Soccer, Nancy Grace and the Dominican Republic baseball

In case you haven't noticed, and judging by the ratings you haven't, the United States Women's national team have managed to win a few games and are threatening to climb to the top of women's soccer. I mention this because on one of the growing number of social networking sites someone mentioned that an American was cheering for Brazil. For some reason, people seemed to care which nation's women's soccer team this person was hoping would win.

It's not like this person was cheering for al Queda or for Nancy Grace (that's not a false equivalency, they're both equally heinous and should be wiped from the face of the earth). No, apparently which athletes you chose to support from the comfort of your own home or sports bar ... Ok so no reputable sports bar had a quarterfinal Women's World Cup game on but the point remains, matters to people. Look, they're just athletes playing a game. Random chance of where you were born doesn't have to dictate who you're obligated to cheer for.

In fact, I've twice found myself cheering for national teams other than the U.S. over the years.both times were in the World Baseball Classic, the sport's version of the World Cup.

I've been a baseball fan for pretty much as long as I can remember. I begged my dad when I was seven to be able to stay up to watch a World Series game on a Saturday night. He relented, not knowing the game would end up being the classic Bill Buckner game. granted, I was seven and didn't understand all that was going on, but I knew it was baseball and I wanted to watch. Add in the countless hours playing fantasy baseball and the hundreds of games I've watched and I had a pretty good idea of the players I liked and the ones I didn't. So when the World Baseball Classic rolled around, I didn't feel that I HAD to cheer for the U.S. simply because we happened to share the same nationality. I don't think Minnesotans feel the need the support Michele "I'm Driving Ozzy Osbourne's Crazy Train" Bachman simply because they share a state any more than I feel the need to cheer for some contestant on The Bachelor because she's from my state.

So I did the thinkable. I cheered for the Dominican Republic in both 2006 and 2009. Granted, neither time did they win, but they had the players I lied to watch the most. And this may come as a shock to some, but if you're using the outcomes of international sporting events to determine the amount of pride you have in your country, it might be time to reevaluate your definition of what it means to be a citizen.

At the end of the day, it's just sports. Cheer for who you want. It's not like it' something really important, like
American Idol. If you don't support the contestant nearest to where you live, you're a traitor to all that is good and just and holy in this world.

Tears of a Clown

Song 23: Don’t Cry

Artist: Guns ‘N Roses

Friday Night Fun

It doesn’t happen all that often, but there are times when I make The Wife cry. Usually it’s a result of some screw up on my part that also coincides with a stressful time at work or during our weekly ‘fingernails across the chalkboard’ session aimed at desensitizing us to sounds emanating from the depths of Hell. So far, it just annoys the crap out of us and has yet to make that sound any more palatable.

But every now and again, I can make her cry and it be a good thing. On those rare occasions when things aren’t stressful at work and I find a particularly humorous thread to pull, I can bring The Wife to tears from laughter. Often, in the middle of her laughing fits, I get told “don’t put that on facebook,” which, of course, means I make it a point to threaten to do it. Ultimately, I would acquiesce to her wishes and not post it on facebook. That’s what Twitter is for.

But every now and then, I would find my wife chuckling at something that’s really not funny at all. For a while, I didn’t think much of it. We all have different senses of humor and her’s simply included a part that found unfunny things funny. But after she told me something was amusing this weekend that was not, in anyway, comical, I started thinking, “if she finds that funny, and it’s not funny in the slightest, does that mean I’m not funny either?”

I then realized the conundrum goes both ways. When I was stuck watching Dancing With The Stars one season, I made the comment that I thought one of the red-headed dancers was kind of hot. Apparently she was not, at least compared to the other dancers on the show. (Which, to be fair, is like saying a Victoria’s Secret model isn’t as hot as the others.) She’d said that she couldn’t believe I found her attractive (I used the word “hot”) because finding a professional dancer with a body (note: this section deleted due to fear that my wife might actually read this and not find the humor in it that I might have. Let’s just say it went on for a while.) really hot is just crazy, right?

Beyonce: Wife Approved

So now I make sure there’s a broad agreement among the world that a woman is, indeed, hot before saying such to The Wife. (Acceptable women so far include Beyonce and Anne Hathaway among others.) However, each time my wife chuckles at a lame pun or cracks a smile at a joke that I wouldn’t make if it were just me and my dog (who has a pretty good sense of humor, for a dog), I cry just a little inside. It makes me question my worth, not just as a comedian (note: I’m not actually a comedian), but as a person (note: not really). On the plus side, my wife finds George Clooney hot, so maybe she thinks I look like him.

