My Rant about my Dr. (some language)

So I wasted three hours of my day today going to see a doctor, and in the end I wasn't even treated.

It was a shrink, to be honest, and it's a good thing I'm not a full-blown wackjob, because the whole thing was stressful enough to make even a healthy guy crack up.

I get there at 10:45 for an 11:00 appointment. I asked the receptionist if the Doc was running on time. She smirked.

Not a good sign.

From past experience I know he runs behind schedule, so I bought a SportsWeekly on the way over.

At 11:25 he walked into the reception area and took in a patient, the first since I'd arrived.

At 11:31 that patient left the building.

At 11:39 the doctor came in chatting on his cellphone, laughed, and left the room.

At 12:07, with my SportsWeekly read COVER TO COVER he took in his 10:45 appointment.

At 12:29 I was fuming. He came in, fumbled around the reception area for a minute, and then cheerily announced : "Daniel, you're next. Right after Gary here."

Oh, he** no.

I stood up.

"The hell with that. I've been here 90 minutes and I'm done."

"I'm sorry to hear that," he said, minus any trace of actual regret.

"No you're not, you're always making patients wait. It's damned disrespectful."

I stormed off, but made a beeline for the receptionist to officially cancel, lest I be charged.

No lie, she closed the glass in front of me, complete with 'receptionist at lunch' sign.

WTF?

I suppose it's bad form to freak out in a shrink's waiting room, seeing as one flick of their pen puts you in Nurse Ratched's bad grace's.

Still, what an a*hole. And imagine what it's like for the poor woman across the waiting room the whole time; obviously disturbed, probably incapable of standing up for herself, and quite blatantly disabled.

Reckon the doc believe's it's A-OK to treat the patients like cra*, seeing as the worst they can do is howl and drool, heh?

Oh, my bad. Sorry for being capable of thought and action.

A*hole.

Virginia Tech Update

AOL has allegedly secured some student plays written by the shooter, via an AOL employee who went to Virginia Tech and says he attended classes with Cho Seung-Hui.

I say 'alleged' because, without meaning to question the honesty of the source, the plays set off some alarms in my head.

This guy is a senior majoring in English at a major university and he writes stuff like this? I've encountered many (too many) educated, intelligent people who write like cr**, but they weren't English majors.

Then there's the stated reaction to the guy from the classmate. (emphasis added)

The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of. Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I was even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in with a gun, I was that freaked out about him. When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap. Even the professor didn't pressure him to give closing comments.

If the plays are genuine, here are my thoughts:

1. Cho was an awful writer, with a juvenile thought process and a 7th graders love of profanity (no sarcasm intended)

2. Therefore Cho could not have been more than a marginal to sub-par English student at an American university.

3. It is even likely that given the statement above, he was allowed to pass classes just so the faculty could avoid confrontation. If that is the case, he should not have remained on campus as a student.

4. If the reaction in the statement is true, and not a hindsight interpretation of events, than: a) the professor had an ethical obligation to report the content of the writing b) failing that, the students themselves had a vested self-interest in reporting a frightening and disturbed individual to the powers-that-be.

Keep in mind no one's at fault except Cho himself; he's the one who pulled the trigger.

Again, if true, the existence of the writing is eerily similar to the Klebold assignment a month prior to his participation in the Columbine massacre. To paraphrase one commenter on the original link "how many times do we have to see this stuff before we learn to react?"

UPDATE: info continues to pour in and make items obsolete, so I think this will finish off my blogging on the subject.

"There was some concern about him," Rude said. "Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it's creative or if they're describing things, if they're imagining things or just how real it might be. But we're all alert to not ignore things like this."

She said Cho was referred to the counseling service, but she said she did not know when, or what the outcome was. Rude refused to release any of his writings or his grades, citing privacy laws.

So someone DID notice, it appears the plays ARE real, and he was referred for counseling.

Virginia Tech

In the wake of the horrendous school shootings at Virginia Tech yesterday, I'm sure we'll all hear the familiar hue and cry for additional gun control laws.

The Drudge Report is already linking to similar thoughts in the foreign press.

In all honesty I don't see where the current gun laws failed. Speaking only with the knowledge gleamed from the (often chaotic) reports of the day, the shooter was armed with handguns, not assault rifles or machine guns. And this was no stereotypical redneck kook or drooling madman. By the accounts I've read, Cho Seung Hui  was an upstanding 4th year English major at a major university and had no criminal history.  

