Here We Go Again

It has not been long since I finished my post regarding the crap factory that is Hollywood in 2010. I just saw a commercial for a new horror movie called The Last Exorcism...yes, really. A new low. What shmuck would pay to go see that? This movie does not have a shred of an original idea to it. It's the same damn thing as the original Exorcist film and all of it's bogus sequels and knockoffs such as the Exorcism of Emily Rose. What a joke.

On Notice

Ok so it's been there weeks since I last did one of these. I was going to wait a month but I'm fuming here. This may be entirely personal and not of interest to the readers. If you have a problem with the segment, let me hear about it.

Freep- Common Sense Story

Black History Month- Ok so it hasn't been as annoying this year, but its existence is unnecessary.

Paying for Food- This pertains to lunch at work. It sucks when you get a real job and mommy and daddy don't buy you meals.

Snow on Weekends- This SOB remains on the list due to the impending storm. My weekend begins Thursday night so I would be pissed.

Indian Givers- You know they make a promise or give you something and then renege and take it back. These people suck.

Jury Duty- Mine is impending. I have never been before but I anticipate a frivolous lawsuit. Here's to hoping I get striked by an attorney.

Mars- Can we live there eventually?

Danica Patrick- She's not hot and is somewhat mannish to me. Why is she appealing? She drives a car and is a woman. Not doing it for me. Please vacate the TV.

Towel Off

I have been a Yankee fan since 1993, the first year that I was old enough to follow baseball day-in and day-out. Living in South Jersey, I still go to 4-5 Phillies games a year, and I've gone on the record multiple times to say I have the utmost respect for the Phillies organization and their ballclub. My sister and most of my friends are Phillies fans. I'd only root against them in the case of a series like this one, or even better, this one. But I must take one issue with the Fightins: the rally towels.

I thought the rally towel was a great touch back in 2007 when the team made the playoffs for the first time in 14 years, as well as in 2008 when they won their first World Series since 1980. I was at a game during the last weekend of the '07 regular season when the towels were first handed out at the gates, and I made it to a Phillies playoff game in both '08 and '09 as well - so I can say from experience that a rally-towel waving Citizens Bank Park was a great sight to behold in those days. To appease the pro-Phillies faction that may be cursing me already, enjoy this example of what I'm talking about.

But those days are over with. October is not a novelty to this team anymore, and it should not ask its fans to treat it as a novelty. Rally towels scream "thrilled to be here!" like a married guy who's allowed a night out with his single male friends without his wife. I thought it was especially curious that the rally towels were brought back out for the division-clinching game last year - even though the NL East had been pretty much a formality since the end of August (they won the division by a healthy 6 games).

Here's the deal. The Phillies are far and away the best team in the National League. It's very very hard to imagine them missing the playoffs this coming year as long as they stay healthy. Once you reach the point that they have now reached, the fans' "rooting aides" have to be left out. You don't see rally towels in New York or in Boston. You didn't see them in Cleveland when the Indians were in the playoffs every year in the Thome/Manny era, and that team had sucked for decades prior to that.

You know where you did see them? You saw them in San Diego in 1998, where the Padres were one of the most "just thrilled to be here!" teams in World Series history. You see a stupid Rally Monkey in Anaheim that has to tell fans when it's time to put their iPhones down and slap together their Thunderstix, because they're still largely oblivious to the baseball nuances and have to make noise with inflatable sticks so they can pretend to know what's going on in front of them. And in Tampa in '08, you had cowbells. Cowbells. Let that stew for a minute or so.

And all of that crap is great if you're a team or city that is new to seeing a modicum of success in baseball, or any sport for that matter. But franchises and fan bases should outgrow that phase after a certain amount of time. It's like when you first get your driver's license and you'll volunteer to do every monotonous errand imaginable just because the idea of driving a car by yourself is so new and cool. This is why sports fans in the Northeast have little respect for sports fans on the West Coast - because the West Coast fans never surpassed that "Oh, we need milk? I'll go! I'll run out and get milk! I don't even care that it's 11:30 on a Wednesday night and I just shut my light out to go to bed. I'll go get the milk!" phase.

