From Bad to Worse
Now the Big E remembers why he gave up gambling. He’s not particularly good at it. Another 1-2 week puts us at 3-6 for the year. Well, look at the bright side: if you just take the opposite of whatever we recommend, you should be doing pretty well. Nevertheless, we are cautiously optimistic that the NFL will start yielding some opportunities as teams get more established. As Bill Parcells (invented football if you listen to ESPN) says: “you are what your record says you are”.
DETROIT +3 over chicago
Well, we got to personally watch Dallas wipe out the Bears last Sunday night. A side note: Bears fans are way too nice. Soldier Field is not an intimidating place to play if you’re a visitor. Anyway, the Bears are finally replacing bad Rex Grossman with Brian Griese. Unfortunately, from what we saw, Grossman wasn’t why the Bears lost Sunday, it was their pitiful defense, which is riddled with injuries. This will probably be another shootout, as we doubt either team will play much defense (take the over), but we like the points at home for Detroit.
NEW YORK GIANTS +3 over philadelphia
The Eagles should win this game easily. The Giants are lousy. However, the Eagles are all banged up, and will be missing top CB Lito Sheppard again, plus excellent safety Brian Dawkins will be at half speed, if he plays at all. Brian Westbrook is questionable, so it’s possible he might not be effective, which would be crippling to the Eagles offense. Furthermore, this is the week before the bye, and Andy Reid has historically been terrible in games before the bye week. We expect another offensive Eagles game plan consisting of throw, throw, throw, which leads to loss, loss, loss.
CINCINNATI +7 over new england
No real rationale for this pick. Which probably means it’s a winner. Just like the points at home on Monday night.
That’s all for this week. Good luck!
Drivers Failing Drug Tests
There is nothing DOT takes more seriously than drug and alcohol testing. This is largely because it’s easy for them to enforce, and there’s nothing a government official loves more than easy. Nevertheless, the most serious violation you can commit is using a driver who has failed a drug test. If a driver fails a random drug test, you must stop using him. NOW! Not a week from now, or at the end of the day. NOW! That means calling him on the cellphone, getting him to park the truck, and getting another driver out there to take the vehicle. Do not let the failed driver ride in the truck. Have him ride in a non-CMV back to the yard. This driver cannot drive for you again, until he goes through the SAP process. It is important that you take this information seriously, as 1) DOT levies several thousands of dollars in fines if they catch you using a positive driver, and 2) I don’t want a driver who in the recent past has been smoking wacky weed, or snorting blow riding next to me in an 80,000 pound truck. No thank you.
Flying Dog!
My marketing guy says I should keep putting images on the blog which will make it more appealing to the eye, and keep people interested. Well, I’m getting tired of putting up the same images of truck wreck, truck fire, truck wreck, etc. So here’s a flying dog! What could be more appealing and fun than a flying dog?
Proposed New Truck Laws in Pennsylvania
http://pahomepage.com/content/fulltext/?cid=20735
The proposed bill would limit truck speeds to 60 MPH, even where the speed limits are 65, and force trucks to use the right lane only. Good Lord. Another stupid politician. This proposal will do nothing except cause more accidents. All you have to do is drive through a state like Ohio, where they have split speed limits, and you will see some of the worst driving in the world. Trucks running at 10 MPH less than other traffic inevitably cause packs of traffic as one truck running 56 MPH tries to pass one going 55, with all the cars piling up behind them. You see more four-wheelers weaving in and out of traffic in these situations than you would see at the Daytona International Speedway.
Luckily, the Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association has pretty good pull in Harrisburg, so this stupid proposal will end up where it belongs: on the scrap heap.
Big E Stumbles Out of the Gate
Well, thank God nobody reads this thing, otherwise they’d see that I’m 2-4 in football picks to start the season. For some reason, everything is in a foreign language to the Big E right now. Press 1 for winning football picks. Well, we try again this week:
MICHIGAN +2.5 over penn state
One of the main reasons we stink, is because we keep picking the Michigan games wrong. So why are we doing it again? Why ask why? Penn State simply can’t beat Michigan. It doesn’t matter if Penn State is good or bad. Something always carries Michigan to the win. It has happened nine straight times. Nine! We observed a respected handicapper picking Penn State in this game, stating that they are the better team. That may be true (we’re not sure), but it doesn’t matter if they’re better. We’ve since some pretty good Penn State teams lose on bad bounces and suspicious referee calls. We figure we can’t lose here, Michigan wins, we can put one in the win column, Penn State wins, well, we hate Michigan, and like Penn State. You say JoePa I say Terno!
air force +11.5 over BYU
This one is jumping off the page at us. Air Force is 2-0, having beaten pretty good Utah and TCU teams. BYU, on the other hand, is 1-2, having lost to UCLA and Tulsa. Stay with us here: UCLA lost last week to Utah 44-6. Air Force beat Utah. BYU lost to UCLA. Therefore, Air Force should beat BYU 100-0. Well, we’ll settle for losing by less than 11.5 points. That’s a lot of points, and Air Force must have something going for it, to be 2-0 against two solid teams. This might be a trick, but we’ll take the points.
