CEO compensation increased by 84 percent, while median worker pay was stagnant, actually falling slightly, by 0.3 percent.

Between 1970 and 2003, the compensation of the top 100 CEOs in the United States increased 83 times faster than did the average wage.

The McCain-Palin camp has had nothing to go on since the the “newness” of the veep’s candidacy wore off. They’ve been trailing big ever since so they went into two-minute drill, down by 21, hail-mary mode, which of course means the “Who is Barack Obama?” and the “He’s a socialist” heaves of desperation. My feelings can be best described by a socialist quoted in the Chicago Tribune article

“The whole point of his policies don’t really represent the political economy of the working class,” said Robert Roman, who edits the newsletter of the roughly 250-member Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. “Obama’s going to be a person who represents all of us, he’s going to be representing the interest of the capitalists as well as the working people. He’s not really talking about transforming society beyond capitalism.”

Capitalism, in it’s pure form, can not work. The economy is more volatile than a four year-old who’s been drinking soda for the last 48 hours. It needs regulation. If anything, some industries need to be nationalized (the oil industry) and most need to be privatized (alternate energy and the banks). Come on Barack. Give us the change we need.

Here’s their latest video as of today:

Wow! First of all, this particular video is awesome. Sam Reich (the bearded guy) was really good in this video. One of their best so far. Here’s the real review. I like these guys. The characters are good even though there isn’t a lot to them. Amir is a crazy person and loves Jake like Dick Cheney like eating babies. There are a lot more hits then misses and there is a lot of misses, but the thing though is these guys aren’t professionals. Well, they kind of are. They write for CollegeHumor, but they aren’t actors or nor have they been writers for very long. Jake is my age. It’s ridiculous. What am I doing with my life?

Do these guys have staying power in the fickle internet comedy industry? Well, I think they’re funny and it shows because they’ve been doing their series for over a year, but I don’t think they can last beyond 2010. Time will tell if they can last through 2009. I hope they can make big names of themselves elsewhere though.

Rating: 3 1/2 Dwight Heads

The thing I like about The Daily Show is that, in my opinion, its basic principle is to bring attention to people about the hypocrisy of television news. Fox News is usually the punching bag because it’s the most heinous offender, but Jon and his cohorts will attack everyone that is being ridiculous, causing partisan hackery that helps no one make their own clear, intelligent, unbiased opinions. What’s the point of roundtable discussions if everyone agrees with each other for the most part or disagrees with each other so much that all they do is yell and make fallacious arguments? It’s a “whoever screams the loudest wins” thought process and it’s causing a drift into a middle-ages like depression of unintelligent thought.

I love The Daily Show…I hope it never ends.

After the debacle that was last season, Bo Pelini was brought in to exercise the demons of the previous regime’s lackluster coaching abilities. Being that the defense was the most troublesome, giving up well over 100 points in the last three games of last season, the Blackshirts were the ones getting the most attention this game.

The game was on pay-per-view and that sucked. The cable version of Fox Sports sucks. The graphics are bad and it’s always blown out and grainy. The analysts are also-ran and wannabes. But, back to the game.

I liked the way that the offense played, for the most part. The run game sucked. Absolutely sucked. The biggest play from scrimmage was a zone read option from shotgun by Joe Ganz, going for about 35 yards. That play was awesome in that it showed that we have an additional threat in the backfield in a mobile quarterback. Ganz was awesome throwing the ball. The pass to Dreu Young on a playaction was thrown on a rope and put in a place where only he could get at it. Wow. An amazing throw. The problems I had were because the Huskers couldn’t get the running game going at all, they had to pass when they should’ve been running to keep the clock moving. It caused costly interceptions. The offense was just flat after we got the lead and the crowd fizzled.

The defense was getting the most attention. I felt that they played 1000 times better than they were last year. There were some bad plays and drives, like the two 50 yard pass plays on consecutive drives. This needs to be shored up. The secondary is young and inexperienced, and that showed, but they’re fast and passionate. Huge hits all around, flying to the ball, things that weren’t seen last year. The biggest thing about the game for the defense, allowing 8 yards rushing for the entire game.

