So the title might be a bit misleading, since I'm going to be talking about baseball. Sorry, everyone-but-my-brother.

Leading off, let me just bask for a moment in the fact that the Shaolin Gyroballers, ably navigated through some turbulent waters by your truly and my roommate, seized first place on the very last day of the season, then hung on for a subsequent day that was tacked on due to the Rockies-Pads tilt. Due to timely contributions from such unlikely sources as Brandon Backe, Rickie Weeks, Manny Corpas, and Scott Hairston, for the second year in a row we stand atop the fantasy baseball podium.

Ahem. Okay. Moving on.

In actual physical real baseball news, 10 things worth mentioning:
1. Matt Holliday didn't touch the plate
2. Padres fans should get down on their knees and thank god that they've had Hoffman for all these years, instead of throwing him under the bus for two blown saves
3. the Angels and Red Sox begin their tilt tomorrow, meaning the next week or so is going to be rather tense around the house (the roomie's a sox fan)
4. Sabathia is the scariest pitcher in the postseason
5. Jeff Kent is a whiny piece of shit that wouldn't know veteran leadership if it knocked him off the motorcycle that he was contractually barred from riding
6. too bad about the Brewers.... it would've been nice to see them in the playoffs (since they haven't been since the Taft administration)
7. at this moment, Bud Selig is naked in a center of a Satanic prayer circle, sacrificing a black goat to Ba'al in hopes of ensuring a Yankees-Cubs World Series
8. worst case scenario for ole' Bud? Probably Rockies-Indians... given meteorological conditions in Cleveland during the 1997 WS, such a matchup could tentatively be titled the Snow-Delay Shootout
9. fewer more epic games will ever be played than the aforementioned Rockies-Padres game... I'm surprised obese Denverians weren't dropping dead mid-fastball
10. Picks: LCS: Halos-Yanks, Snakes-Rocks... WS: Halos-Snakes

No, I'm not biased at all.

Driving home from work today, I tuned in to kroq just in time to catch the song I'm currently wild about (icky thump by the white stripes), which made me happy. Then the song ends, and I prepare to change stations... but the next song is one of my favorite songs of all time (disconnected by face to face). This made me practically orgasmic.

There's baseball stuff going on, but let me just say that the Angels made the playoffs and leave it at that. Go Halos!

Also. Women's soccer has never been one of my favorite sports. But my new goal in life is to exchange bodily fluids with Hope Solo, goalie for the US team. Not only because she's cute, not only because she has a world-class name, but because she calls 'em like she sees 'em. She was replaced before a game against brazil, a game that the US subsequently lost, and ole' Hope called out her coach and the goalie that played in her stead. Seriously, her post-game comments are worth googling.

So I ran the numbers, and I figure I'm but one of about fifteen million or so people turning thirty today. Thus I shouldn't expect the world to stop dead in its tracks and celebrate the fact that I've managed to stay alive for three decades...

That being said, I wouldn't mind a little special recognition. Preferably in the shape of a hummer from an attractive female.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (obviously)
First Among Sequels, Jasper Fforde: the latest in the most entertaining and bizarre Thursday Next series
Crooked Little Vein, Warren Ellis: a shit-magnet detective must track down the Secret Constitution of the United States, and he's willing to watch Godzilla bukkake movies and let people inflate his testicles with saline water to get the job done
Crecy, Warren Ellis: a profane, illuminating, and ultimately very funny retelling of the Battle of Crecy
The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler: a nonfiction book that paints a gloomy scenario of what the human race is in for when global oil supplies begin to dwindle

This is an excellent piece by ESPN's Jim Caple about the 'Homer at the Bat' episode of the Simpsons, along with quick bits about other baseball themed episodes.

The highlight?

In "Brother's Little Helper," a paranoid Bart shoots down a satellite that Major League Baseball was using to spy on everyone. Mark McGwire, however, calms the public by landing in a helicopter and asking: "Do you want to know the terrifying truth, or do you want to see me sock a few dingers?"

The crowd's response: "Dingers! Dingers!"

(By the way, wouldn't it have been awesome had McGwire delivered the same line when he testified before Congress? Had he done so, he might be going into Cooperstown this weekend.)

This is the only baseball-related thing I can talk about at the moment without exploding into a torrent of profanity, as the Angels are so fucking unwatchably awful right now that it makes my head hurt just thinking about it. At least they finally sent Ervin down to triple A. Of course, that pretty much scotched the team's chances at trading him and Kotchmann for Teixeira... that dirty can't-win-on-the-road-or-lately-even-at-home motherfucker.

