taking the long way
Rod Brind'Amour has got to have one of the best hockey names around. (Whenever I hear his name, it makes me think of that old ESPN commercial about Guy LaFleur where the guys are like, "It means ... flower?") Now, he's no Brendan Shanahan, who has the coolest name ever, but it's close.

Okay. This has been happening for quite some time. When I was in Memphis, it pissed me off, and even now that I have nothing to do with the team, it still pisses me off. The thing is, the Commercial Appeal writers seem to dislike writing game stories about the Redbirds. This is not across the board, just some guys, but they do it fairly consistently. I don't know if it's an editorial directive or what, but if you read these stories, you wouldn't even know they had played a game. Today's paper told of the changes coming up player development-wise, because the team, well, it kind of sucks so far, but there were nice quotes from the player development guys. (And, oh, by the way, the Redbirds lost, gave up four runs in the last two innings, but no biggie.) Yesterday, we got the team's response to Barry Bonds. (And, oh, hey, yeah, guess what! They won. Almost pitched their first shutout, but who really cares?) The day before that, there must not have been any really good features for anyone to think of because there was actually a game story, although come to think of it, it sort of read like a feature on Brian Falkenborg. The way the guys used to do it was to come out to the ballpark early, get their quotes, write up a nice feature, and then the second the game was over, toss in a paragraph about the action so they could make it home before most of the fans did. They're well-written articles, but they don't cover the game. (The year I was there, our beat writer wrote game stories, bless him, but then he went on vacation and then covered football during the month of August, and it all went downhill from there.) I like a good feature as much as anyone, really, I do, but you need to do that in addition to the game story. The guys who cover the Durham Bulls understand this. They write game stories, good ones, when the team's at home, and then features on Sundays. It works. So anyway, that still pisses me off.

I was thinking about it yesterday, and I realized that I can't really call TLB "TLB" anymore, because he's not, exactly, although he still kind of is, but really the latest boy is actually the boy from before (TBFB...heh), and he's sort of ... intangible? I don't know. He's not here, we're not going to end up together, but, I mean, you have to give credit where credit is due, right? I always said he and I only had a physical thing, but that's not entirely true. It's mostly true, but we're friends, too, and I care about what happens to him, so there's some emotional involvement. Just no emotional entanglement! But anyway, I think TLB will remain TLB because, well, that's just his acronym now. Even though I said his name, and it's not like anybody cares anyhow. I thought about him yesterday, and thought that I hoped he was doing well, and that he was happy, and then I got irritated at myself for still caring.