Sunday, July 24, 2005

Warning! Written while not wearing pants!

Disclaimer: I just finished two hours on the exercise bike, so I am currently high as a kite on endorphines and my ass hasn't been this sore since I went camping with Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds.

1) So that was short lived. After having internet for nearly 10 hours, it shit the bed. Throw in a technician who forgot to splice the cable line (so we could only use internet or cable, but not both at the same time) and a ridiculously rude guy on the phone, and all I can say is fuck Comcast. Fuck Comcast right in the ear. The bastards. And you all should join me in my condemnation, as I have since lost two (that's right, two!) posts that I wrote which both disappeared into the electronic ether.

2) I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Jared from Subway is getting fat again. And speaking of self-righteous pricks, I get the pleasure of, for the second time this weekend, listening to the White Sox local WGN Sports broadcasters. First, just a side note, it is guaranteed whenever you hear another crew do a game with Wakefield pitching, all they will talk about in his half of the innings is a) how hard it is to hit/catch/umpire a knuckleball, b) how few knuckleballers there are and why not many people teach it anymore, or c) have them make fun of how slow Wakefield's fastball is. Guaranteed.

However, as I suffer through the White Sox assholes bantering back and forth on the broadcast, I've got to say I am pleased this is the last game in the series. If you gave me the choice between sliding icepicks under my fingernails for three hours or listening to these pompous fuckheads call another game, at this point I'm not sure which I would take. I mean, say what you want to about Don Orsillo and the fact that NESN has become a 24-hour infomercial hawking Jerry Remy merchandise, but at least those guys pretend to be impartial. Seriously, this crew's insistence on referring to the White Sox as "we" is bad enough, but ejaculating "yes!" or "get foul!", "get out", or "stay fair!" while calling the game, and rooting for their guys while calling the game is at best unprofessional and at worst homo-erotic. Seriously, saying things like "good guys coming to bat" is just a little too homeboyish for me, and reffering to the players by their nicknames is infuriating (if I never hear about "Pauly" and "Scotty" again, it will be too freaking soon). Saying "Thank you" on Svuem not sending a runner home. Seriously, these guys must be shaved, sterilized, and destroyed, and I mean soon. Throw in that the play-by-play man's catchphrases, "he gone" for a strikeout and "put it on the board" for a homerun sound like something Joe Buck would say in a Budweiser commercial, and is there any doubt that these two should be chained to a cement mixer and pushed off a bridge? These two sperm-swilling donkey-rammers should form a bowling team with Tim McCarver and Joe Morgan as the worst broadcasters in baseball. Just absolutely brutal. I mean, on Friday night, one of them actually said, "you know, if you throw out statistics and all that stuff and just go spot by spot through the order, I don't think you could even argue this is the best lineup out there this year." I wish I could have written down the actual quotation when he said it, but unfortunately when he did say it, it caused blood to start shooting out of my nose uncontrollably, and I had to deal with that before I started seizing. Okay, so let's throw out the presumption in that comment, suggesting that nobody could argue, but essentially what the guys said was, "If you throw out statistics and every other form of objective analysis, and just go with my completely biased opinion, then these guys are the cat's whiskers." Now, granted, that is a true statement, but why the hell would you say it?

Although I will say one thing impressed me about the announcing crew, and that was their ability to annunciate with all of the starting nine's penises securely lodged on their tonsils. Of course, the irony is that the bigger jackass of the two played for the Red Sox in '67. Go figure.

3) I'm sick of "creepy kid" movies. At the Resident Female's insistence, I saw Dark Water on Friday night. I've come to the point with these movies that I am bored about 10 minutes in, thinking "here we go again. Another freaking scene that is just creepy for the sake of being creepy and has no bearing on the movie. Just get to the reason they freaking killed whoever it was and let me go home." I guess I'm bitter just because I liked Dark Water a lot more the first time I saw it, when it was called The Ring. Although, I am once again shocked at Hollywood's inability to be unoriginal (which is really my problem, as you can never lose money underestimating Hollywood's creativity). But here is the plot of every movie that seems to come these days:

A. Single parent struggling with the responsibility that comes with being an adult is thrust into a new and unsettling situation where we are supposed to feel sorry for them not being able to be selfish and only think of themselves.

B. Weird and creepy "mood" gags start happening all around them. The other characters are supposed to be questioning the lead character's sanity and/or ability to lead a life.

C. More creepy things happen with greater regularity, until the main character has some sort of breakdown/emotional outburst/panicked and furious search through a deskful of papers.

D. We find out that all this was happening because a {dead person/evil spirit/alien race} was {accidentally killed/brutally murder/just plain evil}. We think everything is okay, but then something sad happens to one of the main characters. We are supposed to feel a little creepy and saddened, and the writers have left themselves open for a sequel. The end.

4) Congratulations to Lance on officially completing his 7th tour victory. I was watching the tour while riding on the exercise bike, which made the rather attractive woman on the bike next to me both smile and (correctly) assume that she was a much better person than me. However, as he was on the podium, they let him give an extemporaneous speech where he thanked everyone and just sort of talked about his future and the future of the tour. Now, apparently this was the first time anyone had been allowed to do this, and I don't doubt that it will also be the last. Look, Lance, I think what you did was great, it's incredible that you did something nobody else has ever done, even moreso that it was done while coming back from cancer and turning a crappy piece of plastic into a fashion icon. But that speech was pretty worthless. I mean, I'm not trying to call you out or anything, but there was probably a reason that the Tour up until now had not provided a forum to the people who had just spent the last 3 weeks emptying their energy into a 2000-mile journey and constantly exhausting themselves to the point of oxygen deficiet. Those are not conditions for being particularly eloquent. That said, hell of a job with the tour, man. And congrats to the other American racers, who had 3 in the top 10, 5 in the top 20, and held onto the yellow jersey for all but one of the tour stages (Dave Zabriskie also wore it for the first few days before Armstrong got it).

5) As all the professional sports writers start putting out their NFL previews, and making their preseason predictions, we will inevitably see pretty much the same playoff lineup from last year with the same good teams littered throughout their boards, with maybe one or two "non-reach reach" picks snuck in of teams that were good at the end of last year but just missed the playoffs (think KC two years ago and Jacksonville this past year), even though history the last few years says that about half of the teams in the playoffs next year will not have been there last year. Especially with the general weakness of the NFC, we should expect to see a ton of teams rise up and another slew fall off. In that spirit, I'm predicting that this will be the first year we see a home team host the superbowl, with the Lions hosting the Bengals in superbowl XL (and yes, I realize that Cinnci may well be this year's consensus "non-reach reach", but whatever). How confident am I in this prediction? Well, not at all. But I think that it is more likely to happen than the plethora of "Eagles vs Patriots redux" predicitions that the Mediots are about to unleash.

6) Well, Millar did it again. He turned what should have been a standup double for anyone with speed, but a single for him, into an outfield assist. Of course, on the next pitch, Varitek hit a homer. Well, whatever, he is Manny's Monkey so he deserves a spot on the roster (although if he thinks he is so good for the team, why wouldn't he accept just being a pinch hitter, I don't know). I wish somebody actually had interest in trading for him.

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