Youk Of The Nation

Scene: A child's fifth birthday party. An upbeat clown stands off to the side of the picnic table, handing out balloon animals and making funny faces. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins mingle together, sipping beer or soda and waiting for the burgers to finish. A giggling, deliriously happy child sits amidst a growing pile of brightly-colored wrapping paper, his smile widening with every small gift. In the backs of their minds, they know that life will sometimes throw despair at this child, but for now they let him bask in his innocence and realize the happiness and good inherent in being a child. (suddenly, jung bursts through the gate in the picket fence, clutching a stack of papers, out of breath and with glasses and tie askew. Before he can be waylaid, he grabs the child from his perch on top of the pile of gifts, digs his hands into the collar of the boy's ice-cream stained shirt, and holds him at eye level) jung: What are you doing, you fool!? Celebrating? Being happy about the good things and trying to enjoy them? THE WORLD IS GOING TO END! I have reams of data from the Large Hadron Collider! In less than five billion years our sun is going to expand suddenly and swallow the entire solar system in an instant, fiery conflagration! Everything humans have accomplished will be for naught! Josh Beckett is the anti-Christ!" Child: Mommy, help! He's mean and he smells like three years of a four-year psychiatry degree! jung:...and before the planet is swallowed up by the unforgiving vastness of the universe, long before, you will wither away and die, your last days riddled with senility and incontinence, unaware of the mockery your life has become! I DEMAND YOU STOP ENJOYING THINGS AND LISTEN TO ME EXPOUND ON THE ILLUSORY NATURE OF LIFE ITSELF! THERE IS NO ENJOYMENT TO BE HAD! Mother: (frantically rifling through purse, screaming to her husband) Oh, God, Frank, I can't find the Taser, WHERE IS MY TASER?!

But it has almost 100% of the Mormons.

Talkpats.com is hereby disbanded due to insufficient posting density. As a parting gift all posters will receive a urinal cake with Tom Brady's face on it, and Tom Brady will receive a urinal cake in his face as soon as I get my bus ticket to Foxboro.

Ellsbury batting third?

You don't have to, almost all of them live in Utah.

There are a few parts of it that are pretty Hartford-like, especially where I used to work. (I worked at the Pizza Hut on Boulevard right up until it burned down a couple months ago).

I know Connecticut like the inside of my own home. I hate Hartford County and want to move somewhere else in the state whenever I can. Hartford sucks, East Hartford sucks, Manchester sucks. South Windsor, Glastonbury, and Wethersfield are okay. West Hartford is meh. That being said, I would spend 100 years in the North End of Hartford before I spent an hour in Bridgeport. There are, in my opinion at least, five s***** places in Connecticut, at least in the sense that they are to be avoided. Hartford, New Britain, Bridgeport, Waterbury, and New Haven. Hartford is by far the best of all of them. I drove through Bridgeport once with my doors locked and windows up, and when I left I still had a switchblade in my thigh and hepatitis B.

I went to a party in Goshen once at this house on top of a hill. Sober, I remember climbing up the front yard to be a challenge. Drunk, I remember thinking that I had practically conquered Everest. Reminds me of the hilarious incident with a cop at another party, this one in North Stonington. It was a kegger, outdoors in the winter. The whole driveway was covered in snow and angled so steeply that you could break the sound barrier on a sled if you went down it. The neighbors apparently called the police due to the noise. Two cruisers showed up, and one guy came up the driveway to talk to those of us on the front porch. He walked along the yard next to the pavement, so as to keep traction, but when he got to the top where it leveled off, he stepped onto the driveway to get to the sidewalk. He hit a patch of ice, landed on his ass, and slid down the driveway (which was empty due to no one being able to park on the incline with the snow and ice) on his back like a startled tortoise, and came to a stop by slamming both of his feet into the side of his own car all the way at the bottom. Some people giggled but no one dared laugh too loudly because we knew he'd probably come down hard on the party. He got up, looked up at us, and said "Keep the noise down, alright?" and left. I imagine he was far too embarrassed to expect any of us to take him seriously after watching his impromptu sledding adventure.

I'm in East Hartford and I can still smell Waterbury. Although sometimes it could be Bridgeport, they're both so strong it's hard to tell them apart.

Merged. Seriously merged.

72% of statistics are made up on the spot

A five page report? I could write five pages on the socio-economic effects of the Dominion War on the Ferengi homeworld. Actually, the reason I used that as an example is because I have done just that. If you're going to let someone weasel out of jail time for attempted murder than you should at least make it 50 or 60 pages.

As if they need it. The punishment for every crime in Arizona should be the same. "John Smith, you have been found guilty of kidnapping, murder in the first degree, and rape. Your sentence is to continue living in Arizona."

