I rarely have an original thought about baseball so the need to share this one is urgent.
During the Mets latest series against the Nationals the guys calling the game on WFAN kept reminding us that we were getting our asses royally kicked by the lowest-scoring team in the league.
Remember that their manager Manny Acta is the former third base coach for the Mets. So he knows some things about the Mets. Let’s also remember that he was a crafty fuck. I heard that he had a little thing he would sometimes do with Spanish-speaking baserunners coming towards third. He would hold up the stop sign while telling then in Spanish to keep going, so as to decoy the opposing defense. Of course a lot of the opposition also presumably understands Spanish, but not all of them are within earshot. Sneaky!
I wonder if Manny does not have some piece of intelligence, or some exceptionally slick sign-stealing going on, or some other tactical advantage(s) that he is exploiting masterfully to thrash the Mets during this series.
Speakeasy now sucks
Once upon a time I was a satisfied customer of Speakeasy DSL, Internet service provider. The static-IP service was expensive but it worked. On the rare occasions when it did not, you could call them. When you called, a human would answer. And that human who answered would have a clue about computers and networks, and the problem would be addressed promptly. This level of service costs money and I was glad to pay.
Then I moved to a place two blocks from where I had lived hitherto. Speakeasy’s website said “Moving? Not a problem” and represented that you could get your existing service transferred to a new location. It turns out that was false. When I tried to move the service they said I had to enter into a brand new 12-month contract and go through the horror of installation. I agreed to this because it was take it or leave it. Installation proved to be a textbook study in ass-rape. With third parties like Verizon and Covad involved, making you take off work to wait for hours for their techs who then stand you up, or cannot complete the work and make you schedule another appointment, you know we are talking major ass-fucking. Another cute trick Covad pulled was sending a tech unannounced and calling me in the middle of the work day and saying “where are you? We can’t get in because you aren’t here.”
I grant you, Speakeasy is not Covad. But when I moved again a year later, I said no more Speakeasy. It’s expensive and the installation is a nightmare for which I simply do not have the time, let alone the patience.
I drew in a deep breath and signed up for Comcast’s TV/VOIP/Internet bundle, despite Comcast’s notoriously poor reputation for service. (By the way, the Comcast tech came punctually when they said he would, and did what they said he would, and the service has been perfectly fine so far.) I called Speakeasy on September 12 to cancel. They said I could not cancel without incurring a termination fee because the contract did not expire until the 22nd. I said, you coerced me into this contract in the first place after first saying I could move without extending it. And we are talking a mere ten days so what’s the big deal. Too bad, said the unctuous prick in so many words, call back and cancel on the 22nd or eat the fee. I called back on the 22nd and guess what. They said call back on the 23rd. Overnight, I got another invoice for $125 plus another $90 detailed simply as “service charges.”
So I called back on the 23rd and warned the guy who answered that I had been given the runaround and excuse me if I sound annoyed. He made it all right, and made the $90 go away — or so he says, we will see if Speakeasy comes after me for it.
They used to be a decent bunch — there was professionalism mixed with genuine human warmth and intelligence. It seems to me that since the Best Buy acquisition they have turned into just another shithead corporation determined to make the consumer navigate and endless voicemail maze, only to get fucked with and jerked around once they reach a human.
At the swimming hole
You descend from the diving board
and crash through the surface
of the sudden cold
now you are submerged
in silent green luminescence
and for one instant
the mind is clear and still
SUV for Tom Glavine
It’s great that Tom Glavine has won 300 games and received lots of formal recognition for it. He’s a remarkable athlete and has conducted himself admirably both on and off the field. But I hope I am not the only one who finds it disgusting and perverse to reward a millionaire with an environmentally hostile thing like an SUV. What on earth is the point?
In other news, however, the Mets did kick the Marlins’ asses today, which is as it should be.
How to fill a paper napkin dispenser
When I was an student between my junior and senior undergraduate years, I worked a shit job in a Friendly’s fast food restaurant. It was, as I say, a shit job, but we had some fun. After hours we would let in our friends, lock the doors, smoke pot, and gorge ourselves on ice cream. No matter how much we pilfered thus, we could not make a dent, a fact which struck us as hilarious as we continued to devour the cold sweet substance until satiation.
