I need a new idol.

I came to this realization years ago, but it really came to a head over the weekend. You see, my idol for years has been Mick Foley. Whether he was the badass Cactus Jack, the crazy Mankind, the somewhat out of place Dude Love, or later the goofy Commissioner Foley, I ate it up. He was funny, he was tough, he was what I wanted to be, both as a wrestler, a best selling author, and a person. He was just an all around cool dude.

Then he retired. And un-retired. And retired. And un-retired. The problem is, wrestlers never un-retire to make another championship run. They un-retire because they were offered a bunch of money to get thrown down a flight of stairs by someone who wouldn't have been qualified to wrestle in the same building with them years earlier. They un-retire to make a quick buck by screwing over the reputation they spent years building.

Mick Foley has hit that point, run over it and kept going. Saturday night I got a phone call from Laura. Here's the quick version:

LAURA: There's a car show in Green Bay next weekend, you know who's going to be there?
KL: Who?
LAURA: Mick Foley. Wanna go see him?
KL: I really wish he'd stop showing up every time someone offers him 5 bucks.

I'd have driven to Green Bay 5 years ago to see him. Now, I think I'd cry if I saw him doing this. My idol has gone from being my hero to using his quasi-celebrity status to work the car show circuit. And I need a new idol. Any suggestions?

This has been KL Snow.

Here's a One Act Play that's going to eat at my brain for a while:

KL and Laura are in the apartment, KL is preparing to make dinner, and goes over to Laura's desk to see what she's doing. She's discussing my desire to not have children with an ex boyfriend. The following statement ensues:

LAURA: I still think that if I just stopped taking the pill, and a little while later there was a baby, you'd like it.

That's gonna haunt me for a while.

This has been KL Snow.

Ok, news flash.

The world around me, and unless you're from somewhere else, the world around you, is STUPID.

Back to back cases in point.

I was home tonight and I was bored. So bored I decided to go into the gym to work out on what would normally be an off day for me. I should've recognized this as a bad omen.

I got to the gym and got on the elliptical machine, which normally beats the crap out of me for about 40 minutes, before I go let weights beat the crap out of me some more. Normally I listen to a CD during this time. Tonight my CD was skipping. I should've recognized this as a bad omen.

But instead, I changed the channel on my headphones and started listening to CNN. Yes, that's right, CNN, a primary source of news and informed debate in our country. Sometimes. But not tonight. Tonight, there was a debate taking place. A debate between a congressman and a housewife. The topic, you ask? Start times of movies. Yes, that's right. The housewife was angry and thought a law should be made forcing theaters to start movies at their advertised time, with no previews. This woman apparently has nothing more important in her life than this matter.

I got off the machine. There was no way I could have stayed on the machine and not hurt myself while listening to this debate. Stupidity on this level throws me into rage of Lewis Black proportions. So I went to the locker room, changed clothes, got in my car, and did what I always do when I see something stupid: I called Ryan. Ryan is either the person who always gives me a sympathy laugh whether I'm funny or not or the person with the sense of humor most similar to mine, I'm not sure which. Anyway, I vented at Ryan, Ryan laughed, and I was starting to feel better when I got home. Until I checked my e-mail and found this, from Ticketmaster.

"Don't miss Aaron Carter." Yes, Ticketmaster, which has sold me exactly one ticket in my life, sent me an e-mail to let me know that Aaron Carter will be performing in West Des Moines, on Friday the 22nd of April. Aaron Carter is the musical equivalent of having a live grenade shoved up your ass. Thank you Ticketmaster, and thank you CNN, two prominent entities in a world around me which is inherently STUPID.

This has been KL Snow.

It's a momentous day, and the big news comes first:

I don't work at Wal Mart anymore. It's incredibly liberating to be free. I'm also broke, so if you're hiring...I'm listening. But I finally hit the point today where it had to end. I was going to get fired on Thursday for unexcused absences I got excused 3 months ago. So I decided to bring it all back to the present and quit today.

Furthermore, there has not yet been a post since my party Friday night, which I trust you all either enjoyed or missed entirely. I've decided, in place of writing an actual "who did what" party review that would get entirely skimmed over by most, I'm going to assign selected party-attendees titles, based on their actions at my party:

J.D. Fox: Crown Prince of the Ones and Twos, Micro Machines Grand Champion
Travis Monroe: Shrubbery irrigation specialist
Ryan Haasl: Chief assistant, alcohol acquisition.
Bridget (sorry, don't know your last name): Saint in charge of making sure Travis got home.
Laura McDonald: Winner of the 2005 "I hardly stayed long enough for you to know I was here" award.

