ten ton bricks laying on my head

ugh, i feel like i've been hit by a truck. no work for davie today. there's no way i can go in and talk on the phones all day. i just need to drag myself to my one class and then a study session this afternoon.

just like you imagined

the biggest thing i hate about the sudden change in the the weather is its detrimental affect on my health. sure enough, a few days after it got cold and rainy i got sick. going to the navs fall conference probably didn't help either. my throat hurts and i'm afraid that's going to get worse because i can see some sores showing up. plus i think my forehead is going to explode from all the pressure between my eyes. i know i didn't get sick from the conference though, because i could feel it coming on when i was there, and jess started getting sick at the same time. i want to write more, but i'm way too exhausted.

civilization IV will by mine by this weekend. goodbye grades and social life...

all things change

once again, go vote for odell thurman for the nfl rookie of the week and vote for carson palmer for the fedex air award of the week. you can vote for thurman multiple times. and while you're voting for palmer, go ahead and vote for shaun alexander for the ground player of the week, since he's kept my BitterOldMen fantasy football team cruising to a 6-0 start.

this is a call

the bengals has a satisfying comeback yesterday. it was good to see us be able to win from behind. unfortunately we can't always afford to start that slow, especially with pittsburg next week. palmer had yet another near-flawless game (setting a ranchise record and tying an nfl record, too), rudi pounded away with the ball and broke off the big runs when we needed them, and chad abused the titans secondary. chris perry also looked excellent; they definitely made a good decision to draft him last year. it was good to see the defense once again get some nice turnovers after a couple slow games, and the thurmanator's (props to justin) touchdown was especially nice. they still let up way too many rushing yards, which is going to hurt us against jamal lewis or willie parker/jerome bettis. we also had a lot fewer penalties, but they were still painful ones that came at the wrong time.

so daniel craig is the new james bond? he looks like he could be a good choice. certainly better than some of the other rumored possibilities, although i still think clive owen would have been a good choice.

there are a slew of good-looking pc games coming out this week. i'll have to pick up quake 4. the ign review wasn't quite as great as i would have hoped, but i still think it will be a great game. f.e.a.r. is getting excellent reviews, and the demo was pretty entertaining, if not too short. i'm not huge on scary games, only because i'm a big wuss, and the demo alone was really creepy (even if they do blatantly steal the girl from the ring). age of empires has always been a great RTS series, and the third entry looks even more impressive, but i haven't been into RTS games much in awhile.

then there's the king of them all: sid meier's civilization iv comes out next week. i guess i can kiss my grades goodbye.

there are two colors in my head

yeah, the bengals' loss tonight was pretty disappointing. obviously there were plenty of things we could have done better and need to improve upon. but i have the sneaking suspicion that come tomorrow, people are going to start with that "oh man, its the same old bungals" crap, which is just asinine. those "same old" bengals would have never gone 4-0 in the first place. they never would have led the league in defensive takeaways. people can call it a fluke all they want, but i don't know of many "flukes" that last a quarter of the way into the season.

don't get me wrong, we have a million things to fix after tonight. the run defense has more holes that a cheese grater. are guys still don't know how to wrap up and tackle someone with the ball. we still have way too many stupid, costly penalties. but let's not forget that winning a primetime game on the road is one of the hardest things to do in football. listen to how crazy the jacksonville crowd was tonight. that's nearly impossible to overcome. and yet when we were down by two scores, palmer and chris henry hooked up on two huge plays. that drive brought us within two scores. then we got the ball back and organized another impressive drive down the field, only that this time we were a victim of bad luck. that's right, all you gloom-and-doom, fair-weather, "same old bungles" fans, in the end all it came down to was a stroke of bad luck. no horrible mistake by the bengals. no forced pass that resulted in an interception. maybe some bad blocking, but that's it.

we still have a lot of improvements to be made if we want to make the playoffs. but i'm still happy with what we've done. i'm certainly not going to let one close loss change my whole attitude on the season. yes, we should have won and we didn't. yes, it was our own mistakes that cost us the game. but for some reason so many other bengals fans are never going to be satisfied until the bengals are perfect. i'm happy with them just being successful. right now we're still first in the AFC north, and in the end that's the only thing that matters...