The Weekly Minnesota Sports Survey

#-1: Twins (Last Week: -2).  Welp, with the All-Star Break right in front of us, the Twinks have sunk back to a losing pace commensurate with those of the last three campaigns.  They had a screening week of 2-5, the heart of which was losing, yet again, three-of-four at home to the New York Yankees.  It's goddamn sickening to once again be the Yanks' bitch.

After flirting with disaster, the wheels of this club have now fallen off, and they have fallen to about nine games under .500.  The lineup, which I kind of thought would be better and was OK for the first part of the season, has turned into a punchless funeral procession.  And the starting pitching has been a shit show.  Frustration to the point of apathy reached its nadir with the latest execrable outing by Ricky Nolasco, the most expensive free agent in the squad's history.  After getting shelled by the Yanks to the point where the normally diplomatic Ron Gardenhire told the media he flat-out sucked, Nolasco conveniently revealed that he has had soreness in his elbow.  Whew, so that's what that was!  Oh, I feel so much better!  He's now on the Disabled List, where he can hurt the team no more.

In the meantime, congratulations to Glen Perkins and Kurt Suzuki for making the American League All-Star team, being played here in Minneapolis Tuesday.  Particular congrats go out to Suzuki, the longtime majors grinder for finally popping his ASG cherry.  I guess you could make a case for Phil Hughes, the man who struck out eight and helped shut out Seattle in Seattle Tuesday 2-0.  He might be one of the many replacements named when starters decide to sit this exhibition out and say they are hurt.

Since Target Field obviously has to be prepared for the Midsummer Classic, the Twins will be on the road through then.  After they get done with the Mariners, they finish the first half of the season in Colorado.

Leadership Fail

I had this nagging suspicion that I had to tell the winner of our club's award that she won.  I meant to do so, but I just got so busy, so I didn't.  And besides, all I could think of was, Well, isn't the college going to notify her that she won?

It was only on Sunday, when a parents of an applicant (and someone who I know) inquired about the status of the application process, where I finally went through all my e-mails and discovered that it is in fact my job to notify the winners.  And I should have done that early June, when my alma mater finally gave the go-ahead.

So, I am a good month late in telling the winner she won.  This may bring up a lot of sticky situations.  Why couldn't the winner know earlier, for example; maybe financial arrangements would have been altered if they knew about this award sooner.  And what about the losers?  Will they get upset that their kid lost?  And are they going to be more upset that they didn't know till after the 4th of July holiday that we're giving this prize to someone else?  Just for the record, we're under no obligation to send those who did not get this award a letter saying we're rejecting them.  I'm trying to do the right thing here.  I'm just doing it super late, maybe even too late.

Regardless, I think I am a douchebag for not doing this sooner.  I would have, but I got so busy, then my parents decided to task me with figuring out how to do this long fucking road trip (which I haven't yet talked about but I will soon), then we went, and then it was Independence Weekend, and I got around to it now, OK?  I'm sorry.  Sheesh, maybe someone else could do a better job leading the club than me. ...

Love For Sale ... All Others Don't Bother

So out of the blue tonight, just because I was both lonely and horny, I text ****a, the hot girl who gives me a massage and then a tug job.  I just wanted to say hi, and thankfully she was around to message back to me.

She asks me what I was up to and I tell her a roadtrip with my family (yes, yes, I'll blog about that soon enough).  I tell her where I went, specifically ending up in Las Vegas.  ****a said, "Oh, how fun!"  And like an idiot, making absolutely sure my intentions just in case she was thinking this texting was going to lead to a reservation for a massage, I said, paraphrasing: "I lost my pants in Vegas, so sorry, I won't be able to get a massage from you in the foreseeable future."

And she never got back to me.

I could've taken a nap this evening instead of texting this girl.  In fact her text woke me up after I dozed off for less than ten minutes.  I could've used that nap time.  But I wanted this girl to like me.  Apparently she just wants to use me for my money, 'cause it looks like if I'm not buyin', she ain't talkin'.

Well, I'll show her.

