I would just like Regular Reader to confirm or deny Learys involvement in the JWR program?

or did Leary just play little league in the same league that those kids are in now?

That would be 18 steps worse than the HS program love some profess.

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"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

man it's amazing to see another classic thread brought up by the ghost of CSFMB past (He of the kaner/snoop avatar) and see that back in the day it was almost a completely different array of posters, especially when you go to the wild wild west of guest posting.

go figure everyone was sick of bears talk in february, you know, WEEKS AFTER THEY WERE IN THE FUCKING SUPER BOWL. let's take a look at what the actually-playing chicago sports teams were doing:

bulls: ah yeah this was the rookie year of tyrus thomas because the legends say that lamarcus aldridge showed up to a pre-draft-workout with the bulls and skiles sat him down and stared at him for 5-10 minutes straight without saying a word. eventually lamarcus was like "w-what the hell is going on here?" and skiles was like "DON'T DRAFT THIS PUSSY BECAUSE HE CAN NEVER PLAY FOR ONE OF MY TEAMS!" so the bulls fell in love with the bumslayer, tyrus thomas, and made the trade to get.... oh shit who was that european dude who came here and was a bust and a half... viktor khryapa i wanna say? yeah. we got tyrus thomas AND viktor khryapa while lamarcus for his career has averaged 19/8, but in the last couple'a seasons has been established at 23/11. yeah the bulls definitely didn't need that as it only took them 8-9 years to go and get a proper replacement @ the 4 position in pau gasol. and of course pau is like 35 and due to explode any day now. great. the bulls went on to go 49-33 and were led by their big offseason signing BEN WALLACE, who would go on to greater heights including suspending joakim noah and running skiles out of town, bringing in jim boylan to guide the bulls to missing the #8 seed by like 1-2 games so they could enter the draft lottery with a 1.7% chance of the NBA rigging them the first pick, which they did (cuz you know david stern wanted to say THANK YOU for selling out the UC more often than not during the lean post-jordan-years) and we got derrick rose and the super-try-hard-bulls, and after being shut down during "their year" in 2010-11, welp now in 14-15 we finally look to have a chance.

blackhawks: PAGING CURIOUS HAIR! i don't remember much about the majestic trent-yawney-led 31-42-9 06-07 blackhawks season, but this was obviously b4 the renaissance that came with the old man dying and therefore "hockey talk" was a running punchline on the b&b show. i remember once they did a friday fung/pre-friday-fung bit with imaginary radio and i e-mailed in to STOP TALKING SO MUCH GODDAMN HOCKEY!!!! THIS ISN'T CANADA! WE HAVE OTHER SPORTS TOO YOU KNOW! and it actually got read on the air. the havlat/khabibulin-led hawks didn't even make the playoffs, which is pretty much a feat in the NHL cuz you've gotta be pretty damn bad to do that. of course, with the #3 pick in the 2006 draft the hawks took this kid "jonathan toews" and this season resulted in them getting the #1 pick in the 2007 draft where they took some alcoholic friend of snoop dogg named "patrick kane" and it wasn't like dollar bill was getting and younger, so of course this season was ahead of its time in that it illustrated the need for theo's plan with the cubs. without the 2006-07 hawks you probably don't have patrick kane. of course nobody cared about hockey and/so nobody had any idea that toews/kane would end up being the dynamic duo that led the hawks to 2 cups and potentially a third if they had a little bit more against the kings last year, so it's no surprise that nobody wanted to talk about them.

cubs: the 2006 season was the end of dusty baker, as a second year of sub-.500 craptitude greeted them after the legendary run-to/collapse-in the 2003 NLCS and what should have been an easy playoff berth with the superior (and completely unlikeable) 2004 cubs team that wasn't above sending kent mercker to confront you in an elevator (no doubt inspiring a young lawrence holmes to realize where people are most vulnerable). lou piniella was hired on oct 17 2006 so all of the lou talk was ~4 months old and beaten to death. maybe some people beat the drum for joe girardi (who IIRC had just burned out the marlins rotation pretty badly) or maybe some people wanted to talk about the HUGE 3yr/13mil deal for mark derosa that was signed in november.... or how about that time when jim hendry got in a bidding war with himself and gave alfonso soriano 8yr/136mil on nov 20th 2006? the cubs ended up taking josh hamilton from the rays in the rule 5 draft, but the reds purchased him from the cubs outright some hours later. the mighty mighty coo then signed ALL STAR TED LILLY to a 4yr/40mil deal and jason marquis (de sade) to a 3yr/21mil deal. the cubs would sit at 22-29 on june 1st, but turn it around and make the playoffs as a wild card where they got summarily dismissed by..... was that the diamondbacks season? yeah. then the next year they were a juggernaught who i wanna say damn near led the NL central from coast to coast, but then got summarily dismantled by the dodgers.... who managed to set the tone for the series when they took out cubs ace carlos zambrano in game 1 behind something like 5 cubs errors (with 3 in one inning!) leading to a bunch of unearned runs, a zambrano meltdown, and the cubs never getting the chance to trot zambrano back out for revenge. things never got better for the cubs who proceeded to fall apart in 2009, epitomized by carlos zambrano who began his descent into madness as his #s progressively got worse and worse until he ended up being a 4.00 ERA pitcher, then a bullpen guy, then ultimately a miami marlin before he decided that ~80-100mil was enough to start off living the rest of his life as he actually went the hell away and to this point has stayed the hell away from baseball.

