Mike

Week one: 1-0 Win! 36-16

That rocks !!

Occasionally a celebrity passing has more impact on me. This one was one. I was in Southern California when my wife held up her cell phone to show me the story, James Garner dies at 84. She knew I would be moved! Wow, my mom and I would watch that show (Rockford Files) religiously. When in came out on dvd I was first in line. The theme song is forever in my "skull juke box". He was a an iconic actor, the everymans everyman!! The coolest of the cool. At the tone leave your name and number!!

40 years ago. 1974 - Santa Monica with Keith Moon. http://justbackdated.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/john-paul-keith-santa-monica-1974.html

My favorite Santa Claus EVER!!!

If it was the first time, it might be a teleprompter... but last year...

Adella Dazeem? I thought her name was Idina Menzel. Wow!!

Now that I have the "sealed" envelopes to deliver tomorrow to the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood my guesses are Best Picture (25 points): 12 Years a Slave Best Actor (15 points): Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street) Best Actoress (15 points): Cate Blanchett Best Supporting Actor (10 points): Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club) Best Supporting Actress (10 points): Lupita Nyong'o (12 Years a Slave) Best Director (15 points): Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón) Best Original Score (15 points): Gravity (Steven Price) Best Original Song (25 points): "Let It Go" (Frozen) *Best Animated Feature - Frozen

