Fan Appreciation Day

I'M MELTING!!!
Well, not quite, but damn near!  It's hotter than a snake's ass in a wagon rut (thank you, Robin Williams) here in good ol' K.C., and it ain't gonna cool down anytime soon, evidently.  Against my better judgment, I mowed my yard this morning before it got too hot, and I nearly drowned in my own perspiration.  Since then I've been hanging out in my little 9' x 12' air-conditioned cocoon (my bedroom), and I'm ever so thankful to the dude (or dudette) who discovered freon!  Today is also Day One of a week's vacation for me, but I'm not leaving town this time.  I chose this week originally because I was planning a big trip to New York, but I pushed that back to next year, and since I already had the time off anyway, I decided to keep it.  I might just do the Al Bundy-style vacation instead and spend a couple days camped out in my living room...

METHINKS I DOTH SMELLETH A RAT...
Tickets to the Elton John concert at our new Sprint Center sold out in 90 minutes on Monday.  Nothing wrong with that, except that I don't seem to remember there being that high a demand for EJ tickets the last couple times he came to town.  Even factoring in that it's opening night for our new arena and all, I can't help but wonder how many of those tickets got snagged up by these ticket broker outfits on the Kansas side for resale (scalping is legal in the Land of Oz) instead of by the average fan with a credit card who logged on to TicketBastard.  As Col. Potter on "M*A*S*H" would say, "Beaver biscuits!!"

JOE GARAGIOLA WAS RIGHT...
...when he said "Baseball is a VERY funny game."  Take for instance the story of St. Louis Cardinals player Rick Ankiel, who used to pitch for the Redbirds at one time until he struggled with his control to the point where he couldn't find home plate with a Rand McNally road atlas and a decent compass.  He threw more wild pitches than strikes, so they sent him to the minors and converted him into an outfielder, and it turns out the boy can hit better than he once pitched.  After feasting on Minor League pitching, the Cards called him up this week, and he proceeded to hit a 3-run homer in his first Big League game as an outfielder.  He had two more dingers today, too.  That's what I love most about baseball—the sheer quirkiness of it sometimes.

THE COOKIE CRUMBLED
While I'm on baseball, tonight is Cookie Rojas Bobblehead Night at Kauffman Stadium.  Since the Royals have no current superstar players to promote with bobblehead dolls, they have to reach back to their distant past to find worthy players, and Rojas was the Royals' 2nd baseman near the end of his career in the early '70s before being supplanted by Frank White.  Great player, but my memory of Rojas was soured forever by the time my mom took me to get his autograph at a Sears store appearance he made when I was about nine.  He was sitting at a table and talking to some guy standing behind him, and when I got to the head of the line, I worked up the nerve to actually speak to him, wishing him good luck in that night's game, etc.  He just went on jabbering away with that guy and didn't even acknowledge my existence while he scribbled his name (poorly) on his 8 x 10 photo.  I wasn't scarred for life by this or anything, but it feels good all the same to say the following some 34 years later:  Fuck you, Cookie—you're a dick!

CLASSIC MISHEARD LYRIC #46
"The Sounds Of Silence"—SIMON & GARFUNKEL (1966)  "And my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light..."  I thought it was "scared" instead of "stabbed".  Hey, it was AM radio and I was only four the first time I heard it...

TURN OFF THE HYPE MACHINE, ALREADY!
This obsession the sports media (especially ESPN) has with soccer icon David Beckham is bordering on the absurd now.  I watched the game on Thursday where Beckham actually managed to suit up for his first MLS game (mostly because nothing else was on worth watching), and you'd swear it was the Second Coming or something.  Wow, he played a whole 21 minutes!  And to think some idiots actually played the whole damn game—what were they thinking?  Don't get me wrong—I'm a soccer fan, and would love to see the MLS succeed, but they're mortgaging their whole future on one overrated superstar, and I'm telling you they're going to regret this more than they know...

WHAT MIGHT'VE BEEN...
I watched a half-decent flick last night on DVD, the film Bobby from last year, directed by Emilio Estevez, all about the day leading up to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.  The movie was a bit slow to develop at first, but it was surprisingly good, overall.  Now, I'm hardly a fan of the Kennedys—I like them just about as much as I like those nice Clintons—but one wonders what American history would have been like if RFK had lived.  Most assuredly, he would've blown Nixon's doors off in the '68 election, and probably would've been re-elected in '72, thus sparing us from having The Big Dick in the White House.  Food for thought, anyway...