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Footbaw: Week 3

Have to trim the slate a little bit. My class schedule is interfering with my ability to watch 8 games in one weekend.

1) Oklahoma State at Troy – Having made the jump from I-AA just a couple of years ago, Troy has developed a bit of a reputation for taking on all comers in a bid to establish itself as a legitimate I-A school. So far they have shown some improvement but still have a long way to go. Expect Oklahoma State to come away with this one rather easily.

2) Notre Dame at Michigan – As bad as Michigan’s looked the last two weeks, Notre Dame has looked worse… right down to a nation-worst -8 total rushing yards and 266 yards of total offense cumulative for the first two games. Most teams with a non-dysfunctional offense will at least get that by the third quarter of game one, let alone at the final gun of the second game. Statistically and in terms of talent, I still think Michigan’s the better team. Chad Henne went down with a partially-torn MCL but to hear some people tell the tale, that’s actually an improvement and not a setback. If they can shake off last week’s debacle, and that’s a big if, they should win this one.

3) Florida State at Colorado – RB Hugh Charles is coming off of an injury so that should help Colorado’s offense produce a little bit more effectively than they did last week at Arizona State. Meanwhile Florida State beat UAB, but that game wasn’t over until the end of the third quarter. This is the UAB team that Michigan State dropped 55 on in week one, the UAB team that your local 8-man high school flag football team could beat. This is almost like Michigan vs. Notre Dame, except the trainwreck isn’t going to be as spectacular. Colorado should win this one.

And finally…

USC at Nebraska. Has Sam Keller finally shaken the rust off? Last week he threw two picks and fumbled twice. In the NFL they call that “Rex Grossman”. What about the receivers dropping passes that hit them square in the chest? The defense has gotten better in the last year (in the secondary particularly), but all the play fakes and misdirections Wake Forest ran successfully had to register with USC’s coaches. And what’s Bill Callahan’s strategy, is Nebraska going to play to win or play not to get embarrassed? I think execution is going to be a big factor in whether Nebraska even stands a chance, but playcalling is also going to have something to do with it.

So why do I still think Nebraska can win it? Because we already know what they have to work on… USC doesn’t. They beat Idaho handily two weeks ago, but that’s Idaho. There are a lot of teams that could beat Idaho by 28 points without trying. We know USC has some injury problems. CB Josh Pinkard is done for the year. C Matt Spanos has a torn triceps, leaving a freshman to line up against Ndamukong Suh. LB Brian Cushing is a gameday decision due to a sprained ankle. Can the guys replacing WRs Steve Smith and Dwayne Jarrett fill the hole adequately? These are things that frankly nobody knows because one game against the mother of all cupcakes isn’t going to show you where you need to improve.

Meanwhile, Nebraska’s been tested once already. We already know the defense is going to have to shore up and not bite too hard on play fakes. We know the wide receivers need to hold onto passes better. We know the team needs to produce better in 3rd down situations. We know some of the shifts and pre-snap motions are causing problems for the offense. The team has had a week to work on these things – and they’re all things you won’t necessarily find out until you get into game situations with real competition. If the football season was just fall camp and the opening game vs. a cupcake, half the teams in the nation would be championship contenders. But it isn’t, and when the real competition comes to play that’s when you find out what the team is really made of.

This is a really homer-ish thing to do, but I’m really buying the notion that knowing what your own problems are with a week to fix them is a better place to be than not knowing what your problems are and finding out on game day. Nebraska has a definite advantage over USC to that degree, and they also have the advantage of a home field crowd will no doubt be jacked like they were last year when Texas came to town. USC physically may be the better team, Pete Carroll may be a more proven coach, but the environment they are walking into can be an absolute deathtrap for them if they’re not extremely careful – just like it was for Oklahoma in 1978.

Flip a coin, but it won’t be by more than a touchdown. Nebraska wins this one.

