A better day

I just thought I would let everyone know that I received zero rejections today.

Another way Star Wars applies to real life

Star Wars Guide to the Presidential Candidates

Some of them have since dropped out, but very funny.

Did I mention I love Stephen Colbert?

Please read this article and/or watch the videos!

Colbert's Civil Rights MLK Day Writer's Strike-Busting Writerless Show — In Song

How to get Lindsey to go to an art museum

Oooh I wish I was going to be in DC sometime soon. I would totally go to the Smithsonian just to see Stephen's portrait!

Colbert earns "appropriate place" at Smithsonian

Picture-a-day 2007 comes to an end

Well I finished my picture-a-day project! I have a picture for every day of 2007. (I only had to cheat on a few days. For the small number of days I did miss, I posted a picture taken reasonably close to that day.) It is really fun to look back on the year in photos!

However, I have decided not to continue in 2008. In the end it got to be too hard/annoying trying to take a picture EVERY day. I may still continue to do favorite photos each month or something like that. Right now I'm just enjoying the liberating feeling of NOT having to make sure I have a picture each day.

If you would like the links to my 2007 pictures, let me know. I now have them divided up into 2 galleries, Jan-Jun and Jul-Aug at the same links as before.

Exactly

The next Pavel Datsyuk!

Check out this amazing goal by a 9 year old hockey player during an intermission activity at a Dallas Stars game!

World Series 2008!

You won't see many baseball posts on the Flying Lion, but I wanted to link to this cool article about the blockbuster trade the Tigers just made with the Florida Marlins. Boy the Tigers are looking grrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat for next year!

Tigers have mastered art of decisive dealmaking
by Jatson Stark

Isis in the morning

This is eerily similar to what she actually does (minus the baseball bat at the end)!

44-7!

Katie's new favorite song:




RAH RAH RAH!

My first live Lions game in more than 10 years, and we stomped the Broncos!

GOOOOOO LIONS! :)

This is too cool!

Try to count the number of laterals in this amazing, dramatic game winning play for a division III football team:

Wah!!!

I'm at a job interview right now!!!

Also, let it be known that on Oct 21, 2007 it was so hot I that had to use the air conditioning in my car while driving in the state of Michigan (and Indiana and Illinois).

Cantaloupe everywhere!

Ahh local news...the actual "Top Headline" this morning on the Grand Rapids NBC affiliate's website:

Highway ramp shutdown, cantaloupe everywhere

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

It sure doesn't feel like Thanksgiving weather! It was in the upper 80's and humid today. Still, on Canadian Thanksgiving I'm thankful that hockey season has begun! The Wings are 2-0-1 and the Griffins are 1-0. It's a good start to the season, and I'm expecting good things from both teams this year.

Also, happy birthday to Jean and Henrik Zetterberg tomorrow! :-)

Photo-a-day goes public

For the surprising number of you who look at my photo-a-day, I've moved July and August to the older photos gallery. However, I (finally) made my picture-a-day galleries public, so now if you are looking at the new pics you should be able to access the older ones by clicking on the public galleries option. As always, if you would like the link to my photos, comment here or email me and I will be happy to provide. :)

Survivorman

I have a new TV show recommendation for everyone: Survivorman! I love this show! The basic premise is that this guy (Les Stroud) gets dumped off in some remote location with hardly any supplies and no food or water, and he has to survive for a week. The cool thing is that he films it all himself. There is no camera crew or anything; he really is all alone the whole week trying to survive with just like a Swiss Army knife and a piece of gum or something.

Les is charismatic and interesting, and he has a lot of survival knowledge and experience. You will be amazed at the things he is able to think up to help him survive. Also, he goes to really cool locations like the Amazon rainforest, Canadian arctic, Arizona desert, African plains, etc.

The shows airs on the Discovery Channel. Also, for those of you with Netflix, Season 1 is available there too. I highly recommend it! :)

Sign we are living in Bizarro World:

The Lions are undefeated and Michigan is winless!

One sentence about the 2007 Detroit Lions

While I am very excited that the football season FINALLY began last night with the NFL season opener (the college games last weekend were still preseason, right? right?????????? please????), I am afraid that I find myself still a Lions fan. Despite the 10 win season predicted by our fearless QB Kitna, my attitude is much closer to that of ESPN columnist David Fleming, who gives this wonderful, one sentence explanation of why the Lions will win fewer than 8 games this year:

