#Follow Friday

I just spent several minutes sitting at my desk, giggling out loud like a crazy person because I stumbled onto the @theRealPFChangs twitter account.

Fake celebrity and historical person Twitter accounts have been popular since the dawn of Twitter, to varying degrees of hilarity.

But this is the first I’ve heard of a fake corporate Twitter account, and obviously going the casual-dining establishment route — particularly P.F. Chang’s — is amazing. Kudos, whoever you are.

I’m sure the choice was inspired at least in part by the fact that the restaurant chain already has a particularly active Twitter account, which the fake one urged users to unfollow with its first Tweet:

Hi everyone. This is the REAL PF Changs Twitter account. Unfollow @pfchangs immediately.

Though each of the four updates since has been chuckle-worthy on its own, it is the overarching meta-joke — a fake corporate Twitter account set up to accuse a real corporate Twitter account of being a fake corporate Twitter account —  that gets me. And whoever’s running this one is executing it well.

Enjoy this until they get slapped with the inevitable cease-and-desist.

Clip from The Wire, for no good reason

Treme, the new show from David Simon — creator of The Wire — premieres Sunday on HBO, and I couldn’t be any more excited. I’ve set the crap out of my TiVo.

So for no reason other than that, and other than how much I like the song here, here’s the season-ending montage from the first season of The Wire. You probably won’t enjoy it if you didn’t watch the show, but if you did watch the show, you’ll probably enjoy it immensely. And if you didn’t watch the show, you probably should.

Language NSFW:

Chatting beisbol con Juan Alicea

Here’s me talking with Juan Alicea, the Mets’ Spanish-language radio guy. He’s also the voice you hear if you choose the SAP option on your television during SNY’s broadcast.

What’s sad? I took six years of Spanish in school, and I needed help from my co-worker Roxana to prepare a decent question that wasn’t about how to get to the library. ¡Lo siento mucho, Sra. Kahn!

For posterity

I can’t imagine there’s a single TedQuarters reader who hasn’t seen this video yet, but for posterity, here’s David Wright’s silly Vitamin Water commercial with The Situation.

I’ve said my piece about both Wright and The Situation already in the past few weeks, and the video does little to change my opinion on either:

The curious case of Waylon Smithers

A huge hat tip to Joe Budd at Amazin’ Avenue for pointing me to this blog post from Masters of WAR, evaluating statistically The Simpsons’ Waylon Smithers’ ability to put together the best possible company softball team given a massive amount of resources at his disposal.

Smithers, the post points out, failed pretty miserably, frequently opting for players who were past their primes, who were about to regress, or who were simply overrated. It almost looks as if Montgomery Burns’ interminable yes-man put together a team built to win in the realm of public perception, more than one built to win games over Shelbyville.

It still should have been enough to easily beat Shelbyville in the episode, of course, but the players on Springfield’s club fell victim to a series of weird injuries and unforeseen circumstances, and Smithers had lined up no reasonable roster depth beyond scrubs like Lenny and Carl.

The happy ending, of course, is that even despite the misappropriation of resources in compiling the roster, despite the loss of so many star players, and despite a bizarre managerial decision based on maximizing platoon splits where none likely existed, Springfield prevailed in the end.

Homer Simpson earned the glory — when he came to, of course — but certainly Smithers ultimately earned a contract extension for his efforts, however ineffective.

BREAKING NEWS: Francoeur doesn’t walk Thursday

The streak is over.

If Jeff Francoeur had walked tonight, it would have represented a reasonably rare baseball event. By my count, Francoeur, in his 4 1/2-year career, has unintentionally walked in three consecutive games only five times — twice in 2007 and thrice in 2008.

So it has happened a little more than once per season across his career. In the game of baseball, Jeff Francoeur walking on three straight nights happens — very roughly — about as often as no-hitters. It’s not perfect-game rare or unassisted triple play rare, but it’s rare nonetheless.