Shirley Temple Black, who as a dimpled, precocious and determined little girl in the 1930s sang and tap-danced her way to a height of Hollywood stardom and worldwide fame that no other child has reached, died on Monday night at her home in Woodside, Calif. She was 85. Her publicist, Cheryl Kagan, confirmed her death. Ms. Black returned to the spotlight in the 1960s in the surprising new role of diplomat, but in the popular imagination she would always be America’s darling of the Depression years, when in 23 motion pictures her sparkling personality and sunny optimism lifted spirits and made her famous. From 1935 to 1939 she was the most popular movie star in America, with Clark Gable a distant second. She received more mail than Greta Garbo and was photographed more often than President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The little girl with 56 perfect blonde ringlets and an air of relentless determination was so precocious that the usually unflappable Adolphe Menjou, her co-star in her first big hit, “Little Miss Marker,” described her as “an Ethel Barrymore at 6” and said she was “making a stooge out of me.” When she turned from a magical child into a teenager, audience interest slackened, and she retired from the screen at 22. But instead of retreating into nostalgia, she created a successful second career for herself. After marrying Charles Alden Black in 1950, she became a prominent Republican fund-raiser. She was appointed a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly by President Richard M. Nixon in 1969. She went on to win wide respect as the United States ambassador to Ghana from 1974 to 1976, was President Gerald R. Ford’s chief of protocol in 1976 and 1977, and became President George H.?W. Bush’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1989, serving there during the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. After winning an honorary Academy Award at the age of 6 and earning $3 million before puberty, Shirley Temple grew up to be a level-headed adult. When her cancerous left breast was removed in 1972, at a time when operations for cancer were shrouded in secrecy, she held a news conference in her hospital room to speak out about her mastectomy and to urge women discovering breast lumps not to “sit home and be afraid.” She is widely credited with helping to make it acceptable to talk about breast cancer. A statement released by her family said, “We salute her for a life of remarkable achievements as an actor, as a diplomat, and most importantly as our beloved mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and adored wife for fifty-five years of the late and much missed Charles Alden Black.” Shirley Jane Temple was born in Santa Monica, Calif., on April 23, 1928. From the beginning, she and her mother, Gertrude, were a team (“I was absolutely bathed in love,” she remembered); her movie career was their joint invention. Her success was due to both her own charm and her mother’s persistence. In “Child Star,” her 1988 autobiography, Mrs. Black said her mother had made a “calculated decision” to turn her only daughter into a professional dancer. At a fee of 50 cents a week, Mrs. Temple enrolled 3-year-old Shirley in Mrs. Meglin’s Dance Studio. In 1932, Shirley was spotted by an agent from Educational Pictures and chosen to appear in “Baby Burlesks,” a series of sexually suggestive one-reel shorts in which children played all the roles. The 4- and 5-year-old children wore fancy adult costumes that ended at the waist. Below the waist, they wore diapers with oversize safety pins. In these heavy-handed parodies of well-known films like “The Front Page” (“The Runt Page”) and “What Price Glory” (“War Babies”), Shirley imitated Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and — wearing an off-the-shoulder blouse and satin garter as a hard-boiled French bar girl in “War Babies” — Dolores Del Rio. When any of the two dozen children in “Baby Burlesks” misbehaved, they were locked in a windowless sound box with only a block of ice on which to sit. “So far as I can tell, the black box did no lasting damage to my psyche,” Mrs. Black wrote in “Child Star.” “Its lesson of life, however, was profound and unforgettable. Time is money. Wasted time means wasted money means trouble." “Baby Burlesks” was followed by five two-reel comedies and a year of casting calls and bit-part auditions, which garnered young Shirley half a dozen small roles. By Thanksgiving 1933 she was growing older. She was 5½, and in the previous two years she had earned a total of $702.50. Her mother did the sensible thing: she shaved a year off her daughter’s age. Shirley would be shocked to discover, at a party for her 12th birthday in April 1941, that she was actually 13. Her career began in earnest in 1934, when she was picked to play James Dunn’s daughter in the Fox fantasy “Stand Up and Cheer,” one of many films made during the Depression in which music chases away unhappy reality. She was signed to a two-week contract at $150 a week and told to provide her own tap shoes. Within an hour of completing her song-and-dance number “Baby, Take a Bow,” she was formally placed under contract to Fox for a year at $150 a week. The studio had an option for seven more years and would pay Gertrude Temple an additional $25 each week to take care of her daughter. In its review of “Stand Up and Cheer” (1934), Variety called Shirley Temple a “sure-fire potential kidlet star.” She made eight movies in 1934 and moved from potential to full star in February, when Fox lent her to Paramount for “Little Miss Marker,” based on a Damon Runyon story. Playing a child left with a bookie (Adolphe Menjou) as a marker for her father’s gambling debts, Shirley reforms a gang of gamblers, bookies and horse dopers. She would play a similarly wise and maternal miniature adult, dominating the adults around her and solving their problems with unbounded optimism and common sense, in most of her films. She brought peace to a British regiment fighting rebels in India in “Wee Willie