Two champs were crowned yesterday, with the culmination of the Champions League in Moscow and American Idol in LA.  Two worthy yet unexpected winners in Manchester United and David Cook.

As always, you can get the best commentary about American Idol from Michael Slezak at EW.com.  Included in EW’s coverage are the first Q&A’s with winner David Cook and runner-up David Archuleta (where you can almost feel his wrist swelling from the allergic reaction he’s having to the bracelet he’s wearing as he answers the questions).  We fast forwarded through as much of the finale as we could, watching it after Top Chef was done (and if you’re not watching Top Chef, you’re missing some great food for anyone who loves great food!).

We pushed through all of the medleys and ridiculousness of these finales when I had to stop at Syesha and Seal.  She set the tone for the show’s performances, looking almost giddy at times to be singing with Seal in front of America.

The other highlights of the night were Carly Smithson’s duet with Michael Johns, Brooke White singing barefoot with Graham Nash, David Cook with ZZ Top (you knew he just kept shaking his head that he and his little stubble were next to those beards), and even David Archuleta with One Republic.  It was the first time in about ten weeks that I liked Ahchuleta, and maybe the first time I could see him doing something other than joining Up with People.

If I’m going to honest with you, I have to say that I was expecting to see Men Without Hats, Milli Vanilli, Ray Parker Jr, or Billy Ocean after George Michael pimped his upcoming Wham tour.  The Jonas Brothers (who I’d never seen) added some here and now to the parade of acts, and AI should head in that direction as much as possible.

Then David Cook took it all.  Cook could have turned his nose up at American Idol throughout the season, as it seemed AI needed him alot more than the reverse.  He’s been humble and gracious throughout, and did so until the very end last night.  America, surprisingly, got it right.  I’m still an American Idol junkie, but they need to revamp all the fluff in the show if they want to see the ratings head north.  They won’t get rid of Paula and Randy unfortunately, which would help as well.

Earlier in the day, Manchester United bested Chelsea in penalty kicks to take the Champions League final.  There was really no reason that the game was as good as it turned out to be.  It could have been a slugfest, as in more like a slug or snail, as in a defensive war of attrition.  What materialized wasn’t necessarily the beautiful game of Brazil, but it was tense and entertaining throughout.

When Christiano Ronaldo headed Man U into the lead, I felt like we were really going to see a great game.  The Red Devils had a bunch of chances to extend the lead to 2-0 and 3-0, but Tevez last whiff opened the door for Frankie Lampard’s equalizer at the end of the first half.

Chelsea had the better of the second half but could not push the winning goal through.  Didier Drogba and Lampard both hit the woodwork It was really two teams evenly matched, and then a situation only found in soccer set the stage for the penalty kicks drama.  I actually haven’t seen the blow-by-blow analysis of exactly what happened, but here is my best guess after watching it once.

With Chelsea players cramping due to the field conditions (torrential rain on a turf which had replaced the existing turf when it was determined the latter wasn’t good enough), their keeper Petr Cech kicked the ball out of bounds to allow for players to be taken care of (standard soccer practice when there is an injury as there are no time outs or stoppages of play).  Play gets read to be resumed, and Man U’s Carlos Tevez (who was a workhorse throughout the game) kicks the throw-in out of bounds on the side, deep in Chelsea territory, then motions to his teammates to hustle down to defend the throw-in from Chelsea.  Well, in the unwritted etiquette of soccer, this is viewed as extremely bad form (he was supposed to have kicked the ball through the end line so Cech could have a goal kick again).  Chelsea’s Michael Ballack runs to Tevez and then half of all hell ensues (without any real swings or blows that you would find in a similar NBA or MLB situation).  Everyone is pushing and yelling, then Drogba slaps Man U’s Nemanja Vidic (probably a 5 on the 10-point slap scale).  As one commentary stated, everyone knew “…this referee wore tight pants.”  After he settled everyone down, he issued a direct red card to Drogba then a yellow to Tevez, as captain John Terry whispered sweet nothings to Tevez through his collar pulled to up to his lips.

Drogba would have taken one of the penalty kicks, which may or may not have changed the outcome.  Penalty kicks are frustrating way to decide a winner, but there it was. Having said that, you can’t ask for more drama than what followed (below).