Moreover, he made his first purchase on March 13th, meaning this was no spur of the moment/crime of passion that a waiting period would have prevented.

So how do you justify preventing the transaction, unless you believe (as some do) that all guns, no matter what kind, need to be kept from the public, whoever the individual might be?

To me, you forget about the predictable political speeches on gun control.

Instead, you mourn the victims. You question why we continue to produce folks that enjoy hurting others, apparently for sport. You wonder about the emergency procedures in place at Virginia Tech. You applaud the heroes of the day, like Liviu Librescu who blocked his classroom door to allow his students to escape, even at the cost of his own life.

And you continue to wonder why ba**ards like Cho Seung Hui don't turn the gun on themselves before they even leave their house in the morning.

Tags: Virginia Tech, Cho Seung Hui

The Nostalgic Ave Odyssey Pt. 1

 So sometime last summer we were pre-approved for a mortgage and began looking for a house. With our budget our aim was simple: find a nice house with a backyard in a so-so neighborhood (what most readers would call the South Side ghetto, but what we called home).

We toured a lot of homes that sumer.

 

* We saw a very nice house on 28th St that we liked a lot, but the neighborhood was a little too so-so for me and my cousin (and real estate agent) thought she saw evidence of foundation problems.

 

* We gave serious thought to a fixer-upper off of Morgan. It was quaint, in a great neighborhood for us, and had serious potential. It also had a dirt crawlspace for a basement, a lean due to foundation problems, and was set back off the front yard with no chance of ever adding a garage.

 

* There was a very cute house near our (then current) residence that had a Ozzie and Harriet backyard and a good interior. The only bathroom tho' was on the second floor, and there was no way my mother or my in-laws could navigate to it - hence, the house was a no-go.

 

* Lisa really liked another house we saw where the owner insisted on showing us all her improvements. I thought the place sucked, but I guess there was potential.

 

* I took Parker, and later the whole family, on a tour of house off of 12th and Cleveland. The best part of that place was a garage with doors on both sides - you could drive in off the alley and straight onto the back yard.

 

* Another house near our own was spacious and featured something for each of us: an open staircase for Lisa and a comprehensive security system for me. I think we just missed the boat on that property.

 

* We spent the day up north in Oconomowoc looking at houses, where the market will get you a nice house for 1/2 the cost of Milwaukee.

 

* Heck, we even toured a house on Burnham that had no floors - literally. It was just a shell of a house on a boozed up, garbage strewn block.

 

To be honest, by fall I'd decided it wasn't to be, and that it was God's way of telling us to shut up and pay our rent.

 

One day my Dad was listening to me moan at work and suggested that I look into my great-grandma's house on Nostalgic Ave.

 

note: as a tip of the hat to all thepsycho's in the world, I will refer to the house as being on Nostalgic Ave, as you've probably already guessed.

 

For those folks in the family, X Ave has a mythological stature, and is spoken of only in hushed tones of nostalgic reverence. It is the house where my maternal grandmother's parents lived, and where theye each died. It is where my grandparents lived for a short time after the war, and where my mother was likely conceived. It is where my mother and her brother were taken (or dragged, depending on the storyteller's mood) each weekend to visit while Grandma cleaned her mother's house. It is where my Mom got splinters sliding down the wooden cellar door, where Great-Grandpa planted rose bushes, where Great Grandma fell down the basement stairs, where the Xmas tree was by the living room windows and opposite it a fake fireplace; where the earth-shaking booms of the nearby forge were a lullaby to my Mom on sleepovers, and where my Great Uncle Leo, in a apocryphal tale, hid a treasure beneath a floorboard.  

 

In short, it had a lot of history, and a lot of baggage.

 

"It's for sale?" I asked.

 

"No, I don't think so," my father replied. "But it's been empty for years, since Uncle Chester moved to the nursing home."

 

That was the extent of it for a few weeks. I brought it up casually to Lisa and one day we drove past it, probably the first time I'd been to the house in a quarter century. The backyard was horribly overgrown and the porches needed some paint, but it seemed like a house we'd have stopped and toured.

