Call my Hotline

I had a great conversation this weekend that proved I can see the future and through time and space, or it's an example of how hilariously lucky I can be sometimes when it comes to inane things. I named the correct answer when there was 100's of possible answers, and if that's not proof I don't know what is. Now for just a small fee, I can find any piece of information that anyone desires given the bare minimum of information.  Below is an exact transcript of the conversation. The names of other parties in this discussion have been changed to protect the innocent.

Crystal: "I saw this movie one time that had this actress in it and it was about stuff.  I really liked the movie but I can't remember the actress who played the role. Also I hate that Venti Green Tea Frappachino you got and I tasted!"

Me: "What was the movie about?"

Crystal: "Things, and she like slept with some dude in the movie."

Me: "Is the actress old?"

Crystal: "She's older but not old."

Me: "Is it Kate Winslet?"

Crystal: "No, that's not right, let me text my friend to find out" *texts friend*

45 minutes later...

Crystal: "It was Kate Winslet in "The Reader"..."

Me: "Aww yeah"

So you see, given the absolute limited amount of information, I was able, in one guess and one guess only, to find out the information the other party required.  I'm like a super google or something.  And now for a limited time you can call my hotline and ask all the greatest questions of the universe, for example:

"Who was that guy in that thing?"

"What was that John Fogherty song about?"

"Nipples on males, what gives?"

"Pandas and their relative evilness, how to stop the coming apocalypse...which is not really a question?"

I'd also like to state for the record that not only have I never seen "The Reader" but I've also never particularly liked Kate Winslet until she wore the below dress at the 68th Venice Film Festival (picture courtesy of WWTDD)

That dress is amazing and it makes me want to date Kate Winslet at the drop of a hat.  It doesn't even matter that the dress has two extremely clever visual deceptions with the black sides and the bust area being a different color. I want to be deceived, do you understand me? The illusion is real to me, in fact it's so real that my mind is screaming for me not to believe it and I'm consciously telling my mind to go elsewhere while my heart and other parts further south take matters into hand (mmm double entendre). And Kate, if you are reading this, I've literally never seen any of your movies, especially not Titanic, but I want you to know that I would appreciate you and treat you in the manner you deserve to be treated and give you a more fulfilling relationship than ever before or again. Also, I can see through time and space...so I've got that going for me. I've never crushed on a celebrity before I saw this dress, but it does strange things to my small male brain.

Back in the Saddle

Alternative titles for this post:
Get bent California
Eat me Taxman
Probably shouldn't have tried California


So the State of California is crazy broke. Which is entirely of their own doing. I've lived here for almost 4 years and I've only filed my taxes once. Why you ask? Because every year I would get a pretty sizeable tax return and I figure the state is better off with my money and also not paying to process my return. And yes I realize that technically I'm in violation of the law for not demanding my tax return from California every year, but that's not the point. However California has gotten pushy about me filing my taxes, telling me that I might owe them money, I got a little miffed and went back and filed all my returns. The total return for the three years I didn't file taxes? $2400. So congratulations California, you hosed yourself out of $2400 that I was perfectly willing to donate to the cause of getting you less in debt. I wonder what it costs the state to process those three returns?

I feel bad for you California, but you brought this on yourself!

Usually wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole

I don't normally talk very much about this subject but I'm feeling kind of anti-woman this week due to a confusing event. But I was in a discussion with a friend about women being more difficult to work with than men, and I completely agree. Women are impossible human beings full of mystery and malice, whereas men are simple creatures with simple needs and an even more simple communication structure. Whereas your average woman is full of complexity and layers upon layers of emotional Labyrinths, and that's just when you ask how they are feeling.

For example, Men are easier to get along with because in general we say what we mean and there's not much more to it. And a woman has all these emotional and multi-tiered level meanings for things. For example, if I guy says, "I had a good time." It means he had a good time. If woman says, "I had a good time" it could mean anything, including I had a good time but I was anxious because I thought my lipstick didn't match my shoes and also Becky wore a nicer dress than me and maybe that made me look fat and also maybe my date didn't pay enough attention to me and I thought I maybe caught him looking at another woman for a second and oh god is he cheating on me etc etc.

