Vegas Halo Fan

I thought that you had to be at least 80 and from San Diego to be allowed to visit Laughlin.

Let us not forget the arcane blackout rules for telecasts that he has saddled us with. In every other sport, blackouts only occur within 50 miles of the stadium if the game is not sold out. With baseball, any team can claim any city as a "home market" (outside of another MLB city) and their games are automatically blacked out there unless they are broadcast on the local regional Fox network - even if the viewer has paid extra for a subscription package. This includes replays of spring training games, as I found out last year when I tried to watch a replay of an Angels spring training game on MLB Network - only to get the message, "Program is not available in your area". In other sports, blackouts are meant to protect ticket sales. Since I am obviously not going to drive to San Francisco, Oakland, Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Diego or Phoenix if a game isn't on, baseball's agenda is not to protect home teams' ticket sales, but rather to force fans to watch specific channels. Drives me nuts when the Angels are in Boston, the game is only on NESN and FS West is showing a replay of a high school football game from last year. Thanks, Bud.

One of my favorites from How To Avoid Huge Ships: This book really is one of the best huge ship avoidance references I've come across, not just for the effective methods it teaches as to avoiding huge ships, but also for exploding some of the huge ship avoidance myths that many of us take for granted. For example: - Do not charge the huge ship at full speed in an attempt to scare it off. This may work with coyotes, but it is less effective with huge ships. - Similarly, do not roll your boat over and play dead. Unless the huge ship is captained by a grizzly bear, this will not work. - Do not attempt to go under the huge ship. This is typically not successful. - Do not attempt to jump over the huge ship. Captain Trimmer presents a rather novel technique for avoiding huge ships - move your boat out of the path of the huge ship. I know what you're thinking, this goes against conventional wisdom, but Trimmer presents significant empirical evidence to support his theory. Indeed, over the long run, moving out of the way will dramatically decrease the number of huge ship collisions you will have to endure in your daily life. =============================================================== Another jewel: As the father of two teenagers, I found this book invaluable. I'm sure other parents here can empathize when I say I shudder at the thought of the increasing presence of huge ships in the lives my children. I certainly remember the strain I caused so long ago for my own parents when I began experimenting with huge ships. The long inter-continental voyages that kept my mom and dad up all night with worry. Don't even get me started on the international protocols when transporting perishable cargo. To think, I was even younger than my kids are now! huge ships are everywhere and it doesn't help that the tv and movies make huge ships seem glamorous and cool. This book helped me really approach the subject of huge ships with my kids in an honest and non judgmental way. Because of the insights this book provided, I can sleep a little better and cope with the reality that I can't always be there to protect my kids from huge ships, especially as they become adults. I'm confident that my teens, when confronted by a huge ship, are much better prepared to make wiser decisions than I did. At the very least my children certainly know that they can always come to me if they have any concerns, questions or just need my support when it comes to the topic of huge ships.

Shame that he wasn't here while Reggie Willits was with us. Probably could have broken that HR drought.

I am having a technical issue with iTunes.Whenever I load the program I get the following message: The registry settings used by the iTunes drivers for importing and burning CDs and DVDs are missing. This can happen as a result of installing other CD burning software. Please reinstall iTunes. I am running the most current version of iTunes on a PC running Windows 7. I have not installed any CD burning software. Reinstalling iTunes does not fix the problem. The suggested registry edit on the Apple website completely disables my CD/DVD drive, to the point that the computer doesn't even recognize that I have one (I reverted back to reenable it). I posed this question to Apple and they have never responded. And ideas?

It's about half what we will be paying Joe Blanton to suck/go away and mow his lawn/deplete our stock of baseballs.

There is a small group of products on Amazon.com that have become legendary because of the facetious customer reviews written about them. I had previously read the one about the Haribo sugarless gummy bears. Another one you may enjoy: The Hutzler 571 banana slicer. I was literally laughing aloud reading some of them. Pay special attention to the last one on the first page written by esc67, and be prepared to lose it when you click on the link for the suggested alternative product "for a few dollars more". Books aren't forgotten either. There are some great reviews of John W. Trimmer's book How To Avoid Huge Ships.

It's probably better than Vernon's.

I don't understand his massive hatred for Las Vegas either. The NFL won't accept Las Vegas tourism advertising for the Super Bowl, and he has threatened hotels with lawsuits for advertising Super Bowl parties - when in fact a significant part of the NFL's popularity is due to sports betting and fantasy football. Thumbing their noses at Goodell - and rightfully so - the hotels have gotten around the legal threat by advertising their parties as being for "The Big Game", which the NFL cannot trademark.

