Saturday, April 26, 2008

Draft Day, Bonaparte, Boren, and Books!

Ok so last night's dinner at The Melting Pot went a lot better than expected. That place is awesome. Granted, it was like $110 but hey...you only have one Ten Year Anniversary, right? Well, I guess you could have more than one but I think that's fairly rare. Ash loved cooking her own food. She got a big kick out of that.
Today is Draft Day and wow...I don't care. See, the Browns did their thing already in the off season and we have no picks in the first three rounds so I'm basically going to have the draft on but I doubt I watch it too closely unless Phil Savage works a deal to get us back into the first. That's unlikely.

Mario Manningham reportedly got a SIX on the Wonderlic test. This has no bearing at ALL as to whether or not he'll be a good pro. None. At all. It's a ridiculous test to give football players. I think he'll be an average pro because he's a head case and was never a true standout in college--but it DOES show that not all 'Michigan Men' are smarter than your average bear. I remember Chris Gamble got like an 8 on his test so there's no glass house stuff going on here -- but UoM is just like any other bigtime program -- they do what they have to do in order to get the best players. If you think than Mario Manningham would have been accepted to Michigan (or Chris Gamble to OSU) without their ability to catch a football and run really fast wake up and smell the BCS money.

In other football news, I never did get Todd's reaction to the fact that former Michigan starting guard Justin Boren not only left the program because of Rich-Rod's "colorful" personality but he has now officially transferred to OHIO STATE. He's not even going to be able to be put on scholarship because it's a transfer within the conference. So, basically, Boren would rather pay his own way to come to OSU than to stay on schollie at Michigan.

Good times. Here endeth my stick-prodding of Todd today.

I am finally wrapping my brain around Bonaparte at Marengo. It's not that this is a terribly hard game but it's so different to every other wargame I have ever played that I need to rethink a lot of stuff. What attracts me to this game is that there's no dice, no combat tables, no hex grids -- just a map of the battlefield and a lot of cool wooden pieces.

The game looks, as I have said before, like an old map or like a documentary when they show the red and blue army bars facing each other. It's like playing a game with those pieces -- and it's wickedly cool. To give you an idea of what this game is like, check out this sample game with pics from the Simmons website. There's an ebb and flow to the game that I find thrilling.

OK books. I'm currently reading some history books of note. One is Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity. This is a fascinating read as it details the way the ancient Romans and Greeks killed one another. Throw me a book that talks about Alexander the Great, the Spartans and the Roman war machine and I'm in.