tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-46485588055027600632024-03-12T21:39:31.464-05:00Broken PawnBroken Pawn BlogHank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.comBlogger709125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-85712354718689936202021-05-30T19:13:00.008-05:002021-05-31T05:14:26.502-05:00U.S. Windows Inc Urbandale IA review<span style="font-family: arial;"> Last August a derecho storm blew 100 mile hour winds through Marshalltown and most of Iowa. THe two big oak trees in front of our house on the curb lost a lot of limbs. We were afraid the city was going to take them down along with most of the trees on our block. As of this writing the trees have not been taken down and are attempting a comeback. </span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Our house was undamaged except for quite a few shingles having been blown off. The roof was nearing the end of it's 15 year shingle life which led us to decide to get a new roof instead of replacing the lost and damaged shingles. The state was full of houses needing roofs. I called every roofer in the area and could not get a return call much less an estimate. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Eventually I got a call from <a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a> last November. Greg Fox was the salesman and told me that they could put up 30 year Malarkey shingles in 40 degree weather so there was a chance that I could get the roof up in November. I researched the company and found no cause for concern in the Better Business Bureau and other review sites and Greg was a fellow chessplayer (tinman on ICC) so I signed a contract to replace my roof and flashing for $18,500 with $1,800 down and the rest on completion. The price was comparable with the last time I had the roof replaced (in 3 pieces) for my steep and large roof, I've never felt you can overpay for quality work whjich I was hopeful I was going to get with a roof that would outlive me.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> The day after I signed the contract we got a snowfall which put a 2020 roof out of the question. In March, Greg called me to say it would be a four month delay in getting the Malarkey Legacy shingles I ordered but they could get Malarkey Vista shingles instead. It was a lower quality shingle but still came with a 30 year guarantee. I wanted a roof I would't have to replace again so we negotiated a $1200 reduction in price and I didn't ask why my down payment didn't go towards reserving the shingles we had agreed on.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ltSoBVcuRlk/YLQjH7uEyUI/AAAAAAAAI2A/qM0k-aOM6UIySLn1gcylkJcfGZuThGoGwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/DSCN4264.JPG" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="201" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ltSoBVcuRlk/YLQjH7uEyUI/AAAAAAAAI2A/qM0k-aOM6UIySLn1gcylkJcfGZuThGoGwCLcBGAsYHQ/w268-h201/DSCN4264.JPG" width="268" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dHmrf4KCiZA/YLQjH1m_njI/AAAAAAAAI2E/gkrfjD3oVzYxAj8ZVdzVkBMzB2i8kcE7gCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/DSCN4309.JPG" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="202" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dHmrf4KCiZA/YLQjH1m_njI/AAAAAAAAI2E/gkrfjD3oVzYxAj8ZVdzVkBMzB2i8kcE7gCLcBGAsYHQ/w269-h202/DSCN4309.JPG" width="269" /></a></span></div><div><h4 style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Levi and Lonnie... </span><span style="font-family: arial;">US WIndows Inc's roofing supervisors.</span> </h4></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> On March 10th a truck came with 3 pallets of shingles, nails, ridge vents, and roof vents which we had put in the driveway. No one came to even look at the merchandies until the next Wednesday when I first met the head roofers, Levi Paul and Lonnie Foley. They noticed right away that the shingles were not the Malarkey Vista shingles. I hadn't noticed and this gave me a good feeling that I had hired an honest company to do my roof.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> The correct shingles arrived Wednesday, March 24th and sat there until March 31st when an old pickup truck pulled into the driveway and a host of ladders, tarps, and other roofing equipment were placed in the front and back yard. The next day (April 1st) three workers arrived at 10am and started tearing down the roof that covers the front entry and awning over the first floor. The workers were gone when I got back home from work at 4:15 and had torn off some of the roof but the tarps remained in the truck and were not used to cover the unshingled parts of the roof. No one came to work on the roof until the next Monday (4 days later). There were a different group of three workers who worked the next three days starting around 10 and gone by 4:15. All three days when I came home for lunch the workers left, presumably for their own lunch, and had not returned by 12:50 when I left to go back to work. On April 7th, after four days of work and seven calendar days the front part of the roof seemed complete.</span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1TTZNIsJZt4/YLQiRky4IWI/AAAAAAAAI1w/odamwKz5g9gEmMjUwIcvH2jzVhm4jo-rACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/DSCN3975.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="205" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1TTZNIsJZt4/YLQiRky4IWI/AAAAAAAAI1w/odamwKz5g9gEmMjUwIcvH2jzVhm4jo-rACLcBGAsYHQ/w273-h205/DSCN3975.JPG" width="273" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0YcvOFheubM/YLQiRu0kKKI/AAAAAAAAI10/snOZ7sWuAKwYdU8JvGqYWjUACfOuu_tGQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/DSCN3976.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="211" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0YcvOFheubM/YLQiRu0kKKI/AAAAAAAAI10/snOZ7sWuAKwYdU8JvGqYWjUACfOuu_tGQCLcBGAsYHQ/w281-h211/DSCN3976.JPG" width="281" /></a></div><h4 style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">This is how the first group of workers left my house for four days.</span></h4></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> No one showed up after that until the next Tuesday April 13th. For the next five days Lonnie Foley from </span><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a> </span><span style="font-family: arial;">(one of the head roofers) worked on the garage all by himself. Lonnie seemed like a nice enough guy and told me that he was 63 and his back was bad and he was going to get a state job and give up roofing. I asked both Lonnie and Levi about the front part of the house where </span><span style="font-family: arial;">it seemed like the shingles were uneven and was told that after a few hot days the shingles would flatten out. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Lonnie finished the garage on Saturday April 17th and no one showed up at the house until Thursday April 22nd</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> when three men started to tear down one of the valleys at the top of the house. When I got home from work the workers were gone and the valley stripped and covered with underlayment and some plastic wrapping but the wrapping was flapping in the wind and there was a 30% chance of rain with no tarp over the exposed roof (roofs should be tarped when there is a chance of rain according to </span><a href="https://www.roofingexperts.com/2015/03/18/tarps-cover-roof/" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank">www.roofingexperts.com</a>)<span style="font-family: arial;">. I called Chris Sergio at <a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a> he got ahold of Lonnie Foley who came to the house and told me there was no chance of rain. I went in the house and printed a fresh weather report showing a 30% chance of rain. Lonnie said he needed to go to Menards for some nails and came back a half an hour later and nailed down one piece of the plastic sheeting but did not tarp the roof. </span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-spxoHtBGYx8/YLQkoRswUhI/AAAAAAAAI2Q/51enqBGEBHI6ZO6s85HW-eNPlmRGN21AgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/DSCN4072.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="203" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-spxoHtBGYx8/YLQkoRswUhI/AAAAAAAAI2Q/51enqBGEBHI6ZO6s85HW-eNPlmRGN21AgCLcBGAsYHQ/w269-h203/DSCN4072.JPG" width="269" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jU0mYm3xnug/YLQkub5-MxI/AAAAAAAAI2U/y9JJH9T8T1Iaho6RIRisx_rydtkDkJF_wCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/DSCN4075.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="204" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jU0mYm3xnug/YLQkub5-MxI/AAAAAAAAI2U/y9JJH9T8T1Iaho6RIRisx_rydtkDkJF_wCLcBGAsYHQ/w271-h204/DSCN4075.JPG" width="271" /></a><br /><br /></div><h4 style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">This is how the second group of workers left my house with a 30% chance of rain.</span></h4></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> It didn't rain that night and the next day the same three workers got some of the shingles on the roof but had not finished the valley and did not tarp the roof on Friday night either. On Saturday, a crew of over a dozen workers arrived to work. The roof was torn down and reshingled except the small area over a side door. The <a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a> roofers Levi and Lonnie were not supervising the work, I noticed that on one side of the house the roofers put tarps over a few bushes in a haphazard fashion. I have some rose bushes on that side of the house from at least 1994 when we bought the house that were not covered and one of the bushes was uprooted from being pelted with roof debris.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nZyz7kR_Z0g/YLQlH1AyUBI/AAAAAAAAI2c/Bp0iGXryHK8tC0Wa5-MRkAwas-Xuui0MwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/DSCN4083.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="201" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nZyz7kR_Z0g/YLQlH1AyUBI/AAAAAAAAI2c/Bp0iGXryHK8tC0Wa5-MRkAwas-Xuui0MwCLcBGAsYHQ/w269-h201/DSCN4083.JPG" width="269" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3QABbz6zDoY/YLQlOjcUutI/AAAAAAAAI2g/0Twudwd5doIdcf14dOWt-g3zGgudlkqxQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/DSCN4263.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="204" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3QABbz6zDoY/YLQlOjcUutI/AAAAAAAAI2g/0Twudwd5doIdcf14dOWt-g3zGgudlkqxQCLcBGAsYHQ/w272-h204/DSCN4263.JPG" width="272" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><h4 style="clear: both; text-align: center;">A sample of the sloppy tarps over my bushes and some of the nails and roof debris on our yard after TWO sweeps by US WIndows Inc in Urbandale.</h4></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> When we looked at the house the next morning, the roof was on. There were over a dozen holes, breaks, and deep scrapes in the house siding. The metal flashing that seals the house to the bottom of the roof was loose and disconnected all around the house, There was also a broken section on the cement work at the bottom of the chimney as well as lots of shingles that seemed to be sticking up at odd angles as if they were not nailed down. The head of the roofing crew that did all this damage showed up on Sunday to finish up with a couple of helpers. It started raining so he told me he would finish up on Monday. I told him about the broken siding and flashings and chimney and he said I would have to bring it up with Levi. Then he left and it started raining and the piece of roof that wasnt finshed wasn't tarped.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-X0Eu7Y2vjso/YLQmG85uohI/AAAAAAAAI2w/RZjL0kZaYX8S9ahmbJ2h4chmTivSZr29QCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/DSCN4093.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="218" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-X0Eu7Y2vjso/YLQmG85uohI/AAAAAAAAI2w/RZjL0kZaYX8S9ahmbJ2h4chmTivSZr29QCLcBGAsYHQ/w293-h218/DSCN4093.JPG" width="293" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YC31NX4ut3Y/YLQmG2vK-qI/AAAAAAAAI20/heLKez-9Vjw_mRJpp1nKkjU7pmfsO1aVgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/DSCN4094.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="217" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YC31NX4ut3Y/YLQmG2vK-qI/AAAAAAAAI20/heLKez-9Vjw_mRJpp1nKkjU7pmfsO1aVgCLcBGAsYHQ/w290-h217/DSCN4094.JPG" width="290" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yn99oJLZs-c/YLQmGm8FiwI/AAAAAAAAI2s/ghi1fr4Gf-4jW2SZwEjxhBiSt2x1106aQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/DSCN4115.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="222" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yn99oJLZs-c/YLQmGm8FiwI/AAAAAAAAI2s/ghi1fr4Gf-4jW2SZwEjxhBiSt2x1106aQCLcBGAsYHQ/w297-h222/DSCN4115.JPG" width="297" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Cv_Xq2FEz4I/YLQmZSZ5mpI/AAAAAAAAI3A/BXsAWYA6lzcQ8q13zWXYUeJb8fJ-ltRXQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/DSCN4107.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="217" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Cv_Xq2FEz4I/YLQmZSZ5mpI/AAAAAAAAI3A/BXsAWYA6lzcQ8q13zWXYUeJb8fJ-ltRXQCLcBGAsYHQ/w288-h217/DSCN4107.JPG" width="288" /></a><br /><h4><span style="font-family: arial;">A sample of the broken siding and the last section of the roof left uncovered in the rain by US WIndows INC of Urbandale.</span></h4></div></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> I wrote to Greg Fox and Chris Sergio of <a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a> and sent them some pictures of the broken siding. The three roofing crew guys that came on Sunday returned on Monday and finished up in the afternoon. On Tuesday, Lonnie and Levi arrived. Kathy and I showed them the damage. Levi said he couldn't match the siding but was going to go to Menards and find the best match he could. They spent the afternoon scrubbing the scrapes..On Wednesday, Levi showed up and replaced some of the broken siding using pieces from a corner of the house and putting the mismatched siding from Menards in the corner. When I came home from lunch, Levi showed me what he had done as asked if I could pay him the balance on the job. I told him he would get paid when he finished the job. Levi told me that the chimney was sealed off properly and the flashing and weird shingles would settle down as soon as we got a week of hot weather. I mentioned that there were a lot of nails and shingles around the house so he had Lonnie pick up the debris with a magnet. Kathy went over the area after Lonnie and got three gallon ziploc bags of nails that Lonnie missed.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> No workers showed up on Thursday and on Friday April 30th, Greg Fox the <a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a> salesman called me and said he wanted to get paid. I told him that there was a lot of siding still broken but that since I owed over $15000 I would provide some of the payment. Levi came that afternoon, fixed another couple of pieces of siding and I gave him a check for $5600. After getitng paid a third, of their money, Levi and Lonnie got sloppy and were breaking the moldings of the siding while they were fixing the broken pieces. They even replaced a piece of siding with another piece that had a screw hole in it and told me it was a piece of dirt when I asked about it. When I got on the ladder and showed them the screw hole they tried to fix it with some putty and off color paint. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> I'm not a roofing expert but I have had roofs put on the house before. Judging by the way </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Levi and Lonnie and their crew had wrecked the siding and the amount of nails that Kathy found in the driveway after TWO CLEANUPS there was only one conclusion I could draw : Levi Paul, Lonnie Foley, and the crew they had working on my house were NOTHING BUT A BUNCH OF SLOBS.. Add in the company from Greg Fox the salesman to Levi Paul the head roofing guy were very pushy on getting paid before finishing the job and had such quick answers to my concerns about the flashing, shingles, and chimney without ever climing on the roof. And consider that Levi Paul and Lonnie Foley started replacing broken siding with siding with holes in it and telling me it was dirt and then trying to stick putty over the broken siding. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Given all these factors, I decided I was going to call in a roof inspector to check the roof. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">On Tuesday May 4th, Bob from Roof Iowa in Ankeny arrived and inspected the roof. He told us we had overpaid for the roof by $3,000 to $5,000. I didn't care too much about that since roofers have been hard to come by since the derecho. What I did care about was Bob found dozens of exposed nails, uncaulked areas where the roof meets the house, shingles not over the edge of the house. Bob also told us that the flashng and shingles were not going to take care of themselves in the heat, and that the gutter aprons (where the roof meets the gutter) were not installed properly. Bob also had concerns about the chimney but said he talked to Levi and told me that Levi had checked out the chimney and said it was good. I told Bob that no one saw Levi climb a ladder to the top of the roof and Bob said I should wait for a good rain before paying. Bob did think the garage was done properly. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-htIAKI6qxbE/YLQnjYfgM3I/AAAAAAAAI3I/0Y81TZeO7fILms4iTWSbeRsbxQE2E5oAgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Photo%2BApr%2B30%252C%2B11%2B15%2B50%2BAM.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-htIAKI6qxbE/YLQnjYfgM3I/AAAAAAAAI3I/0Y81TZeO7fILms4iTWSbeRsbxQE2E5oAgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Photo%2BApr%2B30%252C%2B11%2B15%2B50%2BAM.jpg" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tTRjWHC7f74/YLQnjf7cs4I/AAAAAAAAI3M/49hUxu_DcK8GDVDDUrWGfCUHp5h8_SmdQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Photo%2BApr%2B30%252C%2B11%2B16%2B28%2BAM.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tTRjWHC7f74/YLQnjf7cs4I/AAAAAAAAI3M/49hUxu_DcK8GDVDDUrWGfCUHp5h8_SmdQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Photo%2BApr%2B30%252C%2B11%2B16%2B28%2BAM.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0QslPwtGbb0/YLQnjex_ycI/AAAAAAAAI3Q/QEhnpBTAtNsxHDGKiBHNdZDlc2BIAWN0ACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Photo%2BApr%2B30%252C%2B11%2B20%2B30%2BAM.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0QslPwtGbb0/YLQnjex_ycI/AAAAAAAAI3Q/QEhnpBTAtNsxHDGKiBHNdZDlc2BIAWN0ACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Photo%2BApr%2B30%252C%2B11%2B20%2B30%2BAM.jpg" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-k8BzlHIZpWc/YLQnjrNPE2I/AAAAAAAAI3U/56GKyx40ngILRhvBeSNC6FPyHULQEQ21ACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Photo%2BApr%2B30%252C%2B11%2B21%2B54%2BAM.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-k8BzlHIZpWc/YLQnjrNPE2I/AAAAAAAAI3U/56GKyx40ngILRhvBeSNC6FPyHULQEQ21ACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Photo%2BApr%2B30%252C%2B11%2B21%2B54%2BAM.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IfknFTSRQLE/YLQnj4HiTvI/AAAAAAAAI3Y/V1i13I58zxU-iVijEILUyMS7dqAw0-y2gCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Photo%2BApr%2B30%252C%2B11%2B22%2B44%2BAM.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IfknFTSRQLE/YLQnj4HiTvI/AAAAAAAAI3Y/V1i13I58zxU-iVijEILUyMS7dqAw0-y2gCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Photo%2BApr%2B30%252C%2B11%2B22%2B44%2BAM.jpg" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Pig1YQqeCMs/YLQnkVhoAjI/AAAAAAAAI3g/UYzndDL8J7AmFusBUb6t1nFojk1O7qbPwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Photo%2BApr%2B30%252C%2B11%2B29%2B15%2BAM.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Pig1YQqeCMs/YLQnkVhoAjI/AAAAAAAAI3g/UYzndDL8J7AmFusBUb6t1nFojk1O7qbPwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Photo%2BApr%2B30%252C%2B11%2B29%2B15%2BAM.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iiR9hst1GEw/YLQnkyHOaoI/AAAAAAAAI3c/jz6RIrHDygEjfVhusRn0r_3ogMWlQ3KMgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Photo%2BMay%2B14%252C%2B10%2B49%2B42%2BAM.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iiR9hst1GEw/YLQnkyHOaoI/AAAAAAAAI3c/jz6RIrHDygEjfVhusRn0r_3ogMWlQ3KMgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Photo%2BMay%2B14%252C%2B10%2B49%2B42%2BAM.jpg" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cp4G_ozDPSs/YLQnlcS2kXI/AAAAAAAAI3k/9toU_9Z4nq4ujZm9545e7JtkdOEtA_LnwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Photo%2BMay%2B14%252C%2B10%2B52%2B24%2BAM.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cp4G_ozDPSs/YLQnlcS2kXI/AAAAAAAAI3k/9toU_9Z4nq4ujZm9545e7JtkdOEtA_LnwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Photo%2BMay%2B14%252C%2B10%2B52%2B24%2BAM.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><h4 style="clear: both; font-family: arial;">A sample of the bare nails, broken flashing, gaps where roof meets house, roof debris left in gutters, and generally sloppy workmanship. This and more were found by Bob from Roof Iowa during his inspection after US WIndows Inc of Urbandale told me three separate times the job was done and wanted me to pay them because the job was complete.</h4></div></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Over the next two weeks Levi and Lonnie and some workers came by every few days to fix the broken siding and the rest of Bob's list and kept on wanting to be paid. On May 8th we had a big rainstorm. The roof held up well an we found no leaks except for the spot where the chimney had it's cement seal broken. I tried to call Levi but his phone's voice mail was full so I wrote to Chris Sergio and Greg Fox from </span><a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a><span style="font-family: arial;"> to let them know the situation. On sunday afternoon Lonnie called me to say he would be there Monday morning first thing to fix the chimney. On Monday I came home for lunch and Lonnie had not been there. I called Lonnie and he said he would be there first thing Tuesday morning. On Tuesday Lonnie did not show up and I called Bob who recommended Ron Purdy as someone that could fix my roof. I called Ron and he came on Thursday and tarred the chimney and caulked another dozen spots that Levi and Lonnie and crew missed. There is still a leak by the chimney which Ron said he will fix as soon as there is some dry weather (we have not had three sunny days in a row since he tried to fix the leak the first time).</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="501" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DTrdhWfKNig" width="602" youtube-src-id="DTrdhWfKNig"></iframe></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><h4 style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Here is the leak in my roof right where the chimney was damaged after Levi Paul from US WIndows Inc of Urbandale said he had 'inspected' the work.</h4></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Eventually Levi and Lonnie took care of all the issues that Bob and Kathy and I found. Chris Sergio agreed to reduce the invoice by the cost of the roof inspection and Ron's leak repair. I suppose it could be said that <a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a> stands by their work. I prefer to think that </span><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a> finished their work because I wouldn't pay them until the job was complete. I also think that </span><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a> </span><span style="font-family: arial;">is a company that employs a bunch of slobs that charge top dollar for shoddy work. Chris Sergio told me that he has used Levi Paul for roofing projects many times and this was the first problem he had ever heard of. I not calling Chris Sergio </span><span style="font-family: arial;">of </span><a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a> <span style="font-family: arial;">a liar but my thought on that statmene is 'Suuuurrrre'. I fell like Levi Paul, Chris Sergio, Greg Fox of </span><a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a><span style="font-family: arial;"> would have been happy to let me pay the bill with a leaky roof, broken siding, three gallons of nails in the driveway, bare nails sticking out of my roof, shingles not overhanging the house, and all the other issues Kathy, Bob, and I found.The fact that a roof inspector had to point these problems out instead of Levi Paul or Lonnie Foley of </span><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span><a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a> <span style="font-family: arial;">checking their crew's work and taking care of the issues before asking to be paid speaks volumes.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> Chris Sergio of </span><a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a><span style="font-family: arial;"> told me that if I had any problems with my roof his company would stand behind their work. I wouldn't let these guys anywhere near my house again. I'm not writing this post to beat myself up or to cause trouble for </span><a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a><span style="font-family: arial;">.I'm writing this post to let people know about this company </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">and see if others have had the same experiences and if the post ends up being in the front page of google search resilts for </span><a href="https://www.uswindowincia.com/" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank">US WIndows Inc in Urbandale</a><span style="font-family: arial;"> so much the better.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></div>Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-83387530107897883082018-07-06T12:00:00.000-05:002018-07-06T12:00:13.722-05:00...And in the end<span style="font-family: arial;"> I started this blog almost than nine years ago. I had a lot of spare time and thought I would use some of it to try to write a different kind of chess blog that focused more on the people and experiences I encountered instead of the self-congratulatory and self-immolation blogs that were the usual fare of the time. After detailing my 2009 adventures at the U.S. Open in Indianapolis I was side tracked from chess writing by the Yankees World Series championship quest, a new job, the passing away of my two awesome dogs Queenie the beagle and her son Tuffy the half beagle, and the arrival of my equally awesome beagles Daisy and Baxter.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The fall of 2010 ushered in my peak chess writing years as I resumed working in faraway Des Moines and started a six year stretch of running the West Des Moines based St. Francis Chess Club in return for having the facilities available for a monthly youth tournament. This brought me into contact with a lot of awesome young chess players and parents and into conflict with a lot of decidedly less than awesome chess administrator types. Writing about all these experiences gave me a new perspective on youth chess competition and the competition for youth chess tournaments. The writings themselves resonated with a larger audience and emboldened me to submit my blog for the annual Chess Journalists of America awards. After finishing last in my first attempt at a humorous column I won the 2011 Best Chess Blog Award, beating out exactly one other entrant. The award only cost me a little over $40 in nomination fees and allows me to forever call myself an ‘award winning journalist’ although I tend to leave out the part about being a self-nominated chess journalist. I even wrote a blogging column for the Chess Journalists of America magazine ‘The Chess Journalist’. The magazine has decayed from a quarterly magazine to not having been published in over four years. I was asked to submit an article for the reboot of the magazine last year. I wrote an article on chess ‘YouTubers’ which is now dated by being ten months old and I have yet to hear any comment on it other than the editor received it but was too busy to look at it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> After my rush of chess writing I had pretty much written all I had to say about youth chess and the politics of same. I reserved my chess writing for tournaments I played in and directed. The highlight of my year used to be directing and writing about the Okoboji Open which had a great tournament venue and great people running it. Running a close second was my yearly pilgrimage from my workplace in Des Moines across town to the Iowa State Fair for the speed chess tournament where I finally won the elusive blue ribbon after seven fruitless attempts and close calls. Both those events went by the wayside for me a couple of years back when I felt I was being asked to do more at Okoboji than I was comfortable with and not working in Des Moines which made a trip to play in the Iowa State Fair a two hour drive instead of a trip across town. The most surprising thing about my Iowa State Fair blue ribbons (aside from the fact that I won them) was that before I won my speed chess exhibitions at the local mall were well attended while after I won no one wanted to play against me at the same exhibitions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I still found plenty of things to write about instead of chess. My movie reviews and reviews of post-apocalyptic television shows like ‘The Walking Dead’, ‘Falling Skies’, and ‘The Last Ship’ are surprisingly well-read as are my forays into the stock market. My most popular non-chess posts were from my guest bloggers Daisy and Baxter. I would publicize their beagle’s eye view of the world on the reddit beagle page and the Daisy and Baxter posts occupy some of the top spots on my most read list according to Google Analytics. I even had my pet cockatiel Harry write a couple of guest columns for me which were well received if not well read (the cockatiel section of reddit must be less frequented than the beagle section). In truth almost everything I write about that is not related to chess gets more looks than my writings on chess. One of my best read blogs of 2015 was my review of Marshalltown’s refurbished Dollar Tree - not because of my writing but because a picture of the toothpaste aisle was picked up by a bigger blog displaying the quality of items available at the Dollar Tree.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> If you didn’t see the title of this post you may be wondering why I’m writing about all my last eight plus years of blogging but if you saw the title you probably realized that this is going to be the last Broken Pawn post for the foreseeable future (I always reserve the right to change my mind). With the new/old job that I wrote about last month it feels like Jerry’s monologue in Edward Albee’s classic play ‘The Zoo Story’ where I have gone a long distance out of my way to come back a short distance correctly. This has led me to the feeling that since I started this blog at my current place of employment rejoining the company (as a 'permanent' employee instead of a contractor) is the proper place to end it. Writing the blog has been great fun. Over the years I have written everything I’ve wanted to write about, more than I should have written about on some topics, and probably not everything I needed to write about. I think the blog is a pretty accurate picture of my life over the last few years and should provide me some entertaining reading in a few months or years when I read it from start to finish.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> So to close this blog for I’ll quote one of my favorite people, the inimitable Yogi Berra, who said “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over”. That is the popular quote but what is less well-known is that he followed that by saying “but when it’s over it’s over” making the complete quote:<br /><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 200%"> <b>“It ain’t over ‘til it’s over but when it’s over it’s over”<i></i></b></span></span><br />
