Shameless self-promotion by promotion

You may notice a new link under those I claim to "Know and Love". That's right, it's my first link to someone I don't actually know in person. Brian Murphy writes an outstanding daily sports journal on ESPN.com called The Daily Quickie, which chronicles the previous day's events in the world of sports. We don't share the same opinions on a good many topics, and I'm envious about his having my dream job, but he's great writer, and I do my best to catch the site before I head to lunch.

In this morning's edition, he mentioned that he'd do something nice for those folks who posted a link to the Quickie on our blog, so here it is. Honestly, it doesn't even matter if it's just a mass-produced email; maybe this will get me back to blogging on sports (sorry, Laura). Who knows, maybe with this inspiration, my writing will get out of this box -- what'd'ya think, Brian? You can get me a guest column on Page 2, right?

Call me Ebert...

Dearest friends and family, I need your help.

In honor of Meagan’s last true Christmas break, we’re going to do our best to watch as many movies as we can, be it in the theatre or from the video store. Each one of us will choose a movie that neither of us has seen every other night (i.e. Monday we watch her choice, Tuesday mine, and so on).

Now, where do you come in? Well, we’ve decided to rate each movie that we watch in our own blogs! Yes, you the reader will get the chance to see what we think of the crappy choices we make when picking our movies. In fact, in the interest of my always taking these sort of things one step too far, I’m going to make my selections based on what YOU suggest!

What I need is a list of movies that could be considered “guy movies” but still are quality movies (i.e. no Rocky V and nothing rated worse that ‘R’). I’ll make my movie picks directly from the movies you suggest, and praise anyone who suggests a movie that gets picked and is an enjoyable movie.

List as many as you like, and thanks for your help!!

I'm being hoggish.

I've started another blog.

I wanted to keep my political blogs away from here in an effort to keep this light and happy. Also, I'd like to use it kind of as a forum for moderate political discussion, and to show that you can have passionate feelings with a moderate viewpoint. So much political discourse focuses on the ideas of radicals, and it seems like the moderate population rarely gets represented (in the words of Jon Stewart, "Meh, we've got shit to do.").

As a tease, I'll even let you know what my first topic is. Congress has decided that it needs to investigate the merits of the BCS, calling it a "flawed system", based mostly on complaints raised by the media and anyone with a message board membership or blog. The flawed system argument holds no water for me -- in the seven years it's been in practice, it's matched the two top teams in the country five times, and looks good to make it six for eight. That's a 75% success rate, which is twice as good as a certain approval rating I can think (and the Bush in my mind isn't Reggie).

So there you go. I'm a blog hog, but hopefully it will keep this blog fresh with interesting topics and encourage me to speak my political views more often. After all, it's not like I have anything to do these days.