Randy Johnson's 300th Win Day - 2024 - 15th Anniversary

Five years ago today, it was the 10th anniversary of Randy Johnson's 300th Win, and throughout the day I was posting my 10th Anniversary celebration posts. It was a project that I was working on for six months, and not surprisingly it opened to a complete thud. Nobody paid any attention to it, and even now Part IV, the longest part of the entire series, had somehow disappeared off the face of the earth. Oh well. 

Of course the fact that five years have gone by means today is the 15th anniversary of Randy Johnson's 300th Win! Today I went to Globe Life Field in Arlington to pick up a giveaway replica 2023 World Series ring. It was a long and arduous process that involved standing in line for over an hour. And instead of the wonderfully overcast day we had in DC in 2009, it was well over 90 degrees with humidity, making it a tough experience. And then I didn't stay for the game, because I still have to do my Randy Johnson's 300th Win Day festivities, which will probably just consist of me rewatching Randy Johnson's 300th Win while playing The Sims 3, which was what I had wanted to do on June 4, 2009 before the rainout the night before delayed my plans for the 4th.

101 NHL Games in Person

Back in April of 2016 I made the fateful decision to go to a Dallas Stars playoff game. The Stars were coming off their best regular season in a decade and I had a friend that I roomed with in pony conventions that wouldn't stop talking about them. I finally decided that I should go to a game just to see what the fuss was all about. I had been to a Kansas City Blades of the defunct International Hockey League back in the mid-90s, but I didn't really know what was going on then, and it had been 20 years since then. So I went to Game 2 of the Stars' first-round series against the Minnesota Wild. It was exciting and I had fun but still didn't really know what was going on. My friend had season tickets with two seats and he would invite me to come along, but I never had time since I lived two hours away. I didn't go to another Stars game until 2018 when I just happened to be in DFW for a Rangers game. I still didn't really have an idea of what was going on, but I became caught up in the atmosphere. So when my friend invited me to games I would accept.

I was still very new to hockey. I tried watching the sport on TV in the past, but it was never able to capture my attention. I realized that I was able to follow the action better in person, especially since our seats were in the upper deck where you can have a view of the entire ice. The more games I went to, the more I gained the ability to follow along with the action. I learned about some of the rules such as offsides and icing. I was better able to appreciate the fluidity of the game. And the more I knew the more I can appreciate watching the game on TV, and the more eager I'd be to watch the game in person. And so when I went to Michigan for a job interview I decided I wanted to go to a Red Wings game in Detroit. 

Pretty soon it got to the point where when my friend was giving up one of his season tickets, I picked it up officially making me a Stars season ticket holder. It led to me flying out to California just so I can watch the Sharks play. When I finally completed my journey to watch a game at every active MLB stadium, I decided that yes, I did want to take on the challenge of going to every NHL arena. I've been keeping track of every NHL game I've been to very much like how I do with MLB games. And on Tuesday February 13 I went to a Nashville Predators game in Bridgestone Arena. When I entered it into my spreadsheet I realized that it was the 100th NHL game I've been to! The milestone just caught me off guard! I had already made a plan to go to a St. Louis Blues game in Enterprise Center just two days later, so I didn't really have time to make this post, where I take a look at some of the statistics from the 101 games I've been to.

Adrián Beltré: His Life and Career

Back in 2018 I wrote a series of six posts on this blog to commemorate the six-month and the one-year anniversary of one of the greatest baseball moments I have ever seen: Adrián Beltré's 3,000th hit, very much what I did with Randy Johnson's 300th win back in 2009. One of these posts was about the life and career of Adrián Beltré. I put in a lot of effort in researching the piece and wound up with a 13,000-word behemoth of an article, and it only covered him up to the 2017 season. I went back over it years later and was impressed by my work, but since I don't have an editor I noticed a lot of typos and grammatical errors and even worse some factual errors. I was thinking about fixing some of those errors and reposting the piece, but then I got lazy and decided hey, why not do it for a really big day, such as after Adrián Beltré gets voted into the Hall of Fame.

Well, it's finally happened. Adrián Beltré appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot for the 2024 election, and has been voted in by an overwhelming 95.1% margin. (Well, by the time I'm writing this intro it's still a few days before the announcement, but he's been named on 175 out of 177 public ballots. He's going to have to fall to about half of the remaining votes in order to miss out on election.) Which means it's time to pull out and present to you the Life and Career of Adrián Beltré!

AMPS 2023 - Winners

It's January 15, Martin Luther King Jr Day in the United States this year. However, in my fictional country of L World, it is the night of the first of three major film awards: the Awards for Motion Picture Services (AMPS). Over the past few weeks I've made two different posts each with a poll, the first one asking people to vote for the final Best Picture nominee, and the second asking people to vote for the Best Picture winner. For some reason the Best Picture nominee poll received a lot more votes than the Best Picture winner poll, and there was a tie going into yesterday. But the tie has been broken, so we can reveal the winner of Best Picture as well as the other 14 categories in AMPS, very much like how I did for 2020 and 2022 as well as the winners from 2000-2019. 

Anyways, we start from the technical categories and will work our way to the acting categories before the final reveal of the Best Picture winner y'all voted for!

AMPS 2023 Best Picture Nominees

So back on Christmas Eve I had posted my annual vote for the final Best Picture nominee for the Awards for Motion Picture Services (AMPS), the first of my fictional film awards that I had been running for well over 25 years. If you go back to the post you'll notice that the poll is done, because I had closed it around the New Year's, although I've been putting on making this post because I'm lazy and all. I was blown away by the level of involvement. We had 17 votes, the most that I've ever had in one of these polls (of course it helps that I kept spamming the link in various Discord communities.) 

It was a really close race, with one movie picking up the votes early on but another one came storming back. In the end only one vote separated the top two movies, but which one came out on top? You'll find out when I reveal the other four films that were pre-selected to make up the final Best Picture lineup for AMPS 2023! And as a bonus for getting this post out late, for the first time since 2020 I will let you the "viewers" have final say in the winner! Yes, at the end of this post there will be another poll where you can vote for who you feel should walk away with the coveted Best Picture prize! 

And in case you are interested, here are all of the previous Best Picture nominees lineup
2022 2021 2020 2019 2017 2016 2015 2013 2012 2011 2008

Also the disclaimer

YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THESE MOVIES
THESE ARE MVIES THAT I MADE UP
NOBODY HAS SEEN THEM BECAUSE THEY DON'T EXIST
EXCEPT IN MY OWN IMAGINATION
BUT DON'T LET THAT STOP YOU FROM VOTING FOR ONE OF THEM