Steroids, NASCAR, and the Great Frisco Freakout

This new Jose Canseco book has brought an ugly reality to light. Not that baseball's new round of record breakers are tainted by steroids. As long as there wasn't a rule against it or baseball didn't enforce any rule against it, there's not really any room to complain. It may have been illegal, but so are drunk driving, cheating on your taxes, and smoking weed. The real problem is I keep seeing the images from Jose's tryout w/ the Dodgers last year. He's wearing the same shirt I bought Pete Smith for the previous Christmas. What's so disturbing is I bought that shirt at Wal-mart for $5. How can I believe Jose's book isn't a money grubbing publicity stunt when he's wearing the same shirt I bought at Wal-mart? Oh, and I'm a cheap bastard of a brother, but that's not anything new (I'm also a cheap bastard as a husband, father, son, neighbor, employee, friend, etc.)

NASCAR is back and not a moment too soon. That 1 weekend b/w the Super Bowl and the Daytona 500 was tough. I wanted to sit around the house and drink beer while watching sports, but I found myself playing w/ the kids, talking to the wife, cleaning up, and on and on. I'm glad it's another 51 weeks before I have to do that again. The biggest change this year is that ESPN is actually devoting air time to NASCAR. I saw Jeff Gordon on PTI. Kenny Mayne and Dr. Jerry Punch are trackside at Daytona (spawning 2 great KM lines - first, after a wreck he deadpanned "I'm an excellent driver" and after the JJ/Harvick incident they showed JJ ranting about Harvick needed to be fined/suspended/fired and KM offered "how about a public caning"). This tells me NASCAR will probably be back on ESPN at the expense of the current NBC broadcasts. NASCAR disappeared from the ESPN radar after they left the network, but a feature story on top of the live Daytona broadcasts every night on Sportscenter this week says we are serious about NASCAR. And NASCAR's willingness to follow the almighty dollar foretells bad things for NBC.

I got my state tax refund this week, but I still haven't gotten my money from the Federales. I hope it's not being used to fund some kind of private retirement account for me.

Finally, the last I, Max aired this week. I figured if I mentioned that my blog would top Google's search list if anyone ever googles "I, Max." You certainly aren't going to get any info from Fox Sports.