Jamie's Journal

If melting into a puddle at the Ballpark* and getting assaulted by Lee Greenwood and TROOPS TROOPS TROOPS TROOPS TROOPS** and seeing David Price pitch an utterly godawful game*** doesn't say the 4th of July, then I don't know what does.

* - Temperature at first pitch: a refreshing 101 degrees.
** - Celebrating our military juggernaut is not the meaning of Independence Day.
*** - 1 1/3 inning pitched, 6 earned runs, 5 walks, three hits that left vapor trails.

When I laugh at things like this, I realize that there will never be a day where I stop being a dork.

"Naw, man, that's what I like about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age." - David Wooderson

I should start this off by saying that I love my wife very much and that this post should not be misconstrued to mean anything. Besides, I already told her about this and she wonders the same thing I do.

College students are beginning to show up at our office to take summer classes in the building we're not using. Some of my co-workers were looking forward to this because of the potential for eye candy. I was not. Like today, I went up to the coffee shop to get something to drink after a meeting. Ahead of me, a girl got out of the elevator, fresh from the gym with an old T-shirt and running shorts on, and a towel wrapped around her neck. She was probably around 20 years old. I felt like a pervert for noticing her.

I understand my own reaction. What I don't understand is why some people my age and older don't have that reaction when they catch themselves looking at a girl who's much younger than them. It just seems creepy. I'd love for someone to explain how that works, without incriminating themselves of course.

Is there anything more mundane and yet completely disorienting as when you go grocery shopping and everything has been moved around?

I can't find a single concise link to everything I've heard about the David Carradine death, but if even half of it is true, it's the most disturbing story of the year, with nothing in second place.

Just wondering: Cristina and I have been looking forward to seeing Up since around the time the credits started rolling at the end of WALL-E. But are we the only two people who do not want to see this movie in 3D? To me 3D is such a headache-inducing annoyance that I only use it for movies that have bad stories and need a visual gimmick to save them. (Or for seeing a movie the second time.) Up is almost certainly not going to be one of those movies, seeing as the closest Pixar has ever come to a bad movie was Cars, and even Cars wasn't that bad.

And besides, the DVD isn't going to be in 3D.

Before the Rays went down to Miami for their weekend series with the Marlins, they called up a pitcher named Dale Thayer. He's a fairly unremarkable pitcher on the surface, but he does have one thing going for him... a fucking incredible mustache. And since he pitched the last four innings of a 15-2 thrashing, we got to see a lot of it.





It's nice and thick, and it goes a good inch or two past the edges of his lips on both sides of his face. Then add the curly hair underneath the helmet and that "I missed a spot" patch above his chin, and he looks like he should have been a stunt double on Magnum P.I.

Early blog reports are very positive.

DRaysBay: "The score presented the opportunity for Thayer to get some work in, and holy heavens did he ever. When the camera flashed to Thayer, the first and only thing anyone noticed was the miraculous mustache, one with roots all the way to Mecca and back. This my friends, should be on scouting reports. It goes; hand, age, hand, gratuitous facial hair (if so, what type), pitches, and so on. Thayer looks like Chet Steadman. This is a very, very good thing...

"There's a distinct possibility that Thayer is here for the weekend and then gone again. That's too bad. 'Staches like that come around once, maybe twice a decade. Thayer could be our Sal Fasano/Matt Stairs type, and frankly that's something that should not be easily discarded. This is a guy with a WAR (Whiskers Above Replacement) of like 5, he's ridiculous. I can only hope he gets some more burn as the season progresses."

Rays Index: "Sure it was a great game all-around, but by far the best moment of the night was getting a look at the piece of fuzzy art on Thayer's face. The 'stache along with a bit of a gut and his mullet starter kit and we think we are on the verge of a real-life Kenny Powers."

My own opinion is that there has to be some kind of gene that only lets people with "Dale" somewhere in their name grow mustaches like this. Like Dale Earnhardt. He had a badass mustache. And all these people who get arrested in White Settlement or out in Wise County somewhere. They get popped for selling meth or beating somebody up, and they get their pictures in the paper. Their middle names are all Dale and they all have bushy mustaches.

Oh, and don't think the rest of the team hasn't noticed that thing. I would bet a lot of money that Gabe Kapler was involved in this somehow:

Things weren't going well at work yesterday and I needed a pick-me-up. So I went downstairs and got a box of Junior Mints. They might be my favorite candy. Who's gonna turn down a Junior Mint? It's chocolate, it's peppermint, it's delicious. It's very refreshing.

So I got it back to my desk and opened the box. I dropped the first one and ended up catching it between my shoes. Well I'm obviously not going to eat that one. But I dropped it again while trying to pick it up and it rolled underneath my chair. I had to awkwardly lunge at it, trying not to fall on the floor, and I managed to hold on to it long enough to get it in the garbage can.

Then I ate the second Junior Mint and nearly choked on it. At this point I should have asked Keyboard Cat to play me off, but I managed to eat the rest without incident. And without refreshment, too.

Everyone today is all "IDOL IDOL IDOL DID YOU SEE IDOL OMG!!!!!"

