UPDATED 27 April 2008: Add Kansas City Royals.
UPDATED 20 May 2007: Add Philadelphia Phillies.
I’m a sports fan, and I “collect” stadiums (stadia?). Especially major league baseball, NFL football, and NHL hockey. My goal, before I die, is to see a baseball game in the home stadium of every MLB team. It would be an added bonus if I could do the NHL and NFL venues, but right now, I’m focusing primarily on baseball.
Problem is, I keep forgetting where I’ve been, and losing count. Therefore, mostly for my own reference (and because I expect few others to be interested), I’m posting a list of venues attended below the fold. I’ve ordered them in roughly the order in which I first visited them, to the best of my ability to recall.
However, if you have comments concerning favorite (or least favorite) venues, feel free to leave them.
April 27th, 2008
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Sports, I do too have a life, NFL, MLB, NHL |
10 comments
How the times change. Three of the top five boy names in 2006 are names that greatly increased the likelihood of you getting your ass kicked on a regular basis back when I was a kid.
April 24th, 2008
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I do too have a life, Culture |
9 comments
- If you’re going to fuck up somebody’s truck, you’d better have a helluva lot better justification than “probably.” Just sayin’. Oh, and unless you want to pay for all the damage you’ve caused, carving your name into his leather seats probably isn’t a good idea.
- People who have read the book suck. If you’ve read the book, do yourself and everyone else a favor: Don’t go see the movie. They simply can’t fit a 400-page book into a two hour movie, so it’s going to be different. Deal with it, or stay home. Even if they did stay true to the book, you’d end up with something like 2001: A Space Oddysey, which makes absolutely no fucking sense to anyone who hasn’t read the book.
- If the ability to read from a teleprompter were the most important criterion for being president, Clinton would be defeated by Obama in a landslide. But for self-effacing humor, Edwards wins hands down. [Side note: Obama proves that he’s anti-gun by removing James Brady from the “On Notice” board. I’m surprised Uncle isn’t all over this.]
- While I’m on the subject of things absolutely nobody here cares about, the NBA playoffs start today. Whatever little semblance of traveling and charging rules the NBA may have, they’re officially null and void until next season.
April 19th, 2008
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I do too have a life |
4 comments
What do you get when you sample from Werewolves In London and Sweet Home Alabama, and then add corny nostalgic lyrics about growing up in Michigan?
Why, you get the abomination of a new Kid Rock “song” that I just heard on the radio, that’s what. I’ve always hated Kid Rock, but Jesus, that’s a new standard of awful. I didn’t think it could get any worse than whining about feeling guilty for being white…
April 9th, 2008
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I do too have a life |
no comments
OK, so Amazon.com offers these “Daily Deals”, right? They pick some item, discount it, and sell a certain number of that item on a given day at the discounted price, until they run out.
Recently they offered a deal on an item that, by coincidence, I had purchased not long before at the regular Amazon price. This annoyed me, because I thought I had been getting a good deal at the regular price (well below MSRP), but they were now selling the same thing for about $20 less than that. I wanted to get in on the really good deal, not just the regular good deal - but of course there was no point in my buying one now, since I already had one.
Then a brilliant plan occurred to me: I could buy one at the discounted price, wait until they had sold out, and then sell it at the regular Amazon price on eBay - thus earning the difference between the sale and regular prices, and essentially reducing my own previously-paid price to equal the sale price, after the fact. But then an even more brilliant plan occurred to me: I could buy a whole bunch of them, wait until the sale was over, sell them on eBay at the regular Amazon price, and earn 20 bucks per unit profit.
So, not to be greedy, I ordered 5 units at a cost of close to $300, and sat down to wait to start shipping them out and earn mass profits. At some point I discovered that I had misremembered my original purchase price; the price differential was actually only $14, not $20, but still, I stood in the way to earn a cool 70 smackers, and that ain’t hay. And at any rate, I knew I had a guaranteed market at that price, since that’s the price they were currently selling for (non-discounted) on Amazon. What could go wrong?
Well, the first thing that went wrong, in fact the moment I clicked the “Buy” button on Amazon, was that I began to feel like a dick. Yes, it’s cool to find deals and it’s the American way to buy and sell schlock merchandise like a bazaar barker in desperate pursuit of the most minimal cash payout, but I realized that I was essentially taking advantage of Amazon’s discount offer to make a profit for myself - and because the discount sale quantity was limited, in doing so I was blocking someone else from getting a good deal who probably only wanted it to enjoy the item for themselves. You can argue that that’s just capitalism at work, but it’s (in a very, very tiny way) one of the ugly things I object to about the way capitalism works - that the constant grinding pursuit of self-interest in every way and form overrides even the most minimal sense of generosity toward others’ welfare. And here I was behaving like an oil company in a nature preserve, just to get 14 fucking dollars out of somebody who wasn’t fast enough to get the discount. So as soon as I had thought about it, I went back to my Amazon account to cancel the order - and found that, in less than 15 minutes, they had already begun processing the order and it couldn’t be canceled. So not only did I feel like a dick, but I couldn’t undickify myself.
