Check this post out over at Oriole’s Hangout. On the headline from the main page of their site, they had the line Paul’s Game Recap: (curled in fetal position) – that made me chuckle. He included some classic comments like this:

MAKE IT STOP. Please. Anyone. I’m begging you. This is the most torturous game I’ve ever witnessed. I cannot believe what I’m seeing. I feel like I’m about to burst into tears– or flames. I want to go home, yet I’m stuck here watching this nauseating train wreck.
I don’t want to be a recapper anymore. I’m questioning my entire life as I know it. Why am I here? What have I done to deserve this?

After thinking about it some more, I think this video applies. :)

I don’t know how many of you follow the site “The Smoking Gun”, but it’s a site that regularly posts court documents and things that are generally supposed to be sensitive. Most of the time it’s stuff I don’t care about, but every once in awhile a real doozy comes along. Like this guy… Jonathan Lee Riches. He filed a lawsuit in court against Barry Bonds, Bud Selig, and Hank Aaron’s bat. Check out this summary from the site:

In his lawsuit, Riches, weaves an intricate conspiracy theory involving television ratings, steroids, the cracking of the Liberty Bell, Colombian narco-terrorists, and secretly recorded conversations for which journalists Robert Novak and Judith Miller have transcripts.

Some other amusing stuff is that he claims that Bud Selig is Barry Bonds’ steroids dealer, Barry Bonds personally bench pressed the guy, and of course Bonds used Aaron’s corked bat to crack the Liberty Bell.
Go check it out, it’s quite amusing.

Testing again.
The final release version of this software came out this morning. It’s installed now, just wanted to test it, make sure things didn’t explode. :)

A really good site to read regularly is “The Biz of Baseball”. It talks about well.. business related issues to baseball. Anyway, this morning I noticed an article about the Rangers, specifically about the “You could use some baseball” ad campaign.
I wrote about this some time ago – the ads are generally funny, and reflect little “moments” we have when we realize that our entertainment choices aren’t great. The only one that’s a little bit of an eyebrow raiser is the one I talked about back in February about “First base has nothing to do with kissing”. Explaining that to a small kid could be odd, but nothing to really get bent out of shape over. ;)
And unlike some people who take any opportunity to bitch about Tom Hicks, I wanted to say I liked the article a lot, and the ad campaign made me laugh, so yes. It worked. Although I don’t think it would make me attend any more games, no advertising would work on me in that regard. :)
Go read the article at bizofbaseball – it’s an enjoyable read.

Does anyone else have the same reaction on TV when Josh Lewin says “We go to Jim Knox”? For me that means hitting the fast forward button on the TiVo. I’d rather watch the staff clean up the ballpark after everyone’s gone home.
I actually switched over to watch a minute or two of women’s basketball. Actually was waiting for the Giants/Nats game to start on ESPN2, but some women’s basketball game is in double overtime. Surprised they’re sticking with that, and not showing Bonds.

Is there anyone else secretly wishing that Vicente Padilla doesn’t come back from his injury at all? As a human being you don’t want to see someone hurt, but as a baseball fan… I kind of like what we have now.
Anyone else feel the same way?

Just in case you didn’t know about the bridge accident in Minneapolis, go read this.

If you are seeing this message, then you are seeing the new look for my site. The look that I used to have was not one I was terribly happy with from the moment I launched it. A few weeks back, Six Apart, the folks who make the software that drives this site (Movable Type) launched a new v4 beta. It’s got a boatload of new features that would make the way I do this site an awful lot easier.
One of the things in the new software package was a bunch of new themes, and I took the opportunity to use that as a key to redesign the site. This is mostly stock software actually – the theme has some customizations (the header graphic, the baseballs), but is mostly “out of the box”. Their “out of the box” is a lot better than it used to be. :) Big thanks to Thijs Leenders for his help with the graphics.
One of the larger more updated sections is my seat selector section. It’s something I started on my own in 1999 on this site, years before the Rangers did it themselves. But this new version lets me cut a lot of waste out of the site. You see in the old version I had three editions of the seat selector (regular, large, extra large). There was an HTML page for each version, because I used to show the images as a pop-up. There are 177 sections in the ballpark, with another 25 or so hidden areas, so there’s roughly 600 HTML pages. This new version does it very differently, so I could drop the popups, saving myself conversdion of 600 HTML pages. Plus the new version of the site just looks a lot cooler.
I’ve cleaned up text formatting, just done a lot of cool stuff to make everything look nicer. I hope you think the same.
One change though – if you were reading the site’s updates via an RSS reader, you may need to resubscribe, as the rss feed url has changed depending on which format you were using in the past. Additionally, if you want to leave comments, you will have to log in and create an account. For some reason Typekey isn’t working, that could be a bug, as this is still technically beta software. If you have any questions about using the new software, let me know via email.
I’ll also be looking at the forums and the gallery to see if I can style them the same and make ’em look more like the “main site”. I also need to fix the captcha issue in the forums, as well as here. Edit: Nevermind – fixed it on the forums. Now I need to fix it in MT.
Thanks again for visiting. Glad you took the time to come.