Testing one two three. Hi Gu Yi, my only follower......hail to my audience.....just testing. Thought I could retrieve a photo of me for another site. If you read this, and have access to a photo of me you could send to me via email, I would appreciate it.

Love, Soggyblogger

This is a new post just to keep this blog site active. I have been in China where blogger.com addresses seem to be banned so I cannot contribute posts from there. I will be thinking about adding to this site soon.

Re-Post: HUSKIES & SAD

Sad. It is sad that WSU fans need to gloat and humiliate Husky fans. Plain and simple, it is just sad.
I was pleased when the cougs were winning and looked to become an elite team. I really was
pleased. I would never root for the cougs to beat the Huskies, but any other opponent and WSU
has my support. Yet the cougs ONLY redeeming part of their season so far is now their sweep of
the Huskies. Again, that's sad.

As bad as the Huskies season has become, with two more home wins we will have swept both
USC and UCLA. As bad as the Huskies have played recently, with even two more wins they will
probably still get invited to the dance. WSU needs to win the Pac 10 tournament to get there, and
I hope they do it if it doesn't mean beating the Huskies.

Sports is about us versus them. The Huskies versus the world. The Pac 10 versus the rest of the
world. The State of Washington versus the rest of the country. America versus the rest of the world.
Some fans think our team is elevated by the fall of our closest opponents, but that is narrow sighted
and just plain foolish.

On finding fault: Romar is responsible. No doubt. How is the problem fixed? I am not amongst the
crowd who will be calling for his head. I know way too little about his assistant coaches. Romar
needs help. That seems clear. Are his assistants there to learn or are they there to elevate the
program? If it is to elevate the program then they are failing miserably. Romar should fire all of his
assistants and hire a complementary co-head coach. Or head assistant coach. Someone who can
teach Romar how to coach in those areas he is lacking in skill. Maybe some retired coaching
genius. Like Millen did with his former Sonics coach. The players seem to be both coachable and
talented. They are playing like an uncoached team.

Re-Post: RE: Censorship On Forums

 Editor's Note: Soggyblogger is fighting a minor health problem
and a major addiction. Certainly that is justification for his laziness
and lack of production for this blog. The best he seems to be capable
of is passing along some of his posts on forums where actual humans
exist. The following post was first posted on the Seattle Times Husky
Basketball Forum.

Will WSU make the NIT? That might be wishful thinking.

This is a troll's thread, but this forum needs more trolls not less.
I can't figure out why this forum is so blah. There isn't all that
much activity here, and so maybe the P-I forum is dominating
the scene the way the P-I Seahawks forum dominates. Why is
that? Maybe the P-I's forum has a friendlier interface. I've been
banned there. It happened during my registration process before
I was ever allowed to post a single time. So I don't have the choice.

Self-censorship may be part of the problem with this forum. I read
the rules, and depending on how they are enforced, they can act
with a dampening affect on the conversations here. There is a no
personal attacks rule which might sound nice, and agrees with my
personal philosophy, but to actually make it a RULE causes me to
be more careful in what I write. And I don't know what the penalties
are nor what the definition of an attack is. I have limited myself to
calling people pessimists or chicken little, and so far so good, I have
not been banned yet. Should I escalate? Feel out the edges of
permissible language? It's not that I have a list of people I want to
unload on - it's that there seems to be no real conflict here. People
seem afraid to disagree too strongly.

I hate censorship of any kind. No, that is not correct. I do appreciate
some very compassionate moderation. Deleting posts given to
pointless vulgarity and the like, or removing a poster when after
repeated warnings that poster persists in obstructive behavior or beyond
the pale attacks on people.

My opinion has changed with regards to conflict on forums. I used to
really hate it, but I am much more tolerant of almost any behavior on
forums today. Some forums I participate on are Google forums without
rules or moderators to speak of. The totally childish and rude behavior
I just ignore. It is actually quite easy. All it requires is a fraction of a second
to scroll past it. Some are hugely offended by vulgar posts and then get
emotionally involved and expose their own childish behavior. In the end,
on an uncensored forum, a much clearer picture emerges of each personality.

