Casino Royale: The best Bond ever?

I was watching Casino Royale last night, and it's just good. And since list making is a good way to generate readership and participation (it's true, look it up), I'm commissioning the rare Lucid Idiocy contest.

If you're a James Bond fan, and I mean an "of course I watched On her Majesty's Secret Service last night on TBS" kind of fan, let me know what you think the best Bond movies of all time are. Email your list to tfain@macon.com and put "Bond" in the subject line. I delete a lot of random emails.

I'm thinking a top 5, maybe a top 10. Make your case, and feel free to include comments on best Bond Girl, best Bond Villain, best James Bond and best Bond Opening Scene. But if you put License to Kill in there anywhere... I just don't even know how dumb that makes you.

Here's a list of the movies, including a bunch of links to plot summaries, etc. to get you started.

Bobby Petrino and his wife... Morgan Fairchild

Hilarious:

"Hold on. In 2002, when you left your eighth team, the Jacksonville Jaguars, for your ninth team, Auburn, you said, 'I gave it a good run in the NFL. I enjoyed my time there and learned a lot. But college is where I prefer to be.'"

"You work for Google or something?

If I was split personality disorder, I'd start running. Fast.

Apparently The Goal Line Stalker has written a book in which he will reveal that he has suffered from multiple personality disorder.

That's not particularly staggering, because the guy used to write poetry in between utterly decimating entire defenses, obliterating rushing records, running track and competing in the Winter Olympics. But it's proof that you can overcome mental illness in a big way, particularly since Walker is, by every account I've ever seen, an exceedingly good person as well as a phenomenal athlete.

By the way, the real reason I'm even posting this is to share my buddy Joe's comment on this:

Two personalities? Really? What are they, Badass and SuperDestroyer?

Kids today

I tell you what, they just don't listen. I mean, you have 12 to 24 kids by four or five wives and all they do is defy your commandment to kill the infidel for the glory of Allah.

Bin Laden's son wants to be a peace activist.

Two things:
1. I hope he's serious.
2. Anyone who thought I couldn't get Osama Bin Laden, polygamy and Bob Dylan into one post was wrong. Damn wrong.


your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
your old road is rapidly aging
please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand
for the times, they are a changin'

Larry Munson, Herschel Walker and Knowshon Moreno

I just can't tell you how awesome this is. It's the piece that ran before the Sugar Bowl.

The look on Knowshon's face when Herschel says "the only thing that separates us now: the Heisman and the National Championship" is going to keep me warm the entire off season.

Hat tip: Georgia Sports Blog (of course).

Stop the presses, it's sort of sleeting in Macon

I think I'm going to go stand outside of Kroger tonight and just slap the ever-living crap out of anyone who comes out carrying bread and milk.

Your daily King

I finished "Where do we go from here?" last night, and have much to share. But, unfortunately, The Macon Telegraph does not pay me to type up a bunch of Martin Luther King quotes and offer comment on them.

But I do want to share this:

I learned a lesson many years ago from a report of two men who flew to Atlanta to confer with a civil rights leader at the airport. Before they could being to talk, the porter sweeping the floor drew the local leader aside to talk about a matter that troubled him. After fifteen minutes had passed, one of the visitors said bitterly to his companion, "I am just too busy for this kind of nonsense. I haven't come a thousand miles to sit and wait while he talks to a porter."

The other replied, "When the day comes that he stops having time to talk to a porter, on that day I will not have the time to come one mile to see him."

When I heard this story, I knew I was being told something I should never forget.

MLK, Boyz in the Hood, Iraq, Alexis de Tocqueville and Doonesbury

If it's not already obvious, I'm reading several books by Martin Luther King right now, and I'll just quote them all day long:

Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus. I said on one occasion, "If ever Negro in the United States turns to violence, I will choose to be that one lone voice preaching that this is the wrong way." Maybe this sounded like arrogance. But it was not intended that way. It was simply my way of saying that I would rather be a man of conviction than a man of conformity. Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it til the end. This is what I have found in nonviolence.
- Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go From Here?, 1967

Boyz in the Hood was on Saturday night and, during the scene where Cuba Gooding Jr's friends are arrested for the first time, I wondered: Why don't we teach non-violence in kindergarten and elementary school?

