Gardening Update

We have a gardening update!  The plants are growing tall!  It took a couple of weeks of watering and sunlight and time and germination.  I have no idea what germination is, but it sounds like I know what I'm talking about.  The top picture is a photo of the plants I, myself have planted.  The plants to the right are my neighbor's plants.  They have a little bit more than I do.

This is my green bell pepper plant.  It doesn't look like it's grown that much, but if you go back to my other gardening posts, you'll see the comparison.  If any of my readers are gardeners or know about pepper plants, there are tiny little peppers growing on the ends of the leaves.  Can't wait until they are enormous and delicious.

Here we have one of my tomato plants.  I think judging by the elongated tomato that is growing, they are the Roma tomatoes.  I can't read the label that is buried underneath, but I will no doubt be using them when they come up.  Underneath all those leaves there are, I think, close to 8 more tomatoes getting ready to bud.  Just from one plant! 

This is another one of my tomato plants.  These look to be the heirloom tomatoes.  It's really exciting being able to see the fruits of your labor come out of the ground.  I cannot wait until I see these ripe tomatoes grow big and be made into a sauce or salsa.

I completely forget what this plant is.  I think it's the zucchini plant.  I know a bought a zucchini plant and this plant does stand out against the basil, tomatoes, peppers, and herbs I've planted.  I'm calling it.  This is a zucchini plant.  

More tomatoes blooming!  Little tiny tomatoes that I cannot wait to taste.

This tomato is actually very big.  I'm just awaiting the days until they turn red.  I've also never had green tomatoes.  I know people talk about fried green tomatoes, and usually they go into an orgasmic state of how good they are.  I just like to wait a little longer and make them ripe red tomatoes.

Fourth and final tomato plant.  These ones are also coming in very well.  I wasn't able to count them accurately but I do know that in total, I counted about 22+ tomatoes.  Not bad for whatever I paid for the plants at Home Depot.

This is the lettuce plant that I started when I bought a head of Romaine lettuce and put the growing  end in the ground.  I saw the idea online on a pinterest-like website.  If I remember correctly, I think it's called dump-a-day.  

This final picture is a the entirety of the garden.  However, when I went out to check the garden and take these pictures, I found a little rabbit sneaking around my garden.  So now, I have to go back to Home Depot or Ace Hardware and get some wire fencing to keep out critters like him.  And then maybe figure out the next step on keeping out birds, making sure my plants don't fall over from the wind (real thing), and then figuring out how and when to pick out my herbs and plants.

V.I.D.E.O.S.: The King Of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

This week in V.I.D.E.O.S., we will talk about a truly nerd-centric documentary that really mixes adult, competition, and video games into one giant epic.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters!


Meet Steve Weebe and Billy Mitchell.  Both are grown American men and they both love to do the same thing: play classic Arcade games.

Billy Mitchell is a businessman and a video gamer.  He looks like a Ben Stiller-bad guy with his mullet and mustache.

Told you!  No, but this is legitimately him.  His business is the Ricky's World Famous Restaurant chain of South Florida as well as the sauces of the same name.  Throughout the 1980's he was the kid in the video arcade that was standing in front of one machine for hours and hours crushing the scores on Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., BurgerTime, Pac-Man, and Centipede.  He is probably the most famous gamer in the world.  He is Nerd Elvis in the video game world.  He was awarded a plaque in by Namco for scoring a "Perfect Score" in Pac-Man (seen below).

Mitchell is famous for his gaming, has influenced many others on gaming, and is overall, a very successful person.

Enter Steve Wiebe (pronounced WEE-BEE).

Steve Wiebe is an engineer.  He graduated with a Mechanical Engineering degree.  He played sports in high school, and even played drums for jazz band.  He also worked for Boeing.  In essence, he is NOT BILLY MITCHELL.  Wiebe is the challenger to Mitchell's crown of high scores in Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr.  Two men enter.  Only one will claim he is the champion.

