Doug Berger – Page 149

October 21, 2006April 18, 2020

Project Runway at this Old House

Nifty title, no?

I just wanted to comment on 2 TV shows I watched this week in the same post. So, sue me.

Project Runway

I have really tried not to be sucked into this reality show. I am not a fashion person or even care about the fashion industry even though I do know something about the history. Simply put I watched a few episodes of the Season 3 of Project Runway because Bravo repeats it so often – talk about roadblock programing.

I did watch the finale and I was not shocked that Jeffery won. Couture isn’t about what regular people will buy and wear – it is all about art and style. Jeffery had the trendy and arty part down. A woman wearing a dress that makes her look like peppermint candy has to be arty, no? The judges on the show were looking for that and that is why Jeffery won. Why else would they ignore the fact he went over budget on his finale designs.You knew he would win the show when he won the couture challenge in episode 9.

If the criteria was about what practical people would buy and wear then it was a tie between Uli and Laura. I liked a number of their designs. Laura’s bead work was stunning and the swimsuit Uli designed was nice.

Project Runway

This Old House

One of my long time favorite shows is finally getting back to basics – at least for this season.

The crew of Norm, Tommy, Richard, Roger, and Kevin began work on renovating an East Boston duplex that was built in 1916. This time money is tight and they have a strict $250,000 budget to use on both units.

Some recent projects had moved away from the formula that made the show a great watch as money became no object. It is great seeing what someone can do with unlimited funds but that gets boring and doesn’t relate to what many regular rehabbers go through on their houses.

For example, in a scene in a recent episode of the East Boston project had Tommy, Norm, and Kevin looking at the stucco on the outside of the house and an expert told them the stucco was original. They learned that totally redoing the outside would require a good chunk of the budget and only patching the cracks would be the least expensive option. Another episode had an electrician explaining to Norm that the house still had active knob and tube wiring that would need to be replaced. The homeowner also learned that the cost of removing a street tree that has clogged up the sewer main to the house would be the same as if they just dug up the sewer and relocated it.

The other part of the return of the show is the homeowners would do some of the labor to save money.

The refocus on the basics seemed to start this past spring, when TOH helped renovate a burned out row house in Washington DC that would sold to a moderate income family through the group Mi Casa.

I remember one episode when Kevin is told the budget for that rehab would be $200,000 he mentioned they spent that on just a kitchen on another project.

It is great to see it back. Now if I can just get my local PBS station not to interrupt it for their pledge drive so I can watch whole project it might be better.

This Old House

October 9, 2006April 18, 2020

Football Deja vu

While reading the Findlay Courier online this past Thursday, I read the article they wrote about the Findlay High game the next day. The article talks about that week’s opponent and the coach’s view of what FHS is expecting.

This opponent was Marion Harding High. Harding is a long time opponent. Marion is about an hour drive south of Findlay. This bit in the article caught my interest:

“I don’t know how much our kids know about the tradition of Marion and Findlay, but I do,” [Coach Mark Ritzler] said.
“Marion is a tough town with tough kids and it’s fun competing against guys like that.”
Ritzler can give his players first-hand accounts.
Like the game in 1985, Ritzler’s senior year at Findlay High, when the Trojans were tied for the Buckeye Conference lead and they went to Marion to face an 0-4 Presidents team. But records didn’t mean much that night as Marion built a 14-6 lead heading into the fourth quarter.
Findlay scored with 11 minutes left and Ritzler caught a 2-point conversion pass from Robb Phillips to tie it. Ritzler also caught the game-winning touchdown pass with about 5 minutes left as Findlay got out of Marion with a hard-fought win.
The impressions have stayed with Ritzler to this day.
“I remember walking out on their field and their fans are screaming and the atmosphere was intense,” Ritzler said. “You want to play in an environment like that.”
Present is all that matters to Trojans

He was being diplomatic. The Marion fans back in 1985 were downright nasty that night. How do I know? I was there.

As I have posted previously, I was on the Trojan varsity team in 1985 with Mark and Robb. Even though I never started, since I was on the varsity I got to dress and go to all the away games.