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-17849313273645015992018-06-29T12:00:00.000-05:002018-06-29T12:00:11.271-05:00Full Circle<span style="font-family: arial;"> Four months ago I started my new job in far-away (60 miles) Urbandale, Iowa. The job was a six month programming assignment with the carrot held out of being hired on full-time if my performance was found worthy. Although I do like carrots I negotiated an hourly rate that was higher than the other contracting jobs that had been shown to me and less than the admittedly windfall-like rate that I got when I contracted directly with a company last year instead of going through a staffing agency like the one I used to get this position.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> My thought was that I would work my six months and if the company wanted to hire me we would negotiate things like salary or being able to work from home a day or two a week. I expected the company to wait as long as possible before making me an offer since the closer I came to the end of the six months the less leverage I would have at least in theory since most workers that take on contract to hire positions are not in a position to miss the paycheck or two that a job search would entail. My windfall last year left me in a good enough situation that I could walk away from the job when the contract was up but my employers would have no way of knowing that.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The job was unusual in a number of aspects. I was part of a team of programmers and engineers based on three continents tasked with making a major upgrade to an existing project. In addition to the three groups there was also a research and development group whose software the existing project needed to interact with. Most of the people on the project (including the R&D group) had been with this company for at least 10 years with most of them having 20 or more years at the company.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> With so many people spending so many years at the company I thought that I could be told what I needed to do and pointed to where I needed to make changes by the more experienced hands. This was not the way it was. I was told what end results I needed to create but the company language was a kind of shorthand that required years to comprehend exactly what needed to change and what side effects could occur and finding where things needed to be changed another matter entirely. No one seems to have the complete picture of the project. Finding out who knew what was cumbersome and frequently making me seem more like a nuisance than a part of the team.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I liked the people I worked with but I didn’t care much for the work at all. All the programming groups seemed to distrust each other and it appeared that they would occasionally go out of their way to make other groups or group members look bad. It reminded me a lot of a place I worked in New Jersey in the late 1980’s / early 1990’s when I first started programming. Everyone there seemed frustrated most of the time and a lot of the people contracted stress related diseases. I didn’t know how that dynamic evolved and 30 years later I don’t understand this group dynamic any better. I recognized this situation as something I’d encountered before and that kept me from getting too frustrated but it is not an environment I want to spend the rest of my working life in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> After a few weeks I settled in and was getting my feet under me. I didn’t have to ask nearly as many questions but had to redo my work often because of my lack of understanding of the project, other changes breaking my changes, a misunderstanding on the part of the person asking for the work or any combination of all three factors. I had taken my name off the lists that recruiters use to cull applicants but in May I got a call from the recruiter that got me the interview with a company in Marshalltown right before I took my current job. Someone had retired and there was another opening. I said I would apply if I could start in July so I could finish up my current projects. This was acceptable and I started the application process once again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Since I had recently applied at this company I didn’t have to go through the entire process. I had a phone interview and breakfast meeting in place of an in-person interview and lunch. I found out a week later I had made the cut to the final three applicants and a week after that was asked to submit my information for a background check. I passed the background check and was offered the job which I accepted and will start on Monday. I gave two weeks’ notice at my current assignment and true to the dysfunctional nature of the place arranged to leave on Wednesday with the person who approves my time sheets and when this person went on vacation someone else asked me to stay on until Friday and work late and on the weekend from home. I agreed to stay until Friday and work from home but was not given any work to do at home.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I will be getting less pay at my new job but the savings in time, gas, and car usage commuting five miles instead of 60 miles will make up for some of the shortage and being part of a health care plan instead of buying my own through COBRA or the staffing agency’s non-subsidized plan should take care of the rest. This is the same company I worked for a decade ago after leaving my job of 13 years writing shoe store software the company was sold to a group from out of state. I was a contractor back then and when the recession of 2008 hit the contractors were taking pay cuts and getting laid off in a terrible job market. I liked working in town but the circumstances of a recession (no pay raises) and no benefits (buying my own health care and not getting paid on holidays OR the ten-day Christmas shutdown) dictated I get a ‘permanent’ role with benefits even though it meant traveling a couple of hours a day for another ten years. I wouldn’t have felt good about taking a contracting role again with this company but feel pretty lucky to have landed a full-time job with benefits at the same place. I’m not naive enough to think that having a job close to home will suddenly make my work life a paradise. It is called work for a reason and I have worked here before and know that every place has its share of disagreeable people and practices. There is a lot of unknowns at any job but if my hand wasn't forced almost a decade ago I wouldn't have left a job so close to home. I feel like I am closing a loop and I expect a pleasant experience to be working so close to home again.</span><br />
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-6860780898844611752018-06-22T12:00:00.000-05:002018-06-22T12:00:15.693-05:00The Season Never Ends<span style="font-family: arial;"> The NBA season ended earlier two weeks ago and not soon enough for me. After my basketball prediction program crashed and burned with its first losing season in the six years I had applied it to seasonal data I found myself $110.50 down at the end of the regular season with half of this losses coming on the last three days of the season. I made up $47 in the first three rounds of the playoffs with a 60% (30-20) success rate with only the finals left to complete my comeback story. I decided to make $5 bets on the first two games to get a feel for the series. I picked the Warriors giving 12 points in game one which turned out to be the only game in the Finals that the Cavaliers managed to cover even as they threw the game away in the closing seconds. I picked the Cavaliers to cover in the first half of the second game which turned out to be a Warriors blowout. I remember how the Cavaliers hung tough in games three and four of last year’s finals so I picked the Cavaliers in the third game but they once again threw away the game in the closing minute and threw away the cover to boot. In game four I was down $84.5 and picked the Cavaliers on the money line for $20 getting 1.55:1 odds. My idea was the Cavaliers would win and get my losses to under $55 and I would go double or nothing on the Warriors to cover in Game five. It seemed like a good idea but the game turned out to be a Warriors blowout and I finished the playoffs only $6 ahead of where I started with a total 148-152 record and $104.50 in losses.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> During the playoffs the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-allows-sports-betting-across-country-n868956" target="_blank"><b>Supreme Court made a decision that allows any state to legalize sports betting</b></a>. The NBA has been ahead of the curve on this issue and <a href="https://www.legalsportsreport.com/20904/nba-commissioner-adam-silver-talks-sports-betting/" target="_blank"><b>Commissioner Adam Silver has long been a proponent of the NBA receiving a percentage of all bets as an ‘integrity fee’</b></a>. I thought this was an insane idea but after the revelation that Cavaliers superstar LeBron James played the last three games of the finals with a <a href="http://boston.cbslocal.com/2018/06/09/lebron-james-nba-finals-broken-hand/" target="_blank"><b>self-diagnosed ‘broken hand’</b></a> after punching a whiteboard following the game one debacle I think the league is in dire need of integrity. Warrior bettors got a gift because of the lack of transparency on this injury. I probably wouldn’t have changed my picks but I certainly would have gotten more points on the Cavaliers in games two and three if it had been known James had a broken hand.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I still plan on placing wagers on next year’s NBA season but since my computer prediction program is in a state of disrepair that I cannot fix by retrograde analysis due to schedule and changes and changes in how players are rested I will leave my prediction program in the ashes of history. I will not be blogging about my betting adventures since I deservedly received no subscription income for my advanced picks. I may move my wagering to a United States betting site as soon as one makes its way to Iowa. I can see sports gambling and the Internet combining to make a betting experience where gamblers will not only bet on games but gamble on the result of a play, what team or player makes the next score, etc., etc., etc. Gambling is going to be the next big revenue stream for sports as soon as they can figure out how to cash in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The next big events on the NBA calendar after yesterday’s draft is the free agent signing period which starts July 1st. I don’t follow college basketball and find the draft to be a big guessing game where every year players are picked in the top ten but fail to make a meaningful impact and are shipped off to another team in a couple of years while some passed over players become contributors to winning teams. I’d much rather wait to see which players pan out before congratulating a team for managing to draft a highly touted player who has yet to play an NBA game.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> While I don’t pay much attention to the draft I do pay great attention to the free agency and trade period where teams shuffle their rosters and star players pick their next destination. The top free agent is once again LeBron James Four years ago I wrote that James had two years of being the best player on a championship team. James has proven me wrong as he is still playing at a championship level after 15 years in the league. Like any superstar player he needs to have the proper team around him to win the championship but James is still the best player in the game. There are rumors that James will attempt to create a new super-team with the Lakers or join the talent laden Rockets or 76ers in his quest to get a fourth, fifth, or sixth championship. James career arc reminds me a lot of the great Wilt Chamberlain. Chamberlain was a supremely talented player that generally played on flawed teams most of his career and was maligned for being a loser since his team’s only beat the Bill Russell Celtics one time just like James’ Cavaliers could only get past the Warriors once in four tries. At this stage of his career Chamberlain forced a trade to the Lakers to join Jerry West where he one 1 more championship in four finals appearances. I can see James following the Chamberlain path to the Lakers but think it is more likely that he would join the Rockets since they are already a championship caliber team that could have beaten the Warriors in the playoffs without the inopportune injury to Chris Paul. If I had to place a bet I would pick James staying with the Cavaliers since that is where his family lives but time will tell.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Time will also tell on the destination 2014 Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard of the San Antonio Spurs. Leonard has one year left on his contract and the Spurs are in position to offer him a <a href="https://www.lakersnation.com/nba-trade-rumors-kawhi-leonard-not-concerned-about-losing-out-on-supermax-contract/2018/06/16/" target="_blank"><b>‘supermax’ deal worth $219 MILLION DOLLARS</b></a>. This is $40 million more than he can get from any other team. Despite this, Leonard he has reportedly demanded a trade from the Spurs. <a href="https://www.si.com/nba/2018/04/19/kawhi-leonard-injury-timeline-news-spurs" target="_blank"><b>Leonard missed all but nine games of the past season with a quad injury</b></a>. He was cleared by the Spurs medical staff but he claimed he had lingering pain and continued his recovery with his own set of doctors in New York., there seems to have been a lot of acrimony about the misdiagnosis about Leonard’s injury with his teammates and coaches taking veiled shots at him. If Leonard doesn’t trust his team’s medical staff I can’t see him ever playing for the Spurs again. There are rumors that Leonard wants to go to the Lakers and there will surely be a host of teams looking to make a deal for his services. Leonard was the best player on a championship team in 2014 but that was five years and an ankle and quad injury in the past. I would be very leery about trading draft picks and star players to get a player that missed an entire sason due to injury. As disparate as the Lakers are for a superstar player I don’t see them mortgaging their bright future for Leonard. The teams I can see making a pitch for him are the 76ers who have young players, draft picks, and after the <a href="http://www.sportingnews.com/nba/news/philadelphia-76ers-fire-bryan-colangelo-burner-twitter-accounts-wife-barbara-investigation-nba-news-ringer-report/w8suc3ojrsmh1pwn6w8hcrec1" target="_blank"><b>Brian Colangleo twitter fiasco</b></a> the franchise may be looking to make a big splash. The other team I can see making a big play is the New York Knicks. The Knicks don’t have much in the way of talent to offer but it would be a very Knick thing to do to mortgage any semblance of a future for a superstar’s scrapbook.</span><br />
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-73620034256454016312018-06-15T12:00:00.000-05:002018-06-20T05:41:08.034-05:00TV Review - Fear The Walking Dead Season 4 Episodes 1-8<span style="font-family: arial; color:red">
<i><b>WARNING : FEAR THE WALKING DEAD SEASON #4 EPISODES 1-8 SPOILERS BELOW!!!</b></i>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I spent the last two months watching <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_the_Walking_Dead" target="_blank"><b>AMC’s ‘Fear The Walking Dead’</b></a> for my Sunday night post-apocalyptic viewing. The show had gotten better and better over its three-season run and I had high hopes for the fourth season. Season three had our zombie apocalypse survivors trying to escape from their latest home – a dam that was in the middle of an armed takeover. The dam had been booby trapped and Nick was on top of the dam holding the kill switch while his mother Madison, sister Alicia, and con-man Strand were escaping in motorboat. Nick blows up the dam and attempts to escape with special ops agent Daniel Salazar. We don’t know if anyone survives except Madison who is washed up on a shore as the last scene of the season.</span><br />
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The big bad of season 4 of Fear The Walking Dead was the oddly civilized 'Vultures'
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> This seemed like a great cliffhanger well in keeping with the show’s history of having a new locale every half season four our survivors before finding themselves on the run once again. Then changes to the show runners and cast were introduced with the <a href="http://comicbook.com/thewalkingdead/2017/04/14/scott-gimple-fear-the-walking-dead/" target="_blank"><b>chief content officer role turned over to The Walking Dead show-runner Scott Gimple</b></a> and the announcement that <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2017/12/03/the-incredibly-important-reason-morgan-is-moving-to-fear-the-walking-dead/#cdfc43f46f63" target="_blank"><b>Morgan from ‘The Walking Dead’ was moving to ‘Fear The Walking Dead’</b></a> and a new cast of well-known character actors would be coming to Season 4 including Maggie Grace (Kim from the Taken movies), Jenna Elfman (Dharma from Dharma and Greg), and Garret Dillahunt (Simon from Burn Notice). I assumed the addition of Morgan was to goose the ratings and I liked the idea of new cast members since I always felt this show is not beholden to a comic book like the Walking Dead proper and could accommodate a cast of characters that die off and are replaced.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The season started well enough with Morgan’s journey from the parent show conclusion to the All-Out War arc in Virginia to the southwest where he meets Althea (Grace) and John Dorie (Dillahunt) and the trio form an unlikely alliance after battling a group of scavengers with the help of Althea’s awesome fully loaded SWAT vehicle. At the end of the episode the trio are shanghaied by main cast members Nick, Alicia, and Strand.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> For me this was the high point of the season as the remaining seven episodes in the half-season turned into a mashup of flashbacks detailing the fall of the baseball stadium home that the original survivors had apparently spent a year in before being besieged by a group called ‘The Vultures’ who ride around the area scavenging everything that can be scavenged and trapping zombies in buildings or oil tanks or etc… while leaving banners proclaiming the zombie inventory outside each container. The Vultures send the young girl Charley in the stadium to get intel and then camp in the stadium parking lot where they offer the residents a choice of joining the Vultures or dying of starvation because of the weevil infestation of the crops.</span><br />
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Great set pieces like this zombie invasion failed to make up for the poor storytelling...
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The action continues to switch from the past to the present. There are some veiled references to how Madison found the rest of the group which would have made an interesting half season in itself except we have been fast forwarded to a disconnected future that we are seeing in the past. We never see Madison in the present and the rest of the cast hints around a terrible fate that befell the stadium at the hands of the Vultures but we also never see that until the season finale. One major event takes place in the third episode when Nick is shot dead by Charley after killing her ‘Vulture guardian’ in a fit of rage. The death was sudden and shocking and a high point of the season. I liked Nick the character a lot but the death seemed foreordained as <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/fear-walking-dead-nick-dies-frank-dillane-exit-interview-1106935" target="_blank"><b>it was revealed that actor Frank Dillane wanted off the show</b></a>. The death was folded nicely into Morgan’s story arc as he warned Nick that killing the Vulture wasn’t going to work out the way he wanted and even seemed to be getting through to him before his untimely death. What made the death less meaningful was that Nick continued to show up in flashbacks with a lesser role in each episode.</span><br />
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The real time death of Nick was much more shocking than if it had been presented in flashback version...
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The season continued to teeter-totter between the past and future as we find that the woman John has been looking for all season (Laura) is really Naomi (Elfman) from the baseball stadium. There is an entire bottle episode of John and Laura’s time in his cabin before she runs away since Naomi not only can’t tell anyone her real name (it is revealed to be June in the season finale), she continually tries to run away from the stadium and is revealed to have joined the Vultures at the end of episode six while the flashbacks show the ballpark making a successful run for supplied and seeds to restart planting food at the ballpark which leads to the vultures leaving.</span><br />
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The scene was intense but I had no way of knowing why Alicia in particular was so upset since I hadn't seen the flashbacks yet.
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The seventh episode has the ‘climactic’ showdown between our group of survivors and the vultures but it happened before we understand that the vultures had a split in leadership that led to one group deciding to take the ballpark by force using all their stashed zombies while the other group wants to leave the ballpark alone. The siege ends the seventh episode flashback while the current day timeline has our survivors heading back to the ballpark to get medical supplies. In the mid-season finale we see an interview between Althea (a compulsive journalist that tapes the story of everyone she meets) and Madison between the end of season three and the discovery of the ballpark, fights between our survivor factions, and Madison sacrificing herself by leading the zombies into the ballpark and locking herself and the zombies in the stadium while the rest of the crew escapes. The finale ends with our survivors settling their differences over a feast of ramen noodles and ready for more adventures in the second half of the season. Yes, all it took was some ramen noodles to get everyone to forget their differences.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The new characters were great, the music and cinematography gripping, and there was more than enough zombie action to make this half season a great one but the constant time jumps led to a confusing story line that made the half season a jumbled mess. It is possible that binge watchers may find this half season more cohesive but I doubt it. Not seeing the missing parts between the end of season three at the dam and the beginnings of the ballpark and having almost all the ballpark scenes in flashback made me not care about the ballpark at all. The struggles of the survivors to secure the prison in ‘The Walking Dead’ made me feel a real sense of loss when it fell. I had no similar investment in the ballpark. Once Nick died in episode three there was no point in showing him in flashbacks in the rest of the season. Having the dual timelines was a bold move that didn’t pay off due to poor storytelling. It would have been far better to have had the timeline run in sequence even if Madison’s ‘death’ (we never saw her die, after all) had to happen in episode four or five. A sequential timeline would have left no doubt to the characters motivations (why Nick wanted to kill Charley’s Vulture guardian and why Alicia wants Naomi dead so bad) instead of leaving the viewers wondering why our characters were getting so out of character.</span><br />
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Madison's death would have been much more effective if told in real time instead of flashback-style.
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The best thing that can be said about this half season is that it is over. Hopefully with what amounts to a new interesting cast with holdovers Strand, Alicia, and Luciana (Nick’s old girlfriend who took most of season three off and suddenly reappeared), the show runners can explore the zombie apocalypse landscape of the western U.S. with story lines that don’t needs flash backs and flash forwards to be interesting. Since Maggie Grace is already in the show I humbly suggest that the show runners do whatever it takes to get her Taken dad Liam Neeson to show up for a guest spot or even be a series regular. Neeson’s Bryan Mills character would instantly be the baddest actor in the apocalypse and would give an astronomical boost to the sagging ratings. Failing landing Neeson, I hope Daniel Salazar can make a return to the show since Ruben Blades portrayal of the Costa Rican black ops soldier would give Mills a run for his money in the bad actor department.</span><br />
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-24430608641152947132018-06-08T12:00:00.000-05:002018-06-08T12:00:11.305-05:00TV Binge Review - Better Call Saul<div align="center">
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Better Call Saul mixes sophomoric lawyer 'action' with some of the best characters on television.
