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March madness, bah.. my brackets are doing just awful. I picked OSU to win the whole thing, so, um, yah.. oops. Well, at least in my pool last place gets their money back, and at this rate, I’m in serious contention for that prize. Yay.

So, two weeks until baseball season starts.. I think the Indians are putting together a solid team this year (and the Browns too, with a ton of great pick ups in free agency). But.. this weekend, my baseball season starts.. Yup, I’ve joined a baseball team. Yes, baseball.. not softball. The ball is smaller, field is bigger, and they pitch overhand and stuff.. After playing with the Japanese Tokyo Sexy Dreamers last year (where I was “Sexy #005″), I decided to join up with a team in the SF N.A.B.A., the SF Superstars. This team is made up of mostly Korean guys, so it’s kind of like the TSD where the on-field chatter is in a language that I don’t understand.

We play full 9-inning games for the 20-game season, so i’m pretty excited.. It’s a wood bat league, so I had to go shopping for new bats this week.. I’m starting off with a Louisville Slugger Pro Stock Lite PLP72, a classic ash bat. I just ordered a Louisville Slugger M9 271 maple bat off this dude on eBay, so that should be arriving soon too. I was really liking the 34″/26oz. DeMarini White Steel I used in softball last season, so swinging these heavier wood bats (more like 33″/31oz.) around should be quite a change, not to mention I’ll be facing pitchers throwing a hell of a lot differently than the softball pitchers.

Time for some batting practice, I think.

Anyway.. As if I didn’t have enough baseball in my life already (with the 2014 season of my OOTP baseball simulation season just starting), I’m also doing a fantasy baseball team. I wasn’t gonna do one, but Masnick pointed me towards this one that sounded interesting — you can’t pick any of the top rated 50 guys. I’m a little scared — Masnick is a baseball whiz, and Joe apparently has this magical excel spreadsheet that he’s named “The Oracle.” Well, I couldn’t possibly fare worse than my March Madness brackets. We could use more owners, so contact the guy running it if you’re interested. And hurry, the draft is on Monday.

Yay. Baseball.

So.. have you ever wanted to be on Jeopardy? But, (unlike my cousin Stephanie) you’re not willing to go all the way to LA to take the test? Well… thanks to the modern marvel known as the Internets, you can now take the Jeopardy tryout test online!! That’s right.. next week, from March 28-30th, you can take the Jeopardy 50 question test and see if you’ve got what it takes to make it onto the show.. The test for the West Coast is on the 30th at 8pm, is exactly when the Her Space Holiday show is… I guess I can take the quiz and still make it to the show though…

[found at tvsquad]

So.. I was reading Valleywag today, and found this link to MyHeritage, where they have some facial recognition software (supposedly to find people who are related to you, I assume).. Anwyay, the demo they have compares your face with their celebrity database, and has provided me with at least 7 minutes of fun this morning. So, I thought I’d share the results with you…

I uploaded a picture of my brother Andy and me…

Turns out.. we’re none other than Gerard Depardieu and Takeshi Kaneshiro (the dude from House of Flying Daggers)..

Woo.. this is fun.. so I dug around, and just for kicks.. I uploaded an old baby picture of mine…

And… who did I resemble when I was a bouncing, little 1 year old?

David Hasselhoff.

Uh.. yah. Facial recognition software stuff is cool and all, but I guess this one only has about 3,500 celebrities in it — I would imagine for a better match that you’d need a lot more people in it. That said, I’ve been dying to try out Riya — I’m fairly fanatical about tagging all of my flickr photos, so I’m sure I’d be a great test subject for them… C’mon Riya folk, send me a beta login please.

When I was on one of my roadtrips last year, I fell in love with a little town in West Texas called Marfa. There’s something truly magical about that place, and I wish I would have stayed a bit longer..

Donald Judd put his minimalist art community, Chinati right in Marfa, and now there’s something new.. Prada Marfa. It’s a Prada Store, and it’s never open. The lights are on, but, the store’s never open, and there’s no way in. At night, the store is eerily lit by the normal Prada lime green found in its many boutiques.. It’s kind of a time capsule meets modern day commerce art project or something. And.. it’ll eventually melt into the West Texas landscape with the tumbleweeds.

Dammit, now I have another excuse to go back to Marfa.. Roadtrip anyone?

[found at MeFi]