So the Order of the Phoenix catches up to Voldemort at a gas station on long island. Some nameless bloke shoots him in the head, and said head is subsequently run over by the back tire of an SUV.

Later, Harry, Ron, and Hermione plan to meet up at a diner that has the best onion rings in New Jersey. Harry and Ron are inside, but Hermione has difficulty parallel-parking her broomstick.

A man in a Slytherin jacket sits at the back of the diner. He eventually gets up and goes to the bathroom.

Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" is playing on the jukebox.

Harry shoves an entire onion ring into his mouth. Then, as he's chewing, he hears the bell ring, signaling the entrance of another person into the diner.

Then the book stops mid-sentence, followed by ten blank pages, followed by the 'about the author' note.

I want to be Russell Mulcahy.

I'm taking a break from Harry Potter, and I'm watching the crappy Alec Baldwin version of The Shadow and I wonder "who directed this piece of shit?"

Turns out it was Russell Mulcahy, who directed Highlander, along with the first music video to appear on MTV.

Yeah, the guy didn't make particularly fantastic choices in years where the third digit wasn't 8, but still. Highlander and Video Killed the Radio Star. Not too shabby, sir. Not too shabby.

I was awakened this morning by a call from my apartment manager, bidding me come downstairs and sign for my amazon-delivered copy of Harry Potter.

I then went to the Dodgers-Mets game. We had really fantastic seats, 7 rows up on the first base side right near the on-deck circle. Holy crap. I had several Dodger Dogs and several overpriced cups of beer. Plus I got the chance to really roundly heckle Scott Schoeneweis (whose name I have almost certainly misspelled), a former Angels, now a Met, who's a bit of a douche. The great thing about our seats is the fact that, when he walked off the mound after getting totally shelled, he walked right toward us to get into the Mets dugout (which, obviously, is on the first-base side). Just as he was walking into the dugout, I yelled the obligatory "You suck, Schoenewies!" He heard me.

I then spent the next two hours floating in an amniotic-temperature pool, the perfect counterpoint to sitting and sweating at the stadium.

Then I had dinner in the Valley with my like third family. High quality food and shit-talking ensued.

And at the moment I'm kicking it on my couch, some several hundred pages into the aforementioned Potter book.

Life does indeed have its moments, O my brothers and only friends.

I am terrified of the internets right now, and will be for at least a couple more days.

I speak, of course, of my fear that some jerkoff will reveal the end of the final Harry Potter book, thus making the whole process of reading it and enjoying the final chapter in a pretty impressive series that much less fun. Plus the whole time I'd be reading, I'd be thinking about ways to track down said jerkoff and shit down his throat.

But I did hear something quite entertaining on NPR yesterday. They were talking about the alleged thefts and leaks of book 7, and ended the segment with the following (somewhat paraphrased):

"We hear at NPR, after a spirited debate, have decided that the ending of Harry Potter is not news, thus you won't hear it from us. However, in Moby Dick, the whale ends up better off than Captain Ahab, and in War and Peace, put your money on the Russian winter."

I nearly ran off the road when I heard that.

btw, I spent an unholy amount (mostly subsidized by a still-idling xmas gift certificate) at amazon over the weekend, and the books have started to trickle in. It'll be awhile before I have them all, as all but a couple of the books were pre-orders (including Potter, of course, but also the new Jasper Fforde Thursday Next book, along with Warren Ellis' maiden voyage into the realm of pure prose), but I'm having a minor bookgasm just thinking about all the top-shelf reading I'm going to get to do over the next couple of weeks...

A final note on young Potter: supposedly amazon will have the book delivered on Saturday (the day it officially goes on sale). So assuming I have the book in my hands as of saturday afternoon, I'm putting the over/under for when I actually polish the thing off at about 1PM sunday afternoon. Place your bets.

So there's a new guy in the office who fancies himself a trivia buff.

He wants to somehow challenge me to some sort of trivia contest over beers.

Life does indeed have its moments.

The question is, how much money should I try and take this guy for? (and should I throw the first round then go for double or nothing like I'm Paul Newman in Color of Money)

I haven't done one of these in awhile, so here we go...