 

On another drive past the home we stopped and looked in the basement window, where we could see a tidy room with a canning cabinet.

 

"It seems like it's still in good shape," we both said at the time.

 

My mom drew us a floorplan of the house in exacting detail, unconsiously showing her enthusiasm for the project. Based on the drawing I thought it was too small, but Lis saw something that piqued her interest.

 

Thus began the excruciating process of finding someone to show us around.

 

The house had been willed to all 7 of my Great-Grandparent's children, but most had been bought out, including my Grandma. 4 owners remained; my Uncle Chester, the most recent resident; the decendants of my Aunt Mamie, who had lived in the house with her brother until her death; my Great Aunt Mabel, wife of the deceased son Wally; and Cynthia, daughter of my late Great Uncle Harry.

 

No one had a key.

 

Aunt Mabel sent me to Chester, who we visited in his nursing home, who we promised to have visit X Ave if we bought it. No key. We were told to contact Aunt Mabel's grandaughter Chris, who for a time had kept up the house. No key. Aunt Mabel herself, no key.

 

Moreover, Chris (being the person most familar with the home) strongly discouraged us from pursuing the property.

 

Not encouraging, let me tell ya. I was begining to think people were intentionally stonewalling me. We're talking a week or two here folks.

 

Eventually we showed up on Aunt Mabel's doorstep and in a genuine but awkward moment Lisa started to cry. A few days later progress was made, and we had an appointment to tour the house with a lawyer that represented some of the parties.

 

That tour  . . . was a wakeup call.

 

Forewarning

I'm going to start the long drawn out tale of our first home purchase. What will follow is the introduction, if you will -  basically everything that preceded our first walk-through and the begining of the 100's of photographs.

Ignore or enjoy, as you wish.

Misc Chatter

Nothing of importance to say today, other than the stairs from my bedroom to the first floor are BRUTAL when you first wake up in the morning.

I think I might install a slide this weekend.

* * * *

I also would like to say that I wasted a decent portion of my life this year reading Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters and a small portion of Methuselah's Children. In a long-ago past post I listed Heinlein as one of my all time favorites, due fully to my memories of the books I read in my teens.

If the trite dialogue and overall crappy writing is indicative of his catalogue, then I kindly rescind my recommendation.

* * *

A sincere thank you to my Dad for coming over close to midnight to show me how to relight my hot water heater and furnace. I'd shut off the gas to the house to complete some work on the dryer (more on that later) and hadn't realized it killed the appliances until my wife stepped into a cold shower hours later.

* * * *

My knee hurts. Did I mention those stairs suck in the morning?

* * * *

We upgraded to standard cable yesterday, which is a big move for yours truly.

For years we went with broadcast TV, but reception became so poor over time that we moved to 'basic' cable. For $12/month we got the local stations, a host of Christian channels, and a home shopping network or two.

Eventually they added Bravo, the Food Network, Style, and National Geographic - thereby rounding out our viewing experience.

Well in the latest move none of the Big Four showed up, with the cable company claiming - bait and switch if ever there was - that none of those stations should ever have been on our line in the first place.

So we went with a bundle. Road Runner Lite (aka AOL), our phone, and standard cable for a bill a month, which is just a MOCKERY of every ideal I hold dear.

$48/month for TV? Ugh.

So now we have Nickelodeon, ESPN, and God help me, HGTV.

* * * *

True tale: we had the cable company out three times for this installation, never getting it done the way we wanted it because, as the tech said, "We aren't magicians. We're cable guys."

The yahoo  said this like a rosary, over and over again. When my wife heard the back door close she said, "Typical a**h**e cable guys. 'I"m not a magician my a**"

Thing is, I'm the one who had closed the door. The cable guy was still there, and I spent the next hour wondering how badly he was going to maim my house in retaliation.

 

Tags: Robert Heinlein, Cable, Hot Water Heater

Man I suck

So I missed Tuesday's Angels-Indians game because of other obligations, and yesterday's because of the snowstorm. I still intended to go tonight, only to pop on MLB.com and find the final game in progress while I sat at work. I hadn't realized it was a day game.

Damn.

