bigg jay

The Hobbit actually was written as a children's story so you're getting the intended purpose. LOTR was intended as a sequel but spawned into something much bigger (not unlike GOT which was originally a trilogy & now has a 7 book on the way with at least 1 more planned). I would argue that LOTR isn't fleshed out as well though. Character-wise, absolutely it's not as deep as GOT, but the world & languages that Tolkien created are incredible. As Rich pointed out, Tolkien wrote his stuff about 80 years ago when that genre didn't exist. He had a lot of his writing interrupted by WWII so I'm not suprised people don't find it as consistent as GOT. One major difference for me between the two is that Martin bases a lot of his material on directly on historical events (ex: The Red Wedding is based on The Black Dinner in Scottish history) where Tolkien created more from his mind. I love both series but I weigh them differently because of those factors. They are both in the fantasy genre, but it's like apples & oranges to me. PS - it's not just Dinklage's acting (which is incredible), the Tyrion character is so well written, it's was a favorite character of most people long before the TV show ever aired an episode.

Manitoba Roughriders Rough Riders Our version would be having two teams called the Bombers... and it would tie into TUP's post about the air force theme.

I believe this is the intended purpose of the Quick Care clinics the WRHA has been opening (there are 3 currently). I have no clue how effective they have been though.

If there's one thing we've learned in Winnipeg... it's that media executives always make good CFL executives... Orridge has some work to do in the hair department if he's going to live up to the lofty standards set before him!

I'm pretty sure I read that Derrett said thanks but no thanks when he was approached about the job. Lawless says he's heard Jeffrey Orridge's (excecutive director of CBC sports) name come up but he doesn't know if he's the guy who will end up getting named commish.

This is one area where I thought Gord Steeves had the right idea when he was running for mayor. He was the only candidate who promised to make the focus safety rather than money. Bowman's take on it was that if you got a ticket, you deserved it.

Lets look at the MTS privatization. Has anyone gotten better service since it was privatized? Filmon lied- in the election before he privatatized MTS, he personally promised he would not privatize it, and then he did it. He said that Manitoba could not afford to have a crown corporation help keep up with all the pending technology, but and here is where it gets interesting, the legislation to sell MTS specifically prevented SaskTel from buying MTS, and they were very interested. Same old stories-lying Tories Yes, everyone gets better service. MTS had lousy customer service for awhile and they knew that. They have improved in that area significantly. Its certainly no worse than any "call center" service I've experienced with other comparable businesses including SHAW. If you're referring to the Phone Center stores, they would have gone away regardless and if they didnt, thats a perfect example of why the government couldnt be trusted to effectively run the operation. Im really not sure there is a great argument against the privatization of MTS at this point. I was pretty young during the bulk of the Filmon years and actually grew up very anti-PC (my parents were NDP'ers) but the older I got, the more I couldnt deny his effectiveness as a leader. As a young person in the 90's, Winnipeg sucked big time. Everyone I knew was dying to get out. Losing the Jets was another nail in the coffin. Filmon was the leader we needed at the time we got him. NDP had come in and screwed things up, economy was bad, transfer payments down. PC's governed during bad times, steered us through it and when things turned around, here came the NDP with alot of wonderful ways to spend the money the PC's worked hard to generate. And now history repeats itself except the Selinger government has had pretty good times and loads of money...they are just incompetent. And along will come a PC party to fix things. You pretty well ignored everything Tracker wrote, except the 1st part about service. My biggest beef with the MTS thing was the fact he had just campaigned on not privatizing it. It's not a whole lot different than Selinger raising the PST after saying he wouldn't. Both were needed and the right thing to do (IMO) but lying about it before hand is sure to piss people off. Filmon deserved the critisism and so does Selinger. Another thing that stinks about it, besides the SaskTel thing, is that Filmon became a director with MTS less than 5 years after privatization, so he not only lied about it, he gained quite a bit financially from it.

If you're even a little bit tech savy, run XMBC off a computer that you can hook up to your TV (or buy a box that runs it), install a few select addons and you're set. No need for cable or netflix as anything & everything can be found on there.

I agree, he looks bad ass, he just doesn't look like the Aquaman that I remember as a kid (the orange & green suit). I was never a big Aquaman guy so I missed the 90's comics version they are basing Momoa's look on.

I dunno...it's DC. They aren't exactly very smart when making movies outside of the Batman franchise. Quoted for the truth! To be fair, they do seem to be making some strides in the right direction but they still make some head scratching decisions. I'm still trying to get my head around Khal Drogo/New Conan as Aquaman.

And now the Jets have picked up Jiri Tlusty from Carolina for a 3rd rounder in 2016 & a conditional 6th rounder in 2015.

