Beavis Returns!

Imagine the feeling of stepping up in front of 50,000 people and getting a standing ovation for having done something that those people appreciated so much that they would stand in your honor.

In particular I reference the ovations that the St. Louis Cardinal’s David Freese and Lance Berkman received for their heroics in game 6 of the 2011 World Series.

What a game that was. Both of those players faced a situation in which probably all pro baseball players have imagined before – being up at bat with the game on the line and delivering the big hit. That situation is one where a player most of the time will fail, statistically. Both players faced 2-out, 2-strike counts with their team losing and came through with game tying hits to keep their team alive.

Freese, of course, went on to top himself after his effort in the bottom of the 9^th inning in that game to blast a monster homerun to win it in the 11^th.

Then in game seven after spotting the Rangers two runs in the top of the first inning, Freese delivered another 2-out, 2-strike hit to tie the game. Perhaps not as dramatic, but it was as clutch as it gets nonetheless.

Game 7 was sort of a letdown after game 6 but I watched every pitch anyway. As someone who calls himself a baseball fan, I had to unless I was obligated to be some place else.

The games and the series have been covered in depth by those who are paid to do it. I had some other thoughts after watching it.

I wrote about Lance Berkman here back in the early days of this blog. He had a chance to play with Texas this year but didn’t want to play there. His quote at the time was "I felt like if they didn't re-sign Cliff Lee that they were going to be an average team, and I feel that's probably what's going to end up happening. It's all about your pitching. I feel like last year was one of those special years where you kind of catch lightning in a bottle and they got hot and they had some guys that I felt like were pitching better than their talent level, and consequently, they had a great year."

My quote was, “The almost 35-year old, listed-at-230-pounds Berkman is coming off of a .248 season where his contribution to the Yankees included a home run. Ironically, his signing with the Cardinals just made his own new team worse.”

Ah, irony. Berkman ends up having to face that very same team in the World Series and then in the bottom of the 10^th inning of game six was faced with the possibility of making the last out of the series against them and sending the Rangers into a cuddle puddle of athletes on the St. Louis pitching mound.
He had a great year for the Cardinals bouncing back from that disaster of a year ago and in one way he was right…if Cliff Lee had signed with the Rangers, how would that series have gone? I think there is a small chance that Lee could have made a teenie bit of difference in a series that was stretched to the distance.

I also bashed the Milwaukee Brewers in that same post I see. But that wasn’t really about the team but more about the city.

So my preseason picks pretty much stunk Braves, Phillies (WC), Reds, Giants
Red Sox, Yankees (WC), Tigers, Angels.

This is clearly why playing the lottery is not wise for me even though at 200-some million today, I’m there, dude.

One of the coolest parts of the World Series was watching Alfred E. Neumann sing the National Anthem before game one.

One has to feel for the Rangers though losing for the second year in a row and being just one pitch away from winning it…twice, in fact.

If you have imagined the feeling from the standing ovation now imagine the feeling of being one pitch away from the world championship and then losing. You may have worked your entire life to reach the goal of winning like that. You have been injured, you have sacrificed, you have dreamed for maybe decades of finally having your dream come true and then someone else takes that from you in a split second, or because of a bad bounce or simply because it’s a game of inches. Ugh, that has to be hard.

Softened by the fact that they get paid millions of dollars to play a game, but still bad thoughts must run through their minds for a second.

I watch the MLB network religiously and I love watching old baseball games and highlight reels. If only the current technology was available since the beginning of baseball though. With super slow-motion, digital-high-definition, broadcast equipment the images of these games are captured in ways that are truly amazing.
We can see the stitches on the way to the plate as it travels over 90 miles an hour. We get multiple angles of shots to let us know if a ball was fair or foul, or if a runner was safe or out, or if, for example, the ball that Nelson Cruz hit last night that was caught by the Cardinals Allen Craig was going to be a homerun or not.
The best part of this technology is that since its digital that quality will remain pretty much forever, unlike material shot just not as far back as the 80’s.

I am glad that they are keeping some of the uber close-up shots out of the broadcast though. The shot that was really annoying to me for a couple of years was the centerfield camera shot of the ball inside the pitchers glove. Then the cameraman would slowly pull out and follow the ball toward the plate. It was just too close. Sometimes doing something just because you can isn’t such a great idea. There are so many other things that I prefer to see in an at-bat with the first being the actual batter.


The return of my favorite actor to TV the other night was quite exciting even though I was on the road when his show premiered. Beavis returned to Beavis & Butthead on the MTV network on Thursday night. Their new shows will replace the real Buttheads on Jersey Shore.
I find it funny that the 10 pm time slots on Thursdays on MTV have actually become more intellectual with Beavis and Butthead replacing Snookie and the Situation. Who could have seen that coming?