Lots of mistakes are made. Posters learn along the way. They grow as
people, and learn something about themselves usually. And so do the rest
of us. It's not all good, but it is rarely dull. And a community develops. A
weird sort of community compared to pre-internet community, but in many
ways it can be enriching, IMO.

I follow the P-I Seahawks forum because it is one of the most interesting,
well written, football savvy group I have found. That I cannot post there may
have been to my advantage in some ways. By now I might have exposed
my ignorance of football and been called on it. I cannot say what the differences
in the rules between the two sites, but threads can get quite heated and not
much censoring seems to go on.

What I have learned so far about the censorship policy here at the Seattle Times
Husky Forum is that some posts get deleted without the author getting banned.
That is a hopeful sign, but what it takes to get banned is of interest to me. And is
there any appeal? Does one get banned for life or is there a time limit on banning?
I know in some cases being banned just means the need to create a new ID, but
so far I cannot figure out how to get a new ID for the P-I forum. Their server seems
to recognize me and wherever I go on that site I am reminded that "my account
has been banned."

There are not any actual humans involved in the P-I.com site so far as I can tell.
They do have telephone numbers to call, but every time I have called I end up with
voice mail, and have never had a call back. I have never gotten an answer to an
email, either. Unless one counts robo emails. So far as I can tell everything about
the P-I.com EXCEPT FOR THE FORUMS are robotically created. If there are five
people actually employed there I would be surprised.

Sorry for changing the topic here and going on so long, but I needed to vent.

Re-Post....UW Basketball

Good posts all. I agree with what you said about Romar, chabby,
and would add that the list of talents a bb coach needs is much too
long for any coach to excel at everything....though maybe that was
Wooden's reason for such success. Players come and go, but the
coach is really the key ingredient in any program. I like Romar. I have almost no complaints. I do wish he would improve FASTER than his peers because that is what this is really about. Adapting, learning, changing, and rearranging priorities in a lot of different areas. 

 

The area which is hardest to measure is the people skills. Working with the players and relating to each of them as individuals to get the most out of everyone. Choosing assistant coaches, and then teaching them, and motivating them, and when necessary firing them. I have no knowledge at all regarding the assistant coaches, but if they were really great they would be making Romar appear better than he would otherwise. A great coach might have even greater assistant coaches working for him. Yes, they will leave and that is the testament to a coach outside of winning games. How well his assistants fare when they leave. So he needs to replace them, and how well he does that could cover up a lot of his own deficiencies.

What we are learning this year, IMO, is that the coaching staff needs to improve in many areas. If we take as a given that the Huskies have the most player talent in the conference, then we can grade the coaches high in recruiting and development of players' skills, but we might need to downgrade the game day coaching skills, the motivational skills, or even the game preparation skills of the coaches. My guess is that following the rules 100% has cost us some of the blue chip prospects. That's too bad, but I don't fault the coaches for that. Corruption exists in all endeavors and avoiding it is a choice that pays off in the long term.

Teaching maturity to young adults from various walks of life is possibly the most important skill a coach can be born with, develop over time, or recruit in assistant coaches. Few people really have this skill. Overall, all Romar teams seem to buy into his program and develop maturity as well as most programs. That could just be the result of a recruiting focus on maturity.

Mental focus is the most important attribute in any competitive endeavor. It is easier to focus when playing at home. IMO, that far outweighs the supposed assist teams get from the refs at home.

The mental state of a team is a moving object, and harder to predict than the stock market, but I get a good feeling about the direction our team is going. Taking an optimistic perspective, I like to think our early losses to good teams will give us the experience to finally turn the corner to toughness. Those losses were due to nervousness and lack of confidence. The middle season losses were due to a lot of issues. Arrogance, laziness, and consequently lack of focus.
We learned humility from those losses. From the recent loss at Arizona, I hope we learned the need to play all 40 minutes with intensity.

