The last Dodger homestand was very hot that featured tons of titty sweat and ornery writers. This week has been a lot cooler. Although it’s nice not to be wiping my brow every 5 seconds drenching a napkin with my sweat, it’s nice not to be overly self-conscious about sweating through my shirts, it’s nice to wear long sleeves, I do miss the hot weather a little.

I got used to sleep buck nekkid on top of my bed with the fan pointed right at my balls. I got used the all the pheromones swirling in the air giving us a true butt-sniffing season.

But this is good, too.

Astonishingly enough it’s been 12 years. But I won’t go into a bunch of remembrances or self-indulgent where-was-I-when-I-heard-the-news type of bullshit.

I’ll just present the above photograph. It’s a beam from the World Trade Center that sits as a memorial at the LA Fire Department training center right below Dodger Stadium. I drive past it every time I cover a Dodger game.

That’s all I’m going to say. I’m not going to repeat the tired mantra “Never Forget” which sounds more of a command given to a dog who has gone in the middle of the kitchen. Those alive in the United States won’t ever forget it.

As Mark Twain said, the reports of my Lappy’s demise has been greatly exaggerated. Turns out it’s a stupid battery issue which is strange. When I turned Lappy on this morning it was plugged in.

Lappy is working. It has been resurrected, and there was no need to put it on a cross, nail the wrists and the feet, stab it in the side, wait until fluid fills its lungs before it died, put it into a tomb and wait a couple of days before it magically came out all shiny and new.

So it lives. Now to study up for my fantasy football draft. Any tips?

That is the boot screen of my laptop. It stays frozen like that. It won’t allow me to boot up in safe mode. It won’t let be go into the BIOS setup screen. It just shows me the stupid HP logo.

It could be a shitty hard drive. It could be a fried motherboard. I’m thinking it’s the latter since I’ve dealt with a fried hard drive before, and it’s not acting like that.

So it looks like I’m in the market for a new computer. For reals. Ugh. Because I can really afford a new lappy. Thankfully my cousin Aaron us saving me with a temporary replacement albeit a Mac. *shudder* But it should suffice in the short term.

So what should I get?

To steal from Busblog, this weekend was Joe’s birthday. He turned 24.

For anyone who has listened to the radio here in LA over the last couple of decades, you know who Joe is. You know what a big WWE fan he is. So I caught one of the few pictures ever to show “The Big Nasty” smiling in pure joy after receiving the old spinny WWE champions belt for his birthday.

The party was held in his apartment building he just moved into in Downtown. Outside some kids were holding a pool party. One guy looked like Andre Ethier. I kept staring, but when I looked at the clock I realized he couldn’t be Andre. Andre had to be at the Ravine to play a game that night.

When the guy came out of the pool, dried off and put on a shirt, I realized he looked nothing like Andre. He was half Asian and half white. I guess my Happa-dar is off.

Either that or I am completely deluding myself.

According to their fancy algorithms, bullshit, whatever, the guys who tend to have the highest match percentage with me are bisexual dudes.

I can’t say that I know any bisexual guys or may have been intimate with a bisexual guy. Perhaps I have. It’s not like I ask everyone I sleep with whether or not they’re gay or not.

But I find it odd that a website that purports itself as a dating/relationship sort of site would think I would be able to cohabit with someone bisexual. I don’t know.

It’s almost as puzzling as those heterosexual guys whose heterosexuality surprises me. Maybe my gaydar is malfunctioning. Or maybe I’m just not giving a shit anymore?

I don’t know.

You combine that with Vin Scully’s press conference, to which I was curiously not invited to, it’s a bit of a clusterfuck in the Dodger press box. I don’t mind the clusterfuck too much, really. I’ve gotten a bit used to it. All that I care about is that I have a seat.

Maybe it’s because the Boston media is in town, and I am in such close proximity to them, but I’ve been angry all afternoon long. Actually I know the reason, but I won’t be expand on that now. Just know that my blood is boiling and whatever.

The brave Pedro Moura is back after his girlfriend tried to kill him. They’re still together. It’s sweet ain’t it?

