Sorry Neifi

*****Cubs Rant Alert, Cubs Rant Alert*****

well since my last post where I called one of Dusty Baker's favorite players a career backup who had no business starting in the major leagues...and spelled his name wrong....
he has since singled in the tying run in the bottom of the 9th last night against the Giants AND
(sorry Chief)he hit a 2 out, grand slam HR in the top of the 11th to beat the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium and win two of three for the Cubs. (that's just a second after I told Brandon that Neifi Perez couldn't hit an elephant in a closet.)
oops....

Sending Out an SOS

*****Cubs Rant Alert, Cubs Rant Alert*****

Well just finished watching the Cubs drop a 2-1 loss in 11 innings to the eventual NL Champion Cardinals at Busch Stadium. After an amazing pitching performance by both sides, the Cardinals won it with a suicide squeeze from David Eckstein after a lead off triple. This is after the Cubs left the bases loaded in the top of the 10th. And after this pitching line score from Carlos Zambrano:
Chi Cubs IP H R ER BB SO
Zambrano 9.0 3 1 1 0 12

ouch...and in the spirit of that and the Cubs sinking playoff chances...here is a funny photo:



as near as I can figure, Dusty Baker who is obviously going down with the ship (Baker is rumored to be on his way out) has sent a liferaft to his favorite players who have no business actually starting in major league baseball: Niefi Perez, Todd Hollandsworth and Jose Macias. Meanwhile that is the head of Mark Prior sinking below the water. A funny little picture which sums up the Cubs right now...the Cubs' hopes are sinking, Baker is probably gone by next season, and the only thing that seems to concern him lately is giving playing time to career backups.

Harry Potter and the Rained Out Hens Game

A quick recap of my very interesting, very entertaining weekend.....

Friday: I worked until 11:30 at the bookstore on the night that the newest Harry Potter book came out. We were hosting a Midnight Magic party for the book's 12:01am release and the party started at 9. I was told by everyone who was there for the last book that this is the single craziest thing I would ever see at Barnes and Not-So-Noble.....10 times worse than any day before Xmas. Wow...were they right. By 9pm we must have had atleast 1000 people in that place...it was shoulder to shoulder and it took 15 mins to get anywhere. Jenny and Kristin came to visit and I scored them some swag that I was going to sell on ebay. More than half of the people were dressed up and the great majority of the people were in there teens or twenties. When the lines started forming to buy the book, the place resembled a battlefield with the small, battle weary staff being overran by the masses of Harry Potter mania. I won't slam the book because Jenny made me read the first one and its quite good. But wow. Grown people were crying when they found out that there were free posters and wrist bands. Quite insane.

Saturday: After doing nothing all day, a bunch of us went to the Toledo Mud Hens game that was sold out. Problem was....there was no Toledo Mud Hens game. We sat in the rain for 3 hours waiting for play to start until they sent everyone home. I was kinda pissed (ok, really pissed) when they did call it....but the thing is, it was really fun just hanging around drinking in the rain with Jenny, Chach, Brandon, J and Ashlie, Brynn and Garrett, and Kristin. Best time I've ever had at a baseball stadium where no baseball was played. Then we went to BWs and I got pretty drunk. I'm proud of myself, I had all the classic drunken qualities:
-memory lapses
-throwing things at girls' cleavage
-hiccups
-throwing up in my yard
it was terrific

Sunday: pretty lowkey as I tried to recover from a drunken night. Watched the Cubs win. Watched more baseball. Got to hear Vin Scully say that a Giants pitcher was from "Holy Toledo, Ohio." Dinner at Jenny's and watched WW and Road Trip when she fell asleep.

Today: goodbye lunch with Jenny as she leaves for Spain and Rome tomorrow. Offered to help her pack which would have been 3 hrs of me bothering her and then throwing me out. So she just threw me out ahead of time. :-) Now writing this blog entry and dreading having to work a whole 5 hrs of work tonight.

This One Sucks..err.. Counts

some (mostly) angry musings about the 2005 All-Star Game:

*first thing first...credit where credit is due to the Tigers, Comerica Park, and the City of Detroit for a great, very well put together event...great showcase for "the D"

*that being said...I HATE HATE HATE the American League and its watered down baseball...I've inherited from my father and grandfather a real dislike of the junior circuit...to the point where we're not allowed in this family to root for an AL team...and like Chief kept shouting "They don't even play real baseball! There are players who don't hit or play defense!" amen....fucking AL

*some stupid Fox moments as there always are cause the network sucks and the only thing they've ever done right is bring back Family Guy
-a very pregnant Jeanie Zolasko or however its spelled interrupting Ernie Harwell mid-sentence to intro a stupid Fox thing with Smoke Robinson...hey glorified eye-candy, you DO NOT interrupt Ernie Harwell ever!! you let him keep talking even if the game is delayed for three hours!! its friggin Ernie Harwell!!!
-the stupid movie promos that meshed with baseball highlights....enough already! I kept expecting Batman to pinchhit for Albert Pujols or Anakin Skywalker to come out of the pen to kill all the AL players
-the repeated reference to seven (now eight) straight wins by the American League and its pretend brand of baseball...umm...excuse me Fox, not quite correct, do you forget the Selig shoulder-shrugging tie of a couple years back? you can't win a tie!!!

*very nice, chilling moment at the beginning when baseball honored the London bombing victims with a moment of silence and the Detroit Symphony Brass playing Britain's national anthem....wow

*though with a giant Canadian flag on the field, Mounties, and a team that plays in Toronto...where was the singing of "Oh Canada"?