* * * *

Over at Inc.com Leigh Buchanan composed a very entertaining and well-written piece denouncing emoticons aka smileys. Her means of destroying them: substitute language for the smiley until people are sick enough of it to stop. An example:

Picture if you will a colon: one tiny, perfect dot poised above its brother. Now imagine that colon transformed into a pair of eyes, bright and sparkling with mischief. From between those dots extends a hyphen. Yet screw up your eyes and…do you see it? A nose! Yes, a nose! Patrician in its straightness it dips toward the generous curve of a closing parenthesis. That parenthesis is a mouth, corners up-tilted in mirth. Viewed in sum, these marks compose a face whose expression of gentle amusement suggests the good humor intended in the previous remark.

You can find the article here.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, here's a disturbing bit about Keith Richards.

In comments published Tuesday, the 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said he had snorted his father's ashes mixed with cocaine.

"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father," Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared," he said. "... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

Read the rest here.

 

Tags: Keith Richards, MLB, Smileys

Snow in Bleepin' April

You know, on the first day of spring my wife and I saw a robin in our backyard. The first robin of the spring, on the first day of the season. How poetic.

Today, April  #@&^ 11th, I am staring out the window at a swirling, nasty SNOWSTORM that is threatening to dump up to a foot of snow here in Milwaukee.

My junior year in high school we had a blizzard in May, but that was a rare exception  . . or so I thought.

* * * *

I've never listened to Don Imus, and could care less if he has a job or not. But I think that in a culture where profanity and mockery are commonplace, and African American comedians/musicians use the word left and right, that the use of 'ho's' shouldn't get the man fired.

Talk about a double standard - not only do comedians and rap artists adore the word, the very 'politicians' who oppose Imus are guilty of perverse [reverse] racism of their own.

My opinion? Imus is an idiot, mainly because his use of the term was offensive to WOMEN. That's my strongest objection to it, and even that isn't enough for me to take away a guy's bread and butter.

In other news, charges were dropped against the Duke lacrosse players. Something stunk about that case from the get-go; a DA mad for publicity, it sounds like.

Now a woman had her reputation dragged through the mud front and center, college players were wrongly put through hell, and no doubt the city will be stuck with lawsuit settlements for years to come.  

Sigh. What a bleepin' world.

Ultasound pics

On my Mom's 60th birthday (April 5th) and the morning after our first night in the new house, we took both of our girls to view the 20 wk ultrasound of the baby.

LuLu was squirmy and noisy, but YaYa behaved herself - purely a matter of being 20 months older, I'm sure.

Still, I'm glad they both had the opportunity to see their sibling in utero, and even at her worst LuLu was still better than 80% of kids would have been.

They couldn't determine the gender, even after some intense searches . . guess he or she wanted to surprise us. It'll be the first 'surprise' birth for us, tho' the safe money is on another daughter.

Here's one of two ultraound pics from that day. I'll try to add the second at a later time.

Tags: baby

AL teams to play in Milwaukee?

News today on mlb.com that the three game Angels-Indians series scheduled for Cleveland this week will be moved to Milwaukee due to winter conditions in Ohio.

Well, hot dog! A chance to see two AL teams compete, and I don't even have to leave Milwaukee? If I can arrange my schedule, I'm there!

One of the reasons I'm so eager is the presence of future Hall of Famer Vladimir Guerrero.

That got me thinking: in my years of watching baseball, how many Hall of Famers have I seen on the field?

[warning: this list will almost certainly be expanded over the coming months as my memory improves]

Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, and Rollie Fingers for sure.

Don Sutton almost certainly.

Big Mac (should he make the Hall) I saw on Sept 10th, 2001, if not at other times.

I saw the '04 Yanks and  White Sox in Chicago, which means I saw A-Rod, Mussina, Jeter, Posada, Giambi, Shefffield and Rivera. At least three of those are HOF.

I've seen Griffey, Bonds, and Kent.

Frank Thomas (man, did he inspire fear!)

I've seen Rickey Henderson and Dennis Eckersely at the old County Stadium.

I saw Cecil Fielder, and his son Prince.

I've seen Pujols (yawn), Sosa, and Edmonds.

With reasonable certainlty of memory, I've watched Maddux and Ryan pitch.

That's not a horrible list, considering I started watching the game regularly only in '92. I'm sure I shorted myself by a score or so, but it'll come in time.

