Skattershooting while wondering whatever happened to Phil Gramm:

• The Decatur Eagles may have been the best 3A team in the state but they learned its kinda hard to win a State Championship. Very hard.
  
• The Butterfly Effect was pretty good but I'm a big fan of the "even the smallest of events can change your life forever" theory.
• I predicted earlier that Martha Stewart and Scott Peterson would not be convicted. Oops.
• Iraq seems to be getting worse and worse. This thing might become a small scale Vietnam before everything is said and done.  If the draft was in effect, I think the public would demand that we get out of there in a New York minute.
  
• Do you think the National Terror Alert color scheme will ever be lowered to green?  We'll forget about it before that happens.
  
• The aftermath of the tidal waves in the Indian Ocean after the earthquake is simply horrifying, and the human loss was simply staggering. When I first saw read about it on a Sunday morning the death count was 5,000. By the time of this writing the projection is now 60,000.  I bet it might go over 100,000.
  
• If you can watch video on the Net, there are a few video clips of the waves here. (They are very slow to load).
  
• One thing that scared me was the fact that "the energy released as the two sides of the undersea fault slipped against each other made the Earth wobble on its axis".  Now that gets my attention.  I'm no scientist, but I bet its very important that we keep the current rotation and current orbit exactly the way it is now.
  
• Spanglish just wasn't that good. Although the Spanish speaking Paz Vega was gorgeous - sort of a Salma Hayek starter kit.
• I downloaded Google's new tool that allows you to search your home computer just like it allows you to search the Internet. It's great. For anyone that ever has used the Window's "find" feature and waited five minutes for results will be astonished at the one second results that Google brings.
• Bill Parcels drives me insane.
• Closer was very good. Intense.  But very good.
• Closer, by the way, had one scene depicting an Internet sex chat that was, err, graphic to say the lease. Oddly (at least to me), two women actually got up and walked out. That seemed somewhat odd to me: so offended by words that you would walk out of a theater. 
  
• People have way too much time on their hands.
  
• After all these years, I still think Blind Date is one of the funniest shows on TV.
• Barry Bonds should retire before breaking the home run records of Ruth and Aaron. The steroid controversy is a shame to Major League Baseball.
  
• I went to a funeral on Christmas Eve.
  
• Do people really use the camera function on camera phones? Who could possibly "chat" with Yahoo Messenger on a phone? Who wants to surf the Internet with a phone?
• Hip Hop has now become the music of choice to the masses.
  
• Why do you feel like you've taken the easy way out when you give a Gift Card but you just love it when you receive one?
• I couldn't help but giggle at the previews for ESPN's movie 3 about Dale Earnhardt. "Daddy, I just wanna race cars."
  
• The New York Yankees payroll last year was $188 million. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays had a payroll of  $24 million.
• Dick Clark suffered a stroke and will miss his ABC New Year's Eve special for the first time in memory. I wonder if we will ever see him in public again?
• The Ellen Degeneris promotional commercials for her TV talk show do not make the show look funny at all.
• The Falcons' star quarterback Michael Vick signed a 10-year, $130 million contract extension Thursday that guarantees him an NFL-record $37 million in bonuses. However, there is a huge difference between the NFL and MLB in the area of contracts. If Vick blows out a knee tomorrow and is forever out of the NFL, his "only" guarantee is the $37 million signing bonus. MLB, on the other hand, requires all of the contract to be guaranteed. Thus, if Alex Rodriguez had blown out his knee while with the Rangers, he was certain to receive his $25 million per year for the remainder of his contract period.
  
• Sideways is about two forty something guys traveling through the wine country of California. One was coming off a divorce while the other is set to get married in a few days. I really liked it - a great "time for reflection" flick. (Although it took me forever to figure out that one of the stars was from the old TV show "Wings").
  
• Who is everyone talking to on cell phones?
• The new Rave theater at Northeast Mall is great - they have the ticket booths inside the front doors. Why aren't all theaters like that?
• Isn't that a boring name for a mall? Northeast Mall? That's the best they could come up with?
• And speaking of malls, wouldn't one be perfect in north Fort Worth somewhere south of Alliance Airport? I think it would do incredible business.
  
• There sure a lot of those yellow magnetic automobile ribbons supporting the troops. I wonder when we will see the return on the "Baby On Board"  decals.
• The Usual Suspects (with Kevin Spacey) is really good.
• The hot girl to the lower left is Petra Nemcova, 24, of the Czech Republic. Why am I showing you her? Here's why: "The supermodel survived Sunday's tsunami in Thailand by clinging to a palm tree with boyfriend Simon Atlee for eight hours. Atlee was swept away by the waters before they could be rescued. Nemcova suffered a broken pelvis and internal injuries " She once was a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model.
• Oprah has a great scam going. She makes a gazillion dollars a year by convincing women everywhere that "I'm just like you, girlfriend".
  
• Junk mail is very odd. Why would a person or company think we would buy something from them when the only reason we opened the email was because of a deceptive Message Subject such as "Thanks" "Here's the info you wanted" or "Order Confirmation". 
  
• "As our nation prepares to ring in the New Year, the U.S. Census Bureau today projected the Jan. 1, 2005, population of the United States will be 295,160,302, up 2,835,602 or 1.0 percent from New Year's Day 2004. In January, the United States is expected to register one birth every eight seconds and one death every 13 seconds. Meanwhile, net international migration is expected to add one person every 26 seconds. The result is an increase in the total population of one person every 12 seconds."
• A bill to be introduced in Texas by Democratic state Rep. Harold Dutton would make possession of an ounce or less of marijuana a Class C misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $500. That's the equivalent of a traffic ticket.  It's about time but there's no it will pass - and that's a crying shame.
  
• The death of Pat Tillman (the NFL player who gave up his football career to fight in Afghanistan) received a ton of press coverage this year.  What didn't receive a lot of coverage was his classless brother Rich, who at the funeral "wore a rumpled white T-shirt, no jacket, no tie, no collar, and immediately swore into the microphone. He hadn't written anything, he said, and [stated]  'Pat isn't with God. He's f -- ing dead. He wasn't religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he's f -- ing dead.'" What a winner.
  
• It's been five years since we watched the year 2000 roll in?