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What was I talking about? Bluegill? Fuck that– s’all about TROUT now, holmes.  Two weeks ago Lawman and I went out to Salmo Pond and I hooked some bass while he brought in three nice trout.  He even gave me one to take home and cook and it was delicious.  I can’t wait to go out there again.

This weekend wasn’t it, though, as Spacebee and I went on another World Tour from Madison down to Aurora, IL and then back up to Racine for a Memorial Day Cookout & Beer Pong Spectacular.  That was fun games day/brat patty fest.  And speaking of brats, we also hit Brat Fest over at the Alliant Energy Center on Saturday.  Every year that thing gets a little more extravagent– this year they had carnival rides, two music stages, a gigantic condiment tent, and KAYAK RIDES.  Dollar fifty brats ain’t bad neither.

On the way home from Racine we stopped at Potowatami so Spacebee could turn in her silver key for a “chance to win” $100,000.  I’m quoting it because it’s stretching things like plastic man with his dick stuck in his zipper to say that that fucking travesty is even a contest.  In this “contest” they will announce a $1,000 winner every day at 8am and 8pm from now until June 19th.  The catch: you not only have to present to win the $1000, but you have to check in within SEVEN MINUTES or they will pick a new name.  Now, let’s just say you manage to sprint from wherever you are in the casino to where you have to check in.  You get your 1K, and then you get to pick from 3 magical fucking treasure chests.  One of them has a golden ticket, which gets you an entrance to the Grand Prize drawing.  Of course, you also must be present to win the $100,000 grand prize.  I don’t know, but presume, that you must claim it within 13 seconds if you are announced as the winner.  Of course, this is the same brand of Not-A-Contest Contest that we have seen so much from the Milwaukee Brewers (often in league with the very same sham casino).  Example: “If Dave Bush throws a no-hitter and the runs add up to 21 and JJ Hardy hits for the cycle in the 10th inning one lucky fan wins a $100 gift certificate to Dream Dance!”  Fuck you, Potowatami Bingo & Casino.

So, the Brewers suck this year.  I’m really, really leaning on the fact that they play 5 out of every 4 games on the goddamned road so far this year while the Cubs whup on Pitssburgh at home seemingly every other game, but who knows at this point.  The pitching rotation is a certified mess, the pen is already shitty, and up and down the lineup dudes can’t buy a hit.  That’s not a winning formula.  And now Melvin is picking up any old broke-dick dog free agent with a 102.7 ERA which should be a terrific solution to the woes.  I say someone coat a tack with roids and put it on Gagne’s clubhouse chair.  Or something.  I’m not even sure at this point.

Next week we’re camping up in Door County so I’ll be indisposed.  Either it will be a fun trip or I’ll be buried alive in a terrifying avalanche of spiders.  The former brings untold riches of stories and anecdotes; the latter brings horrific death and this story holding the front page in perpetuity.  Seeya, cowboy.

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I’ve been busy the past week or so as work heats up and the weather turns milder. I hadn’t even seen wwhazz in a while, so last night lawman, he, and I had a bluegill feast to lighten up lawman’s possession limit. We mixed in some ramps/spinach/pasta fry and a nice big salad that changed wwhazz’s outlook on salads. Then we went to Joe’s Casino.

I got a new bike this week, and I’m getting it outfitted soon for some saddlebags and other storage stuff. Being without a car, it would be nice to be able to ride to the market and have a way to get a reasonable amount of groceries home with me. Plus it would be nice to be able to carry food and stuff when we go for trail rides without taking a bulky backpack along. Maybe I’ll post some pictures when I get the thing fully outfitted.

This is amusing.

The Brewers have been on a roller coaster of late. Two straight sweeps on the road, followed by a good 3 -out-of-4 from the then-division leading Cardinals at home, and they were on the verge of taking the series from the Dodgers when Guillermo Mota unloaded a big, stinky blown save on the mound in the top of the ninth. I wonder if he got a swirly in the clubhouse for that performance. Now the Brewers head to Boston in what will certainly be a horrific beatdown (though I do wish otherwise) by the Red Sox. The pitching just Isn’t There, and no matter how much Melvin and Attanasio talk up the rotation and the pen there just isn’t enough pitching on the team for them to go the distance in the fucking division let alone contend IN the playoffs. It would be nice to be a fan of a team where you don’t cringe in every single ninth inning where your team is winning.

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I knew that flour anecdote was gonna get me into trouble. Did you further know that salamanders used to cost $4/dozen and now they’re at $12 each? DID YOU?! Anyways, there’s some real news that makes me satisfied with my choice to sell my truck last December. It appears that the secondary market for SUV’s has, ahem, crashed.

Via Calculated Risk.

Thinking about trading in that Tahoe for a Civic? Sit down.

High fuel prices are causing the value of used SUVs to plummet, often below what’s listed in the buying guides many shoppers use to negotiate with dealers.

As a result, some new-car buyers think they’re getting cheated by dealers who are offering them little for their SUV trade-ins.