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Two weekends ago I found myself alone with my beagles while Kathy went to Long Island to get Ben back from school and visit Matt in Virginia. I didn’t have any side programming work to occupy myself with and it was a three day weekend to boot. With all the extra time on my hands I decided to have Daisy and Baxter’s now annual fried chicken taste test and in addition I had enough time to binge watch the first three seasons of AMC’s tragi-comedy '<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Call_Saul" target="_blank"><b>Better Call Saul</b></a>'.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Better Call Saul is a prequel of sorts to the highly thought of ‘<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad" target="_blank"><b>Breaking Bad</b></a>’ which chronicled the transformation of high school science teacher Walter White into the drug kingpin known as Heisenberg. The prequel stars White’s lawyer Saul Goodman who left Breaking Bad in the next to last episode by paying a fixer for a new identity saying he would be lucky to be managing a Cinnabon in Omaha’. And that is where Better Call Saul starts – with Saul managing a Cinnabon in Omaha with a name tag listing his name as ‘Gene’. Each of the three seasons starts with a ‘Gene in the Omaha Cinnabon’ scene and then flashes back to the past which is the present as far as the show where Saul is Jimmy McGill, a con-man turned lawyer with his own cast of characters including a lawyer brother that is homebound due to a supposed hypersensitivity to electromagnetic fields, his girlfriend Kim who works for his brother’s law firm, and Howard who is brother’s law firm partner.</span><br />
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The show perks up considerably when Mike Ehrmantraut is on screen.
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The first season of the show starts out with Jimmy as a primordial Saul Goodman. He is not as slick as the later version but nearly as cynical and just as clever. He runs scams to try to convince an embezzling couple to hire him and shows off his pre-law scamming skills by conning bar patrons with his friend Marco. There is a slow but steady mix in the series to most of the Albuquerque drug underworld that became staples of Breaking Bad. The first episode featured appearances by Tuco Salamanca and Mike Ehrmantraut and later seasons have brought in Lydia, Gus, and Hector Salamanca.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The progression of Jimmy is interesting to watch as his scams evolve from tricking marks at a bar out of a few hundred dollars to bribing a bus driver to fake a breakdown for time to convince his elderly nursing home passengers to join his class action lawsuit. His scams culminate in stealing documents from his brother’s house and changing the data to get the client to switch to his girlfriends new practice. This last scam gets him suspended from the bar for a year in a case of self-sabotage since the early Jimmy has a soft heart and confesses his chicanery to his brother to keep him from thinking he has made a terrible mistake and turning into a recluse, never suspecting his brother was scamming him and tape recorded the conversation. This is typical Jimmy who convinces one of the elderly members of his class action suit to settle for the first big offer by turning her friends against her but later getting her friends back by exposing his complicity. Jimmy and the law firms he competes and cooperates with is sort of LA Law in a funhouse mirror and entertaining but not something that would make this appointment television for me.</span><br />
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One way to bring down a truck!
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> What did make me watch 25+ hours of ‘Better Call Saul’ was the adventures of the aging bald ex-Philly-cop turned parking lot attendant Ehrmantraut who is far and away my favorite character on the show. I know Mike as a enforcer for drug dealing Gus in Breaking Bad and his ‘breaking bad’ journey in order to first avenge his son’s death at the hands of some crooked cops to taking on odd jobs as a protection enforcer or second story man is fascinating. Ehrmantraut needs the money for his daughter-in-law and granddaughter but finds himself increasingly drawn into the drug business. Mike ended season three avenging the killing of a good samaritan who was killed as a result of Mike's robbery of a Salamanca drug running truck by making a deal with Gus to launder $200,000 in stolen drug money to give to the samaritan’s wife.</span><br />
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My favorite Mike Ehrmantraut scene!
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> My affinity with Mike probably comes from my being an aging balding man myself. I have no pretensions that I ever was or could be the bad actor that Mike is but I can still dream. To me Mike is the star of Better Call Saul. My favorite Ehrmantraut scene is when Steven Ogg (Simon of Walking Dead fame) is giving him grief about not bringing a gun to a bodyguard job. Mike says if he needs a gun he’ll use one of Ogg’s and then proceeds to prove his point by taking Ogg’s a gun out of his hand, cracking him in the neck with the gun, and then relieving the choking Ogg of his other weapons. Another great Ehrmantraut scene shows him letting his granddaughter drill holes a garden hose while explaining to his daughter-in-law that he needs a soaker for some outdoor plants. Mike then puts spikes in the holes and uses the hose as a lightweight device to disable Salamanca’s drug running truck in the desert so he can rob it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I found the investment of 25+ hours watching Better Call Saul well worth my time. The action, storytelling, and cinematography are exceptional. I am of the opinion that I would not be nearly as enamored with the show if I hadn’t binge watched. Each episode had plenty of slow moving parts which were not as irritating when a morning or afternoon would have multiple scenes with Mike to balance out the lawyer drama stuff that I find boring. The show is scheduled to air Season 4 on Monday nights starting on August 6th. My live television viewing is mostly reserved for Sunday night apocalypse shows but as soon as season 4 of Better Call Saul ends I will head right to Netflix to binge watch the show.</span><br />
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The more Better Call Saul delves into the New Mexico drug running world the better I like it!
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-44149472829070427182018-06-01T12:00:00.000-05:002018-06-01T12:00:01.137-05:00Beagles on Chicken<div align="center">
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It's time to once again turn the pages of the Broken Pawn to those most literate of beagles – <span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Baxter</span> and <span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Daisy</span><br/> to recount a memorable Memorial Day Weekend!</strong> </p>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Hi Everyone!! It’s Daisy… </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">and Baxter ready for our favorite blog of the year! Our Marshalltown Fried Chicken review!! YUM!! We love fried chicken, don’t we Daisy? </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">We certainly do and when Kathy went to Long Island last weekend to help take Ben home from school we thought the long weekend would be the perfect time to eat all the fried chicken in town. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">I think anytime is the perfect time to eat fried chicken but this weekend is especially perfect after Hank and Kathy boarded us at the Happy Tails kennel two weeks ago while they went to the Waffle House in Kansas City. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">To be fair they also went to their niece Lauren’s wedding. Lauren visited us years ago and took us for a walk to the Jiffy to get beef sticks. We like Lauren. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">I like Lauren too but she should have made her wedding beagle friendly, especially since there was a barbeque at the rehearsal dinner, a brunch with lots of bacon, and hamburgers and salmon at the reception. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">That’s right Baxter! What’s the point of having all that wonderful food without some beagles around to show everyone how to enjoy it? </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">No one can enjoy meat, fish, and chicken like a beagle! </span>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">And speaking of chicken we had a great Memorial Day weekend tasting chicken! Hank got a three piece dark meat meal from every place in town. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">We got to eat a drumstick and Hank shared the rest of the chicken with us! YUM!! </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">We mainly judged each chicken meal on the taste of the chicken but we considered other factors also, Baxter! </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">That’s right, Daisy. The size of the chicken and the quality of the sides are important. The better the sides the more chicken Hank shares with us! </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">And the price is sort of important since Hank has to work to pay for our chicken. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">And the more chicken Hank can afford… </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">…means more chicken to share with us! </span>
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<div align="center">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hzpL2L01UGA/Wwx1RzieYeI/AAAAAAAAIjw/amVkqGx_JpsVqL1_A1dCtIdzgMD-j5FcgCLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN9933.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hzpL2L01UGA/Wwx1RzieYeI/AAAAAAAAIjw/amVkqGx_JpsVqL1_A1dCtIdzgMD-j5FcgCLcBGAs/s320/DSCN9933.JPG" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ovwNaIEGSaM/Wwx1R5cXfxI/AAAAAAAAIj0/DGAJCS4BHTISqAWB7B0rKJH5kKZWgn0aQCLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN9934.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ovwNaIEGSaM/Wwx1R5cXfxI/AAAAAAAAIj0/DGAJCS4BHTISqAWB7B0rKJH5kKZWgn0aQCLcBGAs/s320/DSCN9934.JPG" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IJf0E-n8hzA/Wwx1R03ki0I/AAAAAAAAIj4/4b0JOJdr-hozStRSJp0yKhKbV94c22IZgCLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN9935.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IJf0E-n8hzA/Wwx1R03ki0I/AAAAAAAAIj4/4b0JOJdr-hozStRSJp0yKhKbV94c22IZgCLcBGAs/s320/DSCN9935.JPG" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jx2bOLOl8MU/Wwx1SukU6uI/AAAAAAAAIj8/PawfLS9Ps4sQViP-zZHr6v-lPqZ9KZh8wCLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN9936.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jx2bOLOl8MU/Wwx1SukU6uI/AAAAAAAAIj8/PawfLS9Ps4sQViP-zZHr6v-lPqZ9KZh8wCLcBGAs/s320/DSCN9936.JPG" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%; text-align: center;">
<strong>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">For such wonderful in-house food, Pizza Hut's to-go chicken is so tiny!</span> <span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">The butter is almost as big as the chicken leg...</span>
</strong> </p>
</div>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Hank’s first stop was to the local Pizza Ranch in Friday night after he got home and took us for our afternoon walk. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Hank hasn’t liked the Pizza Ranch since 2014 when he had to wait a half hour for a bucket of fried chicken he called in advance for. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Luckily for us Hank wanted to uphold the integrity of our pizza reviews and decided to get us some Pizza Ranch chicken!! YUM!! </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">The three piece chicken dinner at the Pizza ranch cost $7.49 and included a roll, a tiny, tiny cup of cole slaw, and a larger carton of mashed potatoes. The chicken was delicious, Baxter. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">It was indeed, Daisy. It was tender and juicy but there was a big problem. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">The chicken was so small we barely got a taste! The little pat of butter that comes with the roll was almost as big as the chicken legs! I’m giving Pizza Ranch two paws. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">The chicken thigh was so small that Hank didn’t share any with us. It was a disappointing finish to what should have been a great meal of superior chicken. I’m giving Pizza Ranch 2 paws for the taste but they need to step their game up. </span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;">Pizza Ranch – 2 paws </span>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s1600/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 50px; height: 48px;" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s200/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715811290978296738"></a>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s1600/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 50px; height: 48px;" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s200/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715811290978296738"></a>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tvZyZO1Zp0A/Wwx3hPKx3OI/AAAAAAAAIlI/VGkk27ruI-4BGU_2xk4ur3K1uRR4RhsDQCLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN9982.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tvZyZO1Zp0A/Wwx3hPKx3OI/AAAAAAAAIlI/VGkk27ruI-4BGU_2xk4ur3K1uRR4RhsDQCLcBGAs/s200/DSCN9982.JPG" width="200" height="150" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7H6NIn4ji2E/Wwx3hKvKiuI/AAAAAAAAIlM/RnxmArGS5q0jPxh9lxBtuK94LNBW4jsiACLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN9981.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7H6NIn4ji2E/Wwx3hKvKiuI/AAAAAAAAIlM/RnxmArGS5q0jPxh9lxBtuK94LNBW4jsiACLcBGAs/s200/DSCN9981.JPG" width="200" height="150" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-08waiMmJRt8/Wwx3hXr_imI/AAAAAAAAIlQ/RnEarxU_HOQ1-x4o-kND7Co5zV9ziRpYgCLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN9983.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-08waiMmJRt8/Wwx3hXr_imI/AAAAAAAAIlQ/RnEarxU_HOQ1-x4o-kND7Co5zV9ziRpYgCLcBGAs/s200/DSCN9983.JPG" width="200" height="150" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%; text-align: center;">
<strong>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Hy-Vee has large chicken pieces.</span> <span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">This year the chicken tasted way better than years before...</span>
</strong> </p>
</div>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">After a bad night’s sleep dreaming about tiny chicken legs, we woke up bright and early on Saturday. Hank took us for some walks and then left to get chicken at the Hy-Vee. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Hy-Vee has always had giant chicken pieces that were dry and tasteless but our neighbor Becky told us that their chicken has gotten a lot better in the last few months. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Hank paid $9.99 for a three piece chicken dinner with sides of Egg Potato Salad and Rotini Pasta Salad. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Hy-Vee gave Hank a dinner roll too. The chicken was as big as ever but instead of tasting like dried out cardboard this chicken was excellent. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">It was great Baxter. The chicken would have melted in my mouth if I hadn’t gobbled it down as soon as Hank gave it to me! </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">There was so much potato and rotini salad that Hank was almost full and you know what that means Daisy! </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;"> It meant that Hank shared more of his chicken with us. Hy-Vee took their chicken to another level this year. I have to give them 4 paws, Baxter. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">I’m only giving Hy-Vee three paws Daisy. The chicken was great but for $10 I think they should have given Hank a drink to go along with the chicken. I did love that there was at least twice as much chicken than the Pizza Ranch. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Hy-Vee was the clear front-runner but there was still a lot more chicken to taste! </span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;">Hy-Vee - 3 1/2 paws </span>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s1600/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 50px; height: 48px;" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s200/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715811290978296738"></a>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s1600/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 50px; height: 48px;" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s200/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715811290978296738"></a>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s1600/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 50px; height: 48px;" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s200/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715811290978296738"></a>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--gg9jMiv2gI/T1KkWnPxmiI/AAAAAAAABGo/JMpjpPXtHWE/s1600/BaxDaisyHalfPaw.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 27px; height: 48px;" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/--gg9jMiv2gI/T1KkWnPxmiI/AAAAAAAABGo/JMpjpPXtHWE/s200/BaxDaisyHalfPaw.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715811585485806114"></a>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BwN9k1wsIA0/Wwx2UNXaygI/AAAAAAAAIkc/ftRxcZKtsmAwetdd3rmm9PfwpJfKAqlTACLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN0001.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BwN9k1wsIA0/Wwx2UNXaygI/AAAAAAAAIkc/ftRxcZKtsmAwetdd3rmm9PfwpJfKAqlTACLcBGAs/s320/DSCN0001.JPG" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LadXqKFteq0/Wwx2UjlsDPI/AAAAAAAAIkg/NOWElKKULAcKN_ELUPGO0ebe79DrhlIsgCLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN9999.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LadXqKFteq0/Wwx2UjlsDPI/AAAAAAAAIkg/NOWElKKULAcKN_ELUPGO0ebe79DrhlIsgCLcBGAs/s320/DSCN9999.JPG" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kuXSPMrumYg/Wwx2ULeCLSI/AAAAAAAAIkY/g7eSUJKpzMgja6JoVRX-cqdoY35aL4xDwCLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN0002.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kuXSPMrumYg/Wwx2ULeCLSI/AAAAAAAAIkY/g7eSUJKpzMgja6JoVRX-cqdoY35aL4xDwCLcBGAs/s320/DSCN0002.JPG" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JHQCqiSlISM/Wwx2ULBhnjI/AAAAAAAAIkU/-VRVvqzyvEsRx8-ve7j6kQE4hXvc-RglwCLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN0003.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JHQCqiSlISM/Wwx2ULBhnjI/AAAAAAAAIkU/-VRVvqzyvEsRx8-ve7j6kQE4hXvc-RglwCLcBGAs/s320/DSCN0003.JPG" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%; text-align: center;">
<strong>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Haley's has the best broasted chicken but it got mixed up with the potato salad in Hank's car.</span> <span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">If 10 pieces are $12, how come 3 pieces are $10?</span>
</strong> </p>
</div>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">After some more walks Hank left us on Saturday evening to get a three piece chicken dinner from Haley’s Deli. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Haley’s was last year’s winner and we have fond memories of getting 12 pieces of broasted chicken on our Sunday morning walks when they were a grocery store that sold chicken instead of a restaurant that is closed Sundays like they are now. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Those were the days! Hank got a three piece chicken dinner with pasta salad and potato salad as sides along with a roll for the same $10 that the Hy-Vee charged. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Hank didn’t ask for a bag to take the chicken home in and the salads got smeared around in the chicken on the drive home. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">It’s hard to blame the Haley’s for Hank’s mistake but I didn’t like the chicken mixed in with potato and pasta salad. The chicken part was good though. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">I loved the chicken and Hank should be more careful. Haley’s has great chicken but it was a lot smaller than Hy-Vee’s so I’m only giving them 3 paws. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">I’m giving them three paws also. The chicken was great but if the pieces were bigger there wouldn’t have been room for the salads to mix with the chicken. </span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;">Haley's – 3 paws </span>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s1600/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 50px; height: 48px;" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s200/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715811290978296738"></a>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s1600/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 50px; height: 48px;" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s200/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715811290978296738"></a>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s1600/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 50px; height: 48px;" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s200/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715811290978296738"></a>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-33uPw2rLKT0/Wwx21WoIsxI/AAAAAAAAIk8/ESQBPwDcNOw1L5hCSk0CZx9mi0BVZQfewCLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN0069.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-33uPw2rLKT0/Wwx21WoIsxI/AAAAAAAAIk8/ESQBPwDcNOw1L5hCSk0CZx9mi0BVZQfewCLcBGAs/s200/DSCN0069.JPG" width="200" height="150" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j9ISr4kInoc/Wwx21epZaQI/AAAAAAAAIk4/M3PSPnCSLHomQ7-vV9zAVz7UvCzPPpRxQCLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN0068.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j9ISr4kInoc/Wwx21epZaQI/AAAAAAAAIk4/M3PSPnCSLHomQ7-vV9zAVz7UvCzPPpRxQCLcBGAs/s200/DSCN0068.JPG" width="200" height="150" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5tufw6YKbMI/Wwx21XX-xSI/AAAAAAAAIk0/ZKZRJLqFnrERhaCPR1MFUWlkvMROEVAKgCLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN0070.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5tufw6YKbMI/Wwx21XX-xSI/AAAAAAAAIk0/ZKZRJLqFnrERhaCPR1MFUWlkvMROEVAKgCLcBGAs/s200/DSCN0070.JPG" width="200" height="150" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%; text-align: center;">
<strong>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">KFC gave us 2 thighs and 1 leg! More chicken! YUM!!</span> <span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">And they gave Hank a soft drink to fill him up so he could share more chicken with us!</span>
</strong> </p>
</div>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">We all had great fried chicken dreams and got up on Sunday fat and happy. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">I get up fat and happy every day but today I was looking forward to our last taste test. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">We had three walks and waited almost all afternoon before Hank left to go to the Kentucky Fried Chicken for the $8.49 big box meal. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Hank got original recipe and the chicken came with a roll, potato salad, cole slaw, and a soda. Hank liked the soda. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">It was almost 100 degrees and Hank drank most of the soda on his way home which left… </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">…more chicken for us to taste because he was so full. It didn’t hurt that there was way more cole slaw from KFC than the Pizza Ranch even if there was a little less mashed potatoes. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">The best thing about the KFC big box was that instead of two legs and a thigh like every other store gave us we got… </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Two Thighs and a Leg! YUM! Chicken Legs are great but the thighs have more meat for Hank to share. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Having two thighs made up for KFC’s smaller chicken pieces. And it was delicious. Hank doesn’t give us any of the fried skin but the KFC chicken had a smoke flavor built right into the meat that I found very tasty. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">My chicken was great too and because of the soda I think we got more of the KFC chicken than any of the others. I’m giving KFC four paws. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">I think I’ll give KFC four paws also, Baxter. Filling up our owner with soda so we can get more chicken is sure to get a max score from any beagle judge. </span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;">KFC – 4 paws </span>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s1600/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 50px; height: 48px;" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s200/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715811290978296738"></a>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s1600/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 50px; height: 48px;" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s200/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715811290978296738"></a>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s1600/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 50px; height: 48px;" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s200/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715811290978296738"></a>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s1600/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 50px; height: 48px;" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YasLBoJ8Jyk/T1KkFeHto6I/AAAAAAAABGc/fZN2FmIRqB0/s200/BaxDaisyPaw.bmp" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715811290978296738"></a>
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<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">So that’s the end of our fried chicken contest for another year, Daisy. It’s too bad we can’t have one every week. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">I know Baxter. It’s so sad when our chicken weekend is over. All the chicken was excellent and the KFC proved that last is not least by coming from behind to beat a vastly improved Hy-Vee fried chicken experience. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">So it's back to beef stick treats and Hank sharing his bologna sandwiches for another year but that's not so bad, Daisy.</span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">We do love our beef stick treats and bologna but I'll miss fried chicken after eating nothing but for a whole weekend!</span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Cheer up Daisy! Maybe it will be only one dog year! We are dogs, you know.</span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Oooh... I like it! How long is one dog year?</span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Let's see...52 weeks divided by 7 carry the 2...add 1...it might be Saturday!</span>
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-70769062243799588972018-05-25T12:00:00.000-05:002018-05-25T12:00:24.349-05:00Scattered, Covered, Smothered, Chunked, Capped, Peppered, Topped, Old, and Alone
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The best part of any trip to Kansas City!
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I took my first day off since starting my 6-month contract in Urbandale last Friday to go with Kathy to Kansas City for my niece Lauren’s wedding. I am not eager to take many long trips and am not much of a wedding person either but I was happy to make an exception for my niece since she is OK in my book, I get along with her parents quite well, and besides Kathy promised we could eat at one of the many area Waffle Houses while we were in Kansas City.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I spend the week leading up to Friday distracted by the prospects of my first Waffle House meal since last September when we went to Gaffney, South Carolina to attend my father-in-law’s retirement dinner. There are no Waffle Houses in Iowa or my native New Jersey. I had to wait until I was 26 and living in Florida to fall in love with Waffle House staples like T-Bone and eggs and hash browns scattered (on the grill), smothered (in onions) and covered (in cheese). Since then the Waffle House has expanded their menu, now offering hash browns chunked (with ham), capped (with mushrooms), diced (with tomatoes), peppered (with jalapeno peppers), topped (with chili) and country (covered in country gravy) in addition to scattered, smothered, and covered.</span><br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-d_5oRdNG7FQ/WwdcX15zRjI/AAAAAAAAIhA/r1n-vKf6ilkmfxDxsxMjB83almFng9ONACLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN0208.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-d_5oRdNG7FQ/WwdcX15zRjI/AAAAAAAAIhA/r1n-vKf6ilkmfxDxsxMjB83almFng9ONACLcBGAs/s320/DSCN0208.JPG" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
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After dropping off Ringo the mourning dove to his rescue center, we stopped for gas at the Cameron, Missouri Valero - home of $2.59 gas and 99 cent 16 oz. Cokes. With gas in Iowa at $2.89 and 16 oz. Coke cans $1.19 I wonder why Missouri is so cheap?
