Our Brains on Drugs

It rained most of the weekend so I did not get much done around the yard. My Son and I spent most of our time watching Star Wars. I am turning him into a geek like me. Yes!

The rain prevented me from having a cycling accident for the third weekend in a row. Thanks to Floyd Landis cycling was still on my mind. Not just cycling however, with the help of 100m world record holder Justin Gatlin I took my quiet time to ponder the effects of testosterone on the human brain. More importantly I began to wonder what this could mean to my perception of male intelligence.

First a little background. Last week Floyd Landis tested positive for high levels of testosterone after winning the Tour De France. A couple of days later it was revealed that sprinter Justin Gatlin received a positive result after one of his tests. Both of these athletes showed that although testosterone helps yours performance athletically, it may severely decreases your mental performance. Could women be right? Are men stupid? Do our brains begin to shut down as increase our testosterone level? Floyd and Justin provide us with some very disturbing evidence.

After Landis tested positive he came up with many reasons why. Jack Daniels and Cortisone were on the top of his list. Both pretty weak reasons. After he had some time to think he came up with “naturally high testosterone levels.” High levels that had not been detected previously. A high level that has only occurred during stage 17 of the Tour De France when he destroyed the competition. Good thinking Floyd. I needed more evidence as this was only one example and I have suspicions that recreational drugs may be a factor here.

Justin Gatlin stepped up to the plate. It seems that Justin’s massage therapist is part of a conspiracy to ruin his career. The crafty therapist rubbed testosterone cream on Gatlin just before he tested positive. I hope he releases the name of this therapist soon because I am pretty sure he owns the dog that ate my math homework when I was in grade 8.

The evidence was mounting and I didn’t like what I was seeing. I needed to think of someone smart. There is myself. Clearly I am a genius and I ooze testosterone, but I am a freak of nature. Stephen Hawking. Low testosterone. The smart gut from my grade 12 Physics class. No testosterone. Yikes! This is leading me down a path that I don’t want to take. Do women really have the edge on us in the smarts department?

This forces me to ask the question: Who is dumber, testosterone filled men or the women who let us rule the world?

There are Steriods in My Whiskey

Surprise, surprise. Floyd Landis got caught cheating. Before you get your underwear tied up in knots, yes I know that the B-Sample is yet to be tested. Do you seriously think that it will yield a different result?

Looking back at the race and when he got caught it really is no surprise at all. One day after looking like he had nothing left Landis amazingly blew the field away and had the race of his life. We had to endure Al Trautwig and Bob Roll verbally felaciating him and hear how it was the greatest ride in the history of the Tour De France, ever. It seems now that a big shot of testosterone had a helping hand in it. I would love to hear Al and Bob’s take on it now. Maybe it is French conspiracy against the Americans.

I always get a kick when reporters look for comments from the parents of the perpetrators of such grievous crimes against humanity. What do you really expect them to say? “Yes, Floyd was always a cheater. He used to elbow his classmates when playing musical chairs in kindergarten.” Note to reporters: Parents will almost always stand up for their kids. Even if said child has all the credibility of a teenager claiming that the condoms in his drawer are not his.

I am guessing that this positive test will come with the standard two year ban but I am hoping he gets an extra year just for being stupid. After Basso and Ulrich were banned for the suspicion of using performance enhancers did Landis think that tour officials would stop watching? Maybe they should test his sample for recreational drugs also.

Of course Landis has provided us with a perfectly reasonable explanation. Jack Daniels. He drank some the night before his “epic ride.” We all know that Jake Daniels is a major source of testosterone. It is a small wonder that it has not been banned by all major athletic federations. If that is the best that Floyd can come up with then he is in trouble.

Lost in the circus is the fact that Oscar Pereiro stands to inherit Yellow Jersey. He is not all that excited about it. I can’t say as I blame him. It would be kind of like getting table scraps now.

The Leafs Suck

About a month ago a friend of mine directed me to a hockey rumor blog called Hockeybuzz. The main blogger there is Eklund. He really seems to have excellent sources because a lot of what he writes ends up happening. It is a site I visit almost every day.

Along with Eklund there are several other bloggers who contribute. Many of them are focused on a single team. One of those teams is the Toronto Maple Leafs and their blogger is a microcosm of why the Leafs are becoming the most hopeless franchise in hockey (Thanks to the Islanders the Leafs are not quite there yet).

Basically the Leaf blogger (I am not going to name him but he should be easy enough to find) blows smoke up our ass about how good the team is and how great the off season moves are. The sad part is I think he actually believes it and so does the Leaf nation. So as my public service to delusional Leafs fans everywhere I offer you: 4 Reasons Why the Maple Leafs Will Miss the Playoffs this Year.