So, I leave the Phillies and their fans tonight with this. You're already a hard nosed East Coast sports town with some edge. You want Philadelphia to become an honest-to-goodness baseball town? Show us you can make the place rock without the rally towels. Show us all you need on a chilly October evening is your two hands, your voice, 3 or 4 domestics in the parking lot, and your passion. That, and cease with the damn E-A-G-L-E-S chants when you're at a baseball game. But that is a topic for another day.

On Notice: It Begins Again

I would imagine that many of you loyal readers have seen the segment on the Colbert Report called On Notice. For those of you who have not, it is basically a list of people, places, or things that Colbert has a problem with. I discovered how to create my own awhile back and would post new ones each week and post them as my wallpaper at school. They shall now continue on this blog, although not on a weekly basis. Without further ado, I present On Notice (Ok so I can't get the picture down the page) . FYI, there is no order to this.

1. Living at Home- It's getting to me and not just on the weekends. I am a fairly independent person but when you don't really have people your age around you at work things get rather annoying. Not to mention my commutes are generally terrible.

2. Sheep- They are at the mall all the time to get the latest fashions and electronics. They buy shit they don't need. They have no souls. This people will do what TV and magazines tell them to do. They are obsessed with reality TV and watch Access Hollywood like it's their job. They have an iPhone, watch American Idol, wear multicolored scarfs, and move with the masses. Nothing they do breaks the mold.

3. Dancing Sober- I don't dance because I don't enjoy it. I also suck at it. I have to be hammered to attempt it because it does not help my chances with the ladies. This weekend was odd because we found ourselves dancing unwillingly quite a bit.

4. Flo- This Progressive bitch has been discussed quite a bit, further down the page.

5. Sarah Mclachlan- This one may seem random, but she does those animal advocacy ads on TV that are 3 minutes long. Her music "Angel" is being played while dogs who look sad are shown and your supposed to donate money to help them. Listening to the music "in the arms of an angel" does not make make it me want to help dogs. It makes me want to snuff it like Alex DeLarge. For you see my brothers, special interest groups are intolerable.

6. Tim Tebow- I like Tim Tebow. I really do. It's the media that I am hating here because they paint him in a light that not event he most biased Florida Fans would. The latest instance was the Senior Bowl, where the entire highlight package and game stories discussed Tebow and barely mentioned anything else. If you saw the game MVP, you might know why I'm bitter.

7. Perpetual Road Construction- It never ends. They are not really working. They are just moving cones around and are slowing my commute. Surely every one has uttered these words or had similar thoughts. It seems no matter what major roadway I enter, there is some construction that causes lane shifts and reduced speeds. How long does this shit take?

8. Year of Infinite Pain- 2009-2010 has been quite possibly the worst sports year for my teams in my lifetime. As it stands right now this year will be the first year since 1962-63 that all three major sports at Michigan failed to reach either a Bowl game, the NCAA tournament in Basketball, or the NCAA Tournament in Hockey. Don Draper was a pimp then. My parents were in diapers. Not to mention the fact that the Raiders sucked again, and La Salle has failed to live up to even the most modest expectations.

License and Registration, Please - Part Three

The theme of this series of posts involves the uninformed and oblivious screwing with the time and money of the informed and focused. Thus far, we've looked at ineptitude in the gym and on the golf course, which directly screws with a man's time and indirectly screws with a man's money. In this final installment, we go where the action is, directly to the money - the casino floor.

A great thing about living in South Jersey is the proximity of Atlantic City, our own (very) miniature Las Vegas. While those from North Jersey, New York, Washington, Baltimore, etc. may have a trek of 2-3 hours or more to AC, many a South Jerseyan can make it to the bright lights within 50 minutes of backing out of the driveway. For a lot of us from this area, AC stands as the crown jewel of the 21-and-over life, something we drool over as 18-19-20 year olds like a dog staring at a steak. What beckons to us is not necessarily the bars and club scene, because once you hit college the party life becomes habit. No, I'm talking about gambling.