so yeah by february even tho spring training had started and all that, the offseason hot stove season was largely over and we were at the point where pitchers and catchers were starting to report and all the stories about how player X is in the best shape of his life were starting to hit the rags, so basically baseball was in a holding pattern and nobody was in a hurry to talk about stuff that they talked about the last 4+ months.

(continued in next message because it says i have too many URLs in this one)

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white sox: the 2006 white sox finished 90-72 and were probably a better all-around-team than the 2005 white sox (they added jim thome FFS!), however that 90-72 was good enough for third place in the AL central (remember then the twins were good?) and they didnt make the playoffs. huge disappointment coming after the world series in 2005, but hey with the sox being over .500 in 2006 and seriously looking like a better team that just had an unluckier year (and obviously a few less wins because the teams around them in their division improved) there was hope springing eternal that they'd get it together in 2007 and get back to the dance where they could try to have another 2005-type-run! who can forget the trade that sent neil cotts to the cubs for hard-throwing david aardsma? i'll personally never forget going to an 05/06 sox game and seeing some guy with his arm firmly wrapped around a girl wearing a custom sox-pinstriped shirt that said "I'LL NEAL FOR COTTS" which was just all kinds of odd cuz how can you bring your fine girl to the ballpark in a shirt that basically says she'd ditch you in a heartbeat to blow a baseball player? the mind boggles. we moved ross gload to the royals for another hard throwing (ex cub?) in andrew sisco.... and then of course we dumped freddy garcia on the phillies to get back gio gonzalez (who was traded for thome the previous year!) and some autist/first-round-bust named "gavin floyd". we also traded brandon mccarthy to the rangers for john danks and nick masset, a headscratcher at the time (which would go on to make sense, then become a headscratcher all over again) but hey at least it wasn't as bad as signing the ghost of darin erstad to a contract.... or that big ballyhooed move to extend JAVIER VAZQUEZ for 3yr/33mil. he would go on to have a really nice year with the braves before returning to the yankees to suck once again.

naturally the 2007 white sox would go 72-90, but hey buehrle had that no-hitter in april, and hey do you remember bobby jenks retiring 41 straight batters during the season? neither do i but it certainly happened! of course they'd rebound from the 2007 debacle to go 88-74 in 2008 and have that blackout game 163 to get in the playoffs where they lost to the WS-bound tampa bay rays (and IIRC that's where ozzie went HAM on javier vazquez and called him a pussy or whatever) so they'd rebound with 79-83 in 2009, then another 88-74 in 2010 that wasn't quite good enough, and after ANOTHER 79-83 season in 2011 ozzie walked out and the rest is history.

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SO AHEM. yeah quite TL;DR but as i've gone out of my way to illustrate, there really wasn't too much to talk about in chicago sports. you were right b4 spring training really took off as march rolled around, and given that the 2006 seasons for the cubs and sox were both disappointing in their own ways, the forthcoming 2007 season was kinda "meh." the bulls were nearing the end of the line with scott skiles' try-hard-bulls and i dont think anybody fancied them to be anything other than a solid regular season team that had no chance to do anything once the playoffs started, and the hawks were bad enough to go and get the #1 pick, as they had already drafted toews in 2006 and would get kaner in 2007 and it'd still take another couple'a years for the old man to die and for savard to rise up from assistant coach to coach, only to get let go for a proven NHL coach in quenneville when it was time to go for that "ONE GOAL"

so go figure that a bears team that had just been in the super bowl 2-3 weeks previously was getting the majority of the airtime. why at the time we had a top top defense, a quarterback who had seemed to exorcise his demons in rex grossman and show more than enough "good rex" versus the sporadic bouts of "bad rex" to get a little faith from the bears fan faithful (of course i vaguely remember 2007 as the brian griese season and hey i'll be damned if griese-san didnt have that 98 yard bomb to WR hester vs the vikings, or that stunning comeback against the eagles where he came out and said that the quarterback helmet communicator was broken (supposedly) because griese didn't use any of the coach's plays to lead the gamewinning drive. i think rex got his starting gig back by the time they went out to oakland, however this was all for naught as 2008 would bring us THE YEAR OF THE ORFENSE, as kyle orton was surprisingly cromulent (he didnt throw passes 5ft over jumping WRs heads!) to lead them to 8-8 and an eventual trade for jay cutler, and well, the rest is history.

