Demote the Polish Pop-gun NOW!

Another blown save, and a vultured win. This guy will be the death of this team if they make it to the post-season. I hate to think it, say it, and post it, but I'm afraid it will be so. Must the Tribe continue to tempt fate by trotting out their most incompetent pitcher to close out important wins? We're in a bloody pennant race here, damn it! Have the lessons learned in 1997 already faded from the franchise's collective memory? Not so for me, I'm afraid. I can still remember every detail of that nightmare, right down to the debilitating nausea I felt with every pitch thrown by Hoser Mesa. Yet another set of rhetorical questions: What's it going to take to finally demote this train-wreck of a closer? How many more consecutive outings in which he gives up runs? How many more times does he have to practically guarantee the lead-off man will get on base? And what's the threshold on his ERA? It's a staggering 5.60 after tonight's debacle. Does it actually have to balloon over 6.00 before we show this tool the door? Please, no more. I'm sure Blow-rowski is a very decent human being, and I actually feel a tiny shard of guilt pricking my conscience because of the frustration and hostility I'm constantly directing at him... but his closing days for this team must come to an end. Our fan base has suffered enough.

Random images

A few random images from the past couple of weeks; I've really got to get out more!

Bad-ass Vicky Martínez prepares to tee off on the Devil Rays:


Welcome back, Kenny Lofton! Still producing at 40:


Another beautiful rainbow as I cross Alligator Alley on the way to Ft. Lauderdale (I can't chew gum and walk at the same time, but snapping photos while driving at 80+mph isn't a problem -- go figure):


My new tenant, Pepe LeFrog:

The Polish Pop-gun

"Dropped once, never fired." That's the old joke about the seller's description of a Polish rifle. When it comes to the Tribe's closer, Joe Borowski, a better description might read "Throws strikes, mostly meatballs." This is why, from here on in, I'm going to have to refer to him as "The Polish Pop-gun." Yesterday's blown save was yet another example of why, even though he has miraculously racked up 34 saves, The Polish Pop-gun needs to be recalled like a cheap Mattel toy. I was at the game, and was super-excited to catch my beloved Tribe in Tropicana Field. C.C. Sabathia was going for us, we'd won the first two games of the series, and had a chance to widen our lead over the Kittens (they'd eventually lose against the Yankers). Although C.C. was masterful, going 8 solid innings and giving up just 2 runs, our suddenly anemic offense was only able to muster up 2 runs as well, so the game went into extra innings. In the top of the 10th, Asdrúbal Cabrera (one of my new faves -- crazy name, unbelievably fugly, and sporting a pair of ears that would put Dumbo to shame) scorched a solid single off Al "El Asesino" Reyes (GREAT nickname!), watched "Cool Papa" Lofton inexplicably strike out looking (Bill Simmons' nickname, not mine -- very fitting, though), took third on Tricky Trot Nixon's pinch-hit single and, after Grady Sizemore was nicked by a pitch to load the bases, scored easily from third on bad-ass Vicky Martínez's towering sacrifice fly to right (missed being a game-icing grand salami by a few feet -- Vicky just got under it). I prayed for the Pronk to come up with a two-out base-hit, because I did NOT want the Polish Pop-gun coming in to close out a one-run game, but his underachieving ass grounded out to end the inning.

If you've followed the Tribe at all this year, you know what happened next, because it's been sickeningly typical of the Polish Pop-gun's performance: he blew away the first two hitters by getting them to look at his meatball BP fastball, then nailing them with his hanging breaking pitches. How he's been able to rack up so many saves with his ridiculously below-average stuff, I'll never know... but I digress. The next hitter was the catcher, Dioner Navarro, who was batting a "scorching" .205 and had looked absolutely helpless in his first four at-bats. The Polish Pop-gun proceeded to fall behind 3-0, threw two meatball strikes, the second of which was JUST missed by Navarro, then bounced a lollipop five feet in front of the plate, effectively walking the worst hitter in the entire ballpark (yes, this included the fans). At this point, I turned to my pal Dr. Vincentstein and said, "I can't believe this arse-wipe just walked that Punch-and-Judy jackass -- the next two hitters are lefties, and lefties have eaten him up all f*cking year!" Sure enough, both Iwamura and Crawford scorched singles, and the game was tied. Long story short: we eventually ended up losing a game we coulda shoulda won in the bottom of the 12th.

