TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

I posted the review for The DaVinci Code a while back. After I read the book, most people told me that the first book including Robert Langon, Angels & Demons, was much better.

After reading it, I agree. Two main reasons:

1) You don’t spend the entire book really wading through heavy-handed spirituality regarding the Catholic Church and giant Conspiracy Theory. There is obviously a taste of conspiracy in it, but nothing that tries to shake the foundation of the church to its core.

2) An extension of the above, you don’t have to deal with pages and pages and pages of background explanations to make a point.

The general plot in this book is that CERN (a research facility) has discovered how to make anti-matter. Anti-matter, is the theoretical opposite of matter. When it and and matter come in to contact, they annihilate, destroying each other. A scientist (and his hot, adoptive, Italian daughter) created anti-matter and a way to store it without it destroying all the matter around it. The anti-matter gets stolen and planted somewhere in the Vatican on the day that a new Pope is about to be elected.

Elsewhere, the Illuminati have kidnapped the four front-running cardinals in line for the Papacy and have promised to assassinate each of them on the altars of the Illuminati. Robert Langdon discovers a way to find the altars in an attempt to save the cardinals before they are murdered. A few twists and turns later and Robert Langdon saves the day.

Sound familiar?

Yeah, that’s the one huge problem I had with the book. Angels & Demons and The DaVinci Code are essentially cookie-cut from one another. Robert Langdon, shocked into action by a gruesome murder, runs around with an exotic beauty. He follows clue after clue trying to track down something before someone else does… with a shocking twist(~!) or two at the end. As it started to become more obvious it was cut from the same cloth as The DaVinci Code, you were really able to predict exactly what was going to happen before it did. The shocking twists and revelation become kind of tired because the reader of the first book can pretty much guess what’s going to happen.

If you had to pick one of the two books to read, I’d pick this one first. If it seems like you really liked the format… like, so much that you want to read it again with the same characters, then read The DaVinci Code.

The first half-season of Buffy aired from March to June 1997. As we learn a bit later in the series, Buffy comes to Sunnydale after having been expelled from her school in Los Angeles after burning it down. She’d also spent some time in an insane asylum after telling her parents about the first time she saw a vampire. The movie, at this point, is non-canonical (it would later be revisited and merged with the series in The Origin comic.

Surprisingly, as I worked my way through this series, I was shocked at how little had been spoiled for me over the years. Willow becoming the Big Evil in season six was just about the only thing I knew that was coming before it came.

Episodes

Welcome to the Hellmouth: Where it all begins. The very first scene is the show defined in a microcosm. A boy and a girl, in a stereotypical movie moment, travel together into the school after hours. The girl is nervous at the boy’s brash breaking of the rules. However, the girl turns out to be Darla (a character I knew from spot watching Angel) and kills the boy. The show was essentially turning all the stereotypes around. The boy would always be in danger and the girl would save the day.

Buffy leaves behind Los Angeles and, she presumes, he Slayer life. After arriving in Sunnydale, she discovers that she’s come to a town that sits on top of a Hellmouth (a portal to hell) and there is a new watcher waiting to take over her training. After finding the town infested with vampires, watchers, and portals to hell, Buffy realizes she can’t leave the life of a Slayer behind her. The core gang is formed when Xander, Buffy, Willow, and Giles all meet and, against all odds, make it through to the end of the series. Eric Balfour appears as Willow and Xander’s good friend Jesse. He only makes it two episodes as he’s turned into a vampire to lure the slayer to The Master… Season One’s Big Bad.

