Helsinki Pride - this year, a big deal

The Helsinki Pride parade is this weekend; to be specific, tomorrow at 13:00 local time. The parade starts at the Senate square. If you're in Helsinki, be there, because this is a big deal.

Homophobia is having a bit of a resurgence here in Finland. Last year, the parade was attacked with tear gas by a tiny bunch of homophobes from somewhere up north, and since then, we've gotten a rabidly anti-gay interior minister and a huge growth in support for a Christian conservative party at the polls. In order to get the Christian democrats on board in the new coalition government, they jettisoned gender-neutral marriage for the next four-year term.

So all in all, we're going through a bit of a backlash against sexual liberation here. In view of that, and especially because of the terrorist attack last year, it's important to show support for the cause. I'll be there.

New Movies Playing!

The Perfect Host

What's It About?

  A con-man cons his way into the wrong house--- one inhibited by a psychotic who insists he stay for his dinner party.

 

Trailer:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810206614/video

PREDICTION:

"This looks so brilliant!--- Plus weird, hilarious and creepy rolled up all together. The plot is so outrageous you have to wonder how wild the movie will be from beginning to end!"

*

Transformers:

Dark of the Moon

What's It About?

  The third installment in the Transformers film series, this time sans Megan Fox.

 

Trailer:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810159115/video

PREDICTION:
"Out of all the Transformers films so far--- this third helping looks the most action filled--- maybe too much action? The first was so cool because it was the first Transformers movie, the second--- not as great. T3 looks like it will deliver nothing but fun! Seeing the Transformers fight in 3D should make this one very, very cool installment!"

*

 Monte Carlo

What's It About?

  Three girls while on vacation in Paris--- one is mistaken for an heiress and treated to the good life in Monte Carlo instead.

 

Trailer:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810205294/video

PREDICTION:
"It looks cute enough but unfortunately has that straight-to-DVD feel to it."

*

Crime After Crime

What's It About?

  Documentary on a woman--- Deborah Peagler--- allegedly wrongly imprisoned for the murder her abusive husband.

 

Trailer:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810204719/trailer

PREDICTION:
"It looks very interesting but heartbreaking."

*

Aurora

What's It About?

A divorced father plans to go on a shooting spree.

 

Trailer:

http://www.videodetective.com/movies/trailers/aurora-trailer/325927

PREDICTION:
"The plot is as horrifying as it is--- is a good one--- unfortunately it doesn't seem like it will be well-executed. "

*

Larry Crowne

What's It About?

  A middle-aged man named Larry Crowne goes to college and falls for his beautiful professor.

 

Trailer:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810196533/video

PREDICTION:
"The plot isn't interesting at all but it is cool seeing veteran nice guy actor Tom Hanks and 'America's Sweetheart' Julia Roberts in a film together."

*

Terri

What's It About?

A no b.s. h.s. principal takes to one of his most awkward students.

 

Trailer:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810207257/video

PREDICTION:
"Most movies with John C. Reilly are awkward and pretty boring--- so expect to add this to the list."

***

E N J O Y
*the*
M O V I E S

***

Best New Movie Poster of the Week

(Official movie poster for upcoming movie  
The Perfect Host.)

WHY THIS POSTER IS GREAT!:

*The "perfect" psycho host about to stick a guest in the head with a fork--- with two other guests in the background interacting normally.

*The tiny spots of fake blood on the poster.

*The tagline.

 (Alternate poster for upcoming movie The Perfect Host.)

WHY THIS POSTER IS GREAT!:

*The host and some of his guests comfortably lounging about near a pool--- while another guest is floating dead within the pool.

*The tagline.

 

 (Alternate international poster for upcoming movie The Perfect Host.)

WHY THIS POSTER IS GREAT!:

*The host normally eating dinner while a guest is lying dead-like on his floor.

***

Worst New Movie Poster of the Week

(Official movie poster for upcoming movie Monte Carlo.)

WHY THIS POSTER SUCKS!:

*The poster doesn't look extravagant enough as the movie's title and plot suggests. 
Sitting atop suitcases, the characters played by Gomez, Meester and Cassidy don't look like they're having the time of their lives as the tagline says.


**A better poster would be the three girls decked out in the gorgeous dresses they eventually are seen in within in the film--- with the Monte Carlo backdrop behind them still or with them at a ball or gala.
The film's title would look even greater written out in a fancy script and in a bolder color.



