i should have said this long ago

it would not have bothered me tremendously if the yankees had signed carl crawford. in fact, i was basically hoping they would.

blackberry unveils genius low-cost marketing plan

research in motion, famed blackberry bakers, have apparently abandoned their comedy central stop-motion poolside hipster ad campaign to grab attention the cheapest way possible: by getting sued.

though most media outlets have interpreted research in motion's recent announcement of the blackberry playbook as a competitor to the ipad. what cracks me up the most is when they start talking about the price. the most important price on the playbook is this one: free.

free? how can a tablet be sold for free? it can't, but if it infringes upon the iconic naming convention of a rich and litigious competitor, it can generate a lot of free publicity. that's right, the playbook is a play for attention. the current news focuses on research in motion's technological challenge to the ipad. soon, though, we'll have steve jobs firing lawyers until apple legal challenges this thing in court. macbook, ibook, powerbook, playbook? tell me which of those doesn't fit. yup, they all fit. so i think apple will see rim in court.

i mean seriously, you thought they named the "first professional tablet" the "play"book because it sent the right brand message? please. still, maybe they're just faking the initial ad campaign to mess with us. everyone knows only consumer-targeted blackberries come with cameras. this one has two.

no, that guy's pool is amazing

over the long weekend, i was fortunate to be able to watch some rebroadcasted television online. it seems that no one, in terms of ratings makers and ad salespeople, really cares about the online audience, but thanks to verizon dsl, comedycentral.com, and the blackberry corporation, i was able to view some intriguing long-form commercials with my programming.

up until recently, online television has apparently taken a realistic view of the problem of serving up advertising: if there's no content from the ad network, you go back to your video without further delay. the worst thing that happens is you stare at a blank screen for the same (limited) amount of time that you would have watched a commercial.

the vzdsl/c...c....com/bb team, however, has brought an entirely new hilarity to the equation. with no one else using our 3mbps (haha) connection, i found myself staring at a sort of wallpaper/splash screen that featured blackberry branding and an aqueous background. at first, i found this amusing, as if i was watching a slideshow. i was soon irritated, however, to discover that the ad was just going to sit and sit until i had been forced to watch it in its entirety.

let me be clear on one thing: it might be annoying to advertisers that their content doesn't always come through as well as the streaming video it's paying for, but that doesn't mean it's time to enrage viewers. if i'm forced to sit and wait and wait for a chance to watch a dude in a grey deep-v t-shirt play with his phone by a pool, i'm probably going to hate that phone, the people who made me watch the phone, and the people who deliver my internet. three-for-one, guys. clap clap.

so i went and watched videos on a different site. yup, c...whatever may have a monopoly on its own content, but it doesn't have a monopoly on stuff that interests me. sorry. i came back later and found comedycentral.com was working, so i watched some more...and was treated to another static first frame of a commercial, joking to myself that it would be fun to see where the hawaiian theme of this intro was going. it was going to the same dude, but without a narrative that coherently connected it to the previous commercial. yup. why am i still watching commercials of this guy? he is almost as pointless as that palm pre ghost woman - and palm went dead dead sold to hp. bad company to be keeping. so blackberry - even more annoyed at y'all. i'm going to bed now and i've gotta plug in my nokia, which has the same features as your phones and fewer awful ad experiences.

somehow that dude seems sexier now though.

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.