Then the locker rooms at Marion’s stadium were behind the stands and we had to walk past the fans to and from the locker room. We were booed and called all kinds of names. Some even said some disparaging remarks about our mothers.

We were flat and through the first half Marion outplayed us.

At half time we went to the locker room a bit dejected that an 0-4 team was beating us. One guy, Dave Manley, tried to stir us up by urging us to play better. Coach Cromwell came in after a meeting with the other coaches and told Dave to sit down and be quiet. The coach wasn’t a yeller but that half time meeting was loud as he ripped the defense for seeming to forget what we practiced. He also loudly complained about the offense. He knew we were better than an 0-4 team and we better start playing like we were.

Then suddenly he was done and started to discuss the adjustments we needed to make to win the game.

Another game that year was also played in a hostile environment. We played Lorain Senior in Lorain.

Usually at away games we would change into sweats, throw the gear into our travel bags, get on the bus, and leave a few minutes later..

At Lorain, our buses were parked at a secure location away from Lorain’s stadium and at the end of the game we didn’t leave until a couple of hours after the game. They even had a local Burger King deliver a burger, fry, and drink for the team to the stadium. Then after the meal we got a police escort out of town.

I also remember they didn’t let the band or cheerleaders make the trip because the year before, when we played Admiral King in Lorain, the band bus was stoned after the game breaking almost all the windows out. The school was afraid it would happen again.

October 3, 2006April 18, 2020

Crap Happens

On Monday, the big news story was the shooting at the Amish school in Pennsylvania.

I watched some of the coverage on the news channels before going to work. It is a very sad time for their community. I was a bit saddened to hear some of the news people saying factually wrong things about the Amish. One of the things was that the Amish reject any help from the government – that is not true. Here in Ohio the Amish do accept some government support especially when it comes to health care and their children. When they do accept it, the community, later, will have an auction or market day to pay back the state for the aid they received.

Of course, after every violent incident involving a school or children, the religious wing nuts make statements like the one I read in a forum posting on our local newspaper website:

Do you think there is a correlation with taking prayer out of schools and the escalation of school violence? Innocent voices raised in prayer each day kept God’s protection over the schools. Parents better pray for their children each day, I know I do!

Then there was this bit last night on the “Free Speech” segment of the CBS Evening News by Brian Rohrbough, father of one of the students killed in the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado:

ROHRBOUGH: I’m saddened and shaken by the shooting at an Amish school today and last week’s school murders [in Bailey, Colorado]. When my son Dan was murdered on the sidewalk at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, I hoped that would be the last school shooting. Since that day, I tried to answer the question, “Why did this happen?”
This country is in a moral freefall. For over two generations, the public school system has taught in a moral vacuum, expelling God from the school and from the government, replacing him with evolution, where the strong kill the weak without moral consequences. And life has no inherent value. We teach there are no absolutes, no right or wrong, and I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including by abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children. Suicide has become an acceptable action and has further emboldened these criminals. We’re seeing an epidemic increase in murder/suicide attacks on our children.
In response to Pennsylvania school shooting, CBS’ “Free Speech” featured Columbine father attacking evolution, abortion

That was just an uninformed comment. The Amish are about as religiously conservative as a religion goes, yet all their prayers didn’t “protect” them from the violence. It also doesn’t make one any saner. Mental illness doesn’t avoid the religious. In a press conference today, PA State Police reported the Amish school shooter wrote to his wife that he was angry with God.

Prayer is NOT a solution – it is what some do to cope with their lives.

People need to get some perspective. Mentally ill people, who perpetrate these killings, will do what they can to do harm. Unless we can gain some kind of psychic ability, we can NEVER prevent these incidents 100%.

The guy, who is said to have shot the Amish children, wasn’t on any law enforcement radar. The guy seemed to have just snapped (although I bet there were some signs his family and friends ignored).

My philosophy of life allows me to function without being crippled by the unknown. It basically boils down to “Crap Happens”. You deal with what you can control and try your best to slog through what you can’t control.

October 1, 2006April 18, 2020

When moralists throw stones….