And Frenchy thought he had it tonight, too. He looked at a pitch he was sure was ball four in the fourth inning, got a big grin on his face and started trotting down to first, only to be called back to bat by the home-plate umpire.

He ultimately doubled, driving in the Mets’ only run, so it was certainly better he didn’t take his base in this case — the novelty notwithstanding.

I’ve gotten a couple of Twitter messages and an email about Francoeur’s two-game season-opening walk streak. Nearly all of the notes are in jest, but I figured I’d address them because it makes for a neat example of how small sample sizes, taken in isolation, can be deceiving.

In his career, Frenchy has unintentionally walked, on average, 27 times per every 162 games. That’s exactly 1 in 6, which is amazingly convenient, and the reason I bothered with this.

It’s not a perfect analogy because Francoeur can — and has, in some instances — walk more than once per game. Plus he has walked more in some seasons than others.

But saying, for the sake of it, Francoeur walks once every six games, then the chance of him walking in a game is the same as a certain digit coming up on a dice roll — we’ll go with 4, in honor of the occasion — on consecutive rolls. Maybe you’d snicker if you rolled two fours on the first two of 162 rolls, but you certainly wouldn’t bat an eye if consecutive fours came up somewhere in the middle.

I certainly hope Francoeur’s walks are not random, and are an indication that he has finally made good on a career’s worth of promises to improve his plate discipline –weighting the dice, so to speak. Put me down for skeptical, though, especially since one of the walks came amidst Florida’s epic bullpen meltdown on Wednesday night.

He’s hitting, though, and that’s obviously what matters most. I’m sure being more selective helps.

Nathan’s Pretzel Dog < Biscuitdog

Sorry about the utter lack of posts this afternoon. I’m at Citi collecting some material for The Baseball Show and enduring more Internet difficulties.

Because I couldn’t get online until just now, I set out to enjoy my first Nathan’s Pretzel Dog, which I weighed in on a few weeks ago.

It was surprisingly hard to find — I went to three stands that sold Nathan’s Hot Dogs before I found one that sold Nathan’s Pretzel Dogs. It was on the Field level, just to the first-base side of the Jackie Robinson Rotunda, at a stand called “Hot Dogs.”

The product itself is good, but not all I hoped it would be. To be fair, probably nothing could live up to the expectations I set for the combination of pretzel and hot dog. I powered through it without thinking to take a picture, so you’ll have to just picture it in your head.

Probably better that way, anyway. It really doesn’t look as great in real life as it did in my mind. There were no beams of light emanating from it or anything, and it wasn’t presented to me accompanied by triumphant classical music. Just a hot dog wrapped in a pretzel.

It tasted like that, too. And I love both those things, so I thought it was good. No synergy, though. Nothing popped, you know?

It did remind me, though, of one of my great culinary experiments of yesteryear. Back before I moved to the suburbs and secured myself a backyard in which to grill stuff, I had to invent foodstuffs in various tiny Brooklyn apartments.

One such invention was Biscuitdog, which is exactly what it sounds like, except it’s not a dog biscuit. Oh, and I threw some bacon and cheese in there, too, because I’m like that.

It’s a hot dog, wrapped in bacon, covered in cheese, wrapped in a biscuit and baked. It tasted like a biscuit-wrapped-pork-wrapped beef miracle, and it looked like this:

Does that look a little too biscuity? Trick question: There’s no such thing as too biscuity. Also, I’ll thank you not to question Biscuitdog.

Former roommate Mike didn’t. Look at him tear into that sucker:

Well now I want Biscuitdog, or at least a biscuit.

At least I have the best Mets lineup we’ve seen so far this young season to tide me over. Angel Pagan and Ruben Tejada in the same game? Good night to be here. Beautiful night for baseball, too.

You tell ’em, Cowboy

“They’re two of the best teams in baseball. Why are they playing the slowest? It’s pathetic and embarrassing.”

Umpire Joe West, as told to the Bergen Record.

West’s comments are meant to defend his colleague, the widely reviled Angel Hernandez, for not granting time to several Yankees and Red Sox during Tuesday’s game in Boston.

