Yeah, what he said.

I don’t know if I can count Jim Coleman as a blog child or not … he had been thinking of starting a blog for a while … but seeing howardowens.com seems to have spurred him into action.

The Super Bowl received the second highest ratings in history, this despite a blow out against the favored (and probably favorite) team. And it’s not like the Oakland Raiders are as popular as the Dallas Cowboys or the 49ers in their big eras, yet this game was watched by more people than many memorable Super Bowls.

Might it be that good weather in San Diego encourages people to tune in? I think so, but obviously, Paul Tagliabue doesn’t think so. In fact, Tagliabue can see no good reason to hold the Super Bowl in San Diego. What kind of idiot is he?

In his Friday Q&A session, he made it painfully clear San Diego never again would host a Super Bowl unless a new stadium is built, angering local politicians – and, even more important – other people, when he said: “From my own perspective, I’m surprised that we are here this week.”

There is no more suitable venue in on the West Coast for a Super Bowl than San Diego Stadium, but the NFL is trying to blackmail the city.

My advice to San Diego: Give Tagliabue the finger. If the NFL wants a new stadium, let the league build it. If that costs San Diego it’s franchise, good riddance.

If San Diego really needed a new football stadium, I would be the first to stand up and say, spend whatever it costs to keep the Chargers in town. The Padres desperately needed a new ballpark, and the city rightly spent taxpayer money to make it happen. But the Chargers don’t need it. Not in the least. And certainly not until they give us a winner — not just a one-year winner, but a year after year winner.

Here’s what Don Bauder has to say about owner Alex Spanos’ double-dealing with the people of San Diego. Further evidence that the Chargers do not need, nor do they deserve a new stadium, not one that the taxpayers support.

I met Ted Leitner once. He was brusk and obviously self-centered. Still, I think he’s the finest local sportscaster in the nation. At least the best I’ve ever seen on TV. He’s funny and smart and has a fun shtick.

He’s also the most popular broadcaster in San Diego.

So why would KFMB dump him?

TIVO tracks everything.

Some people never buy suits off the rack.

Others won’t pay less than $30 for a bottle of wine, no matter what the reputation of the $7 bottle from Temecula.

My $20 watch runs as well and looks as good as my $60 watch, but some guys wouldn’t be caught dead in either. Hell, there’s guys who only buy $20 underwear.

Let’s face it, even when there are perfectly good alternatives out there, some people will spend a little more to feel like they’re getting best.

When I first floated the idea of building boutique, custom blogs, this is the market I had in mind, and after several days of thinking about it, I still like the idea.

I’ve got the programming prowess, and I’ve also got the designer — Gwen Harlow (great name, better artist).

I’ve still got to work out the hosting details with my Web host, but I think I can negotiate a good plan.

If you know anybody who would be in the market for a turn-key, custom blog set up, send him or her my way. This could be fun.

(The following post was written this morning. I was going to post it at work, since my home system wasn’t working, but my computer at work wouldn’t read the disk — work computer doesn’t read Mac disks, which I forgot about, while home system does … so I’ll post this now … why waste a good post?)

Yesterday was a good day.

Not only to the Raiders lose the Super Bowl, they were embarrassed. They horse-whipped, hog tied, and dragged through the mud. The final score was 48-21, but the game wasn’t even that close. Rich Gannon, from early in the fourth quarter, looked like he’d been hit over the head with a tire iron and didn’t know where he was. His mouth hung open in disbelief as gnats hovered over his tongue.

I rarely root for any team in the Super Bowl. This is the first time in 19 years (the last time the Raiders played in the big game) that I actively rooted against a team.

I’m also happy for John Lynch, the linebacker for Tampa Bay and a San Diego kid. I met Lynch when he was in high school. I was assigned by a short-lived magazine called San Diego Choice to profile his father, who was CEO of Nobel Broadcasting, which owned radio stations 91-X and XTRA-690. I interviewed the elder John Lynch at their north county home. Lynch spent a good deal of time talking about his son, who obviously had a bright football career ahead of him and was already planning to attend Stanford. What do I remember about young Lynch? Nothing. Dad introduced reporter to son. “Hi.” “Hi.” Son left house. Still, he seems like a good guy. He’s from San Diego. So I’m happy he’ll get his Super Bowl ring.

For the festivities, my wife and I drove over to Bakersfield and watched the game with my brother. It was a beautiful day in Buck’s town, if you don’t pay attention to the thick layer of smog that hung over the valley. As we pulled over the Tejon Pass, we thought Bakersfield was covered in a lake of purple water. Not a pretty sight.

The picture with this post is of the historic Bakersfield gateway sign, which now hangs outside of the saloon and shrine built by Buck Owens called the Crystal Palace.

