I like baseball.  I like that it has no time limit, that the umpires each have different strike zones that vary on different days.  I like creaky old stadiums.  I like baseball.  I don't however give a rats ass about all the fuss over this being the last year at Yankee Stadium / All Star Game stuff.

1.  The All Star Game still stinks.  It determines home field advantage for the World Series, yet still coaches have to try to jam every player into the game like some drama teacher does for a high school play making everything akward.  So it kind of doesn't matter since nobody would actually try to jam everyone in the game if it actually mattered...  I'd rather see them just play the best players (coaches decision after the voting) and go from there.

2.  I don't think of the Yankees as all that special.  I grew up in two phases of the NY Yankees history.  They stank, or at least seemed like every other team with good and bad years when I first started watching baseball.  That was about it early on.  Then they started spending money in order to win.   Not some money, LOTS of money.  While I appreciate it was all legal in terms of the actual rules, and it is/was probably emblematic of American society in some ways...  I failed to see those more recent winning years as really all that impressive.  Heck it may be that the entire Yankee's history was financially enabled.  Maybe, I don't know.   Yet those teams I saw weren't teams who overcame any great hurdles or played on the same level field as the other teams they played with.   They SHOULD have won, heck you could argue that they SHOULD have won more games / titles.  So the team, despite its long history, for me just doesn't carry much weight in terms of recent sports achievements.  Maybe the past should matter to me but the present certainly doesn't and you can have all the history you want but if you can't do anything impressive now other than spend money, should those past achievements still reflect on the current team?

3.  Yankee Stadium does NOT look like some old stadium filled with history.  I've never been there but from what I see on TV it looks like a very modern (well mid 1980s and forward) stadium.  It might be on the same ground and so on but I don't see that as a place where Ruth hit home runs or any of the other players made great plays.  Baseball has some beautiful old stadiums that maintain their charm (and/or mold) far better than Yankee Stadium has, and without that I think it looses something.

4.  What exactly is the celebration here?  A lot of the press and nostalgia is all positive?  If say the Red Sox or Cubs chose to build a new stadium next door and plow over Fenway or Wrigley would we be so happy?  Would there be this celebration?  I imagine not.  Granted Fenway and Wrigley have had some upgrades here or there, but they still look and feel like great old ballparks.  Yankee Stadium?  I don't see it at all.  In fact (duxup prepares to duck) it looks like your standard 1980s characterless / faceless stadium.   Maybe that is why there's not much outrage over its destruction, but that also means the stadium died a long time ago and there's little to celebrate now.

Rain

We had a very rainy spring, and now a very dry fall.   I'm not fond of watering my awkwardly shaped lawn.  I'd like some rain plz thanks.  Also not this severe thunderstorm crap where it blows thru loud and lasts all of 10 min followed by these super dry windy days that wipe out whatever moisture was there.   I want some good cloudy days with some soaking calm rain a couple days in a row.

Video Games: E3

It is E3 time, and this means two things.  No more significant hardware announcements, and actual surprises.  I like this much better.  Usually the hardware (new consoles) centric years are a lot of hype, epic BS, lies, and really not a lot of good games.  These in between years I find more satisfying as someone who plays games, that might be out within my lifetime.

Noteworthy:

FFXII on 360:  Sony's exclusive hold on Final Fantasy XIII... is only exclusive in Japan.  The days of major 3rd party titles being exclusive have been long heralded as over, ending.  Square Enix (who sounds like they're not preforming financially as they'd like to (since most of what they do is pimp out old products onto the DS)) apparently figured they may as well get in on the #### it why not go multi-platform? train.

Netflix and 360:  Amongst other Xbox Live changes MS announced that if you have a 360, an Xbox Live Gold Account, and a Netflix account you can tie them together and see your Netflix queue on your 360 and play your netflix movies (that are available online of course) streaming to the 360 at no extra cost (just like on the PC now).  Very cool.  I remember hoping this would happen when Netflix was polling its users about seeing Neflix on a gaming console.  Granted Netflix's entire library isn't available online but it is growing / improving every time I check it out and it is handy.

Sony:  That's about it.  That's not to say the system is crap, but when they did the line during the presentation about "exclusives that could only be done on the PS3" you could almost hear that the line was edited the day before to just include MGS4.   I still look forward to seeing Little Big Planet, and some stuff like MAG (promising 256 player games..) sounds great but I have serious trouble believing they can pull it off without ... a mess.  Meanwhile they keep pimping Killzone 2 and while that might end up being awesome for how many E3s do we have to see stuff about a game that the first title sucked getting pimped as if it is the second coming?

Nintendo:  They've moved on to the land of the Wii, can't blame them as that thing has made them trucks of cash, and honestly I've bought some of it.  The new Wiimote adapter for 1:1 motion control seems interesting but like anything on the Wii will likely left underutilized for my taste.

Texas

My local news media tells me everyone in Texas is going to die soon.  Category 10,0000 Hurricane or something.  Sad.

Baseball: Twins

The Twins continue to play well for the most part.  Having said that they're one of those teams that is "good" but are about as far from one of the best teams in the league, as the worst teams are far from them.  In other words this is a young team with lots of potential for the future.  Even if the AL Central keeps stinking it up they've got nothing to gain from the playoffs except how to get swept.  Still a fun team to watch.  Most shocking is that it has all been in in spite of the fact that the table scrap players they picked up in the off season all suck.

Football: MN Vikings

The LA Vikings to join the LA Lakers?  It seems so.  Long story short, the Vikings have for a long time wanted a new football stadium, the Gophers, the Twins all got their stadiums and are leaving the Metrodome.  The Vikings previous owner had no intention of ever spending a dime he could spare on the team so he sold it.  The new owner had a good deal going with Anoka County and it fell thru a few years ago.   Since then the proposals by the Vikings for a new Stadium have gone from silly, to now absurd.   They want a new stadium, the NFL and Vikings owner will pay $280 million . . . the state of Minnesota is supposed to pay $600 million.

What the heck?  They don't even have a deal with say a local government (city, county) to propose how the public funds are gathered.  They just want $600 million to fall from the sky during a poor economy from the entire state...  Exactly how are you going to get folks up in the north to vote for this thing?  Answer: They won't, ever.

Those pics make it look UGLY.  I'm not opposed to new stadium deals.  I didn't mind the Twins deal.  It could have been better but the general idea was the right idea.  A county makes a deal with the team to build it, the county owns the stadium, the team pays operating costs, a pile of cash is reserved for repairs, the team pays cost overruns, the state tosses in a couple bucks for some transportation improvements (build a new light rail stop).  All the sate legislature has to do is vote yes to allow the deal (allow the new county tax) and the legislature people from the northern part of the state can say "I helped save the Twins and it didn't cost you a dime!" and it gets done.

The proposal from the Vikings is so absurd that there's no way it will ever happen.  Only one explanation remains, they (the Vikings)  know the deal will never happen.  They just make these proposals until their 2011 lease expires, go to the NFL and say "hey we tried, can we move now" and off they go.  It is too bad too because the Anoka County deal was right on the edge of being acceptable like the Twins deal, just remove the roof from that plan and it would have worked.

Reality TV

A second shift coworker of mine watches a lot of TV on the internet when at work.  He was watching recently (loudly as usual) and spouted out loud OMG what a bunch of fucking retards!  That got me thinking, that pretty much sums up the content of 99% of reality TV shows.  There should just be a show OMG what a bunch of fucking retards! sure it is crude but to the point.