I watched, and it did look weird to see Hernandez denying Derek Jeter time. How dare he! Then again, it looked pretty weird to see so many Yankees and Sox calling time so frequently, but I wasn’t sure if I was just noticing it more than I normally would because Hernandez wasn’t granting it, so I was paying attention.

Either way, West’s probably right. I’m not sure if the Yankees or Sox step out of the box or more frequently than any other teams, but if he and his crew are under the gun to speed up games, then by all means, deny Jeter his precious batting-glove adjustment time.

It’ll ameliorate all the sportswriters who are so bent out of shape about the length of the games, at the very least.

It does, however, fly right in the face of something Cowboy Joe West himself says on his spoken word album about baseball, Diamond Dreams:

It’s the only sport where you can manage right along with the manager. In no other sport can you do that.
You can’t do it in basketball, because you don’t know what play they called.
And in football, as soon as the ball is snapped, everybody’s running into each other.
But in baseball, it’s all pretty, and it’s all out there for you to see it.
And this game’s not run with a clock; it can last forever.

More importantly, umpire Joe West has a spoken word album. I’m obviously buying that.

UPDATE: I really thought I’d be the first to bring to the blogosphere, or at least refresh to the blogosphere, news of Joe West’s musical exploits. But then, upon finishing this post, I went to my Google Reader and noted that Big League Stew beat me to the punch. Check that site out for more on this West thing.

Talking about bullpens with John Franco

Before you kill me, I realize that John Franco never pitched 100 innings in relief. I realized that when I asked, too. You know what I was getting at if you read here regularly, I suppose:

On the intersection of Taco Bell and sports

A number of readers have emailed me wondering why I haven’t weighed in on Joey Porter’s arrest in a Taco Bell parking lot yet. Since, as they’ve pointed out, it represents the intersection of sports and Taco Bell, it does seem like perfect TedQuarters fodder.

I’m not aiming to make light of DUI, though, nor am I willing to pass judgment on an arrest with such vaguely reported details: Conflicting online news stories have it that Porter was at the wheel of his car, at the wheel of a friend’s car, and in the passenger’s seat of a friend’s car when he slapped the police officer in question, and absolutely none of the reports I’ve read even specify whether or not Porter ate delicious Taco Bell, nor what he ordered if he did.

Regardless, since Porter will not face charges, he will certainly not face criticism here. Let he who has not been drunk and belligerent in a Taco Bell parking lot cast the first stone.

I will say this, though: There seems to be something about Fourthmeal that brings out the worst in humanity. I don’t really get it, either.

The town where I grew up maintains an inordinately stupid rule under which fast-food restaurants can not keep drive-thrus open past 11 p.m.

Taco Bell is the only fast-food restaurant in the town proper, and so to stay open for Fourthmeal, the Taco Bell must keep its dining room open until the wee hours of the morning. At some point around midnight, it becomes a downright terrifying place.

The solution, of course, is to drive right past that Taco Bell, to the much better Taco Bell in the next town over, where there is no stupid rule about closing drive-thrus at 11 p.m.

But if by some chance the people you’re with aren’t willing to go the (literal) extra mile, or they want the luxury or novelty of enjoying Taco Bell in Taco Bell at 1 a.m., you’re heading right into the damn Wild West. No joke.

To me, it makes no sense. We’re all here for tacos, right? And Taco Bell makes me happy, and puts me at peace with my surroundings, even if those surroundings are a dingy suburban fast-food dining room off Sunrise Highway in the middle of the night.

But it’s littered with lunatics. Not actual crazy people — this is Long Island, so they go to diners since there are no Denny’s around. I’m talking drunken, ‘roided-up madmen, who must be looking to Taco Bell for a late-night protein fix and as a good place to find some asses to kick.

Seriously, about 50% of the time you enter that Taco Bell, some meathead tries to pick a fight with you on your way in or out. It sucks. I’m here for Gorditas, guy, not an ass kicking.