There's a reason that the gambling age is 21, and whether you believe it should be lowered to 18 is another issue. I don't have a problem with it being 21, because I want the population of gamblers on the floor at any given time to be as SMART as possible. I don't mean book smarts, I mean knowing a.) what their limits are, b.) what their surroundings are, and c.) WHAT THE HELL THEY ARE DOING. Towns like Atlantic City were built on the losses of those with clouded judgment. The casinos welcome you with open arms in anticipation of feeding you drinks and blinding you with visions of jackpot grandeur until your pockets are empty. Understand that going in.

Foremost, if you do not know the game you are playing, you are not only being reckless with your own money, you are being reckless with the money of others much of the time, and that can get you into trouble (or at the very least it will yield you the scorn of everyone around you). The first time I ever played in a casino was in Montréal at age 20 (legal age is 18 there), and I only played roulette (I know, soft) because I knew at least I'd be essentially playing a game independent of those at the same table as me. I was honest enough to admit I didn't know blackjack or craps well enough to deserve a spot at one of those tables. And to this day, I still don't know craps that well, so I have never put one red cent on a crap table. Part of that stems from seeing two acquainted friends nearly come to blows in Vegas over how to bet during a crap game.

But what I have come to know is blackjack, and blackjack possibly above all others is a team game. Everyone sitting at that table is playing against the dealer. And since every decision you make alters the card progression for the rest of the shoe, it is overwhelmingly imperative to know what the hell you are doing. It's not that hard. Spend an hour on hitorstand.net or read the Wikipedia article on blackjack and you'll know enough. There is a right way to play and a wrong way to play, and both are outlined pretty clearly.

John I and I recently won about $600 between us in just one shoe, largely because everyone was playing right. Playing right means hitting a 15 when the dealer shows an 8, even though you know you're probably busting. Even if you do bust, you have to take one for the team, not only because what goes around comes around, but because it perpetuates a mathematically proven winning strategy all the way around the table. For instance, if you chicken out on that 15, maybe the next card is a 10 or face and you do get to live a bit longer when hitting would have busted you. But now the guy next to you rightly hits his 14, gets the 10 you would have gotten, and he's busted. Then the guy next to him with the 10, he doubles down and gets a dog-crap 6. While you cross your fingers for the dealer to bust, she flips over a 10 on her 8 to give her an 18, and now everyone at the table has lost the hand, including you, and now both dudes to your left are giving you the Manning Face. Had you hit your 15 and busted, the guy next to you gets the 6 to give him 20 and the doubled-down guy after him is still in good shape with the next card coming. One decision takes the table from 0-3 to a likely 2-1 on the hand. I've seen it way too many times.

Obviously this case is hypothetical and could easily go the other way, but the two underlying themes are these: 1. karma comes back to you - play right and the cards will fall the way you want over a long enough time period; 2. not playing right screws with other people's money as well as your own. If you don't care so much about your money, that's your business, but I damn well care about mine, even if it's the money that I've deemed expendable enough to cash in for casino chips for an hour or two.

License and Registration, Please - Part Two

Yesterday we looked at my rudimentary solution to the "crowded gym full of January piss-ants that are either 20 lbs overweight or 20 lbs underweight and don't know what the hell they're doing in any regard" issue. Today we'll apply the same principle to golf. I totally respect why certain upscale courses won't let players above a certain handicap play. Of course that's totally unfair to do everywhere, but some form of education/licensing system would be very beneficial. It wouldn't have to be rocket science, just play a few pitch and putt rounds (with either a knowledgeable friend or family member as your "sponsor" or with a golf equivalent of a personal trainer), learn the nuts and bolts, pass the short written test, and you've got another shiny little card for your wallet.

