jim lyons's blog

I’ve been watching the more obscure sports I love the Olympics but if NBC doesn't have a heart rending and compelling story about how someone has over come adversity to be there they don't seem interested. I find the sports themselves to be compelling

I don't want to hear any more stories about broken homes and how I'm doing this for little Timmy

When you watch on the computer you can often just find the feed with no commentary.

I’ve watched trampoline, cycling, judo, wrestling, (both men’s and women’s), sailing, triathlon and table tennis. MY favorite so far is team handball.  The team women’s handball match between Norway and Sweden fabulous

I think the person that invented the up close and personal didn't like sports and didn't think others did either

 The Microsoft Silverlight is a great success I haven’t lost a feed or had any problem with buffering watching it on my laptop connected wirelessly. I’ve heard of no problems with servers crashing Big Kudos to Microsoft!

I just got out of the shower and glanced at my self in the mirror and for just a moment I didn't recognize the image looking back at me. The fellow in the reflection had gotten old some how his mustache is white his hair is mostly gray and there are way too many lines on his face.
I don't feel old. Many of my friends are in their twenties, I go to concerts about once a month, mostly indie bands that are just breaking through,  I garden, I hike, I try to stay on the bleeding edge of this amazing tech revolution and I feel strong if not young. 
But for just a moment there was an old man staring at me.

1.  Juno
2. Enchanted
3. The Bourne Ultimatum
4. Waitress
5. Knocked Up

This is a very subjective list and reflects my movie going is often with my daughter. that aside these are the movies and how I felt about them at the time.
The big disappointments were

• Atonement
• La Vie en Rose (which my good friend Mary loved and I guess I just didn't get it)

There are a handful of movies released this year that I want to see but as yet I have not and this is the last day of the year so the list is the list
Movies I have yet to see

• Grace is Gone
• No Country for Old Men
• Charlie Wilson's War
• Once
• The Savages

And there were a couple of movies that I liked but just didn't make the list

• 1408
• Sicko
• The Martian Child

All and all a good year at the movies

Let me share this youtube post with you I think it's brilliant.

The new internet TV service lets you embed clips of TV shows here I've custom edited  a clip from NBC's The Office

  This is so inside Hollywood that I Would usually just let this go but...

The very talented and smart Elisa Dushku (Faith from Buffy th Vampire Slayer and Tru Calling) met with Fox last September and they talked about Ms. Dushku producing and staring in a new TV show. At lunch a few days later she told Joss Whedon about the project. During lunch or as he described it in an eonline.com interview he came up with the show and the name for the show by accident during a trip to the bathroom. He came back and said "I've figured it out." And like that the show was born Joss has sketched out seven shows and Fox has signed up to do the seven shows.

Everything is on hold with the writers strike but for fans of this is huge

So in the sifi future the rich and powerful can live out their fantasy by programing people to be who they want them to be. When the fantasy is over their memories are wiped clean and they are returned to a child like state to live in the Dollhouse untill the next paying customer comes along. The tension is that Ms. Dushku's character Echo is starting to remember things.

I can't wait

It was a beautiful fall day, I was out digging in my garden thinking about the great harvest I had this year. Hey if I just get a load of manure and work it into the garden now well imagine the possibilities. Quickly jumping on Craigslist I found a horse rescue farm that was giving it away. Oh boy. I drove down the guy loaded it up I got up in back to level the load. I stepped up onto the side rail and in the least graceful most ungainly I fell off . I  landed on my hand and my chest hit my hand breaking my arm and cracking my rib.Next stop the emergency room

Now the people at The University of Colorado Medical Center are fabulous, the triage nurse recognized I needed to get in right away  the nurses and the doctors were great  the orthopedic specialists smuched the bone pieces back together and put a splint on it.
Now the tricky part I along with 46.6 million other of my fellow Americans have no health insurance. I was instructed to go to my regular doctor to get a recommendation for a specialist and gt a cast on as soon as the swelling goes down. After a week of trying see a specialist for a week I gave up and talked my doctor to just cast it so I could get back to work.

  

 

Well maybe I'm a little slow but I think I've got a handle on the war in Iraq. After all the misdirection about  WMDs, "the war on terror" and Al quida  the war on Iraq is about oil. They had it we wanted it we took it bing bang boom. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil in his book The Price of Loyalty and when interviewed on the CBS show 60 Minutes said

   And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations.
   “From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.
   “From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”
As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.

Now that makes the attack on 9-11 a convieent excuse to go to war on Iraq to take the oil.
So now with thousands of Americans and tens of thousands Iraqis dead what is the big picture? The Iraqi government is about to hand over the keys to the oil fields to American companies for 30 years. Now if you are a large American company that is going to dump a pile of money into a oil field you want to know that you have some security that a future Iraqi government doesn't nationalize the oil business. What better protection than 50 or 60 thousand soldiers not even on the doorstep but garrisoned right there
So the American military is going to be there a long time. The BBC has a good article about the Al-Asad air base one of many massive American bases. At Al-Asad there are two bus routes inside the base fast food restaurants pizza places and coffee shops Soldiers and marines don't sleep in tents but air conditioned cement block barracks. We are going to be there a long time just look at how long we have had "temporary bases"  in Germany Japan and Korea
Simon Reevs looks into the reasons behind the world

So bottom line on all this the United States invaded a soverign country that was not in a position to threaten us.Overthrew it's government replaced it with a puppet regime that is incompetent and corrupt. We continue to occupy the country so big business can extract it's natural resources. We have returned to colonialism.
 

I found this video on Boston.com the web site of the Boston Globe

  But of coarse it's much easier to import from You Tube