Month: May 2014

Ballparks: Minute Maid Park, Houston, Texas

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Last Sunday, I visited Minute Maid Park, the home of the Houston Astros in Houston, Texas.  This makes #25 of the 30 Major League Baseball teams visited.

As for the ballpark itself, it was nice.  It’s not going to be my favorite, because I personally think baseball is best played in true outdoor fashion, and a retractable roof doesn’t really count.  But it’s also not the worst ballpark I’d ever been to before either.

Read about it, and many, many more ballpark experiences on my sporadically updated ballpark site.

Disney’s Million Dollar Spoiler Alert

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Sure, it’s a nice story, interesting concept, and a legitimately good, plausible idea.  But it would have been an even better one, had the real, actual results amounted to any actual success.

SPOILER ALERT: the two Indian guys that Million Dollar Arm is about didn’t amount to anything in professional baseball.  Neither of them advanced beyond the low minor leagues, and for all intents and purposes are no longer pitching professionally; Dinesh Patel flamed out in 2010, and Rinku Singh may or may not still be pitching, but not for anyone in the United States, and hasn’t since 2012.

Sure, baseball is a beautiful and wonderful game, and it is often hard to not romanticize the analogies and the metaphors that the game provides, which makes it easy for there to be a demand to make movies about the sport.  Regardless, that kind of realistic information isn’t going to stop Hollywood, or Disney from making a film to exploit the story of how such results came to fruition, without actually getting to that part.

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When winning titles is a bad thing

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It was once said that the WWF Intercontinental championship was given to the best worker in the company.  This was a very easy thing to declare when the context behind it was talking about the late great “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig, who is widely regarded as one of the strongest performers in the modern era.  However, in a prior wrestling era, there was some merit to the statement, because when you look at the list of names of guys who held it prior to 2000, it pretty much has been nothing but stars who have achieved success in the business.

WCW’s take on the United States championship was that it was again, for particularly standout talents, but also a means of declaring a potential number one contender for the more prestigious World championship.  And again, like the Intercontinental championship, with few exceptions (David Flair), the list of names of guys who held the US title are pretty noteworthy.

What I’m getting at here is that the Intercontinental and United States championships, the second-tier titles that were once no-less important and prestigious to hold, are pretty much worthless in today’s dynamic wrestling industry.

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The Booker T crime tour

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For those of you who actually look at the pictures I take on my random travels, whom might have been curious to why there were pictures of me in front of a Wendy’s while I was in Houston, this was not a coincidence, nor was it a spontaneous moment of having to take goofy selfies right then and there.

That particular Wendy’s was the Wendy’s where former five-time, five-time, five-time, five-time, five-time WCW champion Booker T worked at for two years when he was a teenager. This is notable, because it was around this time when aside from working at Wendy’s, he also had a separate career going on simultaneously, robbing them.

Yes, the wrestling Hall of Famer, Booker T, was a convicted felon in his youth, and this information is ironically riotous to a guy with a twisted sense of humor like me.

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Photos: An afternoon in Houston, Texas

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As I’ve always said, baseball is the perfect excuse to get out and travel, and see places that I never gave much thought to.  I’d never been to Texas before in my life; it’s not that I’ve never wanted to go to Texas before, but I’ve never really had any excuse to go prior to the pursuit of baseball parks.  I don’t know enough about the areas and cities, and there’s never been any sort of event or occurrence in any Texas that has drawn my attention to demand a warranting trip (that I’ve been able to make happen).  But thanks to wanting to visit all the baseball parks, I have reasons to visit Texas, when the opportunities present themselves.

And as my schedule revealed, I had the opportunity to make a day trip to Houston over the weekend.  First time visiting the state of Texas, seeing a city I’d never been to before, and take in a ballpark that makes me one ballpark closer to having visited all 30 Major League teams.  I didn’t spend a tremendous amount of time in the city, since I had a few small objectives, and with a baseball game, there wasn’t a massive amount of free time to simply explore and wander too much, but for what it’s worth, I had a pretty decent afternoon in Houston.

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Doesn’t calling him a vigilante admit he’s upholding the law?

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vig·i·lan·te, n.

  1. any person who takes the law into his or her own hands, as by avenging a crime.

So, some guy in Florida (of course) was busted by the FCC, for having a signal jammer in his car, that effectively made it impossible for surrounding motorists to use their cell phones while in the moving range of his signal jammer.  He was fined $48,000 for interfering with wireless communications

Translation: some guy, tired of people ignoring the oft-unenforced cell phone use while driving, took the law into his own hands, and used a signal jammer to make it impossible for motorists within his vicinity to fuck around on the cell phones while driving, thus making them safer, less-distracted motorists.  He was fined a large sum of money for doing what the law wouldn’t do: something about it.

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Discussing an issue with no possible solution

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Impetus: for whatever reason, Curbed Atlanta posted an “article” about the ugly parking garages of Atlanta.  Thinly veiled was the subjective commentary that Atlanta has too many parking garages, and that the presence of these colossal concrete dungeons of car storage were inhibiting growth, clogging up space for commerce and potential business and were just plain ugly.

The thing is, they’re not entirely wrong in their claims, but the fact of the matter is that it’s not like Atlanta doesn’t need these parking garages.  Every single one of the parking garages that are being vilified for simply existing are for the most part essential and often used on a regular basis.  If Curbed Atlanta got their wish, and these lots magically ceased to exist, and were immediately replaced with overpriced pretentious boutique shops, overpriced pretentious boutique restaurants, or extremely small parks that provides a tiny bit of aesthetically pleasing green space that will be filled with people who walk their dogs but don’t pick up their shit, where would people park their cars?

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