Tags: MLB, baseball, Miller Park

Kurt Cobain

With yesterday being Easter and all, I figured it wasn't the right time to go ahead and post a tribute to a guy who committed suicide (officially at least).

Anyway, here's a link to an article I wrote in '05 about Kurt.

To quote my '06 entry:  The tribute I wrote last year [2005] strikes me as a little too dramatic and formulaic in retrospect, but the sentiment holds true [and what I wrote in the comments sections is some writing I'm pretty proud of, imho]

RIP Kurt

Tags: Cobain, Nirvana, Grunge

Update

Hey guys, I'm still around.

In the last three months (while I've been ignoring this blog) we've: had two Xmas concerts, had Parker turn two with a great party, had YaYa lose her first tooth, gained back all my weight in return for quiting smoking since November, bought a house, completely remodelled said house from the foundation to the gutters, moved, had a tooth pulled, got into a car accident on the highway, pulled LuLu out of school, blew a transmission twice, became enchanted again with Lost, had a second ultrasound that could not conclusively prove gender, and generally just lived a high stress/no relaxation life as of late. . .

I've thoroughly documented everything with our camera, tho' I'm LOATHE to modify and upload the hundreds of pics I have to show the transformation. I'll get started soon enough.

BTW - Thanks Astaryth for the birthday card for Parker :)

Oh, and a Happy Belated 60th Birthday (on the 5th) to my Mom! Love You!

Parker is Two!!!

Just wanted to get in a quick post congratulating Little Big Man on his second birthday! We love you!

Lost "Stranger in a Strange Land"

Ratings be damned, I think the first few episodes of the "2nd half" of the season have been superb. That being said, my wife has dropped out of this house's Lost fan club because of the same complaints you hear in the press: the storyline has become too convoluted.

Well, I disagree.

But . .

Tonight's episode SUCKED. I'm bitter as all he** that ABC spent the week promoting this as the week we get 'answers'.

Answers to what?

That the Others didn't kill the captives outright?. Uh, I never thought they did. Why bother going to the trouble of kidnapping them if you're only going to kill them?

Other than that slim revelation,  I can't think of a single question, big or small, that the episode answered.

Oh, my bad. It told us how Jack got his tattoo.

Whoopee.

Be careful Lost. It isn't the episode so much as the false promo, but with me you're on shaky ground, thin ice, ready to jump the shark, etc.  

Pick your cliche - they all apply.

Tags: Lost

Wikipedia

So I was perusing the newsblog over at Baseball Think Factory when I came across this article about a baseball player who intentionally wrote a false entry about himself on Wikipedia.

"If Holdzkom does have a musical past, he won’t admit it, except to say that he and his brother, John, cooked up an elaborate story and posted it on the online encyclopedia site Wikipedia — a site that can be edited by the public.

“It’s not true,” Holdzkom said of his child prodigy story. “We just make things up, and Wikipedia puts it on there. I’ve never been on Johnny Carson. It just sounded good.”

Well, what an a**.  To me, that's no better than painting graffiti on a stranger's wall.

I've only recently become a fan of Wikipedia, but in that short amount of time I've come to adore the site.

Sure, a publicly edited encyclopedia has it's flaws: there's no guarantee the info is correct and there's always the idiot factor (case in point: Ed Gein's entire page disappeared yesterday. It was there at 9 am and gone by 10 that night, with only an offensive sentence left in its wake.)  I've also lost track of how many Digimon and animie entries there are (gag).

But it harkens back to my geeky youth, where I'd joyfully pass time reading random entries in a Children's Encyclopedia we owned. (and boy do I remember my joy when my Dad won a complete set of the adult version!)

So I sit and randomly sift through the site. The wife rents Marie Antoinette? Well, let's look her up. From there, I open multiple windows for different terms and people mentioned in the article, from the Revolution to the guillotine to the Bourbon lineage.

 After that, I might just become curious about the cast of the movie and look up Kirsten Dunst. That inspires me to look up Spiderman, which takes me to Marvel, where I look up Stan Lee, who in turn brings me to Kevin Smith . .

And on and on.

It's obnoxious really. My wife's taken to watching TV with me and saying, whenever some fact presents itself,  "Uh oh, better hurry and look that up on Wikipedia"

And I do.

