The Bosque

Originally, our plans for tonight were to go to a hip new place in the Washington Ave. loft district, which is the "in" place in St. Louis right now. But we didn't make a reservation, so no Copia for us.

That was fine, because we had a splendiferous time anyway. April and I met my friend Tracy at The King & I, which is a popular Thai restaurant on the South Side. We then proceeded over to Erato Bar, which is a fairly new wine bar just down the street from The King & I. We proceeded to drink several bottles of wine, which made us very happy...now if you'll excuse me, there's a bed with my name on it...

From the BBC: The Beatles' record label has been told it "missed out" in the fight against piracy by failing to sign up for Apple's iTunes downloading service.

They beat the Beatles...the fucking Beatles!

Ya know...if Apple dropped the price of a Mac down to, oh, $400, I think they could give MS a real run for their money. But I'm not Steve Jobs...yet...

From the BBC: Construction workers clearing a derelict building in New York, near the former World Trade Center buildings, have found bone fragments.

The city medical examiner's office said on Tuesday the bones were human, but there was no confirmation they belonged to victims of the 9/11 attacks.

I can't believe that it's been almost 5 years since 9/11...on one hand, it seems so long ago, but on the other hand, it seems like it was yesterday.

I say that there's still hope because a lot of victims' families have had no closure. Many of them never will, but hopefully, one less family will be waiting.

From Yahoo! News/AP: Al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui offered last month to testify for prosecutors against himself at his death-penalty trial and told agents that he did not want to die in prison, according to last-minute testimony Tuesday.

The bizarre testimony capped a trial that has seen more than its share of the unusual over three tumultuous weeks. Introduced as part of a brief government rebuttal case, this testimony may be the firmest evidence the 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent hopes for martyrdom through execution and could provide fodder for the closing arguments of both prosecutors and Moussaoui's court-appointed defense attorneys.

I'm telling you all...life imprisonment is way harsher than the death penalty. Let this nutjob stew for the next 50 years...you don't think he'll go nuts? And think about it...he'll probably be kept in some sort of isolation or solitary...that'll make him even more nuts. For added measure, we could make sure that he has a TV in his cell that is always tuned to things that highlight American/Western culture.

From Yahoo! Sports/AP: Dave Checketts is buying the NHL's second-worst team, but he's already thinking Stanley Cup.

The Blues announced Friday that owners Bill and Nancy Laurie will sell the team and the Savvis Center to Checketts and his Sports Capital Partners and Towerbrook Capital Partners. The NHL Board of Governors must still approve the deal.

This year has been a rough one for the Blue Note. The Lauries put the team up for sale before the season started. They spent no money improving the team from 2 seasons ago, and traded the heart and soul of the team--defenseman Chris Pronger. Recently, they traded all-star center Doug Weight. They are the second-worst team in the NHL, and the worst in the Western Conference. Their 25-season playoff streak ended last week.

This is the first year in 20 years that the Blues have been so thrifty...hopefully, it will be the last one for another 20. They have a good group of kids that can be great down the line, but a couple of big-game players and a solid goalie could make the Blues the team to beat next year.

Until a few weeks ago, most folks probably didn't know much about George Mason University. It's the largest public university in Virginia, located in Fairfax, in suburban Washington, DC. It's a commuter school, and when I lived in the area, it didn't get a whole lot of attention when it came to sports coverage...it was all about Maryland, Georgetown, Virginia and (to a smaller degree) George Washington.

Their sports teams (known as the Patriots) play in the Colonial Athletic Association, a conference that has had 2 teams in the NCAA Basketball tournament only once in its 20-year history: 1986. They had a great season, going 23-7, co-winners of the CAA regular season title. But they lost in the semi-finals of the CAA tournament to Hofstra, which put them in a bad spot, given the history of the CAA in the NCAA tournament.

The Patriots wound up getting an at-large bid, seeded #11 in the Washington, DC Regional. This drew the ire of some folks like Billy Packer, who didn't think that GMU deserved a spot, nor 4 teams from the Missouri Valley Conference. Packer was the same tard that whined about St. Joe's being a #1 seed 2 years ago.

