PriorBlog

Cole Hamels is on the hill today, and the Cardinals just sent up some kid named Aaron Miles who I guess has been lights out lately.  There were two outs and a guy on first, who ended up stealing second.  Then the Cardinals announcers (Mike Shannon and somebody else) started getting all antsy about the possibility of getting a run.  Hamels struck the kid out.  Take that.

One thing I kind of like about getting the games from other places is hearing announcers who have an interest in your team losing.  I get more aggressive and angry when the people narrating the action do so from an antagonistic perspective.  It’s like they’re out to get you and your team.  But when Hamels strikes out some chump like Aaron Miles, you know who’s boss.

You’ll all recall my pre-season blog entry where I predicted Hamels would win the Cy Young and win 20 games, I am sure.  I think if he wins today it’s win number 10 and we aren’t halfway home yet.  Is there anybody else who is reminded of the 1980 Phillies pitching staff in which they had an ace lefty and then a bunch of nobodies?

Bourne triple!!

One more gripe about mlb.com 400k streaming package.  Works like shit on a Mac.  In internet Explorer it doesn’t work.  In Safari it works with limitations.  In Firefox, it works sometimes, and other times they tell you that you haven’t subscribed.  And when it does work you can’t jump into a game at a certain inning when watching archived games.  In Netscape for some reason the stream is choppy.  You’d think they would have worked this stuff out.  Plus they don’t let you see the post season.  What’s a guy without cable to do.  Did I mention no Red Sox?

I eventually got $1000 from my old job to go towards a replacement for my damaged bike frame.  The cost of a replacement frame with the labor to put my old parts on it would have been around $1300 total.  I say would have, because when I got that $1000 I started thinking about buying a new bike, or maybe a used bike with better components.  So I started looking at craigslist.  My impression of bikes for sale on craigslist is that people with nice bikes, try to unload them for too much money.  There are two reasons for this.  One, there are people that bought decent bikes thinking that they were going to become cyclists and then didn’t become cyclists.  These people then try to unload the bike they paid $2699 for for $2399.  They always use the line “I have the receipt for proof.”  Proof of what, that you spent too much for something you were never going to use.  This one guy on CL Boston has been trying to move this “like new” Cannondale for weeks.  It’s funny because he hasn’t brought down the price, but the sense of desparation in his posts increase with each new one.  Suck it up and give me that bike for $600, dude.  Then there are the people who have a bike they fell in love with but now want  to  unload.  An example of this is the kid trying to sell an old 62cm fix gear Nishiki for $600. Believe me, they are out there in abundance.  People are so unreasonable when it comes to “used” bikes.  So, basically, I didn’t have any luck with craigslist.  Then I check out the prices for new bikes.  I guess it has been a while since I last bought a new bike.  Put it this way, if you are looking for a high end racing bike, $1000 ain’t much.  After that I hit eBay.  More expensive bikes, some decent deals, but you are left wondering about how safe it is to buy a used bike sight unseen.  However, I did notice a guy in Texas selling NEW bikes at too good to be true prices.  Maybe this wasn’t the wisest decision I’ve ever made, but I pulled the trigger on one, and it arrives tomorrow.  For one thing, I can’t wait to get riding again.  But I also have a good feeling about this.  I did a little research on the guy, and while I didn’t find anything definite, there was a suggestion that he is selling Chinese frames with Italian logos on them.  It’s hard for me to be snobby and insisting on riding an Italian frame when I’ve been cruising around on a made in China Giant(s) for the last 7 years.  Still the price was actually too low for the components it comes with, so I maybe should be (or god forbid “have been”) more circumspect.  Either way, we’ll find out tomorrow when I get home from work.  If all things work out I’ll go for a little 20 miler after Hazel goes to bed.  That’ll be awesome!!  Let’s hope.

My wife is bent out of shape because I have been falling asleep at 7 and then waking up at 10 all ready to play when she is going to bed.  What can I say?  If I was tired now, I would go try and catch up to a normal sleeping routine, instead of two long naps a day.

