Diskage:
DVD • Pulp Fiction
CD-ROM • Empty
CD Player
• Soundgarden - Bad Motor Finger
• Mad Season -  Above
• System of a Down - Toxicity
• Skinny Puppy - Too Dark Park
• Metallica - ...and Justice For All

Books Lying Open
• The Encyclopedia of Things that Never Were, Michael Page & Robert Ingpen

Soul-Devouring Worry
• Continued football success.

When I Grow Up:
• Violence will no longer be the only answer.

Curse of the Day:
• May your driving habits fail to impress the authorities.

Daily Update
One thing I forgot to mention yesterday, about the hot players' wives.

A pitcher on the Padres for years in the mid-90's was Joey Hamilton.  He was this pudgy guy, tall but baby-fatted, and a wretched athlete.  He set the record for the longest streak going hitless to start a major league career, and was like 0-56 before he got his first hit.  Yes, he was a pitcher, but he swung like a left-handed girl, and was 0-56 on merit; it wasn't like he kept stinging line drives that turned into highlight reel diving catches.

In fact I remember his first hit, since I was at the game when he got it.  It was a drive to straight away centerfield that went all the way to the wall for a triple.  Half of the credit should have gone to Brett Butler, who was in his last or second to last season then, playing centerfield for the Dodgers.  He'd been a fast guy years before, but by 1995ish he was shot.  No legs, short white guy, 36 or so, and for some insane reason (probably since he had no arm) he insisted upon playing very shallow center field. I remember in one three game series here, where Hamilton (or "Hambone" as we used to call him) got his first hit, the Padres must have gotten 4 or 5 doubles and a couple of triples solely due to Brett playing deep second base and being way too slow to get away with it.  The hit Hamilton got would have been a can of corn for 95% of players, but the Dodgers were playing everyone shallow (since Hambone couldn't hit) and Brett was so slow that the 250 foot drive got over his head and bounced about 10x on the way to the wall.

Hamilton was not a handsome man.  His picture on his bio page (linked to above) there is very flattering, and he doesn't look good in it.  That thick goatee hidesg his plump little chipmunk cheeks pretty well, and he's improved with age over the last 7 years as well.  Back in 1995 or '96 he was actually a pretty good pitcher on a very bad team, and he was 25ish, but looked about 18 with a fat baby face, pop eyes, jowls, a big beer belly, bad spiky hair, etc.  Not exactly a chick-magnet.

But he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars, and was destined for millions, so of course he had a hot wife. She was the hottest of all the player wives, at the time.  At least at first glance.

She looked like a really hot porn star or stripper, circa 1991.  Like the cutest girl you'd see in an old Motley Crüe video.  Not classy at all; long bleached blonde hair with black roots, huge stand up boobies, Angelina Jolie-sized CS'er lips. She always dressed a little bit slutty, with too tight silk blouses or slacks, more makeup than most women wear in a month, super high heels, etc.  I didn't actually find her very pretty; it was like she was trying way too hard.  First glance you'd think she was so hot, but after seeing her several times a homestand, my opinion of her looks went down in a hurry.  I always used to wonder if Joey felt the same way, and he'd thought she was hotter than the sun the first year, but was ready to kill himself by the fourth anniversary.

Anyway, the funny part was that he was eventually traded to Toronto, IIRC, and that year I was watching a game from his new team for just a minute when there was a break in the action (Well, that's pretty much 98% of a baseball game, but you know what I mean.) and the cameras were showing various people in the stands.  After a moment they flipped to a shot of this really cute woman from behind, and as it zoomed in she turned around, talking to someone in the stands behind her, and I laughed out loud. It was Joey's wife, looking just like she had here, with perhaps even thicker pancaked-on make up, and something silk on with her big nipples poking out.  You could see several other women in the shot, and all of them looked just like the players' wives do here, unsurprisingly.

I'm not sure why it amused me so, probably just that I'd never thought to see her again, and hadn't thought of her since he'd left the team, and then suddenly there she was, on that there teevee, looking just the same, if not more so.  His career has pretty well crashed in the last few years, so I wouldn't be surprised if she's moved on to someone younger and richer.

News here, Sunday football game type discussion below.

• I've posted about the screw ups with Florida voting a few times, until I eventually lost interest in continuing to whack that deceased equine.  I don't think I even posted about the disaster that was the actual elections when polls were closed early, opened late, ballots were screwed up, etc.  I wouldn't revisit it at this point but for the new This Modern World, which is about Florida elections, and very funny. It's a cartoon; you read it and laugh.

