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Beau Vine

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by Beau Vine

  1. 5 minutes ago, EMAWesome said:

     

    BTW if you do anything in Clayton, NM you are doing it wrong.  The only possible excuse for winding up in that town would be if you were put into the Federal Witness Protection Program because no one would want to kill you bad enough to go there.  You can drive about 80 miles in any direction from there and not even see a prairie dog town.

    ???

    How else do you drive to Colorado without going through Clayton?

    And that taco truck there is legit.  

    We always stop at the Allsups in Texline to get me burritos for breakfast, and then stop at the truck 20 minutes later to get the wife and daughter tacos.

  2. 10 hours ago, Mac8111 said:

    I looked up Torchy's Recipe online and this one came up.  I will try it next time and see if it gets close.

    Torchy's Queso Recipe 

    16 ingredients???!?!

    16 FUCKING INGREDIENTS TO MAKE QUESO?!?!?!?!?

     

     

    Here's mine:

    campbellsCondensed-Cheddar-Cheese1.jpg
    Don't laugh until you try it.  My best friend's mom in high school 30+ years ago used this.  It still works.

    Heat and stir in some milk.   When it's hot, add this, probably 6oz for each can:

    000738560

    Half of this per can, fried up, dump it in, stir:

    001186701

     

    WALLAH!

  3. On ‎4‎/‎20‎/‎2018 at 4:10 PM, Beau Vine said:

    Rosenthal from theathletic, pretty fucking fascinating:

     

    From Fangraphs today, the BLA CEO actually talking about the lawsuit:

     

    Quote

    I spoke with BLA Chief Executive Officer Michael Schwimer about his company, the Mejia lawsuit, and what the future might hold. Schwimer, it should be noted, was good enough to spend a full hour being grilled by an attorney while simultaneously fathering his two young children, an arrangement most reasonable people would consider to be less than ideal.

     

    Big League Advance

    Schwimer himself is a former major-league pitcher, owner of an abbreviated 48-inning career with the Philadelphia Phillies marked by a lot of strikeouts (9.62 K/9) and a lot of walks (4.25 BB/9). After leaving the game, he started Big League Advance. Schwimer said he started BLA because of his own experience in the minor leagues. “I was reffing basketball games [to make ends meet],” Schwimer told me. “I was babysitting.” Schwimer believed there was a better way, and BLA was born.

    According to Schwimer, BLA trades capital for a percentage of a player’s major-league career earnings. “This kind of business has been around for hundreds of years in boxing and golf,” Schwimer said, citing Upstart and Thirteenth Avenue as examples of companies that have made similar deals with students. (Upstart, it should be noted, is a personal loan company.) Schwimer told me the purpose of the company was to help minor leaguers, particularly given the low pay and long odds of making the major leagues.

    The capital is intended to be used by players for one of two purposes. First, players can use it to improve their chances of making the big leagues, and Schwimer cited specifically the opportunity to use the money to “eat healthier.” Alternatively, Schwimer talked about creating a safety net for minor leaguers whose careers don’t pan out. “We’ve already had players getting released. We’re helping them start their second lives,” he said. As for the money itself, Schwimer said it isn’t a loan — players are only required to pay the money back if they make the major leagues, and then only the agreed percentage of their major-league earnings.

    BLA’s clientele is primarily minor leaguers; Schwimer told me that, of the firm’s 99 clients, “over 90%” are current minor leaguers, and “75% were outside the top 300 prospects when they signed with us.” Schwimer wouldn’t identify any of those 99 clients besides Mejia but did say that they include some “players and prospects ranked way higher than Francisco Mejia.”

     

    Schwimer said that BLA has a proprietary method of identifying minor league players, which looked for “Ben Zobrist types, Moneyball guys.” Schwimer wouldn’t disclose how that model worked, but did say it was “different than anything else around.” That includes, by the way, Fantex: Schwimer told me that BLA and Fantex have completely different business models, with Fantex focused on major leaguers, while BLA uses proprietary methods to identify minor leaguers of interest. Schwimer also bristled at the suggestion that his company was analogous to a payday lender for minor-league players. “We are the exact polar opposite of that,” Schwimer said. “We let the players choose what percentage they want to give up.”

    Thus far, Schwimer described his company in less-than-stellar terms. “We’ve raised more than $100 million in two years [of doing business] and returned less than $350,000,” Schwimer said. Schwimer said that, nevertheless, BLA has started to see returns from a handful of major leaguers who signed deals with BLA while in the minors, all of whom had “paid in full.” Based on that, Schwimer said that he was optimistic that the business model could be successful. “If we lose money on 80% of our investments, we’re in great shape,” he said. And Schwimer did say that his business was growing. “We’ve got 10 players wanting to do deals with us every day.”