I'm not talking about Jesus or other religions, most of which teach that love is the most powerful force in the universe. I'm talking about the political force that has enacted more positive change in this world than any other, without firing a shot.

I also thought to myself: Maybe if whites had been made to live as blacks for a few years in the 1950s the civil rights movement would have chugged along a little faster, but that's kind of irrelevant.

Back to King:

This is not to imply that the Negro is a saint who abhors violence. Unfortunately, a check of the hospitals in any Negro community on any Saturday night will make you painfully aware of the violence within the Negro community. By turning his hostility and frustration with the larger society inward, the Negro often inflicts terrible acts of violence on his own black brother. ...

Therefore I must oppose any attempt to gain our freedom by the methods of malice, hate, and violence that have characterized our oppressors. Hate is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and east away its vital unity.

And from an earlier portion of the book:

During a nonviolent demonstration for voting rights, the sheriff had directed his men in tear-gassing and beating marchers to the ground. The nation had seen and heard, and exploded in indignation. In protest, Negroes and whites marched fifty miles through Alabama. ... The Voting Rights Bill of 1965 was the result. ...

Mass marches transformed the common man into the star performer and engaged him in a total commitment. Yet nonviolent resistance caused no explosions of anger - it instigated no riots - it controlled anger and released it under discipline for maximum effect.

I know at least one person who would disagree with that, but I wasn't there in the 1960s, so I can't say.

I can point out a similarity between the King's nonviolent movement and the concept of civil disobedience, described here by Alexis de Tocqueville:

When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.

I can also wonder whether this same strategy, combined with a nearly limitless ability for forgiveness, could solve the problems in the Middle East. In fact, I wonder if it might be the only thing that will solve those problems.

By the way, this was yesterday's Doonesbury in The Telegraph:

106 miles to Chicago

Because someone mentioned it randomly in the newsroom just now:

By the way, there's an odd dearth of Blues Brothers movie clips on the Internet.

Sunrise in Colorado

I meant to post this last week, but got busy. It's the view from the house where my parents took the family recently for a ski trip.

MLK and 9.11

For some reason, you can get in a lot of trouble in this country by suggesting that the normal laws of cause and effect may have been in play when Islamic terrorists attacked this country on Sept. 11, 2001.

Or, to put it another way, that United States policy may have helped lead to that terrible day.

So let me go ahead and admit that, when I read this quote last night from Martin Luther King Jr.'s book "Where do we go from here":

Cries of black power and riots are not the causes of white resistance, they are the consequences of it.

I wrote "9/11?" as a note to myself in the margin. Please, no one tell Rudy Giuliani. A buddy of mine and I were drinking and talking a couple of months ago, and he said something that I thought was so well-put and simple that I wrote it down:

Let's just maybe stop and think for a second. ... Maybe something that we've done in the past is encouraging this behavior. ... The CIA knows about blowback.... If you piss somebody off, it's gonna cause a hatred. Doesn't mean it's your fault but tell me that doesn't mean s#@$. ... And of course if we leave (Iraq) that's another @#$% you.

Well put. And while I'm sounding like an unAmerican pinko coward of a commie anyway, let me share this quote, from the same King book, which King attributed to former federal Office of Economic Opportunity director Hyman Bookbinder:

The poor can stop being poor if the rich are willing to become even richer at a slower rate.

I'm not sure that's true. But if it is, we should get on that.

AIDS research breakthrough

As my buddy who sent this to me said: "When the guy who discovers AIDS says this is one of the most important research projects on the virus in a decade, I consider it worthy of your review."

From the Washington Post:

A research team announced yesterday that it has identified about 270 human proteins that the AIDS virus apparently needs to infect a person, instantly providing researchers with dozens of new strategies for blocking or aborting HIV infection.

Everest and Mercury

United by a sense of exploration...

This is Sir Edmund Hillary's obituary, which is bound to be better than mine. Particularly since his made The New York Times.

“The whole world around us lay spread out like a giant relief map,” he told one interviewer. “I am a lucky man. I have had a dream and it has come true, and that is not a thing that happens often to men.”

