Top 10 Winter Olympic Events

I’ve really enjoyed watching the 2010 Winter Olympics, and now that they are winding down, I thought I’d post a list of my favorite 10 Winter Olympic events.

1.  Curling:  Most people seem to either love or hate curling.  There isn’t a lot of middle ground.  People who like it proclaim it as one of the greatest sports of all time, while people who don’t like it get mad at the people who do almost to the point of getting violent.  Personally, I think curling is fascinating.  I can (and have) watch it for hours.  It’s a combination of shuffleboard, horseshoes, and chess on ice.  What’s not to love?

2.  Short Track Speed Skating: I like this event because it’s like a Nascar race at Martinsville on ice.  With at least 4 skaters on the ice at a time and no requirements that they stay in a particular lane, every race is very exciting.  And in the relays with 20 skaters on the ice, it gets downright insane.  Trouble in turn 4 is common.  Rubbin’ is skatin’.

3.  Skicross/Snowcross: This is the event where there are four skiers or snowboarders on a course that is similar to a BMX or motocross course.  Another very exciting event.

4.  Bobsledding: A very exciting, very dangerous, and sometimes scary event.  But it’s fun to watch.  Two or four competitors in a sled going over 100 mph?  Wow.

5.  Skeleton: It’s like bobsled, except it’s one person going down the course head first on a small piece of metal at nearly 100 mph.  Double wow.

6.  Luge: There are one and two competitor versions of luge.  It’s similar to skeleton, except the riders lie on their back and go down the course feet first.

7.  Downhill Skiing: You’ve probably figured out by now that I like events that involve the competitors going down steep mountains at a high rate of speed.

8.  Ski Jump: If you add a ramp and skiers flying hundreds of feet through the air, you get another exciting event.

9.  Cross Country Skiing: This is a longer, slower race than most of the other events, but it is still interesting with so many skiers on the course.  I call this event the Tour de France on snow.  And with skis instead of bicycles.

10.  Biathlon: This is the event that combines cross country skiing with shooting at targets with rifles.  A somewhat unusual event, but interesting.  Unfortunately, I didn’t see this event on the TV coverage at all this year.

Lane Kiffin Leaves UT

I’m sure that Lane Kiffin will catch a lot flack from Tennessee fans for leaving UT’s football program after just 1 year to go to Southern Cal.  However, I’m not sure I can really blame him.  While USC doesn’t look to be quite as strong as they’ve been in the past, they are still one of the top 10 college football programs in the country.  It might have been a classic case of the USC job being an offer he couldn’t refuse.

What I DON’T like is that Kiffin came to UT, ran his mouth, committed NCAA violations, and made UT look bad not with the way the team played, but with the way that Kiffin conducted himself.  In my lifetime, UT’s coaches in all sports have conducted themselves with dignity and have always tried to portray the university in a good light.  UT has had its problems with players getting in trouble, but those situations have always been dealt with appropriately.  In my view, UT’s athletic department has always done things the right way and has built a good reputation.

When Lane Kiffin arrived at UT, he immediately started taking pot shots at other schools and coaches, and just generally making a fool out of himself.  He made a lot of people mad.  He became the butt of a lot of jokes.  He made the University of Tennessee look bad.  He hurt the school’s reputation.  And then he bailed.

It’s starting to look like Lane Kiffin was just out for himself instead of looking out for the best interests of the University of Tennessee.  Now he’s run off to be the head coach at USC and left UT with a damaged repuation.  If he conducts himself the same way at USC and starts bad-mouthing the other schools and coaches in the PAC-10, then maybe we can say that’s just Coach Kiffin’s personality.  But if he behaves in a humble and respectful manner at USC, then we’ll know he was just using UT and putting on an act to get publicity for himself.

Favorites of 2009 – Additional Details

A few days ago, I posted my choices for my “Favorites of 2009″.  Today I wanted to take some time to shed some added light on some of my choices.