The point: the starting pitching has been extremely solid (C.C. and Dr. Fausto are on fire, Westbrook is coming on strong now that he's finally begun locating his sinker, and even Byrd has shown flashes of competence), the bullpen has actually been a pleasant surprise (Betancourt and Pérez have been solid, Fultz and Mastny have been acceptable, and Lewis looks promising), and although our hitting has been pretty disappointing at times (especially the Pronk), the team is still scoring plenty of runs (bad-ass Vicky Martínez and Garko are having excellent years, Sizemore is having a deceptively productive season, and Peralta has really bounced back from his horrible sophomore slump). Hell, even the defense has been pretty solid. Be that as it may, this team will not have a successful post-season run if the Polish Pop-gun is still closing. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts. No lead will be safe, the hitters will press, and hitters that press in the playoffs are easy outs. To quote Fat Bastard, "it's a vicious circle." The Polish Pop-gun must be disarmed, and he must be disarmed NOW!!!

Life in Florida, continued

A few cool and a few crazy things to do & see in Florida. I’ll let you decide which is which.

• The Tampa Bay Devil Rays are an atrociously inept franchise, and they play in a stinking dome named after an even stinkier brand of orange juice… but the Tribe make it down to Tropicana Field at least once a year.

• Sarasota is a stuffy, rich white geezer kind of town, but it does offer a plethora of cultural opportunities, including an opera company, a museum established by a circus maven, and the Burns Court Cinema, a gentrified warehouse that’s a surprisingly excellent venue for independent and foreign films. Since I discovered it accidentally a few months ago, I’ve seen a French movie (La Môme), an Italian movie (Nuovomondo), and a Swiss movie (Vitus) there. Shades of the Cleveland Film Festival!

• Theme parks are a dime a dozen, especially in Orlando. For an unusual experience, though, you’d be hard-pressed to top this living biblical theme park and museum, located just minutes from DisneyWorld and Universal Studios.

• Who needs Daytona when you have the Swamp Buggy Races right around the corner?

• The John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park offers excellent snorkeling & scuba.

• Smack dab in the middle of the Everglades, Clyde Butcher’s Big Cypress Gallery showcases his phenomenal photography. Butcher himself is around the gallery a lot of the time, and he sometimes leads lucky visitors on guided tours of "his backyard."

• The Florida Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans has various camp locations (read: Klan rally sites) throughout the state. Don’t forget to visit the Rebel Shop, y’all!

• The Fountain of Youth, ironically located in the oldest city in the United States.

• Florida Caverns State Park – thank God for Karst topography!

More to come when I actually get a life and am able to indulge in a little bit of R&R.

On superstition

I’m often asked how I can be such an overly rational person, yet at the same time indulge in weird superstitious routines, especially when it comes to sports. The easy answer, of course, is that I’m schizophrenic. While there’s an unfortunate element of truth to that, the reality is a little more ridiculous: it’s because karma plays a huge part in the outcome of sports events! Don’t believe me? Allow me to elaborate why I’m convinced I may have jinxed my beloved Cleveland teams with two little anecdotes. I swear to God these are 100% true.

1. 1997 World Series Game 7, top of the ninth inning, the Tribe leading the fish 2-1, Sandy Alomar on 3rd with one out, Matt Williams due up. Jim “Polesmoker” Leyland makes a pitching change, and there’s a commercial break. A huge insurance run, not to mention a WS win and the end of nearly fifty years of misery, hang in the balance... and yours truly, in an inexplicable and inexcusable moment of shocking stupidity, picks that very moment to call the 1-800 World Series video number to order the tape. Why? I was afraid they’d run out... do you suppose my mother had any kids that lived? I’m still on hold when the game resumes, so I hang up the phone call I thought was so important just minutes before and pray for Williams to come the f*ck through. But Williams, a gutless wonder who will defect to Arizona a few weeks later, hits a routine grounder to third -- that chickenshit bastard couldn’t even lift a medium-depth fly ball, for Christ’s sake. Alomar, who was going on contact, gets easily thrown out at home. Bye-bye, insurance run. Then-manager Mike Hargrove was an absolute idiot to have Alomar running on contact with an overanxious, free-swinging piece of shit like Williams batting, but that’ll be a rant for another day. Anyway, I immediately throw the phone against the wall, shattering it to smithereens, unload about three million oaths at the top of my lungs, and smack myself in the face a few times, but the damage is done. In the bottom of the ninth, Hoser Mesa comes in looking like a deer in headlights, bearing a suspicious brown stain on his cowardly pants, and obviously not ready to close the game. He promptly gives up the lead, the game goes into extra innings, and the rest is another sad chapter in the Tribe’s history. “Wait ’til next year” is STILL the official motto of the Clevelander.

