BillSaysThis

First goal of the season from open play for the ‘Pool, 39th minute, Owen pulled the keeper off his line and pushed the ball softly passed him, off the far post and into the back of the net. Cured three+ games of frustration for the Reds and ensured they would not set a club mark with a third consecutive goalless draw. This reporter heard many screams of joy from the offices at BillSaysThis.com after this sweet work!

Danny Murphy was a surprise entry on the substitutes list, losing his place in midfield again to El Hadji Diouf, while Milan Baros got a start up front probably due to Emile Heskey’s still being injured, as Igor biscan made another start in central defense for Stephan Henchoz. I was very disappointed to see Jamie Carragher starting at left back in place of John Arne Riise. Steve Simonson started in goal for home team Everton because of injury to regular man Richard Wright.

Diouf had a lot of touches in the half, some very slick footwork but was too greedy and made very poor finishes. Kewell wasted several opportunities as well by blasting too many balls over top of the goal. Most of the referee’s decisions, to be fair, went Liverpool’s way even if they shouldn’t have and Everton players picked up two yellows.

Everton started the second half with one subs, bringing on the Danish international Thomas Graveson and quickly got a very dangerous free kick from 31 yards but Jerzy Dudek made a smart save. After handling the pressure, Harry Kewell picked up a yellow for a very hard charge into Italian international Alessandro Pistone, forcing the game to pause for almost two minutes.

Baros did some fine footwork around Yobo on defense to get into the box where he laid it off onto the foot of Michael Owen, and Owen did not hesitate in slamming the ball past Simonson for his second of the match in the 53rd minute. Number 10 almost made the hat trick in the 61st but Simonson pushed the ball over the top with a couple of fingertips.

Linderoth off, Duncan Ferguson on in the 71st for Everton; the Reds made their first substitutions Baros and smicer off, Heskey and Murphy on in the 73rd. After a stretch of rough play by both sides, Owen got the ball deep in Everton territory and Simonson came all the way to the edge of the 18 yard box to try and stop him, but Owen juked, the keeper fell down, Owen put the ball on goal where a defender headed it directly to Harry Kewell, and Kewell finally got his shot down and into the netting for a 3-0 lead at the 80th minute.

Wayne Rooney, Everton’s teen star striker, had a strong match though he couldn’t quite make a score but did show his immaturity with a nasty foul on Dudek early in the second half as well as picking up a yellow for arguing with the referee just after Kewell’s goal. Riise came on for Diouf very late, after the Senegalese international really made a difference after early roughness.

Spot analysis: Amazing relief to get the season’s first win but I have to say that luck was certainly on our side today; Eighth consecutive Merseyside derby victory for LFC! Steven Gerrard was MIA as field general most of the afternoon and I’m wondering if Houllier should give Diouf a chance in that role, putting Riise back into his wide midfield role where he did so well last season and leaving Baros as the starter alongside Mr. Owen up front.

Image of the night at the VMAs

Elsewhere:

Can someone explain this Rachel Hunter comparison? The dreadful Kelly Ripa as well. Gillian Anderson must have been on vacation. Um, Tawny must have been sleeping. Then again, there are dreadful photos of me laying about as well.

Oh the shock and horror of it! Smoking Gun, those guys who seem to find all the most embarassing pieces of paper you never want to see the light of day, did it again, finding a 1977 interview Mr. Universe did with Oui Magazine (you know, it used to compete with Penthouse and Hustler). In the interview, Schwarzenegger was less than discrete, copping to playing in orgies with groupies and consuming mass quanities of mind-altering substances. In radio interviews yesterday, he tried to brush it off by saying he didn’t live his life to be a politician.

So Bill Clinton, Gary Hart et al should be forgiven their private life sins? If I remember correctly, it wasn’t their fellow Democrats hounding them over sexual matters. No, you remember, it was the Repblicans who tried to push Bill Clinton out of office for having sex with an intern. Should be interesting to see how long Ah-nuld’s fellow Cali Rs talk their way past this and other embarassments that are sure to follow; I’m particularly curious to see if they start growing Pinnocccio-like noses.

Back in 1969, people where groovy. I mean, they were cool cats and chicks and didn’t let conventional moralities stand in the way of a good time. No sire, not them people back then. So how is it that a movie studio picked four of the least groovy people I’ve ever seen to make a movie called Where It’s At? A couple of clues: the movie was backed by the prototypical ’60s conglomerate ITT (Harold Geneen’s less than synergystic attempt to prove that management is management) and was written and directed by someone whose best work was 15 or more years in the past, Garson Kanin.

