More and more, the finger points at talent

Seth Emerson looks at the last 10 years or so of Bulldog drafts and sees more than a correlation to our performance on the field.

You can read the article for the numbers, but here's the sentence that struck me:

Offensive lineman Clint Boling is the Bulldogs’ most draftable senior, according to Detillier, who thinks Boling is a late fourth or early fifth-round pick.

The biggest problems, though, have been on defense, where we haven't had a player taken in the first two rounds since Tim Jennings in 2006.

Buck Belue was talking about this issue, going forward at least, the other day:

Let me be as honest as I can be about the Georgia defense. We had 9 guys out there that wouldn't be starting at Auburn, LSU or Bama. Only Houston and Boykin are capable of starting elsewhere. Wonder when Grantham realized that?

The personnel should be better in 2011, with Jarvis Jones, Richard Samuel, and Alec Ogletree plugged in. But it's the D-Line that has me concerned looking ahead. Who are the impact dudes; like Auburn's Fairley. Don't see any.

I don't know how much stock I put into Richard Samuel as a starting linebacker next year, since he hasn't cracked the depth chart at all this year. But, then, I had the same concerns last year, when Aaron Murray didn't beat Joe Cox out for the starting job, and look how that turned out.

The bottom line is that we're going to have to find impact players for every level of the defense, and particularly in the middle of the defense. If Buck says we've got that covered next year at linebacker and safety, I'll allow myself some cautious optimism, though I think Jones is an outside linebacker - a position more crucial in the 3-4.

But destructive nose tackles ... you don't usually just pluck one of those off a high school football field.

The dude he shot down

NPR's World Cafe did an interview with Widespread Panic earlier this month and lead singer John Bell told the story behind Saint Ex, the first track on the band's latest studio album, Dirty Side Down.

I transcribed a bit of the interview:

Saint Ex is the short title for the guy who wrote the book The Little Prince. He did a bunch of other stuff, too. Wrote incredible books that weren't just children's stories. ... But he was shot down, theoretically, because for a while - they didn't find his body 'til like 3 or 4 years ago. Or, not his body, but evidence that he was shot down. But he was shot down in the mid 1940s, during the war.

There was a German pilot that read the story of him being - that it was discovered, hey, this is the remains of his plane, this is some evidence he was here. And this 80-something-year-old German pilot came up and said, "I know I was the guy, because that was the air space I was in. And I just came across him, shot him down."

... But the freaky thing was that Saint Ex was his favorite author. He was a much younger pilot than Saint Ex was, and so his books were already out and he had a lot of influence on his life. ... So that's the dude he shot down. So that's a part of, you know — chalk it up to war.

Chalk it up to war. I can't improve on that.

The German pilot's story ran in newspapers around the world a couple of years ago. This is from The Telegraph in Great Britain:

"If I had known it was Saint-Exupéry I would never have shot him down," said Mr Rippert.

"He knew admirably how to describe the sky, the thoughts and feelings of pilots", he added.

Our ghostbusting movies are better than our soccer

My thanks to whoever put Ghostbusters on cable yesterday after the World Cup game. It helped.

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I try hard not to steal professional pictures here. But this shot, from Guillermo Arias for the Associated Press, is the U.S.'s last game against Ghana for me.















Sending the goalie down. What could be more desperate, or less necessary if we'd played better defense?

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I also recommend these pictures of former President Bill Clinton hanging out with Mick Jagger.

Random facebook post from someone yesterday: "LOVE that Mick Jagger & Bill Clinton are BFFs. That should be a friggin' sitcom."

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Wait, Snoop Dawg is in a Star Wars themed soccer commercial?

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Wait, Time Magazine's co-founder loved acid?

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Lady Gaga wore stupid shoes and fell down.

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See if you can guess where this article jumps on the stupid train:

He adds that there could even be other 3-D universes “embedded alongside ours”.