According to the obituary, Hillary preferred to be called Ed. His father was journalist and beekeeper. He was 88.

Meanwhile, NASA is sending a probe closer to the planet Mercury than any man-made thing has ever been:

NASA's MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) probe will make a close approach to Mercury on Monday, one of three scheduled passes before slipping into a stable orbit around the hot planet in 2011.

The probe will be the first to enter orbit there, although the Mariner 10 previously visited the planet in the mid-1970s. But with an approach as close as 124 miles this time, MESSENGER will be able to send back more data, and images of higher resolution, than were achieved by the earlier craft.

No. No. We are not satisfied.

So you can just watch this on YouTube now. Amazing.


There are quite a lot of them online, in fact. This is just a snippet of King's final speech, made the day before he was killed:

Murder in the Cathedral

Where Cathedral = Super Dome and Murdered = Colt Brennan...

Not really. I read T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral over my vacation. And, yes, stuff like this is why my friends all make fun of me.

But there was plenty of wisdom to be found:

The peace of the world is always uncertain unless men keep the peace of God.

Every day is the day we should fear or hope from. One moment weighs like another. Only in retrospection, selection, we say, that was the day.

You think me reckless, desperate and mad. You argue by results, as this world does, to settle if an act be good or bad. You defer to fact. For every life and every act consequence of good and evil can be shown. As in time results of many deeds are blended so good an evil in the end become confounded.

There's another Eliot stanza, from The Wasteland, that is one of my favorites:

The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed

That, I think, is pretty self-explanatory. I would say it is my favorite quote. Perhaps I will add it to my facebook page.

As for the passage about being "reckless, desperate and mad," I figure it like this: If a pretty sizeable portion of the population doesn't think you're at least a little bit $*^#ing crazy, then you're probably doing it wrong. In fact, I don't think I've convinced enough people that I'm crazy, so that's my New Year's resolution: Stop not doing things that people tell me are crazy.

Clear enough? Excellent. I'll close with Martin Luther King Jr., who has a birthday coming up. He was writing as if he were the apostle Paul addressing Americans in the 1960s:

American Christians, I must say to you what I wrote to the Roman Christians years ago: "Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind." You have a dual citizenry. You live both in time and eternity. Your highest loyalty is to God, and not to the mores or the folkways, the state or the nation, or any man-made institution. ... In a time where men are surrendering the high values of the faith you must cling to them, and despite the pressure of an alien generation reserve them for children yet unborn. You must be willing to challenge unjust mores, to champion unpopular causes, and to buck the status quo. You are called to be the salt of the earth. You are to be the light of the world.

Congrats to the Hoop Dawgs

A win over tech is a win over tech, and the Dawgs are 9-4 now. Even if it was ugly:

No shot was un-botchable, no fundamental safe as the team's met for the 184th time in this rivalry. The two easiest shots in the game - layups and free throws - clanked off the iron again and again.

Georgia shot 64.5 percent from the free-throw line, a horrid number but more impressive when compared to Tech's 54.3 percent.

The Yellow Jackets, who lost their 12th straight game in Athens, missed-layup count neared double digits in the first half alone. Georgia Tech shot just 40 percent from the floor.

Moving to the front

Ching, as he always does, gives us an excellent rundown of yesterday's teleconference with Coach Richt.

Man, I am fired up. These are just excerpts:

On whether he expects any of the juniors to leave:
I’d be very surprised at this point, just talking to Dannell, talking to Brannan Southerland…Jeffrey…I don’t think any one of those three guys are interested at all. We had a team meeting to talk about academics Sunday night prior to classes beginning and with the new meeting, there’s a new seating arrangement and our seniors always move to the front. And I think they enjoy sitting in the front and they look back and were kinda reminiscing that it wasn’t that long ago that they were sitting at the top…at the back of the room – I say the top because it’s tiered seating…and they were kinda looking up and back and going, ‘Man, it seemed like yesterday I was way back there and here I am on the front.’ It was kinda that realization that they’re in a leadership role now. I think they enjoy being there and they’re excited about the opportunity to lead the team.