***

A Little About the Future

Hey there!  This is Josh from the future.  Actually from the year 2130.  Seriously, no bullshit.  I know what you are thinking, how the hell can you be from the future?  Well scientists figured out time travel a few years back and they also figured out that you can go as far back as you want.  Do not ask too many questions, do I look like a scientist?

I realize your next question is probably "how are you still alive, you are 150 years old???"  Yeah, I am pretty old, but that is not too significant anymore.  Scientists figured out how to extend the lifespan of people, the average person now lives to about 200 years old.  Again, I am no scientist, so do not bother asking how this happened.

Now that we have all that kind of crap out of the way, you probably want to know what has been happening in the world.  Well that is what I am here to tell you.

Politics
Things turned to shit in this country in the 2030s.  The economy sucked, the rest of the world surpassed us, we had serious problems.  It did not help that people were living to over 120 on average, yet the retirement was still 70.  Yeah, no one could figure out what the hell was wrong in the world.

Then the people elected Juan Rodriguez, our first Latino president (hey, in this entire time, we have still not had a woman president, haha, suck it feminists--just kidding).  He had radical ideas, one of them was raising the retirement age to 120.  He also decided to legalize marijuana and then tax the shit out of it.  He then decided to force Mexico to be part of the United States, divided it up into eight states.  Pretty much made the place a giant resort.  The rest of the place was used to cultivate weed (which was basically all they did down there to begin with).

All those fears about drugs ruining the country turned out to be false, people pretty much only smoked dope on special occasions.  Especially when the laws for other drugs became insane.  Caught with a little cocaine?  50 years in prison.  Tested positive for heroin?  Penal colony in Mexico.  People began studying and focusing more on becoming intelligent.  This became our greatest export:  knowledge.  Medical, computer, technological, whatever advancement you can think of pretty much happened here.

Technology
Speaking of tech, you are undoubtedly wondering what the world is like in the future.  It took me about ten minutes to remember how to type.  We do everything with our minds now.  So much easier.  I do have some bad news though, still no flying cars.  No land-speeders, none of that cool shit.  Cars are cool now and they use an alternative fuel source.  I cannot mention what though, it would blow your mind, I will give you a hint:  you put it in your coffee.

Sports
I do not want to spoil anything, but the Pirates eventually win the World Series.  I am not even kidding.  I will not say what year, but when they do win it, cherish the hell out of it.  You will not see another one.  Depressing, I know. 

The Steelers win a bunch of Super Bowls.  After Ben retires, they draft a QB who is 6'7, 280, runs a 4.1 40 and can throw the ball 90 yards (some people believe he may be the first genetically engineered athlete, we fans say stop being jealous).  The Pens also win a bunch of Stanley Cups, so you will always have those two to make you happy.

The Yankees sign the first player to a $1,000,000,000 contract.  He is a short-stop from Ireland and ends up breaking the HR record.  He hits over 900.  They win a shit ton of World Series with him, most consider it a good investment.

People in America still do not give a shit about soccer.

Random Stuff
-George R.R. Martin finally finishes A Song of Ice and Fire in 2056.  You were right, Jon is Rhaegar's son.  He and Daenarys rule the entire world.  Hope that does not ruin it for ya.

-Movie franchises start combining and become absolutely ridiculous, such as Fast and the Furious 21:  The Rise of the Raging Transformers.  Or Saw 87:  Jigsaw vs. James Bond. 

Oh and the most important thing is about your own future Josh:  You will end up
OH SHIT!  HERE COMES THE TIME-COP, I NEED TO RUN FOR IT!

Happy birthday Lola!

It's about time we pay tribute to the hottest Miss Finland ever, Lola!

She was crowned Miss Finland in 1996 under her maiden name Lola Odusoga. She's called Wallinkoski now that she's married, which is way more boring. She was also Miss Scandinavia and second runner-up Miss Universe, and she's pretty darn hot.

Back in 2001 or thereabouts, she annoyed people by appearing in lingerie in a series of ads:

But whatever she appears in, she's definitely the hottest Miss Finland of them all.

Happy birthday!

