One of the trends in TV production these days is to display your shot on a monitor…and then shoot the monitor. Local news stations do it by rolling video on a TV in set and using a crane cam to slide from it to the anchors. American Idol did it all season long by zooming in on the screen and not letting you know you’re watching them on a monitor through a camera…only to pull the crane cam back and show you what’s really going on.

Cute.

Too cute sometimes.

About a month ago Fox Sports Net Midwest crossed the line. During a Cardinals game they did a locator shot (a shot used to show you where you are, usually to bump into or out of commercial break) from outside of Busch Stadium. There was a small TV monitor sitting outside one of the main gates showing a replay of a play from earlier in the inning with the lights of Busch Stadium shining down upon it.

It was an innovative and original shot. The director, of course, immediately rode it to death, showing it constantly in and out of break. And then they took it too far:

Yes, in the middle of the inning…with Yadier Molina at bat…they went to the monitor-within-a-monitor outside. Did they show a pitch or any action this way? Thankfully no, but it’s the only way it could have gotten worse. After a couple games they put the shot back in the vault and I haven’t seen it yet which is probably for the best. This type of cute production can really spice up a broadcast, but you have to know when enough is enough.

We’re in Litchfield. I had to check my own website to remember if I’d actually talked about this, but then I remembered that I mentioned the radio station and Wal-Mart and several other things so I most certainly let the world know where we now reside. And I did. So yay me.

Perhaps my confusion results from the fact that I haven’t written anything in almost two weeks after I went through the painstaking kind of rough task of redesigning the whole shebang. Chalk the absence up to a combination of being busy and being lazy if that makes any sense. Doesn’t really to me, but there it is.

• I’ve been a member of the Route 66 Association of Illinois for a few years now but never got involved until January when Emily and I attended their quarterly meeting in Pontiac.  Now we’re involved in a big way, as after this last Sunday’s meeting in Hamel we’ve become the Montgomery County representatives for the Association.  It’ll be a good opportunity for us to promote the road and the Association at several festivals in the area, and it got me motivated to work on DigitalRoute66.com again - enough so that it may relaunch as early as Monday.  Shocking, yes. I’ll probably head out tomorrow to take pictures along the Carlinville Alignment as well and give Macoupin County some more love on the website before long.

• Being back on the radio is not as exciting as I thought it would be. It’s far more so.

• I picked the Cardinals to finish third this year behind the Cubs (1) and Brewers (2). I stand by my prediction.

It was warm today.

There was baseball - high def baseball - on my television.

It didn’t snow.  For once.

The Cardinals won.

I went outside.  In short-sleeves.  Without a jacket.

This is nice.

Baseball!

Spring training games start tomorrow - thanks to my XM Radio subscription there are three games I can listen to starting at noon Wednesday and say “I wish I was listening to the Cardinals instead.  Or even the Cubs.”  As useless as exhibition broadcasts featuring teams you care little about seem to be, at this point it’s BASEBALL and quite frankly I’ll take anything I can get.

ESPN has the Braves and Dodgers - in HD - Friday at noon.  Victory!

• Albert Pujols was not named in the report. Neither was Darryl Kile. No matter what the list circulated before the report erroneously stated. For that matter, neither were Kerry Wood or Mark Prior. Given the limited number of witnesses, this doesn’t exonerate anyone. And more names may come out in the future after federal investigations are complete. But after years of random, pointless speculation about Pujols I’m hoping it shuts a few people up. At least for now.

• Roger Clemens is the ass we always thought he was, and his two month wait to join the Astros in 2006 was probably the widely speculated super-secret steroids suspension from Selig.

• Don Fehr is the ass we always thought he was, and he should be fired as head of the Players’ Union.

• Good timing, Houston. Enjoy your new shortshop.

• The Mitchel Report joins the chorus of recent studies that seem to indicate that HGH is pointless as a Performance Enhancing Drug and does nothing to help a player:

A number of studies have shown that use of human growth hormone does not increase muscle strength in healthy subjects or well-trained athletes. Athletes who have triedhuman growth hormone as a training aid have reached the same conclusion. The author of one book targeted at steroid abusers observed that “[t]he most curious aspect of the whole situation is
that I’ve never encountered any athlete using HGH to benefit from it, and all the athletes who admit to having used it will usually agree: it didn’t/doesn’t work for them.”