I'm lucky to have been taught the game at a very early age (6) by my father, and I will say right away that most people are not in that boat - they teach themselves, or pick the game up as a teenager just for shits, or get mildly into it as an adult partially because a lot of their friends play.

However, once you pull into the parking lot of an honest-to-God golf course, the question of where/when/how you began playing is moot. If you do not adhere to the game's written rules of etiquette and do not engage in "Ready Golf" (outlined impeccably by John I here), then you, yes YOU, are harming those who plunked down decent money and chose to invest 3-4 of the precious non-working, non-sleeping hours out of the week on the condition that the game will be played correctly and respectfully.

Since John I explained "Ready Golf" from atop Mt. Sinai already, I need not go too much further into its detail. And since standard golf etiquette can be Google'd (or better, Wikipedia'd), I need not delve extensively into that. But I must point out specific, common-sense type issues that will trim valuable time off of your round, get you into a better rhythm (spelled it right on the first try!), and maybe, just maybe lower your scores.

--The first player in the group to sink the ball on a hole is responsible for replacing the flag stick after all others are done. Grab it quietly after your putt and hold it, waiting for the others to hole out.
--ALWAYS have a spare ball on you. The group behind you will scorn your whole family if they see you searching fruitlessly for a ball in the weeds or trees, and then run 50 yards back to your cart to grab another ball so you can take your drop. Cardinal sin.
--Practice is for between rounds, not during rounds. If you need to take a practice stroke or two on a delicate pitch shot or an awkward putt, fine. But otherwise, no practice swings. I mean it. Try not taking practice swings the next time you play - I guarantee you that you will not throw up a horrid number and that the world will not end either. But you will shave incredible time off your round and may even find it a more effective habit. Too often, people waste their good swings on practice strokes, only to top that 6-iron into the drink anyway. See ball, align with target, center yourself, deep breath, swing. That's it. I know the pros on TV take practice swings, but they also post 67s on championship courses like you or I break wind. Until you're THAT good, no practice swings. At least pretend to be an athlete and have some muscle memory.
--Always be looking behind you. This especially applies on weekends and other busy days. If you shank your tee shot into a brush while a foursome is standing with their arms folded at the tee box behind you, have another ball on you (remember?) and look for your original for about 30 seconds before just taking a drop and moving on. Penalty stroke or no penalty stroke depending on whether or not you would have had to punch back out into the fairway if you ever did find your tee shot.
--On the green, always ask a person with more than a 10 foot putt if they want you to tend the flag. I still remember a guy who once pulled the stick on a par-3 when I was 50 feet out and instead of asking if I wanted it tended, just dropped it on the fringe and ambled over to his own ball. Yeah don't worry pal, this 50-foot snake job just might as well be a gimme anyway. I now have a voodoo doll of this asshat.
--Head on a swivel when about to hit the gas on the cart. You don't want to be gunning it in the golf cart right in the middle of someone else's backswing or putt. If necessary, wait a moment before going if someone within 100 feet or so is about to play a shot.
--Understand that walking renders you a second-class citizen. Most places will only allow walking during off-peak hours anyway, but if you don't want to have to constantly be letting people play through, then pony up the extra cash for a cart.
--And, for the last time, TURN THE DAMN CELL PHONE ON SILENT AND DON'T TAKE IT OUT OF THE BAG. If a call is that important that you need to take it (or worse, make it) on the course, then you shouldn't be playing golf today anyway. It's good to have in case of an emergency and that is it.

That's all for today without making this segment unbearably long. Remember, the less time on the course usually means the better round you've had. You don't have to be a scratch player to get 18 holes in under 4 hours. My old man and I have had plenty of 2.5-3 hour rounds in which neither of us broke 90. And if you need any further motivation, playing smarter gets you to the 19th-hole beers in less time as well.

Tomorrow, we take a look at casino gambling in the final part of the series.