wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww...what is goign on with womens sports???? i mean not that there's any real reason why women should be any less aggressive than men, but has anybody else noticed that over the last year or so we've seen more "violence " in womens sports than ever before. remember the soccer player from New Mexico a few months back who spent an entire game dishing out cheap-shots , including pulling an opponent down by her ponytail? Well here's the latest, check out what happened in the game between Baylor and Texas Tech the other night......

.........Random thoughts from a random guy......Ok so here's my movie review....Shutter Island..have you seen it? Lernardo Di Capra is awesome but i still feel like he's a young kid playin gthe part of a grown-up. i don't want to give anything away, but i will say that i'm going to see it again becasue there are so many twists and turns that i can't keep them all straight. I liked it...i thought it could have been about 15 minutes shorter, it was actually one of those times when you said to yourself, wow, this is a long movie...but still very very interesting, disturbing, compelling, tragic, great acting, suspensfull, all those things rolled into one, again this is a pretty lousey review but i just don't want to give anything away becasue that would totally spoil it for anybody who hasn't seen it.  Random thought number 2...I was the first one who said he hated the idea of pro's playing in the hockey compeition, but i didn't miss a single minute of the gold medal game. You know what i loved the most? the fact that the United States guys looked so down and disapointed when they lost. there is nothing that drives me crazier than after an NFL game when the guys are laughing and hugging each other. its hard to tell who won and who lost. that drives me insane, if you're playing at that level it should hurt to loooooose!!! Random throught 3. Happy birthday John Bon Jovi...48 and still rocking strong...Random thought number 4. Do i loose my man card becasue i expressed my fondness for antique malls and flea markets today?? I don't loose it for that do i???????

like i was saying......I'm going to take a few days off here to work on my book; "Frontlines" the stories of Wisconsin Vets during world war two; coming soon to a bookstore near you.......(hows that for a shamless plug?) any way....i've got some random thoughts that i want to toss out.....first of all we did the poll today on people who absolutly love their jobs, i mean have jobs that they can't wait to get too. 99% of the people who responded were women, whats up with that??? come on guys, how can you not love some of the jobs you have....Carpenters???  Classic Car restorers??? Detectives??  Bar owners??? Fishing/hunting guides??? Taxidermists???? how could you not love those jobs?????
 
Olympics....the US is absolutly kicking butt...Is it just me or does Lindsey Vonn look like Jan from the Office?   Is it just me or would it be a lot more fun if we sent a group of college all star hockey players to take on the Pros from other countries? does anybody know where you can buy one of the ski-caps that the U.S. athletes wore in the opening ceromony? Is there anything less excitting than the NBA this time of year??? Can you tell i've lost weight??? So many questions....so little time...........cccccccccccccccccyaaaaaaa

you know......i very seldom feel sorry for professional athletes. Oh sure there were some pangs of sympathy for the Packers when the Cardinals were celebrating the playoff win...you sort of had to feel for Payton Manning after the super bowl losing int, but overall you have to think they have a pretty good life, i mean have you seen MTV Cribs???? But there is one athlete out there that i absolutly feel horrible for today and that is Olympic snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis. I know what you're thinking, "An olympian? How dare you call them professionals...let me tell you the days of pure amatuers in the olympics are long long gone. If you haven't followed her story, she's the one who did a bit of a "hotdog" move in Torino four years ago and lost the Gold Medal. the ironic thing here is that she's not a "showboat" never has been. she was just trying to pay homage to the snowboarders who came before here and wren't given the respect they deserved becasue so many "pure" olympic followers considered it an inferior sport.   The thing is she is evidently a great young athelte, a role model type who spends time visiting kids in hospitals, gets her hair cut everyyear and donates it the Locks of Love program, believee me she will never pull a Bodie Miller and admit that she didn't win becasue she partied too hard at the olympic village. over the past four years she has dominated the sport. But one slip-up and  its four more years of answering the same questions of why the absolute top person in the sport can't win a gold medal. Maybe thats what's so compelling about the olympics, the agopny of defeat can't be erased in a a few days or a week. this one lasts a lot longer, just ask Dan Jansen.

Happy birthday to you,,,happy birthday to you...happyyyy birthdddddayyyyy dear gingerrrrrrrrrrrr......haaaapyyy birthdayyyyyyyy to youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu...Thats right, the dream girl/lady/woman of my youth is celebrating a birthday. ok she's in her mid 70's...and , well, lets just say she might not look exactly the same as she looked back there on the island....in fact i sort of wish the dream girls from back in the day had stopped having their pictures taken in about 1981. i don't want to think of them as somebodys gramma..i want to think of them as the hottest of the hotties from back in my youth...since Ginger is pretty much out of the picture, i did a little exploring to see how some of the other ladies i had crushes on back in the day are looking right now....Joey Heatherton, Nancy Sinatra, Lori Partridge, Marcia Brady......you know what, it sort of made me feel good...i mean i never would have had a shot at these vixens, (I always wanted to use that word) paying any attention to me back in the day, but now, who knows....and really if you check out my picture from back in "My Day"   there's no logical explanation for them to not have paid attention to that hunky guy back then.....right????

