The first review...

I've never been a huge Kevin Smith fan, but right now he's probably my favorite guy in the whole universe.

Click here, but beware of a few f-bombs...

What the Twins need to do

I'm in a baseball writing mood so here are my thoughts on the Twins so far this year.

As I write this the Twins should be able to wrap up the victory over the Royals and bring their record to 11-8. They'll still be 4.5 games behind the incredibly unpopular and boring Chicago White Sox. It's been a pretty disappointing start so far for the Twins who have scuffled at the plate and shown almost no ability to get clutch hits. Likewise the pitching has been so-so and even the Twins vaunted defense has looked average at best.

In my not very important, but not totally uninformed opinion here's what the Twins need to do to get back to the top of the division:

1. Fire Scott Ullger

Scott Ullger is the most worthless hitting coach in baseball. Unlike Rick Anderson (the pitching coach) he's done nothing to improve scuffling players like Rivas (and in the past Guzman). The Twins have one of the greatest hitters of all time in Paul Molitor back and working in the organization (as a minor league scout). Why he isn't our hitting coach, as he was for the Mariners last year, I don't know.

2. Dump Luis Rivas

Yes he can turn the double play quickly and he's fleet of foot, but I have yet to be consistantly impressed with either his glove work or his hitting. He's young, and he does still have a high ceiling, but he's also lazy and unmotivated. Cuddyer or Punto can get the job done at 2nd and have better raw ability with the bat. We could try to get someone for Luis but we might be better off just trading him for a bag of bats or some Big League Chew®. For 3rd base Tiffee looked very good when he was called up and needs to play in the big leagues anyway.

3. Make a call with Lohse

Kyle Lohse has great stuff but he's also a crybaby who doesn't listen to his coaches. Supposedly Twins pitching coach Rick Anderson is working with him again to try to "simplify" some of his pitches, but we've heard that before. They've been trying that with Kyle for the last 2 seasons and unless he's pitching against the hapless Royals he doesn't seem to have much
consistant success. Either he shapes up and puts some decent outings together or he goes to the pen as long relief and should be traded mid-season. The Twins need to make a final call here.

4. No more dumb decisions Ron

Don't get me wrong, I like Ron Gardenhire. He's one of the best managers in baseball when you consider what he has to work with. He still makes some very suscpicious decisions as manager though. He seems to think he's managing a little league team and everyone needs to play so Juan Castro's parents won't get mad at him. This is Major League baseball Gardy, play the regulars. You're letting a scuffling Mike Cuddyer play so why is Bartlett being held out so much? Likewise he hasn't used the bullpen as effectively as he could. On friday he left a 87 year old Terry Mullolland pitch three innings in Detroit and lose a close game when he could have gone to the best setup men and closers in baseball. Gave one away there Gardy.

5. The bench

The Twins have no bench right now. There's no one who could come off in a pinch to drive a run in or extend a late inning rally. Tiffee would be great here as he is a switch hitter. Instead we have Matt Lecroy, Corky Miller and Juan Castro. Miller and Castro have a combined batting average of negative .174. That's not even statisically possible but somehow they manage it. Jose Offerman was old and crusty but actually was a decent bench option for the Twins last year. They need someone like that. Maybe they can get Molitor out of retirement...

I got my tickets daddy!

I am as giddy as a schoolboy right now. Why, you may ask? Because I just scored the last 8 tickets for "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" 5/19 midnight show at the only DLP screen in town. Oh joy!

For the previous two episodes I was able to corral a couple of fun groups for the Star Wars madness. Check out this motley crew that saw the midnight "Attack of the Clones" with me.

my sister Nikki
Michael "Kaps" Kapala
Ben Tipler
Caleb Knox
Josh "Knobby" Knoblauch
Aaron Cox
Brittany Erhardt

I'll let you decide which people, for one reason or another, won't be returning for Episode 3.

But seriously, I do have one ticket left, so if you want it, give me a buzz and I'll do my best to hook you up.

Here's the crew you'll be joining:

Me
My sister Nicole
My sister Katherine
Jeffy "Kaps" Kapala (filling in for Mike?)
Ben Tipler
Aaron Cox
Jake Bird (filling in for Britt?)
???????

Choose Your Own Death

Choose Your Own Death
Originally uploaded by darthvedder81.

Picture this if you will:

The year is 1990. A fresh-faced lad of 9 years old races to the top floor of the Hennipen County Public Library-Southdale location. He runs past the Microfiche™ machines, past the giant baseball glove chair, past the wall plastered with 8 year old editions of Highlights® magazine, and finally after a brief layover to see if any new "Family Circus" books are checked in, he arrives at his destination.

The "Choose Your Own Adventure" shelf.

In the era before CD-ROMs and DVD's and X-Boxes, "Choose Your Own Adventure" books were about the extent of a childs interactive multimedia experience. There were more than 100 of these things published and most of them had titles like "Kung-Fu Master", "The Anti-Matter Formula" and "Vampires from Outer Space," so that gives you some idea about their overall literary merit.

