Separated At Birth

Magglio Ordonez has played for two baseball teams in the ten years I've lived in Minnesota: the Detroit Tigers and the Chicago White Sox. Both teams are in the Twins division, so I've seen a lot of Magglio Ordonez. And in a tribute to my proscrastination, I am writing this post with two outs in the ninth of what will likley be the last game of the World Series and this season. But for not just this season, but for the past several seasons I have always felt that Magglio Ordonez looks like AC Slater of Saved By the Bell fame.

Am I right?

As an aside, the actor who played AC Slater (Mario Lopez) was part of Dancing with the Stars this fall. Coincidentally, the World Series has been mocked this year because more people watched Dancing with the Stars than watched Game Two of the World Series. Maybe people saw AC Slater dancing and figured they were watching Magglio Ordonez and therefore he World Series.

A Texas Cracker in Queen Emily's (Food) Court

Emily is out-of-town, so I had to run my own errands this weekend. I am not very good at doing them. I did manage to mail a package to my sister and return a jacket I decided I didn't need.

But where I fail immensely is mall shopping. On Sunday I drove to Rosedale Mall, which is Emily's backyard (well not counting our real backyard).

I went to the Apple Store to get my iPod repaired, and found out you have to get a reservation before they'll even look at your hardware. Rookie error #1: Apple Stores may LOOK cool and sleek, but customer service-wise, they are just as clunky and you have to wait just as much as all the other not-so-cool looking repair shops.

The nice young man at the Apple Store with a nasty twentysomething goatee (yes I once had one too about ten years ago) and crazy piercings let me know the next opening for me would be in two hours. I informed that wouldn't work because I had the dog in the car. I thought about asking him, "You have pierced ears. You work at the Apple Store. You can probably tell me, young man, what is this myspace thing all about?" But I digress. This is all about rookie error #2: Don't take your dog to the mall with you, even if you think you have one errand to do in there.

So I decided to go to Banana Republic and see what they had so I could put an order in with Emily, but all the clothes looked the same to me. Rookie Error #3: If you're a guy, don't go shopping without the input from a woman, otherwise you'll end up with a bunch of flannels and superdark Levis 501s.

So to hell with all of this, I thought, and decided to stick to what I know. I got a Blizzard at the DQ in Rosedale and checked out the boardgames at Games By James. I have been wanting to learn how to play Go for years now. And since now I was the one at the mall/Target, instead of Emily, I could finally buy the game.

Now I am learning tips on how to play from the internets. I am excited to play, but I'm not sure Emily will be. Are there any Go fans out there? The guy who sold me the game (another nice young man with a goatee and earrings who probably knows what this myspace thing is all about) said Muddy Paws, a coffee house in Uptown has Go night once a week. But that sounded way too intense for me.

The point to all this is I learned that I still suck at running errands, but I should do them anyway. Then I get to buy games and Blizzards. And I know Emily would appreciate if I did some of those errands myself. Blizzards, games, and a happy wife. See you at Rosedale.

Pancho the Wonder Dog

Footage shot by my brother-in-law (of followart.blogspot.com fame) in Wisconsin. We were there for a family weekend at Emily's family cabin. That is Pancho doing what he was put on this earth to do: retrieve things.

Rant #1723

What is the #1 problem facing baseball/track/cycling/football today?

I would say each sport looked the other way for about a decade as its athelets got dirtier and dirtier and dirtier with syringes and chemistry. There's plenty of blame to go around here. The athletes, the CEOs, and the commissioners all get a slice of Blame Pie. But so do fans like me who continue to follow these sports.

So was anyone else watching the World Series last night? If you didn't, the game began and the announcers spent about three innings discussing the notion that Detroit Tigers starting pitcher Kenny Rogers may have some illegal substance on his thumb. This is cheating of course. Pitchers doctoring balls is as old as the game itself. The real story is how passively the umpires investigated the issue.

And this goes back to baseball's habit of looking the other way rather than vigilantly make sure that its players are on the up and up and preserving the integrity of the game.

Click here for the rest of the story.

I have no idea if Kenny Rogers was cheating. It wouldn't surprise me either way. But this guy has the chance to polish off a very tarnished image, and so I was cheering for him. If the umpires had taken charge of the game and really inspected what Rogers had on his hand (instead of just asking him to wash it off--and destroy the evidence), there'd be no need to speculate. The story would be about his amazing post-season run, not whether or not he's a cheater.

The irony here (as pointed out in the article referenced above) is St. Louis' manager, Tony LaRussa, may have just been burned by a culture that looks the other way. But he spent a decade looking the other way in the Oakland A's clubhouse/steroid outlet mall. You sleep in the beds you make.

END RANT HERE

And the Hits Just Keep Coming and Coming

Those crazy teen-agers and twentysomethings have their myspace (I feel like an old fogie, but I still can't figure what the hell that whole myspace thing is about), and we thirtysomethings have blogs.

