What would happen if.... (7/5 edition)

... somebody named Bob worked at my client, the Juran Institute? Oh wait, one does. When I get an email from him, I am inevitably haunted in my head with the chorus of "Bob, Bob, Bob...Bob Bob - Juran". (Think Beach Boys, and the melody should come to you.)

Shea Hillenbrand used to play for the Red Sox, and whenever he'd hit a homer, I wanted the announcers to say "Shea ralphs one over the seats in left," because that would pay homage to Shea Ralph, who played women's hoops for UConn back around the turn of the century.

The Spanish words for "wet floor" are "piso mojado", and I often see a bilingual sign in the aisle of a supermarket where there's been a spill. The funniest thing to do here is start singing Janis Joplin -- "Take it! Take another little piso mojado, baby! You know you got it, and it makes you feel good!" (Really, I'm only 35 -- it's just that car trips with my parents subjected me to a healthy dose of music from the 1960s.)

Blog reader Jenny had an interesting post about the Shocker. This made me think of two things. One was the way my wife makes the symbol whenever the song "Shock the Monkey" comes on.

The second thought has to do with animals like birds which have a cloaca. Having a veterinarian for a wife teaches you all sorts of stuff....like how some animals have a cloaca, one all-purpose hole for both reproductive and excretory functions. This, of course, makes the Shocker an interesting undertaking....of course, those animals don't have opposable thumbs anyway.

This is prime nectarine season now, and nectarines are my favorite fruit when they're ripe and in-season and juicy. None of the dry ones that I take a flyer on in the winter -- those are awful. Anyway, about 15 years ago I was having one as a snack at work, and the pit was freestone and partially opened. So I didn't have to crack it open to see that there was a small nut inside for the seed. It looked just like an almond after you crack one of those open, so I gave it a small taste. And sure enough, it actually tasted like almond flavoring. You know, like Amaretto or "toasted almond" flavored stuff. Eating almonds themselves NEVER taste like "almond flavor." But this nectarine seed tasted just like Amaretto. I mention this to my dad, and he says that nectarine seeds are a natural source of cyanide. Yikes! (I've since read up that there is cyanide in there, but generally not at fatal levels. Nevertheless, I've never had another nectarine seed again.)

What's the probability that a pitcher will pitch well on any particular day? I mention this as a student of mathematics and probability. Let's say that 85% of the time, a pitcher will do well. Well, if you're a manager and you make 4 pitching changes, then the probability that all 5 pitchers do well would be 0.85 to the 5th power, or 44%. My point is this: The more pitchers you bring in, the more likely one of them is going to suck that day. (I think most major league pitchers should be able to get most hitters out, and leave it at that.)

If we were at war with China, would the US Government discourage fireworks, having been a Chinese INVENTION (whoops, not invasion)? Would we call firecrackers "freedom crackers" or something like that? (I just get annoyed by clowns in the neighborhood setting off stupid loud noises.) Like, too bad they weren't invented in France -- that would cut down on the racket! :)

540 rubles

So, Erika hooked me up to this Russian website which hosts a bunch of MP3s. Cheap, too. They used to bill my credit card in American money, like $20 or $30 at a time, and then you could buy songs for like 10 cents. The price per song has jumped to 15, and now 19 cents each, but that's still pretty good.

Actually, now they're not in cents, but rather these "c.u." which may or may not stand for "customer units". But whatever. The thing is, the prices are now being dictated in Russian money. I went with the lowest re-load amount they offered, which was "20 c.u." for 540 rubles. Unknowingly I just went ahead and clicked for that choice. Then it hit me, what's the exchange rate? Yikes! Well, it turned out that 540 rubles was $20.97, and then I had a 21-cent (one percent) fee for the international transaction.

Let's just call it "coulda been worse...."

As for the MP3s? I still have about 25 out of my 250 audio tapes that haven't been re-done as MP3s. At first, I used to run a wire from my tape player into my Mac, and made mp3s that way. The quality wasn't always the best, depending on how worn the tape was. All of my Beatles stuff sounds great that way....one reason I did that is because I was raised on the American albums -- so to hear the original British CDs is weird, because my mind cues up the next American song in my head, only to have it be something different playing next on the disc. (Each side of an album ends up being a 15-minute "song", rather than me splicing apart the 6 songs into separate files -- that's why it's important to keep the as-in-my-head order.)

So I did a Tesla album from '91....filled in missing songs from Def Leppard's Hysteria, and then took some greatest hits from Eddie Money and George Thorogood and put them on one CD. (Neither of these guys have enough famous songs to really issue an album completely of hits, anyways -- songs on the original tapes that weren't famous to begin with, and not worthy of being included.)

One last weekend bit....our on-demand is working again from Comcast, so we bought Stranger Than Fiction last night -- Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman. I give it a B- to a B, but no higher than that.

freakin' scary

ok, not sure anyone knows that I'm type I insulin-dependent diabetic. The "real" diabetes, as I like to call it. Where it's not your own fault you have it, but rather a genetic thing. (Maybe with mom telling me not to eat a spoonful out of the sugar bowl as a kid, because I'd get diabetes, I should have listened.)

Anyway, I'm on an insulin pump, which works really well. It's hooked up via a skinny tube to an "infusion set" on my stomach, and I just have to rotate the site for the hookup every 4 or 5 days -- as long as the reservoir of insulin lasts. I get a steady-stream "basal" rate, and then I give myself a "bolus" whenever I eat food -- more food means more sugar in the blood which means I need more insulin to get that glucose to the cells in my body. The main thing is that there's a relatively consistent ratio between the amount of carbohydrates I eat and the amount of insulin needed to "cover" the increased blood glucose level.

So a couple of days ago, I'd had a blood sugar level of about 160 in the morning. Not as good as a normal level of 100, but not the worst thing in the world. Usually I'm between 80 and 130 over the course of the day. Well, the temperature was in the 90s a couple of days ago and I went down to Dairy Queen....got a large chocolate cone dipped in cherry. Now, I'm not sure exactly how many carbohydrates are in that, but I know enough about ice cream to figure out something close -- and hey, I use a machine to test my blood sugar level, and if it were too high, I just take more, and if it drops too low, I get all hypoglycemic feeling and I can eat something else to bring the glucose level back to normal. Plus, I figured another couple of units of insulin would incorporate bringing the 160 back down to 100, not including the extra for the ice cream.

Well, something screwy happened. My blood sugar level shot through the roof. Like, 450 (I think it's milligrams per deciliter of blood). I can also tell hyperglycemia because I get a faint ammonia-like smell from ordinary surroundings. So I panic, and take some more insulin....no help, it's now 520. I keep giving myself extra booster boluses (the pump just feeds more insulin through the tubing into my body subcutaneously at the infusion site, like a needle would). Still nothing all afternoon. I hit 582 on one reading, the highest I've ever had. And I can't figure out why it's not coming down. I tried gagging myself to puke up the rest of the ice cream, but of course, ice cream that's been in your stomach a couple of hours just is all gooey and doesn't puke up when you'd like it to.

Eventually I gave up, hysterical, around 3 pm, and drove home. By the time I was home I was back down to 429. I took out one of my old pre-pump needles and gave myself a shot in the butt of even more insulin, then went for a walk (okay, I mowed the lawn, but that's walking). By 5 it was down to 303, and I cooled off swimming in our little pool. A couple of hours after that it was down to 130.

So THEN, I figured I was okay to have dinner, which was just some vegetable soup -- not a lot of carbohydrates there. I did over-bolus myself just a small bit there, but that was because hey, no insulin had been working. I had taken out the infusion set, to move it to another spot, just in case the fatty tissue where I'd been hooked up wasn't absorbing the insulin right or something.

Well, that might have had something to do with it, because the rest of the night I was hypoglycemic. Readings of 47, 64, 51, 71, etc. All the while I had to eat a bunch of peanut M&M's (aw, poor me, right?) and drink almost three-quarters of a bottle of sugary root beer. Somehow I think the exercise of the late afternoon freed up all that insulin that was in my system all at once. I scarfed a bunch of cheez-its and went to bed, and woke up yesterday with a normal 88 reading. That shouldn't have been so hard.

The worst part was that when I was removing the old location's infusion set (the connection point for the insulin tube) it seemed that it wasn't secured in place right....and then I smelled my shirt the next morning and it smelled like insulin from the bottle (it smells like the latex of a freshly-opened band-aid)....which makes me think that part of the problem was the insulin at the point of connection. (The infusion set has a twist-off feature, that allows me to disconnect and re-connect the tube from the pump, so that I can take a shower or go swimming, with just a cover to the point of insertion. I think I wasn't twisted back on properly and insulin was going through the tube and leaking out instead of entering my body.)

The worst part is that next week I have to have my regular bloodwork for my 3-month checkup. They say that the blood test measures a three-month overall average of my blood sugar level based on hemoglobin. But there's no way having a 582 for a few hours won't skew my results even a bit higher than they would, had I not forgotten to go for the bloodwork last week like I should have.

And so now I have to explain this to the doctor in a couple of weeks. If my lab results are too high, he won't buy the excuse that one bad day skewed the whole three-month average!

What would happen if.... (6/27 edition)

....Elvis had a telephone instead of a TV nearby when he shot out the screen? I've thought about that at work. Unfortunately, shooting the phone doesn't convey the anger toward the person on the other line, if you haven't answered it yet and shoot it while it's ringing.