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Finally, Friday morning came. Kathy and I walked Daisy and Baxter on a mile and half round trip walk to the Casey’s for me to get a coffee and give the beagles a beef stick treat. When we got home we hung out until 9am and took another walk with the beagles before taking them and our suitcases to the car for a ride. Daisy and Baxter were thrilled to be in the car until we stopped at the Happy Tails doggie day care where they were to be boarded until Sunday afternoon. After a little coaxing the beagles made their way into the back of the kennel and we were on our way to Kansas City.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> There was a side trip to Des Moines with our temporary guest Ringo the mourning dove. Kathy found Ringo unable to fly a week before and put him in an old birdcage in the garage. The Saturday before we let Ringo loose and he flew away but a few hours later we found him in the driveway with a cut on his head like he flew into a window. Kathy put him in the garage again and found a bird rescue person in Des Moines to take Ringo in. After the side trip we were on our way to Kansas City.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The original plan was to have Sunday breakfast at the Waffle House on our way back home but we were making such good time we didn’t stop for lunch. There was no argument from me when Kathy say a Waffle House sign in Liberty and suggested we stop there to eat. In 2015 I also ate at the Waffle House in Liberty but after looking at the Waffle House store locator there doesn’t seem to be a Liberty, Missouri location so I must have been in a different town altogether. I didn’t recognize this Waffle House as being the same one as last time which was a welcome surprise because it was way cleaner. The grill, pans, and waffle irons were sparkling and there was no food covered tables like my last visit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> We sat at the counter and our server came over to greet us and ask us what we wanted to drink. I asked for a coffee and Kathy a glass of water. Kathy then ordered scrambled eggs with toast while I had hash browns ‘all the way’ except for peppers and country gravy. The server gave our order to the cook who proceeded to expertly place the hash browns and all the toppings on the grill while frying Kathy’s eggs and laying down the toast. The server then started talking to the cook about how he was mad at his mother for disrespecting his friends when they came to his house to play video games in the basement. Then the server told the cook that he told his mother that he was going to move out now that he had this job at the Waffle House and that she was going to die “old and alone and feeding cats”. The cook had that look of someone who had heard this story once or twice and went to the back room, returning a few seconds later with four cases of eggs (15 dozen eggs in a case) which he proceeded to place in metal racks while keeping an eye on our food.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The server apparently wanted the cook’s undivided attention and wasn’t getting it so he went to a booth on the other side of the Waffle House (there was only two other diners in the restaurant) and got on his phone where he told the person on the other end of the conversation that his f@#$% mother had disrespected his friends and that he was f#$%^ sick of her disrespecting his friends and now that he had this F%^&( job at the Waffle house he was going to move out and his mother was going to f^&*)* die old and alone and feeding cats. He then went into the restaurant’s back room where I could see him waving his arms like a bird while he was yelling behind the thankfully soundproof door.</span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Hk9MUwjpTnM/WwdbNgCNeYI/AAAAAAAAIgs/hV92_FGCMoQQz6bGVvHHvUH2QXdD7XGwwCLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN0211.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Hk9MUwjpTnM/WwdbNgCNeYI/AAAAAAAAIgs/hV92_FGCMoQQz6bGVvHHvUH2QXdD7XGwwCLcBGAs/s320/DSCN0211.JPG" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0wIL1gArwMo/WwdbNkys5QI/AAAAAAAAIgo/IoEEwO-kZgwrditvGoaOyatNOZO2-rRDgCLcBGAs/s1600/DSCN0213.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0wIL1gArwMo/WwdbNkys5QI/AAAAAAAAIgo/IoEEwO-kZgwrditvGoaOyatNOZO2-rRDgCLcBGAs/s320/DSCN0213.JPG" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a>
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The cook put 720 eggs in baskets for the next day's breakfast while creating my hash brown masterpiece!
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> While we were waiting for our food I struck a conversation with the cook. Since he was putting his four cases of eggs into baskets I asked him how many eggs this Waffle House sold on a Saturday morning. He pointed to the four cases and told me that in a typical Saturday morning from 6 to 8 he would use four cases of 15 dozen eggs which works out to 720 eggs in a couple of hours! At that point the cook excused himself and got the server from the back room to give us our food. You would never guess that the server had spent the last ten or so minutes cursing at his mother by how pleasantly he served our food. He was so busy with his personal matter he had forgotten to get my coffee and Kathy’s water so I asked him how my wife’s water was coming along. I thought he was going to curse at me but he said he was sorry, got us our drinks, and disappeared in the back room to resume his phone conversation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The scattered, covered, smothered, topped, chunked, diced, and capped has browns were awesome and well worth the trip. Kathy liked her eggs and toast as well but not as much as I enjoyed my hash browns which is my personal highlight of 2018. The other two diners were ready to leave but the server was still in the back room so the hard-working cook took over the register. The other diners used a credit card and the server had the pen so the cook had to get the server out of the back room again. The server came out and helped the two diners and gave me our check while he was at it. We were about done so I waited for the serve to start for the back room before I got up to pay. I told the cook I thought his hash browns were awesome and didn’t give the server any tip at all but I did ask him for a paper receipt after he gave me my change and closed the cash drawer in a futile attempt to get him to curse at me. I suppose I’m not the motherly type.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The next day and a half was full of food in addition to my niece’s wedding. There was barbecued brisket, ribs, beef, sausage, and chicken at the rehearsal dinner. After that we ate ice cream at the fantastic <a href="https://www.facebook.com/bettyraesicecream/" target="_blank"><b>Betty Rae’s Ice Cream</b></a> where I had a plum chocolate chip parfait with berries. The next morning at the wedding brunch I had a hot ham and cheese sandwich. After the wedding there was another dinner with salmon, pasta, and tacos. All this food and ice cream was great but paled in comparison to the hash browns I had on Friday afternoon at the Waffle House.</span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-q5l9u3pZ1Us/Wwdd9Uq_AzI/AAAAAAAAIhQ/EnnMM1RJAAUWGlKj9nQSMxDlxS3vu4r0gCLcBGAs/s1600/IceCream.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-q5l9u3pZ1Us/Wwdd9Uq_AzI/AAAAAAAAIhQ/EnnMM1RJAAUWGlKj9nQSMxDlxS3vu4r0gCLcBGAs/s320/IceCream.jpg" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="960" data-original-height="720" /></a><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TLF39B0TFCU/Wwdd9RwQ-5I/AAAAAAAAIhU/udJTuoac31YvqZB579rSgnaTeMIfqZpvwCLcBGAs/s1600/LaurenBryce.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TLF39B0TFCU/Wwdd9RwQ-5I/AAAAAAAAIhU/udJTuoac31YvqZB579rSgnaTeMIfqZpvwCLcBGAs/s320/LaurenBryce.jpg" width="240" height="240" data-original-width="960" data-original-height="959" /></a>
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Great ice cream and great weddings are incredible but ultimately everything pales next to an incredible plate of Waffle House food!
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The wedding was super and I enjoyed hanging out with my in-laws but by Sunday morning I was ready to get back to the Waffle House for a farewell to Kansas City breakfast. The problem was that torrential rains in the Kansas City area and the tendency of the area to have flooding made us decided to skip the Waffle House and get away from the storm as soon as possible. It was a good plan that seemed like a great plan when we drove through two flooded sections of road but was undone when we were one of at least four cars to have a flat tire in a two mile stretch after the second flooded section. We changed the tire in the downpour and made our way out of Missouri and into Iowa where the skies cleared to reveal a sunny day after all. We were home by 2pm and picked up a very happy pair of beagles from the Happy Tails kennel a couple of hours later.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> It was an eventful trip to say the least with the best event being the awesome hash browns at the Waffle House in Kansas City. I was a little upset when I realized I didn’t get a picture of our Waffle House server at first but soon came to the conclusion that he needs his job more than I needed to print his picture and if the server lost his job the biggest victim would be his mother (who probably can’t wait to die old and alone and feeding cats).</span><br />
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-10569921982679083622018-05-18T12:00:00.000-05:002018-05-18T12:00:01.323-05:00A Rabbit's Tale
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Oreo (2007-2018)
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I never had a rabbit until I got married. One Easter Kathy said, “Come on. We’re going to get a rabbit.” We headed to a pet store in Scotch Plains and got a dwarf Polish rabbit we named Buster. Buster was all black and had a cage he stayed in but was smart enough to use a litter box and had the run of our apartment in back of Phil's barbershop in Hillside New Jersey. Buster nearly came to a bad end one evening when I came home from having my wisdom teeth taken out to find Buster had chewed through all the power cords on my computer. I eventually calmed down and Buster moved with us from New Jersey to Iowa. He was a friendly sort but when we got Queenie the beagle he was scared of her and would stay in his cage whenever she was around. One day we woke up and Buster was dead. There was no warning and we assumed he had a heart attack in the middle of the night.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Our next rabbit was a big brown and white Dutch rabbit named Pogo. Our neighbors had gotten him from the high school and were moving so we took him in. Pogo was never scared of the dogs and had the run of the kitchen where he would hang out with the boots in the boot tray in the winter and sneak around to steal pieces of Queenie’s dog food (Queenie was a notoriously slow eater that would eat a little of her food every hour or so). One day in 2007 we woke up and Pogo was dead just like Buster.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Within a week Kathy got a black and white Dutch rabbit from the local Earl May store. The new rabbit was named Oreo and was slightly bigger than Buster. While Buster was a homebody that was scared of the dogs and stayed in his cage and Pogo was content to hang around in the boot tray, Oreo was a rascally type that would roam all around the kitchen and beyond. Our house has a stairway that leads upstairs from the kitchen. If the door was left open, Oreo would scamper upstairs and hide in a bedroom under a bed. He rarely chewed on wires and had an affinity for staying under the bed just out of reach. I always had to get a baseball bat or a cane and chase him from under the bed, after which Oreo would hop at top speed down the hall and back downstairs to his kitchen area.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Oreo was never afraid of Queenie and Tuffy and shared the kitchen with them happily. He did have a beef with the kitchen broom and would attack it whenever it got too close to him. For such a gentle fellow Oreo was surprisingly fierce when confronted by the kitchen broom. One day Kathy was substitute teaching and took Oreo with her for the kids to play with. Oreo was a big hit but never went back to school because Kathy found the kids couldn’t concentrate with a bunny nearby.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> A couple of years after we got Oreo, Queenie and Tuffy passed away within weeks of each other and I was suddenly dogless. I was depressed and spent a few minutes each day putting Oreo on my lap and petting him until he would get bored and start scampering around. Oreo was a good substitute dog and just the friend I needed. Oreo got along good with Daisy and Baxter when we got the beagle puppies a few weeks later but the little beagles were so rambunctious we were afraid they would stampede Oreo so we split the kitchen in half with a three foot fence and reduced Oreo's running area in half but he didn't seem to mind at all.</span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-X2j1yUB59Hc/WvuSIwik_dI/AAAAAAAAIcU/fCoZyv3kYMgnNNlheT-aqEBcHpJkHD5ZQCLcBGAs/s1600/20180429.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-X2j1yUB59Hc/WvuSIwik_dI/AAAAAAAAIcU/fCoZyv3kYMgnNNlheT-aqEBcHpJkHD5ZQCLcBGAs/s240/20180429.jpg"data-original-width="854" data-original-height="960" /></a>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Oreo had a diet of rabbit pellets and hay and plenty of treats. One of Oreo’s favorite parts of the day was when I made my sandwich to take to work each day. As soon as I went to the kitchen to make the sandwich, the beagles and Oreo would start running over to me. I would give Oreo some bread and lettuce, the beagles some bologna, and everyone would get some cheese. Kathy would always have a packet of cranberries to give Oreo as treats. I like grapes and so did Oreo. When I had grapes to pack for lunch I’d make sure to give Oreo a grape as a treat. He liked them so much that I’d give him a grape or two at night and if I used all the grapes for Friday’s lunch on my way back home from work I would stop at the store to get some more so I would be able to give Oreo his treat.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> At Matt’s high school graduation party one of the parents saw Oreo and told me how he had a pet rabbit who lived in a hutch outside that just loved twigs from apple trees. I started mentioning how Oreo got grapes, cheese, lettuce, etc.… when the parent saw our apple tree outside. We went outside and picked out the perfect twig from the apple tree, cut it to the perfect size, and brought it in to give to Oreo. Oreo took a look at the twig, sniffed it once, and treated the twig with the disdain a food critic might display towards a Whopper.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> We knew Oreo was a pretty old bunny but he was as active as ever (except for not sneaking upstairs through the back steps). I picked him up on most days to give him a few pets and could tell he was getting a little bony and losing his body mass. Earlier this year I found Oreo laying on his side more than a few times having what looked like convulsions which he would recover from once I gave him some pets.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Last Monday, Oreo didn’t come out of his cage for sandwich time and had that raggedy look that I’ve seen all too often when an animal is near death. I was hoping I was wrong but I wasn’t. When I came home from work Oreo was laying on his side in his cage. I didn’t know if he would be alive the next morning but he was still laying on his side. He didn’t come out for sandwich time but when I gathered my sandwich and grapes and fruit for lunch there was Oreo hanging out by the refrigerator. I gave him a grape but he didn’t eat it. When I came home Oreo was hanging out by a window with his head on a little shelf and not moving very much and not eating. On Wednesday Oreo didn’t come out of his cage but Kathy took him into the backyard for some fresh air and it seemed to perk him up a bit.</span><br />
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<div align="center"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zhrdb8DCmmo/TReKFXaAzFI/AAAAAAAAANk/ZdOZApGvytE/s1600/Oreo02.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 480px; height: 318px;" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zhrdb8DCmmo/TReKFXaAzFI/AAAAAAAAANk/ZdOZApGvytE/s320/Oreo02.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5555060490171894866"></a>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Oreo stayed in his cage on Thursday morning and passed away that day in Kathy’s lap. We buried him in the backyard. His eyes were still open as we put the dirt over him. I was really close to Oreo. He was with me through some big moments like leaving every job I've had in Iowa, the deaths of Queenie and Tuffy, and the arrival of Daisy and Baxter. I cleaned out his cage this past weekend and it still sits under a shelf in the kitchen. I see it every time I go in that room and think of my friend. We took down the divider fence that separated Oreo’s part of the kitchen and I think about him when I involuntary get ready to hurdle the fence when I realize it is no longer there. Oreo was a great bunny and an even better friend. I miss him now and will miss him for a long time to come.</span><br />
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<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%; text-align: center;">
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This video from 2010 is the only one I have of Oreo to go along with the hundreds of pictures.
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</div>Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-61462279496318100212018-05-11T12:00:00.000-05:002018-05-12T08:40:37.677-05:00Unplugged<span style="font-family: arial;"> My favorite toy is without question my iPod. I use it to answer emails, listen to music or podcasts, trade stocks, play and study chess, and more. I am never very far away from this device which connects, entertains, and informs whenever I am in need of connection, information, or entertainment. At least I wasn’t very far away from my iPod until four Saturdays ago when it was in my jacket pocket while I took Daisy and Baxter on our 9am walk while Kathy was playing in a pickle ball tournament in Ankeny. When we started on our walk the early morning rains had subsided but a half block into the walk there was a slight mist which tuned into a drizzle after two more blocks and a torrential downpour as we reached the halfway point of our walk.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The rain got even worse as we made our way back home. I was listening to music from my iPod’s Napster app while my two beagles and I got our waterlogged selves home. I took off my coat, dried off Daisy and Baxter, and emptied my pockets as I got out of my wet clothes. My wallet was soaked. I took out all my cash and cards to dry and went to turn off my iPod but it wouldn’t turn off. Even though I have a waterproof cover for my iPod it had gotten soaked from being in my coat pocket and was stuck and unresponsive to the on-off switch, touch screen, or the volume and home buttons.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I put the iPod in a Ziploc bag of rice like I have seen and heard others do. Kathy soon arrived home and we took our normal Saturday morning trips to the local thrift stores for additions to her Christmas candle collection. I figured my iPod would be dry soon enough so I took it with me along with its bag of rice home. About a half hour in I noticed the iPod had seemingly turned off so I reached into the bag of rice and pressed the home button to see if it was responsive. The iPod lit up but would not respond to the ‘slide’ command so I could enter my password and worse seemed like it was getting really hot. I closed the Ziploc bag but after another 24 hours in the rice bag the iPod would no longer turn on.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> If you are thinking I was too hasty in turning my iPod on I would agree with you. Luckily, when I purchased this iPod (my 4th) from the Wal-Mart I bought the extended warranty so on the Sunday after my soaking I went to the Wal-Mart's Asurion website and started an on-line chat with a service representative. The rep efficiently diagnosed my problem and sent me an email containing all the information I needed to bring the iPod to any UPS store and the device would be packed and shipped for repair at no charge. I left the iPod with Kathy on Monday and I went to work for the first time in years without my iPod.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The drive in to work wasn’t so bad. I listened to sports radio instead of podcasts. At work was a different story. I have a work computer I used to check emails but there was no music or podcasts unless I wanted to try to set up my apps on my work computer which I was not going to do. I was much more distracted than normal without any music or podcast to provide background noise for me. The drive back home wasn’t much better with the sports radio stations providing regurgitation of the morning sports talk discussions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> When I got home from work I walked the dogs with Kathy and didn’t miss my iPod until I got back home. If I wanted to do some chess puzzles or check on the scores I had to be in front of my computer because I had no iPod. At night I was having a hard time getting to sleep because I’m used to listening to music or white noise on my iPod which I no longer had.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I hadn’t realized how dependent I was on this little device. The next morning I get my old iPod out of storage. I had replaced it because it wouldn’t charge unless I held the cable just so but to my relief I found that the Apple cable from my latest iPod would charge the old iPod just fine except for having to reseat the cable every so often. I took my iPod to work and was able to listen to podcasts and music once again in my car and at my desk. This iPod is three years old and very slow compared to my new iPod but functional nonetheless. I could listen to podcasts and music and check email but the apps for getting scores and trading stocks kept on crashing. I expect this was due to the apps being obsolete and the underlying web services not compatible with the older operating system on this iPod. I had been doing some chess puzzles on my Chessimo app every day but the old iPod didn’t have any record of my progress over the past year so I decided to wait until I got my repaired iPod back so I could restore my data. I was frustrated at the limitations of the old iPod but happy I had it to give me music and podcasts to listen to at work and the commute.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I finally got my repaired iPod back from Wal-Mart on Wednesday which was 26 days after it got soaked. I restored my data and am now back enjoying my new iPod’s blistering speed and am even back to doing my daily regimen of Chessimo puzzles. One thing I haven’t done is use my iPod to listen to music to help me get to sleep. After a week I started sleeping better without the music and got in the habit of leaving my iPod downstairs at night. It took some time to resist the temptation to check the sports scores and email in the middle of the night but I am now in the habit of not using my iPod at night and have no desire to resume my old ways. The month without my new iPod has me thinking it had become more of a necessity than a toy and I want to make sure that it stays a toy to be enjoyed instead of a device I have to have ready at all times.</span><br />
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-65567505422935747372018-05-04T12:00:00.000-05:002018-05-04T12:00:11.155-05:00Movie Review - Avengers : Infinity War<span style="font-family: arial; color:red">
<i><b>WARNING : AVENGERS : INFINITY WAR SPOILERS BELOW!!!</b></i>
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Avengers : Infinity War is Marvel Studios newest record breaking hit...
