DOWN WITH PANTS!

Ok, I know, this is the height of sports geekdom. However, I have just launched a new blog for my fantasy football team, the Inland Empire Fightin' Combines. Please visit the Fightin' Combines site for very few people will. I will be updating it regularly with game reports, team stories, injury updates and all sorts of random crap. It's pretty silly, but what can I say, I am a sports geek.

Occasionally on his way home from work Down With Pants! listens to the Tavis Smiley show on NPR. Yesterday I caught it briefly, but the part I heard was fascinating. Tavis had Connie Rice on the show to do her regular top ten segment. The top ten for the day was the top ten things said about Baghdad that you'll never hear said about Watts or other US ghettos.

#10 - Isn't it great that Iraqi's are now free to flood their streets with tens of thousands of protestors in open demonstration.
#9 - There's no physical security without economic security.

And the list goes on and really makes some good points. It exposes some of the great hypocrisy in this war and in this country. Here we are bringing peace and democracy to Iraq, but we can't even get it right in our own country. One of the early drafts of the new Iraqi constitution ensures equal representation for minorities and women in their parliament or congress and also proposes standardized health care. Why can't we get that?

Listen to the whole segment by visiting Tavis Smiley's website.

Join Down With Pants! today to rally support to grant Puerto Rico statehood. This lovely territory of 4 million citizens has gone to long under the faux rule of the United States and should be granted the representation they deserve. And besides, if we grant them statehood, they couldn't kick our asses silly in basketball anymore.

1. Today I saw an amazing sight. In this age of rampant cell phone usage in every inappropriate place we have seen just about everything and I'm sure what I saw was fairly normal, however, it still blew my mind. While I was getting gas today a car pulled up with three mid-30's women in it and a baby. One woman got out of the car with the cell phone in hand chatting away. I looked in the car and the woman in the front seat was talking on her phone. I checked the back seat and sure enough the woman back there was on her phone. Next to her sat the baby, crying at the top of it's lungs. For god's sakes! Put down your phones, take care of the baby, pump your gas and talk to each other!

2. When did it become acceptable to bring a dog into a grocery store? In the past year I've seen many instances of this (all at Fred Meyers, my favorite supermarket in the world). Look, if someone needs a seeing eye dog, sure, that's totally fine. But your average, everyday purse dog has no business in the frozen foods! Do people not realize that there is food in Fred Meyers? To these people if you are reading...Your dog has hair, it's going to shed and probably slobber and I'm going to forget to wash the apple I bought. Yuck! So please, leave your stupid rat dog at home you idiot. It doesn't make you cuter. It's not an accessory for your outfit. It's a fucking dog and it's disgusting. (I really do love dogs, just not in the supermarket!)

Last night we broke down and went to Pacific Place to see Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle again and we were not disappointed the second time around. It is so ridiculously funny, even sober.

So after the movie, we had our own craving. So we rented Sixteen Candles (which plays a role in the movie) and we remembered having seen White Castle frozen cheeseburgers somewhere so we stopped at Safeway, and lo and behold, sure enough, White Castle we found. And they were delicious.

I never went to White Castle when I lived back East because they were so proud of their onions and I hate onions just about more than anything. However, the onions were not that bad and now I feel like I wasted a great opportunity. Now, the closest White Castle is in Chicago, quite a ways from Seattle.

But one day, sometime in the future, we too will make our pilgrimage to White Castle just like our friends Harold and Kumar. And just like Harold and Kumar we will have to battle adversity, fight injustice and learn important life lessons along the way until we reach the promised land and we can say, Hallelujah, Hallelujah! Thank God Almighty!

Thank you White Castle and thank you Harold and Kumar.

My last post was brutal. As I read I cringe. I know my grammar isn't very good in the first place, but late at night while being hurried to get to bed, it really suffers. I'm not going to edit it though, it's going to be a living, breathing example of how bad it can get and I will strive to be better than that post from now on.

This evening while Death? slept off her workday, I went down to Fred Meyer to grab the ingredients for dinner. Fred Meyer is the closest supermarket to our house and it is where I do most of my shopping, yet I find myself asking every single time "why do I still shop here?"

Tonight I had one of the worst checkers in the world. Naomi (her real name, sorry Naomi, but if you read this then maybe you can learn from it) was just awful. All the time I've been going to the supermarket I've seen checkers, even the worse of them, have no problem scanning items. It's just something that seems to be not that hard. Why don't I like to scan my own items? Because I'm slow and have to turn it round and round and round to find the barcode, so I use a real life checker to do it for me. However, this novice checker Naomi was as bad as me. Not a single item scanned correctly the first time through. Round and round and round she turned every item in search of that elusive barcode.

Five minutes go by, and I am still not even at the roller to place my items on it. She's half arguing with a customer ahead of me who wanted 20% off of some stupid item, but it didn't ring it up as such. Instead of calling someone and moving on, you could see the gears working overtime trying to figure out another solution. Having finally dispatched with that customer, I was up to the roller. 10 minutes have now gone by, I have read every single headline possible. Did you know that our tax dollars are paying for Saddam's secret sexy life? That's what the Star or Sun or whatever said.

Finally, only one item remains between Naomi and me. The excitement is building. Of course the last item is really tough and as she held it over her head to examine the barcode I did one of those exasperated back knee bends and a 360 degree turn. Can she really be this bad? Is it her first day? Did they just throw her into the fire and stand back and watch?

When it is my turn, I am in no mood for idle chit-chat, but idle chit-chat is what I get. Yes, I am having a find day. Yes it sure is hot out today. Yes Phish food does sound good, that's why I'm buying it. Yes, for the second time, I am using my debit card. For god sake's hurry up! And don't crush my tomato.....damnit, I said don't crush it.

Of course I look around, and every line is just like this. This is Freddy's now. It's just a fact of life and when I go back it will be exactly the same. But will I stop shopping there? Probably not. It's too close to home and I would have nothing to bitch about and really, in the end, that's all that matters.

The Down With Pants! crew saw Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle on Tuesday night and laughed our asses silly. It's one of the funniest movies to come out in years and years. It's silly as can be and totally ridiculous but it works. I don't even want to say too much about it. Just go see it already! We give it a big, humongous two pants down!