"Airlines are investigating why windshields cracked on at least 12 planes at Denver International Airport while a storm was whipping through the area with wind of up to 100 mph."

You know what I think? I think it was the wind that did it. But I'm just a blogger.

Speaking of public transportation--is some cosmic force trying to tell me and my friends something? This weekend, Chan was supposed to fly to Florida, my friend Jennie was supposed to fly to Alabama, and I was going to go out to Queens and get some shots of the construction of the Mets' new stadium. After Wednesday's little storm that could, all flights were messed up, leading Jennie to cancel her trip. Then Chan found out this morning that all JetBlue's flights to Jacksonville were cancelled for the next two days, ending his three-day trip before it began. And then I found out on the news that the 7 train, the only one that goes directly to Shea, is all effed up. So we're all staying put.

When are the Red Sox going to admit that The Police will be playing Fenway Park in July? Tickets are going on sale Tuesday. Everybody knows it. Where's the story? Ever since these concerts at Fenway started happening, I've been waiting for a band to play that I liked even just a little bit, just so I could go and be on the field at Fenway, while maybe enjoying two or three mainstream hits and then calling for the band to play them again and just forget about the "new stuff." I guess The Police are kind of close--I mean, I like every other one of their radio hits. Still, I don't think I'm gonna do it.

I usually get a letter in the mail for being a season ticket holder (if only for 10/81sts of the games) giving me the opportunity to buy concert tickets before everyone else. This time, maybe it's an entirely ticketmaster-ed event. Whatever. Why am I even talking about this? I'm totally not going. Fuck The Police and Jere said it with authority.

I've decided the only band I like that's "big" enough to play Fenway that would have any chance of doing so is the Beastie Boys. I wouldn't bet on it, though.

You know the top story on CNN last hour was "Britney Spears shaves head"? Canada here I come. I thought it was a great move by the anchor who followed up the first anchor's Spears story with a completely straight-faced "And now for some real news..."

The official "reporter who blogs on the side" of ARSFIPT, Amalie 3000, continues to give us real-life, "hey, check this out"-style news from Ft. Myers over on Extra Bases. I decided that if 3000 was a dude, I'd be jealous. Like, "Hey, what the eff? I could do that! He's just hanging out with the team, and telling us what's going on without pretention, I could (and often do) do that! I irrationally hate him! He's probably "cute," too! Screw him forever." But, 3000 is female. So, whatever, she's no threat to us in the "male, thinks they're funny, young but old enough to remember Jim Rice as a player, writes about the Red Sox and seems to genuinely enjoy it and wants them to win" demographic. But you female Sox bloggers--you should be jealous! You can do that! All they had to do was ask you!

It seems Kevin Youkilis has a huge, dark goatee now. I for one am happy about this. I don't know how to explain this without making every molecule in your body explode at the speed of light, but I like it when Red Sox players make cosmetic adjustments that "the ladies" don't like. Clement's beard, Bronsons rows, Schilling's, I don't know, he did something to his hair once... they're always met with "lose that, it doesn't look good." And, I don't know, as a dude, sometimes I do weird stuff with my hair or facial hair just for the hell of it, and I hate to think that people are talking about me behind my back. So, maybe that's it. Maybe it's just that I can relate to not being the Barry Zito of the bunch, so when I hear a female say that some dude is not good-looking in whatever way, I suddenly can relate to that dude. And that makes me feel good, because said dude is on the Red Sox. Hence, Jere=Red Sox player. The dream is alive, children. Now to work on that knuckle ball...

Did you hear the heir to the Evil throne, Steve Swindal, got arrested for DUI? Judging by the police report, I think Big Stein has tabbed the right man for the job. Take a look. Click to enlarge:


Oh! Oh! Better post title: The great drink & drive Swindal!

When I told writers to lay off Dice-K yesterday, I almost thought I was kidding--meaning, why should I have to say that? Who'd have anything bad to say about the guy yet? Silly me--in my boycott of bostonshittydirtshittydogs, I never see what the slugmaster does unless I absolutely have to through following links, just to see what someone's talking about. Sure enough, BDD has already taken the "Dice is fat" angle in his journalism.

I only know this because I was looking at, uh, a major sports website, and saw an article saying, basically, "Dice is fat." It links to some kid's new Red Sox blog. After clicking there, we find out that he's just (admittedly) repeating something dirt dick said: "Dice is fat."

