Milestones

This weekend, the monkey figured out how to sit up, all by himself, and hardly tips over, ever!

And, as of this morning, his two front toofies have broken through. He's soon to be a biting machine.

I want to be a Simpson, too.

As if life isn't tough enough...

(paraphrase of a recent conversation at the zoo)

Mom: Elliott definitely seems to be center stage these days. Willie, does that make you feel bad?

Willie: Not really, it's okay. I'm alright. It's like I've moved from center stage to being Elliott's opening band.

Brushes with fame

In my life, I've had a few brushes with fame.

In junior high, when the NBA All-Star game was in Utah, I met Bill Lanier because my school got to go to the NBA Stay in School Jam. Also in Jr. High I met Mark Eaton, and the "don't waste Utah" guy, if you remember those adds.

Once, some family members and myself watched a basketball game sitting next to Bill Wennington (he used to be an off the bench center for the Bulls in the early 1990's).

When I was in high school, the quarterback for the University of Utah football team came to a bunch of family parties.

At Disneyland, once I saw one of the T-Birds from Grease (the short chubby one with curly hair) and another time, my dad and I were in line at the Matterhorn and guess who walked past us - OJ, Nicole, and their two kids...right before he killed her.

Haley and I have met the Barenaked Ladies. We drove to Lost Wages for a concert and managed to get ourselves in to the special local radio contest lunch at the House of Blues. We ate some food, watched, and then were introduced to all the members of the band. Haley has a picture to prove it. Then, that night at the concert, Kevin, the piana player, said as the band was leaving the stage after their encore, "To those girls who drove here from Salt Lake City, thanks for coming and drive home safely." "those girls" was us!

Finally, on occasion, if I'm lucky, I get to run into Annie the Spazz (It has to be a double zz because I'm in Utah and everything is a double zz). She's a good friend of mine and always pops up at the most unexpected times. I've run into her when I was teaching high school. She helped me walk head on into a plate glass door and smear my greasy forehead with 50 high school students watching. She helps me trip on sidewalks, choke on chocolate milk, and loose stuff all the time.

Well, Annie the Spazz and I met up on Monday afternoon for a doozy of a reunion. This time, the Spazz helped me walk into a sharp pointy corner of a low hanging roof. I was in the Mountains on Monday at a cabin in the woods and to make a long story short, I walked into a roof at a full speed walking pace. You see, I have this problem where I walk looking down, because I'm always afraid of falling. Well, that's a problem when things are hanging at my eye level. I can't see them.

Two days later, it's obvious that I am not concussed, but my head hurts like the dickens. I've got a big red mark where the point of impact was and this morning I can finally turn my head without sharp pains going down my neck.

Of all my brushes with fame, meeting up with Annie the Spazz is the only one that ever hurts.

Death of the NBA

If you thought that the NBA Playoffs were a travesty and that the league is a joke - you were right! No more kooky conspiracy theories. The FBI pulled back the curtain on Stern's sham of a league this past weekend.

Thanks commish for making sure that all of the players abide by a dress code while at the same time your officials are fixing games. Way to go. It is worse than Italian soccer.

This is what Bill Simmon's had to say.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/070722

I cannot agree more. Time for Stern to go.

Imagine being a Suns fan right now. You just spent the past two months believing that your team got screwed by the Stoudemire/Diaw suspensions, that you would have won Game 1 if Nash didn't get hurt, that you would have taken Game 3 if you hadn't been screwed by the officials, that you would have cruised in Game 5 if two of your best guys weren't suspended for running toward their best player as he lay in a crumpled heap. Now it looks like an allegedly compromised referee worked Game 3.

Well, how much did Donaghy affect the game? How many calls did he whistle on Stoudemire? How many of Bowen's potential fouls did he not call? Was he the seemingly incompetent schmuck who made that three-seconds-too-late call on Ginobili? Did Tim Donaghy cost you that game?

If David Stern wants to do right by the fans, then he should order NBA TV to rerun the tape of Game 3. We need answers. We need to know for sure. Hell, they can start a series called "NBA Hardwood Classics: The Tim Donaghy Collection" and we'll spend the rest of the summer combing through games and figuring out how many Donaghy could have fixed. Like Game 6 of the Raptors-Nets series, which New Jersey won by a point in the final seconds. Did he swing that one? What about Game 2 of the Orlando-Detroit series, when the Magic rallied for a late cover in the final seconds with Donaghy jogging around? What about the Heat-Knicks game from last February in which the Knicks were given a 39-8 free-throw advantage and covered a 4.5-point spread by 1.5 points? Did Donaghy call those two technical fouls on the Miami coaches? Is there footage of Pat Riley screaming at him?

Stern promised us that "we would like to assure our fans that no amount of effort, time or personnel is being spared to assist in this investigation." And really, that's great. Thank you. But I'd rather see tapes of those games. I want to see all five playoff games that Donaghy worked last spring, as well as that Heat-Knicks game and any other contest that's relevant. Before we worry about justice, let's get some answers. Especially for Game 3 of the Spurs-Suns series. I left that series believing that the Spurs were better, that their offensive execution was unparalleled, that Tim Duncan was the best player on the court, that they would have figured out a way to win that series whether the suspensions happened or not. Now? I'm not so sure. What if an allegedly crooked referee hadn't been working Game 3? What if the Suns won that game? What then?

If you're a diehard Suns fan, this now becomes the toughest playoff loss in NBA history. You have a legitimate case that you were screwed.