Go Tigers!*

Some of my fondest childhood memories are going to "the old" Tiger Stadium to participate in America's Favorite Pastime.* Dad (FOB) would help me use the scorecard to identify the players -- Al Kaline, Mickey Lolich, Gates Brown -- and patiently explain the finer points of rules and strategy -- sacrifice fly, designated hitter -- plus spring for hot dogs and caramel corn.* I don't guess this sets me too far apart from most red-blooded American men, whose inner 7-year-old is awakened by the smell of roasted peanuts and the distinctive sound of a hardball being dispatched to the upper deck.*

Ol' Blue Eyes, the colorful maternal grandmother of Bruck (GOB), rest her soul, lived with us while I was growing up (maybe some day she'll be immortalized in her own VOB column).* She caught every Tigers game she could, either on her "transistor," or on the TV in her sitting room.* While actual trips to the stadium were not an everyday occurrence, Ernie Harwell's smooth play-by-play regularly beckoned us into Nana's front room for some baseball and second-hand smoke.*

As I grew up, baseball was less of a draw for me; other interests -- high school sports, girls, music -- vied more successfully for my limited adolescent attention, but it was always in the background, and occasionally we'd pile into a friend's hand-me-down car and head down to the corner of Michigan and Trumbull.*

While I was in college (Go Blue!), a new phenomenon developed at Tiger Stadium, namely, "the bleachers. "* The bleachers were the cheap seats, $5.00 at the time, in the upper deck, way out beyond center field, from which the players looked like little white ants, and where relaxed standards of behavioral decorum prevailed.* While most of the stadium housed stolid, reflective baseball fans, the "bleacher creatures" carried on like sailors on shore leave.* If the wind were right, you might even catch the occasional whiff of malted beverages or burning cannibis.* The Tigers' last World Series-winning season was 1984, and we watched a few stellar performances by the '84 Tigers from that lofty vantage point.*

After graduation, temporarily moving away from Detroit, getting married, pursuing advanced education, changing diapers, clawing and scratching my way out of "entry-level" in my profession, and the integration of self and family into civilized society left little time for watching baseball or any other sport, and by that time the Tigers had pretty well waned into oblivion anyway.* But, to quote everyone's favorite pot-smoking tax cheat, "you were always on my mind. "* Then the players' strike of 1994 drove my already-limited interest in baseball in the direction of other sports.* And I wasn't alone: recognizing that there were two sides to this labor dispute, the general sentiment was that the players were a bunch of overpaid crybabies, and the owners were modern-day Ebenezer Scrooges, neither of which group resonated with baseball fans, who stayed home in droves.* Personally, I haven't been able to name a single Tiger since the strike.*

Around the year 2000, my career took me out of research (sports? what are sports? are they governed by stochastic nonlinear differential equations?) and into product development (sorry I can't support your program review, my wife and I both have softball games), so opportunities to watch baseball improved somewhat with work outings and supplier largesse, and I managed to catch a game once in a while.* I even took a group of European employees to a game in 2003; the most candid of them offered, "that was really boring." -- a stinging indictment, particularly coming from someone who enjoys watching soccer!*

Things have been looking up for baseball lately - interest was revived somewhat by the home run derby between Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa in the summer of 1998, and in my case, the Tigers have been putting together some excellent teams lately to go along with their lovely new stadium, Comerica Park (although I still wouldn't be able to pick a Tiger out of a lineup).* So as long as nothing bad happens to the sport, no scandals, no cheating, no legal problems to tarnish its image, I think baseball is definitely poised to continue to make a comeback into the hearts of its adoring fans.* Meanwhile:

Go Red Wings!

Fashion Tips from Bruck

We’ve been tackling some tough topics lately, fire, water, Las Vegas, prolific sneezes, so today let’s throttle down a bit and have a nice little chat about style, with the man who speaks authoritatively on this and any other subject.

Black: Why is everyone wearing all black all the time? Wear some colors, okay? I know, it supposedly makes you look slimmer. But guess what, everybody knows that now, so it doesn’t work anymore. Now it’s, why is she wearing black, she’s not fat, or, why is he wearing black, it's not hiding anything.

Matching: if your jacket is made from the same material as your pants, you’re wearing a suit. If your shirt is made from the same material as your pants, you’re wearing pajamas. If your shirt, jacket, and pants are made from the same material, you’re probably driving a low-rider Cadillac with shag carpet interior and fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror.

Those earphones that look like yoyo halves that hang on your ears? Don’t wear them if you’re bald. It looks really really really silly. Really. Like Shrek, only not as cute. And those clip-on bluetooth earpieces for your phone don’t exactly make you look like junior Einstein either, especially when the blue light is blinking - it looks like you're wearing Christmas decoration. Of course if your hair is long enough to cover up the bluetooth earpiece, it's even worse - you look like a homeless schizophrenic having a conversation with thin air.

I did get some advice from a co-worker not too long ago: blue and green, something in between, i.e., don’t put blue and green next to each other. I think I already knew that, but I wasn’t completely aware that I was wearing green. I have a rather limited ability to distinguish colors (and yet, amazingly, am still able to wax authoritatively on this important subject). I do however, have pretty good night vision and a very acute sense of smell, which can be a mixed blessing:

Perfume: if I can smell you across the stadium, that’s too much. Think about it, is your naturally aroma that bad, that somehow a gallon of Eau de East River is going to be an improvement? Okay, I’ll grant an exception for colostomy bag wearers doing aerobics.

The untucked look: I won’t stand in front of the freight train of fashion, so go ahead and wear your casual shirts untucked; in fact, I condone it as a means to compensate for the fact that American youth are getting bulkier, it being one way to make this a bit more presentable. Another benefit is that it facilitates concealed carry; in fact, I have no idea how people carried concealed in casual clothes without untucked shirts.

But speaking of the hemline of the shirt, girls, please, if you think there’s even the slightest chance that you’re too Reubenesque to expose the midsection, trust me, you are, just take my word for it. If your navel can hold anything larger than a grape, please keep some fabric between it and our retinas. You have to be careful about the back hem of your top as well - if you have a Tramp Stamp, i.e., a large, ornate tattoo on your lower back, be aware that it says probably more than you think, and so you are advised to be careful who you’re saying it to. And from a distance it just looks like a clump of dark back hair.

Fashion tips from Bruck: isn’t it great having an engineer with an extra class amateur radio license tell you how to dress? Yet another of the many benefits of being a VOB reader!