2. Early January, 2003. It’s Sunday morning, and the Brownies, having miraculously made it into the playoffs for the first time in some ten years, will battle the revolting Pukesburgh Squealers in the afternoon. Two nights before, the Buckeyes had won the National Championship. Before the Brownies game starts, I decide to e-mail my Cleveland pals with a celebratory Buckeyes / Go Brownies e-mail, so I put together a little graphic with Buckeye Brutus playing the part of Adam getting touched by God in Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” (yes, I’m aware that I’m a total geek), and adding the caption, “One Miracle Down... Three To Go.” Then I decide to get cute and add a graphic of three guys sitting and reading, replace the heads with the Tribe, Brownies and Cavs logos, then label it, “Meanwhile, in God’s Waiting Room...” So far, no damage. But then, I decide to get even more clever/creative (the demise of all graphic designers -- but at least we’re not interior decorators, like the openly gay Squealer nation), and add titles to the reading materials; for the Cavs (and remember, this is pre-LeBron), it’s “Resurrecting a Moribund Franchise.” For the Tribe, it’s “The Idiot’s Guide to Re-signing Free Agents” (dastardly and borderline retard Jim Thome had just bolted for Philly, announcing: “duuuhhh... errrr... duuhhhh... it’s not, like... about the money... duuhhhh... grrrr... duuhhh...” ... and no, I’m not bitter...); I know I should not tempt fate, and for one sane instant, I decide to leave the Brownies’ book blank, but then my obsessive-compulsive, anal retentive idiocy takes over... if the other guys are reading titled material, so should Browniedawg! Ignoring the spine-chilling shrieks from the little voice inside my head, I add “How to Stop Choking in Playoff Games” to Browniedawg’s book, save the file, and promptly e-mail it, along with an unbreakable jinx, to all my Cleveland friends. A time machine, a time machine, my kingdom for a time machine... Anyway, the Brownies jumped out to a huge lead, then played the entire fourth quarter with their collective hands firmly wrapped around their collective necks, and lost the lead for good with roughly 40 seconds left in the game. To this day, I still can’t look back and enjoy the Buckeyes championship because of the enormous Brownies collapse that occurred less than 48 hours later.

Miscellaneous addendum: my then-girlfriend, who was from Pukesburgh and a self-admittedly uninterested Squealers “fan,” tried to console me, but I still dumped her sorry ass with extreme prejudice that same day... but who’s bitter?

I was a teenage headbanger…

… And now, I’m a middle-aged headbanger, because even a persistent and debilitating week-long battle with some weird hybrid food poisoning/flu wasn’t going to keep me away from Friday’s Slayer and Marilyn Manson concert at the Ford Amphitheater in Tampa. At the risk of oversharing some gross info, I would have worn a diaper and carried a handful of barf bags rather than miss the show. Luckily for everyone involved, I didn’t need to.

We arrived at the Amphitheater some 20 minutes before the scheduled starting time. Since I still wasn’t feeling too hot, I decided to improve my mindset by downing a few Jack & Cokes (yes, I’m a grown-up). I only mention this because while buying my drinks, an unbelievably kind bargirl actually carded me! The lesson: if you want to belie your age, develop some sort of brooding general malaise, drop twenty pounds in a few months so that you look emaciated and perennially exhausted, sleep an average of two hours a night so the bags under your eyes look like 35-gallon Hefties, and violà! Instant youthfulness. My only consolation is that since half of the audience was wasted, and the other half were freakish enough to look like extras in a John Waters film, I blended right in.

The opening act was Bleeding Through, a nondescript screamer band whose only noteworthy contributions were: an unbelievably hot keyboard girl, complete with S&M outfit; numerous references to how honoured they were to open for Slayer & Manson; and several unsuccessful attempts to fire up the mosh pit. Their set was mercifully over within half an hour, clearing the stage for the hardest-playing metal band that ever was, is, or will be: Slayer, motherf*uckers!!!

Oh, sure, Manowar may hold the Guiness World Record as the loudest metal band ever recorded, but no band rocks as hard as Slayer. It simply isn’t possible. From the furious opening number, “Flesh Storm,” through their killer encores, “Raining Blood” and the still-redoubtable “Angel of Death,” Slayer’s set was the most phenomenal, hard-core, cathartic blast o’metal that I have ever experienced. My knees were weak when it was over, and I don’t think this was caused by my illness or the booze. There wasn’t a lot of frill to their show – a few background graphics (mostly the cover artwork of whichever album contained the song they were playing at the time and some anti-religion or anti-war imagery), some moving around on the stage, and some headbanging. That’s it. Slayer know they kick ass, so they don’t bother putting on a crazy show. Instead, they just blow you away with their awesome skill, as you can see in the following clip of a seldom-heard little jewel – a thousand apologies for the lousy video/sound quality, my cheap little camera can only do so much:

