The New York Post is reporting that “there is ‘zero’ chance the beleaguered [Jason Bay] will be released this winter or asked to compete for a job in spring training.”
Just curious
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Taco Bell Tuesday
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Taco Bell Tuesday!
Kind of a slow one though.
Massachusetts man demands faster Taco Bell: Police in Salem, Mass. responded to a disturbance at a local Taco Bell that started when a customer got mad that his food did not come quickly enough. I’d need to check out this particular Taco Bell to tell you who’s justified here. You may claim that anyone who gets upset enough over a Taco Bell wait to merit an emergency call is crazy, but I’d counter that I’ve waited over 20 minutes for my food at the Taco Bell in Elmsford, N.Y. on multiple occasions and that’s way crazier.
Pictures of Flamas Doritos Locos Tacos emerge: They look like the original Doritos Locos Tacos, it turns out. Slightly redder I think, but sometimes my monitor is weird.
Taco Bell working to end hunger even more so: I need to tread lightly because you never know what someone’s digging up on ol’ Glen Bell right now, but I, for one, am pretty glad that when Taco Bell gives to charity it’s on behalf of ending world hunger and not, you know, saving the world from gay marriage. I want my Taco Bell consumption to carry on unencumbered by politics, and a recent harrowing experience at Chick-Fil-A revealed to me that without some sort of bumper sticker that politely but explicitly asks people to not extrapolate my chicken-sandwich choices to imply anything whatsoever about my political beliefs, I cannot in good conscience eat Chick-Fil-A. That’s terrible, because Chick-Fil-A is delicious. And I know it all goes against my typical Sandwiches Uber Alles approach to everything. But it’s just too complicated now. The only statement of any kind I want to make with my fast food choices is, “I am a man who appreciates inexpensive food served quickly.” I don’t want to go in for much more than that.
Heretofore unknown Brooklyn Taco Bell emerges: I had no idea. That’s not an area I get to that often, but it’s good to know about regardless.
Commuting stuff
Commuting from Westchester was a strange experience. Beyond the amount of time it took (an hour and ten minutes, door to door) what usually bothered me most was the bizarre relationship I formed with the people who rode in the same car from the same station at the same time — which is to say the utter lack of relationship. I’ve covered this before, I realize.
I guess it’s common commuter code, but I didn’t know: Apparently you don’t acknowledge the people who stand near you while you wait for the train. One woman smiled every morning, but the seven or eight others I saw every single weekday mustered hardly a glance when I showed up to the spot between the elevator and the stairway where we all always stood.
And then you see the same people on the weekend at Home Depot and they still act like they don’t know who you are! And I’m all, hey buddy, you are literally the first person I see every day that I’m not married to, we can at least nod for the sake of humanity? Yeah, I realize it’d be weird for us to establish any sort of nodding relationship because then we’d have to nod every time we saw each other and that could grow to be a burden, but isn’t this anonymity also a bear?
Apparently not.
Anyway, Mike Malone is the dude that says hello. A Mets fan and fellow Hawthorne commuter, Mike recognized me from the Kiner’s Korner Revisited videos, introduced himself, and interviewed me for his commuting blog at Trainjotting.com.
Mike’s got a new book out, The New York Commuter’s Glossary. It’s a book of clever words and phrases for concepts all too common to daily commuters, among them: iClod, Crapathetic, Latrainian Tomlinson.
If you commute regularly and you liked Sniglets when you were younger — as I did and as Mike acknowledges he did in the end notes — you should enjoy having a standardized set of definitions for the things that have always bothered you or humored you on the train and subway. It’s hardly dictionary length, but the glossary and illustrations by Joseph Walden should be enough to keep you entertained for a couple of commutes and provide a handy reference thereafter. So check that out.
My recent commutes, I should mention, have been far more pleasant. I’ve been riding my bike from the Upper East Side to Midtown, mostly traveling south down 5th Avenue along the park. I get here in 15 minutes, and I ride past all sorts of awesome buildings in the fresh air with the Empire State Building looming in the distance. It’s awesome. I’m the schmo in the office with chain grease on his pants all the time but whatever. It’s not like I like pants.