During this evening’s nap, I had a really cool dream.  In the dream I was feverishly writing a novel, and the visions I had of the action in the novel were very clear, in fact I could see them like in a dream, and yes, if you are paying attention that means that there was a dream within a dream.  When I woke up, I was really excited about working on this new novel, but then I realized that, I hadn’t even started on it, I had only dreamed of being obsessively in the middle of it.  And then I had this debate with myself: Was that really a good story that you were writing in the dream, or did your unconscious mind just tell you it was a good story to get some other point across?

Eh, I don’t know.  I think I’ll keep the plot under my hat for now.

Reflecting on all of this brings to mind some of my reservations about having a blog.  First and foremost being, my shitty writing is (t)here for all the world to see.  There’s nothing better than suddenly remembering some stupid post I wrote three months ago, and realizing that I am too lazy to go back and delete it.  Not only that, but this stuff isn’t necessarily fiction, and as such it sort of attaches itself to me in a distorted way.  You can’t shirk something that is written online about you, especially if you wrote it yourself.  At the same time, the act of writing, especially by somebody whose either not very good at it, or really good at it, is a type of lens that can amplify or minimize certain characteristics, especially in reference to oneself.  Eventually there comes a point where you realize that you’ve written something, but it isn’t the thing, it is something else entirely, it’s own thing.

Thank god nobody ever stops to call me on all this bullshit (except when Univeral Hub picks me up and I inadvertently annoy people by the hundreds).  You probably just sit at a desk and smirk somewhere.

This website’s posts are the sputtering breath of a drowning man.  I am holding myself above the surface so that the lifeguard might see me, but in truth, the best place for me, for everybody else’s sake, might be below where more thorough observations are proffered.  There is something to be said for the feeling of writing something that nobody will see, a feeling of arch mischief, of nullifying communication, like turning out the lights on a room full of people.

I am considering calling this new book– what else, YOKE OF THE HORDE II.

Yesterday when I got back to the house after taking the dogs for their morning walk, I noticed what I thought was a female house sparrow carcass against the stairs leading up to the back deck.  The beagle was all over this find, scratching and clawing towards it.  Luckily I was able to keep him away, and after I got him situated in the house, I returned to the bird, who it turns out was still alive.

I don’t know if I ever picked up a wild bird before yesterday, but I can definitely say I have now.  I tried picking up a cardinal with a broken wing once, but he wouldn’t let me get a hold of him.  At my old squirrel friendly apartment, I had the opportunity to touch plenty of squirrels (paw to hand contact as I gave them peanuts), but a bird’s different.  This bird was pretty easy to get a grasp on.  Her little talons or whatever gripped onto my finger, but the body seemed to waver back and forth as though she had lost her sense of balance.  Holding the bird gave me a new perspective on these little creatures who I see so much of.  The most interesting feature to me was the eyelids falling over the eyes.  I had never really been close enough to notice this aspect of a house sparrow.  The bird’s blinking became slower and I began to wonder what to do with it.  I felt that she was about to die, that she must be in some kind of pain, but I didn’t really want to crack her neck, or whatever manly horror is required of this kind of situation in Bruce Willis-type movies.  At the same time, I had to get to work.  I’m still new at my job and I am not sure how far an excuse like “I had to wait for a house sparrow to die” would, ehem, fly.

Finally, I decided to make some sort of odd compromise.  The best place to put it would be underneath my neighbor’s birdfeeder.  Was this a reasonable thing to do?  No, but I was thinking on the fly, I was panicked and, if you want to know the truth, if you want to know how absurd my thinking was at this point in time, the idea ran through my brain that if it was close to the other birds, they would know what to do with it.  Obviously, I am well aware that house sparrows do not have hospitals or even a basic understanding of their own physiology, but I grabbed onto this scrap of bad faith in order to rid myself of the dying bird.

But as I got to the fence that divides my pile of weeds and dog manure (read my yard) for my neighbor’s laboriously maintained flowerbeds and bird slash squirrel feeding station paradise (read his yard), I had second thoughts about this plan of action.  Mainly I was concerned with the image of my neighbor seeing me poke around his yard in the morning, and then him finding a dead bird back there in the afternoon.  He would probably think that I had decided to begin dumping my excess bird carcasses in his yard.  And so I just sort of crouched behind the fence waiting for the future, whatever it held.  Out of nowhere the bird suddenly chirped to life with a start and a runny shit that ran into the palm of my hand as it flew away.