No, I won't.  I'll get my dick wanked from her some time before the year's over.  I'm a perv and a loser.

First Time I've Talked To Grandmother Since She Was Taken Away

I've been meaning to ask my sister for her help in this, but it came up last night when we were driving home and had an argument about her forgetting all the things since leaving Minnesota.  She kind of brought up the fact I have never spoken to Grandmother since the day she was whisked away to Hong Kong.  With that, I decided to ask for her help in calling her the next night after we buy a calling card.

She did me one better: Grandmother's contacts, namely her daughter-in-law and the maid who takes care of her during the workweek, have Skype, so we should call her as soon as we got home.  Even better.

I was girding myself to know how she's been in the almost two years since she was taken from the country.  When I have my phone and Internet I rarely put it down these days, but as soon as my sis hit the call button I turned it off and waited with held breath to connect.  Will she remember me?  Will she remember anything?  Will she immediately accuse me of taking her money?  How bad is her Alzheimer's -- if she even has it?

The Internet connection was noticeably bad yesterday, probably due to the wind.  (I have no idea if DSL is affected by weather conditions, but it seems as if our Internet is slow whenever it's bad outside.)  But after tweaking the country code defaults, we caught her daughter-in-law's mobile.  They were having lunch.  My sister made a little small talk with her, but she knew she wanted to talk to Grandmother.  And, yes, she was there, and yes, we -- well, my sister -- spoke with her.  She appears to be in good spirits.

Sister introduced me to her and I tried, in my broken Chinese, to say hi.  (Sigh) she recognized me.  The language barrier didn't help our communications, nor did the delay in Internet communications, nor probably did the noise in the restaurant, but we spoke to each other.  The only thing I found weird was that she asked about where our parents were twice.  (We told her Las Vegas; that is a lie.)  So maybe her short-term memory is shot.  But after we hung up I feel a lot better that she's in relative good health and in good hands.  And now I can stop feeling regret and shame for not ever speaking to her.

Oh yes, and this means I need to get Skype too.

The Problem With Social Obligations

The combination of 4th of July festivities and my sister being home has resulted in me being very busy.  I'm in the middle of an extended vacation, yet I feel as if I'm "working," especially on my downtime, away from work.  I'm not getting resentful ... no, I'm getting resentful.

It all started Wednesday, actually, July 2.  Unbeknownst to me, while I was eating dinner, the person who apparently works for my parents now, managing their real estate here, dropped by.  I thought Mother was going to see him at his place; that's why she needed my car that day.  Don't understand.  To top it all off, my aunt unexpectedly dropped by because she wanted to give my sister pictures and was afraid she wasn't going to be able to do it before she leaves.  All these people invading our abode kind of put me on edge.

That edge-putting hasn't abated since.  I don't mind going out yesterday and today for World Cup games; that's what I want to do.  But I've had to also go to my cousin's Independence Day party, where we go to the local town to see some fireworks (not that I'm complaining, I've gone to his place the past several years).  I also have to have dinner with my brother and sister-in-law tonight.  And during last night's party my sister and cousin arranged for us to have lunch, and she also offered up with me the possibility of playing mini-golf with her.

The first problem with all of that is all the food.  I mentioned to my sister how "America" all these social occasions are, particularly with the breadth and the type (read: good but not good for you) food.  And I still can't help myself, so I'll be chowing down so as not to talk to people in these gatherings as much as possible.  Doesn't help I ate a lot during the World Cup games, and it also didn't help that my cousin shoved a second pint can of Grain Belt Nordeast in my hand.  Ugh, I feel so shitty today.

The second, main problem is that I'm busy when I clearly shouldn't be.  What I guess I'm saying is that I would like to be alone on vacation, not necessarily hurtling myself around town meeting people.  I guess seeing my brother and sister-in-law should be one of the social things I do.  But I was kind of looking forward to putzing around the house.  You know, just sleeping in and waking up when I want, doing laundry, trying to get back to writing, catching up on Mafia Wars, cleaning up the room a little bit, etc.  And I can't do that if I have to constantly be going out.

