Real Fans

I can't begin to explain to y'all how excited I was to write this post. I do my best writing when I feel like I have important stuff to say. Anyway, I'm driving back to my parents' apartment today and I'm listening to the Michael Kay Show after the Yankees' victory. Anyone who was watching could tell you how exciting it was, how they came back to win after being down 6 - 2 with two outs in the ninth inning and nobody on base. Solo home run, single, walk, single, single, wild pitch, and all of a sudden Alex Rodriguez can win the game with a single to the outfield. And then he hits a walk off home run and they win 8 - 6. Now for anyone who hasn't been paying attention for the past year and a half, if you were to ask any Yankee fan how they feel about Alex Rodriguez and his $25,000,000 per year salary, 90% of them will tell you that he's a scrub; for that much money he should hit 60 home runs and drive in 150, and hit .330. Anything less is inexcusable, especially in the playoffs, where that same percentage of Yankee fans will swear on their grandfather's season tickets that he's never done anything of value. Az basically, the guy was screwed; if he does well, that's what he's supposed to be doing and he's not worthy of praise, but if he sucks a fat one, then he gets booed out of town. Now, all of a sudden, he's the hottest athlete on the planet, and he can't help but hit a home run every day. Seriously, at the rate he's going, he's on pace to hit .351, with 116 home runs, 301 RBI, 197 runs scored, 231 hits, an on base percentage of .418, 12 stolen bases, and a .965 slugging percentage. Obviously, he won't be able to keep up with this torrid pace, but that's not the point. The point is, now that he's succeeding, you have all these Yankee fans coming out of the woodwork and saying things like "oh, I was always defending A-Rod, but none of you cared! I'm a real fan; I don't boo our own players." But where the hell were all of you last year when he got booed every time he got up to the plate? When you listened to the radio last year you never heard from any of his defenders, only from his attackers? How dare you all call yourself real Yankee fans! I can't say I'm ashamed because chas v'chalilah, I would never even attempt to convince anyone that I supported the Yankees. And you know what? This is why. The average fan couldn't give a crap about the players, because they simply don't know a damn thing. Like I said earlier, "Anything less is inexcusable, especially in the playoffs, where that same percentage of Yankee fans will swear on their grandfather's season tickets that he's never done anything of value." Those 90% have no idea that in his post-season career in 132 at-bats, he's hit .280 with 6 home runs, 16 RBI, 19 runs scored, 4 stolen bases, a .375 on base percentage, and a .485 slugging percentage. These are highly respectable numbers for such a small sample size. Wanna hear what else I hate? A guy called in to the Michael Kay Show saying that the Mets fans should also be embarrassed, because they did the same thing with Carlos Beltran in his first year, when he only hit 15 home runs and 79 RBI. To set the record straight, these two situations are completely, totally different. Carlos Beltran had essentially done nothing in his career except have a nice post-season the year before the Mets signed him. He stunk in his first year in New York, az he got booed. But Alex Rodriguez WAS THE FREAKIN MVP IN 2005!!!!! WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE THAT YOU CAN BOO HIM THE FOLLOWING YEAR?!!!!!! I'm about to call out my roommate, which isn't really fair, but I'll do it anyway. We're sitting in the palace watching baseball, and someone asked us what the most important statistic in baseball is, to which my roommate responded, "batting average." I almost had a seizure. I asked him what the difference is between a .280 hitter and a .320 hitter. You guys know what the difference is? Let me show you. Last year, both Garret Anderson and Carlos Guillen had 543 at-bats. For the average everyday player, this seems to be a fairly pedestrian amount. Garret Anderson hit .280, and Guillen hit .320. Want to know how many more hits Guillen had than Anderson? 22. 22! That's roughly one more hit every 7.5 games. That's roughly 3.5 more hits per month. How is .320 hall of fame material, and .280 isn't? All you fans out there should try to learn more about the game of baseball. Baseball is a dynamic sport that changes all the time. Each and every day, people are coming up with new ways of analyzing the game so that we can get a more complete understanding of how it works. Do yourselves a favor; go to baseballprospectus.com and look up some players. If you're really feeling frisky, sign up to be a member at baseball prospectus for a month so you can get access to players' PECOTA cards. Learn what VORP, WARP3, and FRAA mean. Baseball is a beautiful game, and it's a shame that people are missing out.

