There have been some fantastic extra inning affairs this week. Alfonso Soriano walked off in the 15th with a grand slam for the Cubs on Monday. Tuesday saw an Oakland/Boston game that was rather wacky. Last night had the Dodgers and Cardinals last 15 sassy innings (and look, Jeff Weaver!) before Albert Pujols blasted the winning hit over the centerfielder’s head.
All those were great games. Because none of the six teams are mine.
New theory time. Extra innings are only great games when it’s not your team out there. A few weeks ago, when it took the Tigers 16 innings to beat Minnesota, it was a great game to me insofar that Detroit won it, but holy cow did it screw up the bullpen. It always does. Until the next day off, everyone’s just a little slower.
Back in 2003, when I wasn’t all that vested in the Tigers (but, jeez, who was?), but I did see a 17-inning game that went from a Roger Clemens vs. Jeremy Bonderman matchup to a David Wells vs. Steve Sparks affair. It was a thing of beauty to see eight innings of that knuckleball on a day when he should’ve been resting for his next loss. Since the Tigers lost that game (I know!), it would’ve been terrible if they were contending. Fortunately, with 118 other losses that season, it was pretty easy to take.
So here’s to you, Extra Inning Games. May I recommend every other city except Detroit?
Leave it to my girlfriend to somehow take a Playboy model and have me completely disinterested.
I don’t know how she does it, but girls, here’s some advice if your boyfriends have an unhealthy fixation on attractive celebrities: learn about them. Read and watch everything about them. Try to discuss minutiae of their lives with your beau. This will probably result in the guy being turned off about the girl.
I didn’t even really care about Kendra Wilkinson, and for a while, Brit would keep refreshing my memory as “that girl dating that one football player.” (Because Hank Baskett, is, like, a legendary wide receiver or something.)
But some people somewhere thought she would be perfect for a planned premise television show. It’s called Kendra (great name!), and it delves into how she’s adjusting to being on her own. I mean, all of us have, at some point in our lives, learned to live on our own, but none of us have had to overcome the obstacle of living in a large house with giant boobs.
They say that everyone kinda sorta secretly watches reality TV, whether I like to admit it or not. And the truth is … well, yeah, I watch it. But she watches it, and I’m in the room as well. I could leave the room entirely in protest, but I’m just not that big of a douche. (Just enough to pass as an insufferable blogger.) So I catch snippets of the show while hiding behind my laptop. That oughta be enough to validate the following rhetorical question: why?
She’s blonde and pretty and has a modicum of charisma. She has a supportive family and a big house and is married to an athlete and gets to call Hugh Hefner on occasion à la Suzanne Somers on Three’s Company. It’s just … filler show. You know that E! can’t show eight hours of The Soup in a row, so they need something else.
If the show gets cancelled, no big deal. There’ll be some other pretty person with a reasonably interesting life that can be captured on camera with WACKY UNPREDICTABLE PREMISES! Oh no, a long lost cousin showed up for dinner with a TV producer! And I left my makeup kit in the cabana!
[commercial break]
Oh, everything turned out all right, albeit uneventful. Happy ending!
The worst thing you can do with a blog is not write in it for three weeks, especially when you’re kinda sorta looking for a job.
Well, a beard-like writer’s block hit, in the sense that anytime I felt like getting something in article form, it appeared here. Or here. Or here. And once here! If it wasn’t sports, and I couldn’t get it past one sentence, it showed up here.
Hiatuses are bad, bad, bad, though. It’s blog suicide. Nevertheless, it’s high time I started tending to the homestead once again. There was, no foolin’, a family of ferrets living in my RSS feed.
So we’ll just try this again. But so the writer’s block doesn’t fall on the ol’ coconut again, we’re going to need some kind of slight emphasis. The TV is usually on a lot, so we’ll go that route. TV shows, commercials, things said on the TV, things I yell at the TV … that sounds like a solid basis of posts.
I’m the king of lost blogs. I lost two Futon Reports and a couple of impeccable Blogcritics articles. They’re just gone. GONE. Unrecoverable.
It’s really a sad feeling. After all, those were some great phrases I used. I may have coined a new meme that would have been bigger than the cat playing the keyboard. But alas, clumsy me, I closed without hitting save. I typed directly into an article entry, never hit save, and hit close/refresh/back/thumbupyourbutt. What a terrible feeling. We’ve all been there.
It happened to me Wednesday night, in the first iteration of this LeBron James article. I mean, it was pretty good. Moreover, it was 1 a.m. I was only going to be awake for, like, three more hours! And most of that was going to be playing Adventure Island II. It was inconvenient, to say the least.
So I closed the laptop and attempted to fall asleep rather pissed off. Of course, I’ve seen all the sitcoms episodes where married couples do this. I didn’t want to have a dream where a giant beard ate me, or Wordpress took a dump on my head, so I got back up, and wrote the whole shebang again. Only I wrote it in a different way. And you know what? It turned out better than the first one. (As if that was possible!)
The big lesson may be “save your work,” and if we’re playing Family Feud, it’s probably the No. 1 answer. Always write on your hard drive first, and try to find a word processor that autosaves. Secondly, always, ALWAYS, question your writing. Could it be better? Should you re-write the whole thing?
The context is way off, because it involved one man (Leonard Pitts) publicly writing to another man (Chris Cecil) who plagiarized him, but it applies here:
Here’s how you write a newspaper column. First, you find a topic that engages you. Then you spend a few hours banging your head against a computer screen until what you’ve written there no longer makes you want to hurl.
And when all that work is destroyed by a foolish thing like forgetting to save, it stings even worse, but the feeling of doing it all again is somewhat rewarding.
I’m glad I got back out of bed and tackled the beast again. Maybe I should forget to save more often.