Two more blogs of note have been added to my generation's on-line canon.

The first comes from the shores of Lake Gicthe Gumee in Duluth, MN. One of the true highlights of Christmas for Emily and me is receiving the Christmas letter/update from our friends Jocelyn and her husband (I went to college with Husband), because Jocelyn's writing makes for a truly enteratining read. Now it's Christmas everyday she posts. Click here for a slice of Duluth life. As an aside, Duluth is on my shortlist of cities I'd live in besides the MPLS.

The second blog comes from Kirk, one of my friends from running. He is one of my teammates on the Bad News Bears cross country team I wrote about earlier. His blog is in its infancy, as he presently only blogs only after eating Jucy Lucies at Matt's. Anyway, click here to see his blog. Kirk is not only a very fast runner, but also a sarcastic jackass. Sound like anyone else's blog you are familiar with reading? The difference being Kirk is a faster runner than I am, but less obnoxious and sarcastic. As an aside, I went out with Kirk and some other guys last night at a local bar called The Cardinal. The Cardinal also has Jucy Lucies, but I find them to be very inferior to the greasy goodness that is a Matt's Jucy Lucy.

Back Seat Drivers

Like most people, I don't appreciate back seat drivers. But in this case, when we're road tripping with Pancho, I don't mind so much.

A Two Week Old Distant Memory

Yesterday we had this form of precipitation I call "Iowa." Iowa is a mixture of snow and rain and it usually comes with a lot of wind. It's crappy weather and until recently, I only saw it when I lived in Iowa. But now it seems to happen about twice a year up here in one of our lower 48's northern-most states. Consider it an inconvenient truth.

Anyway, thanks to all the wind and precipitation, the trees are barren and the ground is soggy. The crisp fall days that I love about Minnesota have been lacking.

It was only two weeks ago that I went for a walk with the dog with the sole purpose of taking in fall. Here is a picture of the footpath that goes along the Mississippi River near our house. It is ancient history now.

(Cross) Country Mike

I joined a cross country team this fall. We're like the Bad News Bears. There's a lot of very serious runners in the Twin Cities. Our team does not have any of them. Most of these teams are sponsored by shoe stores. We shop at shoe stores. That's where the similarities end.

Emily went to watch our race last weekend. She said it was fun because she forgot how fun cross country races are to watch, compared to road races. Mostly because you get to see a lot more of the race. But this experience is so far removed from high school or college cross country. And in many ways, it's a lot better. No long bus rides. No overnight trips. No anxiety about how I'll do or the team will do. It's also awesome because it is so much better than running those freaking long-ass races that are 10 miles or longer.



In fact, at last Sunday's race, we didn't have to show up until 9 a.m. So I got to "sleep in" (all the way to 7 a.m.), get up leisurely and have a relaxing breakfast reading the paper. I don't know why I ever want to run a marathon again.

The Most Outdated Rant of All Time...

was actually the rant that never was.

Actually, the most outdated rant of all time is a kid at work with Asperger's a few years back who had a rant about Ghostbusters II . He saw it as a serious monster movie, not as a crappy sequel, so I got an earful about all the flaws with Ghostbusters II and stopped the kid short of contrasting it to Alien. I wish it was "the rant that never was" because I was there. I had to listen to it.

But here is "the rant that never was." It has to do with the Men In Black and Will Smith's single that went with the movie (cleverly titled, "Men In Black"). For some reason I woke up this morning with the song stuck in my head, and have always been annoyed by the lines...

Here come the Men in Black
Galaxy defenders
Here come the Men in Black
The one's that you'll remember

I was annoyed because a) "galaxy defenders" sounds awkward, and b) a huge premise of the movie was that you DON'T remember the Men in Black. They make a point of making you forget all about them. This lyric has annoyed my for the lasst, what, nine years.

So I thought I'd blog about it and get it off my chest. So I went to a lyric website just now to cut and paste the lyrics, and here's what I found....

Here come the men in black men in black
Galaxy defenders oho oho oho
Here come the men in black men in black
They won't let you remember

Oops. Well written Mr. Smith. Sorry I wasn't listening closely. Now that I know better, your song is freaking modern day Shakespeare.

Time Machine

We adopted our dog Pancho when he was somewhere between 12 and 18 months old (it turns out my guess was as good as the vet's). Emily often asks and wonders what Pancho was like as a puppy. She adds that she never could have gotten anything done since he would have been too cute to stay away from for five seconds.

Anyway, last Friday I took some pictures of the fall colors along the Mississippi River near our house. Pancho went with me. And for some reason, in this picture below he looks like a puppy. Photoshop could not have done a better job of making Pancho look like a puppy. I don't know how it happened, and I don't think I could duplicate this picture ever again. I guess the old saying is true: it's better to be lucky than good/smart.

Who needs Photoshop when I have a Delorian, the flux capicitor, and 1.21 gigowatts of electricity?