• For all the criticism people (me) give the flight security screeners, they do get some things right.

Police on Sunday arrested a Bulgarian man who tried to board a flight at Atlantic City International Airport in New Jersey carrying two box cutters and a pair of scissors in his backpack, the Transportation Security Administration said.

The 21-year-old man was the last passenger to approach the security checkpoint to board the plane and was arrested when an X-ray machine detected the prohibited items, TSA spokesman Robert Johnson said.

"One of our TSA federal screeners noticed a pair of scissors on the screen, ordered a hand check. Another screener went through the bag and found a pair of scissors embedded in a bar of soap and two box cutters inside a package that contained hand lotion," Johnson said.

This is a pretty scary story; it's not like he just forgot he had them in there; you put scissors in a bar of soap and box cutters in hand lotion, it's obviously a deliberate act.  A stupid one, being as x-ray technology tends to bypass soap and plastic bottles, but no one said young, dumb, would-be terrorists were smart.

I almost wish he'd gotten through with them and then tried to attack someone, to read the stories about how most of the passengers and all of the crew beat the living shit out of him.  No one is ever going to hijack a plane again with a knife.  It's just never going to happen, after 9/11.  Passengers and crew will never again assume the person just wants to fly to Cuba or make a political statement, and they'll be safe if they don't interfere.  From now on it's a battle to the death; you just have to assume the plane is going into the Empire State Building if you don't act immediately.

• Just about the quintessential drunk story.

Police said Chad Dillon, 24, of Avilla apparently fell asleep in a trash bin that was picked up Friday by a garbage truck in Auburn, a city about 30 miles north of Fort Wayne.

Auburn Police Chief Martin McCoy said the driver told officers he did not hear Dillon's calls for help and had crushed the trash in the back of the garbage truck twice before bystanders alerted him to the screams. After being pulled from the garbage truck, Dillon was taken to Parkview Hospital in Fort Wayne. He was treated for head, chest and arm injuries and released later Friday, hospital officials said.

The closing line is the best of all.

Although Dillon could not remember where he had been prior to ending up in the back of the garbage truck, he told police he had been out drinking at a local bar the night before, McCoy said.

Shocking, huh?  I mean you'd never have expected alcohol to have been involved. What if the guy had been found with a few joints on him?  We'd hear comments about how marijuana is such a dangerous drug and how it causes people to nearly die in trash compactors.  But since it was alcohol, it's just a humorous drunk story, signifying nothing more significant than that some guys can't handle their Budweiser.

orking at pro football games is different than other events. The crowd is always much more amped up; any normal football game is equivalent to a playoff baseball game, and the sport itself is so vastly more exciting and tense than baseball.  Every play can be the one that determines the game, and there aren't pitchers taking 45 seconds per pitch, throwing to first constantly, talking to the catcher, and other boring things that are a way of life in baseball.

Football you must duck down every play, since people will kill you if you block their view. It's pretty easy to do so though, since the plays are always about one every 50 seconds with lots of 3 or 4 minute TV time outs.  You get used to the rhythm of the action and learn when to duck down by the crowd noise and body language, and usually I'm selling something so kneeling or sitting in an aisle as I want for money to be passed over.

Years ago I'd try to see every play, or at least most of them, but the thrill has long since worn off, and now I just duck down. I do enjoy a good play, and I'll turn towards the field if possible, but if I'm looking the other way most of the time and don't really worry about it.

It's almost as exciting as it sounds.

So the game.  The home team won, and there was much rejoicing.

I still question their offense, since it's just so boring.  They only threw the ball 18 times, and almost every time it was a long, slow drop back thing.  Just one or two quick slants, and they have no idea how to get the ball to their best players.  They gave Tim Dwight a fortune to be a wide receiver, and he had one pass thrown at him downfield all day, and it was way underthrown.  His one catch was on a swing pass and he gained 20 yards.  So of course they never tried anything like that ever again.  The Chargers have a great running game, mostly due to their running back Tomlinson being unbelievably quick and nimble. He tied a franchise record for most yards rushing yesterday, so the other team was doing everything they could to stop him all day, which should have opened up huge opportunities for passing.  And I'm sure it did, and they have a decent quarterback, but their offensive play calling is so conservative and unimaginative that they can't really take advantage of the run to set up the pass.

