Maybe they'll put a sports team here...

There was a time when less was more. In the world of sports, bigger has always been better but it clearly isn’t as can be evidenced by the increasingly poor product being put on display.

There was a time when the National Hockey League (NHL) had only six teams and those Original Six teams were all competitive. Of course, the league grew over time and now has a mind-boggling 30 teams. However, the quality of each team leaves much to be desired with many incapable and under-skilled players afforded a job. It’s led to a league that has become very watered down with the talented and skilled players spread too far between teams.

What the league needs – as do other leagues such as the National Basketball Association (NBA) and Major League Baseball (MLB) – is to contract teams. It’ll make for a  better product on the playing surface since having less teams will result in each having the best possible players that would ordinarily be on other teams. Additionally, teams which are financially unstable or financially-underperforming could be removed leading to a better fiscal situation for the league. Why prop up teams in non-traditional sports markets in the name of trying to gain market share when millions of dollars are being lost and a poor product across all teams is being provided? It does more damage to the sport to have more teams with such watered-down personnel employed across the league than whatever limited amount of market share is gained. A better product translates to much more success.

Maybe one day these sporting leagues will realize the folly of their ways and reorganize themselves – just like how many big businesses do – but until then, we’re stuck with a dry product on the ice, the hardwood and the grass.

“Last name Ever, first name Greatest, like a sprained ankle boy, I ain’t nothin’ to play with…”
- Drake (Forever)

Regulate just how much is expended...

When it comes to writing, I use a reservoir. I feel sudden bursts of creativity and go on a writing spree trying to get every thought out onto paper like a madman in an institute. Scrambling and furiously typing – in the modern age, the madmen will use keyboards rather than pens – I try to convey whatever I can in that brief moment of inspiration before I lose it.

Like a good breeze, I set sail on my course navigating through waters of treachery and deceit. It’s a long journey with predators lurking off the starboard bow but the journey is what makes that end result worth it. To overcome obstacles and demons to get to where we want to go makes us appreciate the journey.

However, I can’t suddenly start posting every single drop of text because it might just be too much and lead to flooding. Like the banks of the Mississippi, the levees might just break. So I save everything to my reservoir and slowly release the contents like a regulator. The dams be damned, I set the pace.

“And I’m, quick to bust, if my ends you touch…”
- Notorious B.I.G. (Victory)

Take control of the reigns and fly...

It’s rather amazing how life’s priorities instantly change once you have to start considering a spouse as part of the equation. Suddenly, I’ve gone from having to think about my immediate self and my immediate family to thinking beyond that. It’s a good thing but a big responsibility that needs total commitment if it’s to be successful.

I need a Project Plan. I need to establish what’s important and what’s necessary now and for the future. I also need to coordinate this with my spouse-to-be… I better buy everything that I want now before I lose that ability. Time for me to buy some games now for my recently-purchased Sony Playstation 3… though I doubt I’ll ever get time to play.

Everyone’s got their own issues and problems. Everyone’s got their own direction in life. Everyone has their own ideas and expectations of what a marriage should be like… and as flexible as I feel I can be on things, I know that I’ll have to constantly be prepared to adapt my life for the circumstances.

I keep myself pretty busy and involved in a few extracurricular activities that take up a lot of my time. However, I’ll probably have to curb my life in order to make time for my spouse and her expectations/obligations. Time to pull out the blueprints and project plans for this collaborative effort.

“Did dirt now I knew it would come back one day so I’m on point, scrap, prepare for gunplay…”
- Nas (Life Is What You Make It)

Behind a mask is an idea...

The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was a failed assassination attempt by a group of provincial English Catholics against King James I of England and VI of Scotland. The plot intended to kill the King and most of the Protestant aristocracy by blowing up the Houses of Parliament during the State Opening on November 5th, 1605.

The conspirators also planned to abduct the royal children and lead a popular revolt in the Midlands. The plot was overseen from May 1604 by Robert Catesby, with the conspirators coming from either wealthy Catholic or highly influential gentry families. Catesby may have decided on the plot when hopes of greater tolerance of Roman Catholicism under King James I faded, leaving many Catholics disappointed. However, it is likely that Catesby simply sought a future for Catholicism in England enabled by his drastic scheme: the plot was intended as the first step in a rebellion, during which James’ nine-year-old daughter (Princess Elizabeth) could be installed as a Catholic head of state.

