Love Thy Neighbor, Hate Thy Favre

Well it’s finally that time of year again. The long summer days are winding down, the leaves are weeks away from sporting their colorful coats, apples are plumping up on the orchards, and of course… Brett Favre is playing football.

It’s basically a tale as old as time, simply because Favre could be mistaken for Father Time. Man plays ball, man has great career, man retires, man come out of retirement,  plays again for another team, retires again, comes back one more time and plays with former longtime rival, retires AGAIN, comes back for that “one more year.” 

For some, The Brett Favre Ping Pong stirs up their emotions, both good and bad. For me personally, I love the fact that Favre is coming back… again… again. The fact is, I LOVE… to HATE him.

I’ve never liked Brett Favre and for the last few years, my dislike for him has only grown. 

I’ll give him the first retirement with the crying, weeping, and drawn out speech. I love when a player holds a conference regarding their retirement because it actually shows their real personality and human emotions. However, I do not like it when an athlete does it THREE TIMES!!!

Enough is enough already. If you looked at the percentage of SportsCenter coverage in the last year, 54 percent of it involved Favre in some way or another, 32 percent covered The Decision by King James, and the remaining 14 percent was normal coverage. But then again 67.3 percent of all statistics are made up so who knows if those facts are accurate. 

I digress… these last 3 years have been Favring Annoying. Ahhhh… you see! He’s taking over in my blog now too.

While I am a Patriots fan, some would think that I have plenty to keep me occupied this year. With all the Rex Ryan talk and Patriots being the underdog this season, you’d think Favre wouldn’t bother me at all. WRONG!

Like I said, I love to hate this guy. I loved watching him cry again at the NFC Championship Game against New Orleans, and I’ll love watching him lose again during Week 1 against the Saints. I love watching a sideway number four on the ground after being hit by a ravenous linebacker. 

I also have to mention, that I love how stupid he looks trying to act in There’s Something About Mary.

And sorry Wrangler but I can never buy a pair of pants from you again. 

I can’t wait to sit on my c-o-rrrrrr-you going to the mall today… sit on my couch on Halloween and watch the old man cripple his way onto the field, take the snap from center and play once again, against my beloved Patriots.

Who am I kidding, I’ll be on the edge of my seat, nails down to the bone, wetting my pants as he drives down the field for a game winning touchdown. 

God Damn, I love to hate this guy!

The 2010 YNN Fightin' Niners

On Monday August 30, 2010, the YNN Fightin’ Niners will participate in something the team hasn’t seen in years… a playoff game.

We’re all excited to compete with the best (for hopefully the next couple weeks) but we can’t forget the journey we took this summer to get to where we are today.

The season has practically flown by, well unless you’re Maureen who’s caught almost every game, at least half of them in the 85+ degree heat.

While our team is full of different types of personalities and talent, we have found a way to work together, perform, and finish with an 11-5 record. (Not bad for a team that only won a few games last year)

To explain our team, I guess it’s best to start at the top (of the batting order.)

Kippins was a core player. With speed that would even make Ricky Henderson tip his hat, Skipp could tap the ball and be on third before the opposing team even touches the ball.

However  there are times where he only gets to first. That’s where Skipps second half comes in. The Contact Extraordinar… Sarah! With just the tap of the bat, she’s successfully moved over Kippens at most a dozen times, helping us score on multiple occasions.

Some of our big hitters consist of Matt our short stop and photographer. Our center fielder and shortstop Tim. Our fearless leader, outfielder, fohawk wearing coach Carl. Of course yours truly batting a cool .680 with 5 home runs (yes I love stats and yes I’m a dork for keeping them.)

We can’t forget the other players of the team that made this season possible, basically because we’d have to forfeit without them. The lady niners include Ellie , our second baseman. Maureen our trooper behind the plate. Amy who pitches, plays infield, and hits like Dotty Henson! (she also brings her fiancé Ryan to hit sometimes. HAHA) Ashley was only able to show up a few times but basically was our short stop with a sweet swing. I can’t forget one of our power house batters that I couldn’t add to our big hitters simply because she’s like the Barry Bonds of softball, Laura who hits it over everyone’s heads simply because they always move in when a girl is up to bat. Sucks for them, works for us!

I also can’t forget about our team parent, Molly, who was our number one supporter always seemed to have a snack for all of us. (Juice boxes, crackers, or freeze pops!)

We also have guest appearances from Liz, Lori, and Sam who have helped contribute to our non forfeited games. Whether it be a win or a loss, at least we get to play.

We also wouldn’t have much of a team with out the help of our other Niners.

