{"id":429,"date":"2005-04-14T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2005-04-15T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chocolatemussolini.com\/cm\/default.asp?n=378"},"modified":"2005-04-14T23:00:00","modified_gmt":"2005-04-15T06:00:00","slug":"im-your-color-commentator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/?p=429","title":{"rendered":"i&#8217;m your color-commentator."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Me again!<\/p>\n<p \/>As you know, I am a fan of sporting events, and have become an unexpected fan of hockey in the process, for more than just the pretzels at Mariucci Arena and all the hot goaltender-roughing action. I mean, really, I kinda like hockey a lot now. It&#8217;s weird.<\/p>\n<p \/>Last night, I went to a Twins game with my sister and eight billion of her coworkers. I&#8217;ve been to many baseball games in the past, and am always amused by sitting way up in the upper deck, and, well, I can&#8217;t remember what else was amusing about baseball, but I&#8217;m sure it was something. Maybe the vendors? I dunno.<\/p>\n<p \/>So last night, we were in row 7 in the lower deck, which was a new thing to me. We were on the left field side, which meant that too often a ball would come hurtling directly at my skull, and I found this rather alarming since I&#8217;m not one to pay much attention to what&#8217;s going on in the game, so much as I pay attention to everything going on around me. A guy who looked like Fred Durst&#8217;s younger, whiter brother sitting two rows ahead of us even caught a ball and threw it back, which I understand means that he gets to be on TV. If you were watching the Twins game on TV last night, which I&#8217;m sure you weren&#8217;t, did you see me? I was the one in the Wienermobile hoodie.<\/p>\n<p \/>Because EVERYBODY LOVES THE WIENERMOBILE.<\/p>\n<p \/>Anyway! Baseball is way boring. I had to come up with amusements, so I went with my favorite sporting-event game: play really, really dumb.<\/p>\n<p \/>Granted, I don&#8217;t know much about sports, and I tend to ignore professional sports because it&#8217;s hard to see the sport in million-dollar salaries being blown on coke and hookers, but still! I understand principles of the games and such, and I like to figure out the rules by watching. Also, I really enjoy pestering the hell out of whoever I&#8217;m with, and who better than my sports-loving sister? It gets her really riled up.<\/p>\n<p \/>Before we even found our seats, I started asking her when &#8216;inning-halftime&#8217; was. What I meant was the baseball equivalent of the twixt-period intermission in hockey, the time during which I go to the bathroom and buy my pretzel. I figured it was the 7th-inning stretch, but I like my term way better. It took her forever to realize I didn&#8217;t mean the point in the middle of each inning where they switch sides. What I didn&#8217;t know is that the 7th-inning stretch really isn&#8217;t a break, either. Baseball is so boring that you just go wander off any old time, and it&#8217;s not like you missed much.<\/p>\n<p \/>So, how the game works is this: I point in the general direction of something and name it, for example&#8230;<\/p>\n<p \/>\n<div class='small'><i>me:<\/i> Check out the batting cage.<br \/><i>her:<\/i> Uh, the batting cage?<br \/><i>me:<\/i> Yeah, over there.<br \/><i>her:<\/i> HE&#8217;S ON DECK.<br \/><i>me:<\/i> That&#8217;s totally the batting cage.<\/div>\n<p \/>I can go on forever. We argued about the bullpen (where the lazy chewing dudes sit out in the outfield) vs the dugout (where the team-spirit guys line up to high-five and smack each other on the butt). She laughed her ass off when I asked about the designated hitter, &#8216;does that mean he has someone else run for him?&#8217; I kept calling the catcher the goaltender, on account of the fact he wears padding and a mask and hunkers down; she told me that logically, the pitcher is actually the equivalent of the goaltender. I was having none of it, though. I told her the guy who comes out and rakes around the bases was the baseball zamboni. I said that hitting 40 out of 100 pitches didn&#8217;t sound like that great an average to me. When she mentioned the lines for the football field, I pointed way down at the other end and told her that if there was a tiny metal chicken standing there, I could totally shoot it from where I sat.<\/p>\n<p \/>In my sports-world, the opposing team is always called the &#8216;bad guys&#8217;. As everyone knows, the bad guys are hot simply by virtue of being the bad guys. Our team is not the good guys, they&#8217;re just &#8216;our guys&#8217;. Of course, we want our guys to win, because that means we get to yell. It all works out, though, because when the bad guys lose, they become full of pent-up aggression. Which is a good thing, especially in hockey. I don&#8217;t know about baseball so much; I didn&#8217;t see guys slamming each other into the wall at all, although I did see the pitcher beaning dudes a whole hell of a lot. Which is pretty funny, too.<\/p>\n<p \/>Our guys won, but I&#8217;m not sure than anyone noticed. I don&#8217;t know if I&#8217;ll go see the Twins again, but I hear the St Paul Saints have some kinda craziness at their events. I wonder if they have good pretzels?<\/p>\n<p \/>Holy crap, it&#8217;s too nice to be inside anymore. Later!<br \/>Jenni<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Me again! As you know, I am a fan of sporting events, and have become an unexpected fan of hockey in the process, for more than just the pretzels at Mariucci Arena and all the hot goaltender-roughing action. I mean, really, I kinda like hockey a lot now. It&#8217;s weird. Last night, I went to &#8230;<a class=\"post-readmore\" href=\"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/?p=429\">read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9qt-6V","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}