strong as a can

the chronicles of man-e-faces ramirez
red sox fans have to be shitting themselves, right? one minute manny is driving in runs faster than that japanese guy can inhale a hotdog, the next he is refusing to play. but hey, it's only a penant race. i mean, if you're manny and you can't be happy when
(a) your team is in first place,
(b) your team won the world series 10 months ago,
(c) you play on one of those teams with a frat house clubhouse,
(d) you get to give those good natured two handed salutes when turning a routine fly into a circus event,
(d) big papi hits behind you,
(e) your team has a pretty big latin presence (i assume this is important to him), and
(f) no one in boston cares about your poor fielding and baserunning

it seems like you may never find happiness in professional baseball. but hey, i hope you keep sulking and giving your ab's to stern, kapler, and hyzdu.

in other mlb news, i've been meaning to get some opinions on the kenny rogers suspension. clearly kenny did not know when to walk away, but 20 games? really? a month ago jason michaels assaulted a polic officer and he was in the lineup without mlb repercussions within 24 hours. but kenny slaps a camera down and he has to miss the most important month of the season? i think there's two things wrong with this. first, he is being charged with a crime in the real world, so it's not like he's going unpunished. second, shouldn't this be a suspension handed out by the team, not the league (ex. neagle getting cut by the rockies after trying to get a hummer, shane spencer getting demoted after getting a DWI, etc)? nothing he did was life threatening, and throwing a bean ball (which is definitely life threatening) usually gets you 5 games...

don't touch my (fun) bags
here's an interesting piece on the bag searches in NYC subways.

on a related note, i heard the spokeswoman for the NYCLU on NPR last nite complaining that many asians and middle easterns were afraid to leave their house due to increased security. it seems fair that she was possibly exaggerating the effect of profiling (especially since NYPD is going out of their way to emphasize the searches were random), and clearly was implying that profiling is not "fair" (or moral or whatever).

while it seems to me that the bag searches are ridiculous (the CLU's argument should obviously be that there is a huge added cost for no likely improvement in the situation), i'm a bit confused on the whole profiling issue. let's say a guy with red hair and pink pants robs a bank. it's fair for the police to question any fire crotch in the area who's wearing pink pantalones, no? why does this logic all of a sudden not hold up when there are lots of suspects in lots of areas? it would just be plain retarded to not minimize the focus of your search.

it's fairly common knowledge that there's no crying in baseball, but maybe tom hanks needs to make a movie about professional women's football to get the point across on the gridiron. yup, there is in fact, crying in football.

and while i'm here, i'd like to mention that while i was flipping through the channels last nite, i caught five minutes of buddy lembeck lifting weights with gary busey. take a minute to let that sink in.

pretty much anything with busey is solid gold (i once caught busey on one of those "i suck at dating, help me get better" shows, feeding lines to the sad suitor - instant classic), and he doesn't disappoint here. this show is called celebrity fit club (why they didn't go with 'the husky surreal life', i'm not sure), and they obviously have a very loose interpretation of the word "celebrity" - bam margera's dad and the snapple lady (??) are two of the 8 hefty former "stars". anyway, lembeck now has a huuuge belly, is covered in colorful tats, and often pulls phantom karate kicks a la dirk diggler. i'd have to imagine nicole eggert has at least 4 restraining orders out against him...

al west tidbits

rangers - texas' infield (texiera, soriano, young, and blalock) have hit a combined 85 homers thus far. that's 3 more than the entire a's AND angels offense (who both have 82), yet they trail both of those clubs in the standings. rumor has it david delucci has asked chan ho park to save everyone time by just throwing the ball over the fence.

mariners - normally when your 5 man rotation has been responsible for all but 2 starts of the entire season, you'd be happy. this is not the case in seattle, though, where the whips and k's/9 of the starters are:
moyer 1.49 4.85
franklin 1.36 3.92
meche 1.48 5.29
sele 1.55 4.02
piniero 1.50 4.88

a's - jason kendall has 27% of the a's stolen bases and 0% of their homeruns. there are 8 ab-qualified hitters whose AVERAGE is higher than his slugging percentage. think billy bean regrets losing ramon hernandez?

angels - since you can't just try to make a good pitch to vlad guerrero (see: tom gordon), why wouldn't you just intentionally walk him any time there's runners on? the only other player in the anaheim lineup with a slugging over .450 OR an OPS over .800 is (shudder) bengie molina. yup, the guy/oompa-loompa who makes mike piazza look graceful is their second scariest hitter, and he typically hits 6th or below in the order.

fun facts for the al central:

twinkies - jesse crain leads minnesota in wins (9) despite the fact that he averages less than an inning per appearance (45 g, 44 inn) AND that minnesota has 5 guys with at least 17 starts.

chisox - putting together an unreal year despite the fact that 4 regulars have OBP's under .311 (everett .310, crede .310, aj piez-asshole .293, uribe .263 - yowsers).

tribe - johnny peralta is quietly slugging .528 in 77 games. granted these numbers are skewed by his performance at the jake, but it still looks like they let go of vizquel at the perfect time.

royal disappointments - kc continues to play terrible terrence long every day despite his awful numbers (OBP < .315, OPS < .700) and the fact that aaron guiel (no not the guy from streetfighter) has 21 jacks and a healthy OBP in AAA.

detroit - not much here, except that kyle farnsworth is leading the division in sacks.

i'm a big fan of the wilson brothers, but really, you can't tell me owen doesn't bizarre in this shot. can we get some creative captions for this please?

