GAME05

El Drunko. For those of you who don't speak, that's Spanish for El Drunko.

to get a job i had once, you had to take an intelligence/aptitude test and go through two rounds of interviews with a suit, and it paid $7 an hour. what the heck?

though i'm having a sudden problem with mine, i like XM a ton. even in the offseason here, their baseball coverage is great. during the season there's a guy at night who really knows his stuff and makes some smart, objective comments. tv baseball analysis doesn't even come close. they were analyzing the moves of every AL Central team this morning. I got mine in large part because I live out of state, so now I can still listen to Ueck call the games at night. Between innings I hit a button and cheer for the Cubs to die on that channel. the stations will help you find a ton of new bands since you can pick your favourite genre and always have that. with all these over-air "we play everything" idiotic formats you're constantly flipping channels since they'll flip from AC/DC to Blondie in a heartbeat. 45 and 50 are my favourite channels. too bad there's only one blues channel, and there's one good jazz channel, too.

yeah, got me. I spend all day at work having to concern myself with what should be a semicolon and what should be a comma, so i drop all that when it's not work-related. So for me, saying and writing everything exactly right all the time is like taking my work home with me. one acquaintence of mine corrects everyone like that. i always tell her "i know. if i was concerned with saying it correct, i would have. I do it for a living, remember?" Of course then I turn the tables and tell her about contextual grammar, meaning she's actually wrong for correcting me.

It bugs me that I'm going to reach my 1,000th post soon, but because it's the off-season, I'll probably end up using it on a totally pointless comment like this very one.

I quit a job once only because they played Top-40 music on the speakers all day. Best decision ever. It bugs me that it only costs a fast-food place $0.10 for a cup and your soda, yet they still fill the entire thing with ice--$1.25 for a soda and you get about a cup's worth. It bugs me that Arby's has become too expensive to eat at. People who correct your grammer mid-sentence bug me.

I hate that the Celtics are pronounced like Seltics.

it's a decent song by the Weepies, but Old Navy chopped it up too much in that bad commercial.

it bugs me that i've never been given a single drink on the house at the bar i go to all the time.

what really bugs me a lot here in north carolina is that at a stoplight, everyone stops short a good 10 feet from the car in front and won't move up to the bumper. like today i missed a long light because i couldn't get into the left turn lane only because people wouldn't move ahead. it hugely bugs me.

that girl from Destiny's Child schilling for a phone company bothers me. she doesn't have enough millions already that she's perfectly fine selling out for TV?

i know most people have heard of the vodka in the water purifier thing before. i've always been curious if that helps a hangover, too. those hangover pills you can buy at the gas station are basically just charcoal, so wouldn't running the vodka through a charcoal filter do the same thing?

Pepto or even some milk before you go out will help. also eating some bread or crackers. half beer, half 7-Up is good the next morning. now and in the winter the following morning i always go for a walk. getting your muscles moving again and all the cool air really helps. i've heard it a couple times before that you can wake up the next morning stone sober, but you'll still register a blood-alcohol content. so maybe not a cure or anything, just a caution in case you need to drive to the gas station to pick up that Gatorade.

So my father has offered to pick me up at the Milwaukee airport and take me to Madison on Wednesday morning. I'm just thinking of what traffic around there is going to be like, so I'm wondering if there might be bus service from Milwaukee to Madison that I can catch at the airport. thanks.

i know nobody will really relate, but the City of Winston-Salem, North Carolina bugs me, and I want to vent a little. it's the best city to live in in the nation for retirees, so you can imagine what life is like if you're under 40 (it's also the 6th worst city in the nation for single people). In this city of 200,000 people: --If you want to go out, but not to a bar, your options are extremely limited, dare i say nonexistent. --only one (1) remotely decent sports bar in the entire city. --downtown virtually shuts down by 9 pm on Friday and Saturday nights, no exaggeration. --want a late-night snack? sorry, the hot-dog place downtown closes at 8 pm. --all younger, single people i've met here decide to move away within three months. --Thai and Japanese are the only ethnic dining options. --nobody cares about baseball. --the city council tried to pass a law that would have mandated security guards and metal detectors in every bar (knowingly eliminating most bars in the city). Though it failed, it's indicitave of the city's view of young people. --the only good Irish pub in the city closes at 9.