The title you see on my blog here is obviously a joke. The good people at the "Choose Your Own Adventure" company didn't actually title anything that literally, although they might as well have since that's basically what happened in all 147+ of their books.

The gimmick was that throughout the story you were given opportunites to "choose" which direction you wanted the story to go. A neat concept to be certain, but something was lost in the execution.

It usually ended up like this:

You wake up in the middle of the night to a buzzing sound emitting from a glowing orb outside of your bedroom window.

You decide to open the window. Turn to page 15.

You decide to go outside and investigate. Turn to page 64.

You decide to go tell your parents. Turn to page 32.

Let's say you decide to turn to page 15. Fine. Here's what you get you stupid kid.

The orb emits a powerful death ray, shattering your window and sending shards of jagged glass into your face. It severely maims you but doesn't kill you. Unfortunately the death ray the orb shoots into your chest cavity does. THE END.

So you decide to re-read the book arriving at the same point-of-decision, only this time you know what decision not to make. You turn to page 64 confident in your selection.

You go to your closet to find your slippers and robe. A large pile of board games and baseball card boxes falls on your head, killing you instantly. THE END.

Argh! Foiled again! This time though, you think you have outwitted the "Choose Your Own Adventure" system by keeping your finger on the previous page! You go back and decide to try the final, and by process of elimination, correct answer. Wincing and muttering under your breath you turn to page 32.

You run into your parents room to tell them about the mysterious orb. You turn their bedroom light on, only to find your parents have been assimilated by two mutant alien squid creatures. You are quickly devoured. THE END.

So there you have it. Seemingly every decision you'd make in one of these books would end in your hasty death. They could have made one of these and called it "Happy Bunny's Visit to the Flower Shop" and still have found a way to kill you on every page.

But like crack-addicts we kids kept coming back for more of these stupid things even though we all knew we would only end up bitterly disappointed.

If only life operated like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book. Sure we'd be faced with decisions that could end in our untimely demise, but at least we'd be having fun training as a ninja or fighting Nazis on the moon or something.

"Choose Your Own Adventure: The Tale of the Single 24 year-old Graphic Designer Living in a Basement" just wouldn't be as exciting.

Remember this?

If you can't beat em'...

Well since getting married seems to be the hottest fad these days, I decided that it was time for me to go ahead and join the ranks of the betrothed.

I mean if you can dream it, you can do it, right?

Click here.

P.S. And yes, we do want 14 toasters.

Shopping with Lecroy

Lecroy makes a call
Originally uploaded by darthvedder81.

So today I had the fun experience of running into Minnesota Twins DH/Catcher/1B /bench player Matthew Lecroy. He, like I was shopping for shampoo at the Southtown Target. I asked him if he was excited for the opener tomarrow and he said "Yeah, but I'm probably not going to be playing." Then I congradulated him on his 3-run jack in yesterday's game against the Seattle Mariners. He said "thanks", I said I'd stop bugging him now and good luck on the season.

All in all a pretty neat thing. Not the biggest star player in the world, but he's a nice guy, a team leader and I think he may even be a Christian.

You might remember a blog post I made almost a year ago on Matty. Here it is.

The White Sox and their Gooback fans

Goobacks
Originally uploaded by darthvedder81.

The Twins are playing the White Sox this weekend for their home opening series. I really can't wait for our scrappy, underfunded club to kick the crap out of large market Chicago once again. The White Sox will need all the support they can get from their "fanbase" which went from it's all time high of 7 people to 5 a few years ago when two of their fans attacked Royals 1st base coach Tom Gamboa. Sox Pride!

Got Kaps?

Taking over the web
Originally uploaded by darthvedder81.

I do.

Okay so I stole this from Ben's blog.

I'd like to try a little experiment.

Even if you have no idea who Kaps is, why don't you go ahead and put his picture up on your website and/or blog (try flickr or something), and then encourage others to do the same. Consider it a sort of online, WWW "chain-letter".

Let's see just how far this rabbit hole goes...

P.S. Title your post "Got Kaps?" just to keep it in the spirit of things. The spirit of lame, no longer popular, mid-90's advertising campaigns that is.

A sunday drive with Soundgarden

For this lovely 70 degree early spring day I decided to go for a little sunday drive. I popped in Soundgarden's "Down On the Upside" (an excellent "driving" album by the way) and I was off! I toured the winding hills and dales of Eden Prairie and Chanhassen all the while driving well under the posted speed limit and angering many a SUV driver. It was a most relaxing and enjoyable time.

But hark! What is this? Just as the pounding drums of Matt Cameron on "Rhinosaur" filled my ears I saw it- A large novelty lawn chair! It must have been 15 ft tall and was just sitting in some rich person's yard. Not that interesting, but it gave me a chuckle and I continued on my journey to nowhere...

Free server space?

Does anybody know where I might find some free web server space? I don't need much, 10-20 megs would be nice—mainly somewhere I can stash MP3's, pictures, etc.

The first person to help me gets a can of beets.