Return of The Rocket

Roger Clemens held a press conference today to confirm that the rumors are true -- he’s coming out of retirement yet again. Though he was being wooed by both the Red Sox and the Yankees, he accepted a one year (well, less April and May) contract to pitch for the Astros. The pricetag? $22 million.

Whoa!

Great for the Rocket, stupid for the Astros. That’s a chunk of change for a guy who’s now in his mid 40’s who won’t even be traveling on the road for you. But, like I said, it’s a no-brainer for Roger. If people are going to throw money away, take it. The Yankees would certainly have given him the same cash -- and perhaps the Red Sox as well -- but he’d have been setting himself up for failure. He had a brilliant year in 2005, but that’s because he was pitching to those pansy lineups in the NL. Oh, I can only imagine the vicious boos he would’ve had to endure from either the Red Sox Nation or the Bleacher Creatures when (not if) he got lit up by the Yanks or the Red Sox, respectively. He played it safe. Smart guy. Plus, one of his sons, also a pitcher, is in the minors in the Houston system and he’ll be coming up soon so they can play together.

The next big question for Roger. When he really honest to God FINALLY retires and gets into Cooperstown on the first ballot, what uniform will he wear? Watch him act like a prick and go in with a Red Sox uniform, despite the fact that he was booed out of Boston in his final year there and he won his only World Series championships with the Yankees.

Lastings Milledge: Potential Pied Piper of Baseball?

The media is really bigging-up this prospect for the Mets, Lastings Milledge, who was brought up to replace Xavier Nady, who was placed on the disabled list after an emergency appendectomy.

Check out the ginormous crucifix homeboy was sporting. I guess you need to ward off the undead at Shea. ;)

All kidding aside, although this kid is reported to have great talent and the Mets need to continue this trend towards using younger players, Milledge has some nastiness in his background:

When the Mets drafted Milledge in 2003, they knew he had some problem at school, something about getting in trouble for having sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend. Milledge was expelled from Northside Christian School in St.Petersburg, Fla., and agreed to enroll in a juvenile arbitration program to avoid prosecution. The baggage was enough to scare off several teams, and Milledge, projected as one of the top three picks in the draft, fell to No. 12.

Soon after Milledge was drafted, the Daily News reported that he had been accused of having sex not only with his girlfriend, but with 12- and 13-year-old girls as well. For that reportedly consensual sex, he and the girls were expelled from Northside.

Milledge and his parents, who met with a Daily News reporter three years ago to discuss the allegations, denied he had sex with the younger girls. But a source with the Pinellas County State's Attorney's office, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The News at the time that if Milledge had not agreed to the arbitration program - with the approval of the girls' parents - he would have been prosecuted as a juvenile for molestation.

Obviously he was a teen at the time and the girls were teens (sort of), but red flags are going up. He could be the future R Kelly of baseball. Not good.

Read more...

El Duque

Have I mentioned to you that baby Orlando is named after MLB pitcher El Duque?

I’m happy to see that Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez is back in New York, even though he’s pitching for the wrong team. El Duque gave up three runs on five hits and three walks while striking out seven in hit debut with the Mets on Sunday. Not bad.

And as we all know, as the weather gets hotter, so does he.

Orlando on KFC

Hi!

I don’t have teeth yet, but when I do, I will want to eat meals like the Famous Bowls at KFC. This dish is something that someone mature -- like a two-year-old -- must’ve created. They take a bowl and put everything on the menu in it in layers! Popcorn chicken on top of corn on top of mashed potatoes topped by gravy and cheese!!

Look at all the pretty colors!

Some people may say, “Eeeuw!” but I say, “Yum!”

Or, I will say “yum” when I have teeth.

Bye now!

Legion of Super Villains

A few weeks ago terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Administrative Maximum United States Peneteniary in Florence, CO. This prison, nicknamed Supermax, houses 394 of the most infamous characters in the penal system including:

• Terry Nichols, accomplice to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (who was himself housed there before being executed).


• Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack.


• Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali and Wadih El Hage, convicted of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.


• “Shoebomber” Richard Reid.


• “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski.


• Olympic park bomber Eric Rudolph.


• Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent who is serving life for spying for the former USSR.


• Woody Harrelson’s dad, Charles Harrelson, who is serving two life sentences for the murder of a federal judge.

Uh, am I the only one here who grew up reading comic books??

They’ve put nine supervillains in the same facility and given them almost four hundred potential henchmen.

I know I’ve seen this plot before. They’re going to team up and break out!

I hope someone has the Justice League on speed dial.

714

From Yahoo News:

Barry Bonds tied Babe Ruth for second place on the career list with his 714th home run Saturday, ending a nine-game drought with a shot into the first deck of elevated stands in right-center leading off the second inning against the Oakland Athletics.

...

The ball was caught on the fly by 19-year-old Tyler Snyder of nearby Pleasanton, who was cheered by fans around him and quickly left the Coliseum with his souvenir.

I hope he at least signs the ball for the kid, you know?

Read more...

Never knew glove like this

Remember Danny Almonte, the Dominican kid who threw a perfect game in the Little League World Series in 2001, only to have that stat negated because they lied about his age? Well, he’s in the news again for another age-related matter. It turns out he’s married to a 30-year-old woman.

Almonte, who is 19 and still hasn’t graduated from high school yet(!), is expected to be drafted by an MLB team this year. Could the 30 year-old wife have hooked up with him in anticipation of getting paid?

Naw.

Read more...

