Gammons: First-half review

The Rangers desperately want to change this lethargic team, but getting rid of Gonzalez, Rafael Palmeiro, Chan Ho Park and others (not Carl Everett, if possible) will be extremely difficult. What does this mean for John Hart, and perhaps even Buck Showalter? Not great news, because once again, this franchise is proof of the adage that when a team is at the bottom, there are usually problems at the top. And the top in Texas is Tom Hicks and team president Michael Cramer. Hicks admits Alex Rodriguez has input on player moves and even the draft (gee, a fellow Scott Boras client taken in the second round … what scouting!). Cramer admits to meeting with A-Rod and Palmeiro. Word all around baseball is that Grady Fuson is preparing furniture for Hart’s office, as Hart gets thrown under the bus for signing Park, Todd Van Poppel and so many of A-Rod’s other recommended agent contracts.

WHOA!!! I had not heard this about A-Rod. That can’t be true. And if it is true, that can’t be good. I know Scott Boras is undoubtedly an Agent of Satan, but I didn’t know he had minions from the field of play skulking about the owner’s office. Tom Hicks has lost his mind if he’s letting a $25MM player make his draft picks. Somehow, I can’t quite picture A-Rod scouting the high schools and colleges of this great land during his down time.

But then, that’s the Rangers for you. We make our second-greatest signing ever (Nolan Ryan #1), pay him more than any other ballplayer in the land, and he’s a damn agent robot. An untradable agent robot, at that.

Maybe Jerry Jones isn’t the craziest owner in town after all.

Easily the stupidest thing I’ve seen all week:

That would be the Fan Face Rally Cap, and there’s one in your team’s colors just waiting for ya!

My lord…

I might as well make this official. Today was my last day of employment for the company I was so jazzed to be working for 90-some days ago. I found out that such would be the case about ten days ago.

There are many things about this situation that are infuriating, not the least of which is that I fell for a huckster’s tongue in my ear, telling me how great it was gonna be. After 42 years on this planet, 28 of them gainfully employed in one form or fashion, I have never been suckered so badly (and I am seriously questioning my judgement today.) I have had jobs that I grew to dislike after a period of time, but that was based on my own expectations not being met. As opposed to swallowing a big pack of lies from a bunch of snake-oil peddlers.
Read the rest of this entry »

Just to let you know, Dear Reader, that I’m still under the weather from West SARS Monkey Virus, but the bad part of it is over. I finally got a full night’s sleep, but the junk I’m hacking up out of the deep, smoke-darkened crevices of my lungs has me convinced (once more!) that I have got to quit smoking. Or at least cut it back to a decent level.

In the interest of sweating out the bug that has it’s claws in me, I spent the day yesterday in the blissful embrace of unthinking manual labor. In no particular order, I

• mowed about 10 acres
• cleared four truckloads of brush from the riverfront
• felled three trees on the riverfront
• turned said trees into firewood (the trusty Echo chainsaw got a good workout this weekend)
• cleaned up our one Luxury Tent that was rented this weekend
• re-organized the back store-room, which had become nothing more than ever-growing PILES OF STUFF
• re-organized the back bedroom, which had become overflow for the store-room’s ever-growing PILES OF STUFF
  
  By 7pm, I was pretty drained, not to mention stove-up. My durn knee had given out on me about 4 in the afternoon, and was hurting to beat the band. I think it might have done the job, though, because I’m actually hungry today…yesterday I could hardly be bothered to fix a sandwich. Here’s how bad it really was: ice-cold beer didn’t even taste good. When you’ve reached that point in any illness, the will to live is pretty much gone.

  Other than that, the rest of the weekend was pretty damn dull-icious. I watched a lot of movies — Rooster Cogburn & Terminator 2 are the only ones I remember, but I know there were more than that. Saw most of the Rangers games, too. They won their first series of the last eleven, and it took Craig Biggio slipping in the outfield to let an A-Rod triple get by him. But watching the series showed that there is still no hope for the Rangers. They just plain canNOT develop pitching. It’s just so — disspiriting. I try to care, but I watch these schmoes take the mound, and I see absolutely nothing to give me hope.

