Sadly, the joke I've been using about this merger isn't true...yet.

My joke: "USAirways, the nation's seventh-largest airline, and America West, the eighth-largest airline, will combine to become America's twelfth-largest airline."

Actually, they'll be fifth, for now.

Blatant self-promotion**

Just in case you didn't get the memo (and I didn't send one out yet).

Joe and I have begun a new venture, Best Available Blog, so that we can better serve the community of Steelers fans. I think it's a good reflection of where we're at now. It'll enable us to cover the Steelers in an amusing yet informative way. At this point we'll need to see if we can put more bats in the middle of the lineup, while maintaining financial flexibility. Have I mentioned how excited we are to have the All-Star Game?

**Today's message is in accordance with "Talk Like Pirate Management Day"

Three things from watching a sufficiency of TV.

1. There's an ad for some idiot driving simulation called "Bad Mutha Truckers 2". Now I understand I'm probably not the target demographic for this, but every time I see this ad, I am struck by the fact that the phrasing at the end of the ad is "Bad Mutha Truckers 2. Rated M for Mature." I don't know. Somehow a title like that would be the exact opposite I'd expect for that rating. This is probably because there's no rated I for Immature, which is really something the folks who grade these things could use to great effect.

2. Flipping past OLN, the future home of the NHL, I caught Professional Bull Riding, which I do admit is an enjoyable couple of minutes of television. My enjoyment was broken however, when I realized that they were taking time out of coverage to do an athlete profile story... on the bull.

I really don't have to say anything else there, do I?

3. Flipping through TVNewser, I caught a glimpse of this, regarding Bill Wolff, the new head of MSNBC primetime:

"Wolff joined MSNBC in April from Fox Sports Networks, where he developed the daily talker I, Max. Prior to that, Wolff served at ESPN, where he was creator and coordinating producer of Around the Horn and also worked on signature shows such as SportsCenter NFL Countdown and College Football Gameday."

Wolff was the Disembodied Voice of Around the Horn...

Okay. That explains how Max Kellerman has had a job on three networks without covering any part of his expertise, his remora-like grip on Bill Wolff.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm just going to enjoy the image of Max Kellerman, Goateed Remora, going one on one in an interview with the bull. Rated M for Mature.

Sometimes I wonder if my brain just enjoys throwing practical jokes on other parts of itself.

During a meeting this morning, my mind drifted for about 20 seconds, and started on some tack about Captain Pitt, which was the kiddie show host on channel 22 when I was like 7. Now for some reason I was trying to remember the name of the sidekick creature, which I was moderately convinced was Mosey the Sea Monster. I didn't have the Mosey dead on, but I was convinced of the Sea Monster. Here's where the practical joke kicked in. My reaction, which I just barely managed to cover during the meeting with a cough, was "HOW DO YOU GET A SEA MONSTER IN PITTSBURGH?" Sure enough, this started bothering me, and in the internal monologue of my head, this was the equivalent of someone repeatedly screaming that query in my head. What hope I had for a positive meeting went right in the tank. So I started thinking, "Well, 22 wasn't the most prosperous station back then. And really, did they ever actually call him Captain Pitt? They always just called him Captain. And you know, barge captain on the Mon is not exactly the glamour profession that we think kids want to aspire to. Maybe it was taped from somewhere else, somewhere on the ocean, and then did the title boards in Pittsburgh. It's entirely possible that your whole childhood memory here was an elaborate hoax. How d'ya like them apples, brain?" (Yes, this is how my brain works.) So after the meeting, I do some googling, and find this FAQ, and find my brain was right. Now I'm trying to figure out if I knew this a long time ago and repressed it, or if I actually was able to use logic and deduce this.

As part of the MLB effort to support the Red Cross for hurricane relief, they've started putting the Red Cross logo on the sides of batting helmets, so they show up on broadcast when the batter's in the box. The problem I'm having with this is that where they've put the Red Cross is square on the spot where Sammy Sosa got nailed by Salomon Torres. If I'm a hitter, the last thing I want is crosshairs detailing where exactly one should put a fastball for maximum carnage.