    The Mejia Lawsuit

    Our discussion of Mejia’s suit against BLA began with me asking Schwimer why the contract itself, and BLA’s counterclaim, called for the existence of the contract itself to be confidential. I returned to that question no fewer than four times during our conversation, and, to his credit, Schwimer’s answer was consistent each time. “I don’t care at all [about disclosing the existence of the contract],” he said. “That was never the issue.” In fact, Schwimer said several times that he “encouraged” BLA clients to tell teammates about their deals so as to provide a larger customer base for BLA.

    Instead, Schwimer focused on the terms of the contract, on which he said he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and six months developing with the aid of the law firm Morrison Foerster (known in the industry — and on their own website — as “MoFo”). It’s the terms of that contract which Schwimer said he wanted confidential, worried that competitors might be able to backwards engineer their business model and formula. Interestingly, however, Schwimer said that the contract Mejia signed is no longer used, having been replaced by a new contract drafted by Zwillgen, the firm which employs BLA’s current litigation counsel, attorney Jeff Landis.

    I asked Schwimer why, if the Mejia form contract had been retired, BLA still considered it a trade secret. Schwimer provided two reasons. First, he indicated that although some changes had been made between contract versions, much of it remained the same. Second, Schwimer said that the equity percentage and payment for that equity were confidential — specifically for the players’ protection. “[The players] all think they’re better than everybody else… [T]hey all think they’re hall of famers,” Schwimer said. And although he said that mindset was needed to make the big leagues — Schwimer said he needed it, for example — he was concerned about players bidding based on what other players received.

    Schwimer also said that the confidentiality provisions were “all for the players’ protection… [T]hey don’t want people knowing they have this capital.” Schwimer did concede, however, that it was for BLA’s protection as, well. Schwimer, as can be seen, is remarkably guarded when it comes to disclosing the inner workings of his company.

    Schwimer provided a very different narrative of events than what is contained in Mejia’s complaint. According to Schwimer, Mejia did, in fact, have three different contracts with BLA — and, in fact, was among their first clients. But Schwimer said that Mejia was represented by counsel of his own choosing each time, and BLA never paid for Mejia’s attorneys or went to his house. “We don’t even know where Francisco lives,” Schwimer said. Schwimer contends that Mejia was represented by his ISE agents at the first negotiation, which was $100,000 for 3% of Mejia’s career earnings. Thereafter, Schwimer says Mejia approached BLA twice more without his BLA representation and asked for more capital, using a separate attorney and cutting his ISE attorneys out of the picture each time. Schwimer said that the contract was explained to Mejia in Spanish and said the terms are always explained to every client in their native language. In fact, Schwimer said, that after the third contract, Mejia sent a text to BLA saying, “I love you guys.”

    According to Schwimer, things went south between Mejia and BLA after the catcher asked for a fourth deal, proposing $500,000 for an additional 1% after the 2017 season, saying another company had offered those terms. Schwimer balked at that deal. “At the absolute most, we might do an extra 2% at a much higher valuation, really only to help him out.” Schwimer says that, after BLA turned down Mejia’s proposal, Mejia sued his company and blindsided him in the process.

    I asked Schwimer point-blank if Mejia was lying in his complaint. “Absolutely yes,” he said. “Where we said ‘denied’ [in our Answer], then obviously we’re saying that [that allegation is] a lie.” I then asked Schwimer if he would be pursuing a sanctions motion against Mejia based on that position. “I haven’t even spoken to anyone about that,” Schwimer said.

    The Future

    One matter about which I was curious is whether Schwimer plans to change any of BLA’s business model in the wake of Mejia’s lawsuit. “Absolutely not,” he said. “Integrity and character, that is what we live by.” Schwimer made clear that he and BLA are seeking no future earnings in their counterclaim and that he is seeking only to keep the terms of the contract under wraps so as to prevent competitors learning their trade secrets. But Schwimer did tease that this story wasn’t over. “One of the best prospects in all of baseball is demanding to go on the record [defending BLA],” Schwimer said, though he wouldn’t reveal who that was. He did say, however, that we wouldn’t have to wait long to find out.

