Enough of the heavy stuff for a while. Typical Sloth & Gluttony night of eating silver salmon, watching Deadliest Catch, and putting off grading tests.
With the NBA playoffs going now, I was thinking, what would be the dream game to see? The Dream Team of 1992 certainly stands out. What if pro players had always been able to compete in the Olympics? My two ideal teams would come from 1964 and 1988. To me, these would have been the two best times in NBA history, with the best players at the best stages of their careers.
Now I just thought about putting up today's best and see how they might stack up.
Here goes:
1964 1988 2013
1 Oscar Robertson Magic Johnson Chris Paul
2 Jerry West Michael Jordan Kobe Bryant
3 Elgin Baylor Larry Bird Kevin Durant
4 Bill Russell Karl Malone Lebron James
5 Wilt Chamberlain Hakeem Olajuwon Tim Duncan
I changed Bill Russell, Lebron James and Tim Duncan's positions to allow for the best players of each era to be on the court at the same time.
Looking at the match-ups:
At point guard I'd have to go with Magic, but I only was able to see Oscar at the tail end of his career, when I was too young to know what a triple-double was. Either one could post up Paul all night long.
Shooting guard would have to go to Jordan, but I would love to see he and Kobe in their primes head-to-head. West was great but not in their league.
Small forward is hard because I don't remember seeing Elgin play. This one is the closest to a toss-up.
Power forward is a matter of how you view the game. To me Bill Russell is the greatest team player ever. It's a team game. Lebron is absolutely spectacular, but he's never been guarded by anyone approaching Russell's caliber. Malone was a stud, but he is third here, in my opinion.
Center would have to go to Wilt, but Hakeem would make him earn his money. I think both would be too athletic for Duncan.
The 1988 team is the over-all tallest of the three, but the other two teams are quicker. I think the '88 squad has the best back-court. The '64 team would be the toughest up-front, with the two greatest rebounders of all time. If I had to bet on outcomes, '88 would finish first, followed by '64, then this year's team.
Earth Day!
All these specials on PBS this weekend.
Grow a beard and tell everyone how smart you are.
Give me a break.
Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, Pinchot.
Ahead of their time?
No, you smug little intellectuals.
The real earth ethic was already here.
Before Gore Tex and REI.
Before Stetsons and barbed wire.
Even before Columbus and Leif Erickson.
"Is it really important for a boy to learn the name of a wild animal, what it eats, where it lives, and how it rears its young while at the same time the boy never gets to live near the animal? Would it not be better to let nature be, and let the boy live with unspoiled affection for all creatures, instead of teaching him to boast of knowledge?"
"Of all the teachings we receive
this one is most important:
Track season is off to another fantastic start. I'm blessed with two solid assistant coaches whom the kids love. It has its challenges, but coaching this sport has become tremendously rewarding.
This post is actually dedicated to a participant in a completely different sport. I am not a golfer, nor a golf fan. I just happened to turn on the T.V. to see the end of the Masters today. This was the first time watching golf since viewing a tournament at the Denver airport four years ago. Today's tournament was won in overtime by an Australian, Adam Scott. But Scott was not the one who impressed me.
The man who gained my admiration was Argentine Angel Cabrera. Cabrera hit a great shot, and when Scott followed up with one of his own, Cabrera looked over to Scott, smiled, and gave him the thumbs up. At the final hole, Angel hit an unbelievable putt that stopped inches from the hole. Scott's putt was a long one that made it in to beat Cabrera. Cabrera, being the man he is, didn't sulk or pout, but rather walked over to Scott and gave him a genuine hug. That is class, something we seem to be lacking so often in American professional sports these days.
Last night I returned from a four-day fishing trip to
Eastern Washington.The great thing
about fishing is that it forces you to slow down and listen, at least the kind
of fishing I like to do.Of the four
lakes fished, I was the only fisherman on three of them.I don’t bring an MP3 player, there is no cell
phone service at two of the lakes, and the phone is off at the other two.I sit in an inflatable craft that requires me
to wear waders and flippers to move and not become soaked.I have enough storage in this thing to carry
my lunch, a water bottle, rain jacket, sunscreen, a couple of extra spools for
the fly reel, some extra leader material, and four or five small, clear plastic
boxes of flies.
When not thinking of how I’m going to catch my next fish, or
watching an osprey trying to catch its own fish, my mind is free to drift like
the small waves being nudged along by the light breeze.My favorite days are when my mind tends to
latch on to fun topics like sex, or food, or sports, or where I’m going to fish
next.This trip’s mental theme was not
so sunny, even though the weather was.No, for some reason, politics and the dark side of human behavior kept
blaring away inside my thick skull.