To those of you who didn't make the list of titles, I'm sorry. Try again next time.

Finally, before I get to today's fun blog game, here's a quick movie review, as written by my new alter ego, Linkoman:

On Saturday, Ryan, Tara, Laura and I rented Owning Mahowny, because I liked Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs in Almost Famous. However, Ryan pointed out that Lester Bangs is the only Phillip Seymour Hoffman character that isn't really Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I didn't like the movie much.

Finally, here's one of those fun games with the questions no one really ever asks you, but you post the info anyway on the hopes someone will want to know.

3 names you go by:
Kyle, KL, Snowy

3 screennames you have:
TheEvilKL (AIM), KL4ever.rm (Yahoo), 34206774 (ICQ)

3 things you like about yourself:
I'm goofy, I wear sunglasses and I don't work at Wal Mart anymore.

3 things you hate/dislike about yourself:
I allowed myself to settle into a Wal Mart job for 8 months. I have a belly that won't go away. My wild and loose sense of humor causes me to insult people when I think I'm on a roll.

3 parts of your heritage:
My first baseball game was in Milwaukee
My first baseball job was in Missoula, Montana
My first playoff baseball game was in Cedar Rapids.

3 things that scare you:
The prospect of not being able to save my loved ones from whatever may harm them, dying alone, and Dick Cheney

3 of your everyday essentials:
Baseball, meat, caffeine

3 things you are wearing right now:
EVIL T-shirt, my watch, and boxers that glow in the dark.

3 of your favorite bands/artists:
They Might Be Giants, REM, Barenaked Ladies

3 of your favorite songs at present:
TMBG - Birdhouse in Your Soul
Scotty D - Drop the Bomb (we dance danced at my party and it's been in my head ever since)
Counting Crows - Mr. Jones

<>3 things you want to try in the next 12 months:
Landing (and keeping) a job in baseball
Working a political campaign that doesn't involve the Presidency
More baseball parks I haven't seen. :)

3 things you want in a relationship:
reliability, love, honesty

2 truths and a lie:
I dislocated my finger punching a brick wall this week.
I've got 12 pages written of a paper that was supposed to be 5-10 pages.
I'll probably play baseball again someday.

3 physical things about the opposite/same sex that appeal to you:
Eyes
Body
A noticeable lack of mental vacancy.

3 things you just can't do:
Give birth
Stick to a promise to write every day
Ignore bad grammar

3 of your favorite hobbies:
Video games
Reading
Im'ing
(Baseball doesn't count, anything that occupies that much of your time is an addiction.)

3 things you want to do really bad right now:
Eat
Get in a fight
Turn the page on my calendar

3 careers you're considering:
General Manager
Play-by-play announcer
Baseball writer

3 places you want to go on vacation:
Fenway Park
Cooperstown
I think my planned Tennessee trip this summer fits in here.

3 kid names:
I don't name children, I eat them.

3 things you want to do before you die:
Live a long time
Get a puppy
blow on Laura's belly (done!)

This has been KL Snow.

A quick take on something I hate.

I hate Valentine's Day. Hate hate hate. When I was single, I was convinced it was created and perpetuated to increase the suicide rate among single people. Now, as someone who's taken, I see it as an increasingly unnecessary reminder that I need to pamper someone. Here's a quick one act play to show what I'm talking about.

CONSUMATE PROFESSIONAL CHRISTOPHER PARRISH (CP) is on a couch next to another couch seating KL and LAURA at his house.

CP: So what are you guys doing for Valentine's Day?
KL: I have class from 12:30-9, so we're going out to dinner Tuesday night.
CP: I see. I have to make dinner.
KL: If I made dinner on Valentine's Day, it'd be just like every other day.

Before Laura, I had been single on every Valentine's Day of my life. I had taken a couple of opportunities to perhaps try to find someone on Valentine's Day, hoping they'd be similarly struck by society pressing on them to find someone, but had no luck. But I don't just hate the holiday because it's been nasty to me. I hate the holiday because it's an awful concept.

If you love someone, you shouldn't need a goddamn holiday to show it. Some of us do on a day to day basis what others would never consider doing, even on Valentine's Day. Then we're expected to go above and beyond that, because it's a freakin holiday. It's a shitty, lamentable holiday forcing some people to do what they should be doing anyway and forcing others to sit in a dark corner and have it rubbed in their faces that they don't have anyone to do that for.

So with that said, just so you can maybe get a snicker out of my rage, let's see the messages we're sending with our Valentine's Day gifts:

Flowers say "I love you enough to give you something I removed from the Earth just so you could watch it die slowly."

