Every Day an Adventure

Okay, it's 12:30am and I am WATCHING THE SUPER BOWL. This is really surreal. It's pretty spliced together and the commentary is all in Japanese. The commercials are normal (as in, they're showing the same commercials I've seen all night).

Before this, I was watching Ainori, but I missed a really important detail early on and ended up kinda zoning out for half of it (but Jeff filled me in later on what was going on). Before that I was watching SMAPxSMAP which was FUCKING AWESOME. Not only did they have Hakuho, a famous sumo wrestler, as the Bistro SMAP guest, but then later on they did a really funny parody skit called "Debu Note", which was like "Death Note" only anyone whose name is written in the book becomes big and fat. (I know, it sounds stupid, you had to see it I guess. I'm largely unfamiliar with the original and even I thought it was hilarious). Then, to finish off, Christopher Cross was the musical guest, so all of SMAP sang Arthur's Theme ("The Best That You Can Do") with him and it was really awesome, lots of fun.

Before that... well, Pau came over here tonight around 5:30 and we played Extra Innings, a baseball dice game, for a few hours. He had gone and rated all of the NPB teams for 2007, so this was partially to playtest some rules and some players and all. First we played Fighters (me, Darvish) vs. Lotte (Pau, Naruse) and I lost 8-4 when, of all things, Darvish gave up a 3-run homer to Fukuura. Then our second game was Chunichi (me, Kawakami) vs. Hanshin (Pau, Shimoyanagi). It was going along just fine until I was a moron and pinch-hit for Kenshin in the 8th inning and then Hisamoto gave up the game. Or more like, me rolling some 1's gave up the game. But whatever. The funny part was, we had the 2006 Fighters DVD on in the background for the first game and a Chunichi DVD on in the background for the second. And I was wearing a Fighters t-shirt all day so for the second game I decided I needed to put on my Dragons Morino #31 jersey... to be a good sport I let Pau borrow my Hanshin Imaoka #7 jersey. I insisted on doing all the player cheer songs for my teams, but apparently Pau is allergic to Tyrone Woods and so he made a point of pinch-hitting Shinjiro Hiyama, my nemesis. Anyway, Hanshin won the second game 3-2. Alas. All in all we spent about 4 hours playing.

The afternoon today... well, I did laundry, and I got lunch at Kura, and I bought snacks for gaming at Max Valu (sadly this is the one time of the year that I cannot get Pro Yakyu Chips), and some stuff from the 100-yen shop. And then I came home and cleaned up my apartment a bit since it was a royal mess before, and now it's just cluttered. Even Pau says that my place is really really small, even for Japan, though what would I know?

Wow, come to think of it, this was one majorly social weekend. If only my life was always busy like this!

Also, man, this is one FAST superbowl replay. One hour in and we're already past halftime. Having commentary in Japanese is just plain weird, but the crazy thing is that I actually understand it for the most part. ("TOUCHDOOOOWWN!!!! KORE WA GYAKUTEN!!!" or "TAISETSU NA TAISETSU NA TAISETSU NA SAADO ANDO TEN!" or "ATO ICHI YAADO" and so on.) I don't know whether this is a good or bad thing.

So, last night I was going to write a short blurb on Marinerds about Hugh "Losing Pitcher" Mulcahy, to honor Ryan Franklin's non-tender, but then when looking through books for notes about lousy Phillies pitchers, was reminded of the even worse luck and worse talent pitcher Jack Nabors, who pitched for the Philadelphia Pathetics in 1916. There's this great story about Nabors, well on his way to a record-setting awful 1-20 season, who was pitching in Boston one day, and supposedly went into the ninth inning holding a 1-0 lead and a no-hitter -- only to have a set of mishaps like walks and errors lead the Red Sox into tying the game 1-1 with a runner on third, so Nabors deliberately threw a wild pitch 20 feet over the plate, letting the runner score and ending the game at 2-1, "because these guys are never going to get me another run, and if you think I'm going to sit out here and pitch another eight innings in this summer heat, you've got to be crazy."

Great story, isn't it? Except the thing is... it didn't happen that way. Last night I noticed that I couldn't find a record of any game that came close to matching this description on Retrosheet, and my suspicion was that it was actually the game where they lost 3-2, but Retrosheet doesn't have play-by-plays or box scores for 1916, just the final scores and starting pitchers.

This morning, on the way to work, I stopped in at the library, briefly looked around baseball books with no luck, and then asked a clerk, "I need to access a newspaper that would have the box score of a baseball game played between the Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Athletics on June 24, 1916. Can you help me?" Fortunately, we found the New York Times sports section for that day, and sure enough, the box score indicated that this Nabors anecdote, which I have seen in at least three books, is not factually correct, for various reasons. I left the library with a big grin on my face and a box score printout in my grubby little hands. Seeing the printout sitting on my desk at work all day, I couldn't wait to get home and write this article detailing my find. Man, I'm a goddamn dork, aren't I? On the other hand, I actually really sort of enjoy hunting down these historical discrepancies in baseball books -- only a month ago I also found several in a 1980's Phillies book I was reading as well. Something tells me that being a fact checker for a book publisher doesn't pay as well as being a software engineer...

Um, so anyway, work was okay -- at one point Rich and I were working on releasing some code, but we needed Jack's help, so we were going to call him since he was taking the day off, and I said "Wait, wait, if you call him you HAVE to say happy birthday," so Rich calls him like "Hey, Jack! We just wanted to wish you happy birthday! Well... er, actually, no, we wanted to ask you about these files."

After work I went to samildanach and llynecat's apartment for Jack's birthday party though. I met their down-the-hall neighbor Jason and we went and picked out some board games, and in the meantime, spazzychic (who I had never met but knew of for a while) and aquatwo (talk about WEIRD COINCIDENCES, though I hadn't seen him in forever!) showed up, and we ended up playing Pit for a couple of hands, during which time Jack's sister Peggy showed up. And after that there was pizza-eating and we watched the movie Shaun of the Dead, which was very funny, but I don't think I'll ever actually watch it again (I don't deal so well with all the blood and guts scenes). After that we watched the X-Men trailer, and I was feeling sort of zoned-out, so I came home.

I logged into PP and wanted to just zone out more and puzzle, so I asked Jarrett if I could sail with him -- he was doing a long trade run -- and it was EXACTLY what I needed. I'm #5 in the ocean in Carpentry again, biznatches.