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My friend Bret got me into watching the Red Sox a couple of years ago. In addition, I both like, and don’t like the devil rays. The minor league team here in Montgomery is the farm team for the Rays, so a few of the names on the team are very familiar to me. Well, I am hoping the Sox and the Rays becomes a heated rivalry. You have to see this video.

I think I mentioned this in my last update, but after tomorrow, the majority of my semester will be completed. I have just gone through what can only be described as collegiate hell to have a much happier time this year. In the last 7 weeks, I have completed 3 college courses. I have one class left after all of these, and even though it is an upper level economics class, it will be a cake walk. (I am not going to mention outside of the confounds of a paragraph that I happen to love economics.) Here is to the next 8 weeks of a much more relaxed school semester.

Outside of school, let’s talk about football and friends. Auburn kicked some Vandy ass this weekend. I say that in a loving manner. I love of Auburn. I am a jackass when it comes to my teams. So even though Auburn is winning, I always have Cincinnati to keep me down. Good thing they have a bye week. I guess this just means i will have to rely on Green Bay to give me my NFL jovials this Sunday as they play Chicago. I mean, really, who am I kidding? Green Bay should win this game, Chicago as been playing poorly all season and the Packers are undefeated right now at 4-0.

So Auburn won, and our friend Melissa invited Erika and I to watch the Florida - LSU game at her place. Bo, Lindsey, Trey, Emily, and of course Scott were all there. I was hoping Florida won, no matter how much I hate every team from that state. LSU is undefeated and with that in mind, I needed Florida, a team from the SEC, to beat LSU so Auburn looked a little better. It didn’t happen.

The fun part of the evening, besides the fantastic pizza Melissa and Scott got from Tomitino’s, was seeing Emily, Bo, and Scott eat these cupcakes covered in blue frosting. They were staining the inside of their mouths, and better yet, anywhere the blue frosting touched. Lips, teeth, fingers, all turned to a smurfy blue once touched by the over-sugared frosting.

The blue frosting caused more than just stained teeth, it caused quite a bit of ruckus as everyone was either conserned they would have all of their teeth rot out, or just become a vampire, as the picture of emily below shows. Even though Bo’s picture here is a little blurry (Ok, a lot blurry) it show how much blue was really on their teeth.

Erika and I left just before midnight. They started watching Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. I think we left during the freakshow scene. That finished off the evening for us, and brings me to today.
Of course, this post as come out as more of a stream of conscience for me. I have already talked about today, but what I didn’t mention is that I took a test online today. It didn’t go as well as I wanted, but I have the opportunity to take the test again over the next couple of days. Alright, I am hoping these updates will come more often now that I am done with the majority of the my classes. Oh, and wish me luck on my final tomorrow, it is on financial management. I have told most of you how I feel about any kind of finance class. Crazy math. Let me do calculus, statistics, or geometry any day, but any kind of math that involves balance sheets, income statements, and worst of all, any kind of depreciation time lines or tables, and I just don’t understand it. I get economics and I understand finance, but accounting is something totally different. Anyway, I think what I am trying to say is I need all the luck I can get because the final is much more accounting heavy.

I have been drowned in school work for the last five weeks. I haven’t done much on the updating front unless it happened to fall into the 140 characters or less realm of twitter. Those aren’t real updates. They are notifications. They are blurbs about what I am thinking, or what I have done. They have no emotion. They have no inner thought.

I look at these updates as more of a manifestation of my inner thinking, my feelings, and generally the thought I had leading up to making the large post. Sometimes, no matter how busy one may be, writing out these things comes out of the necessity to get things off their mind. This is one of those times.

I want to preface the remaining paragraphs of this post by saying I am fine. There is nothing wrong with me. No doomed sense of security. There are no LiveJournal drama cases that I wish to emo out. Call me crazy. I just wanted to write.