Winkie” (1937) and to white men and Indians in “Susannah of the Mounties” (1939). She was frequently cast as an orphan, the better to show adults how to cope with adversity: her father committed suicide in “Little Miss Marker”; her aviator father crashed and her mother was killed by a car in “Bright Eyes” (1934); she was the sole survivor of a shipwreck in “Captain January” (1936). “People in the Depression wanted something to cheer them up, and they fell in love with a dog, Rin Tin Tin, and a little girl,” Mrs. Black often said in appraising her success. It is no surprise that Shirley Temple dolls were the best-selling dolls of the decade (and are valuable collectibles now). In many of her films she was a living doll, adored by entire groups of men: aviators in “Bright Eyes," a Yankee regiment in “The Little Colonel” (1935). No Shirley Temple movie was complete without a song — most famously “On the Good Ship Lollipop” and “Animal Crackers in My Soup” — and a tap dance, with partners including George Murphy, Jack Haley and Buddy Ebsen. But her most successful partnership was with the legendary African-American entertainer Bill (Bojangles) Robinson. She may have been the first white actress allowed to hold hands affectionately with a black man on screen, and her staircase dance with Mr. Robinson in “The Little Colonel,” the first of four movies they made together, retains its magic almost 80 years later. Not everyone was a Shirley Temple fan. The novelist Graham Greene, who was also a film critic, was sued by 20th Century Fox for his review of “Wee Willie Winkie” in the magazine Night and Day, which he edited. In the review, he questioned whether she was a midget and wrote of her “well-shaped and desirable little body” being served up to middle-aged male admirers. After the failure of “The Blue Bird” (1940), a film version of the Maeterlinck fantasy that Fox expected to be the bonanza MGM’s “Wizard of Oz” had been a year earlier, the studio dropped 12-year-old Shirley’s contract. Even before the movie was released, her mother had decided it was time for Shirley, who had been educated in a schoolroom at Fox, to go to a real school. She entered the private Westlake School for Girls in seventh grade, with little idea of how to cope. She had sat on 200 famous laps and found J. Edgar Hoover’s the most comfortable. Amelia Earhart had shared chewing gum with her. She had conversed with Eleanor Roosevelt. The Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood had created the Shirley Temple — a nonalcoholic drink of lemon-lime soda, grenadine and a maraschino cherry — in her honor. But her playmates had been few and carefully chosen. At Westlake, after months of being given the cold shoulder, she decided she might as well be herself. She eventually spent a happy five years there. What Fox had dropped, MGM picked up eight months later. But the little girl was now entering adolescence. On her first visit to MGM, Mrs. Black wrote in her autobiography, the producer Arthur Freed unzipped his trousers and exposed himself to her. Being innocent of male anatomy, she responded by giggling, and he threw her out of his office. She made “Kathleen” (1941) for MGM and “Miss Annie Rooney” (1942) for United Artists; played supporting roles for David O. Selznick in two 1944 films, “Since You Went Away” and “I’ll Be Seeing You”; and made “Kiss and Tell” on loan to Columbia in 1945. But her golden hair had turned brown and, as the film historian David Thomson observed, she had become “an unremarkable teenager.” The public had lost interest. By then she was a strong-willed, chain-smoking 17-year-old. Determined to be the first in her Westlake class to become engaged, she had accepted a ring from a 24-year-old Army Air Corps sergeant, John Agar Jr., a few days before her 17th birthday. They were married on Sept. 19, 1945. By the early 1960s she was president of the Multiple Sclerosis Society and co-founder of the International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis Societies, raising funds to fight the disease that afflicted her brother, George. She was representing the federation in Prague on Aug. 21, 1968, when Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks rolled in and brought to a premature end Alexander Dubcek’s effort to remodel the Communist system. For many years the Black family lived in the San Francisco area, where she was active in civic and community affairs. She worked particularly hard for the development of the San Francisco International Film Festival, but she resigned from the festival’s executive committee in 1966 in protest against a decision to show the Swedish film “Night Games,” which she called “pornography for profit.” Mrs. Black had become interested in politics when she lived in Washington. In 1967 she ran for Congress to fill a seat left vacant by the death of the Republican J. Arthur Younger. She hoped to emulate the California political successes of George Murphy, her dancing partner in “Little Miss Broadway,” who had become a United States senator, and Ronald Reagan, her co-star in “That Hagen Girl,” who had become governor. A backer of the Vietnam War, she lost to a more moderate Republican, Pete McCloskey, in the suburban 11th Congressional District south of San Francisco. It probably did not help that the bands kept playing “On the Good Ship Lollipop” at her campaign stops. But Mrs. Black pressed on with her decision to have a new career in public service. In 1969, President Nixon appointed her to the five-member United States delegation to the 24th session of the United Nations General Assembly. She acquitted herself well by all accounts, speaking out about the problems of the aged, the plight of refugees and, especially, environmental problems. When she was appointed ambassador to Ghana in 1974, some career diplomats were outraged, but State Department officials later conceded that her performance was outstanding. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/12/arts/shirley-temple-black-screen-star-dies-at-85.html?hpw&rref=movies&_r=0