Unfortunately, it's a lot like Whack-A-Mole, what the next problem to pop up willbe is anyone's guess. That is another coaching job. Most coaches wilt under the pressure or die of stress related illnesses. My hats off to all of them that excel.

 

Soggyblogger

Fashion Police or The Emporer Has No Clothes Revisited

The Seattle Times Sports Page, on Feb. 21, 2011, had a photo of Ichiro whatshisname the Japanese baseball player who plays right field for the Seattle Mariners. In that photo, Ichiro is wearing a plaid suit, itself a fashion felony, but in addition to the plaid suit, he wore a bow tie which is merely a misdemeanor, but the bow tie was also plaid and from what I could tell, was not a matching plaid to his suit. Wow.

If fashion police had the authority to actually imprison offenders, Ichiro would get life. Or maybe even a death sentence. Yet, to my knowledge no one has remarked on Ichiro's attire. Much like the emperor who wore no clothes, everyone seems afraid to point out Ichiro's fashion failures. The photo accompanied a story about an interview of two hours which Ichiro gave to some Japanese media outlet for the Japanese public who adore Ichiro slightly less ardently than Baptists adore Christ.

My exposure to Japanese culture is limited to a six hour wait on a plane sitting on the tarmac of Tokyo's International airport waiting for a Hurricane to pass by. Which is to say, none. And yet....anytime anything Japanese is mentioned on TV regarding some Japanese cultural characteristic, my wife is quick to point out the Japanese learned that from the Chinese. Like seaweed wrapped rice. Or their clothes. Or their music. Or their written language. Or anything at all. If the Japanese know anything at all they learned it from the Chinese.

According to my wife, without the Chinese, the Japanese would still be monkey's swinging in trees. Therefore, Ichiro, in wearing plaid on plaid, must have learned his fashion sense from the Chinese as well. Given this assumption, one would expect to see a fair amount of plaid on plaid fashion choices being demonstrated in China, and I am here to assure my readers that such is the case.

Walking the streets of Shenzhen (pop. 15 million.....uh, make that 16 and read quickly or 16 will also be an obsolete count on the pop.) one is more likely to see major felonies of the fashion kind then in any other place on earth I have visited.

I am not known for my fashion sense. In high school I took a liking to a flannel pajama top and wore it to school more days then not. Various decades have come and gone with my signature attire a flourescent red watch cap, or a purple polar fleece sweatshirt scarred from grinding metal and stained with copper bottom paint. This last item has been casually identified by more than one former owner as I walk down the street of Craig, Alaska - since I acquired this item from the local thrift store. I have almost no shame when it comes to fashion, and so it is out of character for me to throw stones at Ichiro.

The trouble is that no one else has said a single word about Ichiro's odd attire. Putting the onus on me, and my lonely blog. After all, Ichiro is not a farm worker recently arrived to the big city as most of the fashion criminals from China can claim. Nor is he a fisherman, like me - which allows for any clothes which suit the purpose and fashion be damned. No. He is a very rich baseball player who probably paid big bucks for his plaid suit.

Ichiro, I implore you, spend a little of your money on a magazine article about men's fashions. Something along the lines of  "10 Do's and Don'ts for Men's Fashions." Or, "A Guide to Men's Fashions for the Idiot".

Soggyblogger

Blog On Sick Leave

For all my faithful readers, I apologize for my absence. Along with a case of writer's block has come a variety of minor aches and pains which have reduced my production down to bare survival levels. Consider this piece as a gulp of air only. 


If I ever recover from my various ailments I will go fishing which will add to my absence. 


I am also going through nicotine withdrawal. If I come out the other end I hope to be breathing easier. Three days smoke free and I already feel better. Plus I am making money just breathing. Cool. 


Soggyblogger