UngsungBlog: A (Fantasy) Sports Blog

I had no intention of blogging today, but something happened today that got my juices flowing.

One quick-hitter:

- Man-Ram’s line today:  4 for 5, HR, 2 R, 3 RBI, and a triple away from the cycle.

I’m just sayin’.

(Jason Bay’s doing incredibly well too, and I heard Andy LaRoche hit a HR today.  Talk about a great three-way deal!)

- I am NEVER, EVER AGAIN stepping foot in 168 Supermarket…EVER EVER AGAIN.

No, I did not get my ankle snapped by a shopping cart.  In fact, I wish that my ankle was what was injured!

While in the shopping cart autobahn that is the produce section of 168 Supermarket, I was standing in front of my cart, putting away a few bags of stuff that I had just picked up.  That’s when some idiot rammed his cart into my cart, ramming my cart into…well…you know where.

(That sound you hear is the sound of fellow UngsungBlog male readers—all none of you—keeling over.)

(Tangent:  You know how Jackie Chan and other martial arts protagonists always get caught in out-numbered fight scenes?  Why doesn’t the protagonist just kick one of the guys in the balls?  If he were to do so, the other guys would just keel over in sympathy pain as well, no?  Then again, maybe our protagonist would keel over too.)

Worse, the guilty party gave me the death stare as he passed by my bent-over self, as if I had done something wrong!  If ever there were a situation where punching someone right in the g*ddamn face should be legal, that would be it!

(As an aside…I actually had to admit that my mom was right about something today.  That might have hurt more than the physical injury I suffered!)

- My aunt and cousin went fishing this morning around Mt. Baldy, and they brought back some fresh trout!

I wanted to steam it with some slices of lemon and some fresh herbs, but we had neither, so I went with a bit of melted butter, kosher salt, and a bottle of “Italian seasoning.”  A few minutes in my mom’s Flavor Wave oven later, and dinner was served!

Believe it or not, this was the first time I’ve ever eaten freshly-caught fish.  At least, this was the first time I’ve knowingly eaten freshly-caught fish.  Good stuff, and at $10/fish, it wasn’t terribly expensive either.

- I had a really difficult time navigating through sports web sites today, because of all the pictures of a grinning Diva Favre all over the place!

Later on today, we got to see a beaming Diva Favre as he walked from his just-landed charter jet into an SUV waiting for him.  If the pictures of his face on those web sites were vomit-inducing, that shot of him walking towards the car could have been a biological weapon of mass destruction.

And who the hell were these people that greeted Favre off the runway?  You people reminded me of the numbskulls standing outside the court house when Wacko Jacko’s “Not Guilty” verdict was announced, screaming at the top of your lungs when it happened.  Are you myopians that blinded by his stature that you will let him jerk around with your emotions for THREE STRAIGHT YEARS?  What the hell are you guys going to do next year, if (when?) he performs Act IV of “As Brett Favre’s World Turns?”  Carry him on your shoulders from the airport to Lambeau Field?  Tattoo the number “4″ on to all your chests?

Speaking of divas, if I hear just ONE interview with Deanna Favre, asking her about her tribulations during this offseason with her husband, I might just stab my eyes and ears out.

(ETA:  Week 1 v. Minnesota…Michele Tafoya, get ready.)

Also, to make Aaron Rodgers’ life even more miserable, apparently the Packers are going to have an open competition for the Packers’ now-vacant QB job.

(clears throat…)

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO “Aaron Rodgers is our quarterback??????????????”

Seriously, Packers, please release the guy.  Either that, or give him a gun to shoot himself in the face with.  Let’s face it; despite all of the pageantry and drama surrounding Diva Favre, he is clearly the better quarterback, and Rodgers has almost no chance of beating out Favre for the starting QB job!  Did Aaron Rodgers sleep with the wife of a high-ranking Packers’ official?

Check out this gem:

“Although we built this year around the assumption that Brett meant what he said about retiring, Brett is coming back,” team president and CEO Mark Murphy said. “We will welcome him back and turn this situation to our advantage.”

Are you kidding me?  You had to ASSUME that Brett meant it when he said he was retiring?  The tears, the hesitations…all that was just an act, wasn’t it, Diva Favre?

Please, Green Bay brass, trade Aaron Rodgers for a fifth- or sixth- round pick.  Otherwise, you guys are guilty of first-degree murder…of a career that never had a chance to take off.

Any time you can make T.O. look like a model citizen, you know you’re screwing up somewhere.  Diva Favre, you’re making Adam “PacMan” Jones look pretty good right about now.  Last year, I couldn’t watch SportsCenter because of all the butt-kissing of the New England Patriots.  This year, I won’t be able to watch because of all the coverage the Favre is going to get.

Congratulations, Brett Favre.  You have now surpassed Tom Brady as the most obnoxious player that I hated first out of professional jealousy, and then later hated because for being an idiot.

And I mean this last part with absolute sincerity:

Brett Favre, F**K YOU.  Stay the f**k off my television next year!  I will NOT watch a single game you play in next season, even if the final game you play happens to be the Super Bowl.  Please, I beg of you to throw three back-breaking picks late in a game, and then throw your teammates and the entire Packers organization under the bus.  THAT, I would tune in to.