I don't know who or why, Manning is still an amazing QB with an astonishing record. As he said "there is nothing to be embarrassed about". They had an off game (albeit the worst time to have one) and we had probably one of the best if not the best game ever. I mean sure we have scored more points in a game, heck we shut out a team last year 58-0 with mostly the same team as this one. We can beat any team at any time and we could also lose to any team at any time. 2/2/14 was OUR DAY. My son and I went to the parade yesterday in Seattle with what they estimated at 750,000 of my fellow 12's (we there say it was closer to the million mark) - It was an amazing experience!!!

Thanks Carl, you should see this place... it's nuts!! The whole city (I live 15 miles North of the Space needle, can see Mt Rainier from my roof) I'm home with a bad cold today and been watching the game highlights over and over and over and ... never gettin' tired of it! Fun facts about the Seahawks Superbowl Win! The Seahawks set a Super Bowl record with 36 consecutive points to start a game. The opening safety after 12 seconds of play marked the fastest score in Super Bowl history. Record set for Most Playing Time In The Lead, Game, Team – 59 minutes, 48 seconds, Seattle.

Absolutely not! Manning is amazing! but we are in a division of fighters, Kaepernick is a stinging threat, and the Rams, Cards, Saints all fabulous teams. So we had to get tough, fast and live by trench battle. It made us who we are. Then you put up against the AFC? That league is not the same. But now the world knows what us die-hard Hawks fans knew all season... we are for real, we are the best and we are here to stay for a while!

http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_25004712/seahawks-fans-outnumber-broncos-fans-at-super-bowl The media day had been fun.. first we had Sherman "go off" back at the end of the NFCCG a couple weeks ago and that took all the attention by the media away from everyone else, now the lack of Lynch cooperation with the media has more attention on him than would normally be simply because he hates pressers. When asked by Dion Sanders the other day he said.. "I'm just 'bout that action boss"! Also a little side competition with the Empire State Building colors chosen by fans http://blogs.denverpost.com/techknowbytes/2014/01/29/tweets-determine-whether-empire-state-building-displays-broncos-seahawks-colors/13006/ has been pretty cool too!!

So right about Manning, he gets my vote for MVP. Nobody in this game is more aware of Manning's skills than Wilson who learned from Peyton at his camp - http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap2000000316667/article/russell-wilson-once-attended-peyton-mannings-camp Gonna be a great game!!

