Well, this refinery closure has been brewing and stewing for quite some time. I have my own personal opinion on why the refinery is being forced to close.

I believe the major oil companies want it gone to drive up prices. We currently see with this severe economic downturn much less usage of gasoline and oil related products.  The Washington Post just reported today that oil prices for light sweet crude, not the Bakersfield stuff of heavy and sour, have dropped to just over $41 a barrell. This inconceivable price, from the projections of $200 per barrell just nine months ago, tells the real story of why this refinery is being shut down in our global economy. This is about restricting the amount of product being refined to drive up falling prices. This is a cartel acting in collusion against the best interests of the people dependent on jobs and fuel supply.

What do you think?

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No, the very recent death of Billy Powell probably was not as big a loss to American culture as the passing of John Updike, but in a curious way Billy's early exit from stage Earth resonates more with many of us boomers. Updike's Rabbit ran to the halls of academia, while Billy's tight tinkled runs on the piano filled out a thunderous southern sound that reverberated throughout the mainstream.  

Last week I pulled out some Lynyrd Skynyrd tunes, and played a few on the drive to a gathering for my sweetie. She remarked that I was playing the Bakersfield National Anthem when Free Bird came on.  Maybe there are still a bunch of dudes i-podding, boom-boxing, car stereo blasting many of Skynyrd's classics today. Since I don't do bar hopping or a whole lot of partying these days its hard for me to tell.

I can tell you from the moment I heard these guys in the very early 1970s I knew I really liked them. I was even a Neil Young fan, and loved Sweet Home Alabama with the pointed response to Young's blistering Southern Man, "A southern man don't need you around, anyhow!" I was also a big Allman Brothers fan, but thought Skynyrd had a toughness that the brothers Allman lacked. 

No one would have guessed at the outset of their separate careers how closely these two bands would become intertwined through dramatically tragic and random circumstances.  Death has way of sealing the deal.

There is an exceptional documentary on Tom Dowd that is available on DVD. It is called Tom Dowd & The Language Of Music. Some of you may know who Tom Dowd is. Before I watched this amazing documentary of this sound engineer/producer, I remembered his name in the recesses of my memory being a name on a few records I owned. I had no idea how many records until I saw this documentary. I won't ruin the story but this man of humble means and extraordinary talent brought the best in American music to disc and beyond. Billy Powell makes an appearance, as does Greg Allman. Fitting.

Tom Dowd was the man who figured out how to record a live show and make it sound great. He knew how to record music in any setting. There was a reason The Allman Brothers Band/ At Fillmore East, Eat A Peach and Lynyrd Skynyrd's One More For From the Road all became the standard of excellence as recorded live shows. If you're tired of angst on the telly and radio do yourself a favor and check out this DVD. You will definitely learn a lot about American music, a little history, and much about the man who passed away in 2002 who made music sound great in every setting.

Like Tuesday, Billy and John and Tom are gone but will always be with us. 

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I saw a number of stories on the percentage of California's high school graduates going to college after their 12th year graduation. Here is a link to channel 29's story here locally,  that aired a night or two ago. Jose Gaspar gets the credit.

No surprise Kern County falls below the state average in this regard at about 44% moving on to a college while the state average is at 48%. Kern County is close to the average, but the average is startlingly low. Actually, having only 48% of our state's kids go on to college from the 2003 to 2007 high school graduating classes is terrible.

I saw this story originally in the Sacramento Bee a few days ago. If you want to check out how your local school, anywhere in California, is doing on this score, or how counties and their schools fare, here is the link to a cool database the Bee has linked to to give you all the information.

We have a story in today's paper concerning the lack of a skilled and educated workforce being seen as the major obstacle facing local employers. Here is the story if you missed it.

Bakersfield Junior College is back in session. I live near the college and can attest to a lot more traffic this week as a result. Much of the time the swell of students occurs for the first month and then gradually subsides to modest traffic in a mopnth's time. We'll see this year. B.C. announced they have nearly 17,000 students enrolled for this semester.

As an old geezer these days, I have over the last few years taken a class or two offered by the junior college. I talk to people who also have attempted to retrain or get those necessary courses done to complete either a certification or program choice. The word on the street is that it is really difficult to score required courses at times people need them offered. In my humble opinion B.C. is tapped out on a resource level.