Tags: Wikipedia, Baseball Think Factory

Follow up on Buddy Holly

The recent coverage (what there was of it) of the anniversary of Buddy Holly's death must have brought some folks out of the woodwork.

Today's Journal Sentinel features a front page article that includes two never before published photos from the Milwaukee leg of that fateful final tour. Up until today, there were thought to be no photos from the show in existence.

Check out the story here.

 

Tags: Buddy Holly

YaYa bows to peer pressure

First, she followed along when the girls in her class ditched pants in favor of skirts (and in the middle of winter). Now she has announced that she no longer enjoys, favors, or idolizes the Disney Princesses that were so important to her for years, right up to our trip in November.

It's horse hockey, but whatever.

That didn't prevent her from being excited about the release of Cinderella III. I'd rag her for days: "Well, if you don't like them anymore there's really no reason to watch . . " and she'd come up with one excuse or another as to why she'd still have to see it.

And one day while driving home from Grandma's, where she saw a preview of the movie, she told me all about the plot. In the movie the Wicked Stepmother gets ahold of the magic wand and reverses the events of the first movie.

YaYa then asked me, with hesitant but genuine concern, "But, there's no way Cinderella will really be hurt, right? She'll be ok because she's still in Florida in her castle?"

Funny. One minute they're all mature and precocious, the next they seem just like the little children they are. :)

Tags: YaYa

Baby Slapinons In Utero

Yesterday we had our first ultrasound, establishing that the Mrs. was 14 weeks and 5 days pregnant with a due date of August 10th.

The baby was very active, twisting and kicking and moving throughtout the procedure.

It's very early, but they also said there was a 60% chance that it's a girl . . so we're probably looking at the first pictures of Lauren Kathleen.

Google makes a mistake?? Be still my heart

As first reported on AOL's The Feed, the 'L' is missing on the Google homepage.

The Day the Music Died - 48 years ago

For most of a month now we've been unable to access the AOL software on my home computer due to a 'runtime' error. Tonight, in my eagerness to post, I finally realized I could do so via Internet Explorer. I'll try to update y'all soon.

Today is the 48th anniversary of the death of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper outside of Clear Lake, Iowa.

Buddy remains one of my favorite artists of all time - my personal (if eclectic) concert in Heaven would feature Buddy, Led Zeppelin, Artie Shaw, and Nirvanna, among others.

Here's a few clips of rare footage of Buddy performing.

Rest in Peace.

 

Tags: Buddy Holly

The Post about the Baseball Hall of Fame 2007

Tomorrow the doors to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown will open for the class of 2007.

Cal Ripken Jr.will certainly be voted in and so will Tony Gywnn; both men richly deserve the honor.

Borderline candidates like Harold Baines, Paul O’Neil, and Alan Trammell will get a few votes but stay home.

The annual debates about Andre Dawson, Goose Gossage, Jack Morris, and Jim Rice will rage again.

Oh, and the guy who ranks 7th in career home runs, who hit 49 home runs in his rookie season and 70 a decade later, the man who brought baseball back to front and center in the glorious summer of 1998, will almost certainly be left sitting at home.

Choosing to keep Mark McGwire out of the Hall isn’t a tragedy. I’ll reserve that term for something that doesn’t involve getting paid millions to hit a baseball.

But it is hard to rationalize.

Months ago,  if I had a vote, I too might have decided to leave him off the ballot, just to tweak my nose at the whole Steroid Era.

Instead, by golly, I got the chance to read voter after voter’s explanation for skipping over McGwire.

You can imagine how most of the articles go: Mark is suspected of doing steroids, he’s a symbol of the era, he wouldn’t talk to Congress, etc. Thus, leave him off the ballot.

Well, whoopdedoo.

Forget for a moment his true guilt or innocence and consider the hypocrisy of these writers. Most must have had some clue, some inkling of what was going on in the years they were busy making Mark a national hero, right?

Sure, I sat around in ’98 oblivious, believing that expansion and smaller ballparks alone were leading to more homers. So what?

I didn’t have the opportunity to visit the locker rooms, I wasn’t clued in to the rumor mill, and just to pound the fact home, I’m not the one paid to investigate and publish the news.

Don’t the writers share part of the blame? And yet here they are, the gatekeepers for entrance to the Hall.

How wonderfully ironic.