1. Bryan McCabe: 5 years, 25 million spells overpaid for a player who is only useful on the power play. He should be getting Sheldon Souray type money not Chris Pronger money. The fact that he is the number one defenceman speaks volumes to the sorry state of the team’s defence core.
2. Andrew Raycroft: Tell me how trading one of the best young goalie prospects (Tuukka Rask) for basically a third string goalie on one of the weakest teams in the league is helpful. Now he is your number one goalie? It would have been much better to go with Tellqvist as the number one and keep Rask.
3. The Leaf fans: For believing the swill that comes out of the front office and accepting it.
4. John Ferguson Jr: He has proved to be quite adept at selling the teams future to make the team almost mediocre. Much like many Leaf fans and those reporting on them he thinks things are just fine.

The bottom line is that no defence and no goaltending equal no playoffs. No matter what color your glasses are.

All My Sports

I know you are dying to hear how things went for my golf pool. It went very well. With Tiger Woods Winner and Ernie Els finishing third I made a huge leap in the standings. Mike Weir and Mark Hensby did not do much to help me on the weekend. In the overall ranking I jumped 351 spots to 366. In round two action I moved up 1026 places to 76. Yeah to me!

Going into the final round I was pulling for Els to take down Woods. I am not much of a fan of Tiger but I couldn’t help but feel good for him after he won. I know how he felt.

The Tour De France is now over with a solid blah. Over the years I have watched this I can not figure out why somebody does not try to win this on the final day. There were several who could have had a chance. Instead they all sit back and watch the leader drink champagne. This is your chance to win the biggest cycling race in the world! Grow some balls! Making things worse was having to listen to Al Trautwig and Bob Roll profess their man love of Floyd Landis. Bleck!

The best of the weekend was watching the Blue Jays take 3 of 4 from the Yankees. Woot! They gave them a sounds 13-5 thrashing on Sunday too. The Red Sox Suck.

Crash and Burn

For the second weekend in a row I have had another bicycling “incident” We were going for a ride in our city’s beautiful river valley when we came across a steep and twisty hill. I was pulling my Son in the bike trailer behind me so I decided to take the hill slow. I applied some pressure to my brakes and made my way down the hill at what I thought was a safe pace. The bike trailer had other plans and tried to pass me. I fought it briefly but the momentum was too much and down I went. Fortunately was able to use me body to stop the progress of my bike and trailer keeping them from taking my Son careening into the trees. I quickly picked myself up to check on my Son only to find him staring at me with a big grin on his face. “That was funny, Daddy.” I’ll do anything to entertain my family, no matter the cost to my body.

Thinking bruises and scrapes were not enough to suffer through I stupidly forgot to put some sunscreen on while I was doing yard work on Sunday. It was 35C (95F) without a cloud in the sky. My back is now a bright shade of red and hurts worse than the rest of my body. No one to blame but myself for that brain dead moment.

Later I will update you on my very exciting sports weekend. Ooooooo!

My Wife will Miss Me

This has been a really great week for sports. The weekend is shaping up not so bad either.

My favorite golf tournament is in progress, The British Open. I love those links style courses. My golf-pickem pool is looking very nice right now too. As it stands now I have:
1 Tiger Woods -12
2 Ernie Els -11
T-22 Mike Wier -4
T-22 Mark Hensby -4
T-136 Darren Clarke +7

It would even look better if Clarke hadn’t shat the bed with an 82 today. I am a big Mike Weir fan and it is nice to seem him doing well in a major.

Also this weekend my beloved Blue Jays are taking on the evil empire. Last night we took one from them in extra innings. The Jays could be sitting very nicely if they can polish of the Yankees. As always the Red Sox suck.

To top it all off the Tour de France is getting near the end. Unlike past years the outcome is still in question. I am looking for Andrea Kloden to pull it off. Could someone please throw Al Trautwig off the Alps. His commentary is disgraceful. I am being kind when I say brutal. Although Bob Roll has vast knowledge about cycling he is still a massive tool who can’t even pronounce Tour DE France. Any bets on which one asks Floyd Landis to marry him first?

Some of You are Actually Reading this.

The weekend is nearly here. That means golfing for me on Sunday. I have only been out once this year and I am excited to go out again. I hope I don’t leave my swing at home.

In my laziness I have failed to notice that some of you fine people have been leaving comments on my blog. Thanks! To show my appreciation I am going to link to the blogs of those of you who have kindly commented with your profile or links for me to see. Now you too can benefit from the throngs of readers that come by here everyday. Weeeee!

Here you go…

Penny Rickets has a few things to say.
Yasser is part of the team blog Brain Wash Café. There is some pretty funny stuff here. Some pretty deep stuff too. I even understood some of it.