There are things to work on after the first game, but that’s to be expected for a first year coach and staff, but the sky’s the limit for this team. I’m not gonna get my hopes up to much, but I expect nine wins from this team because of Joe Ganz and Cody Glenn. These guys are leaders and playmakers and it’s what Nebraska needs to get back to the top of the rankings.

Digital cameras (especially the ones on phones), social networking websites, and the emergence of web 2.0 have given stupid people in the 18-24 demographic an ability to share their photos with everyone who wants and doesn’t want to see them. This phenomena is the worst on MySpace. A person will take a picture of themselves, either with the face pointed down, away from the camera’s view, and the picture ends up being of their hair. This picture is supposed to convey depression and a “Help me, I’m about to cut myself again” vibe. Another typical picture is a person standing in front of a mirror, holding their phone in front of their face, and taking the picture so that their face isn’t in the photo but their body is because they want to show it off. These people need to stroke the ego (or themselves off for that matter) or improve their self-esteem (because listening to Simple Plan or The Cure non-stop isn’t helping). I have no idea how it improves self-esteem because depressed people are usually self-conscious and don’t like their body image.

Hey! Guess what idiots? You are not interested in photography. You are interested in yourself. Get yourself a mirror and build it on some sort of a hat contraption so you can wear it in front of your face all day because you obviously only care about one thing, and that’s numero uno.

note: I know my about page is filled with pictures of myself, but it filled the page up and that’s all that I was really looking for.

In flashbacks, we see that Henry Spencer (Corbin Bernsen) assumed his son, Shawn (James Roday), would follow in his footsteps and become a law officer. In preparation, Henry helps Shawn hone his powers of observation and deduction, often using games and challenges to test him.

Shawn originally becomes known as a psychic when, after calling in a tip on a crime covered on the news, the police become suspicious of his knowledge. Theorizing that such knowledge could only come from the inside, they are about to arrest him when he uses his observations to convince all present that he is psychic. The interim police chief warns Shawn that if his “powers” are fake, he will be prosecuted. With no choice but to keep up the act, he makes the most of it. Pretending to have psychic powers allows him to engage in strange and comic behavior as he turns real clues into hunches and otherworldly visitations. He enjoys teasing lifelong friend Gus (Dule Hill), a pharmaceutical representative, over his eclectic interests (including a love for comic books and superheroes, spelling bees, astronomy, and Spanish-language soap operas).

Head detective Carlton Lassiter (Timothy Omudson) doubts Shawn’s psychic abilities and initially does not value his work, while junior detective Juliet O’Hara (Maggie Lawson) and chief Karen Vick (Kirsten Nelson) either fail to recognize that Shawn is a fake, or else are more willing to go along with the charade to solve cases. Henry Spencer and Shawn have a difficult relationship; still Henry helps Shawn on numerous occasions.
Source: Wikipedia.org

James Roday is great as Shawn. He’s got a cocky/funny attitude towards everything that might come off as aloof or thoughtless to those in authority (his dad, Detective Lassiter, Chief Vick) but it shows a tenderness to the woman he pines over, Detective O’Hara. Dule Hill is hilarious as an uptight pharmaceutical salesman that loves sharing the spotlight with Shawn as they go on “psychic” adventures.

I love this show because it’s character driven. Anyone could play a fake psychic detective and solve crimes because they were hyper-observant. The development of Shawn and Gus brings it to the next level. It just wouldn’t be the same without those characters. The show is filled with plenty of gags and crime fighting, but they just wouldn’t be as funny if they were done by crappy characters. I also love that they use lame, obscure 80’s movie and pop-culture references.

If you love crime-fighting comedy shows, this would be a good one for you, but if you’re into character-based shows even more, then check this show out. It’s definitely in my top 10 shows right now.

Rating: 4 1/2 Dwight Heads

I’m not one to judge his judgment on this or other things for that matter, he’s been knighted by the Queen of England, but this is outrageous. This is another addition to the million things that only the richest of the rich can even dream of coming up with or possibly doing.