Brandon Selena News

Well, you know, We all want to change the world



Apologies to John, Paul, George, and Ringo…but we think they’d approve of the motive. If you’ve already abandoned your first 17 earnest resolutions (and really…January is no time to go on a lettuce-only diet, even if it is 67 degrees in the Northeast…), we’ve found three books by Jennifer Roberts that offer some no-brainer ways to make changes you feel good about in the new year.



The LA Times called Good Green Kitchens an “an encyclopedia of great ideas on how to build a kitchen with a conscience.” Good Green Homes broadens the scope, helping readers create better homes that are healthier to live in, easier on the environment, less expensive over the long-term, and more delightful to come home to. And if your 2007 plans include a new dream home, Redux offers a host of solutions for creating a green home with recycled, reused, and environmentally healthy materials, whether remodeling, redecorating, or building from the ground up.



Full of uncomplicated ideas, practical tips, and helpful resources, these reader-friendly guides to green living will make you want to change. We promise.

I have always believed the best way to get rid of spyware is not to get it in the first place. There are easy things you can do to avoid spending a Saturday afternoon trying to restore your computer to it’s former glory. Let’s look at some common ways PC user’s get spyware, adware, viruses and all that other bad stuff.Peer to Peer (P2P) file sharing is a sure way of getting your computer infected with spyware. You may think you’re getting the latest Red Hot Chili Pepper song for free, but you may be getting a little something extra you didn’t expect.Browser vulnerabilities or unpatched security holes in Windows can let spyware in your system without you knowing. This is especially true with Internet Explorer, many hackers target IE because it’s the most used browser, I would recommend using Firefox instead, much more secure. If you were using a unsecured browser and you went to a bad website (porn sites are famous for this) that took advantage of the security flaw you could get infected automatically without even clicking or downloading anything. This is why it is so important to update Window’s and your web browser right away when there is an update.Email is another way of getting infected with spyware or viruses. Never click on links or open attachments, even if it’s from your Uncle in Mississippi. Often these programs will look in the address book and send everyone of them the same email. So before you go clicking on that link or opening up that funny picture Aunt Milgrid sent you double check with them first.So follow those easy things and you should stay out of trouble, and get yourself a good anti-spyware program in fact get several because no one spyware program can detect every single spyware/adware.Tyler Lang is a security enthusiast. Get more information on how to get rid of spyware and get some free security tools.Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tyler_LangAfter Before Penis Enlargement Pills Pic
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Footballers reveal their favourite books.
“Under the scheme, Premier League Reading Stars, every club has selected one player who will nominate their favourite adult or children’s books. These choices will then be displayed at selected libraries across the country - so parents and children know their hero’s favourite read.”
(CILIP Information Services)

BBC starts turning the pages.
The BBC has announced the books to appear on the first two weeks of the book club, ‘Page Turners’. They include ‘Never Let Me Go’ by Kazuo Ishiguro, Khaled Hosseini’s ‘The Kite Runner’ and ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ by Charles Nicholl.

Knowledge is an open book
”Britain has a world class library system, Professor Mark Hepworth tells Olav Bjortomt, and we ought to be making better use of this ‘iconic knowledge economy institution’
(CILIP Information Services)

Texts in Context.
A major new online resource for Secondary students of English and History with hundreds of sources from the British Library’s unique collections, is now available. One of a series of learning resources available on the BL website. Texts in Context enables students to explore how English language and style have continually evolved and changed over time. They can investigate an extraordinary selection of different types of text: recipes, handbills, leaflets, advertisements, letters, logbooks, reports, anecdotes, treatises, satires, catalogues, edicts and legal pronouncements, guide books and dictionary entries, from humorous, serious to just quirky.
(CILIP INformation Services).

Amazon provides a novel way with stock disposal.
Amazon.co.uk and Talis are offering libraries a profitable approach to stock disposal Talis has teamed up with leading online retailer Amazon.co.uk to offer libraries a way of recycling stock that is no longer needed by the library. A full discussion of this can be found on the TALIS blog Panlibus.

CILIP’s New Framework of Qualifications is announced.
Library and information assistants and para-professionals can now enhance their careers by registering for a new CILIP qualification - certification. The qualification will entitle successful candidates to use the letters “ACLIP”. More details can be found on CILIPs website.

