Carnival of Madness

Wow. A complete game 2 hitter by Maholm. When he struck out Billy Crystal last month, all I heard was how terrible it was that Crystal struck out against the sucky Paul Maholm. Yep, he threw a two hitter against a Phillies club with Chase Utley, Ryan Howard and Pat Burrell, all better hitters than Billy Crystal. And then there’s Nate McLouth smashing two homeruns, putting three runs on the board. Then there was Nady and Bautista making huge defensive plays to stop some Phillies hits. Then there was Maholm taking a bunt and making a double play. Man, I hope he’s pitching when I’m in Pittsburgh or Milwaukee this summer. This is probably my favorite game all season so far. I loved it. Sure it was a Sunday afternoon game, but it’s still a “W” and the Buccos are now 10-14 (sadly, they’re still 2-9 in the games I’ve seen).Then there’s the Matt Morris thing. He was let go and the Pirates will “eat” the remaining $10 million that he’s owed. I wish he retired and let the Bucs keep the $10 million that he was owed, but I can understand why he would want $10 million. The idiotic move by former GM Dave Littlefield is over. It was a desperate attempt to turn the team around late last year and it blew up in his face and now, we the fans will have to pay the price in lost money.

Not that I hate the guy. I just hated the trade and the terrible move by Dave Littlefield. The few times I’ve seen him pitch, there was never a lack of effort or a lack of caring. He went out there and gave it everything he got. Sadly, this year, everything he got meant a 0-4 record with a 9.67 ERA. The Giants wanted someone to take him and some of his salary off their hands. DL took his entire salary off their hands. I think I could have negotiated for the Giants to take $6 million of it. Not sure if DL was trying to channel the spirit of Harding Peterson, taking the unhappy Bill Madlock from the Giants in 1979 and giving them a bunch of nothing in return. Of course Madlock helped the Pirates go from a .500 team to a World Series champ. Oh well, that’s the end of that chapter…

Man, I thought I’d look in to the NFL Sunday Ticket thing, since I saw advertisements for it this morning on Baseball Reference.com. They’re offering it for five easy payments of $53.80. That’s $270. There are 5 Steelers games I will be able to see without NFL Sunday Ticket, either on ESPN Monday Night Football, NBC Sunday Night Football or NFL Network. Thus there are 11 games I would like to see that will probably not be broadcast in Iowa (on CBS or FOX), but there’s a chance they could be. Anyways, that’d be 11 games for $270 or about $24.55 per game (assuming that all 11 won’t be broadcast locally in Iowa). But compare to the price of going to a game and paying for a ticket it’s a lot better deal. Of course the best deal would be just to be happy with the 5 games broadcast nationally and not bother with the other 11 games.Compared that deal to the MLB Extra Innings deal. Here, you get pretty much all 141 games (minus the 18 playing the Cubs and 3 playing the White Sox) for about $199. Not only is it cheaper overall, but the average cost per game? $1.41. And if I watch more than just the Pirates, see what the Twins or Angels or Yankees are up to on any given day? The average price is even cheaper still. So yeah, MLB Extra Innings, good deal. NFL Sunday Ticket, way too expensive…

Yah! I finally saw the Pirates win a game. At this point in the season, the Pirates are 1-8 when I’m watching. Until tonight, I wondered if I should have just stopped watching, because when I couldn’t see the game they were 7-4. Of course, X-Man did his job and got in the final two runs in a really close 3-2 game. Sadly Nate McLouth’s 20 game hitting streak ended tonight, but like Tekulve pointed out in the post game show, if you beat out Al Oliver in a hitting streak record, that’s damn good company. He was walked in the 6th and he stole a base but was called out by a really crap call. No only was he there on time, but the opposing player dropped the fucking ball. How could he not had been safe? But hey, they got the win and that’s what counts. Yeah, it was just awesome.