I was working in the back room one day when I suddenly found myself charged with the task of clearing handfuls of dishwater-logged coleslaw from the drain of an immense sink, as deep as my arm was long. Undignified and messy though the work was, I regarded it with equanimity because I understood that this was very probably the nadir of my employment career, and from this point forward things would improve. My optimistic intuition has proven correct, sort of. I have since had moments in my working life where I thought I might rather be back at Friendly’s with the dishwater-logged coleslaw, but no moments quite as messy in the literal sense.
Besides this insight, there were other benefits to be gained from Friendly’s. Early in my short career, one of the other employees explained to me how to replenish a paper napkin dispenser. My instinct told me to stuff it to capacity and beyond, so that refilling would be as infrequently necessary as possible, and began to do so. But my wiser colleague pointed out the correct way to fill a paper napkin dispenser: leave a little space towards the front. If you overstuff it, the napkins cannot easily be withdrawn cleanly, and the customer will inevitably pull not one or two napkins, but an entire cluster. You have surely noticed this yourself when dining at downscale establishments. Besides being wasteful, overstuffing has the ironic and paradoxical effect of making the Friendly’s employee have to refill the dispenser sooner rather than later.
Everywhere you go, you see these dispensers overstuffed. Filling them properly is a lost art. Fortunately for me, I have not needed to apply my napkin-dispensing knowledge in the workplace, because as I said, the coleslaw prophecy has proven true. But it has given me the authority to second-guess paper-napkin-dispenser-fillers across the land.
Rain delay — Shea Stadium, June 2007
Tom Glavine throws six shutout innings
Then the rain returns
steady and effortless
falling through floodlit darkness
onto the abandoned orange seats
pooling on the white tarp over the infield
soaking the flawless outfield grass.
My friend and I sit beneath the overhang
conversing in the way you do
with those you have known at least twenty years
as we watch the security staff
in their yellow raincoats
dutifully guarding the field against nobody
silent and hooded like monks.
The Sopranos ending was fine
I know it’s old news now — a week old. But here’s my belated two cents.
The ending was fine! Fucks everyone whining about? I heard soundbytes on the radio from irate fans complaining about not getting “closure.” Closure? Don’t make me puke. You need to see Tony’s brains splattered all over the onion rings in front of his family in order to achieve closure? That’s pitiful.
What is wrong with a little ambiguity? Either he got shot, or he didn’t. The end.
Libby sentence: with friends like these…
This morning NPR reported on the Libby sentencing and said that he submitted letters of support from such luminaries as Paul Wolfowitz, Henry Kissinger, and Donald Rumsfeld. If it were me up there getting sentenced, I could do without the help of friends like these who themselves deserve to be locked up. I’d sooner accept a character reference from Vernon T. Bludgeon himself.
Joshua Bell, street musician
I read with great interest this piece in the Washington Post about an experiment that the Post did at a DC metro station: they had Joshua Bell himself stand there and play violin music for passersby during the morning rush, his case open for donations, to see how much of a crowd would gather. But for a very few of the adults and all the small children who passed by, people ignored him. I found it astounding that people could be so completely desensitized, dehumanized, so absorbed in their meetings and their spreadsheets and their iPods, that they could not see or hear something as extraordinary as this happening right in front of them.
What do you suppose would happen if they tried this experiment in New York? And not necessarily at the Lincoln Center subway stop. I would bet $100 he would draw a crowd at Union Square. I think New Yorkers are generally more attuned to street entertainment than federal bureaucrats.
Still, this article served as a reminder, a wake-up call of sorts. Pay attention. And not just to the extraordinary.
Viva Kucinich!
I am now a kucinichista.
I have had it with the same old Democratic bullshit. I heard on NPR about the “debate” among the eight Democratic contenders. Kucinich — and this other guy I confess I had never even heard of, Mike Gravel — were the only ones with the balls to point out that if you want to stop the war, cut off the funding. Stop re-authorizing it by continuing to give the Whitehouse the all money it wants, as these wimps in the Senate have just done. Sure, Bush will veto the latest bill because it tries to prevent the Whitehouse from staying in Iraq “until the end of time,” as Jon Stewart puts it. But it still gives him the money because these lame-ass pols are way behind the American public and, apparently, are too timid to step up and make a sincere effort to stop the war.
Kucinich, on the other hand, not only advocates really stopping the war; he has now introduced articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney for falsifying the intelligence and getting us into this illegal and unjustified war.
Is Hillary in favor of impeachment? Hell no. Obama? Dream on. You know what? Fuck these wimps. I am going to write in for Kucinich, even if some of my centrist-liberal friends give me a great pile of shit for it.