CHICAGO -3 dallas
Just a feeling on this game. Dallas has feasted on sub-par competition so far this year, and we think they are going to be in for a rude step up in class here. Dallas’ defense has been poor, which may encourage Good Rex Grossman to show up for the Bears. We expect a ramped up Bears defense to hammer Tony Romo into some turnovers, and it’ll be one rowdy crowd on Sunday night in Chicago. Big E will be in attendance, and we rarely lose games where Big E makes a personal appearance. Bears 27, Cowboys 14.
Time to get it rolling!
Football Newsletter Week 2
Well, it was a slow start in Week 1, as we got off to a boring 1-2 start. None of these are BEST BET games, but still, you’d rather be right than wrong. On the Michigan game, we could not have been more wrong. As soon as the Big E watched 5 minutes of the game, he knew he had the wrong side. Michigan has absolutely no speed, and instead of running the ball, pounding the Ducks, and controlling the clock, they were throwing the ball every down. Recipe for disaster, cooked by the master disaster-chef himself, Lloyd Carr. Anyway, this week we offer you 3 college games. We looked and looked at the pro’s but nothing really jumps off the page at us. So…….
WASHINGTON +4 over ohio state
The Big Ten does not play well on the West Coast. For that matter, they do not play well against teams of superior conferences like the SEC or Pac-10. Washington has been on the bottom of the Pac-10 in recent years, but reeled off a nice win last week against a good Boise State team, showing they are probably ready to return to a bowl game. Ohio State meanwhile is struggling against its hand-picked pasties, like Akron. Ohio State has not settled on a quarterback to replace Troy Smith, so we should struggle all day to move the ball. That’s right, it’s “we” when we’re talking about the Buckeyes, we’re goin’ down on Saturday.
notre dame +8 over MICHIGAN
We’re going to right the ship this week from that stupid Michigan pick last week. What is Michigan, who will be playing without starting QB Chad Henne, doing as an eight point favorite over anybody not named Illinois or Indiana?? We watched some of that backup QB against Oregon, he was h-o-r-r-i-b-l-e. We also watched the Irish against Penn State. They struggled all night to get anything going, but Penn State has a helluva defense. Freshman QB Claussen will find the going much easier against slow, slow Michigan. The road team in this series has dominated, and expect that to continue. Charlie Weis does not start 2007 0-3, Lloyd Carr does.
southern cal -9.5 NEBRASKA
Well, if we’re going to pick non-BEST BET games, we might as well pick the ones on TV, so you might actually see it. Saturday night, there’s going to be a party going on in Lincoln, NE as ABC Saturday night football rolls into town. It’ll be a happening, 80,000 fans screaming, drinking, partying…. And then the game will start, and USC will take the fun out. Crunch. From what we’ve heard, this is one of the best USC teams ever, and they’ll prove it on national TV. USC generally shines out of conference, and we expect them to dominate here.
For those of you who prefer the NFL to NCAA… tough! At least for this week. Just wait, the NFL picture will become clearer in a week or two. Onwards and upwards!
Big E, aka Eric Arnold
Update on Hours of Service Rules
The update is: there is no update. Yes, the deadline for FMCSA to respond to the court is this Friday, but they have been completely silent. I guess this means they will not offer any sort of rebuttal or answer to the court, which means on Friday there is no more 11 hour rule, or 34 hour reset provision. I imagine the FMCSA will come out next Monday with revised hours rules incorporating the court’s mandates. But that’s just me guessing. Stay tuned, nothing is certain yet.
Crazy Four-Wheeler Tries to Beat Train
And loses. This happened in Hammond, IN, on Saturday September 1, 2007.
http://nwitimes.videos.vmixcore.com/p/video?id=1504769
Check out this video, from a parking lot surveillance camera. A woman in a mini-van, coming upon a railroad crossing just blocked by an eastbound train. She races into an adjacent parking lot, streaks the length of the parking lot, and races across the tracks. She never saw the westbound train, which hit her. She ends up killing two of her kids in mini-van, while she and the rest of her kids end up in the hospital. What on earth gets into people?