It's often suggested one wash his hands after peeing. I've always considered that it would be more beneficial to wash your hands BEFORE going....at least from a guy-at-a-urinal perspective. Where are there more likely to be germs? On my hands, touching everything on my desk over the course of the day and stuff? Or on my urine-removal-organ, which has remained in my clean undies over the course of the day, unfazed since showering? Now I grant you, if you tinkle on yourself a bit, that DEFINITELY needs to be washed off your hands. But I think the germ path is more likely going to be hand-to-penis rather than penis-to-hand. (Fine, slow thought week, shoot me.)

If margarine is such a recent invention, why did they decide to name it something so similar-sounding to marjoram, the herb?

When I was 17 I had a blind date for ice cream with a girl who was described as a junior in high school. Or so I thought.....she was in *junior high school*. Okay, everyone, have a good laugh. Nothing came close to happening in a Ben & Jerry's scoop shop anyway.

I mowed the lawn for the first time last night. My wife's old mower had one of those power-assist things to help it get moving. That broke last year, and so she whined that the yard was too hilly for her to push, and so she insisted on getting a riding mower. Of course, if you open a new Home Depot credit account, you can get 10% off. So I was "forced" to open an account and get a two thousand dollar lawn tractor. Which I refuse to learn how to use. I use her $20-floor-model-clearance-from-KMart mower. I don't care if it takes me an hour longer than it takes Erika. I'd prefer to have that extra two grand to pay for more important stuff. Plus, it's fun to use the pool to wash the sweat off afterwards.

I think a good trade-off, in the absence of an umpire, is "no called strikes" for "no walks or hit-by-pitches". Especially at wiffle ball.

Money experts claim that you shouldn't take a loan against your 401(k) account because you pay double taxes on the money. Technically, you only pay double taxes on the interest, because the principal of the loan is really tax-free income while you've got it.

What's the world's record for stretching mozzarella cheese off a pizza, anyway? Is this measured for the Guinness book?

There's a "cigarette discount store" across the street from here, and one time I saw the proprietor go outside for a smoke break. Now, I'm anti-smoking at least as much as the next guy, but of all the places that it probably should be allowed to smoke in public, a cigarette store would seem to be okay in my book.

Velvet Revolver

Anyone get the new album yet? I like these guys, they're the music of GnR with the singing from STP. I saw them at Jones Beach on Long Island a couple of years ago....made me think Axl was rolling over in his grave.

(A tip of the keyboard to Diff'rent Strokes on that one....Mr. Drummond's batty old sister saying if their ancestor had been alive today, he'd be rolling over in his grave. I LOVE that line.)

My softball team continues to suck. I think 5 hits last night. I promised in the 7th inning that we wouldn't get shut out. So I do that same, slap it to the shortstop since they can't throw me out crap...a cheap single...then the next guy hit one off the LC's glove, so we had 2nd and 3rd with one out, and another single scored us both. So we lost, what, 12-2? I'd rather have a team of non-hitters than non-fielders, though. (Of course, I've got both. This will be my last year on this team.)

I have a picture from my daughter's first communion that I went to put in a frame here at work, and it was a 5x7 frame for a 4x6 picture. Oops! I have used a clean fancy napkin as matting behind the picture -- that's better than using the old picture it's replacing! I need to update my other pictures, they're all from 2005. The best one, I think, is my younger daughter after we got a book on balloon animals and stuff. She looks like a soldier of fortune with headbands and straps formed by long skinny balloons all wrapped around each other. And of course, she was 4.

Let's see, what else....with the Sox on the left coast, I had to get my baseball from the Mets-Cardinals. I sorta liked the Mets as my "favorite NL team" as a kid...but then they turned into pricks in the mid-80s, and so only lately have I watched them without all that animosity. Shea's still a dump of a stadium....but I'll still take any free tickets my boss wants to give me.

The yellow weed flowers in the field outside my window are making a comeback. It's supposed to be 94 today. (34 for you in metric-land, which I suppose is....oh, everywhere else in the world.) I may swim tonight, we have a small outdoor pool that had gotten cloudy over the weekend, but some chemicals fixed that right up. The pool is near a lot of trees, though, so we get plenty of leaves in there. Vacuuming must come first, I suppose. At least the water should be warm enough not to scare off Erika from going in. I do have to find my bathing suit, though....I lost it over the weekend and had to settle for floating on a tube "sunny side down" Sunday afternoon.

Late at work on a Friday.

So Carlos Zambrano is pitching to AJ Pierzynski....
Think they're discussing their mutual hatred for Michael Barrett?

I missed a pitch in the all-star game last night. The left fielder was 100 feet off the line and I tried to aim my swing. After that debacle of an at bat (grounder back to the mound), I got 2 singles and a triple, so not too bad. Everything was just "off" a bit for me, though. I slipped on a throw to the plate, and because of that it had to be cut off by the pitcher, whose relay was *just* late. Also had trouble on a deep ball over my head, it landed just off my glove because of the bad angle I took. But I made up for THAT mistake with a nice sliding catch. Our team won, 12-8.

Coors light and its friends are now referred to as "supermarket beer" in my lexicon. Always good to have even a cheap beer at work on a Friday, though :)

It's finally quiet around here. But one other person's here, so I can't blast the audio. So I'll keep a White Sox - Cubs game on instead of iTunes.

The boss is on vacation next week. Insert your own commentary here, I suppose.

My daughters are at their grandparents' house on Cape Cod for the week. So I'll be sleeping late the next couple of days.

the good, the bad, and the ugly

The good...

My co-ed team is 6-0, and my teammates voted me as the male representative for our all-star game tomorrow night.

The bad...

My men's team has lost like 5 or 6 in a row.

The ugly...

I got one hit tonight for that men's team. The other 8 guys in the lineup (yeah, 8....after having 13 in the lineup Friday, we only had 9 tonight) had ZERO.

I broke up the no-hitter in the 4th inning. They had a shift on for me, being a lefty pull hitter....so I Ichiro-slapped a single to where the shortstop shoulda been. Kinda like bunting late to break up a no-no. The next inning the pitcher hit a bomb over my head in left that kept rolling and rolling for a homer....yeah, I had it coming.

What would happen if.... (6/20 edition)

...the last person in the All-Star Home Run Derby, down by one, decides to "run out" his last fly ball, claiming an inside-the-park homer while the 10-year-old kids they let in the outfield struggle to return the ball to the infield?

My softball league is having a home run derby tomorrow night, and there's a $2 ante, with the winners splitting the pool. Now THERE'S a way to spice up the all-star shenanigans.

Is "shenanigans" an Irish word? I'd have a couple of pints at a pub named Shenanigans if there were one around!

After my trip to Ireland back in '03, I finally developed the taste for Guinness, which I hated in college. This does not mean I will eventually like coffee, though.

There's an office in the building here at work, and there's a quotation taped to the door. It talks about how excellence is the result of hard work, not luck. The quote is attributed to "Arthur Unknown". So apparently, excellence is irrelevant in the spelling department.

I think it's mundane for sportscasters to refer to Atlanta as "Hot-lanta". I prefer my own term, in honor of Ted Turner. Ted-lanta.

My wife and I are sixteen episodes into the DVDs for "How I Met Your Mother". What exactly is Barney's job? The guy played by Doogie Howser. If nothing else, he gives inspiration to dorky smart kids everywhere that their lives CAN turn out cool! :) (Just stay away from snorting coke off hookers, like in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.)

I read that you never see cashews in their shells because they contain the same chemical as poison ivy.

If you accidentally put a DHL package in a FedEx drop-off box....and they're side-by-side....will the FedEx guy be nice and put it in the right box, or will they steal the package, to end up lost forever?

Plinko was the most overrated game in the history of The Price Is Right. The Race Game was my favorite. And one time, I think a contestant should have expressed more disappointment to get stuck in a really crappy game like "double prices", where you just have to pick which of the two prices is the right one for the hot tub. Lame!

I was probably older than I should have been before I realized the edible part of the pumpkin is the shell.

I recommend that you steer children towards separate kindergarten teachers, so that you don't get re-runs when the younger kid makes all the same stuff an older one made! (I have nearly identical homemade paperweights now after Fathers' Day this weekend.)

Ever yank a golf shot onto the wrong green, from an adjacent hole? Because you're required to putt the ball off that green before you can chip it back onto the correct hole. Grrrr....

Birthday cake

My claim to fame with my younger daughter is that I always include the age number into her cake. Her first cake was blueberry, so I made a ring of blueberries around the top frosting, and make a big number 1 in the center with the blueberries, too. For 2, it was a chocolate cake with a peanut butter 2 on top. Three was a doll cake, so I had to put the 3 on the front of the dress. (Someone else made that cake -- you bake it in an oversized measuring cup, and then invert it so it looks like the bottom half of a dress. Then you put a new Barbie doll or something inside down to the waist.) I may have to dig for pictures of the 4 cake, I can't remember it off the top of my head. Last year, 5, was like the blueberry cake, except I used lemon drops to ring the circumference and make a 5. This year, Sarah wanted vanilla cake with peppermint frosting. Um, okay....Well, I also crumbled some white chocolate chunks on top, garnering a comment that it looked like feta cheese. Anyways, for the 6, I really cheated and just used a black licorice shoestring wound up into a 6. One of my cousin's kids ate that, I think.



