BALLS!

Balls. Gotta keep them clean.

This is actually an old commercial I saw a while back but I came across it again. I was reading my Sports Illustrated magazine when I saw this ad. It reminded me of the balls commercial that was on TV. Yes, this commercial was on TV.

The surprising amount of wordplay and subliminal messaging makes me laugh. Of course, if you’re too young or are too protective of the real world, you probably don’t get this or don’t even want to hear about men cleaning their balls.

But I just love how it’s always a pair of balls and that there are numerous sizes and well, you get it. The ball sack one is pretty clever too.

Quite frankly, I do think it’s something that shouldn’t thrown out on the airwaves. But the way that Axe was able to tip-toe around it and find a way to promote ball-cleaning without actually talking about real ball-cleaning is pretty smart.

Thanksgiving with family, Black Friday shopping and my early Christmas gifts

Me with my cousins knocked out from the food coma.

Happy Thanksgiving! The above picture is of me with my cousins, all asleep after dinner with the family. We ate too much food. We had too much food. I love it. I made my Mac & Cheese WITH smoked applewood bacon! Oh yes. It was so good and it was a hit. Lots of turkey, corn, mashed potatoes, gravy and so much more for our fooding. It was just so great.

I love being back with the fam and it was just nice to be lazy and be fun!

Earlier in the day, I went to the annual Turkey Bowl at Arroyo High School in San Lorenzo. I spent the first two hours playing basketball. It was really cold but I was playing OK. Then for about an hour I played tackle football. Not so good as I got my foot stepped on by cleats and then ran into another guy running at me. For the first time in my life, I had the wind knocked out of me. I couldn’t breathe for 10 seconds. It was painful.

Happy holiday that features a lot of fooding

Happy Thanksgiving! Yeah yeah, it’s a holiday so I’m happy.

Yes, we should be thankful all the time, not just on day. Yes, the pilgrims were very unforgiving to the natives, etc. But still, it’s a good time to look back and just be thankful for a bunch of things.

Here’s a short, condensed list because I am a little too lazy to go through everything. But here are the important things that are on my mind right now.

– Major thanks to God for saving me, giving me hope. It’s something that I am trying real hard not to take for granted. So many times I have been down and just knowing God will be there for me saves me from going crazy. My life is worthless with God being there for me and everyone else. Thank God!

– Thanks to my parents for giving me everything I need. I don’t know if I show enough appreciation to them and many times they give me a tough time. But they have been there for me always. They give me a place to live, a car to drive and a lot of other things that keep me alive. I need them in my life more than ever now.

– My family. The support I receive from them has always kept me positive. And when everything goes wrong, they’re always there for me no matter what.

– My friends continue to just to help me get along in life. Great memories, great support and more importantly, a love that cannot be duplicated. Growing up as an only child makes me value my friends a lot more. I hold onto these relationships because it’s the only thing I had as a kid and I still need now.

– Thankful for my job. Being a sports writer has been my dream and being right in the heart of it all so early into my life is a true blessing. It’s so fun.

– Thankful for everything else. I think that no matter how many heartaches, bad breaks or anything bad that happens, it develops us into better people. I am thankful for everything. Everything is important. I need everything.

Be safe everyone. Time for me to get some grub on and food coma later!

Look at the cool Beatles notebook I found in the yellow submarine!

I'm never writing in this. It's for display ONLY!

One of the things that I like to do as a fan of The Beatles is to collect random things of The Beatles that I find. Growing up, the band was my favorite music group of all time. I pretty much have their entire catalog of music in myWe all live in a yellow submarine: Look at what I found! head. In fact, I grew up getting my friends to pretend to be The Beatles (I was George).

The band has made me happy in so many ways and their music is amazing. Their story of how they got into stardom has been so well-documented I still find it shocking when people say they don’t know anything about them (like David Archuleta). And when I went to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in August, I froze and stared at John Lennon’s suit from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band… the actual suit that he wore!

So today, as I went to Walgreens to do my early Christmas shopping (not for me, I was buying cards for friends) I walked into the wrong aisle. It was the office/school supply aisle and located in the rack of notebooks, I found this notebook. It was stocked along with KISS, AC/DC and some other randoms stuff. But this notebook grabbed my attention. There were only two of them and I decided to only buy one since I didn’t want to be selfish.

But yes, I was so happy that I found this. Even though it was overpriced at $2.99, the fan in me said I had to get it. I love this band. They got me into great music and opened up everything for me when I was only a young lad in elementary school. Best band ever? You bet! Best merchandises? I think so.

Goo-goo-ga-joob!

