Jay's Random Thoughts

I am not sure how many folks out there are soccer fans.  The MLS here in the US is our soccer league and I am not sure how many people actually watch games.  I watch them infrequently.  I have been watching the Euro Cup soccer games with great interest.  Soccer aka football is huge in Europe and the tournament eseentially takes the best player from each country and all the countries are vying for the honor of best team in Europe.  The players are very talented and in my opinion better than most MLS players.

The thing about soccer is that many american may find it boring because it is relatively slow and low scoring compared to games like football, baseball or basketball.  Having played soccer myself, I can tell you that the fame is much harder than it looks.  Those players have amazing abilities to control the ball and I really enjoy watching them.  In some respects, it may be a required taste, but I highly recommend checking it out althought the Euro Cup final game between Germany and Spain is currently being played.

I watched the Celtics consistently throughout the playoffs and was so excited when they won it all. After the big final game, I spent some time pondering the team and to me, the key person who enabled this  was Ray Allen. Huh, you might be asking, what about Pierce or KG? Well, clearly they were instrumental as well, but keep in mind, Ray Allen was the key to enabling success this year. Let me explain why.
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A couple of weeks ago there there was quite a humorous situation that emerged at a recent Kansas City Chiefs football game. I originally heard about this on sports radio and followed up on the story with some Internet searching. The story is really quite funny. Below are two links and I recommend reading the article first and then following up with the YouTube video.

1. Article
2. YouTube Video:

I just wanted to leave a quick post to let everyone know that the blog update is complete.  I had a couple of issues specifically with the blog skin and associated plugins, but those should be behind us now.  I still have a minor issue with spacing on the frontpage, but I am not worrying about it now.  Also note that I now can more effectively manage long multi-page posts.  You can see that in the Exposure and Metering post.

I previously posted about the Celtics when they traded for Kevin Garnett. At the time, I was uncertain about whether they would be deep enough given that they traded so many young prospects for Garnett.  Ironically, here we are in April and we see that Celtics ended the season with the best record in the league and the biggest one season turnaround in leage history.

It is really an amazing change.  Also, in contrast to my concerns, the Celtics have actually amassed a very deep an high quality bench.  They have brough in veterans like Sam Cassell and PJ Brown.  Amazingly, when Garnett was injured for 9 games, the Celtics went 7-2.  This has been an amazing ride for the team.

There are high hopes for them in the playoffs and it will be interesting to see how they do.  As it stands, I am watching game two of the Hawks series and the Celts have the game well in hand winnin 78-62.  Hopefully they win and go 2-0 in the series we will see.

Regardless of what happens with this and other playoff series, the Celtics have had an amazing season.  They went from the second worst record in the league to the best in one year.  They also overcame the challenge of having 3 all-stars and trying to get them to play together.