The Harvest: Xander is forced to kill his friend Jesse who’s become a vampire. Granted, he does this in Xander’s own inept way. Angel continues to be the dark stranger who only comes to warn Buffy about impending doom. This episode gives you one of those “holy crap” moments at how much different the world is now as Willow uses a laptop roughly the size of an investment banker’s briefcase to get information about the city’s sewers. An important concept is hinted at toward the end of the episode when Cordelia, a tangential member of the Scooby Gang, denies the fact that there was a near slaughter at the Bronze the night before. Fans of the show call it the “Sunnydale Syndrome”; people’s tendency to explain away the inexplicable or pretend it never happened. People’s eyes can be opened, as Willow’s, Xander’s, and Oz’s, but they ignore it for the most part. The fog is very similar to that which surrounds Derry, Maine in Stephen King’s It. The residents in the town of Derry know that children disappear or are brutally murdered, but are not horrified by it. The children in It have their eyes opened by surviving encounters with It. The characters in Buffy are similar. When they’re brought into the Scooby Gang, they become more aware of what’s going on in town. Meanwhile, most of the residents seem miraculously un-phased by the huge body count that must be racked up by having a town full of vampires. Sitting on a Hellmouth, or sitting on some manifestation of The First Evil (I would submit that the creature behind Pennywise in It’s is King’s version of the First Evil) puts the fog around people. They have to overcome inertia to see reality.

Witch: The first episode that let’s us know that witches and magic, in fact, do exist. It introduces Amy, who will spend a few seasons as a rat before coming tremendously important. Amy’s mother had swapped bodies with her to relive her glory days. Amy’s mother is one of the few “evil” witches we ever see in Buffy. Later, witches are portrayed mostly as a persecuted, peaceful group. We find at the end of the episode that Amy’s mother had been turned into a cheerleading trophy and was trapped in the trophy case at Sunnydale High. I assume this is Joss’s dig at jocks stuck in their high school glory days, which is what Amy dealt with as her mom pressured her into cheerleading. This is the way that the show intermingled actual high school issues with magic. Amy’s mom pressured her to follow in her footsteps… but in Buffy, the mom was actually able to take over her footsteps.

Teacher’s Pet: In the first of some prophetic episodes, a hot new teacher comes to town and sets about having sex with her virile young students… unfortunately she turns out to be a giant preying mantis in disguise. Xander is one of her victims. At the end of this episode, we’re shown that the teacher had laid eggs before she was killed, but this was dropped. Whedon pretty much stopped this tactic once we got out of this season… that is, the old horror movie tactic of setting up the sequel. I would assume this was because, after the first season, he had an actual direction to go with and enough story that it wasn’t necessary to pretend he’d need more.

Never Kill a Boy on the First Date: Buffy tries to have an actual social life outside of her duties, dating a guy named Owen. Unfortunately, The Master is attempting to raise The Anointed One, the vampire who will lead the Slayer into hell. Buffy has a date interrupted by general doom. Owen, her date, goes with her on her mission to rescue Giles. He has the honor of being one of the few characters who has his eyes opened that never really appears again.

The Pack: Xander finds a new group of friends and blows off his old ones in typical high school fashion. Unfortunately, he’d been possessed by a hyena spirit and killed the principal. This wasn’t one of my faves and is the second in a long line of “Xander gets in a crazy situation” plots.

Angel: The big reveal: Angel is a vampire and was once the horrifyingly evil Angelus. We discover that he was cursed with a soul, setting up the crazy Buffy/Angel relationship that will go on for three seasons. This episode, much to my surprise, was also the end of Darla. As I saw her on Angel in later years, I was somewhat surprised to see her staked. This doomed relationship seems to be the catalyst that made the show catch on with fans.

I, Robot… You, Jane: Another fun time capsule of an episode. Willow meets a boy on IRC and everyone thinks it’s kind of creepy. Ten years later and I know at least two engaged couples who met online. Of course, in this case it does turn out to be weird… or more truly a demon inside the computer. Ms Calendar, the computer teacher and techno-pagan, is introduced and will become more important later on.

The Puppet Show: We get the new principal Snyder (Quark from DS9, minus the make-up… and it took me a disturbing amount of time to figure this out). This is kind of an odd little episode with a switcheroo. You’re set up to believe the puppet is the bad guy and he actually turns out to be a demon hunter cursed into puppet form.

Nightmares: An It inspired episode as people’s nightmares start coming true. This episode was Buffy’s chance to don the vampire face.

As an aside, this was one thing I always wondered about. How bad-ass would the “Big Bad” have been if it was a former slayer turned into a Vampire? I mean, doesn’t that seem like something Spike would have done? He was cruel enough and killed two slayers, yet didn’t turn any of them.