you can call me a working man
i guess that's what i am

like the song says, i (still) get up around 7 yeah, but now instead of sitting around in my undies til going to the gym around 2pm, i revel in my 30-45 minute drive to the office. and by revel i mean teeter on the brink of complete road rage. i pretty much spend the entire commute screaming the word 'cocksucker' often enough to make calamity jane blush. i do vary it up a bit, though, and alternate that with the word 'fuck' or some derivative thereof (fucker and fuckface are two personal favorites). a great word, fuck is. when i was 11 (and this morning), i did entire mad libs with all the forms of 'fuck'. i had/have lots of friends. really.

anyway, my endless summer has in fact ended. rip ethan's vacation, 3/12/05-7/17/05. it was a great run, but papa needs a new pair of shoes. or something.

so this was my first week as an engineering consultant. i still don't really know what that means, so i've been reading manuals all week in an attempt to find out. but hey, my job title has the word 'senior' in it even though i just turned 27 and have spent less than 2 years in the engineering industry (who knew there were 'senior' janitors?). i'm fairly sure they tossed that in to make me feel better about my salary negotiating skills, which are on par with tommy boy early in his sales career.

that's all i got. this post is awful. give me time to get back in the saddle.

arizona has just seceded to become a colony of france.

i'm a little confused. i'd say if you are born and raised in country x and have lived your whole life in country x, you're an x-ian. seems pretty straight forward to me.

but now arod wants to be dominican. he says it's because his parents were born there (even though by this logic everyone in america would be foreign), but really we all know it's because he wants to be a part of all those fun latin flag waving events (like at the home run derby) and be viewed as one of those latin guys who "loves the game and just loves having fun". seriously, how many media pieces do we see like that? tejada, papi, etc, etc...

anyway, i think it's a douchey move by the slugger, trying to latch on to the hot item right now and join a clique. it screams high school drama. plus it's weird how it's phrased ("i want to say it out loud"), like he's coming out of the latin closet or something.

i don't really care about this at all, especially as long as he keeps raking. i just think it's a bit strange. and now selig is saying he will decide what nationality arod is. i, for one, hope bud declares arod to be czech. that way arod and i can turn some mean pairs in the world cup.

over july 4th nina and i went to vegas to see ahren. we were there for 4 days and 4 nights. we got in thursday night and each set some goals. here they are, and how we fared:

my goals:
(1) to play at least 10 hours of poker
check. we lost a total of $100 after 20+ hours between the two of us, mostly thanks to nina. she's good, while i'm just okay. what i am really good at is not getting pissed when i lose with good cards. i'm so good at this in fact, that i definitely did not call some big guy in a witch's hat a "fucking warlock," or sulk at the table. ever.
(2) to drink at least 10 hours of each day
i wish all goals were as easy to attain. best of all, i got my hangover out of the way on the first morning.
(3) to not get sick
success! i credit this to actually getting more than 3 hours of sleep a night, and to the heavenly cocoon-like sleeping bags we brought with us.

nina's goals
(1) to see a cirque de soleil
we saw mystere one night. as expected, it was awesome. if you want to see mindblowing feats of strength that don't include a guy named magnus dragging a tractor trailer or deadlifting a house, this is your joint.
(2) to play shuffleboard (the bar version)
we found some dive with shuffleboard within walking distance of ahren's place. when we arrived it had exactly 3 patrons, so we were golden. there were 5 of us and ahren developed this algorithm on a napkin that required us to each play head to head 4 times. naturally this took a while, but there was a new bartender working who thought a whiskey on the rocks means filling up a 12 ounce glass and that 5 drinks should cost less than $10, so we all got pretty ripped. $5 got you 25 songs from the juke box too, so the night was filled with 80's songs and one of the two other customers trying to beckon us onto the dance floor (read: empty area in front of the door) all night. good times.
(3) overcome her fear of taking shots
i don't think this goal was actually met, but we did make margarita and strawberry daquiri jello shots one night (yes, jello makes these flavors). boy were those tasty.

some auxilary goals such as
(a) eating country fried steak and eggs at least twice,
(b) watching big lebowski at least once,
(c) saying the word fellate as often as possible, and
(c) getting tar deeply embedded in your palm while doing a cartwheel in the street (cough - nina - cough)
were also met with the greatest of ease.

so it was quite a weekend. ahren is pretty much the ideal vegas host, but remember when visiting that his house is BYOF (bring your own furniture).

yesterday i finished reading confedarcy of dunces, a novel about a fat guy in new orleans recommended by good ol' ace cowboy of slack lalane fame. i thought this book was friggin hilarious, and more importantly, with such outlandish characters, that it could easily be adapted to the silver screen by the coen brothers. since joel and ethan obviously peruse this sight on a daily basis, i'll give them some casting recommendations (using some of their favorite actors, or at least ones they've cast before):

ignatius reilly - john goodman. hopefully he's still fat and can talk like stewie from the family guy.

myrna minx - holly hunter. honestly, i can never tell if she is hot or not.

gonzalez - john turturro. less jesus, more barton fink.

dorian green - phillip seymour hoffman. as he was in boogie nights.

mr. levy - billy bob thorton.

mrs. levy - julianne moore.

policeman mancuso - william macy. perfect for getting walked all over.

jones - bernie mac. sure they've never used him, but cmon. i ain't usin marlon wayans.

darlene - scarlett johansen. and in the screen version, darlene will actually strip. obviously.

mrs. reilly, mancuso's aunt, lana lee - ??? the coens haven't used too many older ladies.

i'm tellin yous, this would be a great flik. hollywood should soon be calling.