  Practically no customers at The Tiny Bidness…hopefully, July 4th will rescue this slowly-sinking outfit. Otherwise, this summer is gonna be a complete loss. At least both Luxury Tents are rented for the full three-day weekend. I’m still struggling with where to take this. I’m on the horns of a dilemna: the Luxury stuff vs. the regular campground stuff. Luxury Camping is well received, and has gotten attention from the press state-wide, and we got a mention from the national press this last week. I even got a call from CNN.com on Friday about including me in their 4th of July Travel Guide. I would like to expand the Luxury Tent idea and put a couple more in, but good lord, the work required to support that is immense. The regular campground, on the other hand, just requires mowing regularly and picking up the trash. When that market is good, it brings in as much money as the two Luxury Tents I have now. It’s a classic problem: keep serving the Common Man, or go completely upscale. Common Man is cheap and easy, but hard to draw and fairly unreliable — Upscale is expensive in time and money, but pays off better in the long run. I think I know that Upscale is the answer for the long-term, but the commitment of time required is my problem. Not to mention the time horizon involved. Not to mention about 4,000,000 other things I could bore the socks off of you with.

Easy Ed Cossette, he of Bambino’s Curse, has been tapped on the shoulder to be the BoSox blogger by FSNE. Of course, Ed’s work is great. You should be reading it regularly if you’re a baseball man, and it should be requireed reading for you if you’re a member oif the Red Sox Nation. I’ve been reading it for years, and I can say that since he’s been on my Blogroll for as long as I’ve had a blogroll.

Of course, let it not be unsaid that it is easy for Ed to wax lyrical and poetical and all literary when he has a team that is swapping spit with the Hated Yankees for first place in the division. So you haven’t won a World Serious in a hundred years? I weep, truly I do. I’ve sniffed playoffs three times in my life as a stRanger fan, and each time we were crushed in Round Numero Uno. We don’t have the longevity the Red Sox do, but our despair is just as crushing, thankyouverymuch.

I’ve been sicker than a dog all day long today. Not to mention exhausted. I finally ended up getting about 3 hours sleep total, with the most in a row being about 45 minutes. Just sitting still hurts, but it hurts the least.

The Wife is convinced that I’ve got West Nile virus, but I’ve got no mosquito bites. I’m pulling for SARS, or missing out on that, monkey pox. The silly thing is that all these diseases seem to start with flu-like symptoms. So how do you know you just have the flu? Go to the doctor? Sounds like an MD-enrichment program to me.

I’ll knock back some off-brand TheraFlu (yum! lemony!), smoke fewer cigs, and pour myself a wee bit of the Turkey which is Wild.

I woke up an hour and a half ago, shaking and shivering from a massive fever, feeling like someone had whacked me with a baseball bat all over, including my head. Now I guess the fever has broken, but I can’t get back to sleep. So I’m watching BAT21 on TNT. That should put me in a coma, except for the commercials that come on at 150% of the movie volume.

Very Richest’s Share of Income Grew Even Bigger, Data Show

Oliver and Jesse and Jack are right, right, right! The Reeps are selling out the little man to the fat cats. Those rat bastards! I’m changing my party affiliation RIGHT NOW!

The 400 wealthiest taxpayers accounted for more than 1 percent of all the income in the United States in the year 2000, more than double their share just eight years earlier, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service (news - web sites). But their tax burden plummeted over the period.

The data, in a report that the I.R.S. released last night, shows that the average income of the 400 wealthiest taxpayers was almost $174 million in 2000. That was nearly quadruple the $46.8 million average in 1992. The minimum income to qualify for the list was $86.8 million in 2000, more than triple the minimum income of $24.4 million of the 400 wealthiest taxpayers in 1992.

Why, that Stoopid&Evil BushAdmin even got a time machine so they can go back and do all this pocket stuffing for their corporate buddies during other President’s terms. Wow. I am just so disillusioned right now.

HoustonChronicle.com - Terrorists possibly targeting Texas

U.S. intelligence agencies early this month eavesdropped on two suspected al-Qaida operatives discussing potential terrorism in Texas timed for the July Fourth weekend, raising the specter of an attack on energy facilities in the Houston area, officials here said Monday.

I’m quite late to the party with this one, but there ya go. Stay hard, Houston.

I do find it mildly amusing that the crazy Islamic bastards might choose to raise some ruckus in the Texas city with more rough’n'ready rednecks (not to mention migrant coonasses) packing heat than any other place in the Great Republic. Do these dumbasses have Clue One? You don’t want to mess with a city named after The Raven.

