Thanks, West Coast Teams

None of you would take David Wells off our hands over the winter/spring. NOW you want him. You guys are like some drunk staggering around at last call, having blown off all the non perfect 10s in the room early in the evening, but suddenly revising your standards. The whole "Wells is great in the post season" line is basically like "He or she looks great after 10 drinks."

I can't bring myself to hate the Dodgers because of their association with Sandy Koufax. But I absolutely hate the Padres.

Great Works in Literature

"Rat Bastards," by John "Red" Shea, gets my vote for best literary work in the whole "Southie Gangster Genre," which is what I'd major in if I ever go back to school.

Here's a sample, with our author talking about a conversation in a local bar.

""I pause to tell some asshole to fuck off, some guy who wants to fuckin' commiserate about the poor MacDonald family. There's too much of that shit in Southie, drunks crying about this or that. Giving their own life meaning by sorrowing over something you couldn't do nothing about anyhow, especially now. 'Get the fuck out of here. I'll make you you fuckin weep," I say to this guy who says he used to watch me fight when Frank the Tank was in my corner. Frank this and Frank that. 'Do me a favor,' i say to this guy, 'go suck your own dick.'"

Best Dubbing Ever

While flipping through channels tonight, my wife stopped on Dazed and Confused. It was right at the party scene, which is my favorite, particularly the part where Adam Goldberg has the confrontation with the greaser dude after saying "someone's been toking some reefer" on the way in.

However, E! totally kicked it up a notch with its dubbing including:

Someone's been toking some reefer = Someone's been smoking some stuff.

So what if I'm a pot head? = So what if I'm a total moron?

Who are you, Isaac fucking Newton = Who are you, Isaac mighty Newton?

I've got to watch the rest of the flick at some point to see the rest of the dubs.

Fuck Deion Branch

Great player? Sure.
Want him on the Pats? Yeah.

But fuck anyone who, as Ron Borges of the Globe noted today, feels that the Patriots' offer of three years for $19 million "undervalued him enough to compel him to accept a $14,000-a-day fine for withholding his services despite having a year remaining on a five-year-old rookie contract that was due to pay him $1,045,000."

I'm a realist -- I know that pro athletes and other entertainers make a crazy amount of money and it is way out of proportion to that of, say, most of the people who scrape together enough money to buy a ticket to watch them.

But there is so much wrong with that sentence starting with

a) feeling undervalued at $19 million over three years. Take a random sample of Pats' fans at any given game and see who would turn down $19 million over three years to play football.

b) feeling so insulted that you'd take a $14,000 a day fine not to suffer under such an undignified contract and

c) being already under contract at more than $1 million annually, which has got to be at least 10 to 20 times the average salary of most Patriots fans.

Borges goes on to dig this ditch deeper with this gem about Deion's current contract: "Even that figure is skewed, however, because nearly half of it ($500,000) was a result of Branch hitting certain incentives last season, when he had a career-best 998 receiving yards to lead the team."

Oh my, how horrible that you would actually be required to perform well to earn $1 million! Now I REALLY understand why Deion Branch is holding out rather than, say, honoring his current contract.

I guess I'll just never understand why fans, who are stuck with increasingly high ticket prices to watch pro sports, have even the tiniest shred of simpathy for most of these athletes during their contract negotiations.

That woman was wrong!

I once worked in the dairy section of a Super Stop and Shop on Cape Cod for a summer, and a woman who felt I didn't express sufficient excitement over serving her told me that I would "never amount to anything."

Boy was she wrong!

I have my very own blog where the top search term that brings people here lately has been "jackass things to do."

I'd love to run into her now and tell her that she can suck it!

BTW the other term driving people here is "Rick Sutcliff."