Just wanted to give a heads up that I had some problems setting up the RSS feed on my new blog.  I somehow managed to have the RSS links on the new site pointing to the RSS feed address for this site.

Bottom line, if you tried to switch over and set up your feed readers for my new site, you might want to check to make sure they’re pointing to the right place.   I believe I have it properly set now.  If anyone still has problems with it, please let me know.

Thanks to TJ for letting me know about the problem.

In an effort to gain a little bit more control over my little piece of space on the web, the PresentTense has set down roots in another spot.  I’ve purchased  my own domain over at www.thepresenttense.net and have a stand alone version of WordPress running there.  If you’re one of my three subscribers, I hope that you’ll correct any RSS or email subscription feeds you have so that you can still get my totally awesome content.

My own domain will allow me to set up things a little bit more the way I want on my blog.  I have more control over the design and some of the plugins that I have running.  That being said, it will also give me the chance to screw things up more.  If you happen your way over there and something isn’t working, please leave a reply at on the “Feedback” tab so I can try to figure out what the problem is.

A much more satisfying game from the USMNT in Chicago against Trinidad and Tobago tonight.  We’ve put ourselves in an excellent position to go through to the next round of qualifying next year.  At this point, I’m pretty sure we’d have to have a colossal collapse for us to not go through.

To be clear, my happiness with this game isn’t necessarily due simply to the score.  We actually scored two of our three goals from set-pieces, which scoring only from set-pieces has been a source of frustration for me in the past.  Despite only scoring one goal from the run of play, we created a good number of pretty dangerous chances from the field that were one solid touch away from being another goal.  The final touch is something we’ll need to work on, but we definitely showed improvement.

I liked the addition of Sacha Kjlestan in the midfield paired with Bradley.  Kjlestan has been showing some ability as an attacking player for Chivas USA this year in MLS and I’m glad to see Bradley move away from the dual defensive midfield setup for a change.  Not sure if that will be a continuing trend, but I’ll be thankful for it tonight.  I will say that Sacha looked a little nervous in his first start for the full side, but I thought he settled in relatively well as the game wore on and he and Michael Bradley seemed to possess the ball well through the midfield.

One thing that did frustrate me were the instances of carelessness and lack of precision with the ball.  Too many times in the middle of the field, we gave the ball away in really dangerous situations b/c we didn’t focus enough to trap the ball at our feet, or make simple passes that should be pedestrian for professionals and internationals.  There’s nothing more frustrating than giving up a bad goal b/c of carelessness when you have been dominating the game as a team.  A better team would have punished us for those kinds of mistakes.

Not much more to say about the game tonight.  Would have liked to see us put away a couple of the really clear chances we had, but as I said, that will hopefully come.  I think the worst thing for me is we have to wait a month before the next qualifier.  My fiancee probably thinks that’s a good thing.

Pretty regularly my Pops forwards on emails that he and his golf buddies share around the office.  I felt that this one was worthy of a wider audience.  If you don’t play golf these may not be all that amusing or may not make sense, but what will make this funny to golfers is the absolute truth behind many of them.

Hope you enjoy.

