Hey, crazy guy on my MUNI train this morning… I have enough conversations going on inside my head without needing to listen to the conversations going on in YOUR head, too.
Of course, now I feel bad about saying something about a person who is dealing with some issues, so I had to make a donation to the Mental Health Association of San Francisco.
Confession time.
I’ve never been to the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. For as much of a baseball fan as I am, and for growing up only a couple of hundred miles from Cooperstown, I should have gone while I still lived in Massachusetts. Now that I live in California, and rarely make it back to the East Coast, I’m going to have to make a pilgramage to Cooperstown someday… should’ve gone when it was more convenient.
Every year at this time, I follow the Hall of Fame election debates on the various sports websites that I frequent. For many years, it was one of my favorite parts of the offseason, reading up on who was eligible, seeing which writers would vote for which players and why.
But for the last few years, as many of the stars of the 1990s and early 2000s have come on to the ballot for the first time, it’s become much less entertaining to follow the debates. The PEDs era has cast a shadow over the whole process, with writers taking to their soapboxes to express their righteous indignation. Never mind that many of them turned a blind eye to PEDs for years, ignoring whispers and rumors until it became en vogue to trash the players that started getting caught. Sportswriters turned heroes into villains overnight, letting idle suspicion change the narrative.
You have Dan Shaugnessy from my hometown Boston Globe spouting nonsense (emphasis by me):
This is where we go off the rails. Like Thomas, guys such as Piazza and Bagwell have Hall of Fame numbers and never tested positive for PEDs. But they look dirty. Something doesn’t make sense. Thomas makes sense.
This is where it gets unfair and subjective. I don’t vote for the PED guys, so it’s easy to say no to Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, McGwire, and Palmeiro. They have positive tests and/or admissions and/or multiple appearances in the Mitchell Report. Piazza and Bagwell have none of that. They just don’t look right.
And then there’s this nonsense from Ken Gurnick of MLB.com:
As for those who played during the period of PED use, I won’t vote for any of them.
Talk about a soapbox… Gurnick is making headlines in the Associated Press (picked up by ESPN.com, SportsIllustrated.com, etc) by who he didn’t vote for — Greg Maddux, who might otherwise have been the first player to be unanimously selected to the Hall of Fame.
I hope this is Gurnick’s last ballot cast for the Hall of Fame. The “PED period” is still happening. A player needs to be out of the game for five years before even being eligible for the HoF vote. By his current stance, Gurnick MAY be available to vote again in, say, 20 years?
The number of days when I spill coffee on the front of my shirt, before I get to work, is high enough to make me consider giving up coffee altogether.
But then I take another sip, and I come to my senses.
I’ve often thought that the true measure of a person’s soul is whether or not they can activate an automatic sink sensor. When you see someone in a public restroom, be it an office building or an airport, and they’re unable to get the sink to turn on, you can be sure that they’re lacking a soul.
Andrew Largeman from Garden State has soul, and the proof is at the 13 second mark of this trailer:
You can be sure Jake and Elwood would have ZERO trouble turning on an automatic sink. They’d even be able to get the soap to come out!
When the Rapture comes, the first thing to change back on Earth will be removal of all automatic sinks, replaced by old-fashioned sink faucets that need a turn of a knob to release the water.
As time marches on, the simple things in life get more and more convenient. At least if you live in the “first world”, especially in a city like San Francisco.
Yes, this will be a post about the extreme amount of laziness that one can partake in if you can afford it. No, I don’t think I’m entitled to it. I worked for it, I can live without it, but you can be damned sure I’m going to enjoy it when I can. They say that money doesn’t buy happiness, but I say that money absolutely buys convenience.
To give you an idea of the things that I have available to me at my fingertips in this day and age, in this city:
That’s just in the past 24 hours. And that’s just barely scratching the surface of what’s available to me.
We truly live in an amazing time for being lazy, and I for one am grateful for it.
Little Miss Aria taking a nap. After my wife, she’s my best girl.
For a whole lot of people who made daily/weekly/regular blogging part of their New Year’s resolutions yesterday, many of them are going to be scratching their heads already, struggling to come up with ideas to write about.
And, yes, I am one of those people.
Here are three resources to use for blogging inspiration:
Or you can do what I just did, which is transform your lack of ideas into a post about how you’re out of ideas. How meta of me.
