Bosley's Law

Now, I'm not invoking former American League outfielder Thad Bosley.

I'm talking Tom Bosley. Everyone's favorite hardware store owner on TV. Howard Cunningham - Mr. C.

Specifically, those Glad commercials with the yellow-and-blue-make-green strips at the top so you can tell that the bags are locked shut.

I often make mention of Bosley's law whenever I find a freshly applied use of Tidy-Bowl or 2000 Flushes, or something like that in the toilet. Yesterday afternoon, they changed the hockey puck in the urinal at work to a dark blue color from the previous pinkish ones they had been using. So clearly, it was time to apply Bosley's law.

Dice....the Pedro, Roger treatment?

And by this, I mean....

Are the Red Sox destined to score only 1 or 2 runs every time he goes out there? Nothing worse than having an ace's performances wasted. Meanwhile, Wakefield will get 8 runs of support, and it'll be either an 8-7 win or 9-8 loss.

Dice went 5 no-hit today, the Red Sox have one hit so far in the 8th inning. Things you could see coming for $100, Alex....

Beer foam

So the instructions for the beer said to give it a week in the primary fermenter, and then move it after a week into the secondary bottle. That's a just-over-five gallon jug that I put an airlock on, after which the bubbles are supposed to SLOWLY escape through a small amount of germicide-treated water. Apparently I had some slow-awakening yeast at work. The stuff was bubbling out like a head, right through the airlock....after a couple of days it's finally slowed down so that I don't need to keep wiping the bottle off. I know this beer will need extra time, but I haven't had a situation like this. We shall see.

Oh, and Erika says the beer smells like pepperoni pizza. She's sorta right, too....the yeast I'm sure provides the dough smell, but the pepperoni *is* a bit odd.

Anyways, Kansas has kept winning for me....but I'm worried, there's another sheet with Kansas winning it all, and the guy's way ahead of me. March is a time for miracles, though.

My fantasy roster

Joe Mauer
Gary Sheffield (had a glitch in the java applet that caused this to pick automatically, but whatever, maybe he'll go .300/40/115)
Tadahito Iguchi (second basemen are such an afterthought)
Larry Jones (where am I, Shea?)
Jhonny Peralta
Torii Hunter (my all-spelling team!)
Ichiro
Coco Crisp
David Eckstein (is plucky grit a stat category?)
Paul LoDuca (a 2nd good catcher...trade bait!)
Nomah!
Milton Bradley (Nobody named Hasbro available)
Orlando Hudson
Aaron Hill (not first, alphabetically, even)
Chris Burke (ya know, in case games go 18 innings)


Aaron Harang
Matt Cain
Josh Beckett
K-Rod
Scott Linebrink (holds are a category!)
Dan Wheeler (ditto...although he could be the Sox closer)
Tim Hudson
Mike Timlin
Greg Maddux

A good license plate

Saw "FENWAY" on a CT plate this afternoon....white jeep.

Once I saw Nomar-5 on a New York plate, even with the Sox logo on it. I didn't realize that would even be available. Good to see some states are a little more relaxed with their vanity plate options!

Got my first fantasy draft tonight. Gotta go sort players, I suppose.

I felt like giving the thumbs up to the driver of the jeep. The only time I did that was to a vehicle with a Sox decal in the back, the morning of game 7 of the '04 ALCS....like I was a giddy schoolkid playing with house money!

First communion

So, my daughter made her first communion yesterday..special Mass on a Saturday. As far I'm concerned, that counts as going this weekend! Nobody ever does anything for the 2nd communion though. I gave her a message to kids from the pope (JP2, not the new one), and a dictionary. Not sure what's appropriate as a present. I got, for mine, a history of lots of saints, from the nuns at the church. It helped out in Catholic school if we needed an odd biography looked up. I think I still have it somewhere.

My brackets are shot. I have 8 out of 16, but have lost Wisconsin and Louisville from my final four. My only hope is Kansas over UNC. Any game I don't have in between must be won by some random team, to prevent others from getting ponts I can't.

11 inches of snow. I shoveled the first 9 myself on Friday, only to find 2 inches of freezing rain the next morning, which takes more work than the first nine. Grrr.... Oh well, beats going to work. I got tendonitis in my right arm. It felt like I was throwing a baseball as hard as I could for half an hour, over and over. But with my opposite hand.

My Sunday morning hoops team won our "NIT" bracket championship this morning, rather convincingly. What a difference it was having all 7 guys show up during the playoffs. We play 4 on 4 on sideways courts. No worries about getting tired. My job morphed into being the defensive specialist on guards....even got a DJ-poke steal in the open court, but missed the putback on a rebound after the first shot by a teammate rolled off. One of our big guys owes me though, he blew 3 bunnies on great passes this morning.

17 for 17?!

Not me, but a guy (a Dartmouth guy, mind you) in my pool at work.