Next Song: Leaving

Artist: Hootie and the Blowfish

My brush with the edge of fame

I haven’t exactly filled my Twitter followings with the likes of influential thinkers or vapid Hollywood stars who want me to know their thoughts on the nature and meaning of existence of what they had for lunch (that applies to both groups.) In fact, I would venture to say that the “famous” people I follow would not consider themselves celebrities. A more accurate description would be “sports analysts for various media outlets whose celebrity status exists entirely within the sports community.”

One of those I do follow is Jonah Keri. You might recognize that name and think to yourself, “I thought Luke just said he didn’t follow any real celebrities, why is he following the “Get Him to the Greek” guy?” And I’d say “no, not Jonah Hill, Jonah Keri” and you’d be all like “I don’t know who that is. I hope this blog gets funny soon or I’m going to watch Get Him to the Greek out of spite.” (Note: You might want to go ahead and pull it up on Netflix and save yourself some time.)

 I first became aware of Keri though his editing of the book Baseball Between The Numbers which is essentially an idiot’s guide to advanced statistical analysis. It’s one of the five books I would take with me if I were to be stranded on a desert island mostly because there’s so much in there I don’t understand. I’d eventually forgotten about Keri until he started a podcast and had as one of his first guests Rob Neyer, (another of the aforementioned sports analysts from twitter). As a Neyer fan, I figured it’d be worth the listen, which it was - so much so, in fact, that I started following Keri on twitter and reading more and more of his work.

If you don't like this book,
I'll do nothing.

It was also around this time that he was pimping his new book, The Extra 2% which tells the story of how the Tampa Bay Rays managed to go from being an historically bad team to winning the toughest division in baseball twice in a three-year span. (I got the book for Father’s Day and finished it four days later. If you’re at all interested in baseball or the business practices the Rays used to go from worst to first, I highly recommend it. It comes with my unconditional no-money-back guarantee. If you don’t like it, I won’t refund your money.) Did I mention it has spent time on the New York Times best seller list?

As luck would have it, Keri is an avid Twitterer, regularly responding to his followers (including me, much to the chagrin of my wife, who doesn’t get Twitter), engaging in various topics of conversation, offering fantasy advice (which I’ve been the beneficiary of a time or two). He doesn’t take himself seriously (always a plus), is self-deprecating and fills in admirably on ESPN’s Fantasy Focus podcasts from time to time.

All that brings us to last week. Keri sent out a tweet looking to crowdsource a few ideas about the most underrated college football stadiums and tailgating atmosphere. He’s got more than 11,000 followers, so you and I can both imagine that he got a number of suggestions, so when I suggested Georgia Southern’s Paulson Stadium as underrated for both stadium and atmosphere, I figured it’d go into the digital wastebasket of tweets Keri received. So last weekend, I’m at my in-laws and decide I should check my direct messages (they don’t show up in my regular feed, and unless you look for them, you’d never know you had them.) As it turns out, I didn’t know I had one and the one I did have was from Keri, himself, who was intrigued by Paulson Stadium and the atmosphere around football games and wanted more information than could be sent via a 140 character tweet. A best-selling author wanted me to email him. Sure, it was for God knows what and may never amount to anything, but I still think it’s kind of cool. 

The Prettiest Little Stadium
in America

So I rattled off a 500-word email doing the best I could to explain what makes Paulson Stadium and Georgia Southern tailgating a special and unique experience. I know I couldn't fully capture what it's like to spend an autumn Saturday at the "Prettiest Little Stadium in America," but hope I was able to give a reasonable representation of what it's like.

It also didn’t hurt that it almost, kind of, maybe convinced my wife that there might just be something to this whole Twitter thing.

Mister Mister

There were two men in my teens that were instrumental in making me who I am today. Depending on what you think of me as a person, you can either credit them or blame them for that. (The Wife chooses to blame them, if that gives you any indication as to her thoughts on the matter.) No, I’m not referring to my dad, an influential teacher, coach, pastor or even an athlete. Those are all obvious choices, but failed to have the impact of these two gentlemen that, honestly, I don’t know a lot about.

Not Mr. Jones

The first I simply knew as Mr. Jones. He was a bit older than me. We didn’t do a lot together as he was usually did find time to talk to me, we’d end up telling each other fairy tales about this or that. Often they’d devolve into dreams of being famous and looking at the moving picture box in hopes that’d we’d see ourselves looking back at us.

I’m not sure what happened to Mr. Jones. We lost touch in the mid-90s and I haven’t heard from him sense. I assume he eventually found that beautiful woman he was always staring at. Of course, it’s possible he got eaten by a lion as he was trying to pass as a cat. Either way, the man had a profound impact on my life despite the fact neither of us ended up as big stars.