ONLY A TRUE GOLFER WILL UNDERSTAND THESE:
- Don’t buy a putter until you’ve had a chance to throw it.
- Never try to keep more than 300 separate thoughts in your mind during your swing.
- When your shot has to carry over a water hazard, you can either hit one more club or two more balls.
- If you’re afraid a full shot might reach the green while the foursome ahead of you is still putting out, you have two options: you can immediately shank a lay-up or you can wait until the green is clear and top a ball halfway there..
- The less skilled the player, the more likely he is to share his ideas about the golf swing.
-  No matter how bad you are playing, it is always possible to play worse.
- The inevitable result of any golf lesson is the instant elimination of the one critical unconscious motion that allowed you to compensate for all of your many other errors
- Everyone replaces his divot after a perfect approach shot.
- A golf match is a test of your skill against your opponents’ luck.
- It is surprisingly easy to hole a fifty foot putt . For a 10.
- Counting on your opponent to inform you when he breaks a rule is like expecting him to make fun of his own haircut.
- Nonchalant putts count the same as chalant putts
- It’s not a gimme if you’re still away.
- The shortest distance between any two points on a golf course is a straight line that passes directly through the center of a very large tree.
- You can hit a two acre fairway 10% of the time and a two inch branch 90% of the time.
- Air is 90% tree.
- If you really want to get better at golf, go back and take it up at a much earlier age.
- Since bad shots come in groups of three, a fourth bad shot is actually the beginning of the next group of three.
- When you look up, causing an awful shot, you will always look down again at exactly the moment when you ought to start watching the ball if you ever want to see it again.
- Every time a golfer makes a birdie, he must subsequently make two triple bogeys to restore the fundamental equilibrium of the universe.
- If you want to hit a 7 iron as far as Tiger Woods does, simply try to lay up just short of a water hazard.
- To calculate the speed of a player’s downswing, multiply the speed of his back-swing by his handicap; i.e., back-swing 20 mph, handicap 15, downswing = 300 mph.
- There are two things you can learn by stopping your back-swing at the top and checking the position of your hands: how many hands you have, and which one is wearing the glove.
- Hazards attract; fairways repel.
- A ball you can see in the rough from 50 yards away is not yours.
- If there is a ball on the fringe and a ball in the bunker, your ball is in the bunker. If both balls are in the bunker, yours is in the footprint
- It’s easier to get up at 6:00 AM to play golf than at 10:00 to mow the yard
- A good drive on the 18th hole has stopped many a golfer from giving up the game.
- Golf is the perfect thing to do on Sunday because you always end up having to pray a lot.
- A good golf partner is one who’s always slightly worse than you are….that’s why I get so many calls to play with friends.
- If there’s a storm rolling in, you’ll be having the game of your life.
- Golf balls are like eggs. They’re white. They’re sold by the dozen. And you need to buy fresh ones each week.
- It’s amazing how a golfer who never helps out around the house will replace his divots, repair his ball marks, and rake his sand traps.
- If your opponent has trouble remembering whether he shot a six or a seven, he probably shot an eight (or worse).
- It takes longer to learn to be a good golfer than it does to become a brain surgeon. On the other hand, you don’t get to ride around on a cart, drink beer, eat hot dogs when you are performing Brain Surgery !!!!

A couple of days have passed, but I still wanted to throw out a few thoughts on the game.

A pretty mundane game, quite honestly.  We got the win, which is pretty important.  I’m tempted to say its the most important thing, but I can’t actually agree with that statement.  I’m half remembering a quote from a movie I don’t remember the name of; “Sometimes when you win you really lose, and sometime when you lose you really win.”  I’m not sure I’d say we lost even though we really won, but I think we tied.

Cuba is a bad team.  There’s no question we should have won this game.  My issue is that we should have won much more handily than we did.  So the conditions weren’t exactly ideal.  It looked as though the field was pretty crappy and there was rain to be dealt with.  That can make it a little harder to play a short passing, possession game.  I actually thought we did reasonably well with that, despite the conditions.

Here are my problems.  Our attack is boring and generally unproductive.  If we can’t create more opportunities than that against Cuba, we’re in trouble.  You know what, I feel like a broken record.  I’m not going to really comment on our crappy attack anymore than to say it still stinks, until it doesn’t anymore.

I’m not so sure about Frankie Hejduk anymore.  He puts forth great effort, but I feel like his effort goes overboard too often.  I don’t think many would disagree that he’s a fill in for Cherundalo when he’s not available, but I think I’d like to find a backup, and eventual successor for Cherundalo that is a little more even keeled.  My other concern about Hejduk is that his his abilities in attack are limited.  He seemed to hit long balls a little too often for my liking, and I wasn’t very impressed with his crosses into the box.