Given Kern County's close to 12% unemployment rate and low median income average for the county residents CSUB (at a modest price) is out of reach for a lot of local students and adults.

I think we need to expand Bakersfield Junior College and create another campus, probably somewhere in the south area of town that could use an economic boost.

Maybe all this news is just the same-old same-old, and requires no consideration or action. Maybe all this news is another alarm bell going off that our priorities are really screwed up. Really, do we want to continue to keep building prisons for thrown away youth? Or couldn't we try to invest in schools where needed skills can be obtained at costs our population can afford?

What an amazing year! I see Dick Cheney in a wheelchair, with Joseph Biden on his right, move to the limo and off to the inauguration of Barack Obama as our nation's 44th President. Cheney gets wheeled out. There might be a trace of justice in the world, after all. "Oh, by Jingo."

The Arizona Cardinals will be in this year's Super Bowl. The downtrodden have risen to the upper echelons of the world.

No one a year ago would have given a chance to a black rookie Senator from Illinois, or the Arizona Cardinals, to have risen so far so fast to sit atop the world. There is much to rejoice and celebrate today, because in spite of all gloom and doom of today's economic and political climate miraculous events still occur here in this great nation of ours.

Now is the time to to move forward and reach out to our neighbors in friendship. To help those less fortunate and down on their luck or circumstance. I found a profound message on my e-mail this morning. It came from an old workmate of mine. The message came from BornAgainAmerican.org.

I invite anyone reading this to check out this link. I think many of you will be surprised and maybe moved to do something great this year. You might make new friends, and find renewed purpose in being alive here and now.

Why does the NFL give the Most Valuable Player award before the season is officially over? Is Peyton Manning the MVP of 2008 while sitting in one of his luxurious homes filming yet another round of commercials this  winter? Or, are there players still making a difference in the playoffs, and hence extending their team's season after putting up stellar stats all year long, more deserving of an MVP award?  Peyton Manning already has this year's Most Valuable Player award, but the real MVP of this season has to be Kurt Warner.

I hope you saw one of the biggest playoff upsets in history tonight. The Arizona Cardinals beat the heavily favored Carolina Panthers in a rout tonight 33-13 on the Kittens home North Carolina field. 

Kurt Warner was Michael Jordan tonight. He simply dominated the game.

The Cardinals still have a shot to win it all.

Just imagine the two teams with the worst regular season records being opponents in this year's Super Bowl. It could still happen.

The NFL Playoffs enter week two pitting the final eight survivors of the NFL regular season, which ended December 28, 2008. 2008 was a strange year for pro football, and two developments stand out for me. There was way too much really bad professional football week in and week out, and the NFL officially tuned out the West Coast fans and cities. If you don’t think the national media has turned off everything football in the Pacific and Mountain time-zones here is what Peter King wrote this week in Sports Illustrated about the first NFL Playoff weekend:

-Over the weekend, only Arizona-Atlanta was a relative snoozer. We had one game go to overtime, another close game get broken up by Ed Reed's acrobatic brilliance, and Brian Westbrook break up a two-point fourth-quarter game by being, well, Brian Westbrook.-

I’m sorry, Peter, but with all your travels up and down the eastern seaboard you could not have watched the same games our western feed delivered to our living rooms and bars. Both of the games on Sunday were brutally predictable and had no drama in the fourth quarters. The Falcons-Cardinals game on Saturday was pure drama, which came down to the final drive with Arizona crossing up conventional wisdom by throwing for first downs instead of running into the line for the obligatory three and out. The final score was 30-24. That was pressure, not watching Chad Pennington throw one more interception with a game long since lost. The scores of Sunday’s games were 27-9 Ravens over the Dolphins, and 26-14 Eagles beating the Vikings. Do those scores sound anywhere as close as 23-17 in overtime, and 30-24, with both games decided on final drives?

I guess when only one team not found in the Central or Eastern time-zones has a winning record for the season it makes for the big snooze button on the coverage for the entire region.

Here is a funny note on the season, the Cleveland Browns, perennial losers since coming back ten years ago as an expansion team, were showcased five times on prime-time NFL broadcasts (Monday Night, Sunday Night, Thursday Night and Thanksgiving) this year. Only the Dallas Cowboys with six appearances on these prime-time telecasts were shown more often nationally than the hapless Browns of 2008.