RENTON, Wash. -- The Seattle Seahawks opened their locker room to the media Thursday afternoon, three days before the flight across the country for a week's worth of Super Bowl XLVIII hype, and, as with Sundays at CenturyLink Field, it was all about the noise. While reporters probed various members of the newly crowned NFC champions for their thoughts, Pro Bowl running back Marshawn Lynch stood at his luxuriant locker playing deejay, blasting an eclectic ensemble of hip-hop tunes through his iPhone-programmed portable sound system. It was Beast Mode meets Beats Mode -- an everyday occurrence at the team's training facility, where coach Pete Carroll and his players have put a 21st-century spin on the notion of Seattle Sound. Whether it's reggae in the draft room, classic rock on the practice field or Lynch's Oakland-heavy rap playlist in the locker room, there's an omnipresent groove at the Seahawks' training facility, one of the many reasons so many players have come to regard their workplace as refreshing, progressive and enjoyable. "Look at this," defensive lineman Michael Bennett said Thursday, gesturing toward Lynch as he reclined in a plush leather chair in the middle of the locker room. "It's the Google of football." That's one reason this Pacific Northwest outpost has become a prime destination for free agents searching for an upbeat environment, a movement the Seahawks' success is only likely to amplify. And the credit should go to the region's most influential power trio since Nirvana: Carroll, general manager John Schneider and owner Paul Allen, all of whom are committed to cultivating an atmosphere conducive to smiling employees. "We work hard, but we like being here," All-Pro free safety Earl Thomas explained. "We have the best facility. The cooks are great. Across the board, they've placed great people in great positions. And the music is always playing ..." In a city that has given the world an inordinate share of musical excellence -- claiming Jimi Hendrix, Heart (whose lead singer, Ann Wilson, provided a blistering rendition of the "Star-Spangled Banner" before the NFC Championship Game), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to4DuQ1i8HY Sir Mix-a-Lot, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Foo Fighters and Macklemore (last Sunday's halftime performer), among others -- the local football team most definitely rocks. "It's a very relaxing work environment," said All-Pro cornerback Richard Sherman, who knows a thing or two about volume. "People are most comfortable being themselves. And if you allow people to be in the most comfortable state, they're going to be the most successful." It might be somewhat of a stretch to equate the constant rhythm at the VMAC (Virginia Mason Athletic Center) with the noise the Seahawks have made on the field since Allen lured Carroll from USC four years ago, with the team's then-CEO, Tod Leiweke, plucking Schneider from the Green Bay Packers' front office shortly thereafter. Yet there is a method to the loudness, something upon which Carroll expounded during our sit-down interview Thursday, for a feature scheduled to air on NFL Network's "GameDay Morning" on Super Sunday. "Music's always been a big part of my world," Carroll told me. "And I've just found over the years that our game and the environment that we perform in has a beat to it. And there is a pulse and a rhythm to it, and it's always encompassed in noise and sound and all of that. And it's all part of something that is part of what we feel. "And so I found out, you know, years ago back at SC that if I included the music as much as possible wherever it fit, we might be able to benefit from it. And I found some information, some reports that support that people learn better, you know, when they're upbeat and they're uplifted. But mainly it's just about (the fact that) I like it. I like the feel of it. And I like the way the players respond to it. "I mean, it's not for everybody. I don't expect everybody to understand that. But it's something that's very special and it's a big part of us." Carroll, naturally, plays a part in choosing the soundtrack that accompanies the Seahawks' daily routine. There is a deejay on hand for practices -- including those open to the public in training camp, adding some entertainment value to the monotony of 7-on-7 drills and the like -- and he also sets up shop on the sidelines on Sundays at CenturyLink Field, where the pregame mix is routinely popping. And while Carroll doesn't decide the entire playlist, the coach does have input. "If I'm not feelin' it," Carroll said, "I'm gonna let him know." You would think a 62-year-old coach supervising musical selections for a team of mostly 20-somethings (the Seahawks are the second-youngest team in Super Bowl history) would have the potential to create some serious blowback. Carroll, however, isn't your typical sexagenarian. "For a 62-year-old, he has good taste," Lynch said. "He listens to all types of music. Sometimes I'll be like, 'What the (expletive) is that that he's playing?' But the majority of what he plays, everybody knows and likes. Even the oldies -- he'll play some James Brown out there, and even the youngest guys on the team will be dancing and singing along." From his days growing up in Marin County, where he checked out a few shows by the Grateful Dead as they forged their golden road from hippie house band to legendary American rock ensemble, to his decade-long stint presiding over the Trojans' renaissance in Los Angeles, where his celebrity helped him forge a friendship with iconic Long Beach rapper Snoop Dogg, Carroll has stayed in the mix when it comes to musical trends. His players notice, too. In August, when Snoop Dogg showed up for a Seahawks preseason game against the Oakland Raiders at CenturyLink -- rocking a white Lynch jersey, to boot -- nobody on the 'Hawks was saying there Ain't No Fun in Seattle. "You have to be a part of it to see how it's run, and how cool it is," said outside linebacker Cliff Avril, who signed with the Seahawks as a free agent last March. "You can't really see it from the outside. We embrace it. Pete himself is an up-tempo, hyped-up guy. If your coach is like that, it kind of trickles down, and you can't help but have fun." Added backup quarterback Tarvaris Jackson, who returned to Seattle after spending the 2012 season with the Buffalo Bills: "Look around -- you see it. There aren't too many locker rooms like this. The type of music we play here, it's like home. Music in the locker room, music on the field, even music at meetings. Music's a big part of what we do here." In the eyes of Bennett, who signed with the Seahawks last March after four years with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Carroll's insistence on exposing his players to tunes might help them tune out unwanted distractions come game day. "I think it's a focus thing," Bennett said. "If you can focus when there's music, when it's loud all the time, it trains your mind to deal with hectic game situations. Your mind is constantly having to think with the noise in the background. Cerebrally, that's one of those things I think (Carroll's) doing -- messing with your psychology." Perhaps -- but Carroll is also fostering an atmosphere of self-expression, especially in the case of a certain reticent running back. While getting Lynch to conduct an interview (present company excluded) is tougher than tackling him in the second level, he's practically an extrovert when playing locker-room deejay, a state of affairs to which his teammates have happily become acclimated. "People connect with music," said Lynch, who on Thursday accepted an old-school request, "Don't Fight The Feelin' " by iconic Oakland rapper Too Short -- exposing several amused Seahawks to its raunchy lyrics. "You see it while you're out -- if you put some good tunes on, no matter where you are, people can appreciate that. It's a relaxing environment. It just puts everybody in a good frame of mind." http://www.nfl.com/superbowl/story/0ap2000000317463/article/secret-to-pete-carrolls-seattle-seahawks-dont-stop-the-music