I think if the moment had happened sans shit, it might have filled me with an exhilarating affirmation of the mysterious power of redemption, but because of the shit, instead of an intense inner feeling, the thought that occurred to immediately afterwards was: I guess I can blog about it.

While typing the next entry this is going on:

The Indians radio announcer is comparing tonight’s Phillies Indians game to a gym class in which you have to square dance with your sister. The analyst senses this is an awkward topic and has refrained for the most part from putting his two cents in. The announcer guy continues on with the metaphor (simile really). Okay, now, it’s starting to end. Phils up 6-3 in bottom of the eighth.

Update: Jason Michaels (ex-Phillie) just hit a two run single to cut the lead to 6-5. “Forget about the square dance now!” Shit.

Update: Jose Mesa (ex-Indian) comes on to stop the bleeding for the Phillies.

Update: Roberto Hernandez now pitching for the Tribe. What is this? Has been reliever night at the Jake?

My buddy Kaiser and I have spent the past few days studying the Tradition in Action website. It’s a site that’s concerned with the “desacralization” of the Catholic church. It suffers hilariously from a neurotic disposition towards semi-nude “native” women the pope met on world tours, funny hats, punk priests, acrobats, and clowns. The last one is my favorite. I love how the author describes the reception of the clowns:

“Receiving circus clowns and acrobatic performers at the Vatican, Ratzinger and Wojtyla certainly gratify these enemies, and offend Our Lord Jesus Christ, whose seriousness they should represent.”

If clowns are your enemies, who are your friends?

Other pictures come with priceless commentary such as:

“A young woman gives an acrobatic performance for the Pope, who watches with other ecclesiastics. Her posture is clearly indecent, and one wonders when JPII applies to himself the precept of custody of the eyes.”

The site also takes time to be anti-semitic, bemoaning JPII’s accepting a menorah from a rabbi as “a practical denial of two thousand years of Catholic teaching about the perfidy of the Jewish religion.” Serious, JP. Why’d you have to ruin it for us?

The fightin’ Phils swept the Mets in Shea! Three glorious games. The Mets announcers said as much. Kieth Hernandez gushing over Chase Utley like he was one of Chase’s Chicks.

Off to KC (site of game 5 of the 1980 World Series, the most intense World Series game ever played) to pad our record!!

I’ve noticed you’ll find it difficult to get the correct quote below online. After winning the World Series in 1980, the Phillies came out with a souvenir record, The Phantastic Phillies, to commemorate the event, their first championship in 97 years as a team. The record’s sides are split A. regular season and B. post season. The problem was that the Phillies radio station did not have rights to broadcast the World Series that year, so basically when you flip from the excitement of the Phillies edging out the Expos to take the division (don’t laugh, the 1980 Expos were a great team), you get Harry Kalas in a studio recreating the dramatic post season comebacks over a track of generic fan noise. In short, awful.

What makes matters worse is that Tug McGraw’s barely controversial speech to end the victory parade in JFK stadium was censored, and played on the record as follows:

“All through baseball history, Philadelphia’s had to take a back seat to New York City. Well New York City, [sudden inexplicable break in fan noise followed up by voice sounding vaguely like Tug McGraw] today is our day.”

When in reality, I remember very clearly, thanks to the newscasts on channels 3, 6, and 10 repeating it ad nauseum on the evening after the parade, that what he really said was:

“All through baseball history, Philadelphia’s had to take a back seat to New York City. Well New York City can take this World Series and stick it! Cause we’re number one!”

This is the year! Again.

Since the “new” job requires me to take 6 different rides on the MBTA, I get a much broader perspective of commuter consciousness than I did previously. Here are some recent highlights.