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I went with Kathy to see the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4154756/" target-="_blank"><b>Avengers : Infinity War</b></a> in our local movie theatre for the Saturday afternoon matinee. Most of the opening weekend matinees I’ve attended have had attendance in the single digits but Infinity Wars played to a packed house which leads me to think this movie is on pace to the biggest super hero movie gross of all time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The movie follows three separate plots of ‘mini-teams’ that are trying to thwart the quest of Thanos to collect the six infinity stones and become the ruler of all reality. Thor and a part of the Guardians of the Galaxy are on a quest to create a weapon worthy of killing Thanos, the rest of the Guardians team with Iron Man, Dr. Strange, and Spiderman to fight Thanos on his home planet of Titan, while Captain America leads the rest of the heroes to battle Thanos’s army in Wakanda to protect Vision and his ‘Mind Stone’. The first third of the movie sets up the teams in their locations and provides some funny character interactions. The rest of the movie is devoted to the battle and the star of the movie, Thanos.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Make no mistake, Thanos is the star of the movie. We hear him repeatedly explain that the reason he needs the infinity stones is because he is the only being that has the will to bring balance to the universe by killing half the life in it. In the comics Thanos is in love with the personification of death and wants to kill every living being as an offering of his love. I have to say I like the half-measured Thanos better. Thanos tells Tony Stark how his homeworld had more people than resources but his calls to eliminate half the population went unheeded and everyone (except Thanos of course) died but the worlds where he eliminated half the populations are flourishing. The movie even gives a flashback to how he adopted his daughter Gamora while having his troops bring ‘balance’ to her world by killing half the population which includes her mother.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Josh Brolin and the Marvel CGI team combine to make a fine Thanos. He was menacing and powerful enough to beat the Hulk in combat but was relatable enough to show his relationship with his daughter Gamora. At a point in the movie he has to prove his love for his daughter (in a twisted Thanos type of way) and is able to show it in a way that made me believe that he really believes killing half the universe is the only way to save it. In this way he is no different than other Marvel galactic beings like Ego, Galactus, and Eternity who have the proverbial 10,000 feet view of all things celestial.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The CGI for the Marvel films just gets better and better. Spiderman’s new suit with mechanical extendable arachnid legs was especially cool. Tony Stark’s new nanotech embedded Iron Man armor that can generate any number of weapons and shapes made him believable as someone who could go toe to toe with Thanos. After taking a beating from Thanos, the Hulk doesn’t want to take over for Bruce Banner anymore which led to a number of ‘almost-Hulk’ transformations. Doctor Strange was another beneficiary of the improved CGI. His mystic powers are very dependent on CGI and the Crimson Bands of Cytorrak seemed to crackle in his hands.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The actions scenes were also great. The battle featuring Thanos’s ‘war dog’ army against Wakanda was the lengthiest battle. It was fierce enough to rivet me to the screen but didn’t distract me with cutting back and forth in each mini-battle like ‘Transformers’ movies tend to do. Even the non-battle scene of Thor restarting the planetary forge in order to create his Thanos-killing weapon was exciting. As if that wasn’t enough the interactions between Tony Stark, Dr. Strange, and Spiderman along with Rocket Racoon and Thor were hilarious without being the sort of out of character interactions looking for laughs that creep into many Marvel films.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> There was nothing techinal about Avengers:Infinity War’s acting, special effects, of film-making that I didn’t like and yet I left the theater disappointed. Why? Lots of characters die the extremely unsatisfying death of turning to ash with a bare minimum allowed to utter a few last words. The first few deaths were shocking but after awhile I was pretty numb to it all and it is obvious that not many if any of these deaths will carry through past the next Avengers Movie scheduled for next year since lots of the newly dead actors and characters are scheduled for future movies. The death scale was so rapture-like with cars and helicopters crashing in New York as half the world’s population turns to dust that the only solution will have to be either an ‘alternate-reality switch’ or a ‘changing of the past to wipe out the entire Infinity War future so it never happened’ plot device.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Avengers: infinity War is a great film but spending 2 and a half hours watching with no resolution and more questions than answers makes me think it a mediocre movie despite all the great components.As a youngster I always preferred DC comics to Marvel comics for this very reason – a DC comic ened with a conclusion while a Marvel comic always made me feel like I was missing out if I didn’t read the last issue or I would never find the resolution if I didn’t have a quarter to spare the next month. I’m Ok with leaving our characters in the wind like Captain America and his crew at the end of ‘Civil War’ or the Hulk after ‘Avengers : Age of Ultron’ but a year long cliffhanger with such a down ending is too much for me. I’m sure the Marvel universe show runners have it all figured out and the next Avengers will likely break all the records that Infinity Wars set but I would rather have had an extra half hour added to the film to make it a three hour movie and resolved the Thanos conflict once and for all or perhaps even ending this movie before Thanos kills half the universe and start part two with it. This ending seems very much like ‘the Walking Dead's’ much maligned <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2015/11/28/how-the-walking-dead-completely-screwed-up-glenns-story-in-season-6/#5fdaa5c76f0a" target="_blank"><b>fake ‘Glenn’ death</b></a> and I could have done without it.</span><br />
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-62720591902408164772018-04-27T12:00:00.000-05:002018-04-27T12:00:13.772-05:00The Worldwide Leader<span style="font-family: arial;"> When I was growing up I could only get sports news from the 2 minute reports on the all news stations every half hour, the five minutes of sports reporting on the local nightly news, and the newspaper. In the 1980’s cable television brought the 24 hour sports network ESPN onto my television and I could get the scores and highlights on their SportsCenter show. Not long after the first all-sports radio station WFAN opened shop in New York with score updates every 20 minutes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> For the next 25 or so years, ESPN continued to grow, merging with ABC before being swallowed by Disney where it currently resides as a large division in that monolithic company along with the Mickey Mouse, the Star Wars franchise, and Marvel Comics. The station is a major player in live sports with major investments in Major League Baseball along with college and pro football. All the same the station has been losing cable subscribers, suffered falling ratings on its properties, and faces competition from other all-sports networks like Fox Sports that bids up the costs for on-air personalities and broadcast rights to live events, any number of apps and internet sites that instantaneously provide live scores and highlights, and the growing world of podcasts and websites devoted to both general sports opinions down to specialized takes on individual sports teams.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> One of ESPN’s bellwethers was the SportsCenter franchise which bred a number of on-air personalities viewers would tune in to see. The show garnered high ratings and advertising fees and was shown with different hosts for hours on end and repeated overnight in a loop. As time went on Sports Center became less and less relevant. Top personalities were paid more to work elsewhere and left the company. Ratings and advertising fees have plummeted. What happened? Technology happened. Where once upon a time Sports Center was the only place to go to get highlights the internet has allowed other media outlets to have highlights available immediately and no one needs to wait for Sports Center to show highlights. Even ESPN is its own competitor in this regard. I can see highlights on ESPN’s website any time I want and never have to wait for a television show to bring them to me. The demand for immediacy is something the ESPN realized and even pioneered with their ‘Bottom Line’ showing continuous scores on ESPN2 in 1995.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The decline of SportsCenter has led ESPN to try many new formats for their flagship show and so far most have failed to stem the ratings decline as more and more people get their information from the Internet. The Scott Van Pelt midnight SportsCenter has been <a href="http://awfulannouncing.com/ratings/espn-ratings-%E2%80%8B-sportscenter-scott-van-pelt-hits-best-post-monday-night-football-ratings-season.html" target="_blank"><b>a ray of hope with improved ratings</b></a> and a loyal following in its midnight time slot. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The biggest change for SportsCenter was the <a href="http://awfulannouncing.com/espn/what-should-espn-do-6-pm-now-that-sc6-no-more.html" target="_blank">rebranding of the 6 pm SportsCenter as ‘SC6’</a> starring popular personalities Jemele Hill and Michael Smith discussing sports, politics, and popular culture in order to hopefully goose viewership. The ratings continued their slow decline. This downward trend wasn’t accelerated or halted by the firestorm surrounding Hill’s tweets calling the President a white supremacist and pointing out that boycotting the NFL may make the league take a different stance on players kneeling during the national anthem. Hill has since left the SC6 show and ESPN had moved the format back to its traditional roots and the ratings still haven’t changed from its downward trajectory.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The problem with SportsCenter is its offerings are just too general. A baseball fan can watch the MLB network for round the clock highlights and there are NBA and NFL networks for basketball and football fans. The world is more and more specialized and that goes for sports viewers also. Any format driven by sports news and highlights cannot get the numbers of the past since there are more and better options for purely football, basketball, baseball, or even tennis and golf fans. The only way shows like SportsCenter can hope to thrive again is to be personality based like the SC6 experiment but this approach takes time to develop an audience and find the right personalities and even then, a successful personality be very expensive to keep since they will be sure to get big offers to switch networks at the whiff of success.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> ESPN’s other major initiative was the launch of their new morning show ‘Get Up’. This was originally supposed to be a show featuring Mike Greenberg of ESPN’s popular radio show Mike & Mike fame. Greenberg was given a new contract of 6.5 million dollars a year but as the show got closer to its premiere network stalwarts Jalen Rose and Michele Beadle were added as hosts. <a href="https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2018/04/20/espn-get-up-ratings-drop-mike-greenberg-michelle-beadle" target="_blank"><b>The ratings for the show have been tepid</b></a>. I’ll give ESPN credit for trying. I like Jalen Rose a lot but I’m driving to work during his morning show and listen to his podcast on my drive home if I can download it when I’m working.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> If you caught the last sentence you are not alone. ESPN also understands that the online world is their path to the future. They had a head start in podcasting when Bill Simmons set up a number of podcasts under the ‘Grantland’ project but never figured out how to monetize it and frittered their lead away when Simmons left the company. Now their podcasts are increasing in number and have the same ads that most other podcasts have. Under new president James Pitaro ESPN is launching a streaming service that will generate revenue irrespective of cable subscribers. The <a href="https://www.si.com/tech-media/2017/12/14/espn-disney-fox-sports-regional-networks" target="_blank"><b>purchase by Disney of 22 Fox regional sports networks</b></a> will buttress the streaming service. The two regional networks I get from Fox as part of my $200+ monthly cable\phone\internet package from Mediacom gives me Timberwolves and Pacers basketball, St. Louis Blues hockey, and Cardinals and Royals baseball. If I was a fan of any of these teams I could easily see pitching ESPN $5 or more a month to see my teams play just like I pay $15 a year to MLB so I can hear the radio broadcasts of the Yankees (as well as every other team).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Live sports is one of the proven ratings grabbers in the digital age because it is live and doesn’t translate to being viewed on demand after the fact and by making the Fox purchase ESPN has gained a major foothold in this area beyond their high priced national sports packages. Shows like SportsCenter and Get Up will always have their place at the network as signature pieces but by making their move in the digital space ESPN has shown that they are ready to get on with the future and continue their leadership in sports programming.</span><br />
<br />Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-47231542171122862432018-04-20T12:00:00.000-05:002018-04-20T12:00:23.653-05:00TV Review - The Walking Dead Season 8 Episodes 9-16<span style="font-family: arial; color:red">
<i><b>WARNING : THE WALKING DEAD SEASON #8 EPISODES 9-16 SPOILERS BELOW!!!</b></i>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> <a href="http://www.amc.com/shows/the-walking-dead" target="_blank"><b>AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’</b></a> concluded its eighth season Sunday night with the end of the ‘All Out War’ saga that pitted Rick Grimes and his hardy band of zombie apocalypse survivors against Negan and his group of Saviors over the past two and a half seasons. The show has been in a rating decline for some time but after talking to a number of fellow viewers I believe the decline is not as severe as previously imagined since many of my fellow viewers don’t watch the show week to week like me but binge watch a half season at a time. I agree that the show is no longer the pop culture phenomenon of a couple of years ago and I also believe the show is way more popular than the ratings would suggest.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I thought the show had become slow moving in seasons six and seven but started to pick back up in the first half of the current season with the war between the baseball bat wielding Negan and his Saviors against the combined communities of the Hilltop, Alexandria, and the Kingdom taking full flight. Part of this feeling may have been because I watch a show week to week that may well be intended to be binge-watched. This past half season saw the show return to the terror of trying to survive attacks of flesh eating zombies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> If I want to see people fight and argue I can watch any police or lawyer show but The Walking Dead gave me three solid episodes featuring zombie terror in the half season. In the half season opener the late Simon from the Saviors gave the order to massacre the mysterious trash people from the garbage dump. Trash leader Jadis was the sole survivor but had to escape from the reanimated zombies of her trashy companions. The 4th episode showed the Saviors attacking the Hilltop and cutting many of the residents with weapons dipped in zombie guts. The wounded were all placed in the main house of the Hilltop where they died and reanimated, eating survivors and spreading terror in their wake. In the 6th episode, Rick and Morgan are captured by a group of renegade Saviors and brought to a dive bar headquarters but the bar is soon overrun by a zombie horde. In a great battle scene, Rick convinces the Saviors to cut them loose to help fight the zombies which they do until the zombie danger is clear whereupon Rick turns into Savior-killer and as a bonus we get to see Morgan trap Jared (the most sadistically vile of all the Saviors) in a room with zombies and hold him through a conveniently placed gate while Jared is eaten alive! Most of the zombie action in the show over the past few years have been battles against a few straggling zombies suddenly appearing in the woods or a swamp or a sewer but these three zombie attacks were superior in their sense of menace and the actual destruction involved.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I spent the weeks leading up to the conclusion of this season by reading the comics from issue 1 to the end of all-out war in issue 126. I didn’t have to buy any of the comics since they can all be seen on YouTube under various channels. Except for the death of Rick’s son Carl (who is still alive in the comics 50 issues past the end of the war) the show was reasonably faithful to the comics although it seemed to lurch and stagger between iconic comic scenes as if the showrunners spent more time hitting the iconic moments without reasoning out how to logically get from one point to the next. This led to inanities like Aaron sleeping outside in the woods outside the all-female compound of Oceanside to solicit their help in the war, never mind that Rick’s group had previously stolen all their guns and Aaron’s traveling companion (Enid) just shot and killed their leader. The plot conveniences (the oceansiders arrive just in time to save the Hilltop community from the saviors with dozens of Molotov cocktail explosives) were a small price to pay for the iconic zombie action that makes this show must-see television for me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I thought the showrunners and writers did a great job in showing Negan in a human context as opposed to the buffoon-like character spouting one-liners in season seven. Negan repeatedly passes up opportunities to destroy the allied communities, instead opting to make examples in order to bring the communities into line to pay their protection ‘fees’. His second-in-command Simon massacres the trash people and leads an insurrection against Negan which he puts down with a mixture of smarts and savagery. The show conveyed the idea that Negan really thinks he is saving the world by taking it over.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Meanwhile the show paints Rick as a beloved and respected leader by his people but he does plenty of shady stuff in the War. When held prisoner in the dive bar by the Saviors he tells them they will be welcome in his community and gives his word saying, “A man’s word gotta mean something”. And it does until he gets the chance to stick his hatchet into as many Saviors as he can once out of danger from the zombies. In the climactic scene of the war, Rick asks for ten seconds of Negan’s time to invoke the wishes of his dead son. This gives Negan pause – just enough pause for Rick to slit Negan’s throat with a shard of glass.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I really liked the juxtaposition of Rick and Negan ‘trading places’. Just as in the comics, Negan is held prisoner, the Saviors head back to their sanctuary to rebuild, and the stage is set for the ‘time jump’ from the comics where our survivors have established a medieval civilization of sorts until the next major threats come along. Without Carl, I see no reason to have a lengthy time jump and hope Season 9 can continue in the current timeline with conflicts between the existing communities (already Maggie at the Hilltop is plotting to kill Negan) and one yet to be discovered (there ares still the mysteries of the pantsuited-Georgie who trades knowledge for vinyl records and the helicopter that does random flyovers). This season and specifically the last half season has given me a renewed thirst for the show and I hope it won’t change from its newfound terror orientation when season nine appears in the fall.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> To mark the end of a great season I am going to pass along some of my favorite snippets. These YouTube clips will probably be taken down before long so enjoy them while you can!</span>
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<b>Best Mass Kill</b>
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<span style="font-family: arial;text-align:left">This category was very strong with the massacre of the trash people and the Hilltopers dying and reanimating for a midnight snack but the winner is Jadis's zombie puree using what may be the only working trash grinder left in the world.</span>
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<b>Most Devious Double-Cross</b>
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<span style="font-family: arial;text-align:left">This season saw the double crosses of Simon, Dwight, and even Eugene against Negan but my favorite was Rick giving his word to the Saviors before flipping his kill switch.</span>
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<b>Best Fight</b>
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<span style="font-family: arial;text-align:left"> Rick and Negan had two epic battles but the winner is Negan and Simon going 'Fight Club' for the leadership of the Saviors.</span>
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<b>Most Idiotic Moment</b>
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<span style="font-family: arial;text-align:left"> The entire episode of blind Father Gabriel and Doc Carson on the run was ridiculous and Aaron camping out at Oceanside even more so but Eugene's escape by projectile vomiting his mac & chess & sardine dinner on Rosita may well be the most idiotic scene ever captured on film!</span>
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-5027955805426450972018-04-13T11:57:00.002-05:002018-04-13T11:57:23.402-05:00New Challenges for New Challengers<span style="font-family: arial;"> American/Italian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidates_Tournament_2018" target="_blank"><b>Fabiano Caruana won the FIDE candidates chess tournament</b></a> last month which gives him a match for the world championship against Magnus Carlsen of Norway later this year. This will be the first championship between players from the Western Hemisphere since the 1937 match between Max Euwe of the Netherlands and Alexander Alekhine of France. If you consider <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Alekhine#1920%E2%80%931927" target="_blank"><b>Alekhine Russian since that is his country of birth and only left for France after the 1917 revolution</b></a> than this is the first Western Hemisphere match since Jose Capablanca of Cuba and Emmanuel Lasker of Germany battled for the crown in 1921.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Caruana was nearly the challenger two years ago when he entered the last round tied with Sergei Karjakin for the lead and playing Karjakin in the final round with an idiotic tiebreak system that was going to have another game decide the tournament winner if the players drew without a playoff. Caruana had the black pieces and as the events in the 'non-deciding' game unfolded needed to play for a win in order to become the challenger. Karjakin won the game and with it the right to challenge Carlsen for the world championship and even held a lead in the championship match with four games left before losing the match in tiebreaks.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> This year’s edition of the Candidates started as Carauana’s to lose as he took the lead in round 4 of the 14-round tournament and held it until round 12 when he lost to Karjakin. Karjakin had lost two of his first four games but with the round 12 win tied Caruana and held the tiebreak in case of a tie with two rounds to go. It looked as if the stage was set for a collapse but Caruana rebounded with two wins in the final two rounds to easily win the tournament. And if winning the candidates tournament wasn’t enough, the very next week <a href="https://www.firstpost.com/sports/grenke-chess-classic-fabiano-caruana-holds-off-nikita-vitiugov-magnus-carlsen-to-win-title-4426171.html" target="_blank"><b>Caruana played in the GRENKE Chess classic</b></a> in Germany and won that tournament with four wins and five draws ahead of Carlsen who managed two wins and seven draws.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Over the last month it seemed to me that Caruana’s opponents were in the habit of over pressing promising positions and falling prey to counterstrikes but that is just my impression and I am likely not qualified to judge. Winning the last two rounds of the candidates tournament following his losing the sole lead speaks volumes to Caruana’s fighting abilities and grace under pressure. It was certainly a far cry from <a href="https://www.tatasteelchess.com/players/masters/master-standings" target="_blank"><b>January’s Tata Chess tournament</b></a> where Caruana finished 10th out of 14 players with one win and four losses while Carlsen tied for first and won the tournament in a playoff.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> While Caruana has shown flashes of exceptional form and is playing in tournament after tournament, Carlsen has seemed to be enjoying himself. He has been playing in the increasingly popular online blitz tournaments on lichess.org and chess.com. Carlsen has not been beaten in his two classical tournaments this year but has not seemed able to pull out the same amount of victories using his normal strategy of outplaying his opponents after an innocuous opening. I wouldn’t say he seems bored but I don’t seem the same level of effort on his chess than the past.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> In the NBA, the Golden State Warriors do not have the NBA’s best regular season record for the first time in four years. The <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/warriors/article/Warriors-slump-has-fans-rattled-12795124.php" target="_blank"><b>Warriors have seemed unmotivated all season long</b></a> with enough talent to still win 70% of their games but the <a href="http://www.nba.com/article/2018/04/12/houston-rockets-mike-dantoni-james-harden-chris-paul-playoffs" target="_blank"><b>Houston Rockets with their 65 wins have captured the best record in the league</b></a> and conference and the Toronto Raptors won 59 games to give both teams the home court advantage in a conference finals or NBA finals against the Warriors. In addition to their disinterest, Warriors' two-time MVP Stephen Curry has suffered a series of ankle sprains and will miss the first round of the playoffs with a ligament sprain in his knee. The Warriors have made the last three finals and won two championships which could have been three if they hadn’t had a meltdown for the ages in losing a 3-1 series lead to LeBron James' Cavaliers in the 2016 Finals and it seems the grind of 100+ games per season has gotten to them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Will Caruana be the man to take the championship from Carlsen? He is certainly the only one with a chance this year. Caruana has beaten Carlsen in the past and outpaced him in tournaments like the 2014 Sinquefeld Cup and this year’s GRENKE Chess Classic. Caruana has shown the ability to string wins together so the possibility exists that he could just take two or three early games against Carlsen and draw his way to the championships in the current era of 12 game championship matches. Two years ago I felt that the only person that could beat Carlsen was Carlsen himself. This year I think Caruana has a chance of taking the title if he plays at his top level no matter how Carlsen is playing with the big question being whether Caruana will be able to retain the tremendous form he has shown over the past two months.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Can the Rockets win the NBA title? They seem like a hungry team to me, scapping for wins long after clinching the best record in the league. They also carry a lot of baggage. Superstar James Harden disappeared in last years playof loss to the Spurs with what was purported to be ‘a mysterious illness’ while celebrated new addition Chris Paul has never been to the conference finals as his Clippers teams seemed unable to maintain their poise for more than one playoff series per year. Head coach Mike D’Antoni went to the conference finals twice with the ‘7 seconds or less’ Suns and was seen as being outcoached twice. The team reminds me a lot of the 2011 Dallas Mavericks team that had a crew of hungry experienced players that came together to win a championship but they also remind me of the Maverick teams from the mid 2000’s that consistently underperformed in the playoffs. I tend to think these Rockets are for real and the Warriors will have trouble flipping the switch but the Rockets' collective past failures makes them far from a sure thing although still the favorite.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The Rockets have much more to prove than Caruana. While Caruana has only one (large) step before claiming the championship, the Rockets have to win four playoff series. The only thing their regular season record has earned them is the right to open each series at home and play a deciding game seven at home is a series comes down to a single game. Caruana has earned a level of immortality by becoming the challenger while the Rockets are only an asterisk at this point.</span><br />
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-65408036748985144412018-04-06T12:00:00.000-05:002018-04-06T12:00:23.491-05:0021st Century NBA Basketball Prediction Program - Stuck In Neutral<span style="font-family: arial;"> I had high hopes for my basketball prediction program heading into the 2017-2018 NBA season. My program had better than the magic 52.4% percentage in each of the last 5 seasons, 4 in retrograde analysis and the 2016-217 season which was the first one in which I took donations for advance predictions and put my money where my mouth was by placing bets on the gambling site Bovada. The only sour taste was that my Bovada account was suspended (<a href="http://brokenpawn1.blogspot.com/2016/11/21st-century-nba-basketball-prediction.html" target="_blank"><b>you can read about it here</b></a>) during a hot streak which made my season bets $4.06 in the red. This sting was offset by $70 in donations for advance picks and anther $126 in a Bovada welcome bonus so all told I ended the season over $190 on the plus side.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> My gambling problem from last year wasn’t my program – it was psychological. I started off with $10 bets but then switched to $5 bets and then varied my bets from $2.50 to $20 dollars depending on how I felt about the computer picks. In retrospect this seemed panicky and I resolved to place bets designed to win $5 on a successful outcome on each computer prediction and attempt to remain detached from the bets. In large part I kept to this resolution and only broke it a handful of times by adding three of my own predictions and leaving three computer bets unacted upon (the reasons of which I will get to later).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The way I had this season planned was that my program would break off to a good start which would allow me to advertise my success online and pick up lots of donations to fund even more advertising which would lead to even more donations which would allow me to increase my bets from $5 to $7.50 with the extra capital I would be accumulating. Unfortunately my program started off by going 1-3 and only got close to .500 three 3 weeks into the season at 19-20 which didn’t give me anything to advertise about since in the gambling world an even record is losing money since you have to have 11 wins for every 10 losses to make up for the 10% penalty on losses (otherwise known as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigorish" target="_blank"><b>vig or juice</b></a>) which is why the break even winning percentage is 52.4% and not 50%.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> From there the pattern was maddenly consistent. My picks went from 19-20 to 22-29 on November 27th to 31-31 on December 3rd to 36-44 on December 13th and bottomed out at 54-65 on January 3rd with losses of $86.25. At this point the program started doing better and on February 27th the record stood at 87-84 with losses of $25.25. Since then the program and I have treaded water and heading into April 3rd the record stands at 110-110 with $52 in losses and only a week to go in the regular season at which point the computer doesn’t pick playoff series and I am on my own.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I haven’t started a deep dive into the individual games that made up this year’s medicore result but a cursory glance showed that my record picking teams playing the second half of back to back games has been far worse than last year. I think the reason for this is paradoxically that the NBA schedule has been altered this season to reduce the number of back to back games which likely makes each set of back to back games more of a burden than something a team gets used to. I will research whether teams are faring worse on back to back games than in years past and try to adjust my formula for it. The problem is now that the scheduling has been so drastically changed I can’t just change a formula and test it on prior years.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Another and far more serious reason for this year’s decline is that teams are resting players far more often than in years past. I have never made an adjustment for injured players because there is generally a short-term bounce in results that the formula has been able to take advantage while the betting line over-reacts to the injury as role players tend to have a few good games in increased roles before showing why in fact they are role players. Resting players is a bigger issue for me. I lost several games where Marc Gasol of the Grizzlies and Joel Embiid of the 76ers were rested on the front end of back to back games after I made the pick. There may have been some ‘insider trading’ in these games although the main culprit is my making the bets earlier in the day instead of trying to wait until the last minute to determine late scratches. Teams have been sitting uninjured players out for ‘rest’ in ever increasing numbers this year or at least it seems to me. I even stopped picking Warrior games since they stopped playing their All-Stars to get them ready for the playoffs that coach Steve Kerr insisted they would be available for if they had started last week. There was a flip side to the Warriors situation since they were still undervalued as all-stars Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green returned and I lifted my ban in time for a few winning bets.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Having lost $50 in the season is no big deal - the playoffs haven’t started yet and I have always done pretty good in the playoffs and have every expectation of getting back in black by the time a champion is crowned. A bigger concern is that since I didn’t have a good year I didn’t get any donations for my picks in advance of when I post them on my blog after the last game of the night finishes. I started the season blogging my picks and results and am driven to finish what I start even though I haven’t been able to turn my program into a revenue stream as I hoped. Once this season is over I will be done with my predictions blog and the true question is going to be whether I want to continue entering in schedules, lines, and results and placing bets. That is what I have the summer to think about.</span><br />