I had some things I wanted to share, but I don’t feel like pulling them all together right now. I might save this as a draft and put those items in this post later, but then again, maybe I will just update instead. I may never publish if I put it in a draft…

Ok, so that paragraph above, I ended up saving it as a draft, and guess what? It is three days later and I am just now picking this up to finish where I left off. I know myself a little too well. In fact, I scare myself with how lazy I can be in the update realm. It isn’t important really.

I think I meant this update to be about me. What have I been doing? Well, let’s do the 4 week catch up.

I have, of course, been swamped in school work. I occasionally come up for air and breath, see my friends, and before I get to have a ton of fun, I am back at it again. I have been generally sleeping about 4 to maybe 5 hours a night during the week. I try to do much more than that on the weekends.

Last week I went to Perdido Bay. It was a group of friends, invited to stay at one of their family’s homes. Very nice. It took place during the middle of a tropical depression, but the weather didn’t hinder out ability to have fun. Auburn won their game that night, and Alabama lost theirs. The games were a bit of a highlight for me, but cooking and hanging out with friends that I don’t normally spend that much time around was also appealing. Emily, Trey, thank you for having us down there. Bo, Lindsay, Melissa, Scott, Chris, thank you for the great time.

I came back from that trip to a lot of work I needed to finish. I had two papers and two presentations that week. The irony of all this is that was just the tip of the iceberg. As much as I would love to elaborate, I will save all of those taking their incredibly precious time and not. Plus, the less said, the more spoken. At least it sounded good at the time.

Friday I met up with Lisa. She and I are working on a presentation for a Global Trade and Finance class. We are doing on U.S. sanctions in Myanmar (Burma). I got to catch up with what she has been doing over the last 6 years. Apparently, it was quite a bit of moving around the country. Now comes the title line. “So I am in Montgomery, and I drive a Geo Prism.” Beautifully put.

This weekend was fun for the most part. Bret and Mike came over yesterday to watch the Alabama game. They lost. It wasn’t as big a disappointment for Bret as I assumed it would be. After that game, Auburn came on. It was refreshing to see a game so invigorating.  I don’t even know if that last sentence made sense. Regardless, that game was fun. The first half was amazing. The second half brought the fear of another loss. But in the end, it all worked out. Thank you Auburn for winning a game few thought you would win, including me.

After the game, Colette came over, Bret and Mike left, and Seth and Crystal came over. In that order. We ended up going to 1048 to see the Moonshine Cherry Band. Yet another good gig for them.

I had a lot of fun. Now I must complete the work for all of the classes that I have ending this week. Three of my four classes are coming to an end this week. I will be back to myself again soon. Then Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s will come and go, and I will be back at it again.

For those of you living under a rock yesterday, Super Bowl XLI aired last night. One of the better super bowls in recent memory, but I digress. What I really started writing this post about was one Kevin Rose, and his immediate celebrity after being featured in a commercial that aired during the super bowl.

Yes, Kevin got his 0.376 seconds of fame. I think. I nearly missed him. I definitely missed Alex Albrecht, Kevin’s side kick from their video podcast DiggNation. They were both on the GoDaddy.com commercial which first aired during the 2-minute warning of the super bowl.

As far as the commercial is concerned, I didn’t enjoy it. Not even slightly. I mean I guess watching Candice Michelle getting soaked in champagne was kinda fun. This is the link to the YouTube page of their commercials, but I have now idea which one was the one that actually aired.

Tomorrow is the Iron Bowl.

For those of you unfortunate enough (or fortunate, depending on perspective) to not be in Alabama, the Iron Bowl is the biggest match in the state. Auburn University versus the University of Alabama. The Tigers versus the Tide.

My bet is Auburn University winning for the 5 straight year 28 - 24.

If you haven’t read the times today, it has an interesting article about somebody we may have never met, but Im sure most of you have at least heard of, Daniel Moore. This is what happens when intellectual copyright law is taken too far. How can a university do this, let alone anybody else?