Out of Mind, Out of Sight: A girl is so ignored by everyone around her she actually becomes invisible. Good thought about high school… not an episode I really cared for. Although, the invisible girl is taken away by the government to be trained as a spy at the end of the episode, giving us the indication that the US Government knows that mystical forces actually exist. This is much more deeply explored in season four.

Prophecy Girl: This was actually the episode that made me realize I was going to watch the rest of the series. Well written, well acted, and probably in my top five favorite episodes in the series. Buffy hears that the prophecy says she must face the Master and she must die. She temporarily quits being Slayer. As Buffy faces the Master, she is killed by him as the prophecy foretold… but she is later brought back by Xander’s CPR. She then goes on to kill the Master ending the first Big Bad.

Summary

While it didn’t seem like twelve episodes that would launch a phenomena, the original twelve episodes were fun. Like I said, not only do they give a little glance back into what high school was like before everyone went insane with metal detectors and whatnot, it’s also a pretty decent little look at what high school is like for the non-popular kids.

The craziest part of the first season, for me, is how quickly and seamlessly Xander and Willow accept the world of the supernatural. They’re like: “oh, there are vampires and witches and magic and demons… all right.” I suppose it was mostly to skip unnecessary dialog, but still it comes off as kind of odd. The first season also sets up what would annoy me most about the show over the years: Xander rarely gets to be a hero. In this season he saves Buffy at the end and later he’d bring Dark Willow back from evil, but otherwise he just gets beaten up by demons and has to be rescued. You’d think, at some point, he’d start carrying weapons or, at the very least, training. Xander would be pretty much the only regular character in the show who would never have any power and would play the constant victim. He never learned magic or summoning or anything and, inexplicably, never managed to get killed.

As this took way longer to write than I expected… the second one will probably be a little later than I first assumed.

Beneath this polished, suave exterior beats the heart of a true born geek. I love all things fantasy. I found my original calling in X-Men comic books, then Star Trek and Star Wars, later in Final Fantasy for the original NES, and in various other outlets before finally discovering the wellspring of imagination known as Dungeons & Dragons. The first “soap” I ever watched was re-airs of Dark Shadows, which ran during summer vacations during high school. I did discover, however, that fantasy television was not exactly a target demographic. I would see a lot of shows (Forever Knight, Covington Cross, Dark Shadows ‘91) I enjoyed get canceled after I started to get into them. It made me kind of… gun shy to get into any new series that wasn’t around for more than one season.

So how did I miss out on Buffy The Vampire Slayer the first time around? Really, I didn’t. Part of it was early 1997 being the second half of my freshman year of college (and television not really being an option) but mostly it was the above. I wasn’t going to invest myself into a series based on a not-that-good B-movie that I was thoroughly convinced wasn’t going to make it out of the first season. Remember, back in the days of late-nineties yore… this universe of 300 different stations trying to fill time didn’t exist yet. The Sopranos hadn’t come along to teach the suits that one single good series could make a network…. and this crazy world where Smallville has been on since 2001 and Heroes, which I truly believed would be canceled by the fourth week, flourishes didn’t yet exist. Long story short… between being in school without cable in my dorm and, later, being convinced that no one would watch this show, I didn’t watch it. At the very least, I figured I could catch up to the second season if it turned out to be good.

I never quite got there. Between working and school and that general radio silence you adopt when you go to college… I never really got into the show and didn’t really watch any of it, at all, until I kind of picked up the final season of Angel well after college. About three episodes in I realized how asinine it was to be watching a series where I knew hardly any of the back story and I quit until Netflix came along. While I had to get 24 and Lost and Prison Break out of the way first… I knew that Buffy, Angel, and the Chronological Star Trek Project (beginning in 2008) would follow shortly after.

As of now, I’m through half of the final season of Buffy with discs four and five coming on Wednesday and, while I probably should have been writing these as I go along, I’m finally going to start putting my thoughts down on these seasons. I’ve been writing so much lately because, well, there’s only so much you can do to stay entertained when you have no furniture other than a desk and a chair.

