Where Your Humble Blogger Loses All Dignity

Well, I did it.

Let me take that back: They made me do it.

I never started out wanting an iPhone.

I never wanted to feed into the massive corporate machine that is Apple.

I never wanted to validate their closed architecture operating systems and regimented control over all third-party apps.

I never wanted to validate this guy:

But, alas, I did. But I maintain that it was everyone else who made me do it. It was LG, and Samsung, and Blackberry, and Palm, and Nokia, and Windows Mobile, and everyone else who just can't seem to make a phone that is even remotely in the same league as the iPhone.

I read plenty of reviews on the iPhone before I exchanged my LG Incite for it, and most of them basically said this:

Cons: Can't copy and paste text, battery life good but not spectacular...ummm...the case isn't aluminum anymore?

Pros: It is a phone that works right the first time and is actually fun to use.

Seriously - go read them for yourselves. I'm not saying the iPhone is perfect; no one is. But the crux of the issue is that the iPhone kicks everyone's ass on the features that actually matter to everyone. I mean, I kinda enjoyed having to edit the registry of my Incite to make it run Internet Explorer a little bit quicker, but in reality I'm much happier playing around in the app store and flicking between my home pages. I mean, I kinda enjoyed trying to figure out why the microphone on my phone would cut out after I loaded Windows Live Search, but in reality I'm much happier watching Shazaam do its crazy magical song-finding shit.

It pains me to write this, it really does. And when it comes to computers, I will always be a PC nerd because I like fucking with all that stuff. But I'm sticking with the iPhone because it works.


ooh plus it has a level and a flashlight~!

And on and on and on

So here we are, a full six days after my last blog post wherein I stated my jubilation that the red sox were out of the bidding for Mark Teixiera. Turns out, they aren't. Turns out, they are still the favorites. That is, if you are willing to believe Buster Olney.

I used to like Buster Olney's writing - a bit dry, but he seemed to have a pretty good grip on things. Plus, he spent two years as a beat writer following the Orioles. But the last two weeks have really made me reconsider my opinion on him; and to be frank, most reporters for the major news outlets.

It has been a kind of perfect storm around here for the last two weeks - things have been slow at work, I am enthralled by the whole Teixiera pursuit, and rumors are flying around everywhere. I have an add-on to my Firefox browser that allows me to see every update to MLB Trade Rumors as it is posted. I am following every link. I am reading every forum. For the first time, I'm putting the pieces together.

And what I've found is that none of these reporters know dick.

And yet, they will all take the same half-second blurb or soundbite or e-mail snippet and spin it in the direction that their sports editor wants them to spin it, and while they're at it, add a paragraph or two that expounds on this statement based on...well, based on horseshit, basically.

The Olney column that I linked to above is a perfect example of this. The Orioles have not made one single statement about their offer to Tex since the beginning of last week, when MacPhail said that their offer was "flexible". That's it. No leaks, no rumors, no statements, nothing. And yet, Bad-boy Buster has been making the absolute clear statement that the Orioles are completely out of the bidding. Based on what, exactly? Similarly, he has been repeating and repeating that the red sox are the 'clear' front-runners. Again, based on what, Buster? If you have inside knowledge that no one else is privy to, I'm sure that your ass would be putting in bold print at the top of your page, "according to an inside source...". But you really haven't made a statement like that.

You're going off of the same bullshit, third-hand, expired information that everyone on the Intro-net has been hashing and re-hashing for the last week. The only difference is that you work for ESPN and you have the balls to report your gut feelings and opinions as fact.

This would typically be the kind of thing to really disappoint me, but I feel as though I'm not alone in feeling this way. Baseball and sports fans in general now have access to exponentially more information than was ever available in the past, and I don't think I'm alone in coming to the realization that some of these reporters are bullshit artists of the highest order.

So anyway, don't take these reporters at their word just because they work for a big newspaper or magazine or gigantoid sports media outlet. They can be just as lazy and full of bullshit opinions as the rest of us - its just now that we can call them out on it.

Main St. Sterling

Yesterday I spent the day driving around Northern Virginia making sales calls, which as you can imagine, was just about the most fun I've ever had in my life. Actually, it wasn't all that bad, but the absolute highlight of the day was my stop in Sterling, VA - I had never been there before, but I was taken with it.

I'm sure that there is a 'real' section of Sterling, with a main street and houses that were built before last year, but the part of Sterling that I saw was the brilliant fake city/main street that they had built as sort of a giant outdoor mall. I've seen this type of thing before, but never to this level. The 'town' has its own streets, benches, lampposts, mailboxes, the whole nine yards - but it is all fake, and built around the franchise stores that they were able to get to move in. Plus, for good measure, there were some pre-fab cookie-cutter townhouses and condos around the 'outskirts' where people could live when they aren't getting coffee from Starbucks and shopping at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Its all very surreal, and I guess I don't really have anything against it, except for the fact that they are trying to re-create a small-town, main street style atmosphere with the very corporations that destroyed the real small-town main streets.

In my hometown of Waynesboro, PA, we actually used to have a Main St. with real shops that people actually went to and purchased goods and services. There was a laundromat, a JC Penny, a McCrory's, a shoe store, a hardware store, a bakery, two banks, a candy store, a couple of kid's clothing stores, a library, town hall, a comic book/baseball card store, the whole nine yards. It has steadily been in decline since I was about 8, thanks to a Wal-Mart, Applebee's, and other corporate stores moving to the surrounding area, and now all that remains is a shitty Chinese restaurant and a pizza place that no one ever goes to.

I guess that's part of life and the ebb and flow of free market economies, but I feel sorry for kids that are growing up in Sterling, VA, whose only experience of a small-town main street is one that is populated by AT&T, Baja Fresh, Lowe's, and Pizzaria Uno.

Ah well. At least I still have 24.