Barry's Life in Napa Blog

"Warm bodies, I sense, are not machines that can only make money." - Ed Kowalczyk In one of the legendary wild west towns - Deadwood or Dodge City or Tombstone - they had a sign at the city limits that said something like "Now entering (legendary wild west town.) Leave your guns with the Sheriff." Having just returned from Las Vegas, I am thinking there should be a sign there offering a place to deposit your soul during your visit. Las Vegas can be blamed on Herbert Hoover. It was the building of the dam nearby that created a huge mass of restless, horny men with cash, and wherever such a huge mass is found prostitution and gambling and other vices will grow. Unlike other western towns where cattle, ore and other fast-money propositions led to rampant growth and manly indulgence (like Deadwood, Dodge and Tombstone, and even my hometown of Joplin, Missouri, which was a lead and zinc mining mecca and noted for it's wide-open nature in those days) Las Vegas did no...

(Chances are you don't give two shits about the World Cup. But if I let the occasion pass without weighing in I couldn't live with myself, so here goes.) It doesn't take much to be a guru these days. Not in the literal sense of "religious leader and spiritual teacher," but in the modified modern sense of "a n advisor or mentor; a leader or expert in a field." You can quite quickly become a guru just by being the first person to buy the latest gadget and investing the time to figure out a third of the crazy shit it will do, and voila! You will be your local iPhone guru or PS3 guru or Zune guru. Ok, never mind the Zune, nobody cares. So in that vein, I have become, to certain people, a soccer guru - wise enough to know that the rest of the world says "football" and means what we call "soccer," but only a pretentious douche will call it "football" if he/she is American - which means I know just a little bit more about the game ...

It's 4:30 in the morning and outside the air smells like summer for the first time, and I am wondering about things. Things like why every apple has to have a sticker on it that delays my first bite, and why some people are trying to provoke a(nother) war in the Middle East, and why the auto-correction logarithm in my iPhone thinks it's more likely that I'm trying to write the word "lice" than "love." And I'm thinking about the unperfect game. Every blogger and pundit worth his or her salt has long ago weighed in on this topic, I know. My turn now. Quick primer for those who don't follow baseball: a perfect game is when a pitcher gets the other team out for all nine innings and no batter reaches base. No hits, no walks, no batters hit by a pitch, no errors that allow a base runner, nothing. Nine innings of three-up-and-three-down. 27 batters come to the plate, 27 batters walk back to the dugout. It's only happened in the big leagues 18 times ...