Some websites that Ramsey visits on a semi-regular basis:

Amusing
Fark
Wikipedia
Something Awful
Warren Ellis' blog
Cracked
Bill Simmons column archive
Filmwise
fazed.net
What Would Tyler Durden Do
Kevin Smith's blog
Bruce Sterling's Viridian Design Movement
McSweeney's Internet Tendency

Webcomics (Warning: These comics may be very nerdy)
Penny Arcade
Overcompensating
Diesel Sweeties
Ctrl+Alt+Del
VG Cats

Baseball
6-4-2 Angels blog
Fire Joe Morgan
With Leather

I finally made it back to the movie theater yesterday (having been on a long hiatus since the awfulness that was the last thirty minutes of Grindhouse) to see the newest Harry Potter movie... yeah, yeah, I would've rather seen Transformers or Die Hard, but the boy wizard was a decent third option. And it's actually a pretty good movie. They've all been at least decent since Warner Bros. wisely kicked douchebag no-talent hack fuckwad dipshit Chris Columbus to the curb. (If you ever want to weep, look up the first movie on wikipedia, and there should be a shortlist of other directors that were angling for the gig... criminal that columbus got the job.)

ANYWAY, the writer(s) did a splendid job of cutting away the fat and figuring out how to make a 138-minute movie out of an 800+ page book. No Quidditch, no prefects, no Mundungus, severely streamlined scenes at 12 Grimmauld Place, etc. The casting is, as usual, brilliant, with Imelda Staunton totally nailing the Umbridge role, right down to the prissy 'hem hem' sound (even tho I long advocated for Judi Dench for the part, but that prolly would be have been a bit too obvious). The wee girl that plays Luna is also excellent (I wrote about her some time ago, as she's a huge potter fan that got the part after one of those 15,000+ person open casting calls). Plus she's just cute as a button and will make someone a fine SO when she comes of age. One of the few things I wasn't wild about was the whole Bellatrix Lestrange thing. Now, I'm a giant fan of Helena Bonham Carter, I've had a mild crush on her for like ten years, but she's waaaaay too over-the-top, to the point where you can barely understand her at times.

Note that I have nowhere commented on Hermione's burgeoning hotness. I will, however, say that in the last scene of the movie, as the students are leaving Hogwarts, there's a brief shot showing a student in robes and a pink top, and unless I'm gravely mistaken, I did espy a pair of seriously hot boobies under that pink top. Shades of the famed granddaughters in Saving Private Ryan.

In other news, Vlad won the Home Run Derby. Yes, I'm a bit concerned that he might have fucked up his swing (a common worry after Bobby Abreu destroyed the 2005 HRD and then proceeded to hit about a dozen more homers over the next two years than Yours Truly), but he's a freak of nature anyway. He can his sliders a foot off the plate 425 feet, so I'm not overly concerned. I'm more worried about Frankie, who looked dicey closing out the actual All-Star Game. To be fair, he came in with a man on to clean up Putz's mess, but still... in a related note, I found it amusing that in the ninth inning, JJ Putz was pitching to JJ Hardy. As befits their last names, Hardy eked out a walk.

Finally. During the HRD, the ESPN guys had former manager Dusty Baker in the booth with them, where they talked about the [b]Glorious 2002[/b] for a moment (as Dusty was the Giants manager then). It was so awesome hearing Dusty try to justify giving the 'game ball' to Russ Ortiz in Game 6 that I could hardly stand it. Because it was a pretty low-profile Wold Series, Game 6 just doesn't get enough credit as one of the top-five postseason comebacks of all time... mostly people remember that series for Dusty's kid almost getting killed at home plate and Tim Salmon in awe of a 500-foot Bonds home run. In related news, it warms my heart that Dusty Baker is unemployed. By all accounts, we have him to blame for the breaking of two of the most promising young pitchers of the last couple of decades (Wood and Prior). So he can choke on my bag.

So I'm obviously less than thrilled with the fact that the Angels were swept at home by the fucking Royals. Serious lack of joy in Mudville. I'm trying to stay positive, but I'm not nearly as entertaining as when I have a nice laundry list of things to mordantly bitch about.

Speaking of the Angels, apparently K-Rod is a big believer in Santeria. I respect his religious beliefs, but it's going to be very hard for me to not make Pedro Cerrano jokes every single fucking time I watch him pitch. There are a bunch of other guys in baseball that are big into Santeria, many of them from Venezuela. I'd make a Hugo Chavez joke, but even I think it would be more arch than actually funny. This isn't the fucking New Yorker. Miguel Cabrera apparently has a ceramic skull on a stick. I want a ceramic skull on a stick. I would carry it with my always and use it to cow my enemies into blubbering submission with its terrible terrible powers.