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-68140903184925185782018-03-30T12:00:00.000-05:002018-03-30T12:00:21.499-05:00Beagles on the Bright Side
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It's once again time for America's favorite beagles – <span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Baxter</span> and <span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Daisy</span>,<br/>to guest write a post in the Broken Pawn. It seems these most literate of beagles are in a surprisingly optimistic mood.</strong> </p>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Hi Everyone! It Daisy… </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">… and Baxter here with another blog for our readers. It sure has been a while since Hank let us take a turn at his blog, Daisy! </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">I know Baxter. It's a shame because this was one of the most eventful winters ever. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">That right! And a lot of stuff happened too! </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Sigh…I suppose that’s one way of putting it. The big news was Hank spent two of months home with us. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">His last job ended in December and he took a whole month off spending time with Kathy and us before he even started looking for a job. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">He was doing some part-time programming but that was only a few hours a week and he spent the rest of his time walking us and eating at home. I like it when Hank is home with us. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Me too! We love Kathy and she is home with us a lot but Hank does one thing that Kathy never does. Eat Meat! YUM!!! I love Meat! </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Kathy is a vegetarian and doesn’t eat any meat. But Hank eats lots of meat. When Hank works he makes a bologna sandwich to take to work and share with us but when he was home he ate lots of soup. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">That’s because in the winter all the grocery stores had sales on Progresso and Campbell’s Chunky Soup for 99 cents a can or less. Hank got lots of soup with beef and chicken in them. YUM!! I love beef and chicken. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Every day Hank would heat up a can of soup and share it with is. My favorite was the Campbell Chunky Sirloin Burger soup, Baxter. It had lots of Sirloin Burger pieces for Hank to share with us. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">You certainly can’t go wrong with Chunky Sirloin Burger soup but my favorite was the Progresso Beef Barley Soup. It had lots of cubed beef chunks for Hank to share with us and there was so much barley in the soup Hank would get filled up and give us almost all the Beef! YUM!! </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">That was wonderful to have soup every day but now that Hank is back working all was get is part of his bologna sandwich. It’s so sad. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Cheer up Daisy! Maybe Hank will get laid off and then we can get back to eating soup every day! </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">That’s right Baxter! There’s a bright side to almost everything if you know where to look. </span>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Here's some of our favorite soups! Campbell;s Chunky Sirloin Burger is my favorite!!</span> <span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">I like Progresso Beef Barley! YUM!! </span>
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<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Sure! Like when our neighbors Gary and Linda’s car got stuck in their driveway. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">It looked like they were going to be stuck in the driveway until spring but we were walking by with Hank and Kathy. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Another neighbor was also walking by and Hank helped push the car out of the driveway. We helped too! </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">That’s right! We barked and howled and were so loud that Hank and the other neighbor pushed extra hard so we would get back to our walk and stop being so noisy. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">The next day Gary gave Hank FIVE DOLLARS for helping him. And because we were such good helpers Hank decided to get us a treat with the five dollars! </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Hank got us a bag of Jack Link’s AM Dried Breakfast Sausage made with applesauce. I don’t care much about applesauce but like the Jack Link’s website says “Sausage is delicious and amazing!” </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">The website also talks about the “magic of portable sausage” and I agree 100%. The sausage tasted even better than our beef stick treats and I didn’t taste any applesauce. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">We didn’t get the sausages every day so they lasted over a month! Now every time it snows we head over to Gary and Linda’s driveway to help if they get stuck but it hasn’t happened yet. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">It just snowed last weekend. Maybe we’ll get another blizzard before spring so we can get more of Jack Link’s AM Dried Breakfast Sausages! YUM!! </span>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-INC6xA105cc/Wr2ZV7hc-VI/AAAAAAAAIB0/OsYCwO7I7kAzOQdweUpc89RIZ8aNK_PRwCLcBGAs/s1600/DSC0001%2B%25282%2529.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-INC6xA105cc/Wr2ZV7hc-VI/AAAAAAAAIB0/OsYCwO7I7kAzOQdweUpc89RIZ8aNK_PRwCLcBGAs/s320/DSC0001%2B%25282%2529.JPG" width="320" height="221" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1106" /></a>
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<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Jack Link's breakfast sausage treats are the BEST!!</span> <span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">I wish our neighbors car would get stuck more often!</span></strong> </p>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Most things have a bright lining, but there was nothing good about what happened at the pond by the cemetery this winter. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">That’s right Daisy. First Mr. Goose died. It was very cold and when we went there for our Sunday morning walk so Hank could take pictures he was curled up in a ball. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">He didn’t even move to get any of the bread Kathy brought to give all the ducks and geese. Kathy threw some over to him so he got something to eat but he barely moved. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Hank thought he was sick and then on Tuesday the paper said he died. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">I guess everybody dies but I’d hate to die on a frozen pond outside in the winter. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Me neither! I’m glad Kathy and Hank have a nice warm house for when we get old. Not that that’s going to happen anytime soon. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">A few weeks after Mr. Goose died, a loose dog attacked Bob the Swan at the cemetery. He went to the vet but he died a few days later. It was so sad. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">I was afraid the cemetery would ban dogs but it’s still Ok for us to go there if we are on leashes. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">We’re always on leashes when we are outside so we don’t run away or get hit by cars. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Sometimes we go to our backyard and then there’s no leashes so we can run around a little. I miss seeing Bob and Mr. Goose at the pond. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">I miss them too, Baxter. There are still plenty of ducks and geese at the cemetery though. Lately there is the funniest duck – he is all black except for some red on his face. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">He’s funny looking but pretty cool also. I hope he sticks around for a while. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">I like seeing the different animals at the duck pond but it is very dangerous living outside all the time. </span>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-r8wyFLPlx7Y/Wr2cZEX4m-I/AAAAAAAAICM/Nsjhfzdw-6sTe56JV4eIN4z9Em9a7rAOQCLcBGAs/s1600/DSC0017.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-r8wyFLPlx7Y/Wr2cZEX4m-I/AAAAAAAAICM/Nsjhfzdw-6sTe56JV4eIN4z9Em9a7rAOQCLcBGAs/s200/DSC0017.JPG" width="150" height="200" data-original-width="1134" data-original-height="1516" /></a>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Rest In Peace Mr. Goose and Bob the Swan...</span><span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">Welcome to the neighborhood red-faced duck!</span> </strong> </p>
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<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">A big thing happened just last week, Daisy. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Last Saturday it snowed but then Kathy left and didn’t come back until Sunday. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">She had to go to a bridal shower for her niece, Lauren. We were lucky that Hank stayed home with us. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">Hank walked us a lot but he left for the entire afternoon to help the Boy Scouts with some chess stuff. We were so lonely. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">I was lonely too but I just took a nap and Hank came home while I was still sleeping. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">You are always sleeping, Baxter! </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">It’s what I do best! </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">I stayed alert for intruders. Of course no one would dare intrude when I was on duty. </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">We didn’t like Kathy being away for a whole night but there was a bright side, Daisy! </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">There sure was! Kathy made us a slab of corned beef for us to share with Hank! </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">No one can make corned beef like Kathy!! YUM!! It was moist and tender. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">And it had a layer of juicy fat around the edge of each slice! </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">It was the best corned beef ever. I thought Kathy was going to be gone a whole week to give us time to eat all the corned beef. </span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">But Kathy came home the very next day. It was the best of both worlds! We didn’t have to stay home alone while Hank went to work on Monday… </span>
<span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">…and we got a whole corned beef! Not only was there a bright side to Kathy leaving, there was a side of corned beef! YUM!! </span>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: verdana;">It's always good to see the bright side...</span> <span style="color: #000099; font-family: verdana;">and no side is brighter than a side of corned beef!</span> </strong> </p>
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-69863734356568880442018-03-23T12:00:00.000-05:002018-03-23T12:00:22.813-05:00Movie Review - Death Wish<div align="center">
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The remake of Death Wish is out!
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I was looking forward to seeing the remake of ‘<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1137450/" target="_blank"><b>Death Wish</b></a>’ as soon as I saw the previews and would have seen it on its opening March 2nd weekend except that it did not make it to the local Marshalltown movie theatre until this past weekend so Kathy and I went to the Saturday matinee with 11 other movie goers. 45 years later <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071402/" target='_blank'><b>the original ‘Death Wish</b></a>’ is dated but at the time it was a controversial film. There was an unprecedentedly graphic and violent rape/murder scene that was completely omitted years later for the movie's network television debut. But what caused the majority of the controversy was the correctness or incorrectness of the concept of vigilante justice. In the original film architect Paul Kersey’s wife is murdered and daughter raped in a home break-in. Kersey deals with his grief and the inability of the police to bring the perps to justice by arming himself and heading out to the streets of New York. Armed first with a roll of quarters in a sock and quickly graduating to handguns, Kersey makes himself a seemingly easy target who switches from victim to hunter and metes out justice as the judge, jury, and executioner.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Aside from the monotonal all-time tough guy <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000314/" target='_blank'><b>Charles Bronson</b></a> as Kersey, the movie features solid character actor <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0306696" target='_blank'><b>Vincent Gardenia</b></a> as Detective Frank Ochoa who finds out that Kersey is the vigilante but allows him to escape charges if he moves into another city. This offer is due to the falling crime rates ever since Kersey has started his activities and the desire of the city authorities to use the vigilante threat to keep the crime rates down. The movie became part of the national consciousness and was propelled into franchise-hood after the <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/1985-02-12/entertainment/ca-4030_1_bernhard-goetz" target='_blank'><b>Bernie Goetz ‘subway gunman’ shootings in 1984</b></a> brought the vigilante question back into the headlines.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000246" target='_blank'><b>Bruce Willis</b></a> was cast as Paul Kersey and given a new job as a Chicago doctor instead of a New York architect. I thought Willis was a good choice to give Kersey a lighter touch and was excited to see how the vigilante question would be treated 45 years after the original Death Wish with the debates over gun rights and ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws at a fever pitch and this was even before the firestorm caused by the latest school shooting in Florida.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The movie starts out much like the original. Kersey is a law-abiding citizen livingh an ideal family life with his wife and daughter on Lakeshore Drive. There is even a bonus as his deadbeat brother is played by the exceptional <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000352" target='_blank'><b>Vincent D’Onofri</b>o</a> (Kingpin in Daredevil and Detective Goren in Law and Order : Criminal Intent). The story continues with the brutal murder of his wife in a home burglary but without the rape. Although the daughter still survives she is in a coma in Kersey’s hospital. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The movie continues to track the original as Kersey sinks into despair at the loss of his wife and the ineffectiveness of the police to catch the perpetrators. One 21st century twist is that Kersey has a therapist to talk to so we know what is on his mind. Kersey tries to thwart a mugging but gets beat up for his trouble. He then flirts with the idea of buying a gun but ends up getting an untraceable one that improbably drops out of a shooting victim’s waistband while in the emergency room that he learns to clean, load, and fire from watching You Tube videos. While riding the trains to keep his mind off his troubles, Kersey uses his gun to thwart a carjacking and shoots a helpless and disarmed carjacker dead. In another 21st century twist the act is caught on a video that is uploaded and gone viral which leads the same detective that haven’t found Kersey’s burglars to look for the vigilante.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> At this point the movie stops following the ‘Death Wish’ plot and turns more into a revenge\morality play. At the hospital, Kersey looks at the gunshot wound of a child whose transgression was to go home from school through the territory of the drug dealer known as the ‘Ice Cream Man’. Using an address gleaned from the youth’s medical records, Kersey heads to the Ice Cream Man’s block in broad daylight and empties two clips in him. This premeditated act is not the kind seen in Death Wish. The only public controversy is from Chicago radio hosts debating vigilante justice and a chief of detectives demanding the same detectives that have a wall of unsolved crimes (including Kersey’s) catch the vigilante.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The plot goes further astray when Kersey attends to the wounds of a gunshot victim that is wearing Kersey’s watch that was stolen in the burglary. The movie morphs from ‘Death Wish’ to ‘Revenge Wish’ as Kersey is no longer looking to rain death on criminals but just to avenge his wife. The rest of the movie is entertaining enough as Kersey tortures one of his wife’s murderers, dispatches another thanks to a well-timed bowling ball, and finishes off the third in a finale worthy of any action movie. It just isn’t Death Wish anymore. The movie ends with some similarities to the original in that Kersey and his daughter move to another city but instead of a tacit agreement on the part of the police Kersey is let off scott-free by the detectives that have gleaned his identity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> ‘Death Wish’ is a well-made film. I like the idea of Kersey being featured in a viral video and getting firearm basic training from YouTube videos. Willis and D’onofrio give fine performances. To me the film’s glaring flaw is that it seemingly wanted as little as possible to do with the original except to draw an audience. This movie is a cut above Willis’s recent forays into the Direct-to-DVD market but has a lot in common with them as soon as it drops the transformation of Paul Kersey from citizen to vigilante. I’m sure the remake aspect was necessary to allow for a bigger budget but after three weeks has barely grossed its' 30 million production budget. I consider this a Red Box special which is a shame because by being truer to the original film I believe the movie would have capitalized on the growing discussion over gun ownership and violence instead of being a revenge vehicle for an aging action hero.</span><br /><br />
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Ultimately the Death Wish remake misses out on the central theme of the original - the transformation of Paul Kersey...
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For good or bad I must say they don't make gunfights (or hair) like they used to. The scenes from Death Wish III (my personal favorite of the series) from the 3:00 to 7:50 marks are classics!
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</div>Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-64236564136604334052018-03-16T12:00:00.000-05:002018-03-16T12:00:13.132-05:00TV Binge Review - Jessica Jones Season 2<div align="center">
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Marvel Comics' Jessica Jones is back on Netflix with the recently released Season 2!
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Jones_(season_2)" target="_blank"><b>Jessica Jones</b></a>’ second season is the latest Netflix\Marvel superhero collaboration and was released this past weekend. While it has taken me a week or longer to watch the previous 6 13-hour productions from Netflix/Marvel (and less for the 8 episode Defenders) once I started watching Jessica Jones on Saturday afternoon I could not stop. I watched the first six episodes on Saturday and the remaining seven on Sunday despite losing an hour sleep to daylight savings time. As the ‘too-long/didn’t read’ crowd may surmise I found the series to be stellar and I put it as a narrow second place behind the first Daredevil series for how I rank the eight Netflix\Marvel series produced so far.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Jessica is running her private investigation agency and gets some information from her adoptive sister Trish Walker which is a lead to a link between the car accident that killed her family and her subsequent super powers. Meanwhile she is approached by a character called the ‘Whizzer’ who claims to have super speed but only when scared. Jones puts off the Whizzer as a fake but finds out that he does have his super speed moments before he is murdered which Jones links to the medical facility where she vaguely remembers being kept and experimented on and the ‘accidental’ death of the doctor running the facility.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> At this point the story looks like a pretty routine hero-villain story as Jones is hunting down the super powered being that is hunting other super powered beings (including Jones) that were treated by a mysterious IGH corp. At least it was pretty routine until the murderer is found to be Jones’ own mother who has even more super strength than Jones but is hampered by an unstable mentality that leads to fits of violence to anything that upsets her or threatens her husband (IGH head experimenter Karl Mallus) who has taken care of her and mostly successfully moderates her bouts of rage.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The story then weaves Jones’ conflict between bringing her mother to justice and trying to understand her motivations as well as get her the help she needs with the other subplots that center around series regulars that want to use powered beings or gain super powers themselves. High powered attorney Jeri Hogarth discovers she has ALS and tries to find a rumored IGH experimentee that gained ‘healing’ powers to cure herself. Trish Walker gets addicted to a performance enhancing inhaler used by ‘Nuke’ in the first season. When the inhaler runs out and she can’t reproduce the contents, Walker kidnaps Mallus and tries to make him alter her DNA to give her powers. The experiment seems to fail but there is a hint at the end that Walker may have gained the super reflexes of her comic book ‘Hellcat’ persona.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The show was less a super hero series than a show about people with powers trying to deal with them. Once the murderer was revealed to be Jones’ mentally ill mother there wasn’t any villain although season one bad guy Killgrave did make a one-episode appearance in Jones’ visions when she become too much like her mother for comfort. The show was about a group of dysfunctional people with and without super powers whose actions oscillate from being helpful or incredibly destructive to each other to satisfy short-term goals.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The pace of the episodes was excellent. All the previous Netflix/Marvel shows have three or four episodes of downtime where the plot slows to a crawl while we explore some aspect of the main characters past in snail-paced flashbacks. Jessica Jones had one bottle episode which was an extended flashback to explain her mother’s motivations but the other 12 episodes all worked together to advance the plot. Except for cameos from the petty theif ‘Turk’ and lawyer Foggy Nelson from Daredevil there was no crossover to the rest of the Netflix series. I thought this helped the show keep a lively pace as too many characters from other shows tend to lead to extra character development and explanation that slow the plot. The lack of crossover left more time to delve into the motivations and actions of Hogarth, Walker, and Jones’ private investigator assistant Malcom.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Another aspect of the show that compared favorably with the recent Netflix/Marvel shows was the complete lack of the countless ninja fighters that infected Daredevil Season 2, Iron Fist, and the Defenders. All three of the shows would take the easy way out from any character conflict by conjuring up dozens or hundreds of ninjas for our heroes to battle to get some pointless action scenes (pointless because the supply of ninjas were inexhaustable) and then rush through the characters'
individual situations. The ‘no-ninja’ policy forced Jessica Jones’ showrunners to deal with the messes they created for the characters instead of dissolving them into ninja-mania.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> My favorite side piece was Hogarth’s revenge against the IGH nurse Inez and her ‘healer’ friend Shane. The pair con Hogarth into getting Shane out of prison and putting the pair up at her penthouse apartment while Shane is healing her. Hogarth feels like she is being cured only to discover the pair has stolen everything they could and split. Hogarth finds out where the pair live and convinces Inez that she has evidence of Shane conning multiple women and Inez is about to be left as a victim to take the fall for the theft of Hogarth’s possessions. She seems convincing to me and especially Inez, who accepts a gun from Hogarth and shoots Shane while Hogarth reports the gunshot to the police. I expect to see Hogarth cured from her ALS at some point and her conniving performance makes me think the character could carry her own series if needed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The series ended with very few loose ends but enough lingering conflicts to set the stage for a third season. Jessica is left distanced from former assistant Malcom and friend/sister Trish but has a new love interest in building superintendent Oscar and an attachment to his young son Vido to set the stage for a possibly revenge filled third season. The only Netflix/Marvel series scheduled are Luke Cage season 2, Daredevil season 3, and Iron Fist season 2. If they can bring back the same showrunners for Jessica Jones I expect there will be a season 3 sooner rather than later given the high quality of this recent series.</span><br />
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-74142158863899711442018-03-09T12:00:00.000-06:002018-03-14T20:13:15.767-05:00On The Road Again<span style="font-family: arial;"> A little more than two months ago my contract ended at the place I was programming at in Ames. I didn’t have another job lined up and had resolved to be a bit choosy in picking my new job with the end result hopefully to be making closer to the incredibly generous rate I was being paid in Ames and working closer to Marshalltown than the 60 mile commute to Des Moines I had in the past few years.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> In order to let the world of recruiters know I was available I updated my resume on dice.com and changed my status on LinkedIn to ‘looking for work’. Almost immediately recruiting companies started making contact with me. Most of the jobs openings were what I considered low-paying ‘contract to hire’ jobs with no benefits with the idea that the promise of being hired after six months to a year will make up for the low rate.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I explained to the recruiters that my salary range was higher than the openings and also explained that that my range was subject to change. That was good enough for most of them. One recruiter submitted me for a direct hire position but would not accept my explanation about not considering a particular contract to hire position. The same recruiter wrote to me two weeks later to ask about the contract to hire position and I replied asking if he heard anything about the direct hire position he had submitted me for. I got a reply asking me if I would talk to his supervisor about the contract to hire position.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I said OK and talked to the supervisor in the afternoon. The supervisor told me that he didn’t understand why I wouldn’t consider the contract to hire position because he had ‘been in this business a long time’ and they were offering the going rate. I couldn’t resist asking how old the supervisor was. He was 32 which meant that I had been programming before he had been born and we probably had vastly different ideas about what ‘a long time was’ (he has been a recruiter for 7 years which may be a long time for being a recruiter but I wouldn’t think so).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The supervisor and I weren’t going to agree but when I asked why I didn’t get any feedback about the direct hire job he said he was going to call his contact at the company in the next week and apologized for the ‘mis-communication’ which was really non-communication since there would have to be a communication in the first place for a ‘mis-communication’ to have taken place. I heard back from the recruiter the next week saying the position had already been filled which tells me that this recruiter had no relationship with the company except to spitball resumes in their direction or else he maybe would have known how the hiring process was getting along. I haven’t heard from the recruiter or the supervisor since which means I haven’t had any time wasted by them which is a positive in my book.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> When you deal with the recruiters of the world (or at least in Central Iowa) you get a good feel for who has relationships with the hiring companies and who is just throwing resumes at companies. Most of the recruiters are trying to get candidates for a few jobs at the same companies. When only one recruiter is mentioning a company that is a good sign they have a personal relationship and you will be considered more carefully if they submit you. By the middle of February I had four in person interviews and two phone interviews in the span of two weeks. All the face to face interviews went well enough and three of them were for what I would consider top-shelf companies that had good pay and interesting work. I thought I did well in the interviews where I was asked concrete questions (solving deadlocks, dealing with an unforeseen issue) and less well where I was asked questions where the right answer was some buzzword that I wasn’t familiar with. I felt the buzzword type of questions were trying to see of someone my age was up on newer technologies since they were almost always brought up by younger interviewers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I decided that I would want to work for three of the four companies I had interviewed with and would accept an offer from any of them given the right compensation. The only problem was that the companies are all 60 miles away in Des Moines. I had a phone interview with a company in Grinnell that was 45 miles away and had the perk of being able to work from home two days a week but they were deliberate in their hiring process and had scheduled a face to face interview for a week after the other interviews.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The next week my face to face interview in Grinnell got postponed for a week but a recruiter called with a job opening in Marshalltown. We talked in Wednesday and scheduled an interview for Friday. The only problem was I got a job offer on Friday morning from a company in Des Moines. I said I wanted to take till Monday to think it over which was accepted. I told the people in Marshalltown about my situation during the interview but they told me that the process would take at least two weeks to determine if an offer would be made or even if a second round of interviews was going to be necessary.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The interview went well enough and I let both the Marshalltown and Grinnell recruiters know that I had to make a decision on Monday. I didn’t hear from anyone so I decided to accept the job I was offered and take myself out of the running for the other jobs. Did I make the right call? I’ll never know. I do know that I was concerned with being the second choice from the other jobs and not having any job after interviewing for a bunch of top-shelf jobs.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> There was a third option that I didn’t pursue which was to accept the job and renege on the deal if a better offer had come along. From a cold analytical standpoint this was the correct option to take as long as I didn’t mind giving my word and going back on it. For me this was not an option. I’ve accepted jobs in the past and then gotten counter offers to remain where I was and increased offers from other companies and increased offers from other jobs. I’ve never gone back on my word and never regretted it either. I like being able to go to sleep not thinking about having broken my word. Also almost every job I’ve had has either provided me extra income after leaving or new skills to make me more valuable to the next job and I don’t expect this job to be an exception, The only downside is that I am back to the hour long commute each way which is 40 minutes longer per day than the commute to Ames and an hour longer than the commute to my living room if I could have gotten a work-at-home job.</span><br />
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Unlike Willie Nelson I am not looking forward to being on the road again, perhaps because while Willie will be in places that he's never been, I will be on the same stretch of asphalt over and over and over...