So, GMU started the tournament off by beating Michigan State 75-65, then defending champ North Carolina 65-60 in Dayton, OH last weekend. This weekend, they defeated Wichita State 63-55 and Connecticut, the 2004 champion, 86-84 in OT on what was essentially their home court: the Verizon Center in Washington, DC. They're the first 11 seed to get to the Final Four since LSU in 1986, and the first "mid major" team to make it to the Final Four since Penn and Indiana State in 1979 (though some will argue otherwise).

I like an underdog...and though these guys are good, they're still the underdogs. And they're headed to Indianapolis to play Florida next weekend.

GO PATRIOTS!!!

If you haven't heard about this guy, you should...his case could have far-reaching implications, IMO.

Rahman is an Afghani who converted from Islam to Christianity while working for an aid group in Pakistan 16 years ago. After moving back to Afghanistan not too long ago, his family turned him in to authorities after a custody dispute. Afghanistan's constitution is based on Sharia law, and based on the apparent interpretation here, he faces death for "forsaking" Islam.

Needless to say, many Americans and Europeans are concerned. Some lawmakers here have expressed outrage...how could we let a country we helped put together do this?

It's called the will of the people.

To be certain, I think this is terrible. Afghanistan's constitution is contradictory on this issue: Islam is the state religion, but it also says it will respect the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes freedom of religion. There are many religions out there...apparently, Islam wasn't for Rahman. That should be respected.

But...what right do we have to interfere with a sovereign nation? The Afghanis have chosen to live by this law. If Afghanis are outraged by this (and it appears that they are not), then they should take to the streets in protest. Their culture is different than ours. While we may find it distasteful, I don't think we have the right to force ours upon them.

If Afghan President Hamid Karzai gives in to Western pressure, Afghanistan is a puppet state. If he stands by the Afghan judiciary, then Afghanistan looks like a barbaric country that doesn't respect any religion but Islam. And this would make them no better than a country like the US, that "doesn't respect" Islam. Not to mention, this would give right-wing pundits and talking heads more fodder than they deserve.

It's a tough call...I feel for Mr. Karzai. But I don't think he should drag Afghanis kicking and screaming into our value system at this point.

Links/info/sources:

MSNBC

BBC

Here's how it works:

1. Review the list.

2. If you see something you're interested in, e-mail me at sicomoro (at) sicomoro dot us.

3. I'll locate the CD and give you its condition information. From there, we can talk about price.

FAIR WARNING: I may change my mind about selling a CD. There may also be inaccuracies in my list.

Inquire away!

People that know me know that I am an avid music fan...always have been. Music is like a drug to me. Over the past 15 years, I've amassed over 500 CDs.

Over the past few weeks, I've been moving into the basement of my parents' house. As a result, I've been going through stuff that I haven't touched since leaving Philadelphia almost a year ago. While I was going through some of this stuff last week, I thought, "I need to quit being such a pack rat. I'll never look at some of this shit again. Why do I bother keeping it?" And as April and I were talking about this tonight, another thought came to mind...

Why do I bother keeping all the CDs I have?

My entire music collection is on a hard drive here at home, on my iPod and will soon be on a backup HD. I basically quit buying CDs almost a year ago...I buy almost all my music online now. And I barely look at the insert booklets anymore.

So, I have decided to sell the majority of my CD collection. In the near future, I will post a list of everything for sale. If you see something you like, I'll have you e-mail me and we'll go from there. After 2 or 3 weeks, whatever is left will go on eBay or in local classified ads here in St. Louis. Stay tuned...

And no...I'm not dying or planning on killing myself. It's just time for change...that's all. :)

On February 18th, April and I bought a bed from a local furniture chain called Rothman Furniture. We liked it, and it was a good deal. Unfortunately, it was out of stock until the following week...no problem.