Winnik has been traded to Pittsburgh.

It wasn't just his arms that looked off, he had some pretty bad back acne going on too. I'm not sure what was worse, Silva's appearance or his performance. Both are a direct result of him no longer being on TRT so I guess it's a tie. It sure was a good night for gamblers and a bad night for bookies! A one dollar bet on the underdogs was worth just under 50k

Cold weather will do that.

Cleveland

GSP is happy with the direction they are going but , like me, wants to hear more specifics. It'll be interesting to see if these changes will be enough to get him back in the cage. From his twitter account:

It sounds like a good start but it's short on details (at least for now until they get their deals in place). I wasn't surprised to to see how little they spent on drug testing over the last 2 years (500k) compared to what they are now committing to pay (several million, but no cap & willing to spend whatever it takes according to Lorenzo). There are a lot of fighters who will either retire or be noticeably less successful in the next little while. The part of about key commissions making things uniform is pretty funny if you've spent any time dealing with them. This enhanced drug testing has created quite a bit of talk about this possibly pushing fighters towards being considered employees rather than independent contractors. Year round testing, "uniforms", health insurance and other things are starting to add up.

Business-wise it makes sense, they want to protect their cash cow's. It's just very hypocritical and something you don't generally see in other professional sports (at least from the league). They want to be seen a a major league sport but sometimes they do very bush league things.

The UFC plays favorites, no question about it. They will cut a lower level guy over a tweet, but a star like Jones gets a slap on the wrist. And it's not as though this is Jones 1st controversy either, he just had the press conference brawl with Cormier (there may still be fallout from that as Jones flat out lied to the commission at a hearing) and he had a DUI in 2012.

The tests are always done by a commission but Silva's test for sure was paid for by the UFC directly. The UFC has & does fund drug testing (especially out of competition testing) but from my understanding, they do not pay the labs directly. The policy in Manitoba is for the commission, not the lab, to bill the promoter (UFC 161 was/is the only time drug testing has been done here if I'm not mistaken).

Not true. The out of competition tests were done by the Nevada commission not the ufc.

I hope somebody tweeted that to Cornish & Federkeil.

There has always been PED users (even going back to the Royce Gracie days - Ken Shamrock has admitted past TRT use & he fought on UFC 1) but it's definitely increased as the sport has grown. It's gotten to the point though where clean guys are contemplating walking away. They've had 13 guys in the last 12 months fail tests. The UFC isn't helping things either, they recently cancelled plans to randomly test each fighter throughout the year (if you believe the rumors, it's because they did a test run & 70% of the samples came back positive for banned substances). They're holding a press conference next week to address the issue, so we'll see how serious they are about cleaning it up.

Thanks Rich! To expand on my earlier post, MMA is having fighters failing drug tests on almost a weekly basis right now (2 of them being major stars in Jon Jones & Anderson Silva). They had arguably their biggest star (GSP) completely walk away from the sport because of the rampant PED use. Those are facts. Another fact is that for the athletes, the promotions, and the commissions (more specifically Nevada because of their laws) it's better financially to ignore the drug tests until after the fights are done. For example, if they had released the test results for the last PPV in a timely manner, it would have forced either the cancellation/rescheduling of the main event or even the entire card (the UFC has cancelled an entire card due to a main event change before). The laws in Nevada state that they could be on the hook for refunds if they don't deliver the card as advertised so if they lost the Silva/Diaz fight, they could have been shelling out a lot of cash, not to mention the huge loss in PPV buys. The NSAC also loses out, as they make 6% of the total gate for the event (for the SIlva/Diaz event, their cut was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars). Obviously the fighters lose out too since they (for the most part), don't get paid if they don't get to fight. Silva's failed drug test was done weeks before the event but conveniently did not receive the result until days after the event - they could have had them in about a week, if they so chose. Given the financial implications I just mentioned, is it a coincidence that they don't get the results until after the event?

Or it could be that the culture of the NHL is different and therefor they have less issues than other leagues. I think thats the answer. All those other leagues and organizations have a brand to protect too. I wouldnt say the UFC is in crises mode. They have problems but it's not a crises. They will get it sorted out. I remember the HUGE drug scandal in WWE a few years ago (that ended up with Vince mcMahon on federal trial) but they worked it out...more or less. The mods may want to split this topic from the Jets/NHL talk. It's not in crisis mode yet, it's knocking on the door for the UFC and only because they are doing their best to bury it. There's a lot going on with PED's in MMA (some confirmed and some stuff is strongly hinted at or rumored). There's so much financial motivation (for all parties involved) to sweep this under the rug, it's not even funny.