I have copied the whole article from the Times’ website, because I know before long, it will not be available without a subscription. The entrie article is behind the cut.

TUSCALOOSA, Ala., Nov. 7 — In the solemn cathedral of college football devotion and instruction that is the Paul W. Bryant Museum here, a large painting dominates the main chamber. It is called “The Sack,” and it shows an encounter between a Notre Dame quarterback and a human locomotive in crimson and white.

“I’ve never been hit like that before,” the quarterback, Steve Beuerlein, said after his near-lethal sack by Cornelius Bennett in 1986, in the University of Alabama’s first victory ever over his team.

Daniel A. Moore, who painted “The Sack” and scores of other renditions of signal moments in Alabama football history, said he felt something similar last year, when his fax machine began to spit out a lawsuit from the university.

Mr. Moore’s paintings, reproduced in prints and on merchandise, violated the university’s trademark rights, the suit said. It asked a federal judge to forbid him to, among other things, use the university’s “famous crimson and white color scheme.”

Athletes, sports leagues and universities around the nation have become increasingly aggressive in protecting what they say is their intellectual property, and their claims have met with a mixed response from judges and fans. But almost no one here thinks the suit against Mr. Moore is a good idea.

“This lawsuit is the equivalent of the Catholic Church suing Michelangelo for painting the Sistine Chapel,” said Keith Dunnavant, an Alabama alumnus and the author of “Coach: The Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”

A university spokeswoman, Cathy Andreen, declined repeated requests for interviews with university officials and lawyers, on what she said was the advice of counsel.

James Glen Stovall, who taught journalism at the university for 25 years, said only one sort of person would support the suit.

“I can see why, if you’re sitting in a roomful of lawyers, you might come to that conclusion,” Mr. Stovall said. “But no one outside of that room would say: ‘Hey, that’s a good idea. Let’s sue Daniel Moore.’ ”

At his gallery in Birmingham, surrounded by prints and paintings reflecting his more than 25 years as a sports artist, Mr. Moore said he remained a loyal Alabama alumnus. He graduated from the university with an art degree in 1976; two of his daughters go there now, and a third is a recent graduate.

“I still love Alabama,” he said. “I still love Alabama football. Obviously, I haven’t yanked my daughters out of school.”

But there is bitterness, too. For two decades, the university gave him sideline passes. Now he is not welcome on game day.

“As an artist,” he said, “it helps to be there, to feel the emotion and excitement and strategy from an on-field perspective.”

He said he did not understand why his work, copies of which have a place of pride in the dens of thousands of Alabama football fans, should not receive the same First Amendment protection that newspaper photographs do. “Artists,” he said, “were the first journalists.”

In its legal papers, the university’s lawyers are grudging in their assessment of Mr. Moore’s talent. “Though skillfully prepared,” the lawyers wrote, Mr. Moore’s art conveys nothing beyond the raw facts of football. Mr. Moore, the suit says, “literally replicates even the expression on the players’ faces in his prints and he adds no message whatever not conveyed by the play itself.”

That is not fair, Mr. Moore said. Though he uses photographs for reference, he said that his compositions and his style were his own. He calls his approach “photofuturism,” which he describes as “five parts realism to one part motion.”

Over the years, Mr. Moore said, his paintings and prints have cumulatively sold “in the low millions.” An 8-by-10 reproduction sells for $25 retail, or $35 if it is signed. An original watercolor might go for $22,000, an oil for $65,000.

The university’s lawyers seemed to take particular offense at Mr. Moore’s use of his paintings on merchandise like coffee mugs and calendars.

In response, Mr. Moore did not hesitate to invoke his own intellectual property rights. “Because I own the copyright,” he said, “it’s my opinion that I can put it on anything I want to. I can put it on a tattoo on someone’s backside.”