Now you take a group of women and the women's hive-mind multiplies this multi-tiered meanings by a billion, until it becomes a negative tornado of emotions and lies, where nothing is good enough and evil pervades everything about it. And that's what it's like working in an office full of women, where the hive-mind sees and judges everything and will never tell you what they actually think. And each individual branch of the hive-mind has it's own goals and secret plans.

So how was your day?

Time flys when you are having fun

So I just moved again for my second time when I was out here. And I got to tell you, it was fantastic. My latest roomate (who admittedly I didn't screen enough) was a 40 year old meth addict who aside from being clean is the worst person I've ever met. Living with her was a certain kind of hell, and I couldn't be more thrilled to be gone. It was so bad that I didn't want to go home for the last 3 months. And when I did I would hide in my room while she would yell terrible things through the walls. I'm not sure what I learned in all that but I did learn that I have a tremendous amount of patience and I believe that any penance I needed to pay for in my life has hopefully been paid.

But I've moved on, out of Purgatory and into a huge new place that I'm eager to show off. Hardwood floors huge bedroom, great place. I'm also looking at buying places although that brings in the question of whether or not I want to stay in San Diego or not. San Diego, like most cities in the country, holds nothing for me. Sure I have friends here who are great but I've got friends in lots of places. It may be time to spread my wings again, go somewhere else. All I know is moving out of my old place and getting rid of that roomate feels like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders. It's fantastic and I can't wait to get my life rolling in the right direction again. Not that I was far astray, but it was pretty miserable there for a hot minute.

D.C. Bleh

So I'm in the middle of spending 10 weeks back in DC for a developmental rotation, working in the office I started in (but in a different division) and I'm struck by a couple things. First it's shocking how many people remember me, all kinds of folks here remember me walking the halls and suprisingly are pretty affable. Second I can't walk into an office or meet someone new without being offered a job, which is great, but I'm not sure I'm ready to move back to DC. I love DC, it's a great town and I have lots of friends here, the lady I'm working with now is great and I think I could do great here. But traffic here has gotten worse in the two years I've been gone, and the town has changed a little bit. I don't know how I would grow as a person here, I would grow professionally, and maybe that's enough, but I don't know where the other parts of my life would grow, other than my waist size, since you spend a billion hours commutting it leaves less time for the gym.

But all in all, the Pentagon is still great, the work is fun. And if the commute wasn't horrible I'd be here in a sec. Incidently the weather has been nicer here in DC than in San Diego.

World Cup

The World Cup is going on right now and as of this writing the US beat Algeria to win their group and advance to the knockout stages. The US should have been down 3-0 at the half and Algeria would be cruising into 3rd place in the group. What sickens me is that the US plays so very poorly in the first half of games and gets away with it. Against Slovenia, they got pummeled in the first half, they were down 2 nothing and the defense looked like a bunch of plastic cones and unfortunately Slovenia's forwards had at some point dribbled around some plastic cones. In the second half the US poured it on and all anyone could say was, "Wow that disallowed goal was the worst thing I've ever seen!" And the talk about that game became about the refs and not about how woefully inadequate the US was for half of the game. Nevermind the fact that a US player decked a Slovenian defender away from the ball.

Against England it was the same thing, blind dumb luck. The US got manhandled and eked out a tie because someone buttered up the England's goalkeeper's gloves. And now all of a sudden the country is ablaze with folks proclaiming Landon Donovan the king of the world, and I for one do not welcome our new Landon Donovan overlords. The hype is great but let's be honest, the US played over half of their three games extremely poorly, and only through dumb luck are the continuing.

