Vehicles in BF2 1.21 Patch

I hear some of them shoot knives.

Driving Worries

The time of the trip is drawing near, and I have to admit I’m a little bit nervous about the process. Supposedly the trip from Williamsburg, VA up to Pittsburgh, PA will take at least 7 hours. Unfortunately, the longest I’ve ever driven in one shot is between 3 and 3.5 hours (when we were evacuating the state for Hurricane Isabel), and this is twice as long. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, or if I’m going to need a nap in the middle.

And this is before I even make it to the world of potholes, hills, and one-way streets. Just to make this a real S-rank mission, now Bunky is trying to convince me that we should bring along Sydney. Sure this sounds good in theory, except that the cat is not going to want to sit in the car for 7+ hours, and I don’t want him to pee/poo in the car while I’m trying to figure out directions. Plus I have to make the trip up and back, and then up once more when we finally move =(. That damn apartment over Giant Eagle supermarket better be hella good!

It’s so tempting to try to just sign something without going to visit, but we both know that that would be irresponsible. Who knows how long we’ll be living at this apartment, and we don’t want to end up with something crappy.

Damn Convenient

This weekend, Bunky and I are heading up to Pittsburgh to scope out potential apartments. This will be unlike any other search we’ve ever had, however, since Bunky will actually be pulling in serious dollars once her job starts. We’ll just be floating on bar loans till Fall, and then maybe we can rise above the poverty line.

So when you can afford real housing (e.g. you don’t look for $400/mo. all utilities included apartments in sketchy areas), all new possibilities open up to you. One impressive contender offers a gated parking garage and a fitness room on the same floor. Not bad, but not nearly as cool as the fact that it is built on top of a supermarket, and the apartment is on the first floor. Why does being on the first floor matter? Well, because they are going to put grass and plants on the roof of the Supermarket. So not only will we be right above a supermarket, but we will still have a lawn. WTF awesome (and weird)!

I’m just waiting for Bunky to tell me to call up apartments that are like dangling from trees or underwater in one of those many Pittsburgh rivers. It would also be fun to roll a Katamari over an apartment that was on top of a supermarket, and I bet I have before.

Oh Dem Knicks

So the New York Knicks traded away Penny Hardaway and Trevor Ariza for Steve Francis, and many critics have already stated that this trade was a mistake. I’ve been critical of Knicks GM Isiah Thomas in the past, but I won’t go so far as to say he is completely incompetent as a GM; after all, he has done pretty well in the draft, and it can’t be all his fault that the Knicks have such a bloated payroll to compliment their status as one of the League’s bottom-feeders. With that said, I still hate what Isiah Thomas has done with the Knicks, but at least they have big names to go along with their horrible roster and salary cap issues, which is more than you can say for the Scott Layden era.

As for the trade itself, it could have been worse. They could have traded for Kenyon Martin, which would have been a disaster. At least Francis actually has two working knees. Trevor Ariza is an ok young player, but he wasn’t going to be playing much for Larry Brown anyway. And the thought of Penny Hardaway going back to Orlando made me chuckle. But what are the Knicks going to do now with two point guards that need to dominate the ball to be effective?

Well first off, the onus needs to be on Larry Brown to make this work. I know he loves to “play the right way” and preach defense, but please just use cheap trickery to make this thing work so that the Knicks get a crappy draft pick, mitigating the Eddie Curry trade. We all know that Brown is going to have to play Francis and Marbury at the same time, at least till the end of the season, and this means they will be atrocious on defense. However, how is this any different from how they are now? They suck on defense already! You’ve got so many ball-control backcourt players, so why not bring out just start playing run-and-gun?

Now I know the thought of Marbury, Francis, and Crawford trying to run a fast-break on every play probably gives Larry Brown ulcers, but it might be possible to steal a few wins from tired teams coming off long road trips. It would also be entertaining, especially when they edit out all the turnovers for Sports Center. On defense, it would be hilarious if they started playing a little full-court press. All those mediocre wingmen wouldn’t be complaining about playing time if their 28 minutes were spent sprinting up and down the court! Of course there are problems with this plan. The Knicks are hardly a superior rebounding team, and I would hate for my idea to cause Eddy Curry to literally collapse and die. But I really think it would raise everyone’s stats, and that would make more of the mediocre Knicks players trade-worthy. That way Thomas could maybe bring in some role players, even if he had to grossly overpay them.

Also, I’ve decided that it is no longer worth harping about how bad the Knicks’ salary cap position is. At this point it is clear that owner James Dolan doesn’t give a crap how much he will pay in luxury taxes, and even if Thomas can’t sign free agents because of it, they can still overpay in trades. The usual rules just don’t apply when the owner is willing to hemorrhage money to put a team together. So why not just grab a bunch of big names, throw chemistry and common sense out the window, and just play them enough to make their stats look gaudy so you can trade them away? Ahhh, now you’re thinking like a Knicks GM =D.