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Other crap

Due to a flub on a certain company’s part – the whole, “employee steals info for countless thousands of accounts” kind of flub – I had to go put a fraud alert out on my credit tonight. Equifax kind of blew at that process; after spending 5 minutes answering random questions on their automated hotline, they politely informed me they were unable to access any reports with the information I provided. Well screw you then, Equifax! I went to Experian’s website instead, and they had a form to fill out right there that worked just fine. So that’s taken care of now, and even better is I got a peek at my current credit report in the process. No damage appears to have been done. In fact, it’s nice to see the amount of progress I’ve made since the beginning of 2006 when I really started keeping on top of things.

On a mostly-related note, I can definitely say this: if you come across some spending power, sit on it until you really need it. Don’t think that just because some place gave you a $1,600 credit line you can go run out today and buy a shiny new object x unless you’re absolutely sure you’re pulling in enough money to make more than the minimum payment each month. I made this mistake multiple times over the course of three years before it all caught up to me, and I and ended up in pretty bad shape for awhile. We’re talking going paycheck to paycheck, skipping a payment on one bill to make a late payment on another, completely draining the bank account midway through the pay period because of the sheer amount of crap that needs to be paid each cycle, things like that. Not only was it not fun, but the money to do constructive things in my life like fixing the air conditioning in my truck or taking classes at the community college simply wasn’t there.

As easy as it would be to do, I find it impossible to blame the credit card companies or the “instant gratification” society for my current predicament. There were many decisions made that could have prevented a few snowflakes from becoming an avalanche, and I chose not to make them in the name of screwing around and playing video games until 5am. My thought is… there are poor people, and there are stupid people. The poor people are the ones who do everything right, but through one circumstance or another, have difficulty making ends meet. And the stupid people are the ones like me who start out fine, then spend every last available dollar on dumb shit – new computers, DVD box sets, video games, you name it. Some things you’re better off learning the hard way… and that’s part of why, two months from my 27th birthday, I’m still chasing after a college degree.

Also, an update on something I mentioned previously: UNL does in fact have a Chinese program in the works. Ni haos, bitches!

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Saturday Night Boredom

I saw Transformers last night after work. It was hilarious, the special effects were great, and most importantly it did justice to my memory of a 20 year old cartoon. The preview for The Simpsons looked pretty funny, but I’ve never been a fan of that show so I don’t know if I’m going to go see it. The last time I did that (Aqua Teen Hunger Force), I was sorely bored after about the first five minutes. That, and tickets at the theater are $8.75 now. That’s almost half of what it’ll cost to buy the DVD, and twice what it’ll cost to rent or order on pay per view. Here’s an idea MPAA, you want people to quit pirating movies? Bring down the prices in the theaters. It shouldn’t cost $50 for a family of four to go see a 90 minute Disney sequel.

I took my first math test today, a week and a half after it was originally scheduled. In spite of the math teacher’s rather strict test makeup policy – that is, there is no makeup test ever – he had to bend in my case since I was down in Florida attending a funeral. The results won’t be official until Tuesday or maybe even Thursday, but I don’t see any reason why I didn’t blow that test out of the water. First of all, this is material I learned back in 1997 when I took trigonometry in high school. This is my third time taking it since graduating high school due to math placement policies at various institutions of higher learning. And more importantly: Pythagoras’ theorem, the relationship between the six trigonometric functions, vector addition, force, work, nautical bearings, etc. – they are all just right triangles, worded differently to apply to different situations. Bottom line is, right triangle trigonometry is pretty straightforward stuff.

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Happenings

We drove out to Florida for Grandpa’s funeral last week. He was given a typical funeral with scripture readings and guest speakers, namely my dad and his brothers and sisters, then the next morning was the military burial service at the VA cemetery in Bay Pines, Florida. As for the trip itself… well, if the purpose of going wasn’t for a funeral, it’d be a nice vacation. We rented a car and drove down stopping at what seemed like every Bob Evans and Starbucks we could fit into the schedule to satisfy cravings, and we probably chewed up all of my dad’s Holiday Inn points on that hotel right on a harbor in Indian Rocks Beach. That whole area is still a little too humid for me, but I think if I moved down there I could get used to it. Either way I can’t complain; I had to do a bit of convincing to get my dad to agree to take me down to Florida with him and mom, and I had to take 7 days off of work and miss a week of class to do it. I wanted to be there to say goodbye to my grandfather, and that was that.