(Not sure why my picture didn't upload from home....but I've since driven to work and don't have the picture available to enclose here.)

Back to the Rack...

Okay, where to start.

No matter how extensive a list you think you've made when you go camping, you always forget something. Or at least, think of something you'd wished you'd brought. For instance, a wine bottle opener. It certainly wasn't on our list, but after buying a couple of wines from North River Winery up in Vermont, you realize it's going to have to wait until you get home. We got one bottle of Vermont Harvest (apple with maple syrup and spices) and one bottle of Rhubarb.

Other fun places to go are Ben & Jerry's headquarters in Waterbury, and Cabot cheese headquarters in Cabot, VT. Obviously they're just tourist traps, but fun enough that they take you through their factories. Both places feature short 10-minute intro videos telling "their story". The B & J's one is funnier because they've been bought out by Unilever, so the founders are "off doing their own thing" at this point. My highlight was seeing the people on the floor watching the tour go buy upstairs, looking out windows at them. I made eye contact with a relatively pretty woman about 30 years old, and flashed her. She laughed down on the floor, and I could see her telling her co-worker...but no flashback, unfortunately (which my wife said would have been funny!). The Cabot factory tour is on the same floor. The guy closest to the window had lots of tattoos, including "KILL" on his knuckles. Erika *dared* me to flash him, but I'm not freakin' crazy. Their store had tons of good cheeses, and the pre-requisite maple syrup. It's a law that every business in Vermont must sell maple syrup, I believe. Actually, we found some there that were infused with other flavors....Erika got vanilla chai maple syrup, and I got habañero maple syrup. Can't wait to try those.

Let's see, what else. The alpine slide at Pico isn't open yet until June 29. That sucked, because alpine slides are awesome. The campsites were all good -- Emerald Lake, Silver Lake, New Discovery, and Thetford Hill. I actually did my student teaching at Thetford Academy fifteen years ago. That place was too small, though, because we couldn't get a campsite away from other people. At New Discovery, we might have been the ONLY ones there Monday night. We rented the first six episodes of The Office. The original British version. Holy bleep, that show is hysterical. And it's funny, because I really like the American version, so we were trying to compare/contrast the shows. Even if it IS 2 versions of the same thing, they're both worthy. Like, you kinda wish the two shows could somehow co-exist in a crossover "parallel universe" thing -- like what if Dwight and Gareth were switched, or something?

Thetford's so close to Dartmouth that we stopped by the campus to sorta point out some stuff to Erika about my school, and have dinner. Of course, her school just had a mass-killing a few weeks ago, so a trip with her to Va. Tech. might only be kinda depressing.

Anyways, we had an appointment at her accountant's yesterday in Arlington, MA. Left at 4:10 to get back for a softball 6:30 game in Oxford. Got there just in time, a testament to the lack of speed traps along routes MA-2, I-95, I-90, and I-84. Went 4-for-5. Just missed a spectacular Willie-Mays catch in the first inning, and then suffered through a 10-inning nailbiter. We blew a 9-3 lead in the 6th. It stayed 9-9 through the 7th, 8th, and 9th (even though they left the bases loaded with none out), into the 10th, before the outfielder next to me let a single go through his legs and the guy at first raced home with the winning run as I tried backing it up.

As for now....catching up at work. I should be able to comment on everyone else's blogs tomorrow, for anyone concerned about my absence.

Still on vay-cay

Sorry I hadn't gotten the chance to write more. I've been in Vermont where cell phone coverage is few and far between. Now I'm at my wife's accountant's ofice in Arlington, MA...not exactly on the way home, either! I'll write more when I get home tonight, Down Under David!

You take the good, you take the bad....

Sorry, not a "Facts of Life" homage...

Just a quick update on softball. I went 0 for 4 Wed. night. We lost, 10-7. First two times up, blinded by the sun. 3rd time up, the right-center fielder went all Jim Edmonds on me....a fantastic diving over his head catch. Grrrr.... Then a line out to end it. Apparently by making the last out, I owe the beer next time. Hopefully we'll be back from camping in time for the game next Wed. night. I already have to miss Friday and Monday. I fielded just fine....unlike, say, the right side of our defense. Oh well, I suppose.

Tonight, though...much better. 3 for 3, all infield singles though. It helps to run hard every time. Fielding was awesome....I keep feeling like I'm being reminded as to why I LOVE playing. First inning....guy hits a BOMB to left...the left fielder and I are sprinting....but neither of us can call it because it's right between us. Left fielder reaches....and it pops off his extended glove....and I snag it with my bare left hand! Sweet! :)

Live update...A-Rod grand slam...guess I HAVE to watch basketball at this point...

Oh, and I also started a double play on a running catch, the runner at second was too far off. Although the shortstop snagged the ball I threw to the second basewoman, we still doubled up the runner. The next batter grounded out, and so no outs, bases loaded led to 0 runs. Yay! (We won, 13-1.)

More interesting stuff tomorrow, I suppose. Perhaps a tribute to pistachios. (burp!)

What would happen if.... (6/6 edition)

....the makers of vending machines installed the "TILT" technology in pinball machines? Your candy gets stuck, so you at least *try* to rattle the machine....only for the TILT lights to go on and the machine goes dark with the exit-tray closed off or something.

Are we familiar with the term "smash-mouth football"? That's where a team never throws the ball, and simply runs up the middle, and is happy with the modest 3-4 yard gain. ("Three yards and a cloud of dust.") It's more physical to run the ball right at the other team rather than try to pass or run to the sideline, etc. Well anyways, one of my friends plays a sort of "smash-mouth golf." All his shots are about 90 yards, even off the tee. But they're straight, and he's on the green in 4, at least as well as I am, who'll spray balls much further, but in much more of a random direction. So he gets a 6 and I get an 8, despite being 125-150 yards further ahead after our tee shots.

When I was a teenager I thought it would be a genius idea to market instant coffee that already had dried cream crystals in it. I was mocked by my friend's dad. Later, this idea was explained to me as "General Foods International Coffees", which have other flavors built in with the coffee and (most likely) non-dairy creamer.

I hate that my phone has no caller ID, but that calls come directly to my desk. I have no idea who's calling, and so sometimes I'm reluctant to pick up out of fear of being "ambushed" by one of our clients' employees asking me stuff they should have posed directly to their HR people. And yet, sometimes I'll stare at the phone and eventually pick up on the 3rd or 4th ring...and I'm never lucky. If I pick up on the first ring, it'll be a legitimate client call. The longer I wait, the more likely I'm going to regret not letting it go directly to voice mail.

I'd like to see a league patent its sport. Imagine if I invented a sport and started a league. I could control labor costs, because it would be illegal for the disgruntled players to try to form their own league to play a game I invented!

I like to tell people I earn seven figures. Unfortunately, two of them are after the decimal point.

In college I was mocked for being a New Englander, where the states all use the same town names. Like Manchester, in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. I wonder how states as big as California can even FIND names for thousands of towns.

I took Spanish classes in high school and college, and I still read it pretty accurately. I enjoyed skimming Yahoo's TV listings for Spain, because I looked to find US programs being translated to Spanish, and sure enough, found "Me llamo Earl." The best part is the description of the episode, where everything is in Spanish except the character names, which remain English.

There's an open field outside my window. Last year they tried planting grass, without too much success -- just lots of weeds. This year, suddenly, the whole field last week was awash in bright yellow flowers. So it's lots of yellow spots amidst a green background. Kind of like a TV screen when you get "snow" for the reception. Except this would be.....yellow snow. (Which we're all taught to avoid)

I like the woman from the E-Surance auto insurance ads. The cartoon woman who's really athletic and seems pretty smart in escaping danger in the world. The pink hair's a bit odd. Usually women with bright pink hair are associated more with the performing arts, rather than athletic travails or the insurance industry, no?

I have no memorabilia

So the DanWagon is discussing sports memorabilia we've collected over the years. Being a rather prudent spender, I've got none. I did have some Marian Hossa bobbleheads I gave the girls after a trip to Ottawa back in 2001, but I'm sure my ex-wife has long since thrown them out. Heck, he plays for Atlanta now anyways.

The closest I ever got to something from a game was at a Pawtucket Red Sox game back when I was like 12. I was using the scorecard in the program to keep score, and asked my dad to fill in for me while I had to go to the bathroom. When I came back, he'd started doing the 3rd inning, but filled it in under the 2nd inning's column, right where the last batter had left off. So I was in the process of erasing and moving the scorekeeping into the right column, when a foul ball came back over our heads. It hit the old wooden overhang -- I know McCoy Stadium has been renovated, but this was back around '83 or '84 -- and dropped straight down onto the wooden seat next to me and bounced away. I only barely noticed it out of the corner of my eye as it flew away another 20 feet to be gobbled up by someone else. And that's as close as I've ever come. I will go to minor league games with no more than 1000 people in the stands, and I still can't get a ball. And now I'm getting to the age where if I do get one, I'll feel guilted into handing it over to a 5-year-old with a glove. I say, I gotta get myself one first, and then any subsequent ones can be turned over to snot-faced tykes!