    One thing is for certain: these companies aren’t going away. So long as minor-league pay is a problem, companies which offer deals like BLA’s will provide an attractive alternative, particularly for players who aren’t the proverbial bonus babies. I found Schwimer to be credible, but questions do remain. His story and Mejia’s are so different that they both can’t be true, and Schwimer seemed to recognize he’s in for a protracted court battle, even acknowledging he won’t be filing a motion to dismiss. “Unconscionability is a pretty tough thing,” he said.

     

    • Like 1
  4. 19 hours ago, austingirl said:

    I'm generally not picky but the two foods I detest are mayo and olives. When I was a kid, my dad's favorite sandwich was olive loaf on Wonder bread with a generous smear of mayo. Which still makes me want to hurk just reading about it. What about you?

    Gotdam.

    Mayo is #1 for me.  Olives #2.  #3 is bananas.  And I don't understand how anyone who doesn't live in Alaska eats canned vegetables.  

    Blows my mind to go to my in-laws house in Denton and they're serving canned vegetables.  

  5. Story just in case it helps anyone else...

    Three months ago, I thought we were going to have to put him down.  

    He was clearly miserable, very inactive, his coat looked terrible, and almost all of his activity was self-destruction -- chewing himself through the skin, rubbed a huge gash in his scalp on a tree, etc.

    The vet initially thought allergies, so we spent a month feeding him ridiculously expensive food, which didn't help.

    Then, thyroid.  We started giving him thyroid medication, and everything returned to normal -- energy, appetite, beautiful coat.  They cut the medication in half, and he acted like he felt well, but his coat lost some luster.  Went back today and got him tested again, and yeah, his thyroid is a little low.  

    If this sounds familiar, get your dog's thyroid checked.

    • Like 1
  6. When I was in college, I umpired a lot of baseball in the summer to make money.  My supervisor was in the FW chapter and he'd give me all of the men's league games in the small far north Texas tiny towns that no one from FW wanted to drive to (and where you needed to speak Spanish to survive).  Always a double-header on Sunday starting at noon, in Gunter, Nocona, Whitesboro, etc.

    Every one of those towns had a DQ.  And after every doubleheader, the other ump and I would be starving after spending 4+ hours in 100 degree heat, and we'd walk into the DQ at about 4:30 pm on a Sunday, and it would be packed.  And usually everyone there turned and gave us a funny look because they didn't recognize us.  It was really bizarre the first couple of times.

    DQ really used to be the center of many small Texas towns. 

  7. On ‎4‎/‎19‎/‎2018 at 9:04 PM, TwiceHorn said:

    To that end, the video seems to show some kind of scripted, satirical and very poor performance of a skit.  It seems plausible that the vile things in it were parodic in nature.  

    It almost seemed like that excuse could work, and then the second video came out:

     

     

  8. 17 hours ago, Buzzrock said:

    Next subject:

    You would think that someone would appreciate it if you warned them that you are in a foul mood that has nothing to do with them, and now might not be the best time to talk.

    But nooooooo...

     

    Preaching to the choir.  Another on the greatest hits album:

    "I had a bad day at work.  I don't want to talk about it."

    "What happened?"

    "WHAT DID I JUST SAY?!?!??!"

    Tone.

  9. Good for him.

    That dude went to Indiana State, where nobody good goes to play baseball, developed like crazy, and was a preseason favorite to be the #1 pick in the draft before his junior year.  He got hurt and slipped to the supplemental 1st round IIRC.  

    Has looked like he has it together even before tonight.

  10. bong-puffer-forever-the-story-of-history

     

    Kinda dusty in here.

     

    Quote

    Brandon Puffer was the 743rd player chosen in the 1994 MLB Draft, and was still pitching in rookie ball when the Minnesota Twins cut him loose in May of 1996. In the years that followed, Puffer backed his way up through the minors. He was a fairly effective 23-year-old closer for the Clinton Reds of the Class A Midwest League in 1999, and got cut anyway. When he signed with the Somerset Patriots of the independent Atlantic League in May of 2000, Puffer had been released by four teams and thrown just eight and two-thirds innings above A-ball. It wasn't until 2002, when he made the Houston Astros' bullpen as a 26-year-old rookie, that Puffer was identified as a Future Star.

     

    Jung Bong threw his first minor league pitch when he was just 17 years old, and his path through the minors was as direct as Puffer's was circuitous. The Braves signed him out of a high school in Seoul, South Korea and held onto him; Bong made steady progress through the Atlanta Braves farm system over five seasons, and made his Major League debut when he was just 21 years old. He was hit hard in a spot start in April and sent down the next day; he spent the rest of the season working as a swingman in Double-A. The Braves saw enough in Bong's 2002 performance to make room for him as a long reliever in the big league bullpen the next year. A young baseball card editor at Topps saw, again, a Future Star.