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-55493535372769141382018-03-02T12:00:00.000-06:002018-03-02T13:09:36.757-06:00In The Fall
<span style="font-family: arial;"> When I last checked in to describe the progress of my stock market forays using my self-directed 401k along with my Found Money Fund or FMF (money I get from secondary programming jobs, chess coaching, etc.…) it was just before Christmas and I was of the opinion that the stock market was primed for a fall that I didn’t know when and where it would occur. Since then the stock market reached record highs in late January before dropping 10% in 2 week stretch and settling around 4% off its previous highs.</span><br/><br/>
<span style="font-family: arial;"> My Found Money Fund followed this same pattern, hitting an all-time high in profit and assets between January 26th and February 1st and then dropping 7% in the next week before retracing to a 3.7% loss over the rest of the month. Losing the 7% was especially sad as it represented a 44% drop in my FMF profit which happily did not turn into a loss. All in all the FMF is back where it was in the beginning of January with heavy investments in the three pillars AT&T (<a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/T?p=T" target="_blank"><b>T</b></a>), Phillip Morris (<a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PM?p=PM" target="_blank"><b>PM</b></a>)), and Coca-Cola (<a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/KO?p=KO" target="_blank"><b>KO</b></a>)) with a minor position in real estate trust <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AGNC?p=AGNC" target="_blank"><b>KO</b></a>). What all four stocks have in common is dividends ranging from 3.5% to 11% a share with the three pillars having raised their dividends every year for the past 10 (PM) to 50 (KO) years. Fidelity automatically reinvests the dividends for me and when the market is down those dividends are able to purchase more shares. The FMF uses the classic ‘buy and hold’ strategy with minimal option plays. When my pillar stocks were at year highs I used my excess cash to play my option game with Intel through most of 2017, netting $600 and 3.5 shares from reinvested dividends in profit from November 2016 to November 2017.</span><br/><br/>
<span style="font-family: arial;"> Once Intel made its big jump to over $50 a share it became less attractive to me. My attention turned to AT&T whose stock price has trended downwards primarily due to a delay in getting permission from the government to complete its merger with Time-Warner. In my last FMF post I displayed how I netted 2.5% over 5 weeks buying 200 shares of T along with an accompanying option sell. When that option expired I turned around and bought 200 more shares of T at 38.54 on December 18th with a $150 discount for selling an option to sell the shares on January 23rd for $38.50. My ace in the hole was that T was issuing a 50 cent dividend on January 9th so if the shares held their price my option would be called after 3 weeks and if the price fell I would get the dividend for myself. T rose over 39 a share at the beginning of 2018 but dropped under $38.50 by January 9th and I collected the $100 dividend. The stock then dropped to $37 and I was able to buy my options back for $3 and sell a new set of options expiring on February 23rd but this time I was only able to get an extra $87. Since then T has dropped even further to a little over $35 and I was again able to buy my options back for a fraction of the cost. At this point I am ‘stuck’ with 200 shares of T showing a paper loss of $33 at last Friday’s close of 36.72. I used the ‘air quotes’ around the word stuck because as soon as T rebounded over 37 I made $44 by selling the option to sell these shares at $39 up to April 6th. In this case I am leaving some option money on the table in the hopes of selling the stock for an extra 50 cents a share with the higher strike price. If the stock drops again I will buy the option back for a dollar or two and be ready to collect another dividend on April 9th, when I expect to be able to sell an option for $38.5 to further lower my break-even point and until then I can collect the 50 cent dividend every three months.</span><br/><br/>
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<tr><td>12/18/2017</td><td nowrap>Buy 200 T @ 38.5452</td><td align="right">-7713.99</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>12/18/2017</td><td nowrap>Sell 2 T Option @38.5 (.84) <br/>Expiring 1/26/2018</td><td align="right">161.66</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>1/19/2018</td><td nowrap>.50 dividend payable 2/1/2018</td><td align="right">100</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>1/23/2018</td><td nowrap>Buy 1 T Option @38.5 (.02) <br/>Expiring 1/26/2018</td><td align="right">-2.04</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>1/24/2018</td><td nowrap>Buy 1 T Option @38.5 (.01) <br/>Expiring 1/26/2018</td><td align="right">-1.04</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>1/25/2018</td><td nowrap>Sell 2 T Option @38.5 (.46) <br/>Expiring 2/23/2018</td><td align="right">89.96</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/20/2018</td><td nowrap>Buy 2 T Option @38.5 (.02) <br/>Expiring 1/26/2018</td><td align="right">-4.08</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/26/2018</td><td nowrap>Sell 2 T Option @39 (.25) <br/>Expiring 4/6/2018</td><td align="right">44.96</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td nowrap>Total (If option is exercised)</td><td align="right">467.32</td><td align="right">6.06%</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td nowrap>Break even price</td><td align="right">36.69</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> My self-directed Fidelity 401k saw a wider swing hitting an 8% drop but rebounding to with a half percent of its peak at the close last Friday. The drop and rebound were more pronounced because my largest holding is Apple (<a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL?p=AAPL" target="_blank"><b>AAPL</b></a>)which went from a peak of $180 to $150 in the two week correction span. I bought 100 shares of AAPL on December 26th and on January 24th. The December buy has been an exercise in buying back my options to sell them again at a higher strike price but with the stock tanking there was no longer a market for these options. The January buy was meant to collect a quick three day profit on an option but the timing was awful being right before the correction. This was a test of me and my system of grabbing small amounts of cash from short term covered calls. I didn’t panic but instead bought my options back for pennies on the dollar, collected a small dividend (63 cents or a third of a percent) on February 9th, and waited. When the Apple rebounded to 165 I sold the option to sell the stock at 177.50 five weeks in advance for $1.50 a share which sounds impressive but was a fraction of what I was collecting before. Since then, Apple has caught an updraft and is over $179 and has yet again set an all-time high this week. I used the updraft to collect an extra $77 by extending the options an extra week. My patience seems to have been rewarded but my decisions will look silly if the stock tanks before April 6th. It is a fact that I would have collected way more for the option by being even more patient and waiting an extra week.</span><br/><br/>
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<table border="1" width="80%">
<tbody>
<tr><td>12/26/2017</td><td nowrap>Buy 100 AAPL @ 170.0457</td><td align="right">-17009.52</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>12/26/2017</td><td nowrap>Sell 1 AAPL Option @170 (1.62) <br/>Expired 12/29/2017</td><td align="right">156.36</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>1/2/2018</td><td nowrap>Sell 1 AAPL Option @172.5 (1.06) <br/>Expiring 1/12/2018</td><td align="right">100.65</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>1/11/2018</td><td nowrap>Buy 1 AAPL Option @172.5 (2.69) <br/>Expiring 1/12/2018</td><td align="right">-274.64</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>1/11/2018</td><td nowrap>Sell 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (1.12) <br/>Expiring 1/26/2018</td><td align="right">106.35</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>1/22/2018</td><td nowrap>Buy 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (1.49) <br/>Expiring 1/26/2018</td><td align="right">-154.64</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>1/22/2018</td><td nowrap>Sell 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (4.03) <br/>Expiring 2/2/2018</td><td align="right">397.35</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/2/2018</td><td nowrap>Buy 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (.04) <br/>Expiring 2/2/2018</td><td align="right">-4.04</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/9/2018</td><td nowrap>.63 dividend payable 2/15/2018</td><td align="right">63</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/14/2018</td><td nowrap>Sell 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (1.50) <br/>Expiring 3/29/2018</td><td align="right">146.83</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/27/2018</td><td nowrap>Buy 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (5.4) <br/>Expiring 3/29/2018</td><td align="right">-543.17</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/27/2018</td><td nowrap>Sell 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (5.85) <br/>Expiring 4/6/2018</td><td align="right">581.82</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td nowrap>Total (If option is exercised)</td><td align="right">1311.15</td><td align="right">7.71%</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td nowrap>Break Even Price</td><td align="right">164.39</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</span></br>
</div>
<div align="center">
<span style="font-family: arial;">
<table border="1" width="80%">
<tbody>
<tr><td>1/24/2018</td><td nowrap>Buy 100 AAPL @ 175.145</td><td align="right">-17519.45</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>1/24/2018</td><td nowrap>Sell 1 AAPL Option @175 (1.62) <br/>Expiring 2/2/2018</td><td align="right">423.35</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/2/2018</td><td nowrap>Buy 1 AAPL Option @175 (.06) <br/>Expiring 2/2/2018</td><td align="right">-6.04</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/9/2018</td><td nowrap>.63 dividend payable 2/15/2018</td><td align="right">63</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/14/2018</td><td nowrap>Sell 1 AAPL Option @177.5 1.5) <br/>Expiring 3/29/2018</td><td align="right">146.83</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/27/2018</td><td nowrap>Buy 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (5.4) <br/>Expiring 3/29/2018</td><td align="right">-543.16</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/27/2018</td><td nowrap>Sell 1 AAPL Option @177.5 (5.85) <br/>Expiring 4/6/2018</td><td align="right">581.82</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td nowrap>Total (If option is exercised)</td><td align="right">891.15</td><td align="right">5.09%</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td nowrap>Break Even Price</td><td align="right">168.59</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</span></br>
</div>
<span style="font-family: arial;"> With the sudden selloff one of my favorite stocks Exxon (<a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/XOM?p=XOM" target="_blank"><b>XOM</b></a>) dropped under $77 a share for the first time in over a year. $77 is a magic number for me because Exxon pays a 77 cent dividend every quarter and a share price of $77 means a healthy 4% return from the dividend alone not even counting the yearly dividend increase that Exxon has provided the past 35 years. On Wednesday February 14th I bought 200 shares of Exxon for 75.62 a share and collected $207 for the option to sell the stock at $75 by Friday February 16th. It was a defensive play designed to give me either a quick half percent profit or have 200 shares of Exxon at an effective price of $74.63 with plenty of upside. Exxon burst over 77 on the 16th and the option was exercised leaving me with a profit of $74.41 for a three day investment.</span><br/><br/>
<div align="center">
<span style="font-family: arial;">
<table border="1" width="80%">
<tbody>
<tr><td>2/14/2018</td><td nowrap>Buy 200 XOM @ 75.615</td><td align="right">-15127.95</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/14/2018</td><td nowrap>Sell 2 XOM Option @75 (1.07) Expiring 2/16/2018</td><td align="right">207.66</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/16/2018</td><td nowrap>Sell 200 XOM @ 75 (option was exercised)</td><td align="right">14994.7</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td nowrap>Total</td><td align="right">74.41</td><td align="right">.49%</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</span></br>
</div>
<span style="font-family: arial;"> I was so pleased with this result that I decided to try it again the next week. On Tuesday February 20th I bought 200 more shares of Exxon at $76.62 and made $133 for the option to sell the stock for $76.50 on Friday the 23rd. The very next day the stock market had a bad day and Exxon dropped under $75. I had an automated sell to buy back my option for $20 and it executed leaving me with $113 and 200 shares of devalued Exxon stock. This did not bother me because Exxon is a money making machine that would still pay better than a 4% dividend for me to hold onto it. I didn’t have to wait long. The next day (the 22nd) Exxon rebounded to over $76 and I made another $96 for option to sell the stock for $76.50 by March 2nd. Since then Exxon has stayed mostly above $76.50 and has even flirted with $80 so once again my profit could have been bigger by waiting an extra day or two. Nothing is certain but it appears that my options will be exercised on Friday leaving me with a profit of $180 (1.18%) for an 11 day investment or in a worst case scenario (aside from a bankruptcy or zombie apocalypse) holding a 4%+ dividend paying stock.</span><br/><br/>
<div align="center">
<span style="font-family: arial;">
<table border="1" width="80%">
<tbody>
<tr><td>2/20/2018</td><td nowrap>Buy 200 XOM @ 76.5967</td><td align="right">-15324.29</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/20/2018</td><td nowrap>Sell 2 XOM Option @76.5 (.70) Expiring 2/23/2018</td><td align="right">133.66</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/21/2018</td><td nowrap>Buy 2 XOM Option @76.5 (.10) Expiring 2/23/2018</td><td align="right">-20.08</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td>2/22/2018</td><td nowrap>Sell 2 XOM Option @76.5 (.51) Expiring 3/2/2018</td><td align="right">96.81</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td nowrap>Total (If option is exercised)</td><td align="right">180.8</td><td align="right">1.18%</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td nowrap>Break Even Price</td><td align="right">75.60</td><td align="right"></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</span></br>
</div>
<span style="font-family: arial;"> The ups and downs of the stock market have become exacerbated by programmed trades that tend to create spirals of activity driving prices up and down. This seems to play in well to my generally conservative strategy of buying stocks for short term gains through the use of covered calls. I seem to have passed the test of the first correction in a couple of years by not panicking and even had plenty of cash on hand to take advantage of the situation by purchasing Exxon on sale to make a quick profit through options of holding at a reasonable price. This events of the last month only underscores to me the importance of sticking with solid companies that have a history of paying and raising dividends. If I was investing in shaky companies that didn’t offer dividends I’d have probably bitten off my fingernails and fingers also this last month.</span><br/><br/>
Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-28899269894656902852018-02-23T12:00:00.000-06:002018-02-23T12:00:43.363-06:00Movie Review - Black Panther<div align="center">
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/xjDjIWPwcPU?rel=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%; text-align: center;">
<strong>
The highly acclaimed 'Black Panther' is the latest Marvel super hero movie.
</strong></p>
</div>
<span style="font-family: arial;"> I went to see Marvel’s newest superhero movie ‘<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1825683/" target="_blank"><b>Black Panther</b></a>’ last weekend. While most of the movies I’ve gone to this past year had single digit attendances for the weekend matinees even on the opening weekend the theatre was half full. Unlike almost all the previous Marvel movies, ‘Black Panther’ was a self-contained film with no crossover appearances of other characters in the Marvel Universe except for the obligatory appearance by Stan Lee.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The movie gives a fairly faithful rendition to Don McGregor’s ‘Panther’s Rage’ story line that appeared in<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_Action" target="_blank"> Marvel’s Jungle Action comic of the mid 1970’s</a>. McGregor excelled at showing the current king and Black Panther T’Challa not just as a super hero but as the King of the mythical African nation of Wakanda which is unique for having the planet’s only known reserves of the super-metal Vibranium which can absorb sound, vibration, and kinetic energy. This has made the country exceedingly rich and technologically advanced while remaining largely hidden from the outside world in order not to become a target for Vibranium thieving nations and villains.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: arial;"> The film starts with a reference to a theft of Vibranium by a man named Klaue (Klaw) and a long ago confrontation between T’Challa’s father and his brother Prince N'Jobu in Oakland. It is revealed that N’Jobu aided Klaue in the theft of the Vibranium for use in helping Africans and their descendants around the world who have been victimized for hundreds of years revolt against their oppressors. The plot then skips ahead to the current time where T’Challa’s father has been killed in the ‘Captain America: Civil War’ movie and T’Challa is ready to take the crown. Wakanda is a land of deep tradition and T’Challa has to fight in ritual combat against any challengers to take his crown which he does. After taking his crown, T’Challa ingests the secret vibranium infused flowers that give him the Black Panther powers and enters the ‘ancestral realm’ where he meets his father.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: arial;"> At this point the action leaves Wakanda while T’Challa and crew (his lover and chief spy Nakia and chief of guards Okoye aka Dabai Gurira / Michonne from Walking Dead fame) head to South Korea to attempt to capture Klaue and the long ago stolen vibranium. There is a gunfight in a casino and a wild car chase. Klaue gets away with help from Erik Killmonger who is a black ops specialist and Prince N’Jobu’s son which makes him T’Challa’s cousin and part of the royal family.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: arial;"> When T’Challa gets back to Wakanda he meets with some disdain from the tribal leaders who expected him to return with Klaue but that is trifling compared to his finding out that his father killed his uncle and abandoned his cousin to the streets of Oakland. His real problem comes when Killmonger makes his appearance in Wakanda, exercises his right as a blood relative to challenge T’Challa for the crown and proceeds to beat the living tar out of him before throwing him off a cliff and take over the throne. Naturally T’Challa hasn’t died in his fall from the cliff and he manages to win a final confrontation with Killmonger and retain his throne and decides to bring Wakanda more into the open as a nation and surreptitiously help impoverished African descendants in other nations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> ‘Black Panther’ is a box office hit and is also receiving critical acclaim. I would place it on the top shelf of the Marvel movies but a cut below 'Thor : Ragnarok' which was more of a fun movie. The plot was easy to follow and the action and fighting scenes were great with the exception of the South Korea street race which I found poorly lit and hard to follow. Killmonger was a true Marvel anti-villain – capable of evil deeds but with a backstory that makes him an understandable and sympathetic character. I especially liked the merging of technology and mysticism in the three visits to the ancestral realm where T’Challa and Killmonger meet their respective parents and discuss their decisions. The ‘morality play’ of keeping Wakanda hidden from the world or using its technological resources to take over the world was the overarching subplot of the movie and handled in a direct manner.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The morality play is what I found most fascinating about the movie. Before Killmonger takes the throne the royal family seems to be steeped in the tradition of the Wakandan people and the five tribes that were affected by the vibranium metor. T’Challa is content to keep Wakanda’s vibranium and technological prowess hidden from the world as it has been for generations. Killmonger take the throne and decides to arm Africans and their descendants with vibranium powered weapons to take over the world. What struck me was how easily so many of the Wakandan royals discarded their traditions in an attempt to overthrow Killmonger after he attained the throne according to their own traditions. When Killmonger is ready to strike T’Challa a death blow he is stopped by the high priest who offers his life instead. T’Challa’s mother, sister, and Nakia leave Wakanda and bring the secret ‘Black Panther’ herb to a rival tribe in the hopes of overthrowing Killmonger.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The morality I took from the movie is that people in power will do whatever it takes to keep themselves in power. Killmonger was open about using the Wakandan traditions as a means to getting power but everyone except the royal guards acted the exact same way except being less open about it. T’Challa’s father abandoned his nephew in America because bringing him back to Wakanda would have opened a debate of the use of Wakanda’s power. The royal family’s adherence to tradition comes to a screeching halt when tradition prevents them from holding their power. Only the royal guards followed their tradition of protecting the throne no matter who sat upon it. Everyone thought they were doing what was best for themselves or their country which made a nice parallel to the current day political climate where so many are so convinced they are so right that dissent is vilified rather than ignored or discussed.</span><br />
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-48832065379366946072018-02-16T12:00:00.000-06:002018-02-16T12:00:26.880-06:00The Trouble With Harry<div align="center">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Kr8YLkrUTV0/WoYqNEU0GVI/AAAAAAAAHwk/FSfYWQbko9gnYMukTnwrSdiceO0eoI_8wCLcBGAs/s1600/Harry201711.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Kr8YLkrUTV0/WoYqNEU0GVI/AAAAAAAAHwk/FSfYWQbko9gnYMukTnwrSdiceO0eoI_8wCLcBGAs/s320/Harry201711.JPG" width="232" height="320" data-original-width="1160" data-original-height="1600" /></a>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yqg3jp6MdJ8/WoYqNC4C9iI/AAAAAAAAHws/RCW7MX8rQn0bAyUJb8cCHsF5tDpmmCSPgCLcBGAs/s1600/Harry201712.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yqg3jp6MdJ8/WoYqNC4C9iI/AAAAAAAAHws/RCW7MX8rQn0bAyUJb8cCHsF5tDpmmCSPgCLcBGAs/s320/Harry201712.JPG" width="216" height="320" data-original-width="1079" data-original-height="1600" /></a>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XJfkpIctj5I/WoYqNHtE18I/AAAAAAAAHwo/p0tpzeVSGD4dfSTn3MuYV2dr1ONtSFF7ACLcBGAs/s1600/Harry201802.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XJfkpIctj5I/WoYqNHtE18I/AAAAAAAAHwo/p0tpzeVSGD4dfSTn3MuYV2dr1ONtSFF7ACLcBGAs/s320/Harry201802.JPG" width="214" height="320" data-original-width="1072" data-original-height="1600" /></a>
<p style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 85%; text-align: center;"><strong>These pictures from November, December, and February show Harry's gradual loss of feather cover on his neck...</strong></p>
</div>