Congrats to Cook and Manchester United on becoming worthy title holders.  Cook could joining Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson as the best this show has produced.  Manchester United should be more stable in the coming off season, with Chelsea ridding themselves of several players while overpaying for more.  For the soccer junkies out there, James and the Giant Blog has a great video collection of the top goals from all the top leagues this year.

SuperUberpost

Chelsea v Manchester United. The top two teams from the English Premiership in the finals of the UEFA Champions League. London’s Chelsea was purchased by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich in 2005, and he proceeded to snap up top players throughout Europe at record transfer prices.

Those players have included Andriy Shevchenko and Michael Ballack (above).  Abramovich has churned through great managers as well, replacing José Mourinho after his runner-up finish in the 2007 Premiership combined with winning the FA Cup and League Cup.  He was replaced early in this campaign by Avram Grant, who has received almost no love from any Chelsea fan.

Chelsea combines top global talent like Didier Drogba and Michael Essien with English footballers John Terry,  Joe Cole, and Frankie Lampard (above).

While Chelsea is more the new gorilla on the block (think the Patriots or Spurs), Manchester United is the premier club arguably in the world.  I won’t bore you with the history of the club (partly because I don’t know it), but this Man U squad was birthed, spanked, and nurtured by Sir Alex Ferguson’s 1992 FA Youth Cup winners.  This group of youngsters served as the bedrock of Man U football for over a decade, including David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Phil Neville, Nicky Butt, and Gary Neville.  Add the enforcer, captain Roy Keane, and Man U was a perenial force.

The 1998-1999 season was the penultimate season of any English club, as Man U won the Premiership, the FA Cup, and in the most dramatic fashion the Champions League.  I rushed into a hotel with my wife in Florence, Italy only to see Man U trailing Bayern Munich 1-0 in the 87th minute.  Then, magic.

Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.  If I wasn’t hooked before, I was after that evening.  I was screaming deliriously as my wife tipped the bellman.  Beckham corner to Sheringham to Solskjaer.  The two goal scorers substitutes by Ferguson.

Whereas Chelsea has led the transfer market, Man U has been more deliberate.  Ferguson has snapped up emergin youngsters while tossing away seasoned veterans.  Wayne Rooney (above) was purchased from Everton in 2004 and has been a mainstay up front for the Red Devils.  He has lacked the panache of Drogba and Thierry Henry but is the epitome of an English bulldog.

It is now Christiano Ronaldo that makes Man U sing.  He’s matured dramatically since arriving from Sporting in Portugal in 2003.  He was known as a ball freak who loved to dive and play fanciful football, but he has grown into a tremendous talent.  He was immediately given the 7 jersey vacated by Beckham and worn by the greats of Manchester United, including George Best and Eric Cantona.

My hope for today is an early goal that gets the total goal up in the 5 range rather than a defensive 1-0 or 0-0 game decided by penalty kicks.  Head to ESPN2 to see the kickoff in thirty minutes.

Sometimes, I’m ahead of the game when it comes to music.  This time, I’m behind the curve.  I’ve looked at the Colbie Caillat CD “Coco” for the several months it’s been near the top of iTunes Top 100 album list.  “Lucky” from Jason Mraz with Colbie Caillat pushed me to get that song then “Realize” from Caillat.

Great interview with her on MTV as a nice introduction to this Californian, whose father Ken co-produced albums for Fleetwood Mac.  She built an audience through her MySpace page (Rhymes with ballet).

A couple nice live videos below.

She’s touring with John Mayer this summer, if you need to find some nice gift to score for that special someone in your life.

So I’m glancing at style.com’s pictorial from Cannes when lo and behold, there is Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn as they search for the Best Dressed @ Cannes.  I’m fairly indifferent/ambivalent/meh about these two, but that sent me on a quest.

Time interview (circa August, 1992)

CNN article about documentary (1998)

Photos from December, 2007

They have two adopted children and have been married now 15 or 16 years.  Bizarre or romantic?

For some couples, failure to conceive is the most heartbreaking situation in their lives.  It destroys marriages, drives wives into depression, and sends husbands into isolation.  It is difficult to imagine the pain that must accompany a desire for children yet lacking the means.