So, I sat down again to wait, feeling guilty and wishing I wasn’t in this mess. I began to wonder if I should donate the profits to a charity or something.
Eventually, a big box arrived with 5 identical items in it, all duplicating the one already sitting on my shelf at home. I stashed it away guiltily and didn’t deal with it for a couple of weeks.
Big mistake.
Eventually, I entered 5 identical sale notices on eBay and sat down to wait some more, because it takes a week for the auctions to end. Now, I’m not stupid, right? - before I began this whole adventure I had checked sale prices on eBay and confirmed that they were doing a brisk business in this item, at prices roughly approximating the Amazon non-discounted price. In part because I had only previously sold things on eBay once or twice and didn’t really know the system, in part because I wasn’t sure it would help, I hadn’t specified a minimum sales price on the auctions - but what difference would it make? The going market price was well above my purchase price, so my profits were secure.
After entering my items for sale, I checked a few similar listings just to re-confirm that the market was strong. And then made a sickening discovery.
Somehow, in the intervening couple of weeks between ordering the items and placing them on eBay, the bottom had dropped out of the market for them. eBay sale prices were now running well under the Amazon non-discount price; “Buy It Now” offers at the Amazon price were going totally unclaimed, and some auctions were actually ending below the discounted price that I had paid! And because I hadn’t specified a minimum price, I could potentially lose almost everything I had paid! But I couldn’t do anything about it - if I waited longer, the price would probably just drop further, and I had to get as much of my $300 investment back as I could. So I left the auctions up and hoped I was just seeing a momentary aberration in sales prices.
I forced myself not to monitor the auctions more than once every day or so for the next week, but on the ending day I was mortified: every single auction had ended within a dollar or two of the Amazon discount price that I had already paid, and most of them had ended well below that - in one case almost $10 less! The total combined sales of all items was $25 less than I had paid for them at the discounted price! Luckily, I had specified a $10 flat shipping fee, thinking it would cost less than that, so I had some buffer room, but it wasn’t looking good.
And of course, three of my buyers were from the midwest - not cheap to ship to - and the rest were all from California - as far away as it’s possible to get in the 48 States. And then PayPal took about $2 off the top of each order they processed, and eBay itself charged me more than $3 per order in fees . . .
End result, after splurging on a bulk purchase of a highly popular item at deep discount, selling into a strong, virtually guaranteed market with demonstrated demand almost $20 above my break-even price point, and paying all associated transaction fees (including the cheapest possible shipping method, even at the risk of not keeping my promises regarding shipping dates, because every other alternative was a disaster): I still felt like a complete dick and I lost $18.81.
Which, paradoxically, had the effect of making me feel a lot less like a dick. Instead of elbowing out others’ discount purchases for my own benefit, I actually wound up subsidizing my buyers’ discounts to the tune of an average of $3.76 below my own purchase price - which would have been a substantial savings for any Amazon customer who had not paid for “free” Prime shipping privileges, and at worst no more than $2 above discount (and as much as $10 below) even for those who had. So I did shift the market from Amazon to eBay, which is not what Amazon wanted, but from the broad perspective the only real loser (in various senses) in this scenario is me. So I’m really a kind of altruist.
Great.
April 7th, 2008
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General, I do too have a life, Economics, Math, Fiasco, How Capitalism Will Ruin You |
6 comments
Over at Obsidian Wings, I made the following two statements:
- We should change the constitution so that all federal judges require a 2/3 majority in the Senate for confirmation.
- I have never seen Dr. Strangelove
Guess which statement caused a ruckus!
March 27th, 2008
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I do too have a life, Bloggin, Culture, Humor |
15 comments
I have a confession: I don’t “get” Elvis Costello. Kevin, our gracious host, is a huge Elvis Costello fan. This is far from our only difference of opinion when it comes to music. We have almost nothing in common in terms of musical taste. And I think I know why.