Of teams playing half their schedule on Pacific time, only the San Diego Chargers made it into the top third of teams playing prime-time football this past season with four games shown. Of the 12 franchises that played at least four games on the big media schedule, the Chargers join only the New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers as clubs that still have a shot to win this year’s Super Bowl. The Broncos, Packers, Bears, Cowboys, Browns, Patriots and Redskins all with four or five nationally shown games did not even get to the playoffs this season. Four of those teams did not even have winning records. The Colts joined this elite most-shown group of clubs and made the playoffs, but lost in the wild card match-up weekend to the Chargers.   

This year’s scheduled Super Bowl in Tampa Bay will mark the longest continuous time that this game has not been played in California. The first Super Bowl was played in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum back in 1967. The longest stretch of Super Bowls played outside the Golden State before returning to California was the five games between 1968 and 1972 with the 1973 game back in Los Angeles and played at the Coliseum. In Super Bowl history California hosted one game of three played in the 1960s, two games in the 1970s, five games in the 1980s, two games in the 1990s and one game in 2003 this decade. There is no future Super Bowl scheduled for California at this time. Florida will have the next two and Texas is scheduled to have the 2011 game.

2008 also the year that the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers were finally displaced as the worst team in NFL history by this year’s Detroit Lions. The Lions gave up 517 points on the way to their 0-16 record. Only the 1981 Baltimore Colts gave up more points (533) in the 30 years that the NFL has been playing a 16 game regular season. As bad as that Colts team was, the guys on it still won two games during that 1981 season.

The dreadful 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers had a built in excuse for their infamy. They were an expansion team that year, and got the very worst players from the rest of the league to start their franchise. The Seattle Seahawks also began playing as a team in 1976. The Seahawks were bad, but at least they won two games in their first year of existence. The 2008 Lions have no excuses, just ill fitting coaches and players working for the worst management in football.

2008 was the year the word parity temporarily vanished from the NFL lexicon. Parity has meant that on any given Sunday the bottom dwellers could rise from the ashes of their ineptitude and grind out a win over a title challenger opponent. The distance from the bottom of the standings to the upper echelon teams is ever so slight when parity rules. Only a modest adjustment, a player or two, or a coaching change is needed to propel a team in the outhouse to the penthouse. This year there were simply too many teams that had no chance all year long. Just ask fans in St. Louis, Cleveland, Oakland, Detroit, Kansas City and Cincinnati if competitive football was happening with teams in their zip codes.

The NFL provides a wealth of statistical information on players and teams in the league. Fantasy Football can take a bow. One of the interesting stats to help determine a team’s relative strength or weakness is the difference between points scored and points allowed for the games played in a season. This point differential tells at a glance how great, putrid or mediocre a team is for any given season. Historically, very few dominant teams have posted better than 200 plus point differential.

In the past ten years two franchises have gone a regular season with better than a 200 point positive differential: the 2007 New England Patriots and the 1999 and 2001 St. Louis Rams.  The Patriots demolished the differential spread by going 16-0 in 2007 and beating their opponents by a record 315 point difference. This is a team that averaged a 20 point margin of victory over their opponents for the whole season. And they didn’t win the Super Bowl. Neither did the Rams of 2001 who bettered their opponents by 230 points for the full season or by an average of two touchdowns every week. The 1999 Rams with a spread of 284 points over their opposition did win the Super Bowl with a saving tackle at the one yard line as time expired. The Minnesota Vikings of 1998, who went 15-1 with a point differential of 260 over the teams they played, did not even make it to the Super Bowl held in 1999. You can’t count on the best in the fall to deliver the goods in winter.

On the flip side of that point differential are the really putrid teams in a given season that get beat over the length of a season by more than 200 points. This doesn’t happen very frequently either. Just like the very few dominant teams, the NFL gets a real stinker club or two in season once every three years. This just completed 2008 NFL campaign had two teams which were so bad (Lions and Rams) that each cumulatively lost by more 200 points. In the thirty years that a 16 game schedule has been in place this has happened just four times (2008, 2000, 1990 and 1984). There has never been two dominant 200 point plus teams in a single season. 

