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So the Sabercats lost yesterday to the Arizona Rattlers, 66-49. Ah, well. This means the Rattlers will head to Tampa to take on the Storm in ArenaBowl XVII in two weeks. I’ll be rooting for the earthquake.
“Rooting for the earthquake” is one of those concepts in sports that everyone understands, but I don’t think it ever had an official name, until I gave it this one. See, for much of my life (well, until Rupert Murdoch bought the team and basically blew it up), I was a HUGE Los Angeles Dodgers fan. And in 1989, the Oakland A’s (who I had a hatred for ‘cuz the Dodgers had just faced them in the previous year’s World Series, plus I was never a big fan of Jose Canseco) and the San Francisco Giants (who I had a hatred for because they were the San Francisco Giants, and dammit, that’s good enough for a Dodger fan) ended up meeting in October to play in the World Series.
Now, there are times when you don’t particularly care about the two teams playing for a sports championship, but even then you can find a reason to root for one team or the other. But I HATED the A’s and Giants. HATED them. No way in HELL could I throw my support behind either team. The same thing would happen today if, say, the Dallas Stars and the Toronto Maple Leafs were to play for the Stanley Cup. Just disgusting.
So I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be great if a giant sinkhole opened up underneath the stadium and swallowed up both teams and put an end to this crap all together?”
As you know, at 5:04 P.M. on October 17, 1989, right as Game Three was about to get underway in San Francisco, an earthquake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale struck the Loma Prieta area, about 45 minutes south of both teams’ home stadia. The Series was postponed ten days.
I was ecstatic. (My folks tell me I was also in shock, but what the hell.) This was, and is to this day, the closest thing I have ever had to a religious experience, the closest thing I have seen to bona-fide proof of a benevolent God. This was Someone in a Position of Power telling the planet that this World Series was never meant to happen. Tommy Lasorda was right. God, if there is one, is a Dodger fan.
So, long story short, whenever a Super Bowl or Stanley Cup Final or World Series or what have you rolls around, and two teams are playing that I really dislike, I root for the earthquake.
Comcast sucks.
You’ll find this to be a recurring theme here at Chez Fred, as their suckitude (and by extention, the suckitude that existed before they took over AT&T Broadband Internet) is directly visible on this site. Ya see, when I first started up this Blogger thing, my cable modem was handled by @Home. They did right by me, Blogger worked like a champ, and all was well.
Then the whole AT&T / @Home thing went down, AT&T took their customers hostage, and ATTBI.com was born. At the same time, talking heads started showing up on my TV screen, assuring me I would enjoy “the same great service from AT&T” that I had with @Home.
Well, if by “the same great service”, they meant “We’re gonna throttle the hell out of your download speeds, raise your rates, and implement totally asinine restrictions on network access, including access to our POP3 server through Hotmail” then they certainly succeeded. Oh, and by the way, they also closed off all access to their Web servers from outside of their network. Which meant that Blogger couldn’t publish to my site anymore. And I have YET to get hold of an egghead at ATTBI who can give me a satisfactory reason for keeping Blogger out. Thanks, guys. ‘Preciate it.
Fortunately, Blogger has a service called BlogSpot for people in my predicament. But unless I pay them money, they slap ad banners at the top of the pages they host. And I wouldn’t have to even host them there if AT&T weren’t such idiots.
Long story short, this is why the blog takes forever to load sometimes, and why there’s an ad banner on top. At least I figured out how to anchor past it.
But this isn’t why I rant about Comcast today.
I have digital cable. I noticed that with Comcast taking over the cable side of things from AT&T as well, that there were new cable packages available. I also knew there was a second tier of digital channels I don’t get, which mostly include 47 different niche Discovery Channels that I could give a rip about, but also include VH1 Classic Rock (said to be excellent for an 80’s music geek like me) and TechTV. And I want these but I couldn’t justify paying another $10 a month for them.
So I call Comcast and ask what’s up. She explains to me that woih the Digital Plus package, I would “basically get every channel but the movie ones like HBO and Showtime.” And it would cost me $2.96 a month more than I’m paying now. Well, hell yeah, sign me up, I say. TechTV, here I come! Woo!
So I get home last night, and plop down in front of the TV to tell my TiVo of the wonderous new programming options it has before it. And lo, there are a lot of new channels out there. And TechTV is still turned off. Well, this must just be a mistake, let’s call the cable company and tell ’em to turn on all of my new channels.
“Ah. Sir, you have the Digital Plus package?” “Yes, that’s correct, just got it today!” “Well, um, TechTV and some other channels aren’t in the Digital Plus package, those are part of the Digital Extra service, and those will cost another $5.95.”
What. The. Fuck.
Digital Plus, Digital Extra, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had an obscure package called Digital Extended Remix With A Twist Of Lime Served Up By A Struggling Gay Waiter, that you had to order to get the 24-hour all-Chihuahua channel.
So we sorted it out, I told them I basically didn’t want anything if they couldn’t give me the channels I wanted in one package, and they set my cable back the way it was.
But still. Digital Extra. And there is NO mention of this on the website, by the way.