On playing LSU and Florida on back-to-back weeks in the fall:
I’m not looking forward to that at all. I don’t know who was in charge of that. Sometimes the SEC schedule, they just hand it to you and there’s not much you can do about that part. Your out-of-conference games, you have some say. But I would not say that’s ideal. I doubt that anybody in the country would envy that situation.

On the 2008 schedule:
It does look like a very grueling schedule, and then you add Arizona State at Arizona State, and they’re a fine football team. And in the West, you’ve got Auburn, Alabama, LSU. That’s probably the toughest draw, or one of the toughest draws, you could get in the West. And then of course, you have the usual suspects in the East. And we always finish with Georgia Tech. It’s definitely gonna be a schedule that I would imagine to be preseason ranked as one of the toughest in the country. The computer polls I guess do take some strength of schedule into consideration, and I think voters, when they do even the human vote, even though they may not say, ‘Hey, strength of schedule is a criteria for my decision,’ I think it always comes into play.

On whether they need to do anything different this offseason because of all the preseason No. 1 talk:
Not really, but I think if guys want to start talking about it out in the open, they’ve got to understand there’s a lot of responsibility that goes with it – mainly work, preparation. They’ve gotta understand that those types of seasons don’t happen on accident, they happen because people pay the price. If that motivates our guys to work even harder, then that’s great.

I don't remember them being THIS spectacular

A buddy of mine wrote this, and I asked his permission to print it here. I hate it when people write gooder than me.

Sanford Stadium, in all of its glory, is empty, waiting for the day it is filled again with more than 96,000 of our closest friends. And so are we. The UGA shrine at the East end zone has the facial expression of a pup that has lost its owner. And so do we. The airwaves are still there, yet they lack a soul. There is no more Munson for us to hear. No one to give us chills and goose bumps. No one to make us worried about that freshman running back from that D-II school that could, at any moment, take it to the house and whittle down that 40 point lead we built up in the first half.

Nope. All of this gone for the moment. But fear not, my friends. Because, much like the hedges that surround the battle field, we must fade away for a while. We have to take a moment to recall the good times of the last 5 months and even more time to think about the ones to come. Because, just like the hedges, we will come alive next fall. Yes, we will come back to life next fall more glorious than ever imagined. People will look upon us, as they do the hedges every year, and they will say, "I remember them being beautiful, but I don't remember them being THIS spectacular". And all will be right. The 8 months of torturous waiting will be over, and it will have been worth it.

Because like I said, I'm happy our Georgia Bulldogs finished 2nd this year.

But #1 is where we're headed.

- Chris Brusko

I would note, and I know Brusko would as well, that there are other concerns between now and the fall. The Dawgs' basketball team (which I will begrudgingly recognize as existing if they do well tonight) plays Georgia tech tonight in Athens.

And there's always baseball season, tennis, gymnastics and a host of other sports for us to cheer.

Go Dawgs.

Take that! Ohio State, college football poll voters, Michael Adams and my liver (again).

Can we make it a rule that Ohio State doesn't get to play in another National Title game, unless it's against Georgia?

Seriously, is every single voter who had them at No. 1 ashamed, and can we get some signed letters of apology mailed to Coach Richt, Southern Cal., the SEC, college football fans in general and all that is right and holy in this world?

Because you chumps blew it.

By the way - as LSU was hoisting the National Title trophy, the folks at the Super Dome shot a bunch of purple and yellow confetti all over the place. I wonder, what do they do with the Ohio State confetti? Presumably they saved last year's supply. Cuts down on costs.

Or maybe they just never bought any, since it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that Ohio State was going to get brutalized like a handicapped second grader playing in a middle school dodge ball game.

As my sister said after Ohio State suffered its first near decapitation: "Welcome to a regular season SEC game, jackasses."

And now I see Michael Adams is for a playoff. That's good news. Where was he 8 years ago, when the rest of us realized the BCS was a mess? Or in 2004 when Auburn went undefeated, got screwed, and exposed the system as the joke it is?

Welcome to the party, President Adams. I hope you brought beer, because we floated the obvious keg last night.

