Because I would love a translation and/or explanation for the following video of Korean baseball teams fighting:

Although I have to admit, I think I would enjoy it very much if the next time Barry Bonds gets hit by a pitch, he just started hopping out to the mound on one foot, ready to bowl someone over in a chicken-fight.

Courtesy Dave Barry’s Blog, who suggests that perhaps it’s time for a different sort of drug investigation in Korean baseball.

I got the following in my personal email inbox a few hours ago, and I’m a bit confused:

The points of confusion, all around the “Why on earth would they send this now?” question:

1. It’s August 15th.

2. I would have understood getting this in my work email as I do a lot of work with gifting. My personal email? Makes no sense.

3. It’s fucking August 15th.

4. When I’ve gotten quotes about turnaround time for numbers of engraved iPods in the hundreds, they’ve quoted me three weeks, even near Christmas.

5. IT’S FUCKING AUGUST GODDAMN 15th.

They even beat the absurdly-early-last-year L.L. Bean Christmas Catalog by almost a full month. What. The. Fuck?

I love a category of internet flotsam that could loosely be described as Weird News. The bizarre, the hilarious, and the truly ridiculous things that happen across the globe on a daily basis. The things that give Fark a reason to exist.

There is a story today that just really hits it out of the park in terms of the elements of a truly great weird news story. This one has four key elements:

1. Stupid and/or crazy Criminals.
2. Situations that lend themselves to multiple puns.
3. Inexplicable costumes, preferably including duct tape.
4. Someone with a hilarious name commenting on the story.

I speak, of course, of the story of the New Hampshire man who decided to dress as a tree and rob a branch (har!) of a bank. That story has a picture of the lunatic gentleman involved, and his…unusual getup.

That story (from the Manchester Union-Leader, whose reporters must be grateful to have such an amusing break from covering the Presidential Primaries) has both merciless use of puns and two hilarious details.

First, the branch that was robbed bears the address of 1550 Elm Street. Secondly, and far more hilariously, the Manchester police captain commenting on the story is named Dick Tracy.

Reading that name, I find it difficult to believe the reporter didn’t laugh and say, “No, seriously,” when the good captain introduced himself.

Apparently, whoever sets off the Fourth of July fireworks in the big public park near where I live decided that since the Fourth was on a Wednesday this year, they wanted to do the fireworks on a more convenient day.

So they’re doing them right now. They’ve been booming away for about the last 20 minutes. It’s not even the first of July yet. Am I the only one who finds that really, really bizarre?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go peel Chaplin off the ceiling.

When I found fleas on Chaplin, one of the first things I did was order up some Frontline Plus, having gotten assurances from several other pet owners that it will keep fleas off him for good.

I bought it from an “Amazon Marketplace” seller who listed her location as Wisconsin for about $20 cheaper than I’d been able to find it elsewhere online, and waited.

Usually when I order stuff from anywhere in the US, it takes less than a week to get here even with slow-boat service since the mail service in LA is actually pretty efficient.

It still wasn’t here as of Monday night, so I was wondering where the hell it was since my credit card got charged for it last Saturday.

I emailed the merchant, and she said “Oh, I use a drop-shipper, so I’m not sure when it was shipped. It should be there in the next couple of days though.”

I went down to get yesterday’s mail this morning, and I realized why it took so long: The drop-shipper was in Australia.

What’s really funny is the drop-shipper put a receipt in with the Frontline, despite a specific request from the Amazon merchant not to printed right on the receipt. I could see why: It showed the price the person I ordered from paid, which was $18 less than I paid her.

I think next time, I’ll order direct from Australia.

I went to high school with one of the Bachelorettes on the current version of The Bachelor.

The night the show premiered, a friend from high school IMed me trying to figure out if it was her, but we weren’t positive. Now, I can officially shake my head in wonder at the ridiculousness.

I’m even a little tempted to watch and see if she’s still the same girl I remember (very nice, but…not the sharpest knife in the drawer).

Maybe if I weren’t working eleventy billion hours with the boss directing, I’d have time to watch. Alas. Anyone actually voluntarily watching this is encouraged to keep me updated.

This is getting more ridiculous on a daily basis.

So I went to Dr. Hot Shit, who I’d been trying to get in with for a while (and who I got some strings pulled to get into), in order to get a third and final opinion on my foot.

Of course, he thinks something else is wrong with it than the first two guys seemed to be in general agreement that it was.

The good news is, he seems to have good reason. He took some new X-rays and basically was able to place the exact spot on my foot that has the most excruciating pain simply by looking at them and seeing something that’s been overlooked.

The better news is that if it is what he thinks it is (aggravation of the accessory navicular bone, for those who give a fuck), the fix is a lot less elaborate.

It still means surgery and a month on crutches, but only another month of rehab after, instead of another month in a walking cast and two more months of rehab for what the other guys think it is.

The weird part was, in order to help test his theory, he wanted to tape my foot to address his suspicion, then take some stress off my aggravated tendon (which is aggravated by my calf muscle on the bad leg being slightly too short).

He asked me to wear inch-and-a-half heels, and when I laughed “Do I look like someone who even owns shoes like that?” in his face at this suggestion, he asked me if I had cowboy boots.

And I thought, “Oh yeah, I guess those do have about inch-and-a-half heels.” And then I felt slightly dumb.

So I spent all of today taped up, wearing cowboy boots, and oddly substantially more comfortable than I should have been, given that I was wearing my single most uncomfortable pair of shoes.

So, possibly further details to come. I’m going back to Dr. Hot Shit tomorrow for a follow-up, and then to my original guy to say, “So, nice miss there, buck-o!” on Thursday.

Maybe I’ll even have a goddamn answer to what the fuck is going on. Wouldn’t that be nice?

A couple days ago, a new vehicle arrived in the parking lot behind my building.

It’s a bright blue PT Cruiser, wrapped in an ad for a small salsa company with tons of bright yellow chips and bright red bottles of salsa.

And bright yellow New Mexico license plates. I am so very, very confused.

They painted the outside of my building in early January, and they took the numbers off the doors when they painted.

I’ve been without numbers for a couple weeks now, which was fun when I tried to order in and had to explain to order-takers where in my building my apartment is, only to have them repeatedly fail to relay this information to the drivers actually delivering my food.

I was happy to see numbers back on my building when I returned home Friday night, but something was a bit off when I got to my apartment:

I wasn’t alone. Almost everyone else with a 1 in their apartment number ended up with the same black one with their silver last number. Well, Apartment 11 just got two black ones, and then the folks next door to me got off easiest:

At least to the unobservant or colorblind, theirs look normal. Mine look like the numbers on a cheap motel in a bad horror movie.

They’re a sign that you should yell at the screen, admonishing the idiot characters not to enter, because there’s totally a guy with a hook inside waiting to disembowel them.

Hope everyone had fun last night. I definitely did, though I believe “getting hammered and playing Cranium” qualifying as fun makes me approximately 400 years old.

Sadly, this will be my last update for a few days because I’m about to get sucked back into the vortex of work. My boss is directing the episode that starts shooting tomorrow, so that’s going to be very interesting but with some very long hours.

In my absence, please feel free to debate in the comments what the people behind the Geostationary Banana Over Texas project are smoking.