“The dealer is going to offer a price, and the customer is going to be ticked off,” says Tom Webb, chief economist for Manheim, operators of auctions where car dealers buy their used-vehicle inventories. “The guidebooks have not caught up to the market,” he says.

Just call me Boris.

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Over a lovely week-shifted Mother’s Day breakfast last weekend we had an interesting conversation about gasoline prices and the price of flour. My father told a story about a baker in Door County who was closing his doors due to the recent price jumps in flour. Two years ago a bag of flour was $6, a year ago that same bag was $12. The price of the same bag of flour currently sits at $67. Gas prices invariably figure into this primarily due to two factors: transportation costs across the board have increased, and a much larger percentage of arable land is now being used to grow corn for ethanol production purposes.

Talk turned to the specific pains caused by recent surges in the cost of gas, and I mentioned that I haven’t even noticed what with not having a car anymore. There wasn’t any detectable hostility at the table, but I suspected I was being somewhat of a boor in broaching the subject. Indeed I’m very lucky to be able to work from home, but my point was less about finding a job that doesn’t require a commute and more about modifying your lifestyle. It’s about not living 50+ miles from your work. It’s about living in a community where it doesn’t take a car and a 20 mile round trip to get your groceries and errands.

Both in private and in public I’ve often wondered just what it would take to fundamentally change the majority of Americans work/leisure habits with regard to driving, especially long distances. A few years back I naively assumed that $5/gal gas was sufficient to shock people into lifestyle change. As gas now tops $4/gal and I hear nothing but wails about the ‘evil oil companies’ (more on that below) I’ve revised my thinking that $10/gal would be the National Freak-Out Moment.  This morning, however, I linked through one of my RSS feeds to this post by Charlie Blaine.  He projects Freak-Out USA at $7.50/gal:

Gasoline at $7.50 a gallon is something nobody should go into denial over because there are going to be big problems from prices at levels I’ve suggested, including:

Will there be any U.S.-based auto manufacturers left? The answer depends entirely on how fast they can transform their product lines. Chrysler is in deep trouble already. That probably means more stress for the Midwest.

Will there be any domestic airlines left? The so-called legacy airlines (American, United, Northwest, Delta and Continental) would either try to combine into one big carrier or simply disappear. They’re having serious troubles surviving as it is. This means big troubles for cities where these airlines operate hubs that generate thousands of jobs like Atlanta, Cleveland, Newark, Houston, Chicago, Denver, Dallas, Memphis and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

How will big convention cities survive? Places like Las Vegas, New Orleans, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Houston have thriving convention industries, all built around the capacity of airlines to transport conventioneers to and from the destinations relatively cheaply. Emphasis on the word “cheaply.”

How will tourist destinations like Florida or Hawaii cope? Add to that places like, say, Williamstown, Mass., whose Williamstown Theater Festival is a big draw, or Ashland, Ore., home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. They’re not close to major cities.

One thing I see over and over is the gnashing of teeth about the oil companies and their exorbitant profits while America crumbles.  I don’t harbor any ill will towards them– they’re entire livelihood is screwed soon enough as oil supplies dwindle.  I would imagine that in the next 10 years or so the oil and airline industries will be nationalized; what other choice will they have?  With razor thin profit margins (once the average American can no longer afford their products) or even losses there will be no incentive to stay in business from a purely capitalistic point of view.  Yeah, yeah I’m expounding on economics as if I knew anything about it; it’s simply my cynical take on things.

I’d rather turn all this flailing and anger about driving to the mall to buy salad-shooters into productive activity based on ratcheting down the globalism and outsourcing that have driven so much work out of the country, and forming productive communities again.  It won’t happen overnight, but we need to focus on the problem at hand rather than storm around.

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Yes, Richards are everywhere in the Milwaukee Sportswriting Universe (i.e., the Journal-Sentinel sports page). Lately the JS has done some ‘reader Q&A’ blogs on their website, and the universal answer to every Brewer fan gripe was, “If Turnbow/Yost/Shouse/Bush/Melvin/Bernie suck as bad as you say, why is the team four games over .500?” Well, a few weeks later and now the team is just one game over .500, 3rd in the division, and coming off a disastrous sweep by the Astros (the fucking Astros!) heading into a tough series with Florida without a starting pitcher and with a closer who has the most blown saves in the majors. From their delightful Brewers Mailbag:

Q: Paul Johnson of Dubuque - How long before the Brewers fire New Yost? This season is looking like a repeat of the previous seasons—–time for a change.

A: Brewers Mailbag - Yeah, the manager is doing a terrible job. The team is 11-7 despite most of the key hitters struggling, and some of the starting pitchers as well. Got to be the manager’s fault. Sheesh.

Fuck you, he IS doing a terrible job.

Q: badgermitt of Mequon - It is early and we should not panic. It is a long season. ok, I said it 5 times fast. It seems like the same ol’ Brewers, starters not getting 6 innings and no timely hitting.

A: Brewers Mailbag - And yet the team is 11-7. Not too shabby.

Except now they’re not, and you’re a dick.