I submit that you can divide pretty much all of the music fans in the country into two distinct groups. The first group (of which I am a member) listens first and foremost to the music, while the second group (of which Kevin is a member) listens first and foremost to what the song has to say. Within either group, of course, musical tastes will vary widely, and two people within the same group may still have virtually nothing in common — after all, there’s no accounting for taste, as the old expression goes. But the two groups still hold, I believe. And this is an important distinction. For ease of distinction, I’ll refer to my group as the Bubblegum Pop Team (BPT), and Kevin’s group as the Important Music Team (IMT).
For the Bubblegum Pop Team, music is entertainment, first and foremost. There may or may not be a message to the song, but it doesn’t much matter, because members of the BPT generally have no idea what most of the songs they like are even about, if they’re about anything at all. This is true, by the way, even if they know all the words to the song. Listening to music is a passive activity for them, and as such, they’re not really paying attention to what they’re hearing. This is why BPTs often like music which, if they paid any attention to the message, they’d find abhorrent (which explains Eminem). It’s a simple function of, “Do I like the music? Do I like the singer’s voice? Does this entertain me?” Or, to dust of repressed memories of American Bandstand, “Can I dance to it?” For BPTs, this is what’s important. BPTs are the people who like manufactured pop like Britney Spears, or who (like me) got into the 80’s hair metal thing, or stuff like Outkast, Fergie, or just about any other popular music.
For the Important Music Team, on the other hand, music is a form of expression. As such, the message of a song is important. IMTs are acutely aware of what a song has to say, and that message — coupled with whether or not they agree with that message — will have a profound effect on whether or not they like a particular song. Listening to music is active for IMTs; they’re the type of people who would discard a Van Halen album, because “they have nothing to say” (a phrase I actually once read in a review of a Van Halen album, by the way). IMTs like stuff like Elvis Costello, Rites of Spring, and Tom Waits. IMTs look at BPTs happily bopping around to Semi-Charmed Life and wonder how people can be cheered by a song about a downward spiral into drug addiction. (They’re also likely to take great pleasure in ruining a BPTs mood by telling them that’s what the song is about…)
As a general rule, IMTs and BPTs look at each other with confusion. IMTs look at BPT music and wonder what the redeeming social value is. BPTs look at IMT music and wonder what all the fuss is about, complaining that “the guy can’t sing,” or “it doesn’t have a good beat,” or “why do all the songs have to be so damn depressing?” The truth of the matter is, because of the completely incompatible ways in which the two groups do something as fundamental as listening to music, they’re likely to never understand one another.
That said, the groups are not completely mutually exclusive. From time to time, there are artists that manage to have appeal across both groups. some of which can do so without being accused of “selling out.” Bruce Springsteen and Green Day spring to mind as artists that write “important” music, but which have a broad following even among BPTs. I’m sure if EMTs thought about it for a while, they could come up with some artists or songs they like, despite the fact that they have no coherent message or redeeming social value. But these crossovers are uncommon, and the exception to the rule.
With all that groundwork laid, there’s one more important thing to point out: BPTs far outnumber IMTs, probably by at least one order of magnitude. Don’t believe me? I can give you a single anecdotal example which, for me anyway, is compelling proof: Reagan’s use of Springsteen’s Born In The USA as a campaign song. If even a third of the population consisted of IMTs, there’s no way Reagan gets away with this: the message of the song had nothing at all to do with the message or the mood that Reagan was trying to convey, and IMTs recognized this immediately. They even complained about it at the time. This fell on deaf ears, because most Americans are BPTs, who heard the words “Born In The USA” and an uptempo tune, scratched their guts, held up their PBR beers, and screamed “Whooooo! USA #1!!”
Need another example? How about the cruise line commercials that play Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life? I’m pretty sure heroin addiction isn’t what the cruise line is trying to sell (or, subliminally, maybe it is). Most people (BPTs) hear it, hear the words “Lust For Life” sung to an upbeat tune, and think, “Fun! Adventure!”
Well, that’s my theory. Have fun tearing it to shreds. 
(I should note that there are two other groups, who do not fit neatly into this dichotomy. The first is the Musician Group. Musicians are an odd bird, and they tend to like things that are musically challenging or complex, whether or not they’re any good. This explains why they’re so enamored of the Dave Matthews Band. The other group is the Psychoactive Drug Group. This group is the only way I can explain Pink Floyd, The Doors, and Bob Dylan.)
March 26th, 2008
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I do too have a life, Bloggin, Culture, Weekend Flame Bait |
26 comments
Scenario #1: Last month, I got a letter from the cable company, announcing that my rates were going up by $5 a month. I’m not at all happy about this, but I’m not going to cancel my cable because I can’t get satellite where I live, or because I’m just too lazy to switch, or whatever other reason you can think of for not canceling cable, so I’m just going to have to suck up and deal with the new pricing.