A big heaping bowl of chemicals

I wish I could remember what that line is from. Like SNL, or WKRP....
Anyways, it's what our above-ground pool became this weekend. All sorts of stuff like shock, algaecide, and minerals to soften and alkalinize the pool. We were given clearance to swim in it Saturday, though, which was cool! Except for having to go buy a bathing suit for Lindsey. Sarah still has hers from her birthday last year. And it STILL doesn't fit her. We had to safety-pin the waist of the bottoms. She's pretty skinny, all right.

Went to City Steam brewery/restaurant for my friend Steve's 38th birthday Saturday night. They do a 90-minute comedy show after dinner. The guys were somewhat local, and none of them really were great, although certainly *some* good spots for a couple of them. Nothing memorable to share, though. The beer at City Steam is good. No, it's not as good as the Victory Brewing place in PA that I mentioned last week. But still a good place to try out new beers.

It's amazing how little network TV I watch any more. I think hockey's on tonight, though! That'll tide me over until Futurama at 10:30.

random variance

So, I follow up an 0-3 with a 3-3....each game featuring a sacrifice fly in the 1st inning. Yeah, that's a cheap way to not hurt your batting average and get an RBI. We won our men's game Wed. 11-5 and co-ed game last night 22-4. We also had 3 new women come to fill Erika's roster spot. There's nothing worse than not being in the field for a softball game, or having a 12-person batting lineup. At least I didn't have to sit -- maybe my inning off would have been one that was wiped out by our mercy rule win -- we didn't play the 6th and 7th innings. The random variance comes into play both with my batting lines, and the number of women apparently showing up for our game.

Men's league in Oxford: We're 2-1. I'm 7 for 12 with 5 runs scored and 1 RBI. (Yes, that's 7 hits out of the #3 spot in the lineup with no RBI other than the sac fly.)

Co-ed league in Trumbull: We're 3-0. I'm 7 for 10 with 7 runs scored and 5 RBI.

All singles so far, though. Eek, gotta cycle up for the summer! (That's steroid talk, so I hear.)


I've gotten smarter, and now I keep a list of good ideas at my desk here at work to save for my "what would happen if..." column on Wednesdays. I wonder if my cell phone has a voice recorder in it for notes-to-self. It should, it's got all sorts of stuff I haven't figured out yet.

Also, Erika and I have narrowed down our campsite destinations for 4 nights in Vermont in a couple of weeks. Cheap and easy, that's the way to take a vacation. Or, save money on lodging, only to spend it at small shops all over. We'll see.

What would happen if.... (5/30 edition)

...if someone were to try to market dairy products made from human milk? Forget goat cheese, Nichole! I think I'd be interested in at least seeing in a store, a line of blueberry yogurt or some sour cream.

When I was a kid, I used to eat American cheese with ketchup sandwiches. Really, it's not much different from a hamburger without the beef, is it? Anyways, that's a trip back to the 70's.....it's left my menu, the same way as the full combination of peanut butter / jelly / AND Fluff. At least with those, it was just too hard to apply the 3rd ingredient to either of the other 2.

If terrorists drove a small plane into the green monster at Fenway, would the Red Sox try to re-build it? Or would they petition the city to put a regular left field out there? And could they, with the space limitations?

What's a better episode of WKRP? The one with the turkeys being thrown from the plane at Thanksgiving? Or the one where Les reads the emergency procedures manual....replacing "communists" at every spot with "tornadoes"? The godless tornadoes!!!

If a town (like, say, Wilton, CT) doesn't want an interstate-esque highway to disrupt its rural character, can't the state legally close the state roads by erecting jersey barriers outside the city limits? You think Route 7 as a highway's bad? Try having NO route into town, ya upscale snots! Believe me, nobody's going to be getting off in Wilton, anyways....you ignore us, we'll ignore you on our way to Danbury or Norwalk, thank you very much.

I once found out the hard way that if you want to carve your daughter's name into a pumpkin at Halloween, names with full circles in them (like d) are a bit tough. An s is actually easier, despite all the twistiness.

What the heck are all the yellow flowers that took over the empty lot next door? It's freaky....you can't even see the green weeds anymore.

I wonder if amusement parks could install EZ-Pass type stuff onto their better rides....like you get what you pay for...6 trips on the roller coaster costs more than 2, and they give you a bill at the end of the day, based on a bracelet you wear all day with a sensor.

Is there anything better than a brewery tour that has a restaurant with it for when the tour's over? Like this place in Pennsylvania. Factor in that we had a cab ride all set up for heading back, and that's pretty darn good!

The good thing about the written section of the national spelling bee is that at least then, everyone's spelling the same words. I'm reminded of the old Far Side cartoon where someone gets "cat" and the next caveman's dreading getting stuck with "Australopithecus".

What would it take to start a new music television channel, to show videos and concerts 24 hours a day?

When I was like 10 or 11, ESPN came in over the air in my bedroom one afternoon. I had a small black and white TV, and there was the snowy feed of an auto race on channel 11. Now, 11 was the number on the cable for ESPN, but I definitely didn't have cable in my room. I grew up close enough to Bristol to pick it up over the air, but that doesn't make any sense, either.

Greg Oden, future #1 NBA pick, recently said he wanted to be a dentist when he was a kid. Combine that with his obvious misfittedness at being 7'1".....and I think we've found Hermey the Elf in his new life.

Being King for a Day should get you the best HMO in the kingdom

Now we're talking....

4 for 4, 3 runs scored....including sprinting home from 3rd on a sac fly to win, 8-7. All singles to right, except for the one in the ninth, which was an infield hit up the middle to beat the throw from second base. (A guy named Frank I know from pick-up hoops....I'd forgotten his name, called him Larry earlier in the game....realized it later, apologized and he said "I'm Italian, do I *look* like a Larry?" good-naturedly.)

So the slide into home, along with an earlier slide in the game, gave me 2 big strawberries on my shin and back upper thigh (okay, butt). Erika had bought for me for Christmas (stocking stuffer) some antiseptic wash and spray-on bandage. (Apparently it's aerosol krazy glue, practically.) Well, on my Thursday night game, she lent it to a guy on my co-ed team who scraped up his knee. That's all well and good, but she didn't put it back where she found it. She had dug through my sporting-goods store of a car trunk to find them, and decided to put them back in the car's first aid kit. A place I've never ventured. So it took until the next morning to really get them tended to, although I did fill the entire shower floor with dirt cleaning those wounds off later that night.

Saturday was my family's annual cookout/campout at my uncle's house. We were the only ones to camp out, most everyone else went home. We had hot dogs (with crunchy peanut butter on Erika's and mine -- her secret topping of choice) and we also went to a nearby petting zoo in the back forest of Chaplin, CT. There were 4 of us in a small tent, because I didn't realize the box with the other tent did not contain that other tent. Combine that with a slow leak in the air mattress....ahhhh. I did get to try my new phone in the morning to check on how the Red Sox did, though. That was cool. My uncle made us pancakes the next morning. Here's a link to my aunt's studio:

As for the rest of the weekend....lots of spring cleaning.

a game-losing homer....

This is a fun story. My co-ed league plays some of its games on the high school's fast-pitch softball field. With very short fences (225 feet maybe?)....so the rule is, each team is allowed 2 homers per gender per game. They went up 4-0 on two two-run shots. We clawed back, got it even, and then exploded for 5 in the 5th (including a 3-run shot) and 1 more in the 6th on a solo shot. (We of course lambasted the kid for "wasting" our last homer on a solo shot, but it was 10-4 so we weren't THAT mad.) I of course with the big lead, and getting tired of squinting into the setting sun, literally wasted my last time up trying to hit a low pitch as a flare to left, but instead got a pop-up to third. So I ended up 2 for 4 with a run scored.

So anyways, that wasted at bat. Sure enough, the other team put together a rally in the top of the 7th. Second baseman dropped a pop-up...lots of gap singles....next thing we know it's 10-9, two outs, 1st and 2nd. I'm kinda hoping for a single up the middle so I can throw out the tying run. But this was where it got funny. The last batter of the game hit a bomb out to right field. Over the fence by 50 feet. So instead of a game-winning homer....it's an out because it's the 3rd guy to hit a homer in the game for them.



Okay, next story. I apparently have been tagged by Chele76. This was at first amusing because I noticed that Dan Mega was tagged first, and he didn't try tagging me. I felt a little passed over, but that was explained when I noticed that Chele had tagged me and Dan at the same time, and I'd only read his first.

Here are the rules:
Each player starts with 7 random facts/habits about themselves.
People who are tagged need to write on their own blog about their seven things, as well as these rules. At the end of your blog, you need to choose 7 people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them that they have been tagged and to read your blog!

1. I'm left-handed but play the guitar righty.
2. I lost spelling bees in the 4th and 6th grades on "persuade" and "cypress", the latter of which I spelled like the island, rather than the tree as dictated in our spelling book. Even showing the teacher on a globe was to no avail.
3. I threw up lobster after finally agreeing to try it as a twelve-year-old, as my parents bribed me with three packs of baseball cards. It wouldn't go down, no matter how hard I tried to swallow (an allergy, maybe?) and they relented and rewarded my efforts with the cards.
4. I prefer Missile Command to Asteroids, any day of the week.
5. I have no trouble spending $80 on something at Christmas time for a relative that I wouldn't spend $60 on for myself if I liked the same thing.
6. I once tried to make homemade butter rum ice cream by adding real melted butter to the mix, which then froze into chunks of butter throughout the mixture.
7. I can still solve a Rubik's cube, 25 years since I last read the book with the sequences for the various stages.