“In theory, there could be another entire universe less than a millimetre away from us, but we are oblivious to it because that millimetre is measured in a fourth spatial dimension and we are imprisoned in just three,” he said.

“Some aspects of reality — a unified theory of physics or a full understanding of consciousness — might elude us simply because they’re beyond human brains, just as surely as Einstein’s ideas would baffle a chimpanzee,” he said. ...

The scientific mysteries that may be beyond us include

* Multiple dimensions — string theory suggests space has up to 11 dimensions, but mathematicians have struggled to prove this

* Consciousness — scientists suggest consciousness derives from chemical reactions in the brain but cannot explain how this might generate a sense of self

* Are we real? — Rees and other physicists have suggested the universe and humanity are part of a giant computer simulation as seen in the Matrix films.

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Finally, I don't know where this picture was taken, but I think the answer should be "everywhere."

Tailgating and trash: Please do better

UPDATE: I feel like I should add here: That looks like one hell of a party. Someone needs to invent a better disposable cooler.
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This video is from Saturday night. Ten years ago I can see myself contributing to this, so I understand. But if you tailgate like this, you should be ashamed of yourself.



It was like that all over the two main quads at 2 a.m. The people who clean that up, I wonder what they think of you?

Thanks to Georgia Sports Blog, Get The Picture and The Grit Tree for getting the word out. You have to wonder: Just how bad is the environmental impact of a University of Georgia game?

It's actually pretty easy to recycle on Gameday. Just bring a bag and make a little sign. There are drop off locations all over campus, as shown on this map, downloadable here in pdf form. And I imagine if you mark it, some enterprising soul will come pick it up.

Tailgating readiness: Save the Earth and campus edition.

The University will be running a pilot gameday recycling program on North Campus this year.

That's good news, considering the recyclables generated at the average tailgate could probably power downtown Winterville for a year*. There have been some unofficial efforts in the past to recycle on gamedays, but since they were volunteer efforts the follow through has been spotty.

American Stadium Services, which has the contract to clean Sanford Stadium and campus after the games, will have staff on North Campus during the tailgates this year, according to co-owner Bill Fox. They'll be picking up recyclables and trash to get a jump on things before kickoff and up til about half time, he said.

When it comes to recycling, it'll be dual stream. That means paper products in one bag and cans, bottles and plastics in another, he said. I didn't ask about Solo Cups (you know, the red ones), but generally those aren't recyclable. Clear plastic cups and plastic water bottles, though, are.

If you're not on North Campus, you can still recycle. I know we plan to this year. All you really need is an extra trash bag and a little sign telling people to use it.

The University has recycling bins on campus, and this map shows the locations. Again, this is dual stream - one bag for paper products (including cardboard) and another for glass, cans and plastic.

Stuff with a lot of food residue should probably just be thrown away.

Hell, you might be able to just bag the stuff up, mark it, and leave it. George Stafford, the University's associate vice president for auxiliary and administrative services, said one of the biggest trash problems comes from people going through trash cans looking for aluminum cans. They end up dumping out all the trash in the search.

If you just leave your recyclables marked, maybe they won't do that anymore.

* Completely made up statement.

Use a little less, give a little more

You know those people who have 5 kids and they're on welfare and you think, "Why do you keep having kids you can't afford?" Sometimes I look around at all the stuff we have and I wonder: Are we those people?







likely unrelated.

I have a friend who ate 5 1/2 pounds of Waffle House

And made clever remarks throughout to boot.

He also ate 17 soft tacos: "No. Nothing helps."

There are others. I don't have the stomach to link them.

Blackwater

If you argue that, by fighting a war in Iraq, or by stationing troops in the Middle East prior to Sept. 11, we might have been creating enemies, you're unpatriotic.

But it seems like I heard this in church when I was a kid. Now it scares the hell out of me.

And this makes me want to cry:
"I was boiling with anger, and I wished that I had a weapon in my hands in those minutes."
When did we start hiring mercenaries?