Marilyn Manson, on the other hand, is not just a terrific musician, but also a consummate showman. My only complaints: his entrance was overly drawn out and theatrical, even for him, and for some reason (possibly to avoid being blown away by Slayer?), the volume was way too loud during his entire performance. I don’t mind loudness, but when it enters Spinal Tap’s “it goes up to 11” territory and the distorsion is so great that the instruments and vocals jumble into a messy cacophony, I can’t help but wish they’d take it easy on the volume and focus more on the music. Nonetheless, Manson’s set was phenomenal, and he really went all out to put on a killer show, cavorting, twisting, and crawling all over the stage, changing clothing between just about every song, making ample use of weird props (a giant chair, a platform that was raised some 40 feet above the stage, a makeshift pulpit, etc.), and whipping the crowd up into an hour-long, “you had to be there to believe it” frenzy. I managed to get a video recording of “Heart-Shaped Glasses” – again, please excuse the shoddy video/sound quality:

And now that you've had a chance to see both bands, please take the time to cast your vote in the "Who rocks harder?" poll in the right column of this page. (Man, I love Blogger gadgets.)

All in all, it was one of the best rock concerts I’ve ever attended, and it reminded me of my “glory days” as a teenage headbanger. Midlife crisis be damned, I think I’m going to scrounge up some money and continue the concert revival – Evanescence and Korn next month, baby!

It ends with a whimper

During the course of my graduate studies at FU, I have had the opportunity to teach several classes. I originally welcomed the opportunity to teach strictly as a means of enhancing my curriculum vitae, but in the process, I have found that I enjoy teaching immensely. Regrettably, I won’t have the privilege of teaching beyond this semester, so today marked the end of the Professor Jorge Era. I’m never good at predicting my feelings, and today was no exception. I expected to feel sadness owing to the fact that it was my last class, as well as bitterness owing to the fact that my teaching days should never have come to an end (that’s a story for another day… probably after I’ve graduated so I can excoriate the powers-that-be at FU without fear of reprisal – the bastards might steal my good pocket protector). What I ended up feeling instead was a jaded ambivalence.

It’s funny how even something you love doing can unknowingly become routine, but that’s exactly what’s happened to me with teaching. I gave the same farewell and good luck speech I’ve given the last day of the four previous semesters, watched a different but remarkably similar group of students struggle with my unbelievable easy exam, and my way of savouring the moment was to do typically mundane things like making a grading key for the exam, entering a few last-minute grades, and checking my e-mail and cell phone messages because one of my students didn’t show up for the exam. Before I knew it, the students were finishing up the exam and beginning to file out. Most of them made it a point to say farewell (I will forever insist I lucked into getting mostly really nice students every semester, especially after hearing the horror stories from other professors who teach the same classes I have taught), bust my chops about the myriad struggles of The Holy Quaternity, or laugh at/with me regarding my obsession with puns and anecdotes that deal with cheesy 80’s music, and that interaction made me feel kind of happy and sad at the same time. Be that as it may, the cynical ambivalence won out again thanks to a couple of whiny jewels.

Whiner 1, whom I’ll call Ditzy Queen, complained about how difficult the exam was, tried to convince me that I hadn’t covered the material in some of the questions, then tried to convince me to drop the lowest exam score, and then actually had the temerity to ask me whether there were going to be any extra credit opportunities. That’s right, Ditzy Queen – I scheduled various extra credit opportunities after the end of the semester! How some of these kids got into college, I’ll never know.

Whiner 2 earned the nickname “Sleeping Beauty” because I constantly had to wake him up throughout the semester. Apparently, Sleeping Beauty slept through every important set of instructions I gave for assignments, because he turned in a paper without reference citations after I spent approximately 30 minutes covering the importance of citing sources and how not doing so was plagiarism. It goes without saying that Sleeping Beauty earned an F for his paper, and he came up to me after the exam to whine about how hard he had worked on the paper, and how he didn’t understand why he got a bad grade. When I explained to him AGAIN about citing sources, he nodded vacantly, then asked about a particular paragraph I’d underlined. The paragraph in question had obviously been cut & pasted from an internet source, because the ink colour was grey instead of black. I pointed this out to him, and his answer was, “It’s grey because the printer was running out of ink.” (I swear to God this is true.) I answered that if this had been the case, the lines below the paragraph in question should also be grey, not black. His answer: “I guess the printer was acting funny.” At this point, I pulled out my wallet and made it a point to squint at my driver’s license until he asked me what I was doing. When I told him I was checking my license to make sure I wasn’t born yesterday, he finally gave up the ghost and left. Priceless.

And so endeth the Professor Jorge Era – not with a bang, but with a whiny whimper.