I live in a city where I can legally place a sports bet 24/7, and I have probably placed four or five sports bets in my entire life, none for more than $20. The casinos have pretty much perfected the art of separating bettors from their money (although they were sweating bullets over several 500/1 tickets out there bet before the season on Auburn to win the college football title). FWIW, those odds seem a little short given recent history. I was figuring on at least 20/1 to win the AL and 30/1 or 40/1 to win the World Series.

I believe it is written into the CBA between the players and owners. If you sign with the Angels, you must thereafter suck.

Check TigerDirect.com. They have a bunch under $1K From the latest ad

Incredibly, he was the best choice in the last election.

That might be the only spot where he could reasonably land. Although Miami is a large city, in baseball it is a relative backwater. He played high school baseball in the Miami area, and he was recruited by the University of Miami as both a baseball player and a football quarterback.

Better not pan the stands during a Packer game. One of the saddest pickup strategies I have ever read.

He may be resigned to the fact that he cannot win, but I still believe that he is convinced that he did nothing wrong. The man has no moral compass whatsoever, the kind of guy who could look you in the eye and tell you that he didn't do something you just watched him do. As far as any kind of amends, that train pulled out of the station the minute he started attacking the Players' Association. By his peers, I assume that he means fellow steroid users.

Only to create them.

Bettman still gets boos at NHL arenas all over.

That is one thing that separates Oklahoma City from any other market I have ever lived in in terms of weather coverage. Because of the nature of the weather there, none of the stations had ornaments reading the weather. They all had highly-credentialed and respected meteorologists. Every station made a major investment in the latest and greatest in weather radar. The National Severe Storms Laboratory is also located in Norman, about 20 miles to the south, and it serves as a resource to the local stations as well. In the opening scene of Twister in which the family is headed for the cellar, the television broadcast shown is real. The meteorologist is Gary England, the senior meteorologist in the market, working for KWTV Channel 9, the CBS affiliate. His stern warning - "You need to be underground if you expect to survive this" - is credited with saving a number of lives in the F5 tornado that passed through the OKC area in May 1999. In a later interview he said that he considered his words carefully, knowing that he was addressing people accustomed to tornadoes who had become almost casual about them. He had to find a way to get across to them that this storm was far worse than any others he had seen during his career.

Mathis has spent at least part of nine different seasons with three MLB teams (only one was stupid enough to let him start). He is a career .195 hitter in 1644 AB, and this is after hitting a blazing .218 (a career high for any season in which he had more than 20 AB) for Toronto in 2012. He has a career OPS of .565. On the upside, he does have nine career stolen bases. There is no substitute for speed.

When I lived in the Oklahoma City area, where tornadoes are a fact of life, every local station immediately interrupted programming for severe weather alerts, and a map was superimposed on the screen showing where the watch and warning areas were. If it was within 50 miles or so of the immediate broadcast area, the meteorologist stayed on the air and kept people advised.

IMO any remaining scrap of hope A-Roid had for ever putting on an MLB uniform again sank beneath the waves when he sued both MLB and the MLBPA. Maybe he can catch on with the Charleston River Dogs again.

I wonder how long this guy had to dig to find something that Trout was "historically bad" at.

I'm sure that we are all in a lot more danger - at least that is what the people at The Weather Channel would like for us to believe. TWC says that they are asking for a penny more per subscriber while DTV says it is quite a bit more than that. DTV has replaced TWC with their own weather station, Weather Nation. TWC, trying to up the ante, says that DTV is endangering their subscribers by depriving them of potentially life-saving information. For the moment, at least, The Weather Channel is off DirecTV due to a rate dispute. DTV says that one thing that prompted the move was customer complaints about TWC's programming, specifically reality shows. My own experience has been that I have sometimes had to wait for 20 minutes or more to get an actual weather forecast because of such life-saving programs as Prospectors, Coast Guard Alaska and It Could Happen Tomorrow. TWC devotes as much as 40 percent of their air time to programming other than weather, which is supposedly their primary mission. By the time you add in commercials, I am certain that the amount of time they spend actually keeping people informed about the weather is less than half the time they are on the air. I'm sure it is much more important for me to know what thickness of garage door will withstand a 2X4 fired out of a cannon at 70 MPH than it is for me to know that a storm may be moving in. TWC has also started naming winter storms much like hurricanes, to increase their importance, I presume. My own take on it: TWC lost the plot when they decided to add entertainment programming to their weather coverage. I used to be able to tune to TWC any hour of the day or night and apart from a brief commercial break here and there,see weather conditions and forecasts across the country. Now I have to endure literally hours of reality programming (as if I have nowhere else to find it) hoping to find a break of a few minutes to find out what is coming later tonight or tomorrow. WN is what TWC used to be: Purely weather programming. Honestly, I don't care if I ever see Jim Cantore again. I had rather keep Weather Nation. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to find an online feed of When Weather Changed History to see the impact of weather on the D-Day invasion.

...and tell everybody that his childhood nickname was Bear.