The report goes on to discuss the negative aspects of HGH, namely the side effects that include cancer, impotence and arthritis among others. Mitchell seems to feel that HGH should remain a banned substance because of the potential for adverse health effects, and that’s fine with me. But the public needs to finally embrace that HGH IS NOT A PED. Call Rick Ankiel a cheater all you want, but every study indicates that HGH does not enhance your ability as an athlete in any way. Perhaps it is a minor aid if you want to use it in tandem with a real PED like anabolic steroids, but without the presence of that greater sin you cannot accuse one of cheating. And the use of HGH does not imply that the player used steroids. It simply implies that he attempted to gain an advantage through the common incorrect opinion that HGH does a damn thing to help you build muscle mass.

The sun sets on Busch Stadium and the Cardinals’ 2007 season. Three hours later St. Louis would defeat the first place Cubs, their first win in ten games, only to lose the next two. The Redbirds will have their first losing season since 1999.

As much as it annoys me when the masses deflate the Reigning World Champs by speaking ill of their mediocre 2006 regular season, I think I’m beginning to enjoy the idea of rooting for a sub-genius ballclub. It takes all the pressure off.

The author of the now-defunct Redbird Nation blog wrote in August of 2004 that the Cardinals that season seemed to win “every. damn. day.” and his summation was dead-on. Imagine how anxious and bored fans can get during the last week of the season once their team has clinched a playoff spot and how the subsequent four-game series at the fifth place club’s ballpark seems to exist only to delay the upcoming fun of October. Then take that feeling and apply it to the entirety of the year’s eighth and ninth months. That’s how Cardinals fans felt in 2004, starting on July 20 after the Pujols Game at Wrigley when the Redbirds came back from 7-2 and 8-3 deficits to sweep a two-game series with the 2003 division-winning Cubs, putting Chicago ten back in second place with no more meetings between the two. The Champs are dead; long live the Champs! Just two more months before a game matters again!

(I know. You’re totally sympathetic towards the fans being forced to root for such a successful club. I know. Anyway…)

After 105 wins and six months of dominating the Senior Circuit the Cardinals lost Chris Carpenter and the offense got tired, and the Red Sox promptly swept the NL Champs, dancing with Jimmy Fallon on Bob Gibson’s mound and inflicting three years and counting of smarmy Bill Simmons columns onto the world. God, I hate the Red Sox even more than the Yankees.

A year later St. Louis won 100 games, but again the offense struggled, this time a series early as the Birds fell repeatedly in Houston, winning a single game there only thanks to Albert Pujols Brad Lidging the shit out of Brad Lidge and giving me the opportunity to turn “Brad Lidge” into a verb just in time for Scott Podsednik to go and use it in the World Series. Congrats on that five-year contract extension, Ozzie!

To sum it up: two seasons, 205 wins, just one pennant, no world title. Each year that last best-of-seven series turned a campaign of joy and high expectations into a disappointment ready to be filed away in the same folder as 1985, 1987, and pretty much every year since 2000.

Then came 2006.

On May 25, 2006, the Cardinals had a record of 31-16, the best in the NL and second in all of baseball only to the Tigers, whom the Cards trailed by only a game and a half in the meaningless overall standings. They led the Reds by four in the Central and were considered by most favorites to run away with the Central for a third straight campaign, especially with Houston off to a tepid start. This time they had to win it all.

Over the next month, the Cardinals went 11-16, reducing their lead to just two games over the Reds. While they would stabilize in July, by August 25 they were only seven games over .500 and had a one-game lead over Cincinnati. After a summer of lackluster play, they were still considered easy frontrunners for the Central crown. Mediocre as they were, so was everyone else in the division.

We know how this ended: St. Louis struggled mightily in September, dragged down by injuries to Rolen, Edmonds and Eckstein, and limped into the last day of the season needing Atlanta to beat Houston in order to avoid a makeup game with the Pirates and a potential one-game playoff in Houston. While Anthony Reyes was shelled at Busch, Bobby Cox did his duty, and the Redbirds, somehow, won their third straight division title, making everyone in Mound City roll their eyes and say, “Fuck, now we get really embarrassed!”

Then their team went 11-5 in October and won their tenth world title. OMG WTF? How?

This 2006 club, good as it was for most of the season, was not a club that seemed to win “every. damn. day.” Or even, at times, every. few. days. And, in retrospect, it made the playoffs a hell of a lot easier to live through. In 2004 it was not only heartbreaking but even almost embarassing to see the Cardinals lose in the World Series, as it seemed to invalidate everything they had accomplished over the previous six-and-a-half months. Falling short in ‘05 against the perenially underachieving Astros, a team that they bested just one year prior, was even more humbling. But who really expected the Redbirds to do anything in 2006?