One thing I do know: the hype calling this one of the best shows ever created is deserved. Looking back on it ten years later, it not only gives you a good memory of what high school was like (for the geeks among us anyway who did regard high school as a special type of hell) but also a strange historical perspective. The first couple of seasons really do remind you how much the world has changed in 10 short years. Examples: Willow uses a laptop roughly the size of a microwave in season one, no one has a cell phone in a high school full of trendy and well-off California kids, and meeting a guy online is still considered weird. Sure… the standard high school issues are addressed in a hyper-realistic way (people who act like “monsters” actually are, you know, monsters) but the message still gets across on both levels.

Without having even started into Angel yet… I see why legions of people still follow the characters, still gather, and still want to know how the series was meant to conclude.

So… in short… stay tuned.

He has a DORP of like… 18.7: Douchebaggieness Over Replacement Player

- Erstwhile Tailgate Crashers contributor and all-around Beirut Superstar Mike Hulse in regards to Ty Cobb.

I listen to this during afternoon quite a bit and, as it’s just about time for Jason Giambi to start making rehab starts, the “Giambi should stay gone” people have started to show up.

I expected this since the Yankees are on a hot streak right now (against the Devil Rays and Royals… but a hot streak none the less) but what prompted this post is one or two of the callers making the point “he only hit .250 last year and he’s still doing it this year. He’s lost it.”

Since I have some sort of conscious thought, I went to The Greatest Website and looked up Giambi’s stats. The caller was correct… Giambi’s batting average after last season was an unimpressive .253. What the idiot caller failed to mention was his .413 OBP, .558 SLG, 113 RBI, and 37 home runs. Obviously, getting on base almost half the time, being second in the league (behind David Ortiz) in walks, and hitting for power really isn’t all that useful.

And yeah, he’s only hitting .260 this season, too… with a .380 OBP and a .436 SLG.

What a loser.

For those keeping track at home. So far this week I’ve found out that my couch, chair, and bed had bedbugs and my cat almost died. So Wednesday, I took a personal day to help the exterminator take out my furniture before he treated the apartment for bugs.

Now, I don’t have much experience wrapping and moving furniture. I’ve seen furniture wrapped exactly once, by the people who moved me from Mechanicville to New York. Three very efficient Russian dudes came into my apartment, used bubble-wrap, and had the stuff wrapped up and gone from my apartment in about an hour. I presumed, of course, that something similar would happen here… that, I don’t know, the exterminator would have done this before.

Imagine my surprise.

The guy showed up with no bags and a roll of construction grade plastic sheeting. I can’t actually put into words the nonsense that followed and the six hours it took to remove the furniture from my apartment. Why did it take six hours? Because instead of just using the plastic wrap to wrap up the furniture and take it out… we instead set to disassembling the furniture with screwdriver and a SawZall and placing it all in garbage bags. Why did we do this? Because I’m an idiot, that’s why. After being burnt out from previous stress and not really getting any sleep for the previous five nights (since, you know, we found out we had bed bugs on Thursday and pretty much had to sleep on the same mattress until Wednesday… you haven’t lived until you’ve spent a night on a bagged mattress freaking out every time anything touches your skin… and then do it for five more nights) I was just pretty much following along with whatever the guy told me to do. Instead of just going with a: “for f*ck’s sake, let’s do it this way”, I just let him take the furniture apart and helped him bag it up.

Later, I stayed out of the way as he sprayed my apartment down with some mixture of alcohol and awful. Then, after having a fifteen to thirty minute period where I thought about going to the store, buying a bunch of boxes, mailing my clothes back to Mechanicville, and punching out of this whole “City Experiment” I instead turned the air conditioning on, filled our fancy new air mattress, took a shower, and took a nap.

This was about three weeks ago now. Since then, we’ve gotten the cat back who is recovering nicely after a couple of weeks with a cone on her head. We’ve seen two more bugs and had the exterminator back only once. We’re still in the process of washing the sin out of all of our clothes and sealing them up into canvas bags and only discussed throwing in the towel on this New York City thing in passing.

Now, I just have to hope and pray that, when I brought laundry up to Mechanicville, that I didn’t bring a surprise up there with me.

