More Red Sox

Even if you don’t like sports, you have to admit that this is a pretty cute story*:

For instance, before 2004, I never would have called my father for a “Who’s winning the MVP?” conversation before the final out. I never would have started recording the ninth inning on our bedroom TiVo just to give the World Series celebration “SAVE UNTIL I DELETE” status. I never would have pulled my daughter out of bed after the seventh so she could watch them win, even though she yelled, “No, I don’t like baseball!” every time we turned on a playoff game this month. Things are just different now. The 2007 Red Sox were really good, they will continue to be good, and that’s just the way it is. They weren’t going to blow Game 4.

I promised my daughter there would be a payoff at the end — that somebody on Colorado would make an out, that the Red Sox players would jump on each other and celebrate, that there would be dancing and hugging and everyone would be really happy. She understands absolutes (words like “happy” and “dancing” and “hugging”) and understood something special was about to happen, but she had never heard the word “celebrate” before.” She liked the way it sounded, so she kept saying it. Celebrate. Every time something happened in the last two innings — a strikeout, a groundball, whatever — she’d ask me why they didn’t celebrate and I had to keep telling her, “No, you’ll know when they’re celebrating, I’ll tell you when.”

Eventually, she started watching me to play off my reactions. When Jamey Carroll cranked that one-out, 0-2 fastball in the ninth, for a split-second, like every other Sox fan who had abandoned their anti-jinxing rituals, I thought I had screwed everything up and screamed, “Noooooooo!” before Ellsbury hauled in the catch and she asked me what happened.

“That guy almost screwed it up,” I told her

“Oh.” She thought about it for a second. “They’re not going to celebrate?”

“No, no, they’re about to celebrate,” I told her.

We moved to the edge of the bed. I was sitting down; she was standing between my knees and leaning against me. Paps uncorked a 2-2 fastball for the clinching strike (“Yesssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!”), whipped his glove in the air and flipped out like he always does. If there’s an enduring image of this 2007 Red Sox team, it’s the sight of a wild-eyed Papelbon waving Varitek towards him for a postgame embrace — he always looks like some drunken Boston kid who just sucker-punched somebody in a bar and wants the fallen guy’s buddies to run over for a full-scale brawl. COME ON!!! LET’S DO THIS!!! Once Varitek jumped into his arms, the entire Boston team mobbed them within seconds, and everyone eventually settled on jumping up and down in a delirious circle. A few seconds passed before my daughter finally turned to me with a big smile on her face.

“They’re celebrating,” she told me happily.

*Note to ESPN: I’m not trying to cramp your style, just trying to share the story. If my blog ever becomes popular and you find this, just drop me a line and I’ll change it to a simple link. Good doing business with you!

Toilet Rats

I was debating whether to share this story, but in the end I feel it is for the greater good. The word needs to get out so that when the other dozens of people in the city have to deal with this problem, they’ll be informed as to what to do.

On Saturday morning I awoke to the shocking site of a rat trying to climb out of my toilet. Now, as luck should have it, either due to the long swim or just being small (read: not New York City subway size), this was an impossible task, but that didn’t keep me from freaking the fuck out. (Okay, anyone who knows me knows that I don’t really “freak” out, but let’s just say I was greatly alarmed.)

What was the first thing I did? I got on Google, of course. I was lucky enough to come across this handy web site:

Rats live in sewers and can follow the food in pipes up to your toilet

• Keep your kitchen sink rinsed clean and use garbage disposals as little as possible.
  • Rinse out your kitchen sink once or twice a month.
  • Use 1 cup of bleach (an alternative to using bleach, 1 cup of baking soda followed by 1 cup of vinegar) and rinse with boiling water.
• Never throw grease down the drain.
• Keep your toilet lid down when not in use.
• If you find a rat in your toilet, flush it! (hint: squirt a little dishwashing liquid under the lid into the bowl, wait a couple of minutes then flush)

That’s right. Just flush it, and problem solved. Well, not quite. It took four flushes, with last time making use of the dishwashing liquid (I’ve heard that’s to poison the rat; I used it simply to make it hard for the little guy to climb anything), but eventually the job was done.

How might this happen, do you ask? Check this:

That’s how.  People have asked if it simply climbed up there from some other place in my apartment, but I don’t have any holes anywhere (trust me, I looked), nor any open cracks from doors or windows where it could have slipped through.  It was simply one of Seattle’s finest sewer rats trying to find a better place.

The RIAA Should Take Notes

This is how you really deal with pirates (from CNN):

A U.S. destroyer has entered Somali territorial waters in pursuit of a Japanese-owned ship loaded with benzene that was hijacked by pirates over the weekend, military officials said Monday.

…

In May, a U.S. Navy advisory warned merchant ships to stay at least 200 miles off the Somali coast. But the U.S. Maritime Administration said pirates sometimes issue false distress calls to lure ships closer to shore.

The pirates are often armed with automatic rifles and shoulder-fired rockets, according to a recent warning from the agency.

Go Sox!

This is one of the coolest pictures from the chaos last night.