Weighing in on the Michael Vick signing

I have not really had anything that just captured my attention for a while, so not much to post. The signing of Michael Vick by the Philadelphia Eagles is not so much the focus of this blog as is the response to the signing.

Let me start out with my disclaimer. I am a total dog lover. I love my dogs so much. I think dogfighting is a truly perverted and sick activity.

As much as I love dogs, I would not put dogfighting as the single worst activity one human can engage in. Yet, the firestorm, and it most definitely is a firestorm, that this signing has created in the city of Philadelphia, and across the internet is amazing.

I find a couple of major issues. Seems like there is the question of whether Michael Vick deserves a second chance. Stepping back from Michael Vick, I thought that was one of the foundational plans for our correctional structure. How many people have gone to prison, become rehabilitated and now are positive healthy parts of society. Why is Michael Vick not a potential for this?

That leads into the second issue. As I noted in the beginning, I love dogs, but the the current backlash is so much hyperbole when compared to people who have commited serial murder, serial rape. Where is the public outcry for those type of actions?

Two NFL athletes. One convicted of dogfighting and another convicted of DUI manslaughter. One gets 23 months in prison and another gets 24 days. One gets the protesters and the circus we are seeing now and I am willing to bet when the other comes back to the NFL there will be hardly any media coverage at all. Is there something blown out of proportion in this picture? Maybe, or maybe not.

Baseball's Anonymous Testing

The "leaking" of the names of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz yesterday from the now legendary and infamous 2003 list made me stop and think again about the whole idea. I realize that I am not nearly as intelligent as the leaders of MLB of MLBPA, so I must be missing something. What I don't understand is how an "anonymous" test would even have a name associated with it in the first place. Again, I am probably just a stupid fan, but if I had been running the 2003 test, when I said it would be anonymous, I would have made sure that there was no way a name could ever be associated with a given sample.

Since there was no penalty at the time, no player tested needed to try and hide anything. I don't know exactly how the testing was administered, but here is a general idea of how my really anonymous testing would have gone. Have the players gather in the locker room. They all give a sample. All the samples are given to someone who has no idea what sample is what. They randomly choose one or two samples and toss the rest. At this point no one, not even the people giving the sample would know let alone the sampling testers, unless of course you were going to do some kind of DNA testing for the purpose of finding out. These samples are still not even labeled or marked or anything. They are put in a container that is identical to the container that this same sample set is being put in at every other team facility. These completely unidentifiable samples are gathered together in completely unidentifiable containers to make the sample test. The testing is done and we get our 104 positives. But who would ever know which individual was related to it?

Obviously there was something very wrong with the "sort of anonymous" test from the very beginning if an individual's name could ever in any way be associated with his sample. It is obviously NOT an anonymous test.

Newbie blogger

As I sit and face my life as a blogger, some of my initial thoughts revolve around what do I really want to consider as "blogworthy" thoughts. I don't think they need to be the most deep things I have thought in days but can they be things that even I know are simple and not to deep?

Throughout the day, thoughts come and go. Sometimes I will ask myself, is this something to blog about? I guess the question I need to answer is whether I need to ask that question! Will I simply "know" when something needs a blog? Or do I need to have some kind of rational filter that tells me yes you should blog this or no don't bother?

If anyone reads this blog, let me know if you think similar thoughts or how you handle the whole idea of what is blogworthy.

First Thoughts

This is my first entry. Not really any thoughts at this point. Just the famous first step.

Obviously "thoughts" is a very generic concept, but that is also very freeing. I can stay in my "blog-scope" with many different issues. Sports thoughts. Food thoughts. Relational thoughts. Music thoughts. Hopefully a wide variety of these can be found here and hopefully some of them will actually even be worth while!

I do hope that as I work through this, I will become a better writer and communicator. I have several friends that I think are great already, just hope to be as good as they are!

Happy Friday and welcome to my thoughts!