There’s Collie, with his hidden speed. Sully who I should have labeled in our big hitters group (only if he played more games.) John who we lost for most of the season because of an injury. George who’s helped us in the outfield. Joe added his pitching, pull hitting, and occasional swearing. Nick was also able to show off his INCREDIBLE pitching skills. He was able to walk more batters in one inning than anyone else combined the whole year. He also almost hit a homerun… almost.

Oh and then there’s Ken. Our co-captain who hurt his poor wittle ankle. Just kidding. He’s also known for hitting my car. Bastard.

This year has definitely been a great time for all. We’ve laughed, cried, walked off, and drank free beer.

Even if our playoff run is short lived, we still have the fall to keep the fun going.

But most importantly, the greatest thing to come from this year is obviously the FREE HATS!!!

30 Days of Fail

For the past 4 months I have been on an exercise hiatus. While I’ve played about 15 softball games and spent about 40 dollars for a gym membership that might as well be used as toilet paper, I’ve practically been immobile. I think however that I’ve finally hit a point where I’m sick of doing nothing. I belong to a gym, live next to a park, and have 10+ pairs of shorts that lack sweat. So I’ve decided to create my own workout for the next 30 days. Why 30 days? I’ll tell you why, hence the blog. 30 days from August 16th is September 15th which happens to be my 24th birthday. There’s really no rhyme or reason, it just happens to be 30 days away and I don’t have much going on until then. (lucky me)

The next question I had for myself was what kind of work out do I attempt, nay, complete  during my 30 days. I’ve practically done every workout there is from all cardio to fast paced weight lifting, and there’s really only one thing I could try that I’ve never done before.

I came up with, the Until Fail Workout, or for title purposes during my duration, “30 Days of Fail.”

When I use to work out with my buddy Kevin back home in MA, we occasionally did weight lifting reps until fail, which for all you non-gym goers, is lifting weight until you absolutely, positively, crying for your momma can’t do it anymore. Kevin unlike myself could rep a lot more than me, so this is where he got his kicks, punches, and Mike Tyson Knockouts in. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy it either, the results were worth it at the time. I lost weight quicker, and gained a lot of muscle.

Since going to the gym and lifting a bar bell over my head for 19 minutes until I failed wouldn’t really accomplish anything, I’ve decided to mix my once upon a time cardio workout with the until fail idea.

The idea would basically be to pick a form of cardio, whether it be walking, running, jogging, biking, stair-ing, or elliptically until I either drop or puke. Hell, maybe even both. Most likely both.

I still belong to the gym so everything will be accessible to me with no excuses. I will document every day for viewing pleasure. If anything it will help continue my on going articles without any down time and entertain any readers I still have. Also I plan to update constantly on my twitter account, so if you're really feeling up to it, you can follow me as destroy my body. http://twitter.com/PaulMSnyder

During my routine, I welcome insight, opinions, and of course the ever popular favorite… criticism.

So tomorrow (or today if you’re reading this on the 16th) I will leave work, grab my shorts, and head out the door for a run or jog, and hopefully by the end, a crawl.

If I’ve done this correctly you should be able to hear me by the end of the day. I’ll be the only guy in the Capital Region crying on my side, screaming for my momma.

Wish me, and over weight body, luck.

Stay tuned… Day 1 is coming up next.

M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-GOTTA BE KIDDING ME

For this particular blog I am going to attempt to do some that’s been quite difficult for me to in most of my posts. I am going to try and tell this story with using the phrase, “That’s what she said.” While it is one of my all time favorite phrases (I loathe Steve Carell for this), I’ve found myself saying it and typing it too often. So without another 17 seconds of wasting your time… here we go!

The other day I was woken up by girlfriend who seemed to be having a slight panic attack. After asking her what was wrong she told me I had to get up… (resisting, resisting). Well obviously! You don’t wake someone up to tell them to go back to bed. That’s like firing someone so they’ll work.

Anyway, I asked her what was wrong and she told me there was a mouse in our bathroom. My first thought was “Why?” My first thought should have been “How?” but we’re talking about the kid who called his dad before the fire department when his car caught on fire during his senior year of high school. (Fun fact for you)

So I got up and walked to the bathroom. With my girlfriend behind me I walked up to the door and slowly started to peak my head into the bathroom, and… I didn’t see anything.

I opened the door quickly, ran in, and slammed the door behind me. I searched my bathroom all over the place (all 5 square feet of it) and finally found a small, tiny, computer mouse sized mouse curled up in the corner, shaking like Muhammad Ali.

Well I figured, since I have a landlord, that I might as well call him to figure out what he was going to do. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi. I have a bit of a predicament.

Landlord: What can I do for you?

Me: My girlfriend discovered a mouse in our bathroom. I would like to know how you’re going to handle it.