That super secret blogger bash in honor of some fiendish defector to Nevada that I mentioned earlier — Emmanualle has more details.

Vince Kern has gone out and gotten himself is own blog domain — taking this stuff seriously, I see. He can now be found here. Adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

Author Garrett Soden send along the following note:

I just discovered a new blog which I think you might want to check out, if you’re not familiar with it. It’s BookLinker at http://booklinker.blogspot.com, run by Dean Hamilton. This isn’t a free-ranging blog; Dean focuses only on books, posting his own book reviews that are not only well-written but are also filled with links to material that enriches whatever the book is about. Check it out.

I did. The site is exactly what Garrett says it is. I just want to know how Dean gets time to read all of those books???

Well, last I saw, L.A. was still standing, despite the debauchery in Echo Park to mourn the semi-departure of Ken Layne. Layne, in case you missed it, is moving to Reno. But he’s not really moving to Reno. It’s more like he’s going to have one of the longest commutes of any L.A. worker. At least if his evil schemes to change the face of American Journalism come to pass.

There were a lot of people at this soiree whom I didn’t know, so I confined my picture taking, mostly, to people I did know.

Here’s Layne (the guy in the Matrix-looking sun glasses) and the woman who is dragging him off to the land of tax evasion and loose morals. As the foto was being snapped, the host was offering toast in his honor, though Layne was already well on his way to being toasted. There are some other people in the picture. I don’t know them. Throughout the evening, Layne had to continually insist that he doesn’t know Dave Barry, at least “in that sense,” which I suspect he meant in the biblical sense, but the crowd, which seemed to largely consist of his lawyers and potential staff writers, remained incredulous.

Steve, who plays some instrument or other in the band Tsar, which seems to be particularly popular with bloggers, mixes your photographer another drink. A strawberry and banana daiquiri. That drink was proceeded by some communist/cuba concoction that Welch forced me to drink. It was quite tasty, but when I began to think kind thoughts about Castro, I thought I better switch beverages.

Finally, we have Welch, caught in mid-grope, and the ever lovely Emmanuelle, fending him off. “Not in public, Matt,” she told him. Cute couple. So in love. It gives you hope for the world.

I’m back in the office to post a couple of things — still no DSL at home.

It’s not the DSL connection, it’s not the hub, it’s not the modem. One by one, tech support and myself has elminated those as the potential source of problems. For example, I can plug in my old tired Mac and access the internet just fine.

So we thought it might be my machine, so I took it into my local bit and byte dealer to have the tech there take a look. He plugged it into their PacBell DSL connection, and it worked just fine. So it’s not my computer.

The last thing to check was the actual cable running from the computer to the modem … cause I used a different one with the Mac (which worked) than I did with the PC (which didn’t). So I plugged the cable I knew to be working into the PC … still no DSL.

So, PacBell is send a tech to my house Monday evening.

Blogging was going to be light the rest of this weekend anyway, just hope I can get back up and running Monday.

Meanwhile, go read Welch.

Last week, I’m driving to work. I’m waiting at a long stop light at Telephone and Main and I’m sitting behind this 1960s Ford Thunderbird. It’s white. It’s big. The body is in good condition, but it needs a paint job, some rust work and some interior work. It reminds me of the 1967 Cadillac El Dorado I used to drive. It makes me feel a little nostalgic for that Caddy.

I think it’s pretty cool that this guy is driving this old car to work.

Then I notice the Tiki bobble-head doll in the back window. Now I think not only does this guy have a cool car, he has cool taste. He is a man of sophistication and taste.

Then I think about how people who drive cars that they think makes a statement about themselves — and I’ve been there — imagine that people notice, but they never really know. Nobody ever stops them and says, “That’s cool.”

Of course, it would be totally uncool to do that. So we all remain mute.

Then I thought, hell, I should follow this guy to his office and tell him I dig his car. And his Tiki doll. Then I think, “Don’t be a nerd, Howard. You’re such a nerd. Forget it.”

So the light changes and I try to get around this guy to get a better look at his car, but he’s booking, so I’m running out of room before I will reach my necessary right turn, but I do notice his totally bitching wide white walls, then I drop back in the lane behind him.

We reach Ralston, and he turns right. This is my right turn. We take the bend in the road past the police station and reach Saratoga, where he turns right, and I must turn right … and then he pulls into the parking lot of my office.

Now I’m really curious as to who this guy is. So I park and walk over to where he is parked.

It is Fred Scolfield, one of the graphic artists in our advertising department.

The car is a 1962 Thunderbird and he bought it last year, has already done a bunch of engine work and will get it painted in April. Very cool.