They had success yesterday by luck, mostly.  There weren't any sustained drives, with the Chargers scoring with a 55 yard pass, a 68 yard run, and a 38 yard run. Despite this, New England gained far more yards, had the ball much longer, had more first downs, etc. NE just hurt themselves with mistakes, including two interceptions in scoring range, a missed field goal, and being stopped on downs another time in scoring range.  They had no break away plays, and had to earn every yard as they battled their way down the field. SD just played a lot of "bend but don't break" defense and waited for a mistake, and was able to capitalize on them when they came. If they played again I'd pick New England by 14 or more, since SD got almost all the breaks and still barely won, 21-14.

The Chargers are now 4-0 and they beat probably the best team in the league yesterday.  I wasn't real impressed by their 3-0, since they'd played two of the three worst teams in the league, and then scraped by the very mediocre Cardinals last week. Yesterday was by far their best game of the year, and you gotta give them credit for it.

It's sort of unfortunate, since I wasn't planning on paying much attention to pro football this year.  I love watching it, but it's a huge time sink.  I used to follow every team, read the standings, had 4 or 5 teams I liked enough to read all about, and watched every televised game, which means 10 or 11 hours on Sunday and then another 3 or 4 Monday night.  Even if the teams weren't that good, football is such a glorious exhibition of organized violence and precision team work that I couldn't resist.  Last year I tried to not watch at all, or just when a really good game was on, and I mostly succeeded, helped in no small part by the local team losing their last 9 games and killing all regional interest.  The only team I really enjoyed watching the last couple of years was St. Louis, as they were setting offensive records nearly every game.

For some reason StL has totally vanished this year, after losing a Super Bowl they should have won last season, and they fell to 0-4 yesterday, with their QB out for a month.  It's not just that they've lost this year, but how horribly they've lost.  10-13 yesterday, to a crappy Dallas team.  They'd lose odd games the last three years, but it was usually like 42-38, and damn entertaining to watch.  Now they are horrible, and boring as well.  If the Chargers were awful as well, or at least mediocre and boring, I'd be turning down the football interest knob in my brain like a pre-teen diving for the volume when mom bursts in while he's got Eminem blasting.  I'll at least try to not watch the Monday night game tonight, since it's one very good team (Denver) vs. one horrible team (Baltimore) with no offense.  The only problem is that San Diego plays at Denver next week, when both will almost certainly be 4-0 and that will be a great game (though SD will surely lose, they always get killed in Denver) so I'll want to see something of how Denver is playing this year.  Bah.

The actual game wasn't bad to work at.  Odd weather, humid and warm, but with huge cumulus clouds overhead the whole time.  I was selling frozen lemonade and when the sun would come out for 10 or 15 minutes straight it would heat up 15 degrees and I'd start selling them left and right.  The a cloud would come over and the wind would pick up, and suddenly I couldn't give the damn things away.   The day might have been 85 and cloudless, and if it had been I would probably have made $100 more than I did.

The real annoyance was a parking ticket I got.

Not an actual parking ticket, since I was parked legally.  I got a ticket for not having my wheels cramped against the curb while parked on a hill.  That's about a ticky a ticket as you can get; akin to being written up for not signaling a lane change.  Real bullshit fine for the sake of a fine, like some sort of Tijuana police tactic.  The really annoying thing is that I was on a hill about half as steep as the bunny slope on Vail, and never even considered turning my front wheels into the curb when I parked.  I usually do that on a real hill, but I very seldom park on one of those, and this one was so shallow that it just never entered my mind.

It was technically a slope, I mean if you dropped a golf ball it would have bounced down, but probably 50% of the driveways in San Diego are steeper than the hill I was parked on.  And of course I had the stick shift in 1st and the parking break on, so there's no way on earth my car could have moved, short of someone dismantling much of the internal machinery.

Why would a cop write such a bullshit ticket, one that comes with a piddling $42 fine?

I assume since I was parked on a residential street, about half a mile from the stadium, and they (residents and cops) don't like people parking there and walking down the hill to the stadium.  There is usually one sign up saying "no event parking" and it's always ignored.  I got there at 11:30, 90 minutes before game time, and the streets were empty of cars.  When I got back to my car after work, every inch was full of automobiles, since the stadium parking lot is woefully undersized for the crowds that fill it.

