Random Picture Friday: That Darn Cat Dog

This is such a beautiful picture. We love it's evocation of the wide open field of freedom so brilliantly espoused in the doctrines of baseball. Whatever that means. We just made it up right now.





Let us tell you, if we had a nickel for every time we've been viciously body checked by a giant dog in a giant field of grass, well, we, uh, still wouldn't have any nickels. Dang.

Listependance Tuesday

This will be phenomenal. Really. You are phenomenal.


Things My Son Said To Me Today When He Wanted To Draw on Our White Board

1. I want to color!


2. I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT. Please?


3. I WAAAAAAAAAAANT IT!


4. I want to color, daddy!


5. AAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAA


6. It's my turn, daddy!

Bills I Paid Today

1. Mortgage


2. Condominium Fee


3. Cell Phone


4. Paxton


5. Mr.

On Last Night's Baseball Game (See more tomorrow)

1. Teams Playing: Washington Nationals and Florida Marlins


2. Cost of tickets: $7 each


3. Cost of tickets with service charges and fees: $12.50 each


4. Seat Section: 532


5. Reason for attending: Deadspin field trip


6. Number of Deadspin readers and/or writers talked to: 0


7. Number of home runs hit by Soriano: 2?


8. Number of complete at-bats I watched: <5


9. Walks taken with aforementioned son: 2


10. Innings pitched: 5


11. Should you take the metro to the game: No


12. Opinion on naked babies: Neutral to negative


13. Best thing on concession menu: Cheese Cup ($1.00)


14. Beers that count as "Premium": Corona, Heineken.


15. Attendance: 100<, <1,000,000


16. Winner of the President Race: Lincoln, oh yeah!

Baseball, Steroids, Anger

So I was all poised to write a long post about the retardedness that is our national outrage over steroids in baseball and then this jerk goes and does it first (and much better, by the way). Dang you, guy-that-writes-for-an-actual-website-and-not-just-on-his-own-pretentious-"blog."

But there's still one point that he didn't cover that I would like to discuss.


Listen closely now, all y'alls.



BASEBALL IS A GAME!

That's right. It's not high-level politics. It's not life and death. It's entertainment. Are you going to tell me that you didn't glue yourself to the TV every time McGuire or Sosa were at bat in '98? (This only applies to baseball fans, and if you aren't a baseball fan, I don't care what you have to say anyway. So there.) Are you going to tell me that you would have rather had game 7 of the 2003 ALCS end at 6-4 after a boring final two innings and not see Aaron Boone jack one out to win the game? I even hate the Yankees and I still prefer to see them win in dramatic fashion (I mean, I hate the Red Sox, too, so why do I care who wins?)

The bottom line is that you pay money to be entertained at the game, and steroid-enhanced players are more fun to watch. Are some of them idiots? Abso-bloomin-lutely. So are some of us. Are some of them total *******? (edited for content since this is a family site) Of course, but we don't have to deal with them on a personal level, so who cares? Let them play the game however it needs to be played to entertain us. That's what matters.

And to those of you who claim that ballplayers were better and more upstanding than the current crop, you don't know what you're talking about. Ty Cobb? Racist jerk. Mickey Mantle? Drunken idiot who could have been the best EVER but instead never lived up to his potential (and you think watching juiced up players play is a rip off!) Most players before (heck, even for awhile after) Jackie Robinson made his debut? Racist, and thankful they didn't have to compete with the Negro Leaguers. So get off you high-horse and have a $7.50 beer and just enjoy the show.


P.S. Palmeiro used steroids, I don't care. Palmeiro lied about using steroids to Congress while under oath. What a tool. I say send him to jail (for the lying, not the steroids).

close:angryrant

My first protest! Well, sort of.

Today, after church, three people from church and the three of us drove up into our neck of the woods to attend the fourth in a series of five gatherings intended to bring attention to the ongoing genocide/mass rape/persecution etc. of people in Darfur. We missed the first three, one to see our Beloved Mariners lose to the Nationals, and the next two because we were out west visiting family. So we went today to sing songs, and listen to a sermon all about death and what we can do to stop it. Also, we were right across the street from the Sudanese Embassy protesting their government's apathy towards and/or active encouragement of the aforementioned atrocities. Police were on hand in case anything got out of control.

But here's the deal. I constantly get caught up in the minutiae in sermons. The guy today (I don't remember his name) went on for awhile about the activism we need in order to change the situation in Darfur. He namedropped the National Association of Evangelicals and praised their work. And then he mentioned their three major social/political issues. Darfur, abortion, and preserving traditional marriage.

Screeeeeeech! Let's call the whole thing to a halt. Is he saying that by being there we are condoning the NAE stance on all three issues? Can't we take them one at a time? And how can you compare the mass murder of millions of innocents (be they in Africa or in American wombs) with the "weakening" of an, at best, two-century old matrimoial tradition that isn't even biblically mandated? And from that point on, all I could do was nitpick the rest of the sermon. I noticed how he divided Christians up into us-and-them, and we're the good guys. I noticed that, while paying lip-service to the idea of loving others as ourselves, he didn't seem to believe that it applied to gays. I noticed that he wasn't even a very good speaker. And I couldn't help thinking that when he told a story about a woman who died in NYC, in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood when no one would answer her calls for help, he was also thinking that it was black people who wouldn't answer the calls and that it is black people in Sudan that are not answering the calls now, and that that's just how black people are, so we have to carry the white man's burden to change it.

I'm sure that I read waaaaaaaaay too much into what he was saying. And maybe that says a lot more about me than it does about him. But I'm not ready to delve into that idea quite yet.

By the way, one of the songs that we sung was what I've always known as "The Prayer of St. Francis." The first line is "Make me a channel of your peace." I just love that idea. I love the whole song. It's all about becoming selfless, loving others as yourself and just being a messenger for God. If I ever get the guts, I'll try to play and sing it at church (the version I know, not the one we sang today)