the red sox have no class.

Last night, Coco Crisp (yes, if your not familiar with him, he does in fact share his name with the breakfast cereal) took a swing at the (first place) Tampa Bay Rays’ James Shields after getting plunked.

After the game Crisp basically called the Rays a bunch of pussies.

Later in the same game Manny Ramirez and Kevin Youkillus went at it in the dugout.

Let us not forget the fact Manny Ramirez doesn’t acutally wear baseball pants during games, Tony Francona chews a disgusting amount of gum every game, and the team refuses to enforce any real cleanliness issues with the players or the uniforms they wear.

Maybe it’s the Yankee fan in me, but even to an innocent bystander, the Red Sox have to be perceived as classless.  The Yankees do go a little over-the-top with their restrictions on facial hair and uniform cleanliness, but would it kill someone to get a new batting helmet when it’s covered in pine tar?  Would it upset Ramirez to actually put on a baseball uniform?

There’s something called the sanctity of the game and the Red Sox, in their neverending quest to be the anti-Yankees, have thrown it all to hell.

Fenway Park is a shrine to the game, the Red Sox organization should put together a team worthy of it.

it’s 10:30…

I woke up this morning at 9:30.  I don’t know where the time went today.  It’s 10:30 now on the East Coast, meaning I’ve been up for 13 hours, and I have done nothing besides spend 40 minutes on a treadmill and 15 minutes doing push-ups and sit-ups.

I go back to work on Saturday and (for once) I’m actually looking forward to it.  And it’s not even like it’s a new job, or something that might actually not suck, it’s the same old job I left after spring break and promised myself I’d never go back to.  I’m looking forward to it and it’s Saturday hours.  Saturday night hours.  I don’t get off work until 9, and I want to go.

What is wrong with me!?

my new toy.

Get your head out of the gutter.  It’s a cell phone, not some type of crazy newfangled vibrating…never mind.  I’m not even going to go there.

And it just isn’t any cell phone.  It’s a Motorola Q9c equipped with Windows Mobile 6.  That’s right, a smartphone.

Oh yeah.  Look at that.  It’s beautiful isn’t it?

Full QWERTY keyboard, integrates with Outlook, has Documents-to-Go functionality, has email and web service, Windows Media player.  And, get this IT CAN MAKE PHONE CALLS TOO.

But I can’t help trying to shake this feeling that it is taking over my life.  As I sit at my laptop and write this while periodically looking up to see how the Yankees are doing (Hey, Michael Kay and Al Lieter just started a full blown conversation about Manhattan College’s baseball legacy*) I can’t help but keep the phone within my field of vision.

Last night I even felt compelled to put my entire schedule on it.

Up to December.

I put every class on my Fall 2008 schedule and the dates of the newspaper meetings on it.

It sits here, to my left and it is beckoning to me.  “Pick me up, send a text message with me, GO ONLINE AND RUN UP YOUR PARENTS PHONE BILL WITH MY PRE-INSTALLED INTERNET EXPLORER!”

Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to get this phone.  I feel like it is going to try and integrate with me (hey, it’s already done so with Outlook) and it’s going to end terribly, like that episode of South Park with Cartman’s Trapper Keeper that is supposed to bring about a post-apocalyptic world in which humanity has to take up arms against the machines we have created to make life easier a-la Terminator.

Yeah, just like that.

*The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY recognizes that Brother Jasper started the tradition, validating that version of the story as the origin of the late frame stretching.  Take that Harry Wright, Cincinnati Red Stockings, and President William Howard Taft.

pj orourke is hillarious

Under the influence of my father I have always felt some type of desire to read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. “It was what our nation’s economic principles were based on!” I was told (or something similar).

However, while I felt the need to feel the need to read it, I never actually wanted to pick up the book. Honestly, it was written by a Scottish philosopher who died a couple hundred years ago. I can appreciate that, but I’d rather not sit down and read all [INSERT OUTRAGEOUS NUMBER HERE] pages of his writing. Luckily, P.J. O’Rourke has taken it upon himself to make Smith’s ideas consumable for the general unwashed masses, aptly titling his interpretation of the influential work On The Wealth of Nations.

Ok, I think I was a bit over dramatic on how much he cleaned up Smith’s original work. He presents Smith’s origins, the origins of his ideas, and his economic thinking all very well, without the circular thinking and wordiness O’Rourke admits is present in The Wealth of Nations. But it isn’t at all dumbed down.

The complexity of Smith’s ideas are still there, but O’Rourke presents them in both a humorous and understandable way. But there were times I felt like I was a little kid watching Saturday Night Live again. I just laughed when everyone else did regardless of whether I actually understood the joke or not. Even though no one else was reading the book with me, so I just sat there and laughed to myself. It was at this point my mother began to worry about my substance abuse habits.

But unlike SNL, O’Rourke’s humor is much more high-brow (keep in mind being more high-brow than SNL isn’t particularly hard). In fact, there were times at which I thought I was trying to fit in at some swank, overtly pretentious Ivy League cocktail party. I’ll be honest, some of On The Wealth of Nations was just over my head. And I’m not stupid, I got a 750 on the Reading Comprehension part of the SAT (transcript available upon request).