Its a revolution in avoidance of personal responsibility, perpetuated by our own court system. It started around the same time it stopped being acceptable to smack your kids around a little bit, which coincidentally was when "ADD" and "Oppositional Defiance Disorder" showed up. Everyone has dozens of things to blame their stupid or illegal actions on and people in power let them.

Okay, it was harmless the first time, but replacing the s with a dollar sign is getting really annoying to read. We all hate the Yankees, but we can just call them the Yankees. Save the weak rhymes for rap battles at the community center.

I agree with everything you said, naturally. The man who killed Ami never saw jail time other than the night of the accident, and suffered nothing more than a broken arm. During the court appearance where he was told he would likely not go to prison, I threatened him loudly and convincingly enough that I had to be forcibly escorted to the hall and told by the police officer there that I was dangerously close to being sent to jail myself. What a riot. Kill someone, walk away. Threaten to kill someone, jail. Ha. As far as texting and driving, I find that almost worst, as some people lose inhibition when drunk and cannot make rational decisions. It's not an excuse, but it is true. On the other hand, to do something dangerous and stupid while completely sober somehow seems even worse. Oh, as an aside, the guy who caused the accident that killed Ami is now living halfway across the country with a different last name, which the lawyers and judges and police refuse to give me. I'd like to think that my threats are what made him change his name but I am told it was just the inability to find a job with the DUI conviction. And yes, you can bash them all you want, just go ahead and do it in threads meant for it.

How is it that a thread about a Yankee player doing something stupid can still turn into a discussion on the Red Sox sucking? Can we just all be happy discussing how much of a moron Pineda is?

No, after careful consideration and intense philosophical debate on an intellectual level near that of some of history's greatest thinkers, we decided "f*** the Patriots". Personally, I doubt Socrates could have said it any better.

Hi, I'm Bob McClure. You may remember me from such pitching disasters as "I'm Beckett You To End This" and "The Lester Know, The Better"!

f***ing *******. The best part is he'll get a slap on the wrist and continue on with his career. This isn't even "Pulled over for not using a turn signal and smelling slightly of alcohol". Swerving and driving without headlights at 2:30 in the morning is incredibly irresponsible. It's pathetic that people have to do this multiple times before their licenses are taken away or they are incarcerated. Driving drunk to the point of not being able to drive in a straight line or turn your headlights on is little different than firing a handgun randomly out of your window while driving. They are both reckless and can easily result in you murdering another person through your abject stupidity. The only difference is there are thousands of people who feel that there is nothing wrong with drunk driving until someone gets hurt. Here's a tip. If you shred the licenses of everyone who gets busted for DUI the FIRST time, maybe less people will get hurt. I hope the next time he gets behind the wheel he gets hit by another drunk and ends his career. Then he can spend the rest of his life with a missing leg wondering how close he came to doing the same thing to someone else because he couldn't use some of his higher-than-99%-of-the-population salary to call a f***ing cab.

How the mighty have fallen. Maybe he can spend his off-days collecting cans and bottles with Mike Tyson and Dennis Rodman.

Rebuilding the Astros is like rebuilding a skyscraper with LEGOs.

I felt that this board could benefit from the creation and/or bumping of some threads not directly related to how awful the Sox have been this season. This seemed like a good one to resurrect, and seeing as I hadn't posted in it originally, here you are. How long have you been a fan? I was a late bloomer. I never cared for baseball, when I was younger I considered sports in general boring. That changed in 2001-2002 when my father started getting tickets through work and took me to several games. I wish I could say that it was the Sox that inspired me to become a baseball fan, but it was the fans and the game of baseball in general. I likely would have become an instant fan of whatever team my father got the tickets for. As soon as I got back from the second or third game he took me to, I immediately buried myself in stats and history until I knew as much as I could possibly know, and the rest is history. How did you become a Red Sox fan? See above Who is your favorite current Red Sox player? Pedroia Who is your favorite all-time Red Sox player? Of those I saw play, Pedro. Of those I didn't, Williams, because, well...he's Ted motherf***ing Williams. Who is your least favorite Red Sox player ever? Tough call. There are plenty of guys who sucked that I could choose just because of that, but as far as Red Sox players who were with the team for extended periods of time, in my lifetime, Carl Everett. What state/country do you live in (to see how spread out the fan base is here)? Connecticut What is your favorite memory being a Red Sox fan? Clay Buchholz's no-hitter, which he threw only days before I left for the Army for what, at the time, I had assumed would be a full four years. When was the first time you ever went to Fenway Park? 2001 was the first time that I remember, I believe I went once when I was too young to recall. Who is your least favorite Yankee player of all-time? Sheffield, Swisher, A-Rod, Teixeira, Joba Chamberlain, Roger Clemens.

You're going to dismiss the value or relevance of every bit of statistical data gathered from the beginning of baseball history because the Sox are 5 games off of a hypothetical win-loss prediction?

Yeah, but...oh, ow. Sorry. I tried really hard to care for a second there...made my head hurt.