Enigma, Your Name is X Chromosome

It can’t be a coincidence. My friend and I both came to work today with stories about how our wives both became angry at us for NO FREAKING GOOD REASON! Is there something in the air? Something in the stars? Are all women linked to some kind of temporal irrationality cycle?

My friend got shat upon because he told his wife’s sister that he liked her new hairstyle. Apparently he is being too sincere with other people and not sincere enough with his wife. My buddy foolishly tried to explain himself calmly and logically. Naturally this only enraged her further. It was not long before he was being blamed for a wide variety of problems including the current situation in the Middle East. She has told him to go out by himself tonight. Clearly he should go home, take his lumps and try and smooth things over. I have advised him to draw a line in the sand. He needs to get together with the boys and go get gassed.

My Wife was writing a letter to her friend who is moving out of town soon. She asked me to read it. I told her it was good. She looked at me seemingly wanting more. I offered that I thought she was a good writer and that her friend would like it. Not good enough. She stopped talking to me. When pressed as to what was wrong I got the classic female response “nothing.” Now was a perfect opportunity to live by my new axiom: “If you tell me that nothing is wrong I am going to act like nothing is wrong. Even if I know it is not true.” I will be joining my friends for beers also.

So what is going on here women? Is this all a game you play with us to keep us from solving your mysteries? Or is it just simply you all suffer from a collective, organized insanity? Enlighten me, please.

Still Hard at Work

Today I would like to point you to a couple more websites that I visit whilst I should be hard at work. TrekToday and TrekWeb are full of all the current Star Trek news and happenings. Even though there is no show currently in production these two sites manage to find news about my favorite show everyday. I get especially excited when there is news about Jeri Ryan and her form fitting Starfleet issue catsuit. Yum!

So if you are like me and need to know when Brent Spiner cuts his hair or Leonard Nimoy passes a kidney stone these two sites will keep you up to date on all the dirt.

Wie, Wie, Wie all the Way Home

Let me start this off by saying that I have nothing against Michelle Wie as a person or a golfer. My problem is with the people who are advising her about her career and development choices.

There is no doubt that Michelle Wie is good. Very good. The question I find myself asking is what has she won in her professional career? Nothing. She has not won because she is a sixteen year old girl competing again women and men. Right now all she is doing is learning how to lose. Until she can dominate the LPGA tour she has no business even trying to play on a PGA tour event.

Unfortunately Michelle Wie is paying for her advisor’s (her Dad) poor direction. This weekend at the John Deere Classic she was hospitalized for heat exhaustion. No doubt the stress of the whole world watching her every move for the last four years was a contributing factor. It is pressure that no teenager should have to face. Go ask Jennifer Capriati how that story goes.

The last young golfing phenom, Tiger Woods, was handled much differently. At sixteen he was competing against amateurs and learning how to win and slowing learning how to handle pressure. Once he turned pro he hit the ground running and still is today.

Earl Woods looked at his son as saw talent. He did everything he could to develop that talent but always his primary goal was to raise a balanced man ready to take on the world.

BJ Wie looked at his daughter and saw talent. Then he saw dollar sings.

Those Handle Bars are for Turning

On Friday my Wife walked out of IKEA after some shopping to find that the door on our SUV had been dinged. The jackass who did it decided not to leave a note and just drove off. People who do this are jerks, and probably drive Fords.

When the situation occurred to me in reverse on Saturday my anger blinders initially told me to be a jerk and get payback on the world. We were on a bike ride with my nieces and my four year old niece was not as skilled as handling her bike as we expected. As a result she ended up running into a parked min-van and scratching the paint. My niece survived the ordeal without a scratch. I thought about driving off for a moment but I decided that I didn’t want to show my son or nieces that being a jerk is acceptable behavior. Also I don’t drive a Ford. We found the owner and explained what happened. They were grateful that we didn’t run off. I will be paying to fix a door.

Later I told my niece’s mom what had happened. Her generally philosophy on living is one of the reasons I decided not to take the coward’s way out. Predictably she found the humor in her daughter crashing into a vehicle and made no offer to help pay for any repairs that may be upcoming.

There are a lot of jerks and fat, ignorant cows in this world. That does not make it acceptable to be one. Set some standards for yourself or we will and up with a world full of Courtney Love’s, Robert Downey Jrs or moms to my nieces.

Please excuse me while I go empty my rage cup.

Rolling back into the past

Totally by chance I came across this website called Tabletop Sports. It is devoted to sports related dice games. Gamers upload their own games or provide stats for existing games. Some people have even posted spreadsheets for keeping score of your favorite game.

