Opening Day: Brewers 7, Dodgers 1

The Brewers had a great opening day game. The "free" game for our ticket package was opening day, so Lisa and I were there to see it. I won't recap the game itself. You can read that online elsewhere if you are interested.

Our day started around 10:30 in about a 20 minute line on Bluemound Road, trying to get into the parking lot. Once we were parked, Lisa and I headed into the ball park and went to Friday's Front Row Grill. Since most people were out tailgating, we were able to get good seats out on the patio section which is basically built into the left field wall. The Brewers had BP while we were eating. Geoff Jenkins, Matt Wise, and a couple of others were shagging fly balls out there and we managed to get a practice ball from one of them.

After lunch, we headed over to our seats. This year, we are in the first section of the field level outfield (section 109). Very nice seats, but you really have to pay attention to foul balls down there (which can be a problem for me if I am busy fixing my score card when the next guy comes up).

All in all, it was a very pleasant day, topped off by a strong performance by the whole team, especially Sheets. Hopefully the rest of the games in our package will be equally as enjoyable, and not frustrating like last year.

Please Don't Snort Me When I am Dead...

All I ask of my child is that when I die, she not mix me with some blow and snort me. I am pretty sure that is not too much to ask...

Update: Now it turns out that Mr. Richards may have been joking. The sad fact, however, is that the original story is actually quite believable...

R U a Dumbass?

Yesterday I wasn't feeling all that well and I was bored, so I decided to watch a little TV. Jeopardy was preempted by the NCAA basketball tournaments, so I tuned in to "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?". After watching this show once, I think a better name for it would be "Are You Smart Enough to be Alive? Or are we Going to Have to Remind You to Breath Because you are Way Too Eff'ing Stupid to Remember to do That on Your Own?"

Here are some of the questions that the contestants had problems with:

1. On which planet would you be the heaviest? Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter?
2. If the diameter of a circle is 4 inches, what is the radius?
   
3. Y = 3X, 3X = 12. What is Y?
4. What is the adverb in the following sentence: "My wife snored loudly..." (there was more, but nothing even closely resembling an adverb)
5. Density is defined as Mass divided by what?
6. Do Ohio and Illinois share a border?
   
7. What is the only continent that is also a country?

How incredibly eff'ing dumb do you have to be? Seriously...

On number seven, the woman actually said something like "well, North America is a continent and a country...". Really? And you really so stupid that, in fourty-four frickin' revolutions around the sun you have not yet figured out the difference between "North America" (the continent), and "The United States of America", "Mexico", and "Canada"?

She then said that all seven continents are also countries. So, according to this twit, Europe is a single county (forget about France, Spain, Italy, Greece, etc). Same for Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and even Antarctica (which, by the way, is the only continent with NO countries). She even said "Australia" when naming off the continents, but it never clicked in her brainless head that "Australia" was actualy the correct answer...

Anyhow, by the end of the show, I was ready to put a gun to my head. At least at that point, I would be as "smart" as the people on the show...

BTW, the correct answers are:

1. On which planet would you be the heaviest? Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter? - Jupiter. I guess you could be excused for not knowing if Saturn or Jupiter had more mass, but if you guessed Mercury, please take one more step into the Sun. Also, if you had no clue that the mass of the planet had any bearing on your weight, please also manage to find your way into the sun.
   
2. If the diameter of a circle is 4 inches, what is the radius? - Diameter is the distance from one end of a circle to the other end passing through the center point. Radius is the distance from the edge of the circle to the center point. Thus, the radius if half of the diameter. Thus, if the diameter if 4 inches, the radius is 2 inches, and if you didn't know that, you are thus a total dumb-ass...
   
3. Y = 3X, 3X = 12. What is Y? - OK, this is so amazingly eff'ing stupid that if you can't figure it out, then I am not sure how you remember how to breath without constant prodding... Hint: 3X == 3X...
   
4. What is the adverb in the following sentence: "My wife snored loudly..." (there was more, but nothing even closely resembling an adverb) - Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, get your adverbs here, father son and Lolly selling adverbs here...
   
5. Density is defined as Mass divided by what? - Believe it or not, the contestent said "air"... In case you are just as stupid, no, the answer is actually "volume".
   
6. Do Ohio and Illinois share a border? - Um, no, Indiana is in the way... Duh...
   
7. What is the only continent that is also a country? - Australia...

Quite frankly, if you are so dumb that you didn't know this stuff, please, please, please shoot yourself now before you do something really stupid like breed...

Thx!

Wikipedia...

Wikipedia is an interesting phenomena that I have commented on before. It seems that a bunch of college students where dumb enough to trust it as a source.

“I was looking at a stack of final examinations,” said Waters, a professor of Japanese studies at Middlebury College in Vermont, “and I found several instances of misinformation that [were] identical from one student to another.”

All of those students in Waters’ Japanese history class late last year had been steered wrong by the same source — Wikipedia

It is not hard to figure out why this happened. I personally like to use it because it is convenient and because it is free, and it covers a lot of topics that may be hard to find elsewhere. However, I would never trust it as a source for much unless the "facts" are attributed and at that, are themselves attributed to reliable sources. Often, this is not the case. However, Wikipedia is still a good place to start your search. My advice would be to go to the links and sources sections, though, and dig into those if you are doing any serious research on a topic.