But I have to.  And by the time the weekend's over, I have to go back to actual work.  And by the way, I have the surgery coming up later that week.  All these things I want to do because it's a holiday is just going to stay there.  It's like as if I'm still working. ...

Addendum To: Fuck -- Thanks For The Surprise, Mom

Well, much to my surprise, Mother nor Father made a peep about how shitty the car is these days.  On our drive to work in the morning the taillight warning light naturally came on as soon as I pushed down the brake pedal, and the low oil level light came on intermittently, also as usual, but beyond that there was nothing of incident with the car.  Oh, and Mother didn't raise much of a stink when I arrived downtown.  I was prepared to beat back any questions of, "I thought you worked in the suburbs!" with the line, "No, I told you I got a new temp job."  So far, that lie is not needed.

Coming back I was expecting the worst, seeing as Mother now had the time to drive my car on her own.  Surely she would see something and scream something at me when she picked me up.  But she didn't.  She was behind the wheel on our way home from downtown, and I glanced at the dashboard from time to time.  The taillight warning light was on the whole time, of course, but I didn't see the low oil level light nor, more importantly, the Check Engine light.  It might have helped that when she asked for the quickest way home I told her to take the side street instead of the highway, when that's not true; I think accelerations to highway speeds triggers the Check Engine light.  But surely she must have gone on the highway some time in the afternoon, hasn't she?  If not, great.  But if she has, why didn't she say anything?  Is she giving me space ... or have I underestimated her and she doesn't really care?

And now they're on vacation, so they'll probably forget about the commute, though not necessarily about the car.  Maybe I was too worried for no good reason!

#ThingsTimHowardCouldSave ...

... is the latest brilliant thing on the Internet, and maybe The Best Thing Ever On The Internet.  This despite needing to overcome all the supposedly funny stuff that came before it.  This Twitter hashtag meme, created in the wake of the U.S. men's soccer team's 16-save performance in the eighth-final loss to Belgium Tuesday, really shouldn't be all that special.  There are memes on Twitter all the time.  But the combination of a funny premise, ridiculous situations that Howard could save (the comet from wiping out all the dinosaurs, Ned Stark, Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction"), the expert Photoshopping and the in-the-end lionization (speaking of lions, there's a shot of Howard saving Mufasa of The Lion King from the antelope stampede) of someone who's become a national folk hero makes this so much better than any previous attempt at intended humor which only some people found funny.

This probably erupted early Wednesday morning.  I was looking through my Twitter feed during So You Think You Can Dance and somehow one of my followers retweeted #ThingsTimHowardCouldSave and I just got sucked in.  It's still got some juice; just now I've seen a photoshop of Howard diving in front of Drake apparently taking a bullet on his TV show Degrassi High, as well as him sticking his hand inbetween Rihanna and Chris Brown, a picture I can't find a link for yet.

There's a lot of shit on the Internet.  A cynic might say this is one of those short-lived things that burns out and will be largely forgotten.  The latter might be true, but if there's any justice in this world, this will be seen as one of the great reasons to have the Internet, and not one of the "fake" great reasons to have the Internet.

The Weekly Minnesota Sports Survey

#-1: Wild (Re-Entry!).  These guys are here mostly by default.  The silly/stupid season in the National Hockey League kicked off Friday with the NHL Draft, and the Mild mostly did well there.  Oh, who am I kidding, I have no fucking idea how well they did.  I just looked at ESPN and they said good things about this Alex Tuch guy, who apparently represents the next in a recent string of guys who are "big," which apparently has replaced "fast" as the attribute that will bring your team Stanley Cups.

See, this is the problem the NHL Draft has with the Major League Baseball Draft; these next big things are nobodies, toiling in places where no media hype finds them, generating no heat behind any anticipatory hopes they'll play for our team because they're not on ESPN, and once they go up on stage, shake hands with the commissioner and don the uniform and hat of the team that just selected them, they go back into the minor leagues black hole from which, if everyone involved is lucky, he'll rocket into success, fame, fortune and idolatry.  Alex Tuch could be the next great Wild player.  All we all know is, well, nothing, and so we can't get excited about a guy most of us didn't even know existed until his name was called.  So I rely on experts who say the organization did a good job.

