My Singing a Song, My New Kids, and is “Criticize” a Synonym for “Lynch?”

By:

The Dude on the Right

Just a couple of quick things to blog about while I take a break from animating
our "Snakes on a Plane" review…

If you listened to

my latest podcast
you already know about my latest dilemma, but in case you
didn’t listen, I wrote what I think is a cute parody song concerning the demise
of Pluto, but right now it isn’t the criticism of the funniness of the song that
is stopping me from recording it, but the making fun of my singing by everyone
in internet-land, especially by those of my immediate family.  I suppose I
should just suck it up since I know I’m no

Pavarotti
, or even
Weird Al
.  We’ll see how the weekend goes if "The Dude on the Right’s"
singing debut goes public.

It was also an exciting week in The Dude household
as I’m a new dad (sorry mom for telling you this way)!  Ever since

Bill’s passing
last December, my other two "kids," Steve and Ashley, just
haven’t been the same.  I think they are too young to understand the
concept of death, but they seemed to always sense that someone was missing from
their home.  And so, needing a replenishment of snails and crabs, and since
my fish tank seems to have stabilized after my

last cleaning debacle
, I decided it was time for Steve and Ashley to get
some new siblings.  I could have replaced Bill with another Bill, but
decided on something different on the swimming side, and also added a couple of
starfish.  I’m trying not to get too attached to them right now, waiting to
make sure they end up nicely adapting to their new home before dying on me, and
so they don’t have names yet, although one of them is close to being called
either Bam, Betty, or Becky.  I don’t have pictures yet, either, because
they are still kinda skittish about coming out in the open.  One of the
starfish, as it is want to do, also just likes to bury itself in the sand, so my
only hint it is still alive is that the sand looks to move.  More on my
growing family at a later date.

And finally, I don’t want to give my
commentary on this right now, other than I found it interesting and odd, but one
of the sport’s talk radio stations pointed out something very interesting about
a quote by Cubs’ Manager Dusty Baker as printed in the Chicago Tribune. 
I’m listening to "The Boers and Bernstein Show" on
The Score here in
Chicago yesterday, and they pointed out that while Dusty was discussing pitch
counts, the Tribune wrote "Baker pointed to Greg Maddux’s high pitch counts
early in his career, claiming Maddux had thrown 167 pitches in one start. 
‘If I left somebody out there 167 pitches, you’d [criticize] me,’ Baker said." 
You might be saying something like "Fine, so Dusty might have said something
like "shit all over me" and the Tribune decided to replace that phrase, in
brackets so you knew it wasn’t exactly what Dusty said, with "criticize." 
Only the boys at The Score played the tape of the interview and what Dusty Baker
actually said was "If I left somebody out there 167 pitches, you’d lynch me."

Boers and Bernstein weren’t criticizing Dusty Baker’s choice of words, they
actually had their reasoning for Dusty’s using the word "lynch."  Nope,
they wondered why the Chicago Tribune, who own the Chicago Cubs, would seem to
decide to replace an inflammatory word with one not so inflammatory?  My
question is simply in what thesaurus can you find "criticize" as an appropriate
replacement for "lynch?"  Nothing in my mind, nor my online source,

www.thesaurus.com
, comes close.

Anyway, back to animating!  Thanks
for reading!

That’s it for this one!  I’m The Dude on the Right!!  L8R!!!