    Or, anyway, he saw an opportunity. Future Stars cards, and please forgive the baseball card jargon here, tended to feature players projected to be stars, in the future. There is no reasonable reason why Jung Bong or Brandon Puffer should have been featured on one of the Future Stars cards inserted in the 2003 Topps Baseball set. For one thing, they were not on the same team. A second, more salient, reason would be that there was no universe in which these two might have been projected as future stars. There is only one reason why the two of them, Jung Bong and Brandon Puffer, would have wound up on the same card. You have probably already figured out what it is.

    Read More: "Spreadsheets Are Dope," Or The Allure Of The DIY Fantasy League

     

    "Bong Puffer is fucking funny, right?" Wayne Walker said. "I puffed a few bongs at that time, on my free time," he added. "Never before or at work, I was serious about that. But after? Hell yeah. NYC weed delivery was legit. Thirty minutes or less."

    It was the summer of 2002, and Walker's time as one of the two baseball editors at Topps was winding down. The 2002 Topps set, which is known within the company as The Flagship, was the first set that he edited at Topps, and 2003's was his last. In July, he would leave the company and move to the Czech Republic with the woman who would later become his wife. As usual, Walker relied on Jim McKenna, who edited Topps' more prospect-oriented Bowman products, for some help pulling together the players that would be featured on the ten-card, twenty-player Future Stars subset. In the fullness of time, some of those pairings have come to look better than others. None of them looked like Bong Puffer, even at the time, which was something Walker understood when he put it on the checklist and pulled the necessary photos.

    I asked Walker how serious he was about trying to get this particular card through the company's various editorial backstops and into the set. "About making Bong Puffer? One hundred percent," he said. "It was happening. Unless JP vetoed it."

    John Perry, then Topps' basketball editor and Walker's close friend, was charged with shepherding the Topps baseball set through its final stages after Walker left. "I told him," Walker said, "'when you get these sheets for proofing, you might notice that one of the Future Stars cards looks different. One has two guys from different teams.'" Walker suggested to Perry that, should he catch any heat regarding the card, he could "plead overwork" from having to handle his own product lines as well as Walker's. "I told JP that he could blame it all on me," Walker said. "He was all good with that."

    bong-puffer-forever-the-story-of-history

    The back of Wayne Walker's perfectly aged Bong/Puffer card. Image courtesy of Wayne Walker

    "There's a card in Topps' 2003 baseball Series I that's on the hot list of many dealers and collectors," John Leptich wrote in the East Valley and Scottsdale Tribune in January of 2003. "While most common 2003 cards are being weeded out, No. 331 is getting a bundle of attention and creating quite a buzz. The Future Stars card shows photos of Houston Astros rookie pitcher Brandon Puffer on the left, and Atlanta Braves rookie hurler Jung Bong on the right. Fired-up collectors refer to the joint effort as the Bong-Puffer card."

    While the other attention that the card got was slightly more understated in its expression, the operative word is slightly. "You got it, it's the 'Bong-Puffer' card," Keith Olbermann said on his ABC radio show. "Unclear if its publication will cause Topps' reputation to take a hit."

     

    Walker, by this point, had married his fiancee and was reading about his cardboard brainchild's lite infamy from Prague, where he would live for three years teaching English. "I remember being pissed that they set it as Puffer/Bong and not the other way around," Walker said. "But JP couldn't exactly send that note out on the proof, you know?" The ordering was, I was told, a strategic choice; it is one thing to try to sneak a Puffer Bong card past the quality assurance department, but Bong Puffer just seemed like pressing your luck.

    The response within the company was muted: "That's funny, now don't ever do it again," one person who was in the room said. Topps had made errors in previous years, generally of the swapped-photo variety, and it had also engaged in what Walker called "baseball card malarkey." The Bong Puffer card, however off-brand its entendre, fit into a broader tradition of pursuing this prehistoric version of virality. "There was no disciplinary action taken," said Frank Amadeo, who was the company's Creative Services Manager at the time. "Remember, those subject lists were brand manager approved and sometimes combinations that would cause an eyebrow raise were done to create buzz." When Perry left Topps at the end of 2004, shortly before I was hired, it was under his own power, for a job at Fleer. The Bong Puffer card was already fading from memory.