Restaurant (National Chain): Chop House

I don’t eat at Chop House all that often, because let’s face it, it’s pretty expensive.  However, I have found myself eating there more often during the past couple of years than I used to.  Although I’ve heard a few negative reviews of it from time to time, the food and service have both been outstanding every time I’ve been there.  It’s not a place I eat at on a daily or even weekly basis, but it’s very enjoyable when I do, and it has become one of my favorite restaurants in Kingsport.

Restaurant (Fast Food): Pal’s

Until recently, I hadn’t eaten at Pal’s all that often for more than a year.  Believe it or not, I was trying to be more careful about how much fast food I ate.  However, I’ve recently started eating at Pal’s more often again, and I was quickly reminded of just how good their food is.

Restaurant (Local): China Wok

I believe this is my first repeat winner from last year.  I eat at China Wok once a week, and it’s far and away my favorite locally owned restaurant in Kingsport.  Their food is a higher quality than most other Chinese restaurants in town.

Movie: I Am Legend

I think this movie was released prior to 2009, but I watched it for the first time in 2009.  I thought I Am Legend was good, but not great.  The reason I picked it is because I try to pick a fairly new movie to present this award to, and I just don’t remember seeing any outstanding new movies in 2009.  If I included all movies that I saw for the first time in 2009 in this category, regardless of their age, I would have picked the 80s horror movie Cube.

T.V. Show: Destination Truth

I love Ghost Hunters, which won this award in 2008, but I’ve come to like Destination Truth even more.  It’s simply more interesting.  Something that can’t be explained seems to happen in every episode.  Could they be faking it all?  Sure, but it’s still exciting.

Destination Truth doesn’t focus exclusively on ghost hunting.  They investigate all sorts of unexplained phenomena, including bizarre creatures (in the ilk of Bigfoot).  My favorite episode was probably the one where they investigated Chernobyl.

Video Game: Dragon Age – Origins (X360)

I actually just finished this game last night but it was hands-down my favorite console game I played in 2009.  It’s very much like a traditional computer role-playing game, only with the controls tweaked a bit to fit the X360 controller.  The combat, inventory system, story, and all other aspects of the game are outstanding.  I liked it much better than Fable 2 or Fallout 3.  And it absolutely beats the socks off of Mass Effect.  The first expansion pack for Dragon Age is slated to be released in March, and I’m looking forward to it.

PC Game: Torchlight

This game was released in the latter part of the year, and I have only been playing it for about a month.  It’s basically Diablo I with better graphics.  It’s even from some of the designers who worked on Diablo (and Fate).  Don’t be dissuaded from trying Torchlight just because it’s more like Diablo than Diablo II.  It’s a ton of fun, and it only costs $20 (you can even get it for $9.95 if you catch it on sale).

Card Game: Phase 10

My new favorite card game of 2008 (Rage) failed to repeat as the winner in this category in 2009 simply because several of my friends disliked it so much that we never played it again.  I didn’t figure I could give a “Favorite of 2009″ award to a game I didn’t play in 2009.  So, Phase 10 wins this year.  It’s a great game too.

Board Game: Loaded Questions

Deciding the winner in this category was a tough decision.  Why?  Because I realized when I was picking the winners that I don’t remember playing any of my actual favorite board games during 2009.  I don’t think I played Scattergories, Sorry, or Oh What A Mountain! at all.  But I did play Monopoly, and now that I think about it, it would have won this category if I’d thought of it when I made up my list.

Don’t get me wrong, though – Loaded Questions is a good game and it’s a lot of fun.  It’s one of those games that asks a lot of different questions (some of them revealing), and challenges one of the players to figure out who wrote down each answer.

Electronics Store: Circuit City

Despite being out of business, Circuit City is still my favorite electronics store.  I don’t shop at Best Buy unless it’s absolutely necessary (i.e., if they have something I need in a hurry that I can’t find anywhere else).

Website: Facebook.com

I still seem to spend more time on Facebook than I do on all other websites combined.