Jeanette Mcdonald

Police brutality, part IIIa: Introduction to SWAT nation

I've been moving house, so one day I found myself browsing through my back issues of Playboy, mostly to read Bobby London's Dirty Duck comic strips. As I was doing that, though, I ran into a Forum piece in the November 2006 issue by Radley Balko called Unreasonable Searches and Seizures. (for a cautionary note on Radley Balko, see here)

The Playboy article is a simple one-page thing with six examples of SWAT raids gone wrong. The real issue, of course, isn't just that sometimes raids go wrong, but the whole spectacle of police militarization in the US.

I first encountered this subject in the pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine back in 1999. Funnily enough, you can read the story in question online here, because when FOX News asked Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh to explain his motivations for his attack, that article was one of the things he sent them. The article, by Wayne Laugesen, is called "The Thin Blurry Line: When Cops and Soldiers Are One-and-the-Same".

"Since the late '80s we've been seeing the militarization of police, and the policization of military," says Peter Kraska, a professor of police studies at Eastern Kentucky University, who has studied the militarization of police for more than a decade. "These are converging forces. Soldiers are told to be cops, both domestically and on foreign soil, and cops are becoming more like soldiers, working in elite SWAT-style units."

In 2006, the aforementioned Radley Balko wrote a paper for the CATO Institute called Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. To start with, I'll be quoting heavily from those two sources to give you a brief summary of what's going on in SWAT nation. Here's Laugensen:

Kraska says his research has found that in small town America - towns of 25,000-50,000 - two of every 10 policemen serve on a department paramilitary unit. Throughout America, 11% of police departments have armored personnel carriers. Of all the country's elite paramilitary police units, 20% are used for routine patrol work, and 85% of their calls are to carry out no-knock warrants for drug raids. In 1986, the nation had 3,000 deployments of paramilitary police units. In 1996, it rose to 30,000.

A tenfold increase in paramilitary police deployments. Why? Here's a chilling quote from Balko's paper:

“They [police officers] made a mistake. There’s no one to blame for a mistake. The way these people were treated has to be judged in the context of a war.”

—Hallandale, Florida, attorney Richard Kane, after police officers conducted a late night drug raid on the home of Edwin and Catherine Bernhardt. Police broke into the couple’s home and threw Catherine Bernhardt to the floor at gunpoint. Edwin Bernhardt, who had come down from his bedroom in the nude after hearing the commotion, was also subdued and handcuffed at gunpoint. Police forced him to wear a pair of his wife’s underwear, then took him to the police station, where he spent several hours in jail. Police later discovered they had raided the wrong address.

The war he's referring to is, of course, the war on drugs. Wayne Laugensen explains:

"The collapse of the Soviet Union has, unfortunately, led many military officials to seek out a new enemy to justify continued funding," writes David Kopel, a New York University law professor and author of No More Wacos. "The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) admits that it is no longer capable of protecting Americans from incoming nuclear missiles. Yet NORAD enjoys hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding, as part of a $1.8 billion systems upgrade, having convinced congress to assign NORAD the mission of tracking planes and ships that might be carrying drugs."

In addition, the federal government has been especially keen to promote the militarization of the police. Balko:

In 1994, the Department of Defense issued a memorandum authorizing the transfer of equipment and technology to state and local police. The same year, Congress created a “reutilization program” to facilitate handing military gear over to civilian police agencies.

(...)

By the late 1990s, the various laws, orders, and directives softening Posse Comitatus had added a significant military component to state and local police forces. Between just 1995 and 1997, the Pentagon distributed 3,800 M-16s, 2,185 M-14s, 73 grenade launchers, and 112 armored personnel carriers to civilian police agencies across the country.

(...)

A retired police chief in New Haven, Connecticut, told the Times in the 1999 article, “I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted.”

One of the reasons given for this militarization, and enthusiastically peddled by Hollywood, is the spectre of heavily armed criminals. Radley Balko debunked that:

Moreover, there's simply not much evidence that criminals are arming themselves with heavy weaponry. In a paper by David Kopel and Eric Morgan published by the Independence Institute in 1991, about a decade into the militarization of civilian policing that began in 1980, the authors point to a number of statistics showing that high-powered weapons, which are often cumbersome and difficult to conceal, simply aren't favored by criminals, including drug peddlers. The authors surveyed dozens of cities and found that, in general, less than 1 percent of weapons seized by police fit the definition of an “assault weapon.” Nationally, they found that fewer than 4 percent of homicides across the United States involved rifles of any kind. And fewer than one-eighth of 1 percent involved weapons of military caliber. Even fewer homicides involved weapons commonly called “assault” weapons. The proportion of police fatalities caused by assault weapons was around 3 percent, a number that remained relatively constant through- out the 1980s. It was during the 1980s that SWAT teams first began to proliferate.