"The Lions were 9-7 in 2000 and missed the playoffs by one play (a game-winning 54-yard field goal by the Bears on the last snap of the season) when owner William Clay Ford, the great grandson of Henry Ford himself, pulled his own uber-Edsel and tabbed former NFL linebacker Matt Millen to run the franchise for a cool $3 million a year, despite the fact that Millen would continue to live in Pennsylvania most of the time (the Lions are located in Michigan), that he was legally blind in his eye for talent, that he wore sneakers with suits and that he possessed no actual front office experience of any kind whatsoever, zero organizational skills and, on occasion, the social couth of Britney Spears -- fatal flaws that first showed up with Millen's doomed decision to let interim coach Gary Moeller go in favor of the 49ers unknown and slightly quirky offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg, who has since become a good coach but was overmatched at the time and consequently went 5-27 -- a historic run of ineptitude highlighted by two things: his decision to kick the ball after winning a coin toss in overtime; and the choice of quarterback Joey Harrington as the third pick overall in the 2002 draft; Harrington, of course, was the first in a string of draft blunders by Millen (including, but not limited to, first-round busts wideouts Charles Rogers and Mike Williams) which were then layered by even poorer decisions in free agency that -- because of the current economic structure of the game that places a premium on fortifying your roster with inexpensive, young talent through the draft -- have crippled the the Lions at a rate of two years for every bad draft, which, by my calculations, puts them in the clear somewhere around 2047--something Millen might understand by now had he not spent so much time doing damage control for things like telling Mike Ditka during a radio interview about one of his players who was a "devout coward"; the true definition of which Millen himself conveyed a little later when he told Mornhinweg his job was safe while, behind his back, he was negotiating to bring in former 49ers coach Steve Mariucci, something he did, but only after being fined $200,000 by the league for not interviewing a minority candidate, an egregious error, to be sure, but also another fundamental, fatal, front office flaw considering how Mooch's schemes didn't match well with the personnel Millen had been able to cobble together through years of under drafting and over spending, leading to yet another season of futility, another sickening outburst (after a loss in Kansas City in 2003 Millen shouted a homophobic slur at Chiefs wideout Johnny Morton but kept his job) which led to the first recorded speculation four years ago about Millen's imminent dismissal (when, in fact, no one ever gets fired in this franchise, not even people who can't dress themselves) and then to what I think is the lowest point in the franchise's 77-year history: when Ford himself said he actually was pleased with Millen's drafts and his leadership and scoffed at complaints about Millen's 10-38 start, saying, "the fans, and I don't blame them, are interested in the won-loss record and I guess that's the barometer you judge success or failure by if you're a fan"; well, right, exactly, because everyone knows how unfair and subjective those silly NFL standings can be, I mean, that would be like someone measuring the Lions' heart only by that string of 24 consecutive road losses or something like the Ford Motor Company being judged strictly by its losses, layoffs and plant closings like the ones going on when, in 2005, Millen was given a FIVE-YEAR CONTRACT EXTENSION (the second most shocking thing in Michigan sports history after the App State loss) and Mooch was fired but allowed to continue earning more than $10 million not to coach the Lions -- something most NFL coaches would gladly do for free, just not potential candidates in Detroit like Jim Haslett and Russ Grimm who never received the courtesy of a phone call from Millen after he hired Rod Marinelli, a well-respected coach from Tampa who, nonetheless, led the Lions backwards to 13 more losses (seven of them on the road) and a humiliating 27-10 shellacking by Miami and former Millen scapegoat Joey Harrington on, of all days, Thanksgiving which, at least, inspired fan protests and walk-outs like the Millen Man March as Detroit -- softer (32nd in rushing and 28th in total defense), sloppier (minus-9 in turnover ratio) and slower than ever before -- suffered its sixth-straight losing season under Millen (who is now 24-72 with a league-worst .250 winning percentage during his realm despite once promising to "get out" if he couldn't win it all in five years) which, one could argue, did put the Lions in a position to draft fourth-time's-the-charm wideout Calvin Johnson whose huge frame fits perfectly with the rounded routes of offensive coordinator Mike Martz's schemes, thus giving the Lions the potential for a scary-good offense with a loaded backfield, a better line and three legit, downfield homerun hitters (Mike Furrey increased his catches by, oh, 97 balls in 2006); which, trust me, I know, is like waving a Vernors, a Coney (no mustard, light onions) and some Sanders ice cream under the noses of starving Lions fans, but could still all be for not if Kitna, 34, who got sacked 63 times in 2006, can't stay healthy and Millen's stellar backup plan, someone named Dan Orlovsky (career passing: 63 yards) takes over for the Motor City Kitties: a transaction that likely would lead to what is the only sure bet with the Lions these days: another contract extension for Millen."

Home sweet home!

I'm back at home (and reunited with my cat!) after a nice two week vacation. I accomplished my vacation goal of riding the Seadoo every day (even when it was 62 degrees and raining!, pictured above) and I also waterskiied for the the first time in a few years which felt great! Several of my friends came out to visit for a day, which was fun, and the weather was only semi-bad that day instead of terrible like usual. Finally, we had some excitement our 2nd to last night when a big storm came through and blew our boat away. (We later recovered it.) Now, it is back to real life and back to work. New goal: writing my thesis. My Seadoo goal was a lot more fun!