Mr. Wendal

The other was a man known to me as Mr. Wendal. I honestly couldn’t tell you if Mr. Wendal was his first or last name. He was simply known to everyone he met as Mr. Wendal. I’d dare say he might be like Sting or Bono and only have one name. Anyway, Mr. Wendal could be considered the crazy guy like the ones with the sandwich boards proclaiming “The End is Near” with his talk warning us about our ways. A lot of people didn’t bother to get to know him, which was their loss. I’d buy him lunch and he’d drop knowledge on me like Randy Jackson drop names on American Idol.

I don’t know what happened to Mr. Wendal either. I got busy and our weekly meetings seemed to end. Sadly, Mitch Albom stole my idea and met with some guy named Morrie on a weekly basis and turned it into a best-selling book.  Maybe he and Mr. Jones met and became famous, but nationally or internationally, but that seems unlikely as I haven’t heard of them as a duo and a Google search for the two together turns up nothing. So I guess it’s safe to say they’ve both faded into obscurity.

Unlike U2, I found what I was looking for

What a long, strange trip it’s been

Do good things,
good things happen

One of my favorite episodes of My Name is Earl relays the story of how he won $100,000 in a scratch off lotto ticket and in his excitement and zeal, runs into the street where he is hit by a car resulting in the ticket embarking on a journey through the fictional town of Camden. Willie the one-eyed mailman could have gotten the ticket if he had better depth perception. Joy, Earl’s ex-wife, could have had it if she hadn’t been so busy stealing a movie from the video store return box (I’m not sure Problem Child 2 was ever worth the $3.50 rental price it cost in Camden.) Didi, the one-legged woman almost got it, but instead the wind blew the ticket right past a triple-amputee and she ignored the ticket to fall in love. Eventually, the wind blew it back to Earl’s hotel where he found it while he was taking trash to the dumpster.

I like to think that’s similar to the journey my iPod took over the past few days. It started last Sunday when I took it with us on a drive to show a friend of ours around Wilmington. Normally, I don’t take it in the car unless I’m going to or from preschool to pick up Mini-Me. But he’d just woken up from a nap and is usually cranky, so I figured some Raffi and some Wheels on the Bus would make the little excursion a little more bearable for him.

UNC-Wilmington

Fortunately for us, it did (though unfortunately, the strawberry farm we were going to pick strawberries at was closed due to massive crowds the day before.) So after a tour of Wilmington and of the campus The Wife works at, we made our way back to our apartment. I left my iPod in the car and we apparently left the car unlocked. It wasn’t something I typically did, but it wasn’t all that uncommon either. On that Monday, our friend leaves and a few minutes later, I went to my car to get my iPod to download the latest Fantasy Focus podcast. (yes, really) Once I opened the door, I noticed something wasn’t right. First, our GPS was missing. Second, there was some loose change strewn about. I called The Wife to ask if she took our GPS for some reason. She didn’t. So next I went back to get my iPod only to find it, too, was no longer there.

I called the police, not expecting anything more than the police to take a report and use the incident as one of the thousands they receive each year to set patrol patterns. But as the officer who took the report was getting ready to leave, she said to expect a call from a WPD detective within the next five minutes. He did, indeed, call to say that someone had tried to pawn my iPod, but because the person was acting suspicious, the pawn shop wouldn’t take it. But he was 99-percent sure it was mine and figured the thief would try to pawn it somewhere else.

From there, the trail gets a little murky. The detective called every pawn shop in Wilmington trying to see if our bandit continued his tour of selling my iPod. But alas, it wasn’t to be. So the trail went cold, or so I assumed. But as the officer told me when I initially field the report, “he has to be right all the time, we just have to be right once to catch him.”

The dog did not play a
role in recovering my iPod

At some point, our not-so-bright scoff-law stole a car from Wilmington and was spotted in the neighboring county. He was pulled over and arrested and when they searched the car, they found quite a few items that didn’t belong to him, though my iPod wasn’t one of them in the car. Eventually, they called the Wilmington detective working my case and let him know what they found and he asked if the crook had an iPod on him. They said he did and the detective told them to take it from him because it was stolen. That was my iPod.

I met with the detective Tuesday to get my iPod back. I thanked him as I signed the paperwork and he told me they’d be charging the guy with my theft as well as a multitude of others. I told him I was genuinely surprised they were able to recover my iPod and he said sometimes you just get lucky. Apparently this time was one of my times.

When I was about to tell The Wife what I learned from this, she said, “lock your car and don’t leave your iPod in it.” That’s a crazy lesson that ‘s not applicable to anyone. Instead, I learned that if you’re going to leave your iPod in your unlocked car to be stolen, make sure it’s stolen by someone who will later steal a car and later get arrested with your iPod in his possession.