1. He's not fat.

2. Terrible job by dirt dog for having nothing else to say about our nice, funny, new pitcher but "look, he's chubby!"

3. Terrible job by that kid for having nothing else to say but something that he got from BDD.

4. Terrible job by, all right, it's deadspin, for taking what some dude who's been blogging for a month said, that wasn't even his own opinion, but came directly from "I know my name is Steven" Silva, and making it into an entire post.

So I think my boycott will extend out a little further now. No need to go to BDD, ever, but we've known that for quite some time. But I think it's just better for my health if I avoid most internet Red Sox articles. Fat chance, but I have to give it try. It just makes me too angry reading all the lies and rumors. Think about it, when is it the most fun to watch the Red Sox? When you've been off the internet for a few days. That way, there could be some stupid made up Manny talk or whatever, but just watching the games, you'd never know it.

Amalie "(Ice Cold) 3000" Benjamin is the newest writer on boston.com's Extra Bases "blog." EB was always pretty cool, but bland and not updated often enough. Amalie makes it more personal, like, "Here I am with the Red Sox and here's what's going on and I can't wait to tell you what happens next." It's working so far. So click over there, but make sure you ignore all the "ssilva" posts!

Note: On Colbert just now, they committed one of my pet peeves--saying "J.J. Walker." It was Jimmie Walker. (He played the character J.J. Evans.) God!

Nice article about Dicey Jones. I am getting so psyched for this dude. All signs point to him pitching his first Fenway game on April 11th, which I have tickets for.

From the article:

I would like my first batter, if he is listening, please try and not hit the ball.

Nice! I hope he's listening. The rest of the article gives a sense of what a funny guy Daisuke is. And he says he either will or will not throw the existing or non-existing Gyroball, as well as a knuckler. For all the writers that are ready to run him out of town for no reason, consider just quitting right now. We don't need you. Give the guy a chance. It seems the media is liking him, and we'll hope it stays that way. And for those Sox fans who are just discovering the team's internet presence, you're gonna see a big, pretty USA Today-ish site called boston dirt dogs, and you're gonna feel the pressure to spew out his ideas as your own, to be cool or whatever. Just consider getting the facts first and forming your own opinions. That site doesn't know any more than any other one.

The last quiz had problems. Check out what happened in the comments there. So here's the replacement quiz--and I'll make use of this comment moderation thing, since people can buzz in and their answer won't show up until I allow it to. But you only get one guess. The first one to guess right will get three points. The next two will get a point each. And it's easy, because I have to move this along:

When was the last year that another Boston MLB team had a better regular season record than the Red Sox?

The Las Vegas Money, their owner, Jere, and team president, also Jere, do not condone the recent statements of former player Tim Hardaway, who stated that he hates gay people. Mr. Hardaway is no longer welcome at any reunions, or in the Money family in general. Terrible job, Tim. Grow the F up.

[The Las Vegas Money was my fantasy basketball team in high school, from 1989-1992. The first season consisted of my Money, Mike (the pitcher in the basement league video)'s Dynamite, Pat(my 10-game plan partner at Fenway)'s Spolars, and Casey's short-lived Coneheads, who didn't make it through year one. Season two saw the fall of the Spolars--leading to a huge problem: Who gets Jordan?--and the addition of city names, with my Money going to Las Vegas, and Mike's Dynamite squad taking up roots in Memphis. My team's slogan that year was "Makin' More Money in '90-'91ey." I witnessed (if only in boxscores) the play of Michael Adams of the Nuggets that year, and let me tell you: Underrated. Our league was weighted toward three-pointers, and that guy shot them more often than he did free throws. I just looked it up, and my memory is right: 564 threes attempted that season. I probably haven't shot that many threes in all my years of playground ball combined. Needless to say, fantasy leagues were way cooler back then. I guess I grew up in the "walked ten miles through snow, uphill both ways" days of fantasy sports. But my achilles heel will always be that I absolutely refuse to pick players from my rival teams. I don't know how anyone can! Terrible job, America. As usual. When somebody's sitting next to me at Fenway, and they say, "It's okay if A-Rod gets a hit, he's on my fantasy team," my response is, "I hope you die."]

Google maps just added subway stops to New York City. I checked Boston, and you've got it, too. Ours give specific lines (when you zoom in), whereas Boston just shows name of station. Still, a big day in map...ping.

Did you know the Yanks will be wearing an arm band all season in honor of the late Cory Lidle, even though he only appeared in ten games for them? Hey, that is 3.6 percent of his total games in the majors...