Read this if you eat meat

The text below is from an article by Gregg Easterbrook (one of my favorite ESPN.com writers). He is discussing the Michael Vick dog fighting situation but in doing so he does a great job pointing out why any of us who eat meat are responsible for cruelty to animals that is equal to or worse than what Vick did.

"Yet I can't help feeling there is overkill in the social, media and legal reactions to Vick, and that the overkill originates in hypocrisy about animals.

Thousands of animals are mistreated or killed in the United States every day without the killers so much as being criticized, let alone imprisoned. Ranchers and farmers kill stock animals or horses that are sick or injured. Some ranchers kill stock animals as gently as possible, others callously; in either case, prosecution is nearly unheard of. As Derek Jackson pointed out last week in the Boston Globe, greyhound tracks routinely race dogs to exhaustion and injury, then kill the losers, or simply eliminate less-strong pups: "184,604 greyhound puppies judged to be inferior for racing" were killed, legally, in the last 20 years.

Hunters shoot animals for sport. They do so lawfully, while the manner in which Vick harmed his dogs was unlawful. But from the perspective of the animal, there seems little difference between a hunter with a state game license zipped in his vest pocket shooting a deer as part of something the hunter views as really fun sport, and Vick shooting a dog as part of something Vick views as really fun sport. In both cases, animals suffer for human entertainment. The animal-ethics distinction between Vick's actions and lawful game hunting are murky at best. A first-time offender should go to prison over a murky distinction?

Much more troubling is that the overwhelming majority of Americans who eat meat and poultry -- I'm enthusiastically among them -- are complicit in the systematic cruel treatment of huge numbers of animals. Snickering about this, or saying you're tired of hearing about it, doesn't make it go away. Most animals used for meat experience miserable lives under cruel conditions, including confinement for extended periods in pits of excrement. (Michael Pollan, who enthusiastically consumes meat and fowl, describes the mistreatment in his important new book The Omnivore's Dilemma.) Meat animals don't magically stop living when it's time to become a product; they suffer as they die. One of Vick's dogs was shot, another electrocuted. Gunshots and electrocution are federally approved methods of livestock slaughter, sanctioned by the Department of Agriculture for the killing of cows and pigs. Regulations under the Humane Slaughter Act of 1958 give federal sanction to shooting cows or pigs, or running electrical current through their bodies. Shooting and electrocution are viewed by federal law as humane ways to kill animals that will be consumed. Federal rules also allow slaughterhouses to hit cows in the head with a fast-moving piston that stuns them into semiconsciousness before they are sliced up. Being hit in the head with a powerful piston -- does that sound a bit painful, a bit cruel? It's done to tens of thousands of steers per year, lawfully.

Don't say "eew, gross" about how meat animals are butchered, then return to denouncing Vick. If you're eating a cheeseburger or BLT or steak or pot roast today, there's a good chance you are dining on an animal that was shot or electrocuted. You are complicit. You freely bought the meat, you did not demand Congress strengthen the Humane Slaughter Act. Livestock can be calmed and drugged before being slain. A few slaughterhouses do this, but most don't because it raises costs, and you, the consumer, demand the lowest possible price for your meal. Now about your turkey sub or coq au vin. Federal slaughter regulations apply mainly to large animals, leaving considerable freedom in the killing of fowl. Many poultry slaughterhouses kill chickens by slashing their throats rather than snapping their necks. Snapping the neck kills the bird quickly, ending suffering, but then the heart dies quickly, too. Slashing the throat causes the bird to live in agony for several minutes, heart still beating and pumping blood out of the slash -- and consumers prefer bloodless chicken meat.

Further, the Humane Slaughter Act exempts kosher and halal slaughter. In both traditions, the cow or lamb must be conscious when killed by having its carotid artery, or esophagus and trachea, slashed. The animal bleeds to death, convulsing in agony, as its heart pumps blood, which is viewed as unclean, out of the slashed openings. The delicious pastrami we consumed at a kosher deli, or the wonderfully good beef we could buy at a halal butcher, comes from an animal that suffered as it died.

Yes, Vick broke the law; yes, he arrogantly lied and refused to apologize when first caught; and yes, his actions before and after the dog killings indicate he is one stupid, stupid man. But Vick's lawbreaking was relatively minor compared to animal mistreatment that happens continuously, within the law, at nearly all levels of the meat production industry, and with which all but vegetarians are complicit. There is some kind of mass neurosis at work in the rush to denounce Vick, wag fingers and say he deserved even worse. Society wants to scapegoat Vick to avoid contemplating its own routine, systematic killing of animals. We couldn't all become vegetarians tomorrow: that is not practical. But American society is not even attempting to make the handling of meat animals less brutal, let alone working to transition away from a food-production order in which huge numbers of animals are systematically mistreated, then killed in ways that inflict terror and pain. We won't lift a finger to change the way animals die for us. But we will demand Michael Vick serve prison time to atone for our sins."