Quickie update, more later

1) Brother McGuffin's bachelor party went off without a hitch. Okay, maybe one hitch: the strippers were much more adept at sucking money out of our wallets than being hot. And I did very poorly at paintball because my face-mask kept fogging up. And the bachelor got a paintball on the head of his penis. Still a good time...

2) Go Dave Pauley! Toronto, a team that seems to have been built for the sole purpose of beating the Red Sox, keeps beating the Red Sox. To avoid a sweep, we send a AA rookie to the mound. Oh, crap. Well, hopefully we can beat long-time rival and POS-junkballer, Ted Lilly. If we lose, well, it puts us so that by next Monday the AL East standings may not look like this anymore:

I'm taking a vacation day

1) So, one day after starting work, I am taking a day off. Why? Well, I don't have my temporary badge, so I can't get into the building. Even if I did, I don't have an electronic account yet, so I can't access a computer. And, of course, there is no work for me yet, since the people I am going to work with haven't told me what the heck I am doing and aren't going to be there at all today. SO, rather than sit there just racking up the money, I've decided to just hang out at home instead of hanging out there earning money. At least here I don't have to dress up, and I'm not bilking the American taxpayers by getting paid for hours in which I am doing nothing. At least not until tomorrow.

2) Vintage Schilling. 8 innings on fewer than 100 pitches, only one earned run (hey! Damon finally got a RBI against his old team, and it only took five games! And his wife is still a piece of trash!)

3) Well, I did it. I have finished the first chapter in the book I am writing. Don't worry, people: the solutions to all your problems are only a few months away. And, yes, this project I've embarked upon is part of the reason I've been slow to post as of late, despite the conclusion of my first year of grad school (hooray! Only like 4 or 5 more years to go!).

4) Still don't get NASCAR. Really, I don't. Could someone explain its appeal? And could that person please have all their teeth and a wife without a black eye? What, no takers? Really?

5) The Resident Female recently was driving my car back from the Preakness, and my car broke down on her in a rather unfortunate area of DC. Apparently, within a minute of her car breaking down, the car was "swarmed by a bunch of Sunday Morning Hobos". Fearing for her life, she was also hit on by a guy who had just served a ten year sentence before I was able to get there with my AAA card. As she would later say, "He must've been a murderer, because what else do you go to jail for ten years for?" Well, I said kidnapping would probably get you ten years, as well. This comment did not seem to calm her down.

6) I'm find the Vault soda commercials extremely hilarious. Granted, I'm never going to try the stuff, it looks like crap, but man are the commercials funny.

Sexual Assault With A Concrete Dildo?

Things I like:

Rescue me - Thanks to Netflix, I've been watching the first season of Dennis Leary's firefighting show on FX, and it is spectacular

The Beckett-Lowell-Ramirez trade - Sure, Hanley is tearing it up in Florida, but Lowell is definitely earning that albatross salary and Beckett, though having had a rough couple of starts, is a fabulous player

The Department of Energy - For giving me a job this summer. I start this coming week.

Bourbon - For always being there when you need it. Wait, what?

The Naked Gun franchise - for the title of this post, the added humor of watching OJ Simpson in action, and the fact that it gave Ricardo Mantalbon since he had this part.

Green Day - For making the best album of the last several years in American Idiot

Burritos - Who doesn't?

South Park - Greatest satirists of our generation

Endings - Because I'm tired of writing

Fuck ESPN

1) Okay, I get it, Barry Bonds has an opportunity to be only the third person to hit 714 homeruns. Right, I know, it's a big deal to some people. But, you know what? I didn't tune into ESPN to watch the Giants game, nor did I tune it to watch some steroid-infested cranium hauling around a pair of withered-grapenuts hit a home run to tie for second freaking place, and I sure as hell didn't tune it to see him NOT get the homer. I turned on the TV to watch the Sox obliterate the O's, and see Beckett dismantle the their batting order. Well, I've gotten what I want, save for Beckett absolutely cranking through three of the Os. In the time it took for ESPN to make me spew blood out of my nose in anger and see Bonds not hit a homer, I missed Beckett get three, count them 3, outs. I hate ESPN. I hate them so much, I just wish they would die. Stuart Scott? Michael Berman? That freakin' cell-phone douche bag? I never want to hear from them again. Oh, and the Sox are up by 7. So that's good.

...

Thanks to the RI refugee for this picture.