(He’s already getting the double-middle-finger salute from my sister, and she used to be a HUGE Brett Favre fan.  And trust me, she’s cursing him out 10x worse than I am.)

Tags: 168 supermarket, aaron rodgers, andy laroche, brett favre, diva favre, fresh trout, injury, jason bay, manny ramirez, mt. baldy, produce section by Peter
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Quick-hitters:

- Current rebate-o-meter: $1,740, though $60 of that almost never reached my bank account (more on that later).

- I see that there are eleven left in the IMBC.

Amy, you might as well give up now…you have no shot of winning!

- It’s time for another installment of UBMe!

It is a beautiful day today, so you decide to get out of the house As you head for the parking lot, you stop by your mailbox—it’s a typical apartment mailbox; small, rectangular, barely large enough to hold a single brick in it. You open it, and find two bubble mailers and the Wall Street Journal that you know your sister no longer reads.

(Background: My sister subscribes to the WSJ, but for some reason, the WSJ delivery guys don’t have a key to get in to our complex. Therefore, they have to deliver the paper with the normal mail, and, according to my sister, we always get the previous day’s paper with the current day’s mail. Since my sister doesn’t bother reading the WSJ, I usually just toss it.)

You grab the folded paper, check between the fold—you know your mail carrier likes to fold the paper around your other mail—find nothing there, and proceed to toss the paper into the nearby trash can. Upon tossing the paper, you see the pages of the folded paper fan open…and a rebate check pokes its head out between two pages!

You grab the paper from the trash can, and find the rest of your mail shoved inside the newspaper: two more rebate checks, a credit card bill, and some junk mail! If you had just blindly tossed the paper into the trash can, all of that mail would have been lost!

I guess my mail carrier missed the fold itself, and accidentally inserted the mail between pages of the paper. It’s a damn good thing I noticed it when I chucked the paper. Now I gotta wonder: have I thrown away other mail in a similar fashion?

- Have you ever watched a baseball game and cringed when a batter fouls a pitch off, and the ball caroms into one of his legs? With the exception of the shot to the package, I’d have a hard time arguing that there is anything more painful in baseball than that.

I mentioned that it was a beautiful day today, so we decided to swing by the local family fun center for some batting practice and, if time permitted, some miniature golf. While watching my sister all but bunt her allotment of slow-pitch softball tosses, she popped one up in her immediate vicinity. Taking cover as if she heard a gunshot, I quipped “Isn’t that what the helmet is for?”

When it was my turn to hit, I decided to start with the slow-pitch cage as a warm-up. If you don’t mind my saying, I was raking pretty well; I made excellent contact with several of the pitches without whiffing on a single pitch.

(I know, I know…bragging about hitting slow-pitch tosses. How impressive!)

The batting cages used to be $2 for a token (20 pitches); it’s now $3 for a token (though now you get 30 pitches, so at least it comes out to the same cost per pitch). I remembered having enough trouble with twenty pitches—I’d tire out at around 15 or so—and I was feeling especially tired near the round of 30. When pitch #29 came, I took a giant swing at it, and knew immediately that I hit the top of the ball.

How did I know? I fouled the pitch RIGHT OFF THE TOP OF MY RIGHT FOOT, right on top of my shoe laces (I hit right-handed, so that was my back foot). YEOW!!!

I let out a painful scream, tried to regain my composure, and could only very weakly swing at the next pitch. I was in so much pain that I couldn’t raise my left foot off the ground! Fortunately, that was also the last pitch of that round.

I limped out of the batting cages, limped towards the bench outside the cage, and immediately began massaging my foot. Fortunately, the foul ball didn’t leave a bruise, although I still feel pain in the foot.

Moral of the story: I can insult my sister, but at serious risk to my own health. Clearly, I still have not learned my lesson.

- Finally, I just have to end today’s blog with a…um…intriguing sight I saw at 99 Ranch today.

(Disclaimer: The following may be offensive to some. You have been warned.)

I was at the butcher’s section of the store, strolling about with my shopping cart, when I noticed a petite Asian woman standing quite oddly. And by “quite oddly,” I mean that she was sticking her chest out about as far as anatomically possible. Strange, I thought…

Robin Williams, in Live on Broadway, once quipped that he saw a woman that had such a bad boob job that, when she turned in a different direction, her boobs stayed in the same direction. Let’s put it this way: it looked like she was wearing a breast plate under her shirt; she turned, and those things didn’t move. I figured they were made out of Kevlar; a bullet wouldn’t have stood a chance! The woman looked soooooooo uncomfortable standing there, and it’s not like she had C or D cups!

Once I found the item I was looking for—chicken breasts, interestingly enough—I went down a couple aisles to where my sister was shopping, and before I could ask her if she saw the girl, she immediately asked me if I noticed her!

Bring on the hate mail!

Tags: baseball, batting cages, injury, supermarket, UBMe by Peter
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