Who to tag....let's go with some of the folks from my fantasy baseball league: Big D, Guy in the Corner, Fost, Andy, Dr. Doom, Jays64, and Rafael.

What would happen if...(5/23 edition)

...I yelled out to the trucks sweeping my street with "Someday...you'll dance with the reaper!!!"

Not much look worse than dead vines among live trees.

I like to read the label in supermarkets of Chicken Pot Pie, or Pot Stickers, and comment, "hmm...contains no actual pot." Made a hippie-looking guy laugh once.

Saw the 24 finale....I think they realize they need to scale back *just a bit* next year. The seasons are usually, what 18 months apart? So Chloe will have already had her kid....I found it amusing that Jack knew his way around CTU as though they'd never reconfigure areas, plus he knew the old abandoned motel was still there to meet Chang.

Jordin's 17...I wonder if she has her driver's license yet, and if not, what good is the assumed Ford sponsorship?

I was surprised that the recycling collection people took empty Corona bottles with the dead limes in them. I certainly wasn't taking them back for nickels. (Not mine!)

Does everyone play croquet with the "poison" concept? It seems like it's never mentioned in the rules that come with the game? It makes it way more fun, though, especially on uneven terrain.

Sprint converted my old T-Mobile number onto my wife's account, and when I called her, the caller ID had her name with my number. Apparently that takes 72 hours to fix? Huh?

On a lint roller, are the perforations lined up with the same spot on the roll? If the sheets you tear off were all the same size, they wouldn't work becaue the circumference around the roller shrinks as you use up sheets.

If a major league baseball team files for bankrupcy, where in the line of creditors do the players' salaries rank?

I've been "banned" from eating raisins by my wife and daughters. Perhaps you can guess why, if anyone has the same "affliction".

If Indianapolis had won Super Bowl 45, would we have gotten any corny scenes with a 75-year-old Schneider and Ms. Romano during the pregame?

Is there a list somewhere of every show/city combination? Heck, even Hartford got Judging Amy to compete with Providence! If Springfield, Mass. gets a show, look out!

Jimmy Page played guitar with a bow. I'm waiting to see someone try it on a banjo.

dutch apple cheesecake

Yes, my wife has invented the world's greatest dessert, it seems....and by breakfast, I mean "next-day breakfast" to finish off the masterpiece that we'd served the night before.

Played some Oh Hell, Hearts, Setback, and 9-5 Setback. I woulda won hearts except I got f-bombed....Ever play, know you can shoot the moon, if only a last early trick goes by so you can get rid of your crappy loser cards early? And then your wife decides on the 3rd time, as the last of your losers goes by, to give someone else the first heart of the hand? And then you've got a recipe for 25 big points left in your hand and no way out??!

We had to buy a replacement croquet set for my daughter's. Grownups tend to pound the mallets into woodchips. The new set has slightly larger balls, but monstrously solid mallets, so that the balls roll all over the lawn better.

Game 1

First at bat, bottom of the first....batting cleanup. They had a huge shift on me, so I decided to try to go to left. The problem with that is I don't hit liners to left, I hit slicing tailing flares. That's what I hit, and the woman in left field ran way over, stuck out her glove about mid-thigh high, and dropped it. So I ended up at 2nd base, where I was stranded.

Second at bat, 2nd inning....bases loaded. This time I pulled it, but got under it just a bit. The right fielder went way back, and sorta had trouble planting his feet. The ball popped out of his glove just over his head. He should have caught it....but I went all the way around the bases....so like a grand slam, but technically it's a sacrifice fly and E-9. I'm debating whether or not to call it a 2-RBI sacrifice fly....it was deep enough for the guy on 2nd to score. But definitely not 4 rbi.

Third at bat, 4th inning. two on. Swung at a slightly high pitch, and hit a little dribbler back to the pitcher's left. He had trouble picking it up, but I think an infield single would have happened anyway. Lord knows, I'm NOT going to say I got on 3 times in a row all on errors! I was then stranded.

Last at bat, leading off the 5th. The pitcher said the new right fielder was asking me to hit it to him. I did, but it was a sinking liner that short-hopped him. He then had it fly out of his glove in right, so I decided to try for 3rd, not just 2nd. The relay throw might have gotten me, but it hit me flush in the back as I was starting my slide. (So maybe I would have been safe...) The ball rolled away into the bench, so I was given home.

I'd have to say I went 2 for 3, with two singles and a sacrifice fly. One RBI, and 2 runs scored.

We won on the mercy rule, 19 or 20 to 7 after five innings.

No tests of my sore arm....you'd think a left-center fielder would be more busy other than picking up one rolling single.

What would happen if....

CBS decided to break out their 1976 prime time lineup for a week? Would the ratings be better or worse?

I can't even imagine that CBS used to show Scooby-Doo when it first came out. It always seems so ABC in my mind.

If the island on Lost has such great healing powers, does that mean Locke will be okay after getting shot?

Could ventriloquist dummies fight? Would the performers be able to keep up the voice work while engaged in hand-to-hand combat?

Does lawn fertilizer with anti-weed ingredients only work prophylactically? Will it kill existing weeds already sprouted?

How many people with pet woodchucks actually name them Chuck?

Did anyone wonder if my use of the term "prophylactically" had anything to do with birth control?

Why isn't birch beer more popular?

Isn't it amusing when there's a welcome sign for someone in your office with the same name as a guy you knew in college? I secretly wonder if it's the guy who joined the gay/lesbian student association....just to see how he's turned out as an adult.

I throw about as deadly a wiffle ball pitch as there is. Unfortunately, because I'm lefty, it only really works half as well against righties. Combo left-to-right break with off-the-table drop.

Can regular people hit knuckleballs better than trained baseball players?

I hate it when I punch a spindle-hole through the numbers on a page.

Can alcohol actually be administered intravenously, if diluted enough? Have medical residents tried this?

Ever hate it when one band you like covers a song by another band you like? Aerosmith's "I'm Down" is way better than their version of "Come Together".

Does cooking bacon in the oven really make it catch on fire?

What's the minimum height for a highway overpass, so that it does NOT need one of those warning signs indicating its height? 13 feet 8 inches? 14-9?

Can they invent a piano with strings as easy to tune as a guitar's? I could save a hundred bucks a year.

What else, besides excess consumption, may cause a laxative effect?

I used to always call the tan M&M's "brown" and the ones more commonly known as brown as the black ones.

Macaroni and cheese with pepperoni is an awesome use for post-party platter leftovers.

Riemann sums....anyone?

Pitching in shirt sleeves

This is a phrase that Joe Castiglione uses on Red Sox radio when the weather starts getting warmer. It drives me crazy. He means to say the guy's pitching in short sleeves. The only shirts that don't have sleeves are tank tops, and long sleeves count as shirt sleeves, too!

My arm is killing me! It was healing nice, until I got my arm stuck in a rebound battle last night.

Got some Bang Tango playing on iTunes here at work. Anyone remember them?

sweet bridge

So yesterday was Mothers' Day. We made two meals. First, eggs benedict over homemade toast for my mom (and dad). I skipped the hollandaise sauce and just had fried eggs. The kids didn't even have eggs, just toast with bacon. They love Erika's new favorite food....which is peanut butter with white chocolate in it made by the Peanut Butter Company.

For Erika's mom, we went to her house in Montebello NY. Usually we've gone over the Tappan Zee Bridge because she's in western Rockland County. But yesterday we tried something different, going over the Bear Mountain Bridge in Peekskill. First of all, the toll is only one dollar, coming west to east on the way home. That beats anything on the interstates. The bridge is beautiful, too....nestled among hills and stuff. You can tell they had to blast out the side of the mountain to get a road through there. The nycroads.com website probably has more on the history. I may check it out later today.

Anyways, it was like Iron Chef, with almonds as the secret ingredient. Erika made a salad with broccoli slaw, ramen noodles, and almonds. I passed, but did have 2 helpings of green bean amandine with slivered almonds. My contribution to the meal was chicken breasts baked with a coating of paprika and chopped almonds (instead of bread crumbs). That always turns out great!

And then of course we got home and I found out the Red Sox scored 6 in the ninth to win. sweet!

timber!

So my big task of the day was to chop down a dead tree between our front yard and the road. It took a couple of hours to disconnect the tree from the oriental bittersweet (which killed it) and the poison ivy (which has climbed up the trees where Erika killed the bittersweet!).

I'll know in a few days how much poison ivy I got. Dad doesn't get it, but Mom sure does. Guess which gene I got. Actually, mine's never as bad as Erika's. She takes prednisone for a couple of weeks when she gets it. A few years ago my tattooed ankle got it. The blue and green turned orange with poison ivy goo....but eventually healed itself just fine.

Red Sox won today! Schilling couldn't handle the long breaks between Steve "human rain delay 2?" Trachsel's laboring on the mound....kept giving back the leads the offense worked for. Finally the bullpen shut down the O's, and the Sox got lots of runs late.

The coolest part of chopping down the tree HAD to be swinging an ax. One day I'll venture to try Erika's mom's chainsaw in our garage.

I had a really cool idea to mention in my blog today, but I forgot what it is. Crap!

oh, the pain....