 American Horror Story revolves around the Harmons, a family of three who moved from Boston to Los Angeles as a means to reconcile past anguish. The all-star cast features Dylan McDermott as “Ben Harmon,” a psychiatrist; Connie Britton as “Vivien Harmon,” Ben’s wife; Taissa Farmiga as “Violet,” the Harmon’s teenage daughter; Jessica Lange in her first-ever regular series TV role as “Constance,” the Harmon’s neighbor; Evan Peters plays “Tate Langdon,” one of Ben’s patients; and Denis O’Hare as “Larry Harvey.” Guest stars for the series include Frances Conroy as the Harmon’s housekeeper; Alexandra Breckenridge as the Harmon’s housekeeper; and Jamie Brewer as Constance’s daughter.

The house which they purchase is a “murder house,” where pretty much everyone who ever lived there was murdered and their spirits live on to terrorize all the subsequent residents and their guests. There have been three episodes so far and they have all been great.
I know that FX is a cable channel so they don’t have the same language guidelines for it. But I have been surprised to hear language on there so far that would have made us in the Dungeon of Manlove show blush a little bit.
This is the same network which aired The Shield, which was fairly raw like that. I haven’t seen Sons of Anarchy on that same station but imagine that it might be a little rough too.
I’m ok with all of that, I guess. I don’t have kids so curse away and show lots of boobs for I care. But I guess that’s a pain in the neck to have to monitor that stuff all the time if you’re someone trying to keep your kids vocabulary from sounding like mine on a daily basis.
Jessica Lange in great in this show so far and I like Connie Britton in it who is pretty hot. Her bio says she was in the series “24” but I can’t recall when that would have been.
Anyway, if you’re into “horror” shows, this one is for you.

Beavis, my favorie actor

I did watch the new show late last night after the baseball game. Sadly, it wasn’t as good as I hoped, but anything with Beavis in it will have me glued to the TV.


I have also been watching American Horror Story on the FX network. Here is the official description of the show:

Speaking of horror shows, I had a potential for one of my recent shows to be just that as I traveled to Franklin, VA to do a hypnosis show at a party for a 60-year old.
Now generally these parties for older people are tougher right from the beginning. We get more and more jaded and suspicious as we get older so it can be tricky getting volunteers to participate in such a show. I normally have to spend extra time prepared the audience and easing any of their concerns. In shows with younger crowds people are more likely to be more open to the thought or being on stage in a situation where they have no idea of what is about to happen.
My host for the birthday party told me when she hired me that this was an “all black folk crowd.” Why she made mention of that, I’m not totally sure. Maybe because I’m an all-white dude or something. This has never been a concern for me. I’ve done historically black colleges, shows in inner-cities where I was the only white dude, shows where everyone was all White, all Asian, all Jewish, all Catholic, all Indian and all Lawyers, for some examples. I don’t care. Just volunteer for my show, I’ll hypnotize you, you’ll be funny and I’ll get to eat for the next week.

So I get to Franklin, VA and I notice something right away that, for the first time, made me think that I might have a real tough time for this show. I was right in the middle of a bunch of cotton plantations and was going to do a show for this “all black folk crowd.”

There was one other white dude there. He was the town’s real estate attorney and friend of the guest of honor.
I wouldn’t say that I was uncomfortable at all. Everyone was very nice. After all, it is the south and southerners are just generally nicer and I stand by that opinion.
But the show just didn’t go as well as I would have hoped. I had volunteers right from the beginning, but it just wasn’t my usual chaotic experience. I ended up with about 5 people sort of hypnotized. One of them was kind of funny. I kept wondering if history had any role to play in the quality of the show that night. Was it possible that this group, overall, just didn’t trust me in that type of position where I was “in control” of their minds?
That thought ran through my head for sure. How could it not?

I have found it interesting to learn that I have readers of this nonsense from 18 different countries. It’s because of my hypnosis career and not the sheer brilliance that I pen from time to time here. There is an interesting…let’s say…sub culture of people who are fanatics of hypnosis. So I have fans out there that will follow what I do because I am a hypnotist and only because I am a hypnotist. They are searching to find out what my secret messages are in my writing and on the podcast. (xaxlxlxmxyxfxaxnxsxpxlxexaxsxexsxexnxdxmxexmxoxnxexyxsxoxIxcxaxnxexaxtx)
I think that’s funny. It’s cool though and it is partly why my podcast, the Dungeon of Manlove, is closing in on 1000 subscribers now (that’s subscribers, not listeners) and has reached into 52 countries. It just needs to pay for me at some point. I have to eat!

