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Shots from the 2006 Debbie Kruck are up on the site.

The shots came out a little redder than I prefer; I think I’m going to have to abandon the auto-white-balance when speed shooting across the width of the stage.

There were also some yabbos shooting with uncovered strobes flanking the stage; besides leaving me half-blinded, they ruined a couple dozen of my shots (and Ian’s too, I suspect).

More seriously, the show had no female bodybuilding competitors. None. Zero. I counted ’em twice.

The show *did* have a half-dozen or so talented female bodybuilders, who inexplicably showed up in the figure rounds.

What ya gonna do? I hate to abandon the state’s only Daytona-region show, but unless these issues get some discussion, I won’t be terribly motivated to go back next year. We’ll see if the topics come up.

So I just got back from my first college football game since the new rules were implemented.

“New rules?” you ask. Yes, new rules that are designed to “speed up” the game. New rules that keep the clock running after a change of possession. New rules that start the clock on kickoff, not when the other team touches the ball.

Rules, in short, that are designed to ensure less actual football but leave plenty of time for ads.

Hey, I’m aware of the realities. Ads = revenue. You don’t get to the top of this heap with bargain-basement personnel. Great leaders, great staffers are few and far between, and they don’t come cheap.

But this is wrong in so many ways. If there’s really a need to speed things up, put a tranquilizer dart in the red-hat guy’s neck. Because while he’s on the field, there’s one tenth of a million people in the stands twiddling their thumbs, and the rest of the country’s checking for leftover pizza in the fridge.

But it gets even worse: this game was on freakin’ pay-per-view. How the hell did we get suckered into paying to see ads?

Take a step back and think about this question:

How many commercials would it take to motivate nearly 100,000 screaming, rabid fans to lay down a handful or two of Alexander Hamiltons in order to spend days driving, fighting gridlock traffic, searching for a place to park, trudging up several flights of stairs in oppressive humidity, and cheering themselves hoarse for a couple of hours, fighting back tears of joy the whole time?

How many insurance ads would get that kind of turnout?

How about ads for cars or banks or drinks or bug sprays or groceries or–well, anything else?

You get the picture.

Football– the game– is the filet mignon in this T-bone. Ads are the gristle. We put up with ’em because we have to, but they’re not the reason we’re here.

Television had better wake up to this reality before advertisers suck *all* the life out of the game.

Because when the T-bone has too much gristle and not enough meat, there’s always leftover pizza in the fridge.

Reader’s Digest recently gave FEMA a raspberry for ineptness and inefficiency, claiming they lost “some $1 billion in potentially bogus Katrina-related aid. An audit found that the federal relief agency didn’t properly monitor where the funds were going.”

Surprisingly, the inefficiency aspect isn’t the biggest issue to me. The definition of “emergency” means you handle unexpected conditions to the best of your ability. And while audits are necessary, they don’t save lives in the trenches.

I think FEMA got a wake-up call, and learned some powerful lessons in the only way they *can* be learned. Too optimistic? Time will tell.

The raspberry, in my humble opinion, needs to go to any so-called American who tried to bilk the “system” in the face of the catastrophe.

In fact, I’d be in favor of stripping the citizenship of anyone convicted of defrauding FEMA during a declared state of emergency.

I’m not getting this hurricane season at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying the peace and quiet. But this time last year you couldn’t risk facing east while you sneezed, lest you cause a tropical depression to spin up.

This year we’ve seen event after event start to loom, only to fade out like a cheesy ghost at the “Haunted Mansion”. Here it is almost the season peak and feeble Alberto has been the only thing to even drop some rain on our grateful heads.

*Something* is different between this year and last. Maybe salinity or temperature or pressure or sunspots, but *something*.

And I hope the Scientists and Experts are sampling anything and everything they can to try to figure out what.

I put together a travelogue from my trip to Cincinnati this year. Feel free to let me know what you think about the content or the format.

Shots from the 2006 Ancient City in St Augustine are up.

I love this venue, the lighting is so nice.

I boosted the size of the shots by 20% as well, hopefully people will find this a good change. Enjoy.

Startling jury finding: the Houston woman who drowned her five children because Satan was in her body and she thought the act would prevent her from going to Hell, is insane.

Of course it took the legal system three years and untold thousands (millions?) of dollars to come to this conclusion.

Insanity, it seems, is going around.