It didn’t help that the camp sites at three of the four
lakes were completely trashed.At the
last lake it was mostly just the usual wrappers, broken beer bottles, and cigarette
butts.There were wads of toilet
paper strewn all over the bushes and ground, even though there was a public
bathroom only fifty yards away.At the
most remote lake there were broken fishing rods, beer and pop cans, various packages
of fishing bait and equipment, and even two abandoned pickup truck seats by the
fire ring.The worst of all was at the
first lake, where there was gang graffiti on the outhouse, every sign, and on many
of the big rocks.The broken glass there was
to the point that I couldn’t take two steps in any direction without stepping
on it.The worst part was the dead dog
that someone had just dumped recently.Good thing the dog hadn’t been there long enough to really smell the place
up.The sensible side of my brain said, “Let’s
just get the hell out of here!”The
stubborn side won out, with “I’m not gonna let a bunch of punk-assed gangbangers
keep me from fishing!”What kind of
people go out of their way to visit a remote lake and then just trash it?
This was the back-drop of the trip’s big question, “Where have
the level-headed people gone?”I’ve been
wondering that a great deal lately.It
seems like this country is becoming more and more polarized.Even though I didn’t vote for him, I took
great joy knowing that a brown-skinned man like Barack Obama could be elected
as president.I didn’t vote for President
Obama because I felt he was just saying anything he could to get elected, and I
felt Ralph Nader had a much better plan to get us out of Iraq and balance our
national budget.I didn’t vote for McCain
because I didn’t want my tax dollars to keep supporting tax breaks for the
wealthy, and I didn’t want another president who might feel it was his duty to
declare war an another country full of brown-skinned people.
I was reassured in my decision to not vote republican by the
absolute hate and venom unleashed at Barack Obama by all of these supposedly respectable
white men and women after the past two elections.I thought much of the blame put on President
Bush was unreasonable, but it was nothing compared to what is being hurled at
our current president.Maybe we have
come a long way since Martin Luther King’s days and maybe we haven’t come so
far after all.
The tragic killings in Aurora, Colorado and especially at
Sandy Hook elementary have me deeply worried.The shootings themselves were, of course, tragic enough, but what really
has me worried are the reactions of many people after the shootings.An enormous segment of our society apparently
could care less about all of the innocent people who were gunned down.
What this segment of our population cares most about are guns.It is just plain sickening to me.Little first-graders were killed and all of the
gun people lined up to either ban guns or worship guns.Is that what it has come to?God, I hope not.If you own guns then you are labeled a
red-neck by the left-wingers.If you own
guns but believe AR 15s and AK 47s are too excessive, then the right-wingers don’t
want to believe you exist and call you a liar and a liberal.Yes, I do own some guns.Yes, I do hunt with these guns.So what?The lives of those poor little kids and their families is and always
will be more important than your damn guns or the rights of Remington, Ruger, or
Browning to sell all of weapon and ammunition that they can.And no, I don’t think that those of us who do
own firearms should be penalized by the actions of the criminally insane.Both sides seemed to completely lose sight of
the human element.Those victims and
their families deserve better.
Is affordable health care for everyone in this country
really a bad thing?Can the greatest
economic power on the planet afford to make sure we all can be treated both
physically and mentally?Or should adequate health care be
reserved for only a certain, privileged segment of our country?Follow
the money.Where are your priorities?
Are we as a country really this polarized?I hope not.But the politicians and those who back them seem to think so.What happened to those of us in the
middle?Are we being drowned out or are
we being lazy enough to let ourselves get drowned out?I would like to think our country has not been
reduced to the Liberals vs. the Teabaggers.I’d like to think most of us are still using our own heads and not letting
the extremists on either end do our thinking for us.
Waylon Jennings began a song with, "The only two things in life that make it worth livin'..."
So this got me to thinking the posts have been kind of heavy lately, maybe it's a good time to lighten things up...
So here's an incomplete list that will always be open to revision...
Kids' Happy Laughter
Sunsets
Family (most of the time, anyway)
Watching An Athletic Woman Move
The Smell of Mountain Hemlock and Heather
The Feel of Granite
The 400m Relay
Catching a Bright Fish On a Fly Rod
Good Movies and Music
Waking Up In a Warm Sleeping Bag On a Cool Morning
Fall Sunshine On Aspens
Dirty Jokes
The Sound of a Small Alpine Creek Running Through a Meadow
A Driftwood Fire On an Ocean Beach With No One Else Around
Watching Bears
The Taste of Fresh Barbequed King Salmon
A Conversation That Makes Me Think
Naps In the Sun