Done.

Cruzin' and Freesin'

The 2011 World Series starts tomorrow, the 19^th, and features the Rangers of Texas and the Cardinals of St. Louis.

Both teams closed out their championship series in convincing fashion pounding the baseball all around Arlington and Milwaukee in game 6 for each.

The Rangers Nelson Cruz set a single playoff series record with 6 homeruns and was named the MVP while the Cardinals David Freese earned the same honors for St. Louis in the NL.

The Cardinals have the better starting pitching in this series but simply because the Rangers might not have the horses to start games, they have a nice bullpen and have the power to overmatch the Cardinals.

The Rangers return for the second straight year to the World Series but the Cardinals are no strangers to it either. They won it in 2006 and have Albert Pujols. I know that every time I write about baseball that I mention his name. But he is the premier player in the league and, as such, deserves the mention. After all, look where his team is right now.

Ron Washington’s Rangers starters need to hold off the Cardinals for a good 6 innings in each game or they are doomed again. Five inning “quality” starts aren’t going to get the job done, I imagine, especially on this stage. But this is going to be a tricky thing for them.

But the Cardinals staff has its own worries. Michael Young, clean-up hitter and future hall-of-famer now, is now on fire getting locked in at just the right moment. That’s fuel on the fire that Cruz lit against the Tigers. The Cardinals can’t pitch around these guys either because there are 5 other guys in the lineup who hit at least 24 homeruns this season.
Normally the DH rule has an effect on the AL in the World Series, but not here. When the series is in St. Louis, Young, the regular DH, will play first. They don’t lose a thing there and I think it tightens up their lineup. The Cardinals will get to DH Lance Berkman in Texas which will help their defense in those games. But that won’t matter too much in that park, which is a launching pad anyway.

Will there be any new-found heroes this year? Will the stars we already know are stars, like Young, Pujols, Adrian Beltre, Chris Carpenter, Josh Hamilton, Berkman, Matt Holliday, or Cruz add to their stature? Will there be one of those “goat” moments or a black-cat kind of moment which will go down in baseball lore? 

Wednesday we will begin to find out.

I am a news junkie and particularly a political news junkie. But I am now currently interested in odd news stories from around the world. To be precise I am interested in finding headlines that stick out as odd to me. For example…

Scrabble player demands strip search of opponent after letter 'G' goes missing...

Teacher on trial for punching, choking first-graders...

Burglars steal 7-year-old's piggy bank...

The main reason is to discuss them on the Dungeon of Manlove show. They provide good fodder on which the cast can opine. These conversations get pretty interesting and often times funny as our diverse group of misfits provides a unique blend of commentary.

If you’d like to hear examples of that, you know what to do, but I really bring up this point to bring up a different point.

The Holidays will be upon us soon and as soon as Thanksgiving hits I stop reading the news. Even though we will be in an election year and there are extra things to think about and discuss, I try every year to keep as far away from the news as I can so that I can enjoy the season.
This will be particularly important this year as I have all the classic symptoms of depression once again. Whether this is a chemical issue or just the result of an awful year, there is little doubt about this.
I was in the gym a week or so ago and was watching a screen talk about depression and its symptoms. Now, I’m not a hypochondriac here; I’m pretty objective about myself when it comes to this stuff. I had everyone they listed. It was depressing to read that I was depressed!

But certainly not shocking. This means taking proactive measures wherever possible short of checking in with a doctor for medication. That is one place where I will not turn unless as an absolute last resort. As a recovering person diagnosed with depression a long time ago in a rehab clinic I was pretty pissed off when I was prescribed anti-depressants when I was trying to rehabilitate myself from self-medicating for far too long.

Staying away from the news is one of those ways. Now I did just start my political blog under my fake name so I might have started that too soon since I might have to take the holidays off from it. But since it’s my fake name, no one will care even if anyone finds it anyway.

Autumn does have a positive effect on me though. The summer really drains me and is a reason why I get down in the dumps. It’s totally opposite of most people, I know. I’ve been fortunate to have a few shows this month which have taken me to a couple of areas where I can enjoy watching the leaves change in the mountains. It has been sort of tempered by the fact that my dog is gone but it still helps. Driving, and driving to see as much territory as possible, is one of my favorite things to do.

Well, there are lots of things I need to do and not a lot of money to do them, so I guess that I’m off and I’m

Done.