On a related note, never trust it to be accurate on topics that touch subjects like politics and current events. For one thing, it seems that a fair number of people who edit Wikipedia are actually lefty whack-jobs, which doesn't help things at all. To counter the left-leaning wackiness, I suggest a link I found at Little Miss Chatterbox's blog called Conservapedia. At least there the, they are up front about the bias, and the bias leans in the correct direction.

No, Your Daughter is Actually a Bad Person...

And the delusional mother of the year award goes to (drum roll), Joy Miller. Joy Miller is the mother of Ashley Miller, one of the so called "Barbie Bandits." Here is what Joy has to say about her precious little angel:

The mother of an 18-year-old arrested in a bank theft scheme said Monday that her daughter isn't a bandit, she just fell in with the wrong crowd and made a bad choice.

Yeah, the bad choice to be a bank robber. Face it, Joy, your daughter is a bad person, period. The first step to making any sort of reformation of your daughter's behavior possible is to admit that. Hiding from, or ignoring, her sin does no one any good. It is why the first part of the Christian confession is to admit that we are all wretched sinners who fall short of the glory of God rather than something like "Gee, God, we really aren't all that bad, we just made some bad choices and really ought to be forgiven."

This attitude that some parents have of "oh my little angel is basically a good kid" just makes me sick. 99.9% of the time, the kid is actually a rotten brat, and a big reason for this is the parent's inability to confront the child's failures when they screw up. For the sake of your daughter, Joy, stop apologizing for her and start being a parent. Step one is to make sure she suffers proper consequences for her actions rather than having you try to white-wash them...

Terrorist Squirrels

I would say something witty about this mirroring certain left leaning people's approach to terrorism, but...

1. I am lazy today.
2. Anything I came up with wouldn't be accurate anyhow, since:
1. They wouldn't be hucking the peanuts at the squirrels, they would be out there hand feeding them.
2. While almost as stupid as the cat, they wouldn't be smart enough to realize that their plan was not optimal.

Hockey...

Lisa and I went to a Milwaukee Admirals game yesterday with church. We only make it to one or two games a year. It isn't that we don't like hockey, it is just that there is only so much time and money, and we tend to spend our entertainment time and money at Milwaukee Wave games instead.

The guy who organized this trip has a daughter who works for one of the people in the Admirals ownership group, so we got some pretty good seats, third row from the glass, down by the goal that the Admirals attack in the first and third period. Very nice!! Unfortunately, the Admirals lost that day. Oh well...

Another person from our group and I were chosen to go out on the ice between periods for one of the little event contests. We were told to go out on opposite ends of the center line, then run to the middle where there were a pile of pucks, and then start shooting pucks at empty beer cases that were lined up on the blue lines. Whoever knocked off the most beer cases in 30 seconds won a gift certificate to the Miller Time Pub. When I got to the middle, I slipped and fell on my butt in front of about 5000 people. On the plus side, I did manage to knock off the most beer cases.

Lust in Space...

By now, everyone has heard about the fact that the cheese has slipped off of Astronaut Lisa Nowak's cracker. However, I must say that this article contained more puns in the first 5 seconds of reading than any article I have read in the a long time.

Do they actually teach people to write like that in journalism school now?

Cold Snap

It is really cold, so cold that my brain has frozen to the point where I actually wrote this little haiku the other day in an e-mail message to some friends at work

Hang, icicle prism
Fall, pulchritudinous snow
Shit dude, it is cold

Bad poetry aside, this is probably the longest cold snap I can recall since moving back down to the southern half of the state 13 years ago. When I lived up north, we had one of these snaps every year. Now, I am a wuss, and can't handle it!

This morning, it was -17 when I walked the dog. The other day, Lisa and I walked from the US Cellular Center over to Rock Bottom Brewery. It is just a few blocks down Wells, not really all that far, but I would not have wanted to go any farther. The walk back for the Wave game was worse, since the wind was then in our faces. At least at that point I had a couple of pints in me...

I can't wait for Wednesday. My weather outlook widget tells me we should be up to 16 above by then!! Yeah!! OK, I'm done whining for now...

Boys Behaving Badly

Yet another young NASCAR driver gets himself busted doing something he shouldn't. This time, the driver is Martin Truex Jr., and his offense is public urination. Specifically, he was busted peeing on the side of his car in a parking garage. A little gross, but not really much of a news story. After all, what guy hasn't peed on something that he shouldn't have. His car, his neighbor's house, whatever happens to be four stories down from the window of his dorm room, whatever.

On the other hand, his excuse is just pitiful.

"We had a few drinks, I was not intoxicated and we had a designated driver," Truex said.

Really? Not intoxicated? You exhibit this sort of behavior while relatively sober? To me, that actually sounds worse than admitting that maybe, just maybe your judgment was diminished by having a touch too much to drink...