Less than a week after former President Clinton handed the right wing their ass on Bin Laden and President Bush had more proof of his lies thrown in his face when the National Intelligence Estimate came out, a sex scandal has erupted in the US House of Representatives.

Rep. Mark Foley (R-Florida) resigned suddenly after learning a report on his inappropriate Internet contact with a 16 year old House page was about to be reported on ABC News.

What made me bust out laughing was when I heard that Foley was a leader on the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus. He worked to help gain passage of the “Adam Walsh Child Protection Act of 2006” which, among other things, increases penalties for adults who use the Internet to discuss or solicit sexual acts with “minors” (defined as an “individual who has not attained the age of 18 years”). GOP leaders hailed this law as a vital tool in protecting our nation’s children against Internet predators.

Now one would think that the GOP would bounce Foley and stick to their scripts about “protecting children”, but it seems the speaker and majority leader knew back in 2005! about Foley and his obsession with male pages.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was notified early this year of inappropriate e-mails from former representative Mark Foley (R-Fla.) to a 16-year-old page, a top GOP House member said yesterday — contradicting the speaker’s assertions that he learned of concerns about Foley only last week.
Hastert did not dispute the claims of Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.), and his office confirmed that some of Hastert’s top aides knew last year that Foley had been ordered to cease contact with the boy and to treat all pages respectfully.
House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) told The Washington Post on Friday that he had learned in late spring of inappropriate e-mails Foley sent to the page, a boy from Louisiana, and that he promptly told Hastert, who appeared to know already of the concerns. Hours later, Boehner contacted The Post to say he could not be sure he had spoken with Hastert.
GOP Knew of Foley’s Messages

Any time an adult has some kind of contact with a minor of a sexual nature, people get quite upset, and the adult usually is vilified. Unless you are a Republican and your PR comes from Fox News:

Discussing the recent resignation of former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) with host Chris Wallace on the October 1 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday, Fox News political analyst and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) claimed that House Republicans would have “been accused of gay bashing” if they had “overly aggressively reacted” to Foley’s allegedly inappropriate email communications with a 16-year-old male congressional page when House Republicans reportedly first learned of Foley’s actions in late 2005.
Gingrich: House GOP would have “been accused of gay bashing” if it “overly aggressively reacted” to Foley’s emails in 2005
On Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume asserted that there is a “difference” between the Democratic and Republican parties because former Republican Rep. Mark Foley is “out of office and in total disgrace in his party” after allegedly engaging in sexually explicit communications with underage congressional pages, while President Bill Clinton and Rep. Barney Frank were not similarly reprimanded for their “inappropriate behavior.” However, neither the Clinton nor the Frank allegations involved minors.
Hume compared Foley scandal to those involving Clinton, Frank, ignoring key difference
On Fox News’ The Big Story Primetime, Ann Coulter claimed that reports that the House Republican leadership was previously aware of communications former Rep. Mark Foley allegedly had with underage congressional pages are “somewhat incredible,” asking: “Why wait until right before the election to let it break?” and dismissing such reports as gossip, saying: “It’s something you hear.”
Coulter spinning on Foley scandal

Wow!

Brian Ross, who broke the story on Friday on ABC (US), is not one to report hearsay. More than one page has come forward and there are reports that pages were warned about Foley when they started their assignments.

Fox News is trying to spin the scandal like when they claimed that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was nothing more than Fraternity hazing.

So I guess we can add Republicans to the list of those who get a free pass on child abuse – along with Catholic priests.

Prototypes are cool, baby….

While reading the October issue of Playboy Magazine (yes, I was reading it…), they gave review and short clip of the new album by the French band Prototypes. It blew me away.

Prototypes throw out a great mash-up of punk, new wave, and pop music. Since I don’t speak a word of French I have no idea what the lyrics are, but the music is kick ass.

My favorite song right now is “Je Ne Te Connais Pas”. Allmusic.com said:

‘Je Ne Te Connais Pas,’ is almost perfect with wheezy organ, fuzz bass, handclaps, tambourine, and shouted yeah-yeah background vocals, all whipped into a frothy blend that sounds like 21st century ye-ye mixed with what you wish teen pop sounded like.
Prototypes

The album is available on iTunes and Amazon.com