Every team has either appeared in or won the World Series sixteen hundred times since the Texas Rangers morphed into existence 35 years ago, when I was a young lad of 12 and still enamored with the Great Game. Except the Texas Rangers.

Any more questions on why I watch NASCAR these days?

Go ahead and try to convince YLB that the Back-Up doesn’t need to match the dust ruffle.

Maybe you can paint the stock to match this month’s bedroom scheme.

Via Fark, natch…

Whatever happened to just leaning it up against the wall? Oh, yeah — the 21st century, the Safety Century. Never mind.

Interesting tidbit: they say in that video that 100,000,000 Americans keep guns in their homes. By my arithmetic, that’s only 1/3. We need to bump that up, folks.

…and I was literally watching paint dry…well, it was polyurethane, not paint, but I was watching it dry, so I could get another coat on and all…but on a whim, I decided to play in the BoDog blogger tournament. And, faith and begorah! Your favorite old fat not-bald poker player won him a little cash.

About enough to pay for all the damn sandpaper and stain and stuff I’ve bought since Sunday, but still…it’s nice to win a tournament. Regular rare readers will know I’m no tournament specialist at all — cash is my calling, and what I love. Tournaments are such a crap shoot, but they are fun. It took me two suckouts to win, which I hate for the other guy, but we’ve all been there, no?

All of my SATX poker peeps done ditched me, too. So, I’m forced online for some card action. I’m pondering a trip to Austin, where I hear the cards still fly. I’m also pondering a trip to the coast for that casino steamboat thingy they have there - informed sources tell me they have poker on it, and I just salivate over the potential. I’m also considering a trip to the big N. O. since they have a real live legal casino, but such a trip would take a week to recover from. I still want to go, on like a Thursday afternoon, play as long as I can hold my eyelids open, sleep a little, play some more, sleep a lot, and then come back on Sunday. I sure hate getting old and having to hold down a real job. Of course, I must acknowledge that if I were I better poker player — there would be no real job worries.

I hate it when reality slaps me in the face with a mackerel.

WSOP Bracelet Winner & poker player extraordinaire Tom Schneider gets taken by…centuries-old gypsy shell game?

You read that right — the old pea under a nutshell scam. Complete with filthy gypsy accomplice threatening bodily harm to traveling partner.

I think I’ll stick to Vegas or Mississippi - at least there, cocktail waitresses with large boobies give you free alcohol while they fleece you.

A weekend with extremely intermittent internet tubes meant there were entire 8- to 12-hour blocks where I didn’t sit here typing or reading. And I made it. Quite nicely, too. Got some sh*t done that needed doing, like washing the truck and chasing down a table saw. I kind of vegged with all the roundy-round NASCAR stuff last night, and the Pokes today.

Speaking of the Pokes, they had their chances but NE is sure stout. Can we get to the Redskins, though?

HeraldNet: Drunken tractor driver nabbed, police say

ARLINGTON – It’s a story that started with cars, bikes and planes. It ended Thursday when an Arlington man was arrested for allegedly driving a tractor while drunk.
[...]
The whole thing started when a man flagged down a trooper to say he thought someone was driving drunk. He told the trooper he’d helped a man pull his car out of a ditch. About an hour later, he saw the same man with the same car in a different ditch.

Police dispatched a Washington State Patrol airplane to look for the drunken driver and troopers in the air quickly zeroed in on the Kubota tractor, Rudeen said.
[...]
Police think this is what happened:

The man drove his car into a ditch for the second time that morning. He walked home. He got his tractor, and used it to pull the car out of the ditch. After driving his car home, the man hopped on a bicycle and pedaled back to retrieve the tractor.

The man was at the wheel of the tractor, swerving along a country road, when troopers found him, Rudeen said.

Driving a huge piece of farm machinery while drunk is no laughing matter, Rudeen said.

Sadly, there are no pictures, of either the tractor or the very determined drunk. Where’s the dashboard video when you really need one?

(Yes, more Fark…)

That Columbine wannabe kid in PA this week? Fark nails it:

Media: school attack plotter had cache of guns, grenades, table full of rifles. Reality: 1 gun without ammo, toy airsoft grenades, many BB guns

Morons.

I saw the movie Idiocracy last week on the satellite teevee — (5wr: not screamingly funny, Judge genius) — we can call this story an indicator of it’s predictive accuracy.

More Cole: I am not the brightest guy on the planet (entire websites exist to point this out)

That’s a blog post, John, not an entire website.

Have another margarita, buckie - it’s Friday, and those fvcking kids will be out of your hair for two days of sweet inebriation. Don’t put any dishwash liquid in the blender.

Chicken lorry jackknifes on the A80, shuts down Scotland

Pretty awesome…loose livestock on the freeway is never not a good time.

NASCAR Cooties

House Homeland Security Committee staffers are on a peculiar mission to study “public health issues at events involving mass gatherings,” which has personally insulted Rep. Robin Hayes of Concord, North Carolina.

The event: NASCAR.