Last night I was tipped off from a reliable, prominent individual that my Twitter account was going to get some more traffic. This is always a beneficial thing. More people are going to see my paranoid thoughts about the Tigers blowing late leads. Hooray!
And then, there it was. On his blog, Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra (the boss that signs my Blogcritics paycheck, were one to exist) announced the launch of a site called Twittorati, which picked off the top echelon of bloggers affiliated with the top 100 bloggers and put them on some kind of pedestal. As an example page, he linked to mine. Verbatim:
You can also really dig into the information source: writer pages display each tweeter’s blogs and Twitter information and Technorati Authority
Ergo, Deadspin is a top 100 blog, so they get a page, and there are all the Deadspin mothertwitters. I mean, they actually hand-wrote in my Deadspin title. Why did they spend their time on that? (I mean, you can understand why I would. They forgot to put that on all the business cards.
Like Twitter itself, it took me over two years to figure out what the hell to do with the medium. Maybe by 2011 I’ll know the purpose of Twittorati, and perhaps by 2021 I’ll know why I was selected.
So here’s a guess. What Twittorati may address is a flaw in Twitter’s metric of prominent users. All the most widely followed Twitter accounts are very famous people. Martha Stewart uses Twitter? I know who she is, so I’ll see what she has to say. But how do you find the top tweetin’ bloggers, a.k.a the people who make a name for themselves by writing interesting things? They try just a bit harder than the average celebrity who can make lazy waves by simply telling them what they recently did, or heard about. Therefore the quality of a blogger’s 140 characters is probably going to be, on average, slightly better.
Instead of using some cryptic quadratic formula to determine the most widely read, responded to, and therefore “the best Twitter user in the world,” they’re using humans to manually reap bloggers and package them to everybody else. I suppose it’s a start, albeit very blogocentric.
Hey, it got my attention. Then again, I was used as an example. And I have no problem with that.
Written on July 8, 2009 | Posted in Tech | 1 Comment
Steve McNair was murdered. That’s about as much as anyone knows about this sordid mess. As for the girl, Sahel Kazemi, found shot in the head next to him, it’s anyone’s guess. Actually, it seems more and more likely that the gunshot wounds came from her gun, and the dots, connected in a perfect linear fashion, will probably reveal that Kazemi was the one who pulled the trigger.
When it comes to alternative theories, Spencer Hall found some more speculative bloggers, but they aren’t the only ones. In the early stages of the investigation — this is going to sound terrible — but I really had hoped it wasn’t as open-and-shut as that. Maybe it’s my terrible fascination with Law & Order, but a murder-suicide just leaves so many unanswered questions.
If the killer was still alive and at-large, obviously that would be more dangerous. But the capacity to discover so much more about McNair’s relationship with this woman would be alive. And I hope I’m not the only one in this line of thinking. It’s definitely a selfish reason to want the killer to be someone else. It would mean a whole new flurry of blog posts, which benefits me.
But like so many other tragedies in life, not everything has an answer. No city’s police department is without their multitude of cold cases and crimes left unsolved.
I will know for sure who broke into my apartment last year. But, damn, I would sure like to decisively know who, and how, and why. It would even be an excellent hour of television.
We knew so much about McNair’s football career. The league probably has every down he’s played on film somewhere; probably even with multiple angles. And that’s about it.
So perhaps in lieu of having answers, we want to make up our own. Those of us with blogs, soapboxes, and other platforms will want to share those theories. Personally I’m fairly certain it was the guy who carbombed Adrian Monk’s wife. Look between the lines, there are similarities.
So here’s an idea where I can make some money off Twitter. It may not work, and I haven’t worked out all the details, but it’s better than just doing nothing and blogging about it, am I right?
One cent is not a lot of money. It’s enough to let someone drop it into that little dirty gas station tray. “Here, let someone else use it.” Even in this economy, we don’t literally have to pinch pennies. Just larger coins and paper rectangles with dead people on it.
One penny to subscribe to someone’s Twitter account per month. Not anyone’s account — hell, you’re not that special, but suppose one could designate their account as a “premium” feed. They’re not talking about what they ate for breakfast or looking for any recommendations on where to park downtown. They’re offering up links, insights, jokes, and every other microbial cornerstone of the Internet. For a penny.
Of course, like the plan on Office Space, the pennies add up. Suppose all my Twitter followers were giving me a penny. That’s, like, almost four bucks a month. It’s not much, but it’s something.
Hmm. Maybe I’ll charge two pennies. But I don’t want to get greedy.
I haven’t noticed a ton of websites that review commercials. So we’re gonna try and see how long we can keep this up.
Problem: your dog goes wee in your house. On your carpet. On your floor. on your lifesize crossword puzzle. You paid two easy payments of $19.99 for that!
Solution: Housetrain your dog.
Alternate solution: Shoot your dog.
Alternative solution: Buy a Potty Patch. It’s a synthetic mat that looks like grass, but isn’t.
How it works: You pee on it. (Or your dog, if you wish.) There’s a tray that catches the urine.
Other applications: Use as a welcome mat for Aquaman. Re-sod Ford Field. Line the bottom of your toilet and make it look like you’re relieving yourself in the Amazon rainforest.
How you can make your own: Buy a casserole pan. Steal some turf from Ford Field. Drink eight glasses of V8.
There have been some fantastic extra inning affairs this week. Alfonso Soriano walked off in the 15th with a grand slam for the Cubs on Monday. Tuesday saw an Oakland/Boston game that was rather wacky. Last night had the Dodgers and Cardinals last 15 sassy innings (and look, Jeff Weaver!) before Albert Pujols blasted the winning hit over the centerfielder’s head.