We seem to have the opposite problem, firing babies out at the blink of an eye.  It turns out that I made a good decision not to be sexually active in my youth, as I would have been a father at 13, 15, or 17.  I must be what one would call virile or potent, whichever word is accurate.

Five years ago, our second son was finishing up his last year of pre-school.  Our life was great, two boys, business rocking along, an easy, manageable family of four.  I was in Phoenix later that year when my wife told me that, in fact, her OB/GYN had just come to understand what it means when they say that only 1 in 1000 women become pregnant using an IUD.

He brought more risk to our family and to me as a father.  I went from having two chances to be a poor father to three chances to be a poor father.  He was an inconvenience to our quaint world here in Suburbia, forcing us to learn about a whole new crop of horrible television shows like the Backyardigans and Nora the Explorer (Little Einsteins excluded, as it is terrific).

He is, simply put, a gift to us.  He is a gift to me.  The little hands of my two older boys are a distant memory, but his slips gently within my chunky mitt.  These last couple years have been extra special, getting to hear his whispers all the time, joining him for lunch on an almost daily basis.

Thank you for coming into my life, and Happy Birthday.

As a qualifier, know that I am a pretty ignorant computer user.  I’ve used Firefox as my browser of choice now for probably three years or so.  The only problem I’ve been able to find with it is that it seems to eat a ton of memory, which locks me down at times when I have a zillion applications running.

Lifehacker pointed me to the opportunity to download Firefox 3 and provide feedback during the Beta testing that Mozilla is driving.  Since I have no idea what I’m doing nor if I should be downloading it, I proceeded (Lifehacker says that it is stable enough to use, so I’ve jumped in).  You expert users might want to do the same.

I’m feeling a need to get much more structured about how I start my day online. Here are the sites that I visit to start my day, and I’d be interested in how that differs from your Top Ten.

1. ESPN.com I spoke to a friend who is vehemently opposed to ESPN.com and all of their video loading etc that they hit you with.
2. NY Times All the news that’s fit to print. It is a free site now, but I’ve always been a heavy user, including subscribing to the Saturday and Sunday editions in print. I probably should cancel that (I’m not sure if we need any newpapers coming to the house at all), but I still enjoy the times I can sit down to the Times.
3. Wall Street Journal This site is a paid site, and it is a regular morning stop for me. I used to spend much more time searching for business leads here. I get the paper delivered daily but read much more of it online.
4. Schwab I’ve had brokerage accounts at Merrill Lynch, Prudential, and Wachovia. Now, I’ve consolidated everything with Schwab. I’ll check the accounts in the morning, as well as any stocks on my Watch List. We currently have about a third of our holdings in cash, the rest in stocks. Best performer this year: ITT Corporation.
5. Soccernet My source for everything soccer.
6. Flickr I’ve cooled off in the last week or so, but this is still a regular morning place to stop and look around. I check out any comments folks have made, as well as look at my contacts images.
7. C2 Choices Head here to get started with posting.
8. Google Reader I’ve just started going daily to Google Reader, and I need to make this a standard part of the morning.
9. EW.com From Entertainment Weekly, which has to be one of the top five magazines in America. So many good things about this site, with terrific writing and videos. For you American Idol fans or those needing to catch up, they have a great poll where they show the two David’s performances each week, letting you vote for who was best. That includes Cook’s “Billie Jean” performance, which was just terrific.
10. Go Fug Yourself I get to visit my buddy Carmen’s favorite site from two very, very funny ladies. A riot constantly to see what they have to say about any and every celebrity.

Sorry, poker content.  I know this is probably irrelevant in the zillions of hands we play, but do you ever fold this hand in a 6-max cash game?  With that betting pattern, I put him on that hand more than the majority of the time (seemed pretty rockish).  Regardless, I just cannot fold there.

