Yesterday in baseball

I watched the 1974 All-Star Game courtesy of ESPN Classic (it was caught by the "Pittsburgh" wish list on my TiVo because it was played there). I was born about two months after that game was played, and hoped to see my "namesake," Jim "Catfish" Hunter. It turned out that ESPN Classic's edited 2-hour version left out the sixth inning, in which he pitched well, but included the seventh inning, in which he gave up a home run.

He was wearing the bright yellow shirt of the Oakland A's, which actually seemed like a fairly reasonable uniform choice, given that the White Sox, Twins, and Royals were all wearing powder blue uniforms. It's hard to believe now that anyone ever thought that looked good, especially on the Sox and Twins. Fortunately, this was a few years before the Astros switched to their uniforms with the multi-hued horizontal stripes.

I have to admit that I kind of missed having the balls, strikes, outs, and runs continuously on the screen the way they are on baseball games these days, but in all other respects, the amount of graphics that NBC was putting on the screen in 1974 was perfectly adequate. And there were no little sound effects when they popped on and off, either. The big innovation in the coverage of this game was a mobile cameraman stationed in the dugouts; announcer Curt Gowdy seemed very happy about the fact that now the viewers could get the same view of the game that a manager gets.

Something else Curt Gowdy said at one point which seems to have passed into the mists of history on network sports broadcasts: "We now pause for station identification. This is the NBC television network." Can't take valuable time away from promoting tomorrow night's prime-time lineup these days, you know; just have the affiliates slap their logo on the bottom of the screen, and that's it.

More great moments in journalism

In three days, there have been two hockey-related stories on the front page of the Los Angeles Times: on Monday, a story about wooden hockey sticks versus composite hockey sticks; on Wednesday, a story about the people who went to a Sears store to see and have their pictures taken with the Stanley Cup.

Plenty more to come, I assume, depending on how long the Mighty Ducks stay alive in the Stanley Cup finals. I'm not making any predictions.

Great moments in journalism?

This is a quote from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" producer Marti Noxon as it appears in the May 24-30 issue of TV Guide: "A girlfriend and I bought tickets for [a movie] and snuck in to see Frank Langella in 'Dracula' [instead]. It blew my mind. I wanted to get bit."

Sounds exciting, TV Guide, but why replace whatever she said with the generic [a movie]? Especially since the way that sentence reads now makes it sound like "Dracula" isn't a movie. Let's see if I can think of some reasons:

• Marti Noxon called up TV Guide after the fact and told them she's now friends with the producer, director, and/or star of the movie she bought a ticket for but didn't see, and doesn't want this person to feel bad.


• Someone was worried about the statute of limitations on sneaking into movies.


• Marti Noxon and her friend actually bought tickets for a porn movie with a title that's too raunchy for family-friendly TV Guide.


• The movie she said she bought a ticket for had a very long title, which, if TV Guide printed it, would screw up the layout of the page on which this blurb was printed.


• Someone at TV Guide actually did some research for once and discovered that the movie she claimed to have bought a ticket for wasn't out at the same time as "Dracula."

I can't decide which of these is the truth, although I'm pretty sure it's not the last one I listed.

A capital suggestion

Also "The Boston Rag" by Steely Dan.

This amuses me for some reason

Don't ask me what I was searching for that led me to discover this, but the iTunes Music Store has Bobby Darin's version of "Alabamy Bound" mistakenly listed as "Albany Bound." (Actually, it's too bad it's not "Albany Bound," because there haven't been too many songs with state capitals in the title, aside from "Tallahassee Lassie," "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," and "Please Come to Boston.")

Parental discretion advised

I've been getting a lot of spam recently that invites me to "enlarge [my] penis and nuts." Now, aside from the fact that I actually don't think I need any help in that department, my editor sense is highly offended by the lack of parallel construction there. I mean, come on, either use two medical terms ("penis and testicles") or two slang terms ("dinky doodle and nuts"); don't mix them in the same phrase.

Hmm, now that I think about it, isn't "Dinky Doodle and Nuts" a new cartoon on Nickelodeon?

Here, have some content

Someone seems to be obliquely complaining that I should write in this blog more often. So, let's see, what do I have to report?

• Since I moved away from home in September 1997, I've been using my parents' old set of dishes; these dishes were not microwave-safe. I finally got sick of having to put things on paper plates and/or in plastic bowls in order to microwave them, so I went to Target and bought a new 45-piece set of dishes ("8-piece place setting with completer set"); dishwasher safe, oven safe, microwave safe. Of course, I'll probably never use the cups and saucers, since I don't drink coffee, and I have some collectible mugs for my occasional forays into the world of hot chocolate. Anyway, I microwaved a burrito on one of the new plates tonight, and neither the microwave nor the plate exploded.


• Today, I closed-captioned two music videos, both in the R&B genre and both what I believe would be referred to as "slow jams." One was called "Wonderful and Special," by an artist named Mike Phillips, and the other was called "Exodus," from the solo debut of Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish fame. Both songs were fairly mediocre, and both videos were fairly unmemorable, although there was a saxophone artist featured on the Mike Phillips song, and he was pretty good.


• I went to a baseball game last night with some friends, thanks to the L.A. Dodgers' "Family Pack" deal, which you don't even need to be a family to take advantage of. They have exciting new scoreboards at Dodger Stadium this year, all the better for them to show McGruff the Crime Dog when Fred McGriff hits a home run.

We get letters

On May 8th, the Los Angeles Times published a photograph on its front page of the first passenger train to leave Baghdad since the recent hostilities in Iraq had started. A pithy observation instantly occurred to me, and decided I might as well e-mail it to the Times as a letter to the editor.

Three days later, I was surprised to see my letter, complete and unedited, in the paper, especially since they hadn't called me to verify my identity. It was Sunday, so there was a larger potential readership for my letter than the other six days of the week...although I had a feeling that a lot of the Sunday readers get waylaid by the Best Buy ads and the TV magazine and never make it all the way back to the Opinion section.

For the record: "Re news photo, front page, May 8: It's nice to see that passenger train service has returned to Iraq with the help of the U.S. government. Now, where is the Bush administration's support for passenger train service in the United States?"

I'm sure it didn't hurt that it was short, and it was actually timely, although I don't think the L.A. Times ran any articles about the hearings Congress recently had in which deputy secretary of transportation Michael Jackson basically said the Bush administration wants Amtrak to go away.

Random thought as I'm about to fall asleep

If Jack Tripper and his female roommates had really wanted to get rid of Mr. Furley, they probably could have done it by arranging for him to overhear what he thought was Jack and one (or both) of the ladies having sex...and then having it turn out that Jack and one (or both) of the ladies actually were having sex. Mr. Furley's head explodes, the building gets sold to a huge, impersonal management company, and instead of a nosy landlord, there's a building manager who couldn't care less what goes on. Then "Three's Company" goes off the air. The end.

(This most likely would not have worked on Mr. Roper.)

(Tropicana) Twisting the night away

"Passionfruit Eruption"? I'm not sure if I want my juice having more fun than I am.

Oh, what can it mean?

At the Fuddruckers restaurant in beautiful downtown Burbank, there is a section of the wall containing several dozen pictures of the Beatles, in various combinations of the group and the members singly. The only thing on this part of the wall that's not a picture is a 45 RPM record...

...of the Monkees doing "Daydream Believer."