So in a last gasp to remain relevant in the days before the Steelers consume all the remaining sports news oxygen in town, the Pirates put Lloyd McClendon out of his misery today. The prevailing question people have asked me over email is "Why now?" Since Lloyd was a lame duck at the end of the season, it doesn't make sense to bump him off now. There's two reasons it could matter:
The first is that following the fight between our coaches and the Cardinals coaches, and it was picking up racial overtones, somebody had to be let go to quench it. The irony of this being that once again, Larussa wins. (There's a meme of Larussa hating the Pirates and enjoying screwing them over. Personally, I think it's more like Larussa enjoys screwing everyone over, and the Pirates have just never managed to have an effective way to get the bully off their backs.)
The second reason would be if the assumption is that they want to get a coach in now, bypassing the expected hoops one would get for an off-season coaching search. This would indicate a candidate in hand, possibly that they want to bring back Jim Leyland or bring in Art Howe, as they're the only favorite son candidate not working now. (Macha, should the A's not extend him being the other candidate from the area.) Leyland, though he wants back into coaching, I can't see taking this team around the corner. Howe is either a good thing, given his term with the A's, or a bad thing, given his term with the Mets. The problem is I don't see really anyone who could move this team forward in its current configuration, or anyone who could create a configuration that would lead it out of the basement.

The other curiosity of this is that any candidate carries the possibility of being a short-termer. The other prevailing meme of Piratedom is that the management has telegraphed that a sale of the team will occur as soon as the checks clear for the All-Star Game revenues. If you assume that a systemwide shakedown will occur following that, there's no reason to assume the manager will survive it any more than the GM. So, it's not like anything's improved by this, it just makes it more uncertain.

Okay. I feel like a cat that's now playing with a bunny that's it's cornered: Do I drop the strikethru on him? Or do you think there's another act in this play?

Let's get one thing straight. I had a breakthrough a couple months ago, when I realized that I actually hate phones. I don't hate much in my life, and almost all of it is of the form "I hate that it has to come to this." But somehow I realized that in fact it has come to this. The phone is simply a piece of equipment, a medium of communications I do not wish to associate myself with any more than is utterly necessary. I'd gotten it down to the bare minimums, the occasional explanatory phone call for NAQT, the endless and tedious sessions of telemarketer harassment, the once a week call of "do I need to pick up anything before I get there", and the 3am sound of my cable box calling home. Simple clean minimalism. The phone was not a necessary component. But then I realized the parallelism. I don't like instant messaging either. There was the excuse I had for a long time that because there were three or four different formats, I didn't want the hassle of dealing with three or four ID setups. But it was more than that. IM and phones share the same problems. When I am thinking, when I am at my best, I've got three to four different thoughts occurring at the same time. You can't express that properly in a phone conversation, and as for typing that, forget it. There's an expectation of exchange of information that simply doesn't work there. I can't tell you everything I'm thinking in one sentence. This is why I like email, this is why I like posting here. I can lay out everything, edit my thoughts, keep the slanderous mambos to a minimum. (This has taken an hour to write already.)
I can also see why people are addicted to these forms of communication. And I do mean addicted. The more hooked in people are to these things, the worse it is. And I tend to find that it's about as repulsive to me as it would be to watch you shoot up. It lessens my opinion of you, if you have to take this call. If you can't break yourself off. And with a cell phone it's as if you couldn't even control yourself long enough to get home. On a cell phone, half the time I can't hear you because of the signal cracking up, and the other half of the time, you're phoning from something that I can hear in the background, and frankly, I'm usually distracted to the point that I want to know what that is, and you're talking over it, so your message isn't getting through. Now I know I've got my addictions: irony, a codependent relationship with the Pirates. But I at least think I'm aware of them.
So why is this coming to a head now? Because my birthday came and went, and now I'm sitting here staring at my 'gift'. Somebody bought me a cell phone. And I think it's worse that they did it for what they thought was the best, but for the worst of all reasons. "We worry about you driving by yourself." Great... somebody thought of the children. Given my predilections for being self-motivated, and knowing all my options all the time, if I get to the point where it's necessary to use it, it's going to be "Hi, Mom and Dad. Gonna die now. Nope, all options exhausted, completely doomed. Bye." That's of course pending whether I remember to charge the thing, or put minutes in it, and given my penchants for cheapness, laziness, and minimalism, I don't like my odds. As for getting rid of it, I can't. It's one of those, it was a gift, and I'm stuck with it, because it would break their heart. Or they got it from a cell phone store, which would make for a damn amusing return. This is one of those family things, you can't understand it. Sometimes I don't either. So I'm doomed to keep this thing in my glove compartment, kind of like the OnStar that's even closer to my head, violating my right to privacy, and not allowing me to terminate service until I actually begin being served. I realize I'm not rational on this issue, but I don't really care. I at least realize, I may not be rational, but nobody else is either.
Isaac Newton thought it a great thing that he died a virgin. I wasn't aiming for that, but I was aiming to live my life without having to deal with cell phones. Now I don't even have that going for me.