Landlord: (girlish shrill) Oh My Gawd! Are you serious? I don’t know. I’m afraid of mice. See what you can 
do about it.

Me: Are You Effin’ Kidding Me!?

Needless to say I decided to take measures into my own hands… well actually, measures into my own cooking pots and pans. I grabbed the biggest pot I could find and jumped back into the bathroom.

It was like trying to wrangle up a pig. The mouse wouldn’t cooperate and all of a sudden I felt like Nathan Lane. (From Mouse Hunt, not The Producers)

After about 20 minutes of exercise in my bathroom (hold it together Paul... not this time) I finally caught him with my toilet cleaner. Yes you heard me right, my toilet cleaner. (See picture)

Well actually, it was the holder for the toilet brush. Who knew the bottom of it was hollow? Not this kid!

So I slip a magazine under the holder and asked my girlfriend to open the doors for me. So she Usain Bolted out both doors while I made myself outside. I put the container on the ground expecting the mouse to run off. 

Instead it insisted on hanging around. We’ll I had to get to work in 4 hours and I was in no mood to just “chill.” So I kicked the damn thing and the mouse shot out like Augustus Gloop.

I walked back inside, washed my rodent infested hands, contemplated throwing out the pots and pans, decided to throw out the toilet holder, made fun of my girlfriend for standing on a chair, and went back to sleep.

To all of you that may run into the same situation, save yourself some time and simply ask your landlord when applying for an apartment whether or not he likes peanuts and never forgets.

Because chances are, if he does, then he probably shares other characteristics of Elephants as well which could leave you playing Mouse Trap.

Remember that game?? No one knew how to play it but we all knew how to set it up. Best 10 seconds ever. That's what she said... DAMMIT!!

Don't Forget To Turn Left...

This last weekend I happened to be watching SportsCenter (big surprise, I watch it like 4 times a day). But this time I happened to watch the highlights from the Brickyard 400 in Indianapolis.

During the quick minute of crashes, passes, and celebrating, I noticed one thing about the NASCAR highlight.

I realized that a minute of watching racing is about all I can handle. I just don't understand the fascination of competitive racing. (I say competitive because it's clearly a "competition" between a group of people. They train and compete to be number one.)

However, I am not convinced that racing is a sport, just like I'm not inclined to calling drivers athletes.

I grew up watching the four major sports; Baseball, Football, Basketball, and Hockey.

While I understand that every sport has it's boring moments that arguably every sports fan can make. Football with it's continuous replays and commercial breaks, hockey with it's low scoring match ups, and basketball when it's not the playoffs. Let's also not count out the entire sport of baseball (my favorite) that's boring in every aspect of the game to anyone who doesn't share the passion of America's past time. (At least I'm man enough to admit it.)

But racing... I really don't understand it. How can someone sit through 3 hours of cars going around in an oval. They're cars... they drive, pass each other, turn left about 2,000 times, and often crash because of stupidity. It's like the I87/I90 split during rush hour.

The concept of racing is simple but apparently the preliminary rules of racing are more complex than rocket surgery and brain science combined. The car must be perfect to a "T" in order to pass inspection for racing. If just the slightest thing is off kilter, a driver/car can be disqualified.

Can you imagine if this was the case for other sports.

Sorry, Rockets have to forfeit because Yao Ming forgot to lace his sneakers through every hole.
Looks like the Mets lose another one because Reyes' brim on his hat wasn't curved properly with a length of middle Ordinate of 1.5 inches. 

I'm not even going to get into the different types of flags that are waved depending on the different situations. Lets just say if it were football, the refs would look like a bag of skittles running down the field.

I'm also not going to even get started on the fuel issue of NASCAR, how dropping competitive racing could also drop gas prices by a significant amount. All I know is that NASCAR racing uses about 200,000 gallons of racing each year. For me, I could fill up 20,000 times with the amount of gas they use in one year. This would last me almost 780 years! So not only is the sport boring, but it's also wasting a natural resource. (Okay, I guess I got into it.)

It's not like baseball is hurting the population of cows from the leather baseballs that are used.

Overall the sport is just a way to kill time on a Sunday. I can't even say raining day, because they don't race during the rain, just like that other 1% of all sports.

I say, do yourself a favor. Next time you want to kill an afternoon of car watching. Grab a 6 pack, a couple law chairs and plop yourself on the medium of the highway, there's really no difference. Jimmie Johnson will still probably win.

Can You Hear, Email, Tweet, Text Me Now??

In the world we live in, technology is always changing. I think we can all agree that’s obvious. But to really step back and analyze it only makes you think even more. The other day I bought myself a new phone because my old one was dying after going through more abuse than Tina Turner.