Chocolates say "I love you enough that I don't care if, in a moment of weakness, you decide to eat the whole goddamn box and have to spend your rent money buying new clothes."

Stuffed animals say "I love you enough that I got you a warm fuzzy object so you'll still have something to cuddle with when I need to be somewhere else cause you're driving me insane."

Dinner, professional massages or trips to a day spa say "I love you but I'm sick of having to pamper/cook for/take care of you myself, so I'm paying someone else to do it."

And of course, gift certificates say "I love you but I stand absolutely no chance of actually figuring out what you want by myself."

This has been KL Snow. I promise I'll be in a better mood after this is over.

I'm grumpy lately, and not for reasons I'm completely comfortable explaining to lots of people. But I'm seriously grumpy, so grumpy that Laura asked me today "Is it your time of the month?"

But since I'm not completely comfortable describing my real problem, here's what I've decided to do. I've created, in my head, a fictional problem. And I've created a fictional character, thus far unnamed, to deal with said problem. Here's what he'd say, faced with a problem not at all similar to my problem, in his way which is not all that similar to mine.

"You seem to think you belong in my world.
You seem to think you're strong enough, fast enough and smart enough to compete on my level.
But I know something you don't; you're not man enough.
You're scared, and if you're not, you should be.
Doing what you do has become a hobby. Being a thorn in my side has become your pastime. Some people play tennis, you irritate me.
But while you're dabbling in irritation, I'm making my life's work out of the dismantling of souls like yours.
So come stand toe to toe with me now, if you want. But make sure you're ready. Cause your life is headed for a permanent change. You'll never see a challenge the same way again."

This has been KL Snow.

Ok, here's a blog game for you all to play, on my blog, therefore making me feel popular and driving my self-esteem through the roof while you all think I'm witty and clever.

Ok, that's a best case scenario. Probably not really going to happen. Maybe I should've changed that first sentence to "Here's some shit to do if you really care to blow the time on it."

We've all seen the game on other people's blogs, post your name and the blog author will write their honest feelings about you. I'm not into feelings, and I certainly don't need everyone on Earth knowing what I honestly think about them. But I will play a similar game.

Post your name, height and weight (lie about the weight if you have to), and I'll write your scouting report. I'll be honest and truthful in some of it, perhaps downright flattering in some of it, and perhaps utterly ridiculous in most of it. It'll give you something do for a little while, y'know, if you're bored.

Post away.

This has been, and presumably will continue to be, KL Snow.

Just something quick and fun...


How evil are you?

Recipe:

Chicken Salad from Chicken Shit
by KL Snow

Step 1: Get shit on.
I attended my first class today on "The Iowa Environment," the last science class I'll ever have to take. First step, was of course, to introduce ourselves, and tell something interesting. I mentioned Snowbaseball.com and the new Snow Index and drew some minor interest from one of the professors (yes, this class has two professors). But there was a problem. You see, the Iowa Environment requires a lab, which is only offered two times. I had class both of those times. So after class I spoke with the professors, who recommended I drop the class. That couldn't happen. You see, I'm taking 18 credits, and to graduate I need 18 credits.

Step 2: Find someone who wants shit.
The professor who was intrigued by the Snow Index works in the math department, and was greatly interested in seeing how it works. He arranged a meeting for half an hour after class to discuss it, and the lab problem.

Step 3: Trade for Chicken Salad.
The professor was greatly intrigued by the Snow Index and what I've done with it, and offered me an independent study, consisting of...

3 papers, 5-10 pages
weekly meetings to discuss my findings
1 baseball lecture at the end of the semester, given by...KL Snow. :-)

So let's summarize. I'm losing a class called "Religion in Politics," which one fellow student told me would be "the hardest class you'll ever take." I'm gaining:

1 more morning a week where I can sleep in
A math professor to help me work on the Snow Index
The opportunity to give a lecture, on baseball, to faculty, friends and potentially baseball executives.

Exit chicken shit, enter chicken salad. Gold-plated chicken salad.
This has been KL Snow

Just something that occured to me today...

Here's an All New One Act Play by KL Snow, not new in that it just happened, but new in that I thought about it again today.

KL is running errands on the day before Election Day with AMY, one of my supervisors and friends with the Democratic Party. AMY was beautiful, smart and funny...I haven't seen her since the day after Election Day, but that's besides the point. Anyway, on this day, AMY and I were at HyVee in a series of errands, when AMY remembered she needed a pack of cigarettes. Then, while checking out, she remembered she needed a lighter too.