We need to at least try something different in the midfield.  I’m starting to feel like two defensive midfielders is just too conservative.  I could understand it maybe against a team that is equally skilled or better than us, but we should be prepared to try to take the game to less skilled teams.  One defensive mid should be sufficient for a team that we’re much better than, and we could definitely use the extra help to try to produce something in attack.

Brian Ching won a few points with me this past match.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect him to score goals, but he did an excellent job of playing with his back to the goal.  He received the ball and held it long enough to get support and play the ball off to then move the attack along.  Its not exactly what we need from our strikers, but it is something that helps the team.

We play again Wednesday against Trinidad and Tobago in Chicago.  Now we have no excuses not to play an attacking game.  We’re at home with as favorable a crowd as we’re likely to find, the surface should be high quality, and T&T has to travel.  If we don’t show something really impressive this time around, I’m honestly going to be a bit concerned further along in the qualifying.

I’ve been pining after an xBox 360 for a really long time now; pretty much since I bought my HD TV last May.  The combination of my government stimulus check, a gift card my parents gave me for my birthday, and a drop in the prices of xBoxes sealed the deal for me and I finally picked one up.

The system came with Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Forza Motorsports 2, and I had to pick up NCAA College Football 2009.  Ultimate Alliance is okay.  I don’t see myself playing that a great deal.  The other two are a totally different story.

My biggest complaints about Forza and NCAA is that they have too much to offer.  Forza is a pretty straightforward racing game with a rediculous number of cars you can race with even more ways to upgrade them to make them better and cooler.  The replay value on Forza is almost limitless.

NCAA is your typical solid offering from EA.  I haven’t spent a terrible amount of time playing it yet, but I think the gameplay mode I’ve been playing is one of the most interesting aspects of the game.  In Campus Legend mode you can create an athlete starting in the playoffs of your senior year of high school.  You pick a position and outfit him the way you want him to look.  You play as many games as your team plays through the playoffs trying to rack up stats to get yourself recruited to a good school.  After you get a scholarship, you settle in on campus and try to rack up as many stats as you can, hopefully on the way to a Heisman trophy winning career.

The interesting thing is, you only have control of your player, and you only play the plays he’s involved in.  You also have to work your way up the depth chart before you get to play in games.  You work your way up the depth chart by going to practice to improve your skills between games and pick off the field activities to improve.  One of those off field activities has to be going to the library some to keep up your GPA.

Now that I have my 360, all I have to wait for is Rock Band 2 to come out next Sunday.  Oh Yeah, we’re gonna rock our faces off.

This was a much more pleasurable weekend of college football watching, though I didn’t actually watch as much this weekend as I did last weekend.  I can’t think of any major losses that made me particularly unhappy and there were some great wins on the weekend.

- Big win for Wake Forest this weekend.  I only care because they’re an ACC team.  The better they do out of conference, the better it looks for the conference in general and the better it will be for FSU’s strength of schedule ranking.  Makes whatever record FSU ends up with more respectable.  Also, winning it with a last second field goal is huge for the kicker.  As a kicker, no one knows your name unless you screw up bad or you win a game.  Unfortunately, people forget your name quick when you’re the hero, but their memories are much longer when you’re the goat.  At least he’ll get his 15 minutes on campus.

- I turned things around in college pick’em this weekend, only missing three of ten picks, and at least one of them was my lowest scored pick.  Cris wanted me to make sure that I mention that she only missed two and did better than me this weekend.  She thinks she’s the boss of me.  I’m very impressed with her picking skills for the weekend.  As long as she doesn’t beat me overall during the season, I’ll be okay.

- Finally, FSU came through big this weekend, even though they played a pretty terrible team.  The reason I’m so pleased about the game is that they actually won the way they were supposed to win.  Over the last several years they’ve played terrible against really bad teams and only beat them by a little bit.  This win reminded me a little bit of the wins we had in the mid and late 90s where we shelled teams that we should shell.  It was also good that this happened with a new quarterback and a good number of our best players serving suspensions (b/c they’re stupid).  It gives the offense a bit of confidence with the new signal caller.

