So has your team made a move before the trade deadline? I have only been following the Sox, Mariners, and Cubs sporadically this season and am therefore not very familiar with their needs. I know the Sox have basically given up on 2007 by sending second baseman Tadahito Iguchi to the Phillies for a minor league pitching prospect. I don’t know much about Danny Richar, but he’ll be called up soon, so we will all be able to get a good look at him then.

The Cubs are in the thick of things in the NL Central (this has to be the biggest surprise of the season!), but I’m still not watching them very much. I lost interest in the Cubs after the 2003 season when they made it to the NLCS before getting eliminated by Florida. After that, Prior and Wood have been ghosts in the clubhouse, and since those were the only two guys I liked on the team, I found no reason to keep watching. At any rate, the Cubs didn’t make a major move.

The Mariners are also doing well and are currently just 3 games behind the Angels in the AL West. They have a three-game series against the Angels right now, so they can make up some more room in a hurry. Their lineup seems pretty steady these days and I hadn’t heard about them looking in a particular area, so it’s not really a surprise that they didn’t make a move either.

The biggest trades seem to be Mark Texeira going to Atlanta and Eric Gagne going to Boston. How did your teams do?

Have you heard about Thoof.com yet? Thoof is a cool new website that allows users to submit and view news articles, blog posts, videos, photos, and more from around the web. This may just sound like another aggregate site to you, but Thoof.com goes well beyond that.

At Thoof, you can get truly personalized news because every time you click on a story, you add a little bit to your user history. From there, Thoof.com employs a complicated algorithm to determine what kind of content you view most often, and on subsequent visits your favorite content will appear right at the top of the page so you don’t have to sift through hundreds of irrelevant articles to find what you want to read.

Joining Thoof.com is very simple. All you do is submit your email address, wait 2 seconds for a confirmation email to be sent to your account, click the link in the confirmation email, and add a password. That’s it! From there, you can begin reading and submitting content to build your user history.

There’s also a “ThoofRank” system that shows you how popular a particular article is among the community at large. I submitted a recent post that I wrote about Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling speaking out about steroid use in Major League Baseball. It was very easy to submit my post (a simple matter of copying and pasting the URL) and add the appropriate tags. After submitting, I saw my post ranking and got the HTML code so I could put my ThoofRank badge up on my blog as well.

Right now I have a ThoofRank of 2 percent. Although that’s pretty low, I’m not too worried about it…. After all, I just submitted my post a few minutes ago. Let’s see how much my ranking increases once people have had a chance to read my submission!

Anyway, I really like the whole Thoof.com concept and will definitely be going back on a daily basis to read my personalized news!

The X-Games will be taking place from August 2-7 this year in Los Angeles. I have really grown to like this event a lot, especially since they’ve added so many motocross-related events over the years. First there was just the freestyle competition. Then they added the Step-Up and Best Trick. I think two years ago, they added Supermoto, which attracted a lot of top MX riders to the event. And this year, they’ve added a “Moto X Racing” event, with Ricky Carmichael, James Stewart, Chad Reed, Ryan Dungey, Ryan Villopoto, and several other full-time pros expected to compete.

There have been a lot of great MX moments in X-Games history, but the best had to be just last year when freestyle king Travis Pastrana landed an amazing double backflip in the Best Trick comp. I’ve put a YouTube clip of the jump here so you can relive the moment (or see it for the first time if you’ve somehow managed to miss the buzz). Travis made it look easy, and I think a lot of casual fans don’t realize just how dangerous that type of jump is. A mistake could have landed TP in a wheelchair — or worse. (Check out the part when Travis hugs his mom and says “I’m sorry” to her.)

Anyway, Travis has said he won’t do the double backflip again (nothing to prove), so it’ll be interesting to see what he pulls out of his sleeve for Best Trick. And it’ll be awesome to see him racing against RC and Stewart again! The SX and MX series haven’t been the same since Travis left…..

My husband and I didn’t have anything planned for today, so I convinced him to help me give the house a thorough cleaning. Usually, we settle for taking care of the superficial stuff such as vacuuming, sweeping, and washing dishes. We hardly ever get down to the nitty gritty (so to speak) and do any deep cleaning, so we were well overdue for something like this.

With the two of us working, it took only about four hours to clean the house from top to bottom. We did everything: cleaned out the oven, microwave and refrigerator in the kitchen; scrubbed the bathtub, polished the bathroom faucets, and sprayed Tilex on the walls in the bathroom; and mopped every exposed floor surface we could find.

I love it when the house is this clean, but I know it won’t last long. I bet by this time next week it’ll feel like this day never happened!

Anyone who drinks bottled water has surely heard these claims before: most of the stuff is simply purified tap water. Now, according to this Reuters article, Aquafina might begin saying as much right there on its labels. Some people think this could deter people from buying the water, but I don’t. As it says down near the bottom of the article, I’m more interested in bottled water for the sake of convenience than purity and probably a lot of other people feel the same way.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see if this has an adverse effect on Pepsi Co.’s bottom line. Probably not.

Sometimes I really get tired of living in the Midwest. The weather is terrible and the area doesn’t have much to offer in terms of nature. No mountains for skiing or snowboarding and no ocean for boating, fishing, and other water sports. I often dream of living on the coast, and since I’m not much of a California fan, I like to focus my attention eastward.

For instance, I was looking at some Wilmington NC real estate listings the other day and was impressed by what I saw. Not only are the properties amazing and actually affordable, but the scenery is stunning! I wouldn’t mind living there at all, even if it means I’d have to turn into a Panthers fan!

I’ve still got a bunch of Sopranos episodes on my DVR from the sixth and final season. I’ve been rewatching some of them in the last couple days, and since I already know the storylines, I’ve been able to focus on some of the more superficial details of the show.

For example, I can’t help wondering how Tony could always get decent-looking women to sleep with him. I mean, not only is he a dangerous guy, but he’s also grotesquely overweight and unattractive. Seriously, he should have been looking to score hoodia in that Vegas episode instead of peyote! I guess I can understand that some women like powerful guys, but Tony Soprano is just too much of a stretch. Gross!