Ugh. What a miserable game that was. The Bucs were down 7-0 in the 3rd when I decided to turn the game off for the day and watch something else that sucks a lot less. I ended up watching an MST3K episode called The Starfighters. It was funny as hell. Basically it’s a lot like Top Gun, only more boring and gay than the Tom Cruise flick. Yep. They spent about 15 minutes refueling the planes in mid air. That was the funniest part because it was just a bunch of sex and gas station jokes.Yeah, so far all the Pirates games I’ve seen have been losers. I now have MLB Extra Innings and the Pirates are still playing bad. They’re usually only good when I can’t watch. Like last weekend, they swept the Reds and I couldn’t see it. They took 2 of 3 from the Braves and couldn’t watch that series. The first game against the Dodgers, couldn’t watch it either. They’re 7-4 when I can’t watch the game. All the games I’ve seen they’re 0-6. That sucks. I can imagine after tomorrow it’ll be 0-7…

Wow, watching the Phillies-Mets game on Fox and they preempted the commercial for American Idol so they could go back to the game. I have to say that of all the locals on DirecTV, Fox seems like the best. Of course I haven’t seen anything on CBS yet. Probably won’t until football season starts. Speaking of which, the Steelers naturally have the toughest NFL schedule and of course the Patriots have the easiest schedule. Of course.

Overall, DirecTV isn’t a whole lot better than Dish Network. DirecTV has more Sports and HD locals and Sci-Fi HD and Weather Channel HD, etc. Dish Network has Monsters and Kung-Fu HD. And Dish has an easier to use menu and DVR system. But I like it so far. It’s all good.

HAHAHA! I’d like to see him try.The sad thing is that the Steelers are potentially better baseball players than the Pirates are…

This sort of thing is way awesome. It’s just so cool to hear people talk about a rather obscure topic, like the gold standard and monetary policy in such a way. Now that it’s becoming clear to more and more people that the paper standard of the Federal Reserve is destroying our system of money, people are getting educated on why the Gold Standard is golden, why the Federal Reserve has no reserves and the big problem with the current Fiat Currency that is losing value every day.In other news, the Pirates after having lost three in a row to the Cubs and being able to see all 3 games on WGN and Comcast Sports, they’ve now won three in a row against Central Division foe Cincinnati Reds. It seems to me that the city of Cincinnati should be used to Pittsburgh handing their asses to them. Steelers usually do it to the Bengals during football season and now the Pirates are doing it to the Reds. Way cool.

Finally what the hell? Come on! It was just a stupid shirt, what’s wrong with it buried in some cement. Of course, it could just be that the Yankees front office believed that the jersey, left in cement would curse the Yankees in their new home. In which case, since when has this sort of thing worked? Red Sox fans out there spent decades trying to reverse the supposed curse on their team with little luck. It didn’t take an act of god, gods or anything else. All it took was a good team. Really, all it will take the Pirates to win the division is talent and a good team; something they really could use right now.

So there was a little inclement weather in another part of the state last night and that was apparently good enough reason to preempt 30 Rock and The Office. First watch the Pirates lose third in a row to the Cubs and then no Office, which was the first new episode since November. Now I’ll have to wait until Sunday morning after SNL’s over with because they’re not gonna air them until Sunday morniing at 12:02 AM. I have the recorder set up from 12:00-2:00 in the morning. I shouldn’t miss anything in that time. I could download it on iTunes, but it wouldn’t look as good as an HD version. If it’s not in HD, I’ll be really, really annoyed. Anyways, that’s what sucked about last night. Of course they’re preempting episodes of SG-1 for the airing, but nobody watches that show anyways…In anticipation of the new DirecTV system we’re getting next week, I have made a list of my regular (weekly or daily) recordings. This way, I won’t forget anything. I wish I had it already, but they were booked solid for over a week. Also, Dish and DirecTV were supposed to start ESPNEWS HD this week. DirecTV did, Dish did not. Another great reason to switch.