Free agency, which started overnight Monday/Tuesday, is a different story; at least there you're dealing with players whom hockey fans can at least recognize.  And on Tuesday afternoon they scored the guy many people believed would be a Wild ever since 2014 began: Tomas Vanek.  He may have been the best offensive player on the free agent market, known for his prolific scoring and on-ice vision, two things a team that could still use a lot of scoring pop lacked for parts of last season.  This seems like a hand-in-glove fit, something so perfect you would have wondered what would have happened if Vanek didn't come back to Minnesota.

He does have a huge deficiency -- defense.  That was kind of exposed during the Stanley Cup Playoffs, where his lackadaisical effort off the puck busted his worth several notches in many people's eyes.  But that may have been a blessing for the Wild.  Vanek's still the kind of scorer that could command a huge, long contract.  Minnesota already has two huge, long contracts for Zach Parise and Ryan Suter, and they could not afford a third big one.  But that's where Vanek's poor showing during the playoffs help the club.  Vanek knew his market shrank, and therefore a shorter contract with less-than-max money (it's three years at $19.5 million total) may have been the best he could have gotten, at least from a squad that doesn't suck.  (To be fair, that Vanek is One Of Us helps; even though he's Austrian, he played for the Gophers.)  In turn the Wild get tremendous value for a guy who, assuming his deficiencies in the defensive zone don't outweigh his contributions in the offensive zone, could be the key difference in a division where every single team seemingly upgraded their roster, all on the same fucking day.

There's more work to be done.  First of all, they lost several people.  Defenseman Clayton Stoner is going to Anaheim, and both Matt Moulson and Cody McCormick are going to Buffalo, the team that traded them to the Wild this past year, making the latter two by definition rent-a-players.  They need a D-man, and they need to clear up the goaltender situation, where they have three #1 goalies and therefore have no #1 goalie.  But at least they have a stable of young hands that could produce the next Mikael Granlund or Erik Haula, and just as important, they still have a lot of cap space, something many teams can't say they have.  There isn't a good D or G out in the market anymore, but the opportunity is still available.

#-2: Twins (Two Weeks Ago: -1). A 6-7 screening period has careened them several games below .500, giving Twinks fans a sour taste in their mouths a couple weeks before the All-Star Game that's being held at Target Field.

It was a hell of a ride getting to 6-7.  They started it off by getting swept in Boston by their third consecutive low-scoring, one-run game.  They then returned to Target and swept the White Sox in four games.  They then went out to Orange County and got swept in a three-game series against the Angels.  The Twinks then lost the first two games to Texas before snapping a five-game losing streak (and ten-game road losing streak) Sunday, 3-2 over the Rangers.  And they have split with Kansas City.

In last (Tuesday) night's 10-2 crushing of the Royals, Joe Mauer had to leave the game.  Not to say he'll be too missed, since he's clearly not the man we assumed he would be.  Right now, I doubt he'll be in the All-Star Game unless there's a rash of sudden "hamstring pulls" that force those voted in and selected to sit it out.  It's more likely Glen Perkins and/or Brian Dozier, for the lineup and the starting rotation (save for Phil Hughes) is just scuffling -- and the bullpen has been an outright shitshow.

They finish up with K.C. this (Wednesday) afternoon then host Derek Jeter and the Yankees as their Independence Weekend opponent starting Thursday.  They visit Seattle for a quartet starting Monday.

#-3: Wolves (Re-Entry!).  In the end, the Woofie Dogs remained at 13 in what many believe is The Greatest Draft In The History Of The National Basketball Association.  And they took UCLA Guard Zach LaVine who reacted by saying ...



... "fuck me," right?  Wow, another UCLA player who decides he doesn't want to play in Minnesota??  What are the odds???