“Forever” Banned (oh look it’s the 1980s again…)
Pasadena Independent School District superintendent Dr. Rick Schneider has banned the book “Forever” by popular children’s author Judy Blume. Read what she thinks about it all.
(LISNews)

Orange Prize short list announced.
This years shortlist is now available and discussed here.

The Romantic Novel of the Year 2005.
This annual prize has been awarded to Katharine Davies for her first novel ‘A Good Voyage’.
More details are available on the Romantic Novelists’ Association website.

Reading and Writing.
In October 2005, the BBC will be launching its biggest adult literacy campaign ever – RaW (Reading and Writing, read more, write better with the BBC); a fresh, entertainment-led 3 year drive to engage the passions and interests of the nation. RaW is aimed at intermediate readers in the UK between 25-54.

With this post, it’ll be three months that I’ve been doing these Previews Round-Ups, and while I’ve stuck to the tried-and-true format of doing the major publishers one day and the small press companies the next up to this point, I’ve been seriously considering an adjustment to that little formula.

I mean really–and I say this as someone who owns more shirts from Graphitti Designs than any sane person ought to–I could go on about the apparel section alone for days. Why?

Because this is the third month in a row that they have offered this:

The mind boggles.

But there’ll be time enough for that later! For now, there’s still half a catalog to get through, and we’re burning daylight here!

P.222: Amaze Ink/Slave Labor Graphics: I’ve mentioned it once or twice, but it really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with my sense of humor that I rank Evan Dorkin right up there with Michael Kupperman and Kyle Baker as one of–if not the–funniest creators in comics today. So needless to say, I’m looking forward to Biff! Bam! Pow!, the first new comic that he’s put out since October.

Because really, a comic about a crime-fighting Interstellar Boxing Champ named “One-Punch Goldberg” is pretty much exactly what I want to read.

P.265: Dynamite Entertainment: In addition to their first issue of The Boys now that they’ve acquired it from DC under mysterious (to me, at least) circumstances, this month’s output from DE–or as I like to call them, The Last Thing We Need Comics, Inc–includes nine titles with a grand total of thirty covers between them. Admittedly, this is lagging behind Avatar’s 7:32 ratio, but considering that they’ve managed to find something even more tasteless than the Lady Death vs. Pandora bondage cover with their Dead Baby homage to Nevermind, I’m going to have to award this round to Dynamite.

Well-played, DE. Well-played.

P.289: Digital Manga Publishing: Given my previous comments about Manga in last night’s post and the fact that you’re not reading this on a LiveJournal account, you’ve probably already deduced that my interest in yaoi is pretty much nil. Even so, if DMP keeps making ads like this…

…then they can make whatever the hell they want, because that is the funniest thing I have ever seen.

P.300: First Second: Long-time ISB readers are probably familiar with the fact that I’ve developed a pretty cordial relationship with the good people over at First Second based on the fact that they send me their books, I flip out about how awesome they are, and everybody goes home happy. Even if it wasn’t for that, though, I’d still be telling you to order Eddie Campbell’s The Black Diamond Detective Agency, purely on the basis that his last book from :01, Fate of the Artist, stands alongside American Born Chinese as one of the best graphic novels I’ve read in the past year, and I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t want to miss it.

P.384: Zenescope Entertainment: When the solicitations for Return to Wonderland went up online, I recieved an email from Matt Algren, who claimed that it was my duty as an American to once again lay my own sanity on the line and review a series that includes a splash page that he described this way:

That’s a grown up Alice of Alice in Wonderland, who has just attempted suicide in a bubble bath (hawt!!!) and has been found by her daughter, who has apparently dragged her out of the tub and put the bubbles in just the right position so she could be drawn nekked as she lay dying all splayed out on the floor. (2x hawt!!! . . . I guess.)

Well, Matt, as much as I hate to disappoint, I’ve leafed through an issue of Grimm Fairy Tales, and those things are damn near incomprehensible. Sure, I read Tarot and Anita Blake, and while the things that happen in those books are really, really stupid, there are at least things happening. But with this stuff, aside from poorly presented fetishism for latent pedophiles, there’s just not a whole lot there.

Books

P.400: 52: The Novel: … Seriously?

Calendars

P.415: Okay, before we go any further, I feel like I should warn you that things are about to get really, really geeky, even by the standards of a comic book blog. Heck, they’re about to get geeky even by the standards of a comic book blog that devoted the better part of a week to discussing the majesty that is Volstagg, so for those of you who are already perilously close to nerd overload, I’ll meet you down at the T-Shirt section.