Revenge is a dish best served using Little Leaguers as waiters
The Long Island youth-baseball manager arrested for allegedly stalking an opposing coach shelled out more than $50,000 to personally finance a revenge team that fell flat on its face, The Post has learned.
Angered after his own son failed to flourish on the Long Island Infernos traveling baseball team for 10- and 11-year-olds, Robert Sanfilippo used his own money to create and fund the Long Island Vengeance to even the score against his boy’s former squad, a law-enforcement source said….
While other Long Island teams had modest equipment, Sanfilippo spent like a Suffolk County Steinbrenner. The Vengeance sported top of the line helmets with airbrushed skull and crossbones insignias that cost upwards of $300 each for a team of roughly 20 kids. The squad also provided each player with two uniforms and baseball bags worth hundreds of dollars.
Oh man, Robert Sanfilippo hates subtlety. The Long Island Vengeance! Sounds like a wrestling move and/or a drink special at a Park Ave. bar in Rockville Centre.
Also, outside of the whole playing for an alleged stalker thing, it doesn’t sound like such a bad deal for the other members of the Long Island Vengeance. They get awesome gear and a chance to play in this league, and all they have to do is help Sanfilippo enact his bizarre Little League retribution.
I wonder what he would have done if they beat the Infernos, anyway. Would Sanfilippo just drop it? Would that be the end of the Vengeance? “OK, boys, our work here is done. Pack up those bags. Oh, and I’m going to need those bats back.”
Probably it wouldn’t shake out like that because it almost never does with (alleged) psychotic vendettas.
The skull and crossbones logos, it turns out, are awesome. Not in any way appropriate for 10- and 11-year-olds, but awesome. From the Vengeance’s website:
Badass, right?
Via James K.
Dear guy
Dear guy,
On behalf of all of us sitting in the rows behind you, I’d like to thank you for your antics throughout the 8:15 p.m. showing of Dredd 3D at the AMC Orpheum on Sunday evening. Were it not for your persistent, exaggerated outbursts to demonstrate otherwise, I might have thought that the movie was pretty cool and that you were not cool. Thankfully, though, you came through, and now I know that you, guy, are so much cooler than Dredd 3D.
For example: Without you sitting in front of me, I probably would have enjoyed Paul Leonard-Morgan’s thumping industrial score and maybe even considered it an inspired accompaniment to the futuristic urban hellscape in which the action in Dredd 3D takes place. And I definitely would have thought it pretty neat when, in the trippy computer-graphics driven sequences meant to depict characters’ torpid narcotic experiences, the music slowed to a heavy, spacey brood. But luckily, you were there in front of me, wildly mimicking cliched techno dance moves in both tempos. That was hilarious. Your friends seemed really impressed.
And while some of the dialogue did seem rather predictable, perhaps even simplistic in its bluntness, if you were not sitting in front of me, guy, I might have assumed that had something to do with the fact that the movie was adapted from a comic book, and that the lines that came off as kind of funny were intentionally kind of funny. But your affected, condescending giggles throughout assured me that the directors and screenwriters intended every line in Dredd 3D to be received without any shred of irony and that you, guy, could have written them so much better.
Guy, if you just sat there quietly watching the movie like the rest of us, I might have forgotten that I — like you — shelled out $15 for high-minded fare ripe for mockery if it failed, not some stupid action movie I picked because my wife had to go to bed at 9 p.m. and I wasn’t tired and it was the next thing playing nearby. Certainly we should all have high standards when entering the follow-up to Judge Dredd, a movie that managed to present both Sylvester Stallone and Rob Schneider at their most irritating.
