NO NATS! NOT NICK!

Yeah Nick's Grimace in this pic just about shows how much I liked today's Mid-Season Trade Deadline Trade.

The WASHINGTON NATIONALS announced a Mid-Season Dead-Line Trade with the Florida Marlins. The Nats just traded one of my all-time fave NATS, who was part of the Original 2005 Season Nationals who were the Montreal Expos, First Baseman Nick Johnson (The last Expo who was still with the Nats) for pitcher Aaron Thompson from Florida's Minor League System Oh and some cash considerations. The biggest sucky part of this is we won't see Thompson in DC for at least a year, maybe two since he's still Minor League.


I haven't been this annoyed at a trade the Nationals made since the Church & Schneider for Milledge trade with the Mets during the winter of '07 just before the 2008 Season. Chruch is now with the Atlanta Braves (after a recent trade a few weeks ago) and Milledge is with the Pittsburgh Pirates from another recent trade. I think Schneider is still with the Mets, thank goodness.


I wasn't even annoyed when the Nats traded away their closer Chad "The Chief" Cordero (another fave of mine), who was their last real closer they've had for sometime.

I know there had been rumors of trading away Nick for sometime, probably even when he was out due to that collision with Austin Kearns in 2006 vs. the Mets in New York that broke his leg.


The Nats are saying they would have gotten rid of Nick at the end of this season anyway. Say What?

OK so how long will the rest of my Fave Nats remain Nats? Ryan Zimmerman, Austin Kearns, Jesus Flores, Will Nieves, Josh Willingham, Jordan Zimmerman even Adam Dunn and the new kid Nijer Morgan. Well at least Nick looks pretty good in pinstripes. After all he did start as a Damn Yankee.

Dream Blog?

Dream Blog or No Dream Blog?


I've been toying with the idea of making a dream blog. It would be a blog version of my personal dream log that I already sort of do in a word document. My biggest strike against it though is when real people I know (or celebs I may or may not like) are in my dreams I would have to change the names for several reasons. I don't want to embarrass myself or the other person in case of any compromising situations. I also don't want to open myself up to any sort of law suit. I thought about making up aliases for people but that would require me to make a master list of the aliases and remember who I call who? (or is that whom I called who?) It could get confusing to me.

Although they are just dreams? Right?

Another strike is often times I don't describe things well enough to give the reader the same vision that I saw in my dream. Sometimes when I reread my old dreams, I have no idea what had happened even though I wrote it down. Most of the time I do recall some of it after a little thought.

It's not good for someone who sometimes wants to get into writing to write stuff that doesn't make any sense to the reader, or give any vision of the action. I'm noticing the same problem when I try to write stories. [super big sigh]

OH well maybe there is still the porn biz, or am I too old for that now? (Joking)

Childhood Icons First thought.

Just a quick one, I think I will expand upon it tomorrow. This past week within the last 3 days 3 Entertainment Icons from my childhood passed away. Starting with Ed McMahon who for many years was Johnny Carson's Sidekick on NBCs The Tonight Show. They had started sometime before I was born or close enough so I grew up with the Tonight Show being a staple on late night television. I didn't always watch them, and some years the only time I watched them was when they would have the Mighty Carson Tonight Show Players to see their silly sketches with Johnny trying to do a character that was not very convincing. Ed passed away on Tuesday 23 June 2009. For several years he had some problem or another, the sad thing is some people upon hearing of his death said "I thought he was already dead". I guess that shows how bad some of his illnesses were.

Then there was Farrah Fawcett 62. Super Sex Symbol of the 1970s. I admit it she was the first of at least 3 reasons why I watched Charlie's Angels starting in 1976 (or was it 1975?). Her passing today (Thursday 25 June 2009) was not a total shock, but it still jarred the system. For the last couple of years she had been battling renal cancer, which a month or so ago had spread to her liver.

Then the Total Shocker Michael Jackson today suffered cardiac arrest and passed away. He was 50. The last few years its been odd thinking about his chronological age vs the age he seemed to act as. I'm not saying he was childish, he just didn't seem completely "grown up" either.

The Politics of Sports.

Who says that politics and sports don't mix?

In recent years first professional wrestler Jesse "The Body" Ventura was elected the Governor of Minnesota.

He also appeared in a small Hollywood action movie you might have seen with the Governor of California called "Predator". His acting wasn't bad, wasn't great, but wasn't bad. He also appears to have been a pretty good Governor.

Now a professional basketball player has been elected as Mayor. Former Detroit Piston (and Washington Bullet) Dave Bing was elected Mayor of Detroit.

So now the mayor's office will have to have a regulation backboard for the Mayor's One-On-One games with the President.

EDIT:
A link or two: bingformayor.com, espn.com news

Sigh another app at Yahoo being closed down.