Other specials at Dunbar Stadium in 2007:

Andy Stankiewicz plaque unveiled in Monument Park

I'll stop there. You all know the drill by now. It's actually funnier to just wait for the Yanks' promotional schedule to come out, and list some of those days. They provide the comedy for me with their Yankees pen lights and Don Mattingly toaster oven covers.

Please read the story of Gary Tyler. Jason made me aware of this situation. The guy's been locked up, convicted of a crime he didn't commit, since 1975, the year I was born.

My old town of Danbury, CT in the news. (The Boston news, even.)

Guy, in jail for weed posession, has his mom bring him his safe, so he can use the cash inside to bail himself out. What else in in the safe? Coke. Whoops.

Also, Olbermann just made fun of NYC for "not being ready" for this snow"storm," reporting that midtown streets were unplowed. I'd like to agree that they did a terrible job. 1st Avenue literally looked like a plow had not gone by all day, let alone the cross streets. Just one plow, right now, going up or down each avenue will make things a lot easier for drivers. But, hey, I guess they just don't feel like it...

Lenny DiNardo's gone. Too bad. I still think that kid's gonna be a quality pither one day. Photo by me. And what's with Drew getting Trot's number? Terrible job.

I love the headline of this article.

Most Americans like to have it the easy way. They'd love it if there was one giant corporation that ruled every aspect of their lives. I'm not down with that. Google now owns Blogger and YouTube. And without getting into the details, everything's all fucked up. I just want you all to be able to go to a page with all my movies on there. I tried using the movie label, but that only shows back to August of '06, and there's no way to go further back. I just set up a new YouTube account, and tried making all the vids private, but the embedded versions couldn't be viewed here that way. So now they're all public again. Which gives me a greater chance of getting kicked off again. Because god forbid I put up a two second clip of Diff'rent Strokes without contatcting the ghost of Conrad Bain himself. People are greedy and horrible, and they'd rather have their creations sit unseen for eternity than have someone pay tribute to it by actually letting people see it.

And now that Blogger and YouTube are owned by the same people, who control me, talking about YouTube over here on Blogger will get me screwed over again, because one big machine monitors it all. The people of this country need to start some major boycotting. You'll have to sacrifice, but it will be worth it save our world. (Not MyWorld.)

So, go ahead, Blogger or Google or YouTube or whoever you are, punish me for the horrible, horrible crime of allowing a few hundred people to see a guy hitting a ball with a stick from 15 years ago, while you keep destroying the planet and its people. (Thanks for this free blog, though--how long til it's "Wal-Mart presents A Red Sox Fan In--we interrupt this title to tell you about Armour hot dogs, the dogs kids love to bite--Pinstripe Territory"?)

All you rich, greedy corporate people will be just as dead as me in a hundred years. I just hope you suffer way more than I do. To quote the great Soundgarden:

It wouldnt pain me more to bury you rich
Than to bury you poor

When it comes to me vs. MLB, I clearly win. I think I've done a much better job with my site than they have in the offseason. Their aarticles are either redundant or pure filler. Even after I thought of this--upon seeing an article about how good Papi is--I scrolled down the page and saw another "Where's Roger going?" article. Unbelievable. You know what I'd love? If Roger makes his decision, and the team he chooses says, Well, actually, we don't want you. Sorry. If we got him, it'd be like when Parcells brought Dave Meggett onto the '98 Jets, assuming this guy he had before would come in and take the team to the promised land. Instead, he just got in the way, and ended up ruining everything by fumbling in the AFC championship game. It was like when Buttermaker had Kelly run in front of the other fielders to catch flies. Our team is fine. We don't need a ringer. Especially not one who might shit the bed anyway, Meggett-style. Yes, I compared Roger Clemens to Dave Meggett. And I hope he hears about it.

Note: The videos below should be working now.

Huge news in WKRP-land today. I got the email from Amazon saying that, thanks to the demands of myself and othres, WKRP In Cincinnati will be released on DVD, starting with the first three seasons. Word still doesn't seem to be out on whether the DVDs will have the original songs from the show or the replacements used in syndication. My opinion is, on a show about a radio station, they should do all they can to get the original songs back.

Either way, 'KRP will soon be available in all of our homes. It's safe to say we're all Cincinnatians today.

I forgot all about this. Rocket Ismail stomping on some dude's head with both feet, doing more damage to himself than the other guy. And Bob Page was always the ultimate prick. Made me laugh every time, though. Enjoy. (Most of my movies are back up. Check the link at right or click the movies label at the bottom of this post or any other post you come across with a movie in it.)

