My 2013 NFL Draft Predictions

-Luke Joeckel will be the best tackle in this draft
-Chance Warmack will be the best OL (guard or tackle) in this draft
-Eric Fisher will be a disappointment
-Dion Jordan will not live up to the hype
-Dee Milliner will be a shutdown corner
-Tyler Eifert will be a success, but not a top TE
-In the right scheme, Jarvis Jones will be a perennial pro-bowler
-Manti T'eo will be great
-EJ Manuel will be the best QB of this class
-DeAndre Hopkins will be the best WR

Player not to be drafted in the first round...
-Dion Jordan
-Ziggy Ansah
-Geno Smith
-Tavon Austin
-D.J. Fluker

Thoreau's Idea

Step one, conform

Step two, follow the norm

Step three, now listen carefully

Think free but suppress such defiant acts

What we are told is success

Lies in our ability to impress

Fight this systems wrath

Wear that most personal path

Sweeping change is hopeless

Within oneself is all we possess

For resolve and its ability to warn

To diverge, is to be reborn

Thoreau’s perfect idea

Live the dance of the free

2012 NFL Draft Predictions

(Writing this down here as proof for how NFL should hire me to be on the scouting teams)

My 2012 NFL Draft predictions...
-Ryan Tannehill will be a bust.  Like should not have been taken in the first round bust.
-RGIII will do well and may make a few pro bowls but won't win a Superbowl
-Andrew luck will be a perennial pro bowler and win multiple Superbowls. Peyton Manning level.
-Morris Claiborne will not be a shutdown corner.
-Matt Kalil will be a mediocre tackle.
-Trent Richardson will be a top 5 RB in the league.
-Justin Blackmon will be a disappointment.
-Fletcher Cox will be a pro-bowler.
-Dontari Poe will be a bust.
-Riley Reiff will end up being a better OT than Kalil.
-Luke Kuechly will be a decent LB.
-Stephon Gilmore will end up as a better CB than Claiborne.
-Quinton Coples will be a star DE.
-Mark Barron will be a pro bowl safety.
-Michael Floyd will be a legit No. 1 receiver.
-Coby Fleener will be a bust.
-Chris Polk will be a steal.
-Kellen Moore, if given a chance, will be a steal.
-Brandon Weeden will be drafted by the 49ers and win a Superbowl before any other QB in this class.

Players that should not have been drafted in the first round...
-Ryan Tannehill
-Matt Kalil
-Melvin Ingram
-Dontarie Poe
-Coby Fleener
-Dre Kirkpatrick

Listening to: Ray LaMontagne - Empty

The Unaware

Look back
Look past
Away from lights shown
A personal direction
Of which no one shares

In the faces of the diverted
Simple truths
Of grins and scowls
Wonder and disinterest
Apathy and awe
Tell more than the aware

Without knowing
One’s company
Nor confines
Nor ambience
Smiles cannot be fabricated
By the logic of the mind
If such a mind is engaged

Such truth
Such universal truth
Seek such truth
Look back
Look against

Much Obliged Star...

Listening to: Sigur Rós - Hoppípolla

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode."
-Lawrence M. Kruass

It's difficult for me to wrap my mind around that. Not because I don't believe it, but because it seems so foreign. Reminding myself our Sun is a star is a daily routine, simply because its brethren are the most meaningless of specks in the nighttime sky (Meaningless, in their effect on our day to day existence, not towards the Universe as a whole. I must say, their affect is great) and it could not be more meaningful. I will never feel another star's warmth or its blinding light. The light I see from them is, at the very least, over 4 years old and likely much greater. For all I know, the star I look at now, has long since died. It's like looking at the pages of a history book. I will never know that time or that place, all I can do is imagine what it would be like be sitting at the feet of the our greatest philosophers and breathing in their skepticism of the status quo. Yet, these distant cousins are what created me. Without them we are all dark matter, aimlessly existing in the great expanse of space. Billions of years ago a star exploded, likely only a few interstellar blocks away. A small portion of the elements left behind, after years and years of being recycled and recycled, would come to form the random concoction that is me. I hope I do not disappoint star.

Random musings...

In case anyone outside of my own consciousness was wondering, I was tampering with my own website for a while and using that as my blogging headquarters. Tons of spam comments and hours of headache-inducing directory issues (thank you Wordpress) later, I'm back to the tried and true blogger.com format.

So, I present some random musings...

-I used to laugh at people that needed TUMS, I now am those people.

-Red wine has far exceeded white wine for the time being.

-Being a sports fan in Philadelphia over the past year has been trying.

-The Walking Dead = my new Lost.

-To stay in the city or become a suburbanite, thus is the question on my mind most right now.