Sporting Event: Fall race at Bristol

A couple of years ago, we almost let our Bristol tickets go because I had decided that fighting the crowd and the long walk wasn’t worth it.  I was wrong.  As the date of the race grew closer, I realized that I would really miss it if I wasn’t at the race.  It’s now become my favorite sporting event once again.

Amusement Park: James H. Drew Exposition (Appalachian Fair)

I’m probably as shocked as you are that Dollywood didn’t win this award.  You’ll probably also be shocked to learn that I didn’t visit Dollywood in 2009.  I can’t remember the last time I went a full year without going to Dollywood.  But none of my friends bought season passes, so I didn’t either.  I didn’t even find time to take the once a year trip that I usually make with mom and dad.

So, the James H. Drew Exposition at the Appalachian Fair wins the award.  It’s really a carnival instead of an amusement park, but it’s a large one.  And it’s impressive.  The rides are in better shape than in any traveling carnival I’ve ever seen.  In fact, they are in downright pristine condition.  The folks who run the Drew Exposition deserve to be commended.  It’s easy to see that they work very hard to keep their midway in tip-top shape.

TV Station: TV Land

Although some of my favorite shows are on SyFy, our TV seems to be on TV Land more than any other station, especially when the Andy Griffith Show is on.  A few days ago, I said that TV Land probably wouldn’t be my favorite station in 2010, but that was because I thought they were going to stop showing Andy Griffith.  That lasted a week before they put Andy back on.

Food:  Crab Cakes

This selection ties back into my favorite chain restaurant (Chop House).  My favorite dish has become the crab cakes with burgundy mushrooms and Parmesan spinach.

The First Bi-Annual Bristol Nascar Jellybean Challenge

While shopping for snacks to take to the Food City 500, my friend Chris and I decided to get some assorted Jelly Belly jellybeans.  I don’t eat many jellybeans and I generally don’t like them, but Jelly Bellys are good.  The different flavors actually taste like they’re supposed to, instead of all tasting the same like cheapo brands of jellybeans do.

Food City sells their Jelly Bellys by the pound (yes, we appropriately bought our snacks for the Food City 500 at Food City).  Apparently we went overboard in judging how many jellybeans to put in the bag, as it wound up costing $10.

I thought of an idea to use the jellybeans in a sort of Fantasy Nascar contest.  Chris and I would each pick two jellybeans out of the bag, and we’d pick cars that were the same color as the jellybeans.  Whoever picked the highest finishing car would win the contest.  The winner would have a choice of prizes – they would either get all of the remaining jellybeans, or they could force the loser to eat all of the remaining jellybeans before we got back to Kingsport.

I picked the first jellybean, and it was solid red.  I chose Tony Stewart as my driver, as his Office Depot car is mostly red.  Chris selected next and got a yellow bean.  He chose Clint Bowyer, not realizing that Bowyer’s paint scheme was only about 30% yellow.  The second bean I picked was yellow, and I picked Jeff Burton, who is driving the Caterpillar car this season.  Chris got a red bean with his second pick, and he made the surprising pick of Juan Montoya!

Just after the green flag flew is when the controversy began.  Chris noticed that the primary color of Bowyer’s car wasn’t yellow, and he tried to change his pick to Mark Martin.  I contended that you can’t change your pick after the race starts, while Chris said that wasn’t specified beforehand.

You can probably guess what happened.  Burton finished one spot ahead of Montoya, so I think I won.  But Martin finished ahead of both of them, and Chris says he won because he changed his pick to Martin.

Although the First Bi-Annual Bristol Nascar Jellybean Challenge ended in controversy, there were no hard feelings.  I intended to give the remaining jellybeans to Chris’ daughters, but I forgot and took them home.  So, I ate some of them, but I’m going to take the rest of them and give them to Chris.

Trip to Indy, Part 4 – The Trip Home

The day after the race, we packed up and left Indianapolis fairly early.

The highlight of our return trip was a visit to the Louisville Slugger factory in Louisville, Ky.  Almost all of the bats used in Major League Baseball are made there.  We took a tour of the factory and got to see the machines that make the bats in action.

