OWYOUNG

October 8, 2006

Well, it's certainly not a professional shot. And it's not close to the kind of quality I used to put out when photography was a true hobby of mine. Nevertheless, I was able to get this shot of the Blue Angels flying above my apartment building this afternoon, using a digital point-and-shoot.

October 1, 2006

Go ahead, call me a genius for what I wrote on 9/13/2006 about "Survivor." Three episodes into the season, Mark Burnett did exactly as I predicted -- that the division of tribes by race would not play out the entire season -- when the tribes were realigned this past Thursday.

September 13, 2006

As an ardent fan of "Survivor" since its first season, I can't help but weigh in on all of the brouhaha surrounding this season's premise of dividing the "tribes" by race. Now, if you think I'm going to come on my web site -- eh, I mean, my blog -- to discuss race and whether the show is doing right or wrong, think again.

The only thing I have to say is that there is conceptually no difference between the way the show has divided players in the past (by gender and age, by external appearance and popularity) and the way it's dividing players this season. I emphasize conceptually. So what's the big deal?

Therein lies the trigger to my posting. I am not so much amazed at all of the yap surrounding the start of this season as much as I am amazed at how people have jumped all over the show and the topic, and being the genesis of all this "racial controversy," really, without even having seen one episode.

For those who know how "Survivor" works, you know there will be twists and turns that invariably will have the show end completely different than how it started. Mark Burnett is a marketing genius for generating all this buzz for doing the same thing he has done with "Survivor" for the past six years (I won't go into all the details to support my point of why Burnett is a genius. Reality-TV couch potatoes will understand.).

And so for everyone else out there who are not "Survivor" fans but are the kind of people who refrain from pre-judging, then this season's premise should be no big deal to you, either. At least for the time being.

August 16, 2006

Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! ... Armando Benitez blew another save tonight.

July 30, 2006

So .... a couple of things. One, I finally got tired of looking at the outdated homepage. "Updated: Friday, December 28, 2001" ... geez, could I have been lazier for the past five years? Well, lazy at updating my website, anyway.

Secondly, what's the big deal about blogging? All this clamoring about myspace and the proliferation of online-publication scribes writing blogs ... I mean, I just got done looking at the archive files of the first version of my website, circa 1999, and we were doing "web diaries" back then. And I'm sure web diaries were written even before I hopped onto the "Information Superhighway."

What's the saying? "Hate the game. Don't hate the player"? Well, I don't care enough to hate -- "hate is such a strong word" -- but I do find this current fascination with web blogs comically interesting.