Rants

Abu el Banat*

I wish I had better luck with the lottery. That way I could be wealthy enough to just stay up all night and watch Bravo’s West Wing Marathon Mondays and not have to worry about getting up the next morning.

They say bad things come in threes, well I’m here to tell you sometimes good things come in threes too. First there was that winning the company’s Safety Bingo game, then there was all those Walmart Gift Card emails and now this lil’ ol’ website won $30 paypal dollars in a weekly contest held by my webhost. I was chosen from literally tens of entrants as the best designed and most informative. Click here soon as it may not mean anything in another week.

Started down, still down.
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Next Time Let’s Wait More Than 87 Years

The last time the Boston Red Sox played the Chicago Cubs was in 1918 when the Bosox beat the Cubbies in the World Series. I think the Cubs were still holding a grudge because they, like St Louis (who the Sox beat in last year’s World Series) earlier this week, whooped up on the FRS like they were little leaguers. Or maybe the Cubs are upset that the Red Sox won the World Series last year after only 86 years since their last, while the Cubs are only a couple of years away from a century since their last World Championship team of 1908.

My local cable company doesn’t carry WGN, so I can’t watch the games, like I could with the Braves and TBS, until Sunday when the match-up is the ESPN Sunday night game of the week.

Curse You HGTV

We have one of those single arm kitchen faucets and it has developed some leakage. Anywhere from a drip to a small stream depending what the angle of the arm is when it gets pushed down. The work around for this bit of annoyance is to shut off the faucet and then lift the arm ever so slightly. I am perfectly happy with this arrangement, Donna is not.

All it probably needs is a replacement washer inside the faucet. Because she watches a lot of HGTV, Donna sees a 15 minute job rated 1 screwdriver at a cost of under a buck. I see an all day job costing hundreds of dollars because I know my limitations and luck.

Here is how I see it going: I turn off the 50-year old shut off valves under the sink so I can work on the faucet. Because they are so old they don’t shut off the water completely. So I then have to go outside to the main water shut off. (Fortunately this works because it was replaced 4 or 5 years ago when we had lawn sprinklers installed.) I now disassemble the faucet and extract the mangled rubber piece. I will then spend 15 minutes looking thru the junk plumbing bits I have in the garage in hope of finding a match. With no success, I head over to the local mega home repair place and spend 30 minutes wandering the aisles and pulling open plastic drawers looking for a match. I find something I think might work, spend $2.98 and return home. With the new piece I reassemble the faucet and close the outside valve and am greeted with barely any water pressure. Oh, yeah, the inside valves. I open them up and the faucet now leaks all the time because the rubber piece I brought home was not an exact match. To compound matters, now that I have disturbed one of the inside shut off valves from its comfortable spot it proceeds to start dripping from the packing around the handle. Outside to shut off the water to the house again. Back to the mega home repair store. This time, in disgust, I just buy a whole new faucet. Back home I spend the next 3 hours pulling out the old faucet, scraping the old caulking and plumber’s putty off the sink and installing the new one.

The nice new shiny faucet won’t drip, but it will make our well-worn kitchen sink look, well, well-worn. This will bring about talk of replacing it. But to do that, the tile counters will have to be replaced which would then make our well-worn cabinets look, well you get the picture?

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
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WEEI III

I called and complained to to MLB.com’s Customer Service on Thursday morning. Talked with a nice fellow named Victor, who while sympathetic, could not do anything about a refund because their policy is they are only available for 10 days after purchase. He asked if I would email him a description of my issues and he would pass them along to his supervisor. I sent him a novella generated from my ranting posts here and earlier email traffic to someone else in their customer service department.

The Red Sox had an afternoon make-up game with the Orioles and wouldn’t you know it, the audio was nearly flawless. But tonight’s game against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim was one of the worst ever in the quantity of sound gaps. I’m listening to the game on the Angels radio station, ESPN. I’d really like to listen to the Bosox’s announcers, maybe if I tried the Spanish language broadcast, might learn to speak a second language…

Started up, went down, back up, back down, still down.
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WEEI II

Last week while listening to the Red Sox/Blue Jays games on WEEI via MLB.com the annoying sound gaps I’ve been complaining about seem to come and go. I sent an email reply to the last customer service address I had that said keep them posted, but heard nothing. Saturday and Sunday the Yankee’s games were on the tube, so I watched. Monday and Tuesday games with Baltimore were on ESPN as well. Tonight it was back to “radio” and I couldn’t make it through the player introductions the silences were so bad. Tomorrow I’ll give them a call on the toll free number and see if I can get 2/3rds of my money back or something.

Guess I’ll go back to listening to Radio Paradise in front of the PC in the evenings and check the box scores in the morning…

Started up, still up.
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Spit TV

I watched the 3rd game of the Red Sox – Braves series on TV this afternoon. Clement pitched a heck of a game and it was nice to be able to put a face on Kevin Youkilis, but I’m going to be glad to go back to the radio. Managers, coaches, players, sunflower seeds, tobacco juice, water, Gatorade, saliva, seems like all these guys do is spit.

Started down, still down.
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Revenge of the Seething

Bless my mother-in-law, she means well. She knows I’m a Star Wars fan, so she saved me the “special” two-page poster from this Sunday’s USA Weekend. I thanked her, but I’m generally uninterested. About the poster and so too, to some extent, the movie. I am considering not going to the theater to see it and just waiting for the DVD. I will still probably get sucked in and see it on the big screen, but it will be more like late June once the crowds have died down. And I will probably be underwhelmed.

I’ll leave you with the last couple of lines from an Ed Halter column for the Village Voice, If you are interested the rest can be read here: May the Force Be Over

But blockbusters have since become an overbred species, and Lucas’s work has likewise degenerated into unbalanced overproduction. Post-Jar Jar, our expectations have sunk so low that now fans will celebrate a film just because it doesn’t completely suck.

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