Kopel and Morgan also interviewed police firearms examiners. The examiners in Dade County, Florida—home to Miami— for example, found that contrary to the Miami Vice depiction of the South Florida drug trade in the 1980s, the use of assault weapons in shootings and homicides in Miami was in decline throughout the decade.

Despite this, more and more military-grade weapons and equipment are being channeled to police forces around the United States. The latest threat invented to justify it is the heavily armed illegal immigrant. When I wrote about Sheriff Joe Arpaio's antics earlier, I encountered this piece of reporting:

Arizona Republic: Joe Arpaio launches 16th immigration sweep in desert

In a stretch of barren desert alongside Interstate 8 near Gila Bend that has become a corridor for human and drug smuggling, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and about 100 men staged a crime-suppression operation Thursday.

Arpaio brought with him a belt-fed .50-caliber machine gun that can shoot accurately up to a mile as a display of the kind of force he would use if anyone hurts a deputy.

"I am trying to send a message to Mexico," he said. "We will not take anyone hurting our deputies. We will fight back."

The 7-year-old gun has not yet been used, Arpaio said. "It is more for defense." Nor have any of his deputies yet been harmed in a border scuffle.

"We have been very lucky," he said.

The sheriff said criminals smuggling drugs and immigrants across the border are now carrying AK-47s along the swath of desert that is seldom patrolled. The Barry M. Goldwater Range is used for shooting and cannot be patrolled without permission from the United States Air Force. That gives smugglers an easy path for entry, Arpaio said.

This is classic law enforcement logic: there's supposedly a heavily armed enemy out there who puts the officers at risk, necessitating military-grade hardware and civil rights violations. The fact that the AK-toting illegal immigrants seem to be a myth, as evidenced by, among other things, the lack of shootouts with heavily armed immigrants in Sheriff Joe's neck of the woods, is irrelevant. What matters is that the police need bigger guns. Balko:

With all of this funding and free or discounted equipment and training from the federal government, police departments across the country needed something to do with it. So they formed SWAT teams — thousands of them. SWAT teams have since multiplied and spread across the country at a furious clip.

It's no joke, too. I earlier wrote about the Bay Area Rapid Transit system's SWAT team. Just recently, a SWAT team raided a house at the behest of a department of education investigating white-collar crime.

In this part of the world, it used to be a running joke how every single Russian government agency sprouted a SWAT team equivalent around the turn of the millennium. Now the same seems to be true of the US.

What's wrong with it? Balko:

The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

That's no exaggeration. Here's a few of the examples Balko provided for the Playboy piece I mentioned earlier:

- Anthony Diotaiuto, a 23-year-old student, was killed by a SWAT team making a "no-knock" raid on his house. They knocked down his door, without declaring themselves to be the police, and when the justifiably alarmed Diotaiuto went for his gun to defend himself, the police shot him.

- Cheryl Lynn Noel, a 44-year-old woman, was shot to death in her bed by a SWAT officer in 2005. After finding marijuana seeds in the family's trash can, the Baltimore police department sent a SWAT team to raid her house in the middle of the night. The team broke down the door, threw stun grenades inside and stormed up to the bedroom, where they found Noel holding a handgun. The police officers immediately shot her. Full details here.

- Cory Maye, sentenced to death for shooting a police officer who entered his apartment on a no-knock raid. Maye had no idea the man he shot was a police officer. Read the Reason piece here.

This is the most terrifying aspect of this era of SWAT teams. The police may come by information that leads them to seek a search warrant on your house or a nearby house, or an arrest warrant on you or one of your neighbors. This information may well come from a paid informer, who may have a grudge against someone or just plain lie. It's now becoming increasingly common for the warrant to be carried out by a SWAT team breaking into either the target house or one near it; wrong-door raids happen far too often.

If you do find your door being broken down by a SWAT team, you're very unlikely to be able to tell that it is, in fact, the police who are coming at you, and not, for instance, home invaders. In the United States, it's considered legitimate to own a firearm for home defense, and the country has seen some spectacular home invasion cases. However, should you exercise this right to home defense, and it's the police coming in through your door and not a criminal, they will shoot you and face no consequences for doing so. Not that being unarmed will protect you, as SWAT teams regularly kill unarmed people as well, whether because they think they're armed or by accidentally discharging their weapon.