Q: Tim Trapp of Rio Rico - Ned Yost made his worse move of the young season. With a bullpen full of pitchers he brings Gagne in for a fourth consecutive day. Do they have a radar gun in the bullpen? He did not have his normal velocity and threw what amounted to batting practice pitches and lost the game. What was Ned thinking?

A: Brewers Mailbag - I think Yost was thinking that Gagne would save the victory.

And I think that you’re a dick, and that it’s not a good idea to push a questionable closer for 4 straight days when you have other experienced pitchers (among them former closers!) in the pen.

Look, I’m not freaking out about the Brewers being 3.5 games back in early May (though I do think the Astros series was horrendous). This is more about the Journal Sentinel’s sportswriters being complete assholes. If they didn’t want to answer reader questions, then why did they even create the fucking ‘feature’ to begin with? They know that sports inspires all sorts of misplaced anger and blame, then took reader questions which included the inevitable grousing about the coach and the past decisions, then wrote smug “answers” to said questions. Jerks!

UPDATE

Speak of the devil; as soon as I posted the above I got an RSS alert that a new Brewers Mailbag had posted.  And right off the bat…

Q: Jon Czerwinski of Waupaca, WI - You keep defending Yost and say the season is early but what about last year with the relative same team and the year before that and so on. How many it’s earlies do you keep giving him? Are you on Yost’s payroll? or a Journalist?

A: Tom Haudricourt - What have I written to defend Yost? I don’t remember taking any stands on that subject. I ask him questions about what’s going on with the team and then write the answers. And I didn’t know Yost had a payroll.

Umm, well, I would point you to all the responses in the past Mailbag, which included your byline.

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So much news and junk to get to– let’s get right in to it (har).

The best parts of Vegas this trip were surely non-gambling related.  The Beatles LOVE show at the Mirage was entertaining, Spacebee and I rented out a cabana at the Mandalay pool for a day, and our 2nd Anniversary dinner at STRIPSTEAK in the Mandalay may just have been the best service (and food) that I have ever had in a restaurant.  We also followed my former boss’ advice and had lunch a tiny, blink-and-you’d-miss-it cafe in the Venetian.  The result: an incredible meal.  Back to STRIPSTEAK for a moment; I really can’t say enough about how well we were treated and how great our waitress was.  We arrived 30 minutes before our reservation and expected to wait at the bar, but they wished us a happy anniversary and whisked us right to our table.  They accommodated my request for one finger of scotch to go with my salad course, and the waitress suggested I try a cut called a Ribeye Cap which turned out to be quite good.  Finally, our dessert had ‘Happy Anniversary’ written the plate in chocolate.  Little pricey, but a great place.  I would definitely go again.

The worst parts of Vegas were gambling-related.  Every time I touched the dice (or bet on others who touched the dice) I got assraped, but it was nothing compared to the utter shitstorm that awaited me at the blackjack tables.  The runs were just horrendous, with dealers actually expressing their condolences to the degree that I was pounded.  11? Double down. Get a 3. Dealer 5? 6 underneath. 21.  It just wouldn’t stop, so I did.  As a matter of fact, the most FUN I had gambling in Vegas, even if I didn’t win, was playing roulette with spacebee down on Fremont Street at the Golden Nugget.  We also had a great time playing $3 craps at the Golden Gate, even though we didn’t win there.  I have to say, the dealers down on Fremont are more fun by a mile than the dour sons-of-bitches on the Strip.

Spacebee got me a rod and reel for an anniversary gift and I’m eager to go try it out on some unsuspecting fish.

The Sausage Race this year is on July 26th.  It just so happens that that is the day that I’ll be attending Spacebee’s cousin’s bachelor party.  The good news: it’s at the Brewer Game, so I’ll be there anyways.  Everyone else, though, click here to sign up.

Speaking of the Brewers, I saw first thing this morning that they jettisoned Turnbow.  Probably for the best; when dude gives up 6 runs in a game like Wednesday’s he’s probably not the one we want.  However, now that Gallardo’s injured again we’ve got Dave Bush back into the rotation. Hurrah (sarcasm).  I’m not sure what to think at this point in the season.  The Crew has yet to put together a good run or a big slide– it’s just kind of flat.  Maybe the bats just haven’t come alive yet, and if they’re above .500 with the way they’ve been hitting so far, they could be in for a quite a little run.  I’ll just leave it at that.

Thanks again to Maddddddddddddd for letting me crash at his place last week.  Sadly it will be the last time I get to see the Little Tycoons playset from his window as he will be packing up his rucksack and hopping the next boxcar to Seattle.  Happy trails you silly little hobo.  Last Friday me and scientist did have a boatload of fun playing Whazz Classic at the Nob Hill Tavern.  I was even on my way to -20 before a stroke limit bottled my potential and threw it in the sea.  Fuckin’ whazz. whizz.

So.  I’ve cross-crossed the United States the last two weeks on Midwest Airlines and I’m ready to settle in for a long summer’s nap.  We planned a camping trip up north in June, but other than that we’ll be rooted in Madison for the remainder, cap’n.  Stop by and sit for a spell; it’s right nice.

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