Never stop playing

Short story shorter: Julio Franco is still getting paid to play baseball, at the age of 56, signing with a semi-pro team out in Japan.

I love Julio Franco.  Not just because he was on the Braves for a period of time in which I deemed him as a player of a cult-like status, but simply because he just kind of embodies what’s right and great about baseball in my opinion.

Julio’s basically a guy that’s been known to just love the game so much that pretty much nothing is going to stop him from playing, much less get paid to keep playing.  It’s not that he even really needs the money or anything, as he’s also known to be a conservative, deeply religious individual, so really it boils down to the fact that he simply doesn’t want to stop playing.  More power to him if there are teams out there that wish to pay him to do so.

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Blogging will never die, as long as I can help it

Impetus: A well-known blogger decides to call it quits, Mashable deems such an appropriate occasion to write a requiem for the practice of blogging as a whole.

Much like billions of people don’t know who I am, or have ever visited my URL, I have no idea who Andrew Sullivan is, nor can I say that I’ve ever read the Daily Dish.  However, I do know that in spite of putting up quite a good fight for roughly about as long as I’ve been writing stuff and posting it to the internet under my own one-man operation, Andrew Sullivan is, like millions of would-be bloggers in front of him, another quitter.

Chalk the Daily Dish up as another blog that will have the plug pulled from it, to sit dormant and collect dust until the registration on the domain is eventually forgotten, un-renewed, and transforms into a link re-direct site by an entity with the wherewithal to try and capitalize on the negligent mistake URL search.

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College football and wrestling logic, revisited

Ultimately, if it were up to me, I would have liked to have seen Oregon win the National Championship, because when the day is over, it’s always fun to see Ohio State get shit on.  But when the mighty Oregon offense simply could not accomplish anything against Ohio State’s defense, even after halftime, the writing was on the wall and I frankly didn’t even have to stay up until the finish to know that the Ducks were toast.

As a consolation prize though, however, I can apply the aforementioned wrestling logic that Virginia Tech are the uncrowned National Champions, by virtue of being the one team that actually beat Ohio State throughout the entire season.

This is where Rick Rude with Frank Beamer emerges from the curtain to shit on the championship parade being held by the Ultimate Warrior after beating Hulk Hogan to remind the Warrior that he still has his own championship victory over him, and that BCS Redemption sponsored by Snickers, the National Championship should be on the line against the Hokies.

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A resolution achieved, and then some

When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, I tend to keep them to myself.  It’s like I have a superstitious belief or something, that’s basically like if I make my resolutions known to others, then it becomes less likely to succeed.  Sometimes I wonder if other people have that kind of mindset when it comes to resolutions, regardless of the fact that those who go with the tried and true “lose weight/save money” become kind of obvious in their behaviors, but for what it’s worth, I like to keep my resolutions somewhat private, for the sake of hoping they succeed.

That being said, with a day left in 2014, I figure it’s safe to pull the veil back just a little bit to my six readers, and let the cat out of the bag to what some of my resolutions were over this year, as well as the year prior.

This time last year, I made a short post with what I had striven to be a frustrated tone, because that’s precisely how I felt when I wrote it.  It was about how I had failed to achieve my one resolution in 2013, and how I was going to give it another go in 2014, but lower the criteria, lower the bar to the absolute lowest it could possibly get.  And that if I failed to achieve it in 2014, then I would have no choice but to make some dramatic changes in my life come 2015.

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Thoughts on New York

Over the weekend, I went up to New York. The reason for the trip was to visit Yankee Stadium, and take it off of my list of MLB ballparks, which I can happily say that such was mission accomplished. Otherwise, the rest of the trip was more or less a whirlwind of cabs, trains, booze, chicken fingers and cash flying out of windows.

I guess it could be said that I had a pretty New York experience, and I have no regrets about anything. I look back at the weekend fondly, and naturally I’m writing about it now, which says something too.

As for Yankee Stadium, I’ll get more in depth of what I thought about the place as a whole when I write about it for my ballparks page, but when my friend and I had planned the dates out for this trip, we didn’t even think for a second about the fact that this was the start of Derek Jeter’s final homestand. Not that either of us are remotely close to being Yankee fans, I have to admit that is something cool about having been there for a little bit of what people are perceiving as somewhat historic. Needless to say, tickets were pricey and the crowds were massive, for what essentially were games between two non-contenders, and I thought the vaunted Yankee Stadium was pretty okay, overall.

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Photos: Dragon*Con 2014 – Thursday

So, this picture kind of sums up my personal Dragon*Con Thursday night experience.  Once the bourbon started to flow, it literally was like an hour before I hit the deck in a well, regrettable fashion.  I know this thanks to the timestamps on the photographs of the night, several of them that I have absolutely no recollection of being taken.

I am apparently a very affectionate drunk with an affinity for attempting Blue Steel.

A little bit of backstory however: about 45 minutes after I had unloaded all of my personal effects and finally settled into my hotel room, I came to the realization that my messenger bag was nowhere to be found.  Said messenger bag contained my camera, my iPad, and one of those long-forgotten devices known as a netbook in it.  Close to roughly $1,200 of electronics in it.

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Things Dwyane Wade won’t be able to buy anymore

Not long ago, I wrote about how opt-out clauses are kind of killing professional sport, and a whole bunch or rambling about how at the root of all opt-out clauses, is more greed. In every instance I mentioned, the people who opted out of millions of dollars ultimately signed contracts worth even more money, displaying what I feel are truly disgusting rich-getting-richer scenarios.

Ultimately, what I failed to say when I wrote that, was that I would love to see an instance where a guy opts out of his contract, only for it to backfire and blow up in his face, and they’re unable to better the numbers in which they opted out of. Because that would be just dessert for someone getting greedy, and being rudely awakened when the number crunchers and bean counters of sports franchises realize the favor they’ve been granted, and the money they don’t have to spend to acquire their talents.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait that long after making my post for it to actually come to fruition.

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