Whiter Shades of Pale: The Book Trailer (via Stuff White People Like)

Also, a trailer for a book? I can’t wait until I get my hands on this book. It will be a fun read!

Click the link to the original entry to play White people Bingo!

Whiter Shades of Pale is out tomorrow! How could we resist celebrating with a round of White Person Travel Bingo? Play your own round of White Bingo: Buy the book: Amazon Barnes & Noble Borders.com IndieBound … Read More

via Stuff White People Like

The food I eat while covering the 49ers

I like covering the 49ers. But when they suck on the field (like they did today), I like to occupy my mind with other things… like the free food.

Free food isn’t guaranteed at most sporting events. The 49ers and Raiders provide free food at their stadiums. The Warriors have a $7 buffet for the media. Food there is good, but I prefer free. It tastes better.

Of course, I’ve been told that food back in the day when the 49ers were winning Super Bowls was much better. When a team wins, food tastes better I suppose.

But anyway, here are some pics of the food I ate today while suffering through the 49ers’ shutout loss.

Building my own chicken and steak fajita. It looks bad, tasted not bad.

Prince: “Let’s run a play — Computer Blue!”

During this past week at work I have been partially tired. That could probably be traced to my lack of sleep and lack of motivation. Well, that’s partially my fault. Anyway, to get myself into a better mood, my iPod has been saving me and keeping me awake.

The only music I end up listening to all week is Prince. To be more specific, the album Purple Rain is my choice. Not only is that one of the best movies I have ever seen, but the soundtrack/album is one of the finest things that I have ever heard. It actually is an album that opened up my eyes and allowed me to be a huge Prince fan. So glad I found a copy that I could check out three years ago in a Chinatown library.

Anyway, these two songs are the ones I listen to because in the album, they are consecutive tracks (and in the movie too, in consecutive scenes) and the story it tells is really good. Of course, you would have to have seen the movie to make sense of it. But still, the guitar work, the intensity of the song and the scenes just make it so great.

Trusting in God: It’s good to have these reminders every now and then

Bored outta my mind and I started to look through my Twitter feed and came across this link about trusting God.

It highlighted this verse from Proverbs 3:5-6

Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek His will in all you do, and He will show you which path to take.

It’s a simple thing really. Let all worries go and trust God to take care of things. That if we look for God and do what is right, He’ll take care of us.

In my mind I know that. I understand it. I try to remember it. But taking it to heart, as the verse says, is a different story. To fully trust God with all your heart — not as easy as it sounds. In fact, it’s probably what separates us from being human. Fear, uncertainty and a bunch of other stuff prevents us from fully allowing God into our hearts.

It’s hard to stop being so human. Yet when we trust God, He’ll do things that humans could never accomplish. I just have to get that through my head and into my heart. I gotta trust God a lot more than I say I do. I need to make it happen for real. I got too much stuff I am thinking and worrying about that I just gotta let God take care of for me.

If the food or beverage is the color orange, I’m going to consume it

Probably the most powerful of all orange foods.

I have this crazy thing for foods that are orange colored. I have no idea why, but whenever it comes to snacking, I end up going with food that is orange colored.

A few of my favorite things that snack on happen to be orange (and mainly cheese flavored). My favorite snack to eat is Cheetos (love what it does to my fingers), but I will have Cheez-Its, cheese balls, Goldfish or whatever cheese-flavored chips. The same thing goes with candy. I like all fruit flavored candy but things that are orange colored and flavored tend to get my attention. Like Tic Tacs. My favorite is the orange one. It must be the citrus. It’s refreshing.

When it comes to beverages, orange soda please. To me, it’s the best kind of soda out there. You can have your lemon-lime flavored drinks or your cherry cola. For me, orange is the best. I prefer orange Gatorade too. My favorite juice is apple, but when I feel like I need to drink some healthy juice, I go for some pulpy orange juice.

I may have great hair, but my hair can also give me signs of my health issues

So I came across this article and it really grabbed my attention. It talks about how hair can also have signs of a person’s health issues. Hair isn’t just dead protein, but rather a telling sign of possible health issues that one might have.

Very interesting article. And if you jump, I’m going to copy and paste the portion that I think pertains to my hair.

When it comes to our hair, most of us worry most about what to do with it: how short to cut it, how to style it, whether to color it once it begins to go gray. But experts say that our hair says a lot more about us than how closely we follow the latest styles. In fact, the health of our hair and scalp can be a major tip-off to a wide variety of health conditions.

“We used to think hair was just dead protein, but now we understand that a whole host of internal conditions affect the health of our hair,” says dermatologist Victoria Barbosa… Read More

via Yahoo! Health