The rub: the requirement that the Democrat and Republican staffers attending first be immunized against Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, tetanus, diphtheria, and influenza.

“I have never heard of immunizations for domestic travel, and as the representative for Concord, North Carolina, I feel compelled to ask why the heck the committee feels that immunizations are needed to travel to my hometown,” Mr. Hayes, a Republican, said in a letter to Rep. Bennie Thompson, Mississippi Democrat and committee chairman.

“I have been to numerous NASCAR races, and the folks who attend these events certainly do not pose any health hazard to congressional staffers or anyone else,” Mr. Hayes said.

A committee staffer says that the Republican staffers have declined the shots but that two Democrat staffers were immunized before attending the race at Talladega last weekend.

A phone call to the committee spokesman was not returned.

I’d disagree with Congressman Hayes that NASCAR peeps don’t pose a health hazard to congressional staffers — the feds are subject to coronary embolisms brought on by running for their life from mobs armed with tar, feathers, and fence rails. Let’s not forget NASCAR’s roots, after all. I don’t think the distaste for revenooers has diminished that much.

Found in an email with the subject line, Why Some People Bow Hunt

I’d never even heard of the .577 T-Rex before. Truly frightening recoil. I don’t think I even want to be in the same zip code with an animal that requires such a stopper.

I guess they can blame this one on Wade Phillips, too. Unless Brett Hull was somewhere on the sidelines. If I was Wade, I would have given him a few grand just to hang out and drink margaritas.

T.O. Owens almost got the goat horns there, boy. Dropping the ball in the end zone, and then at the 25 — bad form for a loud-mouth uber-talent.

I got no sympathy for a team that can’t put away another team after getting five interceptions.

Q: Why do I keep John Cole on a secret blogroll?

Example 1: How many of you were aware that you could not substitute dish soap with dishwasher detergent, and that if you did, you would have six inches of suds across the entire kitchen floor?

Example 2: Why is everyone soliciting sex in bathrooms, for chrissakes? Is there some underground bathroom/gay sex culture out there?

Example 3: I do have a problem with publishing a desperate family’s financial information, scouring pictures of their kitchen to determine the value of their appliances, and stalking their abode. Even if they were used at a press conference by Democrats.

As I read the story, it wasn’t ‘used at a press conference.’ I, and most sensible people, would take ‘used at a press conference’ as meaning the young lad was a participant at a press conference which was called for, attended to, and run by Democrats. The headline, though, says “Baltimore native to speak today for Democrats” about the lad. The story also says this “The Senate staffers wrote the script for Graeme.” Maybe the Sun is lying, and the young man didn’t give the national radio address, and the script wasn’t written by presumably Democratic staffers. And maybe we should all put dishwash soap in the dishwasher.

Here’s a tip, John - don’t put it in the washing machine, either. Don’t say nobody ever told you about that one, professor. One more - don’t enlist small children to be your national spokesmen and expect innoculatoin from national criticism simply because they’re small children.

I don’t think I’m being partisan here. Have there been small children used to provide a platform plank for the Republicans? I hope not, and it wouldn’t suprise me, and I hope all parties will stick with adults talking to adults and not using small children reading scripts as their mouthpiece. It might spell disaster for fishwraps like the Sun looking for column fodder, but them’s the breaks.

And those cold hard facts boil down to this - I can’t hang no more. I went to see Hayes Carll last night, I was in bed by midnight-thirty, and I feel like total crap today. I think the live music thing is going to have to change from a weekly or bi-weekly event into something more monthly or bi-monthly. Maybe even quarterly.

Hayes and the band put on a pretty good show. It was, as I’ve come to expect for a Floore’s show, lightly attended, and I think most of them were road-tripping Austinites. SATX doesn’t support Texas Music so well. They’ll come see the Willie Nelsons, etc., but not the next generation. It’s a shame, because Hayes has the chops to pull off the big time, and I hope he does.

As I say, the show itself was pretty good, if overloaded with ballads and slow songs. Rather than a honky-tonking atmosphere, it was more of a sit-back-and-listen show. Carll is a fine songwriter, so that’s not so bad, but it was not what I’d hoped for. But I’m not calling the shots. The end result, though, was that the faster favorite ravers seemed perfunctory and forced. The bottom line, though, is that for $10, I got my money’s worth, and you can’t complain about that.

One side benefit from last night was finally hearing the McKay Brothers live. Very South Texas…lots of Mexican influence in the music, and that’s a nice change of pace. Inexplicably, I couldn’t find a merchandise table to buy a CD, so I’m going to have to find it online. I’d always rather buy at the show, since the band gets to keep most of the money that way. Regardless, I wouldn’t mind seeing these guys in a more honky-tonkish atmosphere than the inside room at Floore’s.

ABC News: Prosecutor in Sex Sting Kills Himself

A federal prosecutor accused of flying to Detroit last month to have sex with a 5-year-old girl committed suicide Friday in his cell in a Milan federal prison.

It’s so unfortunate that this turd doesn’t get to waste tax money in a court of law.