Song for the Week

I have been listening to this song ALL WEEK LONG. I didn't know about this until it played on my iTunes list. Shame on me for not liking it long ago. Oh yeah, and this might be the start of me putting up videos and music I like and would like to share with you.

My Love for Ken Burns

I'm watching the second half of the Ken Burns documentary Baseball: The Tenth Inning. I must say, having James Earl Jones narrating this is absolutely perfect. There is really nothing I would like to add to this presentation. Ken Burns knows so much about history and everything about filmmaking. I might go buy a ton of his documentaries just so I can watch all of them and learn all of the things that I missed and didn't catch through all of my years of education. I could learn about Jazz, the Brooklyn Bridge, The War, Baseball, the Civil War, Congress, Huey Long, The Shakers, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, the National Parks (Americas Best Idea) and all of the other things that I would like to waste time in front of my TV learning about. His next documentaries are on Prohibition, the Roosevelts, The Central Park fire, and the Dust Bowol which I can't wait to watch/learn about.

As I watch this, I find a couple of things funny. The first voice I hear is Michael Felger's and its when he was on WEEI. The next thing I see is the one face that every person in Boston around 1999 would recognize: Pedro Martinez. A tiny man, who scouts claimed would be too small to pitch in the big leagues, is pitching the best season that a pitcher has ever pitched. You can check on that, but I already know it. His 1999 season is considered the best season of a pitchers by any standard. His 2000 season is probably up there too. It segways into Roger Clemens, Ichiro, Barry Bonds, 9/11 and its effect on the game, and now its on to the World Series in which the Diamondbacks won over the Yankees. This would be the World Series that afterward, Buster Olney would write his book "The Last Night of the Yankee dynasty". I only remember Schilling and Johnson winning a co-MVP award during this series.

This is an interesting point in the film. Bill Costas says the phrase "The ball may be juiced and the players may be juiced" and as that happens the Tigers reliever Todd Jones throws a ball over the head of the catcher as if Todd Jones heard him. It's not hard to see that someone called out players for juicing. Chris Rock once said to Ken Burns himself, "If you could take a pill that made you get paid like Steven Speilberg, you'd take that pill." He's right, and the people that wouldn't take that pill to make more money aren't thinking of their family, but thinking of the 'integrity' of the game. The game of baseball isn't the most honest game by any means. The game of baseball will live on past a players years. A player only lives so long that he has to make every effort to get recognized, get that contract, get his 10 year tenure so he can retire with a baseball players pension, and maybe make a hitting instruction video or hold a camp for up and coming kids.

I'm not exactly defending players taking steroids, but I understand why they did it. Money. If you can get any advantage in doing something that everybody can get access to, then there is no reason why you wouldn't do it. I'm sure someone said that if you're not juicing, you're not competing.

There has to be something said about people like this. Ken Burns works for PBS and has been for 25 years, making some of the best documentaries that can be seen. Why hasn't he been glorified more? Maybe its the fact he's on somewhere between This Old House and Sesame Street. I just think that people don't give him enough credit for putting American History into perspective and also for putting it on film. I'm sure by the time he is done working he will have cataloged every major era or story in our history. God Bless Ken Burns.

Red Eyes, Tommy Boy, Boo-Gate....

Okay, so first thing I do in the morning is wake up and look at myself. Make sure I don't look like shit for most part and then put on the glasses and bring the laptop downstairs to enjoy some TV. Then I notice something. I remember something about last night. My eyes are all red. I didn't leave my contacts in, but apparently when you have your contacts in backwards all day, it will turn them a deep red. A guy at work today thought I was hit in the face with something because my eyes were this color red. I took a picture of them last night and they were red as the devil's dick as one might say.

I know this picture makes it look like a deer in headlights, but realize this is right after taking my contacts out. Haven't seen this many Red Eyes since watching Couglin from Cocktail make breakfast. So I continue my morning and for the rest of the day, I have come redness in my eyes. Mostly noticeable, but I get over it. After work, which ended rather late, I drive as fast I could to get home and do this. Thinking about about what to complain about or what the hell the road guys are doing working when it's raining, or how fast I can go without being pulled over by the cops on the side, who I think are either sleeping or doing a jumbo book of sudoku. I notice something on my hood after the 93 split. My hood is bouncing. Not a good bouncing, but the kind of bouncing that would make you wonder what is wrong with this car now.

Immediately I think of the movie Tommy Boy, where Tommy is driving their piece of shit car along with Richard and they are singing the Eres Tu song and all of the sudden the hood of the car shoots up and blocks the windshield. The scene can be seen really fast here, and all I can think about is at what point will my car hood smash into my windshield and make a great coming-home-late-one-night/buy-me-a-new-car-now story. I just try to get home as fast as possible because I am in the middle of the roadwork area and I don't want to pull over in that area just so people don't have to think 'Look at that poor asshole on the side slowing everything down, it's bad enough with the roadwork'. I will endanger my own well-being just so I don't have to be on the side of the road at the 1Am hour. Anyways, I made it home, slammed the hood shut, which made a pretty loud noise. Hope I didn't wake up anyone, but then again, I don't care.