1. The Meathead who reminded me of Marcel Proust

Yesterday afternoon, getting off the Red Line and heading to the Orange Line at Downtown Crossing. As I’m walking in the tunnel, the guy a head of me, an angry musclehead in a wife beater makes it a point to punch every metal door he passes, sending a resounding echo of his brute masculinity down the passage. Once on the train, it is my good fortune to find this prime specimen of machismo only a few steps away from me, similarly pressed against the multitudes. It so happened that I was reading my Proust, and I chanced to see this hulk dismissively shaking his head at the predicament (presumably) of having to stand on a crowded train. Meanwhile, Marcel wept over the realization that he’d been going to fancy parties instead of mourning the loss of his grandmother, lamenting how their old way of communicating through a series of knocks on the partition separating them in the Grand Hotel at Balbec would never again suffice:

I knew that I might knock now, even louder, and that I should hear no response, that my grandmother would never come again. And I asked nothing more of God, if a paradise exists, than to be able, there, to knock on that wall with the three little raps which my grandmother would recognise among a thousand, and to which she would give those answering knocks which meant: “Don’t fuss, little mouse, I know you’re impatient, but I’m just coming,” and that he would let me stay with her througout eternity, which would not be too long for the two of us.

Fitting, no? After our meaty friend got off the T, the guys who’d been standing around him began a discussion in which they considered how much damage he would have been able to inflict upon them had he for some reason punched them.

2. The 25mph Dachshund

If that wasn’t enough action for one commute, on the 32, as we made our way out of Forest Hills, I and many of my fellow passengers, spotted a miniature Dachshund jogging in the middle of Hyde Park Ave. As a miniature dachshund owner, I felt a sense of helpless urgency watching the poor animal play matador with cars. It took a few blocks before anybody on the sidewalk noticed the little guy, and when they did, the dog, hearing footfalls behind it, broke into an impossibly fast (for a dachshund) sprint. To give you a frame of reference to the speed, a real literal frame of reference I should add, I was watching these events through the bus window as I was standing in the aisle. Again, the bus, like the train was crowded, so I couldn’t reposition myself fully to follow the events as closely as I would have liked, but as the bus moved past the traffic and picked up speed along the emptier part of Hyde Park Ave, the dog began its sprint, and this is when I lost sight of it, because it moved beyond my view through the window. At this point it was moving faster than the bus. I finally caught sight of it again flying up Walk Hill Ave. That dog must have been going 20-25 miles per. I repeat, this was a miniature dachshund pulling that speed. That’s like the Hicham El Guerrouj of dachshunds. Hope it got home all right.

Finally one more.

3. Yes, in fact, I have met him

This morning on the 32. The only people talking were a man and a woman. The man was wearing some type of fez, and was nice enough, but kind of pontificating about some religion, I couldn’t catch which. The woman was polite, not really pushing the issue, but not blowing him off. He asked her if she’d seen the Republican debate the night before. No, she hadn’t. He told her she didn’t miss much and then bemoaned the lack of character among the current crop of candidates. His list of grievances was enumerated, which included some having to do with Barack Obama. After he’d gone on for some time, she mentioned that she was voting for Obama. So he challenged her on this. She mentioned among other things, that she thought he had a lot of integrity. Well, he asked, did she know him? This was, of course, asked with the expectation that she would say no and that he could then proceed to say that she really had no idea whether he had integrity, BUT, unfortunately for him, she said in so off-hand a manner as to seem as though she were talking about her neighbor, and therefore her statement came across as impossible to be a lie, “I’ve met him.” Stunned, he stammered out questions seeking details. But he was out of luck. She casually mentioned a friend from Chicago who invited her out there for a campaign meeting or something.
Fez man was so caught off guard I almost started laughing. I’ve never seen a man backtrack so quickly. This revelation occured at the same place as the dachshund turned off Hyde Park Ave the day before, and in that short span of time between then and before we got off at Forest Hills he had pretty much told her that he’d be voting for Obama too.

I think I recall reading something in college about Nietzsche saying that history is as much about forgetting as remembering. I don’t know where exactly the following situation falls, maybe somewhere in the middle. It looks like the Chinese government has censored information about Tiananmen Square to the extent that it now can sneak back into public consciousness.  In other words, how do people recognize something as needing to be censored when they don’t even know what it is.

The quote from Reuters:

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post said a young woman on the Chengdu Evening News classified section had allowed the ad to be published because she’d never heard of the June 4 crackdown.

The link.

