Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Each Moment
Wednesday
April 26, 2006
"But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day."
-Benjamin Disraeli
Last night's Spurs/Kings game had an outstanding finish at the end of regulation... at least, it was outstanding if you are a Spurs fan, like me. It went something like this: the Spurs were down three with less than ten seconds to go. Manu Ginobli drove the lane, drawing Mike Bibby in to cheat toward him, away from Brent Barry in the corner. It was a trick. Ginobli fired the ball to Barry, Bibby ran into a pick from Tim Duncam, and Barry launched a wide-open three.
The ball hit the rim, bounced up, hit the backboard, then back down into the rim and in. Tied ball-game with 4.0 to go. Shareef Abdur-Rahim had a shot to win it for Sacramento at the buzzer, but Abdur-Rahim who is in his first post-season after years of futility marked by such fun as bouts of Terrett's Syndrome) choked, and the game went to overtime. The Spurs took control in the extra session, and they head to California up 2-0 in their best-of-seven first round series.
It looks like I'll be back in Nashville this weekend, as I'll be at a meeting for work on Friday, so it'll be a natural progression for me to stick around for the weekend. With the NFL Draft being on Saturday, my bro Matt has told me that I can watch it in HD at his place. Though I'm not sure what benefit there is to the draft in HDTV versus regular TV, but I suppose I'll find out. I want to catch up on The Sopranos, which (since I don't have HBO) I've fallen waaaay behind on in the past several weeks.
Last night I watched the movie Hotel Rwanda. Wow, what a powerful film. As good as Jamie Foxx was in Ray, Don Cheadle really deserved the Oscar for Best Actor last year from his amazing performance in that film. And as much as I enjoyed Cheadle in roles like Buck Swope in Boogie Nights, this was simply amazing. If you want to see a good movie, rent Hotel Rwanda sometime. It's worth the time/money/effort.
Today is the 20 year anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. I was reading up on it last night, since I was pretty young when it happened, and I ran across this link, which is one woman's story (with pictures) about travelling through the Chernobyl area. It's haunting and fascinating all at the same time. The English isn't perfect, but what's not there gramatically is more than made up for with the story told and the pictures shown.
I'm behind the curve on this one, but I heard about this today during a Bill Simmons chat on ESPN.com: it's a recreation made of the bottom of the 10th inning of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, made with an emulator of RBI Baseball for the Nintendo. Check it out:
It's pretty amazing, I think. The guy who made it put it together in just 10 hours, which is pretty remarkable when you consider how many retakes he had to do to get everything to match up.
Speaking of the chat, Simmons was nice enough to answer my question about who the Patriots should take in the draft. I submitted the question this morning when I saw that he was going to be on the site for the chat, and sure enough, he ended up using it (and he had 22,000+ questions that poured in.)
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Lou Pickney (Alabaster, AL): Who do you think the Patriots will take at the #21 spot in the first round of the draft on Saturday?
Bill Simmons: They desperately need a linebacker... that's what we're all hoping for. Although, if the right RB dropped to them at No. 21, I wouldn't be upset about it. It's weird to be a Pats fan right now because Belichick has earned a certain level of trust with his personnel moves, so no matter what he does, you just kind of have to agree with it. In a way, it's more fun to be a fan of a crappy team during the NFL Draft. Like, if you're a Lions fan, no matter who they select, you can flip out about it and pretend you could have done better. For Pats fans, we just have to nod passively and say, "Okay, he sounds good, I like it."
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I think he's on the money on that, by the way.
It looks like I'll be going to Nashville tomorrow night for work. The upside for that is that I'll be able to parlay that into a weekend visit there, versus making a weekday work trip to Nashville and trying to make that fit with going up to visit on a weekend. Gas prices are pinching everyone these days, unfortunately...
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