Mr. Moore has asked Judge R. David Proctor of the Federal District Court in Birmingham to dismiss the case on First Amendment grounds. His brief cited a decision of the federal appeals court in California ruling that a trademark owner “does not have the right to control public discourse” if “the public imbues his mark with a meaning.”

After the citation, Mr. Moore’s lawyer, Stephen D. Heninger, added a parenthetical aside. “Who could argue with a straight face,” he asked, “that the cultural significance of Alabama football has not assumed such a role?”

A ruling on the motion is expected in the next few months.

Other courts have also tried to balance the rights of the owners of intellectual property against that of free expression. The cases, which involve a variety of legal theories, generally turn on whether consumers are apt to be confused about who produced the works in question and on whether artists managed to add something meaningful to the bare facts.

At one end of the legal spectrum, a federal judge in Louisiana had no difficulty in July in enjoining a company that sold shirts bearing the school colors and initials of four football powerhouses.

At the other, the federal appeals court in Cincinnati in 2003 rejected an effort by the golfer Tiger Woods to stop an artist named Rick Rush from using Mr. Woods’s image in a painting commemorating his victory at the 1997 Masters in Augusta, Ga.

That painting, a panorama that included likenesses of six past winners, “communicates and celebrates the value our culture attaches to such events,” the majority in the divided three-judge panel decision found. “It would be ironic indeed if the presence of the image of the victorious athlete would deny the work First Amendment protection.”

In the middle of the spectrum is a 2001 decision of the California Supreme Court. It expressed great solicitude for the rights of artists under the First Amendment. But it ruled against an artist who had created a simple charcoal drawing of the Three Stooges and sold it on T-shirts.

The court attached no significance to the fact that the artist, Gary Saderup, reproduced his art on clothing. “First Amendment doctrine,” Justice Stanley Mosk wrote for a unanimous court, “does not disfavor nontraditional media of expression.”

But Justice Mosk found that the image itself contained “no significant transformative or creative contribution” and derived its worth mostly from the Stooges’ celebrity rather than Mr. Saderup’s talent. Andy Warhol’s celebrity portraits, by contrast, Justice Mosk wrote, “may well be entitled to First Amendment protection” as “ironic social commentary.”

These decisions, Mr. Moore said, make courts into critics, a role that may not suit them.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in a 1903 decision holding that circus posters may be copyrighted, appeared to agree.

“It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law,” he wrote, “to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/us/12artist.html?ref=us

Went to the Tigers - Bulldogs game yesterday. I have to say, I must be a fan when my team loses, it rains, it gets cold, I had to walk a couple of miles back to the car, and I still had a great time.
Don’t get me wrong, I am still in a state of shock, even though I knew Auburn would either win by the smallest margin or Georgia would kill us. The latter happened, and I am still upset about it. To be honest, I know that our team is a great team that just hasn’t gotten our shit together.

Standing in the student section will make you feel every high and low in the game to the extreme. A first down and the students are cheering like it was a touchdown, a touchdown, and the students are cheering like they just won the national title. A turnover, and you feel like your team just died in a fiery crash. A touchdown from the opposition and we are on the verge of a nuclear holocaust.

All told, I would much rather go to a bad auburn game than to a good day at work.

Went to the Tigers - Bulldogs game yesterday. I have to say, I must be a fan when my team loses, it rains, it gets cold, I had to walk a couple of miles back to the car, and I still had a great time.
Don’t get me wrong, I am still in a state of shock, even though I knew Auburn would either win by the smallest margin or Georgia would kill us. The latter happened, and I am still upset about it. To be honest, I know that our team is a great team that just hasn’t gotten our shit together.

Standing in the student section will make you feel every high and low in the game to the extreme. A first down and the students are cheering like it was a touchdown, a touchdown, and the students are cheering like they just won the national title. A turnover, and you feel like your team just died in a fiery crash. A touchdown from the opposition and we are on the verge of a nuclear holocaust.

All told, I would much rather go to a bad auburn game than to a good day at work.

War damn eagle!