Scooter Chronicles

This is my friend David’s home brewed beer. He is calling his brews Zog’s Grog. Zog being a nickname he uses on line. And grog is another word for alcoholic beverage. Jester’s Kin comes from the fact that his brother (kin) brews his own beer too, called Fool Circle, and he uses a court jester as part of the logo.

Anyway, to the beer. It was a good beer. Nothing spectacular. And not heavy on the alcohol. I believe it came in at just under 4%. But considering this is his first batch of home...

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WOW!!!

It appears that the players mean some business. They have offered a 24% roll back on current salaries! Yes, this is a one time thing, and doesn’t guarantee that salaries won’t skyrocket again. But it is one heck of a start. And the players proposal includes a graduated luxury tax.

Gary Bettman has already said that this is not cost certainty as the owners are looking for. But this is something they seem to be willing to further expound upon. They have canceled tomorrows session, but only pushed it back to next Tuesday. This way they can think things over and go from there.

This seems promising but again, if the owners just won’t give in to their $31 million salary cap demands, I...

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— UPDATED (I had some of the numbers wrong) —

Today the NHLPA and the NHL owners sit down and start talking. This will be the first time since September 9th that the two sides will talk. Two days are set aside for this, but it has been reported that if things don’t go well today, the second day (Friday) will be canceled.

The rumors floating around are that the Players’ Union proposal is a major upgrade to the owners side from the last one. The original proposal included a luxury tax that made teams pay 25 cents for every dollar they spend over $50 million in player salaries. This also included a one time player salary rollback of 7%. The new proposal is rumored to make the luxury...

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House, MD
This TV show continues to impress. It is not overly impressive. The storylines are similar from show to show. They have a patient with a strange or unexplained problem, they go back and forth trying things, then they are cured. But it is still interesting to watch the interaction of the doctors and last nights storyline added ethics issues. And along with those, a patient did die, adding extra issues of one of the doctor’s methods of updating the guardians/family, then eventually telling them that this person died. (In this case a newborn.)

The most impressive thing about this show though continues to be Hugh Laurie. His acting has been great. Especially since it is a drama, and his background...

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“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

— Benjamin Franklin

“From man’s sweat and God’s love, beer came into the world.”

— St. Arnold of Metz, Patron Saint of Beermakers

“Are you crying? ARE YOU CRYING? There’s no crying. There’s no crying in baseball. Rogers Hornsby was my manager, and he called me a talking pile of pigshit. And that was when my parents drove all the way down from Michigan to see me play. And did I cry? NO! NO! And do you know why? Because there’s no crying in baseball. There’s no CRYING IN BASEBALL!”

— Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan in “A League of Their Own”

“The Five People You Meet in Heaven”
This turned out to be really good. Of course the book is always better. You get deeper into the character’s thoughts and feelings. But this movie did the book a great justice. Guess it always helps when the book’s writer is the executive producer. By the way, did I mention that was Mitch Albom? ; )

One thing the movie did get across as good as the book was the emotion of the story. Visuals always help. Like when Eddie (played by Jon Voight) approaches a wedding and the fourth person he is to meet, and sees that it is his wife Marguerite (played by Dagmara...

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I FINALLY FINISHED IT!!

The super-hyped fantasy novel, that is not typical fantasy as we know it (unless you read Harry Potter), was quite a piece of work to get through.

Where to start? First, what it’s about. Two magicians in England set about to re-discover the art which has been lost for a few hundred years. This takes place in the early 19th Century, while Britain is fighting off the advancing French army led by Napoleon.

As you can imagine in being an interesting storyline, the two don’t start off as a “team” first thing in the book. Actually, Mr Norrell makes a big impression on all of...

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Marcia and I went and saw “Finding Neverland” this afternoon. Kind of cool, because we ran into our friends John and Kathleen, along with Kathleen’s Mom. We sat in front of them and didn’t even notice it at first. John and Kathleen didn’t either. It was Kathleen’s Mom how recognized Marcia from meeting her last night at Pizza Night.

The biggest attraction to this movie for the both of us was Johnny Depp. Though at first when Marcia said she wanted to see it, I thought it was ridiculous that there was yet ANOTHER Peter Pan movie. But after she explained it was about the writer and how he comes to write the play,...

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We had Pizza Night last night at my mother-in-law’s place. And it was a different Pizza Night. There was no pizza. Our friends Kathleen and John provided the food, which was stuffed cabbage and mashed potatoes!! Yvonne also brought along a roll, which looked like a really large wrap that you can get from a restaurant. It looked good, and I heard it was good, but I didn’t have any. I was too filled up with the stuffed cabbage. ; )