Cats puke a lot. Fortunately for us, we have wood floors in our apartment, so a little hairball or creepy cluster of God knows what is really not that big a deal. A couple paper towels, some Fantastic or Windex (I subscribe to the “any spray product that doesn’t smell like vomit wins” theory), and a garbage can and no biggie. The problem was, Ninja Kitty started puking on Friday and didn’t stop, well, for four days. Toward the end, after she’d stop eating, she’d moved on to just throwing up the water she was drinking to stay hydrated. Bad stuff. Every once in a while she’d throw up a piece of shoelace (she has a bad habit of eating string… cue ominous music) and I would think “oh, that’s the hairball… it’ll be fine now” but it kept not being.

So, The Lovely And Talented Ms. L packed her up in the crate and brought her to a branch of our local over-priced vet (conveniently located next to one of my favorite bars). The cat looked like hell. She wasn’t really moving… at all… when she put her in the crate. She gets to the vet and, after a quick examination, they determine that she’s extremely dehydrated from the vomiting so her kidneys had shut down, and to give her an IV and put her in a warm bath wrapped up in a towel. Ms. L said it was one of the cutest and most pathetic things she’d ever seen. After an X-Ray or an MRI or some other procedure I thought was only done on human beings they discovered the culprit. A giant mass had taken up residence in her lower intestine. Dandy. So, the diagnoses was “we need to get her hydrated, then we’ll perform some exploratory surgery on her intestine and see what’s up. If necessary, we’ll remove part of her intestine.”

Now, so far there’s been at least three things done to my cat that I thought only were done to humans: First being an IV, second being an X-Ray, and Third being exploratory surgery. And the verdict? My cat’s inane habit of chewing up shoelaces turned out to be an inane habit of eating up shoelaces and, over the last two years, she’d amassed a grotesque little wad of shoelaces (think, about the size of two fingers) in her intestines. So, they cut into her intestines, removed the shoelaces, and sewed her back up.

Now, I was definitely one of those folks who pointed and laughed at people who were stupid enough to fall for the Pet Insurance scam. However, the grand total of the bill for my cat came to a whopping $2,000.00 for the hospital stay, surgery, and whatever. Had I actually gotten an insurance policy, the grand total would have been…… fifty bucks.

So, when she finally came back, doped up on pain-killers and in one of those plastic cone things (which has earned her alternating nicknames of Satellite Cat, Fat Chick Surgery Cat, and The Six Million Dollar Kitty) she was minus some shoelaces, minus some intestine, and eating some kind of bland cat food that smells worse than standard cat food. She also has a hard as fuck scar up her belly that looks pretty similar to my grandfather’s heart-bypass-surgery scar.

And the exterminator hasn’t even come to visit yet.

As a long-suffering geek and baseball fan, I enjoy SABRmetrics. The thing about it that I find the most interesting, though, is the complete disdain that stat-heads have for old time baseball people… and the utter rage that old-time baseball people have for stat-heads.

Mostly summed up in this column on Fox Sports.

While I’m not Ken Tremendous, and I did get this column linked from an FJM post, I’d like to actually take the time to respond to this vast wasteland of stupid:

Sabermetrics, is the Scientology of baseball. It all started in a tiny, airless, room, where the guy who got picked last in Little League, perfected his revenge. This handy guide will help clear up the wildest misconceptions spread by this extremely annoying and exceedingly irrelevant cult.

Starting off with a belittling insult is always the best way to get your point across. Scientologists believe that little alien souls inhabit us all and we are all descended from an alien god who put people in volcanoes. Sabrematicians use 140 years of data to come up with patterns that they can apply to baseball players. Remember folks: any first-year college class that deals with statistics = aliens.

Definition.
Sabermetrics is also known as, long winded pointless dissertation, insufferable boors with calculators, or guys with pocket protectors. If you’re like me, you don’t need to know the equation for cracking oil to figure out you got a batch of bad gas in your car. Or live near the Devil Rays or Royals, to realize beauty might be skin deep but bad goes all the way through.