I got a call on the 23rd, telling me that the bed was in stock. I wanted to have them deliver it the next day, but the delivery window was 10am-4pm...they could not pin a time down any better than that. I wanted to set the delivery up for Saturday...but they could not give me a time until Saturday morning. So, I set the delivery up for Tuesday. My stepdad offered to stay and wait for it.

They brought it over that Tuesday, the 28th. Unfortunately, the box spring would not fit down my basement steps. April and I were under the impression that it was a split box, as that was what we saw at the store. So I went to the store to talk to someone. The split box is only for the king-sized bed. They said they could special order it, but it would cost $60 more and take 2 weeks to arrive. I was so irritated at this point that I asked for a refund.

April and I talked about the situation later on that day, and we decided that we really wanted the bed. So, we decided to go to another Rothman location...they have 7 locations. We originally went to the Shrewsbury location, but decided to try the South County location.

So, we ordered the bed again along with the split box. The salesman told us it would be about 2 weeks.

I called on the 14th...they had a backlog at the factory due to a model changeover. It would probably be in the following week.

I called yesterday. Apparently, they didn't make the split box originally ordered, so it had to be upgraded...no charge for that. It's now supposed to be here the week of the 28th.

This motherfucker better be here next week. We spent over $700 on this damned thing! We will never buy another furniture item from Rothman again...fuckers.

From MSNBC: But for Arthur “Deke” Winston, turning 100 is no big deal. Not going to work from now on is what will take some getting used to.

...

Winston retired this week after 75 years of cleaning and then supervising the maintenance of first, Los Angeles trolleys, and then buses. He never took one sick day and only missed one day of work — when his wife passed away.

The only place you see an American news story is on a British newssite. From the BBC: The US Supreme Court has rejected an attempt to give residents of the territory of Puerto Rico the right to vote in US presidential elections.

Judges threw out the appeal by a group of Puerto Ricans - the latest development in a long-running debate on the islanders' constitutional rights.

...and here is the forecast for St. Louis for tonight and tomorrow:

phpBB : Critical Error

Could not connect to the database

...let me know.

Apparently, I need to enter a command that tells the board how to connect to the database. The problem is, I don't know which file I need to modify to do this. So, if you know how, please contact me via e-mail at sicomoro at sicomoro dot us.

Gracias.

...the French will protest over anything. From the BBC:

Hundreds of thousands of people have marched through French towns and cities in protest at a new law making it easier to hire and fire young workers.

...

Protesters are bitterly opposed to the new First Employment Contract (CPE), which allows employers to end job contracts for under-26s at any time during a two-year trial period without having to offer an explanation or give prior warning.

April, May and I went to the St. Louis Galleria (a large shopping mall in the suburb of Richmond Heights) tonight to meet a friend of April's from out-of-town. After April's friend left, we meandered around the mall for a bit, and wound up at the Build-a-Bear Workshop. May built a bear, and I bought an outfit for the bunny that April built me for Xmas.

We went to the checkout, and the cashier asked May if she wanted to add green bows to her bear (for St. Pat's Day). May's bear is a boy, so she asked if she could have them put on his arms instead of his ears. The cashier started putting them on, and mentioned that he was having difficulty doing so.

I then joked to the cashier not to cut the circulation off on the bear's paws. I then mentioned that it would be a shame if the poor bear had to have his arms cut off due to gangrene from no circulation.

The world then stood still...

The cashier looked at me in horror...genuine horror. Apparently, I had just ruined his day. April quickly jumped in and jokingly admonished me about being so macabre. Then the world started moving again.

It was fucking funny...and crazy. And I've probably been reported to all BABWs, and will never be able to build my own stuffed animal there.

I wonder what would happen if I left one cut up at their entrance...

What? People didn't feel like showing up for work anymore?

It appears that the move to the new server has been rather smooth. Unfortunately, the forum is still not up and running, and I don't know why. Apparently, the DNS isn't set yet, but I could have simply fucked things up.

Keep your fingers crossed...we'll see where things are tomorrow.