Changes, changes changes. Yahoo is making more. I learned of this latest change they are going to do from a blog I follow Eye of Polyphemus. Yahoo is closing down their free website hosting "Geocities". They have just made the announcement so far, and say that the shut down will happen around the summer. Details on how to save current accounts will be given a little later. They will no longer have a free service you will have to pay $4.95/month for their Yahoo domain service. At least it looks like you can choose your own domain name.

Back in 1997 when I first set up my free account with Geocities the choices of free website hosting was limited to about 3 or 4 services, and the webhosting services that you had to pay for had prices that were skyhigh. Also at the time when you set up your Geocities website you chose a neighborhood to move into there were neighborhood categories like "Hollywood" for entertainment related sites, "Soho" for arts related sights yadda yadda. For my sight I chose the Athens/Olympus area because I wanted mysite to be mostly original poems and writings I wrote, well I branched out in to other areas. Shortly there after Yahoo bought Geocities and the website urls were renamed from the long neighborhood addresses to simply "geocities.com/youraccountname". For extra $$ you can get your own domain name and that eliminates the ads that appear on your site.

Oh getting back to my main part of this rant. Earlier this year Yahoo shut down it's Breifcase function, which was primarily another storage area for all sorts of files. It was primarily designed to shuttle files from your home computer to work or vice versa. At least that they gave some warning about. About a year or two ago they got rid of their Yahoo Photos service, which was like photobucket, or flickr without any warning (at least without any warning I remember). Unfortunately for me I didn't know about the photo shut down and lost who knows how many photos. I think anything of any real importance I still have elsewhere, but since I didn't have anytime to make preparations I don't know if I lost anything that was just over there. Sigh. With the briefcase, which I used a little bit but not too much, I was able to save whatever was there that I wanted. Hopefully with Geocities I will be able to save what I want. Right now there are some photos there that are only there that I know of so I'll have to do some saving. Most of my regular pages over there I have updated/duplicated at my own website klandersen.com.

Gee thanks Yahoo.

Gotta Get Blogging More.

(*Found this picture here clearwave.ca)

Yeah, OK I've gotta get offa my tush and get blogging more often. It's Mid-April and I've only done 4 posts this year. Lets see, I average about 37 posts a year, which is only about 3 posts a month. Hmmm not bad, but not good as far as the blogging world is concerned. I guess it's all that time I spend on Facebook and Twitter. One thing about Twitter that I don't like is when you follow someone (or a group) you get ALL their updates whenever they update, so for twits that Twit (or is it Tweet?) constantly your homepage is filled updates from that one group. You can't follow someone and only occasionally check their updates. OH Well.

Anyway I have two books that I need to review here, and add to my A Recent Read listing. I also need to update and fix somethings on my website klandersen.com For that I was going to try learning about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and started doing that, because that is how most websites now-a-days are coded. My big problem with it though is I want a link list on a side bar like my site has so I don't have to always update a million pages when I want to add or delete a link. So far I'm confused as to how to get that actually done, because when I experiment with it the ways people have mentioned how to do it don't seem to work. So I will probably have to continue to do things the very long old-school HTML way.

A Spam of all Spams

OK so we have all gotten Spam email, or at least have heard about it. You know there are the "Chain-Letter" spams that are now on email, there's the Get Rich Quick scams, and the "Bank Of Anerica" (notice there is usually a misspelling such as I did here) Well in my Yahoo email, oddly enough on my birthday (I just now noticed that, weird or coincidence?) I got the Mother of all Spam-Scam-Emails. This is supposedly from of all places THE FBI Um yeah, like the FBI would send an anonymous email instead of sending an official letter via the USPS or a Hand Delivered subpoena or some other real official notice.

I originally didn't even bother reading what the thing was saying, I just read it while posting this message about it. I only saved it for the purpose of posting here just to say Neah neah neah neah, neah. The text was all in bold font. A couple of the big RED Flags that indicate it's a scam: All the misspellings, the email address. If it had really been from the FBI it would have had an email address of fbi.gov and it would probably have had some sort of extra stuff in the header or footer that had some sort of "this is official government correspondence" and mentions of official use and abuse of government documents yadda yadda yadda.