The bats that they make for retail sale and for most minor league players are made on a set of 5 or 6 machines that carve a piece of wood into a bat based on a metal template.  It amazed me that these machines can make a bat in less than 60 seconds.  They still have to burn the logo into the bat and treat it with a lacquer finish after they come off of the machine, but the process of actually carving the bat takes less than a minute.

They have one single machine that makes the major league bats, and it is the only machine of its kind in the world.  There is a computer attached to this machine that contains the specifications for over 3,000 different bats, and the machine carves the bats based on the specs fed to it by the computer.  We saw some bats that they had just finished making for Ken Griffey, Jr.

As part of the tour, we got to see their collection of baseballs that had been signed by various Presidents of the United States.  They had baseballs signed by every President going back almost all the way to 1900.  There was an information card there that indicated Calvin Coolidge said “Baseball is our national game”.  I knew he had to say something or he’d never have gotten to be President.

We also were given a miniature replica bat as part of our tour.  At under $10, I’d definitely recommend the tour to any baseball fan.

There is also a museum there containing many historic bats.  Admission is free, so you can visit the museum even if you don’t take the factory tour.  There were bats there used by many of the most well-known baseball players of all time – Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and even Honus Wagner, to name a few.

One of Babe Ruth’s bats that was on display had an interesting story connected to it.  Someone had found it in a garage where it had sat forgotten for many years.  When they examined it, they found that not only was it a Babe Ruth Louisville Slugger, but it actually had been personally autographed by Ruth.  They did some research and discovered that it was the bat with which Babe Ruth hit his last home run.  The bat is currently on loan to the museum, but it is worth so much that the owner plans to eventually sell it to finance their kids’ college education!

There is also a large gift shop at the factory, where I got my name engraved on a miniature bat.  No, I’m not a kid anymore, but I still thought that was cool.

Something that surprised me about Louisville Slugger is that the factory itself is pretty small, and they only have a total of around 200-300 employees.  For a factory that produces almost of the bats used in Major League Baseball, I guess I expected to find hundreds of machines and thousands of employees.

Our other major excursion in Louisville was to go across the Ohio river back into Indiana in order to visit the largest riverboat in the United States.  Of course, there’s a casino in it, which is why I wanted to visit it.  I’m not a big gambler, but I like to visit casinos occasionally if I’m in a place that has one.

Indiana is one of those states where only riverboat casinos are legal – you aren’t allowed to build a casino on dry land.  I have no idea why, but several states are like that.  It seems to me that casinos should either be legal or not – I don’t know why it matters if it’s on water.  The way this casino was built, it seemed obvious to me that it stays docked all the time, although I’ve heard the riverboat casinos are actually required to leave dock in some states.  The restaurants and hotel at the casino (The Horseshoe South Indiana) are all built on land, with a bridge crossing the road to the casino.  You actually can’t tell you’re on a boat at all when you’re in the casino.

The other highlight of our trip home was a meal at Steak ‘N’ Shake!  I had a portabello mushroom steakburger with a side of cheese fries and a cookie dough milkshake.  Great food!

After our meal, we drove the rest of the way home, and our trip came to its conclusion.  I must say it was one of the most enjoyable trips I’ve been on.

Trip to Indy, Part 3 – Indianapolis Motor Speedway

On Sunday, we attended the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard.  I’d been to the track many years earlier for a tour, but this was the first time I’d been to a race there.

We knew going in that we wouldn’t be able to see the entire track.  I’ve never understood why, but in addition to the usual grandstands around the outside of the track, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway has large grandstands inside the track infield behind pit road.  These stands block the view of everyone sitting along the front stretch, and I’ve never understood why they were built.  If they weren’t there, everyone would be able to see the whole track.  As it was, we could only see the front stretch and turn 1.  We watched all of the other action on a big screen TV.

One good thing about our seats is that we were right at the exit of pit road, and several of the top cars were pitting right in front of us.  Due to the frequent cautions, there was a lot of action in the pits.