Okay, anybody still here? All right, this is just between us here, and it’s a question in two parts that I want you to think very carefully before you answer:

1. Who would win in a fight between Number Six and the Daleks?

2. How freakin’ awesome would that be?

Apparel

Ah, the apparel section! There’s really no better way to cleanse the palate of one’s own forays into the abyss than by mocking products directed at those even worse off than me! Whatcha got for me, T-Shirt Section?!

P.441 Jimmy Olsen T-Shirt:

Ah, crap. Yeah… I’m gonna need that.

Come on, there’s got to be something in here I can poke fun at to deflect my own misgivings about hypothetical mid-60s British Sci-Fi matchups!

P.445: Dragon Catcher Double-Sided T-Shirt:

Ah, that’s better. Thanks, Previews! I knew you wouldn’t let me down!

And that’s the catalog. If anything caught your eye this time–or if you have any responses to my estion-quay about Atrick-pay Goohan-McAy–feel free to leave a comment!

I’ve been reading travel stories. Other people’s travel stories. Scuba diving among sea lions. Climbing Kilamanjaro. Constipated in Italy. Their stories. Not mine.

I’ve spent more months not traveling this year than I have in a long time. The urge pulls me forward. I still hope for HaitiIndiaNepal in ‘07 and to start ‘08 with PalestineIsraelEgypt.

In the meantime, I decided to dig. In my memory. Where the stories live. To put some structure to it. I thought I’d keep it simple. Starting with A. And going through the alphabet. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll start with A. You can count on it.

A new comic controversy bubbling in the Islamic world has led to the closing of an Iranian newspaper and the imprisonment of its top editor and cartoonist. The strip in question — which featured a cockroach speaking Azeri, the language of Iran’s largest ethnic minority — caused riots and led the country’s leaders to say Iranians stand united against outside threats, the Associated Press reported. “It is clear that the evil hands of foreigners are making efforts to provoke tribal, ethnic and religious differences under the present circumstances,” said State Public Prosecutor Ghorban Ali Dorri Najafabadi. “Our nation is vigilant and hates the United States.” Iranian cartoonists had better be careful: In that part of the world, when a bigwig says “heads will roll,” sometimes they mean it.

I was a big baseball fan growing up. I played it and had the baseball cards and learned to read box scores in the paper and followed the pennant races and watched it on TV. I didn’t grow up in a major league city, so I only went to one game as a kid. Braves, Cardinals on a visit to Atlanta. I saw Hank Aaron and Joe Torre hit home runs. The game went into extra innings, I think 13, and we were out till midnight. It was great.

I followed Aaron’s home run record chase intently. I remember him coming up just short at the end of the season and having to wait an entire off-season to see him hit 714 and 715. It was an exciting time for a baseball loving kid.

Then I went off to college in Dallas, and I was in a major league city. We would go see the Rangers on a whim, as bleacher seats were cheap enough that even on a college budget we had enough for a stop in one of the local Arlington strip clubs on the way home. (”Seriously, dude, I think she likes me.”)

But through a combination of all the strikes and lockouts and crap that baseball went through, I completely lost interest. And I can’t get it back. I moved to South Florida the year the Marlins first won the World Series. I thought I might be able to get it back then, but Huizenga went and sold off the entire team and they went in the crapper. I got tickets to a game a couple of years later, and there were just over 5,000 people there. It was pathetic in a stadium that holds 60,000 for Dolphin games. That didn’t rekindle my interest. In fact, I think we left around the fifth inning.

I do remember the “summer that saved baseball” with McGuire and Sosa hitting ridiculous amounts of home runs. I didn’t follow it because they were so obviously juiced up on steroids. And now, when people say, “we didn’t know at the time that they were on steroids,” I just have to laugh. Anyone who has spent any time in a gym knows what guys using steroids look like. It’s like the skinny chick with the huge, perfectly round tits up under her chin with the three inch gap between them that is stretched so tight you can see her sternum. We know they’re fake, she knows there fake, there’s nothing more to see here, just keep moving. It is impossible to get the body that McGuire or Sosa had without help. We (my friends and I) knew those guys were on steroids. I don’t remember any of us being outraged, it was just a fact. For people to say they didn’t know at the time is a joke.