so yeah TLDR MASSIVE UP IN HERE! basically there was jack squat diddly shit to talk about in the chicago sports landscape in mid to mid-late february... there wasn't a lot of hope around this town outside of the bears, who had just gone to the super bowl with a dominant defense and hey, lets get some more weapons for rex and let ced benson get established and get taht offense rolling with the world class defense and we should be hanging around the playoffs for years to come, right? R-RIGHT?!?!?!!

so i dont blame anyone for wanting to talk bears. they were easily the best thing going in the town and that great-white-hope-led, erm, urlacher-led defense was going to be a problem for the NFL and with some of the talent we had stockpiled on offense the arrow was only pointing up for the longterm! long live the beloved!

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Ah, 2006-07, Season Zero of the new era. This was the year I got back into the Hawks/NHL after taking 2005-06 off out of spite for the lockout. Here's what I remember:

- That was actually Denis Savard behind the bench most of the season. "Commit to the Indian" wouldn't be for another year, though.

- Peter Bondra signed on midway through the season for a half-hearted victory lap so he could hit 500 goals. He did. I was excited. Why?

- Troy Murray was a clueless dope on radio broadcasts. I believe I used to refer to him as "hockey Santo" because all he could do was groan and yell. He's gotten a lot better. The games were still on 670 then back when the Hawks had to buy the time outright and the Score would not promote them one bit.

- There was some Finnish guy named "Tony Salmelainen" who I was convinced would be among the Next Big Things for the perpetually rebuilding Hawks. I think he won a game in overtime/the shootout once and he was known for being fast. He was gone at the end of the year and there's no way anyone remembers him.

- The roster was full of guys like that, high-pedigree drafted/developed guys who were supposed to be part of the eventual Hawks resurgence but never made it to the finish line for one reason or another: James Wisniewski, Rene Bourque, Tuomo Ruutu. They became two weeks of Samuel Pahlsson, the draft pick for Brandon Saad, and Andrew Ladd.
- Keith, Seabrook, and Sharp were there, but I had no idea they'd become what they became. You could argue that Duncan Keith, not Toews or Kane, is the best player of this era.

- For the last homestand of the season, you could get free tickets plus nominal TicketMaster processing fees. They were wretched by the end of the year, so I still didn't go. No one did.

- There was some buzz about this Toews guy coming up soon.

In retrospect, it certainly felt like the cusp of something with the way they were pushing Savard as the guy who would bring the Hawks into the new era of offense-first hockey (boy, that era lasted), but I had no idea Wirtz was gonna kick it after the season and set the rebuild to lightspeed. I just figured they'd become a playoff team again.

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I remember someone posting about those free tickets. We were a very young family always looking for inexpensive family fun so I took advantage of it ni found street space parking so paid squat. We had great tickets in the 200 section with no one around us. My son puked into the row in front of us that was unoccupied so we left in the third

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Last night, Larry discussed Tinder with Herbie. Both made it clear they are not on Tinder. Their game doesn't need that.

SWIPE LEFT!

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Don't take it personally.

Sir also reported Zaidman isn't on tinder. He does very well for himself.

Oh, and it's extremely hard to find a straight man in Atlanta.

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I tried listening last night but gave up after about 10 minutes when the show intro was still going on and on and on and on......

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

The starting lineup thing isn't played out at all.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Chet would get talking to Brendan Suhr by 6:00:15

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

Goff was addressed. Supposedly he's up in Chicago. BUT, when Loho visited him during the Final Four in ATL they breakfasted together which led their waittress to assume they were gay men. According to Laurence's statistics there is a 11 straight black women to 1 straight black man ratio in Atlanta.

A 11-some (mini-DiCaprio) isn't out of the question for Loho so I believe his statistics.

The starting lineups are great...jmo.

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My pistols represent me
Bust until my rounds empty
Back for the street fame

Followed by Tatiana

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Kenny Williams fell for the banana in the tailpipe

No better way to blow 12 minutes of a 23 minute show.

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"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

-Herb