It's quite possible the US will end up playing Serbia, which benefitted from the worst call in the World Cup against Germany with a red card that gave Serbia the win. And if the US plays them we will probably win because Serbia is terrible. Then all of a sudden everyone will be crazy about how USA is the new soccer Emperor and soccer fans will come out of the woodwork....Ugh

I love the World Cup, but I love the World Cup 100% more when the US is not in it. We are not a great soccer country, these are our D list athletes at best. The best athletes in the country are playing Basketball, Football, Baseball. Here's a short list of the sports more important that soccer in the US:

1. Football
2. Basketball
3. Baseballe
4. Hockey
5. Nascar
6. Golf
7. Roller Derby
8. MMA
9. Boxing
10. Jai-lai
11. Bowling
12. Table Tennis and Ping-Pong
13. Real Tennis
14. Bicycling
15. That weird Speedwalking thing they tried in the olympics
16 X-Games
17. Surfing
18. Competitive Video Games
19. Running
20. Monster Truck Rally
21. Billards
22. Lacrosse
23. Extreme Eating Competitions

All of these things get more coverage than soccer which is approxiamtely the 34th most important sport in the US mindset. It's a great amateur sport, fantastic at the college level. But the US national team is a joke, a silly silly joke.

The Real Best 10 Baseball Movies of all time!

Someone else I know did a horrible, and I mean just horrible job naming the 10 best Baseball Movies of all time. It was one of those jobs that makes you think, this guy just has no clue what's going on, a good top 10 list can have some movement in the list and you can argue on the placement of the movies on the list, but there are certain movies you have to hit. I'll make my own list, which may not be 100% accurate but it at least lends itself to some credibility. But first I'll start off by mocking his list:

10. Field of Dreams
9. Hard Ball
8. Fever Pitch
7. The Natural
6. Little Big League
5. Rookie of the year
4. The Rookie
3. Major League
2. The Sandlot
1. A league of their own

Holy crap, fucking "Fever Pitch"? "Little Big League"? Come the fuck on, how dare you have those two movies on there and skip some of the best baseball movies of all time. It pains my eyes to see those movies over "Field of Dreams" and "The Natural", and it is basically telling the world that you are a clueless yokel pedophile when you put those movies over "Bad News Bears" and "Bull Durham", which you left completely off the list. I understand liking kids baseball movies, but can you at least hide your sexual attraction to children a little better?

The sad thing is that you start off so well, it's like you almost kind of steer in the right direction and then you jump off a godamn cliff. 1-3 could legitimately be defended as the greatest baseball movies of all time. They are all fantastic movies which warrant at least consideration. But then you derail your train off the tracks forever with "The Rookie"...are you trying to tell me that this piece of Disney garbage is the 4th best baseball move ever? It wasn't even a well made movie!
From there it gets even worse. 9,8,6,5,4 are all abhorrent selections, let me tell you why.

9. Hard Ball - I liked it a lot better when this movie was called Mighty Ducks 7 - Gettin' Mighty With It. The tagline for this movie is the universally stupid and incorrect saying "The most important thing in life is showing up" Well if you show up and do a fucking horrible job like you did with this list you are a failure and a bum, and you wouldn't have been either of those things if you'd stayed at home or not put this list out there.

8. Fever Pitch - Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon...this is possibly the movie that I'll be forced to watch in hell for all time. Even the most jaded of Red Sox fans doesn't consider this a "good" movie. It's tripe, it's awful, and all DVD's of this movie should be burned, and the master copy should be shot out of a cannon into the sun. This might actually make the list of worst movies of all time. When the nuclear war sweeps the earth priests of the new religions are going to use this movie to show the evils of the old world or possibly treat a copy of this movie like the necronomicon, a tome so evil and terrible that it must be sealed away for all time at the risk of angering the fire gods of the sky again.

6. Little Big League - Extreme Islamic Fundamentalist Radicals (the bad kind) show this movie to suicide bombers before they send them out in a truck full of dangerously poorly rigged explosives.

5. Rookie of the Year - There's one sequence in this movie that is any good, and it's the extremely flawed part where they show him striking out major league stars. I believe they show him striking out Ken Griffey Jr, Barry Bonds and some other guys. This movie was made in 1993 and the kid plays for the Cubs...what's wrong with this picture? It actually is a good example for why this movie can't be on the list of greatest baseball movies, it doesn't understand how baseball works. Frequently throughout the movie there are terrible errors about scorekeeping and baseball rules and it conceptually has no idea how the game of baseball is played, it is just factually terrible. The IMDB page for errors in this movie is about 400 pages long.

Here are some movies that didn't make my top 10 but you could argue belong in there somewhere:

Any sequels or remakes - I like Major League 2 and Angels in the Outfield, I think there are a couple more remakes out there that are pretty solid baseball movies but I didn't include them because I think the list is rounded out enough without sequels.