Bribe the Audience

Two tough battles are raging the MLB Championship series.
The Tigers held off elimination last night with the aide of their third base last night. Not their third baseman, but their home field third base bag as a routine double play ball bounced off of the bag fair and into the leftfield corner to help save the game.
The bag itself was removed after the game and is now in the possession of Tiger manager Jim Leyland who said he would place the bag in his personal memorabilia collection. Should the Tigers win it will be worth a little more than if they lose the series, of course.

The Rangers Nelson Cruz has smacked five homeruns in this series already, which tied a record for one post-season series. He has hit 2 extra-inning homeruns which is a record and became the first player in post-season history to end a game with a grand-slam homerun.

I refuse to say “walk-off” homerun, because it’s a stupid saying and I am tired of hearing announcers shout out “WALK-OFF!” when their guy strokes a game-winning hit.

Some of these announcers are really bad but I won’t name names because I am feeling kind today…sort of. I hate the way they count pitches, call game-winning hits, and overly praise players with stupid adjectives like “gutsy” when they are playing a game that last 3 hours, for the most part.

The Cardinals and the Brewers are now tied at two games each. This should not come as a real surprise since they split the 18 regular-season games that they played. The perfect way for this to play out is for the series to go seven games.

I would imagine that MLB and the network that airs the World Series would like to see a Cardinals-Tigers WS matchup. They played against each other in 2006, which the Cardinals won, and famously in 1967. St. Louis is the best baseball town in America and Detroit is such a hell hole that the city could really use a boost of morale for its citizens.

But the Brewers Ryan Braun and Prince Fielder are prime-time players. Braun seems to thrive in the limelight and I am sure that he will pick up a lot of new fans and enemies in the Fall Classic, should they bounce past St. Louis.

The Rangers pound the ball though and in a season which didn’t showcase a great deal of power numbers, they have three guys who hit 30 homeruns each and two others with 24 and 29. Since they are the defending champions of the AL, they do have some players which casual baseball fans would know like Josh Hamilton, Michael Young and Adrian Beltre, for example. The return appearance would also solidify their standing as an AL powerhouse which bodes well for the AL since the Red Sox and Yankees could use some competition in that regard.

For whatever reason there are more people reading this blog than I actually imagined. It has left me with a bit of a dilemma. I teeter back and forth with what I want to do with this stupid thing here. In one respect it’s a journal for me but I do also have the desire to write about more intense things that are on my mind. These things include politics but they also include a venting process where I would like to speak more freely about things that aggravate me and I would like to swear a lot while doing so.

I am writing this around 5pm. I have been thinking about this since 8am. I think that what I am going to do is start another blog with a fake name and rant there rather than risk alienating people that I don’t wish to alienate.

So I will stick to basic cultural things here like baseball, TV shows, and anything that I might find interesting to pass along while on the road performing. I’ll toss in some personal things that, for some reason, generate more feedback than anything else (like when the girl friend left the house and when my dog passed 2 weeks ago) but leave the bitching about some otherwise polarizing subjects to my ghost name, which I naturally will not reveal here.

A show at West Chester University went rather well last night. It was my first time in there and there was a crowd of over 100. There is no telling how many people will ever show up at these things and it is sometimes a risky proposition taking a show like this without a decent estimate of crowd size. This is particularly risky doing a show for a place like for the first time. Let’s face it; I’m no household name so I don’t get any draw because of that. I have to hope that the hosts give out cookies and ice cream and make a free show out of it to get a room full of college kids on a Thursday night.

But more often than not my concerns are unwarranted. Ugh…I’m not even going to jinx myself by expanding on that any further. It went well and I’ll probably get asked to come back there again in the future; that is what is most important.

I am concerned about the future months coming though. Last year I had my December shows booked by August. It’s now October 14^th and I have one show booked for December. It’s getting hard to make ends meet and I just got some local real estate information that was disturbing for me also with the depreciation in home prices here. My house was my out in case of emergency. It still is, of course, but now it’s less of an out for me.

That is one thing makes me need to go write another blog…RIGHT NOW BEFORE I EXPLODE!

Done.

Curse of the Squirrel

Round one of the MLB playoffs is out of the way and so is a combined 370 million dollars in payroll between the Yankees and the Phillies, the teams with the top payrolls in both the AL and the NL.

I was on the road for a couple of the 5^th games of the divisional series and watched from a hotel room and heard on the car radio. All three of the final games were interesting and exciting for a baseball fan.

