Now that I was let go yesterday from the temp job that I had been working I have a little more freetime currently to regain perspective. The first thing I am taking note of is the fact that I'm hungry, for which reason I shall keep my comments today reasonably short. Aiding this is the fact that there is a giant spider somewhere in my room that has kept me from sleeping in my bed the last two nights. I woke up Monday morning, turned on my lamp, and saw the spider crawling on the bedpost near my left foot. I popped up, found the first visable shoe, and went to kill the damn arachnid, but by that point it had already sought shelter and I haven't been able to find it again since. As I believe it is still crawling around somewhere in the vicinity of my bed, I refuse to sleep there until I can locate it and kill it. Ugh - I hate spiders.

On to a slightly less shriek inducing topic, how 'bout 'dem Twins? I have to admit that before the game, I didn't give them a chance in hell of beating Mulder and the A's out in Oakland, but Radke was insane, the righties stepped up (it had to be Hocking's best game of the season by far), and then Pierzynski and Ortiz came alive in the 9th. As much as he's a fan favorite, Guardado gives every Twins fan a minor heart attack when he steps out on the mound. At any rate they won, but since I never expected them to get this far, everything they do now is just gravy. That takes us to game 1 of the ALCS. Even though it was such a close game, with Mays on the mound I never worried until Eddie came in in the 9th. All the newspapers wasted the "A-Mays-ing" headline on the game where he outduelled Pedro, but they should have saved it for last night. If Radke was insane in game 5 in Oakland, I don't think words can suffice for Mays' performance last night. Wow. If Reed can win tonight, and knowing that the Twins have Radke and Milton coming up for games 3 and 4 respectively, I have to tell you that I'd be pretty confident in our chances of sweeping Anaheim and going to the Series. Before I get there though, we do have to get by a pretty tough Angels team that made the Yankees - no matter how much I hate them - look like a AAA team.

I complained during the division series to several people about how the Twins were relegated to ABC Family because Fox didn't want them. After watching last night's game, I am now longing for Joe Morgan and Jon Miller on ABC Family or ESPN. I mean, at least they talk about the game and act like professionals. Those two morons we had last night were apparently taken straight from a frat house out on one of the coasts. Early in the game all they could talk about were the rubes who live in the Midwest. Of course, throughout they had to carry on with the usual banter about playing in Metrodome and the ceiling and the turf. It's not as if the Twins play the regular season at Midway Stadium and move to the Dome just for postseason. 81 games a season get played there in the Metrodome and the ceiling is not as big a factor as they make it out to be. It's also not as if these other AL teams have never played there either. Oakland played 3 games there this year (and even won 2 of them) while Anaheim played 6 games there. They know this stadium. They just make it out to be much worse than it really is. Sure, we'd all rather see the game played outdoors and on real grass, but this is what we have and this is how it's played. Enough already. At any rate, it's reassuring to know that Minnesota and Anaheim are so important that they've been relegated for game 2 to Fox Sports Net in favor of the NLCS.

Hmmm... that brings up another point - namely the Twins being blamed ever so briefly for the small crowd in Oakland for game 5. The announcers said that the Twins aren't that big of a draw, but I should like to turn the tables and point out that 56,000 people have to been attending the games in Minneapolis, while only 35,000 were showing up in Oakland. We support our team, it's the fans in Oakland who must not support their team.

I have to get back to last night's game again briefly and complain once again about Fox. At one point they wanted to advertise a part of their website which featured keys for the series written by Rex Hudler and Bert Blyleven. First, when it flashed on the tv screen, they spelled Bert's name "Byleven" (neglecting an "l"). Now, I look at their website page they were advertising, and the link to it has his name spelled "Burt"!!!! (See below.) The people who work at Fox are a bunch of morons! I do see that after clicking the link, they have his name spelled correctly. For more on Fox's opinion of the series, there was this article in the Strib.

Okay, enough complaining about Fox. I need that food of which I spoke earlier.