Excellent use of cliche. I bet he likes pitchers that are “built like a horse” or outfielders that “look like a ballplayer”. One of these days, I’ll have to try and figure out what a “ballplayer” looks like (I’ll be he’s white). I also enjoy how it’s a long winded, pointless dissertation to say “hitters who get on base a lot, pitchers who don’t let guys on base a lot, and guys who don’t make errors are better than guys who do the exact opposite of those things.” One would think that would make a whole lot of sense and guys that already do this well are better than guys who don’t do it well but might do it well some day.

Humor.
Sabermites believe they have a sense of humor. Sadly, it can only be expressed mathmatically.

Oh, wit. My favorite math jokes:

Old mathematicians never die; they just lose some of their functions.

Trigonometry for farmers: swine and coswine.

Let epsilon be less than zero…

All of which are funnier than the above.

Reality.
Using pseudo-algebraic conclusions to describe the infinite intangibles of great baseball is like using cement to describe Mozart. Abstract baseball minutia stacked like pancakes doesn’t get around the real consistent opinion voiced by those who watch baseball daily and this churns the guts of Sabermites.

No, the general idea is that “intangibles” are greatly over-rated. I’ll give you the all-intangibles team and you give me a team built with stats and I’ll win 70 out of 100 times.

Do you know the difference between watching Alex Rodriguez play every day and looking at his stat line for 2007? If you watch him play ever day, you know he’s having one hell of a season. If you look at his stat-line, it tells you he’s having one hell of a season. See how that works? This works in baseball because at-bats are pretty static things with very few variables at any given time. Since almost no one watches every game every day, they provide a convenient way to compare seasons.

Equate.
Never allow anyone near the prime equation of sabermetrics, A+B=Shut the Hell Up. This is sports for math club members.

I guess this is his vaunted “sense of humor” shared by “real baseball guys”? I’ll share more math jokes:

How many mathematicians does it take to change a light bulb?
None. The answer is intuitively obvious.

Q: What is the first derivative of a cow?
A: Prime Rib!

I’ve heard that the government wants to put a tax on the mathematically ignorant. Funny, I thought that’s what the lottery was!

Q: Wadaya get when you take the circumference of your jack-o-lantern and divide it by its diameter?
A: Pumpkin Pi.

Gross Tonnage.
The complicated formula for “Hey that guy just bunted the runner to second…” would fill this entire page. SABER stat-bot hysteria amply illustrates the “Star Trek Factor,” now that Kirk’s too fat to worship, Sabermites invented an arcane statistical abstract to replace dialectic Klingon arguments that made their life worth living…

Here’s arcane: look at each possible combination of bases and outs and see, on average, how many runs score from each state. For example, if you had a man on first with zero outs (in 2005) on average you scored 0.89 runs by the end of that inning. Then, you compare it to having a man on second with one out and discover that, in 2005, you scored an average of 0.69 by the end of the inning. 0.69 is less than 0.89, so you were more likely to get a run if you didn’t sacrifice an out. If your sacrifice fails, and you have a man on first with one out, you drop to scoring an average of 0.54 runs by the end of the inning. That also means, if you have a guy with a crappy average (like a pitcher at the plate) that if he’s more likely to ground in to a double play or fly out than get a hit, that it makes more sense to give him up for an out.

Believe it or not, real baseball guys think this way, too. It’s the same reason that you probably wouldn’t expect Derek Jeter to bunt a guy over, but it’s less surprising when Tom Glavine does it.

Value.
According to SABER dogma, a single just isn’t worth a double. Take that Ty Cobb, you BLEEP because 75% of your hits aren’t all that and a bag of SABER chips.

Let’s think about this for a second. Ty Cobb, who walked 118 times and struck out 43 times in 1915? Ty Cobb, who posted a career OBP of .433, a career SLG of .513, and 1,249 walks vs a (I’m projecting) 538 strike-outs? Ty Cobb’s actually a stat-head’s wet dream. Ty Cobb is only ever brought up when people make self-righteous moral statements about the hallowed grounds of Cooperstown. Ty Cobb, who once slapped a black elevator operator for being “uppity” and then stabbed the black night watchman who intervened and who beat up a handicapped guy for taunting him. He’s in the Hall of Fame… but idiot writers are going to make holier-than-thou statements about the players these days, who may or may not have used illicit substances to get stronger? Or that we’re somehow supposed to dislike Mark McGwire for using creatine? Meanwhile, if I was a very religious writer, I’d get ridiculed for bringing up the fact that every person in New York State probably knows someone who knows someone that Captain Intangibles in New York has slept with (I know two!). He’s of high moral character, though, and has all sorts of awesome intangibles. Steroids made you morally corrupt. Everything else is, apparently, fair game.