Other plotters included Thomas Winter, Robert Winter, John Wright, Christopher Wright, Robert Keyes, Thomas Percy, John Grant, Ambrose Rokewood, Sir Everard Digby, Francis Tresham and Thomas Bates. The explosives were prepared by Guy “Guido” Fawkes, a man with 10 years’ military experience gained by fighting with the Spanish against the Dutch in the Spanish Netherlands.

The details of the plot were reputedly well-known to the principal Jesuit of England, Father Henry Garnet, as he had learned of the plot from Oswald Tesimond, a fellow Jesuit who, with the permission of his penitent Robert Catesby, had discussed the plot with him. Although he was convicted, there has since been some debate over how much Garnet really knew. As the details of the plot were known through confession, Garnet was bound against revealing them to the authorities. Despite his admonitions and protestations, the plot went ahead; however, Garnet’s opposition to it did not save him from being hanged, drawn and quartered for treason in 1606.

“You are the truth outscreaming these lies…”
- Flyleaf (Red Sam)

Moving on to the greater beyond...

Many people talk about stepping things up to the “next level” but what does that really mean? In the world of hip-hop music, rappers always try to make it seem like as if they’re beyond rapping about what they used to. However, as cleverly mentioned in a review that I recently read, it seems that all “next level” efforts simply involve using more futuristic sounds and spaced-out delivery. Same stuff, different wrapping.

The same can be said about  life… it’s just the same stuff with different wrapping each day. We wake up, we go to work, we go to sleep. The next day, we might do these things a bit differently but we’re still doing the same core activity: we wake up, we go to work, we go to sleep. Repeat this cycle until death. That’s the “next level”?

We can try and fill in the blanks with other activities but the same cycle continues. Maybe the “next level” is to step back from it all and try running life a bit differently… or maybe the “next level” is death and the afterlife. To each their own – I won’t tell you how to do things – but I know this much for myself: the next level requires me to start preparing for where I go from here.

“If I stay it won’t be along before I’m burning on the inside…”
- Three Days Grace (Get Out Alive)

Tangled up in a web of lies...

One of my cousins recently suggested that I turn my blog into a revenue-generating tool. How? He suggested that I focus or apply my blog to a defined set of topics – for example, on mobile technology – and that people would read it then to see what it’s all about. The traffic to my blog would suddenly be able to generate revenue through advertising…

The idea I think has a lot of merit but there are a couple of problems with this. I’d have to be committed to doing such a thing and I don’t think I am. I have a lot of extracurricular activities, including writing on this blog, and it’d be difficult to be able to dedicate more time to this blog than I already do. Plus, anyone who knows me knows that I’m not going to do anything haphazardly… so I’d have to go all out and ensure that this blog would be really unique and powerful. I know I can’t commit that kind of energy to a project of that kind at this time…

If I’m going to have a web presence of that magnitude, it’d require much more time and invariably, something will suffer while I’m all caught up in the spindles…

“Whatever you about to discover we off that…”
- Jay-Z (Off That)

Powerful yet possibly dangerous...

Is it just me or do wind turbines scare you? I’ve always appreciated the power generated from a sustainable resource such as the wind or a water source but a farm of wind turbines bothers me because of the potential environmental damage that could occur. Granted, they don’t seem dangerous when gracefully being turned by the wind but when you have a multitude of them, I can imagine that for anyone nearby they can feel the cumulative physical effect of multiple turbines.

For example, the wind pushes the blades of Turbine A which then generate its own physical force adding to the wind’s power of Turbine B. Continue that process along a series of turbines and it becomes clear that the force generated by several turbines will be much greater than the natural force of the wind itself. Now try standing nearby there… and see just how it feels…

…or worse yet, imagine if the wind really becomes excessive and has the turbines spinning at full speed. Aside from the obvious fact that it’d become like a giant slice ‘n dice machine, the resonance frequency could be enough to kill people just from the sheer force of it. Imagine the damage that could happen to wildlife in that area. This may sound like it’s from the X-Files but bridges have been known to collapse due to high winds thanks to the resonance frequency… so what makes you think a farm of wind turbines couldn’t wreak havoc?

“Life, it’s always overblown, till we wake up create some other needs…”
- Chevelle (Roswell’s Spell)

Who would think that these could be lethal...

Think about it: a world full of electric grapes. Everywhere you go, bulbs light up a fruit and advertise to you its availability. Every social gathering, they’re available for your consumption. Every function, it can be had. Electric grapes.