...Billy Graham. I have a great deal of respect for him. From an interview in this week's Newsweek:

Jon Meacham, Newsweek: What do you tell people who ask how a loving God could let something like this (Hurricane Katrina) happen?

Rev. Billy Graham: Well, I spoke yesterday to the clergy and I asked myself why, and I told them don’t know why. There is no way I can know. I think of Job, who suf­fered the loss of everything—seven sons and three daugh­ters, all of his cattle, all of his sheep and his flocks, every­thing gone. He couldn’t help but ask why, but he didn’t find the answer immediately, and he really never had the answer at the end.

God came back and restored to him all these things, but the cause of the thing in his life was not God, it was the Devil. I didn’t mention that yesterday, because I don’t think this is the place to talk about Satan and the Devil, because I don’t know. The Devil might have had nothing to do with this; I don’t know. But God has al­lowed it, and there is a purpose that we won’t know maybe for years to come.

From MSNBC: The reigning Miss Deaf Texas died Monday afternoon after being struck by a train, officials said.

Tara Rose McAvoy, 18, was walking near railroad tracks when she was struck by a Union Pacific train, authorities said. A witness told Austin television station KTBC the train sounded its horn right up until the accident occurred.

If you’ve followed the news over the past few days, you’ve probably seen or read about the storms that knocked the crap out of parts of the Lower Midwest.

10 people died, 9 of them here in Missouri, 4 of them near the town of Renick in central Missouri, near Columbia. We got lucky here in St. Louis…just a lot of rain the last couple of nights. We actually needed it, too, as we were in near-drought conditions.

Tornadoes are a fact of life here in the Midwest, much like the East Coast puts up with hurricanes. But I’ve never heard and seen this much damage in such a short amount of time…and it’s early in the tornado season.

The last tornado to touch down in the City of St. Louis was in 1964…it blew the roof off the old Arena. It’s only a matter of time before we see another one…one touched down in St. Louis County in the late 90s, and O’Fallon in St. Charles County got walloped twice in the 90s.

There has been so much natural destruction and suffering since Christmas 2004. I wonder if there will be a true lull anytime soon…and I pray that I never become desensitized to people’s pain.

Stay strong, folks! Tornadoes won’t keep you down for long.

Read this article from today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch, especially the part about Cynthia Bowling.

What the fuck?! If both of them are happy, then hey, it's all good. But that's just nuts to me. I love my parents, but I plan on getting out of here by the time I graduate.

As of this afternoon, everything has been moved from the old server to the new server. Now it's just a matter of waiting for the domain name to resolve, which could be as long as 3 days. Every other website transferred over smoothly...I saved the board for last, since it's the biggest.

Once I figured out how to work with the new server folks, it was pretty easy. Still, I'm proud of myself...I've never had to do something like this before. But sometimes, you have to just dive in to figure shit out.

Of course, I've got everything backed up, just in case...

From the BBC: Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has survived a critical phase in its mission by parking itself in an elliptical orbit around the Red Planet.

News of its success followed a tense period of radio silence while the spacecraft passed behind Mars.

Over the next six months, the probe will steadily reduce the size of its orbit until it reaches an optimal position to start scientific studies.

I'm not used to being home on a Thursday night anymore. This is the first Thursday that I haven't done anything class-related since Thanksgiving.

Of course, it's not like I'm doing anything ground-breaking over here. I just finished going through my room upstairs in preparation for moving downstairs. My new bed should be here early next week, so I'll be headed down there. Now I just have to start going through all the stuff I brought in from the garage that is now downstairs.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to bed.

From MSNBC: Three college students, including two aspiring actors known around campus as pranksters, were arrested Wednesday in a string of nine church fires across Alabama.

Federal agents said the defendants claimed the first few fires were set as "a joke" and the others were started to throw investigators off the track.

Now this is just plain fucking stupid. You want to pull pranks? Smash a mailbox, book a nerd, throw eggs at someone...drop a flaming bag of poo on someone's front door.* Don't destroy a house of God...that's terrible.