But not all of his writing is like that. After doing a little research, I found his ode to Hunter S. Thompson-style gonzo journalism entitled “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.” Not only was it one of the funniest things I’ve ever read, but it wasn’t over my head.

The only thing I dislike about the book, is the cover. Perhaps because I was waking into my room from the shower this morning when I looked down at the book cover, and O’Rourke seemed to be looking back at me as if to say, “y helo thar.”

Perhaps it was just the ideas O’Rourke was presenting that made me feel like I was in a bit over my head. Or maybe it was the fact I was coming down off a hangover almost every time I cracked the pages of the book. Either or.

game 5

It’s been said time and time again and last night proved it to be true. Nothing can truly match the intensity of the Stanley Cup finals.

One of the most anticipated finals to date – the veteran-driven Detroit Red Wings facing off against the young gun Pens – has proven to live up to the hype (however, it’s not like it is particularly hard to top the past hype of, say, a Carolina Hurricanes cup run, but I digress). In fact it is even reminding older fans of Gretzky and Messier’s first team, the Edmonton Oilers, having to pay the piper, which in this instance took the form of the New York Islanders, before winning five cups in seven years.

With that said, the series has historical significance.

A breif few minutes in Game 4 became the shift of Brooks Orpik’s life. The Pittsburgh Penguins defenseman hit everything in sight. Game 5 became Marc Andre-Fleurry’s coming out party, as he single-handedly kept the Pens in the game from the third period into the overtime.

Chris Osgood, the Red Wing’s stand-in for the formerly great Dominik “The Dominator” Hasek, played the Pittsburgh to two scoreless games. Johan Franzen came back from what I’ll call a concussion, and continued to make an impact, all the while taking shots to his head.

Furthermore, this series is great for the game. It has two relevant hockey markets going at it. No more Down South expansion franchises going at it all the while boring the combined populaces of the US and Canada (sorry Sun Belt hockey fans).

In my mind, this cup series marks a turning point for the sport of hockey. The series has everything, and it is going to turn some heads. People will start paying attention and the game will grow.

aleve commercials

I’m not sure if anyone’s seen the new Aleve commercials. They have people talking about how it allows them to move. They play this annoying music while nonthreatening members of various ethnic groups dance, as they laud, mid-dance, the benefits of taking Aleve to kill pain.

And here I was thinking extacy was the only pill you could make you dance. Oh, how wrong I was.

This week I plan to submit some stuff I wrote to a few online publications. I think I’m just going to end up submitting two microfiction pieces to Rumble, but they don’t seem to publish consistently, so it might be a while before I hear back from them.

lsd vs alcohol vs tree

http://wallout.com/lsd_vs_alcohol_vs_tree

I found this thanks to the Laugh Lines blog from the New York Times.  I laughed.

craigslist missed connections

I’ve started trolling the fuck out of that site in recent weeks, looking for places to get work published, looking for jobs, and recently, looking through the “missed connections” portion of the personals section.

It’s weird, it’s like a huge message board for people who missed the one possible shot they had at meeting someone.  And it seems like such a long shot too.  I’ve read ones along the lines of “We made eye contact at lunch at 49th and 2nd” or “I saw you getting on the 6 train.”  I even saw one of someone who graduated from my high school looking for an old classmate.

As I sat here reading them I wondered to myself if these things actually ever work, or is it simply a way of exercising the demons of frustration on missing your shot?

basement shows were the only good thing to come out of jersey

After listening to Lifetime and Texas is the Reason the last two days I’ve begun to lament the lack of really good music that’s come out lately.

Of course I’ve always done this.  I’ve regretted how all the bands I listened to when I was in 8th grade or my freshman year broke up (Finch*, Something Corporate, The Movielife, just about anyone else signed to Drive-Thru Records circa 2002), and how no one makes music like that anymore, but never has it really hit me like this.

It was always a “damn somebody should make more music like this,” not an urgent I-NEED-TO-START-A-BAND-AND-BRING-THIS-SCENE-BACK feeling.  That’s what makes people still care about bands like this — that sense of urgency and longing for a time that’s gone by.  For some it’s Led Zeppelin or The Beatles, to me, it’s all the aforementioned bands.

After listening to Texas is the Reason you can hear, loud and clear, the imprint the band made on Long Island outfits Brand New and Taking Back Sunday, but dirtier, but nevertheless relevant, vocals.

As for Lifetime, if you’ve ever read about a New Brunswick, NJ basement show and immediately wanted to have one, you have these guys to thank.

It really hit me, today especially, that everyone wants to make heavier and heavier music (see: Metalcore), or keep up the Hardcore, and (sometimes) mix in some New Found Glory-style pop-punk (even though NFG’s new stuff has very strong Hardcore undertones), so the likelihood of these type of bands coming back is almost nonexistent, but I hope anyway…

*I know Finch got back together.  They’ve even got an EP coming out next summer (I hope it’s What it is to Burn Finch and not Say Hello to Sunshine Finch, not that SHtS was bad, it just wasn’t Finch)!