Now it’s raining out again! Yah! Man this is 1993 all over again. I hope we’re not combining corn on New Years Eve this time…

There’s a “public” smoking ban in Iowa. Doesn’t mean that publicly owned buildings have smoking bans. This just means privately owned and operated businesses that are open to the public will have this smoking ban crammed down their throats. Do the people who own and operate these businesses have any say in the matter? Nope. Not really. They put in all the money and have large sums of it taxed away and the government comes in and tells them what to do and what not to do. I say that if there’s some guy smoking in a bar in Iowa, it’s none of the government’s fucking business.Of course there’s one big exception: Casinos! I’ve been to a casino a few times, they’re loaded with many times the number of people that I’ve seen at most bars. They’re emptying their wallets to push buttons. While most bars smell like smoke, it seemed like the casinos had even more smoke and there was no decent ventilation system in these casinos. It seemed like the smoke just stagnated. At least most restaurants that did allow smoking had a decent ventilation system to get rid of the smoke. Most of the time, restaurants had smoking sections that I didn’t even know about. Why make casinos exempt for a public smoking ban? Why else, taxes. Casinos in the state of Iowa are obscenely profitable for the government. The state of Iowa would hate to take a hit because of an annoying little smoking ban they enacted. They get large sums of money from the taxes collected on not only the winnings of gamblers, but also on the revenue collected by the gambling establishments. If restaurants and bars provided as much money as Casinos and were as afraid of losing business because of this ban, the state of Iowa would have never allowed such a ban to take place.

I hate smoking personally, it stinks. But I’m sure as hell not gonna tell anyone else or any business what to do on their private property. Oh well, just a victory for the people who have nothing better to do than nag everyone else on what they’re suppose to do.

Even though I still have 3 months of Dish Network left, I’ve decided to cancel it and go back to DirecTV. It’s not anything against Dish Network, they’ve been great. I’ve had very few problems with their service and they have a pretty good selection of programming. For the most part. Dish Network delivered local channels first which is why I went with them in the first place.The problem is that in the last 6 months, DirecTV has surged ahead of Dish Network in HD programming. A year ago, Dish Network was better, it had more channels, period. Today, Dish Network is having a problem delivering all the new HD channels. DirecTV has all the newest HD channels and now has local 2/7/28 in HD. Which would make my using a TV antenna a bit obsolete. I don’t watch much on Channel 9 in HD except Boston Legal. But I can’t imagine that it’d be too much longer before DirecTV has Channel 9 in HD too. And there’s the money issue too. Right now, I can get all the same basic channels and MLB Extra Innings for about $15 more a month than I’m paying now. Sure it’ll cost more for April, May, June and July; but after that it’ll be down to about $65 a month. Not too shabby for the same thing I’m getting now, minus ABC HD, plus Fox HD…

So it’s gonna be here on the 16th. I’m not sure how to cancel Dish Network. I guess I’ll call them on Monday and see what I need to do…

I saw the movie Once this weekend. I rented and downloaded it on iTunes about three weeks ago and decided to watch it last night. It is without a doubt probably one of the coolest little movies ever made. Yeah, no big names or cool looking sets or anything fancy. All expenses were spared when making this movie. Except they clearly spent a lot of time on the music and writing. It’s freaking awesome. No duds when it comes to the music. None of the songs made me think “They shoulda cut this out” or “Wow, this song is completely out of place.” The music is well written and memorable. The dialog is smartly written and unpretentious. All the characters are memorable, realistic and likable. The lead guy is completely flawed and kind of a screw up sometimes, but is really a good guy.I think what makes it work is that they didn’t try to do too much. They just told a simple story about two people and the music they wrote together. I think one of the problems with some movies is that they try to do too much.

On the other hand, sometimes doing a lot of shit all at the same time is a good thing. Like the new episode of Battlestar Galactica. That took a long fucking time, over a year. The final episode of Season 3 aired in March of last year. The first one of Season 4 didn’t air until April 4th of this year. Thanks Writers Strike! Some of the time was spent on those Razor episodes from late last year, in November, I think. They coulda skipped those, they didn’t really add anything, except that Admiral Cain prefers the company of women and that one of the 6′s was lesbianing it up with the Admiral. At this point they have four of the final five Cylons (Tigh, Anders, Tyrol and Tory). I think the big surprise would be if Starbuck is not a cylon. I mean they certainly are spreading it on pretty thick that she is in fact one of them. I loved how they started the episode, with Col. Tigh grabbing his pistol and shooting Adama in the head. Then going back to reality. It’s just easy to tell that this season’s really gonna do some kicking of the ass. They ended the episode with Starbuck trying to kill the president. Uber Sweet.

I also went out and bon fired some wood and such. It was pretty cool in all. Free beer and fire, what could be better? Well it coulda been warmer out…