So, the ex-Scrubs (still without a name) had our first scrimmage last night. Not everyone could make it, but it was good to start running around out on a field again.

a. My arm feels like it's detaching at the shoulder. That's not cool, especially for an outfielder. It doesn't hurt to throw. But it hurts to simulate a throwing motion. Weird. I've already mentioned to my other coach that perhaps I should play second base and throw right-handed. (If I throw like a girl, would that fill a roster spot as such?)

b. I was backpedaling back out to left-center after backing up second base, and fell over on my butt. People look at me, what happened, am I ok, etc. Turns out there was a hole in the outfield that I'd stepped in. About eight inches round, and 6 inches deep. Someone from the other team came out the next inning and filled it with a spare shoe so that we'd be aware of it.

c. Scored 2 runs after 2 infield hits. But infield hits suck....all it proves is that an all-grass infield is slow. Data-Ease tonight should be doing batting practice, so I can get some more lift on the ball. Still haven't heard which field, though, that we're supposed to be on at 6 tonight.

On another topic, Rival, the Crock-Pot company, makes an indoor BBQ pit, and the ribs I had going all day yesterday came out awesome! I made a quick sauce with ketchup, honey, and lime-pepper spice mixture from the cabinet. They went for about 11 hours, and I couldn't even pull the 4 half-racks out of the thing, because the meat was falling off and sticking to the racks. I had to invert the thing over a plate!

But ugh, I fear tonight I must clean the thing now.

Are we Scrubs?

We'll find out soon enough. A scrimmage at 6 pm. Last year, as the non-aligned people who needed a team to be on, we were called Scrubs. I got #14, a nice testament to Jim Rice. Still, we should have been given character names on our shirts, I feel. Of course, I'd have wanted Turk, although Dr. Cox is probably a good athlete too (or was, back in the day).

Now the team seems dominated by co-workers of one guy who's taken over the organizing -- contact with the league president, sending out the emails, etc. I can't remember which guy it was from last year, though! Since last year's team was an embarrassment, I can only hope it was someone who was equally shamed and didn't come to many games as a form of protest. Or, I just didn't put the face to the name.

Softball's so easy. The ball is ridiculously slow. Most of the players are, too. Our team last year lacked "baseball instincts". That drives me more crazy than anything -- even pitchers who can't throw strikes (check), batters who miss (check), or showing up with only 8 or 9 guys for a game (check and double-check!). I played shortstop one game, and got a grounder, went to toss it to second to get the force, and the second baseman's nowhere to be found. Yeah, I got the error because I threw the ball over his head by the time he realized he was supposed to cover. My arm had already completed the swinging motion for the flip, and I still had to try to hold on to the ball and wait. Not exactly Alex Gonzalez or Alex Cora.

Well, we'll see how it goes.

p.s. the homemade beer is quite good! and no more foam incidents, although one bottle over the weekend was a "dud" with no carbonation. Not sure how that happens.

Clemens got a no-decision

Okay, that title comes from one of the songs I used to bang out on my old four-track tape recorder in the early 90's. I was watching the Red Sox against Detroit back in the early 90's, and they took him out of a game while losing, but the Red Sox tied it up against the bullpen or something, I think. I always hated either singing or writing lyrics, so I'd come up with crap like "Clemens got a no-decision, you shouldn't..." as though to encourage the listener to not sit around, and make a choice when given the opportunity.

The Christmas after Clemens signed with Toronto, my ex-mother-in-law got me a JC Penney closeout special of a Red Sox Clemens shirt. Like I'd ever wear that again. I always would take it out of the attic for the next three years, but never put it on, and then would put it back in the crate every fall. Finally I donated it to charity.....thought about it a year or so ago as possibly being worth having, but obviously not after this latest job choice.

I went to Fenway maybe 8-10 times in the Clemens era, never saw him pitch....including when my friend had 4 games' worth against his White Sox, and they were the four games in-between his starts, I think. (I only saw Pedro once at Fenway, and he was pulled with an injury after 4 innings. Great luck, huh? And of course, I missed Dice-K because of the rainout last month.)

The only ex-teammate of Clemens still in Boston is Wakefield, who of course IMMEDIATELY became staff ace upon his arrival back in '95, while Clemens labored behind Erik Hansen in the rotation!

Who's a dumbbell?

Maybe me. The shoulder pain is from trying to invent exercises in the fitness room at the Marriott Saturday morning. All they had were dumbbells and one machine with pulleys, like for doing lat pulldowns. Funny how I couldn't remember that for a while, but I clearly did something not normal with the dumbells. I guess it's healing. Possible 2 practices this week for my co-ed team and my men's team. Hopefully the new composition of the men's team will not be the "Scrubs" we were named for last year. Unbearably bad. Although I do hope not to have to pay extra for a different team shirt. In that case, Scrubs is okay with me.

I wonder if scientists can do brain-wave analysis when Red Sox fans see that interlocking NY for the Yankees. I just saw one on TV at a Dodgers game, and I got a frown on my face, for NO FREAKIN' REASON! :)

It's my cousin's birthday. Happy Birthday Kate

The buffalo wing pretzel bits from Snyder's of Hanover are fantastically addicting.

ho hum....

So, I haven't watched 24 yet this week. I'll watch it just before the new Lost tomorrow night. I'm not too thrilled with this "epilogue" involving the otherwise cute Audrey Raines. We figured they shoulda stopped the season after Fayed was killed and the nukes found. They could have called it 17 this year, nobody would have minded. Especially if they're planning to play up this romance with VP Daniels and his little chickie friend.

My left arm is killing me suddenly when I try to make a throwing motion. NOT a good sign with softball season pending. Maybe I slept on it funny or something? Maybe I tore my rotator cuff, though, huh? I was trying to loosen it last night, not paying attention as I was walking down the hall, and I knocked off one of the glass sections of the hall light, shattering it on the floor. Ooops!

Tonight is haircut night. Even though the fine folks at Camden Yards were nice enough to card me, cutting my hair short keeps me looking like a kid! (okay, it hides the 7-10 gray hairs that are apparent more when the hair is longer on the sides) I have been going with a #7 top, #2 sides/back the last few times. I will go at least 2 months between haircuts that way, too. Erika says she likes it fluffy, but I've liked short hair since my first buzz cut in college. Of course, Nabeel from Pakistan across the hall mocked it by claiming I was neo-Nazi. Luckily short hair became popular back in 1989 so I didn't stick out.

Back from Crabtown....

So how about Wily Mo Peña? I haven't finished catching up on stuff, so I wonder what Dawn had to say about WMP....or Lugo against the Yanks, for that matter!

My fantasy team won without my help...although I could have pulled Harang off the bench for Sunday's start. oops.

My wife didn't mention to me that she paid $10 for internet access in the room Saturday before she headed off to her conference. So I was stuck watching the endless NFL draft instead of surfing the Web. At least later in the afternoon I hit the sports museum they have right next to OPCY. Ten bucks for a couple of floors' worth of exhibits. Mostly Babe Ruth...the Orioles...the Colts. Ravens stuff seems too recent to be museum-ified.

Went to Virginia Friday to see Erika's grandmother, who's got some Alzheimer's. Although, the multiple-tellings of the stories make it easier to remember the details. Our biggest fear was that she might not recognize me after I emerged from the use of her bathroom. That was allayed, though. But since I'd forgotten contact lens solution, I was attending to my lenses at her sink for a couple of extra minutes. She was pretty nice, and really appreciated the visit, and that we re-arranged her furniture for her.

Virginia has an exit for something that I think was called Backlick Road off I-95. Ewwww... Of course, there's also Pohick and Powhite (as in Trash?)....so let the Confederacy-bashing begin! (Cue "dueling banjos") At least they have leaves on their trees. That was mildly saddening, driving back up and having the leaves get smaller and smaller until they were blank in NY and CT.

Baltimore

Hey, tomorrow's our trip to Baltimore for Erika's veterinary conference. She's looking for vendors to give her sweet deals on equipment for her practice opening in September(-ish). I insisted we go to an Orioles game, and since they're in Cleveland this weekend, that meant going a day early to see a Thursday night game. Well lo and behold, they're playing the Red Sox! Yee-hah!

This reminds me of when I visited my brother in Tampa back in '04. Let's see who the Rays are playing...Red Sox. Our whole section behind the dugout was Red Sox fans. Probably will be something similar in Baltimore. If only Dice-K were pitching, too. Should keep the place only half-empty.

A Guy in the Corner from my fantasy baseball league has plans to attend the game. That'd be interesting to meet someone from the league. I did actually attend a book reading with Big D, but we didn't know of each other at the time last October. We're sort of trying to arrange a league outing to see a game, maybe in Philly to appease New Englanders and Mid-Atlantickers in the league. Doesn't help the Midwesterners, obviously, but they're outnumbered, so we'd get who we could.

My friend Johnny is available for fun and games in Silver Spring Saturday. I haven't seen him since 2003, when my older daughter and I went to see DC with him. (She was 4...potty trained enough for the long car ride, so unfortunately the 2-year old missed out.) I've got a great picture somewhere of Lindsey sweating profusely, hugged by the Orioles mascot at OPCY.

