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MaybeACoordinator

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Posts posted by MaybeACoordinator

  1. 1 hour ago, El Diablo said:

    Maybe talk to him more often? Seems like he's not getting enough attention from you and is starved to tell someone what's been going on. He probably made time for you once upon a time, maybe not, but it would probably help if you got things to the point that he was tired of hearing from you so fucking often.

    Eh, I'd say we talk about once a week. And sometimes he doesn't give me the whole Tennesseean deal. On the other hand there's this other annoying thing that happens -- sometimes my stepmother will pick up and sit in on the whole conversation. Which would be one thing if she'd raised me, but they got married after I'd moved out...

     

    Part of my frustration comes from the fact that we have the kind of relationship where I can't just tell him, "Dad, I've heard this a thousand times before, lol. Cancel your scrip' and move along. And tell me some more about that time you drank with Boe-noe (that's what he calls Bono) for six hours."

    It's my way of respecting him -- I just sit there and take these rants and then vent on anonymous message boards. 

  2. 2 hours ago, Kringelbert Fishtybuns said:

    I get the sentiment, but maybe don't call him while you are stuck in traffic.  Call when you want to and have time to talk and not just to get that shit out of the way while you are doing something else?

    Good advice. Even though that old codger went to UT for seven years, and he was no good in helping me maneuver out of that 35 / 290 clusterfuck from 1000 miles away! (KIDDING of course.)

  3. I've talked to my sister about it and I keep trying to get her to sort of encourage him to get off these hobbyhorses of his and write that memoir, but I don't think she's been able to make any more headway than me. I feel as frustrated with him as he was with me for years, and as frustrated as I have been with my own son in the past, who now makes me proud as shit. It's a funny time in life. 

  4. I wonder if this dude read the Cliff's Notes of 50 Shades of Gray and thought she would be down with this...If I was a sleazy attorney I might try that as a defense, but it looks like he's already found sleazy attorneys who are trying the old "try her in the court of public opinion" gambit. 

  5. 14 minutes ago, LonghornJones said:

    So this sounds like its more about you, and not your dad.  Life is short.

    It is, but it's frustrating. I wanted to tell him about a milestone in my career but first I had to hear that some ol' lament at length for the 900th time before I could get around to telling him, by which time the import felt diminished. 

  6. I really shouldn't be bitching, I know...My father in law has fairly suddenly come down with some form of dementia that has stumped some of Houston's best doctors, and his decline has been enormously sad and disturbing. It just came out of the blue and all of a sudden he's a shell of himself and worst of all nobody knows why. So I try to treasure my time with my still-lucid dad but it can be frustrating, especially because this is not anything new. I've been encouraging him to dump that dang paper for decades now so he can move on but he just won't listen to me. 

  7. I guess you have to be there. You are dying to tell him something you are doing that you know will make him proud but first you have to sit through the same bitch session you've been hearing since 1978, and by the time he's done, you feel like you are bragging on yourself. 

  8. 1 minute ago, TwiceHorn said:

    Most 74 year olds are pretty incapable of learning anything new, much less new sabermetrics.

     

    And be glad/grateful that he's capable of making any sort of conversation at all.

    He turned me on to Bill James in the early '80s. He was a great baseball dad, unlike his own father who worked him so hard he threw his arm out in HS. I am grateful for him, but again, I just want him to spend his time more wisely and get off these things he can't change, like the goddamn stupid Tennesseean newspaper. 

  9. I am well aware that my own kids are already storing up this kind of shit about me. Circle of life and all that. And one day they will do it to their kids. Like the poet said, "they fuck you up, your mum and dad, they don't mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had, and add some extra just for you."

  10. 18 hours ago, BrickHorn said:

    I know a huge conservative who posts self-righteous shit on FB from time to time.  But when his kids were in school, he hid income from his business to qualify for free lunch aid.  I guess it’s only welfare when people who actually need help get free stuff.  

    I've got a very rich aunt who's also a big Republican when she bothers to think about politics. She sent all her kids to pricy private schools, but if the public schools opened a week or so earlier than the privates, she would send them there as free day-care centers. Sidenote: when she goes to a Mexican restaurant, she asks for more chips right before she gets the check, and then puts the chips in a plastic bag and stuffs them in her purse. (You might think she got rich on her own, but she married her money.)

  11. First off, I don't want to seem ungrateful that my dad is still alive and kicking and has all his faculties. He's gonna be 74 this year, and with all the partying he did over the decades, it's a little amazing that his mind is still intact. And he was and is a great dad. I lost my mom over 20 years ago, and she was a straight up lunatic, so I've always been grateful that he has been there for me, and I love him very much.

    All of that said, Jesus Christ, talking to him can be a fucking beating. About half the time I call him, he launches into a tirade about the shortcomings of the newspaper in his adopted hometown of Nashville. (He moved up there from Houston in 1974.)

