So tell me, what was your favorite toy growing up? I’ll pick one of you at random, and if I can find your toy for less than $10 on eBay, I’ll get it for you. If not, I’ll send you a book or something. Yo Joe!

My flight left from Miami on Tuesday at 6:00PM and landed in Madrid at 9:00AM, even though we’d only been in the plane nine hours.  The missing hours probably have something to do with the fact that we flew straight through the Bermuda triangle.  In fact I may now be living in an alternate universe, though in this alternate universe I apparently still cannot understand Spanish.

At the airport a man, who’s job description undoubtedly includes ‘scowling’, stamped my passport and loosed me to roam about his country.

2,800-room fixer-upper in a very desirable location

Through some rather poor planning, I had left myself about 47 minutes to explore Madrid, and as any seasoned traveler will tell you, you need at least an hour to see it all, so I decided I would visit the Royal Palace, and miss whatever was left.

The Royal Palace is the official residence of Juan Carlos I, the King of Spain.  Of course Juan Carlos and his family don’t actually live there, because at 1,450,000 square feet it’s possible the king could get lost and not be found for decades.  Instead the King and his family live at the Palace of Zarzuela, which is a more modest 33,900 square feet.  The Royal Palace, best I could tell from the twenty minutes I stared at it, was built primarily as a means to attract gawking foreigners.

From there I took a train to Barcelona.  This cost me $100 or so, and I have no idea if it was a good deal.  That’s because Spaniards, like the rest of Europe, use the metric system, which is a scale of measurements designed specifically to confuse Americans.  I tried to calculate the price of a train versus the price of renting a car by creating a word problem, but this only managed to give me a headache.

Suppose Chad has $120 and wants to travel the 384 miles from Madrid to Barcelona, leaving him enough money to buy tapas for dinner.  Keeping in mind that there are 1.609 kilometers in a mile, and that one dollar is worth .7601 Euros, and that fuel in Spain is called petrol not gasoline, and that gas stations sell it by the litre not the gallon, and that one gallon equals 3.785 litres, and that Europeans spell liter with the r and e reversed, and that Chad isn’t entirely sure he can legally drive in Spain, how many tapas can Chad eat in one sitting?

See what I mean?  There is literally no way to know which is cheaper.  The train was nice though and it even had WiFi for €9.95 (Roughly $1,350).

My first night in Barcelona I went to see an F.C. Barcelona soccer match.  The F.C. stands for football club, which leads me to believe when not playing soccer the guys like to get together and watch football.  The match that evening was against Valencia, and was held at F.C. Barcelona’s stadium called the Camp Nou, which holds 99,354 fans, making it the largest stadium in Europe, or the second largest stadium in Alabama.

Barcelona won the match 2-0, and I learned how to yell at referees in Spanish.  I also got to watch Lionel Messi, who many consider the greatest athlete in the world you are likely to mistake for a middle schooler.

The next day I visited Sagrada Familia, a Catholic church designed by Antoni Gaudí, who is not to be confused with Antoni Gaudy, who would have insisted the outside of the church be covered in rhinestones.  Construction on the church began in 1882 and was finished in, well, actually they are still working on it.  Last year officials announced that the church would be finished 2026, or maybe 2028.  Spaniards, it seems, are only in a hurry when being chased by bulls.

That afternoon I had lunch on La Rambla, a street whose name literally means The Boulevard, and figuratively means The Tourist Trap.  The chalk menu on the street presented a great deal for two tapas and a pasta dish, the chalk menu failed to mention I would be paying $7 for my Diet Coke.  Even so, I was excited to try tapas, which turned out to be just little finger food appetizers. The paella was delicious though, and the waiter was even kind enough to place one ice cube in my soda, for an extra €2 of course.

A stunning likeness

The rest of my time in Spain was spent aimlessly wandering Barcelona’s Old City, stopping only to tour the Picasso Museum and admire the work of my favorite artist that occasionally depicts noses with triangles.

In the end I thoroughly enjoyed my two days in the Kingdom of Spain, and would give the country 4.5 out of 5 stars if for some reason I were asked to rank countries on a five-star scale.  Had I been there in the summer to witness the Running of the Bulls I would have probably given a perfect score, but February’s Jogging of the Cows just isn’t as exciting.

So have you ever been to Spain?  Tell me about it!

Sagrada Familia in Barcelona

The Basilica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia.  Strangest looking church I think I’ve ever seen.  The front, or maybe it’s the back, looks like it is made of melting wax.  Have any of you ever seen it?  

It sends emails you can hold!

That’s because every February, the nation’s greatest high school football players commit to play football for the nation’s greatest institutions of higher learning via the nation’s greatest tool of business communication from the 1990’s.

You may ask why these commitments are not done electronically, but that would be a stupid question, because fax machines use electricity.  So then you may rephrase your question and ask why these commitments are not done via email, and I would tell you I don’t know.  I don’t know why they are not done by telegram, or smoke signals, or carrier pigeon either.  There comes a time when you just have to accept the fact that there are mysteries in the universe we will never understand and move on with your life and stop asking me questions.