But guy, your snickering witticisms and your attention-grabbing gesticulations, from the way you took it upon yourself to simulate various 3-D images with your hands as they were happening to the way you reenacted many of the film’s gory slow-motion death scenes immediately after they occurred on screen even though they were plenty engaging on their own the first time, helped remind me that I didn’t just pay $15 to watch Dredd 3D. I paid $15 to watch Dredd 3D and some a-hole in front of me with skinny jeans and a Buddy Holly haircut demonstrating to the world that for whatever reason he was really ashamed to be at Dredd 3D and so needed to remind everyone every few minutes that he was cooler than Dredd 3D, which he undoubtedly was. It was f—ing great, guy. You rule.
Thanks,
Ted
So the replacement refs are not good. What now?
The scab NFL refs, you might have noticed, are awful at officiating football games. This leads to some awful football events like those that occurred at the end of last night’s Seahawks-Packers game, awful calls at a seemingly higher rate than they came last year, and an awful lurching pace to games as the fill-in guys run around trying to figure out what happens next.
Speaking of: If you’ve determined that the NFL’s replacement refs suck to the point that they are impacting the quality of NFL football — as they obviously did last night — what recourse do you have, as a football fan, to encourage the NFL and its officials to squash the beef?
That’s not rhetorical, really.
The best I can think of is for everyone to stop watching NFL football until its settled. But since the NFL has a monopoly on professional football and professional football is a juggernaut, that doesn’t seem likely to happen. Maybe we’re all just going to abide the scab refs until they improve or are replaced by better scab refs because we just can’t get enough football.
A more palatable but certainly less effective alternative is for everyone to whine and moan about it so much that the public-relations hit forces the league to flinch. That’s sort of what this post is about. But it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than this to do that. The NFL mints money off a bloodsport that we plan our weeks around and tune our flatscreens to every Sunday, Monday and Thursday like we’re the brainwashed populous of some dystopian future. The NFL is Big Brother and we have always been at war with the NFL Referees Association. Or something. The NFL can take its knocks without breaking.
The players present a wild card in the process. Clearly the replacement officials jeopardize player safety, and the players taking a unified stand against the league’s position could help the process along. But while the NFLPA is sympathetic to the refs’ cause, it insists there’s nothing it can do beyond writing strongly worded letters as “they’re not permitted to strike under any terms other than the security of their union.”
But if they’re claiming that the league “failed in [its] obligation to provide as safe a working environment as possible,” isn’t that a pretty legit gripe? Some football players die from the long-term effects of the head injuries they suffer. The NFL will make more than $9 billion in revenue this year off football players playing football. Who really holds the cards? No one wants to see Roger Goodell play football, right? No one wants to see Jerry Jones in a three-point stance across the line of scrimmage from Jim Irsay, at least not for more than a quarter.
What if in all the 1 o’clock games this Sunday, the players called the coin toss, returned to their sidelines, then just stayed there for a few extra minutes to remind everyone who actually does the football playing in football? No macho b.s., just a group of men who risk their health for their jobs so that they can make some money (and some other guys can make way, way more money) standing up for themselves to demand the safest possible incredibly dangerous workplace? Would anyone blame them for that? Would the league really sue?
The Baseball Show: Knuckleball
So this was pretty awesome. If you’re wondering why I didn’t ask certain questions, it’s that Kevin Burkhardt did a long segment with Tim Wakefield, Phil Niekro and R.A. Dickey immediately before we filmed that will air on SNY at some later date. I didn’t want to sit down immediately after and ask them the exact same questions, but Kevin came prepared and covered a ton. Dickey had to leave for a Mets function, so then I told Tim Wakefield he was crazy and impressed Phil Niekro with my knowledge of knuckleballer history. Nice guys both.
Link
Carlos Beltran will troll you right back
https://twitter.com/MHealeySports/status/245869417412579329
Since Mark’s tweet on Sept. 12, Carlos Beltran has hit .433/.528/.633.
That’s based on a tiny sample, yeah, but so is any assertion that Beltran was providing the Cardinals absolutely nothing. <3 the Beltran.