    Yes, the Tennessean is a shit newspaper, but I have been hearing forms of these rants now for well over 40 years. Here it is, but there's usually a new outrage on top of these general laments:

    "They don't run enough box scores. They don't cover track and field adequately. They give too much coverage to teams from Memphis -- nobody in Nashville gives a shit about Memphis, but now that the Nashville paper owns the Memphis paper, this is just a cheap way to fill space. It's all a conspiracy to get me to subscribe to USA Today -- Gannett owns them too. I wrote them a letter to the editor about all this but I doubt they will run it." (The man is always keeping him down.) "And don't get me started on all the Vols / Titans overkill -- article after article that is just pure speculation. Thank God for John McLain on the the radio up here or I wouldn't know shit about football."  (Yeah, The General is a big star up there on the Cumberland, and while he may suck by Houston standards, he really is the second coming of Grantland Rice compared to the hacks up there.)

    Towards the end of every baseball off-season, he unveils some new statistical formula to easily and simply measure the worth of hitters. This year's model is one he calls the "1-2-3-4 Club." He went through all of baseball history to find the very few dudes who had 100  extra base hits, 200 runs produced, averaged .300 for a season, and racked up 400 total bases. He thinks this will revolutionize our understanding of baseball record-keeping, despite all the work of thousands of sabermetricians whose work he just completely ignores. "I'm sending this to the New York Times!" he told me. (If you were wondering, only nine people have accomplished this: Ruth, Hornsby, Greenberg, Musial and Luis Gonzalez, who managed it one time each, and Gehrig, Helton, and Chuck Klein, who hit those levels twice. "Chuck Klein is seriously underrated!" he told me.)

    What bothers me about all this is he launches into this stuff as soon as he picks up the phone. No asking me what I'm up to. No telling me about how my sister's very first art opening went down until I asked him about it directly. Plus, I was trying to navigate the I-35 / 290 interchange in heavy traffic, so I was already irritated, but man, I wish he would get off these obsessions of his and work on projects more worthy of his time. Like writing his memoir -- he's had a completely fascinating life in music, from tripping balls at early Elevators shows in Austin, hanging around with close friends Guy Clark, Townes, and Steve Earle, among many others. He's hung around with and drank and drugged with Cash and Waylon, Bono and the Dead, pretty much everyone who was cool in rootsy /country/ psychedelic rock / and even blues and zydeco from about 1960 to 1995, when he semi-retired, but instead of writing that up he's nursing decades-old grievances against a lame newspaper whose ability to disappoint him will never ever end (and why he just doesn't cancel and turn to the Internet is a mystery that I'll never unravel) and trying to reinvent baseball statistics, as if he is the only doing that. 

    • Like 1
  12. I was listening to a months-old Sam Harris podcast last night. He was interviewing David Frum and it was mostly a 90-minute Trump bashing session, but at the end Harris asked Frum about the future of the GOP. Who were the rising stars? This guy was Frum's first answer. He's charismatic, he said. He's a Navy Seal. He's a Jewish Navy Seal! "I didn't even know we had those," Frum enthused. And now this. Seems like Seals tend to be really fucked up people, it turns out. 

  13. 2 hours ago, TriStone said:

    "There is no doubt that if the right situation came up, I would coach again," Brown said. "I have a few good years left."

    "Only if they would call me,” Brown said, according to Arizona Sports. “If Ray doesn’t find what he wants and he would like to talk I would love to talk to him about it.

    Hard to believe that ASU went with Herm Edwards when a living legend like Mack was signaling interest in the job.

     

    This is just insane.  Are you doing a bit or something?

     

    Yeah, Charlie snuck in David Ash's dorm room and whacked him in the head with a hammer and snapped Dom Espinosa's knee and planted drugs in the piss of all those lineman all so he could roll with Tyrone Swoopes and a bunch of glorified walk-ons at QB and on the OL for two years. 

     

    There is this school of Charlie haters on here who would like us to believe that his tenure existed in a vacuum, and that all of his problems came from his alleged stupidity and lack of acumen rather than the fact that he was dealt shitty hand after shitty hand and failed to perform miracles with them. 

     

    Yes, after Kansas he had to go, but to act like his failures were all on him and him alone is patent bullshit. 

    • Like 1
  14. 1 hour ago, FondrenRoad said:

    Yeah they are.  Most of the ones Ive been in destroyed their small town feel by centering commerce around the nearest highway exit. You don't see that in Europe. A 1000 person town in France will have a bar, bakery, and butcher you can walk to. Don't really need anything else. 

    Colorado has some good small towns though. 

    That trend has reversed, somewhat, at least in the towns that have some life left in them. Mom and pop restaurants, bars, stores, breweries, yoga studios and art galleries are coming back to downtowns in towns all over Central Texas and the Hill Country and in the Big Bend area. People are even restoring the living spaces that have been vacant for decades in the buildings around courthouse squares in those areas. Deep East Texas and Northwest Texas / Panhandle still blow, though.

  15. Again, why on earth would Assad think this was a good idea? 

    Killing women and children with poison gas? It would be the absolute dumbest thing he could do, and we are to believe that this is like the third time he has done this since 2013, at each time the war seemed to be taking a hard turn in his favor.  I feel like we are being sold the same bum steer for the third fucking time.

