Month: April 2018

Briefly A Citizen Again

In 2014 I renounced my citizenship in the Red Sox Nation. I was going to watch the games on MLBTV instead of listening to them on the radio (which was a perk of RSN membership.) The first year I watched the TV games in between innings they would have silence with a screensaver style image in the background. Coming from radio where you heard the actual WEEI commercials, the lack of that “entertainment” was jarring. It actually bothered me. The quiet made the three minute breaks seem like ten. By year two I was used to it.

During year three they started throwing up random MLBTV highlights in between innings. I now found the sound from these images jarring, especially since the volume level for them was 30% louder than the game audio. Compounding the misery was there were only 4 or 5 “highlights”, so over the course of a nine inning game you’d see them each about 25 times. Up until now I was just listening to the NESN TV broadcasters do the game and while Dave O’Brien was a decent voice, he didn’t have the chemistry with Jerry Remy that the newly departed Don Orsillo had, so I went back to listening to the radio announcer sound over the TV pictures.

Last year, the fourth, the MLBTV highlights were replaced by those annoying Chevrolet “Real People, Not Actors” commercials. They were made even more annoying by the fact that there was just one of them played like three times during each break so you got to see the same thing like 50 times a game. The radio sound with TV picture worked pretty well against it until somewhere in the second half of the season while watching the games on the Roku box they figured out how to override the radio commercials with the audio from the Chevy commercials (along with the typical volume increase.)

This year I decided to to drop MLBTV entirely and go back to the Gameday Audio. I just couldn’t abide by paying $120 and still having to listen commercials. Well why not join the Red Sox Nation again? For the same $20 it costs just for the radio broadcasts I can get that and a few other perks, so I signed up on March 20th. I didn’t get a chance to listen to a broadcast for several days and when I did I could hear it on the radio but, when I tried using the At Bat app on the phone I couldn’t get access. I could hear using the Roku box, but not on the Kindle.

I contacted MLB Customer Service via email to ask what the problem might be. The first email told me to go to settings and login with my credentials – well, no shit Sherlock, already tried that. Next email from them told me to uninstall the app, restart my phone, install the app and sign in. Even though I already done this once, I did it again. Emailed back to tell them that it didn’t help. MLB emailed back with, “We will contact you via phone.”

The actual customer service person I spoke to started to run me through some corrective attempts, but he must have been in training because at nearly every step of the way he would have to put me on hold for a minute to find out what was next. It was an excruciatingly slow process and when I realized we were doing the same two emailed scenarios again I hung up in frustration. While I was on hold with the CSR I went online to the Red Sox Nation web site and found a contact phone number there. It wasn’t an 800 number, the area code was 617 (Boston, MA), so I dialed it and got an answering machine.

I got a call from that same phone number a few minutes later and when I told the woman what my problem was, she explained that the Red Sox Nation Gameday Audio thing only applied to computers, not mobile devices. She could offer me my money back because I was unsatisfied with my membership, so I took it. Then waited a day and purchased the At Bat app on my phone and not only can I use it on the phone, but on both computers, the Roku box and the Kindle too.

Curiosity (Nearly) Killed the Mini (Part I)

Last week I mistakenly thought the falling pine pollen was through for the season, so I decided to wash the several levels of yellow that had accumulated on the Mini. When drying the car off afterwards I raised the hood to towel up any water that might have settled under there and might drip down the exterior when next driven. Because this is like only the third or fourth time I have had the hood up, the first couple were battery related, I looked around a bit.

The battery sits on the left side up against the firewall, under the windshield, and to see it you have to lift a plastic flap. Well, there is another little plastic flap on the driver’s side too. Hmmm, I wonder what’s under there. I unsnapped the top and there was a small reservoir. Looks like it could be for windshield washer fluid. I unscrewed the cap and as I was lifting it off it slipped out of my hand and dropped down. It wasn’t for washer fluid, it was for brake fluid. This became obvious to me when I looked down to find where the cap was, it was tucked neatly underneath the brake booster.

In every other car I have owned or worked on this would not be a problem as the master cylinder and booster have been there in the wide wide open space in front of the firewall. In the Mini there is an enclosed area that runs along the whole firewall that hides the battery on the left and the brake componentry on the right. There was no way to retrieve the cap through the small opening of the flap, there was barely enough room to unscrew the cap.

The plastic cowl cover is in two pieces. The passenger side piece where the battery sits is about 1/3 long while the driver’s side piece covers the remaining 2/3. It tucks under the windshield at the back and at the front it snaps into the plastic front wall of the enclosure and a rubber gasket is pressed onto that to seal the elements out. This picture is not of the Ladybug, but it close enough to show what I’m talking about:

To get in there I needed to pull off the rubber seal, undo the two nuts that hold down the cowl on the driver’s side, separate the top plastic piece from the front one by pulling up hard to unsnap them, then squeeze my arm down in between to blindly poke around hoping to find the errant cap. There was just enough room to get in there, but not enough to get to where I needed. To do that I was going to have to remove the driver’s windshield wiper.

Try as I might it wouldn’t come free. So instead I pulled the passenger side of the cowl off hoping to free the left end so I could get just a little more room. That is when I discovered that the front plastic piece could be lifted off enough from the left side that I could actually slip my arm in to grab the cap. At this point I was bleeding in a couple of places on each arm from scratches with only one requiring a band aid.1

With the cap back on I was no longer swearing under my breath, and occasionally out loud, about selling the %#$!@% car. Then, when I went to reach for the 13mm socket wrench to put everything back together, I nudged the plastic case of the socket set just enough to knock it off it’s convenient resting place on the exhaust manifold shield and spill the entire contents into the engine bay. Double %#@$!

To be continued… in Part II

Jesus Christ Superstar


Got a double dose of JCS for this Easter Weekend. Not only did I watch my favorite 1973 version, but Sunday night Donna and I watched the 2018 John Legend live version on NBC, actually enjoyed both.

The 1973 one will always be my “go to” version for holiday watching, because it comes with the voices I am most familiar with. Probably because several of the movie cast reprise their roles from the 1971 concept album that was my first exposure to the work. But the 2018 one was actually pretty good, the single stage with simple sets reminded me more of the stage play I saw in high school and have to admit that as much as I liked Josh Mostel’s King Herrod in the movie, Alice Cooper’s version was kick-ass.

Oh what a pity if it’s all a lie.
Still, I’m sure that you can rock the cynics if you tried.
So, you are the Christ, you’re the great Jesus Christ.
Prove to me that you’re no fool; walk across my swimming pool.
If you do that for me, then I’ll let you go free.

I wonder if NBC will re-run the live version next Easter?