Sox-Yanks among other stuff

So here's what I think. The Yankees' bats are as hot as they may bet all season? Yes? No? Maybe? And they got more than enough runs against the Red Sox. But the reason the Red Sox won was simply because their pitchers went deep into games. 5 runs in 7 innings isn't bad against NY. The 7 innings was more important. The question is, later in the year, will the Yanks still be getting 5-6 runs a game, EVERY game? Remember, this is off their sweep of the Indians scoring 8-9-10 runs a game.

Seussical wasn't as good at UConn as it had been when I saw it at the Oakdale with Sandy Duncan. I should do a Google to see if anyone else notices the pretty strong pro-life message. I mean the obvious "a person's a person, no matter how small" also piggybacks the fact that Horton and Gertrude are adopting an abandoned baby by that tramp bird Macy.

While extending our new front walkway, I found the pipe from the house to the septic tank in the front yard. So now I've got to lift and raise the stones higher to provide clearance, because it just wasn't worth trying to rout out the stones to have it fit snugly over the pipe.

Still can't see the Futurama with Fry's dog looking for him at the pizzeria. My wife starts crying thinking about it, so I have to switch it off. At least it gave me an excuse to watch more baseball during the 8-hour Cartoon Network marathon.

foam alert

Okay, I cracked open a homemade beer, and the foam wasted half of it and made a big mess. I do believe the foaming calms down after a few weeks, so I shouldn't be tempted to jump the gun like that.

Yesterday was the first day of spring, as far as I'm concerned. Now it's warm (65-70?) today and sunny, too. wow.

I found a dead mouse in my hockey bag. I think it came from Erika's old garage before we moved. Oh my did my gear smell. It was too wet from the melting snow on the garage floor from a few weeks ago to wear, so some of it is being laundered, while the bigger stuff (pants, shin guards) will be hosed down and pumped full of febreze this weekend. This explains the chewed skate laces.

The wife likes her burgers well done, and it's cost me the timing on my own medium burgers when she doesn't eat with me. I've overcooked 2 in a row, although last night's only by a couple of minutes.

Some day I may play with the template on this blog. The white background and crappy font suck. I like Arial, among the major fonts. My old Mac Plus in college had lots of great fonts, including one that looked like overplayed stereotypical lefty printing (reverse slant to the letters). I had a left-handed professor, so I handed in a paper with that font to her once. Slight amusement, I believe.

Seussical the Musical

Apparently this is playing at the theater at UConn this weekend. My parents have gotten tickets for all of us...I've seen it but Erika and the kids haven't, so it should be good. I saw it at the former Oakdale (which car theater is that now? Oh yeah, the Chevy Theatre) a few years ago with tickets I snagged from a woman in my old hockey clinic. That production starred Sandy Duncan, so I'm sure I went out and bought some Wheat Thins afterwards.

That reminds me, I should get back to playing hockey on Thursday nights. 15 bucks for like 90 minutes of ice time, I think. It's so darn expensive compared to basketball (free), and I'm definitely not as good, although good enough to at least take my shifts regularly. It was weird finding a place to wedge my insulin pump in my gear, I had it pinned by the elastic waistband of my hockey undershorts (which have velcro to hold up the big hockey socks) without a clip, and as long as I didn't get hit or fall on it, there wasn't anything to worry about. My only time on skates this past winter (which I think ends this weekend, weather-wise!) was at Rockefeller Center in December.

And I'm stunned that Nabisco has discontinued Twigs, the sesame-cheese snack sticks. I checked with their customer service center online. The worst part is that they'd still show a box in the picture of all the flavor varieties on the back of kinds they still DO make -- chicken in a biskit, vegetable thins, sociables, better cheddars....I think they stopped making the Bacon crackers, too. But Twigs were freakin' awesome!

46 bottles of beer on the floor...46 bottles of beer

So I bottled the beer yesterday while watching playoff hockey. I only broke 1 bottle while operating my dad's old bottle-capper. I wonder how capping technology has advanced in the last 30 years. Anyways, when you break the bottle while capping, you pretty much crush the first inch or so of glass....so you can actually pour the beer into another empty bottle and try again. The beer probably won't be ready for another month or so, but I'm sure every week or so I'll check in with a bottle :)

Red Sox look good this afternoon (instead of morning, with the rain delay). I hate warnings to pitchers....I actually bet Ervin Santana left fastballs out over the plate partially out of fear of coming in too far on Sox batters. Anyways, the Vlad thing seemed to be an obvious accident, so what's the deal? Maybe the ump figured it was getaway day for the Angels after losing a couple...they might be short-tempered?

So after the monsoon on our wedding day at the house, we had Home Depot put a new roof on in January. Well they goofed. During yesterday's several inches, water was running down the wall in a couple of spots, plus a couple of drips. We're using it to water our herb garden before taking that outside for the spring (whenever THAT comes). It's all insured, so one guy came out yesterday...thought he fixed it (didn't), and now the project manager is coming tomorrow morning.

And now that I've bottled the beer, I was able to return my empties since I wouldn't need them....I had no idea that I had 102 bottles to return. That paid for half of a new beer for me to try tonight. Brooklyn Brewery's Pennant '55 Ale or something like that. Seems like a good way to honor Jackie Robinson? ha!

Lastly, sadness at Virginia Tech today. Kinda freaking me out if we're going to Erika's vet school reunion there in the fall!

The perfect complement?

So, remember that David Lee Roth video where the really fat guy offers advice to the up-and-coming singers? "Try the Quad Burger at Irv's...."

I thought of this as I mixed two beers together last night. Sam Adams Double Bock, which is strong and very "brown". And Smithtown Brewing's Double White Ale, which is extra-spicy and pale. Neither beer was terrific on its own, but mixed together, a worthy experiment. In any event, that would be a double-double, or a quad, of some sorts.

I drank it while watching American Idol with Erika. Egads, I sorta like that show now, and I *never* used to watch it. Also fun to try to play piano along with the band. Our piano needs tuning pretty soon. It was last done last summer, and although it's not as bad as it was then, it still could use the proverbial (and literal) tune-up.

Post-Easter ramblings

So....

My first chance to see NESN right now. What's the decorum for hanging the USA flag over the green monster? There were obvious flaps perforated throughout it, but that's gotta be necessary to keep the thing from getting caught in the wind, a flag of that size. Red Sox games never stream as clearly as other teams...must be the demand!

I don't blast the volume too loudly....and yet I still hear people's speakerphones over the broadcast. People are just f-bombing rude around here. Either pay for an office, or realize you're not the only one here. Some day (like when I'm in my 2-week notice period) I'm going to swear audibly into their speakerphones as a hint to pick up the damned handset.

My uncle's got a 50-inch HD set.....very nice for the end of the Masters Sunday.

Easter Sunday dinner was lamb. well done, it's not the worst meat in the world, but eesh. Mom wouldn't tell me, but there's always plenty of good stuff for options when my Aunt Beth cooks. I provided the dinner wine, a cabernet-shiraz combo that was good (maybe not $25.99 good, but whatever).

We're starting a stone walkway to our front door. 32 inches (4 16x16 squares) done, 32 feet to go. Hopefully Home Depot won't discontinue the stones before we finish, right?

Dice-K's okay

But did you notice the Red Sox get the leadoff guy on between innings 2 through 7? (Was it 8, too? I switched to the radio feed when MLB.tv took forever to stream...)

I don't like the idea of him not getting his run support! Greinke's good, but not that good....

On the bright side, no work today! Thanks, Jesus! (I will suck it up for the Saturday night vigil Mass in Oxford....oh please don't read all the Old Testament passages....some churches kinda pick and choose 'em. Although with this church, they sing everything, so I will block off a couple of hours of my schedule from 8 to at least 10 tomorrow night.)

The Dice-Man Cometh....

Check out this ad from Japan

This should be interesting....I wonder how much Wally got paid for his brief appearance. And what the Japanese people must think of the guy!

Anyways, I sent an email to Comcast last night....since they've just bought our cable company, I gave them the old "Hey, the Red Sox are the most popular sports team in New England, so when are you adding NESN?" line. Double that with the fact that MLB.TV blacks out the internet stream since most of Connecticut is in the Red Sox home territory, leaves me NO way to watch the game....unless I use one of those fancy IP re-router thingies to make MLB.com think I'm somewhere else besides home.

Anyway, the game will be on here at work at 2. So I'm eager enough!

Bosley's Law update!

So last night, having just finished providing my own yellow to an otherwise-clear toilet, I proceeded to spit out my Crest Pro Health rinse, a very pretty shade of blue, before flushing.

Anyways....planted some MORE grass seed last night. Good to see the robins this morning nibbling on a free meal, I suppose, huh? Sheesh. They can't eat ALL the seed, they'd grow grass out of their stomach or something.

House is always a good show that I never watch. Caught it last night. Everyone's got shows like that, right? They like them, but they're not addicted to them, so it's cool to catch an episode now and then without having to make the "investment" to watch them all. (For me, it's 24 and Lost....I watch all the Family Guys, but sometimes not until they pop up on adult swim.) Another good show like that for me is The Office. I've been watching that more on Thursdays, but it's not like an addiction, maaan!

Fantasy baseball team has the early lead this week over Mega. Looks like the Sunday night Mets-Cards stats DO count this week after all. That's a relief, since I have LoDuca and Eckstein. I had to swap Aaron Hill for Nick Punto, so that I could have a second 3rd baseman on nights when Chipper Jones isn't playing. Of course, the roster change is effective today, after the off-night for the Braves.