So Bonds broke Hank’s record sometime this week. I don’t care. I have noticed some people trying to play the race card against the white establishment sports writers. These are the same sports writers who have raked the white McGuire over the coals and who think Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali and Tiger Woods can actually walk on water. I watched Aaron break the white man’s record, and he did it in the South. There was some racial tension there. Bonds? Give me a break.

I just returned from a lovely evening sipping flasks of yogurt-soju cocktails followed by a wobbly post-beverage walk in the brisk wet Seattle air. It is on libationary nights like this that I find myself musing about interaction design. Certainly, such behavior must be an incurable disease rooted deeply in the nerves at the base of the spine, but after this much alchohol, I can’t help but give in.

Tonight’s stream of thought kept returning to the question: What level of expertise should we target with our product feature? On one hand, web savvy designers swim in a warm sea of learned gurus preaching the religion of simplicity; how it entrances new users, increases our reachable audience and leads to happier customers. At the exact same time our expert users, the ones paying the bills, are screaming for cybernetic time travel juggernaut creation tools complete with one billion intricately labeled switches.

Balancing the tension between new users and expert users need not be a painful task. Here is a simple framework that I’ve used for many sober years to help me make these decisions more easily.

Layers of mastery
First, I always imagine a program of consisting of three distinct layers of functionality.
Intro: First are the features that are encountered when a new user is introduced to a workflow or scenario for the first time. Often these features require only basic, common skills to understand. . Expert: Next are features targeted at the expert user has mastered the workflow and is looking to use the tools provided in an efficient and effective fashion. Expert features require the mastery of several new skills from the user, but they pay off with improved productivity. Meta: A meta-feature help extends the capabilities of the product in new directions. Meta-users use functionality like API and construction sets to better serve newly discovered needs that are not directly served by existing expert or intro features. The presence of meta- features enable lead user scenarios and open up entirely new and unexpected markets.
An example
For my last product, a 3D multimedia application called Anark Studio, we were in a tricky situation. Most of our initial users did not like programming, yet they were hell-bent on building complex interactive applications. In response, we created three basic layers of usage.
Drag and drop behaviors
Core expert conceptsProgram it yourselfIntro: Drag and drop behaviors
At the intro level, users could drag and drop pre-created behaviors onto objects. If they wanted a cool mouse over effect, they just drag one out of the gallery and dropped it on their object. The only skills the user needed to know was how to read an how to drag and drop. We made sure all the defaults on each prepackaged behavior were set to something reasonable, the names of the behaviors were easy to understand, and the results were instantaneous and visible.

New users found this functionality amazing since it broke their preconceived notion that all interactivity required programming. The low barrier to entry helped users overcome much of the fear of failure and lost time that naturally arises when they encounter a new application.

Expert: Core concepts
Some users stopped learning at the intro level, but most were engaged enough to dabble in more complex tasks. In order to provide them with more powerful tools that opened up creative possibilities, we introduced to the users three additional core concepts called slides, actions and symbols.

When providing tools for the expert to master, you can’t simply throw the kitchen sink at them. If you provide a hundred tools that all operate differently, you’ll find the most of them go unused. I’ve found that most expert users are only willing or able to learn 5 or 6 core concepts. These are of course the same users who are asking nuclear powered button tool chests. The trick is to bundling variety of tools together using a familiar metaphor. This allows you to teach one concept that opens up multiple capabilities.

For example with slides, most of our users were familiar with slides in PowerPoint. Even though we really were dealing with a rather powerful state machine full of unique persistence and animation constraints, the familiar metaphor helped them bridge the gap to practical usage quite quickly. They could immediately add, remove and rearrange slides. Only after they were using the slides to create interactive states did they start to notice the unique aspects of our implementation.

Add core concepts and their associated metaphors with great care. You’ll be living with them for many years as you build on new features within the conceptual framework that your users have learned.

Meta: Program it yourself
From the very beginning, we also told users that they could double click on any behavior and edit its underlying code. Every control in the application was build up from atomic elements and we gave the user full access to everything under the hood.

Now, they could certainly dabble in creating new behaviors by modifying our existing samples. However, in order to truly build new behaviors, they needed to have mastered all the expert features to an intimate level. Objects models, property publishing, custom events and all concept unique to the inner workings of an Anark behavior all were required to build new objects that extended the system. At the meta level, users were willing to put up with a lot of learning. They had invested heavily in the program and were excited to extend the application in a myriad of ways.

