Happy Veterans Day to all. It doesn't seem like much of a holiday though. It's on a crappy Tuesday this year, meaning Monday was a school day. The private schools don't observe it; the school I live next to was alive and buzzing, even louder than recent mornings, which got me up when their bell rang at 8, when I usually get up on Tuesdays. All financial markets and businesses seem to be open. No time to reflect when there's a dollar to be made. Even the Senate is in session after Senator Reid of Nevada spoke for 8 straight hours yesterday in protest of an upcoming 30-hour session on judicial nominations, holding up an appropriations bill. So it seems Veterans Day will always be lost in the shadow of Memorial Day. At least it has this Simpsons dialogue.

Bart: I just think our veterans deserve a little recognition.
Lisa: That's what Veterans Day is for, Bart.
Bart: But is that really enough to honor our brave soldiers?
Lisa: They also have Memorial Day!
Bart: Oh Lisa, maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, the important thing is that veterans deserve a day to honor them!
Lisa: They have TWO!
Bart: Well maybe they should have three, I'm Bart Simpson.

Like almost everyone else, I'm fighting illness right now, luckily in its later stages. Still, I'm feelin awfully tired, even though I always feel like that nowadays. But things got worse on Sunday when I wanted soup, but I couldn't find the can opener anywhere. Not knowing what to do, I did what any desperate guy would do and bashed that can open. Geez, what a loser I am.

The roommate search is going nowhere fast. I guess I'll have to relist it.

Somebody stole my professor's car, an old Nissan Pathfinder. He seems to be taking it in stride, but is it coincidence that it was stolen shortly after midterms? The funny thing is he offered the class extra credit to whomever can find it.

ESPN has been showing some weird things lately. The Spelling Bee is one thing, but the Math competition is a complete waste of time. Playmakers is over-the-top football fun (its season finale is tonite), but Deion Sanders on the All-American Sportsman is a mismatch. Honestly though, do Scrabble and chess belong on ESPN? Scrabble is something to play for fun, not as part of a competition. It doesn't make for good television. Chess does make for good television, they even made a good movie about it with "Searching for Bobby Fischer". But trotting out Garry Kasparov to face a bunch of machines is boring even if this time it's in a virtual reality/3D environment.

As for traditional sports, Cal needs to win its final two games to reach a bowl game for the first time since 1996 when Steve Mariucci coached the football team. It lost last Saturday night to Oregon, blowing a 10 point lead heading into the 4th quarter.

But what's cooler than being cool? The Raiders, at 2-7, are literally ice cold. And to top it off, they're really old too. They're holders of the league's worst record. I would usually laugh, since I'm not a Raiders fan, but this is getting ridiculous.

As a former soccer player (please, I emphasize former and I was awful), I stay interested in the game. How can you take your eyes off the World Cup? But that's every 4 years. In the meantime, there's the crappy MLS. Every year, one thing turns me off from it. This year, it's the playoff format. They went to a two-game aggregate score format, which is totally unfair for a team like San Jose, which blew away the competition and into a first seed in the conference playoffs. With two games, there's no home field advantage. And if one team runs up the score in the first game, the other has little chance of winning the series in the next. In this situation, Los Angeles defeated San Jose last weekend 2-0, which meant San Jose, at home, needed to win by 3 goals in the next and final game to advance. This task was further complicated by the Galaxy scoring twice within the first 13 minutes of the second game. Miraculously, the Earthquakes scored 4 unanswered goals, then scored the golden goal to advance and face Kansas City in the semifinals.

Finally, kudos to the VTA. They've finally finished widening 880 to 3 lanes each way all the way to 101.