Browsing through the site a little got me to thinking about when I first really became interested (obsessed) with sports statistics. It happened in 1986 the spring after the Toronto Blue Jays won their first pennant. I was flipping through the pages of my copy of Bill Mazeroski’s Baseball Annual when I saw the advertisement that would change my summer. Strat-o-Matic claimed to be a game based completely on statistics. You could endlessly replay baseball seasons based on probabilities generated from player performances. I had to have this. I would replay the 1985 season and this time the Jays would win. I convinced my Mom to lend me the money and I frantically filled out the order form. Now all I had to do was wait 4-6 weeks.

That wait was excruciating. The Jays got of to a terrible start and even worse the Red Sox were leading the division (The Red Sox Suck!). Finally one June morning a package was at the post office for me. I could hardly contain myself as I carefully opened the box and found the playing board, rules and hundreds of player cards with crisp, freshly cut corners. It wasn’t long before the Blue Jays were leading the division and the Red Sox (Who Suck) were where they belonged, firmly in last place.

I hardly left my room that summer but I visited Exhibition Stadium, Candlestick Park and countless other places I had only dreamed of. I got to see the still unhittable Dwight Gooden strike out sixteen Cardinals only to have Willie McGee break up his no-hitter in the 9th. I watched Dave Steib dominate the American League East. I learned what a pesky hitter Rick Manning was. I was puzzled why the Giants sucked so much in real baseball. I couldn’t figure out why the Dodgers were winning. I have never since experienced the kind of imaginary wonder that I felt when playing that game. Until now I didn’t realize how much I miss that feeling. As adults we don’t allow ourselves to experience it.

I never did finish the season. Between school and growing up I just never devoted the time to it again. Now that I am old(er) and have a fancy computer to help me along I think I will do some searching for a game that will help me find a little bit of that feeling again, and share it with my son.

You should be working right now!

I thought I might start a regular “feature” to my blog to help give me some focus and an excuse to make more posts. Somewhat periodically I will throw up a couple of links of places on the internet that I like to visit and kill some time. I’ll even try to say something useful about it that will make you want to visit it. This is my contribution to mankind (Not much of a contribution but at least it is better than inflicting American Idol on the viewing public). Hold on to your shorts, here is the first edition of “Things I do when I should be working.”

I would like to direct you to a couple of blogs I try to visit on a regular basis. One is written by someone who makes part of his living writing. The other is a really cool idea for generating blog traffic.

The first blog is Wil Wheaton dot Net (In Exile right now). You may remember Wil as Gordie from Stand By Me or Wesley Crusher from Star Trek the Next Generation. I came across his site because I am a huge Star Trek Geek. Most of Wil’s posts are about his life and family. He will also mix in some entries about poker, politics, technology and occasionally some science fiction goodness. I really enjoy his writing style. I find it quite captivating. I have really come to respect him for one main reason. Quite often you see former stars or nearly stars become attention whores after their shine starts to dull (see Kathy Griffin or The Surreal Life). Wheaton took a completely different approach and basically reinvented himself and is arguably more popular then he has ever been (on the internet anyway). And he is a geek!

The other blog I would like to tell you about is The Bestest Blog of All-Time. I found this site using the Next Blog button that is provided to us from Blogger. It was one of the first blogs I found that was written in the English language. Every day a new entry is made describing a blog that is usually pretty interesting. I have found it to be a great time killer. He also features a link exchange. If you link to his site he will link to yours. Linking to his site has actually increased traffic to my blog. Soon all the internet will know of my greatness! Woot!

Back From the Dead.

It has been a while since I have written here. I gave myself a nice little vacation away from work and the computer for a few days. I enjoyed the time playing my son and doing some yard work in between thunderstorms. It was all good.

Also during my break my Wife and I decided to continue our Academy Nominated Film Extravaganza. After Capote we decided it can’t get much worse than that. We rented Brokeback Mountain and it tried to be worse. We could not even finish it. I fell asleep early on. All I can tell you about the movie is that there were a couple of cowboys standing around not saying much. And there were sheep. The Academy Nominated Film Extravaganza is now officially over.

We needed a laugh so we rented Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. If you are looking for comedy, look elsewhere. We are sure on a roll in our movie rentals. Eventually I brought out my copy of Contact. Finally some good movie viewing. I made me feel better.

Come back tomorrow for a new, hopefully regular feature to my blog. It will open up a whole new world to you. Or not.

Where is my Internets?

This weekend my internet connection was down. Great timing by my ISP to screw things up during the Canada Day long weekend. You can imagine how embarassing it was for me to find out about the Chris Pronger trade from my wife. I may have to turn in my hockey fan card. Late last night my connection was finally fixed. I am back on-line to enrich all your lives. Yeah!