An editorial cartoon...

This is an editorial cartoon that I enjoyed, courtesy of the Boston Globe. I don't claim to be a financial genius, but I'm concerned about the $1 trillion bailout the U.S. Government is working on as we speak.

Just in case you can't read the text in the bottom right, it says: "Sharing profits worked differently."

ARR! I be Iron Sam Flint, ruler of the 3 and 3/4 seas!

Today be national talk like a pirate day, lubbers! T' truly enjoy this fine and bloodthirsty day, take this 'ere quiz and find you're true pirate name. ARR!

My pirate name is:

Iron Sam Flint

A pirate's life isn't easy; it takes a tough person. That's okay with you, though, since you a tough person. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
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Uh... nice ornament?

I saw this in Cambridge as I was driving home from work last week. It is easily the largest thing I've ever seen hanging from a rear view mirror.

To further set the scene, Latin music was blaring from this car as loud as possible. That's interesting because the woman in the car was on her cell phone.

Brady Out for Season

Well, the worst possible thing that could have happened to the New England Patriots happened in the first quarter of Sunday's game: A Tom Brady Knee Injury.

The team announced today at a 3 p.m. news conference that Brady will require surgery, and he is done for the season.

Ugh.

In all likelihood, that ends the team's chances of returning to the Super Bowl. The 2008 Patriots can probably still make the playoffs, but now there are definitely better teams in the AFC.

For millions of Patriots fans, today has been a day of despair. Certainly, some (all) of the luster has been taken out of the season opener.

What the hell are we going to do now?

In times like these, I always turn to one man to make me feel better: Bill Belicheck.

Here is Belicheck's quote from the news conference (courtesy of Mark Murphy and the Providence Journal)

"We all just have to do our jobs. That's what every player has to do. Each guy has a job to do, a coach, a player, they have a job to do, and they need to do it as well as they can. Really that doesn't change.

"[Brady] played one position and he played it very well. There will be somebody else playing that position now. I have a lot of confidence in Matt [Cassel] and everybody else does to [sic]. They just have to continue to do their job just like they always have and like they always need to."

Well, now I'm fired up.... thanks, Bill.

Of course, he's right. If the Patriots are going to make anything of this season, they'll have to put a new chip on their shoulder and win despite Tom Brady. Everyone will say their season is done too.

Brady was only one part of the team (a HUGE part), and now the rest of the very talented roster is going to have to shine in order of the Pats to get back to the playoffs.

Is that likely? Well, it certainly puts more intrigue into the season. Last year, regular season games got boring after a while. Who wants a guaranteed win? Now the team will have to scratch and claw for every win, just like when they won the Super Bowl against all odds in 2001.

If there is one thing I don't doubt, it's that Brady will be ready for 2009. He's a work out warrior, and my eyes tell me it could have been worse. I can say from experience, it's a good sign that he was able to half walk off the field in the first place. If you have a badly torn ACL, you don't walk anywhere. Remember when Rodney Harrison was carted off against Pittsburgh two years ago?

Let's open the book on the Matt Cassell era, and get ready for some good games. This team has too many veterans, too many hungry players to just throw in the towel after one game.

I'll tell you what is NOT going to happen. The Jets will not finish ahead of the Patriots in the division. You heard it here.

J - E - T - S Suck Suck Suck!

"Who's going to stop us?" Putin said, laughing.

A lot of things have happened in the week since I last posted. The Olympics started, an event that fully deserves its own post. That will have to come later.

More importantly, Russia invaded Georgia, the former Soviet republic (not the state).

The Russians weren't unprovoked. Georgia moved into South Ossetia to reclaim the breakaway province after separatists shelled Georgian forces, and Russia responded to protect the people they consider Russian citizens.

After that, Pandora's Box opened wide, and what came out was a Russian display of force nobody saw coming. The vastly superior Russian army rolled over the Georgians, not only taking back the two breakaway regions (Abkhazia is the other) but also driving deep into Georgia proper.

The rest of the world stood by and watched as a pro-NATO, pro-U.S. government got its ass kicked. That is not good.

But what could be done? Did anyone want to open a full shooting war with Russia? Hell no.

Now, you can believe what you want about protecting Russian citizens, but South Ossetia and Abkhazia are both home to major oil pipelines and other petroleum infrastructure.

Russia's invasion of Georgia served three purposes:

The first was to further consolidate its stranglehold on the oil infrastructure in the Caucasus region, which it uses to supply Europe with a large portion of its petroleum.

The second was to show the other former Soviet republics the penalty for close dealings with NATO and the U.S.

The third was to show the world that Russia means business, and unless you're going to stop them, they're going to do whatever it is they want.

Well, okay then.

When the war started, my first thought was "Is this what it looked like to the rest of the world when we invaded Iraq?" I don't know the answer to that.

Again, say what you like about combating terrorism, but by now we all know that the invasion of Iraq had at least something to do with oil.

So now we have two wars, one short (theirs) and one much longer (ours), that are about oil.

Russia has openly invaded an ally of the U.S. Conversely, the U.S. has effectively surrounded and continuously threatened a Russian ally, Iran.

Remember that line about being doomed to repeat history?

Many, if not all, of the world's largest wars are preceded by tiny ones. World War II started with Germany gobbling up surrounding countries to protect "German citizens" in those areas. World War I started because of a little revolutionary flare up in the Balkans. Stop me when this starts getting familiar.

Or how about this one: The Punic Wars. They were the largest war in history, really three little wars, between Carthage and Rome. They were the western world's two greatest superpowers, and the wars ranged from 264 B.C. to 146 B.C.

They started because both the Carthaginian Empire and the Roman Republic involved themselves on opposite sides of petty land disputes between tribes in Sicily, a strategic concern for both superpowers.

The world's energy crisis is not going away. Neither is Russia. Or China, for that matter. If they're willing to bulldoze half of their largest city just to throw a huge party, what else are they willing to do?

I'm not saying tomorrow, but this will get much bigger than we thought, and soon.

Joba on the DL

Well, I guess I told you so. Yankee pitcher Joba Chamberlain was placed on the 15 day diabled list today. Will he pitch again this season? Nobody knows.

Read about the story here, courtesy of the NY Post.

If Joba is unable to return to the Yankees' rotation, or is severely limited when he returns, I'm not sure how the Yankees will be able to contend for the pennant.

A pithy political cartoon...

I'm feeling particularly political today, so here is a nice little cartoon I found on Boston.com. I think this sums it up nicely.