Sandwich of the Week
This was supposed to come this weekend, but this weekend came first. That happens sometimes. I had two hits in baseball but struck out in a big spot in the ninth. Totally unclutch. Still reeling.
The sandwich: Adobo torta from the Mexico Blvd truck, which was parked on 48th St. between 6th and 7th in Manhattan on Friday.
The construction: Pork loin “marinated for 24 hours in [their] great grandmother’s adobo,” sour cream, lettuce, tomato, jalapenos, onion and avocado.
A sign on the counter said, “Ask for XXX Spicy,” but I’m never sure if that means deliciously spicy or oh holy hell I asked the Thai place for extra spicy and now they’re obviously punishing me for it spicy. So I sort of mumbled “spicy,” after I ordered and didn’t say “XXX Spicy.” So I don’t know if this was the spicy or regular version. It came with chips and a small plastic container of hot sauce, which I used.
Important background information: I thought I had a nice little window of time carved out to purchase this sandwich, bring it back to the office, photograph it, eat it, then get down to the studio in time for the 1 o’clock thing I had to do there. But then– oh man, this story is going to be really boring. Work!
Point is, I wound up having to eat the thing in something of a hurry on a crowded bench bordering a fountain in Midtown. It was a blustery day and I was trying to secure as much personal space as possible and keep myself reasonably tidy. So I had to politely position myself between fellow bench-bound lunchers, carefully arrange the bag the sandwich came in under one leg and some napkins under the other so they didn’t blow away, then rest the carton on my lap on top of a bunch more napkins to protect my pants from what looked to be a not-insignificant portion of that adobo sauce.
What it looks like:
How it tastes: Within five minutes, the people to my immediate left and right have both finished lunch and left the bench, and a group of twenty-something business-casual types are hovering over me, obviously hoping I will scoot down the bench to make room for their full party as any reasonable and decent human being should in that situation.
I am going nowhere. My fists are full of amazing torta, and adobo sauce is dripping down my arms and splattered over my pants. The bag I took so much care to secure is adrift in the fountain, sailing north in the fall breeze. I felt it come loose when I leaned forward to prevent the sauce from spilling on the crotch area of my pants once the spillage was clearly inevitable, but the torta was way, way too good to worry about littering.
About that: Man, oh man. It tastes like what I imagine my Mexican great-grandmother’s cooking would taste like if I were Mexican and knew my great-grandmother. The flavor of the adobo — this is hard to describe — it’s almost cozy, something that makes you feel warm from the inside, not because it’s warm (which it is) but because it’s, well, warming. It makes me feel like I am being hugged by pork, and that’s the best feeling. Does that make any sense? I think it might have to do with cinnamon, but I’m not even certain there’s cinnamon in there.
Oh, and the pork loin — in a layer of thick hunks — is so tender it bites like a cheesesteak or something. Texturally, it makes for a nice contrast with the crispy the lettuce and the creamy avocado. There’s tomato and sour cream on there — Adobo Torta Supreme? — but they don’t factor into the flavor as much as you’d guess as the adobo’s pretty powerful, and if you add some of the hot sauce there’s a healthy kick, I suspect from habaneros but don’t quote me.
The bread’s soft and delicious too. It’s not quite enough to contain the sauce, sour cream and meat, but I’m not sure anything would be. This is an amazing sandwich, but you’re probably going to want to invest in a plate, or use a table, or eat it on laundry day. Or do what I do and just stop caring about getting sauce on your pants. It’s great. So liberating!
At one point, when the younguns in their trousers started straight-up staring at me, I’m pretty sure I actually snarled at them. I am nearly certain I had sauce dripping down my chin while I did it, and they looked rather disturbed and soon sought bench-space elsewhere. Good. Every man for himself out here. See that pile of napkins, dripping with adobo and sour cream, cascading off my pants and onto the bench around me? That’s the flag of my people, bro. My territory.
What it’s worth: I think eight bucks, plus the cost of laundry.
How it rates: 92 out of 100. Hall of Fame.
Tedquarters 