How you doin'?

ok, first things first...the green tea diet...not so good. i put on a pound...ok on to more important things....did i tell you abot the time i met Lady Gaga when she was about 14 years old....so, i'm in Harrison N.J. for an open audition for the Sopranos..a few yrs back, I was interviewing some of the people in line on my little cassette recorder to bring back to the show, well a guy comes up to me and starts telling me all about his daughter, about what a huge star she's going to be, about how all these agents are tryign to sign her etc etc....i remember interviewing her.....but i can't find the tape, anyway i absolutly swear on my grave that it was a young lady gag who had a very long italian name....i'm not kidding...i swear it was her!!! her dad was absolutly insistant that she was going to be a big star. so how about that...i almost got a part on the sopranos and i discovered Lady Gaga. not too damn bad of a day wouldn't you say.......and also katie thinks i have a very big forehead in this picture...how about the tan on Paulie Walnuts.....

....Ok i've got to admit, it's not going as well as i had hoped...the old weight loss challenge. i tink there's soemthing wrong with me, seriously, i'm like a bear just prior to hibernation, everyrtime i eat someting it just stays with me and turns into poundage...at least the bear knows that at soem point during the long winter, while snuggled up inside a cave...(actually how much furn would that be...eat as much of anything as you want and then take a 2-month nap) but anyway...theyknow that sooner or later that excess will burn off by itself...while they sleep!!! are you kidding me??? come on God this isn't fair! anyway here's my experiment, which i do not suggest anyone else follows...i am going to do nothing but drink diet green tea for 24 hours...thats it...nothing more nothing less and see what happens. i was 221 on the scale today....if it doesn't work i might look into the hibernation thing...i wonder if you can get Pay-per view in a cave???

Ok so this is going into the "Really??????" heading. all morning we were talking about rumors of "celebs" living, or at least having a summer-winter-fall-getaway places in the area....Li'l Wayne, Oprah--who evidently has at lest six places in wisconsin.--kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Tim Mcgraw., micheal jordan..etc etc....here's what i want to know...need to know...has anyone actually seen one of these people and or had a picture taken with them???? major-mega-prize package at stake here foks....i will post it here on my blog...i will pay you serious homage...come on....if all these people spend time up here somebody has to have some verification....i would like to expound further on this but i have to run home real quick,  Denzel is spending the week with me and i forgot to leave him a key.....

Heyyyyyyyyyyyy i want to thank everybody for stopping by Festival Foods for our Haitian Relief effort. you folks were fantastic...nearly $30,000 has been raised so far. There was however one unfortunite incident,.. unbeknownst  to one of the individuals assisting with the collection efforts, Festival Food stores are saturated with surveillance cameras. Thus, if an individual innocently forgets to pay for a cup of coffee, (due to concentrating on his collection efforts) it is possible that this person could possibly have his photo captured and sent out to all of the Festival stores in the state of Wisconsin. This really could happen! so as a warning please do not slide into the sorid world of crime. You may be forced to do time...and worse than anything....those camera's really make you look much "stockier" than you really are.........

DO NOT APPROACH THE SUBJECT(S)!

NOTIFY MANAGEMENT OR LOSS PREVENTION IMMEDIATELY!

Somethings wrong with me....don't worry i can hear all you people , (well actually the few of you who actually read my blog.)....saying.."You're telling us there's something wrong with you????" anyway....I want to be so happy and giddy that the Vikings got beat that this should be one of the best days of my life. ..don't get me wrong...i'm ecstatic...but i'm also felling sort of hallow...becasue as much as it hurts to say this, the Wrangler guy added a certain something to football this season that is gone. There's a reason that Pro Wrestling has villians...they add passion to the ring. Just watching a couple of beefy guys toss each other around would get pretty boring. but "back in my day" you'd have the "Mad Russian" (how could you not hate a "commie" )you had the Iron Shiek...evil Nazi characters type villians as they battled the lovable Killer Kowalski and the Crusher....now i'm not comparing the Wrangler guy to any of them, but with the biggest sporting event of the year coming up how do you stir up any strong feelings for either Payton Manning or Drew Bree's?? you just can't do it...i want to despise one of them, i want to hear that Payton hates Italians, i keep searching to see if Drew ever stole a quarter from the candle box at church..errrrrrrrrr wait a minute that was me...you know now that i think about it....they could use me in the Super bowl...Brutis Beefcake doesn't have a thing over me!

...Normally this is one of my favorite weekends of the year...ranks right up there with Final Four weekend for college basketball and the opening weekend of deer season...even though i don't really deer hunt much anymore i start getting jacked-up knowing that venison sticks are on the way---a true staple of the Maino/Atkins diet.

but this weekend is going to be tougher than most...and maybe a lot less enjoyable. it pains me to say this but right now, as of this writing, I truely believe the Minnesota Vikings are the best team in football. Do you know how hard it is to admit that???? Forget the whole Favre drama....the Vikings would be the best team with Gary Cuozzo at qb....you have to go wayyy back to remember Gary Cuozzo....I do not want the Minesota Vikings to win. plain and simple. which means they almost certainly will seeing as how i do so lousy picking games. In fact i can come up with a list of things i would rather experience than the Vikes in the super bowl.

1. I would rather have Jay Leno's chin...Conans hair and my paycheck...than to see them win.

2. I would rather defoliate Murphys head every morning live on the air...than to see them win.

3. I would rather go on an "All you can eat" diet of Katie's 3-layer jello, cherry pie and fruit pizza...than to see them win.

4. I would rather try to steal candy out of the hands of Brady Popenga's kids at his Halloween Party than to see them win. (btw this will never happen seeing as how murphy and I are never invited to his annual party.)

5. I would rather make out with Nancy Pelosi in front of my high school buddies...than to see them win. (Ok maybe we're getting carried away here....i think you get the point.....

Who Dat...Who Dat..Who Dat gonna beat them Saints!!!!!!!