A while back in the days when people were talking about how digital TV and 500 channels were going to revolutionize the world, Joe and I kicked around the perfect notion for sporting events. Since you'd have something like seven different audio channels available for each channel, you should hook up the system with appropriate sound for each side, Audio 1 being the network feed, Audio 2 home radio, Audio 3 away radio. The kicker was setting up audio 4 and 5, drunk guys in a bar (home), and drunk guys in a bar (away). We thought it was genius, the home team fan experience, no matter where you are.** Well, I think someone else has made the connection: OpenTV

Please note the paragraph in the article:

"...Their 2.0 PVR allows viewers to not only choose amoung 4 -8 camera angles on select programming, but even more exciting they are able to choose from 4 - 6 audio streams as well. Recently during a Rugby match they not only miked the tradional commentators, but also hooked up some die hard beer drinking hooligans to their audio streams as well. While FCC regulations might restrict what fans say or do on air in the U.S., because of Austrialia's progressive censorship policies, fans were able to enjoy true color commentary from like minded fans."

**Note we thought of this prior to the FCC getting all tight about such things, so it can't work with the existing technology/legal climate, but it's good to see the theory was sound.

In the travelogue appearing here this week, you may find reference to a trip to the Carnegie Library to inspect TV Guides from 1975. While it wasn't my quest, it actually got me started on a new one. I had known about Channel 19 in Pittsburgh, excuse me Jeannatte, for a few years, since it had been a Johnstown station, which managed to get its license moved to a location within Pittsburgh's "must carry" radius. I had known that it had started up in the late 80's as an independent, and had been sort of the very low wattage station for that area. What I didn't know was that circa 1975, it had been a CBS affiliate, then sometime between then and the late 80's, it had collapsed. I would have never known this, were it not for Mike's research.

That's why I'm a little disturbed to find this data probably won't be available to researchers in 30 years. In reading this article, I find it simultaneously revealing as to the awareness of TV Guide as to its own fate, admitting to their own failures, and then promising to fix the problem by becoming completely irrelevant. I had earlier been bent out of shape about TV Guide being not much about TV any more, and now it would seem they're not going to be much of a guide to anything either. I feel a tingle... And there it goes.

Reading this article got me thinking... I really have to capitalize on the powerful marketing opportunities of fraught before I die. Look, I don't want to die and be exploited, I want to be right there to enjoy the exploitation. Then I realized that this was the perfect product. It's not hot sauce... No, no, no. It's Dwight Kidder's Original Fraught Sauce. It's hot sauce that reminds you that you're doing the wrong thing. See, it says Fraught, right there on the label. Fraught sauce combines with many things and none of them are healthy for your colon. Make your hot wings fraught wings with Dwight Kidder's Original Fraught Sauce.** Our slogan: You should know better than to use it.

**No, we are not going to see Fraught Sauce with Puppies.

More only in Western PA sports stories: Only in Western PA could someone get away with this. I can understand the first part, but only in a town with a complete love affair with the backup QB could someone claiming to be Brian St. Pierre get action.

I spent all weekend trying to figure out if this story is the worst incident of youth sports in recent memory, sadly par for the course for Western PA, or the side plot of the next Farrelly brothers movie. You decide.

You will note at no point in this article do they note how they're ripping off the Tick.

Existential joys that I'm probably alone in getting:

"With this, we have the mailing address of every high school in Wyoming! Yeah!"

We tend to be obsessive about answer lines in NAQT, since we know that people have been given liberty to do stupid things in the past, like try and do the full name of Dikemebe Mutombo, and nasty fights break out when they screw it up. But occasionally something pops up where I hesitate to put the full answer down for fear that the moderator will just spend the rest of the round looking back at the answer line going "That can't be right!" and as a result knocking themselves out of rhythm or something similar. This would be an example. [Paragraph 6] It would certainly knock me off stride were an answer line to be the first I'd heard of it.

While this story is great, in the "why was it even considered as a theory?" vein, the explanation found here for how it happened is even better.

I really didn't even need to look at where this was being done. I had that thought of, "Yeah, they're doing this in Pittsburgh, aren't they" even before I looked at the article. This does explain the whole low-level fraught vibe I've been getting in the city. You know what this means folks...more zombie voters. Frickin' zombies don't pay taxes, they won't buy anything, won't help revitalize downtown. Look, we didn't have to give George Romero tenure. I'm just saying...

As I'm looking at the front page of CNN.com this morning, I have to think they're losing their marbles, or it's a very slow news morning.

Major headline of the day: Internet transforms modern life

However, I have to think this is just a place holder until they get their research back from the two stories on the side:
Voice of Winnie the Pooh's Tigger dies | Voice of Piglet dies

I realize this will turn the crime beat people away from their Aruba vacation, but get on the stick, people. The Heffalump's turned into a spree killer!

All I have to say about this: Yes, there had to be testers involved, to make sure they got the flavor and texture right. No, that did not include your favorite stunt carnivore. No, I'm perfectly cool with not being the tester on this one.