Oldster Rage

40-year old Texas Rangers pitcher Kenny Rogers is in trouble again, this time for shoving cameramen and kicking a video camera to death. This comes after Rogers missed his last start because he punched a cooler and broke his pinkie. Rogers joins fellow oldsters Randy Johnson and Kevin Brown as dramatic examples of geriatric rage. I'm not trying to cast aspersions, but it seems these pitchers are able to keep throwing like men much younger than they, albeit with occasionally erratic behavior. Curiouser and curiouser... Or perhaps they're just taking Dylan Thomas's advice that "old age should burn and rave at close of day." What's next? 42-year-old Jamie Moyer biting the head off a kitten?

A New Feature

Weren't you, like, running for something recently?

To commerate my final weeks in Washington, DC, Expecting Rain presents: Legislative Branch Celebrity Sightings!

Yesterday, while riding up Independence Avenue, Congressman Dennis Kucinich was spotted leaving the House office buildings. Dressed in a dark-blue suit and carrying a briefcase (no doubt stuffed with bills to help Ohio's proud 10th District), it took me a second to recognize the man whose presidential campaign was only slightly less doomed than that of Carol Mosely Braun. Still, all that time in the spotlight stumping for liberal causes did accomplish one thing: he was on TV enough for me to recognize him and make him the first Legislative Branch Celebrity Sighting!

Breakfast Links

The witty observations of Larry David remind me a lot of the thoughts that keep me awake in the wee hours. Only his thoughts are inherently more amusing than mine. Could this be why he has a hundreds of millions of dollars and I do not? Hmmm. This isn't going to sway me that "Curb Your Enthusiasm" is better then BBC's "The Office", but I will say that it's a Mantle vs. Mays-type of argument.

{I don't know why I titled this post "Breakfast Links." It's possible it has some connection to the fact that, though I've been up since 4 a.m., on a normal day I'd be having breakfast about now (11:28). Oh, and I'm "linking" to things. If that doesn't work, think about it in an nonsensical, Andy Kaufman-type way. As I often do, allow me to quote Spinal Tap: Such a fine line between stupid and clever.}

{In another tangent, people who claim that any of the latter-day Christopher Guest films are on par with Tap are just plain crazy. It's like Willie Mays vs. Torii Hunter: one is undeniably a classic, while the other provides memorable moments but bats .267 lifetime}

Apartment Hunting

When one is of limited financial means, apartment hunting can begin to seem a hopeless task. This is increased ten-fold if you're looking for a temporary sublet, and ten-fold again if it's in New York City. Three weeks I've scoured Craigslist, with nothing to show for it. There are a couple areas that seem to have reasonable rents and a fair number of vacancies, though it's beginning to seem as though I may never live in a neighborhood that lacks a lingering association with race riots.

Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game

Occasionally on this blog I will discuss matters of concern to the hip-hop community. I don't usually drop names, but this site has received plenty of "hits" from, among others, The Game and C-Murder (aka C-Miller), so I know the people are listening.

Tonight at the Merriweather Post Pavilion, Wilco's opening act was Philadelphia's favorite sons, The Roots. They spent much of their set trying to get the audience to dance and/or participate, but to little avail. Even more mainstream fare, like covers of "Jump On It" and "Rapper's Delight," did not impel the audience to "get down." Eventually they gave up, with visible frustration.

I wish they'd asked me first; they could have saved their breath. See, Wilco's fan base is as lily-white as the Heritage Foundation, and is only capable of head-nodding or, if whipped into a true frenzy, toe-tapping. I've seen the good intentions of Mos Def and Jurassic 5 dashed on similar rocks of apathy by mostly Caucasian crowds in Seattle. It may be genetic, but most Anglos cannot help but care when they are asked to put their hands up in the air and wave them. I don't want Black Thought and The Mighty, Mighty ?uestlove to feel down about this, but unless the margaritas they serve at the venue are made a helluva lot stronger, ain't no way Whitey's gonna dance.