Football Newsletter Week 1
Opening Weekend
WHOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s football season!!! The season has just started and already we’ve got fireworks. In the colleges, football history was made last week when #5 Michigan was defeated at home by Division 1-AA Appalachian State. Kudos to Appy State, although this is not the mega-upset the pinhead-media is making it out to be. Appy State is the two-time defending champion of Division 1-AA. While these schools are very much smaller than the major schools like Michigan, they do have athletes, and they also have speed, something Michigan sorely lacks. Many forget in the late 1990’s, Marshall was a Division 1-AA school. That was a Marshall team with Chad Pennington and Randy Moss. The year they went into 1-A, they went to Motor City Bowl in Detroit, so it’s not like these top of the line Division 1-AA schools are complete stumblebums.
Now, that being said, what the hell is up, Michigan? Yes, it makes this Ohio State alum joyful to see those perennially overrated bums fall on their faces, but this is getting boring. Plus its hurting the conference. Ohio State will not be able to beat the USC’s, Florida’s, and LSU’s of the world, if the level of competition in the Big Ten doesn’t improve. Michigan keeping Lloyd Carr on as coach is a joke. What is it now, five losses to Ohio State? When was the last bowl game he won? I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I hate stupidity. Take it from me, Michigan: Dump this guy. Everyone told us that we’d be crazy to get rid of bonehead John Cooper (career record vs. Michigan 2-10-1). Then we finally did it, and now we have Jim Tressel (career record vs. Michigan 5-1, one National Championship). Dump him, we’ll all be better off.
But now let’s make some predictions! In football season, I am no longer trucking safety consultant extraordinaire Eric Arnold. I am The Big E! And the Big E is a premier handicapper. For entertainment purposes only, at this stage of his career, however. It occurred to me about seven years ago I could make more money in stock market than I could with my bookie Guido.
Nevertheless, let’s get it started. We offer two types of selections. One is the run-of-the-mill pick, which usually just something to take up space and pass the time. We have middling confidence in these picks. The second is the BESTBET!!!! These are the ones in which we have complete confidence, and would bet boatloads of money, if we still did that sort of thing. (At one point, at the urging of Joe Salamy, we called them BIG E BETS, but we were losing at an alarming rate under that name, so we quickly switched it back).
MICHIGAN –8 over Oregon
Losing last week was embarrassing, but Michigan is still a very powerful team. If idiot Lloyd Carr goes to what the Wolverines do best, which is run Mike Hart, they should easily beat Oregon. A red-faced Michigan starts the long road back on Saturday.
HOUSTON –3 over kansas city
The Big E is bullish on Matt Schaub as quarterback, and we think Houston will be a hidden jewel this year against the number. He will be a dramatic improvement over David Carr, who is headed on the Tim Couch Train out of the league. KC, on the other hand, has no solution at quarterback, with two journeymen manning the position. Larry Johnson will be the only hope KC has, and that won’t be enough. Houston cruises.
ST LOUIS –1 over carolina
The Big E saw Carolina play in the preseason, and they were L-O-U-S-Y. We think that St. Louis is poised for a big year, with a premier quarterback and running back leading the way. We’re not sure that Carolina has a premier anything. Only laying one point at home, that looks like a gift. Take it, and bet it.
There are no BESTBETs this week.
You may fire when ready, Gridley!
Driver Vehicle Inspections
Commercial Motor Vehicles, particularly tractor-trailers, have hundreds of moving parts. Like anything mechanical, they require constant maintenance to remain in safe operating condition. Daily inspections conducted by the driver are large part of any maintenance program.
The safety regulations require that both a pre-trip and post-trip inspection be done on commercial motor vehicles each day they are driven. The pre-trip inspection is done before the work shift, and takes less time than the post-trip inspection. A driver must assure himself that the vehicle is in proper working condition. To do this, he should make a complete trip around the vehicle, including looking under the hood, checking fluid levels, tires, lights, etc.
The post-trip inspection is to be done at the conclusion of the shift. This inspection should take no less than 15 minutes, and include all areas covered by the pre-trip inspection, plus crawling under the vehicle, checking the brakes and suspension. A driver should look for cracks and leaks. Many drivers do not conduct two inspections, but instead combine them into one inspection before the shift. For example, a driver does his inspection in the morning, concludes his shift, parks the truck and goes home. The next morning, he does another inspection. This is not correct. For one thing, what if the driver finds something wrong with the truck during his morning inspection? He has places to be, customers to service, and a boss to keep happy. All that will have to wait, as the driver now has to fix the truck. Of course, more commonly, the driver drives the defective truck, and worries about getting it fixed later. If he had done the inspection the previous evening, he could have gotten the truck fixed the night before. Make sure your drivers are doing both pre and post trip inspections.
