Update: Petagine Called Up.

Our apartment is really long and narrow. Narrow enough so that my bed can only fit one way in my room. But long enough for a forty-yard dash. So tonight, I said to Chan, "Hey Chan, I wonder how fast I can run from one end of the apartment to the other." Before this idea could settle into Chan's brain, I'd already taken off my watch and was telling him which button to use to start and stop the timer. I decided to make a prediction as to how long it would take. I closed my eyes and ran the apartment in my mind, counting the seconds as I did. "I bet I can do it in under five seconds," I boasted. Then after a second I changed my estimate to 4.25 seconds.

I headed to the kitchen, clearing a path along the way. I got in position, hand touching the table against the wall. Chan was ready on the other side, ready for the classic "On your mark, get set, go." He'd then stop the watch when I touched the far wall.

At the signal, I sprinted across. Not much to avoid in the kitchen, some junk on the floor as I passed through my room, then Chan's, and into the home stretch of the living room. The end was tough, since I had to slow down from a full sprint about two steps from the wall, to avoid injury.

"Ooh, 4.28," said Chan, less excited than the "ooh" might suggest on paper.

I was very excited that I guessed within three hundredths of a second of my actual time. But I'm pretty good at stuff like that. Ask my friend Brian how I do at celebrity-age guessing. Actually, ask the whole town of Danbury, Connecticut. They watched me guess celebrity ages on our old cable access show for a good fifteen minutes. When I say the entire town, I mean, of course, the ten people who watched the show. But the entire town COULD have watched. (Although e-mail response volume suggested they did not.)

So I did one more run, because, in the tradition of household records, you have to try to break it at least once. Got 4.03. Maybe tomorrow I'll try to break the four-second barrier. Make that definitely.

Well, my other prediction today wasn't as good as 4.25. But close, kind of. My 12-1 win prediction said that I thought the Sox would win a game in which 13 runs were scored. Exactly right. And I said seven strong for Miller. He started the seventh, and he gave up less runs than our offense had at the time. And got the win. So, come on, I was right again there. Exactly.

So are all you fair-weather Manny fans gonna bitch and moan about him missing time again? You saw the blood, right? See, the straight-laced, regular-haired, not-threatening-to-your-white-picket-fenced-neighborhood Schilling had blood, now Manny has blood. They both miss time when they have to, and they both come back and play amazing baseball.

30 homers for Manny, too. I remember when that was a rare thing for an entire season.

The yanks had a four-nothing lead tonight with the Moose. They lost. We've got them by four and a half. And they still have really, really, really crappy pitching. Cano was on fire tonight, bunting foul with two strikes, dropping a pop-up, screwing up Jeter on a double-play ball. Although some of the blame on that goes to Jeter, who made his second horrible throw to first of the night on the play. Can you believe that? Two "one-in-a-trillion"s in the same game. In all yankee announcers' minds, anyway. "Wow, you'll NEVER see Jeter do THAT.....or THAT." And I love it when it looks like it's gonna be a "Troika/TanGorMo" night, but then the plan goes all to hell. (These are actual names that Michael Kay calls the theory of some mythical yankee starter going six perfect innings, before handing the ball over to Stutze for a perfect seventh, Gordon for a perfect eighth, and Mariano for a perfect ninth.) And, again, Jeter made the last out. Giz-old.

Do you realize we're 10 1/2 up on Baltimore now? And the Jays are within a game and a half of NY.

But back to the apartment dash. I just realized how it all started. At one point in the yankee game tonight, some Indian took a 2-0 pitch right down the middle. I said, "Come on, I woulda swung at that...and hit a home run." Chan laughed and said, "You don't have the power." I quickly came back with, "Inside-the-park!" Chan, predictably, but incorrectly, said, "You don't have the speed."

I said, "Chan, pick any thirty people off the street outside, and I guarantee I'm faster than 29 of them." So we started talking about actually racing random people, and then my idea of running across the apartment came up.