it's that time of the year

i am visiting my parents. there's a temptation while here to live a slightly different life than i normally do, and maybe that's the whole point of vacation. i have noticed that i treat my email and phone differently than i would if i were home. i wonder whether that is the secret to enjoying getting away. now, it's not like i have a boss calling me up, but the distance from my social home is probably an okay thing. i don't know if there are people who think i'm ignoring them; i did try to warn folks that i was leaving for a while.

i am also traveling back in time via my own posted writings. not from here, of course. it does strike me as funny that i almost wrote a post tonight mentioning the unusual nature of my old 97s fandom and then i randomly clicked two posts from september 2007, both of which turned out to be about the old 97s. not unthinkable, but an amusing coincidence.

i noticed while writing all of this, however, that i am not going to be able to honestly maintain my strong pro-kathryn calder stance. her new solo material seems fine, but it definitely seems like something i would listen to for a few months and then forget. there's nothing wrong with that; i think it's perfectly all right for an album to make you happy for a short period of time. i just don't think i'll bother obtaining hers, and that makes me slightly sad.

a likely story

i have two reports of the red sox game to deal with, or at least two possible reports:

1. they had scored nine runs or were up nine runs in the first inning or two

2. the score was 7-5

while modern technology makes it almost insane for me not to reconcile these two facts, i am going to assume the second was the score of the previous night's game.

what strikes me as odd is that i cared enough to look up the score of the game even knowing it had started out with a nine run explosion, and yet once i saw this 7-5 thing happening, i gave up. oh, and there was the fact that the newspaper web site it was posted on had annoying ads and popups that tricked our popup blocker.

conclusion: information may be easy to get from a time standpoint, but once that's a fact, there's less incentive to bother retrieving the information once anything goes wrong.

people have no idea who jacoby ellsbury is

no, actually they do. i just wonder if adrian beltre has any idea who jacoby ellsbury is. or that when he's done collecting his huge checks for this second amazing contract year of his career, he'll apologize one more time for running into him like he was a brick wall. technically, fault is not an issue. the fact that someone missed nearly an entire season is an issue, and one that demands repeated apologies.

so i don't blame adrian beltre. i just happen to have been angered that the red sox signed him since the day i heard about it. only the marco scutaro signing angered me more, and scutaro has the benefit of being older, less talented, and the first massively annoying signing of last offseason.

i would like adrian beltre not to be on the red sox next year. is that asking too much? i would like to get rid of mike cameron, bill hall, marco scutaro, and adrian beltre. now maybe that's asking too much. i just want to ask, because what else can i do? and maybe some jacoby ellsbury memorial 2010 t-shirts, with the letters in ellsbury all cracked like his ribs. i heard he stole four bases. that's great. imagine how many bases the guy should have stolen this year, without having to go through ridiculous third baseman collision rib crackery to steal them.

people have no idea who jacoby ellsbury is. or they do, they just don't know how many bases he could have stolen this year. because that is impossible to know. as is the actual value of prolific base stealing as a contribution to a major league baseball team. but i think most people are in favor of unbroken ribs. make healthy choices people. in your diet and your baseball team. say goodbye to adrian beltre. if only he had never run into his teammates.

reasons i want dan haren

Dan Haren's a good fantasy baseball player. I don't mind grabbing him for my keeper league, but I thought I should make sure I've made the case properly. Six of my fantasy pitchers come from just two teams, so if nothing else it would help to spread my risk.

Why I am pretty sure Dan Haren is worth adding off waivers:

He's not a Tigers starter.
He's also not a Blue Jays reliever.
I'm desperate for a reason not to keep Fausto Carmona for $3.
Now I can worry about an elite pitcher other than Cliff Lee, who's not even on my team.
Any time you can add a pitcher with a .350 babip, you do it.
It's like picking a pitcher off the dollar menu.
A pitcher who's striking out a guy an inning.
Unlike Derrick Lee, he actually wants to play for the Angels.
Maybe now I can forgive myself for not grabbing a $3 Carlos Santana when he cleared waivers in April.
At the end of the year, no one remembers who finished with the best waiver priority.

not in miami

i just realized i'm doing something lebron james could probably never do again in his life - i'm wearing cleveland cavaliers shorts and a sport coat.

yes, it matters how you hold the phone

it's interesting to me not that the new iphone has reception issues if you put your fingers in the wrong spot, but that this is receiving attention in the mainstream media. maybe people are used to having flip phones with those little extendable antennas, but every nokia i have owned gets horrid reception if you put your fingers on the top 1/4 or so of the back. that's where the antenna is. this is a known issue, but it's only talked about on sites that exclusively cover cell phones, and relatively speaking, it's a tiny subset of the phone purchasing population that ever visits those.

so this has been clear already with previous iphone-related issues, but the massive level of attention given to apple on the stock market, in the media, etc totally cuts both ways. there are times people get mad because things they feel were not originated by apple are acclaimed as exciting new developments. however, performance problems that are far from new to the mobile phone world often are talked about as if iphones are the first products to suffer from these limitations. the reception issue is the latest example.

i actually was highly impressed to hear that while the antenna runs around the phone, there is apparently only one spot where there's a problem. it's so natural to hold a bar-style phone by the top, but my nokia experiences have taught me not to do this. it sounds like the iphone thing is easier to work around, which would be nice.

why i am not watching the nba playoffs

i walked into the living room, where my roommate and his breakfast burrito had congregated for the celtics-lakers game, and andrew bynum was being introduced. immediately, i announced 'this is just going to make me angry,' and left the room to watch something on the internet.
i am watching the a-team right now instead of the nba finals because the a-team is not going to result in me getting angry.