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Mmmmm. Delicious.

New policy: Until at least Labor Day, no more blogging on Saturday/Sunday - except for sports blogging, which happens in the moment(!), and cannot wait for Monday. But - not much happening in sports right now. So, likely no weekend blogging until football season. Go Cowboys; go Horned Frogs; geaux Tigers; go Aggies; on Wisconsin; sic 'em Bears; be Mean, Green.

Which reminds: Baton Rouge, LA must be one of the best places in America for sports talk radio about college sports. The radio guys are SOOO knowledgeable there. During my brief visit to Baton Rouge, I learned LSU is a serious contender for the 2007 National Championship (Geaux!). I learned Wisconsin might deserve to be ranked higher than their pre-season ranking of #7. Wow. Geaux Badgers. Baton Rouge sports talk radio has their eye on you.

Also stopped in College Station and learned that - despite rosy pre-season predictions - true Aggie fans know, just as a matter of fate: A&M is gonna suck. They know it. They expect you to know it. They expect everyone to know it.

Human Interest Note: TCU, despite having a hole at QB, is pre-season favorite to win the Mountain West, and to have a good TCU team - aka a pretty salty team you might rather not play. Lately, TCU has been putting together pretty salty teams pretty often.

TCU has a DE who might be a top half of the 1st round NFL pick: Tommy Blake. Blake is about 270 lbs. He is very fast, and he makes plays: play after play after play. Blake is not a kid with "potential." He is a kid who's been wreaking havoc on the field since his Sophomore season.

Tommy Blake is also a nice, soft spoken, small-town-America kid from around Port Aransas. Grew up living with his grandmother - with no men around. He's the kind of kid who needed a lot of development out of h/s: physically, intellectually, and emotionally. TCU does wonders with such kids. Anyway, Blake was kicking a** and taking names for 7 days of preseason football. On the 8th day, NFL scouts showed up en masse on the TCU sideline: studying Blake's every move, making notes in their secretive notebooks, watching, watching, watching.

Blake freaked out a bit. He's a shy kid who doesn't welcome scrutiny. He sorta wanted to play in college, then have a quiet NFL career, then go home to live near Port Aransas. After that practice, Blake got dressed and drove 7+ hours to Port Aransas, to his beloved grandmother's house. Now, TCU coach Gary Patterson is going to have to fly to the Port Aransas area after Saturday's practice, then do his best impersonation of Bambi's father, and try to help Tommy Blake "buck up", so to speak.

Puns?! .... the media are dog-piling on top of Michael Vick .... Thank you! I'll be here M-F next week! Hot Links:

~1~ Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became an Evil Overlord

2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.
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5. The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.
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12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
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98. If an attractive young couple enters my realm, I will carefully monitor their activities. If I find they are happy and affectionate, I will ignore them. However if circumstance have forced them together against their will and they spend all their time bickering and criticizing each other except during the intermittent occasions when they are saving each others' lives at which point there are hints of sexual tension, I will immediately order their execution.

~2~ Short video about 2007 Dallas Cowboys facemasks. I've loved facemasks ever since childhood. My childhood favorite was James Street's facemask, circa 1969.
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~3~ French President Sarkozy angers intellectuals by ............ jogging:

Mr Sarkozy has rekindled a French suspicion that the habit is for self-centred individualists such as the Americans who popularised it. “Jogging is of course about performance and individualism, values that are traditionally ascribed to the Right,” Odile Baudrier, editor of V02 magazine, a sports publication, told Libération. Patrick Mignon, a sports sociologist, noted that French intellectuals had always held sport in contempt, while totalitarian regimes cultivated physical fitness.

~4~ The top gift from Italian parents to daughters graduating from High School is ____ ____.
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~5~ Speaking of: though I don't watch Nip/Tuck, this is a wicked good mini promo for "a deeply superficial series". Season 5 will prominently feature Madonna.
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Nip/Tuck also had a hip Season 4 promo.

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~6~ and last: Atlanta Braves fans love Mark Teixeira. My favorite moment in any song is when the writer reeeeeaaaaaches for something that rhymes, and comes back with something quirky, such as "Berra."