I took this picture yesterday. Here’s a link to his own shots of the car right after he bought it.

Regular readers know I’m, to say the least, an Elvis fan. So would it surprise anybody that I have an Elvis on Velvet?

It was a wedding gift from our friend Dave Schwab. He bought it TJ, of course.

It hung above our bed for years. Then Billie got tired of it, so it went into storage for a short time, and then when I rearranged my office furniture one day, I found this big blank wall that needed something on it. And there it hangs today.

I’m quite proud of it.

Last night, playing around with my new camera, killing time with DSL down, I took this picture of my Elvis on Velvet. I title the shot “Elvis on Velvet.” I thought it turned out pretty good, so I thought I would post it.

Thanks for stopping by.

PETA is bugging the Padres.

Seems the new ballpark sponsor, Petco, has something to do with animals. It’s evil to have pets, I guess. Oh, there’s some allegations about Petco mistreating animals, but I take such claims by PETA about as seriously the House of Saud’s declarations of religious tolerance.

Imagine if T Bone Burnett brought together Eddie Lang, and Louis Armstrong in the backroom of some Los Angeles cafe at 3 a.m. in about 1965 and started to riff gently on a few pop songs — impossible, given the the mixing of eras and location — if that happened you might get a recording that evoked the essense of Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft.

I bought L&T when it first came out. Listened to it. Liked it. Put it away. Last week, I put it in my car audio device, and it hasn’t stopped spinning since.

It’s one damn fine album. Better than Dylan’s Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind. Musically it is more interesting; melodically it is more inventive. It fits snuggly on any CD shelf that contains Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited and Blood on the Tracks.

Dylan dips into the entire menu of American musical styles, from vaudvillian vampiness to rockabilly rebelliousness — there is a tasty slice of Americana in every bite. A song like “Honest with Me” rocks with an R&B groove; country suffuses the tone of “Cry A While” and track 8, “Moonlight,” would make even the most ardant Cole Porter fan rapturous. The album is jazzy more in its wide-ranging musical vocabulary than it is in substance, and blues more in its weary wisdom than it is in its done-me-wrong angst.

The one knock non-Dylan fans make about Bob Dylan is that he can’t sing. Well, I guess that’s all in how you define “sing“. Dylan’s voice has always had it’s own lyrical power, which is all we can really ask of any musician who is expressing his own vision. On L&T, with his vocal range diminished and his scaly vocal chords even more frayed, Dylan has continued to mould his songwriting style to his own limitations — as always, those seeming shortcomings become strengths. Dylan remains a master had giving his songs more soul, while turning out numbers snappy enough that more polished musicans can probably have big hits with them.

So, yeah, you can say I like Lamp;T, and I think you should buy it.

This is the first second in a series of posts that I’m writing at home this morning and will later carry on a disk over to my office, and then post from my office.

I’m having Matt/Emmanuelle-like DSL problems at home.

After posting, I’m off to Los Angeles to covort with a bunch of drunken bloggers intent on bending the world to their ghastly and nefarious memes. I’ll bring back pictures, if their secret police don’t suspect my covert intentions.

Dave Barry now has a proper blog. But shouldn’t he have something a little more high end?

Well, the Olympus D-550 ZOOM has arrived. I’ve taken my first picture with it. Unfortunately, it may not be suitable for the home page of a family-oriented (ha!) blog. So I’ve published it here. The easily offended are encouraged to NOT to click this link. (M.E., this is the picture I promised you … but you shouldn’t take it personally … you know what a card Bruce is.)

Florida signing Pudge Rodriguez makes no sense. They’ll give him $10 million for one season — a team that supposedly is hurting financially and has gotten rid of stars like Preston Wilson and Charles Johnson in an attempt to trim payroll (though Mike Hampton is no bargain either), and … and this is crucial, has no realistic chance to make it to the World Series this year. After Mike Lowell and Luis Castillo, what offense do they have? Derek Lee is inconsistent at best, Eric Owens and Kevin Millar (hardly major hitting stars) are gone. The outfield is pitiful and they’re weak at SS. Outside of Mike Hampton, the pitchers are young and Pudge is probably not the best at handling a young staff.

It’s deals like these that give owners a bad reputation.

Bizarre is not the word for it.

There is a Padres angle in this, though. The contract is good for Pudge because he keeps him from getting boxed into a three- or four- year deal in Japan, and with the Padres opening a new ballpark next season, they might be willing to fork over Pudge-like money in 2004. Ivan has previously said he would love to live and work in San Diego. In playing for a non-contending team, he can get healthy, prove he’s still got game and make himself a viable candidate for San Diego’s starting C job in 2004. Or, at least I can dream.