Welcome to the 11th. Annual Songfacts Oscar Pool This thread will serve as the pool. Just post a reply with your choices in the following categories: Just post a reply with your choices in the following categories: Best Picture (25 points): American Hustle Captain Phillips Dallas Buyers Club Gravity Her Nebraska Philomena 12 Years a Slave The Wolf of Wall Street Best Actor (15 points): Christian Bale (American Hustle) Bruce Dern (Nebraska) Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street) Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club) Best Actoress (15 points): Amy Adams (American Hustle) Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine) Sandra Bullock (Gravity) Judi Dench (Philomena) Meryl Streep (August: Osage County) Best Supporting Actor (10 points): Barkhad Abdi (Captain Phillips) Bradley Cooper (American Hustle) Michael Fassbender (12 Years a Slave) Jonah Hill (The Wolf of Wall Street) Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club) Best Supporting Actress (10 points): Sally Hawkins (Blue Jasmine) Jennifer Lawrence (American Hustle) Lupita Nyong'o (12 Years a Slave) Julia Roberts (August: Osage County) June Squibb (Nebraska) Best Director (15 points): American Hustle (David O. Russell) Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón) Nebraska (Alexander Payne) 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen) The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese) Best Original Score (15 points): The Book Thief (John Williams) Gravity (Steven Price) Her (William Butler, Owen Pallett) Philomena (Alexandre Desplat) Saving Mr. Banks (Thomas Newman) Best Original Song (25 points): "Alone Yet Not Alone" (Alone Yet Not Alone) "Happy" (Despicable Me 2) "Let It Go" (Frozen) "The Moon Song" (Her) "Ordinary Love" (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom) *Best Song is the first tiebreaker, followed by Best Score. The Oscars are Sunday, March 2, 2014 so make sure to post your picks by then. Only one entry accepted per person. Good luck!

Well, now we learn what may have set Sherman off... maybe... http://www.seahawks.com/videos-photos/videos/Richard-Sherman-and-Michael-Crabtree-micd-/c2ae00fc-4efa-4f01-89c5-d7e77a23a984 I hope Crabtree gets a hefty fine!!

THIS LEADS TO THIS

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The Cards played great, what an amazing defense!! They are in the toughest division and they have been playing so much better the second half of the season! Congrats!!!

Let’s take a look at the man at QB 23 Wins by Wilson, the most by a second-year quarterback in NFL history. Ben Roethlisberger held the previous record of 22. 50 Career touchdown passes by Wilson. He became the third quarterback in NFL history, along with Peyton Manning and Dan Marino, to throw 50 touchdown passes in his first two seasons.

NFL BEST RECORD 12-2, MOST ROAD WINS IN 37 SEASONS WITH 6. FIVE MIGHTY GIANTS STILL CAN'T STOP THE BEAST FROM SCORING