Speaking of class, I enrolled in the beginner Japanese class for this fall. For those of you who don’t know, I was heavily interested in Japanese language and culture through high school and a few years afterwards, to the point where I had Colorado and Pitt in my list of college choices because they offered Japanese language majors. (Yes, the same Colorado that- never mind, it’s not football season yet.) Anyways, I took beginning Japanese my first semester at Nebraska and did fairly well in it, but sometime toward the end of the first semester my head got plunged up my ass and the rest was history.

Fast forward to two years later, and in the fall of 2000 I took beginner Japanese at Metro. The next term I took the second course and did fairly well there too, so the idea was to continue taking classes and see what happened next. The instructor I had those two semesters was one of those instructors – she made it her life to make sure you learned the material. If you didn’t get something, she went over it with you again and again until you got it. If you couldn’t write a character quite correctly, she’d give you a blank sheet and tell you to practice. On day one, she gave everybody her e-mail address and instructions on how to install the global IME software on your computer so you could exchange e-mails with her in Japanese. And if you still had problems, she’d give you and 3 or 4 other students directions to her house and tell everyone to be there on Saturday for a weekend study session. I think that was the biggest reason for me even staying in school at Metro as long as I did, because with all the work Osugi-sensei put into her teachings, for somebody to quit was just too much of a waste of a perfectly good opportunity.

When it came time to sign up for the third semester class (which would be the first intermediate class), I eagerly signed up, along with about four other people. Yes… four. The class was canceled due to the lack of interest. As they say in Falling Down, “not economically viable”. I don’t know what happened with the other people who were signed up, but without the structure of the classroom or incentive to move forward, I quit studying Japanese and moved on with my life.

Next summer, I’m uprooting myself once again and going back to school at Nebraska. I somehow managed to get enough credits to be just short of junior status, and as a result of having been accepted back for enrollment there way back in about 2002 (I didn’t go, mostly for financial reasons), I am already back in good standing with the school. I can go back and academically bankrupt the two semesters I blew, then coast through the second half of my degree with hopefully much better results. In short, the school is all but holding the door open for me to go back. So, while I’m single and still cringe at the prospect of producing younger copies of myself, I figure I’ll go ahead and get this done. Anyways, as is required by the school of Arts and Sciences (which houses the Computer Science and Engineering department), I need to have four semesters of a language. I figured, I have three options here.

1) I could take something completely new. Czech would be pretty oddball, same with Russian. I could have sworn Nebraska offered Chinese classes too, but either they were done away with or weren’t offered at all in the first place. And I was never really interested in French or Spanish anyway.

2) I could take German. I lived in Germany for five years, and was becoming close to fluent with the language by the time I graduated high school. The problem is, I resented being moved back to Germany in the middle of high school. That’s a separate rant for a separate day, but I absolutely hated being there and wanted out as quick as possible. I know now that by going I had some cool opportunities to do things that I wouldn’t have been able to do in Nebraska, but there were also things in Nebraska I couldn’t take part in because I was in Germany. So, for the sake of keeping that chapter closed, German is out.

3) I could take Japanese. As I said, I had the ideal instructor and I know I’d learn something if I went back. My copy of James Clavell’s Shogun hasn’t been touched in ages, I quit watching anime years ago, and more importantly I can’t remember much of the language itself, but I’ll be damned if I found something really wrong with the time I spent in that area before. The only thing I hated were the know-it-alls that came into class on day one knowing three or four phrases and tried to impress the instructor. Just shut the hell up, you idiots. I found out a few weeks ago the same instructor is still teaching at Metro, and the intermediate classes are now “economically viable”, so if I started this fall I can hit all four semesters before setting foot on campus next fall. It’s a situation I know will work, and it won’t take long for me to start remembering things anyway.

Pretty obvious choice.

Incidentally, Iowa Western Community College offered a transfer program while I was taking Japanese classes before, and I could have spent 6 months over in Japan through them. But apparently dismantling their 9th-grade level entrance exams and having an open wallet doesn’t mean shit when your cumulative GPA is around football level.

Bedtime sounds good right about now, so… yeah.

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Grandpa

Passed away this evening at the age of 81. Father of five, war veteran, and an all-around good guy.

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