As far as McGwire’s appearance before Congress, that was a no-win situation. If he admits fault he is ostracized from baseball, and folks that say differently are fooling themselves. If he denies it, he’d be labeled a liar, especially after Palmerio’s perjury.

And apparently, if he just keeps his mouth shut, he’s out of the Hall.

You know the most duplicitous argument? That the decision to leave him off the ballot has nothing to do with steroids and everything to do with a one-dimensional career that isn’t Hall worthy.

If you think for even a second that those same writers weren’t drooling over his numbers at the turn of the century and booking tickets to watch his enshrinement, you’re as crazy as their argument.

Do I believe McGwire did steroids? Yes. Do I have proof? No.

Does he belong in the Hall? Honestly, I don’t know.

But I do know this is the opening bell for a decade or more of debate. Eventually Sosa, Palmerio, Giami, Sheffield, and Mr. Bonds will be up for enshrinement.

Can you legitimately keep an entire era of superstars out of the Hall?

Here’s an idea that’ll never happen, and one that even I’m not that keen on: keep the borderline (and certified cheaters) Palmerio, Giambi, and Sheffield out, even if their final numbers warrant inclusion.

Then put Sosa, Big Mac, and Bonds on a single plaque, extolling them as the dominant sluggers of the era but mentioning the controversy surrounding their accomplishments.

Would it mean rewarding cheaters? Probably.

But it would acknowledge an important era in the sport, and give the (officially) innocent the benefit of the doubt.

Five years ago McGwire was a guaranteed lock for the Hall. Now he’s a pariah.

That in itself might be punishment enough.

Tags: Cooperstown, steroids, Mark McGwire

The BCS Championship

I've had the game on as white noise off and on all evening, and I am shocked.

 If I thought it was going to be a blowout, I'd have said Ohio State would be on top.

The worst part is that a friend of mine, a Florida native, will be insufferable now.

Any chance of Boise State sneaking in to the #2 slot? I'm not familiar enough with the BCS to know . . .

 

Big Grandpa - 20 years

 Today while taking YaYa to school I suddenly remembered that it was 20 years to the day  - January 5th, 1987 - since my paternal "Big" Grandpa died.

It is honestly alarming how quickly life is passing by; his death seems only a moment ago in my mind, certainly nothing approaching two decades.

 

YaYa began to ask a lot of questions, and I was impressed by her interest. She soon explained herself, saying that she wanted as much information as she could remember so she could add a prayer for him to the P.A. announcements this morning.

 

She even asked me to write down his name for her.

 

'No man is dead if he is remembered' - that's the motto of a cemetary I pass daily, and it's something I firmly believe.

 

Today, Big Grandpa's memory is alive and well.

 

Rest in Peace, Grandpa - I love you.

 

 

Tags: Big Grandpa

What a Fiesta Bowl!

Holy Cow, what a game!

A true David v Goliath match from the start, Boise State jumped out to an early lead against the favored Sooners. After maintaining the lead into the 4th quarter (and with some spectacular plays along the way) it looked like it was all over with Oklahoma up by 7 with under 30 seconds left  . . and then booyah! a fantastic trick play that tied the game with 6 seconds left and knocked it to overtime!

Fantastic!

Overtime is just about to start so we don't have a winner yet, but man, what a game, what a game!

UPDATE:

Oklahoma took the lead in OT, but Boise State scraped together another TD. At that point they decided to go for it all and win or lose on a 2pt conversion. They knew OK had studied game footage of their team in similar situations - so they ran a bootleg to the left and took home a VICTORY!

The Cinderella team wins the Fiesta Bowl!

The. Best. College. Football. Game. I've. Ever. Seen.

LOL - and then to top it off, on live TV one of the players got down on one knee and proposed to the head cheerleader. What a game!

Happy New Year!

I just wanted to get a quick post in to welcome 2007. Technically, I've now had this blog up and running for four years - '04,'05,'06, and 2007. Of course, that's b.s, as it amounts to a mere 26 months over that time.

My wife's friend Chris and her kids were over for New Years this year, but at 10 I left and went to work to oversee the year-end, just returning a few minutes ago. The kids called me at 11 (when the Apple dropped in NY) to wish me a Happy New Year.

Anyway, blessings to all for 2007!