David Janssen stars as the fictitious owner/operator of Ceaser’s Palace in Las Vegas, Robert Drivas is his semi-estranged, just-graduated from Princeton son, Rosemary Forsyth is Janssen’s new wife, and Brenda Vaccaro made her movie debut as Janssen’s under-appreciated secretary. Forsyth, at least, comes within a smidgen of groovy but the other three miss by a mile. Don Rickles even makes a cameo playing a dealer who tries to sneak a scam past the sky in the eye; Janssen busts him down to dishwasher, literally, to repay his debt.

Drivas should have had an easy time of it but Kanin seems to have been unable to buy a clue about the younger generation. Janssen’s acting can best be described as early screaming; almost every line he utters right until his comeuppance is delivered with a gruff, barking tone, even when his character is trying to make nice with the wife or son. Vaccaro is sweet but her part just makes no sense at all–for most of the movie her Miss Hirsch is just a typical harried executive assistant until, out of the blue, she appears in nightclothes in Drivas’ suite and asks him for a night of passion before she leaves Las Vegas.

Kanin, who wrote and directed Where It’s At, was retired for most of the ’60s and I’m thinking he should have stayed that way even if he was only in his late 50s when making this. His reputation was built on some terrific films–Tracey and Hepburn in Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, the Jayne Mansfield trash classic The Girl Can’t Help It, and a few films with Judy Holliday. This clunker seems like an attempt to update that vibe for the Swinging ’60s but turns out as just another father-son melodrama with plot points winked at instead of built solid.

Not recommended

Well, actually, I’ve listed my first 18 items for auction on eBay. Perhaps the big new text on the top of left hand navigation box is a good enough clue for most of you but I’m not at all about the subtlety, not even close. Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then remind them what you just told them, that’s my motto. For today. Sell, baby, sell.

Forget about being safe or happy, just struggle to get through the weapons, the lies and the people who will kill you for not agreeing with their version of the invisible little man in the sky.

Iran Admits Foreign Help on Nuclear Facility – hint: the help came from our primary in the war in Afghanistan, the same folks who thought it would be cool to help the North Koreans too.

2004 Deficit to Reach $480 Billion, Report Forecasts – so cutting taxes will cure our economic ills? Or, will the changes actually pass on a huge debt burden to the next generation, already wondering where the money will be found for their turn at Social Security and Medicare?

A monument to intolerance – Iraq, Alabama, wherever you go, there they are. God may or may not be everywhere but people who are willing to tell you exactly how the Almighty wants humans to live life certainly are.

Meanwhile, did my folks feel the 3.8 quake that hit their neck of the woods today?

Is there actually life offline? Do not believe the sushi, the sushi seeks only to deceive. And be eaten.

I am peeved. You came all the way here from Visalia for more than a whole day and didn’t even call me for coffee. How ever do you explain that? And, oh yeah, forget my email, guess I ran in to that DNS problem too.

…

Okay, just kidding, don’t get bent out of shape. (Did anyone else get the Visio joke?)

What does Pam mean by “latter-day Yes Meets early Beatles”? I cannot begin to fathom this, some combination of raw, simple guitar chugging music with corporatized, out in the aether art rock. Don’t misunderstand, I really like both bands but I just can’t see how O.A.R. can sound like a mix of them. I listened to a couple of tunes, Hey Girl from both Risen (studio) and Any Time Now (live) and Missing Pieces from The Wanderer and didn’t hear what Pam did but then maybe that’s the difference between live performance and studio recording. What it comes down to is I’m glad Pam enjoyed her party evening listening to good rock and roll.

She can be so funny. Just check out the first line of a current column on Ah-nuld and the Recall: “One problem I have with Arnold Schwarzenegger is that he looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts.” Tell me that does not make you sit down and laugh!

I’m using their TurboLister software to prepare a batch of items for listing all at once. Go, but go big is my motto here. The items are an assortment of things I’ve got laying around the house: a couple of no longer used cellphones, an old DSL modem, some promotional tech company t-shirts, an ELP CD box set, a couple of videotape box sets (I don’t have a VCR any more…), and a combo pack of iPlanet promotional items. Not really sure how to price the last one but I’ll probably start it at $19.99 plus shipping and see where it goes from there.

I’ve also had some further conversations with Rogulus. I’m going to pick up some inexpensive DVD and CD sets at Costco, then break them into individual items and profit on the arbitrage. He’s had some very good results with the specific items and I hope to copy that success, with permission of course.

Plan is to go live tomorrow.