*it was cool for Brandon and I in our Cardinal and Cubs jerseys and hats to actually pull for each other's players...for the only time all year I get to say "Crush the ball Albert." anything to beat the pretend baseball league

*well...Kenny Rogers got his by losing the shutout on Andruw Jones homer that actually was last seen sailing over Toledo...also the only time I've done the tomahawk chop without mocking it

*had a pretty good line...Chief and I were watching the Aquafina commercial where everyone is drinking water to a drinking song as it has replaced beer and I asked Brandon, "Do you think this is what Chach's nightmares look like?"

*goddamn AL and their winning streak

NOT a Yankee Doodle Dandy

Much higher than I would have thought....sounds a little too Lee Greenwoodish to me

You Are 52% American

Most times you are proud to be an American. Though sometimes the good ole US of A makes you cringe Still, you know there's no place better suited to be your home. You love your freedom and no one's going to take it away from you!

How American Are You?

Stayed tuned for Part 2 of Toronto travels...as soon as I stop being lazy

Oh Canada

HAPPY CANADA DAY!!! Sorry that I haven't been heard from in awhile, the internet on my computer has been down. I have to right on my dad's which is the only one with internet for some reason. But enough...now onto what everyone is waiting for with baited breath...the recap of the WSJP Toronto trip!!!!

Thursday June 23
Brynn and Garrett came to pick us up around 8:30pm for our two hour drive to Sarnia. Unfortunately as we were heading up 75 we all forgot various things and we had to go back to both houses. We were on the road for an hour and hadn't even left Toledo. We eventually got to the hotel in Sarnia and crashed for all of 5 hours. Stiga and Jen stayed at Jen's brother's house up there. J and Ashlie just came over in the morning. And Chach and Corey did god knows what around Sarnia all night. Though casino and 7/11 were mentioned.

Friday June 24
Got onboard the train to Toronto around 6:45am. We had the back of the train to ourselves and we still managed to keep the rest of the train awake and pissed off. After Stiga had finished telling us a story about strippers with duct-taped nipples and then acted out their dancing some Bible-humping dude in a tie-dye shirt that said "I heart God" or something told us to be more quiet and that we were offending the other passengers. Which I guess was probably true...but oh well. We're all going to hell anyway. But the train was fun....my first time on a real train.
We got into Toronto at around noon and proceeded to walk to the hotel. This is when we first got an indication of how many hot women were in this city. They were everywhere all weekend...usually in packs. You could practically hear Chach and Corey's head spinning around. After we checked in we went to this giant mall called the Eaton Centre (note Canadian spelling) to eat lunch at this place called Mr. Greenjeans. We had this pretty hot waitress with an ass that the single guys were ready to write poetry to. But dumb as a rock. Chach asked her for good bars to go to and she managed to slip in the word "boyfriend" about 5 seconds in.
We kind of hung out at the hotel and went swimming in Canada's biggest pool until we went out to dinner at a place called Jack Astor's which we annoyingly kept calling Jack Asses.
After dinner we went to a bar called Crocodile Rock which was just like any place you'd find in BG. Kinda lame. But Corey and Chach zeroed in on two Canadian girls sitting next to us who (sorry guys) weren't all that hot. The rest of us left them and oddly Stiga at the bar and I guess Corey got atleast one of their numbers. No word on if they were actually numbers to the bus station or something.

Saturday June 25
We started Sat. by walking down to near the CN Tower and the Skydome to see a tour of a local brewery called Steam Whistle beer. It was maybe the closest Chach has been to heaven. We walked in and immediately got free samples from the hot girl behind the counter. And they kept refilling us. I was starting to buzz on free beer before the tour even started. A cool guy named Dustin took us on the tour. Chach ate hops. Several of us got to pull the steam whistle. Then we got more samples and a small glass. It was excellent and I seem to be hooked on this damn beer that I can't even find in Ohio. Must be crack in it.
Then we went to see Skydome in the window wall of the Hard Rock while Garrett bought a glass or something. Chach, Brandon and I smoked cubans while we walked around.
We went back to the pool and swam with everyone. Brandon made some funny Paris Hilton joke that I promised him I would put in the blog (but I can't remember it Chief, do you remember the joke?) He also chatted up three hotties in the hottub but he didn't get enough details according to the guys.
Then we went to this Olympics Experience place where we got to try various events and compete against each other in like running, bobsledding, hockey and strangely curling. I got caught checking myself out in a mirror as I was rowing against Brandon.
After that we took the subway to this bar that the dumb, nice-assed waitress told us about....and to her credit it was very cool. It was this huge mansion that was converted into a bar...and it was a frigging maze, lots of floors and tons of different rooms connected by a labyrinth of stairs. It was pretty awesome. We ate and most of us settled in a room where this acoustic guitar player was playing cool songs (Coldplay, Oasis) and such. He was very cool, he said "cheers" everytime we clapped for him. And we were really the only people there. Garrett would shout out various requests...no "Freebird" and we left before "With or Without You".
The subway ride was hilarious because most of us were pretty buzzing. Corey and Chach slid down the railing of the stairs and Corey fell around it and almost smashed his head on the floor. Then he was running down the empty car and he almost fell over again when the car rocked. Good times.

Wow.....ok, this is going to have to be broken up into a second part because my arms are killing me. And no one is still reading at this point. Stay tuned for more highlights and lots more lowlights in Part 2!!!