First of all, LaVine's agent texted a guy I once worked with saying he was just expressing relief.  We all know that's bullshit, even the agent.  Second of all, why is it only NBA players who openly bitch and moan about where they're drafted?  You don't see NFL players say "fuck me" to themselves when they learn they've been picked by Green Bay, and they actually have to play out in the cold -- basketball players play indoors!  And don't tell me it's the organization.  Yeah, yeah, the Woofs are a goddamn hot mess, but no one I've seen grouses about playing on bad football teams.

Fact is, LaVine doesn't want to play here.  A guy who, in a normal draft, would be a Top 10 (and maybe Top 5) guy gets pushed down to 13th, and instead of at least being grateful for our good fortune, Wolves fans now need to mark the date Levine's rookie contract expires so they'll know exactly when he's going to get the fuck out of town.  On the other hand, I have a friend who wished the Timberwolves selected him and must be over the moon.  Experts say that this is a Hail Mary pick; either he squanders his potential (or decides to dog it because he hates Minnesota so fucking much) or utilizes his prodigious scoring talent to be an excellent, even terrifying, wing that the franchise has lacked for so long.  Oh, and we get Glenn Robinson III, someone I'm familiar with because I'm familiar with seeing his dad and seeing him play for Michigan on the Big Ten Network, but is projected to be a tweener in the Association.  That's just too many question marks for me to see Thursday night as a positive for this club.

Free agency is going to be worse.  The only players Flip Saunders is going to attract onto his bench are guys smarter squads knew would be locker room poison.  This team is going to suck for at least the next three years.  But hey, at least Flip's getting the band back together!  Sam Mitchell and Sidney Lowe, two beloved Timberwolves players that have Head Coaching experience elsewhere, will serve as his Assistant Coaches ... alongside Flip's son, Ryan!  Networking and nepotism are alive and well at Target Center!

Fuck -- Thanks For The Surprise, Mom

I come home and she asks me when I go to work tomorrow.  I tell her 7, so then she tells me my sister is using my parents' minivan and she needs a car, so she's going to take me to work because she's going to use my car tomorrow, then pick me up after work.

Well, that's fucking great.  Now my secret's out.  First of all I'll have to tell her that I work downtown when I know she thinks I work out in the suburbs.  And then, after she's all confused and pissed off over that, she's going to see the Check Engine light go on the dashboard and freak out.  Boy, that'll be a great conversation my parents are going to try to have with me for dinner tomorrow.  Just greaaaaaaaaaat.

This was just sprung on me without warning.  Not like I can do anything about it if I had advanced warning.  Right now I'm toggling between blogging this and going on VEF and wondering if I should jerk off while the rest of my family is not only awake but doing stuff just outside my bedroom with unlocked door.  Because after I get found out tomorrow, who gives a fuck?

Addendum To: The Death Of Journalism At ABC News

Remember back when I slammed Diane Sawyer for turning ABC News' World News Tonight into tabloid journalism and forcing Peter Jennings to spin in his grave?  I now have some empirical evidence to back me up.

Back in February, Andrew Tyndall of The Tyndall Report published his minute count of all the top stories of 2013 and concluded that by far, ABC News covered less of the hard news than counterparts NBC and CBS.  While Sawyer & Co. hedged their journalism bona fides by relying heavily on news topics that affect Americans on a daily basis, such as the weather and consumer issues, and also blanketing lurid stories that nevertheless do not affect the country as a whole, such as George Zimmerman and Ariel Castro, which I don't have much of a problem with, Tyndall added up it all up and saw that when it came to the big issues, the ones that are extremely important but very complex to report on and are not very sexy -- Syria, the budget, surveillance -- ABC News covered them the least.  Just as I thought.

I love the first sentence of his Year in Review: "2013 marks the year when ABC World News finally rejected the mission of presenting a serious newscast."  Couldn't have said it any better, or with the appropriate amount of disgust in my mouth, or the mouth of any respectable journalism major.

I for one am glad Sawyer is leaving.  Hopefully ABC News will put the news back into ABC.