Skiles and the Shaq Ad.

Greetings from the Pacific time zone!

Start times for everything out here are quite odd. I always complain about how late warriors games start when I'm back in the central time zone, but out here, everything from the eastern and central time zones ends at about eight p.m. It really is weird. I feel like my head is going to pull the old "arnold schwarzenegger on the surface of mars" from Total Recall...or not.

On to business.

Scott Skiles got the axe in Chicago, and I'm not sure how to feel about that. Obviously I WAY over-hyped their team at the begining of the year, but I'm not sure how much of it is Skiles fault. Seems like more of it would reside in their front office. Skiles wasn't responsible for over paying a player they didn't need, nor is he at fault for creating a massive distraction with the Kobe talk. He also isn't necessarily responsible for Kirk Heinrich suddenly looking like he's the starter for Chicago's WNBA team.

Then again, Skiles is responsible for his pissing match with Tyrus Thomas, and that certainly hasn't helped team chemistry. Skiles could also be stuck with the stupid decision not to start Noccioni and Deng together for most of the season.

I don't know how this will work out for the team, but I think their season is close to being a wash at this point.

On another topic: recently Shaq's ad for the heating pads that you can apply for pain relief have been running a lot recently. There's one scene where you see Shaq's exposed back where a pad is applied. I watched this about three times before I realized that it must be a body double. The body they show is in really good shape, and Shaq is not. So how embarassing must that be on the set of the commercial? Say you get paid millions of dollars a year to play a sport, and when it comes time to film a squence with your shirt off, they have to use a more fit body double. Do you get upset? Or do you just say, "the hell with it" and drive off in your Ferrari?

-Dusty