An announcing idea....2 main talkers, and then one guy whose job is to interject with all the factoids and stuff he can find online during the game. Like, if the announcers go off on a tangent discussing Chinese food, this 3rd guy can spot-check for highly reviewed restaurants in the city they're playing in.

Digging up dead grass

There's a fine spring tradition.....taking a metal garden rake, trying to rip up all of last year's dead crabgrass, and then grading the lawn and adding new grass seed. Apparently 12,000 sq. ft. of seed wasn't enough. Of course, I overseed like crazy, but we had to buy 2 more bags yesterday, and it started raining before I could finish prepping the area for it. Part of the time was lost when my 8-year-old thought she could help. But she doesn't have the strength to really chew up the stuff I'm trying to take up. Sure, she got some dead grass on the rake, but left plenty behind. Anyways, our whole back area needs to be re-seeded, and then the crabgrass-preventing fertilizer applied.

Meanwhile, the best sports day of the year, when you combine opening day baseball with the NCAA championship. I will have the mlb.tv package going strong!

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.

Small point to make here....

So, Madison Square Garden in NYC actually calls itself the World's Most Famous Arena.

Blah blah blah....I bet more people actually know where Wimbledon is, or Wembley, but whatever.

My actual point of contention with MSG is this. If you're such a great and wonderful arena, then WHY does the basketball floor for college games have the NBA 3-point line painted on it? Would it be that hard to have a separate floor for college games? It's freakin' New York, where tickets are all a hundred bucks each, anyway.

The Big East tourney is coming next week, and I'm sure, there'll be white and blue lines separately painted. IT LOOKS STUPID, and makes the college game look secondary and unimportant.

The Futurama reference in the future to "Madison Cube Garden" is very inspired!

The madness is coming....

Some rambling here about how NCAA tourney pools are scored.

Does anyone understand why scores go 10-20-40-80-160-320 for the final?
Why isn't this just 1-2-4-8-16-32?
Why artificially inflate scores by a factor of 10?

Once at my old job, the owner wanted to run a tourney for the women's pool. She decided to make every game worth 2 points. TWO....not one. WHY?!

Anyways, I usually run a men's pool. And I've got an awesome scoring idea to reward those who pick upsets. (Based on this being me, years ago.....knowing the good teams to pick early, and then getting screwed later.)

I started it as 5-10-15-25-40-65....Not quite the Fibonacci sequence at work, but each round is worth the sum of the previous two. It definitely rewards early rounds versus later rounds.

Then the bonus points for upsets is done as

difference in seeds X round number.

This works well....and you can even get lucky. Like, if you've got a 3 beating a 7 in the sweet sixteen, but they actually beat the 2....then you get extra points for the 3 being there, even though you had them winning an easier game. (Of course, you didn't get the 7 over the 2 in the second round.)

What can suck is if you had a 14 over a 6 in round 2.....that could be 16 bonus points! But if the 11 beat the 6 in round one....then the 14 beating the 11 is only 6 bonus points.

Anyways, there's usually an extra 50 points or so if you're good at calling upsets.

So a few years ago, I scaled back the regular points by 20%.
4-8-12-20-32-52 for the championship.
And sure enough, the first year I did that, I squeaked by with the title.

I've won twice in 11 years of running it. Last year, despite 0 final four teams. Of course, nobody had final four teams last year, so it was actually over before the final weekend. George Mason, though...the bonus points....
11 over a 6 in round 1 = 5
11 over a 3 in round 2 = 16
11 over a 7 in round 3 = 12
11 over a 1 in round 4 = 40

Anyone got any good scoring systems?

Memories of DJ

Okay, time to reminisce on the late Dennis Johnson...

1. The DJ poke....that move where he's squared up against someone, pokes their dribble behind them, and runs around the guy and makes the steal. This STILL works against the average clown in a pick-up game.

2. Game 4, 1985 finals....Celtics too injured to really compete with the Lakers, but DJ nails a 20 footer to win it at the buzzer in LA and tie the series. One of my high school friends lost power with a minute left in the game, he had to scurry to a car radio in his driveway to hear it.

3. 1986 finals, the post game show on the radio....he did a pretty funny Johnny Most impression while being interviewed. Not as good as Gerald Henderson's 1984 "Henderson stole the ball!" but still very funny.

4. Those passes to Bird just underneath the hoop, where even on TV you can't believe it goes by the heads of two defenders turned the wrong way, and Bird gets a lay-up.

Too bad his Hall of Fame vote next year will have to be a sympathy vote.

In the altered words of John Cougar Mellencamp

Puking, "to me, don't sound like all that much fun."

So it's not dying, but it wasn't much better. Somehow I was infiltrated with the same 24-hour bug that got my daughter and wife. Only instead of just stomach issues, I decided that I needed to remove previously-eaten food voluntarily....

ya know the 5-finger comb? this was the 2-finger ipecac....

Hopefully it doesn't make me a bulimic. I think the bug led to gastroparesis. Wednesday noon, I was puking Tuesday's dinner. hamburger. The worst was earlier in the morning, bringing back the flavor of rumple minze that flavored my hot cocoa from the night before. Chocolate is naturally bitter, so it's not a good complement for bile.

Anyways, my first taste of Pepto ever, although it was store-brand, and some Motillium, and today I'm as good as new, sorta. Still not hungry....

Fantasy baseball

I don't mind letting anyone from my fantasy baseball league (Dan Shan Fan) on yahoo know that I'm a fantasy virgin. Talk about feelin' the peer pressure! Well, we'll see how I do. If nothing else, I'll pay even more attention to the articles on ESPN. The best blog is Buster Olney, but I like reading Jayson Stark's stuff most of all, since he goes for the Useless Info.

I have no overwhelming interest in fantasy football. Fantasy baseball at least seems like it can auto-pilot itself, except for keeping an eye on starting pitchers, if we're doing a head-to-head where we want 2 starts out of a guy in a certain week.

And besides, there's no cash riding. Of course, that would increase my devotion to knowledge. Like when I win March Madness and Football spread pools.

One game that always seemed cool was MLB.com's "beat the streak", where you have to pick a guy every day, and string together a hitting streak that way, with different players. I'd like to see something similar involving an ERRORLESS streak. Pick a guy NOT to make an error that day. Imagine getting screwed over in a game like that!

Goin' to PA

This should be a fun weekend. My niece Madeline is getting baptized, at my sister-in-law's hometown church. So they fly from Tampa, my family has to drive 6 hours, and her family gets to roll out of bed 10 minutes before Mass! Nice....

The most fun, of course, is being on highways I've not driven on before. I was on I-80 years ago when we went to State College in high school. Too bad I have to drive, the girls get to watch Electric Company videos in the back seats.

This winter sucks!

So great, it's cold finally after being 60 degrees for most of December and January. No real snow, though. We were supposed to get 7-12 inches, but no, we got 2 inches with another inch of crust on top of it. Snow pot pie, in my front yard. (Contains no actual pot)

On the bright side, I got a day off with impassable roads yesterday. I actually got to iron my shirts for the first time in a while. Of course, since I wear sweaters all winter long, it's no big deal, since I can wear t-shirts under a nice sweater. But the shirts were wasting away in my laundry basket. Pants don't need ironing if you grab them right from the hot dryer. Well, except for the Gap khakis....those things look like they're made out of crumpled wax paper. Nothing gets them wrinkle-free.

Alas, back to the world of annual 401(k) testing....

Cherry Coke Zero is out!

Oh this is just about the best news of the day!

Yes, I do like regular coke flavor over cherry, but cherry is the only fruit flavor to coke that has ever really worked. Lemon sucks, lime is just freakin' weird. But cherry coke is awesome.

And now they've got it tasting like coke zero, instead of diet coke.

How much happier could I be? I snagged a 20-oz. bottle this afternoon to go with some spicy thai potato chips (another awesome product, by the way, by Kettle brand chips)....

It's now officially "highly recommended".

Cold days

So, I was thinking of having some friends over for croquet in the snow. That's gotta be a reason to drink hot cocoa spiked with Rumple Minze, because nobody else has the stupid gene to try it. I was thinking getting balls buried in snowbanks, or whizzing them along the icy crust, could add a fun intrigue to an otherwise warm-weather game. Plus, the poison ivy in the woods isn't an issue. My guess is something shatters in the cold. Like a tibia.

The other thought would be to freeze the front yard into a rink, but I think you're supposed to buy a liner for that to do it right. I suppose I could drive over to Buccigross's house from ESPN, that's pretty close, and he showed pictures of his home rink in his latest column. I wonder if he gets sports fans stalking him like that....ya gotta figure more regular guys would wanna hang out with him, compared to Berman's villa (wherever that is).

groundhog day

I don't think I grew up learning the exact specifics of this day.

I was told, if Phil sees his shadow, there's 6 more weeks of winter, otherwise winter ends at its regularly scheduled time. But that's 6 and a HALF weeks, so I didn't see what we were saving there.

Anyways, my all time best name for a band has to be

The Philutawney Punks.

I'll play bass if anyone wants to start it up! Well, as soon as my hyperextended pinky finger heals. Unbelievable how important it is...This wouldn't have been a problem if I'd restrung my first guitar to play it lefty, like I should have. So I play righty, and my shooting hand with the dislocated knuckle ends up being my fret hand.