It sucked to see ESPN’s experts all pick your team to get drummed out in the NLDS, but on the other hand it released a lot of pressure. If San Diego had beaten the Cardinals in the playoffs (an admittedly laughable premise that causes my sides to hurt,) Cards fans could have shrugged their shoulders and said “yeah, we sucked this year.” A loss to the Mets in the second round would be even more explainable, and losing the Series to the Tigers, while certainly not enjoyable, would have been an acceptable finish as well as, at that point, almost anticipated. The 2006 playoffs, unlike the two previous years, were a pressureless,
expectation-free zone.

Which brings us to 2007. After tonight’s latest impotent performance by Mark Mulder, the Cards will sit four games out of first place with an upcoming four-game series at home against Chicago that, much like the five-game series at Wrigley in ‘03 that ended the Birds’ hope for October, could knock the Cardinals out of playoff contention. I’ll be there Saturday night along with two Cub fans who will certainly give me loads of ha-ha shit on the ninety minute drive back to Effingham.

But you know what? So what. This Cardinal team sucks, and, for that matter, so do the Brewers and the Cubs. Just maybe not as much. The winner of the Central, thanks to the way the MLB playoffs work, could go far just like the Birds did last year, and if they do then it’s because they’re the better team by virtue of doing what no other team could: winning when it counts the most. But who really thinks any of these teams will? While it helps for St. Louis fans that their club won the World Series last year and the aura of that victory will hover for a while, Brewer and Cub fans can take the same comfort if (when) their team falls short in September or October: it’s great to have a dominant, feared club, but ultimately for those teams it’s win-it-all or be ridiculed. When your team sucks, you can sit back and enjoy whatever success they achieve without being humbled by their failures.

It’s kind of nice having this weight off your shoulders. Now I know what it’s like to be a Pirates fan.

With the Cubs now in first place, let me tell you how they got there.

On Monday, June 11, 2007, the second day of our honeymoon, my new bride and I awoke in Milwaukee, planning to head up the western coast of Lake Michigan as part of the Circle Tour. Later in the day we planned on touring Lambeau Field in Green Bay, since I figured we wouldn’t be in that neighborhood for a while. First, though, we would stop by Miller Park, home of the Brewers, and take their tour that included a trip through the clubhouse, dugouts and press box. This was, to me, to be one of the highlights of our trip.

Buying our tickets on the internet in advance, we arrived about a half-hour before the tour’s start time of 10:30. Killing time, we looked around the team store and wandered into the seats for a minute, as they failed to close off that part of the concourse. A few minutes before tour time, we made our way to the starting point along with five or six other people.

After about fifteen minutes of waiting, those five or six other people marched over to the ticket window and wondered what was going on.

Another fifteen minutes.

And another ten.

Finally, thirty-five minutes after our tour was set to begin, we were informed that there would be no 10:30 tour. Nor one at noon. No, if we wanted to see the secrets that Miller Park held for us, we would have to wait until 1:30. The Mrs. and I had fancy plans and could not wait that long, meaning we would be denied our fun in Milwaukee.

Your author was (slightly kinda) heartbroken (well, almost,) and his wife could tell. Together, they decided to place a curse upon the Brewers, that they would not stay in the comfy first place position they currently favored in the NL Central Division.

On Monday, June 11, 2007, the second day of our honeymoon, the Brewers were playing .539 ball, with a record of 34 and 29. Since then, they have played .533 ball, going 24 and 21.

Not much of a difference. Some curse, huh?

Actually, this is a Curse that works in Reverse.

On Monday, June 11, 2007, the second day of our honeymoon, the Chicago Cubs were playing .451 ball, with a record of 28 and 34. They trailed Milwaukee by five and a half games in the NL Central.

Since then, they have played .667 ball, with a record of 30 and 15. They are in first place in the NL Central.

Milwaukee has company.

There’s still two months to go; the Brewers haven’t blown it yet. But they will. The Cubs will win the Central Division, all because our curse, the 10:30 Curse, is far more powerful than any once laid down upon the North Siders. Our curse is powered by Love, and Love beats a billy goat any day of the week.

Nine-hundred and change photos at 5 MB or so take a lot of time to migrate from a laptop to a desktop, and with the apartment office still a mess, more stuff to go claim from home and the onset of a cold people are waiting longer and longer for honeymoon pics. The hope is to start busting out albums tomorrow starting with Sunday (since there will be, like, five pictures…if that) but there can be no guarantees, especially if this Sudafed knock-off I got from behind the counter at Walgreens doesn’t do the trick tonight.