Navel Ring Follow-Up

Man, yesterday's post got some mixed reviews. I don't mean that I pulled a Don Imus and insulted people, and now my financial backers are threatening to pull their funds; I mean that people felt the need to put in their two cents about the issue. From what people have told me, and from various pieces of literature I've been given, I've come to the conclusion that body piercings are generally frowned upon for a variety of less-than-satisfactory reasons. As with most things about which I feel strongly, a variety of less-than-satisfactory reasons is good enough for me. As I've mentioned before, I certainly don't have the proper intellectual ammunition to defend any conclusion one way or the other, az I'm just going to let the issue lie. This certainly isn't the place to discuss halachic issues, and I'm certainly not the person to do said discussing. And just to clear things up, since I got a lot of feedback yesterday, a little too much for comfort if you ask me, whether or not a girl has a navel ring won't affect my decision to go out with her or not. Another words, you can completely disregard anything I might have said yesterday about navel rings, diamonds, and any combination of the words "super" and "hot," especially if they were all found in the same sentence. For those of you who have been dedicated readers since before the days when I moved all my posts onto facebook, and for those of you who have come to see the light over the past coupla weeks, I would like to refer you to my post entitled "Favorite of All Time" from December 14th, 2006. There I discussed the reasons for a player or team being your favorite, and I came up with this brilliance: "What would happen if those criteria stopped applying?...This is the same for any kind of love...There can't be a reason you love someone or something. You love your team just because." Another words, what I said about navel rings was superficial and not intended to be serious. Now that I've successfully bludgeoned that point into submission, let's move on to other things.

Since today was such a nice day (just to clarify for those who read this post at any point after Thursday, April 12th, 2007, it was a horribly gross, wet day. In the words of the immortal Guy Gavriel Kay in "The Summer Tree," "Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain." Someone name for me one more author who could get away with writing a sentence like that.), and since I had time to kill between interviews, I ended up walking from 42nd Street and Madison Avenue to Kosher Delight on 37th and Broadway for lunch, and then from there to Waverly Place and Broadway to investigate the selection of Scotches at the Warehouse. Now walking straight down Broadway through different parts of Manhattan is crazy cool; there are so many different neighborhoods to see. Sometimes it's hard to remember that the Broadway by 187th Street where I live is the same Broadway by 116th Street where I went to school, and the same Broadway by 72nd Street where I used to gorge myself on sushi on Mondays, and the same Broadway where I was today in the 30s and in the village, and the same Broadway by Wall Street where I had my second interview. It's just cool is all.

Anyway, since I can't really afford to spend much money these days, because my roommates would kill me, I was trying to get some liquid chametz as cheaply as possible. Az I'm standing in Warehouse down in the village examining their selection and I noticed not only their bottles of Finlaggan, which I grabbed immediately; it's the first time I've seen it in the USA, and I've been looking for it all over the place, but also their obscenely low price for Lagavulin 16, my favorite reasonably priced malt. Now they used to sell it for $59.99, which is the lowest price in the city, and it's even lower than the one I saw at the Duty Free shop on the Canadian border by Buffalo, NY on my way back from Toronto. Now, they lowered their price to $49.99. Anyway, I didn't buy any because that's way too much for me to spend right now, but I'm definitely storing away that info for later.

Yesterday, I went to pick up a friend from the airport, and on the way back we stopped off at Grille Point for some more chametz. While he was picking up the grub, I went over to Gifts Plus to pick up some A Capella CDs for sefira. Now my two favorite A Capella groups, Six13 and AKA Pella, each came out with new albums this year. Az I was playing some of the songs in my apartment, and one of my roommates said that the songs couldn't be A Capella since they sounded too much like real instruments. I assured him that no instruments were used on the CDs and suggested that he try to think about fancy sefira music in the same way as fancy sheitels. One can assume that the requirement for married women to cover their hair is not designed to enable women to wear attractive wigs, because that would take away from the law's original intent, which was to prevent married women from enticing men other than their husbands. Az this totally awesome A Capella music, while technically still halachically valid, is probably only following the letter of the law and not necessarily the spirit. Either way, I'm still gonna listen to it. If anyone wants to steal some of it from me, that's cool; that's why I'm here! Besides, I like having visitors at the palace. Wow, almost 1000 words; good for me.

Oh, and just in case some of you get uppity, I was merely referring to the most stringent of halachic practices when I was discussing the "requirements" for married women to cover their hair, and for people to refrain from listening to instrumental music during sefira. Az don't anyone think that I'm telling y'all what y'all should and shouldn't be doing. Geez, I really gotta be careful what I say; I wouldn't want to insult the wrong people.