This was a very unusual race due to tire problems.  The cars could only run 10 laps before the tires were completely worn out.  After 4 cars crashed in 3 seperate incidents early in the race, Nascar decided to throw a caution flag every 10 laps for the rest of the race so all of the drivers could come in a change tires.  I’ve never seen such a thing happen in all of the years I’ve been watching Nascar.  I suppose they were afraid some of the drivers would try to stay out too long and there would be more crashes.

While I would have preferred to see a more traditional Indianapolis Motor Speedway race with some long stretches of green flag racing, I still enjoyed the race.  The racing was actually very good while they were under green.  The cautions kept the field bunched up, so it was exciting.  Jimmie Johnson was the winner.

After the race, we had supper at Carraba’s Italian Restuarant.  While there is one not too far from where I live, I hadn’t tried it before.  I can’t begin to remember the name of the dish I had, but it was lightly breaded scallops with a sauce that reminded me of a stone-ground mustard.  As a side item I had some sort of pasta with a spicy marinara sauce, as well as a house salad with creamy parmesan dressing.  I pretended there was no possibility of the dressing containing any mayonnaise.

After that, we just hung out at the hotel and took it easy until time for bed.

Trip to Indy, Part 2 – The Dark Knight and O’Reilly Raceway Park

After driving to Indianapolis on Saturday morning, we found an IMAX theater so we could watch The Dark Knight.  It was an outstanding movie.  Heath Ledger did an amazing job as The Joker.

We then briefly stopped by our hotel (The Jameson Inn) to check in.  It was both nicer and more expensive than Motel 6.

We then headed out for O’Reilly Raceway Park (formerly Indianapolis Raceway Park).  It’s a 3/5 mile short track a few miles outside of Indy.  It was out in the middle of a bunch of cornfields with nothing else nearby.  I’ve been watching races at this track on TV for years, and it surprised me how “old school” it was.  The main grandstand was very small, and the rest of the stands were portable bleachers.  The section of the stands that we were in didn’t even have access to a permanent restroom – only Port-a-Johns.

We decided to pay $11 extra to sit in the “all-you-can-eat” section of the stands.  Given the normal price of racetrack food these days, it costs almost that much for a burger, chips, and drink at most tracks.  So, we thought this sounded like a good deal.  The all-you-can-eat tent was seperate from the main concession stands.  The advantage to this was that there was no line to wait in.  The disadvantage is that the food and drink selections were severely limited compared to regular concession stands, which we didn’t expect.  Still, I had 2 cheeseburgers, 2 hotdogs, a bag of hot fries, a bottle of water, and 6 cokes, so I got my money’s worth.  They were also encouraging people to take as much as they wanted after the race because they had a lot of leftovers, so we wound up with another backback full of cokes, and I had another cheeseburger.

The race was very good, even though Kyle Busch led 197 of 200 laps.  Guess who led 2 of the other 3 laps – Morgan Shepherd!  Yes, that’s all I have to say about the race.  Leave it to me to write more about the food than the race.

The coolest part of the night was what happened after the race.  As we were walking out of the spectator gate, we noticed some crewmen pushing a wrecked race car past us.  I looked to my left and saw a truck with the car’s sponsor on it, so I assumed they were pushing the car to their souvenir stand to display it.  We then realized it wasn’t a souvenir trailer – it was their car hauler!  We then realized all of the car haulers were lined up right beside us.

It isn’t uncommon for the car haulers to be left outside the track at the smaller tracks, but they are usually inside a fenced-in area.  This is the first time I’ve ever seen the car haulers parked in the same parking lot where the fans park, and just a few yards away from the first row of parked cars.  So, we got to watch them load the cars as if we had a pit pass.  One crewman came by trying to push David Reuitimann’s car by himself, and he yelled for a group of fans to help him push it.  My friend Chris wound up helping them load the car into the trailer!

After that, we headed back to the hotel to rest up for Allstate 400 at the Brickyard!