The question now is what is the over/under on fights in the stands. Because we all know what amiable folk Bostonians are, right? Especially those pizza-tossing Red Sox fans.

This cunt is a San Antonio City Councilwoman who thinks I’m disgusting because I am gay. She doesn’t think I should be able to adopt because I like things going up my butt. Don’t worry bitch. I don’t want kids anyway, but still.

This dickhead is the junior US Senator from Texas. It turns out he has dual citizenship in Canada. So while he wants to build fences around the US/Mexico border, while he wants to legislate me out of existence for again liking things up my butt, it turns out I’m more American than him.

These dickheads, rapists, cunts, bitches and all the like are okay in and of themselves. Not everyone in the world is going to agree with me and be genuinely nice. Not everyone is going to use some common logic or have empathy towards their fellow man and woman.

But the fact that people like this decide what laws will become codified sickens me. The fact that there are people who like the fact that these sorts of people are elected sickens me.

This is why I’m so disillusioned.

Recently when the Rays played the Dodgers they promoted relief pitcher Josh Lueke to the squad. Lueke back in 2008 raped a girl. He denied it, but when Kern County sheriffs said that DNA tests proved his spermy wormies in on her jeans, tank top and anal canal, he pleaded to a lesser charge “false imprisonment with violence” and was given 42 days in jail, time already served.

I tweeted about this, and each time he made an appearance in the game I called him “The Rapist”. Being disillusioned I expected many responses to be “well he already paid for his crimes,” or even worse “she was asking for it.”

Instead many of the retweets came from men showing their disgust of Lueke. I was afraid I was being a little over the top. Thankfully I wasn’t.

One thing did bother me a little. Many other media folks came up to me to ask me more about the story. They seemed just as appalled as I was over it. I don’t know whether it was their outlet’s social media rules or what not, but they didn’t mention it at all.

So there you see why I remain a jaded son of a bitch.

First of all, let this not be an all-encompassing endorsement of Time Warner, its cable division and its practices. I find it hard to sympathize with a multi-billion dollar conglomerate that profits by preying on the people. They are a shithole company.

Now CBS wants Time Warner to pay more to retransmit its signal on the coaxial wires so that we cable customers are able to watch it seamlessly. Never mind that we already get to watch that shit for free over the air.

CBS and Time Warner can’t agree to the retransmission fee, so Time Warner pulls the plug. What have I missed?

* I have missed a bunch of shows I never watched. I don’t care about “Big Brother”, “NCIS: Your Basement”, “Two Broke Girls”.

* I have missed the KCAL9 news. With the exception of 3:30-4 p.m. and 7-8 p.m., there is a local news broadcast on live between 5 am and 11:30 p.m. during weekdays here in Los Angeles. KCAL provides the bulk of that programming. But that’s fine. Twitter exists so we don’t have to be so dependent.

* I have missed one Dodger game. Well, I could have missed one Dodger game, but thanks to technology I was able to watch last night’s game that was exclusively on KCAL. An even bigger benefit was that I watched the Fox Sports Midwest broadcast so I could avoid Eric Collins.

* I have missed Showtime, but I never got that channel to begin with. If there was a show that intrigued me, there are other ways of watching them even in a legal manner.

So I’m fine with this blackout. It really hasn’t affected my life, and if things get really desperate I could buy an HD antenna thingee.

I went to Porky’s BBQ for lunch today and order their blackened catfish poboy, red beans and rice and strawberry soda. It was very fucking good, but there was a slight glitch.

I asked, as I do whenever I patronize any establishment with a Southern bent, “Do y’all have sweet tea?” You see, no one does sweet tea like we do in the South. No one. Sure, all it is is iced tea and shit tons of sugar, but Southerners tend to have gotten the ratio of sugar to tea down perfect.

“No we don’t,” the clerk said. “We used to, but no body ordered it.”

?????

“Fucking Yankees,” I harumphed. He laughed.

I get that here in California people tend to want to make better eating decisions. But when you go into an establishment that serves fried chicken, fried catfish, greens, sticky slobbery ribs and the like, what difference does sweet tea make to your health?

The correct answer is, “None.”

Fucking Yanks.