The Grail

Well, today I saw a neat video about a little kid who likes to play soccer. That lead to some videos of soccer players doing tricks. I was watching one of those when I realized that soccer players in other countries wear pretty ugly looking combinations of colors. I'm not some fancy dude from a fashion show on Bravo, but even I can see that they wear very bright, intense, ugly colors - especially their huge knee high socks. Of course I began thinking about how we U.S. Americans are so superior to the rest of the world. I mean, our soccer players wear cooler colors. And baseball! They say baseball is our pastime and baseball uniforms...

...look really stupid when you think about it. I googled 'history of baseball uniforms' and found a nice site on the subject. I know baseball players will say it is tradition, but these guys are basically wearing tights and stockings, more than one shirt, and a beanie with a bill in the front. And what part of baseball tradition calls for steroids, illicit drugs, sex scandals and gazillion dollar salaries? If the boys of summer aren't really taking tradition seriously, then I think they just like "dressing up". Or maybe the owners said, "OK, OK, We'll pay you 40 million dollars, but we're going to make you and you manager wear this!".


I realize that some of what they wear has practical purpose. One part I can think of doesn't show, but has got to be the most useful item - the cup. I'm not even going to look it up on the internet. I know that the cup must have been introduced a long time ago. Probably the first time a baseball player got hit in the knards and entered that level of debilitating pain we males claim as ours exclusively (okay, you females have childbirth, but you would make a cup for that if you could. I don't even want to think about getting hit in the nuts for say 8 to 36 hours, but if it happened the pain would kick childbirth's ass.) he came up with an idea for something to stick in his pants to prevent that unique sensation from ever being caused again. Actually, the first few thousand times it happened, the guys probably just stopped playing baseball forever. But a few guys saw it happen, weren't sufficiently scared, and kept playing, but with a plank of wood (well sanded) or a metal bowl stuck in their pants.

When you're wearing a cup, you feel invincible. Every guy, no matter how old he is when he first wears one, will punch it a few times and maybe even get a buddy to kick him there (no TOO hard) to test it. This is a piece of equipment with an acceptable failure rate of zero percent, so we demand proof that it works. But once we believe that it works - we are indestructible. We stand with our legs spread and hips forward just a bit more than otherwise. The Fear is gone. Males have been crashing into and through things all of our lives, and nothing ever hurt much. The only deep worry we all share is the direct hit in the apricots. The only guaranteed guy flinch is a shot toward the dangling orbs. But - once that danger is removed - we cannot be harmed. What if guys wore cups all of the time? Imagine what we could accomplish with the fearlessness that would result. Yes, there would be comfort and hygiene issues, but we would have the motivation to produce the proper model of all-day cup, and with the technology and materials available to us today it would be a snap. It would change everything.

We're not really afraid of much. Not losing a job, not being alone, not being nagged, not lack of approval, not having sex withheld, not falling off of a cliff, not dying. Most of those things we've been through and adjusted to, the rest only happen once. But a zets to the beytse - there's no getting used to that. It is at the core of all male hesitation and caution. Remove that fear and we would be unstoppable. In fact, if you know a guy who doesn't seems to worry about anything, who seems immune to fear of death, disease, or the fact that Sex in the City has been made into a movie, he is probably wearing a cup right now.

When you think about it, the crazier feminists should fear the cup. I'm talking about the really crazy feminists who just don't like men and don't trust them any more than they trust modern deodorant. I don't think women realize that the only deep, real fear men have is getting nailed in the rocks. All that stuff you do to us or threaten us with only seems to scare us because deep down we are afraid that if we don't give in, we'll get a scossa in the sfere. In the spirit of cooperation between the sexes, I will offer this. This cup thing could help men gain an advantage except that we can't wear one when we're naked. So women, get married and get naked with your man as much as possible and everything will be fine. If you don't want to listen to me, don't say I didn't warn you. I've already ordered a production prototype of my new invention.

Who is this Al everybody is talking about?

Lately I have been reading blogs and articles that mention a guy named Al. They never say the man's last name. It's as if it should be obvious which Al they are talking about. I really feel like I'm missing out. So I start thinking - Al Gore? No, there's no context about polar bears for emotional manipulation, or how much jet fuel it takes to get you to Sweden. It can't be Gore. Al Franken? Nothing funny. Not Al Jolson - the things I'm reading when I see Al are not about music or singing, they're usually about science or technology. Albert Einstein? No, for so many years nobody called him Al , why would they suddenly start now?

Let me tell you where I started seeing Al mentioned. One blog post talked about how spammers are using Al to decipher those letter puzzles on websites called CAPTCHAs. Another talked about how computer scientists are now using Al to help advance their entire field. (Maybe it is Al Gore, what with that whole Internet thing he started.) Then there was a blog mentioning a book titled "Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine" This Al guy is really important in computer science. He's got to be really fast with numbers, because people seem to think he can actually outperform present-day computers.

I tried Googling [Al "really smart"] and got references to Al Stewart of "Time Passages" (or Time Path-a-gezzz) fame, and mention of how the Today show tried portraying Al Franken as "really smart", but nobody would pass up the chance to use the name Franken, so it can't be him. Then there were results involving Alabama. I hadn't thought of that. AL is the abbreviation for Alabama. Could it be that Alabama is deciphering those letter puzzles on websites called CAPTCHAs, and doing other things to advance computer science? I guess if they all work together it's possible, but I just don't know. Besides it's AL not Al.

I can't figure this out. It's weird. Maybe I can get a computer to figure it out for me. I said - maybe I can get a computer to figure it out for me.