The Use and Abuse of Personal Websites

Just because I am a WordPress user, doesn’t mean that I can’t read Blogger blogs, right? The thing that I like the best about Blogger is that they have that “Next Blog” button on the top of each blog that sends you to a completely random blog. Or maybe I should say “supposedly” random, because how am I supposed to know if I am not being sent various places for a reason, because everything happens for a reason, right?

I need affirmation tonight… right?

Anyhow, if they are truly random, then I think after flipping through many many of them I am somewhat qualified to make overall pronouncements about the blogosphere. Here are a few. There are a lot of Spanish and Portuguese blogs. Most blogs in English are written by parents making cutesy comments about their new babies. You’ll note that I try to keep my kid out of this place. Friends and family know where the secret link for pictures is, the rest of you don’t want to be bothered. Nobody likes hearing about cute kids– or supposedly cute kids– they’ll never meet. The whole process of hearing about them eclipses them, by that I mean that the annoying way new parents go on about their little tykes could fry the nerves of a saint. When you add a blog to that, especially the ones in which the parents ghost-write for their tots (“Today mommy and daddy took me to the zoo.”), they have to realize that they are pissing off fans of the next blog button and thereby may suffer for it.

If I were a real mean-spirited SOB, I would post rude comments on these blogs about the kids and stuff, but I am too nice a guy to indulge in anything that cruel. The only thing I can do is to suggest to those of you, who are truly mean spirited… I did see a few months back, somebody (probably and ex-) posted a link to a website of a couple about to get married. It was a site with directions to the event and so forth and so on, but it also had a comments section, and this person on Craigslist, was asking people to pile on with the evil comments. No, I didn’t comment. What do you take me for? But I did read some of the comments. It was brutal. But anyways, back to kids on the internet.

You can only imagine my delight to finally stumble upon the blog of a person who will definitely NOT be posting cute kid pics anytime soon. The author of “Overactive Sexdrive” describes himself in his profile as:

I am in my 20’s, I am a male, Caucasian, middle class, very high sex drive. I live with my girlfriend and have been with her for over a year and a half, I love her. We don’t have sex very often anymore, this is becoming a big issue that I have with our relationship. I hope that by blogging about it, I will be able to sort through things, and maybe get some feedback from any readers.

There’s also a link to another blog in which a couple describe everything they do with one another. It’s sort of like, if you’re not satisfied with reading about somebody who gets no sex, read about two people, who not only can’t get enough of it, but who don’t describe themselves in anything but sexual terms. Granted, the advent of the search engine increases areas of specialization (I can’t complain, I just found a bunch of Tymon Dogg albums for download. Check out “Low Dow Dirty Weakness.” I love this guy and couldn’t find his stuff for the longest time.), and thereby encourages to some extent a fracturing of the personality into different sectors. For all I know, the guy who writes in his blog exclusively about not getting any action from his girlfriend has another blog highly regarded by heart surgeons for it’s unique take on how to do quadruple by-passes. Or maybe quadruple by-passes aren’t that big a deal anymore. I don’t know, maybe he’s important to somebody other than his girlfriend. You get the point.

TWIB Notes from Around the League

Shane Victorino hit the game winning homer for the Phils today. For those of you who don’t know, Victorino is from Hawaii, and today the promotional freebie at the game was a Shane Victorino Bobble Head doll complete with grass skirt. What a day for Victorino, who by the way, is having a much better season than Bobby Abreu.

Special Note for Red Sox fans. Promotional Freebies are things given away to fans to get them to come to the ball park. You don’t get them because the Red Sox sell out every game. Next time you need a plastic Red Sox hat with a giant Bickford’s Restaurant logo on the back and you can’t find one, think about why.

The Red Sox are having Jon Rish (who let’s face it, should be in the booth) give updates on the Orioles, because the Orioles are in second place. This is like bizarro world. A.) I know they’re in second place, but they’re the Orioles. B.) They’re like 30 games out or something like that. Who cares? Let Rish take the place of whoever is taking O’Brien’s place tonight. Rish is the best. He is light years better as a post game wrap up guy than Sarandis used to be. Don’t think I don’t like Sarandis. I love Sarandis. I love him doing BC hoops games, which he is top notch at. But when Rish gets all cantankerous with nitwith callers after the game, that’s great fun. Of course, it’s great fun at his expense, because I think Rish is actually upset, but I like it.