• I told the wife to stop calling my cell phone and start text messaging me. I’m not sure if that’s a dick move or not. Who cares.
• Nothing is more frustrating than having semi-relevant e-mails you send get ignored/blown off. It’s happened to me probably a half dozen times in the last couple of weeks. I guess if you can’t condense your thoughts down to however many characters Twitter allows whomever you’re contacting can’t be bothered. People suck.
• I now consider myself an athlete. Sort of even look the part too. Except for the wrinkles, gray hair (what’s left of it) and glasses.
• I’m finally going to see Body Worlds 2 next week. I am so stoked.
• Still haven’t decided whether to get something expensive and ostentatious or something cheap and practical as my next vehicle. Whatever it is, it needs a right side driver’s seat arm rest. I’m demanding.
• A couple of the ugliest teenage boys I’ve ever seen were having a debate in my gym’s locker room while I was in there changing. It was about which of their little female friends is the most bangable. If the girls they were talking about are in those boys’ league I can only imagine what they look like. Actually, I don’t want to.
• Ok, they probably look something like this.

I took in a game at Camden Yards to see the Orioles play the Tigers Friday night. The good thing about the current state of the Orioles is that you can walk up half an hour before game time and get great seats with no stupid Ticketmaster fees. In this case, I tried to get seats in section 272, which is in the LF club box seats. That is, club level luxury without the club level price (or the club level in-seat food service, but that’s neither here nor there).

However, they’ve changed things from section 272 over and made that whole seating level an All You Can Eat area for an extra $15 per ticket. And the guy at the window said there was nothing available in 272 anyway.

I contemplated it for a minute and asked my kid how hungry he was. He said he was pretty hungry, so I said screw it and bought two seats in section 278. We got up there, got our hand stamped for the All You Can Eat deal and proceeded to get our grub on.

First, let me say that when the game started and we were in our seats, sections 272, 274 and 276 were virtually empty. In those three sections there were only about 10 people sitting in them. Yet I was told there was nothing available. WTF. Could they all be season tickets not being used? Doubtful.

Anyway, when you go to the AYCE porch or balcony or whatever they call it you get all the hot dogs, nachos, peanuts, popcorn, ice cream sandwiches and soda you can eat or drink. They have alcohol stands set up right next to the AYCE area to buy your beers and such, but if you want pizza or pretzels or cotton candy or anything you need to go for a walk to find it.

I figured that everything would be puny and toddler sized, but I have to hand it to the Orioles. Everything they give you is full sized. The hot dogs are the quarter pound size even. The sodas are the ones you pay $4 for. So if you get a dog and a couple drinks you’ve pretty much gotten your money’s worth out of the extra cost of the ticket.

Of course, the object is not to just get your money’s worth, but to get sick. I swear I never thought I could eat so much, but value is a good motivator. Here’s my approximate tally:

3 hot dogs
5 diet cokes
2 nachos
2 bags of peanuts
1 box of popcorn

And my kid’s:

1 hot dog
4 sprites
4 nachos
1 bag of peanuts
1/2 box of popcorn
1 ice cream sandwich

Maybe it was more because it felt like we were eating and drinking a lot more than the tally indicates. Every half inning one of us was going up to reload on something.

By the time the AYCE benefit ended after the 7th inning I was so ready to stop eating it wasn’t even funny. And the next morning my stomach was singing all kinds of gurgly songs. But it was a lot of fun to partake of it all, and the O’s do a nice job of keeping everything well stocked to the very end (I can’t imagine how many bags of cheese they went through for the nachos because every time I went to get some one of the machines was about out but would be refilled right away). Also, while sections 272, 274 and 276 were empty and my section was only maybe half full, sections 280-288 were packed. People take advantage of the AYCE business. It’s a good scam for the team.

The LF club AYCE ticket is not something I can do more than once a year or so, if that, for obvious reasons (I’m still waiting for my cholesterol to even out after those dogs and nacho cheese and my blood pressure to drop from all the salt), but it’s a pretty good idea, a pretty good value (all things considered); I didn’t pay a dime for anything at the stadium beyond the ticket price, and allows for a pretty good time.

Heck, I think the Orioles even won the game. And we got to see fireworks after the game ended. It was a win/win/win night all around.

As a perpetual cynic and aspiring curmudgeon, I cannot take Dara Torres’ performance at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials at face value. I just can’t. She is 41 years old and is sleeker, stronger and faster in the water than she was TWENTY years ago. And she’s setting records (and even breaking her own from over a decade ago) in a sport where you’re pretty much finished by the time you’re in your late 20s, if that. And after two surgeries in the past year.

In the last 10 years or so, too many athletes have either performed too remarkably at the upper echelons of their olympic sports (Marion Jones, Justin Gatlin) or have gotten markedly better after they turned 40 (Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens) to be termed just genetic freaks (at this point I’m willing to give Michael Phelps the benefit of the doubt but I even wonder about him). Genetics don’t kick in further with age after you’ve already proven yourself as a world class athlete to make you legendary. They just don’t.

I’m not even saying steroids or HGH or anything is bad. I mean, it’s banned from athletics and some of it’s illegal, but I don’t really care what people do to give themselves a competitive athletic edge. Just don’t treat the public like dumbfucks and use the diet and exercise line as the only reason for your success. In fact, Torres claims her success is due to nutritional supplements and “resistance stretching.” Slate has an article that calls bullshit on all that and openly wonders WTF is going on with her, even though she’s volunteered for more stringent drug testing than most athletes.

Sadly, the state of affairs in sports today pretty much force us all to wonder WTF is going on when athletes perform near miraculously the way Dara Torres did at the olympic trials. Anyone who doesn’t have a kernel of doubt in his or her head about Torres is either naive or purposely blind.

And that’s one (more) reason why sports figures are not heroes. In most cases they’re even more flawed than we are.