Summer Catch - Actually not a bad movie, and if this list were hottest chick in a baseball movie it would be number one by a lot. But in the end the acting in this movie leaves it out of my top 10, the acting is pretty terrible at times and the realistic chance of a scout all of a sudden deciding to sign a kid to a big signing bonus is silly. There are plenty of guys who can't pitch complete games and always blow it in the 9th inning, they are called middle relievers in the big leagues. Plot holes keeps this off my list.

61* - I like this movie, I think the acting in particular is pretty fantastic. It also clearly understands the game of baseball. The problem I have is the factual inaccuracies that this movie suffers from being too Yankeeized*. I think when you make a historical pictures about this timeframe there is enough evidence to be factually accurate that a decent job editing the movie should be easy. The film makes some pretty horrible factual errors but I still like it and it could very well appear on a top 10 list.

Angels in the Outfield - I actually like the remake better than the original. It is very campy but I'll allow it. I was just never that crazy about the concept of this movie, so I'm leaving it off.

10. For love of the game - I saw this movie and was a little shocked that it wasn't more highly regarded. While it's as much a campy love story as it is a baseball movie it is still pretty good even though there are some editing problems. I also love the fact that it's not some championship game, or some kind of playoff game, it's a simple movie about an aging veteran having one more day in the sun. Which always rates highly with me. It shocks me to have 3 Kevin Costner movies on this list but so be it.

9. Eight Men Out - Although it's filled with factual errors and problems I find the subject matter to be fascinating. The acting is pretty great too but the story is just compelling as hell. Amazing performances by John Cusack and David Strathairn. The cast of this movie is fantastic.

8. Mr. Baseball - Still holds up today as a phenomenal movie, both in the baseball part of the movie, and the love story. But again it has the aging veteran trying to have one last day in the sun. It's formulaic as hell, and you can predict what happens, but it's still fun to watch and Tom Selleck is the perfect part for the roll of stupid american ballplayer in a foreign country. The editing is actually pretty top notch for a sports film as well.

7. Bad News Bears - The remake was garbage but the original is fantastic, it's pretty much the original story about losers making it which has been done 1000 times since then. It is supposed to be a comedy, but it is actually much deeper and more genuine than it appears at first glance.

6. Major League - I feel like this movie should actually be higher on my list. But I think that it hasn't aged nearly as well as some of the other movies on this list, the comedy itself doesn't always hold it's weight anymore. But it's still a great movie and I would watch it any time.

5. The Natural - Tremendous story, just pure fiction and it's great writing. I actually think this is one of Robert Redford's worst acting performances and he's still fantastic. The editing in this movie is abysmal.

4. Field Of Dreams - Again I feel like I should have this movie higher on my list, it's a good movie with solid acting and in interesting and engaging plot. I think I may have done this list too fast...

3. The Sandlot - This movie has universal appeal. People who may never have seen this still mouth out "FOR - EV - ER" because they've seen other people do it. The story is fantastic and the scene where the kid fakes drowning to make out with the lifeguard is one of the great scenes in kid's movie history, the scene where they beat the rich kids and the catcher is talking trash is the best sports scene in kid's movie history. I feel like maybe this movie should be a little bit lower on my list, possibly supplanted by Field Of Dreams, the problem is that the first time I saw Field I was incredibly sick. Every kid wishes they had a nickname as cool as Benny "The Jet" Rodriguez.

2. A League of Their Own - Tom Hanks should have served two years for Grand Theft for his role in this movie. He steals the movie and turns an ok movie into one of the best baseball movies of all time. "There's No Crying in Baseball" and his subsequent diatribe is one of the most quotable sports lines ever. The movie is pretty darn predictable and you can cut out the beginning and the end for all I care but the scenes with Hanks are priceless. David Strathairn is also fantastic in this movie.

1. Bull Durham - May very well be the best sports movie of all time. It is quotable, funny, deep, and knowledgeable as hell about baseball. The story, the acting, the transitions, it's all there. It's not a love story, and it's not a pure sports movie, it's a movie about life. And to keep it off your list of the 10 best baseball movies of all time is stupid.