People Who Are Old: Open Bar

On this day in 1978, Open Bar's proverbial keg was tapped.

31 years, a few teeth left on the bottom of the swim club shallow end and one ill-advised admission on national TV later - he is still rocking it out.

Happy Birthday!

Seriously, Though, What Is The Best Beatles Album?

First of all, is there a difference between your favorite Beatles album and the one that is objectively the best? Can you really make a coherent argument on a foundation of, "Well, in terms of being groundbreaking, Rubber Soul is their 'best' album, but my favorite is still Magical Mystery Tour."? Also, do we have to count the entire White Album? Because, honestly my favorite Beatles album is the first disc of the White Album, whereas I can do entirely without the second disc. But I also love Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road. And, well, shit it's all great isn't it?

At the same time, what is your favorite Beatles song? I'd be lying if I said that I had a single favorite static Beatles song. I do know, however, that I'm a Paul devotee. I love Yesterday, Blackbird, She's Leaving Home, Maxwell's Silver Hammer, I Will. It's not that I don't love the others, but I do find myself leaning towards the Paulish stuff.

The Dumbass Award for Lazy Writing goes to ... Joe Ward!

... for his article entitled "Moving Home Plate Could Help Mets."

(This is a quick response to the article Chuck posted below, which was gonna be a comment, then became a commmmmmmment, then grew legs and walked on over to the New Post nursery, and Poof! Here it is, a brand new post! They grow up so fast…)

It's an interesting idea, this whole Mets-can’t-hit-home-runs-so-let’s-shrink-Citi-Field thing, but the author leaves out some glaring, rather obvious information.

For example, he says:

"The Mets have the fewest home runs at home of any team in the majors this season, with 47, and also have the fewest home runs over all, with 93."

Using calculus, I deduced that the Mets have therefore hit 46 home runs when not playing at Citi Field. Which, if I understand word meanings correctly, is fewer than they hit at Citi Field. Which doesn’t seem to support the idea that Citi Field is the problem.

Aside from home runs, let’s take a look at the Mets’ overall home/away power numbers this year:

Doubles
Home: 135
Away: 151

Triples
Home: 29
Away: 17

Slugging percentage:
Home: .402
Away: .381

Now while those numbers (including homers) are all god-awful sucky bad, it’s actually quite clear that the Mets – if anything – have more power at Citi Field than away from it, though admittedly it’s very close.

Also, regarding David Wright, he writes:

"...the Mets, and particularly, David Wright, have struggled to hit home runs at home." [Ed. Note: Awful usage of commas there, too.]

David Wright 2009 home runs:

Home: 5
Away: 5
Which: the same

(And regarding the Mets as a team struggling to hit home runs at home, please see above where the Mets hit more home runs at home than not at home.)

Look, the Mets fucking suck. They can’t hit for shit, that’s obvious. But you really can’t say Citi Field is the problem when they actually hit better there than not there. The problem is that they can’t hit anywhere.

Finally, the article's headline, "Moving Home Plate Could Help Mets" is also just...ugh. How is moving the plate 10 feet closer supposed to help the Mets? Wouldn’t it help their opponents equally and, therefore, actually help nobody? (And yes, I realize Joe Ward probably didn't write the headline. Nevertheless, it's a good summation of his article, so I still win.)

Rather than Citi Field, here is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of things genuinely wrong with the Mets that should be fixed/traded/released/fired/sacrificed to the Mayan God of Round Trippers (Pujolsia) in an unholy ritual involving testicle removal and mouth-shitting:

1. All of the players
2. All of the coaching staff
3. All of the front office
4. The cast and creative team of “Entourage” (the Mayan thing)

Someone Actually Wrote Something Interesting About The Mets. Sort Of.

The only interesting thing I've heard about the Mets in the last several months is this. It's an article that's basically an opinion piece about how the Mets should move home plate forward in CitiField by 10 ft. The graphics that go along with the article are pretty cool.

The two things that it doesn't really mention that they could also accomplish by doing this would be to get some room down the foul lines and to increase the space behind home plate, which is currently the smallest in baseball and is too small.

Darrelle Revis is a football player

And Dan Dierdorff is the worst. Props to the Sports Guy for calling him out on this idiotic kind of broadcasting.

Time Warner Cable Sucks

A few of us were discussing this over email the other day, and it merits discussion in this larger forum.

First, a little background. Cable, phone and Internet are all packaged together in New York City. If you want all three, you pay Time Warner Cable about $200 a month (give or take a few bucks depending on whether you buy any premium channels, go without a phone, get an extra cable box for the bedroom, etc.). This is the only non-satellite option that is generally available to most New York City residents. And given that battling with a landlord over satellite installation would be about as much fun as jamming a PEZ dispenser into your eye, most people just go with Time Warner.

