Yes, I eat cow...I am not proud

This is the new message on the dry erase board in my office. We had forgotten about these lyrics, which come from an obscure song on Nirvana's first album. But Junior was listening to the album the other day, and a lot of the songs came back to us. As for the new dry erase board message, it was either going to be this or "I'm a negative creep and I'm stoned." But we figured the latter wasn't really appropriate for work.

Here are some of our favorite Paul Simon lyrics (which happen to be about Carrie Fisher):

She comes back to tell me she's gone,
As if I didn't know that
As if I didn't know my own bed,
As if I'd never noticed,
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead.

We really like that song. Hell, we really like Carrie Fisher.

We also really like Zack Greinke, who really likes his Chipotle burritos. But it's starting to sound more and more like Greinke is gone. As if we never noticed the way he kicks the dirt on the pitcher's mound.

P.S. Here's a new short story. We misspelled DiMaggio's name (ugh) but they're supposed to be fixing it online.

P.P.S. In addition to cow, we also eat turkey. But it's going to be a little harder this year after viewing that Sarah Palin turkey-killing video that's been circulating on the internets.

The English Major

Instead of grading papers, we read Jim Harrison's novel The English Major this weekend while bored to death at the swim meet. The main character is 60, but we really relate to him. His wife cheats on him at a high school reunion, then leaves him, sells all of their property, and gives him 10 percent. He, of course, just accepts this as the price of doing business and getting predictably screwed over. He decides to jump in the car and just drive around the country and contemplate being an old geezer. Along the way, he takes up with one of his ex-students, a young and beautiful and smart and crazy nymphomaniac, even though he really just wants to be alone and think about women and farming and dogs and birds and fish and the stupidity of cell phones. At first, the beautiful young nymphomaniac makes him feel young again. But, true to nature, she just makes him really feel his age after a while. Here is our favorite line from this novel: "A woman in a hammock is always faithful. It's a question of physics not morals." It's not really a great novel, but, like we said, we relate to it. And that is a pretty good line (actually two sentences, but whatever).

Big Donkeys' Unlikely Prediction of the Week: Royals sign Furcal for four years, 48 milion.

Is David Dejesus a 100 RBI guy in 09?

We are off to Columbia later today for a weekend swim meet (ugh). We'll of course be eating and drinking at Shakespeare's. It's just the thing to do. We might also sneak away Saturday night after everyone's asleep and try to recapture past glory out on the town. Oh, who are we kidding? We'll be snoring by the 10 o'clock news. Anyway, most of the old places have changed.

Posnanski has some very compelling things to say about David Dejesus near the end of this post.

This just in: Rob Neyer hates every move the Royals make, especially when they are acquiring productive major leaguers like Gil Meche and Coco Crisp instead of prospects like, say, Justin Huber or Denny Bautista.

We're fine with getting as many prospects as possible. But it's not a crime for the Royals to have some proven veterans. Glass can afford them. It's not like Wal-Mart is GM or something.

Let's go, Coco!

This is from an old Posnanski interview with Bill James.

POSNANSKI: I know you thought that Coco Crisp had a terrific year defensively last year — you sent a few of us an excited email about your general amazement. You are obviously pretty well known for being logical and searching for answers and so on, but you also are an emotional fan: Did you get a whole new feeling about centerfield defense watching Coco?

BILL JAMES: I wouldn’t say so exactly. It was more like this: that for almost three months, every time there was a ball that you didn’t know whether the center fielder could make a play or not, he did. After about two months of this you started to relax when somebody hit a screaming line drive into the gap, figuring Coco would run it down because he always did. It was more like a long series of successes than a revelation.

P.S. Does the practice of trading human beings for other human beings ever seem a little weird to anybody else? Outside of sports and slavery and possibly prostitution, does this happen anywhere else?

You know me, Al

Have been grading LOTS of research papers lately. Sentence fragments haunting the mind. Should be a Scan-Tron tool for English teachers. Went to Chiefs game Sunday, sat in front row seats as usual. Saw the Stealth fly over again. Awesome. Got lots of close-up pictures of cheerleaders, but can't figure out how to get them out of phone and into computer. Another loss for the Chiefs. Also, another trade rumor involving Teahen, this time to the Cubs. We'll see. Still in a funk lately. Ended pseudo-relationship with hot woman-girl. Will probably regret.

P.S. Forgot to mention, ate Gates. Gates is good.

P.P.S. APPARENTLY THE ROYALS HAVE JUST TRADED FOR COCO CRISP, GIVING UP RAM-RAM. We loves it. Crisp is a GREAT CF, goood (decent) OBP guy with some pop, and a switch-hitter. And his name is COCO CRISP. Starting to get a little worried about the bullpen though.

Drill, baby, drill!

