10 for 10 (8th Entry): The First Line of the Novel 'Choke'

Greetings to our blog readers in Macedonia, Belgium, and Jordan.......in order to substantially increase our global audience we will name drop Serbian soccer player Branislav Ivanovic of Chelsea and German striker Mesut Ozil , who is of Turkish heritage, for Arsenal.

Tonight actually marks the 10th anniversary of our first blog entry here on this blog, to our knowledge only four or five people read that one. Hopefully, at least 98 will read this entry (nudge, nudge, wink, wink....)

On a personal note, we want to send our kudos to Chris Hurst, the 11:00 news anchor for WDBJ-7 in Roanoke, Va. If you watched CNN a few weeks ago, you saw him speak with Anderson Cooper, he has been through a lot. Tonight marks his second week of returning to the broadcast booth. Since Roanoke is our hometown, we wish Hurst the best.

We were hoping a joke about Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor who dropped out of the Republican presidential candidate race, but we are running late, and you can see the tweets of his former employee Liz Mair, which are indeed quite amusing.

Tonight, we are going retro with the first line of Chuck Palahniuk's great 2001 cult classic novel "Choke." A few years ago, we had lots of fun with posts about the first lines of novels, such as Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace," which we must profess to have never read!

Here is the first line from "Choke:"

"If you're going to read this, don't bother. After a couple pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece. Save yourself."

http://chuckpalahniuk.net/

Coming Soon (we hope): Futbol Week

On Friday, we are hoping to launch a seven-day series devoted totally to soccer both here in the United States with weekend MLS games as well as Mexico and Europe.

The top image is of Serbian national Branislav Ivanovic, a star player for London's Chelsea football club. Today, German national Mesut Ozil, who is of Turkish heritage, signed with one of Chelsea's main rivals, Arsenal.

The bottom image is of Drew Moor, an American defender who plays for the Colorado Rapids in the MLS. Alas, our personal favorite MLS team, DC United is having a disastrous year so far!