More Road Rage

For the last (past?) week, we celebrated the holiday of freedom, the holiday of redemption. Now, I have trouble with this holiday; I find that it has no redeeming values. Hehe, that's my favorite Passover pun, but seriously. I understand that holidays like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur should be tough, because we're fighting for our souls, but a happy one like Passover shouldn't be a burden. Honestly, I hate cleaning. I know you're all surprised to hear such an admission from me, but it's true. Also there is bread. I love bread in all of its forms: rye, white, bagel, whole wheat, brick oven topped with mozzarella and marinara, fermented and brewed with hops, oat, spelt, video games, you name it. Additionally, I think the Matzah might have caused irreversible jaw damage this year. I won't get into the rest of the reasons, but you get the idea.

Az there I am, on the way over to H&H Bagels West in an effort to end the Matzah madness, and I run into this moron. Going southbound on Broadway between 82nd street and 81st street, the right two lanes were closed off for construction. This didn't bother me; it was pretty late, but what did bother me was that said moron put his girlfriend/wife/concubine into a taxi, which was blocking the only open lane. Then he made her get out so he could give her another hug and kiss, and all the while I'm honking away, expressing to my friend how I couldn't believe what was happening. Then the cab and the car ahead of me finally sped away through the green light, and guess what. THAT VERY SAME MORON STUCK HIS HAND OUT AND MADE ME WAIT WHILE HE CROSSED THE STREET ON MY GREEN LIGHT! Sorry for the caps, but it had to be done. Imagine the chutzpah of this guy. I was honestly frothing at the mouth. The good news is that he went into H&H right ahead of me, az I had the perfect opportunity to tell him off. It's a crying shame that I'm the least confrontational person I know, az I didn't really tell him off. I know you're all upset with me, but I think I'd rather have y'all think I'm a wuss than have y'all think I was capable of cursing a guy out. Anyway, put "being a moron" up on the list of my pet peeves.

This morning, I asked a friend about her holiday, and she said it was pretty boring and she played a lot of Rummikub. Az I asked her how she pronounced the word "Rummikub." Is it "Rummy-kuhb" or "Rummy-kyoob?" Apparently she ascribes to the former while I ascribe to the latter. I should take a poll. If anyone has any thoughts, please don't hesitate to share.

Oh man, I never add to a post after it's been published, but someone just brought up a fascinating, and potentially important topic. Why don't frum girls have piercings in places other than their ears? Could be for the same reason that tattoos aren't allowed, but for the moment, let's assume that body piercings aren't assur. I think navel rings are super hot. If I got set up with a girl who had a navel ring I'd bring the diamond with me on the first date. Okay, now I'll go ahead and republish this bad boy.

Road Rage

Az today I drove back to my apartment from the East Side so that I could catch up on the shows I missed over the holiday. I ended up not watching them yet, but that's another story. Anyway, I was driving northbound on York avenue, and I got stopped at a red light behind a guy that was signaling a left turn. I figured, "okay, great. He'll turn right away when the light turns green, and I'll be able to drive ahead." But, no, he decides to wait until all the cars going in the opposite direction go before he turns. This is one of the most important unwritten rules of driving. If you're turning against traffic, you better be the first one to go when that light turns green. Keep this in mind when you're driving southbound on Broadway and you want to make a left onto 178th street.

Once that debacle was over, the drive up the FDR should have been a breeze, right? Right?! Wrong! Just as I was getting to the end of the ride, I was preparing to exit from the left lane onto Amsterdam avenue by 179th street. Sometimes the cars are backed up there, but it's never much of a problem. This time, there was one of those street pavers going up the ramp, and it was actually PAVING THE ROAD! Seriously, it's a one lane road and that machine was actually inching its way towards Amsterdam avenue. At least have the common decency to close the road so that the cars don't get stuck behind! It would cause far fewer problems if everyone were forced to go under the apartments via the Trans-Manhattan Expressway and come out on the other side. It's just not right.

On the topic of important lessons we need to impart to the ignorant, I decided that the single most useful rule to teach to children is the "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" rule. If you're unfamiliar with this rule, please ask me in person, because it might look embarrassing were anyone to post up their ignorance for all to behold. And boy, wouldn't I like to be holding your ignorance right now, especially if your ignorance is super-hot. Mmkay, anyway, this rule is uber-important, az please teach it to your children.