Early versions of Anark Studio had only a few intro and expert features. However, the existence of meta features allowed users to create a truly impressive set of additional capabilities ranging from new animation techniques to physics systems to large scale enterprise hooks. Many of the subsequent markets where Anark found success were a direct result of the customer driven innovation that formed around the meta features of the program.

Paying it forward
Another lesson that was has stuck with me is that you gain a lot by allowing the efforts of meta-users to be bundled up into modular items that can be used by both expert and intro users. All the code they wrote could be turned into simple drag and drop behaviors. Not only do your meta-users extend their own capabilities, but they also can extend the capabilities of the other users of your application.

Hints for using the model in real world situations
My favorite models are ones that allow me to ask hard questions about a design.
Do I have a good balance of intro, expert and meta features? Often I’ll find that I ignore a category in a design. Lack of intro features kills my potential market size. Lack of expert features hurts my chances of having a dedicated core audience. Lack of meta features builds the product into a corner, does not leverage customer contributes and reduces future flexibility. Am I classifying my features correctly? Sometimes someone will place a very cool and powerful feature smack dab in front of intro users. The few users that make it through the gauntlet are delighted, but the rest disappear without a whimper. You rarely hear from the users that find your product too difficult. Am I managing conceptual complexity? Am I use a few key metaphors that are readily accessible to my target audience?Do my meta-features empower intro and expert users? If you fail to take this final step, the 1- 5% of your users that a meta-users will end up creating their own isolated community that fails to expand your market and take the burden of creating features off your shoulders.
Answering any one of these questions correctly can have a major positive impact on your product’s success, be it a website, a desktop application or a game. Ask them early and ask them often. Do not be afraid to adjust your design if the answers are not satisfactory.

Conclusion
Used correctly, this simple model of mastery layers goes a long way towards creating balanced applications that serve all your users. It never has been about only serving clumsy newbies or only serving the button fetishists. Such a dichotomy is silly. If we step back from all the blathering, it is obvious that intro, expert and meta users are all quite potentially the same person, just at different stages of experience.

Building products that take into account mastery is really a technique for ensuring user delight throughout their entire life cycle of usage. From the first intuitive inaction with the application all the way to the find stages where they play your application like an instrument, we are charged with making our user’s experience chock full of pleasure and value. Each stage matters and we ignore them at our own peril.

Hydrating with tea,
Danc

References
www.anark.com
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html: An interesting take on simplicity by Don Norman. I’ve run into this many times myself. the problem with making something that is easy to learn, but hard to master is that users often don’t realize how much power is at their finger tips. In some sense what many users are asking for is something that *looks* powerful, but is very easy to master.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html: Joel on simplicity. Another interesting argument that basically says “All those features are great and computers are advancing fast enough to deal with the increased complexity.”

Better Off Dead ()

This old John Cusack comedy is one of my absolute favorite movies. It’s nominally a teen movie about a guy who’s dumped by his girlfriend for a bullying ski champ and becomes suicidaly depressed. He tries to kill himself repeatedly and fails, only to fall for the French exchange student across the street, who inspires him to win a race against the ski champ.

I say “nominally” because Better Off Dead all but ignores this so-called plot for long stretches. Instead, the minor characters all but take over the movie: a pair of drag-racing brothers who talk like Howard Cosell, a paperboy scarily intent on collecting his two dollars, a top-hatted druggie sidekick, a mother whose food is so bad it walks off the plate, a claymation hamburger … the movie is a gigantic, shambling, glorious mess. The movie does manage to juggle more than the usual number of subplots, but only at the cost of leaving some of them offscreen for half an hour or more.

One interesting undercurrent is that the movie comes off as a vicious indictment of the emotional deadness of suburban life. If the only things that matter in life are hanging on to your girlfriend of six months and making the ski team, perhaps Cusack is better off killing himself. His father can’t speak his language, his little brother doesn’t speak at all. At the Pig Burger, employees wash their hands on their own time, and at the high school, the basketball team communicates only in grunts. At Christmas, everyone puts a TV showing the yule log channel in the fireplace, and wears aardvark-fur jackets (complete with snouted hood). And then the paperboy comes knocking, like the Angel of Death. Perhaps the writer/director, Savage Steve Holland was deliberately drawing on childhood miseries, or maybe this stuff just snuck through subconsciously, or maybe I’m reading too much into it. This is a movie whose villain is named “Roy Stalin,” after all, so the subtlety may be more imagined than real.