The stadium here initially seated around 50,000 people, and the lot holds 18,000 spots.  That's not enough, but it wasn't horribly undersized, and they had a few huge empty dirt lots nearby that they could use for emergency overflow.  Since the stadium opened 25 years ago, they've expanded and remodeled it several times and it now seats over 70k for football.  Over the same time the parking lot has lost over 500 spots to the supports for the trolley that was extended through it, and all the big empty dirt lots have become shopping centers.  You can do the math and figure that there's no way on earth the lot can hold the amount of people that come to any game that's anywhere near sold out.  I really don't know where people go, since the lot is usually totally full and closed off by an hour before game time on a big day, and there will still be 10,000 vehicles driving in.  Which is why I parked way up on top of the hill, knowing the game was sold out.

It's a bit of a walk, but I save the $10 parking price (the employee lot is totally full long before I arrive) and I don't have to try and get out early in the 4th quarter to avoid the traffic crunch.  After running around selling heavy things for 4 hours, I really don't want to sit in gridlock for 45 minutes trying to move 500 yards and exit the parking lot.  Parked up on top of the hill I can just drive on surface streets that hardly anyone else goes on and get to the freeway and then home in 15 minutes. 

The cops know that the parking lot doesn't hold anywhere near the number of people who come to the game, and they know that no one is going to pay any attention to the "no event parking" signs on a residential street when it's 10 minutes to kick off and they paid $80 per ticket.  So I assume that they go over the cars that are there with a magnifying glass and and write up infractions, however minor and normally unenforced. Like parking without turning your wheels into the curb on a slight incline.

I've gotten four parking tickets in my life, IIRC, and three of them have been bullshit.  The only one I deserved was leaving my car in the loading zone at an airport about 10 years ago, when I was picking my dad up and his plane was late, and I only left to run inside and look at the arrivals screen to see if his flight was canceled or not.  I came back out in three minutes and the cop was already putting the ticket under my windshield wiper.

Of course if I did that today my car would be towed to some remote lot and gone over with bomb sniffing dogs, a privilege I'd no doubt be billed about $800 for, but it was long ago, in a simpler age.  One might argue that was a bullshit ticket, but it's not as if there aren't 500 signs saying "no waiting no parking no thinking about waiting or parking" so I knew the risks.

Once I saw the ticket and the cop smiled and walked away, I went back inside.  It wasn't like they weren't going to write me two tickets that quickly anyway.  And dad arrived shortly afterwards.

The second ticket was in the parking lot of a community college I was taking some night classes at.  The lots had been repaved about a week before, and the red lines for the somewhat arbitrarily-assigned areas you couldn't park in hadn't been repainted yet, though the white lines for the spaces had.  I parked in what looked like a good place, between two other cars that were already there, and came back after class to a $65 ticket.  The guys on each side of me had one also, at least.  There were no signs saying no parking, there was plenty of room, etc.  Hence my bullshit decree.  In the school parking rules it did list no parking next to fences, but that's impossible to go by, since 85% of the "next to fences" area was legal to park in, with just a few of them red painted.

The last ticket was about 6 years ago, and it was really bullshit.  I was in the employee lot at the stadium, which is across the street, and long and narrow and anarchic.  One end of the lot turns into total valet parking at every Chargers game, where people pack in, eventually filling the exit lanes completely. You literally can not get out of half the parking lot until people who got there later return and leave.  One side of the parking lot is next to a steep hillside with trees and tumbleweeds and such, and people parallel park there always.  It's legal.  One day when I was there I returned to see every car had a ticket, including mine.  It was like $85, and as I walked up there was a hugely-fat black female traffic cop riding along in one of those little three-wheeled golf cart-like traffic mobiles.  She said to me that someone new had been there and written the tickets and that they weren't valid, and we could call the contact number and get them dismissed.

I was young and dumb and trusting of bureaucracy and didn't get her name or badge number, and when I called a few days later the person on the ticket line of course had no knowledge of anything, despite there being about 25 illegal tickets written that day in that one area, and could offer me nothing but the right to include a letter with my fine.  Which I did, and which got me a form "sorry, but your fine is being upheld.  Asshole." reply, and they cashed the check.

I'm not going to bother protesting this $42 curb wheel crap since it wouldn't do any good, and technically I was at fault. I don't know what degree slope requires you to cramp your wheels, but this one has got to be right on the borderline, if not under it. The extenuating circumstances, that I was parked for the event where the sign said "no event parking" wouldn't help my case either, I don't think.

That's life with government; laws that keep order are often a pain in the ass when honest citizens commit some minor transgression and get punked for it.

<-- Yesterday  --  Tomorrow -->
Archives Page

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.