My Favorite Blank

The bulldogs from Athens, Georgia is getting ready to take on the Arkansas Razorbacks for the winner of the SEC basketball conference. This should be a good game and I can’t wait for the tip off that is about 30 minutes away. Even the storms in Atlanta can’t stop this match up today from happening. The skies are crystal clear and very blue over the Atlanta city skyline.

It will be important for Georgia to continue what they have been doing and that’s the tough and scrappy defense that has got them here. They get into foul trouble playing this way, but it’s prove to be effective to this point. Hopefully our players from Georgia will make it to halftime with 2 fouls or less for our top 7 or 8 players on the team. The whole team has been working the magic in this SEC tourney run and I hope that continues today in the Championship Game.

It was tough on our boys to have played back to back games and now have to turn around play a 3rd game in 2 days. They are young, strong and determined and as far as I am concerned, they are already champions in my book. Let’s hope the basketball gods are kind to them one more time and let them get out of the SEC with a championship that they deserve so much. Go Dawgs!!!

It’s not been too long from the days of the dial up services and I think most now have some type of high speed connection online. I use to just be happy being online, but you soon learn that speed is everything on the internet. You can really waste a lot of time if you have to constantly wait for pages to be loaded. I’m glad I made the upgrade to a high speed connection and if you still have a dial up service, you really should make the jump to high speed internet.

There is just so much information that can travel through those existing phone lines and you really need some type of CAT5e product that can push much more information through in a shorter amount of time. The router and the cables that come with a high speed connection allow you to exchange much more information online; than you ever could with a standard phone line. The Ethernet cable is larger than the phone line running from your phone to the wall jack. So when the World Wide Web comes knocking at your door and wants to send that information through the line, bigger is better!  If you have considered a high speed connection in the past, but haven’t made the jump yet, go ahead and make arrangements today to move up to a higher speed service, I promise you will never regret it!

My twin nephews turned 3 in December and I believe they have learned a lot during those 3 years. They can sing songs, say the alphabet, know some of the state capitals and they know what they like to watch on television. They are both much smarter than I was when I was 3 years old. They don’t even like their kiddie toys anymore and want the stuff they know they are not suppose to have. I guess even as adults we keep that little trait going; wanting things we can’t have. I think they will make an easy transition to when school starts for them, since they have learned to play with each other and will have each other at school. I know they won’t be this size forever, so I try to enjoy them now and I just wonder how much of this they will remember when they get older.

College Basketball is very exciting right now with all the conferences having their tournaments this week. Some champions have already been crowned, while others will be crowned on Sunday. Soon after the crownings, the selection process will begin to find the best 64 or 65 teams in the country. It’s a great time of the year and college basketball is very special.

However, they try to pack all this excitement too close together and when you have a tornado that disrupted the SEC tourney; you’re then faced with teams like the Kentucky Wildcats and Georgia Bulldogs having to play two games in one day. Kentucky lost their game to Georgia, so they had to only play one, but Georgia was forced back on the court 5 hours later to take on another very good team in the tournament. The Georgia Bulldogs shocked the nation by sending Kentucky home early in the tournament and it became even a bigger shock when they won their 2nd game of the day over the Bulldogs from Mississippi. Georgia now finds their self in the championship game, where they will once again be facing another very good team in the Arkansas Razorbacks.

College basketball needs to fix this and do it next year! Our weather is changing and emergencies will occur and this needs to be spaced out better. I’m sure if the USC Trojans were faced with this issue the whole landscape would have changed for them. Nobody respects the SEC and teams from the South in general, so it’s no big surprise they would just make Kentucky and Georgia play 2 games in one day. You can bet your last dollar the same would have not been the case if the USC Trojans had to face this terrible dilemia.