To sum up, it's entirely legal, and considered totally legitimate, for US law enforcement agencies to maintain heavily armed paramilitary units which regularly assault the homes of private citizens and kill and maim some of them. In the Soviet Union, people lived in dread of the midnight knock on the door: it would mean the secret police were coming to arrest them. In the United States, on the other hand, the police don't knock, and they'll shoot.

The fact that this kind of activity is considered normal policing is just terrifying. On principle, the idea that police officers can invade your home without announcing themselves, kill your pets and possibly kill you, based on nothing more than vague circumstantial evidence that you might be guilty of anything ranging from failing to appear in court to a misdemeanor, is unthinkable. Yet it's true.

This is another case of the basic problem of police misconduct: the majority of the population believes that the police only ever do bad things to criminals, and that criminals, by being criminals, deserve it. The problem with this is that there are criminals and there are criminals: the majority of SWAT team raids target unarmed people without serious criminal backgrounds, guilty of non-violent crimes like possession of small amounts of marijuana. Worse, it ignores the fact that there are wrong-door raids where the police attack the wrong house or apartment, and raids based on false information. And in both those cases, the police shoot, tase and beat first and ask questions later.

The reasoning given for all this is, most commonly, the safety of the officers. For these SWAT teams, that comes before the safety of the citizens they're supposed to be protecting. That isn't right. US law enforcement is treating the citizens of the United States like the inhabitants of an occupied country.

Reading the Laugesen article from 1999 is especially scary now, in 2011, when it's gotten even worse than he imagined.

Fantasy Baseball Week Twelve

Well, Gideon and I had a pretty good battle.  We tied 6-6.  That did not help me gain any ground in the standings.  I also continue to lose the same categories every week:  HRs, AVE, OBP, ERA, WHIP.  I need to make a trade to change that, I need someone elite.  I have the pitching if anyone wants it.

My most dominant player was Verlander again, but since I posted a picture of him last week and I do not like to double post pictures.  Sabathia was pretty good as well, getting a win, 9 Ks, and a 1.13 ERA.  My big hitter was, wait for it...Erick Aybar.  He hit a HR with 6 Runs scored, 3 RBIs, 1 SB, .391/.417.  Not bad for a light hitting shortstop. 

Next week, I plan on taking a look at how my season totals are doing in comparison to my actual head-to-head stats.

Jenni Kayne resort 2012

images via Jenni Kayne

Mrs. Flynt

The Return of True Blood

Tonight was the premiere of True Blood, but before I get into that, I want to point out how I am an idiot.  Last week I wrote about the season finale of Treme.  Well it was not really the finale...I am shocked that no one pointed that out to me (probably because only two people I know watch it).  Anyways...

The new season of True Blood started out with Sookie in the land of fairy.  Turns out her grandfather was there for the last twenty years.  Also, the fairies are not good guys.  They are harvesting humans and all that pretty stuff was just an illusion.  Everyone should know that if they ever read Sandman.  Yeah, the story was pretty lame, as were the special effects. 

Sookie then comes back to our world, her grandpa dies and she heads home only to find workers there remodeling.  Turns out she has been gone for more than a year and everyone thought she was dead.  Jason sold her home.  Oops.  Here are the things that have happened:

-Jason is a cop now and he seems to be good at it.  Andy is a V addict.  Jason ends up being locked in a deep freezer by someone in that meth town.  Turns out Crystal left.

-Sam has anger problems.  His brother is a Jesus freak and lives with Hoyt's mom.  Sam gets drunk with some shape-shifters now and probably has orgies.  Weird.

-Bill is now the King of Louisianna.  Are they ever going to explain how that shit works?  If he is the king, why doesn't Eric just kill him and take over?  Does being the king give you super powers?

-Eric is the one who bought Sookie's house and he gives it back to her and then says he owns her.  It was pretty obvious that he was the one who bought it, but I have no clue where this thing is going.

-The fight between Jessica and Hoyt was so lame.  Probably the worst acting I have seen on this show and that is saying something.  At least Pam was funny when they were at Fangtasia.

-So, Tara is a lesbian named Toni now?  She and her girlfriend are cage-fighters?  This was probably the first time there was a girl-on-girl scene on TV that I had absolutely no interest in.

