We have to be honest: we had chosen this particular mascot before even knowing what it was. The reason? This team name. The Orem Owlz are the Single-A affilate of the Los Angles Angels. That would be Angels, not Angelz. Can you perhapz tell why we dezpize this team zo damned much?
Orem Owlz baseball : It'z X-Treme!
What truly shocks us though, is that this horrid late-90's spelling is actually brand freakin' new! The team was the Provo Angels until December of 2004. Owlz....
Anyway, we decided on this team before ever seeing Hootz (of course!), and Sweet Baby Jesus is this thing creepy.
Try to look away. Just try it.
The Fourth of July: Fireworks, flags, barbecue and baseball. Whether you go out and play catch with Dad or head to the bleachers for a hot dog and a chance at a fly ball, the national pastime is – and always will be – intertwined with this particular celebration of America.
So how is it that the Puget Sound – with three professional teams – has no baseball to be seen? The Mariners are in Kansas City, the hometown Rainiers begin a four-game series in Portland tonight, and the Everett AquaSox (admit it, you love the name too) are in Boise. The Rainiers held Independence Day festivities yesterday, with a fireworks show and some sweet alternate jerseys.
The Fourth for this household though, is a little on the sedate side. We are the owners of four dogs. Four large, overly excitable dogs that don't take to sedation very well. Fireworks for us is an adventure. So, with no baseball and large dogs, today is a relaxing holiday for the Frinklin Household. Sleep late, enjoy the day-off and perfect weather, fire up the grill later this afternoon and later walk a couple blocks for a great view of the Freedom Fair fireworks show.
Have a happy and safe fourth everyone.
If you are between 25-35 you know about the Transformers. A massively successful toy line in the 80's, it spawned a TV series and an animated movie. The storyline never changes: massive robots from a dead world land on Earth, impersonate pick-up trucks and fighter planes, and beat the bejezus out of each other.
The movie hews pretty closely to the established Transformer mythos. Dead planet, centuries long war between the heroic Autobots and evil Decepticons, Earth caught in the middle. As this is a Michael Bay picture – a Michael Bay picture based on a toy-turned-TV series, no less – plot isn't really all that important. All the Transformers are looking for the All Spark, a giant cube that can either return life to Cybertron or turn Earth into Cyberton, Jr. The key to finding this thing is a kid named Sam Witwickey (Shia LaBeauf) who has the coordinates to the All Spark encrypted on his great-grandfather's glasses.
Boy, that made even less sense after I type it.
Still, doesn't matter. This movie is about action and there is plenty of it. We have running. We have shooting. We have yelling. We have shooting while running and yelling and we have yelling while running and shooting. Sometimes we don't have yelling, just running and shooting. Always running and shooting. This movie runs a thousand miles an hour from the first scene (a US Army base in Qatar gets blown to smithereens by a Decepticon) and never, ever lets up. The effects are spectacular, from the CGI robots to the amazing car chase scenes (three of 'em!) and dizzying final battle through the streets of Los Angeles.
Not everything can be CGI, so there is a rather impressive human cast, led by LaBeauf, an enormously appealing young actor and old hands like Jon Voight as the square-jawed Secretary of Defense and a scenery-chewing John Turtorro as the head of secret government operation that knows about the robots. This is Michael Bay's world, so the women are preposterously good-looking and there is a surfeit of gun-toting hero-types such as Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson as survivors of the Qatar attack.
Is it necessary to be a pop-culture obsessed Gen X type on a nostalgia trip to enjoy this movie? No, but it helps. There is a certain thrill the first time Optimus Prime comes around a corner or when Megatron sneers “fleshling” like it's 1986 again, but it isn't necessary. This movie is just so damned much fun, anybody willing to buy into the concept will enjoy it. This movie is so full with guy stuff - cars, guns, jetfighters, incomprehensible army jargon, semi trucks, leggy blondes…. Well, it’s easy to overdose on it all. I’ve been using Sufjan Stevens albums to recover. It's well worth it though. For two-plus hours I - and everyone else in the theater - was 14 again.
Okay, look: this movie features giant outer-space robots with swords. Tell me that isn't cool!
Brodie Downs – the 27-year old rookie – picked up his first win as a Tacoma Rainier on Saturday, and that strikes us as just being incredibly cool. Brodie, in his second appearance as a Rainier, worked two scoreless innings to pick up the win in relief of Horacio Ramirez. Ho-Ram, as he is annoying called, is the Mariners' Quadruple-A starter that cost the team the services of Rafael Soriano in one of the more lopsided trades in baseball this past year. Ho-Ram was Ho-Awful, giving up six runs over four innings in his first of three scheduled rehab starts.
Tomorrow: Zooperstars. Run while you can.
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