I guess I don't totally agree with that. The DH position has allowed certain players to get big, fat and strong and specialize in hitting. So out of that position develops players like Ortiz and Cecil Fielder. But bench players in the NL, since they HAVE to be able to play a position, are forced to stay relatively thin. it's that defensive necessity that negates at least some amount of hitting ability. That the Brewers carry Councell and Gwynn et. al as bench/pinch hitters, though they're not awesome offensive players by any means, is just a funcion of the league they play in and not any strategic lapse by Milwaukee or any other NL team. And if anything, Milwaukee does that, carries the good hitting/bad defensive players. Braun would have been a DH this past year, we're only forced to put him at 3b so he can play every day.

I really started to enjoy the Brewers more when we made the switch to the NL. it seems like there are so many more decisions for a manager to make in the NL, that managing an NL team is so much more intricate. it's a real small part of it, but part of why I like seeing pitchers up there is they're the everyman when it comes to hitting and not the experienced, professional batter. I feel like I could hit as well as Sheets against ML pitching. The rare time he loops one into right field, that's a little victory for me.

yikes. i was thinking you didn't have a new job yet. you'd honestly quit your current job and go to an old competitor just to get revenge on a dude? let it go, man.

you were going to get fired no matter how well you worked. no boss wants a guy under him who doesn't like him. sounds like he was trying to get you to quit and building up customer complaints over a year was only his way of justifying the firing and not any truthful comment about your work. he would have said anything. just go get a job at your competitor and bring all your old customers with you. that'd feel sweet.

well, as long as we're here, Machiavelli is interesting. "Shogun" is a good look at ancient Japan. the "Hagakure" is a favourite of mine. "Wild Swans" is a good look at three generations of Chinese women: grandmother was a concubine with bound feet, mother grew up under Mao and daughter (and author) got the heck out of there.

"Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer. the movie just came out, too. awesome non-fiction adventure book and very thought-provoking. Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" is also a great story about his Everest climb and disaster. "Hobo," about a man who lives as a rail tramp for a good while. Bukowski's "Post Office" is primarily non-fiction. definitely read Winston Churchill's biography if you have any interest at all in WWII. related to that, Hitler's "Mein Kompf" (sp?) is truly frightening. "Jungle" by Ghinsberg is a great non-fiction adventure about a guy escaping the jungles of Peru. "On the Beaten Path" is one of the best Appalachian Trail autobiographies written, if you like hiking. "Hustler Days" is a great book on the history of billiards relating to its most famous players. biographies of Che Guevara make for good reads, but bear in mind you'll of course get biases. Anderson's is a good read, but he did leave out some negatives. Naturally you'll get some good Castro information in there, which would be timely with him dying soon.

they pay for installation and the pv cells and you just pay for the electricity? so at what point do they jack up the $/kWh you're paying to some outrageous price? Edit: ok, maybe that was a little harsh without knowing enough about it.

PM me and I can send you some info.

ha! this is great. my metaphors make sense only to me. ha. and here I am, a professional writer. Please excuse me for breaking the unwritten rule of this very great thread just once: girl left her number on my car (girl's handwriting). don't know who she is. called the number, "Mike and Tina" or something like that on the answering machine. brother/sister? just roommates? boyfriend/husband? beats me. I mostly assume brother/sister since that's a pretty dumb tactic for a cheater to take, but one never truly knows. I leave no message, since I don't want to be part of it should it be something not cool, and also don't want to be the cause of some big breakup (or have my car smashed, frankly). the dude calls me yesterday, had my number on ID and was checking. I told him that I must have had the wrong number. Should have said something? beats me. I've made three calls over two days (today is the third day, but no call made). She'd have my number if she knew to investigate. I should add also, that the girl I had guessed it was from did not write it. I ran into her in person (I don't know her, unfortunately) and as smoothly as could be, asked her. nope. and it's possible she thinks I'm weird now or at best just have the worst pick-up lines ever. The way I figure, I have two options: 1. Call one more time and only one more time. Leave a message and number, or try to smoothly get the girl on the line should the guy pick up. 2. Just let the whole thing be. One more call may land me at "stalker" or at least "annoying jerk." Maybe she'll just happen to see me in the parking lot and say something in person (btw, I've been taking more walks in the parking lot lately).

thing is, at what point do you just have to accept that you're not ever going to sign the perfect player? There's even knocks against ARod. I'm not necessarily lobbying for Hunter, but any solid FA out there is going to get a contract until he's 36, at least. And as far as Hunter or any other high-profile CF out there this year, when he starts to slow down too much for CF, we just scoot him to a corner and assume that some prospect like a Ford or Gillespie or whomever is going to be able to take over CF at that point.