Brush With Power

So I guess I was at the ballgame tonight with George W. Bush. ESPN has it that he brought Condi (better eye candy at State than Powell), along with past and future cronies for the cronyism mill. Now I know why the Secret Service guys at the stadium were being such dicks.

I'm glad I didn't realize it at the time, since I've been infuriated by everything involved with the administration lately. If I'd known, I might have waited out in front of Gate F and shouted something untoward, such as "Mr. President, please don't open nearly a third of all remote national forest lands to road building, logging, and other commercial ventures." Ah, but what good would that have accomplished?

If it's not the Big Dick implying that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay should be happy to be living in "the tropics," it's the administration using the EPA to fight restrictions on pollution. It makes me so mad, I just might leave town.

Hmmmm...

While the twenty-first century might have its drawbacks, it has certainly made it easier to figure out in what year major motion pictures were copyrighted.

On Friendship

I'm not quite sure, but this haiku by Jonathan Franzen may be the most profound thing I've ever read:

You get a haircut
Ordinary people laugh
Do friends? No, they don't.

Lessons Learned

It's getting hot in here

I was recently alerted to a front page news item that broke while I was in Belize (and which is now buried deeply under Michael Jackson's acquittal coverage). With the headline "Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming," the New York Times detailed how an oil-industry lawyer inserted strategically misleading adjectives to blur the science of global climate change. Environmental leaders have decried this as more Bush administration chicanery intended to stifle science and aid polluters (a.k.a. "The Base"). They have responded to the report by pointing to what they, the left-wing intellectual elite, call "facts."

However, I must respectfully disagree with those Sierra Club granola munchers. Bush is truly a tree-hugger at heart, and his administration has truly taken one aspect of environmentalism to heart. Hear me out. Back in the run-up to the Iraq War (Operation Enduring Infinite Revenge or whatever it's called), the Bushies were producing lots of reports about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Though dead set on war, they were still mindful of the environment. They saved innumerable trees by deleting the many caveats in the reports, resulting in lean, Hemingway-esque prose. This "Reduced" the amount of paper needed.

The Bushies could have just tossed those caveats in the trash, but that would be wasteful. Instead, they "Reused" them, inserting words like "possible" and "maybe" into this global warming report. It turns out that doubt and circumspection can be useful! Now watch them "Recycle" the same old smear tactics to discredit those who disagree with them about climate change.

{Update: Obfuscation as career move}

Insidious Eli-Mariners Connection

Be gone, sports fan!

When I left the country, your Seattle Mariners were mired in last place in the AL West, playing the type of lackluster ball usually associated with the cities of Kansas City and Tampa. Since then they've been on a tear, winning 8 of 10, climbing out of the cellar and recently taking a road series against the formidable Florida Marlins. They seem to win when I can't watch. There may not be a connection between my being in the country and the Mariners winning (although the summer I spent in London they won 116 games), but all I'm saying is this: if they drop three straight any time soon, I'm buying a plane ticket.

Some Observations from Abroad

In the years since I last went abroad, there has been a veritable sea change, with one figure now virtually ubiquitous across the planet. This cult of personality, billions strong, stretches from the suburbs of Houston to the remote provinces of the Developing World (which is what we used to call the "Third World". I have a theory that this designation has changed not out of politcal correctness but because everybody was always asking where the "Second World" was. Was it India? Egypt? Scranton? But I digress).

So who is this influential figure, straddling oceans like some latter-day Colossus of Rhodes? No, it's not Jesus or Pope Benedict XVI or even Che Guevera. It's Spongebob Squarepants. Though one might think he's limited by a television signal, his empire of t-shirts, backpacks and sundry paraphenalia stretches even beyond the reaches of electricty. His beatific, Mao-like visage was spotted in a remote Maya village near Guatemala. Spongebob's bootlegged movie, a Kane-like study of his rise to power, can be found for sale on streets the world over. When the little children do inherit the earth, he will be the one to lead them. All hail, Spongebob.

In other news, I would like to report that Nescafe tastes like used coffee grounds mixed with piss.