Damn meth users. I want the real Dayquil back stat.

• I’m waiting for the whole Chris Benoit mess to really settle in my mind. I haven’t watched pro wrestling regularly for a few years, but between 1988 and 2004 the industry was a passion of mine. Not necessarily the pageantry and typical Hulk Hogan-stomp-the-mat-fake-punch bullshit that non-fans think the “sport” is, but the more technical and high flying exhibition brought to the table by grapplers such as Bret Hart, Chris Jericho, Eddie Guerrero, et cetera. Of course it’s fake, but they can make it seem real, working together to create the illusion of two men fighting for the pinfall.

Oh, and who could forget the best technical wrestler of them all, Chris Benoit.

The highlight of my wrestling fandom, which I share with many others, was the end of WrestleMania XX in March of 2004 when Benoit, after years of being the too-short, low-charisma underdog, made Triple H tap out with the crossface and won the WWF Heavyweight Title, and then he and WWF Champion Eddie Guerrero embraced in the ring. Part of my lack of interest after that, besides the lackluster matches and inane plots, was the fact that I didn’t know how they could top that moment.

Now Benoit’s murdered his seven-year-old son, his wife, and then himself, all in a gruesome, merciless manner.

There’s no apologizing for this, or the industry, the life the wrestlers lead on the road every week of the year, and the increasing demand the fans have on the performers who work harder than they ever have on more dates than in history. It’s not easy what they do, sacrificing their bodies; the hits aren’t all real, but many of them are, and when Benoit would come off the turnbuckle with a swandive, his body absorbed a hell of a hit, night after night after night. With every new move introduced and every hardcore match that takes the violence a step further the fans ask for more to satiate their appetites, and it kind of makes me happy that I haven’t been a fan for a few years and that I haven’t given the WWF any of my money since that WrestleMania XX pay-per-view. The fans are as much enablers as Vince McMahon or anyone else in the industry, and as long as things stay the same horrors like this can’t be avoided. No one can say for certain why Benoit snapped, but the combination of steroids, painkillers, multiple concussions and very little time off to take care of family issues is a dangerous combination. All that exists to keep the fans happy, and this has to change - now.

Will I be able to watch his old matches and enjoy them like I used to? I don’t know, but, to be honest, I don’t care right now. He killed not only his wife, but a seven-year-old boy. His son. Who really gives a damn about my, or any other wrestling fan’s, ability to watch a Benoit-Malenko match and enjoy the exhibition?

• We have Mediacom cable here in Effingham, and for just $60 we get all the analog channels (including three NBCs, two CBSs, three PBSs and a crapload of other locals,) Starz and Encore, a DVR, and 8 Mbps cable internet (which, divided up amongst all the users, is comparable to 1.5 Mbps DSL. But for the price I can’t complain.)

Anyway, this is the first time I’ve had access to On-Demand, and it’s the Deal. The ability to pull up movies and TV shows at random and pause, fast-forward, et cetera is awesome; I always knew about it but was never able to experience it. It’s like a DVR, except you don’t have to record the damn thing!

We have a three months of Showtime and The Movie Channel for free, and right now the movie Waiting… is playing on demand for the second time (since little else is on.) It really isn’t a good movie, with writer/director Rob McKittrick taking a good idea (making a film from his experience working in a semi-casual Applebees-type restaurant) but he doesn’t have enough story to wrap around his few amusing anecdotes and instead kills time with poorly developed, meaningless characters and jokes about penis games. It’s really not worth much of your time.

It got me thinking though about the core story, though, that of Justin Long’s character. His situation reminded me of a lot my few years trapped in retail, particularly at Best Buy, where people were sucked in to their job as a menial electronics salesman (who didn’t make much of a living salary) and often gave up college or abandoned whatever future plans because of the young party lifestyle that the job afforded. Get up late, close the store after dark, go drinking and partying, get to bed by four, rinse and repeat; just killing time at a low-stress job with no worry about real career advancement and plenty of time to party with friends and co-workers seems so attractive that I saw people drown in the habit and waste months and years there. There are plenty of exceptions: those that finish school and quickly move on, those that get fired and are forced to change, and so on. But the film’s story of a young man lost in this seemingly innocent but realistically harmful vicious circle of employment, lackluster as it was, was in part a true reflection of a lot of what I saw at both Best Buy and Circuit City, especially the former. It resonated with me, even if most of it was boring filler.