Comcast sucks.
So here we are. Sunday night, I should be asleep, but I’m just not tired yet. So, a few thoughts.
I hope the four of you who read this site on a regular basis are enjoying the redesign. I’ve certainly enjoyed putting it together…I think it’s way tidier than any format I’ve had so far, and there’s actually some content here other than The Resume. (Which, ironically, is the only part that still needs redesigned – I want to port it over to the new content style format. Maybe tomorrow.)
Bought me a couple domains over the weekend. First time for me, so there is still a little ego-swell to the whole deal. The one you’ll care about is fredsmythe.com, which is now the main portal to this site. Finally, no more tildes. For those interested in such things, my registrar is GoDaddy.com, and the good people at ZoneEdit.com are doing all of the DNS work gratis. (And I’m nobody special – they offer free DNS for up to 5 domains assuming you don’t get truly obscene amounts of traffic, and I never see myself owning more then two or three, and that just for fun stuff anyhow. So unless I put up message boards with wacky Photoshop hacks and turn into another Fark, we should be OK.) It was all working yesterday because GoDaddy was doing the redirection for me, but I found out that ZoneEdit will mask the redirection for free while GoDaddy wants another six bucks for the service, and I think that looks slicker, so I set that up this afternoon, which means we’re gonna need the new nameserver information to propagate. Hopefully tomorrow.
The San Jose Sabercats are now two wins away from repeating as ArenaBowl champions. Next victim: the Arizona Rattlers, this coming Sunday at 2:30 on NBC. Go ‘Cats Go!
Alright, that’s all I have for now. Until Next Time, America…
So we had a fairly major power outage last night. I’m not sure when the power came back on, I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of ten hours all told, based on where my oven clock (the only power-dependent analog clock in the house, welcome to 2003) was was when I woke up and discovered the power was back, and the fact that my TiVo reports it failed to grab Jeopardy for me last night at 7:30.
As a result, I returned home to my apartment complex after a delightful evening with friends to pitch darkness (with workers in front and back working furiously in the rain, Glub bless ’em), and was treated to the unique experience of hoofing up three flights of stairs balancing a couple board games and a dozen Krispy-Kremes. But that’s not what compelled me to write about this.
I woke up this morning, and, having no idea myself and a houseful of clocks blinking “12:00”, I stumbled out to the kitchen to acertain the time situation. My first instinct is to grab the phone and call the Time Lady. The Time Lady rules. She always knows what time it is. So I punch in the numbers. 767-anything else, right? S’what it always was. “Hi, welcome to Qwest Voicemail Services.” WTF?
Okay, traditionally it’s listed in the book as 767-8900. Nope, no go there. How about the traditional POP-CORN? Nope. I called the operator. Wouldn’t put me through due to “increased call volumes.” Um, okay. Called 411, asked for the Time Lady. She put me through to some third-party service that wasn’t no goddamn Time Lady, so I hung up,
Long story short, I live in a place where there is no Time Lady. Or if there still is, for the first time in almost 30 years, I don’t know how to call her.
This is exceptionally disconcerting.
Okay, I’d be terribly remiss if I posted something when Chick Hearn died and skipped out on Fred Rogers.
But what can I say that someone else hasn’t said better by now? I grew up with Mister Rogers, just like every kid my age. I particularly loved the Neighborhood Trolley, and when he would feed his fish.
I think the thing that really hits me about it is this: We have a lot of parents out there who depend on television to raise their kids, because they can’t be bothered to do it themselves for whatever reason. And for those kids, Mister Rogers was their advocate, he was the one who explained the Big Shit to them that they should have been getting from their folks. The Neighborhood show aside, when Shit Went Down, when the Challenger went up, when the Persian Gulf War happened, when the WTC came down, Mister Rogers was there to tell the kids what happened, and that it was okay to feel whatever they wanted to feel about it, and that it was okay and maybe even a good idea to tell their parents how they felt.
And now he’s not here anymore. And the timing couldn’t be worse (like death is EVER well-timed, especially for a man as great as Fred Rogers), since we’re about to go to war again, we have a whole new batch of 4- and 5-year olds who don’t know what to make of it.
I don’t have any kids myself. Still a little unsure if I want ’em. But I tell you this: if someone reading this has a son or daughter, and from reading this, says to themselves “Hmm. Maybe I better sit down with my kid and see how they feel about things,” then I think I have remembered Fred Rogers in the way he would want me to have, and I think he would be proud to know that he helped me grow up into the man I am today.
Upon hearing the news this morning, on a local BBS I Telnet into, Slumberland, I remembered Fred Rogers thusly:
“Nobody but NOBODY can say that man did not live a worthwhile life, and make a positive impact on the world. And when you get down to it, that’s all we really wanna do.”
Isn’t it?
Rest well, Mister Rogers. The Land of Make-Believe is in capable hands. You should know, you put it there.
Terry Tate goes on Vacation!
Hey! A brand-new Terry Tate spot! Streak This, Baby!
And here’s one that I think teases a later movie….
Best ad of the Super Bowl. Welcome to “Terry’s World”…
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