AMY: I need a lighter, do you see any?
KL spots a rack of lighters and points to it.
AMY: Can you grab me one?
KL wanders over and arbitrarily picks out a yellow lighter. He comes back and hands it to AMY.
AMY: A yellow one? You know they're bad luck, right? Although I've also heard that black ones are bad luck, and red ones...
KL: I think it's possible that smoking is bad luck.
AMY laughs.

Admittedly, I made a good joke in this case. But do you ever wonder what would have happened if in that one moment of truth you had arbitrarily picked the blue lighter? Yeah, me too.

This has been KL Snow.

I cried a little bit today.

Admittedly, I only review games when I have a bad experience. TMNT 2 entertained me for a couple of weeks, at least. Zelda: Four Swords was the first Zelda game I've ever been completely unable to put down. You didn't hear about either of those. I hated Donkey Konga, and you got pages about that. So yeah, sometimes I'm too negative.

I had a bad experience of a new kind today. You see, I've picked up a new addiction: Flipwords. You can play it at Yahoo, but to get the full experience you have to download it. The demo is 60 minutes long. I thought, "I can get a good fix in 60 minutes and then decide if I want it."

I started playing, and I got on a roll. You see, I'm good at word games. I'm really good at Wheel of Fortune and Boggle, and as luck would have it, this is almost a cross between the two. So I got on a roll. Last night I played online and lost in round 7. Today, I was rolling. Laura saved me from certain death one time around level 12, but I had pressed on, each level expecting death and miraculously surviving because of a well placed letter or free vowel, and made level 26.

Visions of high score graphics danced in my head. But the magic phrase for level 26 wouldn't come to me. Finally, with 1 turn remaining, I figured it out. I went to type it in...

And my demo ended. I screamed. A screen came up telling me to purchase the game for $19.95. I didn't even think about it. I paid. (Couldn't find a way to crack it.) After credit card information, etc, I went back to the game. A window popped up saying "Thanks for purchasing." Then it closed. And my score was gone. GONE.

I cried a little bit today.
This has been KL Snow.

EDIT: It's now Saturday, and in my third full try at the game, I reached level 31, where the phrase which stumped me was "Bubble Milk Tea." I don't know what Bubble Milk Tea is. But my score was the 445th best...of the last 24 hours. I will find you, top 10 score. And when I do, it'll say "KL" there.

Hey everybody!

(This is where you say "Hi Dr. KL!")

I had a weird night of dreams last night. First, I was captured and enslaved by weird triceratops-lookin creatures, and when I tried to escape they incinerated me.

Then, Wal Mart started on fire and I ran into a (strangely uninhabited) gym type building where I followed a man in a dark robe who turned around to see me, turned out to be death, and chased me for a long time before I stole away his scythe, used the blunt end to poke him in the face, and started to run before he touched me and I froze.

The third dream, finally, didn't end with me dying. When I woke up, I was completely amused by the way it turned out, so I e-mailed it to the other person I knew in the dream, Shawn Umland, a former teacher of mine, WIAA licensed basketball official, and all-around good guy, cause I thought he'd get a laugh out of it. I apologize for the sentence structure, grammatical issues and rambling nature, I wrote it immediately after waking up from the dream. But I thought I'd share the e-mail I sent him here:

Hey Shawn,



Don't mean to bug you, but I've gotta tell you about

the dream I had last night. I was playing basketball

for Lakeland, by some bizarre occurence...basically

just trying to stay out of the way of people who knew

what they were doing. Time was running out and we were

winning, though, so I took a three, and one of the

defenders pulled me down by my arm. So I turned around

and yelled at you, "Where's the foul?" And you T'd me

up.



Thought you'd be amused. :-) See you Wednesday.

That's all for now. This has been KL Snow.

EDIT: Oh, and one other thing:

What Kind of Geek are You?
Name
DOB
Favourite Color
Your IQ is	very high
You are a	word nerd
Your strength is	you never need to sleep
Your weakness is	chocolate
You think normal people are	aliens
Normal people think that you are	satanic
This QuickKwiz by owlsamantha - Taken 164678 Times.

New! Get Free Daily Horoscopes from Kwiz.Biz

Ok, it's been a while, and I do have some stories to tell, but before that...

It's an all new one act play by KL Snow!

I'm titling this one, which I don't always do, but let's call this one, "So what am I eating now?"

KL SNOW is at IMPERIAL GARDEN enjoying...well, maybe not enjoying...partaking in a Chinese buffet. He's seated near the front counter. The phone rings and WAITRESS comes over to answer it. A brief conversation ensues, followed by this moment:

WAITRESS (on phone): No, there's no meat in there, it's just onions and green onions, mixed when brown sauce, and then we mix in the beef.
KL stops chewing for a moment.

I'm pretty sure Ryan will agree with me in calling that a "If it weren't for my horse" moment.