Always good...

...But this one was especially funny.

0 for 4 goes the whore

1)
Steady B said:
So you are saying that Damon was a douche bag while he was with the redsox?

Yes, but he was our douchebag. He was an idiot, everyone knew it, and he was a whore when he came to us from Oakland/KC.

2) Doug Mirabelli is back out of the blue. No loss in losing Bard, but it is kind of sad to see a guy with the potential of Cla Merideth and his self-proclaimed "nut-cutting sinker" leave. However, he is not quite ready for the big leagues (like two years or so), so I guess it is cool. Regardless, nice to see The Gut back catching Wakefield. I don't doubt that Bard would have figured it out eventually, but it's nice to see the most popular backup catcher in history back behind the plate when the knucklers start flying.

3) Once again, after tonights game, I feel it is important to point out my comments from the preseason, which pretty much sum up tonights game:
Tizzle vs. Slappy
A-Rod is one of the best hitters in the game, hitting tons of home runs, good average, gets on base well, and is a good base stealer. Ortiz is a God.

4) Watch this video and understand why my students think I'm a huge dork. The best part? I own that textbook.

5) Okay, three more added benefits from the game: Jeter getting tossed out at second then whining whining whining to the umpire; Damon watching as Paplebon make his catch for him; the subsequent "Johnny" chant by the crowd and ESPN's closeup of his face, looking like a man that was just shown a movie of himself taking it in the pooper by a burly dude in prison. His tearing up in the postgame interview was pretty special, too. Very enjoyable game all around.

6) Finally of note: the other whore, The Ultimate Whore, continues his incessent media campaign of showing how much of a whore he is for the almighty dollar. But I will say that, as much of a detestable human being that fatass is, I'm not the kind of person to cut off my own nose to spite my face. I gotta say, I prefer Clemens taking starts away from Lenny "Tell me about the strikeouts, George" DiNardo, and an October rotation of Schilling, Beckett, Clemens, and Wakefield is one hell of a staff. Granted, judging by his post-season record, we would need to make sure Clemens faces a starter not as good as Pedro Martinez or Jeff Supan, but I'd still like our chances.

Of course, this all assumes that Clemens continues his Toronto/Houston workout regime and not return to his Red Sox shape, where he looked a lot more like David Wells than he or his wife would care to admit.

So, in short, I look forward to the opportunity to have Clemens edge either Wells, Ramiro Mendoza, or Cesar Crespo from the top three of my "Most Hated Red Sox in Recent Memory". Of course, I would have to unretire his number from my "Most Hated Red Sox in History", dust it off, and grit my teeth for a few months until I can go back to hating the man that shattered my fledgeling love for baseball and made me decide that any fatass could be good at the game. He stunted my baseball love for a good five years, so I will never forgive him, ever; of course, a World Series with number 21 would at least moderately soften my view on the one-time MVP.

This just in...

I dislike the Yankees. Go Wakefield.

2) Since everyone else in the world is writing about this, I guess I might as well address the issue: we should boo Damon because he is a douchebag. Now I know what you are think: "But Fletcher, you are saying the guy who helped win the World Series in 2004 and had four fantastic seasons wearing the Red Sox uniform has become a douchebag just because the front office didn't try to pursue him and so he took the huge over-payment the Yanks offered him?" No, quite the opposite, actually; he isn't a douchebag because of the past offseason, but rather he has been one all along. For confirmation of this, flip to any random page in the self-promoting piece of tripe that passes off as his autobiography. He brags about his infidelity, and obviously has the intelligence of a toadstool. A retarded toadstool. A retarded toadstool that passes its time by huffing ether. So boo Damon for being a douchebag.

3) For the record, even though Coco's injured, I still think the Sox made out better than the Yanks in the CF derby. I'll take the younger, cheaper, faster player with an identical OPS to the older, douchier player who spent the past 4 years in a hitters park. I feel confident that 2009 will prove this.

4) I am heading into my exam period, with my first final on Thursday, and my last final on Thursday (the next one). As such, I am already to the point where I am spouting incoherent babble randomly and without reason. Fantastic.

5) When in doubt: always put on your underwear before you put on your pants.

6) Exceptions to point 5: when you are doing a revivalist play of A Clockwork Orange.

7) I think Bill Bilicheck is expecting Tedy Bruschi and Mike Vrabel to play until they are 50 years old. But our offense should be pretty bad ass.