PokerStars Game #17546356135:  Hold’em No Limit ($0.25/$0.50) - 2008/05/19 - 16:02:28 (ET)
Table ‘Appella III’ 6-max Seat #3 is the button
Seat 2: pokerlarry ($50 in chips)
Seat 3: chipking33 ($39.25 in chips)
Seat 4: Peufje ($70.55 in chips)
Seat 5: csquard ($73.55 in chips)
Seat 6: johnyb41 ($179.30 in chips)
Peufje: posts small blind $0.25
csquard: posts big blind $0.50
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to csquard [Kc Kd]
johnyb41: folds
pokerlarry: folds
chipking33: raises $1 to $1.50
Peufje: raises $1.50 to $3
csquard: raises $4.25 to $7.25
chipking33: folds
Peufje: raises $63.30 to $70.55 and is all-in
csquard: calls $63.30
*** FLOP *** [9c 9s Ks]
*** TURN *** [9c 9s Ks] [5h]
*** RIVER *** [9c 9s Ks 5h] [Qs]
csquard said, “sweet”
*** SHOW DOWN ***
Peufje: shows [Ac As] (two pair, Aces and Nines)
csquard: shows [Kc Kd] (a full house, Kings full of Nines)
csquard collected $140.60 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $142.60 | Rake $2
Board [9c 9s Ks 5h Qs]
Seat 2: pokerlarry folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 3: chipking33 (button) folded before Flop
Seat 4: Peufje (small blind) showed [Ac As] and lost with two pair, Aces and Nines
Seat 5: csquard (big blind) showed [Kc Kd] and won ($140.60) with a full house, Kings full of Nines
Seat 6: johnyb41 folded before Flop (didn’t bet)

(Photo:  AP)

It is so very easy to see this world of ours solely from our corner of it.  We all learned about our nation’s history as a melting pot, a place for people all around the world to come and have a chance at freedom and success.

Some of those places were bad placed, nations who were self-proclaimed enemies of ours, nations who took a different path than ours, nations whose people had less human rights than ours, nations who looked and spoke and lived differently than we do.

China is one of those lands.  The country has been flipped on its head since I first visited Beijing in 1994.  Very few Westerners visited then; in fact, you could count the number of Western hotels in Beijing on one hand.  I wasn’t a very experienced traveler, so all of it was a bit bewildering for me.  I made the good decision to have a young engineer give me a tour in and around Beijing, and so we saw Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall.  My favorite memory of that trip was going to a ceramic factory, where entire families of grandparents and parents and children made beautiful vases and other items.  They hand-bent slivers of tin and brass to create the ornate designs then filled these patterns with whatever you use to make such things.  We still have the vase which I brought back from that trip.

I’ve been back probably ten times since then, traveling to the big cities as well as into the rural areas outside of Shanghai.  The one thing about this land that has stayed with me since my first trip there was just how many people a billion people is (now 1.3bil, I believe).  Every conceivable contraption that can have a minimum of two wheels is driven or ridden on impossible paths and roads and highways to carry impossible loads of stuff from here to there.

We’ve been led to believe that this is a country of evil people, a Communist country at one time looking to conquer Southeast Asia unless we prevented it.  I’ve never been much of a revisionist historian, and I do not fault the slippery slope that led us to the Korean War and to Vietnam.  Our logic was based on the domino theory, that if one of these countries slipped into China’s grip, then the entire region would eventually capitulate.

I must admit I am only recently learning about what’s going on in Darfur and China’s role in blocking UN efforts to take action on the government there.  China has invested significantly in the oil industry in the Sudan, and this is an example of their policy to go directly after raw materials procurement at the source rather than buying on the open market.

So, it’s easy to compartmentalize a nation of evil people led by evil men and women who have zero human rights, a nation of foreigners speaking multiple languages with so many people that they even manipulate the birth rate and skew the percentage of boys born due to their One Child program.

(Photo:  Getty Images)

Yes, it’s easy until you see that the tears of a child in China who has lost her mother are no different than the tears of a child in Birmingham who has lost his father.  35,000 people lost, a number that may grow to 50,000 among a people of 1.3 billion.  Then 158 relief workers die in a mudslide as they frantically care for those injured and mourning and in shock.

And you see that the people of China place as much value on each life lost as we do.  Their nation mourns, and their leaders are faced with challenges that seem overwhelming.  5,000,000 people left homeless?  That would be all people in Minnesota or Colorado told to get out of their homes immediately.

As I head to grab lunch, I am struck by this question:  am I connected to any of this?  Do the tears of that young girl, do they fall on my cheek?  And should they?