Scenario #2: I never even read the notice announcing the rate change, and only found out when this month’s bill came and was $5 higher.
Starting from either scenario, pick up here:
Seeing that I’m upset, my wife asks, “What’s wrong, honey?” And I respond, “I’ve just reached an agreement with the cable company that we will pay $5 more per month.”
Now, you might think that this is a mind bogglingly stupid way for me to describe what just happened. But apparently, lots of self-described “free market” types disagree. That’s not only a perfectly fair way to describe what happened, apparently, but just how people talk. So we should find nothing the least bit awkward, inaccurate, or unusual about my hypothetical response to my wife.
TERMS OF USE
March 22nd, 2008
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I do too have a life, Bloggin |
60 comments
From a blog thread on time travel paradoxes:
me, i’ve done quite a bit of fantasizing about becoming a mentor to myself at 15. “first of all, DON’T let the keyboard player sell you acid. JUST SAY NO!!”
HAH!
Dude - I can relate.
March 20th, 2008
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General, I do too have a life, Humor |
one comment
An actual e-mail that I submitted to the folks at ThinkGeek.com:
To Whom It May Concern:
I’d lose my geek street cred if I didn’t bother you about this, because it’s been bothering me and it’s geeky to point it out. Take, for example, this page:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/popculture/9fce/
You keep talking about “acronyms,” but I do not think that word means what you think it means. None of the examples you list are actually acronyms. It’s only an acronym if you pronounce it as a word, rather than just saying the letters. Thus, DOS and RADAR and laser are acronyms, and WTF and FTW are not — they’re initialisms.
Also, one more geek note, from here:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/sciencemath/3813/
Apostrophes indicate possession, not plurality. So it’s the stuff that chilis are made of, not “chili’s.”
Thanks for your time. I have to go back to my mom’s basement.
Sincerely,
- [tgirsch], Professional Dork
(Licensed in six states, plus the District of Columbia.)
I know it’s dorky to even send such an e-mail, but the “acronym” thing really bugs me.
Anyway, carry on with your day…
[One more note: I can’t find any agreement as to whether it should be spelled “chilis,” “chilies,” or “chiles.” The first two are both listed as valid, but third is my preference, mainly because that’s the Spanish spelling, and it’s where we stole the word from…]
March 6th, 2008
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I do too have a life |
22 comments
This is disturbing on so many levels, but the reviews are hilarious.
March 5th, 2008
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I do too have a life, Humor |
2 comments
Don’t ask me how, but somehow, I’ve been sucked into Dancing With The Stars. Anyhoo, is it just me, or do the judges seem to have it in for Mark Cuban for some reason? I’m not a huge fan of Cuban or anything, but the criticism of him seems unusually harsh, and his scores unusually low, especially compared with what they give everyone else. What’s up there, anyway?
October 1st, 2007
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I do too have a life |
2 comments
Continuing my series of idiotic advertising, because I have nothing substantive to say, I just couldn’t pass up the tagline: “Perhaps the coolest and most powerful spork ever created.”
The Spork of the Gods
Every mythic hero normally has an equally mythic weapon. Zeus had his thunderbolts. Thor had his hammer, Mjolnir. King Arthur had his Excalibur. Frodo and Bilbo had their Sting. Rhydderch Hael had his Dyrnwyn. King Kong had his bananas…you get the idea. It’s time for you to join the ranks of the heroes and heroines of lore as you wield your own legendary weapon in your battle against a very powerful foe: hunger.
The Titanium Spork is ready for the challenge. Titanium is known for its great strength, corrosion resistance, and light weight, which makes this spork a valuable asset around feeding time. Imagine how much more food you could shovel in at your local buffet if you didn’t have to worry about the strain of picking up a heavy fork or spoon. Your food consumption can become the stuff of legends. Even just holding the Titanium Spork in your hand, you can feel its power. It is perhaps the greatest gastronomic invention since lickable wallpaper. Hunger, beware - your end is near!
I’d post the picture, but . . . it’s a spork. You know - a spoon with some teeth ground into the edge so you can also use it as a fork. It’s cool. It’s powerful. It evokes the ancient gods. But, you know . . . it’s a spork.
More than a dozen people submitted “action shots” of the spork. I’m seriously thinking of ordering one.
September 5th, 2007
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General, I do too have a life, Culture |
no comments
#1: Chalk lines work better when they’re filled with chalk.
#2: When you buy a chalk line, it probably doesn’t come filled with chalk.
You’re welcome.
September 3rd, 2007
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I do too have a life, Humor |
5 comments
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