So yes, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out about 10 hours ago on the East Coast when thousands (millions?) of little kids, teenagers, college students, and probably grown adults lined up at bookstores across the nation awaiting the last installment of the series. I, myself, am unabashed to say that I pre-ordered the book from Amazon.com all the way back in February. I’m a huge fan of the whole Harry Potter series so I’m highly anticipating getting the package very soon later today and reading the whole thing in a day. As it stands, Snape has killed Dumbledore and Harry vows to not go back to Hogwarts and seek out Voldemort to finally kill him. Did I say I was excited? I have a few of my own predictions on what is going to happen, but I just want to read the god damn book and get a definite conclusion. I’ve been trying to stay away from the Internet in fear of coming across ANY spoilers, but I did read a synopsis of the NYT review and everyone is saying that the conclusion is very un-Sopranos like – aka satisfying and conclusive. My dick of a friend Jim has probably already finished the book seeing how he was one of the thousands to line up at bookstores last night, and as promised, he sent me a text with probably a huge spoiler. I hate the feeling of having an unopened text, but Harry Potter is much more important than with the way I feel. But fuck Jim regardless.
Last night, I headed into the city with my parents to meet up with my sister for dinner at The Sea Grill, a seafood restaurant in the bottom of Rockefeller Plaza. This past week and next week are the semi-annual event regarded as “Restaurant Week”. Some of the best (but not the really really extraordinary ones, because those fuckers don’t necessarily need the publicity) restaurants offer price-fixe menus for lunch ($24.50) and dinner ($35). The lunch is much more worth the money, because you get essentially the same food and portions at a discounted price. But with my whole family working, dinner was the only option. The food was pretty good, I had some crab prawns for an appetizer, grilled sea bass for an entree, and some sort of pudding + strawberry sorbet for dessert.
On my way in to the city, however, I noticed something that I just need to rant about for a bit. We had just entered the city through the Holland Tunnel and I saw a billboard for “World’s Best Rum”. This bold statement caught my attention, but the ad was pretty stupidly retarded. From about 500 feet away, I could not discern the actual name of the rum from the billboard. I thought the whole point of having a 40 x 60 foot advertisement on a road was so that you could catch the attention of motorists as they were driving by at pretty high speeds. Even worse, however, was the fact that when I was DRIVING BY the billboard, the name of the rum was still too small to actually tell what it was. Someone needs to fire the person who designed that shit… cause it was definitely a huge waste of money. What am I supposed to do? Google “World’s Best Rum”? Well that doesn’t work out so well…
I’m currently watching the British Open on ABC, with the possibility of playing some poker and firing up a few SnG’s (Sit n Go’s). Tiger, unfortunately, has yet to make his signature “I’m going to play superhuman and fuck up the rest of the field” move on Saturday so far, but he still has a few more holes to have this round put him back into contention. I say “unfortunately” not because I’m a huge Tiger fan, but watching Tiger play at his best always leaves me awestruck. Sergio Garcia is the current leader right now at -7, with KJ Choi two shots back at -5, and a few others at -4. Assuming that Tiger doesn’t make a miraculous run through the last few tough holes and finishes the day at like -4 (which is probably a bad assumption, but whatever), I’m going to pick KJ Choi to win the Open this year. He’s playing extremely well (winner of two big tournaments in the Memorial and AT&T National in the past two months) and the course is fit perfectly for his game. It’s not too long, and KJ is an extremely accurate tee to green player. Sergio is also one of the better tee to green players on the Tour (some say when he’s on, one of the best), but once we’re on that green, only God knows where that shit is going. Sergio showed so much potential in his battle with Tiger at the 1999 PGA, but has since choked away tournament after tournament. Additionally, through the first 4 holes of today, Choi is driving straight and hitting his irons well, whereas Sergio has been a bit wild off the tee. The penalty of a bad drive isn’t necessarily as bad as it was at the US Open, but getting into the deep feskew is never a good idea. I’ll take KJ and his steady game over Sergio, his lead, and his extremely volatile game (check out the Driving Accuracy and GIR stats).
**update** So it’s like noon right now and Sergio is at -9 (with a good putt for -10), Steve Stricker is at -6, and KJ Choi is at -4. Oh yeah, Tiger finished at -1. Maybe I was wrong about Sergio and it could be his week, but then again, you never know when the Sergio Collapse will come.
Some more sports… The NFL is mired in the Michael Vick scandal (which I will not write about until we start to get more facts – lesson learned from the Duke scandal), the MLB has Bonds’ chase of Aaron’s HR record (which brings to light racial divides and the whole steroids issue), while the NHL… well the NHL just absolutely sucks right now. Right when we thought that the NBA was the league that could do no wrong with rising stars (Lebron, D-Wade, Greg Oden, Kevin Durant) to complement it’s established stars (Kobe, Shaq, Nash, Duncan to name a few), it got a huge fucking bombshell yesterday. A veteran NBA official of 13 years, Tim Donaghy, has been accused of betting on NBA games, including ones he has officiated. That last part, “including ones that he has officiated”, is probably the most disturbing one as a pretty avid NBA fan. It’s one thing to gamble on horses, other sports, or even other NBA games you’re not officiating (I am, of course, not one who is against the concept of gambling), but a completely different thing to be betting on games you are officiating. Could Donaghy have actually affected a game in a point shaving scheme? I doubt he could have had that much influence on a game since each NBA game is officiated by 3 referees and it would become pretty obvious if one guy was just calling tons of stupid fouls on one particular team. And basketball isn’t like baseball, where the home plate ump clearly has much more authority than the other umpires calling balls and strikes. At the same time, however, one has to wonder if Donaghy actually did use his officiating power to affect the outcome of games. Someone, throughout the course of this investigation, will probably have to go through the game film of any games Donaghy both officiated and gambled on. It’s sad that something like this will severely damage the trust fans have with officials and the integrity of the game. Let’s hope we can learn something from this and prevent it from happening in the future.
-K
Posted by kevinhuang 