I'm so happy about the yanks' blown game and series loss to the Devil Rays, that I'm not going to get into my Chan-scaring rage that I was in earlier in the game.

Since the yanks elected to put Aaron Smallace (because he looks like Wallace, from Wallace & Grommit, last time I'll explain that one) in the pen, due to Jaret Wright's return, I guess Torre's plan tonight was to go with Leiter, and then have Smallace at the ready. Leiter actually did pretty well; didn't even have to throw 120 pitches. In fact, he was only at about 80, I think, when Torre gave him the quick hook. And it cost them, as Smallace had his first bad outing, getting the Rays back in the game. (A game they were only losing, 5-2, because of their own miscues, and yankee bloop hits, of course.) Then the yanks thought, hey, how can we work Alan "Captain Cheese" Embree into this one? Cheese actually didn't do too bad, but note that at this point, Piniella was doing everything he possibly could to give the yanks the game. A blown squeeze helped them get out of the seventh, with the game tied. Cheese was still in in the eighth when Cano made a horrible throwing error. Then Sturtze came in, gave up a double, and then gave up the winning run on what Ken Sigleton called "The wildest pitch you'll ever see." (Not really, as a dude once threw a pitch at Fenway that went on top of the screen, slowly rolling down as two Red Sox scored.) A 1-2-3 ninth by Danys Baez, and the Rays actually had a comeback win. Hallelujah. So, we're still up 5 in the loss, with 44 to play. (43 for them.) Hey, the yanks' record is 65-54! Do you know what this means? It means that Michael Backwards Kay's prediction of 108 wins is one loss away from being incorrect. As of now, they'd have to go 43-0 for Kay to nail it. My predictions can be off, but not that far off.

That was a long paragraph, eh? Anyway, it's getting close to magic number time. Last year, I kept track of it here all season. This year, I guess I'll wait til it hits single digits. I'm sure everyone will be talking about it by then, though. I'm sure I'll come up with some new and exciting way to do it.

So we head for the coast now, and the yanks head to Blotown, where they'll face a team whose motto for the season is: "Win. Or die trying." I kid you not.

In "music in commercials" news, I've noticed some astonishing things lately. Jane's Addiction's "Mountain Song" appeared in a Coors ad recently. And "Easy"--the Faith No More version, as opposed to Lionel Richie's--is on some Levi's commercial. But the craziest one is the Nissan spot, which features the tune "Can't Wait One Minute More" by CIV. The dude from CIV, named Civ, used to be the singer for the straight edge hardcore band Gorilla Biscuits. I just think it's odd. I mean, not only the fact that these people are selling rights to big corporations that stand against everything their bands once stood for, but just that these dudes are now the voices of commercial jingles that people who would never listen to these bands now hear every day. I'm talkin' about:


I don't know, maybe it doesn't really matter. I guess everybody dresses and acts "weird" nowadays. And it's no different from all those sixties songs that are in commercials. Maybe it's just weird to me to hear these bands from "my" generation in commercials.

Oh well. yankees lost.