I also saw that Ohio State's president is against a playoff. Shocking. The guy who most benefits from not having a playoff is against adding one. Someone give a wounded deer a microphone and let's see what he thinks about adding bazookas to the list of approved hunting weapons.

Take that! Hawaii, Colt Brennan, New Orleans, the BCS and my liver.

Four train days
Carry me back to New Orleans...

I'm back. Surely plenty has been said about the Sugar Bowl. Pretty much every news account I read after the game included some form of the phrase "wicked beating." My personal favorite was a column subhed in The New Orleans Times-Picayune: "Georgia defense will haunt Brennan forever."

Honestly, I haven't seen anyone take a beating like that outside of a Rocky movie.

But I will say that the Hawaii fans seemed nice. Of course, the only real interaction I had with them was listening to them talk about how cold it was and watching them give each other that cute little "aloha" hand gesture.

But they sat there at the Super Dome and watched the entirety of an epic beatdown they came 2,000 miles to witness, so I can respect that.

Looking ahead, I love where this leaves us. Being ranked No. 2 at the end of the season is great, but, more importantly, this young team is hungry. They got a taste of just how close they could come to an actual National Title shot in a season that, let's be serious, was on the brink of disaster in October.

Now they feel invincible. I really think Coach Richt could start matt drills tomorrow and he'd have these kids slobbering at the mouth to run gassers at 5 a.m.

Better yet, let's keep playing. My buddy Joe wants to line up and play all the other 118 teams in college football, alphabetically, starting tomorrow.

What Coach Richt, his staff, and this team have accomplished this year is nothing short of staggering. It is the launching pad to new heights. I've been saying it since last year, but now I'll put it in print: We will win back-to-back National Titles in 2008 and 2009.

Also, someone drive dump truck full of money up to Stacy Searels house. He can not talk to the media all he wants.

We lose so few weapons next year. A young offensive line that was so strong at the end of this season should improve. The concern now: Off-season shenanigans (read: disciplinary suspensions) and hype. And since we open with two cupcakes, mostly hype.

Bulldogs, you're going to be a fashionable pick to win the title in 2008, and with good reason. Don't believe it boys. Please don't forget you almost lost to Vandy this year. This game you love is hard.

As for the Sugar Bowl experience, New Orleans starred as itself, as always. And, as always when pitted against any challenger except mother nature, it won.

I got home to a pretty fantastic string of emails from my friends. Most of them added up to "Ouch." Some of them included real nice visuals of their return to work following the Sugar Bowl:

When attempting to set my coffee on someone's desk it immediately fell to the floor and spilled everywhere.

Its fun when you have to keep telling stories about black eyes at work. CEO's and board members really respect them. (Editor's note: This man was beaten up by a cajun woman, who apparently hit him in the head with a bottle.)

It's also fun when you call one of your clients to have an at-length conversation today - and the said client reminds you that you've already had this at-length discussion yesterday. (Editor's note: This young lady drove BACK to New Orleans this past weekend for the National Title game.)

Yeah, the Big Easy was pretty tough on some of us.

A few last points:

I don't know how I could have missed it from the upper deck, but my brother told me a group called "Bonerama" performed the National Anthem before the game. You stay classy, New Orleans. And be sure to overcharge me while you're at it.

My dad told me that the television broadcast had a bit with Herschel Walker and Knowshon Moreno walking around Sanford Stadium, and that Knowshon tried to teach Herschel the "Soulja Boy" dance.

How is this not on YouTube? Why even have YouTube?

As for our tailgate, I thought things couldn't get more ridiculous. Then helicopters started showing up. Seriously, we tailgated right outside of the Super Dome, and next to the helicopter landing pad. As my buddy Brett said, we pulled up, got out of the cars, shot-gunned a beer and the state police flew in reinforcements.

This first short video gives you the lay of the land. Notice how I totally pan away from the action and make a smart ass comment just as the helicopter pilot makes a fantastic move.


Shortly after that, the state patrol helicopter took off, leaving just the second chopper. Right after the patrol helicopter left... well, look what the other chopper pilot does:

Yeah. He just changes parking spots. Awesome.