*--sycamore does not encourage you to commit any of the acts listed

Kirby Puckett didn't look like he belonged on a baseball field. But he was a hell of a hitter and one of the good guys of the game. It was a shame that he had to retire due to glaucoma-related blindness in 1996, and he was wholly deserving of his election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001. With 2300 hits in 12 seasons with the Minnesota Twins, he would have easily made the 3000 club had his career not been cut short.

His life has now been cut short as well...he died yesterday from complications of a stroke, age 45.

Dana Reeve's life was also cut short. She took care of her husband, actor Christopher Reeve, after he was paralyzed in a horse-riding accident in 1995. She announced that she had lung cancer in August, less than a year after his death, and died today from that cancer. She was 44...and never a smoker.

Rest in peace...

Part 1

Last week, I got an e-mail from a company called LiveNation. I had never heard of them before, but apparently they are a concert promoter in the Chicago area. The e-mail went into my trash folder because I had never gotten anything from them before, and thus, the e-mail would be considered spam. And most likely, I would have deleted it without reading it if it hadn't been for the subject line:

Depeche Mode Returns to Chicago

What?! They're doing another round of shows in the States? Sweet!

And indeed they are. While they are not playing St. Louis, they are returning to Allstate Arena in Chicago on May 11th.

Will I be there? Does a bear shit in the woods? I bought my tix Saturday morning. I got up early just to buy them.

Part 2

As some of you probably know, Harry Potter 4 comes out on DVD tomorrow. April's sister is a huge fan...she skipped a family wedding to buy the most recent book when it came out last July. I suspect that a few stores here in the area are going to start selling it at midnight. And where will May be?

On a school retreat. And according to April, there hasn't been a whole lot of hoopla surrounding its release.

Well, the kid was sick with the flu last week, so I guess I should cut her some slack. :)

This is a break week for me from school. We get a week off during holidays and every 8-10 weeks. So it's like Spring Break...except that Fontbonne is on Spring Break next week. *shrugs* It's not like I'm going anywhere anyway.

April and I had a great time in Alton this past weekend. The winery was nice. Unfortunately, we did not eat at Fast Eddie's...the place was packed wall-to-wall with people. We'll try to go on a weeknight in the near future.

Today, I got reading done for my new class, moved some stuff down to my new room, got rid of the old desk that was in my current room and cleaned up my iPod. Tomorrow, I'll probably go out to the garage and start bringing boxes in...they've been sitting out there since I came home. Maybe the pizza shop will call...I told them I was available for work this week.

Life is good...it would be even better if my bed arrived early. It's supposed to be here in a week and change.

From the BBC: The US army is to launch a criminal investigation into the death of a former American football star who was killed in Afghanistan.

Pat Tillman gave up his professional contract to join the army after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US.

Greetings from Alton, Illinois!

April and I decided to get away for the weekend, and here we are, about 45 minutes north of St. Louis. Tomorrow, we're going to a winery on the Mississippi River and a restaurant/bar we've been wanting to go to for years called Fast Eddie's. Should be a lot of fun.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some cuddling to do...

I finished the second class of my Masters program tonight: Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior. Good course...learned a lot. Instructor was good, if a bit nitpicky on grading. We did our group presentation tonight along with our open book final. The presentation was good, though I felt that we were a little wooden. It was on restructuring...once I get the sites moved over, maybe I'll post our paper. The final wasn't too tough, though a couple of the questions threw me off. I probably got an A or A- in the class...whoohoo!

This class went by incredibly fast...I can't believe that it's already March and that we're done with 2 classes. 10 more to go...up next is Business Law and Ethics. That should be an interesting one...

We actually forgot about it...it was Monday. So...Happy Belated Birthday, Bosque! You have now entered the terrible twos.

It's been fun. I know that I haven't been overly eloquent lately, but I go through cycles...plus I'm so busy these days.

You keep reading, I'll keep posting. Fuck...even if you don't read, I'll still post. :)