So back to the point of all this before you interrupted me.  Every February the NCAA has something called National Signing Day.  On this day, great athletes are allowed to commit to play football and occasionally go to class at colleges around the country.  Before this day they can verbally commit, but these verbal commitments, from what I’ve gathered, are not legally binding.  Thankfully, neither is the devotion you pledge to a student when he verbally commits to your school, then stabs you in the back with the sharp end of a fax machine six weeks later.

A little history now.  Back in the day, colleges could not give athletic scholarships to prospective student-athletes.  Instead, coaches were forced to go from classroom to classroom, asking the larger kids if they were interested getting a concussion later that afternoon.  But all of that changed with the McNamara-O’Hara Service Contract act of 1965, which stated colleges could now recruit and give scholarships to big, fast kids, so long as they didn’t give them money or cars when anyone was looking.  I may have made most of that up.

Since then, college football recruiting has become big business.  These days there are dozens of websites devoted to each school’s recruiting efforts, and tens of thousands of people pay trillions of dollars for information about perspective recruits.  Below is an example of what they are paying for.

We spoke to Ryan Simmons (6-3, 235lb, OLB) from Westside High School in Orlando this morning, and he remains verbally committed to Tech, though he admits he will probably change his mind, and he has no idea what a fax machine is.  He also just finished reading the Hunger Games. 

Good thing he didn't commit to Georgia Tech

The result of this unholy union between athletic scholarships and the Internet is the advent of the Signing Day Announcement.  Back in the day, high school kids would just call the coach of the college they planned to attend and say, “Hey coach, hang up the phone I’m trying to send you a fax.”  But these days, with the world watching, the students feel they must partake in a little performance theatre.

Sometimes the student will stage a press conference and appear before a large auditorium sitting at a table with three or four hats in front of him.  He will try on each hat, eventually settling on one and tossing the others on the floor to thunderous applause.  Last year a kid pulled a bulldog out from under the table to indicate his plans to attend the University of Georgia.  Stunts like this leave teams like Auburn and Florida at a distinct disadvantage, and may one day bring the NCAA to require all schools to have mascots that are cuddly, and safe to keep under a table between your legs.

That's great and all, but what's his 40 time?

And now I will mount my high horse and tell you in recent weeks I’ve decided that high school kids holding press conferences to announce where they will attend college is perhaps the stupidest thing since Crystal Pepsi.  Ever wonder why some athletes become prima donnas (fax machines are actually Pre-Madonna) and act like the rules do not apply to them?  Maybe it’s because we treat their announcement to play safety for Kentucky with the same fanfare we treated Jonas Salk’s announcement that he’d cured Polio.  It wouldn’t be the end of the world if these kids are reminded from time to time that playing a game is not, in fact, the most important thing in the world, particularly if they are not going to play it for my team.

So I propose the next time a big-name recruit holds a press conference to announce his intentions to play at either State or Tech, we just don’t tune in.  We don’t show up and pack the auditorium, and we don’t log on to the message boards and hit refresh sixty times a minute.  I think the recruit will be a better person for it, and so will we.

“But how will I know if the big-name recruit committed to my team,” you ask.

Well, you could just wait until the first game of the season and see if he’s on the field.  Or, if you can’t wait that long, look towards the western sky next February – I’ll be sending up smoke signals with my fax machine.

Last Tuesday my friend Jordan and I left for Madrid, Spain. We spent a couple days in Barcelona, then three days in England. The trip was for some research on a book I really hope I get to write. Here is a link to some of my photos, and I should have a video up later this week. Also, the flight to Madrid cost me $5. Yes, $5. I’ll tell you how to do that later too.

Does your entire tithe have to go to your church?

Is it wrong to give five percent to your church, and five percent to, lets say, an orginization like Samaritan’s Purse or Compassion International?

I would love your thoughts, along with the verses that helped you come to your conclusion. Would also like to know why you think tithing was not commanded in the New Testament, by either Jesus or Paul.

Once day while out picking strawberries, The Great Gazoo (little green alien of Flintstones fame) appears before you and offers you one of two things.  Option one is for seven days you can have the business savy of Warren Buffett.  Now, you won’t have any more cash than you have now to invest, and you will have a hard time convincing your friends or a bank that you all of a sudden have a brilliant brain for business, but you will, for seven day. Or, option two, for seven days you will have the basketball ability Michael Jordan, in his prime. Again, you will not be any bigger than you are now, but if inserted into an NBA game, you would not have much trouble going for 50 points, freaking brothers every way like MJ.

So, which one are you choosing, and which one do you think you could make the most money with in your seven days?

Groundhog Day is one of my favorite films of all-time. I just love it, and will stop and watch it anytime I flip past it on TV. Last year I was reading about the movie on wikipedia and came across this quote that blew my mind, and gives the movie a much darker feel to me.

Stephen Tobolowsky said that Ramis (Harold Ramis, the Director) told him that he felt that the entire progress of Groundhog Day covered 10,000 years. “I always thought that there were nine days represented [in the film], and Danny Rubin, the writer, said that he felt something like 23 days were represented in the movie, [but they lasted] over 10,000 years.”

10,000 years!  Anyway, while we are on the subject, if you had to pick a day in your life to live over, and over, and over again, which one would it be? Wedding day? Or maybe a day from the honeymoon? An Iron Bowl? How about a day you visited a major city, where you’d have a hard time running out of things to do. What day are you picking?