Anyway, back to recent happenings. Finals came and went, nothing tremendously noteworthy occured, we're hoping for passing grades in all 6 classes, at least 2 of which are still in doubt. But it's too close to call. So we're not going to talk about that. I just ate.

Worked through the weekend and then, Monday morning I departed for Wisconsin for Christmas. Someone told me the other day that my drive back to Wisconsin (5-6 hours depending on traffic and my own personal sense of urgency) is too long, and I gave them my standard response:

"This summer I drove 1400 miles to Montana, and back, in the same week. After that, any trip where I leave and get where I'm going in the same day feels short."

I hate it when lines like that come back to bite me in the ass.

It snowed in Wisconsin on Monday. A lot. That really probably shouldn't surprise most of you. Actually, it didn't surprise me a whole lot either. I've been driving in snow for a long time, I'm pretty confident in my ability to do it. I am not nearly as confident, however, in the talents of other asshats who think they can drive in the snow.

CASE 1: Semis have no fear.
As a full time Wisconsin resident, I used to hunt a fair amount, primarily for deer. At the risk of grossing some out, I will give you a base understanding of how the process of removing a dead deer from the woods works.

STEP 1: Shoot deer. Sometimes more than once. If you don't do this right, the rest of the process is much harder.
STEP 2: Find deer, remove guts. Leave gut pile in woods. I'm sure something will eat it...not something I'd ever want to encounter/kiss though.
STEP 3: Find a friend (hopefully), enlist help in dragging dead deer to a vehicle of some form, preferably not a bicycle. Dragging a dead deer will sometimes cause you to leave a trail of blood behind you. It won't draw sharks, don't worry about it.

Anyway, now that you understand the process, here's the point. I used to wonder how other deer could walk through the same place, see a pile of entrails and trail of blood, and not think "this probably isn't a safe place." Semis in the snow operate on the same concept. On I-90, I drove past a semi which was jacknifed, tipped over on its side, and had its trailer bent in half. It's probably the most vehicular carnage I've ever seen in person. Not 30 seconds after driving past this, a semi went shooting past me in the fast lane, driving at least 20 mph faster than I was, in treacherous conditions.
PERSONAL IMPACT: Thankfully none to me, but I'm sure some more asshats held up traffic in other places cause they couldn't understand the concept of ice and how it impacts a several-ton, nonflexible projectile.

CASE 2: Snow distraction
Snow will cause some morons who aren't paying attention to take things which would normally worry them for granted. Like, for example, looking to make sure they won't hit anyone before they change lanes. Here's a step by step of this one:

STEP 1: KL is driving in the outside lane, going a solid 45 mph, only slightly too fast for conditions.
STEP 2: Asshat pulls up alongside KL, decides to change lanes, fails to notice KL is there.
STEP 3: KL swerves and honks horn.
STEP 4: KL catches shoulder of the road on the right side, causing his car to spin into and across traffic to the left side of the road, where it momentarily rights itself.
STEP 5: Thinking all is well, KL attempts to merge back into traffic, only to have the car's momentum catch up with him and spin him back across traffic into the ditch on the far side, where he strikes a cement culvert, which sounds bad, but really was a good thing, cause if he had missed the culvert by 6 inches on either side, he'd have ended up in a pond.
STEP 6: Asshat drives away unharmed.

To make a long story short, I called 911, waited almost 2 hours for a state trooper, and had to spend the night in Tomah, WI waiting for a tow truck to come pull me out, then finish my trip to Wisconsin Rapids in the morning. So, to bring it back full circle:

"After that, any trip where I leave and get where I'm going in the same day feels short."

It was a long trip.

This has been KL Snow.

The Sandwich Saga, Part 2

My ham sandwich, however, would not be a true superbeing if it did not search for enemies, find none, but have its followers find enemies for it anyway.

I've found fried chicken. You see, I ate fried chicken once and got violently ill. I've never really fully recovered. So it must in fact be the chicken that is evil.

Thank you, oh ham sandwich, for protecting me from the temptation of the fried chicken. I know it will be hard, but I also know you'll be there with me, because you're still several legs of evolution away from being able to climb out of my pocket.

The Sandwich Saga, Part 1:

In the absence of a God to handle all my cares, worries and concerns, I've decided to make a ham sandwich. That ham sandwich can be my personal scapegoat:

"It didn't work out because it wasn't the ham sandwich's will."

An empowerment:

"I felt weak, but then I realized the ham sandiwich was with me."

And my comfort:

"The ham sandwich will make it all work out."

It's a very liberating ham sandwich. And I'll go to war with you if you question it.