College Basketball had no compassion for the tornados in Atlanta and even chose to take the tournament a few minutes away to the Georgia Tech Thriller Dome; where they let over 9,000 seats go unfilled thinking this was the best way to handle the situation. College basketball failed and I hope Atlanta never invites another SEC event back into our state. College Football is already a mess with no playoffs and yet they crown a champion based on the rich guys and the schools they attended.

Students of the natural sciences are in agreement when they say that of all the creatures in the animal kingdom, only humans seek to adorn themselves. Even as far in the past as primitive man, designer jewelry took on this role in a variety of forms.. Small objects were of primary importance, with some examples being found in the early Neolithic strata of the caverns in mas d’avil. It was here that many pierces stags’ teeth were discovered, often still in the shape of a necklace with its holding twine long since disintegrated. (Jewelry objects have now been found in pre-historic Africa that date back about 75,000 years.)

Closely related to the human need for ornamentation was the use of jewelry as amulets endowed with magical powers. For a true understanding of the growth and history of the importance of jewelry and precious stones, one has to be aware of the indelible belief that precious stones could affect the fortunes of the wearer.

I believe it does affect the person wearing it and if it’s not with any luck or fortunes, it still makes a nice little chunk of change at the pawn shops!

Have you been to a high school sporting event lately? It seems the guys in high school are getting so big these days. You can always find one or two people at a high school that has a very adult appearance, but now you see a lot of the athletes on the field and court having those adult like features. I’m not sure if our health and nutrition is better these days or if it’s due to bodybuilding supplements. My local high school football team has at least a dozen guys on the team, I believe I could take to any sports bar or club and could get them past the guy checking ID’s at the door. It’s not just their looks either, but the amount of weight they are lifting and the speed they are running at is amazing. The future of sports is going to be very bright in another decade or so, when these new-look athletes from high school start to sign all those professional sports contracts!

What started out as a typical Friday day in the Peach State would all go horribly wrong before the day was over. Beautiful weather, warm temperatures and Atlanta hosting the SEC college basketball tournament was just a few of the highlights going on in Georgia on March 14th. A typical basketball game being played in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta would come to a crashing halt as the city of Atlanta was being hit with the first tornado ever! It was the first direct hit from a F2 tornado and it caused damage at the Georgia Dome and many of the surrounding landmarks in the heart of Atlanta.

There was one person that said the tornado in Atlanta on Friday Night reminded him of the Olympic Bombing during the 1996 Olympics. It had that same impact and panic in the streets of Atlanta. My home is located 40 miles north of the Atlanta area and I’m not even sure the powerful F2 tornado made one limb move in my area. It was unbelievable at all the destruction that was taking place in Atlanta, while just a few miles up the road nothing was happening.

The amazing part of it all is that nobody lost their life in this powerful twister that stayed on the ground for over 6 miles in the heart of Atlanta. When I say the “heart of Atlanta”, I mean that in every sense and if you had to pick the middle of Atlanta, you would choose the area around Phillips Arena, the CNN Building and Georgia Dome. Mother Nature took a precise hit on Georgia that only a military general could appreciate; that might be trying to land a guided missile to a target.

The residents in our state didn’t have time to lend a hand or feel sympathy for the city of Atlanta, because as soon as the Mayor of Atlanta Shirley Franklin was declaring the city of Atlanta in a state of emergency, the rest of Georgia would take it’s blows on Saturday. Storm after storm came blowing through our state, all of them were moving very fast, but leaving damage behind all the way. The main topic on Saturday March 15th was hail. We had pea size hail, grape size hail, golf ball size hail and even some had baseball size hail falling from the skies. Mother Nature didn’t stop with her attack on Atlanta, but she then sent out the other weapons in her arsenal and began to carpet bomb the state of Georgia with frozen pieces of ice. Georgia has truly been in a war zone over the last two days and it’s finally good to see that the attacks have stopped for now. Lives were lost on Saturday, homes destroyed and the people’s way of living has taken a whole new perspective in the 24 hours of destruction that took place on a March Weekend in the Peach State.