Within the documentary we learn about the history of Twin Galaxies, Walter Day (official keeper of the scores for Twin Galaxies seen below), the history and culture of the Arcade as it pertains to Americans, AND we learn about some things about the games that you would not suspect would be involved in video games.  We also meet some other video gamers from the same era.  It's pretty fascinating to see that even before the Internet age, there was a strong network of gamers that just loved to compete.

It's a journey across several states, through several arcades, and will no doubt entertain everyone, whether you are into video games or not.  Prepare for a dramatic race to the top of the Leaderboard!

Boston Sports: The Celtics, The Patriots, and the Forecast of Raining Shit in New England

A lot has happened in the last 2 weeks of sports, especially if you are a fan of Boston sports.

The Stanley Cup was won by the Chicago Blackhawks, defeating the Boston Bruins.  The Bruins now enter a turbulent off-season, with several key players already not being resigned and entering Free Agency.

The former Patriots Tight End and Bristol Blood fan/member is basically one more murder away from being Tony Soprano (Rest In Peace James Gandolfini).  This news story went from "some dead guy was found near Hernandez' house in Attleboro" to "Holy Shit, the Patriots drafted a suspected murderer out of Florida".  There have been two things that made me laugh about this whole thing and that's these two pictures of Hernandez in court:

The second picture, for some reason, made me laugh about what he's thinking while he's in court, and I instantly thought of The Situation from Jersey Shore.  "Gotta look good for the Judge, can't have no chapped lips.  GTL."  Sorry, my mind wanders.

How pissed is Bob Kraft and Co. after taking "the weed guy" in that draft and then realizing he's the "weed and guns and murder guy"?  Definite due diligence fail.

Good news for the Internet, we now have "Hernandezing" to go alone with "Bradying" and "Tebowing".  I think the Patriots should stop picking up all these meme-players.

Bradying

Hernandezing

Like I need to tell you what this is.

The Celtics first traded their coach to the Clippers for a first round draft pick, and then traded Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Jason Terry to the New Jersey Brooklyn Nets for Marshon Brooks, Gerald Wallace, Kris Humphries-Kardashian, Keith Bogans, Kris Joseph, and 3 first round draft picks (2014, 2016, 2018).  If you asked me two years ago about the age of Garnett and Pierce and whether or not they should come back, I probably would've said no.  But after a Boston-centric news week like this, I still say it's too early.  Plus Paul Pierce, the one person who I didn't think I wouldn't see wear another team's jersey, is going to be wearing another team's jersey.  Unreal.  He, along with Garnett, will no doubt get standing ovations when they come back to Boston.  Might need to check the tickets on that game.

Swap jersey's guys.

In baseball, The Red Sox can't close games, but are still managing to have an incredible record.  If there is any bad news relating to the Red Sox, I think it's just that players are getting injured.  Happens all the time.  I don't know any dreadful soccer news for the New England Revolution, but I know they are still playing, which is actually good news!

My initial reaction to all of this news coming within the same 10 days of each other -I don't know how fans around the Boston area are going to buy any sports tickets in the next year.  I honestly don't think I would want to go to a Boston sports game unless I got the tickets for free.  I know that seems fair-weather of me, but the opposite of a fair-weather fan is an obsessed fan.  Boston has too many obsessed fans.  Don't believe me?  We watch sports talk radio shows on TV:

Now the landscape right now for Boston, looks terrible.  Every person now has a question mark attached, which makes me think of Jim Carrey's Riddler.  Terrible image.  But for people that live around Boston, Sports is what keeps us sane.  After the Boston Marathon bombing, it was the Red Sox game, the Bruins game, and the Celtics game that everyone paid attention to.  I was at the first Red Sox game where Papi got the biggest rise out of a Red Sox crowd in a pre-game speech.

It was emotional and really brought the whole city together.  It made us all realize that we pay attention to sports to get away from the realities and horrors of war, bombs, and terrorism.  So maybe we don't need to be eccentric and obsessed, but I'd rather be sports-obsessed than war-obsessed.

That's all I can write for now, take care everyone!