I find that this commercial perfectly sums up why I have never watched that show.

Went to a Fort Worth Cats game tonight with Cristina and her family. I'm consistently amused when "YMCA" is played at a sporting event, and groups of people who would be horrified to learn that the song is about dudes shacking up with other dudes instantly jump up and start dancing along. I'm talking to you, First Baptist Church of Boyd.

Cristina and I were both quite disturbed by the sight of this lady, who appeared on our TV screen about two minutes after the Capitals beat the Penguins tonight.



She was at least 10 times creepier in HD. Plus she was yelling at someone, or maybe no one at all. If it hadn't been for all the Capitals coaches man-hugging and rubbing Bruce Boudreau's red, sweaty, bald head like it was the Blarney Stone after the game-winner in overtime, this would have been the highlight of the night.

Come to think of it, both games were one long highlight. I would definitely show those two games to someone who said they didn't like hockey to try and change their mind. If they came to the end of the Blackhawks-Canucks game and said they still didn't like hockey, I would know there was no hope of changing their mind.

If you'll excuse me, now I have to go get that Fratellis song out of my head.

Texas Brahmas win Central Hockey League championship

Of course, they're the Texas Brahmas and not the Fort Worth Brahmas because our esteemed city council got all horny at the thought of an NBA D-League team in downtown and screwed the Brahmas out of the weekend home dates they needed to make money. The Flyers ended up averaging around 28 fans a game (rough estimate) and folded so fast that the city ended up holding the bag for the rest of their lease. The Brahmas found an arena in the suburbs and got very good very fast.

Once again, an epic fail for Fort Worth government. I can't wait to vote all these pinheads out on Saturday.

I finished my workout on Saturday afternoon, and it was time for the body test. I stepped on the balance board. It told me I weighed less than 200 pounds for the first time in several years. My BMI had slipped into the Normal range as well. (I know the BMI isn't a perfect measurement, but it is for what I'm trying to accomplish.)

I was very pleased. Cristina heard me cheering and came down for a look. She was also very pleased.

Then the Wii Fit tried to slap an asterisk on it all. You know, your last body test was at 8:00 in the evening! Your body weight can fluctuate up to two pounds during the day! THIS DOESN'T COUNT IT NEVER HAPPENED AHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I wonder how many calories I burned flipping off the screen.

Why I don't post all that often anymore. It's also why I never got interested in Facebook and another reason why I refuse to use Twitter.

The web has, in part, turned our social world into a positional good. Consider a fancy watch. When someone wears a Rolex, they don't get a more accurate sense of time. Instead, they get an object that signals their social position. At the same time, they effectively raise the expectations of everybody wearing less expensive watches. These people now feel inferior, since their Timex has been devalued by the costlier item. The perfectly effective watch has been diminished by the perfectly useless positional good. This is part of the unhappiness of being poor - you constantly want what you can't afford, if only to raise your social status.

A similar thing is happening with social networks. We're always noticing the person who has more of what we crave, be it friends or followers or page views. The end result is a surfeit of insecurities, which approximate the stress of being broke and walking on 5th Avenue. I'm not saying a little insecurity is a bad thing - if I didn't want more page views or more book sales I might not be writing this post - but, like anything else, it's crucial that we're able to turn off the insecurities when we need to, that we maintain some confidence in our social world and our place within it. And that's the kind of confidence that comes from being able to afford a Rolex or having lots of twitter followers or being more interested in googling Romanee-Conti than your own name.

To summarize: being connected isn't a bad thing. It's a glorious thing. But it can be stressful, because it constantly exposes us to people who have more of what we want.

Cristina told me that Danny Gans died yesterday. My first thought was, "Oh no! What are they going to do with all those billboards?"

You know what this is like? Imagine you've saved up your money for years and you're in the market for a luxury car. Early on in the process, you fixate on a Jaguar. Everyone around you says, "What, are you crazy? Jaguars are extremely unreliable. Just get a Lexus instead, you won't regret it." But you're swore and determined to get a Jaguar, even though it could be a complete and total lemon.

Then, not only do you buy the Jaguar, but you decide to pay an extra $5,000 just to make sure you get it, even though no one else wanted that car.

This afternoon G spotted a herd of longhorns being driven along the Trinity River towards downtown. We all went over to the windows to have a look. Sure enough, there were about a dozen steers walking along the riverbank, with some mounted police guiding them along and a pickup truck backing them all up.

I don't know where they were going - maybe it had to do with the Cats, or Rick Perry's hilariously ironic location for the tea party, or the Main Street Arts Festival. Still, the only thing I could think when I saw that was, "Oh my God, I live in a hick town."

Dear Quizno's on 3rd and Taylor Street,

When I went to lunch, I noticed the sign in your window saying you would close at 3:00pm this afternoon in observance of Good Friday. Of course, most religions that observe this holiday wouldn't allow their members to eat your food today anyway because they would be required to abstain from meat, or fast altogether. I am conflicted as to whether this was a dick move on your part, or a secretly genius way to get the afternoon off on such a nice day as today. I'm leaning towards the latter.

Hat tip,
- J