Update: The basement baseball league video is back up, and now contains some bonus footage. And the "jumping of joy" line has been corrected. Click above for full story, or just watch the video here:

Labels: movies

Worked really hard on a video tonight, only to find out my YouTube account has been suspended. I wrote to them and am waiting to see what the deal is. In the meantime, there are other ways to get my videos online. I'll keep you posted.

It's Jere day over at CSTB. Meaning lots of mentions of stuff I'm interested in there today: Gene Scott, M&MD, The British Office...

Yeah, I said Gene Scott. We used to prank call this dude's operators for summer nights on end. What a freak. He had some kind of TV ministry. Periodically for years after that, my mom would say to me, "There's something in the mail for "Danny" Smith from a...Gene...Scott. Do you know anything about this?" Why I actually gave him my address I can't say...

In this article, Mike Lupica tells me how much I loved the late-90s Dunbar Dynasty:

[Joe Torre] made it harder for Yankee haters to hate them than at any time in the history of the franchise.

Ehhh...NO, Peg. Seeing the Yankees win the World Series, at any time, makes me hate them at the highest possible level. When it involves Roger Clemens celebrating that victory, or Wade Boggs riding around Yankee Stadium on a horse, and when it's the first time I had to deal with the millions of Yankee fans that were surrounding me at the time as "World Champion Yankee fans," (I was only 2 and 3 in '77 and '78) well, that breaks the tie for "most hated Yankee teams of my life." I wouldn't have cared if Mother fucking Theresa had been their manager.

You know what manager made the Yankees less evil to me? Dallas Green. Torre's teams have made me want to puke way more, and I'd say "simply because they won," but there's so much more!

Who cares how nice a guy the manager is? It's not like Steinbrenner wasn't there for those four championships. Mike Pagliarulo was from Mass and even used to wear a shirt with both the Red Sox and Yanks' championship years under his jersey. But Jesus, I wasn't rooting for him! He was on the Yankees! There are going to be "nice guys" in every walk of life, but it doesn't mean you change your opinion about who they work for. "Oh, well, one of the 19 hijackers was truly a nice guy. Seriously. So I have to say I felt a little bit--just a little bit--happy for those guys when they succeeded in their mission." No! Terrible job!

I've always said this about Joe Torre: Hearing him get interviewed, compared to most sports personalities, is a breath of fresh air. He talks like a normal person--casual and without cliches. (Although things like him saying "I'm not sure how injured Schilling really was [in Game 6 of the '04 ALCS]" seem to get swept under the rug.) And, sure, I feel bad that he grew up in an abusive situation--and still cringes at loud noises because of it. When I was little, god forbid a balloon was about to pop, or the opening scream of Electric Company was about to come on. But still! Root for the Yankees because of it? Are you serious? And speaking of that terror attack--no, I didn't even think of rooting for the Yankees in the '01 World Series. Why in the world would I have? That had nothing to do with baseball. The Red Sox fans who died in those attacks surely are waiting in the afterlife for any Sox fans who rooted for the Yankees that year so they can kick their asses on a white, fluffy cloud.

Today's the day people in Boston get to watch trucks full of equipment roll down Van Ness Street on the way to sunny Florida. While we in the New York area hear nothing like that about the Yankees, because their fans are busy watching Survivor and Deal or No Deal until someone at work tells them the playoffs have started. But we've got the internet to show us the pictures. This will take you to the boston.com gallery of this morning's thrilling events. Specifically photo number 22. Click on photo 11, and you'll notice it's the same shot as 22, but with a different caption. Dirt Dog himself took the photos. Even though someone else could have written the captions and done all the uploading and arranging (and cropping/brightening), I'd just sooner fantasize that the Silva Surfa took one too few photos to meet the quota, so he tried to fool us with the 11/22 thing. Terrible job, DD! Your first blunder of the season. I'm sure the folks that still visit your site have many more to look forward to. I hope you don't "accidentally" post pictures of a black guy getting lynched and then "accidentally" "lose" all the complaint e-mails! Good luck in '07!

I'm lovin' this Bernie thing. The Yanks drew up a minor-league--non guaranteed, mind you--contract on a napkin for the guy, as a reward for 16 years of service, and let's just say Bernie's a little pissed right now. I love how he refers to the Yankees as "that team" in the article. This is fun.

Meanwhile, my mom, a Blue Devil, is psyched for this dude, Central Connecticut State alum Bary Hertzler.

What's the significance of this series?

54, 45, 38, 28, 23.

Note: this is actually part of a longer series of numbers. There are more before and after.

Note: This has nothing to do with math or any kind of formula.