Hey, never had a chance to congratulate Luke, who came up with the idea of an element/not an element round a couple of weeks ago. Nice work. Also, as far as that Philly mag bashing I promised earlier, it might have to wait till tommorrow. Usually, I pick up that mag and can stand it for about 5 minutes, and find plenty of things to make fun of almost immediately. But this issue is kind of…um…uh…good. I read for like an hour and still have more to read. I’m sure I’ll be able to bash the cover story about Philly being cool, but I haven’t read that one yet. So check back manana.

Alright, the holiday is over, and you are back at work. You just had a number of awkward family moments, you ate too much, you made out with somebody completely inapproriate, and now you’ve returned to the salt mines. You really feel like ranting, but you don’t really have anybody to rant to. Well, now you do. Send me your angriest/funniest rant about anything (your job, your family, your holiday, the president, the Eagles, your boyfriend/girlfriend, etc.) You can even leave a codename if you like, so you won’t be found out. And you can make it as long as you want, from a sentence to a short story. Send your rant to johnny@johnnygoodtimes.com. I’ll be posting the best ones, and the most excellent one gets two passes to the Adventure Aquarium in historic Camden and 2nd place gets a $15 gift certificate to the Good Dog! Contest ends Friday. Also, tune in later today. I just got the latest issue of Philadelphia magazine, and I feel like bashing it. But first I need to get a cup of coffee.

Hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday!

This from ESPN.com. This would be a sweet deal for the Phils, who are in desperate need of a young center fielder who doesn’t punch cops. Also, there are some good comments under the Phils story below. Feel free to put in your two cents.

Here’s an interesting piece worth reading on ESPN.com about how all of the Eagles seem to be sticking up for TO instead of Donovan. Might also be a good time to reread the comments Bernard Hopkins made a few months ago about the situation.

I read this today in the Inky.
How can you not be bitter when the Phillies have lost more games than any franchise in the history of professional sports and have only one World Series title in more than 120 years of baseball?
I constantly hear people reciting this trivia fact as if it’s really indicative of this town’s sports teams failures. Of course, this fact is completely meaningless, for a number of reasons. First, the Phillies play baseball, which has a 162 game season. That is roughly twice as many games as hockey and basketball have, and ten times as many as football has. So a bad football team would take about 9 years to equal the amount of losses that a great baseball team would have in a single season. In addition, the Phils began play in 1883. The NHL began in 1917, the NFL in 1920, and the NBA began play in 1946. The Phils have played several thousand more games than most of those teams, so of course they’ve lost more games. Ok, so what about baseball? There are only three teams in the majors that have been around as long as the Phils, so you can really only measure them against those three teams. So the Phils have more losses than the Reds, the Cardinals, and the Giants. Nothing to be proud of, but not really that shameful. There are many sports franchises more woeful than the Phillies when you use the only meaningful stat as a comparison, winning %. The Phils have a .467 winning percentage. Again, nothing to brag about. However, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have a winning % of .382, and the LA Clippers (who really are the worst team in the history of pro sports) have a % of .358. Numerous other teams have a % worse than .467. The point is, there are plenty of fun facts you can point to about the Phils phailures, so why go the lazy route and write (or say, b/c I hear people saying it on WIP all the time too) the most cliched and worthless stat about Philadelphia sports futility? As for the 2nd part of that sentence, “…and have only one World Series title in more than 120 years of baseball.”, he would have been better served to write one championship, not one World Series. The Series has only been around since 1903, but they had baseball championships in the 20 years before that and the Phillies not only never won one, they never even made it to the championship game.

There are, of course, numerous people who don’t think that Oswald killed Kennedy, and it seems highly suspicious that he was the lone gunman. Here’s a fairly good analysis of the assassination on PBS’s website. Here’s a write up in the Houston Chronicle that’s fairly interesting, presenting a theory I had never heard before:
Perhaps most intriguing is the idea that there was not one Oswald, but two, that long before the shots in Dealey Plaza rang out, a secret organization — maybe the CIA, maybe the KGB, maybe the FBI — had recruited a look-alike to live a life parallel to Oswald’s. Here is a website that tries to dispell many, but not all, of the reasons for doubt. Many people place Jack Ruby as part of the plot to kill the president. Ruby fought to clear his name, but a lot of his comments to the Warren Commission were fairly cryptic. Here a guy tries to defend Ruby, claiming that he was not part of a conspiracy and was simply insane. This is pretty neat: a minute by minute account of Lee Harvey Oswald’s movements and words in the two days between JFK’s death and his own. And of course, everybody likes to talk about the similarities about the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations.

What Audie Murphy movie was playing at the theatre where Lee Harvey Oswald was captured?

This from Dan Gross:
Philadephia Soul partner and Ritz-Carlton owner Craig Spencer and wife B.J.rented Chickie’s & Pete’s (15th & Packer) two Saturdays ago for a lavish Bat Mitzvah party for daughter Taylor. Among those in attendance were Gov. Rendell and Eagles Reno Mahe, Jason Short and Stephen Spach. Q102’s Chio was the DJ. Southern-rock band Ingram Hill, from Tennessee, played too. The guest of honor arrived on a motorcycle. A mechanical bull was set up outside.
OK, at first glance, this seems like one of those ridiculous rich teenager parties that they show on MTV and you watch just in the sick, sick hope that the dance floor somehow catches on fire and horror ensues. But then the last sentence changed everything. “A mechanical bull was set up outside.” What? All of a sudden, I kind of like this Spencer guy. Sure, he’s loaded, but at least he’s spending some of that hard-earned money on a mechanical bull. I’m telling you, mechanical bulls change everything.

We raised $216 this past week for Community Voice Mail! Thanks for your donation towards a worthwhile cause. We’ll do it again in December. I think I’ve already got a pretty neat one lined up.