That’s about it for this CF weekend update.  FSU has another cupcake next weekend and hopefully we can take care of business again before our season really begins against Wake Forest the following weekend.

John Stewart cracks me up.  Nothing I say really adds anything, so just go watch the clip.

(I tried to embed, but couldn’t figure out flash video embed. sorry.)

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=184086&title=sarah-palin-gender-card

I’m just now coming out of my euphoric haze from the opening weekend of college football and I wanted to share a few thoughts.

- First, this was the worst start to ESPN’s College Pick ‘Em I’ve ever had.  I think for the first time in my history of playing that stupid game, I’m in the bottom half of the standings.  That’s thanks in part to my second thought.

- Clemson…is…was…this was painful to watch.  Since my primary loyalties lie with FSU I primarily pay attention to what’s going on in the ACC.  All I’ve heard all preseason is how good Clemson was going to be, and pretty much all the “experts” said they were going to win the ACC.  What a monumental let down.  They didn’t just lose to Alabama, they were terrible.  I might be being a little harsh on them, but that’s what happens when you get hyped as much as they have been.  I hope for Tommy Bowden’s sake he rights the ship for the rest of the season.  He’s always dancing on and off the hot seat, and a less than great season this year could spell trouble for him considering the talent he had to start the season.

- I’m really freakin tired of USC.  Let me be clear that I think they’re a good team, they couldn’t have won some of the games they’ve won if they weren’t.  Let me also be clear that year in and year out they play in a three or four team conference.  The Pac10 is better than the ACC at football right now, but that’s not saying much.  USC jumped UGA (bias notification: I’m a UGA grad school alum) in the rankings this week, I’m assuming, because they beat UVA and Georgia beat Georgia Southern.  UVA is supposedly in a better conference, but I think a game between UVA and Ga. Southern would be a pretty close one.  Honestly, a win over UVA isn’t all that impressive in comparison to a win over Ga. Southern.  The press have turned into such USC fanboys over the last five or so years, its sort of nauseating sometimes.  If USC played in a decent conference *cough SEC cough* they would not have had the same success they can claim over the last however many years.

- Finally, UCLA’s overtime win over Tennessee Monday is the kind of college football I live for.  It was so good my fiancee, who usually uses college football as a substitute for Ambien, was really into the game.  Tennessee was favored and there were alot of questions about UCLA because of a new coach and a new quarterback.  Make no mistake, Kevin Craft’s first half was one of the worst 30 minutes I’ve ever seen for a quaterback, but the second was incredible.  Someone needed to check under the helmet to make sure that was still Craft under there.  In addition to Craft’s amazing turn around, neither team ever let up making for a great back and forth game, with two fantastic drives to score points to push the game to overtime.  And finally, one of many reasons I think college football is funner to watch than the NFL, both teams get a chance in overtime.

All in all, I couldn’t have asked for much more from the first weekend of college football…well, except for a few more wins from ACC teams (Its really a little sad, honestly). Given some of the big upsets and close finishes, I’m looking forward to the rest of the season.  Hopefully, I won’t be cursing my Seminole fanhood after FSU’s first game this weekend.

Here’s the list of players that have been called up for the next couple of World Cup qualifiers for the USMNT, and I have to say I just don’t get some of these picks.

