Am I Done Yet?

One of the great things to do in life to sit down and read a really well-written book. When you're deep into a book that is thought out, structured well and put together in a way that allows the story to flow, it's nice to sit down and just read in silence. I'll polish off a good book quickly, because I won't be able to put it down. But, when a book is not very good, it becomes a chore to have to finish it. It almost feels like homework. I'll find myself constantly double-checking how many pages I have left until I'm done with it and skimming through sections. Still, I'll power my way through, because I'd rather read all of a bad book than half of one. It could turn out to have a really good ending and I wouldn't want to miss it (by the way, that almost never happens).

Recently I picked up a copy of the Manny Ramirez book, Becoming Manny. Usually I like sports books (biographies in particular), but I found this to be a tough read. As biographies goes, I think I prefer the unauthorized version. The writing itself was fine, but because this was written with a lot of help from the Ramirez family, I thought it took on a real "yeah, but..." feeling too it. All of Manny's odd behavior is quickly followed by an excuse to let him off the hook. He was raised differently than you and I... He's just shy... He's misunderstood... It's different in a Latin family. Also, due to the fact that book is co-written by a child psychologist a lot of Manny's behavior is tied to how he was raised and blame is passed off to the culture of coddling athletes from a young age. Plus the section where they talk about how "pure" Manny is are now comical when you consider the steroid allegations that have come out since the book was finished. The bottom line is this: he's kind of a weird guy, he's narcissistic and will only do something when and if he feels like it, but he hits the curveball like nobody's business. If he couldn't he would probably wouldn't be allowed to be so weird.

-Today Channel 4 was set to break in every half hour to tell us all about the damage that Hurricane Danny was doing to the area. Unfortunately, Danny sort of faded a lot over the last 24 hours and not only is it not even a tropical storm anymore, now it's not even making it all the way to Boston. But still, they scheduled a weatherman to come in for updates and by God, they're going to use him. So, every half hour while I was trying to watch golf, Barry Burbank popped up on my screen to tell it was raining. Not historic rain, mind you, just regular rain. It reminds me of a party where someone ordered a keg of a beer no one liked, despite everyone telling the person not to order it. Then you're left drinking some sort of crappy ale you don't even like, just so this guy can return the keg and get his full deposit back. If only there was a person who could have predicted that this storm was going to dissolve so that the weatherman didn't have to waste his day at work...