Tonight was the last “school night” for the year for the local middle school. It was busy up until late, so I was just finishing up my end-of-night jobs when the Orioles game ended and the commentators on WBAL kept running their mouths.

Look, I’ll be honest, it’s my sister who inherited my dad’s love for baseball. I don’t follow the sport or the team. Anyway, as I was mopping, I listened to the commentators run their traps, and it blew my mind. One guy — I don’t know who — claimed that for the Orioles to be good, people had to start coming to the games and getting the team the revenue it needed.

Everything I know about the Orioles says that the Orioles have been atrocious the past few years, and if certain people aren’t buying tickets to the games this year, it’s because of a simple basic rule: don’t pay good money for piss poor quality.

Hey, WBAL commentator? If the Orioles need the revenue so damn bad, why don’t they step it up and justify the money spent on games? Seems to me people’ve been paying good money for Orioles tickets for quite some time now, and it’s time the revenue should be based on the performance.

(I probably have no idea what I’m talking about, feel free to ignore this post).

Tony Barth doesn’t have an e-mail account attached to his Brickshelf Gallery, which is too bad, because I’m enamored by his current work in progress, the USS SASIL (and I want to e-mail him and pester him to finish it already).

1. The book sucked.

2. By The First Rule of Movie Scripts (”Movies Based on Books Will Never Be As Good as the Book”), the movie must be worse than sucky.

3. Ron Howard is a mediocre “safe” director at best, and a shitacular one at worst.

Besides, if you’re interested in reading in more detail about the research behind the book, you might want to go to the book he “borrowed” it all from.

(I’m aware Dan Brown was found not guilty in the lawsuit against him. Just sayin’).

Guiness is a dog owned by one of the Franchise’s regular customers. Guiness is a big black and tan, of a sub-species I can’t identify. She’s a big overly happy bark-crazy fur-bucket, and usually — which is to say, every other time I’ve delivered to these folks — locked inside the house, clawing the door to shit trying to get at me.

A few weeks ago, these customers determined I wasn’t afraid of dogs when their black lab was out in the yard and I got to play with her on the way up the steps. So tonight I guess either they decided to introduce me to Guiness, or Guiness was already out by the time they noticed me pulling into their driveway.

The customers — husband and wife — were standing on their porch when I pulled in, so I got out of my car, grabbed the pizza bag, and ran up their sidewalk to impress them. As I’m running, my alert sensors come on — the black lab is running at me, but keeping her distance. Guiness is running at me, and if he had a little control room in his head, I can imagine that room’s commander shouting “RAMMING SPEED!” I slammed on my figurative brakes about half a second before Guiness collided with me, and if I hadn’t stopped I probably would’ve taken a spill. As it was, Guiness was just very joyful to sniff and paw me, then bolted for my car, which she apparently intended to bark at.

Hopefully they’ll let Guiness out more often. Whenever anyone apologizes for their overly friendly dog, I tell them not to worry about it, “I have cats,” I explain. “It’s nice getting a chance to play with pets that actually want attention.”

(I don’t mention how nice it is to have pets that are litter-box-trained and don’t have to be taken out for a walk at three in the morning in the middle of January).

The USA Today tag read: “Rumsfield backs Guards at Border. Will sharpen troops’ skills.”

Because, once they’re deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq, or Iran, those Spanish language skills they’ve sharpened will make all the difference.

In addition to being short-staffed at the Indy, we’re even more so at the Franchise. Having recieved an amazing offer at her day job, A.’s last day is in early June. This is good news for me as I’m going to get her Saturday day shift and Friday late shift. In practical terms, this means our driving staff will be reduced from five to four, and we were already short at five.

I’m not complaining — if you want to make money as a pizza shop, a good recipe is finding a place with fewer drivers, because that usually means most shifts will be understaffed to spread out the working strength. One of the downsides is that getting specific days off can be difficult — if not to actually get off, then for the store to cover with adequate drivers.

Personally, I’m looking forward to the first Friday of June. The only regular drivers who can work are me and Ross. To fill out the schedule, Greg’s wife is coming in to drive, as is — ready for it? — Ogre.

I’m actually kind of excited about it. Before they had kids, Greg’s wife used to be a regular driver on the schedule several nights a week. This was before I started working at the Franchise, and I only met her for the first time a few months ago when she was in helping out. In any case, she’s forgotten the delivery area — y’know, I look at an address, I can tell you what roads to take to get there, what way to turn on the street, and probably landmarks of the house (”Green mailbox missing the last two numbers, on the left, they’ve still got their Halloween shit up.”)

As for Ogre, it isn’t the first time he’s come in to “help out” as a rush driver. The last time he showed up straight from his other job selling cars (apparently, he sells four a month, although I can’t imagine anyone who would buy a car from him) complete with his black dress pants, which, y’know, is all good and well except the uniform calls for khakis. Greg didn’t make a fuss since Ogre was doing him a favor, but we all got a kick out of Ogre repeating (every time he was in Greg’s earshot), “You should switch to black pants, they look so much better with the uniforms!”

(Errr. No, they don’t.)

Anyway, I’m looking forward to Ogre disappearing to Robcaste for an hour again. “It pronounced it different than I do!” Remember?

I’ve been getting hit with a lot of spam the last few days that got past SpamKarma (although still needed to be moderated), so I knew what I had to do — I changed SpamKarma’s setting from “normal” to “kinda mean.”

So if you post a comment and are told you’re a non-living evil computer spam-bot who should fry in hell …

… don’t take it personally, ‘k?