Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Out of habit

Here's the Giants' chance to go 162-0.

Or: It's gonna be a long season.

I hope it's long and glorious, but I'll settle for just plain ol' long, the next six months of re-grooving the daily habit of following the San Francisco Giants, fresh off their third World Series championship in five years.

Have I mentioned that before?

(I know, you are probably one of the very very few who have made it to this paragraph. My baseball posts are not popular reading. Thanks for hanging with the curve.)

For the next six months we in this household expect to watch the Giants at dinnertime, just as we did last night as the Giants squeaked past the Arizona Diamondbacks 5-4 in the Opening Day game. But the Giants have trouble with two starting pitchers right off the bat (pun intended), and their superstar rightfielder is out for April with a broken arm. That 162-0 record might be in jeopardy.

Or I expect to be listening to games on the office radio during luxurious mid-week day games. I will count on my four companions — broadcasters Jon Miller, Dave Flemming, Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper — to cheer and jeer and tell with their golden voices.

(I expect as well to shirk my duties as a National Public Radio listener to check in on the morning baseball aftermath at Giants flagship station KNBR, the Murph and Mac Show, and their regular interviews with Giants and broadcasters. If they ain't talkin' baseball, I ain't listening, so I've dismissed KNBR the last six months.

(This is also a good place to mark the passing of longtime Giants broadcaster Lon Simmons. As a narrow-minded baseball fan, I don't have a lot of history with Simmons, a Hall of Fame™® broadcaster who called all kinds of sports.

(What I remember is that Simmons required you to listen to games differently than other broadcasters, to pay closer attention. He wouldn't say, for example, "Barr winds up … here's the pitch … just a little high and outside." Simmons would say, after a long moment filled only with the noise of the crowd, "Ball one!" and maybe not say anything again until, "Strike!")

Starting yesterday, we have sloughed off the tolerable and semi-dark last six months, when we replaced ballgames for "Jeopardy!" and "Wheel of Fortune" (though I had left the room by then) and Sitcoms We Otherwise Deemed Beneath Us ("The Middle," we found out, is genuinely funny in a loopy way, and carves dangerously close to the truth).

I may have to switch over to reruns of "Bob's Burgers" at 9:30 PST (I'm a latecomer to that show but now I'm hooked). By June 1, I'll have weaned myself from that habit too.

It's all baseball from then on. Everything's exciting and new!

I'm in, win or lose. I swear!


In other news:

I couldn't fit this anywhere else, but had to post it: The best email sex products come-on (so to speak) I've gotten yet:

A complete line of products for bed flaccidity

Because, of course, nothing heats the juices quite like "bed flaccidity!"

Also, I get a new round of consistent demands that I paint my garage floors, seek college scholarships for my children and get myself into luxurious senior citizen housing. Good to see what my swim friend Dave calls "spray and pray" non-targeted advertising isn't dead. Eventually, advertisers figure, they'll strike it rich with me.

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