Do a Yahoo! search on "yankees choke," and my site comes up fifth. What a proud day this is for me.

The Red Sox won 17-0 and pitched a no-hitter. Too bad it's spring training. And they were playing a college team. But still...actual baseball games are back again. The circle of life continues.

When I saw this picture of Kevin Millar, I thought, What, is he having twins?

Yes, he is.

Seahorse-boy Up!

Before I decided not to, I had kind of wanted to drive to Florida and see some spring training games. This would have been the week. So I saved a whole lot of money and I avoided the apparent north pole-like climate of Ft. Myers. But our boy Wrong Dog Silva is down there, and he's keeping us up to date with dozens of pictures of concession stand workers and empty bleachers.

Have you noticed that every year around this time we hear about how cold it is in Florida? The crops always freeze, the space shuttle always gets de-iced. Terrible job, Sunshine State.

Last night, and you can stop reading here if you're only here for baseball stuff, Pat & I drove up to one of my favorite places in the world, Northampton, Mass, to see Lou Barlow. This show easily made up for the fact that the Sleater-Kinney shows in NYC sold out before I even checked for tickets, and I couldn't get anybody to go to Le Tigre at Toad's Place in New Haven, strictly because nobody (myself included) wanted to go to the crap-a-rama that is Toad's.

But again, Lou Barlow and Northampton both rule, so it all worked out. Lou, of course, is the dude from Dinosaur Jr and Sebadoh. And Sentridoh. And the Folk Implosion. The music was great, it was him and an acoustic guitar, and a drum machine type thing. He also went back and forth (within songs) between a regular mic and a mic that makes it sound like he's on the phone. The dude has perfect pitch. Find out more about him at his website, (you'll be able to tell why big kids like myself enjoy this guy). Click on the cat picture, and see his reasoning on why he's a cat person. I agree with his logic 100%.

On stage, he reminds me, in a way, of the comedian Stephen Wright, only not as over-the-top-melancholy. (Under the bottom, I guess.) When he would talk between songs, he'd tell these fairly depressing tales, and compound them by accidentally hitting himself in the face with the mic, or knocking his guitar into a mic, making an ugly noise. And he'd just laugh it off. What I'm trying to say is he had a good stage presence, in a Stephen Wright kind of way. At one point he told a story of a cat he took in. After a while, the story went, the cat just disappeared, but then it returned. Then he played the song he wrote about the situation, only to shake his head at the end and say, "It ended up running away again. And it never came back."

He also said he's gotten 25 good haircuts in a row, always telling the barber to take off a half an inch, since his hair is curly. So with that streak, he got cocky on his most recent haircut, and told the barber to take a full inch off, leaving him with way-too-short hair. The way he told these stories were much funnier when he told them, you know how life is.

I saw him play with Sebadoh last year, but I don't remember him being this funny. Maybe it was because last night he had the stage all to himself.

Oh, and he covered that Ratt song "Round and Round." Hilarious. He told the story of Dinosaur Jr practicing in J's basement with MTV on with the sound down (in the eighties), and every time Ratt would come on, they'd turn the sound up.

Northampton-style famous types we saw milling about at the show: J Mascis.

We were going to parlay the trip into a viewing of the Sox game, since we knew we'd be in NESN territory, but the logistics didn't allow it, and we were sure the game would be rained out anyway. So the plan was "Parlay: View and Barlow, Lou." But we only got the Barlow, Lou.

As Bill Hicks would say, "Get off your 'we hate puns' high horse."