Keep walking in a world where pleasure is king and electric grapes are consumed with tolerance levels in place. A little too much and you’ve lost your balance. A little more will lead to poor decision-making. A little more and you’re lethal with a pair of keys in your hand. Electric grapes bring the party to life but also bring the party to a sudden halt.

Maybe it’s time for the availability of electric grapes to be decreased and its consumption to not be advertised. The same was done for cigarettes in an effort to decrease its effects on the populace so maybe it’s time for the same to be done with electric grapes… too many people are losing their lives over these fruits.

“I know that you are in a better place, somewhere you can escape…”
- Adema (Do You Hear Me)

Burning in a city of ice...

We all have to work… dragging ourselves out of bed each day in order to go into our workplace where we need to expend energy and effort to get things done. But who says we can’t have fun while at work?

In a recent meeting in my company’s boardroom, I broke apart a paperclip while listening to someone talk and I realized that I had five pieces… so I laid out the five pieces to form a torso, two legs and two arms on the desk. It reminded me of the doll from the first season of Dexter that was left in Dexter’s fridge by an enemy. I then wrote out on a piece of paper Dexter’s famous line of “he’s asking me if I want to play, and yes, I want to play, I really want to play…” and left the piece of paper there in the boardroom with the paperclip pieces.

Last month, I left a note in the boardroom for others to read when they’d eventually come into the boardroom about how it makes no sense for the Wizards and Magic to play each other in the NBA since the two are supposed to go hand in hand. I went as far as explaining that any wizard playing without magic was in for a long night…

The President of the company that I work at already thinks that I’m crazy since I pull pranks on other people all the time while seemingly coming up with very creative ideas and presentations for major issues. An example: I named our software implementation project as “Project Firestarter”… we’re a lumber yard.

Other wonderful things that I’ve done are:

• Changing the order of the keys on peoples’ keyboards or writing messages out of the letters on their keyboards
• Attaching a computer mouse to the bottom of a chair so that when that specific person moves their chair, the mouse moves along too like as if it’s a real mouse intended to scare them
• Turning everything upside-down at someone’s desk including their monitor, keyboard, chair, personal possessions, papers, stuffed animals and more
• Changing the radio station everytime a specific person leaves the room intended to make that person paranoid that the radio station keeps changing
• Giving a 5-minute speech in front of about 15 people for a meeting about how I tried to come up with a topic for my 5-minute speech and how I subsequently never did come up with a topic and then used the lack of a topic as my speech’s topic – and then titled the speech as “The Topic of Topics”…
• Watching hip-hop videos in the boardroom and turning up the music loud enough so that when people walked by the boardroom, they’d wonder what kind of meeting was taking place and how come they were missing out

Productivity is no good if you can’t have fun doing it… might as well travel the road less traveled in order to get a wild ride from it.

“Only thing that’s on my mind is who gon’ run this town tonight…”
- Run This Town (Jay-Z)

Attacked on all sides - openly and covertly...

In Lillehammer, Norway on July 21, 1973, Israeli Mossad agents murdered Moroccan waiter Ahmed Bouchiki. The agents had been sent by Israel as part of Operation Wrath of God to assassinate Ali Hassan Salameh, the leader of the Black September Organization, a Palestinian group that carried out the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. They mistook Bouchiki for their target and shot him repeatedly as he walked back from a cinema to his apartment with his pregnant wife. Two members of the assassination team were arrested the next day as they re-used a getaway car to go to the airport. After their interrogation the whole cell was arrested. Incriminating documents and the keys to a network of safe houses were discovered.

Of the nine agents who participated directly in the assassination, six were captured by the Norwegian authorities and five were convicted of Bouchiki’s murder. Two of the killers escaped and one was acquitted. The five convicts were sentenced to prison terms ranging from two and a half to five years but all were released within 22 months and deported to Israel.

The revelations of the captured agents dealt a massive blow to the undercover infrastructure of the Mossad in Europe. Agents who had been exposed had to be recalled, safe houses abandoned, phone numbers changed and operational methods modified. Michael Harari, the leader of the assassins, managed to escape and was never extradited by Israel to Norway. The Israeli government has not admitted responsibility for the murder, but in 1996 paid compensation equal to US$283,000 split between Bouchiki’s wife and daughter, and a separate settlement of US$118,000 to a son from a previous marriage.

“Time is like a knife for me now…”
- Lacuna Coil (My Wings)