-Lafayette and Jesus...um whatever, this storyline already sucks a major cock.

-Am I forgetting anything?  Probably not, the show was pretty dumb.  I will keep watching though.  At least there will be plenty of boobs.

Beating the Red Sox and Being There to See It

I think most of you know that I hate the Red Sox.  My hatred started years ago, the exact moment was probably during the whole A-Rod trade stuff.  The Sox acted like it was so unfair that the Yankees traded for A-Rod.  They cried up and down about how the Yankees were creating a monopoly and all sorts of other bullshit.  They failed to mention that they were in the running for A-Rod, they were going to send Manny to Texas.

From that moment on, I started to really dislike Red Sox fans and it only got worse.  Anyways, the Pirates played them this weekend and there was a lot of talk about this being the most attended series in history.  I contacted my place of work to see if they had tickets and sure enough they sent me four tickets in section 120.  I decided to see if my mom and step-dad wanted to go to the game.  They said hell yeah.

She looks so cute...

Unfortunately, it was a pain in the ass to find a hotel room.  Everything in the city was booked (there were two conventions and the game), but I lucked out by finding two single rooms up near the airport.  We took a cab to the game (it cost $32) and decided to go to the casino to kill some time.

Me and Harmon (my step-dad) played three card poker, which I tried playing before on the cruise, but did not really enjoy it.  I figured I would play a few hands, if I did not like it, I would go to the blackjack table.  I lost my first $60 after a bunch of hands of getting crap.  I put another $60 in and figured if I lost this, I would go to the ATM and get money for the game and call it quits.

I think this is Youkilis swinging and missing.

I hit a straight, which put me up a good amount, but still not back to even.  It was funny because I was down to my last $20 and Harmon had to spot me the $10 so I could bet on the straight.  I then went on a pretty decent hot streak and I had a nice chip stack going.  Unfortunately, like most streaks, it came to an end and I started going back down, I was down to about $80 when I hit a straight flush, which paid me almost $400.  Lindsey and mom came over to see how we were doing, they did not believe that I just hit a straight flush, until the dealer started counting out my chips.

Lindsey then took $200 of the money and cashed it in.  I played for a little bit longer and ended up cashing out with $235.  We went to dinner at the buffet upstairs and I was a good son and paid for the meal.  We then headed over to the game.

Damn, the place was packed!  It took forever to get a beer and get to our seats.  Our seats were pretty great and there were only a few Red Sox fans in our section.  During the third inning, Lindsey and I went up to meet Offord and his future wife.  On the way back to our seats we stopped for another drink and that was when Overbay hit the three-run homer.  Damn!  I missed it.

The game was pretty intense.  Every moment seemed like the Red Sox could just score a ton of runs.  But then, the Pirates would get the guys out that needed out.  It is hard to imagine Jeff Karstens dominating that lineup, but somehow he did it.  As soon as Gonzalez hit his homer, I said to Harmon that they needed to pull Karstens.  Hurdle allowed him to stay in to give up another one and bring the game to 5-4.  Luckily the Buccos got another run and they went into the 9th inning with a two-run lead.

Hanrahan warming up...

It was great to be there for Hanrahan's entrance.  You see it on TV or watch it on YouTube and it is cool, but at the game it is one million times cooler.  Did everyone else almost have a heart-attack during that inning?  I thought Xavier Paul caught that ball, I was cheering like an idiot (like everyone else).  I seriously thought Gonzalez was going to catch up to one of those fastballs.  The entire place was on it's feet.  This was a game in June and the place was that crazy.  Can you imagine how crazy that city will be if the Buccos make the post-season? 

After the game we went to Mullen's and drank a few beers outside on the corner and then took a taxi back to the hotel.  Once there, Lindsey and I went to the bar and started bullshitting with a couple of Red Sox fans.  They were actually very nice.  The one guy kept saying how great of a city Pittsburgh is and how this is the most beautiful ballpark he had ever seen.

We had a great time and we could not have asked for a better game to be at.  I cannot wait to go back down for another one.

KAJAL AGARWAL

 

KAJAL AGARWAL IS A STAR IN TOLLYWOOD AND NOW SHE IS MAKING HER DEBUT IN BOLLYWOOD OPPOSITE AJAY DEVGUN IN SINGHAM