Coming from David Levien and Brian Koppelman, the same pair that wrote Rounders, no one was surprised that Knockaround Guys is another movie about young guys caught up in the underworld. But Guys does not have anyone like Matt Damon or Edward Norton to play the young men struggling with The Life and no femme like Famke Jansen to add spice. In the end, the pair’s script and direction is pulled under by overly pretenscious speeches and a simplistic plot.

It’s all about putting words in the mouths of stereotypical characters. Barry Pepper is a mob boss’s son, whose father doesn’t give him the respect he craves, Seth Green and Andrew Davoli are also second generation hoods not living up to dad, and Vin Diesel is the muscleman who ‘understands’ the truth of their path better than any of the others. John Malkovitch is Pepper’s evil, slick uncle, chafing under the thumb of Dennis Hopper. A bunch of no-name actors play the hicks who get in the way of Malkovitch’s plan to flip the pecking order and none stand out. Might have expected Levien and Koppleman to use the wide open spaces of the Montana location a little more attractively but that didn’t happen either.

Not really worth the time

The Sweet One made me some tasty ribs tonight. I love eating her cooking. Makes married life even more wonderful.

Mainly has been a semi-lazy day, as a good Summer Saturday ought to be. We did get up early and go the gym, eat some breakfast and then I drove TS1 to the office so she could earn some overtime $$$. I then enjoyed the Manchester United 2-1 victory over Newcastle. Really, I couldn’t care which team won as they aren’t Liverpool but I’m infatuated with ManU’s new American goalkeeper Tim Howard and their awesome goalscorer Ruud van Nistleroy and both of them had excellent games.

I had to deal with far too many of the SoBig-generated emails. That was a midday downer.

In the afternoon I got an eBay tutorial from PowerSeller and buddy Rogulus–do you see that rating? +2815 is very impressive. He gave me a bunch of good tips and I’ll be putting them into effect this week with auctions on some extra equipment I have laying about, some clothes, maybe some music CDs. Just waiting for my PayPal account to go into effect.

To top off the day, the 49ers are beating the Saints at the half and after dinner coffee is brewing.

When asshat gets comeuppance: Alabama Judge Suspended for Refusing to Remove Monument.

This sounds cool: New Line will re-release the first two Lord of the Rings installments for one week each beginning two weeks before the release of the concluding movie, Return of the King. But not just what we saw before, the extended versions: 208 minutes for Fellowship of the Ring and 214 minutes for The Two Towers. Some theaters will even go over the top: on Dec. 16, a daylong marathon during which all three films will be shown back-to-back. Exhib guidelines call for a 3 p.m. showing of Fellowship followed by a 7 p.m. screening of Towers and then an 11 p.m. screening of King. Oh my. Think of your bladder and the big picnic baskets. OH MY!!!

Once again a bored writer fell prey to the rants of an aggravated homeowner and published a story on the evils of homeowner associations. One of my fellow MeFites, though he violated the posting guidelines by simply posting a biased phrase as hyperlink text without any additional commentary or explanation (which I find oddly amusing), put it up for discussion on MetaFilter. Given the often (small l) libertarian bent of many commentators, the cries of fascism were not long in coming. Being president of the HOA in which I live, I feel the commentators are generally giving us a bum rap and said so, in detail. To summarize: HOAs are not evil but are also not for everyone.

This list is more for my bookmark-like use but feel free to click away yourself on this list of C#-related material:

• WindowsForms – an official MS site
• Sells Brothers – Chris Sells now works for MS but has code and demo goodies and good articles, a well-populated blog, and more.
• ASPxtreme ADO.NET Web Workshop
• CodeSmith is a FREEWARE template based code generator.
• CSharpFriends – self-proclaimed world’s greatest C# community
• Designing Resizable Windows Forms
• RSS.NET – open source library for working with RSS
• Shawn Wildermuth – he wrote the book I picked up today, Pragmatic ADO.NET. Hat tip to Chris Sells for the recommendation.
• C# Scheduler – Code Project article on writing scheduling services.
• Tim Dawson – some interesting looking, worthy of investigation Windows Controls: no charge for you to use in your products royalty-free!

Have fun if you find this stuff fun.

Yes, those are Google AdSense ads you now see on top of the content column on the pages of this website. Feel to click through and help me earn a few dollars. You might also want to help out by starting your Amazon shopping by clicking the “Shop Here” button on the top left of the BST homepage. Hopefully these small efforts will help pay for the incidentals around the house while my job search continues into its–yes–third year. I’m also starting a selling program on eBay and if you don’t have enough books, CDs, beanie babies and the like already, feel free to bid as I put them up for sale.