    Claude Raymond had his best season in 1966, when he served as the closer for a 72-win Houston Astros team. In his Topps card from that year, the Quebecois reliever is photographed with his eyes cast upwards through horn-rimmed glasses the size of cruise-ship portholes, as if watching his catcher assess a harmless foul pop; an empty ballpark sprawls behind him, sun-bleached and vacant. It is impossible not to notice that the fly on Raymond's uniform pants is down. Raymond is seemingly more focused in his 1967 Topps card, this time striking a pose that suggests he has just released a pitch. Again, the fact that he is standing in foul territory in an empty spring training stadium takes away somewhat from the verisimilitude of the thing. Again, Raymond's fly is yawning open; the neat script of his reproduced autograph on the card serves as a sort of cursive underline.

     

    Reasonable parties can disagree about what this says about Claude Raymond's sense of humor or attention to sartorial detail, but the collectible market has spoken. Raymond's ridiculous baseball cards are exactly as valuable as any other common card from those sets, which is to say that ones in very good condition are rare and fairly valuable and ones that are not, which are not, do not. The player on the front of the card has some impact on a card's value to collectors, but what really makes baseball cards valuable to collectors—the only thing, really, that consistently does it—is scarcity. There is no more convincing testament to how unprepared the business was for the brief and retrospectively hilarious period in the 1990's when otherwise functional adults saw baseball cards as a viable financial investment than the fact that card companies responded to all that new demand by furiously printing many hundreds of thousands of the same cards.

    It was only later that the companies learned to build scarcity into their sets, which they did most effectively by creating numbered parallel versions; where there were untold thousands of white-bordered base cards in the world, there were discrete numbers of parallel versions with different-colored borders, all of them shrinking towards an exceedingly scarce one-of-one version. In later years, Topps took to cutting up the metal printing plates used in producing the cards and inserting those into packs, each marked 1-of-1 and affixed with a sticker certifying their authenticity. On baseball card forums like BlowoutCards, you can find collectors debating whether they are truly one-of-ones, given that there are actually four different printing plate cards for every player, one for each of the four color process used in producing the cards.

    bong-puffer-forever-the-story-of-history

    The icon himself. Image courtesy of Wayne Walker

    By this grim logic, nothing is more important about a baseball card than how difficult it is to find. When Billy Ripken showed up on his 1989 Fleer card with the words FUCK FACE written on the knob of his bat, the result was a bit of crude art. Fleer scrambled to fix it, creating more than twenty flubby alternate versions in which the profanity was obscured by various scribbles, blobs of white out, black boxes, airbrushing, and a notch cut into the card by a power saw. "To the best of my knowledge, the 'Circle Scribble' versions are the toughest [to find]—by far," said Jon Pederson, who runs BillRipken.com, a website dedicated to the card. "There are four distinctly different varieties of 'Circle Scribble,' each with varying levels of black airbrush coverage." He estimates that fewer than 100 of those cards are out there in the world; he himself has seen fewer than 40. The original card, which is the only one in which the legendary words are clearly visible, is the least valuable of the many variations; an estimated 100,000 of those FUCK FACE cards made it into packs, which makes it the easiest one to find.

    Topps never withdrew the Bong/Puffer card; there was nothing to correct, really, beyond the central goofy fact of its existence. It's less an error card and more on the order of Claude Raymond's poker-faced x-y-z moments, although in this case the punchline is the existence of the card itself. There doesn't seem to be any real collectible market for it at all, although someone on BlowoutCards offered to pay $25 for a black border parallel of the card back in 2015; he received no replies. Of course, what the Bong Puffer card is or isn't worth has nothing to do with its value to that lone seeker on BlowoutCards or to Walker, who keeps a heroically tattered copy of it in his wallet to this day. The reasoning of the market does not and by definition cannot account for this type of value.

     

    "The collector mentality is, by definition, irrational," said Jeff Katz, the author of Split Season 1981 and a contributor to the SABRs Baseball Card Committee. "So few things are truly rare and worth scrambling for ... they trigger memory and emotion, which is where the real value is." Understood this way, there is no such thing as a common card—every one of these disposable things is tied to a memory or a moment that imbues it with something that is not otherwise there to find, and which is specific to the person who treasures it.

    "It's funny," Walker said. "I've been an ESL teacher over the years, and the card has come in handy, just to explain what a baseball card is to foreigners." The card has stayed in Walker's wallet for nearly 15 years in large part for sentimental reasons, but there's something practical about it, too. Whenever he needs to, he can reach into his pocket and show someone exactly what a baseball card is.

     

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