These things are unrelated

1. Historic 32 run day for the Twins

The whipping the Twins put on the Black Sox Friday night was the most runs scored in a single day by a Major League team since the Red Sox scored 35 runs in a doubleheader back in 1939. The Twins won 20-14 in the first game, which is some pretty good run support for Kevin Slowey who gave up seven runs and still got the win. For reasons passing understanding that game wasn't televised, but I watched the second game, in which Matt Garza and the Twins bullpen shut out the Black Sox, and the Twins hit six home runs to win 12-0, scoring eleven runs off the homers by Morneau, Cuddyer, Hunter, and Cirillo, and the Piranhas drove in the twelfth with a couple base hits, and lead runner Nick Punto nipping a couple extra bases on each hit, just for Ozzie Guillen. The Black Sox tried everything too, like in the first inning when Jim Thome took out our catcher by over-swinging at a strike and letting the bat fly right into Mike Redmond's head. Some may say it wasn't intentional, but he managed to find the one spot on Redmond's head not covered by a mask and helmet, and he took a practice swing, letting go of his bat and hurling it all the way to the backstop on strike one (scaring the crap out of the people behind home plate). Because he caught the first game, Joe Mauer was in as a DH, and Gardenhire had just abandoned his usual three catchers policy, so Joe had to catch the rest of the game and the Twins lost the use of the designated hitter. The Twins had their pitchers hit and still spanked the Sox 12-0, ironically winning American League style playing under National League rules. Justin Morneau's 3-run homer in the first was the 100th of his career, and Morneau went on to homer not once, not twice, but thrice (apologies to Mr. Burns) en route to becoming the first Twin to hit three home runs in a game since 1973. The Black Sox won yesterday against BOOF in what seems likely to be Mark Buerhle's last start* in pale hose, and the decider is today with Carlos Silva facing Javier Vazquez.

*-Apparently Buehrle is willing to sign for less than his open market value to stay in Chicago but wants to be sure he stays in Chicago if he's giving up money to do it, so he's reasonably demanded a no-trade clause and the Sox won't give it to him. How they can manage to be a small market team strapped for cash while splitting a city twice the size of Boston with the hopeless Cubs is beyond me. I know it's fashionable to be a Cubs fan, and the Brewers and Cardinals, and to a lesser extent the Tigers, Reds, and Indians, squeeze out their TV market, but seriously they can't take the risk on a no-trade clause or pay full market value on a pitcher? The Twins haven't let their big targets go, and they're squeezing their revenue out everything west of the St. Croix, not south of Wacker Drive.

2. SpikeTV the Sick Man of Basic Cable?

This morning I turned on Fist of Fury, aka The Big Boss, which I tivo'ed off of SpikeTV, hoping to finally see the last of the big five Bruce Lee movies (Fist of Fury, The Chinese Connection, Way of the Dragon, Enter the Dragon, and Game of Death) that I hadn't seen. At first, I was really disappointed to find how similar it was to The Chinese Connection, and how derivative it must have been being released just two years after Fist of Fury. I had this nagging feeling that I'd seen all this before, but I passed that off as remembering Jet Li's remake Fist of Legend. After a bit I started to lose interest, doubting there would be anything on the order of the epic fights with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Chuck Norris in Game of Death and Way of the Dragon, or even the great scene in Fist of Legend when Jet Li goes into the Japanese dojo, politely takes his shoes off, and beats the living hell out of the entire school and cripples the huge karate master, and then meekly strolls back out. But then letting it run in the background for a while, I eventually recognized a scene and realized it fucking was The Chinese Connection.

What the hell is this crap? I know Asians are all supposed to look alike to us round-eyed devils, and some of Bruce Lee's movies were recut to manufacture sequels and half the time he's not even in Game of Death, but nobody over there has seen The Chinese Connection? I was going to record Enter the Dragon and any other Bruce Lee movies Spike was showing, but now I wonder if I'll get a triple feature of Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility, and Brokeback Mountain instead... Bruce Lee, Ang Lee, Jane Austen John Saxon, close enough. Actually given the godawful voice actress who dubbed over Zhang Ziyi when they showed House of Flying Daggers, which was so bad I had to turn it off, maybe I'll just give up on Hong Kong films on American TV and just finish watching 8 Femmes and thank heavens that it didn't make a big splash here, or there'd be a bubble gum remake with Avril Lavigne, Lindsay Lohan, Mariah Carey, Madonna, and some American Idol finalists set in the Hamptons, only more "accessible" and "empowering".

3. 98.6 degrees... sounds like the hot tub at the Captain's place

It was almost 100 degrees out yesterday, and completely still leading to a total absence of ventilation in my apartment. About 10:30 when it was still 90+ degrees out I finally gave up and turned on the AC so I didn't have to sleep naked in a kiddie pool with my windows open. If this continues, I'm moving to Nunavut (which is a real place, even if none of my countrymen seem to have heard of it) and running the chicken hut in Baker Lake, NU. You may wonder why I'd go to Canada when I keep making fun of them, but consider two things: the cool people in Baker Lake are all Inuit, not British Canadian, and since Russia just claimed half the Arctic Ocean as part of their territory and paranoid Canadians on the internet insist the USA claimed the other half, (according to Canadians this annexation really happened but just wasn't reported in American newspapers and that's why you haven't heard of it), Nunavut's warm water ports on the shipping route from Asia to America and Europe won't be Canadian long. (I know they're not warm now, but give our SUV's, hairspray, and New York to Philly plane flights time to work, we'll have that sucker melted in no time.) So somebody email me when the new Batman is released, for The Dark Knight I'll fly back down into the sauna.