But here's the thing. Time Warner Cable sucks.

It is fucking terrible.

One of the contributors to this blog recently observed that "I hate [my cable box] more than anything else including terrorism." It's not big things. They don't superimpose turtlenecks over Emmanuelle Chiriqui (scwhing!schwing!) during episodes of Entourage or anything like that. But the little stuff adds up. The sound cuts out for no particular reason sometimes. If you tape one football game for more than ten minutes you lose every episode of the Daily Show that you taped last week. It costs a fucking fortune, etc. But such is life, right? You deal with it or you shop elsewhere. Well that's all well and good, but now they are just trying to piss me off. Because of the aforementioned problem of keeping a five-hour Superbowl on tape, my old cable box crashed. You remember the one:

Who would have thought I would ever miss you?

So we had to get a new one. I cannot find a picture of it on the web, but it is (a) bigger, (b) uglier, and (c) about a thousand fucking times worse than the old one. Micro League Baseball on Mike Gray's Commodore 64 had a better graphics array than the display on this fucking thing (side note: someone told me that the software changed regardless of the cable box; seems odd that it happened the day we got the new box, but whatever). The machine is about as responsive to the remote control as Mrs. Side Bar is to me on a Tuesday morning (zing!). And the fast forwarding. Dear god the fast forwarding. Like the old model, this cable box offers the user a choice between several different speeds of fast-forward. But it's really no choice at all. It either goes so slowly that you might as well watch the commercials, or so quickly that you jump 5-10 minutes into the program before you can get it to play at a normal speed again. How the fuck are the Mets already losing, the Phillies haven't batted yet? Oh wait, I just fast-forwarded into the middle of the 6th. Neat.

I think it's on pause.

I know this may seem like it is not a big deal, but I would be the first to admit that I watch a lot of television. And when DVR technology first came out, it was pretty amazing. But Time Warner has managed to make it so fucking tedious to use it that it just amounts to a huge step backwards.

Dear Lord Jesus, Thank You For Jay-Z

Holy fucking shit, Jay-Z's new album, The Blueprint 3, is so good I almost don't believe it. Every time I'm about to give up on rap music, Jay-Z comes out with a new album and this one is no exception. Let me just say this, is his song "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-tune)" the beat is supported the whole way through by a clarinet (it's possible that it's a saxophone). And it's not like, "why is there a clarinet on a rap song?", it's more like "why isn't there clarinet in every rap song?" I don't know what else to say. It's just so damn good.

Jay-Z aside, I don't really know what else to think about the rest of the rap world. As good as Jay-Z has been since 1996 is how bad the remainder of rappers have been since then. The exceptions, Eminem I guess, are few and far between. Even guys who were great at one point, let's say Nas or Q-Tip or Method Man, have been wack for years. I'm in a quandary of sorts in that I know I love rap music, yet there isn't any new rap music that I like even a little bit. I can name a hundred rap songs that I love, but none of them have come out since I was in high school. I know it's not that I've changed, because every time Jay-Z comes out I love it, and I can appreciate that Eminem was perhaps the cleverest rapper ever and threw down some great shit. I know in my heart then, that new rap music just sucks.

Hopefully they're just going through their adolescent phase, kindof like rock and roll in the '80s, before they blow it back up. Of course, for every Nirvana and Pearl Jam from the '90s there are a hundred Matchbox 20s and Nickelbacks sucking the life out of rock and roll.

Anyway, thank you Jay-Z.

Art Imitating Life?

Down goes Gmail!

This can't be good.

WHAT DO WE DO?! HOW AM I SUPPOSED POST THIS AWESOME SERIES OF MCFLYS IN MY STATUS BAR? OR THIS AWESOME AD FOR DUREX CONDOMS? COME ON, INTERNET, STOP FUCKING MY SHIT UP! AND IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAMN DAY, TOO?! IF I DON'T SEND THAT EMAIL BY 6 ... everything will probably be fine, I know.

I'm also quickly realizing how addicted I am to my Gmail. I've got some things I need to do (which I need Gmail for), but ultimately they can wait. Still, all I can think about is FUCK YOU GMAIL! YOU KNOW WHAT? I'M GONNA GO USE FACEBOOK CHAT! DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU'RE MAKING ME DO?! FACEBOOK CHAT SUCKS BALLS AND SO DO YOU, FUCKFACE!

I should really try to get a girlfriend or something.

Blog Fatigue

Side Bar summed it up nicely:

I get bored of seeing the same thing on the blog, and when we go more than a few days without a new post, it sort of sucks. And that is particularly the case when the most recent post is (a) yours and (b) kind of shitty.

This post is my solution to that problem.

we can't be friends, E.