In a year without parity and the West Coast in a major media decline I’m rooting for magic this month where the Arizona Cardinals wind up meeting the San Diego Chargers. Could Ed Hochuli referee this year’s Super Bowl? Maybe this is that kind of year.

Good luck football fans, everywhere!

It's a wrap for the Bowl Holiday Weekend. For the dedicated followers of football fashion this was quite a weekend. Tom Petty had it right when he penned "even the losers get lucky sometimes." Ole Miss, which hadn't been to a bowl game since Manning The Younger attended that historic campus in Oxford, Mississippi, put a pasting a heavily favored Texas Tech squad that had lost only one time (against Oklahoma) coming into this Cotton Bowl game. Sweet!

Kentucky, which was 6-6 going into the Liberty Bowl, bested an East Carolina squad that was 9-4 before it fumbled away in historic fashion a chance for a 10 win season. A really entertaining upset and ball game on January 2, 2009.

The evening of January 2, 2009 was the ultimate capper for the whole stupid fraud of BCS (Bowl Conspiracy Syndicate) designed games. Utah came into the Sugar Bowl undefeated and a heavy underdog to the Alabama Crimson Tide. By the time Alabama's coach, Nick Saban, figured out what Utah's no-huddle first quarter offense was doing, The Tide was down 3 touchdowns. Alabama did get to within four at 21-17 in the third quarter but then was buried under a ferocious Utah pass rush and interceptions. Utah won going away.  

It was bizarre watching Saban, the coach of Alabama, give no respect to the Utah team for a very convincing win. The Alabama coach used one excuse after another, including his own decision to sit a star lineman for a team infraction, as reasons for this loss. Saban makes a ton of money coaching at Alabama after walking out on the Miami Dolphins two seasons ago. He ended his tenure of two seasons of mediocrity in the NFL by lying to the Dolphins owner about his intentions and commitment and was hired by Alabama to mold young student athletes.

But the Utah Utes received no respect at any point this year, certainly not from the networks or the print media. This team beat the only team that put a loss on USC this year and went undefeated for 13 games. The 4 pretenders to the BCS crown Oklahoma, Texas, Florida and USC can't make that claim. 

Utah is number one. If you buy all the soap that writers and advertising geeks are selling in order for you to watch the Anti-Climatic Bowl games of one and two loss football teams this coming week  it still won't wash away the bad smell of having this great Utah team getting the shaft from a greedy and corporate Bowl Conspiracy Syndicate.

I sip my third cup of coffee this afternoon and watch the USC defense put another vicious hit on some Penn State player in what has become another boring rout in the Rose Bowl. I remember all the analysts on TV, radio and in print telling everyone all year long how crummy the Pac-10 football teams are this year. Only two teams from the Pac-10 are ranked in the top 25. The Bowl record for the five teams from the Pac-10 that got to play in bowl games this year goes to a perfect 5-0 after today's wipe-out of Penn State.

The analysts and bowl experts must believe that only teams east of the Rockies actually play real football. The ACC has 12 conference teams and 10 of them made it to bowl games. Thus far the ACC has gone 3-6 in bowl games this year. The SEC and Big 12, both touted as the most powerful conferences this year, have 8 and 7 teams respectively representing their conferences in bowl games this bowl season. A mediocre Iowa team from the Big-10 today beat a mediocre South Carolina team from the SEC.  A lower ranked Oregon team already beat the higher ranked Big-12 Oklahoma State in convincing fashion.

The analysts really aren't about facts, or the myriad of factors that come into play over the NCAA's drive to make tons of money. Analysts are really all about promotion. Promote the Big East and ensure that 6 of the 8 conference members get a bowl bid for money and exposure sake. 

Here's hoping your team won or wins this bowl season. All the talk of conference superiority from sports analysts all season long is a lot like the political crap that gets dished out from the highly paid pundits on a regular basis to keep people ignorant and at odds with one another. It is hard to form a consensus and solve problems when the people rigging the games keep baiting people into petty quarrels of philosophical trifles and stymie progress.

Think of all the money being made by the networks, their affiliates and the NCAA this bowl season and ask yourself why higher education costs continue to get beyond the average family's ability to pay. 

Remember you cannot spell analyst without the a-n-a-l. 2009 marks a great opportunity for everyone to use facts instead of gossip to build conclusions and a better future. 

Happy New Year!