<span style="font-family: arial;"> I’ve written previously how one of our two cockatiels was killed by Daisy in 2014 when he flew too close to him, leaving us with one cockatiel named Harry. Eventually, Kathy and I decided not to try to get Harry a new cockatiel to be friends with because the process of introducing cockatiels to each other is long and has no guarantee of success. We also found out that while cockatiels are happier when they bond they don’t have to bond with another cockatiel – they can bond with humans as well.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: arial;"> Since then Harry and I have bonded – every morning during his outdoor time he sits on my finger and I rub his head and feathers for about 20 minutes until he gets bored and ambles over to his play area. It seemed he was happy with the arrangement until last November when I noticed he was getting a bald spot on his neck. I kept an eye on the situation and saw that new feathers would start to grow back and would disappear before transforming from porcupine like quills to actual feathers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> It seemed that Harry was pulling out his feathers. I looked up <a href="http://www.dummies.com/pets/birds/solving-your-cockatiels-feather-plucking-problem/" target="_blank"><b>cockatiel feather pulling on the Internet</b></a> and the possible causes ranged from boredom to parasites to sexual frustration to stress to a change in environment to diet. Nothing has changed in Harry’s environment and he seems to relieve his frustration easily enough by rubbing on a cloth toy in his cage like he has dome for years. I saw no evidence of parasites so I went to the Petco in Ames and got some advice, vitamins for his water, some new toys to give him something new to play with and be less bored by, and a spray for his feathers in case he was pulling feathers because of itchy skin.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: arial;"> I put the new toys in Harry’s cage and play area and gave him vitamins right away but didn’t feel comfortable using the spray because winter has come with a vengeance and the spray warns against letting a sprayed bird get chilly. Harry liked the new toys and didn’t balk at the vitamin infused water but he was still pulling his new feathers out and occasionally some of the existing feathers around his neck.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Our local vet doesn’t handle birds very much but recommended the small animal hospital at Iowa State University that has veterinarians that specialize in birds. I made an appointment for Harry on January 18th. I filled out an eight page questionnaire about Harry’s habitat, habits, and health and talked with a veterinary student about Harry and the best way to prepare Harry for travel. It wasn’t very warm on the day of Harry’s appointment so I warmed up the car for 20 minutes and put Harry in a cat carrier covered with towels. I put Harry in the passenger seat, removed the towel covering the door of the carrier so he could see me, buckled him in, and off we went.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: arial;"> Harry handled the trip very well with only a minimum of squawking and we arrived in Ames 45 minutes later at 9am. Harry and I checked in and went to the Avian waiting area until Lynette the vet student brought us into an examination room. Harry stayed in his cage and I waited in the exam room with him until the vet came in and said they would bring Harry to a back room to get blood and stool samples. Harry went to the back and Lynette told me that I could go get lunch because while Harry would quickly generate stool samples in no time it would take over an hour to get enough blood for a sample.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: arial;"> I went to Wal-Mart and ate lunch at Jimmy Johns and got back to the veterinary office an hour after I left. After a few minutes I was ushered back to the exam room and met with Lynette the vet student and two of the doctors. The doctors said Harry had no parasites and was in generally good health except that he weighed 90 grams which was a few grams overweight (90 grams is 3¼ ounces) and that his feathers were darker and had less spring than they would like. They attributed this to his diet of cockatiel food from the Wal-Mart which they said contained almost all fatty seeds and recommended a pellet based diet and even gave me some samples and some instructions on how to wean him off his seeds and onto the pellets because just like people, cockatiels prefer fatty foods over healthy pellet based foods.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: arial;"> The doctors told me that Harry’s throat swab and stool sample both had high concentrations of yeast which led them to the conclusion that Harry had a yeast infection in his throat which was causing itching and his feather pulling. I was told the samples had been sent to the lab for confirmation but to help the infection I should switch his normal tap water out for a mixture of distilled water, apple cider vinegar, and honey. I was pleased to find out Harry was in good health and happily paid my $400 bill, put Harry back in the carrier, buckled him in the car, and we were home around 1pm.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: arial;"> I changed Harry’s water with the distilled water/apple cider vinegar/honey concoction and started mixing in his pellets into his food. While Harry was super about taking his trip to Ames, he was less than happy about his new food and water. Harry would still sit on my shoulder but he resisted all my efforts to rub his head feathers like he used to. You could say he was an angry bird.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: arial;"> This went on for around a week and then I got a call from the Lynette the veterinarian student to tell me that Harry didn’t have a yeast infection after all. It seems that his samples in the lab were tainted by yeast which lead to the false conclusion. I was glad to hear that Harry didn’t have a yeast infection but this left us right back where we started with the exception of knowing that Harry was in generally good condition except for being a couple of grams overweight. Of course if the doctors could be wrong about the yeast infection they could be wrong about Harry’s good health but I believe the doctors are genuine in their interest about Harry’s well-being.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: arial;"> I decided to get Harry back on his fatty seed and tap water diet and after a couple of days he was back sitting on my finger enjoying having his head rubbed and whistling back and forth with me. Harry is at least 12 years old and cockatiels live in the wild for 10 to 14 years so it is possible that he is just reaching the end of his lifespan and his feather-pulling is some age related thing. On the other hand cockatiels can live 20 or more years as pets so I may have Harry for a number of years. My plan for now is to enjoy Harry pulled feathers and all and start to spray his feathers with the solution from Petco when the weather gets warmer.</span><br />
<br />
<div align="center">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wpS-9soeoFo/WoYqo8f4gyI/AAAAAAAAHww/N8e5eHrdc2kQdw2wTs5sqAUiI2Ddcus1ACLcBGAs/s1600/DSC0042.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wpS-9soeoFo/WoYqo8f4gyI/AAAAAAAAHww/N8e5eHrdc2kQdw2wTs5sqAUiI2Ddcus1ACLcBGAs/s600/DSC0042.JPG" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1340" /></a>
<p style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 85%; text-align: center;"><strong>Neck feathers or not, Harry is my buddy and I'm going to do my best to get him back to his old self!</strong></p>
</div>Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-79112289730362731102018-02-09T12:00:00.000-06:002018-02-09T12:00:32.921-06:00Cases for the G.O.A.T<span style="font-family: arial;"> I hadn’t been watching much pro football this season. My favorite New York Giants crashed from an 11 win playoff season last year to the second-worst team in the league this year with a paltry three wins which got both the coach and general manager fired. When the Giants are playing poorly there isn’t much about football that interests me until the playoffs start.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: arial;"> This year’s playoffs was unlike most years. Perennial playoff teams like the Seahawks, Cowboys, and Packers dropped off the radar and new teams like the Titans, Bills, Jaguars, and Rams made it back to the playoffs after years in the doldrums. A constant over the last decade has been the appearances of the New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers in the playoffs. The teams have only missed the playoffs eight times this century. The Pats and Steelers had the best records in the AFC. Everyone was expecting a titanic AFC championship game between the twountil the Jacksonville Jaguars pulled off a playoff upset in Pittsburgh and even gave the Patriots all they could handle in the AFC championship game before losing 24-20.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: arial;"> The Patriots took on the Eagles in this year’s Big Game (I would call it the Super Round Dish or the Great Bowl but those terms are <a href="http://www.mcall.com/sports/football/eagles/mc-spt-eagles-patriots-super-bowl-copyright-laws-20180122-story.html" target="_blank"><b>copyrighted by the NFL</b></a>) where they lost to the Eagles 41-33. The game was decided by the Patriots being unable to stop the Eagles offense after getting their first lead in the game late in the fourth quarter and the Eagles managing to force a Tom Brady fumble after getting the lead back with two minutes left. This was a deserved Eagles victory as they played better than the Patriots on offense, defense, and special teams despite playing backup quarterback Nick Foles after losing starter Carson Wentz late in the regular season. I have to confess to rooting for the Patriots to win because as much as I dislike Patriots owner Robert Kraft I root for the success of their coach Bill Belichick due to his roots as the Giants defensive coordinator in their first two Super Bowl seasons. Belichick’s defense was miserable on Sunday and was almost bailed out by 40-year old quarterback Tom Brady who was nearly as unstoppable as the Eagles and nearly pulled the victory out with his 505 passing yards and four touchdowns.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> This was the Patriots third ‘Big Game’ in four years. I believe the country was suffering from ‘Patriot Fatigue’ because there was as little buzz leading up to this game as I can remember in the past 20 years. One storyline in particular that caught my attention was the debate over whether Brady would supersede Michael Jordan as the team sport G.O.A.T. (Greatest Of All Time) with a sixth NFL championship title or whether he had already superseded Jordan. You can find a couple of topical articles <a href="https://www.foxsports.com/watch/the-herd-with-colin-cowherd/video/1145772611729" target="_blank"><b>here</b></a> and <a href="http://www.espn.com.au/nfl/story/_/id/22211056/tom-brady-vs-michael-jordan-greatest-all-goat-scorecard" target="_blank"><b>here</b></a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The reason the sixth championship held so much importance for Brady’s side of this debate was because Jordan was on six championship teams which is held to be the gold standard although Kareem Abdul-Jabbar also was on six championship teams and super role player Robert Horry won seven rings with three different teams. At his current pace and longevity LeBron James will retire with the all-time NBA scoring record and is on a streak of leading his teams to seven NBA finals in a row but continually finds his acceptance as the greatest basketball player of all time challenged by his only having half of Jordan’s championships because his teams have lost five of the eight finals he has been in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Since Brady did not get his sixth championship on Sunday the GOAT debate has been muted until the fall in favor of the supreme performance of the Eagles. I would be comfortable saying Brady is the greatest quarterback of all time and leave it at that. He has been in a record 8 NFL championship games and was a key part of his team for all of them. Both Brady and Jordan were fortunate to be on teams that were well run with championship caliber rosters for them chase their championships with. I don’t subscribe to Jordan being the greatest NBA player of all time (my vote goes to Julius Erving with Kareem and Wilt Chamberlain also ahead of Jordan) but when it comes a choice of having one player to be on your team in a must win game I couldn’t argue with Jordan. The Jordan GOAT argument is not just based on his six championships – it is based on his six championship in his only six finals appearances with six NBA Finals Most Valuable Player awards in an eight year span where Jordan missed a season and a half in his first retirement. Brady’s five championships over 15 years are amazing but only in last year’s victory over the Falcons did he conduct a game winning drive and that one ended in a running touchdown by James White – not a touchdown pass. Brady’s other four championships were decided by late field goals and defensive stands. I’m not trying to lessen Brady’s impact but he simply does not have the signature touchdown drive like Joe Montana did in 1989 against the Bengals, much less Jordan’s signature championship winning shot against the Jazz in 1998. The thing that is missing from Jordan’s pedigree is any film clips of him as the defeated party in a championship series which compares well against the clip of Brady having the ball stripped from him on Sunday while trying to lead the Patriots to a go-ahead score or being pummeled by the Giants in the other two championship games he was defeated in. The closest we can come to similar Jordan video was his 1995 playoff series against the Magic when he still had his thicker baseball body and dribbled the ball off his feet for turnovers late in the deciding game.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The argument for Brady and James as the greatest team players of all time is based on longevity and I fell has a large part I the desire of fandom to want to believe they are witnessing the greatest of all time. Jordan’s case is rooted in the perfection of his championship pedigree – six Finals, six Championships, and six Finals MVP awards. The person who gets the short shrift in this argument is Bill Russell of the Celtics who played 13 season, made the finals 12 times, and won 11 championships. The NBA Finals MVP award is named after Russell but his 11 championships in 13 years is so beyond anything ever accomplished in team sports that it just cannot be put into any context and is largely set aside as an anomaly so we can believe that six championships is the gold standard. For this day and age Jordan is still the greatest but the true GOAT has to be Russell who only misses my list of all-time greats because I never saw him play.</span><br />
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-67457922200514063962018-02-02T12:00:00.000-06:002018-02-25T12:58:07.247-06:00Panic In Detroit<span style="font-family: arial;"> The NBA world was rocked by the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/sports/clippers/la-sp-clippers-trade-griffin-20180129-story.html" target="_blank"><b>Los Angeles Clippers trade of Blake Griffin and some spare parts to the Detroit Pistons for Tobias Harris, Avery Bradley, and a protected #1 draft pick</b></a>. Griffin was arguably the greatest Clipper ever. He was the first overall pick in the 2009 draft, the 2010 Rookie of the Year, and a five time all-star. In the offseason Griffin signed a five year $171 million dollar contract that will take up between a third and fourth of the salary cap of any team he plays for.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The Clippers were one of the NBA’s most successful regular season franchises since the arrival of all-star point guard Chris Paul in 2011, making the playoffs six straight seasons and winning a playoff series three times. The franchise was scarred when losing to the Houston Rockets in the conference semi-finals after having a 3-1 series lead along with a 25 point lead in the second half of the fifth game. Paul forced a trade to the Rockets this season and the Clippers remade their team around Griffin and center DeAndre Jordan surrounded by the role players received in the Rockets trade and some free-agent pickups. After a 4-0 start, the team started suffering injuries and Griffin missed over a dozen games. The Clippers lost 11 out of 12 but started winning again when Griffin returned and are currently in a battle for the final playoff spots in the Western Conference. This trade signals the start of newly hired consultant and NBA legend Jerry West’s housecleaning as he attempts to rebuild the Clippers into a contender for championships instead of hoping to make the conference finals one of these years.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Normally getting a five time all-star is considered a steal but there are serious questions about Blake Griffin. He made the all-star team his first five years in the league but was not chosen the last three years mostly due to injuries that have cost him at least 20 games a year. In a salary cap sport like the NBA teams whose top paid players can’t play tend to struggle, much like the Detroit Pistons who started the season with a 14- 6 record including wins over the Warriors and Celtics and then lost 20 of their next 28 games in no small part because point guard Reggie Jackson (the second highest paid player on the team) suffered an ankle injury.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The Griffin deal is the either the last gasp or the crowning moment of Detroit’s <a href="https://www.basketball-reference.com/coaches/vangust99c.html" target="_blank"><b>Stan Van Gundy’s</b></a> tenure as the Coach/GM of the Pistons. This is Van Gundy’s 4th year with the Pistons. The first three years have netted one winning season (44-38) which gave the Pistons the 8th seed and a sweep at the hands of the eventual champion Cavaliers in the opening round of the playoffs.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Now one playoff sweep in three years may not be seen as an abject failure except that in the NBA most coaches with that sort of record don’t make a fourth year. There are four current NBA coaches that have had one playoff appearance (or less) in the past three years: <a href="https://www.basketball-reference.com/coaches/cliffst99c.html" target="_blank"><b>Steve Clifford of the Hornets</b></a> who made the playoffs twice in the past four years (losing both times in the first round) but once in the past three years; <a href="https://www.basketball-reference.com/coaches/snydequ01c.html" target="_blank"><b>Quinn Snyder of the Jazz</b></a> who made the playoffs in his third season and won a playoff series; and <a href="https://www.basketball-reference.com/coaches/brownbr99c.html" target="_blank"><b>Brett Brown of the 76ers</b></a> who was hired to oversee a team that was purposefully trying to lose as many games as possible. Van Gundy is the fourth. There was not one coach fired from an NBA team last season. This season Phoenix, Memphis, and Milwaukee made coaching changes. The shelf life of an NBA coach that doesn’t make the playoffs on a regular basis is short. Very few coaches get a fourth year with the record Van Gundy has had with the Pistons but he does have the advantage of not only being the coach but also the General Manager.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Van Gundy's record as a General Manager has been mixed. His 2015 pickups of Tobias Harris from the Orlando Magic and Reggie Jackson from the Thunder worked out well enough. The pickup of Jackson could have been franchise-altering except that Jackson has proven to be injury-prone the past two season which leaves a $14 million player (1/7 of the cap) on the sidelines. He has not proven to be able to develop role players into above average starters and his drafts have been abysmal. His highest pick was the 8th pick in the 2015 draft Stanley Johnson. Johnson has a world of athleticism but has barely been able to crack the starting lineup after three seasons. The 18th pick in the 2016 draft was Henry Ellenson who has barely been able to stay out of the G-League. His 2017 top pick Luke Kennard (12th in the draft) has been a rotation player which may or may not be due to Jackson’s injury and the need for Coach Van Gundy to show that GM Van Gundy has hit on a draft pick.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Van Gundy received an <a href="http://www.mlive.com/pistons/index.ssf/2017/10/pistons_owner_tom_gores_i_beli.html" target><b>endorsement from the Pistons owner Tom Gores earlier this year</b></a> but the team has just moved into a new arena in downtown Detroit and won’t sell tickets without the excitement a winning team will bring without even mentioning the millions in revenue the team gets for having home playoff games. Van Gundy’s 5 year $35 million dollar contract runs out next season and it would not be unreasonable to expect a consistent playoff team by the fourth season. The Pistons had lost eight straight games before the trade (they beat the Cavaliers at home the day the trade was announced). The Griffin trade is an incredibly risky move. Griffin has not proven he can stay healthy for a full season and has missed the last two playoffs with injuries as well. Committing so much of the salary cap for a player that can’t stay healthy could hamstring the franchise for the next decade but Van Gundy does not have to worry about the next decade of Pistons basketball if he cannot turn around this season and he has only 30 games left to do it.</span><br />
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Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4648558805502760063.post-37481063273094049502018-01-26T12:00:00.000-06:002018-01-26T12:00:00.232-06:00Review - Garry Kasparov's MasterClass<div align="center">
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<p style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 85%; text-align: center;"><strong>Garry Kasprov's MasterClass was made available on YouTube recently. This is merely the preview.</strong></p>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Once I had finished my review of the “Revolutionize Your Chess” Master Method course by Ginger GM Simon Williams I went to You Tube and found myself watching videos of the best fight scenes of Steven Segal and Jason Staham. You Tube (a Google company) keeps track of what I watch and on the sidebar it offers up selections of movie fight scenes, a sampling the seemingly unending number of You Tubers that make a living reviewing the Walking Dead television shows and comics (including full releases of the comics), and chess videos. Once I had finished watching some of Statham’s incredible fights from his “Transporter” series I looked on the sidebar and saw that the seven hour Garry Kasparov chess course from the MasterClass series was available and recommended for me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> <a href="https://www.masterclass.com/" target="_blank">MasterClass</a> is a series of online learning courses that is distinguished by the quality of the presenters. You can learn comedy from Steve Martin, tennis from Serena Williams, writing from James Patterson, singing from Christina Aguilera, etc… There was an acting class by Kevin Spacey that I can no longer find but that is beside the point. A MasterClass course costs $90 for a lifetime viewing pass but for the price of two courses ($180) you can watch all the courses for an entire year.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> If MasterClass was going to have a chess course there would only be two possibilities for the presenter : Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen who in their time were both considered the greatest player of all time much like Bobby Fischer was in the 1970’s when he was world champion. Since Kasparov has been retired from competitive chess since 2005 and Carlsen is an active reigning world champion, Kasparov was the likely choice. Kasparov was not only the world champion for 15 years, he is a prolific chess writer, and occasionally tries to insert himself into the world of chess politics and the politics of the world. As an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin he has found himself in exile in the West where he has a foundation that supports chess around the world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I knew the Kasparov Masterclass course on YouTube was pirated and it didn’t include the workbook but since YouTube recommended it to me I decided to take a look. I’d hate for anyone to think too harshly of me for viewing copyrighted material so will note that You Tube is protected from copyright claims based on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act" target="_blank"><b>Digital Millennium Copyright Act</b></a> as long as the copyright infringement is not intentional. This means that You Tube must take down copyright violating videos when alerted but is not breaking any laws by allowing the videos on their site and more importantly I am not breaking any laws by viewing the videos. As best I can tell the video has been taken down in the last week.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I ended up watching the entire seven hour course in over a week. The course has incredible production values. While the GingerGM Master Method course shows 15 hours of the presenter in his best t-shirt with a white backdrop, Kasparov looks like a million bucks in a suit and is seated in front of a chessboard in a couple of spacious rooms in a mansion. Kasparov starts the course by pointing out that his goal is to inspire the students to be as passionate about chess as he is which will inspire the student to further their chess studies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Kasparov then goes over many different tactical elements one at a time – pins, double attacks, skewers, etc. When Kasparov sets up the pieces on the board in front of him, the screen splits and a full length board appears on the right of the screen showing a 2-D version of the board and moves. I noticed no missteps between the 2-D and 3-D boards unlike the ichess.net offerings where the visual chess board are irritatingly overlaid by ChessBase popup windows with no editing to remove them. I expect that the MasterClass was done in multiple takes much like a movie or television show and likely scripted to some extent. Each section is prefaced by a simple graphic with some music which gave the production a classy look and feel..</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Each section follows a familiar theme. Kasparov explains a simple position to illustrate the tactic and then proceeds to more complex positions which includes examples from games in his career or other famous games. Each section concludes with a composed study that is meant as a “challenge” for the student to pause and examine before Kasparov explains the solution. The tactics section takes up the first three hours of the course and then Kasparov moves on to the endgame.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> Kasparov only spends about 45 minutes on the ending and tries to demonstrate how endings require precision by showing seemingly simple endgames that contain many twists and turns. He pays special attention to the concepts of king position and the king shouldering his opposite number aside to queen a pawn. Then Kasparov moves on to the opening. This section is mostly philosophical in nature with his examples showing more of the psychological thinking behind openings and his opening choice in his must win game against Karpov in his 1987 championship match and even mentions in passing that his failure to break Krammnik’s Berlin Defence cost him his championship but that he beat the famous Berlin Wall easily after the match.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> The openings section took 45 minutes and at this point it appears the Masterclass ran out of content. The next hour has Kasparov giving a simul against three players of varying strengths – an expert, a class player, and a player that is a level above beginner. We have 45 minutes of Kasparov walking between the three boards leaning, grimacing, and thinking while his opponents try to match wits with the ex-champ. Not only does the pace of the video slow to a crawl, the boards are hard to see from the overhead and side angles (no 2D board on the side). After the simul, Kasparov goes over the games with each of the players and then gives them some lessons in the opening and ending. Having the presenter engage with the participants is a feature of the MasterClass lessons but in the case of chess it seemed artificial and a time waster. The simul and group lesson took about an hour and 45 minutes and the MasterClass concludes with Kasparov talking about his chess carreer, post retirement activities, computers, and other subjects for about an hour.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial;"> I think that any aspiring chess player will get more instruction value from the Simon Williams’ Master Method that I looked at last week than Kasparov's MasterClass. The video did give me a better appreciation of the geometry of the chessboard that is not explained elsewhere and the value of composed studies that seemed to be a staple of the Soviet Chess School. This piece attempts both instruction and a glimpse into the mindset of a champion chess player. Unless the workbook that comes with the course is the best workbook ever the lessons come off more as an introduction to chess which to be fair was part of Kasparov’s stated goal to whet the students appetite for chess instead of hardcore instruction. Since the piece attempts both instruction and a glimpse into the mindset of a champion chess player I would have liked to see more Kasparov interviews from the past mixed in to his reminiscences. All told the excellent production values make this more of an incomplete historical view of a great chess player than an instructional video.</span><br /><br />
Hank Anzishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13480992607757364540noreply@blogger.com0