So here is the email I got directly cut & pasted:

APRIL 2009 NOTICE

Saturday, April 4, 2009 8:03 AM

From: "Federal Bureau of Investigation"
Add sender to Contacts
To: undisclosed-recipients


FROM: Federal Bureau of Investigation

This is an official advice from the FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI). It has come to our notice that some certain individuals have used your name as the beneficiary of funds worth Millions of United States Dollars from abroad. These individuals with their collaborating banks knowing fully well that they do not have enough facilities to effect this payment from any part of the world to your account, used what we know as a Secret Diplomatic Transit Payment (S.T.D.P) as well as the ATM card system to pay this fund which has not been completed till this day. Direct transfers are difficult and Secret Diplomatic Transit Payment (S.T.D.P) are not made unless the funds are related to terrorism activities and we ask why must your payment be made in secret transfer, if your transaction is legitimate. We do not want you to get into trouble as soon as these funds reflect

We decided to contact you directly to acquire the proper verifications and proof from you to show that you are the rightful person to receive this fund, because of the amount involved. Be informed that the funds are now with a top bank in the United State in your name and under the monitoring/custody of the FBI. At the moment, we have asked the bank not to release the fund to anybody that comes to them, unless we instruct them to do so, this is to enable us carry out a comprehensive investigations first before releasing the fund to you. Hence, you are to forward the document to us immediately if you have it in your possession, if you do not have it, let us know so that we will direct you where to obtain the document and send to us. Thereafter, we will ask the bank holding the funds, to go ahead and credit your account immediately. FBI Identification Record and Diplomatic Immunity Seal of Transfer (DIST) often referred to as a Criminal History Record or Rap Sheet is a listing o

Final Instruction;
1. Credit payment instruction: Irrevocable credit guarantee. 2. Beneficiary has full power when validation is cleared. 3. Beneficiaries bank in U.S.A. can only release funds. 4. Upon confirmation from the World Bank / United nations. 5. Bearers must clear bank protocol and validation request.

NOTE: We have asked for the Diplomatic Immunity Seal of Transfer (DIST) document to ensure the most complete and up-to date records possible for the enhancement of public safety, welfare and security of society while recognizing the importance of individual privacy rights. If you fail to provide the Documents to us, we will charge you and take appropriate action against you for not proving the legality of the funds. The United States Department of Justice Order 556-73 establishes rules and regulations for the subject of an FBI Identification Record to obtain a copy of his or her own Record for review. The FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) division processes these requests to check illegal activities in USA and beyond. An individual may request a copy of his or her own FBI Identification Record for personal review or to challenge information on the Record. Other reasons an individual may request a copy of his or her own Identification Record may include internati

FBI Director,
Robert S. Mueller, III.

Huh?
What the heck did that say anyway. It was all just nonsense to me. It sounds like a variation on the Nigerian Scam but it doesn't seem to give any instructions on what they want you to do or to reply, if you are stupid, or gullible enough to reply to them.

Oh it apparently is The 419 Scam a form of the Nigerian Scam. I forwarded it just now to the abuse email at live.com (report_spam@live.com) and I will mark it as spam in my Yahoo Mailbox.

Here is a link to a Hoax Alert from about.com about a similar email http://crime.about.com/od/scams/qt/fbihoax.htm

Who the Frack are these scammers and how stupid do they think people are? OK so they are not relying on people being stupid, they are relying on people being naive about financial matters and hoping that people will just see the You can get $1 Million in the notice or however much they say you supposedly Won, inherited etc..

New Look for Screech!

Well changes are coming for The Washington Nationals in 2009 in more ways than one. If news of trades for good or bad, or firings of coaches and resignations of general managers and whatnot was not enough for you then here is something else for you. The Nationals Mascot Screech, has a new look. The news media is calling it
a grown up look, I call it molting or something.


Here is SCREECH in The early days:


On Final Saturday Night Game at RFK Loss to Phillidelphia 22 September 2007.


The next day at the Official digging up of Home Plate Ceremony after the Final Game at RFK Win on Sunday Afternoon 23 September 2007.


And now here is the New very Toned down Screech:



I'm not sure that I like it. I think the "00" jersey number is a nice touch for a Mascot, but I liked the "05" he had to indicate the year of his Hatching. Well like many other changes it will take some getting used to.

Nice Face, Shame About the Anorexia

A few days to a week ago, I spotted this Ralph Lauren ad while on Facebook. My first reaction was dang how much skinnier and bonier can those two get? Get Anorexia much?


Why am I reminded of those cartoons where the character gets flattened and they look normal until you see the side view and they are a very paper thin line?

That is so not healthy. I can see using a healthy skinny model for your ads but skin & bones? No. Its a real shame because the one on the left would be pretty cute if she had some meat on her bones!

Give then girls some Pizza and some Girl Scout Cookies Stat.

First Words of 2009!

It's a brand new Year so lets get going with it and hit the ground running. I usually send out an email near the New Year that gives my Year In Review. I am not sending out that email this year. I end up adding it to my website anyway so that is what I will do from now on. I think I will make monthly updates to it and just post the updated version as I go on the website. Of course I need to make sure I can still update my old site. It seems they might have changed the way files get uploaded to the site so I'll have to play with things to see if I can still make changes if not I'm SOL.

Me being Goofy (Circa 1993)

I will not make any New Year's Resolution, because I don't make those. Why make an outrageous promise that you might not be able to keep. Also who checks at the end of the year to see if you kept your resolution. Who remembers the resolution they made? EXACTLY!