Celtics Lose NOOO!

Ahh! Dammit! We had a 13 point lead for crying out load, and they gave it all up in the last like 6 minutes of the game.

Ah it was a good run. The Lakers were strongly favored; Celtics weren't even supposed to make it this far. Perkins was out of the game on injury. And in the end I would like to point out that apart from a three-pointer from Kobe, LA's like last 15 points were all free-throws. It was like every time they went down there at the end of the game drew a foul. Yes, that is largely Boston's falt, but it was like 'COME ON! AGAIN!'

Ah well. Just to show though that I'm not going to be terribly bitter about this I do want to show you this commercial they showed during the game. It's actually really clever considering this would be LA's fifth title. The song "All Together Now" is a Beatles' song being covered by Andree 3000. It's a pretty good version. Unfortunately I think it is only for commercial and can't be downloaded.

Billionare - Travis McCoy

With absolutly no authority to do so or power by which to enforce it, I declare this the new CBPA anthem. Just go with it.

Book: The Lost City of Z

Yes, I actually read an entire, real, book book. Pretty impressive I know. But enough of my staggering achievement. This book is freaking amazing, and even more so because it is entirely true.

This English gentlemen from the late 19th century, Colonel Percival Harrison Fawcett, was the greatest explorer of his time. He is largely responsible for exploring and mapping most much of the Amazonian region. If you have ever seen the Pixar movie Up, the explorer Charles F. Muntz is pretty much the idea you should picture (without the talking dogs of course). Fawcett was this absolutely remarkable man's man type of fellow. During this time there were no vaccines or other amenities of modern medicine. While most people in his parties were overwhelmed by disease and infection during the journeys, Fawcett never got sick. He managed to form close relationships with local tribes that had only showed other parties violent hostility.

Throughout his explorations he began to develop theory based on evidence he had seen that the storys of El Dorado, while exageranted to some degree, were based on an actual, magnificent, ancient city lost somewhere in the heart of Brazil. However despite having come back triumphant in the face of insurmountable conditions in the past, Fawcett, his son, and his son's best friend mysteriously disappear. Because he was such a notable public figure at the time, all of the search parties have gone out to find him over the decades with often similar results that they do not return.

Helen Thomas

WOW! Haha ... Now I've heard some pretty off color things from the mouths of some from the older generation, but WOW! What is probably even more wild about this is that Helen Thomas, the woman in the video making all of the blatant anti-zionist statements, after 50 years as a member of the White House Press Corp and its most iconic members, she is stepping down because of these comments. The women started there with John F. Kennedy. She has served there for over half a century.

Now to be fair she is around 90 years old and closely resembling the undead, so retirement was bound to come soon, but the circumstances have brought about some questions of the rights of free speech. Now the video shown here asks how Mrs. Thomas can be unbiased in her reporting when she is making comments such as these, but would they have made similar accusations if she had spoken in of the Israel state?

The zionist issue is not a simple matter and is certainly one littered with heavy areas of gray. There is no ignoring the atrocities made towards the Jewish people in the Holocaust of WWII, but the establishment of the Israel state does seem to have been made out of guilty haste with little considerations of the people already occupying the area. There have been tremedous acts of violence committed both parties, and yet the United States has stood in unwavering support of Israel.

To a degree this has been necessary in order to establish the state in such hostile territory, that is if you believe the state should have been established at all. However if you do not believe as such, it begs the question what should have been done with some millions of people having just faced the worst atrocity in modern history. It is not a simple issue, but it is certainly it is a issue that ought to open for discussion.

Movie: A-Team

All right, yes, A-Team was a cheesy 80's TV show, and, yes, this is another display of Hollywood's lack of originality, but that does not mean this will be a bad movie. Think about. We have seen a number of pretty decent 80's remakes. None of them brilliant examples of filmmaking I'll grant you, but they were still fairly entertaining. We've had in recent years The Dukes of Hazard and Starsky and Hutch, and, if you want to go back a little farther, The Brady Bunch movie was good enough to get a sequel. These movies understood just how ridiculous these shows were and just had fun with it. So I don't know this could be pretty funny.

Dow Below 10K

AHHH! It wasn't but a month ago that we had finally reached above 11000. Ah happy days have come and gone. We haven't closed below 10K since February and today it happened. There was an initial rally at the beginning of the day when the market received the best new home sales report since 2008. The damn euro is what drug us down. Apparently China freaked everyone out when they said that they would be reevaluating their euro bond holdings what with the every growing Greek deficits. Come on!

Bare Feet

Okay so I was watching the Bryant Gumbel HBO sports show, and they had this story about running barefoot. These guys had been studying indigenous Mexican tribes that could run at top speeds for these HUGE distances having lived their whole lives without shoes. Another group was studying those tribes in African that seem to produce the worlds top Olympic runners, and this group too saw barefoot as a contributing factor to the amazing performance.

When you run barefoot, they noticed that the front ball of the foot actually touches down first, as opposed to with shoes where you're foot hits the ground at the heel. By landing on the front first you actually cause less shock to your legs. You always hear about how careful you have to be and how it can tear you up, but this theory suggests that running is natural thing we were built to do. To be true, there is still a lot of controversy about this. Some people don't have the ideal foot structure and need that shoe support.

If you do want to try a more natural running style, I would suggest the Vibram Five Finger. They're pretty cool little deals. You get as close to the barefoot experience without risking stepping on glass or tiny rocks or any of the other inconveniences of the ground. I would not recommend wearing these into the weight room, though. It always hurts to drop a weight on your foot, but the protection of a real shoe helps.