Just got back from the dentist. I think he was Sarah Palin's cousin, and one of our incisors was ANWR territory. Smoke is still shooting out our mouth and possibly ears. The left side of our face, our left eye-lid, some brain matter, and left ear are numb. We are slobbering onto the keyboard. That is all.

Who could have guessed that newspapers were dying and that car companies in the U.S. don't have a clue?

We're not finding much about the KC Star firings in the KC Star. Jeffrey Flanagan would probably have the scoop, but, well, you know...

Elsewhere, from Thomas Friedman today:

Somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year.

Read the full column in the New York Times.

Maybe Jobs would like to run the KC Star, or the KC Royals, or the KC Chiefs, or the KSU Wildcats, or the Treasury Department?

Adam Smith was wrong

Happy Birthday to me and to Charlie Manson and to Kurt Vonnegut, wherever you are. Say thanks to your veterans today, and tip your waitresses.

Junior and I watched the original Chevy Chase Vacation twice this past weekend.

We're going to Kansas City this coming weekend. We're thinking about running over to Manhattan for the KSU-Nebraska game. We're guessing that Ron Prince will be extra bold and daring from now on. Regardless, we're going to the Chiefs-Saints game Sunday. Maybe the Chiefs will win one.

We're starting to get worried about the talk coming out of KC regarding the Royals off-season. The only reason we were OK with the Jacobs deal is because we thought it was just the start of a lot of activity. But, hey, at least we re-signed Brandon Duckworth.

Surely KC will be in on some deals and acquisitions during the winter meetings.

All of this talk about socialism and taxes and economic theory has us thinking about John Nash. Remember that scene in A Beautiful Mind where Nash has an epiphany involving the girls in the bar? Basically, he tells his friends to ignore the really beautiful girl in the group and to pay extra attention to her non-ugly friends. That way all of the guys get laid. Well, we subscribe to this theory of economics and we also apply it to Big Market versus Small Market basesball. Everybody should ignore A-Rod and pay extra attention to the Royals and Pirates. That way, everybody but Madonna benefits. Or something like that.



P.S. Check out this bloodbath at the KC Star.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.

– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.


The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.

– Ezekiel 25:17


I’d say the average person wouldn’t eat a Chipotle burrito and still do his running...full speed...like me. That’s why they call me special.

– Zack Greinke

Election Eve in the Armpit of the Ozarks

Well, we went to see Obama Saturday in Springfield. We met some friends who were near the front of the line at 3 p.m. We drank airplane bottles of vodka and Southern Comfort while the kids ran around. It was fun. We were among the first 200 or so people who got inside the venue at 6:30 p.m. We situated ourselves about 15 feet from the podium. The kids, who had been up all night the night before, laid down on the football field to take a nap. Then the crowd kept coming and coming. It soon became clear that we were trapped in our spots for the duration of the event. Luckily the kids had gone to the bathroom on the way in. Apparently, the line outside stretched from Parkview H.S. all the way to Bass Pro. (All told, some 30,000 showed up.) After several boring speakers, including the biggest doofus in politics, Jay Nixon, and the competent Claire McCaskill, Michele Obama FINALLY came on stage about 9:30 p.m. She was soon joined by her beautiful kids and then by Barack.

We tried to lift Junior up to see, but he's getting big. We sorta had him situated on our back for a while, but we eventually gave up during Sen. Obama's speech. It didn't help matters that the starting five for the Lakers was standing in front of us, and everybody was waving those stupid campaign signs. By the time Obama's speech was halfway over, the kids were zombies. The youngest girl was weeping. We'd been there forever without food or water and no way to move even a foot in any direction. Then one of the kids started to get sick. Somehow, thanks to the help of a security guard, they got him out of the crowd before he tossed his Halloween candy. He was still very sick later on when we saw him in the parking lot.

After Obama stopped speaking, we tried to find a way off the field. But there was only one narrow path of escape. We chose to hop a fence. Junior and I didn't have much of a problem, but we had to rescue one of the ladies who freaked out in mid-climb. Back in the parking lot, FINALLY, there was a monumental traffic jam. Junior and I said screw it, left our car where it was, and started walking. We had about a five-mile hike, but we were finally FREE.

On the long walk home, Junior said he was going to write about his Saturday on Monday (today) in class. The whole thing had made a big impression on him. He said he was going to write all about climbing over the fence and walking across town at midnight. What an adventure. Apparently, the part about seeing the next president of the United States was a very minor part of the story and would only be mentioned in his paper in order to set up the parts about the fence and the journey home through Middle Earth. We are very proud of Junior.

P.S. Sorry. Broke out of the Royal We for a moment there. That's harder to manage than you think.

P.P.S. I share these sentiments about the Jacobs trade.