The Brewers and Diamondbacks game featured one of the best postseason catches in history in the 7^th inning by the D’Back’s Chris Young in centerfield, who coincidentally wears #24, the same as Willie Mays. Young made a run-saving, back-to-the-plate running, stretching catch that was simply better than the one Mays made in the 54 series against the Indians. At the time the game was 1-1 with a Brewer standing on second base.
Unfortunately for the Diamondbacks ace pitcher Ian Kennedy, he then paid Young back by hanging a fastball and a bloop single scored the run anyway.
But the Brewers closer, Jon Axford, who hadn’t blown a save since April then blew one in the 9^th to send the game to extra innings.
In the 10^th there was some déjà-vu. The Brewers Carlos Gomez stood at second base and scored the game winning run on a Nyjier Morgan single, scoring as he had for the Twins in a one-game playoff a few years ago that helped the Twins advance to the playoffs.

In Philadelphia good friends Roy Halladay and Chris Carpenter faced off in a great pitching duel won by Carpenter and the Cards on a 3-hit shutout. The Cards scored their run with their first two batters and Carpenter shut it down the entire way. Credit Cardinal manager Tony Larussa for not trying to fix what wasn’t broken and leaving Carpenter in to finish what he started.
This game featured a little déjà-vu also as the Phil’s Ryan Howard made the team’s season-ending out for the second year in a row. Howard added injury to insult this time as he ruptured his Achilles tendon trying to get out of the batter’s box and he’ll require surgery that will most likely keep him out of the Phil’s lineup for the first couple of months of the season. I have a feeling it will be longer than though. I had an Achilles issue in my 20’s and it was a couple of years before it felt right again.
The Phillies’ fans have a scapegoat, if they wish, and it’s not Ryan Howard…it’s squirrels. In the 4^th game in St. Louis, which they lost, a squirrel ran across home plate while the Phil’s Roy Oswalt was pitching. Prior to game five, in Philadelphia, groundskeepers had to chase down and remove yet another squirrel.
I believe that it was the exact same squirrel which was brought to Philadelphia by the Cardinals in order to get in to the heads of the Phillies. And it worked; the Phillies lost because of a squirrel!

 

The Yankees went down weakly in the Bronx with the heart of their batting order looking like minor leaguers in the bottom of the 9^th needing one run to tie the game and keep them from advancing to the championship series. But Tiger reliever Jose Valverde, who was perfect in save situations all year, stayed perfect in post-season play too closing out this game by striking out Alex Rodriguez.

So those three game five winners joined the Texas Rangers who dispatched the Tampa Bay Rays in four games. The Rangers capped off their final game win with help from Adrian Beltre’s three-home run game.

I think the Rangers are now the favorite to win the World Series. They beat the Tigers in game one and now the Tigers are down two starting outfielders, Delmon Young and Magglio Ordonez. Young tweaked an oblique muscle in the Yankees series in which he hit three homeruns and Ordonez broke the foot which kept him from playing in most of the 2010 season.
The Rangers have 5 guys who hit over 20 homeruns and three of them hit over 30 so they can bomb a team for sure. With CJ Wilson their number one starter they don’t match up as well on the mound but it might not matter.
The Brewers beat the Cardinals in game one as their marquee players (Ryan Braun and Prince Fielder) both went deep in a 9-6 come-from-behind victory. I can’t see the Cardinals beating them but they did split the 18 games they played against each other this year. But since my predicting skills have been less than skillful don’t place any money on anything I have to say.

There is a new Showtime series called Homeland that I think is a winner. It aired its second episode last night following Dexter, which is still fantastic. Homeland is about a US Marine who was help captive in Afghanistan for 8 years and was rescued and returned to the states. A female CIA agent believes that he was turned by his captors while there and the “rescue” was facilitated by the terrorists so that they could send him back as a sleeper agent. Her superiors don’t believe her but she attempts to watch his every move nonetheless.

I’m not going to write more about TV shows right now since it would make it sound like that is all that I do. But to recap, I am currently watching Dexter, Homeland, Hung, Survivor, Raising Hope, Jersey Shore, Two and a Half Men, Whitney, Terra Nova, Fringe, Stossel, Baseball, Football and anything that involves politics (I have to get my share of horror shows in there, after all.)

The last couple of weeks have been tough for me without my doggie. Today was probably the first day that I noticed that I wasn’t looking for him around every corner. That, however, made me sad anyway. But for the most part I have come to terms with it. Aside from the fact that he had been with me for 15 years I am also bothered by the fact that I simply can’t just go get another dog right now. With times tough for me and no one else around the house to help take care of one when I am on the road it’s just not fair to try bring one home to fill some emptiness within me. So until such time as our times improve or my living situation changes I will have pet and play with other people’s doggies for a while.
Ok, that just made me sad again, so I’m…

Done.