Aside from living dangerously, I decided what I would really blog on was this "Boo-Gate" thing I was reading on the TV ticker we now have at work in the break room. It said something about Dancing With the Stars, Bristol Palin, Boo-Gate, and something else. My first thought: People booed Bristol Palin off of DWTS and incited Boo-Gate. Then I look up online and I read that people were booing because her score was too low. She got straight 8's! What the hell people? Why are you complaining this much about dancing idiots?

Speaking of idiots, and things they do, can the media stop calling every 'scandal' or thing that goes awry "Problem-Gate"? Watergate was called Watergate because of the name of the hotel was Watergate. Not Water. It's almost like if another Watergate happened, we would call it Watergate-gate. I'm utterly surprised that people let this slide this much. I googled "suffix gate" and the first thing that pops up on Wikipedia is a list of scandals that end in gate. I'm not kidding. Antennagate (iPhone 4 antenna problem), Nipplegate (Janet Jackson's nip-slip during the Super Bowl), 3 different Troopergate's, SpyGate (Pats videotaping Jets), Tigergate (which I always called Tiger Woods Balls get caught in the trap), Monicagate (whatever happened before Bill Clinton got 1000 high fives from staff workers), Kanyegate (Kanye speaks the truth in front of everyone and says that Beyonce had a better video over Taylor Swift, which was correct no one is talking about Taylor Swift's videos, just her music), and some others I don't have enough patience for right now, are just the tip of the future oncoming iceberg of uncreative headlines for the news of our time. Let's go people, get creative. Make another news headline that doesn't involve the word gate at the end of it and you might get my attention. Let's hope tomorrow I get home on time and don't have to waste all of my time talking about this crap anymore. I wish. Mahalo.

I Got A New Hockey Shirt!

So I get home from work at around 1 am, and I look in the living room to see if I want to watch TV, which I don't, but I see a particularly interesting looking package (excuse the pun) sitting on the coffee table addressed to me. I see that it is from Cupstuff.com, which is a website that I have fancied recently to get my defunct hockey team gear. I wanted to get another foam dome from them, but when I recently tried the hat on, it was too small and my head just isn't made for small hats. By the way, Foam Dome is the name I have given to baseball hats that have a mesh/foam top that can usually be found in 1989 and around Little League parks.

Anyways, I open the package and it is a gold shirt with the Oakland Seals logo on it. I had recently emailed the guy that works at the website and said I was basically unsatisfied with my purchase. So I was hoping to send back the hat and get a shirt. But here's the thing, I haven't send back the hat! This company is just amazing, already sending their products out before they get theirs back from me. I love the shirt and I intend to wear it somewhere and maybe turn some heads, probably of an old-timer sitting at a bar with a flannel on. I needed a gold shirt anyways and this certainly does the trick. Awesome purchase.

First Post in a long while....

Perhaps it was just a lack of effort or maybe the idea that I needed to be on topic all the time about whatever it was I was blogging about. I would start on something like MLB standings and then I would jump from that to how the NCAA is a cartel or how I would be complaining about going in and out of the job market. As I'm typing this I am realizing that maybe that Dragon Speech writing software may be the best thing for a writer/blogger/kid who speaks his mind. So, to start things out, I will list a declaration of principles on how I intend to write. They did it in Citizen Kane and I can only hope I become a destitute Trillionaire with limited friends while ruling the media world only to be succumb by my own principles when I grow that old and confused. So here goes:

1. I will always write what's on my mind, and usually I will do it how I please. I'll try to keep it clean, but that usually depends on what kind of emotion I am in.

2. I probably won't write about my job or workplace that much, since the last time I did that some corporate d-bag commented on how I shouldn't bad mouth a company I work for even though they were clearly at fault for doing some illegal. I'm over it, and I don't really have that much interest in blogging about my job. I might write something else about my job, maybe a screenplay or short story of some sort. But rest assured it won't be on here.

3. No emo-blogging. I will do my best not to blog about how my world will end because the sky is gray and there isn't enough sun in the world and maybe I should get a Beiber haircut, wear skinny jeans, only drink cappuccino, listen to MOE, or wear a hoodie 24-7 while listening to the Final Cut on repeat.

4. I don't plan on tearing people new a-holes unless they deserve it. And no one I know personally will be torn apart on here. I usually like to do that face-to-face and am much more candid about that.

5. I won't always be interesting, but I'll do my best. Like I said, I'll write what I think, and that might not always be interesting.

6. I like to watch movies a lot, so I might just post a movie review of my own, whether it be in theaters or easily added to a queue on Netflix.

7. Some of my jokes won't be that original. I know James Bucknam usually catches me on what he has copy-written (so.......don't copy me!). Shit, I just mentioned a real person. Well there goes that rule.

8. Along with movie reviews I might even post a book review. I like books and you should too. If you would like me to review a book/movie without you have to spend money on it, I will do so as long as it is not War & Peace, Gone With the Wind, or anything that I already have no patience for wasting time on.

I can't think of anything else right now that I will be posting on or anything serious that I should say because I am running late for work/shower/life right now. So I will leaving you right now. Oh, and expect me to be posting mostly in the mid-morning or late-late night and probably not everyday. But I will try to write as much as I can.

Vaya con Dios