Perfectly wonderful advice for all you young cats out there.

I seem to have trouble with opening lines [and] the ladies. I always seem to give the impression that I’m wanting to be their friend. And you know there’s nothing worse than being stuck in the ‘friend zone’. How do you get past this without being a complete arsehole (Australian spelling,) I mean, no one wants to be a prick, but I seem to over-do that.
N., Australia

Man, you are doing the worst thing possible: acting like you’re another girl. Being all “the friend.” All “listening” and all that. A woman wants a Man! Capital M! Long D! Jackhammer hips!

Be the man that women talk ABOUT, not TO. Because the man that women talk TO is essentially another woman, at least sociologically

.

Word.

I can’t help but be cracked up by this. Ads served by Google when you search on your weblog URL. I’ve got the coolest:

- “Don’t Eat Me!” pizza t-shirt (some wack vintage clothing store - huh??? maybe I’m just cool as all get out)
- Suzy Boguss (rawks)
- Cocunut Monkey Purse (I got a MONKEY! - HAHA!)
- Blake Shelton (sounds familiar…I’m sure The Wife knows him)

Go try your own.

Found it over at Jarvis’ joint…

Meet the Henny Youngman of the Llano Estacado:

… But while I was mowing the lawn this afternoon, I couldn’t help thinking about the implications of having two “brain trusts” meet in a national collegiate championship showdown.

I mean, for possibly the first time in history, you have two teams who not only compute slugging percentages to the 12th decimal point…they do it in their heads. [rimshot /]

And it goes downhill from there.

Ollie still can’t quite get that truth thing down:

Oh, THAT Guy!

It’s been like a year since Bush said the “O” word. All of a sudden people are asking about WMDs and it turns into “Look what I’ve got over here!”.
He sayeth:
“Whether Osama bin Laden is here or across the border, your guess, sir, would be as good as mine, so I wouldn’t like to venture into a guess.”
All we have to do is go to war with Iran and North Korea and their leaders can also go AWOL…

Who would you think said that, if all you did was scan through OW’s daily dose of Craptonite? Well, it’s actually the President of Pakistan who made that statement. Not George Bush. And no, there’s really no way a smart kid like Oliver could have mis-read the story. But there’s sure going to be a way for him to make up something stupidly pointless about BushHitler.

UPDATE: Wow! He corrected it.

I’ve always, as long as I can remember, wanted to learn to surf. Well, Michael Blowhard did not find the experience to be quite so rewarding.

After my four-hour group surfing lesson yesterday, I can guarantee that no Blowhard will ever again be welcome on a surfing beach. I’ll pass quickly over my complete lack of talent for the sport and cut directly to the excuses. The main reason I won’t be going back again is that there’s a lot more physical daredeviltry involved in surfing than I expected. And even though it’s a point of pride with me that I’m not the world’s least-athletic arts geek, I’ve got nothing — zero — of the physical daredevil in me. Surfing reminded me of rockclimbing, another sport I gave my all to for a total of a couple of hours. “I’m supposed to find being in actual physical danger thrilling? You’ve got to be kidding” — such was my overwhelming response to both these sports.

I know nothing of rock-climbing. If you fall while doing that, you fall on a rock or something similar. I always picture Wylie Coyote holding a little sign saying OOPS! If you fall in surfing, you fall in water from no height at all. Sure you get pounded along the bottom for a while, but eventually you get spit up onto the beach. Just gotta be able to hold your breath a while.

One day I’ll do this. For Michael, though, I can highly (VERY highly) recommend the big-wuss counterpart of surfing, body boarding. It’s not near as hard, and it’s kinda fun, and even us old guys can do it.

Well, lookie there…the Tiny Bidness made the big time! WA-HOO!

Travel + Leisure | Get Outside

40 Glen Rose, Texas: Buck’s on the Brazos
At this site some 65 miles southwest of Dallas, the two-room canvas tents come with queen-sized beds and a prepared campfire; camp cooks can be hired to cater meals. Swim in the Brazos River, ride horseback at the adjacent Broken O Ranch, or rent a set of clubs at the Squaw Valley Golf Course-one of the best public courses in Texas.
DOUBLES $100; 254/898-2825; www.buckbrazos.com

Check out the Falling Waters Resort and their yurts! I want one!!!