Goalkeepers: Brad Guzan (Aston Villa, England), Tim Howard (Everton, England)

Defenders: Carlos Bocanegra (Rennes, France), Danny Califf (Midtjylland, Denmark), Steve Cherundolo (Hannover, Germany), Frankie Hejduk (Columbus), Oguchi Onyewu (Standard Liege, Belgium), Michael Orozco (San Luis, Mexico), Heath Pearce (Hansa Rostock, Germany), Marvell Wynne (Toronto)

Midfielders: DaMarcus Beasley (Glasgow Rangers, Scotland), Michael Bradley (Heerenveen, Netherlands), Ricardo Clark (Houston), Maurice Edu (Glasgow Rangers, Scotland), Sacha Kljestan (Chivas USA), Eddie Lewis (Los Angeles)

Forwards: Brian Ching (Houston), Landon Donovan (Los Angeles), Clint Dempsey (Fulham, England), Eddie Johnson (Cardiff, Wales)

Goalkeepers: No problems here.  I’ve been a big fan of Tim Howard since he took over for Kasey Keller, and the more exposure Guzan gets, the better he’ll be once its his turn.

Defenders: I have no real issue with these selections.  Our two center backs are pretty much decided, but we’re still trying to find the right people to play at outside back.  Cherundolo will be serving his suspension for his red card against Guatemala so he sort of doesn’t count at least for the first game.  The one selection that raised an eyebrow a little is Michael Orozco.  After his stupid red card in the Olympics that put the US team in a real bind for almost the entire match, I’m not sure he should be getting rewarded with a call-up to the full men’s side.  He served the team well in the qualifiers for the Olympics so perhaps Bradley is looking to the future, but a little surprising to me none-the-less.

Midfielders:  I hope the reason Adu didn’t get called-up was to try to help him get situated in with Monaco.  Sacha kljestan is the only player that typically shows any kind of dynamism on attack, and he hasn’t been getting a lot of starts with the full men’s side.  Perhaps Bradley is going to change things up a little (doubt it).

Forwards: (Preface: Like Adu, I’m working from the assumption that Altidore is either injured or they’re letting him try to get settled in with Villareal) *smacking my forehead*  Isn’t one definition of crazy: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?  Does Bradley think that Eddie Johnson is about to find some International level talent?  Or perhaps Brian Ching is going to bust out with an unexpected hat trick?  I recognize that the teams we’re going to play don’t represent the powers of CONCACAF, but wouldn’t this be a perfect opportunity to try someone who hasn’t gotten much time with the National Team.  We really need to stop calling up players that haven’t performed in the past and haven’t shown much sign of performing in the future.

To me, its a crime to continue to call up Johnson and Ching when they’ve displayed their inadequacies at the International level when you have someone like Kenny Cooper, who is scoring a ton of goals in MLS right now, that you haven’t even given a chance.  Maybe Cooper gets called up and he’s a total bust too, but at least we’d know then.  Give Charlie Davies a chance to try to see if he can pull something off.  Again, maybe he stinks up the field, but at least we’d know.

This leads me to my final point.  When Bradley was named the interim coach, I was fully up to giving him a chance.  The first couple of games, I was really pleased with some of the choices he made in terms of calling up new players and giving people a chance.  We came out with a different attitude and we were taking on teams that were a much better challenge for us that would help the team improve.  I was pretty pleased with Bradley’s choices and his selection as the full-time head coach.

Since then, I feel like we’ve really stagnated and haven’t continued to push ourselves.  We’ve developed a more solid defense, but our attacking as a team continues to be dreadfully inconsistent.  We can’t ever seem to develop dangerous opportunities with any kind of consistency.  We try the same players up front that haven’t really produced any kind of results.  If we don’t try anything different up front, we’re not going to improve in the ways we need to in order to get ourselves through the group stages in the next WC.

They always say if it ain’t broke don’t try to fix it.  Well, I’m not sure I’d say things are completely broken, but things definitely aren’t working great and we need to try to fix it.  If Bradley doesn’t start doing things to try to fix something, perhaps we need to start looking at different options for a coach.

Unfortunately, I’m concerned we won’t realize a change  is needed until its too late.  The US should make it through most of CONCACAF qualifying with few real problems.  With a solid winning record during qualifying Bradley will look like the right choice.  But if we get to the World Cup and have the same troubles as in 2006, we may realize too late that Bradley wasn’t the coach to take us where we want the team to go.