The NASCAR season began today and I've decided I'm going to be a more avid fan this year. Mainly I need something to fill the void left by the absence of football. I grew up an auto racing fan, so it doesn't take much to get me back into gear (pun intended).
I'm also extremely interested in seeing crew chief Drew Blickensderfer's name gracing the coveted position in the 2009 F'd Up Tourney mainstays list. What is this, you say? Let me delve into one of the greatest ideas of all time.
Three years ago, I received a magic marker board that had a design of a blank 64-team tournament bracket. After long deliberation, it was decided that we needed to fill this bracket with completely random people, organizations and events.
What ensued was a weekly tradition of flipping a coin to decide which seed moved on. Higher seeds had to win fewer flips to advance. Check out the bracket:
Sadly, we have yet to finish flipping to see who ends up as the champion. Whether that happens is moot though because the 2009 version of the F'd Up Tourney will put all other imagined tournaments to shame. (Eat your heart out ESPN and your “Who's Now?” bracket that you blatantly ripped off from us)
The 2009 version will be a 128-spot bracket, which will include a certain number of “mainstays,” certain ones that make the list every single year. Consider this the equivalent of automatic bids in the NCAA men's basketball tournament. To figure out which mainstays get into the tournament, Luke and I actually plan on having a Mainstays Tournament (similar to a pre-season NIT). It's a tournament inside a tournament, which I'm convinced could only be thought up by fans of the TV show LOST.
We plan on compiling a list of mainstays on February 24, the 4th anniversary of “Kevin Hunting” becoming a verb. (Quick explanation: Former Temple Men's Basketball Head Coach John Chaney sent a bench player to commit an intentional foul. The foul ended in an opposing player breaking his arm. Chaney gave himself a one-game suspension. After announcing this, Andrew Braverman and Joe Barrett decided that Chaney had just “Kevin Hunted” his career. Luke started laughing so hard that he ran outside and threw up in Braverman's shrubs. The verb has stuck ever since.)
I will do my best to keep up with the hilarity of the entire 2009 F'd Up Tourney on this blog site. And this idea is now copyrighted, so don't steal it or I'll find you and destroy you.
As I type this, I'm still sitting on dinner break. I've decided that working Sundays at a TV station is possibly the worst way to spend a day. Since we have a 5 p.m. newscast (who the eff has a 5 p.m. and no 6?!?!) and I have to sit in this newsroom listening to the awful police scanners telling me things that I don't really care about, but can't miss in case we need to show-and-tell it to some of our viewers who also really don't care. I'm forced to take a longer-than-normal break as well, making up for the time gap.
I just sit here, for two hours on Sundays, watching TV (but not with the sound turned up in case of scanner traffic), surfing facebook (this is where I get my stalker reputation – looking through random photo albums becomes a hobby) and trying to read up on sports (but I can't concentrate because I'm so far out of the sports loop being on the news side). Thankfully I don't work a lot of Sundays, so I'm happy for that.
Plus I still have seven days off that need to be used within my first year of employment (June 23 is that anniversary), so things should be slowing down substantially very soon.
I plan on doing a live blog from work at some point, just to give people an inside look at what goes on during the day/night at NBC 15. You'll have to check out my work blog for that. Stay tuned.
Baseball season is almost here and I'm interested to see how the Cleveland Indians' starting rotation shapes up.
If it sticks, Laffey and Reyes will likely switch positions, but overall it seems like the team is depending on players to be different than they always have been, namely with Pavano and Reyes.
But who cares about pitching when you have Grady Sizemore in center. Love watching him play.
Well this has been good enough for who it's for. Hope you enjoyed it. Go Tribe.
