A daily dose of good, clean fun

I thought this strip was particularly amusing. Happy Festivus Eve!

Oh for the days of Juan Samuel and Curtis Pride

The Tigers are terrible. Perpetually. Everyone knows this. They last over-.500 season was 1993, and their last good season was 1987...when they traded the 1996 NL Cy Young award winner--John Smoltz--to the Braves for Doyle Alexander, who gave Detroit 2 4.00 ERA seasons and then retired after the '89 season.

The ghost of Ty Cobb has since perched itself over the entire worthless metropolis, laughing.

I bring this up in light of the Tigers' most recent acquisitions, which were memorably one-linered in this story about the Marlins in Slate:

So, why don't more teams follow the Marlins' lead? The Tigers, for instance, could have received a bunch of quality players this winter for Ivan Rodriguez; instead, they signed Kenny Rogers and will miss the playoffs again.

We seem to be reamking ourselves as a poor man's Mets: Rodriguez; the permanent injury that is Magglio Ordonez; the Old Man's Club of Rogers and someone named Jamie Walker; the one-day wonder called Dmitri Young; and Craig Monroe. We now have two closers, in Troy Percival and Todd Jones, who absolutely no team is going to want in a trade, and we have Franklyn German and Marcus Thames.

Mike Illitch's pizzas might be hot and ready, but his baseball team is lousy.

Ryan Jacobs

Shirk, the greatest white male dancer I know (with apologies to T.Kohl), had this to say: "No way! You're 25!" It was amusing.

He reminds me, almost to a T, of my man Ryan Jacobs back in Australia. He was one of the greatest people I've ever known, and I wish I could find him. Ryan, if you're still on this planet, email me.

In other news, one of my sweet tennis balls was lost today. No clue how. Disappearing tennis balls are as mysterious as those times you walk into a room and have no idea why you're there.

The Bro Is Mentioned Twice

After a happy bout of tennis yesterday, The Bro and I began discussing whether we rank among the world's top 1 billion tennis players. Are we better than 83.4% of the planet's population at the game? I think yes, as I have no knowledge that the people of Indonesia and China, not to mention most of the rest of Asia, as well as Africa and South America, have ever picked up a racket. He pointed out that naturally gifted athletes would have an inherent advantage, but I'm skeptical; could LeBron James beat me in straight sets? These are the kinds of things I wish there was an easy way to discover.

This sort of Big Picture Thinking is entertaining. The UofM vs. OSU game last month, for example, with its 111,591 people (the most people I've ever shared an experience with), sported .037 percent of the country's population.

On the same note, the oak tree that is the Sunday New York Times listed 40,000 as the number of deaths that result every year from car crashes. That's 109 every day, a tad higher then the 14 that was once quoted in USA Today. Assuming the reality is somewhere in between, doesn't this seem like an awfully large number? There's nothing in American life as dangerous as controlling multi-ton machines of metal running at speeds between 1 and 80 miles/hour, yet it's done. All the time. Is this the best we can do? Wookie hates me for bringing up teleportation pretty much every day, but I swear, its time has come.

On a completely unrelated note, I would like to share the difference between New York Life and Tampa Bay Life, courtesy of the wedding announcements that appear in the major papers in each region:

This is from the Tampa Tribune: "Andrew...is employed by Vanc E and Hines Motor_Sports...he races competitively on the National Hot Road Association circuit, riding a Screamin' Eagle/Vanc E and Hines Harley Davidson V-Road."

Great. Follow your passion.

Now to New York: "Virginia...is an associate producer for CBS News...covering politics and Congress. Her father is the general counsel for [Important Financial Firm]...her mother is the chairwoman of the NY Landmarks Preservation Foundation...Edward is a producer in the Washington bureau of ABC News, covering Capitol Hill...he gradated cum laude from Georgetown University.

Or change the world.

I often feel stuck between these two worlds; that is, following the less-than-intellectual passion of baseball and just having fun, or attempting Something Important that Dr. Hulme always challenged his students to do. It's US Magazine as serious reading vs. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography as pleasure reading; James Patterson vs. Jonathan Franzen, and if this makes me an elitist, it's not more than The Bro dividing movies into the Good Movie and Entertaining Movie categories (Memento vs. Armageddon).

Woohoo Sunday Night.

Don't

An easy way to hinder your consideration for a graphic design/entertainment position would be to put "DOS" and "Microsoft Internet Explorer" under the "Summary of Qualifications" on your resume.

Isn't that sort of like putting "riding in a carriage" and "walking" under your "Stuff I Can Do" category? I'm just saying...

The WE Network rocks

Other than a brief glance at the O'Reilly Factor to make fun of Bill, I don't watch FOX News. Or MSNBC, for that matter. Not really CNN either, unless Something Important seems to be happening. But the FOOD Network; hoo boy.

I'd prefer my channels a la carte, as FCC chief Kevin Martin threw into the air of Washington some days ago. Some Cable People were like, "No, that'd be really expensive for the consumer, and then there'd be no audience for Oxygen, so basically, it's a terrible idea." Ha! Nonsense! Malarchy! My boy Rob Pegoraro, over at WaPo, has pointed all who subscribe to his lovely weekly newsletter to a Canadian company that offers, including helpful category packages. How nice.

The downside, obviously, is that people who only get 8 channels might not develop interests in what's on A & E or, gasp, Lifetime. And I admit that those terrible Sea Creature From The Deep movies on SciFi aren't really all that bad, once you get past their terribleness. Do you subscribe to SciFi just for these, or will you not miss them? Awkward.

Wizards Of Winter

This is the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my entire life. Merry Merry Christmas.