Anyone who says Ty Cobb’s baseball accomplishments are over-rated are not only painfully wrong, but quite possibly brain-dead.

Worship the Stat Gods
Barry Bonds is a perfect example, the thought of losing all those succulent steroid drenched numbers sends the average Sabermite into a slobbery, mad dog, frenzy. They would rather chew off the non-math lobe of their brain than let go, or admit, that Barry might indeed be full of nincompoop.

While I can’t speak for everyone, for me it’s more “If you celebrated the Mark McGwire/Sammy Sosa run for the record, don’t go and get up on a moral high-horse now because Bonds calls you media assholes out as exactly what you are: media assholes.” Baseball made this bed when they looked the other way after the strike season, now they get what they deserve.

What Can You Do?
I know the answer to every problem is “sing a song” but if organizing a world wide series of concerts is beyond your grasp, try these simple SABER killing phrases:

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Albert Einstein

Very true… it’s very hard to quantify defensive-aptitude in baseball.

I think this can be summed up with one thought: “Jocks still hate nerds. Jocks just get lamer as they get older.”

The worst week(s) of my life, thus far, actually began about July 3rd. I really say this without reservation: July of 2007 has been the worst month of my life not involving the death of a family member.

So, to start at the beginning, about a month before, The Lovely And Talented Ms. L started getting a wicked case of hives. Fortunately, we had recently bought a new type of detergent for the first time, so we immediately assumed it was the new detergent and set to re-washing everything. As the hives didn’t go away, we obviously realized this wasn’t the case. She proceeded to go to a few doctors, who referred her to two different allergists who came to the conclusion that she was allergic to everything on the planet. They put her down as highly allergic to grass (we live in New York City… not a ton of grass around), cats (we’ve had a cat for two years), dogs (her family has three dogs), and about 20 (no that’s not an exaggeration) other things including dairy, fruit, pollen, air, wood, polar bears, and Republicans.

A couple of weeks later my cat, who has been dubbed The Ninja Kitty, suddenly started getting really interested in the couch. Around 9pm every night, the cat would get up on the couch and start intently stalking the cushions. Now, I love my cat, but I’m perfectly willing to admit she’s mildly insane. So are all cats. Later on in the night, she would start batting at some mysterious thing on the couch.

Finally, a doctor mentions that they might be bug bites, but that theory is quickly dismissed since I haven’t been bitten by anything. A couple of days after that and Ms. L kills a bug on the bed. Shortly after Ms. L kills the bug, I finally notice some microscopic little crawly things on the couch… which is what The Ninja Kitty had been noticing. My building has an exterminator in the building once a week… so eventually we’re able to catch one of the things and put it in a zip-lock bag. Lo and Behold, the exterminator reveals the itchy truth: we have bed bugs.

I can’t actually express to you the horror which followed for me. Many of you may or may not know this… but I’m mildly insane when it comes to certain things. For instance, I can’t keep milk in the refrigerator at work because I’m afraid that someone will drink out of my carton. I can’t leave my water bottle open because I have visions of roaches throwing a little cocktail party in my it. Yet, I have no problem playing beer pong with perfect strangers… go figure. Anyway, after the exterminator told me what I had, he then informed me of my options. As my couch, chair, and ottoman were all microfiber (and my first set of actual matching furniture, at that) were given the death sentence of “we have a terrible time getting them completely out of furniture of this type and it would almost cost you more for the treatments than to just replace them. Not that it was really a problem as I’d likely never be able to sit on the furniture again, much less sleep on it. A similar judgment was passed on my mattress and bed frame… along with the verdict that every stitch of bedding that can’t be washed has to be tossed… and every thing that CAN be washed has to be sent through the hot water cycle and dried to ensure that any stragglers have been killed.

And strangely, my cat has just started to throw up an awful lot.

Fucking Ugh