- In January a 25lb bag of Milagrosa Rice cost $12.50.
- Last night the same 25lb bag of Milagrosa Rice was $19.00.

That’s a 52% increase in six months.

I know there is a rice shortage in the world, but I didn’t think it was that bad.

According to the market forces which pit supply and demand against each other, it is. At some point you expect the supply to come back up, but will the prices drop? Like high gas prices, this might be something we’ll have to eventually accept as the norm.

During the (almost) six years I’ve lived in the city, I’ve had numerous conversations with people about baseball allegiances. First and foremost I live and die by the Brewers, but I’ve been here long enough to pick a local favorite. Lucky for us, Major League Baseball placed two teams in the metropolis. One can learn a lot about society by observing both fan bases.

As soon as I moved here I knew it was apparent that there’s a discrepancy in perception between the two teams. The Cubs play on the north side and play baseball in this so-called Baseball Eden called Wrigley Field where you’ll always have a good time because there’s beer, baseball and hot (read: blonde) chicks. The masses pay top dollar to watch a bad baseball team while taking breaks to pee their $6 beers back into trofts. The Sox play on the southside where things are supposedly a little tough and as a former co-worker advised before I attended a game in 2002: “bring a gun.” Well, it’s 2008 and after attending many games at “The Cell,” I’m still here. After the Sox won the series in 2005, I heard my boss make a crack that the victory parade would be well attended because “Sox fans don’t have jobs.” Uh yeah…perception. Where was I?

Oh yeah, I was talking to my eldest brother and he was also duped to think you attend a Sox game if you want to get shot. I told him my experience was vastly more enjoyable on the Southside because you have more room to watch, fans are civil to each other, the bathrooms are clean, and nobody hurls racial insults as opposed to one particular game where I sat in the Wrigley Field Bleachers. It was during the season Hee Sop Choi was touted and eventually run out of town. I expected some race-related ribbing, but they took it an insulting degree by saying things like: “you don’t know the meaning of Home Run” and “hit me a big Dong” when he didn’t excel. After the game (or perhaps it was later in the season) I was walking down the street when a group of people spotted me across the street and started chanting “Hee Sop Choi!” I mean…okay, so I kind of look like a Korean, but that doesn’t mean that’s the only reason I attended that game or follow the team.

When I watched the Cubs home opener on TV and saw a group of fans in the right field bleachers wearing stereotypical Japanese headbands to welcome their famous free agent Kosuke Fukudome, I thought to myself: “oh boy, here we go again.” It turns out that profiteers (not official cubs merchandisers) took it to a whole new level by introducing the Fukudome shirt:

I consider it very insulting but I’m not the least bit surprised that a) the shirt was made and b) the shirt is a top seller. When the Sox fielded Tadahito Iguchi to at second, you’d never see anything like that and his nationality was never brought up…but I digress. There seems to be a bully mentality among a segment of the fanbase that believes it’s okay to use race as a means to mock. I feel that these Cubs fans represent a chunk of the US population who still feel that it’s okay to be ignorant (”in good fun only”) as long as they can drink their beers, watch baseball, and feel better about themselves.

Locally, this just makes it easier for me to be a Sox fan. But on a grand scale, this episode shows that there’s quite a bit of work to be done when it comes to race, perception, and knowing where to draw the line…

You obviously need to know this about me. I have a cellular telephone. I have a land line at my apartment.

The cellular telephone is to be used for communication purposes wherever I may be at that particular moment. The land line was originally installed as a way to direct telemarketing calls to my answering machine, create an easy way for family to get a hold of me and leave messages, and a portal to 9-1-1 just in case. If you call Ma Bell and insist on picking your features ala-carte, you can get bare-bones telephone service with caller ID for less than $20 a month. Local calls within a five mile radius cost only $0.03 cents a call. However, after a few years of having almost-impossible telephone conversations in my apartment on the cellular phone (standing on the couch by the window is not a comfortable speaking position), I thought long and hard about whether to expand my land line’s calling power beyond that radius.

Ma Bell offers long distance packages at reasonable prices depending on your use. I was deciding between paying; (a) $2/month to call around the country at $0.12 per minute and; (b) $10/month for 120 minutes of call time. The break even point there is about 67 minutes. That means option B makes more sense as long as you make 68 minutes worth of telephone calls. I do like getting more bang for my buck. So I now have 2 hours a month in which to make calls from my apartment…we’ll see if I make this venture worth it.

As close friends probably know by now, I’m not one to spend much time on the telephone machine (thanks in part to two medium-distance relationships in my life). Why call and just talk when you can make plans and catch up then? I (still) abhor public telephone conversations, so the cellular telephone is used mostly as a locater and planning device (I have about 70 hours of constant rollover on my cellphone) with calls never lasting more than a few minutes.

The irony here is that between the ages of eleven and eighteen, jockeying for telephone position at the house was a constant battle. A second line was never an option. Now I sit with two telephone lines that I barely use…but that might change. I have years of catching up to do with friends in different places. Are you on that list? Stay tuned.

This 300 piece puzzle was much easier than “Fantastic”. It was completed in about an hour and all the more fun because I like map puzzles. Whereas “Fantastic” was one piece short, this map had an extra piece, so I guess the puzzle universe balanced itself.

I picked it up as a souvenir for Ms. B on our way out of Aruba…and let me tell you about that airport. You’re tricked into thinking that everything is cheap on the island until you’re on you way out of the country and need things at the airport. Bottles of soda are $2.50, slices of Sbarro are $5, magazines are two times the cover price, and paperbacks at the bookstore are usually around $20. Paperbacks!

Anyway, I found this puzzle much easier because I just looked for words to match up. Does that make me right brained or something? When I was sorting out the pieces between land and ocean, I noticed that most of the puzzle covered water. It seemed weird to me that we were working on a puzzle that framed a body of water but it was a fun exercise.

The flu virus made its way through my body and it took another five or so days to feel right again. I finally made it back to the gym yesterday and today woke up no worse for wear. Things I would have otherwise blogged about since my last post:

- TBS airs four episodes of Home Improvement between 11am to 1. Though many would argue that is four episodes too many, I found myself laughing more than once. The particular episodes I saw were from the final season. JTT left the cast and the writers were forced to focus more on Tim and Al. With out the JTT factor, the show became more tolerable.

- Breaking Bad is another recent discovery on my TV list. Malcolm in the Middle’s Bryan Cranston churns out a crazy performance as a high school chemistry teacher who learns he has inoperable lunch dinner cancer…this leads to him to begin a Meth operation with a former student who flunked his chemistry class. Hilarity ensues…under a really dark cloak.

- Being sick helped me finally reach my target weight of 187. Now the challenge becomes maintaining myself and getting “down” to 180. Steady visits to the Y will help, but I’ll need more work on curbing my gluttonous ways.

- The aforementioned Platy population; has increased from its original four to over 20 in different stages of development. A camera does nothing to capture the creepy feeling I get when I see so many identical looking fish in one tank. Anybody need a hardy live-bearing fish?

- Last week’s laundry session was highlighted by the fact that my Kirkland brand laundry detergent didn’t really dissolve in the washers. I was frustrated enough to leave the detergent at the laundromat with the word “free” written on top. It’s one thing to incur side-effects like stains or my clothes not getting as clean as I would have liked. It’s another for the product to not even perform its basic function. Aside from their trail mix, I will never use Kirkland brand products again.