In any event, fellow fans should feel free to post your favorite quotes in the comments.

A couple quick-hitters:

- Ok, so I’m finally sick and tired of the tiny font I used to use for my blogs. I think I will stick to the normal-sized font from now on.

- Man, I just put $400+ on my credit card, on two items with questionable rebates. One item was from TigerDirect (the horror!!!).

One more thing before I get on to the topic at hand:

- Tennessee Titans’ CB Pacman Jones will be suspended for all of the 2007 NFL season; Cincinnati Bengals WR Chris Henry will miss eight games. I recall someone making such a prediction less than a week ago:

As far as the two players mentioned above are concerned, if I were the Commish, I would make examples out of these two guys and suspend Pacman for the 2007 season, and Henry eight games.

Good for the Commish to stand up to these guys and levy these punishments! I’m also happy to hear that Titans owner Bud Adams and Cincy coach Marvin Lewis respect Goddell’s decision. Not unexpectedly, Pacman’s mom (Ms. Pacman?) wasn’t too happy with the verdict, calling it “not fair for him. It’s just not fair.” What did you expect? Did you expect the league to suspend him for four games, or even eight? He had been involved in TEN separate incidents involving the police in two years! I don’t think I served ten instances of detention in my entire life! Ms. Pacman and her son should be happy that the Titans haven’t yet waived the cornerback yet; why they haven’t is anyone’s guess. In all seriousness, though, I do hope that Pacman and Henry can complete their suspensions without getting involved in another situation that involves the police.

Now for the topic of the NBA Playoff races!

Yes, this is the time of year when the NBA finally starts interesting me. With about a week to go in the season, teams in the playoff picture are jockeying for position, and teams out of the race are jockeying for more ping-pong balls. The NBA in April, it’s FAN-tastic!

- Here are the latest NBA standings. I’ll start with some commentary about the Eastern Conference.

1) I am praying that Chicago holds off Cleveland for the #2 seed, not because I’m a Bulls fan, but because I want to see a Miami-Cleveland first round match up! The two most untouchable players in the league, going at it, one-on-one! How thrilling will that be? By “untouchable,” I don’t mean there’s no way in hell anyone could pry either of these players away from their respective teams (which is true), but I mean it literally; after last year’s whistle-fest…er…playoffs, I’m convinced that defenders can’t look at Dwyane Wade or Lebron James without being called for a foul. These two guys might average sixty foul shots a game between them!

As fun as watching Wade and Lebron having a FT shooting contest might be, there is the potential for something even more exciting to happen in this series. What if these two players defended each other? Will the refs have the stones to call violations–fouls, walks, carryovers, etc.–on either player? If so, neither guy would last more than twenty minutes of playing time! David Stern must be pissing his pants at the potential of this first-round match up! I wonder if he has the refs for the Bulls’ and Cavs’ remaining games on full “fix” alert. Of course, that would be assuming the NBA fixes games…

2) Poor Detroit. Assuming every first-round match up goes in favor of the higher-seeded team, Detroit will face Miami in the second round.

3) I don’t bandwagon, but if I did, I would reserve a ticket on the Toronto Raptors’ bandwagon. No, I don’t expect them to win the East, but a 2-3 match up between Toronto and Chicago should be quite intriguing.

Now for some thoughts on the West:

1) I can’t help but be intrigued by the 4-5 match up between Utah and Houston. No, this isn’t Stockton and Malone’s Jazz, and we’re not talking about Olajuwon’s Rockets, but it would not surprise me if either team gives Dallas a run for its money in a potential second-round match up.

2) The Lakers v Suns, part deux, eh? I just hope a sportsbook has a prop bet on whether or not Raja Bell will go WWE on Kobe again this year. I’ll put my money on Yes, and parlay that with the over/under on Kobe’s average score in the series (I’ll take the over, thank you very much).

3) Are my eyes deceiving me, or do I see the Golden State Warriors as the #8 seed? Wow. Props to them if they hold off the Clippers and make it to the playoffs, where they will serve as cannon fodder for the Dallas Mavericks.

There is an article, written by freelance writer (and MSNBC.com contributor) Michael Ventre, talking about how the Dodgers’ pitching this year doesn’t remind him, in the least, of the years of Koufax and Drysdale. As much as I enjoy Ventre’s articles, this latest article couldn’t be more ridiculous. I’ll address this article at a later date.

Until next time!