Galactica/TV Guide Promotion

Dynamite Entertainment announced today that TV Guide is offering an exclusive sneak peak of their all-new Battlestar Galactica comic book series.

In cooperation with SCIFI, Universal and TV Guide, Dynamite’s Battlestar Galactica #0 will be featured in the May 22nd issue, with subscriptions begin being mailed on May 15, 2006. The exposure of the comic is expected to reach millions of TV Guides weekly readers, and through it the fans of SCI-FI’s hit TV series, Battlestar Galactica. An interview with series writer Greg Pak will be included to bring awareness of the comic to the potential untapped readers that TV Guide has to offer.

Interesting promotion. But the timing is weird. They should've dropped this at the beginning of the new season.

Read more...

City of Men

I occasionally find some interesting programs to watch on the Sundance channel and City of Men (Cidade dos Homens), a mini-series about two boys living in the slums (favelas) of Rio de Janeiro was a gem that left me wanting more.

The series is a sequel of sorts to 2002's City of God (Cidade de Deus) which shows the rise of the drug trade in Rio in the 60's and 70's. City of God is gansta movie with a bunch of black kids running around doing wrong, but it feels very different than the typical urban American fare we've been seeing for the past twenty years. Besides the fact that the characters in the movie are speaking Portuguese, these kids are really poor. They put the "p" in poverty. Not "I only got basic cable and one pair of sneakers" poor. These kids from the favelas are "I gotta bathe in a public fountain because we have no plumbing in my entire neighborhood" poor. That's a reality check for some folks.

The protagonists of City of Men are two cute 13 year-old boys, Acerola and Laranjinha, who seem really small for their age. Perhaps they're small because, unlike their American counterparts, they can't simply walk to the local McDonalds and say, "Super size me" whenever they get hunger pangs. A 99 cents extra value meal is beyond their reach.

We never see their parents, though Laranjinha's mother works somewhere that takes her away from home for long periods of time. Maybe she's a domestic. Maybe she's a whore. Both boys are apparently being raised by their grandmothers.

We follow the boys on their adventures in their ghetto. The things they want and need are so simple it seems alien. In the premier episode the boys want to go on a field trip to a museum, but they can't scrape together the measly $6 (!) fee. In another episode Acerola's sister becomes the girlfriend of the neighborhood's chief drug dealer and Acerola is ecstatic when the drug lord gives him a used pair of sneakers. In a Tom Sawyer-ish endeavor in another episode the boys make a map of the favela and name the streets to solve the problem of getting the post office to deliver mail to everyone. In an episode that steps outside of the favela, Laranjinha's life is contrasted with that of a middle class white kid who also lives with his single mom and worries about his disintegrating friendships.

Sundance only showed the first four episodes of City of Men, but according to the BBC site there are nine episodes. I hope they air the rest soon.

Border Patrol

The president is going to address the nation tonight to outline his proposal for deploying 5,000 National Guard troops to stop illegal immigration across the 2,000 mile border with Mexico.

Let me do the math...

Okay, that's 2.5 guardsmen per mile.

Oh, wait -- it's against the law to actually place the guardsmen on the border, so they're going to use them to do administrative duties to free up the actual border patrol. So men and women who are already burned out from doing tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq will be deployed to border towns to make Xeroxes for six months.

Is there any incentive to joining the National Guard nowadays? And surely 5,000 troops isn't enough to make a difference, so why bother? Conduct a massive effort to penalize the employers that are hiring the illegals if you're serious and this is not just an exercise in making people scared of Mexicans feel secure. But shutting down businesses and sending white collar folks to prison is not sexy.

Should be a good speech.

Portraits at Sears

Yesterday I took Orlando to Sears to get some pictures taken. He pretty much wanted to sleep through the whole thing, so the photographer had to go to great lengths to get him to open his eyes.

They gave me the above collage for "free," but the total cost of the package I bought was just shy of $300.

Ouch!

He looked so cute, though. :)

The rest of the pictures will be ready on the 26th.

Battlestar Galacticsimpsons

This is cute. A fan drew some pictures of the Battlestar Galactica cast as Simpsons characters.

See the rest of the images here.

Cinco de Orlando!

Today's my birthday! I'm one month old. Here's a new picture for all my friends.

I have an "outie" belly button!

American Inventor

Okay, this program is bullshit, but I'll admit to watching it. The premise is this: self-proclaimed inventors from across the country showed off their wares to a panel of four judges. The judges narrowed the field to twelve semi-finalists. The semi-finalists were each given $50,000 to polish up their invention. Based on what they accomplished in that round, the field will be narrowed to a final four and the ultimate winner will get $1 million.

For me the bullshit detector went off when I saw how many of the inventions involved bodily functions. Are people really that fixated on peeing, defecating and farting? There was a guy who had a cape that you could don so that you could pee into it if you couldn't find a toilet. There was another guy who had sanitary napkins with a carbon filter that were supposed to take away the stench from a fart.

Come on!

These people have to be ringers. They've got to be actors that were paid to look stupid. Who would honestly believe that they could win a million dollar completion with a toilet paper/hand lotion combo dispenser? Or a stick that's supposed to ward off mountain lions?

Now that they're working their way down to the final four, the inventions are a little more viable. There was a portable gym, a tool for rapidly making sandbags and a reversible umbrella, among other things. Unfortunately, none of the inventions shown is really worthy of a $1 million prize. Still, American Inventor is interesting enough to watch on a boring Thursday evening.