-Stars, the incomprehensible amount of stars in the Universe. More stars in the Universe than grains of sand on Earth.

-Did you know that the Universe and the observable universe are often differentiated by a upper or lower-case U at the beginning? The observable universe being lower-case and overall Universe being upper-case.

-Do you ever find yourself on Wikipedia or in a book looking for the most random pieces of information (like my recent interest: President Truman's courting of Bess Wallace, really fascinating love story btw) and then trying to figure out the logical tangents you took to get there? Never does time go by faster than when you're learning something new and interesting.

-Just realized this post is an example of those logical tangents.

-The worries of adulthood. Sometimes I feel like pulling up, taking the savings and buying a small house in the middle of a small town. Finding a nice small job that can buy the food and pay for the heat, but foregoing all else. Would such a life be liberating at first but nosedive into a feeling of boredom with no purpose?

-Green is such a calming color. At this moment I cannot recall one negative connotation associated with it. Nor do I want to.

-Grammar, very important and at the same time can be incredibly trivial (I'm fairly certain this sentence is grammatically incorrect. I should look up how to fix it, but I won't, I'll leave it be).

-Disassembling and reassembling pens. The 20th century time waster.

-I am sincerely interested in how people actually met up with one another before cell phones. How many times have you picked a time and place to meet someone, only to get there and be unable to find them? Now you can simply pull out your phone and call/text them. There's even phone apps that let you temporarily share your location with a friend so they can find you on their phone. What did we do before? Did we just wander around until we found our acquaintance? Were people just more meticulous when making picking a time and exact location? Perhaps the success rate of meet-ups was far lower before cell phones. I'm not young enough where I didn't encounter such scenarios, but I'll be damned if I can remember what I did.

-Meeting with someone for lunch. I will make every attempt to be forgo technology in the next hour and find my friend sans cell phone.

And with that, until next time, cheers.

The Exception

I believe in the exception
The men who go beyond the status of hero
They are the closest and the farthest from ordinary
Such men prove, through our whimsical deeds of good,
The same ones who help us sleep the sounder sleep,
That the trading of trivial benevolence for piece of mind
Is a disregard for which we are all culpable of

I believe in the exception
The nullifiers of convention and stereotypes
They open our eyes to our beloved ignorance
An ignorance of appalling magnitude
The type of which we hold so tight
For the world’s realities are too much of a burden
Not worthy of being bothered with

I believe in the exception
The one inside of every man
The few who open their eyes to man’s injustice
Create and breathe amends for their blindness
Minds who awaken to the genocide of decency
Yet choose the immune life of preaching false ethics
With shrugged shoulders and empty words of remorse
Continue to be the majority, the authority
Perhaps the day when the exception becomes the rule
The sleep slept of soundness and peace
Will be shared throughout the world

RSIL...

New type of post I’ll try to share fairly frequently called “real shit I learned.” I have quite the reputation for having the most random facts rattling around in my head. The creation of Wikipedia has quite possibly had more effect on my life than Cafe Du Monde coffee. Generally, I go looking for some specific information but inevitably hours will pass as I go on tangent after tangent reading through its pages.

Well, yesterday I randomly had the movie “The Ghost and The Darkness” pop into my head. Tangent: I know it’s grammatically incorrect to capitalize a trivial work such as “the” in the title of a movie but technically it’s a name since the two man-eating lions were called “The Ghost” and “The Darkness”. Am I wrong? Anyway, this random movie from my high school years came into my head and I felt the urge to look up if such man-eating lions actually do exist. Well, they do, since the movie was based on the true events surrounding the killings of 35-135 men in the African town of Tsavo, Kenya. Basically, these two maneless lions pictured here…



terrorized a camp of workers who were building a railroad for the British. Over a matter of months these lions not only attacked the men during the day, but also went into the camps at night and took the men as they slept! I don’t know about you but knowing a man-eating lion was walking around outside my tent is right up there with diarrhea as the number one cause for insomnia. Seriously, after the 2nd or 3rd guy was kidnapped by a lion I think I’d find a new career path. Anyway, these two lions killed a bunch of people and were finally shot by some badass bridge builder/colonel/hunter named John Henry Patterson after months of trying. Like any rational human being who just killed the most horrifying animals to have ever existed (I’m honestly trying to think of an actual animal that’s worse….nope, none), he kept the skins of the two lions for rugs before donating them to Chicago’s Museum of Natural History where they were stuffed and put on display (which is the picture above). Oh, and these weren’t just your normal run of the mill 5ft to 8ft lions, no these bastards were over 9ft long from nose to tail.

Also, I learned Liger’s are the biggest felines in the world. Just fyi.