While getting use to my new phone (LG Ally), I sat in living room jaw to the ground amazed at how many different things that it was capable of doing.

I’m actually surprised the manual wasn’t the size of a bible.

While reading through it, and playing around with the phone settings, I day dreamed back to the days of middle school where my parents handed me my first cell phone…The Nokia Brick.

The Nokia was the greatest and coolest thing a kid could own back then. It finally gave you a sense of ownership with something as responsible as a phone line.

It came with 3 or 4 ringtones, basic number pad for calling, no form of texting, limited service, oh and one of the coolest games, Snake.

I miss the days of simplicity in phones. Now-a-days my phone allows texting, emailing, instant messaging, picture taking, video recording, ringtone downloading, emailing, facebooking, youtube watching, WiFi-finding, Google Searching, emailing, voice activating, game playing, document scanning, GPSing, and about 10,000 other things the Nokia couldn’t but a Droid now can. (BTW, I put emailing 3 times because I have three emails linked to my phone, so there, it wasn’t a typo that you thought you noticed.)

Every phone I received after the Nokia got better and better, technology wise anyway. Not so much physically. I’ve had multiple bricks, flips, crackberrys, and now a droid.

I know that I’m amazed today at how much my phone does, and can wait for the next few years to see what else it can do.

And actually it won’t matter, because my father’s response to my future phone will never change and I get a kick out of it every time.

I’ll tell him everything from ESPN Fantasy Tracker to Bank of America Online Banking and he’ll just stare at me the way I cow stares at an oncoming train, and simply say, “DOES IT MAKE PHONE CALLS??”

Here’s to the APProaching Cell Phone Future!

epaC eht no floG

On the 4^th of July, I did something I have only done for the 3^rd time all year. And after about 5 hours of struggling, swearing, pissing (and moaning), weeping, throwing, kicking, and stomping, I’m not sure I’ll be doing this activity for quite some time.

No, I’m not talking about baking a soufflé or trying to land the effin’ plane in Top Gun for NES.  I’m talking about golf.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love golf. I love playing it, watching it, talking about it, (betting on it), reading… well maybe not reading about it. But that doesn’t mean you should stop reading about it. Let’s continue…

I guess we can start our story off at the beginning of my round which began when my jaw dropped in the pro shop when I saw how much it was to play.

Now granted, I wasn’t the one paying; my father was (God Bless his wallet.) Regardless, no one should have paid that much to watch me struggle for 18 holes.

1^st hole we get up to the tee box and my dad takes his first shot of the day. That’s if you don’t could the 50 or so he took on the practice green. Dude loves to putt. (Fun Fact: My dad is the 1988 Massachusetts State Mini Golf Champion. Not mock it, until you can tell me what your dad is the state champion in.)

His ball goes far and a little left. Next my brother, long and straight down the fairway. (Must resist CaddyShack reference)

Next my uncle who take out his 5 wood and smashes the ball up the fairway. “Big hitter the Lama, long.” Dammit!

Then it was my turn. My first shot went about 60 yards to the left, dead hook, in the trees. 1 ball down, 42 left in the bag.

The next 9 holes was alike a Lincoln Theater Tragedy. 53 swings later and standing at a cool 18 over par, the best thing to come from this day had finally arrived. A red Power-Ade and frozen Snickers. Nothing ever tasted so good. Remind you that it was in the 90’s (the temperature not my score) and it felt like playing golf in Satan’s sauna.

For the first time in 13 holes, I actually hit the damn ball straight and WHATTA-YA-KNOW! I pared the effin’ hole.

I’m not so bad after the second shot; unfortunately the hole starts on the tee box not 200 yards down the middle of the fairway.

The rest of the holes weren’t a pleasure cruise but I did get to witness my brother par the par 3 with a chip out of the sand that slowly rolled across the green and into the hole. It was very cool to see since I had never seen anyone do that before. (Would have made Bobby Orr #4 on SportsCenter’s Top Ten.)

So after 5 hours, 104 strokes, 15 lost balls, 3 blisters, and the creation of 3 new swear words, I officially had the worst round of my life, but… I still had fun.

I had fun because I know I’m not a good golfer. I know I’m not going to hit under par, or bring my hand cap under my age. So it’s all about having fun and enjoying the one par I’ll get or watching someone else chip it in from the bunker for par.

I can’t drive, chip, loft, flop, or any other kind of golf swing other than putt. My game consisted of no more than 2 putts per hole which by mini golf standards puts me at 9 UNDER!!!! Sooooo… I HAD A GREAT ROUND OF GOLF!!

Looks like it’s time for me to take after my dad and hit the windmills and clown months rather than the fairways and fringes.

See you on the fake greens… I’ll be the one with the $90 dollar putter and red colored ball.