Ahem.

In entertainment news, what the fuck has gotten into the heads of the writing staff of Rescue Me? At first, I thought they were just trying to emasculate Tommy (with the impotence story to the investigative board and the backing down from the aggressive guy at the restaurant and the passing up of steamy coitus with Jennifer Esposito and the not having been laid since before the fire and the getting his ass kicked by his daughter's boyfriend), but it turns out that they are intent on emasculating every man in that firehouse.

Really quickly, let me note that, while discussing this episode of the show with my roommate, I ended up doing an extended pantomime of Eeyore reluctantly having sex with a nun. Complete with the donkey's coital moans and out-of-breath requests for information about the whereabouts of his tail. High fucking comedy.

**SPOILER ALERT** (yeah, like any of you are huge Rescue Me fans)

Okay, they're emasculating everyone in the firehouse: Garrity is so subordinate to Maggie that he should be wearing a leach, Lou is complaining about too much sex with the ex-nun, Franco for some reason doesn't want to kiss the chick with the, um, mentally handicapped brother, Probie acts pretty much like Probie, and the chief, well, the chief sticks something phallic into his mouth and takes what it shoots into said mouth. Lots of other ways for someone to blow their brains out. Also note that the chief was slicing a carrot (emasculation alert!), eating a salad, and impeccably grooming himself before his self-induced Big Adios.

**END SPOILER ALERT** (yeah, like anyone stuck around for this long)

Finally, I don't want to talk too much about the horrible wrestler thing. It's just ten different sorts of awful. But in the course of my travels I came across this list of, to put it bluntly, dead wrestlers, and there are some shocking names on there for someone who grew up watching the odd bit of wrestling. I mean, major icons of my childhood, and not just the obvious Andre the Giant: Bam Bam Bigelow, Yokozuna, the Big Boss Man, Earthquake, Rick Rude, Junkyard Dog... all dead. Really disquieting, and really fucking sad.

Schadenfreude [SHAHD-n-froi-duh], noun: satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else's misfortune

Perhaps it would be in poor taste to speculate what sort of medical condition it was that got her released in the first place (drug withdrawal, herpes outbreak, panic attacks, AIDS), but the fact remains that the stupid spoiled whore is going back to jail. Apparently when she came out of the courtroom, after hearing that she would (supposedly) have to serve the entire 45-day term of her sentence, she was screaming and crying and wailing and what not. Jesus, it's not like the chick is going to Oz where she'll be raped by Adebisi. She's going to a private cell where she'll be watched like a hawk.

And before you say it: no, I of course would not want to be in her situation. But if I had a billion fucking dollars, I would have someone fucking drive me places when I get loaded, rather than drive myself and get busted for a DUI.

You know what, tho? I'm glad Paris Hilton exists. I dated a girl once that out of the blue expressed admiration for Paris. That was when I knew that she and I were never really going to work out. At this point, Paris is like a litmus test. And for that I can thank her.

On June 6, 2007, at about 7:40PM PDT, the team-formerly-known-as-Mighty won the Stanley Cup.

I was so excited, I nearly crapped myself. I have most of the third period and the whole celebration and trophy ceremony and what not saved on my DVR. I will never delete it.

I regret that I wasn't able to be there in person, as I was for Game 7 of the World Series in 2002, but it was about a grand just to walk in the door, and I don't exactly have a thousand bucks lying around that I can blow on a hockey game. Instead I watched at home (and listened during my commute home on the Ducks' excrable radio station) and had a big ole' shit-eating grin on my face. I've been a Ducks fan for a very long time, basically since their inception, and despite the fact that they were named after a horrible Disney movie, I've always seen them as my hockey team.

A couple of amusing things:
For the last three seasons, the Stanley Cup finals came down to a matchup between a team from Canada and a team from the Sunbelt, with the latter winning each time (Tampa over Calgary, Carolina over Edmonton, and now the Ducks over Ottawa). In fact, Canada hasn't won a Stanley Cup since the Canadiens beat the Kings in 1993... then again, there are more Canadians on the Ducks than on the Senators...
Also, the Ducks won the Cup their first season after a major uniform and name change. Interestingly enough, the Angels won the World Series their first season after a major uniform change. Coincidence or conspiracy? You make the call.

Anyway, I'm happy. Now my and the other dozen hockey fans in Socal are going to drink a shitload of beer and celebrate the first California team to hoist Lord Stanley's Cup.

WOO-HOO!