Too much upheaval makes marriedtotheoil's brain hurt

Well I'm clearly late to the "OMG KLowe!" party, but seriously, today has been an exhausting news cycle for this Oil and Bosox fan. An unusually productive day meant no internet for me, so it was an accomplishment not to destroy dinner in confusion as D tried to catch me up the news when he got home. Then, as I'm trying to make sense of that, I discover that apparently the Red Sox don't want to go to the playoffs this year after all, as they have traded three players, including MANNY RAMIREZ for some dude named Jason Bay.

Thanks to hockey and graduate school snatching a fair chunk of my time, I'm not quite as obsessively detailed in my knowledge of the MLB as I used to be, but I seriously have no idea who this guy is. Something makes me doubt he's a functional replacement for Manny Ramirez, even if he's statistically likely to bring less drama and distraction.

I'm too tired to post-mortem this yet, but I am fascinated that as it frequently seems to happen, there is an Oilers connection, beyond both teams having a high-turmoil day. According to Boston.com, this Bay guy is good buddies with "fellow Trail native and Edmonton Oilers center Shawn Horcoff".

This is really all that's keeping me from sniffling softly into my peanuts and crackerjack right now.

I need a giant Oilers flag...

to go with the giant Red Sox flag I just unpacked from a box of baseball memorabilia I retrieved from my parents' soon to be ex-house. Then we can have a both delightfully tasteless and mystifying balcony display here in Austin come October.



Any thoughts on the best place for me to buy such a thing online or in person the next time I'm in town?

And in the subtracting sports memoribilia category: Posting baseball cards on Beckett.com for sale is easy and relatively efficient, but the size of the task is still daunting. I seem to have amassed something in the tens of thousands when I was in highschool. Posting 25 took the better part of an hour today. I may have to start mailing them out as prizes for quizzes on this site.

Um, anyone want to go out to dinner in Austin?

I hear it's skate around with your mouth open good... Maybe we'll go toast our returning players there.

Book Review: Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

This is a quite entertaining "True Crime" story with a healthy dose of hockey thrown in. It follows the 1990's exploits of a terrible hockey goalie/ terrible zamboni driver/ terrible (yet astonishingly lucky) bank robber. The prose gets a bit purple at times, but if you take it with a grain of salt and enjoy the wild ride provided by the narrative, it's easy enough to assume truth really is stranger than fiction. It's also an interesting look at a very strange moment in Hungary's (and indeed, all of Eastern Europe's) history, and prompts some sobering thoughts about the pro hockey circumstances in other countries that players were fleeing from to the NHL. More than anything, I couldn't put this book down and found myself laughing incredulously quite a bit, which made it a perfect vacation read. Highly recommended for the beach/airport.

It Starts

Where has marriedtotheoil been? Using her powers of telepathy to prompt the signing of Shawn Horcoff to a six-year deal? Well yes, of course, but I was also on an extended trip back to New England for some family matters, and for what turned out to be some hard-core sports nostalgia. As I receive the boxes full of souveneirs of fourteen years of Red Sox fandom that I packed up and shipped back here, I'll be sharing some of the highlights. Also on tap will be musings about the nature of New England sports culture, and of course Oilers Oilers Oilers.

Also, some of the finest youth hockey fiction of the pre-war era I have yet seen will be excerpted. So come back often. I swear the drought is over, and fun will abound frequently.

In the meanwhile, I'm going to enjoy my Maine beach tan and follow Lowetide's sterling example and get myself a beer.