Here's the thing. I got Duke-VCU wrong. I had Duke in the elite 8. Now I'm in a weird position. I want Pitt to lose, because I figure I need VCU to go far to eliminate points from anyone who had the higher seeded Panthers into the sweet sixteen. If the team I picked isn't there, I need to eliminate all other possible point-mongers from the equation. Maybe 1 or 2 other people have VCU, but a few have Pitt, so Pitt has to lose to keep others' points to a minimum.

1 down, 63 to go...

Congrats to Niagara....now good luck against Kansas. People were saying Niagara shouldn't have been a 16 seed....and since Kansas has tanked two years in a row....who knows, could we have a 16 over a 1?

I had no idea Terry Gannon, ESPN's announcer tonight, played for the '83 Wolfpack from NC State. Of course, Steve Lavin kept mentioning it every 10 minutes throughout the broadcast.

Anyways, Gannon's voice sounds just like Mark Jones, another ESPN guy. I wasn't sure who was actually announcing the game for a while. Lavin is good, but Gannon doesn't click with him like Brent Musberger does on the Big 10 games on Tuesdays.

Other good March announcers: Ron Franklin...always underrated. Fran Fraschilla, too. Surprised he works out west, with his St. John's ties. Of course, Bill Raftery is the best. He *should* be working with Sean McDonough, but CBS got rid of him a few years ago. And yet, Verne Lundquist is still a very good pairing for him...CBS must find a way to get Gus Johnson to do both of the first two weekends. I heard he's being replaced with James Brown, and that's unacceptable. Another example of networks thinking we care about their "big name" announcers, when we don't give either cheek of a rat's ass.

Anyways, with 3 points, I'm tied for first in my pool.

Weekend stuff

First things first, I'm cloning La Moinette Belgian Blonde Ale. Started the yeast proofing Saturday and added it yesterday to the wort while watching the NCAA tourney shows. I can't believe I go to pick what I think will be a light, spring ale, and it ends up listed as 8.5% alcohol. Not exactly the kind of thing you sip on a warm spring day. It takes 2 months to finish in the bottle, too, so it will be warm by the time it's ready to imbibe.

Love the NCAA tournament shows....Dick Vitale is probably still crying over (fill in this year's team whose bubble burst.....Drexel). Nice to see Jay Bilas get in a little dig at him in the segues. I will now collect $5 a head from anyone here in the building willing to contribute to the "Brian petty cash in March" fund. It beats hitting the bank....and if I win, like last year, then I don't have to scurry off to a bank to get the cash for the eventual winner. I do that because I've already spent the entry fees over the course of the tournament as cash on hand....using it to buy lunch, for instance.

Went to Beardsley Zoo Saturday with the girls....it had been a couple of years.....but March again, which again meant no alligators. Nice strong scent of indoor wild cat piss, though. I believe it was ocelot pee we were greeted with. The coolest animals they have are the foxes on stilts. I forget what they really were called, but the fox on stilts nickname for them was very apropos. I also commend their cafeteria. $21 got us lunch for four including hot chocolate. Burgers were cheap (3.75 for a double with cheese) so it made the skinny pressed-meat patties very forgivable. Fries and chicken tenders were good, too. I was expecting 35-40 bucks for all that.

Lastly, Sunday was my older daughter's last ever non-communion Mass, since she's making her first communion next week. I thought about coming back to the pew and showing her half-chewed host in my mouth, but that's considered sacrilegious, so I opted just to swallow politely before I returned.

Dirty-Joke Jeopardy!

Here's an idea I had a few years ago.

In terms of where it might play out, I'm not sure....maybe at a party, or if worse comes to worse, as a bit on the Howard Stern show.

A little mini-game show where the object of the game is to figure out the joke based on the punch line. The jokes would be famously dirty.

Answer: It's a ten-cent stamp, but if you want to lick it, it's a quarter.

And so, you've got to come up with the Question :"Did you hear the Post Office has a new stamp celebrating prostitution?"

Of course, that's pretty tame, but there are plenty enough famous dirty jokes with well-known punchlines. ...

Best beer ever?

So what is it?

I offer up Hop Devil, by the Victory Brewing Co. in Pennsylvania. Very tangy from the hops (duuhhhh), but enough malt body so that it's almost thick. I took a tour of their brewery/restaurant a couple of years ago. Tremendous food to go with their beer, that's why it was packed, I'm sure.

As for the worst beer....it would be cheap and easy to say Budweiser....so I won't. Actually, because Bud doesn't exactly try too hard, it ends up being harmless. The worst beer I've ever had may have been Hop Monster, brewed by Paper City in Holyoke MA. It tasted like paper pulp must. And the thing was, the first sip you're like, "wow..." and then you realize, "oh God! What the hell am I drinking?" And of course, I kept trying to fool myself later in the week, starting another bottle....getting fewer and fewer sips in before realizing I was in taste bud hell. Was it paper? Was it motor oil? Who knows....

I suppose it's easy, too, to offer up beer brewed with lemon ginger, or cayenne pepper in it. But those are an attempt to mingle flavors. More easy to forgive the attempt. Hop Monster really had no excuse for sucking so bad.