    We are being led by emotion on this. Photos of dead kids and shit, just like the Brits successfully portrayed the Kaiser's army as tossing Belgian babies around from bayonet to bayonet. Propaganda 101, enhanced by high-tech. We really don't have a clue if anybody actually died in this attack, and if they did, who killed them. All I know is to ask who benefits the most from this attacks. It sure as hell isn't Assad. It's his domestic enemies, Saudi and Israel. 

     

  16. Mack inherited a stacked roster from Mackovic and left such shit behind, TH is still trying to dig out of it, four seasons later. Along the way he won an NC with a QB he had to persuaded to offer and then only let him play the way he was meant to play after a humiliating shutout to OU, yet another in a series of calamities suffered at the hands of our most hated rival. And he almost won another, but his apparent genetic aversion to having more than one viable QB on the roster at any one time -- a bad habit he picked up in the Simms vs Applewhite era -- doomed us vs Alabama. 

    Shit, we were relatively lucky in 2009-2010, because by that time Mack had recruited an actual QB he intended one day to give some snaps. Meaning ALL THE SNAPS. He fully expected to slot in Gilbert in Fall 2010 and not have to give the position another thought for at least three seasons, probably four. That was just the way he rolled then. He was shy of having more than one viable QB on the roster at once, and then VY's Iron Man tenure made him think he could get away with that. 

    Imagine we had gone to the NC game in 2008, and McCoy had gone down early. Mack turns to his bench, and there's Chiles (should startz) and Sherrod Harris, who never threw a single pass in four or five years on the 40. 

    His handling of that position was really, really dumb.

    And his handling of OL for the last decade of his tenure was amazingly incompetent, and both of those factors led to Charlie's downfall -- he inherited Ash, who had no real back-ups behind him, and exactly one legit o-lineman who was not a headcase -- and Herman is still trying to fix that shit.  And I think the OL woes will still doom us to at best second-tier Big 12 status this coming year. In the end, that was his worst failing, because OL problems -- or at least a Mack-level fuck-up of the entire ten-man two-deep -- are extremely hard to fix. 

    • Like 1
  17. 16 hours ago, bolverk said:

    I decided to look up a list of the micropolitan statistical areas of Texas. There are 43 of them. The requirements for qualification is to 1) form an urban cluster of at least 10,000 and 2) NOT be a suburb of a major city as measured by commuting patterns (this is a legit Census Bureau designation).

    KsthdpPm_t.jpg

    I hope this image isn't too small. I'm still trying to figure out the imgbox thing.Edit: There are several from this list I've never been to. Sell us on your top five. 

    Places I've never been: Andrews, Athens, Big Spring, Borger, Brownwood, Gainesville, Lamesa, Levelland, Mineral Wells, Pampa, Pecos, Plainview, RGC, Snyder, Stephenville, Sulphur Springs, Sweetwater, Zapata

    Places I have been, and no fucking way I'd ever, ever move there: Alice, Bay City, Beeville, Dumas, Eagle Pass (the only town on the border where the Mexican side is a vast improvement), El Campo, Hereford, Huntsville, Jacksonville, Lufkin, Marshall, Mt. Pleasant (I have way too many insane relatives in the area), Paris (see Mt. Pleasant, also town still has a nasty Old South racial vibe), Vernon.

    Need to study further: Del Rio, Kingsville, Nac, Raymondville. I doubt I'd find much to like about Del Rio, but I do love South Texas. Nac transcends the usual ETX bullshit via history and being a college town. Knee-jerk reaction is it's preferable to Huntsville. 

    Hot take: Fuck Fredericksburg. It's too late. You should have moved there 30 years ago. It's the Austin of small Texas towns, and it's been ruined. It's now attracting assholes who want to change everything about the place while living there maybe 20 days a year. 

    Which leaves me with: Brenham, Corsicana, Kerrville, Palestine, and Uvalde. 

    I confuse Corsicana and Palestine, but I do know that they are both trying to make their downtowns interesting and fun. Brenham also falls in that category, and I think the environs of Brenham are a little bit prettier than Corsicana and Palestine. (I lump Paris in with this group, but there is just something really fucked up about Paris that you can't measure with statistics. Proximity to Oklahoma, probably.) I'd probably give Brenham the edge 'cause it feels a little less Babtis' than Palescana / Corsistine. 

    Kerrville blows away all the ETX places in natural beauty and "cool factor." People would come visit you there. Probably not if you lived in Uvalde, and the immediate area is nothing special, but you are about 20 miles south of Concan and the rest of the western Hill Country, so there's that. Also lots of cheap and great Mexican food and the Liquor / Guns one-stop, and you're close to the border and SA. 

    Narrowing down: Kerrville, Brenham, Uvalde

    • Like 2
  18. 56 minutes ago, zork said:

    Seems like it needs a separate thread.  Hungary clearly spoke with their election results.  I say good for them.  They didn't make the same mistake that Germany did only to regret it 8-12 months too late.

    The last time Germany went far right / nationalist, they didn't regret it until it was 12 years too late. 

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